Monday: Hili dialogue

November 20, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the top o’ the week: Monday, November 20, 2023, and National Peanut Butter Fudge Day (better than no fudge, but not as good as chocolate or maple).

It’s also World Children’s Day, National Absurdity Day, and Transgender Day of Remembrance.

As I’m still not sleeping well, my morning coffee, which I made, is a latte with four shots of espresso:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the November 20 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Rosalynn Carter died at 96, only two days after an announcement that she was going into hospice care, afflicted with dementia. She was the beloved life partner of Jimmy Carter, who, despite all expectations, is still alive at 99. I’m sad because he is presumably still sentient and had to experience the loss of Rosalynn. They had been married 77 years, were inseparable, and she was a good woman.

*Welp, the NYT isn’t going to be happy about this, but they’ve dug up even more evidence that al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza was a Hamas headquarters. First, we now have video of hostages being dragged into the hospital on October 7.

From the Elder of Ziyon:

In the footage from the hospital on the day of the massacre, October 7th, 2023, between the hours of 10:42 and 11:01 a.m., hostages abducted from Israeli territory are seen surrounded by armed Hamas terrorists. One of the hostages is injured and is being carried on a hospital bed, and the other is walking. The hostages, a Nepalese civilian, and a Thai civilian, in the documentation, are known, and information on the subject has been passed on to the relevant authorities.

and

*Further, they are uncovering more of the tunnel network under al-Shifa.

The Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet security agency release new footage showing part of Hamas’s tunnel network underneath Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, where the terror group is believed to have a main command center.

Clips are published from two separate devices that were lowered into a tunnel entrance discovered by the IDF on Thursday in the Shifa complex.

The tunnel shaft had been located on the hospital grounds under a canopy, where IDF troops had also found a Hamas pickup truck with weapons in it, similar to those used by the terror group in the October 7 attacks.

The new videos show that the tunnel shaft has a winding staircase from around three meters deep, continuing down for another seven meters until it reaches part of the tunnel network. The tunnel continues for five meters, before turning to the right and continuing for another 50 meters.

At the end of the tunnel, the footage reveals a blast door with what the IDF says is a gunhole for Hamas to shoot through.

“This type of door is used by the Hamas terror organization to block the ability of our forces to enter the organization’s headquarters and underground assets,” the IDF says.

“The findings prove beyond all doubt that buildings in the hospital complex are used as infrastructure for the Hamas terror organization, for terror activity. This is further proof of the cynical use that the Hamas terror organization makes of the residents of the Gaza Strip as a human shield for its murderous terror activities,” the IDF adds.

*Finally, the Times of Israel reports that a UK doctor who worked at the Al-Shifa hospital says that it was used for “non-medical purposes” (i.e. terrorism).

A British doctor who used to work at Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical center, under which the IDF says Hamas operates a major command and control base, has confirmed that there were areas of the hospital where he could not go, or else he would be shot.

In a recent interview with the English-language channel of French broadcaster France24, the doctor, who declined to give his name for fear of endangering his colleagues in Gaza, said he had worked at Shifa and other hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank for three months, three years ago.

“When I was first asked to work there [at Shifa], I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot,” he was quoted as saying.

“Was it explained to you why that was?” asked journalist Irris Makler in the recorded conversation.

“No, but implicit was that it was being used for non-medical purposes,” replied the doctor.

. . .“They would say there could be many other reasons that you would be told not to go to a particular area of a hospital. It’s not unusual,” the journalist argued.

“I cannot emphasize too much the air of collective paranoia that existed there,” he continued.

. . . The physician also reported to the journalist that if hospital staff were 10% frightened of possible Israeli airstrikes, they were 90% frightened of being persecuted by Hamas.

After all this, I have nothing but contempt for both the NYT and the BBC, who kept reminding us, only three or four days after the IDF entered Al-Shifa, that the “smoking gun” had not been found, and that Israel’s reputation was in danger since they might have been mistaken about al-Shifa. Well, I am confident that they weren’t mistaken, and the coming days will confirm that.

