RUTHFULLY YOURS

Napoleon once ascribed his success to being able to see things as they were, and not as reflected in a fun house mirror. “The first qualification of a general-in-chief is to possess a cool head, so that things may appear to him in their true proportions and as they really are.”

In Washington’s eyes Gaza may be the biggest conflict the Middle East; but objectively it is the littlest. The numbers tell the story. Syrian president Bashar Assad went down on his knees at a mosque following what some have called the worst week in the Syrian civil war [1] ”amid reports of an unprecedented high death toll among his troops battling Islamic extremists.”

The military casualties came as fighting intensified in the past two weeks, with militants from the al-Qaida-breakaway Islamic State group seeking to eliminate opponents from all sides, dealing a series of setbacks for government forces and rival rebels alike … about 1,240 soldiers and other Assad loyalists have been killed in the past 10 days in northern Syria.

Other activists in Syria confirmed that past weeks have seen a record death toll. Syria’s three-year civil war has already killed more than 170,000 people, nearly a third of them civilians.

Nor should we forget Iraq was always a much bigger deal than Gaza and may be about to get worse. The Daily Beast’s Jamie Dettmer [2] tells readers to get set for the coming Blitz of Baghdad. “Analysts at the U.S.-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War, who have been plotting the locations and types of attacks in the recent flurry of blasts buffeting the Iraqi capital, have noted a clear pattern developing. They say it suggests the Islamic State is building up to something big and is no longer just focused on consolidating its grip and developing governance in the lands it now controls.”

The institute’s analysts predict the caliphate may be readying for an onslaught, possibly timed for the end of the holy month of Ramadan on Monday or during the Eid holiday celebrations this week. The aim would not be to seize Iraq’s capital, which has a very large Shia population with every incentive to fight to the death against an organization that slaughters Shia prisoner en masse. The purpose of the Islamic State offensive would be to sow mayhem and to keep Iraq’s state apparatus from recovering from its stunning defeats in June, when it lost control of Mosul, the second-largest city in the country. …

There has been a burst of attacks by bombers wearing suicide vests and also car blasts “along avenues of approach to the capital and also within Baghdad proper,” the institute notes in an intelligence update.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke some seldom-heard truths when he said Tuesday [2]: “What we’re seeing here with Hamas is another instance of Islamist extremism, violent extremism that has no resolvable grievance. Hamas is like ISIS, Hamas is like al Qaeda, Hamas is like Hezbollah, Hamas is like Boko Haram.” Indeed so; and Hamas shares those groups’ implacable hatred not just of Israel, but of all Jews – based on the Qur’an’s dictum that “you will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers to be the Jews” (5:82).

In practice, this generally manifests itself as just the opposite: in Muslims being the most intense of the people in animosity toward the Jews. That was clear last week in new calls for mass murder and genocide of Jews from supporters of Hamas and the Palestinian jihad – again making it difficult for supporters of the Palestinians to claim the moral high ground [3].
5. Qatari imam prays about the Jews: “Count them one by one, and kill them to the very last one.”

Sheikh Tareq Al-Hawwas delivered a Friday sermon [4] on Qatar TV on July 18, the day after the Israelis began their ground incursion into Gaza. “For the first time in the history of the abhorred country, the state of Israel,” the pious sheikh exulted, “sirens are heard around the clock and over three million people flee to their hideouts. Schools, governmental departments, and airports came to a halt. When have we ever heard of such things? This is the beginning of good things to come.” He concluded his peroration with an appeal to the deity:

Oh, Allah increase the pressure You exert upon the plundering Jews. Demonstrate upon them the miracles of Your might, for they are no match to You. Count them one by one, and kill them to the very last one. Do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, disperse them. Oh Lord, freeze the blood in their veins. Oh Allah, tear them asunder. Oh Allah, sow discord in their hearts. Oh Allah, do not let them prevail. Make an example of them for their allies. Oh Allah, bring down the planes of their air force, burn their infantry and sink the ships of their navy.

Benny Morris was first in his class- that class of Israeli/Jews who burnished their image in the left by libeling and bashing Israel. He opened the floodgates and deserves opprobrium rather than the polite rebuttal by Martin Kramer who wins this debate hands down…..rsk

The debate between Benny Morris and Martin Kramer over Israel’s wartime conduct enters its second round.

