Tag: Gaza

The Cost of Ideology

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I know a woman who is extremely progressive in her beliefs and because of this orientation she is surrounded by people who agree with her on every single point of the narrative.  So naturally, she and her friends are squarely behind the Zionism = Genocide talking point.  But she has a very old friend who was also on the Left who is also Jewish.  And she was relating to this friend a story about a high school student graduating in America who was a Palestinian refugee and who spoke movingly about her experiences in living in and then leaving Israel and the Palestinian areas.  What she told me was that her friend became extremely angry by any attempt to portray Palestinians as victims and Israelis as aggressors.  She asked me if this attitude makes sense and whether she could somehow bring her friend around to her way of thinking.

I was adamant that her friend would never change her point of view about who were the aggressors and who were the victims in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  I said that to this woman the Israelis were more than countrymen, they were tantamount to family.  And then I went further and said I thought it was very likely that her opposing opinions might mean that this woman might not even consider her a friend any longer.

I told her that I have lost friends and had angry confrontations even with family over deep differences in belief and ideology.  I am of the opinion that family still represents the most important relation and must override even differences in ideology but the way forward involves agreeing to disagree and avoiding the subjects that will trigger anger.  So, I hazarded the opinion that if indeed this woman was now unfriendly toward her, it would probably require an acknowledgement of the seriousness of the difference and an agreement by both to avoid this irreconcilable difference of opinion in the future to preserve the friendship.  Of course, I’m not sure how good my advice was but it was my honest opinion.

So, what’s interesting about this story?  I think the radical nature of the new progressives is causing considerable strain on the Left.  Just as the trans-ideology caused rifts with feminists and even lesbians so the Gaza orthodoxy is causing a very considerable portion of American Jews to revolt against this plank of the Left’s platform.  And even beyond this there is someone like Democrat Senator Fetterman who refuses to reject the Israelis even in the face of incredible abuse by his own party.  So, if the radical fringe of the Democrats continues to control places like New York City and Los Angeles I think they will continue to alienate significant portions of the Democrat coalition.  And that is all to the good.  It gives the rest of the country a clear idea of exactly what the Left will do if they take over.

So, I ran into a case where the radical Left is tearing up old friendships.  Possibly this will give some people pause.  But either way it’s an indication of just how toxic this new radicalism really is.

Did Donald Trump End the Arab-Israeli War?

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You know, the longer I live on this planet, the less I think I know about reality.  I can remember as a small child in grammar school hearing about the various Arab-Israeli conflicts.  And it was always assumed that only the wisest and most sober of men would ever be able to untie the Gordian knot that was that conflict.

But Donald Trump will do it?  Look, I love Trump.  He’s some sort of bizarre cross between P T Barnum and Pericles by way of Madison Avenue.  He’s the first American politician since Andrew Jackson to side with the regular people.  He towers over his enemies like a colossus.  But how in the name of everything reasonable can he end an intractable war between peoples who hate each other so viscerally that death is preferable to compromise?  And yet, if the news is to be believed, Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first step of the Trump Peace Plan; return of all the hostages alive and dead and Israeli stepping back to some first line of withdrawal.

But how many different ways can this process fail?  The list is infinite.  Even with complete good faith on both sides I can imagine endless scenarios that could upend this effort.  And when in the history of the mid-east has there ever been good faith on both sides?  Never.

Now in Trump’s favor, this negotiation includes many Arab and Moslem countries acting as surrogates to prod Hamas toward ending the war.  There is a desire on the part of almost all of the middle eastern countries to end the ceaseless cycle of attacks and counterattacks that makes this whole region of the world hell on Earth.  Could this finally be the day when sanity and the will of the vast majority of people there manage to smother the fire of violence under their collective bodies and end this disgusting abomination of death and hatred?

I’ll have to confess, I just can’t come around to believing it.  It would require these people who have done horrific things to each other for more than half a century to somehow find a miraculous solution to their problem.  It’s as if both sides are forced to navigate through a minefield that both sides have mined but neither side still has reliable maps of.  At any moment disaster can strike and any disadvantage on either side can inspire the other side to press for a kill shot.

The whole thing sickens and disgusts me to the point where I just want to forget it exists and move forward without ever thinking of it again.  But the last time I did that, planes started flying through buildings in New York.

So here we go again.  Good luck Donald Trump.  I guess if anyone can pull off the deal of the millennium it would be him.  But I almost think he’ll have more success with Ukraine than Gaza.  Sure, they’re almost as crazy there but as bad as it is I don’t think the level of hatred between the Russians and Ukrainians can ever come close to the savagery of what happened two years ago.  Maybe a little prayer would help.

Israel Frees Four Hostages in Raid on Hamas Captors

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Four Israeli hostages were rescued alive by troops from Hamas captivity in a daring operation in the central Gaza Strip earlier today, the military announces.