Here’s what’s in the NYT today (click to read). I wonder what the paper would regard as “proof”.  NYT reporters were on the site, given a tour of the hospital, and saw the tunnel shaft. I guess they think the IDF built it to gain credibility!  The paper is qualifying every statement with “the IDF says,” which is fine, but they don’t do that with the body counts from Gaza, which are given by that paragon of probity, Hamas (the counts are often said that they come from the Gaza Health Ministry, which of course is controlled by Hamas).

For a really acrid take on the BBC and NYT’s anti-Israel reporting, read this article in Spiked.  If I still had a subscription to the NYT, I’d cancel it now, but I get free access through our university library.  And I have no theory for why most of the MSM, as well as many organizations like the United Nations are especially wary of Israel, believing what the Palestinians say but always checking up on those wily, sneaky Jews. Could the media really be antisemitic? I’m being forced to that conclusion.

Finally, a disgruntled reader sent me this about the NYT’s coverage of “identity issues”:

 In terms of NYTimes, back in 2006? with Israel/Hezbollah….I noticed that pictures of Hezbollah showed its soldiers in almost regal military wear, marching etc….and Israeli soldiers would from time to time be portrayed in contrast recumbent, sleeping, t-shirts etc.  This happened more than once and I caught on to it.  Around the same time the entire Lacrosse/Duke imbroglio was taking place….also very eye opening.  Too obvious a pattern not to pick up on it.
My lesson?   Respectable media can barely be trusted on anything touching on identity, and especially Israel.

*Many sources, including the Washington Post, report that Hamas and Israel are close to a hostage deal.

Israel and Hamas are close to agreement on a U.S.-brokered deal that would free dozens of women and children held hostage in Gaza in exchange for a five-day pause in fighting, say people familiar with the emerging terms.

The release, which could begin within the next several days — barring last-minute hitches — could lead to the first sustained pause in conflict in Gaza.

A detailed, six-page set of written terms would require all parties to the conflict to freeze combat operations for at least five days while an initial 50 or more hostages are released in smaller batches every 24 hours. It was not immediately clear how many of the 239 people believed to be in captivity in Gaza would be released under the deal. Overhead surveillance would monitor movement on the ground to police the pause.

The stop in fighting is also intended to allow a significant increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance, including fuel, to enter the besieged enclave from Egypt.

“We’ve made some progress recently and have been working hard to advance this, but it remains a volatile situation,” an administration official said Saturday on condition of anonymity. After this article was initially published, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson tweeted that there was “no deal yet but we continue to work hard to get a deal.”

The outline of a deal was put together during weeks of talks in Doha, Qatar, among Israel, the United States and Hamas, indirectly represented by Qatari mediators, according to Arab and other diplomats. But it remained unclear until now that Israel would agree to temporarily pause its offensive in Gaza, provided the conditions were right.

Israel is under tremendous pressure from the relatives of the hostages to get them freed, and that’s why they agreed to a longer pause. They will also, I’m guessing, release an equal number of Palestinian women and younger people from Israeli prisons. But, as they said, the situation is volatile

*Just about as insane as calls for a cease-fire is the suggestion that the Palestinian Authority should run Gaza after the war is over. That may be jumping the gun, as the war may last a very long time, but seriously, the Palestinian Authority? The WSJ runs through the ups and downs of that solution.

As Western and Arab leaders look beyond Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, most agree they want some form of Palestinian government running the enclave, but they can’t agree on who it should include.

One emerging point of consensus is that the Palestinian Authority—as it now operates and oversees the West Bank—isn’t up to the job. But there is no easy alternative.

That’s a given: the PA is deeply corrupt, and its head, President for Life Abass, has to go.

Discussions in Washington, Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East are focused on reforming the authority or pushing it aside for something better to govern roughly 2.2 million Gazans upended by a devastating war.

Israel has said it doesn’t want to govern the strip once its offensive ends, potentially months from now, but wants to maintain security to ensure Gaza isn’t used to attack Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also has said he opposes the Palestinian Authority in its current form governing there.

The authority’s 88-year-old leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has said he would return to Gaza only as part of broader Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations toward a two-state solution. Yet few envisage a quick peace agreement so soon after the Oct. 7 attacks by militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel, prompting Israel’s assault on Gaza in response.

