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The Media Is As Awful As They Are Predictable
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With That Retweet, Ilhan Omar Pads Her Reputation as an Anti-Semite
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The attached is a NYT's article.
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As Gazans Scrounge for Food and Water, Hamas Sits on a Rich Trove of Supplies
Hamas has spent years stockpiling desperately needed fuel, food and medicine, as well as ammo and weapons, in the miles of tunnels it has carved out under Gaza.
Palestinians receiving building materials through tunnels in Southern Gaza in 2011. The network is by now so established that Hamas can manufacture weapons underground, eliminating the need to smuggle them from Egypt.Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
As supplies of virtually every basic human necessity dwindle in Gaza, one group in the besieged enclave remains well-stocked: Hamas.
Arab and Western officials say there is substance to Israeli claims of Hamas stockpiling supplies, including desperately needed food and fuel. Hamas, they say, has spent years building dozens of kilometers of tunnels under the strip where it has amassed stores of virtually everything needed for a drawn-out fight. It is a reality that Israel may soon find itself grappling with if it makes good on its threat to invade Gaza.
Hamas has hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel for vehicles and rockets; caches of ammunition, explosives and materials to make more; and stockpiles of food, water and medicine, the officials said. A senior Lebanese official said Hamas, which is estimated to number between 35,000 and 40,000, had enough stocked away to keep fighting for three to four months without resupply.
One of the four Israeli hostages released by Hamas even described the group providing captives with medicine, shampoo and feminine hygiene products. All are now said to be extraordinarily scarce in Gaza more than two weeks after Israel, aided by Egypt, imposed what it called a “complete” blockade following the attack by the terrorist group on Oct. 7.
The Arab and Western officials who described Hamas’s supply situation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were disclosing information gleaned from human sources, communications intercepts and other streams of intelligence. The stockpiles are typically kept underground, they said, and cautioned that precise details on Hamas’s supplies were difficult to come by.
While the blockade has left Gaza’s roughly 2 million people scraping by with what little food and water they scrounge up, it does not yet appear to have begun to degrade Hamas’s ability to fight. The group has launched hundreds of rockets at Israel since the blockade began and have fended off preliminary Israeli incursions into the enclave.
The supply situation speaks to the relative sophistication of Hamas as a fighting force — an axiom among military professionals is that while amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics. Yet with Gazans facing a humanitarian catastrophe, Hamas’s stockpiles raise questions about what responsibility, if any, it has to the civilian population.
Displaced Palestinians charging their phones at a displacement camp in Khan Younis on Wednesday. Arab, Western and Israeli officials say that Hamas is sitting on a trove of supplies while Gazans are increasingly scrounging for necessities like food, water and electricity. Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
History abounds of well-supplied armies fighting on the front lines while the home front went hungry. Germans, for instance, endured what became known as the “Turnip Winter” at the height of World War I, even as the Kaiser’s armies were well provisioned. They eventually lost and the German Empire fell.
Hamas has said little of its supply situation — combatants rarely do — but the government it runs in Gaza says it has an emergency fuel stockpile that is quickly being depleted. “Hospitals, the ambulances and fire fighters’ machinery and civil defense trucks have been using the government emergency fuel store,” said Salama Marouf, who runs the government’s media office in Gaza.
But those fuel stockpiles are separate from and far smaller than the 211,000 to 264,000 gallons of gasoline and diesel that the Israeli military says Hamas has on hand.
Fuel has taken on growing importance in recent days. Israel has so far refused to allow any fuel to be delivered to Gaza, even as other aid begins to trickle in, leaving much of the enclave without electricity to power hospitals, desalinate or pump water, fire bakers’ ovens and run internet and cellphone services. The United Nations, which handles the bulk of humanitarian relief work in Gaza, said on Thursday that it “has almost exhausted its fuel reserves and begun to significantly reduce its operations.”
Asked about the situation, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, told reporters that if Gazans or the United Nations need fuel, they should get it from Hamas.
“Hamas has fuel but has different priorities — to provide ventilation and air for its tunnel system, for firing rockets, command and control,” he said on Thursday.
