Quotulatiousness

November 15, 2023

Can we criticize the Climate Goblin now?

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill asks if it’s allowed to criticized Greta “The Climate Goblin” Thunberg now:

Can we criticise Greta Thunberg now? For a time, anyone who raised even the mildest objection to the pint-sized prophetess of doom risked being damned as a bully. Surely this moratorium on Greta-scepticism will end following her platforming – to use woke lingo – of an activist with very iffy views. An activist who has trivialised the Holocaust and seems pretty chilled about Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. Calling out Greta for her fact-lite blather about the planet being “on fire” may have been forbidden – pulling her up for hanging out with Holocaust relativists must not be.

Thunberg has made waves by switching her focus from saving the planet to saving Gaza. Like every other Gen Zer with a TikTok and an insatiable urge to signal his / her / zir virtue to the world, she’s become an overnight authority on Israel-Palestine. She posed with a placard saying “Stand with Gaza“. She turned Fridays for Future – where pious rich kids bunk off school to raise awareness about climate change – into “Justice for Palestine” stunts. And on Sunday, she made a climate protest in Amsterdam pretty much all about Palestine.

She invited activists to the stage. One was Sara Rachdan, a Palestinian studying in Amsterdam. It didn’t take German newspaper Bild long to discover that Ms Rachdan holds views which – how should we put this? – are not very pleasant. On Hamas’s pogrom, Ms Rachdan said: “This is finally Palestinians taking action [against] the occupation”. She’s dabbled in Holocaust denigration. She shared a blood-spattered graphic comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza with the Nazis’ actions in Auschwitz. Repulsively, it implies the Jewish State is worse than the Nazis. Where 127 kids a day were killed in Auschwitz, 178 a day are currently dying in Israel’s war in Gaza, it alleges.

Shorter version: the Jews are more accomplished child-killers than even Hitler’s henchmen were. This is rank Holocaust relativism. Comparing the greatest crime in history to this horrendous war denudes that crime of its unique horror. It renders it ordinary. It was no big deal – just the same kind of thing you see on your TV screens every night from Gaza. The implication of moral equivalence between the Nazis’ minutely planned gassing of Jewish children and the deaths of Palestinian kids as a terrible byproduct of Israel’s war on Hamas is beyond immoral. It is the gravest of inversions, treating the Jewish State’s war against anti-Semitic mass murderers as indistinguishable from the Nazis’ acts of anti-Semitic mass murder.

Of course, there’s nothing to suggest Greta shares Ms Rachdan’s views. But isn’t her woke generation obsessed with “platforming”, with only rubbing shoulders with the perfectly politically correct and no one else? Indeed, Thunberg ostentatiously flounced out of the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this year because it received funding from a firm that invests in fossil fuels. Take oil money and she’ll dodge you like the plague; describe an anti-Semitic pogrom as an act of resistance and she’s all over you like a cheap suit. Care to explain, Greta?

November 14, 2023

The deep cognitive dissonance of “Queers for Palestine”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Armin Navabi points out the utter absurdity of a group of self-identified queers actively supporting the terror organization running the Gaza Strip, which would execute as many of them as came within its power:

Leftists in English-speaking nations tend to see Palestinians (including Hamas) as an oppressed, brown victim class, whose freedom-fighting “resistance” against their oppressive, white, US-backed colonizers in Israel is a righteous cause with which to stand in solidarity. This facile view of the long-standing conflict in the Middle East leads to confused and contradictory thinking, as seen in the incoherent slogan (and now meme) “Queers for Palestine“, emblazoned on banners brandished at anti-Israel rallies.

“Queers for Palestine” attempts to meld LGBT advocacy with Palestinian liberation, a juxtaposition that has precipitated a whirlwind of criticism and ridicule, since LGBT rights scarcely exist within the Muslim world; and the Palestinian territories are no exception. The slogan has been widely satirized. Variations like “Chickens for KFC” and “Blacks for the KKK” highlight its proponents’ basic lack of awareness of just how incompatible the values of the Western left are with those of the Islamic right they so readily champion.

The reality of the situation could not be starker. Though there is room for improvement in Israeli attitudes towards these issues, Israel is at the forefront of LGBT rights in the Middle East. In Israel, LGBT people are visible members of society with legal protections and civil rights, and are accepted by a plurality of its citizens.

Palestine is quite a different story. A 2021 report on LGBT acceptance by UCLA’s Williams Institute rated Israel 44th out of the 175 countries/territories they examined. Palestine came in at number 130, behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Georgetown University likewise placed Palestine 160th out of 170 countries on their women’s peace and security index, in company with most of the countries in that region. Amnesty International‘s 2020 report on human rights highlights the fact that, in Gaza, male same-sex relationships are punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and points out the conspicuous absence of legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination and harassment. This lack of civil rights has led hundreds of gay and bisexual Palestinians to flee to Israel to escape persecution. One such refugee, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a 25-year-old gay Palestinian man, was living under asylum in Israel when, in 2022, he was kidnapped and beheaded in the West Bank city of Hebron. His murderers uploaded footage of the killing to social media.

Every time these disparities are mentioned, critics are quick to lob accusations of “pinkwashing” — a concept invented to frame any discussion of Israel’s progressive stance on LGBT issues as a distraction from their mistreatment of Palestinians. But the fact remains that these “Queers for Palestine” could march in Pride parades in Israel if they wanted to. In Palestine, they’d be killed.

Another disconcerting element of “Queers for Palestine” is that the slogan popped up in prominent left-wing anti-Israel/pro-Palestine rallies in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s terrorist attacks, before Israel had even had the chance to respond. There is no way to interpret this slogan and the surrounding leftist fervor except as a signal of support not merely for Palestine, but specifically for Hamas, a jihadist movement with the explicit aim of eradicating the state of Israel. It’s imperative to understand that Hamas, as detailed in its 1988 Covenant, is propelled by a fundamentalist Islamist ideology whose goal is not only to eliminate all Jews but to conquer the world — just like ISIS. Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar has stated on record, “The entire planet will be under our law, there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors”.

Western support for Hamas, under the guise of support for Palestinian liberation, betrays an ignorance of the deep-seated radical Islamist ethos driving that organization, which, if left unchecked, would jeopardize the very freedoms cherished by LGBT people across the developed world. Anyone who doubts this should try being gay, bi, or trans in most of the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) Muslim-majority countries. Almost all these nations have laws that criminalize both homosexuality and transsexuality, some of which carry the death penalty. Human Rights Watch’s report “Everyone Wants Me Dead” succinctly encapsulates in its title alone the perilous environment faced by LGBT individuals in these regions.

