RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Left’s false prophesy

It happened again, this time in a crowded restaurant in Tel Aviv. Two terrorists opened fire on civilians with the intent of taking as many Israeli lives as possible before they would inevitably be stopped. The murderers were successful. They brought lethal weapons to a place of joy and celebration and gunned down the innocent, one by one. We now know that cousins Muhammad and Khalid Muhamra, both 21, carried out the attack. The terrorists were both from the village of Yatta, near the city of Hebron in Judea, and their peers celebrated their crime both on social media and in the city streets, handing out treats to honor the attackers.

Last night, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai was asked by Army Radio to comment on the Palestinian celebrations following the terror attack in Tel Aviv that took four lives and wounded 18. The mayor responded by saying, “We might be the only country in the world with another people living among us under occupation, without civil rights. … You can’t keep people in a situation where they are under occupation and hope they’ll reach the conclusion that everything is fine.”

Not only is this an outrageous statement — the mayor chooses not to condemn the terrorists or the people handing out food and candies in celebration of what they refer to as “Operation Ramadan,” but rather the Israeli government and its policies — but Huldai’s words also reveal a deep and dangerous naivete.

To blame the murders on “a 49-year occupation” or to believe that giving up Judea and Samaria, or any other piece of land for that matter, would end the violence and the terrorism is to gamble with people’s lives.

I spent a good deal of time on social media in the hours after the Tel Aviv attack on Wednesday, as I do every day, and what I saw on Twitter was not calls for peace or even posts about how, once the Palestinians get the West Bank, they will build a country and create a state. No. What I saw under the hashtag #OperationRamadan were calls for the terrorists not to stop until the entirety of Israel was theirs. This is not a peace process or a protest, but a war that has very little to do with territory or borders, but rather the very existence of the Jewish State.

“Commanders for Israel’s Security” are a group I would much rather respect than ridicule, but drivel is drivel, even when it comes from men with an illustrious past and an accumulated 6000 years of security experience.

One does not have to be a military expert to easily identify the critical defects of the armistice lines that existed until June 4, 1967 (Deputy PM Yigal Allon, former commander of Palmah strike-force, 1976).

…historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory…Now the victors are the vanquished… (Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, 1938).

The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse… Then we will move forward (Abbas Zaki, PLO ambassador to Lebanon, 2009).

It genuinely distresses me to have to write this article—but I feel I have little option.

Despite my personal bias

I confess that I have a strong personal bias in favor of men who have devoted years of their lives to the defense of their country and endangered themselves to protect others. The members of the Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS) certainly fit that bill – comprising a group of over 200 former high-ranking officers in the IDF, intelligence services and police.

Today, however, we are faced with the bitter irony of a spectacle, in which scores of ex-senior security officials, who spent most of their adult life defending Israel, are now promoting a political initiative that will make it indefensible.

Recently, CIS, an allegedly non-politically partisan organization, which ran a virulently anti-Netanyahu campaign in the run-up to the March 2015 elections, published what purports to be a “plan” to break the ongoing deadlock over the “Palestinian issue”, appealingly but misleadingly, entitled “Security First: Changing the Rules of the Game-A Plan to Improve Israel’s Security and International Standing” .

In broad brush strokes, the seminal elements on which the entire proposal is based are that Israel should:

(a) Proclaim, unilaterally, that it forgoes any claim to sovereignty beyond the yet-to-be completed security barrier, which in large measure coincides with the pre-1967 “Green Line”, adjusted to include several major settlement blocks adjacent to those lines; but,

(b) Leave the IDF deployed there—until some “acceptable alternative security arrangement” is found – presumably the emergence of a yet-to-be located pliant Palestinian-Arab who will pledge to recognize Israel as the Jewish nation-state; and

(c) Embrace the Saudi Peace Plan–a.k.a. Arab Peace Initiative (API) subject to certain changes which the Arabs/Saudis recently resolutely refused to consider.

Noxious brew of the fanciful, the false & the failed

President Obama is burning his so-called bridges to a “green energy” future that will leave America’s families and industries powerlessly impoverished.

Any notions that generously subsidized solar and wind will significantly compensate capacity losses from shuttered coal plants and overregulated oil and natural gas suppliers are scientifically and economically delusional.

And as for any prospects that truly clean non-fossil nuclear or hydropower can make up the slack, forget about that too.

Let’s start with some simple arithmetic. If you have heard some USenergy2015really exciting news that the Obama Administration has already doubled the amount of total U.S. energy derived from “renewable alternative” sources (solar, wind, and biofuels), that would be true.

Thanks largely to $150 billion in generous federal subsidies, combined total renewables (not including hydropower) grew from supplying slightly more than 2% of our “primary fuel” (including electricity) to a whopping 4% today.

Meanwhile over the same period, the total increase of non-subsidized oil and gas also doubled, but added eight times more energy than the total growth of wind, solar, and biofuels combined. Oil and gas now supply about 63% of all U.S. primary fuel. Coal provides another 19%.

BilLGatesBill Gates, a leading “green energy proponent,” candidly discussed false industry narrative in a November 2015 Atlantic magazine article titled “We Need an Energy Miracle.”

Referring to “self-defeating claims of some clean-energy enthusiasts,” he said, “They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbons. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements.

What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what?”

As Gates pointed out, “The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this [economical energy technology] thing is. So false solutions like divestment or ‘Oh, it’s easy to do’ hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated.”