A damaged gas station in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. While fuel supplies are running low in Gaza, Israel says Hamas is sitting on a stockpile of 800,000 to a million liters of gasoline and diesel.Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Neither the Arab nor the Western officials offered estimates anywhere as detailed as what the Israelis claim. And with only a trickle of aid beginning to reach Gaza, Hamas does not appear to be replenishing its stores, they said.
“But they are very careful in using what they have because they will be using it for long periods,” said Samir Ghattas, an Egyptian strategic analyst who closely monitors Gaza.
That certainly appears to be the case with food. Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, a freed hostage, said that while in captivity she ate the same single meal that Hamas fighters eat every day: pita bread with two kinds of cheese and cucumber.
Mr. Ghattas said there was little chance that Hamas would be willing to provide food or any other kinds of supplies to aid civilians. “The Hamas movement cares only about the Hamas movement,” he said. “The public of Gaza mean absolutely nothing for Hamas.”
Hamas has grown adept at manufacturing its own weapons in underground bunkers and shielding them from Israel’s advanced surveillance systems, the Lebanese official said. So the smuggling routes that Hamas once relied on, through an intricate network of tunnels to Egypt, have become less relevant. Hamas has also raised money by taxing the Palestinian population that lives in Gaza, making outside support less relevant than before.
Isabel Kershner and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
Matthew Rosenberg was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump, and more recently exposed how Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from Facebook. He previously spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and was expelled from Afghanistan in 2014 because of his reporting. More about Matthew Rosenberg
Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent based in Mexico City, covering Latin America. She previously reported from Afghanistan, across the Middle East and in India, where she covered South Asia. More about Maria Abi-Habib
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Israel will/can never win the" message war" no matter what they do. Why? Because the anti-Semitism virus always lurks beneath the surface. Furthermore, now that the mass media embraces the concept of proportionalism this allows attackers to win hands down over victims.
As Henninger writes, the mass media feel they have have an obligation to give even space to those claiming injustice.
"When all else fails lower your standards" so animalistic behaviour by sub-humans has been elevated.
Oct 7 is Trump's fault because he was successful in negotiating The "Abraham Accords" versus Obama's success of circumventing the Senate with his the JPOA contract.
Finally, why we should get out of The U.N or, at the very least, stop funding it.
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Can Israel Win the Messaging War?
U.N. Secretary General Guterres is already building a new conventional wisdom about Hamas and Gaza.
By Daniel Henninger
Wonder Land: Political opposition has become a learned reflex. But the fact it kicked in mere hours after Hamas’s civilian slaughter on Oct. 7—the assertion that somehow Israel drove Hamas to do it—deserves examination.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
Political opposition has become a learned reflex. Whatever you’re for, I’m against. End of story. But the fact that this same political reflex kicked in hours after Hamas’s videotaped mass slaughter of innocents on Oct. 7—the assertion that somehow Israel drove Hamas to do it—begs for examination.
There was a time years ago when one explanation would be that people weren’t fully aware of the scope or physical details of such mass killings. Consider the difficulties at the start of World War II to convince some in the West, notably in the U.S., that a plan to exterminate Jews was under way in Germany and Poland.
Today omnipresent mass media and personal video make it impossible to be ignorant of atrocities of the sort that occurred in southern Israel. There is no excuse not to know the details. A striking summing-up of all we have seen and heard was given on Fox News by an Israeli worker still recovering bodies. “I’m a child of Holocaust survivors,” she said, “and I grew up hearing stories of the camps. I thought those were the worst stories. These stories are worse.”
A question that persisted for days was: What did Hamas hope to achieve with what obviously would be seen as a coldly conceived plan to commit unspeakable atrocities—other than the killing of Jews?
The answer has emerged in the days since Oct. 7. It was in great part about the messaging.
“Messaging” has become an everyday word normally associated with branding campaigns. Messaging is an enormous industry whose purpose is to shape public opinion. Ultimately messaging is a euphemism for propaganda, a practice often correctly associated with the Nazis’ Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s minister of propaganda. Goebbels’s job was to manipulate the media of the time, newspapers and film, to portray Nazism favorably.
It is clear now that a primary Hamas goal was to elicit an overwhelming Israeli military response directed at Gaza itself, with Gazan civilian deaths expected. Hamas knew that an Israeli reaction to the atrocities, such as its current bombing of Hamas sites inside Gaza, would in time produce a counterreaction in Europe and the U.S. That is starting to happen.