November 12, 2023

“When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan on how our “elites” now live in a world that the renowned Oxford academic Charles Lutwidge Dodgson1 predicted in his writings a century and a half ago:

“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The word “genocide” may be the one rendered most meaningless in our discourse. It has some steep competition, of course. “White supremacy” now means asking someone to show up on time. “Trauma” means being referred to with the wrong pronoun. And “genocide” can, among other things, mean debating experimental sex reassignment procedures for children. (Go look up #transgenocide on Twitter and weep.)

But the supporters of Hamas and of the Palestinians have seized the g-word with particular zeal. And who can blame them? There’s a real, adolescent frisson in accusing the victims of the worst genocide in modern history of being genocidal themselves. “Israel, we charge you with genocide” is a common chant in many of the pro-Palestinian protests. “Genocide Joe” has been trending on Twitter. Eight hundred artists signed an open letter calling the Israeli counteract in Gaza “a genocide”. Yale professor Zareena Grewal channeled much of the “decolonizing” left: “Israeli [sic] is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle”.

It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide”, and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria. A State Department official tweeted that Biden is “complicit in genocide”. A UN official just quit his post, adding:

    In just 4 weeks, Israel with US backing has cut off food, water, power & then brutally exterminated more than 10,000 imprisoned civilian men, women & children in Gaza, destroyed their homes, churches, mosques, schools & hospitals because they are Palestinians. Name it? #Genocide.

The devastation in Gaza is horrifying to watch, worse than horrifying. Anyone who isn’t deeply troubled by the mass death has lost humanity. But the UN official, and all those echoing him, are full of it. The basic definition of “genocide” provided by the State Department is “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”

The key, defining thing here is the aim. Horrifying massacres may or may not be genocidal, depending on the intention. The Hiroshima bomb, for example, was devastating, but it was aimed at ending the war, not obliterating the Japanese people as a race. And if Israel were interested in the “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs, it has had the means to accomplish it for a very long time. And yet, for some reason, the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories has exploded since 1948, and the Arabs in Israel proper have voting rights, and a key presence in the Knesset.

This is not to exonerate Israel entirely. I’ve had strong words for the Netanyahu governments over the years. And Israeli politicians, on the far right, have used foul rhetoric and deemed the Palestinians subhuman in some respects. Bibi swiftly suspended a rogue minister for saying a nuke could be dropped on Gaza. There are anti-Arab maniacs among the West Bank settlers and in Bibi’s cabinet. But a policy of Arab genocide? Please.

The only people actively and proudly engaged in genocide are Hamas. The marchers on the streets this weekend will not be opposing genocide; they will be defending its perpetrators. It’s right there in the Hamas founding charter:

    [All of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. … The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

This is not mere rhetoric. On October 7, we saw what genocide is in practice. Hamas didn’t kill civilians as a tragic consequence of attacks on military targets. Its torture and murder of Jewish civilians was its core mission. And if Hamas had the capacity, they would gladly enact a second Holocaust, and they have proudly said so, with even more sadism than the Nazis. They would kill every Jew they could.

    1. Lewis Carroll, “an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems ‘Jabberwocky’ (1871) and ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.” (Wiki)

November 8, 2023

Details from the day of the Hamas terror attack on Israel

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Gurney in The Line:

On Nov. 6, one-month-less-a-day after the Hamas assault on southern Israel, I was one of a small number of journalists to receive a briefing by a senior Israeli government official at the Israeli consulate in Toronto. Part of the briefing was the showing of a film, approximately 42 minutes long, that contained video and audio records of the attack. The sights and sounds came from many sources, including home security footage, survivor footage, surveillance cameras at private residences, military facilities and in public places, as well as cameras and Go-Pro-style body worn cameras carried by Hamas. Later in the film, we also see footage taken by Israeli first responders — some of it informally, via body worn cameras and smartphones, but some of it also deliberately and meticulously, as part of the documenting of the attack’s aftermath. The video also included audio portions of what the Israeli government claims is intercepted Hamas communications sent during the attack.

I have to preface this near the top: I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the videos, or of the translations. I believe that the videos are authentic and the translations accurate — the latter is easier, since it has by now been shown to enough people that any false translations would have been noted by members of the audience, but I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, and had to rely on the captions. As for the videos, while some of what I saw on Monday was new to me, other clips have already been shared widely on social media. There’s a decent chance you’ve seen some of them, too. For further disclosure, many of the clips are very short — a few seconds each. The Israelis said that in many cases, they are only choosing to release what the families of victims have agreed to allow to be shown. That’s an editorial decision, and I haven’t seen the unedited videos. I can’t tell you what I wasn’t shown.

So if you’re absolutely determined to find a way to discredit or dismiss everything I’m about to say, I’ll keep it easy for you. I saw what was presented to me, by Israel, and have little ability to independently confirm any of it.

If you’re interested in hearing what I saw, though, here it is.

I should start by telling you I don’t plan to dwell on all the atrocities or try to summarize the whole 42 minutes of carnage I watched in any kind of coherent sequence. It’s not that the atrocities aren’t important — they’re obviously the central point of the briefing for reporters, and what I was asked to bear witness to. My thinking is simply this: much of what I could tell you has been summarized elsewhere. The global media first saw this film, in Israel, two weeks ago; some of my Ottawa-based colleagues saw it last week. If you’re looking for a summary of the contents, those exist already. I don’t think you’d benefit from just another version of that, and I know I wouldn’t enjoy writing one. So in the main, I’ll avoid long, descriptive passages where I tell you what I saw. I’ll try to offer something different.

But first, let’s get this out of the way. I confess that I was afraid when the video started. Simple fear. Fear I’d crack, fear I’d have to look away, fear I’d somehow fail to meet the moment. I don’t know if that was a rational fear — what the hell does meeting the moment even mean? — but I was afraid. I was afraid from the moment I was asked to attend and said yes. As the film began, though, I found many of the videos less graphic than I’d feared, and actually less graphic than some of what I’d already seen and written about. No one should mistake me — the videos are graphic, some of them extremely so. But in many cases, the videos are taken from too far away or from an unsteady camera (particularly the body worn ones) and many of the worst gruesome details are thus obscured or missed.

Not all of them. Lord no, not all. But some. That helped.

November 7, 2023

The “slopes of Lyle”, and why they matter

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains what Paul Wells christened the “slopes of Lyle” and why Canadian political discourse is so hypocritical so often:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the (pick your team’s preferred term) [protest | insurrection] in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It was a bit over a year ago when Paul Wells, in one of the best pieces of his I’ve ever read, created the concept of the “slopes of Lyle”. The “Lyle” refers to some polling published by Greg Lyle, of Innovative Research Group. I won’t spend a ton of time recapping the polling or what Paul drew from it, beyond the necessary: Lyle found and could graph what amounts, in effect, to political hypocrisy. Using the example of whether governments should meet with protesters, even if those protesters have broken the law, Lyle found that one’s opinion on the matter hinged less on any overall value-neutral philosophical belief and more on the specifics of the protesters. Left-leaning Canadians (NDP and Liberal voters, in Lyle’s poll) were a lot more sympathetic to a government that would meet with Indigenous Canadians (and supporters) protesting a new pipeline than they were with the Ottawa convoy protesters. CPC-supporting Canadians — and who’da thunk it?! — felt the reverse. Graphing out these positions resulted in those slopes Paul noticed — left-wing and right-wing support for governments meeting with protesters tanked when you changed who the protesters were.

