Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 9, 2024 • 6:45 am

I’m back after a day off and some rest (I actually got a decent night’s sleep), so welcome to Sunday (Sabbath for goyische cats), June 9, 2029.  There will be a shortened Hili dialogue today as I was too wiped out to prepare them. (Most of the preparation is done the night before.) Tomorrow we’ll resume as usual.

It’s National Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day, which becomes edible only when you omit the rhubarb. As I say endlessly, vegetables (especially gritty and sour ones) don’t belong in pies.

It’s also Donald Duck Day, for it was on this day in 1934 that the pantsless drake first appeared in the short animated Disney film “The Wise Lttle Hen”. Here it is; Donald shows up at 2:04, dancing the hornpipe:

And it’s Race Unity Day, La Rioja Day, celebrating a great wine, Coral Triangle Day, promoting ocean conservation, and Don Young Day, celebrating the Republican congressman from Alaska who served for 49 years—the longest-serving representative in history.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

The big news is the rescue of four Israeli hostages by the IDF in the Gazan refugee camp of Nuseirat. (The details of the operation are here.) All four hostages were held by civilian families (three men in one place and the woman in another), and the rescue involved firefights in both the homes and the surrounding villages; Hamas gunmen were involved in both place. Hamas opened fire on the IDF from a market as the IDF tried to put the hostages into a vehicle to remove them from Gaza. The death toll is uncertain, ranging from 55 (in the Palestinian hospital) to 210 (Hamas’s figure). (Israel estimates 100.) We don’t know what proportion of the dead were terrorists (were the family holding the hostages along with Hamas gunmen “civilians”, for example?).

This is what I can gather from a cursory look at the news, and what’s absolutely predictable is the world’s reaction, which is that the hostage rescue produced a “massacre” (see this article about the reaction of EU representative Josep Borrell):

European Union High Representative Josep Borrell called the hostage rescue operation carried out by Israeli security forces on Saturday morning “appalling” in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

The operation, carried out jointly by the IDF, Shin Bet and Border Police’s National Counterterrorism unit Yamam, successfully rescued four hostages: Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Almog Meir Jan, and Andrey Kozlov. According to Palestinian officials, over 200 Palestinians were killed during the IDF operation.

Borrell referred to the operation as “another massacre of civilians,” noting that the EU “condemns this in the strongest terms.”

Borrell called the fight to rescue the hostages a “bloodbath,” but, curiously, also said this:

Earlier on Saturday, Borrell also sent remarks congratulating the four hostages on their release, writing on X that they are “are free and safe today.

“We share the relief of their families and call for the release of all the remaining hostages.”

It almost seems as if the reaction of the world is that Israel should not have tried to rescue the four hostages, or at least rescued them without there being so many deaths in the firefight. My reaction is that the deaths of civilians were an unfortunate byproduct of Hamas trying to kill IDF soldiers trying to rescue the hostages. Hamas could just let them go, you know.

Here’s a tweet showing the woman hostage, Noa Argamani, being escorted to a helcopter for evacuation:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is narcissistic, as always:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I beautify the world with myself.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Upiększam sobą świat.

. . . and a photo of Baby Kulka looking out the window:

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

From The Dodo Pet:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy: (I suppose Jesus is also his seatbelt):

Masih and Yasmine Mohammed appeared on Sam Harris’s show talking about Gender Apartheid.

Here’s the episode:

From Luana: Another school adopts standardized tests:

A protest in Washington D.C. calling for the killing of more IDF soldiers as well as “Zionists” in general:

I don’t understand this, and neither does the cat.

From Malgorzata; Golda Meir speaking 54 years ago, and still sounding contemporary:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: an 18-year-old man gassed to death upon arrival:

From Matthew: amazing glassblowing skill:

 

30 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. No one seems to point out that maybe Hamas ought not to keep hostages in a refugee camp, guaranteeing that any attempt to rescue them will result in civilian casualties (but of course, we know that is exactly what Hamas wants).

    PS I fixed my insomnia when I realised how low my serum magnesium was. Supplementation worked.

