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A Hundred Days after Gaza’s October 7 (Part 3 of 4) Culpable Ignorance and the Devil’s Spreadsheet by Gwythian Prins

Posted By on January 30th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20357/israel-gaza-culpable-ignorance

Sir William Shawcross’s much delayed and now recent report on “Prevent” – the British Government anti-radicalisation programme – which has documented the failure of efforts at integration and the degree of risk residing within Muslim extremism has secured this disturbing knowledge its place on the public record.

In a climate of Israelophobia, where moral compasses go haywire, Hamas is not being held to account. Predictably, the BBC has presented international law as superior to national law and the International Court of Justice as a higher court than any national court. Neither is true. Under the guise of “human interest”, the BBC repeatedly broadcasts prurient details of injuries to individual children in Gaza. Why? It is designed to shock and anger the listener and to demonize Israel; and it leaves those implications unspoken, hence deniable.

Predictably, the BBC has presented international law as superior to national law and the International Court of Justice as a higher court than any national court. Neither is true. The former Director of BBC Television asks, “When do individual errors add up to something more? When do ‘mistakes’ become a clear pattern of institutional bias? These are questions the BBC must answer when it comes to its reporting of Israel’s conflict with the terrorist group Hamas.” He then lists nine other cases of gross error since 7/10 where the bias has been always the same, namely anti-Israel. “…Is the BBC just unlucky that this keeps happening? The answer is no.”

Hamas has nowhere to hide under Geneva 4. Its crimes are war crimes of the highest order. The ICJ’s interim ruling is vexatious and, while unable to make an objective finding, tarnishes that Court by implying that Israel might in the future commit “genocide” when there is neither evidence of intention nor a community which meets the criteria to be victims of genocide. The same day as its ruling, evidence arrived that UNRWA on which in part it had relied had itself now been discredited by evidence of its operatives’ involvement in 7/10. This is the latest form of Holocaust denial.

It is a matter of moral and legal judgment about how a country with high moral standards wages war against a terrorist enemy that has none. The framework for such an assessment has not been satisfactorily spelled out.

Israel’s entire ground force is part of an interactive all-arms cyber/air/sea/land concept of operations optimised for precision targeting to minimise collateral casualties, maximise the extinction of Hamas terrorists and ensure the effectiveness of its own force protection.

Hamas, conversely, has only a homicidal interest in its own Gaza civilian residents. Bluntly, for its purposes, the more that are killed the better because their deaths can then be blamed on the IDF and added to the undifferentiated butcher’s bill in which Western media take figures issued by Hamas uncritically as being all civilian. Hamas repeatedly obstructed Gazans trying to evacuate south of Wadi Gaza, blocking the route — even shooting them — when, before the first phase of ground operations began, the IDF gave civilians notice to move.

The devil’s spreadsheet therefore brings the ethical terms of engagement squarely front and centre. Israel did not bring war on 7th October. It has Just Cause, is fighting by just means, and has clear precedent.

So the relevant ethical compass is all too clear. It is Hamas and by extension its supporters wherever they are – on the world’s streets, even in the BBC it seems – who carry all moral blame for the fate of Gaza and its people.

In the modern trope of woke “intersectionality”, as victims of purported “white, Jewish colonialism”, Arabs are licensed to do freely any depraved act; and by definition Jews can never be victims.

[F]ar from being an agent of indiscriminate warfare, the IDF is probably the most successfully discriminate modern army. Has the comparison with other modern armies been heard or discussed in BBC analyses? The genocide case was just an attempt to smear with loose language… and has no relevance to Israeli conduct, which will not stop attempts to claim that it has.

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Mark Steyn Accuses Michael Mann of Lying about Winning Nobel Prize in Heated Courtroom Exchange By Ryan Mills

Posted By on January 30th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/mark-steyn-accuses-michael-mann-of-lying-about-winning-nobel-prize-in-heated-courtroom-exchange/

During cross examination in his defamation trial on Monday, conservative pundit Mark Steyn hammered climate scientist Michael Mann on the charge that he had engaged in academic misconduct by falsely claiming to have been a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

And Steyn suggested that the Mann was not truly harmed by controversial comments he and a fellow defendant made in blog posts at the center of the nearly 12-year-old legal case.

In his 2012 legal filing against Steyn and Rand Simberg, a scholar who was formerly with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Mann claimed to have been a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, a claim that Steyn said was “fake.” Instead, Mann was one of thousands of people who received a certificate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, for contributing to its 2007 award, which it received along with former vice president Al Gore.

Taking aim at Mann’s credibility, Steyn suggested that Mann used his “fake status” as a Nobel prize winner to claim in his lawsuit that Steyn’s and Simberg’s criticism of his work was defamatory. Penn State University, Mann’s former employer, also pointed at the claim as part of an investigation in 2010 clearing him of research misconduct.

