RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20237/strategy-to-end-iran-aggression

History continues to offer lessons and strategy to Washington if only the Biden Administration had the wisdom to hear it.

Eighty years ago, the allies quickly realized that both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan fed their war machines on oil. In the Pacific, American submarines sank every enemy tanker on sight, choking off the crucial petroleum desperately needed by Japan. It would be part of a ground, naval and air strategy that ultimately brought surrender. In Europe, our air forces went after the refineries and the rail networks that were fueling the German military. At the end of that conflict, there were probably more disabled Tiger tanks from lack of fuel than from bazookas.

Let us be clear who today’s enemy is in the Middle East.

Hamas may be carrying out the atrocities against Israeli civilians, but they are proxies of Iran.

Missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels recently struck three commercial ships in the Red Sea and attacked a U.S. warship. Those missiles were supplied by Iran.

Hezbollah has been lobbing rockets into northern Israel. Their masters? The Iranians.

The Iranians are operating with impunity because they believe the United States does not currently have the military will or strategic vision to act against them. They will continue to use their proxies to ratchet up the violence, testing to see where is America’s “red line.” After all, it is not as if anyone believes these various malevolent forces are acting on their own. So, for Iran’s mullahs, how far can they go in sponsoring violence against America’s allies? And more to the point, against America itself?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20236/doctors-without-borders-gaza

Since October 7, MSF, which is extremely active on X, has not made a single tweet denouncing the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, including the abduction of over 240 Israelis and others who have been held in Gaza as hostages, and the use of hospitals as barracks or human shields. MSF has constantly denounced Israel in virulent terms, but never the violations of humanitarian law committed by Hamas.

The information provided by MSF, which often repeats without proof the words of its local Palestinian employees, should therefore be no more credible than that of Hamas.

MSF must be irreproachable and neutral in its work. This is clearly not the case in Gaza.

The public statements since October 7 of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) and its employees, on the ground in Gaza, show a systematic bias in favor of Hamas and hostility to Israel. MSF has failed in its humanitarian purpose and violated its own charter, which proclaims “assistance… irrespective of race, religion, creed or political convictions.”

MSF has been present in the Gaza Strip since 1989. It now plays a leading role there, with at least 300 staff members, and works closely with local hospitals on a number of projects, either directly or indirectly with the Hamas “Ministry of Health”.

MSF is often quoted by the international media and is seen by public opinion as an objective, neutral and independent observer of the conflict in the region. Because of the history of the organization, which in 1999 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the French and international media have blind faith in MSF when it comes to reporting what it states.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-lust-for-mutilation-murder-sexual-atrocity/

Hamas groomed an army of angry, insecure, wife-beating psychopaths and gave them permission to rape, mutilate and kill Israeli men, women, and children. The terror organization drugged these psychopaths, told them to videotape their atrocities, and offered them a $10,000 reward for taking hostages. Hamas savages were high on captagon, Israeli blood, and visions of martyrdom. They believed that they were heroes righting wrongs and injustices by killing and violating the “oppressors” who stole and occupy their land.

The October 7th attack on Israel can be partly attributed to the red-green alliance of radical leftists and Islamists who foster a cult of Palestinian victimhood. The coalition of radicals that divide the world into oppressors and oppressed has generated one of the most successful long-term global information operations by making the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a cause célèbre. Decades of calculated anti-American, anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, oppressor-themed propaganda has resulted in “Palestinian solidarity” and support from Americans and people around the world. Disinformation campaigns combined with shame-based indoctrination techniques facilitated Oct. 7th — and its aftermath of worldwide antisemitic, anti-Israel protests and hate crimes.

The propaganda strategy portraying Palestinians as helpless victims against Israeli aggression is calculated to evoke deep-seated feelings of humiliation and shame that prompts violence. The Palestinians, similar to many other Muslim Arab males, belong to what is referred to as an ‘Honor – Shame’ culture, in which men are in a constant struggle with fear of dishonor and maintaining “reputation.” Emotions of weakness, helplessness and shame are always just below the surface, triggered by a hypersensitivity to any real or perceived act of humiliation. Honor and reputation are everything and can only be restored through violent bloodshed which washes away the insult.

Palestinian men who are continually portrayed in the media as weak, powerless, demeaned, and humiliated by Israel often relieve their feeling of shame and inadequacy by beating their wives. This is exemplified by the extremely high rate of Palestinian domestic violence. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2019, over seventy percent of the women in the Gaza Strip were exposed to violence from their husbands. The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) attributes Gender Based Violence in Gaza to ‘traditional patriarchal norms and values’ and then justifies violence against women by blaming Israel for frustrating Gazan men.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20223/world-at-war

[Senator JD] Vance has apparently not heard of World War II, which did not end with a negotiation either in Europe or the Pacific.

Leaders, officials, and legislators across the political spectrum have gone crazy, thinking their crowd-pleasing but truly awful ideas, if implemented, will have no consequences.

[Biden] is far more interested in avoiding escalation than in winning, and not angering the totalitarians in Beijing and Tehran has apparently become his primary goal… That is a grave strategic mistake.

[Putin] is unlikely to stop with just that embattled state. By explicitly adopting the language of Peter the Great, Putin has made it clear that Russia has the right to expand to areas now in NATO states. The Baltics, for instance, are obviously at risk. So is much of Eastern Europe.

Many in the West say that Putin would not dare to attack a NATO country, yet a failure of the West to defend Ukraine, a country protected by the guarantees of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, could convince Putin that he does not have to worry about the trans-Atlantic alliance or its most important member, the United States of America.

