Posts Tagged ‘Israel’

Once upon a time in Israel

Posted: October 10, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

It’s incredibly ironic and sad that the best chance for peace between Israel and the Palestinians happened almost 30 years ago.

I remember watching in the Rose Garden at the White House as Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands and signed the so-called “Oslo Accords” on September 13, 1993.

For many years, I reported on the Palestinians for Newsweek and ABC News. I spent a lot of time with Arafat and later met Peres. Both saw the accords as the best chance for peace. One U.S. expert wrote recently: “In many respects, the early years of Oslo were a U.S. negotiator’s dream. Israelis and Palestinians had finally done what we had been encouraging them to do for years: get together and work through their own problems themselves.”

What went wrong? The accords were an interim plan. Territory would be transferred gradually to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for its assumption of security responsibilities.

Essentially, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization had different interpretations of the final outcome. For Palestinians, that outcome was an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. For Israel, the government was unwilling to commit to two states. 

Both sides had complex constituencies. Arafat led an organization with so many factions that it was difficult to keep them going in the same direction. These groups include Fatah, Arafat’s group and the largest of the PLO. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was the second-largest faction, mainly because it launched the most effective terrorist operations. But there were groups allied with Iraq, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others. 

Israeli leaders had to govern a country with just as many factions as the PLO. These groups ranged from far-left socialists to conservative religious factions. 

As a result, both sides had to compromise with their constituencies before they could compromise with one another.

For example, Rabin had also locked himself into a public commitment not to dismantle any settlements during the interim period. The settlement issue came to a head when, just after the accords were signed, an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians in Hebron, and he did virtually nothing about it because of his promise.

Nevertheless, Rabin was one of Israel’s most sensible and influential leaders. His death in 1995 at the hands of an assassin who opposed any deal with the Palestinians finally put the final nail in the coffin of the agreement. 

The hopes and dreams on that sunny September day 30 years ago came crashing down, leading almost inevitably to the chaos and war that exists now. 

Five Israel Thoughts Under the Fedora: Only Shocking if you Didn’t Pay Attention, 2A case closed, Updates, Going the full Sherman and Priorities

Posted: October 9, 2023 by datechguy in Israel, middle east
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I am shocked SHOCKED at the number of media people and pols in places from Australia to Canada to New York who are shocked SHOCKED at the number of Muslims in their countries who are all for kidnapping women, gang raping them , murdering them and the desecration of their bodies.

All you had to do is pay attention to what they’ve been saying for years to know this.

A basic rule that every Sicilian knows is this: If someone says they want to kill you, believe them.

of course given the Tom Hagen math of Islam in America I suspect the outcry against this by Dems will be at brief at best.

I was actually rather shocked to find out that Israel had loosened their guns laws in the wake of the Hamas attacks. Not because it was a bad move but I naturally presumed that a nation where almost everyone serves and is constantly under terror threat already had their civilians well armed.

That they have not is a tribute to wishful thinking and idiocy.

However it has provided an answer to the question oft asked by the left: “Why does anyone need an AR-15 and if they suggest that the US is not Israel all we have to do is show pictures of those marching in New York and DC and elsewhere in support of murder, gang rape and kidnapping.

Apparently there will be regular updates from Israel on how the fighting is going, this is the first one:

I’ll be watching this daily, you should too.

Yesterday I suggested that Israel needs to fight General Sherman’s War and to consider the hostages dead and not hold back based on them ,of course if they can save them they should but not at the cost of destroying Hamas. :

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to destroy their ability to make war. It will be messy and it will be horrible, but it will end the threat from Gaza once and for all.

They need to take to heart these words by General William Tecumseh Sherman

  • You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. 

And those curses need to be poured out in Gaza to all those who aid abet and cheer Hamas’ actions in the same way that Sherman poured those curses on the people of Georgia and the Carolinas. What are your critics going to say that they aren’t already saying about you now? Sherman again:

  •  “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and we must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” The hard war was here for Georgia. “We cannot change the hearts and minds of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

The time for mercy is after the enemy is defeated and helpless at your feet, until then the war should be fought hard until it’s won.

Well I don’t have the readership I once did in Israel but it appears somebody took this advice to heart:

Israel has decided that its attacks on terrorist targets in Gaza will be carried out with great force and breadth, even at the cost of harming Israelis who are being held captive in Gaza, a senior government source tells reporters.

The source clarifies that if Israel has precise intelligence information on the location of Israeli captives, it will of course refrain from attacking in that specific location. But so long as no such information exists, all Hamas targets will be attacked.

So will will be Sherman’s War instead of the old game after all. Given that the left has always accused Israel of genocide I can’t think that their cries are going to make much of a difference.

Finally one might wonder how one of the supposedly finest intelligence agency in the world got caught off guard and how the US got caught off guard as well.

Given the US armies priorities of transgenderism and progressive indoctrination and the FBI’s giving priority of targeting parents at school board meetings, Trump voters and Catholics who regularly attend mass I’m not shocked that they had no time to watch for this kind of thing.

But now I understand that the Mossad was concentrating on fighting Bibi these days.

