The Bad Optics of Fighting for Your Life When it comes to Israel, memes have replaced morality. Bari Weiss

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-bad-optics-of-fighting-for-your?token=eyJ1c2Vy

I am weeping.

It appears that standing up for the right of innocent people to protect themselves from a genocidal terrorist organization has become extremely risky to one’s “brand.” And so lies have replaced truth. Memes have replaced morality. Hashtags have replaced history.

I’m speaking, of course, about Israel. 

In the past 48 hours, according to the Israel Defense Forces, more than 1,500 rockets have rained down on Israeli cities. Those rockets are being launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and by Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since Israel unilaterally withdrew from it and forcibly evacuated every last Jewish resident from  the territory in 2005.

Israelis have gotten used to living life in a kind of perpetual war. On Tuesday, Nellie was on a call with a journalist in Tel Aviv who abruptly hung up because the sirens started wailing. A friend sent a photo of his mother crouched in a bomb shelter. All ok, he said. Friends across the country told me about huddling with their crying children in safe rooms. It’s fine, they insisted.

But living like this is not fine:

Israel Under Fire @israelunderfire
Moments of horror in Israel. A rocket hits directly an Israeli bus. #IsraelUnderFire #IsraelUnderAttack

May 11th 2021

15 Retweets21 Likes

It will never be fine to have children killed by terrorists whose explicit aim is to kill them:

120 Retired US Military Officers Warn of Conflict Between Marxism, ‘Constitutional Freedom’

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/120-retired-generals-military-officers-sign-letter-warning-of-conflict-between

BY JACK PHILLIPS

More than 120 retired U.S. generals and admirals signed an open letter warning that the United States is embroiled in an existential fight and urged “all citizens” to get involved in local and state politics.

“We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty,” states the letter (pdf), which was signed by 124 former military leaders, released by “Flag Officers 4 America.”

The letter also posited that opposition to proposed bills and laws that would strengthen election initiatives has troublesome implications.

“Election integrity demands insuring there is one legal vote cast and counted per citizen. Legal votes are identified by State Legislature’s approved controls using government IDs, verified signatures, etc. Today, many are calling such commonsense controls ‘racist’ in an attempt to avoid having fair and honest elections,” the letter states.

According to the Flag Officers 4 America website, it’s a group of former military leaders who “pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,” whether “domestic” or “foreign.”

Of note, signatories of the letter include retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc—a Senate candidate in New Hampshire, retired Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, and retired Vice Adm. John Poindexter—who was the deputy national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

“China is the greatest external threat to America. Establishing cooperative relations with the Chinese Communist Party emboldens them to continue progress toward world domination, militarily, economically, politically, and technologically. We must impose more sanctions and restrictions to impede their world domination goal and protect America’s interests,” the letter says.

Other threats they listed include the United States reentering the Iran nuclear deal, illegal immigration, and the stoppage of the Keystone XL Pipeline project. President Joe Biden issued an order halting the pipeline project early in his presidency.

No, a four-year-old girl is not ‘really’ a boy Adults need to stop inflicting trans ideology on small children. Joe Bartoch

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/11/no-a-four-year-old-girl-is-not-really

Stormy is a four-year-old female child whose parents believe she is a transgender boy. They believe this because Stormy has expressed the belief that she has a masculine gender identity. The media loves a sensational trans story (guilty), and, as the parents of what might be Britain’s youngest ‘trans’ tot, Stormy’s mum and dad duly received their 15 minutes on the sofa of This Morning this week.

Daytime television isn’t known for intellectual rigour, but it would have been fair to expect a little journalistic curiosity. Instead, head gently titled, Holly Willoughby oozed sympathy, stating with surprising confidence: ‘As a society we tend to want to put people into a girl or a boy box that just fits with what we know. It makes sense, it makes us feel comfortable, but that’s not reality.’

In saying this, not only did Willoughby demonstrate an alarming level of credulity — she also entirely missed the obvious point. Stormy could be a little girl living outside of the ‘girl’ box. She could have short hair, wear trousers and like firefighters, while still being female. Instead, Stormy’s parents have opted to put their female child in the box marked ‘boy’, because it seems it is still considered shameful to have a child who does not conform. There is nothing progressive about this. It is informed by what was once known as sexism.

The idea of trans children ought to make any right-thinking person wince. Only a decade ago, someone who sought to change his or her sex was referred to as a ‘transexual’, and someone who wore clothes associated with the opposite sex was referred to as a ‘transvestite’. Stripped of the sexual connotations, the words ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ emerged. This happened at around the same time as the medical profession began treating children with gender dysphoria as if it were their bodies, not their minds, that needed fixing. The rebranding of what used to be regarded as an adult psycho-sexual disorder has created a new concept – the ‘transgender child’.

Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed? The global woke loathing for Israel is taking an even darker turn. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/12/why-wont-israelis-let-themselves-be-killed/

“There is nothing positive in contemporary Israel-bashing. In its naivety, it assists the rise of Hamas. In its arrogance it empowers the West to determine the fate of the Middle East. All of this stores up more conflict and hatred for the future.”

Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.

But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?

This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?

AOC’s Attack on Yang’s Meaningless Israel Statement Shows Her Role: Protect Dem Leaders Real power over U.S. policy toward Israel and Gaza rests with Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, Blinken — not Yang. But AOC’s function is to shield them from leftist anger.Glenn Greenwald see note please

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/aocs-attack-on-yangs-meaningless?token=eyJ1

Greenwald always so astute on the media and politics reverts to his historic anti-Israel bashing here….vicious and wrong and boring….Too bad…..rsk

There are three interrelated political factions that wield actual power to change blind U.S. support for Israel: the U.S. Congress, the Democratic Party, and the Biden Administration. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who claims to oppose this U.S. posture toward Israel, has significant influence in and responsibility for each: she is a member of Congress, one of the party’s most popular elected officials, and was a vocal supporter of the Biden campaign in the general election and is now a key surrogate for his administration.

As Israeli bombs fall on Gaza yet again as part of a conflict triggered by further incursions by Israeli settlers into occupied East Jerusalem, those key power centers remain steadfast in their support for Israel. The Biden State Department has issued one statement after the next so supportive of Israel that its spokesman, Ned Price, was petrified to utter a word that might be construed as empathy for Palestinian suffering — even refusing to condemn the killing of Palestinian children when asked explicitly if he does. After a two-minute opening statement on Sunday in which he announced that “the U.S. condemns in the strongest terms the barrage of rocket attacks fired into Israel” and heralded “Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself, its people and its territory,” Price took questions from reporters in which he appeared on the verge of some sort of seizure each time he was pressed to say what he thought about violence by Israel against Palestinians:

The Thin Veneer of American Civilization By Victor Davis Hanson (August 11, 2020)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-thin-veneer-of-american-civilization/

In a flash, it’s been blown away, revealing the barbarism beneath. The seeds of destruction were planted long ago.

Nine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis. It was coasting on the more or less good governance of its prior two mayors and on its ancestral role as the global nexus of finance and capital.

The city is now something out of a postmodern apocalyptic movie, reeling from the effects of a neutron bomb. Ditto in varying degrees Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — the anti-broken-windows metropolises of America. Walking in San Francisco today reminds me of visiting Old Cairo in 1973, although the latter lacked the needles and feces of the former.

At the present increasing rate of police defunding, homeless encampments, the emptying of jails and prisons, the green-lighting of rioting and vandalism, the flight of the wealthy, the revolutionary change to Skype/Zoom tele-working, and the exodus of upper-middle-class liberal families to safe houses in the New York and New England countryside, once beautiful New York City is in danger of becoming the nation’s aneurysm. That is, after the “recovery,” it and other blue cities may be seen as permanent weak veins and arteries prone to sudden fatal hemorrhaging that could implode at any moment, and thus may become metaphorically tied off, as the country reroutes around them.

In the old days of 2019, tolerant Americans more or less accepted that finely crafted statues of sometimes less than inspiring and formerly illustrious (to some) heroes were part of our history. For example, integral to California’s rich historical culture were its missions, acknowledged by Father Serra’s numerous eponymous streets and statues. No one in his right mind believed that renaming a mall named Serra at Stanford University would help mitigate the weekend murder rate in Chicago or the endemic poverty of illegal aliens in my own neighborhood.

The same allowance for imperfection by present standards was made for Robert E. Lee, a capable though not brilliant strategist, and by the standards of his time and space considered a good man who fought for a terrible cause. His name and likeliness were reminders to Americans of the tragedy of the Civil War that saw 700,000 Americans die in the struggle to end slavery. Focusing on inner-city gun violence or abortion or integrating the public schools with the scions of the white upper class might do far more for racial relations than toppling more bronze horses and riders. But that is the point: Focus on the irrelevant misdemeanor as therapy for ignoring the existential felony.

The collapse of Israel’s dream palace of normalcy – And how Israel can still achieve a great victory  David Wurmser

https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/the-collapse-of-israels-dream-palace-of-normalcy-and-how-israel-can-still-achieve-a-great-victory/

Every intelligence officer in the United States at one point in his formal training learns about the great Israeli intelligence failure in the 1973 war.  The lesson was clear, and the same one identified by Roberta Wohlstetter about the great failure of surprise in Pearl Harbor in 1941: a set of ideas, or “conception” can so thoroughly dominate elites and the professional strategic and intelligence communities that it overpowers the increasing pace of evidence and information suggesting an approaching tectonic change.  Israel has just been shaken because it suffered in recent days the second great, indeed catastrophic, “failure of conception,” with dramatic human and strategic consequences.  And it will face a grave national challenge going forward beyond the horrific affairs of massive missile barrages from Gaza because its entire understanding of its situation and the defense concepts that flow from it have collapsed.

