John Hinderaker:
This is a disgrace. The U.S. currently has two Carrier Strike Groups, bearing almost unimaginable striking power, in the eastern Mediterranean. If our president were not a senile, half-witted fool, he would have told Hamas long ago that if all Americans were not freed within 12 hours, Gaza would be reduced to rubble. Not to mention that Gaza would never get another nickel of American money.
I am not much of a fan of Donald Trump, but that is what he would have done, and the American hostages would have been free within days after they were kidnapped. Joe Biden’s utter failure in the current crisis is one of the worst of his sad term in office. Remarkably, I have seen no criticism of his ineptitude in the press. I understand that reporters and editors are doing their best to protect the Democratic Party in the upcoming election, but their silence is a dereliction of duty almost on a par with Biden’s.
John Hinderaker:
You might assume that someone has gotten out a pencil and paper and figured out how a transition to “green” energy, accompanied by a transition to EVs, can possibly be implemented. But you would be wrong. There is no plan, no demonstration project, no set of calculations, no plausible feasibility study. The whole thing is a fantasy which will cause ever-increasing damage if politicians insist on pursuing it.
John Hinderaker:
It is true that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can be described as a cycle of violence that has now continued for decades. But why is that?
Consider World War II, for example. The Germans and Japanese started the war, but did it lead to a cycle of violence? No. The war’s conclusion brought about a peace that continues to this day, as far as those combatants are concerned. Why is that? Because the war had a decisive result. Germany and Japan were crushed. There were millions of civilian casualties. The German and Japanese people understood that they had lost the war, and the war had been a catastrophe for them. They had no desire to renew the violence.
One can contrast that with World War I, which did not have a decisive result, and which did become part of a cycle of violence, i.e. World War II, precisely because the German people did not accept that they had lost the Great War.
Or consider the Napoleonic Wars. There was a cycle of violence that began with the French Revolution and continued intermittently until 1815. The cycle ended when France was decisively defeated in 1815, and was occupied for a time by the victorious powers. France suffered terribly, and the result was more than a half century of peace.
Then there is the Middle East. Israel fought a series of wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973 against Arab coalitions including Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. There was, for a time, a cycle of violence. But the Arabs’ attacks failed decisively, and the hostile Arab powers eventually decided to give up on their ambitions and make peace. Several decades have now gone by without armed conflict between Israel and Egypt, Jordan or Syria.
Not so with the Palestinians, i.e., the Arabs who live in the former British Mandate. They have continued to launch terrorist attacks and wars against Israel from 1948 to the present, most recently and most horrifically last month. Why is that? Most fundamentally, because the Palestinians do not believe that they have been defeated by Israel. On the contrary, they—especially the Gazans—seem to have believed that they were doing pretty well. Intifada was good to them, yielding vast quantities of international aid and considerable international respect.
In my view, the approach taken by the E.U. and by Palestinian sympathizers in the U.S. is precisely wrong. If there is a cease fire, another tenuous “peace,” ongoing yammering about a two-state solution that the Palestinians have rejected over and over again, the cycle of violence will continue. The only thing that will stop it is a victory by Israel so crushing that Palestinians acknowledge they have been beaten, lay down their arms, and repudiate their leaders.
John Hinderaker:
There you have it: the pro-genocide students (or many of them, anyway) are non-Americans, most likely from the Middle East. They have brought their unAmerican attitudes with them to this country. MIT doesn’t want them to be deported, likely in part, at least, because they are rich kids who pay full freight. Foreign students are a cash cow for universities, often being nearly the only ones who pay the university’s sticker price. So for MIT, left-wing ideology and financial interest probably go hand in hand.
Ed Morrissey:
It’s also based on absurd and completely ahistorical application of the doctrine of proportionality, which is also based on a deliberate obfuscation: “collective punishment.” We hear a lot of complaints about “collective punishment” by Israel of the Gazans, but that is a lie. That would apply if Israel still occupied Gaza, but they haven’t occupied it since 2005. This is not “collective punishment,” therefore — it is war, one started by the party recognized as the government of Gaza against Israel. Once started, the offended party has the right to see the war to a conclusion of victory either by feat of arms or the capitulation of its enemies in the field.
In no other war other than those involving Israel did the world impose a standard of civilian-death “proportionality,” because that standard would be absurd and does not exist. Did the US stop attacking the Taliban when the death toll in Afghanistan exceed the estimated 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11, for instance? Of course not, and no one called the war on Nazi Germany “collective punishment” on Germans either — and the Allies carpet-bombed Germany for years before ground troops utterly vanquished the Nazis.
Proportionality relates to the necessity of judging the gains of a military operation against the potential collateral loss of life among civilians and in making all practical efforts to limit the latter. It most certainly is not an equation of casualties. The IDF has always operated on the properly defined basis of proportionality and punished commanders who do not. It is beyond absurd, and arguably outright malevolent, to apply the casualty-equation standard to Israel in a war started in this manner. That’s especially true when based on the number of civilian deaths as reported by Hamas, a terrorist group that uses those numbers for its propaganda and includes its own operatives among those numbers too.