I have to admit that, prior to reading his essay, “What Happened at Lydda,” I had never read anything by Martin Kramer. But I had heard that he was a serious Middle East scholar, albeit of subjects far removed from the 1948 war. His essay, however, is imbued with clear political purpose—“Israel is defined by much of liberal opinion as an ‘occupier,’” Kramer writes at one point in an essay that ostensibly deals with July 1948—and thus smacks more of propaganda than of history (even though the minutiae of his criticism of Ari Shavit’s manipulation of texts and facts regarding one minor episode in the war—what happened at a mosque in Lydda on July 12, 1948—are illuminating, if not so much about the war as about Shavit).

In my response in Mosaic to Kramer’s essay, I argued that “disproportion” speaks “massacre.” Kramer has now replied to my argument in a manner disingenuous if not forthrightly mendacious. Yes, in contemporary warfare between advanced technological societies and Third World societies—the U.S. versus Iraq, for example, or Israel versus Hamas—the application of air power and sophisticated artillery by a Western power can lead to completely disproportionate losses on the part of ill-armed Arab ground forces, and these do not necessarily speak of massacre. But in the Israeli-Arab war of 1948, two or more relatively primitive armies came to grips. When, in a specific battlefield, one side was more powerful than the other, a “disproportion” in losses might arise. That happened, for example, in the successive battles between the Haganah/IDF and Jordan’s Arab Legion at Latrun in May-June 1948, where many more Israelis died than Jordanians due to the Legion’s efficient use of its mortars and 75-mm artillery batteries and to Israeli paucity in or misuse of heavy weaponry. But when the disproportion is 250:0 or 250:2, as occurred, according to contemporary IDF documents, between the IDF and the Lydda townspeople, some of them armed, on July 12 of the same year, then “battle” is surely not the name of the game; “massacre” is more like it.

To Kramer, this was a “battle with two sides.” And now, to mislead his readers, he says in his reply that there was indeed a “battle” between the Yiftah-brigade soldiers and the two or three Jordanian armored cars that had penetrated Lydda. But that is not at issue. Sure, there was an Israeli-Jordanian battle (or, more accurately, a skirmish, in which there were Israeli casualties) around noon on July 12. But the question is whether what transpired afterward, between the townspeople, some of whom sniped at the Israelis, and the Yiftah troops—an action that ended in 250 dead townspeople–was a battle. Given the vanishingly small number of Israeli losses, “battle” is a tendentious misnomer, Kramer’s sophistry and verbal acrobatics notwithstanding.

The question that routinely comes up regarding U.S. foreign policy these days is: What in the world were they thinking? The latest puzzlement is the weekend fiasco in which President Obama and John Kerry pressed a cease-fire that is likely to extend the war between Hamas and Israel.

As Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza enters its third week, the goal of America’s foremost ally in the region is clear. It must degrade Hamas as a military and political force to the greatest extent possible.

That means destroying the rockets the terror group hasn’t yet fired at Israel and especially collapsing the network of tunnels used for smuggling weapons and infiltrating into Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be mindful of Palestinian civilian casualties and maintaining domestic and international support, but a victory requires achieving these strategic goals.

The irony is that Israel’s immediate Arab neighbors privately want it to succeed. Jordan wants no part of a Palestinian state run by Hamas, and neither do the Saudis or Egypt’s military government. The Fatah Palestinian faction that runs the West Bank also wants Hamas to emerge weaker. Surely the White House knows this.

Yet over the weekend Secretary of State Kerry blundered into the conflict promoting a cease-fire floated by Turkey and Qatar that was close to the terms demanded by Hamas. The U.S. hasn’t released the details, but Israel’s press has published what it says is a one-page summary. The document called on Israel to negotiate with “Palestinian factions,” meaning direct talks with Hamas, as well as an end to Israel’s military campaign while giving Hamas concessions on border crossings and outside payments. In short, it would have ended the war while leaving Hamas in a position to rebuild its terror economy.

Mr. Obama didn’t endorse the Kerry plan per se. But in a readout of his Sunday phone call to Mr. Netanyahu, the White House said in a statement that, “Building on Secretary Kerry’s efforts, the President made clear the strategic imperative of instituting an immediate, unconditional humanitarian ceasefire that ends hostilities now” and leads to a deal based on the cease-fire in November 2012. That’s the one that let Hamas rearm.

Israel’s leaders said they were escalating the military campaign in Gaza and told the country to prepare for a prolonged operation, defying international demands for an immediate cease-fire after Hamas militants broke a Muslim holiday lull.