Might I suggest that taking a page out of the American left’s playbook is always a bad idea.

Arming our enemies: From scrap metal being sold to Japan before World War II to $6 billion for Iran

Posted: October 8, 2023 by John Ruberry in Uncategorized
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By John Ruberry

Here’s an almost forgotten slice of history.

In 1939, Chinese Americans protested the loading of scrap iron in Oregon on a ship bound for Japan.

As you’ll see the link, there is a photograph of the protest “This iron is for bullets” and “Your wives and babies may be next,” are among the messages on the picketers’ signs.

The protesters were right.

As you of course know, two years later, Japan not only attacked Pearl Harbor, but also Guam and the Philippines, both US possessions.

Before those attacks, Japan seized Manchuria and invaded the rest of China in 1937. The Japanese committed numerous atrocities against the Chinese during the Second World War, most notoriously the Rape of Nanjing.

Last month, on September 11 no less, the Biden Administration announced it was releasing $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran, that was part of swap of American hostages held by the terrorist regime in exchange for some Iranian prisoners held here.

Swap? I call it a ransom payment.

The appeasement-minded Biden administration at the time claimed that the $6 billion can only be used for humanitarian reasons. Even if that is true, which I doubt it is, the definition of charity in the West is remarkably different than how jihadists define it.

In 2008, five former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, which claimed to be a charity, were convicted of sending $12 million to Hamas.

Okay, yeah, I get it, the $6 billion probably isn’t in the hands of the radical mullahs in Iran yet, but like someone who knows he’s about to collect a huge inheritance, Iran is now financially confident–and it’s emboldened by Joe Biden’s weakness.

Yesterday, Hamas, the Iranian-funded terrorist group, attacked Israel in the deadliest strike against the Jewish state since the Yom Kippur War.

The Iranian mullahs call Israel “the little Satan” and America “the Big Satan.”

America may be next.

UPDATE 6:00pm EDT:

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Iran greenlit and helped plan Hamas’ attack on Israel.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Israel: I Advise General Sherman’s War Unless You Want a Replay in Years to Come

Posted: October 8, 2023 by datechguy in Israel, middle east, war
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Spock: Captain, you took a big chance.
Kirk: Did I, Mister Spock? They’ve been killing three million people a year. It had been going on for five hundred years. An actual attack wouldn’t have killed any more people than one of their computer attacks, but it would have ended their ability to make war. The fighting would have been over permanently.

Star Trek A Taste of Armageddon 1967

Our friendly neighborhood terrorists of Hamas have launched their boldest and bloodiest attack on Israel in decades and have put icing on the cake by the targeting and kidnapping of civilians, slaughtering families and killing and kidnapping not just Israeli’s but Americans and at least one German as well.

They caught Israeli intelligence completely off guard and US intelligence completely off guard as well, but that is understandable. Apparently just as US intelligence is busy going after Catholics at mass, Parents attending school committee meetings and Trump supporters Israeli spooks were more interested in going after their Prime Minister.

According to the leaked documents, an assessment attributed to a Central Intelligence Update from March 1, leaders of the Mossad “advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest against the new Israeli Government’s proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli Government.”

These documents were part of a huge leak of Pentagon documents that Hotair has covered, but what’s more important is this move by Israel to formally declare war.

Israel’s cabinet invoked Article 40 Aleph and formally declared war against Hamas after the terrorist group launched the worst attack on the Jewish nation in 50 years.

Over 600 Israelis have been killed, more than 2000 are wounded, and 100 are confirmed to have been taken captive by Hamas since the war began.

This is, in my opinion a very good sign, all you have to do is watch the arab world cheering and even in America as Americas are killed and kidnapped people organizing to support Hamas publicly to understand that you can’t just retaliate a bit and defeat Hamas. You have to destroy them.

Israel in my opinion needs to prosecute this war without restraint, they also have to do it, I’m sorry to say, with the idea that all the people taken as hostages are expendable (If they get a chance to save some by all means do so but not at the expense of destroying Hamas.

And the only way to do so is to retake Gaza, annex is and give the people there a choice to stay or go.

Israel has left Gaza once, and did so without condition and this attack is the result. Israel must recognize that no amount of deals, or concessions or anything is going to change the attitude of either the Palestinians or the Arab world toward them. If the Arabs or Muslims around the world had a chance to slaughter the Jews they would without hesitation.

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to destroy their ability to make war. It will be messy and it will be horrible, but it will end the threat from Gaza once and for all.

They need to take to heart these words by General William Tecumseh Sherman

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. 

And those curses need to be poured out in Gaza to all those who aid abet and cheer Hamas’ actions in the same way that Sherman poured those curses on the people of Georgia and the Carolinas. What are your critics going to say that they aren’t already saying about you now? Sherman again:

 “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and we must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” The hard war was here for Georgia. “We cannot change the hearts and minds of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

The time for mercy is after the enemy is defeated and helpless at your feet, until then the war should be fought hard until it’s won.

Until and unless Israel takes these words to heart, this cycle will repeat and they will really be responsible for the next attack that comes because it will be made possible by not destroying the ability of those who will make it when they had the chance.

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