For a Jewish-centric view on this dangerous fantasy, one promoted by both Blinken and Biden, read Jonathan Tobin’s JNS piece, “Biden’s dangerous Palestinian state fantasy.”

Still, Biden’s refusal to abandon Israel and to try to force an end to the campaign against Hamas is something of a surprise, especially to the Democratic Party’s liberal base, which is furious at him about this. The full-scale revolts among lower-level staffers throughout the administration, as well as among those who work for congressional Democrats, are just one indication of the way younger members of his party have embraced intersectional lies about Israel. They have exhibited a clear predilection to take the side of the Palestinians and Hamas terrorists. This is being illustrated by the polls showing Biden’s shrinking support among younger and minority Democrats.

. . . Whatever may follow the conclusion of the fighting in Gaza—and there’s no certainty about how long it will take for the IDF to complete its vital mission of destroying Hamas—some things are certain. Chief among them is that after the experience of allowing Gaza to be Jew-free, as well as a no-go zone for the Israeli military, there is no way that any Israeli government, no matter its political composition, will allow a repeat of the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s experiment in the summer of 2005 in which every soldier, settler and settlement was pulled out of the Strip.

Sharon and military strategists repeatedly assured Israelis that if the Palestinians were so foolish as to pass up the opportunity to use the withdrawal and the promised Western investment in the area to create an incubator for peace—and instead use it as a launching pad for terrorism—then the Jewish state would have no problem reversing the process. This was a catastrophic mistake in terms of its expectations about Palestinian intentions, international opinion and Israel’s ability to contain or create deterrence against Gaza-based terrorism.

. . . A peace based on the ideas of partition, coexistence and mutual respect, in which both Jews and Arabs would have sovereignty over part of the small country that they share, has been at the heart of every plan to solve the conflict since the 1930s. Yet all have failed, despite the Jewish acceptance of this concept because the majority of Palestinian Arabs have never been interested in any of it. That’s why they rejected the “Arab state” in Palestine that the United Nations voted for in 1947, in addition to repeated Israeli offers of an independent state over the course of the last quarter century.

. . .Common sense dictates that there is no alternative to Israeli security control in Gaza. Alternatives such as a joint force put together by the Arab nations is a fantasy, as those countries understandably want no part of having to deal with the Palestinians and their intransigent refusal to give up their dream of eradicating Israel. Nor is the United States or any Western nation going to go down that rabbit hole. The only choices are a return to the pre-Oct. 6 situation in which the terrorists run Gaza and have free reign [sic] to make good on their promises to repeat their Oct. 7 carnage again and again, or Israeli control.

That might not be what Biden, the foreign-policy establishment and the corporate media that has helped mainstream antisemitism or international opinion want to hear. But it’s the stark truth.

I can’t believe that Israel will want to have security control in Gaza; it seems disastrous. But the two-state solution, in which a Palestine borders on Israel, seems dead as a doornail, at lest until we get new leadership in both countries, and even then I would foresee Palestinian terrorism against a contiguous state of Jews.  Let’s just get this war over first while the higher-ups ponder these follies.

*Do you know how much your subscriptions cost per month? I have a good idea, but what bothers me is the subscriptions I’ve forgotten about that are self-renewing. This is the beef of writer David Mack in his NYT op-ed, “The sneaky sticker shock of subscription culture.”

You see, the thing about background spending is it tends to happen, well, in the background without your full attention. And therein lies the point.

“Hand over your credit card details and let us take care of the rest,” these companies assure us. But by agreeing to this trade, we’ve become passive consumers who are allowing the balance of capitalism to tilt away from us. We have ceded one of our key powers as individuals: our agency.

And this laziness breeds more laziness because most of us can’t be bothered conducting regular reviews of our subscription spending. Indeed, economists estimate that buyers forgetting to cancel subscriptions can increase a business’s revenues by as much as 200 percent. It’s no wonder these companies feel that they can jack up the prices. We’re too lazy or busy to even notice or cancel!