The military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, said Israel’s assault on Gaza’s Hamas rulers was being “intensified” after three weeks of fighting that has cost more than 1,100 lives.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a televised address, gave no sign the military would go beyond its stated goals—degrading Hamas’s rocket arsenal and finding and destroying a network of cross-border tunnels that fighters use to infiltrate Israel. The military needs about another week to accomplish that, officials said.

“We will not finish the mission, we will not finish the operation, without neutralizing the tunnels, which have the sole purpose of annihilating our citizens and killing our children,” the prime minister said. He told Israelis to brace for a prolonged fight.

As he spoke, the military sent messages instructing thousands of Palestinians living on the outskirts of Gaza City to leave their homes and take shelter in the city center—an apparent prelude to an assault on suspected Hamas positions in civilian neighborhoods.

Just before midnight, missiles struck several buildings in Gaza City, some of the heaviest bombardment since the assault began three weeks ago. Flares lit the moonless sky, followed by strikes that rattled and broke windows several blocks away. Acrid smoke hung over the city that houses many of Gaza’s municipal buildings and its commercial center.

Later, flares lighted up the midnight sky over Gaza City, accompanied by repeated explosions that rattled windows.

There had been a brief lull in fighting from Sunday afternoon as Israel eased up on strikes for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which began on Monday.

Nicholas Casey and Tamer El-Ghobashy in Gaza City and Joshua Mitnick in Tel Aviv

Israeli forces pounded Hamas symbols of control and the Gaza Strip’s only power plant Tuesday in their heaviest bombardment of a 3-week offensive in Gaza, defying international demands for an immediate cease-fire after Hamas militants broke a Muslim holiday lull.

The military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, said the assault on Gaza’s Hamas rulers, which has cost more than 1,100 lives, was being “intensified.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis late Monday to brace for a long fight.

In a televised address, Mr. Netanyahu had given no sign that the military would go beyond its stated goals-degrading Hamas’s rocket arsenal and finding and destroying a network of cross-border tunnels that fighters use to infiltrate Israel. The military needs about another week to accomplish that, officials said.

But the overnight strikes by Israeli aircraft, tanks and navy gunboats on dozens of targets pointed to a wider campaign.

They damaged the home of the top Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, along with government offices and the headquarters of the Hamas broadcast outlets, Al-Aqsa TV and Al-Aqsa Radio. The Israeli military said it hit the broadcast center to silence Hamas propaganda and messages to its operatives. The TV station continued to broadcast but the radio went silent.

In Paris as in Gaza, human shields are the way to go!

Journal du dimanche correspondent Paul Guyonnet, reporting from the 5,000-strong banned demonstration at Place de la République on Saturday July 26 noted, at 5 PM: “Many peaceful pro-Palestinians have left the Square despite pressure from the more virulent, who tried to block their way.” The JDD reporter says the prayer session [that other sources place at the beginning of the rally] called by an imam at 6:30 PM, magically calmed the assembled mass.
Shortly afterward the violence resumed as punk jihadis pelted riot police with fire bombs, stones, paper bags filled with broken glass, and the rest of their standard arsenal.
A video by Guy Sauvage embedded in an editorial on the site of Riposte Laïque shows the early stages of the demonstration: http://ripostelaique.com/
Here is the best footage I’ve seen so far of the insurrectional climax – LTL News.
Talk about misreporting—mainstream journalists who were on the spot when these videos were shot somehow managed to estimate the unruly element at three to five hundred. It looks more like one thousand to me. This selective tally is part of the narrative. The demonstration is always good-natured, the violence is always on the edges, never in the center, always disconnected never an integral part, necessarily paradoxical not squarely in the logic of everything that went before, and committed by a minority rejected by the good-natured majority.
Guyonnet tweeted this slogan, “Hamas résistance, jihad résistance” @Pauluskupa

What is “jihad résistance?” Might it be this exhibition of severed heads on stakes, posted by Walid Shoebat? Does it include the destruction of Jonah’s tomb in Mosul? The planned Rosh Hashanah massacre in southern Israel? The murder of four civilians at the Jewish Museum in Brussels? Public executions in the squares of Iraqi cities and towns brought under the black flag of the Caliphate? Is that the “jihad résistance” these people are preparing for us? France, a nation so proud of its Résistance to the brutal Nazi occupation now stands down as the Hamas/jihad résistance violates the Marianne, symbol of the République. Unopposed, this neo-résistance would deliver us into the hands of the Caliphate.
Where is the Front National when Islam assaults the Republic?