The slopes of Lyle.

It’s been basically a month since the appalling assault by Hamas into southern Israel. Israel’s war against Hamas grinds on, and is producing the kind of horrible collateral damage we all feared. People across the West, including very much here at home in North America, are devastated by what they’re seeing, hearing and reading, and of course they are. It’s awful, every bit of it. There have been large rallies and protests and from them, we’re starting to see some of those Lyle-ian slopes emerge. It’s predictable, but it’s still bad, and it’s worth noting. Because we can do better, and it’s not hard to try.

Consider one issue: whether or not a protest is defined by the worst elements within it. Personally, I say no. Any large group of people necessarily becomes impossible for any organizer to control, and if terrible people show up to wave terrible signs, chant terrible slogans and do terrible things, I don’t think that reflects badly on everyone who showed up. That’s my overall philosophical view on such matters. I felt that way about the convoy in Ottawa, as some of you may remember — I tried really hard in my pieces from the capital to hammer home how the crowd there was a blend of the nasty and the harmlessly well-meaning. At the time, many were portraying the entire event as harmless — just a bunch of bouncy castle fans, folks! Others were portraying every last one of them as Confederate Nazis. Neither was accurate, and I said so then, and I’ve said so since.

Ditto with the protests we’re seeing in Canadian cities of late. I have no problem agreeing that many, probably even most, of the people showing up are good people, motivated by genuine concern over the plight of the Palestinian people, both in the broader sense of their aspirations for a better future but also over their current endangered state, as the war grinds on around them. I’m also not blind to the fact that some of what we’ve seen — some of the flags, some of the chants and slogans, some of the signs being waved, and some of the behaviour — has been wildly inappropriate, perhaps even illegal, and has absolutely gone well beyond simple criticism of Israel into outright antisemitism. There’s just no way to deny that we’ve had antisemites marching through our streets, saying and doing antisemitic things. Loud and proud, out in the open.

And yet I’ve noticed some, ahem, difficulty in admitting this or acknowledging this. And that’s interesting, because some of the very same people who will go to their deathbed believing the convoy was a Nazi uprising get very upset at the suggestion that there’s much to be worried about in the anti-Israel protests or that we should read much into people who want Jews killed for the mere fact of their Judaism.

So that’s a conundrum, eh? I don’t care what side you take. I really don’t. I just want you to be consistent. So I’ll just ask the question: does the presence of a radical group with a larger protest invalidate the protest and even tarnish the cause, or nah? Again, I don’t care which way you vote. But kindly put yourself on the record.

November 2, 2023

With progressive allies like these …

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Suzy Weiss and Francesca Block record the reactions of progressive Jews who are waking up to discover that their “allies” hate them and want them dead:

After Donald Trump was elected, Emily Rose, 51, flew to New York with her daughters to walk in the Women’s March. She demonstrated on the streets of Minneapolis, where she lives, in the days after George Floyd’s murder. She donated money to small, black-led movements and social justice organizations that she believed in. She unlearned and then re-educated herself, as white Americans were instructed to, and read the teachings of anti-racist scholars like Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But then, after the massacre in Israel on October 7, when some 1,400 Jews were brutally murdered, not to mention the rapes, beheadings, and instances of torture, Rose began to notice something odd from the cohort of fellow progressives she admired: they were cheering for the other side.

“I started to see these intelligent, educated people, whose mission is to make our system better for people of color, suddenly posting all this anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian stuff,” Rose said. “I’m not changing my values, but screw the allyship. I will not stop fighting, because I believe in the causes themselves. But as for going out of my way to support, to post, to give money? I’m done.”

While professional politicos, like DSA founder Maurice Isserman, are publicly stepping down from their parties and denouncing organizations that justify, or even cheer, the events of October 7, and wealthy Jewish donors claw back their millions from elite universities that they say helped foment antisemitism on their campuses, there’s a quieter, more personal reckoning happening among progressive Jews. Like Rose, they feel betrayed by a left that they thought would have their backs.

Dov, 30, a Canadian musician who didn’t want to share her last name for privacy reasons, is transgender and a self-proclaimed “political progressive”. Since October 7, she says, “Every time I open Instagram I’m just like, blocking or deleting people that I thought I knew.” She calls anti-Zionism “cloaked antisemitism”.

Josh Gilman, 37, who lives in Arizona and prides himself on having friends across the political spectrum, says he has been muting even close friends who espouse anti-Zionist views. “I don’t need the emotional distress,” he told The Free Press. “If there’s someone who is truly my friend, it makes me feel that they very much don’t understand who I am as a person.” He’s cut out people he had invited to dinner at his home, and who he had trusted around his family and children.

“There’s a line in the sand, which is Israel,” he said.

Nate Clark, 34, lives in Virginia. He’s marched for gay rights, and in 2020, for the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers in his home state. He said his choice to stand up for others is rooted in his Jewish identity.

“As a Jew, I feel like it would be weird if I went to Germany and took a right turn down Hitler Avenue or saw a statue of Eichmann, and then hear people claim ‘Oh, it’s our history. We’re just proud of our history’?” he told me.

Since October 7, he’s found himself “politically homeless”.

October 31, 2023

As we’re always told in a pious tone of voice, “violence never settles anything”

Filed under: Germany, History, Japan, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray, ever the iconoclast, begs to differ:

One of the things everyone knows about Gaza is that the Israeli attack is just creating more violence, as the next generation of Palestinians watches the bombs fall. Inevitably, the story goes, the young are learning hate and rage, and will pay it forward. Here’s the upscale think tank version of the argument, under the headline, “Israel risks creating a newly traumatized and radicalized generation of Palestinians”:

    What will remain of Gaza’s population, and among Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and inside Israel proper, will be a newly traumatized and radicalized generation of youth, none of whom were born or of voting age when Hamas was elected … As a result, Hamas’s self-declared raison d’etre — “resisting the [Israeli] occupation with all means and methods” — will only grow in the minds of Palestinian youth. This will render unsuccessful Israel’s attempts to eliminate Hamas militarily.

Here’s an example of the Twitter rando version, which you’ll see over and over again if you engage with social media at all:

But is that true? Without advocating for brutality, I find myself looking for historical examples and mostly coming up with the opposite. To start managing the “yes, but” up front, there are many ways of waging war, and the extractive nation-building warfare of an imperial constabulary — low-grade fighting, prolonged counterinsurgency without decisive violence — does seem to often lead to more violence and “blowback” over time. But what Israel is doing now in Gaza seems like something else entirely.