And yet, Israel also faces a great opportunity.  A proper response could deliver Israel a tremendous victory, perhaps one its greatest, and leave Israel more strengthened and valued in the long run as an appealing potential ally for others struggling to survive in a dangerous region.

The Dream Palace of Illusions

With respect to Iran’s nuclear program and attempts to establish Iran’s power in Syria, Israel has embraced the original strategy of preemption which served it so well in its first years, to deny an avowed genocidal enemy the means to execute its ambition. And yet, other than Iran, for the last several decades, Israel turned in response to its other enemies from preemption to deterrence, and a “quiet for quiet” formula.  It turned to relying on American support rather than enjoying freedom of action to shape their environment into a less dangerous form. It watched massive stockpiling of missiles in Gaza and in Lebanon, but believed its overwhelming force, and the willingness to use it, guaranteed the success of its reliance on deterrence. Israel believed it could absorb constant attacks on border communities as a below-the-threshold simmering that can be tolerated, much to the chagrin of the people living in those communities.  And Israel believed it could pay blood money to a desperate Hamas via the Qataris to keep them quiet.

Opinion: The end of Jewish-Arab coexistence?By David Isaac

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-the-end-of-jewish-arab-coexistence/

Jews cower in their homes as Arabs set fire to synagogues and comb the streets for Jewish victims. Failing that, they attempt to break into Jewish homes. They burn cars and whatever else they can lay their hands on.

These events, more reminiscent of the Pale of Settlement, are taking place now, for the last two days, in Israel proper, in the city of Lod, a half hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.

More than one eyewitness has called it a pogrom. The city’s mayor compared it to Kristallnacht.

What makes it different, indeed intolerable, is that it’s taking place in the Jewish State, established to end such horrors.

Lod is a mixed city. Its Jewish population has been shouting for help as they remain trapped in their own homes as Arabs run riot. The government has quite rightly been criticized for its tepid response. Only about 30 rioters have been arrested. Finally, on Tuesday evening, the government ordered 16 Border Police companies to the city and declared a state of emergency.

As pathetic as has been the government and police response, it’s Lod’s Arabs who deserve the most censure. They are Israeli Arabs. They have grown up in Israel, not on the other side of some imaginary line, not in the so-called ‘occupied territories.’ Israel makes enormous effort to help its Arab citizens feel a part of the country, despite propaganda to the contrary. In short, there is no excuse for the savagery of this ungrateful minority.

Joan Swirsky: The Pathology of Liberalism *****

https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-pathology-of-liberalism 

Bottom line, the entire world is now witnessing a regime of fixated Liberal-Leftist-Progressive children trying to run the most powerful country on earth, when what they really need is psychotropic medication, behavioral therapy, and a Congress with enough backbone to banish Voter Fraud forever!

From the inception of psychology about 140 years ago, medical conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, Tourette’s syndrome, even stuttering, were thought to be psychological in origin––and with enough therapy, enough blaming inadequate parenting, enough talk, enough delving into “feelings,” the sufferer could be treated successfully or even cured.

We now know––thanks to tools like PET scans and pharmaceutical advances––that these conditions are largely biological in nature, more receptive to medications, augmented with behavioral-therapy techniques, than to any of the other “therapies” that were utilized so ineffectually on multimillions of people over the past many decades.

These scans, in fact, have revealed the specific areas of the brain that show increased activity during anger,  revenge, anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, stuttering, pathological lying, cheating, manipulation, obsessive-compulsive behavior, depressive disorders, even cravings for chocolate!

NATURE OR NURTURE?

How do we know these conditions are for the most part biological? Because in addition to the fact that medications have treated them successfully––for example, Haldol for psychoses, Lithium for bipolar disorder, Lexapro for depression, Xanax for anxiety, et al––they have identical symptoms––albeit some more severe than others––in people raised in luxury high-rises in Buenos Aires, slums in Los Angeles, kibbutzim in Israel, huts in rain forests, and penthouses in Manhattan.

Pompeo: Biden signaled to Hamas that he values Israel less Former US Secretary of State places blame on current US President for current round of Hamas-Israel violence.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/306076

Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed the Biden Administration for the ongoing Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket fire on Israel.

“Biden delayed his call with Israeli leadership and restarted funding to the Palestinian Authority through the UN — both signal to Hamas & terrorists in the West Bank that America places less value on our relationship with Israel. It matters who leads,” the former secretary of state tweeted Wednesday,

Pompeo’s statement comes as over 1,050 rockets have been launched at Israel since Monday.

Six Israelis have been killed in the rocket attacks so far.

The Biden Administration has come under fire for drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas’ attacks on Israel’s efforts to defend itself. Yester, State Department Spokesman Ned Price stated that “Israel has the right to defend itself and to respond to rocket attacks. The Palestinian people also have the right to safety and security just as Israelis do.”

“We call on all sides to exercise restraint and calm,” Price said, lamenting the loss of life on both sides and the hundreds of Arab rioters who were injured in clashes with Israeli police in Jerusalem prior to the rocket attacks,” Price said.