In the controversy over American Betrayal I am remiss in one respect. I never wrote a proper review of the book. Instead I wrote two versions of a review, and both were rejected by editors. For this I am grateful because in truth I had not invested the time required to properly do the job. I did not fully appreciate the impact of the campaign against American Betrayal, or how effective that campaign had been. For those who have not read the book, it is about the Communist infiltration of the U.S. Government, and the influencing of U.S. policy during the critical years of World War II and its aftermath. The facts reviewed in the book are not entirely new. What was original was the way in which these facts were presented; that is, in order that we might see the big picture with greater clarity. This is Diana West’s special achievement.

This is a book with far-reaching implications. These implications, of course, have yet to be mapped out. For example, we must assume that Soviet agents were not only at work in Washington during World War II. They were also at work in Chungking, Tokyo, Berlin, London and Paris. If the U.S. Government had Communist moles, every other government probably had them. As if to prove my point, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Louis Kilzer wrote a book titled Hitler’s Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich (which alleges that Bormann was Stalin’s agent). Here we discover that it wasn’t just a case of Harry Hopkins manipulating Roosevelt. Hitler was manipulated by Bormann, and probably by others we’ll never know about. Many books remain to be written; for example, regarding how Churchill was manipulated, and also de Gaulle. Consider a 1997 article titled How a Soviet mole united Tito and Churchill. Consider, as well, the situation of Charles de Gaulle, as described in the Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations: “In the late 1950s, and especially since the defection of Anatoli Golitsyn in 1961, strong suspicion surrounded the SDECE of harboring Soviet moles who were close to President Charles de Gaulle after he returned to power in 1958.”

Then there was the Tokyo spy ring, of course. Within that organization, Soviet spy Richard Sorge was credited with saving the Soviet Union in 1941. At the Spy Museum website we read, “The spies [of the Tokyo ring] pursued relationships with senior Japanese politicians, garnering information about Japanese foreign policy.” But as we know, Soviet spies do not merely garner information. Their primary work must have been to influence Japanese policy – as Moscow’s moles in Washington worked to influence American policy. Why did Tokyo fail to make peace with China and solidify a friendship with the United States? It is not an idle question when so many leading Japanese politicians thought the proper strategic direction for Japan was against the Soviet Union. In reminding us that Soviet agents are not merely spies, Mrs. West has laid bare the tragedy of a war that need not have been so costly. And this is why she has been so savagely attacked. This is why her work is called into question.

This might not be the best time for family gatherings. Uncle Norm says, “Let’s crush them.” Young Jake, home from school, hotly says that if Israel had given up the “settlements” there would have been no problem. The Arabs want peace. His professor says so and his professor knows best. The table erupts. Grandma says, “Let’s eat.”

I’m with Grandma.

There’ll be plenty of time to settle scores amongst our own when this is all over and Hamas is finished. King David took care of business that way.

Israel is at war. We are all at war in case you haven’t noticed. The world is coming at us from all directions, overhead the missiles, underneath, the tunnels. They’re breaking our windows again throughout Europe and it’s starting to happen even here in the United States. The news media are screaming for our blood, wherever we live.

Resolved: Only our IDF guys are the absolute heroes. The rest of us do the best we can.
In a time of war it gets simple. You’re with us or you’re against us…and if you are truly part of the Covenant, muzzle the dissent, please.

Morale is crucial and a loose lip is dangerous.

Resolved: Only our IDF guys are the absolute heroes. The rest of us do the best we can. How about we curb the nitpicking? Save it for later.

To argue the Palestinian side, in the Gaza war, is to make the case for barbarism.

Of all the inane things that have been said about the war between Israel and Hamas, surely one dishonorable mention belongs to comments made over the weekend by Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.

Interviewed by CNN’s Candy Crowley, Mr. Rhodes offered the now-standard administration line that Israel has a right to defend itself but needs to do more to avoid civilian casualties. Ms. Crowley interjected that, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Jewish state was already doing everything it could to avoid such casualties.

“I think you can always do more,” Mr. Rhodes replied. “The U.S. military does that in Afghanistan.”

How inapt is this comparison? The list of Afghan civilians accidentally killed by U.S. or NATO strikes is not short. Little of the fighting in Afghanistan took place in the dense urban environments that make the current warfare in Gaza so difficult. The last time the U.S. fought a Gaza-style battle—in Fallujah in 2004—some 800 civilians perished and at least 9,000 homes were destroyed. This is not an indictment of U.S. conduct in Fallujah but an acknowledgment of the grim reality of city combat.

Oh, and by the way, American towns and cities were not being rocketed from above or tunneled under from below as the Fallujah campaign was under way.
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