If this violence will create “the next generation of Hamas”, then the children of the Germans who were firebombed in Dresden and Hamburg should be constantly strapping on suicide vests and attacking Ramstein air base. After the Wounded Knee massacre, it shouldn’t be safe for white settlers to live near the Lakota, and South Dakota should be a hellscape. Or consider North Vietnam, which won its war: “The US carried out more than a million bombing raids during the 20-year conflict, dropping some 5 million tonnes of ordnance on the Southeast Asian country.” After the war, a substantial Vietnamese population resettled in California. Violence trains the next generation to hate, right? So the Vietnamese must constantly attack Orange County.

The horror of total war has mostly not seemed to produce more violence. It seems to have mostly left later generations brutalized and horrified, and highly unlikely to go on fighting. Waging war decisively seems to be historically … decisive? The experience of crushing defeat seems to be a cycle-breaker, and even a horrifyingly costly victory — as for the North Vietnamese — seems to limit the appetite of next generations for more war.

Japan nurtured a profoundly violent warrior culture for a long time, with the nation’s soldiers serving as brutal invaders and horrible occupiers, then faced a ghastly campaign of firebombing and two nuclear bombs. Japan no longer has a brutal martial culture; the next generations didn’t become the new warriors. The currently popular theory says that they had to: the children witnessing this horror will be the next generation of militants, because trauma teaches violence. Tomorrow’s Hamas comes from today’s JDAMs. The people who lost World War II don’t seem to prove that theory.

Someone is going to say in the comments that I have blood on my fangs, but the point isn’t to cheerlead for the killing in Gaza. The point is to consider evidence about what comes next, and to ask what the comparable examples are. Is it factually true that youth, traumatized by war, become the violent next generation? We ran this experiment a lot in the twentieth century, and I think we have some strong hints at a consistent answer.

As Robert Heinlein had retired Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois say to his History and Moral Philosophy class in Starship Troopers:

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that “violence never settles anything” I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.

October 28, 2023

Israel’s Zugzwang

Filed under: Government, Media, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Not being a huge chess nerd, I’d never encountered the term “zugzwang” before, but as Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens explain here, it’s an appropriate way to characterize the situation Israel finds itself in at the moment:

Zugzwang is one of the ultimate challenges for a chess player. In zugzwang, a player is in a situation where any move can only weaken one’s position and carries the risk of checkmate — but not moving isn’t an option. Beyond the intrinsic horror of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it is now obvious that the attack was designed to provoke Israel into reacting. The extent of the zugzwang is increasingly clear, and Israel has few good options. Nor does the United States.

No one should have been surprised by the attacks on Israel by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Over the last year, there have been more than a dozen public meetings between Iranian officials and the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and PIJ. Enormous quantities of men and matériel have moved from Iraq into Syria, with other matériel arriving by land and air to Lebanon. Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the common thread of the region’s so-called “Axis of Resistance”, have worked to build and consolidate enormous bunkers and fortifications across Syria along with Hezbollah. Some anticipated another Lebanon War, others expected another Gaza War, and others expected a Third Intifada. The only thing few — if any — expected was a design to drag Israel into all these battles and several more at once.

The Imperative to Act

In the aftermath of October 7, Israel must strike back. Propelled by nationwide rage, a new government of national unity in Jerusalem has vowed to destroy Hamas. If that is the true goal, a ground operation in Gaza is necessary. Such an operation began in Israel on Friday night. The very nature of urban warfare means that it will have an enormous human cost and an uncertain duration. And this is not just urban warfare: there are two Gazas — the aboveground and the underground network of tunnels where Hamas’s men and weapons are stored.

And time is not on Israel’s side. International support is already waning, and nowhere more than in the Arab world. Egypt and Jordan, Israel’s most important security partners in the region, have already accused Israel of planning the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Worse still, the operation will tie down a significant portion of Israel’s manpower and assets. Israel will, as a result, be especially vulnerable to the risk of overextension.

Gaza isn’t the only problem. There is also the West Bank, where unrest is already growing and where the Palestinian Authority is at risk of collapse. Then, to the north, Hezbollah has its vast arsenal of rockets, drones, men, and missiles in Lebanon, while on the Syrian border tens of thousands of Iraqi militants have amassed with the goal of “liberating” the Golan. Thousands more Iranian-made drones and ballistic missiles are spread out across dozens of bases in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. For that reason, Israel now relies on American support. Jerusalem is likely waiting for the last of American reinforcements — including another carrier strike group — to arrive in the region prior to launching its attack. But is there an alternative?

Of course, it’s widely believed that Hamas deliberately positions its facilities to make Israeli attacks less likely due to the elevated risk of unacceptable levels of collateral damage … like this:

October 25, 2023

Progressive support for Hamas, despite (or even because of) the atrocities

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson outlines the dilemma many on the left find themselves in, as the Hamas atrocities in Israel attract loud cheering from other sections of the left:

The shockingly broad support for Hamas is a full mask-off moment for a big chunk of the modern North American left, and I think most ordinary people are recoiling from what the self-styled progressive movement has revealed itself to be.

I do wish to be fair. I believe a lot of lefties were caught up in the latest Hamas incursion, and expressed support for it before we had a full view of how brutal and, yes, barbaric it was. I also assume that a lot of lefties are well-meaning, and struggle to acknowledge the significant overlap between a noble Palestinian cause in abstract, and the violent resistance movement that seeks to support its ends. I suspect very few have read Hamas’ charter, which is explicitly and openly genocidal. This is not a militancy that is engaging in violence with the ultimate goal of a peaceful, two-state solution. Hamas — the political entity running Gaza, whether we like that fact or not — wants to run the Jews into the sea, and to establish a theocratic Islamic state in its stead.

There is nothing more bizarre than seeing pictures of soft-headed proggies holding signs like “Queers for Palestine,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that a Palestine run by Hamas is one in which the Queers would be pushed from the top floors of whatever is left of Gaza’s multi-story buildings once Israel is done bombing them. One can be deeply sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians as a people while noting that there is nothing liberal, humane or progressive about Hamas’ actual, stated goals, let alone its recent actions.

The fact that this terrorist organization has garnered so much public support from the likes of unions, professors and groups like Black Lives Matter, is darkly ironic.

Let’s look at a few examples; CUPE was, perhaps, the most infamous supporter of Palestinian “resistance” in the hours after it had been revealed that Hamas militants had killed more than 1,000 Jewish civilians, and taken hostage hundreds more. Fred Hahn, Ontario’s CUPE president, reveled in the news last Sunday, noting that he was thankful for “the power of resistance around the globe.” And: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — presumably (?) unaware that this is a phrase that is commonly associated with the destruction of Israel.

Hahn did apologize. Sorta. “My social media posts became a giant lightning rod for both legitimate anger, and also for bad faith actors with a divisive agenda.” Sure, Fred. Timing and those with a divisive agenda. That’s what got ya.