The rescued hostages are named as Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv. All four had been abducted by Hamas terrorists on October 7 from the Supernova music festival near the southern community of Re’im.

Special forces had simultaneously raided two Hamas sites in central Gaza’s Nuseirat. At one location, Argamani was rescued, while Meir Jan, Kozlov, and Ziv were at the second location.

The rescued hostages are all in good condition, according to initial medical assessments. They were taken to Tel Hashomer Hospital for further evaluation.

Amid the operation, heavy airstrikes were carried out in the area against Hamas sites and in support of the ground troops. Hamas health authorities reported a “large number” of casualties.”

Most of the mainstream media sites are playing up the Palestinian casualties incurred during the rescues.  Yeah, I guess being a kidnapper or a kidnapper’s neighbor isn’t the safest decision you can make.  Pro-tip, live far away from Israeli captives.

Kudos to the IDF for pulling off a difficult mission.  Regrettably there was one IDF death.

Breaking News: I Have Joined the Princeton Hunger Strike

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After nine days of a liquid diet the awesome hunger strikers of Princeton collapsed.  Immuno-compromised, ethically compromised and feeling both hot and cold at the same time, they threw in the towel.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/princeton-anti-israel-hunger-strike-collapses-solves-its-problem-by-rotating-in-new-strikers/

But good news, they’ve come up with a daring new concept in hunger strikes; relay-hunger!  That’s right, just like in relay-races where one runner hands over the baton to the next runner, relay-fasters hand over the fast to a new faster at each (convenient) step in the hunger strike.

It’s brilliant and also allows each of us strikers to employ our own lived experience of what defines starvation.  For instance, personally, I always find that the period between 10:33 am and 11:17 am is a crisis time for me.  At that point my energy reserves from my 9:30 snack are completely gone and the forty three minutes until lunch are literally (figuratively?) torture.  And so that is why I have designated 10:33 am and 11:17 am my leg of the relay hunger strike.  I feel that I am almost dying for my beliefs.

But luckily I won’t have to die.  And the best part is I’ll be able keep this hunger strike going for twenty or thirty years.  Now that’s what I call progress.

Week Two of the Campus Hunger Strike Begins – Oh the Humanity

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If you pay attention to the young woman holding the speaker in front of the speaker you will notice that it will take at least a couple of months of fasting before she will be able to fit in her jeans without the use of a pry bar or the application of vaseline as a lubricant.

When we reach week ten I’ll be interested to see if any of the “hunger” strikers have lost any weight at all.

Princeton.  Must be great to be able to horse around on an Ivy League campus playing Che Guevera and still have Mom and Dad foot the bill.  And even better to then get a job at an Ivy League school or ABC News because of your connections.  Why didn’t I do that?  Oh, yeah.  Because I don’t have any connections.

 

 

What If?

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I was following some of the Pro-Hamas protests.  There is a “hunger strike” going on at Princeton.  One of the goofy kids there was a scrawny girl who said she has been on the hunger strike for almost one hundred and five hours.  She hasn’t had any solid food in all that time.  So, I guess she’s living on Gatorade and orange juice.  And I thought, “Well, she’s gonna lose some of those extra pounds she’s been trying to lose for the beach season.  That’s a plus.  And then they started telling us of all the innocent people in Gaza; women and children that were starving and being killed by bullets and bombs.

And that’s true.  While the IDF and Hamas shoot it out, the human shields that Hamas has emplaced will be killed.  Now that’s a horrible thing.  But when Hamas went on a rampage back in October, they were killing men, women and children.  And they weren’t trying to shoot IDF soldiers hiding behind these people.  They searched them out in civilian towns and murdered them face to face.  They killed parents in front of their children.  The murdered infants and then cut their heads off.  They raped women and then killed them for good measure.  Then they took some of these victims back to Gaza to add to their stock of human shields.

So, if the Israelis want to prevent the next massacre how do they do that without capturing or killing Hamas?  And if Hamas, as a policy, hides in the mass of Gazans how do you fight them without killing those they hide behind?  When we burned down Dresden and Hiroshima, did we separate out the women and children?  No.  Shouldn’t the Hamas fighters confront the IDF face to face, man to man?  Are they cowards?  And shouldn’t the “innocent” Palestinians sneak away from Hamas and leave them to their fate?

Most of these questions have no good answers.  War is horrific even when it is only soldiers involved.  What can you say about women and children dying in war?  There are no words.  But what do you do with an enemy that murders your women and children as a policy.  That makes the need to destroy this enemy an existential imperative that overrides most of the moral sanctions against extreme actions.

I wish there were a magic strategy that could be used against Hamas without harming a single Palestinian civilian.  If there were one, I’ll bet the IDF would be using it right now.  But there isn’t.