A pivotal messaging event was the Oct. 17 “bombing” of al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. It has since been established, including in a video analysis by this newspaper, that Israel didn’t bomb the hospital. Note, though, how quickly the blame-Israel assumption fell into place among major news outlets. It mattered that Israel’s role in this bombing was disproved. But what mattered to Hamas—via the incredible Palestine Ministry of Health—was establishing that initial assumption. Israel was already being pushed off the moral high ground.
McCarthy’s Ouster Was a Sellout for Nothing October 4, 2023
At this point, events quickly arrived at a familiar juncture. The media and some world governments were beginning to “balance” the story. In the past 20 years or so, the U.S. press has adopted the belief that it is obligated to give equal space to groups or movements asserting claims of injustice. Everyone in the political messaging business understands how justice claims drive coverage. Hamas’s massacres, while still being reported, are now being balanced—meaning diluted—by the constant narrative of concern for the Palestinians. However sincere that concern, Hamas and Tehran couldn’t care less.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin surely saw this inevitable balancing of blame coming when he said while in Israel just after the massacres that this was no time for “false equivalence.” It remains to be seen if the Biden administration, especially the White House, can hold the line against false equivalence.
Hamas’s release this week of several of its some 200 hostages appears to be primarily another messaging exercise. Hopes raised, Hamas will negotiate for weeks as the wind ebbs behind Israel’s world-opinion sails.
U.N. Secretary-General Guterres gave a speech Tuesday condemning both Hamas and Israel and called for “an immediate humanitarian cease-fire.” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller rightly said a cease-fire “would give Hamas the ability to rest, to refit, and to get ready to continue launching terrorist attacks against Israel.” But a weather vane like Mr. Guterres shows which way the wind is blowing. It is up to President Biden to resist the inevitable conventional wisdom that both Hamas and Israel bear responsibility for any deaths that occur now. From there we move to the familiar modern policy goal known as “stop the killing.” When that moment arrives, Hamas wins.
Also let off the hook will be the American left—the Squad and the students and professors whose reflex in the face of the bloodletting was to defend or justify Hamas. That fell outside even the elastic norms of “balancing,” so they’ve since evolved into a more generic pose of concern for Gaza’s civilians. And a pose it is. Whether protesting for Palestinians or any other aggrieved group, the left sustains the conceit that their empathy carries greater moral authenticity than that of their opposition. One thing we learned from Israel’s killing fields is what a fraud that is.
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In a Small Town the first Black & Female Mayor Governs Pragmatically not on Identity
By Salena Zito
BRIDGEVILLE, Pa. — Betty Copeland was sitting home minding her own business in 2017 when three friends asked her to lunch. Her husband Curtis, who had been Bridgeville’s postmaster for years and was known as “Mr. Bridgeville,” had died the year before. “I just thought they were just being kind,” she explained.
They were being kind, but they had an ulterior motive: to get the 83-year-old well known for her service to the community to run for mayor. They sprung it on her at the end of the lunch.
“They said they thought I would be a goodwill ambassador for the town.” She thought they were crazy. “I told them there was no way people are going to vote for me against the then-mayor Pat DeBlasio.”
Ms. Copeland, a Democrat, prayed about it and decided to run. To her great surprise, that November she defeated Mr. DeBlasio, a Republican, by a little more than 30 votes.
It was a victory that made her a series of firsts for the 120-plus-year-old borough: the first woman, first octogenarian and the first Black person to win the mayor’s seat.
Ms. Copeland is deeply proud of those identities, but she stresses that they aren’t central to how she governs her small town. That includes overseeing the police department, working with state legislators to access money for roads and bridges and — as her friends suggested — being a goodwill ambassador.
Ms. Copeland said the mindset of people in small towns is very different from those in a larger city: “People recognize the importance of working together across party lines to get things done. Our budgets are small, so there is no time for bickering, and there is no time to waste pretending problems don’t exist and not attending to them.”
One of her biggest cheerleaders is Republican state Sen. Devlin Robinson, who moved to the town several years ago and works hard to make sure Ms. Copeland gets the monies she needs for the biggest problem Bridgeville faces: flooding.