This week, we had a student group at Toronto Metropolitan University issue a public statement insisting “Israel not a country, but rather the brand of a settler colony” and supporting “all forms of Palestinian resistance and efforts toward liberation”. Credit is due for not mincing words. There is no mealy equivocation between Hamas and the innocent people of Palestine, here.

“All” “resistance” is legitimate.

[…]

I could go on, but I trust you get the point. None if it is compatible with cheering on atrocities — literal violence of the the most base and brutal kind. Justifying rape and baby beheading is irreconcilable with a version of the “left” that presents itself as secular, humane, compassionate, and committed to social justice.

Ordinary people see this, and the dissonance is jarring.

So how do we reconcile it? Well, try this on: Support for Palestinian resistance reveals this lefty jargon for the straightforward power play that it always was.

The activist left doesn’t actually believe that “words are literal violence”, and never did. The weaponization of compassion, the cancelling, the de-platforming — these are tactics. It’s never been about creating a more harmonious and tolerant world, nor protecting innocent students from harmful opinions; it’s about winning. Re-setting the Overton window by bullying dissenters. Dismantling the old power hierarchies — and replacing them with new ones. These politics exist to ensure that anybody who disagreed with the new order and its values was too intimidated to speak up for fear of being labelled a bigot, a racist, a transphobe, whatever, whatever

Violence, harassment, and threats have always been acceptable tactics to this crowd, provided these measures were applied to the right people for the right causes.

There is a reason why this ideology found such fertile soil in universities, and particularly in elite universities. (And it’s no coincidence that the most expensive institutions of education also happen to be clearinghouses for Palestinian support.) At the risk of stating the obvious, universities don’t just exist to educate students, they exist to instruct society’s future scions in the language, manners, and political views that signal acceptance in the ruling class. That’s what elite schools to do. It’s why major corporations and most media institutions have likewise followed suit. It’s power all the way down. .

October 19, 2023

Why there are no regional refuges available to Gazan civilians

Filed under: History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West outlines the sad story of Palestinian civilians uprooted from their homes by the many conflicts that have convulsed the region:

Arab attacks in May and June 1948.
United States Military Academy Atlas, Link.

It is generally a good idea for refugees to be housed in neighbouring countries rather than on different continents, for a number of reasons, but we should be wary of casually stating that Arab states should house Gazans. In a difficult region many of these countries have already put themselves under enormous strain through acts of immense generosity, and none more so than Jordan.

[…]

The survival of Jordan’s monarchy has been one of the more surprising outcomes of the past few decades, and experts have repeatedly bet against it. The country has an unusually bad hand in many ways. Situated beside the disputed Holy Land, it lacks the natural resources of neighbouring Saudi Arabia and Iraq, while also being more remote than Lebanon or Syria, which had long been at the heart of Mediterranean trading networks and far more plugged into European markets.

But most of all it has suffered the destabilising effect of refugees. Abdullah is named after his great-grandfather, the first King of Jordan, whose assassination in 1951 forms the opening of Hussein’s autobiography; indeed he calls it “the most profound influence of my life”. He was just 15 years-old when he travelled with his grandfather to Jerusalem to perform Friday prayers, where the monarch was shot dead by a Palestinian. The gunman then fired at Hussein but the bullet struck a medal his grandfather had given him.

Abdullah I had ruled the new kingdom for just five years, and it endured an incredibly bad start with defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which led to a surge of refugees. Estimates of exact numbers seem to vary hugely, but in Lion of Jordan, Avi Shlaim writes that 700,000 Palestinians left in 1948, and of these “450,000 ended up in Jordan, which did more than any other Arab state to help them resettle and integrate with the rest of society”.

He wrote: “The refugees in Jordan wanted to preserve their separate Palestinian identity, but this ran counter to Abdullah’s policy of ‘Jordanization’.” He gave them citizenship rights “but the refugees were a great burden on the weak Jordanian economy; it simply did not have the financial resources to cope with a humanitarian tragedy on such a vast scale.” Many ended up in resentful poverty and “the Palestinians thus became an important factor in domestic Jordanian politics”.

Another source suggests that in 1949, “Jordan welcomed approximately 900,000 refugees by amending the country’s 1928 Law of Nationality to grant equal citizenship to Palestinians; the 1954 Law of Jordanian Nationality later extended citizenship to Palestinians who arrived in Jordan after the 1949 addendum.”

After another defeat against Israel in 1967, up to 300,000 displaced Palestinians in the West Bank retained Jordanian citizenship, and today around 40% of the Jordanian population descend from Palestinian refugees, although the figure may be higher (again, they vary hugely). What seems certain is that about 40% of displaced Palestinians and their descendants live in Jordan, with another 10% in Syria (although many of those have since fled to Lebanon).

The Hashemites, unlike some Arab countries, were keen to integrate the newcomers and to avoid them having to endure a permanent refugee existence; that is why three-quarters of Palestinians in Jordan are Jordanian citizens, although Palestinians from Gaza aren’t, that area having been part of Egypt before the Six-Day War.

In contrast Palestinians who fled to Syria were not given citizenship, for all the talk of solidarity, and often remained in refugee camp-cities for decades (many of which were heavily affected by the Syrian war).

In Lebanon it was even worse; there the Palestinians could neither gain citizenship, nor in many cases access things like healthcare, education or work. The situation here was uniquely dangerous, because their arrival tipped the country’s incredibly delicate balance between Christians, Shia, Sunni and Druze; in 1975 the country descended into civil war, a horror that saw a modern example of shibboleths where Christian militiamen would present tomatoes to suspected Palestinians and ask them to pronounce the name.

This refugee surge had a destabilising effect on Jordan. Already in 1958 things were so bad that Hussein hoped to form a tripartite union with Saudi Arabia and Iraq to counter the influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Neither neighbour was too keen on the idea, and Saudi prince Abd al-Ilah remarked that “Hussein’s trouble stemmed from the fact that 70 per cent of his subjects were Palestinians with no loyalty to the throne”.

But in 1970, three years after the Six-Day War, it reached a crisis point, with the British ambassador commenting that “the mixture became so volatile that the container exploded”. There now came full civil war in Jordan between the army and the Palestinian fedayeen.

Jordan had become home to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, but this umbrella group was itself split into different factions, Fatah being the largest and most moderate. They were reluctant to get involved in the internal affairs of other Arab states, but this was not the case with the more extreme Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by Dr George Habash (who, as his name suggests, was a Christian) and the Marxist-Leninist Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (yes, it does get very Life of Brian).

