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October 2023

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America’s Hamas double failure Don’t expect the Biden administration to acknowledge its errors, any more than it did after the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan Charles Lipson

By on October 18th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/america-hamas-double-failure-israel-iran-biden/

Did American failures contribute to Hamas’s war of terror — its unprovoked attack, its total surprise, its horrific butchering of innocent civilians simply because they are Jews?

Yes, but a lesser one. The failures to discover the plans, deter the attack and, having failed at deterrence, to defeat it promptly are Israel’s. The secondary actor here is Iran, not the United States. It was the Islamic regime in Tehran that supplied its terror partner with funds, plans, intelligence and weapons.

Still, the US played a role — a combination of bumbling incompetence and fundamental policy errors that contributed to the onset of the conflict and to Hamas’s success.

Israel’s elaborate network of signals intelligence and human sources failed to uncover a massive plan of attack that involved thousands of terrorists and was months in the making. How could they have missed it? That’s a question its leaders must answer after the war is over. They must also ask why their deployment of military resources near Gaza was insufficient to deter the attack and, failing that, inadequate to protect civilian lives across southern Israel or defeat the rampaging invaders.

But America’s agencies failed, too. They were never expected to unmask internal operations in Gaza, but the CIA and other US intelligence agencies should have discovered what Iran was up to. After all, that regime ranks as one of America’s four enemy states, along with China, Russia and North Korea. Those should be a primary focus of US intelligence efforts — and this was Iran’s biggest foreign policy adventure in years.

Will anyone in the US government be held responsible? You’re kidding. This is The Government. No one is ever held responsible for failures, no matter how grotesque. If the first rule of Fight Club is, “we don’t talk about Fight Club,” the first rule of the Inside the Beltway Club is, “we don’t talk about our mistakes. We protect each other.”

Bad as the intelligence failures were, they were not Washington’s most important blunders. That shameful trophy goes to the Biden administration’s wrongheaded policy in Middle East. Its policy can be summarized in a single word: “appeasement.” The Obama administration pursued the same policy — and many of the same people are in charge now.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The High Price of Historical Illiteracy – Knowledge of how we won our rights is a crucial part of keeping them. David Catron

By on October 18th, 2023

https://spectator.org/rights-high-price-of-historical-illiteracy/

Thomas Jefferson, in an 1816 letter to a member of the Virginia General Assembly, made this observation: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” He wrote this passage to highlight the need for a system of primary schools in the Old Dominion. Eventually, the Commonwealth did establish a public school system, though Jefferson didn’t live to see it. That is just as well, perhaps. He would certainly be horrified by the ignorance of the people who attend and receive diplomas from our public schools.
 
During recent years, numerous studies have found that most Americans don’t know enough about the nation’s history and Constitution to pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. A particularly thorough 50-state survey of 41,000 Americans was published by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in 2019. Nationally, only 4 in 10 passed. In only one state, Vermont, was a majority (53 percent) able to earn a passing grade for U.S. history. This dismal state of affairs was clearly exacerbated by the ill-conceived school shutdowns that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the low 2023 ACT test scores demonstrate.
 

But the problem predates the pandemic, which arrived on our shores a year after the foundation’s survey was conducted. The real explanation can be derived by breaking out the scores by age group: In the 65+ group, 76 percent passed. Only 51 percent of the 45 to 64 group passed. In the under 45 group, a mere 27 percent passed. This suggests that history instruction has been neglected in public schools for decades. As Timothy S. Goeglein explains in his book, Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story, this neglect of history in public schools comes at a high price:

When there is no historical context to draw upon, no shared history, and no understanding of how government works, it becomes seed to sow division and discord in hearts and minds. When people are not equipped to refute an argument and lack the critical thinking skills to see beyond the rhetoric, they tend to accept it at face value. They become easy prey for demagogues — from the Left and the Right alike. They become tools to be exploited for a certain agenda.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

An Iran Proxy, Islamic Jihad, Turns Out To Be the Culprit That Rocketed a Christian Hospital in Gaza City, Israel Defense Forces Conclude ‘Those who murder our children also murder their children,’ Netanyahu says after the official conclusion is reached. Benny Avni

By on October 18th, 2023

https://www.nysun.com/article/an-iran-proxy-islamic-jihad-turns-out-to-be-the-culprit-that-rocketed-a-christian-hospital-in-gaza-city-israel-defense-forces-conclude

In an indication that Hamas is winning the propaganda war a mere 12 days after committing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Arab and Western leaders — and the New York Times — have quickly adopt the terrorists’ version of events that accuses Israel of killing hundreds of innocents in an air attack on a Gaza hospital. 

Hamas issued a statement Tuesday evening, declaring that some 500 people were killed and hundreds injured in an Israeli air attack on Al Ahali al Arabi, a hospital at Gaza City. Prime Minister Netanyahu then countered that Islamic Jihad rockets shot toward Israel were the culprit. 

Even before the Israeli version came out, the Hamas version was almost universally adopted as gospel. The Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, immediately left Amman, Jordan, where he was scheduled to participate in a summit with President Biden Wednesday, and declared a three-day period of mourning across the Palestinian territories.

Jordan then unilaterally announced that it will cancel the planned summit, which was designed to discuss humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians, Israel’s Channel 12 television is reporting. The Israeli embassy at Amman was besieged by hostile protesters. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and several other Arab countries immediately issued condemnations. American press outlets joined in. 

The Times led its website with the headline, “Israeli Strikes Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry says.” Like all other Gaza authorities, the health ministry is controlled by Hamas. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Woke Hits the Wall. Part Four Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 18th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/woke-hits-the-wall-part-four/

Another tenet of woke was a veritable war on gas and oil. Note the same serial ironic theme: if Biden inherited a calm border, he had the luxury or rather the margin of error to demagogue it, destroy it, and not be swamped by illegals—for a while.

It was also easy to call for defunding the police and the BLM agenda, as long as such megaphones were safe—and they were until the full effect of their nihilism eventually rooted them out.

And so too it was easy to war on fossil fuels when Trump’s full-production agenda had given an incoming Biden seemingly limitless gasoline and natural gas at cheap prices, with a full strategic petroleum reserve.

But as in the case of illegal immigration and crime, Biden’s rhetoric of banning fossil fuels finally caught up with him. Grinding down the fracking industry, canceling and restricting federal energy leases, stopping pipelines, and freezing vast oilfields finally gave Biden what he wanted and most feared: record-high gas prices and an irate public that blamed him for its misery.

The iconic, jump-the-shark moment of his failed fossil fuels campaign was when Biden began draining the strategic petroleum reserve right before the 2022 midterms.

Biden’s woke subtext went something like this: “Because we curtailed production of our own horrific fossil fuels, we want to get our hands on more of the awful stuff by either draining what the evil Trump had stockpiled for us, or begging the illiberal Saudis, Venezuelans, and Iranians to produce the icky goo that we will not.”

What, then, is Biden’s energy policy? It is to virtue signal greenness and to damn the Saudis, the oil companies, and the MAGA Winnebago and snow-mobile crowd for two-year intervals.

And then before a national or midterm election, it is to turn on the oil spigots in order to get gasoline prices down before the mail-in-voting begins, by begging the now good Saudis and the noble Venezuelans and our partners the Iranians, draining the last drop out of the strategic petroleum reserve, and symbolically opening a new federal oil tract for leasing that likely has little oil beneath it.

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