You know, I wonder what answer I’d get if I asked one of the “starving” hunger strikers a hypothetical.  Now, under the strain of extreme starvation maybe she couldn’t muster the clarity of thought to answer me but I’d ask, “What if you lived in a neighborhood and you had a family living next door that really hated your family?  They were poor and dysfunctional and hated you because you were rich and happy.  And let’s say that several times the police were forced to come and arrest members of this family for attacking one of your siblings.  And let’s say that one day the worst members of this family went crazy and broke into your house and killed your parents and raped your sister and cut your baby brother’s head off and kidnapped you little sister and took her back with them to their house.  And you called the police and told them what had happened and they went to the house where the killers were but they came back later and said that they couldn’t do anything because there were small children in the other house including your sister so it was too dangerous to attack them.  So, they were just going to issue a warning to the killers not to do it again.”

How would that be?  Would that make everything all right?

A Reckoning

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Watching the bizarre scenes from the various campus “protests,” I thought, what a strange point in American history.  America conquers the world and then tries to swallow the world.  But in the process, loses its soul.  Or maybe its identity.  Or more exactly its elites try to cast off the European based identity of the western world in order to fool the world into thinking the West equals the world.  And maybe it’s a brilliant ploy that would cement the entire world into eternal subservience to the elites.

But it also means that we, the regular people, become no one.  The New Testament (Mark 8:36) says, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  And we’re not even the ones gaining the whole world.  We’re just losing the little bit we had.

These geniuses who run everything.  These billionaires playing ten-dimensional chess with artificial intelligence; pulverizing and homogenizing all the human bits of the world into a gray paste that they can sell back to us in a plastic bottle; have it all figured out.  TikTok is the new rock and roll.  They hypnotize the kids by selling them this vapid product by the minute or the fifteen second, whatever happens to be the attention span they’ve reduced their audience to.

And this is nothing completely new.  The mass culture has been selling this since the invention of the phonograph and the motion picture.  What’s new has been the removal of anything resembling the original American or even Western culture.  What’s left is pathetic.  Childish at best.  More like infantile.  Dysfunctional and ranging into deviance in multiple directions.  It’s as if the intention is to divert a whole generation into a dead end where they will be dependent on the government to keep them alive but completely helpless.

And I think they’ve been successful.  Most of the next generation are doomed to a marginal existence that will not include marriage, home ownership or children.  They are a termination.

So, the important question is how to pluck your own family and friends out of this dead end and put them on the path to life?  I guess you have to do it every day.  You have to preach the good word of normalcy.  Tell the kids that the real secret of life is to make yourself a useful, capable human being and then find a mate and build a family.  And try to encourage them to strive for the things that are hard to do.  And by all means provide moral and financial support and advice when you think you have information that they lack.

Watching those morons on the campuses act out their Che Guevera pantomime has been a fascinating reminder that since the Occupy Wall Street movement back in the Obama era we have been watching a lost generation demanding that the government pick them up off the playground floor and give them their pudding cup to soothe them for being complete losers.  They want Communism not because they think it’s just but because they’re too lazy and stupid to even try to live.

The red states are going to have to cut off welfare to the useless so that these people will retreat to the blue states where they can be stacked up in two by six cubicles, fed their daily ration of crickets and narcotized with porn and pot as they await the blessed release of death.  All of these people will have to be swept away.  They don’t want to live.  They just want to be plugged into their matrix.

There’s no way to keep this absurd thing going.  There has got to be a reckoning.

The Student Protests

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The news has been full of accounts of students setting up tent cities on the grounds of Columbia University and other elite schools around the country.  They are protesting their universities’ failure to stop the Gaza war.  Well, of course that’s ridiculous.  How exactly would Columbia University stop the Israeli Defense Forces?  How many nuclear weapons can Columbia University field?  At last count I think it is still zero.  To be fair to the cretins in tents, what they want is for their university to divest of any Israeli stocks and any stocks of companies that make weapons that the US government provides to Israel.

All of this angst is reminiscent of the student protests in the 1960s and 1970s over the war in Vietnam.  The same tired playbook is being used.  The radicals are disrupting the education process and garnering as much attention in the media as they can and attempting to get the presidential race wrapped into their cause.

You know it’s a funny thing.  When I see these useless people and hear them speak about their confused take on the Gaza War, I despise them and wish that the police would drown them in pepper spray and tase them into submission, tie ropes around their feet and drag them away.

And in the red states that’s more or less what is happening.  In these states they want the colleges to educate their kids and there’s no room or time for Bolshevik Theatrics.  You can watch the state police drag the wannabe antifa players off to jail.  But in the People’s Republic they beg and plead with their toddlers to eat their vegetables and un-occupy the Bursar’s Office, pretty please.  And I guess we’re supposed to be upset if the mental patients are running the asylum.  “Something must be done!”