October 16, 2023

After the attacks, Hamas proudly shared photos and videos of the victims

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In UnHerd, David Patrikarakos describes what he calls “the week Hamas reinvented horror”:

Israel and Gaza are a Pathé newsreel of violence. Atrocity mounts upon atrocity. Blood smeared on gristle. Festivals mottled with corpses. Women dragged off to be raped and killed. And, now, perhaps the ultimate taboo. “This is the most difficult image we’ve posted”, ran the Daily Telegraph’s front page, reprinting a tweet from the State of Israel’s official account. “As we are writing this we are shaking. We went back and forth about posting this. But we need each and everyone of you to know. This happened.”

The images were of the charred and blackened corpses of babies. Dead bodies are a fixture of my professional life, and I have never seen anything like it. I have never felt that level of nausea. Nothing is beyond the sadism of Hamas. Nothing, now, might be beyond the response — comes the reply from Israel.

Clearly, nothing now is beyond being live-streamed, uploaded, posted, tweeted or shared. Amid the horror and disgust, one thing has struck me above all: the footage has overwhelmingly come from the perpetrators. Yes, there is video shot by terrified and fleeing victims, but scroll through Twitter, Telegram and Instagram and what do you see? Hamas filming themselves barking at cowering Israeli families on the ground; parents covering their children’s eyes, desperate to banish reality; Hamas yanking soldiers off tanks and throwing them into the dirt; Hamas grinning as they parade an elderly woman around in a golf cart.

This conflict has lasted for almost a century, yet what we have seen this week has never been seen before. It is a nasty and brutal war fought over land where ideology and the interminable cycle of reprisals has made its resolution impossible. But it is something else, too. It is perhaps the world’s longest running geopolitical media spectacle. Nothing, not Kashmir nor the Balkans nor any of the other enduring conflicts largely created by empire, has received anywhere near this level of coverage. The depths plumbed by Hamas are unprecedentedly low.

Several factors explain the brutality. First is a perennial of human nature: old-fashioned rage and bloodlust. No one, least of all it seems Hamas, expected the attacks to be so successful. Coming upon hundreds of unarmed Israelis was obviously too much of a temptation for many of these incontinent fanatics.

Then there is the desire to provoke. To get Israel to overreact, but also its neighbours. Broadcast images of dead Palestinian babies onto those feeds and then maybe your Arab allies will start to wonder about the wisdom of their various normalisation agreements with Israel. History is turning away from Hamas. The warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia threatens to destroy them forever. If the “Custodian of the Two Holy Places” decides the “Zionist Entity” is actually ok, then it’s only the politically impotent and half-witted Bashar al-Assad beside you, and the Iranians, who are formidable but largely alone.

It’s a basic strategy but a generally successful one. Don’t forget that one of the reasons bin Laden struck the World Trade Center was to get the Leviathan to lash out, which it did. Hamas has limited options. This is perhaps the one card it can play with any real efficacy.

October 14, 2023

Lessons the Israelis must learn from the Hamas attacks

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander finishes off his short series on the Hamas terror attacks on southern Israel last week by highlighting some of the things the Israeli military and intelligence organizations must take away from the failure to anticipate and parry or repel the attackers:

  • Complacency Born from Excellence:

    • Israel is one of the richest, most educated and advanced societies on the planet. Their social capital is almost unmatched. Gaza is one of the poorest, miseducated, and dependent societies on the planet. On paper, one would think there would be no way what happened over the weekend could have happened. No, belay my last. I can very much see this scenario being on paper — and probably was — but it was not “the paper” that drove policy. The overconfident and optimistic won the argument. Like in 1973, if you spend most of your brief talking about how great you are and discussing how weak your opponent is, you might be missing something … or a lot of things.

  • Technology Briefs Better Than it Performs:

    • How many times must this be learned? High tech solutions to human problems brief well when not properly cross examined or wargamed by skeptics. Tech seems clean, effective, and affordable — but it is not robust outside its planning assumptions. They work wonderfully in narrowly scoped vignettes, and not much more. Remote control machine guns on towers seem much more exciting than soldiers on patrol in an APC … but which one is more resilient to the unexpected? There is always compromise and risk. Sometimes well meaning and smart people make the wrong call.

  • Coddling Useful Idiots is a False Economy:

    • In times of peace when facing very ugly truths, it is human nature to a large percentage of the population to defer to emotion, desire, and aspiration as opposed to reason, reality, and capabilities. It is easy to project your best intentions and world view on your enemy in the hope that their motivations are the same as yours. The fact remains, well meaning people can be wrong. Hate is irrational and as such, immune to reason. Well meaning but wrong people cannot be allowed to drive policy when there is no backup plan.

  • Doomsday Cults Sometimes Take Over Entire Cultures:

    • Two people or two million people can become part of and enablers to a death cult. Humans are capable of the most wonderful things, and the most horrible things. This duality of mankind is what brought us to our advanced stage of civilization. When these death cults are closer to two million than two — more Hamas than Heaven’s Gate — you need to be prepared to respond in what ever way removes that threat should it cross over in to your reason-based society. They cannot be ignored. They grow until they take a nap to Hale-Bopp or fly in to a music festival.

  • Evil Waits While Good is Impatient and Forgetful:

    • A free people can get distracted by their own pursuits that can only exist in a free society. Evil is hard to counter, uncomfortable to think about, and easy to avert your eyes when it is “over there” and forgotten and not “in here” trying to kick in the door. Too many people will make excuses, and ask you to accept their excuses, to avoid the unending and hard work of keeping evil away. Evil will exist always, the key is to not just keep it contained but to make sure it is small, isolated, and socially unacceptable. If you don’t do the last two, the first one will grow.

  • F=MA:

    • How hard have you actually wargamed your defenses? In hindsight it is easy to second guess the border around Gaza, but at some time there had to be someone warning it was not enough. If you can run a bulldozer through a wall, it isn’t a wall — it is an aspiration. That, I hope, will be part of the post-war investigation.

There is the quick look so far this Thursday. In that Top-6 there are lessons for every nation to hoist onboard — especially the U.S.A.

In his Friday Q&A, Severian answers a question about what Hamas expected to gain from launching these attacks:

Which brings us, at long last, to Hamas. I too am baffled by this, because it seems so very Tet-like. NOT that the Mullahs are trying to “get rid of” their version of the Viet Cong, as the question suggests, but because it really seems like a big mistake. Bare minimum, it reveals the catastrophic failure of Israeli / AINO intelligence. If they have an ounce of Seriousness left anywhere in their government, they will have to massively clean house. Which would be terrible for Hamas – the guys who were asleep at the switch, allowing huge shipments of first-rate arms and etc. to be smuggled into Gaza, are now wide awake.

Same deal with training and financing. As incompetent as the Intel services were, I’m pretty sure even they would’ve noticed that hey, the Gaza Hang Gliding Club sure has a lot of new members! Where in Gaza could they possibly have practiced this stuff? It’s a sophisticated operation that betrays high levels of strategic and tactical coordination, with well-trained commandos doing something really innovative. I mean, parasailing? That’s some Otto Skorzeny shit right there. Whether or not Hamas dreamed it up on their own, or they had help with the operational concept, they surely had to train somewhere other than Gaza. Now, where could that possibly be?