I know it’s not just me who is suddenly living life as a smooth-brained subscriber. The average consumer spends $273 per month on subscriptions, according to a 2021 poll of 2,500 by digital services firm West Monroe, which found this spending was up 15 percent from 2018. Not a single person polled knew what his actual monthly spending was.

. . . There’s also evidence we are spending way more on subscriptions than we even realize. Last year, C+R Research asked 1,000 people to estimate what they fork over in subscription costs before actually having them itemize this spending. They found the average monthly spend was $219 — more than 2.5 times higher than the $86 that people guessed.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili doesn’t like all the fallen leaves:

Hili: Autumn is making a mess again.
A: I like it.
Hili: I cannot understand it.
In Polish:
Hili: Jesień znowu śmieci.
Ja: Ja to lubię.
Hili: Nie umiem tego pojąć.
And a picture of the uber-affectionate Szaron:

*******************

From Roy:

From Richard: A very bad tattoo of the Savior, making Jesus look like an Eskimo with frostbite:

From Robin, a Dylan Thomas meme:

From Masih: Apparently the hatred of Jews and the wish to die killing them begins early in Iran as well:

From Jez (the UEFA is the Union of European Football Associations).  However, Malgorzata told me that there was just a demonstration of Polish activists in front of the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw, protesting Israel’s “war crimes.”

*Also from Jez. I presume the clumsy seagull got the biscuit after it hit the ground:

*Israeli actress and activist Noa Tishby calls out Students for Justice in Palestine in front of the House Ways and Means Committee

The Babylon Bee has a funny (but pretty accurate) simulation of an interview between a PBS-like interviewer and a member of Hamas:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 19=year-old Dutch woman who didn’t survive:

From Dr. Cobb. He calls the first one “a nice thing”, and it is:

Best video ever? You be the judge, but the 6-minute video of the acorn weevil, with great photography, is mesmerizing.

31 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1789 – New Jersey becomes the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.

    1805 – Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, premieres in Vienna.

    1820 – An 80-ton sperm whale attacks and sinks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) from the western coast of South America. (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this incident.)

    1936 – José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, is killed by a republican execution squad.

    1945 – Nuremberg trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.

    1959 – The Declaration of the Rights of the Child is adopted by the United Nations.

    1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis ends: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.

    1968 – A total of 78 miners are killed in an explosion at the Consolidated Coal Company’s No. 9 mine in Farmington, West Virginia in the Farmington Mine disaster.

    1969 – Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.

    1974 – The United States Department of Justice files its final anti-trust suit against AT&T Corporation. This suit later leads to the breakup of AT&T and its Bell System.

    1977 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, when he meets Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and speaks before the Knesset in Jerusalem, seeking a permanent peace settlement.

    1980 – Lake Peigneur in Louisiana drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole.

    1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0, the first graphical personal computer operating environment developed by Microsoft, is released.

    1989 – Velvet Revolution: The number of protesters assembled in Prague, Czechoslovakia, swells from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million.

    1990 – Andrei Chikatilo, one of the Soviet Union’s most prolific serial killers, is arrested; he eventually confesses to 56 killings.

    1992 – In England, a fire breaks out in Windsor Castle, badly damaging the castle and causing over £50 million worth of damage.

    1993 – Savings and loan crisis: The United States Senate Ethics Committee issues a stern censure of California senator Alan Cranston for his “dealings” with savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating.

    1994 – The Angolan government and UNITA rebels sign the Lusaka Protocol in Zambia, ending 19 years of civil war. (Localized fighting resumes the next year.)

    1998 – A court in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan declares accused terrorist Osama bin Laden “a man without a sin” in regard to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. [Who’d have thought that in 2023, “progressive” Americans would post videos of themselves on social media basically agreeing with bin Laden’s justification of the 9/11 terrorist attacks?]

    1998 – The first space station module component, Zarya, for the International Space Station is launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

    Births:
    1750 – Tipu Sultan, Indian ruler (d. 1799).

    1752 – Thomas Chatterton, English poet (d. 1770).

    1851 – John Merle Coulter, American botanist (d. 1928). [Served as the president of Indiana University and Lake Forest College and the head of the Department of Botany at the University of Chicago.]