    1. These places are not “refugee camps”, they’re just towns.

      At least, they may have been “refugee camps” (i.e. tents) for a few years after the 1948 war, but they long ago turned into normal towns and cities. To call them “refugee camps” is to buy into the idea that at some point the inhabitants will all “return” to homes in what is now Israel. (I put “return” in commas since most of the inhabitants are too young to have lived anywhere else.)

    2. The civilians, whose dead and shattered bodies are clear for the whole world to see, do not make the decisions about where the hostages are kept. The last vote on government was held in 2006, when most current Palestinians were not alive, and Hamas won 44.45 % of the vote. The previous last vote was in 1996. These civilians are dead because Israeli forces killed them, just as the civilians in Israel were are dead because Hamas forces killed them. The world understands this. Quoting Tom Cotton is not the avenue to intellectual prowess.

      1. This is a widespread argument: that the Palestinians in Gaza have no agency. And I agree they’re sympathetic people in many ways. But the Israeli hostages didn’t choose to be kidnapped, raped, abused, and imprisoned, and they also don’t get to choose where they are kept: in some military tunnel vs. a civilian apartment block.

        And there is at least *some* agency on the part of Gazans: either some civilian(s) said “yes” to keeping Noa in that apartment, or the people who shot back at her rescuers were themselves combatants and not civilians. One could choose to do neither of those things, and maybe risk being shot by Hamas instead of by the IDF. I don’t know and I’m glad I don’t have to make that choice.

      2. Hamas may have received 44.5% of the vote, but of the remaining 45.5% of the votes, almost all of it went to other jihadi terrorist parties. In the last 15 years, a quarter of a million presumably rational Gazans have emigrated from Gaza, which more than accounts for the Gazans who voted for in 2006 for non terrorist factions.

        Add to this the facts that the IDF has found that a majority of Gazans households harbor stockpiles of munitions, that non Hamas civilians participated in October 7th, that the Gazan streets were filled with celebration and defiling of Israeli hostages.

        I find this persistent framing of Gazans as victims without agency or moral responsibility not only inconsistent with the facts but abhorrent.

      3. 70 percent in 2006.

        recent polling shows higher approval.

        Don’t think that almost the ENTIRE Pal population want nothing more than to destroy Israel.
        They value things we in the rich secular west just don’t.
        Big thing to get one’s head around I know but give it a shot.

      4. Under the law of war, it doesn’t matter whether non-combatants in Gaza have personal agency or not for their own actions, or have any control over the actions of Hamas. The IDF can still kill them, if it has to, in numbers proportionate to what the IDF regards as the military value of the objective. They must not deliberately or gratuitously kill non-combatants as collective punishment or as genocide for the hell of it. But if there are non-combatants in the contested battle zone where the IDF is trying to grasp its “diamonds”, some of them will surely get killed in the resulting fire fight even if they don’t pick up a weapon.

        At the Walk With Israel today, some keffiyeh-masked protestors accosted us with taunts, “You should be proud of yourselves murdering 200 civilians to rescue four hostages!” The organizers had urged us not to engage with them, so we didn’t of course. But my only response would have been to shrug.

  2. Speaking of the lopsided reporting on Gaza, NYT has an article “A Small American Bomb Killing Palestinians by the Dozen in Gaza” which talks about the GBU-39 precision guided bomb now used extensively by Israel. The US encouraged their use, replacing larger 2000 lb bombs responsible for many civilian deaths. Good right? No bad! The article does not praise Israel for reducing casualties, it condemns it because the small bombs still do kill civilians. Israel might win the war, but it just can’t win against the media.

    1. What really puzzles me is why. We can say ‘because reporters hate Israel’, but it still baffles me. Any reporter should look for comments from both sides in any conflict, not just one side. But I guess not when it comes to Israel.

      1. It boggles my mind, too, Mark. All I can think of as a possible explanation, other than anti-Semitism, is that there must be moneyed interests behind the news media that have it in for Israel. Those interests could very well be aligned with Christian Zionists who are agitating for Armageddon and the subsequent return of Jesus.

          1. I hadn’t heard that term before, but, yes, it fits nicely with what is known as Christian Zionism. Thanks for the reference!