You don’t roll the dice that way unless you really think you’ve got a strong chance of winning. But … win what? Unless they seriously thought Hamas could defeat the Israeli Army straight up … which, maybe they did. History’s full of that kind of thing. The Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Hitler in the Ardennes. America ended up beating those guys, so it’s ok to acknowledge that they made dumb mistakes based entirely on wishcasting. But Ho won, so it was brilliant 4D chess. Something similar might be happening here. It’s not very satisfying, but … there it is. We’ll have to wait and see.

October 13, 2023

One of the reasons Israel was surprised by the Hamas attacks

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak explains why Israeli intelligence was deceived leading up to the Hamas terror attacks last week:

The last major news item about Gaza before the first news of Hamas’s surprise attack was the September 22 announcement that 17,000 Gazans would immediately receive permits to work in Israel, with that number set to rise to 20,000. All understood the likelihood of a permit-holder smuggling in a bomb, or perhaps stabbing an Israeli fellow worker, but that seemed a risk worth taking.

Hamas, after all, had stopped launching rockets against Israel, and appeared to be focused on containing the influence of Islamic Jihad — Hamas’s only remaining competitor after its suppression of the PLO, and one which is financed by Iran to propagate Shi’ism in Gaza. This obvious rivalry was skilfully exploited by Hamas to deceive the Israelis into thinking that it was no longer launching rockets because, as an emphatically Sunni organisation, it wanted to join the Sunni reconciliation with Israel that was already a fait accompli from Morocco to Bahrain.

Once again, as so many times before, Israel’s leaders were deluded into thinking that a Palestinian leadership had some concern for the welfare of its own people, as opposed to its ideological aim: “Palestine” for the nationalist PLO (which always included Christians), and Islamic supremacy for Hamas. The latter’s leaders have frequently explained that Islamic rule must be imposed not just on Israel but on the entire world, and that Palestinian nationalism is un-Islamic twice over — because it includes Christians, and because any nationalism intrinsically subverts Islamic unity.

With Hamas seemingly on a path to reconciliation, only the much smaller Islamic Jihad was still assembling and launching rockets. But most of those attempts were pre-empted by Israeli strikes, guided by precise intelligence supplied by a seemingly reliable agent network. Almost certainly, Hamas itself supplied the “actionable” information passed on by those agents. This efficiently blinded Israeli intelligence, which has plenty of expertise in detecting double agents peddling false information, but could hardly suspect agents who were supplying highly accurate information.

This was the first Israeli failure: its intelligence analysts did not realise that the silence of Hamas was not due to inactivity, but to planning that they could not detect. Such silence was far from normal, and it should have inspired efforts to find out what was going on. But it did not.

On top of that, there was a separate failure which was purely military. Even if intelligence reported that all was well and that Gaza was on the path to peace, military planners should not have yielded to such optimism — for a very specific Israeli reason. Since the Israeli armed forces rely on reservists, who must be recalled to duty and kitted out before they can fight, as opposed to an enemy that can switch from peace to war instantaneously, military planners must be professional pessimists no matter what. They must always be mindful of the minutes needed to broadcast an alert, of the hours that even soldiers in situ need to prepare for action, and the full 24 hours required to mobilise the reservists.

At Spiked, Frank Furedi is angered by the widespread victim-blaming being shared on social media to pretend that the Hamas terror attacks were somehow “legitimate” and the atrocities committed against civilians somehow “okay”:

The assault on southern Israel last weekend was more than an atrocity. This callous and systematic murder of civilians was nothing less than a 21st-century version of a barbaric pogrom. The videos recorded by Hamas operatives as they slaughtered people serve as a frightening testimony to human depravity. They more than match the numerous beheading videos that glorified the barbarism of Islamic State and other terrorist organisations in recent decades.

Seeing the Hamas-orchestrated pogrom was gut-wrenching. But what I have found almost as disturbing are the smug voices of those in the West who say that Israel is responsible for Hamas’s barbarism. That it brought this horror on itself.

Ever since Hamas operatives embarked on their depraved killing spree, self-styled “progressives” have been queuing up to tell anyone who will listen that the evil Zionists had it coming. Not even this week’s reports of Hamas’s massacre of babies have given them pause for reflection. Their victim-blaming is echoed by numerous Western Muslim organisations and even by some mainstream politicians. They too say that Israel had it coming. With his usual smug complacency, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis declared in an interview that he would never denounce Hamas for these atrocities. Pointing the finger at Israel, he stated that “the path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid”.

Varoufakis’s apologism for atrocities against Jewish men, women and children appears civilised compared with the response of the West’s Palestine-solidarity campaigns. Many of them have actively celebrated this pogrom. One speaker at an “All Out for Palestine” protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York seemed to think that the systematic murder of 260 young people at the Supernova music festival provided excellent “comedy” material. “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time”, he said, “until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters”. The rabble assembled outside the Israeli consulate responded to this “joke” about the mass murder and kidnapping of “several dozen hipsters” with gales of laughter.

Time and again, these atrocities are excused and their victims are dehumanised. Dr Mennah Elwan, an NHS medic, tried to excuse Hamas’s assault on innocent Israeli civilians by claiming that these youngsters fleeing for their lives were not civilians at all, because “there are no civilians in Israel”. She then said of the revellers that “if it was your home, you would stay and fight”.

On Saturday, while the pogrom against Jewish people was still unfolding in Israel, Somali-American journalist Najma Sharif felt the need to remind her followers on X: “What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” That she associates a blood-soaked pogrom with the objectives of the “decolonisation” movement in Western universities is revealing.

Indeed, Sharif was far from alone in framing this pogrom as an instance of decolonisation. This view has been systematically promoted by Hamas apologists. Maggie Chapman, a Green member of the Scottish parliament, responded to public disquiet over the Hamas attack by posting: “The oppressed are fighting back for their rights … Don’t let the Western media fool you into thinking it’s terrorism, this is decolonisation.” It is worth noting that Chapman is deputy convenor of the Scottish parliament’s human-rights committee. How long before she argues that perpetrating a pogrom is the human right of the oppressed?

The “decolonisers”, whether they realise it or not, are sending an unambiguous message to the world: “This is no time to be squeamish; after all, they are only Jews.”