    1858 – Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish author and educator, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1940). [The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909, and the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.]

    1866 – Maria Letizia Bonaparte, daughter of Prince Napoléon Bonaparte (d. 1926). [The last of the Bonaparte line. She was a patient and friend of Sigmund Freud, and it was to her that he made his “What does a woman want?” pronouncement.]

    1889 – Edwin Hubble, American astronomer and cosmologist (d. 1953).

    1892 – James Collip, Canadian biochemist and academic, co-discovered insulin (d. 1965).

    1900 – Chester Gould, American cartoonist and author, created Dick Tracy (d. 1985).

    1908 – Alistair Cooke, British-American journalist and author (d. 2004).

    1913 – Charles Berlitz, American linguist (d. 2003).

    1913 – Libertas Schulze-Boysen, German opponent of the Nazis (d. 1942).

    1923 – Nadine Gordimer, South African novelist, short story writer, and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2014).

    1924 – Timothy Evans, Welshman wrongfully convicted of murder (d. 1950). [Hanged for murders, including his wife and young daughter, actually committed by serial killer John Christie. The miscarriage of justice was amongst those that led to the abolition of the death penalty in the UK.]

    1924 – Benoit Mandelbrot, Polish-American mathematician and economist (d. 2010).

    1925 – Robert F. Kennedy, US Navy officer, lawyer, and politician, 64th United States Attorney General (d. 1968).

    1936 – Don DeLillo, American novelist, essayist, and playwright.

    1941 – Dr. John, American singer and songwriter (d. 2019).

    1942 – Joe Biden, American politician, 46th President of the United States.

    1946 – Duane Allman, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1971).

    1947 – Joe Walsh, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor.

    1954 – Frank Marino, Canadian guitarist and singer-songwriter.

    1956 – Bo Derek, American actress and producer.

    1959 – Sean Young, American actress and dancer.

    The goal of all life is death:
    869 – Edmund the Martyr, English king (b. 841). [Simon Edge’s Anyone for Edmund? is a comedy based on the fictional discovery of Edmund’s remains under a tennis court in Bury St Edmunds.]

    1764 – Christian Goldbach, Prussian mathematician and theorist (b. 1690).

    1894 – Anton Rubinstein, Russian pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1829).

    1910 – Leo Tolstoy, Russian author and playwright (b. 1828).

    1924 – Ebenezer Cobb Morley, English sportsman and the father of the Football Association and modern football (b. 1831).

    1954 – Clyde Vernon Cessna, American pilot and engineer, founded the Cessna Aircraft Corporation (b. 1879).

    1975 – Francisco Franco, Spanish general and dictator, Prime Minister of Spain (b. 1892).

    1976 – Trofim Lysenko, Ukrainian-Russian biologist and agronomist (b. 1898). [His pseudoscientific ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People’s Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, culminating in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962.]

    1997 – Robert Palmer, American saxophonist, producer, and author (b. 1945).

    2005 – James King, American tenor (b. 1925).

    2006 – Robert Altman, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1925).

    2020 – Jan Morris, Welsh historian, author and travel writer (b. 1926). [As James Morris he broke the news of the first ascent of Everest. One of the UK’s first transsexuals, his daughter has written about his cruelty and misogyny towards her.]

    Reply

    1. Robert Altman directed Kansas City – which is a great intro to some hot jazz players on the scene from that time (90s to now), as well as a sampling of great standards and period (30s? 40s?) sound. PCC(E) might be interested, as there is definite homage to players like Lester Young, and composers like Ellington – they play Solitude. It’s a live house band sound – not a studio – so it’s realistic.

      There’s a soundtrack… actually, I have to add it to my library! (I own the cd only).

      Here it is! : https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA14E2CCB19AEBA3B&si=oUQ_JPAEhdkUc2sc

      There’s an additional one too but not on YouTube called After Hours – More Music From Kansas City.

      Reply

      1. “We will not accept hostility from those who incorrectly weaponise science to incite hatred” is itself a hostile statement against science which incites hatred toward it and advocates the incorrect weaponisation of anti-science.