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Proportionality . . . Again Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on January 30th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/proportionality-again/

You could set your watch by it. Whenever there is an atrocious attack on the United States or Israel, if transnational progressives are not subjecting us to the “escalation” drivel, they are subjecting us to the “proportionality” drivel.

For about the millionth time, the law-of-war concept of proportionality does not hold that a response to an attack has to be on the same scale as the attack itself. Several Biden supporters are making that case regarding Iran’s killing and wounding of our troops in Jordan (otherwise, you see, there could be . . . escalation). Think how absurd that is: A rabid enemy aggressor gets both to attack you first and to dictate the scope of your response.

That, of course, is not how proportionality works.

The driving question in a proportionality calculation is: What is the military objective? If that objective is legitimate (which, under the United States Constitution, we get to decide for ourselves), then the use of force must be reasonably proportionate to what is required to achieve the objective. If the objective is to end or drastically diminish the aggression of Iran and its proxy forces, then a proportionate use of force would be whatever is necessary to break the enemy’s will to continue (and even escalate) that aggression.

In April 1988, after Iran mined the Persian Gulf to paralyze commerce and security traffic, one of these mines detonated and nearly sank the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a guided-missile frigate, as it was escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers. President Reagan responded with what became known as Operation Praying Mantis, combined surface-ship and air attacks that destroyed much of Iran’s navy. As described by retired U.S. Navy captain William Luti in a Christmas Day Wall Street Journal op-ed, the operation remains a case study in effective deterrence.

That operation was textbook proportionality.

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Team Biden’s Lose-Lose Approach to the Border

Posted By on January 30th, 2024

https://amac.us/newsline/national-security/team-bidens-lose-lose-approach-to-the-border/

Give the Biden administration credit: If there is one skill they have demonstrated time and again, it is an aptitude for identifying the strategic low ground in political confrontations, and then positioning themselves so that they consistently fight their battles from that ground. That has once again proven to be the case in their recent confrontation with Texas over the ongoing historic border disaster.

Democrats, and their allies in the media, will be quick to assert that the Biden administration has the law and Constitution on its side, having secured a narrow 5-4 Supreme Court Decision allowing the federal government to remove border barriers constructed by Texas. This is technically true, but the political value of the Court’s ruling is dubious.

While Joe Biden would like to be Abraham Lincoln or even Andrew Jackson in a new sectional crisis, his moral and political position is weaker, largely as a result of his own actions.

Leaving aside how both Lincoln and Jackson have been cancelled on the left, it’s worth noting that Joe Biden and the Democrats have gone out of their way for years to suggest that the Supreme Court as an institution is not and should not be the final say on constitutional questions. They have also argued that Supreme Court decisions are purely political.

It will be difficult now for Democrats to generate a crusade in defense of a Court they themselves have disparaged, especially when the deciding vote in the Biden administration’s favor in this case was cast by Amy Comey Barrett, who Democrats insist was illegitimately appointed. Exclude her and the balance is 4-4, with Texas’ position sustained.

In short, the Biden administration’s efforts to justify itself on the basis of defending the rights of the Supreme Court place it at odds with the rest of its messaging, messaging it is likely to resume later this year if the Court overturns Chevron deference or issues any number of other rulings liberals are sure to be outraged about.

Similarly, it is far from clear that Democrats want to go to war, figuratively, on the principle of federal supremacy and power. Prior to 2016, many Democrats allowed themselves to believe that they would always control the levers of federal power, and it is clear that for at least some Democrats the Trump presidency did not disabuse them of the notion.

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The UN’s Terrorism Teachers American taxpayers have been subsidizing educators who call for the murder of Jews. Suspending these funds isn’t enough. UNRWA must be abolished for good. Hillel Neuer

Posted By on January 30th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-uns-terrorist-teachers-israel-unrwa?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Many who watched the October 7 massacre likely wondered how a man’s mind can become so warped that he not only commits heinous acts of murder, rape, and mutilation, but proudly films this carnage for the world to see.

It is a complicated question. But one of the primary answers is found in the schools that mold the minds of young people in their formative years. In Gaza, the organization that does much of the molding is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. That organization pays the salaries of teachers who call for the murder of Jews. 

On Friday, UNRWA said it had fired some employees accused of participating in Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel. Over the weekend, in an unprecedented rebuke of the agency, more than a dozen of its donor states, including the U.S., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands, announced their suspension of funds to UNRWA. The latest revelations follow numerous other reported cases of UNRWA’s entanglement with Hamas terrorism. 