Ed Morrissey:
This is an outright scandal. What happened to holding those in power accountable? What happened to democracy dying in darkness? For crying out loud, what happened to basic journalism?
And for that matter, what happened to the House Republicans? Rather than censure Tlaib for her genocidal sloganeering (or at least along with it), when will they demand an Ethics inquiry into this report? If this report is accurate, Tlaib shouldn’t be censured — she should be expelled and then investigated for material support of a terrorist group.
Ed Morrissey:
Israel isn’t ‘radicalizing’ anyone in this operation. Gaza has become a nest of genocidal radicals, and the only solution left to them is to destroy its command and control and force Gazans to reckon with their own choices. As Murray argues, that’s precisely what Britain and the West did with Germany and Japan. No one was arguing that Allied air strikes and ground operations in Germany were creating new Nazis, and Nazi Germany actually did have some anti-Nazi efforts before and during the war. Gaza has had no analogue to that dissent in the last 17 years, at all.
In short, or even at length, Murray rebuts practically every tongue-clucker in the West that turned a blind eye to Hamas’ 17-year rocket bombardment on Israeli civilian centers and numerous attacks culminating in the October 7 massacre, and who now wring their hands over “collective punishment.” This is not “punishment” — this is war, a war cheered by Gazans and conducted for nearly two decades by Hamas. The Israelis are putting an end to this war the same way that the Allies put an end to the Nazis — by defeating their enemy utterly.
David Strom:
The radical ideologies floating out there could be described as a swing of the pendulum, but the embrace of violence and destruction coupled with the open hatred for our society is a threat to the very existence of our culture. As it is intended to be.
What makes this outbreak of barbarianism fundamentally different from the 1960s, where we saw a similar descent into madness that wasn’t fully rejected until well into the Reagan years, is the fact that our major institutions are now owned by the barbarians themselves.
Western resilience in the 1980s was buttressed by the fact that our education system, Hollywood, and the media were not fundamentally corrupted in the way they are today. Each of these institutions leaned left, but not Left. They were dominated by people who thought America could be better, not that it must be destroyed.
That is no longer the case. Your average college professor is either a radical or is so intimidated by them that they remain quiet. Your average college student has already been exposed to over a decade of propaganda and is then thrown into a hothouse of political nihilism that it is a miracle if they come out sane.
John Hinderaker:
But it is obvious that re-occupying Gaza will be painfully difficult at best. An entire generation of Gazans has been reared under the insane tutelage of Hamas. How much do they know of civilized life? Not much, as the horrors of October 7 demonstrate. Somehow, Israel will need to figure out how to govern such people.
My only word of advice, for what it is worth, is that as soon as possible after the war is over, Israel should cut off all foreign aid to Gaza. Gazans need to learn that trying to kill Jews is not a career path, and that economically useful skills are necessary for survival. These will be brand new ideas to those who have been raised under Hamas, with the indulgent support of the UN, the EU, and our own State Department.
David Strom:
There is now a name floating around for all the 2nd-rate but highly effective propaganda being pumped out of Gaza: Pallywood, and despite the horrors of war (or because of it, using gallows humor), it has become something of a joke. A joke because only the most credulous, like New York Times and BBC reporters, could fail to recognize how contrived it all is. So FAFO is showing up in memes now, proving that the average meme creator has an IQ 30 points higher than a BBC reporter.
It’s almost like the MSM want to believe it all so badly that they ignore the contradictions. Like that dead guy always popping up in new videos. Hey, wait…were they identical quintuplets or something? See, that indigenous Palestinian medicine must be miraculous!
There are reporters covering Gaza more fairly, but they stand out so much that it only emphasizes how distorted the average report from Gaza actually is.
Some of the best Pallywood productions, or most entertaining at least, are from the supposedly electricity-free hospitals in Gaza. You have the fake urgency, the bright lights, the extras overacting, and the recurring characters who magically change roles between patients, doctors, radiologists, and corpses.
I have no doubt that there are places in Gaza that are hazardous to one’s health, but there seem to be many that are safe enough to do play-acting for the media.
Israel should change that. No place should be safe for Hamas in Gaza, or anywhere else. If there are enough places available to set up Pallywood acting sets, there aren’t enough bombs falling. Let the BBC and NYT set up refuges for Pallywood actors to do their thing far away from Israel. They can then help produce the propaganda footage themselves and up the acting quality.
I take no joy in the death of civilians, although I have a hard time taking seriously the claimed horror that the “From the River to the Sea” folks claim to feel; after all, they weren’t horrified at all about Israeli deaths, about which many of them exulted. So screw them.