Senator JD Vance on December 11 suggested that Ukraine surrender land in order to obtain a peace settlement with Russia.

“It ends the way nearly every single war has ever ended: when people negotiate and each side gives up something that it doesn’t want to give up,” the Ohio Republican said to reporters. “No one can explain to me how this ends without some territorial concessions relative to the 1991 boundaries.”

Vance has apparently not heard of World War II, which did not end with a negotiation either in Europe or the Pacific. Moreover, given what he just said about a peace-for-land agreement with Russia, Vance also apparently knows nothing about the Munich Pact of 1938. I suspect he may not be able to locate the Sudetenland on a map.

Vance is not the only misguided American in Washington. Leaders, officials, and legislators across the political spectrum have gone crazy, thinking their crowd-pleasing but truly awful ideas, if implemented, will have no consequences.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20220/france-jihad

From the murder of Sébastien Sellam in 2003 to that of Mireille Knoll in 2018, all murders of Jews in France have been committed by radicalized Muslims.

Shouting “we are coming to kill white people”, they attacked, murdering Thomas Perotto, aged 17, who had his throat slit. Seventeen other people were wounded, some seriously. Criminologist Xavier Raufer, asked about the attack, replied that raids like that take place throughout the country every week.

Although the prosecutor in charge of the case received multiple testimonies that the attackers said they were “coming to kill white people,” authorities maintain that the motive for the attack is “unknown”.

74% of Muslims between the ages of 18 and 25 in France say they place Islamic sharia law above the laws of the French Republic.

Television journalist Christian Malard, who had access to the results of confidential inquiries carried out for the French Ministry of the Interior, said they show that more than half of the imams in France proclaim the superiority of Islam over Western culture and the need to Islamize France, even if that means using force.

The anti-Jewish atrocities by Hamas on October 7 reinforced a distrust of Islam, and for the first time in years, a majority of French people support Israel’s fight in the ongoing war.

Paris, December 2, 2023. 9 pm. A man shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (“Allah is the greatest!”) stabbed a German tourist walking along the Seine near the Eiffel Tower, an area considered safe. On the way to the hospital, the victim died. The murderer, again shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”, attacked two more people, seriously wounding them, before the police arrested him. A government press release quickly mentioned that the killer was a French citizen, born in France, with the exceedingly French first name of Armand.

Then reality struck. Armand was indeed born in France in 1997, but his original first name was Iman (full name: Iman Rajabpour-Miyandoab) — until 2003, when his Iranian parents, who had fled the Islamic Republic, became French citizens and changed his name to Armand. In 2015-2016, he proclaimed his allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) and made contact on social networks with many Islamists who had perpetrated terror attacks in France in that time period, and he planned a terrorist attack in Paris.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/12/we-need-an-immediate-ceasefire-in-ukraine-not-israel/

It’s time to acknowledge that the U.S. isn’t going to risk World War III to maintain Ukraine’s 1991 borders.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington this week, once again pressuring U.S. lawmakers to dole out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for his war effort. At issue is a $110 billion national security supplemental the Biden administration has requested that includes about $61 billion for Ukraine, as well as more funding for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and money to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senate Republicans last week sensibly blocked a vote to advance the bill because it doesn’t include changes to border policy, which is the only thing that would actually secure the border. But the border isn’t the only good reason to block the funding package. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the war in Ukraine is an unwinnable quagmire, and that for all the calls we hear for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, what’s really needed is a ceasefire in Ukraine, where the solution today is more or less what it was before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022: a negotiated settlement.

Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio hinted at this in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper over the weekend, saying there’s no reason to think $61 billion will accomplish what $100 billion hasn’t. “The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous. Nobody actually believed it. So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is.”

So far, neither the Biden White House nor any neocon Ukraine hawk in Washington has been able to articulate what the endgame strategy in Ukraine should be. Instead, we get platitudes about the need to shovel more money into a bloody war of attrition from the likes of Mike Pompeo, who of course doesn’t bother to elaborate on what he means by “end the war.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20217/biden-helping-putin-win
• The Biden administration’s persistent failure to provide Ukraine with the military supplies it requires poses a serious danger of gifting victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• [T]he Ukrainians… remain desperately short of key ammunition.
• [A]ny form of Russian success in Ukraine would not only spell disaster for Kyiv, but for the wider Western alliance.
• Putin has made no secret of his desire to extend Russian military aggression beyond Ukraine to include other regions of eastern Europe,
• [I]t is vital that the Biden administration not only renews its support for Zelensky during his visit to Washington this week, but also ensures Ukrainian forces receive the equipment they desperately need to defeat Russia.
• Only by making certain that Putin suffers a humiliating defeat in Ukraine will the West succeed in deterring autocratic regimes such as Russia, China and Iran from committing further acts of aggression.
The Biden administration’s persistent failure to provide Ukraine with the military supplies it requires poses a serious danger of gifting victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
From Abrams tanks to F-16 fighters, US President Joe Biden has constantly dithered over providing Ukraine with the equipment upgrades its forces desperately need if they are to succeed in defending themselves against Russian aggression.
The failure, moreover, to ensure that Ukraine achieves victory in its battle against Moscow’s unprovoked invasion has been a key factor in the failure of Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive to achieve a decisive breakthrough of Russia’s heavily-fortified defences in Ukraine.
Even though it is a year since President Volodymyr Zelensky first made his request to the US and other Western allies to be equipped with superior heavy armour and warplanes, the equipment is only starting to become available on the battlefield now, just as the bitter Ukrainian winter takes hold, thereby severely diminishing its effectiveness.