But when I think about it a little, I say, “Who cares?”  My family doesn’t go to Columbia, Harvard or Berkley.  We couldn’t afford to and we wouldn’t be accepted.  So why should I care that the type of people they do accept wants to put on this silly passion play?  I sure don’t.  In fact, I’d be thrilled if they burned Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League right down to the ground.  I’d buy the DVD and watch it at Christmas.  It would be a job well done.

And why should I care if they lay siege to the Democratic National Convention?  Let them.  Let them occupy all of Chicago if they want (although I wonder if the gang-bangers will be intimidated by the Zoomer protesters).  For all I know this is like the Summer of George Floyd and will allow the Left to consolidate its hold on the youth vote.

But either way, what it makes me think is how little I have in common with these people who inhabit the Left.  The future I care about will not be decided by the students protesting at Columbia.  The uselessness of those students will lead nowhere.  They will not become leaders or anything else.  Most of them won’t even leave children after them.  The women are unlovable and the “men” are feeble children.

The young people I care about are the ones who are looking around themselves and trying to figure out a way to scratch out a normal life.  Learn a skill, get a job, find a wife, raise a family.  Real life.  Not sleeping in a tent on a college quadrangle and pretending to be a revolutionary while your parents pay that university a hundred thousand dollars a year.  Figuring out how to help these young people, in my case, my grandchildren, is the most important consideration any older person can have.

As for the Ivy League Intifada, honestly who cares?

Stupid in High and Low Places

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Putting aside Trump (meaning his trials and the Supreme Court’s review of them and the various election stories) I guess the big story this week are all the campus protests for Gaza.    From what I can see, really lame leftists on various campuses across the country are building encampments and screaming obscenities about Israel in particular and the Jews and the military in general and demanding peace or death or both or neither for Palestinians, Israelis, College presidents, soldiers, Joe Biden or everybody.

I watched some pretty hilarious footage of what happens when Georgia, Indiana, Arizona, Illinois and Ohio state troopers are told to arrest really lame leftist protestors.  I tell you it does my heart good to hear these dopey kids screaming and crying and cursing at the police as they’re being slammed to the ground and zip-tied and dragged away.  Even some of the loopy leftist professors got into the act.  One dopey woman who said she was a professor slapped one of the cops in the head and got the deluxe treatment.

So, what can I make of all this?  Well, I’m guessing that anything that makes it less likely that Zoomers will vote for Joe Biden is a very good thing.  I also think that the Israelis had better decide whether they want to finish off the threat from Hamas in Gaza or not.  If they end the fight without taking complete control over Gaza they will be back where they started and can anticipate the same kinds of attacks in the future.  But I admit it’s a difficult situation when the whole world is accusing you of “genocide” and even your main supporter, the United States begins wavering.  My advice to Netanyahu is hurry up and finish the mission.  Of course, that’s easier said than done.  The Israelis are going to have to transfer the entire population of Gaza into a refugee camp and search each person and all their possessions one by one and then purge the Gaza strip of all weapons and contraband and then begin resettling them.  And then they’ll have to permanently patrol the whole enclave to prevent Hamas from returning to power.  That’s a daunting task.  But when you’re dealing with implacable hate, extreme measures are inevitable.

Jewish Americans are finding out how the Left treats their various constituencies.  You think that they’re your friends until some other more important cause or constituency comes between you and them and then they attack you as if you’re as evil as Trump himself.  They’ll attack you personally and vilify you in the public space and allow terrible people to say and do terrible things to you and your friends.  Well, that’s the reality.  We all have to pick sides in this extremely binary political system.  And if you vote for Democrats you can expect at some point to get more of this behavior.  This is what they are, up close and personal.

The talk is about whether the Democrat Convention will be under siege from the same protestors as the colleges.  I have to admit I’d find that immensely entertaining.  Can you imagine if they storm the convention floor and take Joe Biden captive?  Could he regale them with tales of Uncle Bosey and Corn Pop and how he spent thirty years in a South African prison before becoming Nelson Mandela?  It boggles the mind.  Joe Biden and the Gaza protestors in a struggle session.  That much stupid all concentrated in one place would threaten the very fabric of space-time and could trigger a moron supernova.  Sounds like a good time will be had by all this summer.

Hey, Here’s A Guy Who Agrees with Me

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A couple of weeks back I said that the simplest way to knock out the Gaza tunnel system would be to pump seawater into it and flood it.  Well, here’s a guy trying to steal my idea!

I’d say great minds think alike but I’m too incensed that he got the idea linked on Real Clear Politics.  Oh well.  We geniuses are never recognized within our own lifetimes.  Well, there’s always my anti-gravity ray.  Maybe that one will take off.