October 12, 2023

Considering Israel’s potential courses of action in Gaza

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander puts on his Operational Planning hat and sifts through what Israel may decide to do in light of open source information from Israeli and other sources:

This isn’t going to make anyone happy. It doesn’t matter if you are on the “cease fire and de-escalate” left or the “Linebacker III” right — none of my COAs will be quite what you are looking for … though the Linebacker III crowd might be OK with COA-B and COA-C … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Cut this ‘ole Operational Planner some slack, and a few caveats:

  1. I’ve had to rewrite 85% of this from its first draft over the weekend as we now have Commander’s Intent (CI) and higher Direction and Guidance (D&G). That had me discard two of my three Courses of Action (COA).
  2. I am quite sure the Israeli Defense Forces had appropriate draft Operational Plans (OPLANS) on the shelf with all sorts of Branch Plans and Sequels waiting to be updated and providing enough once dusted off to get things in to Phase I.
  3. I don’t have a Planning Staff or even a Core Planning Group, intel support, or even some Italian colleagues to remind me to take my 10:00 and 15:00 coffee breaks, but I’ll do my best anyway. As anyone in crisis response planning can tell you — as opposed to advanced plans types — you have to be comfortable enough to accept that you don’t have enough time, staff, or information to produce a great OPLAN, but you’ll come up with a good enough plan anyway. You’re happy to be wrong about a detail or two, and are open-minded enough, secure in your ego, and content to change what you thought was perfect — some or all of your plan — the moment you get better information, changes in CI or D&G, or the situation develops in unexpected ways … as they do.
  4. If you are looking for a detailed Tactical OPLAN or a sweeping Strategic OPLAN, you’re at the wrong substack. I’m an Operational Planner and what I am about to do is an “elevator speech” level Preliminary COA Decision Brief with the principals (J2, J3, J4, J5, and the Chief of Staff) where they get to weigh in and refine what the Planning Group I am the Chair of has produced (OK, I’m a Planning Group of one and I made myself Chair … I don’t care, it’s going on my FITREP anyway). Following the Principals’ input — especially from the Chief of Staff who has had better one on one time with the Commander and as such has the nuance no one else does — I’ll beg for a day and will be told I have two hours to make changes and then well brief the Commander.

Working from open-source information, we have CI and D&G from the Prime Minister and the Minister for Defense.

If you go to YouTube you can get the script, but we’ll use this statement from the weekend as a close approximation of POLMIL-level guidance from Prime Minister Netanyahu;

As a Planning Staff, what do I need to take away from this?

  • Israel is at war.
  • Israel will finish it.
  • We will exact a price that will be remembered by them (Hamas) and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.

From Defense Minister Yoav Gallant we have:

  • Gaza won’t return to what it was before.
  • We started the offensive from the air, later will also from the ground, and that’s how it will end.
  • Gaza will never return to what it was.

Like I said … that had me ditch two of the my three COA from this weekend. If you wanted to know how it shifted, my most dovish COA is gone, and my most harsh COA is now the center of my Overton Window. A planner must try to align with CI and D&G as it is understood — not how he wishes it to be.

October 11, 2023

“It’s our first-ever live-streamed pogrom”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts (some of) the opening atrocities of the terror attacks on Israel by Hamas terror squads:

As I write this, Israel seems close to clearing out its invaded southern areas. In the coming hours, we will be presented with more scenes of horror and atrocity as new killing sites are found. Israel’s counterattack into Gaza will almost certainly be massive, far beyond any of the campaigns we’ve seen in recent years, and we’ll see all the awful carnage that causes from close up, too. Hamas has already said they will respond to these retaliatory actions by killing their hostages one by one and sharing the video and audio of the killings for the world to see. I believe that they will indeed do exactly that. You should all prepare yourselves for that.

For me, though, as we wait for the future to arrive, I’ve been thinking about the books on my shelf and what they tell us about the past. Books about the Holocaust and Sept. 11, and how the world grappled with truly evil regimes in eras past. There are lessons there, in simple black and white. What I saw on my phone wasn’t that. It was visceral, and awful, but in its own way, usefully clarifying.

But how many people saw what I did?

[…]

During that time, and I’m limiting my summary here to reasonably verified videos, I’ve seen an Israeli family forced to watch the apparent execution of one of their children/siblings; a man having his head either smashed in or chopped off with what looked like a garden tool of some kind (the video was a bit grainy); I’ve seen what looks like some kind of shelter that was breached, with all the occupants inside gunned down. A terrorist steps inside into ankle-deep blood and corpses and puts a few rifle rounds into bodies that are still moving.

I’ve seen a shocked looking woman being dragged out of a vehicle, her pants soaked with blood flowing from between her legs, and I know what that is. (See first photo, above.) I’ve also seen a video that I’m not sure, but that I think, happened to catch a glimpse of a rape in progress. I didn’t have the stomach to go back and watch that one again, though, so I can’t be totally sure. Whatever it was, the woman was terrified and the men around her were delighted. They enjoyed her fear and torment.

How many others have seen these things? I would bet a bunch, but not a majority, or even close to a majority. Most news savvy people are probably aware that there is a conflict, and may even know the outlines of it, but if they aren’t well-plugged into the online ecosystem for news and don’t know where to look and have hepful media contacts in the region to help filter out the garbage sources, what they’ve seen of it is sanitized and curated by well-meaning news editors whose default assumption is that graphic detail is to be avoided lest the reader or viewer be traumatized and send in a complaint.

I glanced throughout the weekend and again this morning at the major Canadian news websites, and the photos are mostly what you’d expect. Evocative, but not graphic. The most graphic ones shown aren’t a fraction of what’s available. The presentation of this story looks familiar because of all the other times we’ve seen some version of it: rockets flying up atop their exhaust trails, tanks manoeuvring over desert sand, troops looking grim as they put on their equipment, clouds of smoke and dust over Gaza. This is all bulked out by the odd tasteful photo of a grieving family member, from either side. Or perhaps even both sides, for balance.

This situation completely inverts the truism that many of us overly online people have had to cling to in recent years: this time, Twitter is real life. It’s the rest of the presentation of reality that is distorting your understanding of what’s happening. Twitter is a tire fire these days, full of bots and deliberate disinformation accounts, but for those with local sources and who’ve taken the time to curate their trusted sources — and again, Ukraine has been what forced me to do that — it can still be an invaluable tool.

But you’ve got to work at that. How many do? There is a very good chance that many of the people forming and expressing opinions about this right now are doing so with only a pretty basic understanding of what’s actually happened. The coverage they’re seeing of it looks familiar, so they’ll assume it’s basically the same as ever, if maybe slightly worse. They won’t bother assessing it or wondering if they should tweak their usual prior default response to The Latest Middle East Violent Flare Up. They see a headline on the CBC and Reuters and simply man their usual culture war battlestation. It’s a reflex by now.

That’s a mistake this time. This is one is different. Not exactly unprecedented; Lord knows Israel has suffered defeats and intelligence failures before. But none like this in 50 years, and never in an age when the simple act of seizing a victim’s phone allowed the raping and butchering to be uploaded onto the Facebook pages of the victims for their families and friends to watch. It’s our first-ever live-streamed pogrom, and I can’t be the only one who spent part of the long weekend warily glancing at some of the history books on my shelf, remembering scenes described therein that many of us have now seen happen live from our homes.

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