This agency was chartered after the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Since 1950, UNRWA has provided the bulk of social services at Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, including the crucial task of teaching Palestinian children and adolescents. 

But the notion that it is primarily an agency for the relief of refugees is a front. UNRWA’s main task is political. Palestinians who work for UNRWA call it “the main political witness to our cause.”

UNRWA exists to perpetuate Palestinians as refugees. Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which since World War II has been responsible for the welfare of all refugees in the world, and has worked toward their resettlement and relocation, UNRWA deals only with the Arabs from Palestine and has a completely different objective.

Millions of Palestinians who attend UNRWA schools in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza are taught that the war of 1948 is not over, and that they have a “right of return”—meaning, to dismantle and take over Israel. 

The UN betrays its mission by signaling to the Palestinians that the war is not over, and to keep fighting. 

UN Secretary General António Guterres said he was “horrified” to discover that UNRWA employees participated in the invasion and massacre of October 7. But in reality, their actions merely translated UNRWA’s core message into action.

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How to Stop DEI Bari Weiss hosts a debate: Christopher Rufo vs. Yascha Mounk.

Posted By on January 30th, 2024

This weekend, Bari Weiss hosted a debate between me and Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk on “the right way to fight illiberalism.” There were points of agreement, but ultimately, the debate diverged as we considered the practical necessities for winding down repressive DEI bureaucracies. My approach was more aggressive; Mounk’s was more cerebral. The consensus in Bari Weiss’ comments section was that I had the upper hand, but you can listen and make your own determination.

The following are highlights selected by The Free Press:

On how to describe DEI’s capture of higher education:

Bari Weiss: Some people call it wokeness, which sort of automatically brands you as being on the right. Other people call it critical theory or identity politics or postmodern neo-Marxism. There’s a lot of disagreement about how we actually describe this thing that all of us are witnessing. So I want to start there. What is it that we’re actually talking about?

Christopher Rufo: I think it’s an ideological syndrome. So it’s a cluster of traits, ideas, concepts, narratives, and bureaucratic arrangements that have really revolutionized American society over the past 50 years. I trace the immediate origins back to the year 1968, and the argument that I make in my book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is that all of the ideas from the radical left of that era—the late 1960s, early 1970s—have infiltrated universities and then started to move laterally through bureaucracies in the state sector, in K–12 education, in HR departments, and even the Fortune 100 companies. And what you see over the course of this process is some very multisyllabic, complex ideological concepts from the originators of these ideas in that period. And now they’ve filtered out through bureaucratic language, through euphemisms, to become what we now know as DEI. That’s the ultimate bureaucratic expression of these ideologies.

You can call it—any of those labels that you just suggested, I think, are correct in general, at least facets of this ideology. But at this point, it’s not just an idea. It’s actually an administrative, cultural, and bureaucratic power that has manifested itself and entrenched itself as a new, let’s say, hegemonic cultural force in American life. 

Yascha Mounk: I think the best way to boil down the ideas of this ideology is in three propositions. Number one, that identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation are the key prism for understanding society. But to understand how we talk to each other today, or to understand who won the last election, or to understand how political revolutions happen, you have to look at things like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Number two, that universalist values and neutral rules, like those enshrined in the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are just meant to pull the wool over people’s eyes, that they actually were always designed to perpetuate forms of racist and sexist discrimination, that as Derrick Bell, the founder of critical race theory, claimed, America in the year 2000 remained as racist as it had been in 1950 and 1850. 

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VIDEO: NETANYAHU AND DOUGLAS MURRAY

Posted By on January 30th, 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57xdV_mIsA

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“Choice” by Sydney Williams

Posted By on January 30th, 2024

http://www.swstotd.blogspot.com

Free choice, where it does not break the law or infringe on the rights of others, is fundamental to our rights as Americans. We make hundreds of choices every day, some significant, others not so. Next November’s election represents a significant choice. It has been portrayed as critical because, or so we are told, democracy is on the line. Progressives, and their propagandists in mainstream media, would have us believe that the election of Donald Trump would signify the end of democracy. And there is no question he is mean-spirited, has spoken of retribution against those who oppose him, and may go to jail. On the other hand, many of us on the right believe democracy is at risk because current political trends suggest we are, with the degradation of individualism, headed toward group-think, socialism, and central planning. One is reminded of Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

As for Trump, despite his well-publicized flaws, consider what he faced in his first term: the weaponization of the intelligence services; retribution by his political enemies; along with the pursuit of identity politics, the elevation of the group over the individual, the imposition of DEI into many aspects of our lives, and the inflicting of ESG into our investment and financial organizations – the phony feel-good elements of Wokeism. Keep in mind, threats to democracy can come from the left as well as the right. So what does a thoughtful voter do? Colleen Hoover, a writer of romance stories for young teens, wrote in Hopeless: “Sometimes you have to choose between a bunch of wrong choices and no right ones.” Given what our options for President are likely to be in November, voters may face a similar ineluctable conundrum – a “Sophie’s Choice” between two bad options, the rock shoals of Scylla or the whirlpool of Charybdis. However, there are nine months to go until election day and much could happen, especially with two far-from-ideal elderly candidates.