        Another institution bites the dust. I continue to be amazed when science institutions – the ones who should have a built-in immunity to postmodernism – fall over into that cesspool. A book club devoted to fiction would be right in line with this.

        Reply

  3. After all this, I have nothing but contempt for both the NYT and the BBC, …

    Here is a clip of the BBC platforming someone billed as an “analyst” who just claims that the Israelis have “doctored” the evidence.

    For a really acrid take on the BBC and NYT’s anti-Israel reporting, read this article in Spiked.

    Also well worth a read is today’s bluntly-worded Spiked article: “You can’t beat anti-Semitism with ‘diversity’ training: The DEI ideology is fuelling the explosion of Jew-hatred in elite US universities”.

    Reply

    1. I’m inclined to take Claudine Gay quite literally in her stated intent ‘to more fully integrate anti-Semitism into the work of [the Harvard DEI] office’. It fits right in alongside their ongoing anti-Caucasianism and anti-Asianism.

      Reply

    3. Totally OT:

      Did you recommend The Nurture Assumption a week or so ago?

      Thank you if so – I just got a copy.

      Personally, I find concerning parallels with the Red Guard in Mao Zedong’s China. At least.

      But that’s just me.

      Reply

      1. Yes, I think I did. I read it back when it came out, and it was one of the few times when I changed my mind on an issue between the start of the book and finishing it.

        Reply

        1. I was pleased to read – on this ~1998 book’s back cover – praise written by Robert Sapolsky! Not to mention Steven Pinker’s foreword.

          Whom of course readers here are much familiar.

          Cheers

          Reply

  4. … Rosalynn Carter died at 96 …

    So it goes.

    Speaking of Uncle Kurt, I recently chanced upon an insightful essay Salman Rushdie wrote for The New Yorker on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Slaughter-House Five. (Turns out, like Rushdie, I first read Vonnegut’s novel in 1972, three years after its publication; coincidentally, Rushdie and I both read Mr. Heller’s Catch-22 for the first time that same year, 1972, eleven years after it was first published.)

    I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the intervening half century reading, frequently rereading, and occasionally brooding upon Vonnegut’s magnum opus as well as the rest of his oeuvre, and Rushdie’s essay contained some fresh insights about Vonnegut’s writing for me. It’s well worth a read by fans of Rushdie’s writing, or by fans of Vonnegut’s writing, or even just by fans of great writing about great writing. Anyone interested can access Rushdie’s essay here.

    Reply

    1. Thanks for the link Ken. I think that I was also a 1972(+/- 1) reader of all of Vonnegut. Links like this from commenters is one of the things that I love about WEIT….and why the leaves will not get raked this morning!

      Reply

  5. Here is a video I saw over the week, here from Politico, of Bill Clinton in 2016 responding to a question about Palestine (the “she” apparently refers to Hillary). He references two occasions when peace was there to be had, but Hamas turned it down.

    And Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket Israel, they insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools, in the highly populous areas, and they are smart.

    Also, I saw over the weekend, but, cannot remember where, that Israel has said that they intended to go after the Hamas leadership in Qatar. I expected that to be picked up in more places, but I have only seen it once. Since Qatar seems to be helping to broker the hostage release, presumably Israel will wait until that is done. I’ve been wondering why that hadn’t happened.

    Reply

  6. As far as bias in the msm and how idiotic college students act you can call it anti-Semitism but they would deny it. And they are right, it’s not about Jews. It’s about them. If you are on their bad guy list it doesn’t matter who you are. And any arguments you might have against their position wouldn’t matter either.

    Reply

    1. If it’s not about the Jews, why are they always going after the Jews? Why not go after Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who has killed far more Muslims than has Israel? The fact is that Jews are always on the college bad-guy list, and you can’t explain that without antisemitism.

      Reply

  7. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals hears oral argument this morning at 9:30 am on Donald Trump’s First Amendment challenge to the gag order imposed by federal trial judge Tanya Chutkan.

    You can access the livestream of the argument here.