When Ms. Copeland won “Pennsylvania Mayor of the Year” in 2021, it was Mr. Robinson who handed her the award.
Contrast that with the problems another first Black mayor, Pittsburgh’s Ed Gainey, faces — problems such as homelessness, empty storefronts, crime, social unrest and navigating his laser-focus on movement politics.
While there is a nostalgic urge with some people for big cities — or at least medium-sized ones like Pittsburgh — to return to a more pragmatic approach, Michael Genovese, director of the Institute for Leadership Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif., says governing a small town and a larger city these days is getting close to the proverbial apples and oranges.
“Local governments, like small-town mayors, deal with the everyday concerns of voters like trash pickup and potholes, all the while being very close to voters. They see them every few days. In a small town, it is hard to escape them,” he explained.
That proximity to voters changes the political as well as the physical calculation. In short, when you see a neighbor who’s struggling, it’s hard not to feel right along with them.
Big city mayors, on the other hand, are more remote and distant from the citizens. It is a function of scale. As you get higher up on the political food chain, issues become more divisive, and the stakes bring out our partisan biases to a larger extent.
Keystone College political science professor Jeff Brauer said elected officials of small and medium size towns are often the most effective at good governance: “Their jobs are simply less political and ideological; running small and medium sized towns involves such things as fixing roads, cleaning streets, snow removal, sanitation, parks and recreation.”
“These are not — and should not be — political or ideological,” he said. “A pothole is not Democrat or Republican, not liberal or conservative.”
Mr. Brauer added that — importantly — a small town mayor’s job tends to attract people who have less of an ego and who are more interested in practical public service: “in short, getting things done for their communities,” he said.
Which is exactly what Ms. Copeland was doing last Saturday when she was joined by members of her community, as well as the mayor of neighboring Heidelberg, in a tree planting initiative on a publicly owned lot on Baldwin Street, where flooding had taken its toll two years ago. Thanks to support from Davey Tree and the Pittsburgh Penguins, the once-barren lot now sports 15 trees and a park bench.
In 2021, Ms. Copeland secured a $1.2 million grant to buy up properties in flood-prone areas such as the one on Baldwin Street, many of which were evacuated in 2021 when Hurricane Ida pummeled the borough, prompting her to declare a Disaster Emergency.
Bridgeville has a real sense of identity despite its tiny size (one square mile), and it does a remarkable job of maintaining that, despite being squeezed on all sides by a fast-paced world. To its south, for example, Bridgeville is abutted by a sea of modern American conveniences: Starbucks, McDonalds, Aldis, Taco Bell, a Hampton Inn and a Holiday Inn Express.
For many, this borough is just a blur as they whiz by on I-79 heading north towards Pittsburgh or south towards West Virginia. Those people miss the Main Street filled with hardware stores, coffee shops, notaries, banks, restaurants, antique shops and a multitude of other small locally owned businesses like the kind so often idealized in Hallmark movies. It still exists here — and has for generations.
There are also church steeples, a gun shop, a seasonal ice cream stand, a throw-back orange and blue Gulf gas station, a rug store, tattoo parlor, signs for the upcoming Halloween parade and tidy, well-kept homes on charming tree-lined brick streets.
And in the center of it all, sitting on short line tracks that are still in use, is an old caboose, completely refurbished. Outside it is a sign reminding passersby that there will be a bake sale Saturday to benefit the Bridgeville Historical Society, which calls the caboose home, and inside sits the mayor, along with other historical society members, planning how best to both preserve the past and modernize the future of their beloved hometown.
She is not driven by politics, she said. “My focus is on governing and being that goodwill ambassador. I try every day to live up to that promise.”
Modernization isn’t just about potholes, flood plains and de-clustering the traffic that clogs up the pike with suburbanites trying to cut through town off I-79 to get home. It’s about encouraging enterprises like Public Art Bridgeville.
The organization, now in its second year, supports the installation of 10 outdoor sculptures by nationally recognized sculptors from around the country. That art is the talk of the walk-able community and visitors, with the favorite being a sculpture that depicts a man with his sleeves rolled up while his foot rests on a lawnmower.
Ms. Copeland says everyone wants to know if the lawnmower will soon be replaced with a snow shovel.
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