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Time to End UNRWA’s Jihad against Israel by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on January 29th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20356/unrwa-jihad-against-israel

“Hamas is involved in everything. Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers. Hamas manages UNRWA. They are those in charge in the agency. From the day Hamas came to power, they took control of everything. The UNRWA employees are from Hamas. The heads of the departments and the senior staff are Hamas members.” —Palestinian from the Gaza Strip to an Israeli officer in a recorded call, X (Twitter) December 27, 2023.

It is now clear that the UN heads were lying when they said they were unaware of the involvement of their employees with terror groups. In fact, they knew but did their utmost to appease Hamas.

In a moment of rare honesty, in 2021 the UN acknowledged that UNRWA’s school curriculum referred to Israel as “the enemy,” taught children mathematics by counting “martyred terrorists,” and included the phrase “Jihad is one of the doors to paradise” in Arabic grammar lessons.

“Before UNRWA, this terrorist accomplice [Abdallah Mehjez] worked for the BBC…” — Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

“Now is the time for reform. Reform for rehabilitation – so that the minds of Palestinian children can no longer be poisoned. So that there can be a shared vision of peace in this land.” — Lt. Col. (res.) Peter Lerner, X (Twitter), January 27, 2024.

Western taxpayers should not be funding terror groups disguised as humanitarian organizations.

UNRWA was established to support the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees, not to support the development of terrorism.

It is time to dismantle UNRWA and end the farce of Palestinian “refugees.” There are no real refugees. There are millions of Palestinians living — often in unspeakable conditions (so that Israel can be blamed) — under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

It is the UN that enables and perpetuates this human rights abuse. These Palestinians live under Palestinian and Arab regimes that should long ago have absorbed them instead of keeping them in “refugee camps” with the cheery “humanitarian” promise that they will one day flood Israel, turn the Jews into a persecuted minority in their own country, then bring about its demise.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

When genosuicide feels like genocide Muslim world is largely modernizing but a few tragic holdouts like Hamas will fight to the death to maintain backward traditional societies David Goldman

Posted By on January 29th, 2024

https://asiatimes.com/2024/01/when-genosuicide-feels-like-genocide/

An American coalition consisting mainly of Iraqi forces destroyed the city of Mosul in northern Iraq in 2017, with civilian casualties estimated at somewhere between 2,500 and 40,000. The Associated Press count was 11,000 civilians dead but it might have been much higher. ISIS fighters prevented civilians from leaving as the US and its allies bombarded the town, and no one knows to this day how many are buried under the rubble.

No one called this genocide because it didn’t feel like genocide. Muslims killing Muslims is a tragedy but Jews killing Muslims feels like genocide in the mind of the Muslim world and some who sympathize with it. Humiliation equals death in traditional society, and it is not the death count in Gaza but the humiliation of Hamas that elicits the charge of genocide.

When Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “We love death like our enemies love life! We love martyrdom, the way in which [Hamas] leaders died,” the world should have taken him at his word. Hamas leaders might experience martyrdom vicariously from hotel suites in Qatar but they are sincere about martyrdom and do not care how many martyrs they make among non-combatants. This is not genocide but rather genosuicide.

The purging of ISIS from Mosul parallels Israel’s efforts to root Hamas out of Gaza after the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis accompanied by unspeakable sexual and other atrocities, and the abduction of another 240 Israeli hostages. 25,000 Gazans are alleged by the Hamas-controlled health ministry to have died, of which almost 10,000 are Hamas fighters by Israel’s count.

The civilian death toll is about the same as Mosul’s. With 2 million residents in 2014, Mosul had roughly the same population as Gaza so the per capita death rate of civilians is roughly the same—assuming that the unverified figures circulated by Hamas and echoed by the United Nations are accurate.

An Internet search for items posted before 2020 shows that the term “genocide” appeared frequently in connection with Mosul but only and exclusively in association with ISIS, which perpetrated genocide against the Yazidi religious minority, according to a UN commission. There is barely a single instance in which the term “genocide” was used to characterize the destruction of Mosul itself, apart perhaps from the heading of a 2017 Arab Center Washington DC think tank report.

Why then accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza for collateral damage among civilians in a similar campaign to extirpate a terrorist army? The charges brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice are absurd on the face of it.