          2. I clicked on that. Towards the end of the article it talked about using technology for such purposes (AI) which is interesting as I just heard someone characterizing Silicon Valley types as preferring to apologize for overstepping (with their tech inventions) after the fact rather than asking for permission first.

          3. I think “accelerationism” can be applied to a variety of scenarios, Debi, but I was thinking about how Christian Zionists might be supporting Israel because they think the backlash to Israel will be greater if Israel is seen as potentially vanquishing its foes, and that this backlash will bring sooner (accelerate) the day that their hoped-for Armageddon will arrive. Just a thought. I’m not knowledgeable about Christian Zionists.

          4. I’ve known Christian Zionists and I can guarantee you they are not big readers of NYT.

            My theory is the editors are leftist idiots.

  3. Amazing interview with Golda Meir. Thank you, Malgorzata, for bringing it to our attention.

    Yes. There was collateral damage during the rescues. Hamas was responsible for that, as Hamas placed the hostages in homes in a residential area. Also, a good deal of the damage was not collateral. The people housing the hostages cannot reasonably be called innocents.

    Yet the press continues cheerleading for Hamas. They do it for sport. Not one of those journalists would voluntarily subject themselves to Hamas governance.

    2. One more comment, as I finish reading the morning news… .

      Here (link below) we have a former IDF spokesman patiently dismantling a BBC reporter who questioned him regarding the hostage rescue: Should the IDF have issued a warning to the local civilians,? she asks. She seems hopelessly naive. Naive in not realizing that a warning would be a death sentence for the hostages. Naive in thinking that the “civilians” holding her—including a possible Al Jazeera photographer—were just ordinary apartment-dwellers who deserved to be warned in advance. Naive in thinking that others in the building were innocents living their lives, not knowing that hostages were among them. And naive in thinking that the heavy fire that greeted the IDF when they arrived to save the hostages were just peaceful residents protecting their homes. It just goes on and on, with the Israeli spokesman calmly and patiently telling her about the facts of life. It’s an interview worth watching.

      https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/391294

      1. Former IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus always manages to be calm in the face of hostile questioning. I see him occasionally interviewed on Amanpour & Company (via PBS), although Christiane Amanpour is usually more sympathetic to anti-Israeli perspectives, if only because she frequently shows grieving, injured, and dead Palestinians.

  4. There is something fake about the dog supposedly going through the baby gate and the cat with very large eyes. If the dog actually went between the bars, they would have to bend, but they don’t (I’ve paused on both instances a couple of times). There must be some sort of illusion here or computer manipulation. Does anyone know? The video of the cat could obviously have been taken separately and just added on.

    1. Many improbable video clips on social media are simply cgi. Same for incredibly stupid or funny signs that we see on social media. They are just doctored but they look real.

    1. Yes I hope so. The snowball will be advertised as a way to help ensure that marginalized kids who lacked financial advantages can show their abilities on a level playing field. As if that wasn’t the point of standardized tests all along. Like the future fading of gender wang (and past mass delusions like the satanic panic), I expect most people will realize how embarrassing this all has been and stop mentioning it. No great reckoning, and no accounting of the harm done to kids who were denied a shot at college via a great SAT score, just quiet regret and a return to previous form.

  6. I enjoyed the Disney video of The Wise Little Hen. I couldn’t help but notice that Peter the Pig’s appearance, mannerisms and bullying behaviour are like those of Agent Orange. Even the accordion-playing movements are like drumpf’s gesticulations when he speaks.

    I remain heartsick over the missing Israeli hostages, their families and the innocent lives lost, and hope more of them survive this insanity. The onus is on Hamas to free them all, sooner rather than later, to end this hellish situation that they caused.

  8. The illusion of the dog walking through the fence could be achieved by forced perspective, where the two parts of the fence appear to connect, and at the same angle. However one part is closer to the camera than the other one, and the other one actually extends at a different angle away from the camera, but is built to that from the camera’s point of view the perspective looks the same (slopes away from the camera but increases in height to make it look parallel). So from the dog’s point of view, there is a big hole between the two sides to walk through that the camera can’t detect.

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