    Reply

  8. Could the media really be antisemitic? I’m being forced to that conclusion.

    I’m not ready to go there yet. Instead, I wonder if journalists who report anything supportive of Israel’s stance receive personal threats, or it it’s common knowledge among them that if they do, they will receive such threats.

    (Otherwise, does everyone have to enter their email and username with every post these days? Are the days of auto-fill forever over? Or is it just with some of us?)

    Reply

    1. I think it’s all of us. For me, it about clicking on choices to load my email and name. I click on the email box and choose the email that I use here. Then I click on the name box, and click again to load my name.

      Reply

      1. I googled this:
        What causes death from snail?

        More than 200,000 deaths a year can be attributed to freshwater snails.

        So I think you left off a zero, making the comparison even more stark…by a factor of 10!

        Reply

  11. Israel needs to keep up the attack on Hamas. The hospital was used for Hamas activities, as Israeli reports and unidentified hospital personnel have shown. And, Israel needs to continue providing more evidence, as it needs to fight the propaganda war as well. There will never be enough evidence for the NYT and the BBC.

    What happens after Hamas is gone, nobody knows. Places like Libya end up as “failed states.” But Gaza is already a failed state. I am not optimistic, but dire need sometimes allows a solution to emerge. The Palestinian Authority? A long shot, unless Abbas retires and new, moderate leadership steps forward. Create a new state of Palestine from Gaza and the Swiss cheese that is the West Bank? Again, who would lead it?

    Would a new state be better off than what we have now? Maybe. Perhaps a state recognized by other states would be able to survive, particularly if buoyed up by the international community. Does being part of the international community of nations help stabilize nascent nations through political alliances and the financial system? What about a Marshall Plan (which others have discussed)? Or would a new nation on Israel’s borders (now on both borders!), just be a bigger menace?

    My only hope is that there are good thinkers out there who can help achieve a tolerable solution.

    Reply

    1. Why can’t the Gazans be pushed into Egypt, or the sea, and the people in the West Bank pushed into the Jordan River? Particularly in the latter case, the river is more like a creek in most places. No one will drown. The pushees can wade across it, even with children in tow. And there is dry land on the other side. Sure, no one wants Palestinians in their countries. European countries don’t want Muslim African migrants in theirs, either, but still they flood in. So the reception might be less welcoming than, say, crossing the Rio Grande, but why should Jordan (and Egypt) escape their duty under international law to hear asylum claims from people fleeing persecution, which everyone would be quick to agree Israel was doing? Other countries have to. Why can’t Jordan and Egypt have an “open-borders” policy for displaced migrants?

      Pushing Gazans into the sea — maybe just the males — would be more drastic, but there are already large ships chartered by NGOs cruising the Med looking for migrants to rescue and take to Europe. They would jump at the chance to make Israel look bad by rescuing Gazans from the leaky dinghies that the snakeheads would rush to provide them with, for a hefty fee, of course. What happens to them after that is the UNRWA’s problem, not Israel’s. Re-settle them in Rwanda for all Israel cares. (Or the Gazans could stay in place if they foreswore violence and meant it.)

      The various terror organizations around Israel seek to encourage Jewish emigration by making happy prosperous peaceable life progressively untenable. Two can play that game.

      There is nothing inherently morally wrong with ethnic cleansing of chronic recalcitrant troublemakers who teach their children to hate, as long as you don’t gratuitously kill enough that it turns into genocide.* That’s why Israel can’t let the Muslims ethnic-ly cleanse Palestine of Jews: no boats would come for the Jews and they would all drown.
      —————
      * The only country in the Middle East that doesn’t want to see everyone in Gaza dead is…..(wait for it)……….Israel!

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      1. … why should Jordan (and Egypt) escape their duty under international law to hear asylum claims from people fleeing persecution, …?

        Please sir, I know the answer to this! It’s because, not being Western, they don’t hold themselves to the same standards that white Western countries hold themselves to.

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  12. As of yesterday (a radio news report) Hamas have indicated 6 hostages have died from IDF bombing… they may have trouble explaining the large gash to the throat and bullets lodged in the skull but the BBC will find a way.
    I don’t know that of course but it fits so I’ll wear it.

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