Friday, March 22, 2024

TASTE OF 10/7.DEATH TOLL COUNT. BLINKEN THE CLOWN? HOOVER WEEKLY.

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MOSCOW GET'S A TASTE OF 10//7.

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40 Killed in Moscow Attack
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Fake Death Toll in Gaza, Long COVID a Farce, State of Washington Abolishes Bar Exam

A study questions the existence of long-term COVID. According to a Penn Wharton data professor, the Gaza death toll is statistically impossible. The state of Washington has abolished the Bar exam. And a Tesla reportedly caught fire due to its lithium-ion battery

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THE DEAR FRIEND WHO SENT THIS NOTED BLINKEN CLOWNED HIMSELF.  I RESPONDED I BEGGED TO DISAGREE. CLOWNS ARE FUNNY.  THIS CLOWN IS PATHETIC.

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Blinken Completely Beclowns Himself in Israel, Netanyahu Tells Him to Jump in a Lake

By Bonchie 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up a trip to Israel on Friday, having failed to convince Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and the rest of the leadership there to essentially surrender to Hamas. 

Members of the Biden administration suffered embarrassment earlier in the morning after their "ceasefire" resolution went down in the flames at the UN. They are such amateurs that they can't even throw Israel under the bus without screwing it up. 

Blinken continued to try, though, meeting with Netanyahu and lecturing him on the finer points of combating Hamas. You know, because if anyone knows about defeating terrorists, it's the guy who helped lead the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and has more recently overseen the resurgence of the Islamic State. 

Here's a bit of what transpired behind closed doors.

Behind the scenes: Blinken told Netanyahu and the war cabinet that he came to Israel as a friend who spent the past five months defending Israel around the world.

But he warned that on the current trajectory, without a clear plan for the day after the war, Israel will be left with a major insurgency it can't handle.

"You need a coherent plan, or either you're going to be stuck in Gaza," Blinken said, according to the source. 

This is like a high-school drop-out telling a post-grad how to study. Blinken's record is one of abject failure. Everything he has touched has turned to rubble, and his only "achievement" has been to empower Iran as a major force in the Middle East. To mouth off to Israel about having a "coherent plan" is laughable. They have a coherent plan. It's called defeating Hamas in the physical battlespace that exists, which means going into Rafah.

What happens after that? That's not Israel's problem, is it? Hamas, which is supported by the vast majority of Palestinians, chose to attack on October 7th. They brought this on themselves, and Israel is not going to stop its mission simply because there's uncertainty on the horizon. Perhaps the "international community" I'm always hearing about can handle the relief work.

Besides, the idea that Hamas should be left in place lest there be a "major insurgency" is nonsensical. Was what was in Gaza before the war somehow safer? Less violent? Less prone to carry out murderous rampages? Sometimes there is no perfect answer to every concern, and victory is the only path to pursue. If there's an insurgency, then there's an insurgency. That's preferable to having an openly hostile terrorist government operating next door with impunity.

No matter, though. Blinken wants everyone to know that he believes Hamas should be defeated but that defeating Hamas isn't the right way to do it. Wait, what?

Perhaps if Israel squints really hard and stares at Hamas long enough, they'll just magically disappear. What is Blinken even trying to say? You can't kill terrorists without executing a military operation to kill terrorists. Not entering Rafah means allowing Hamas to survive and rebuild. There is no other path to taking them out, which is exactly why the secretary of state doesn't actually offer an alternative. He doesn't have one.

Regardless, Netanyahu wasn't buying Blinken's "expertise."

In the end, I think Blinken knows the Israelis aren't going to listen to his dollar store foreign policy demands. He's just playing for the cameras, trying to make Iran and the pro-Hamas contingent in the United States feel better. It's gross but predictable.

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NEW YORK BAR ASSOCIATION INVITES CUBAN COMMUNIST JURIST  TO SPEAK:

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NYC Bar Association Welcomes Stalinist Cuba’s 'Jurist' as Guest Speaker

BY Humberto Fontova

(The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.)

“Top Cuban Communist Party official with eternal allegiance to Fidel Castro to address NYC Bar Association,” headlined the New York Post this week.  Yamila Gonzalez Ferrer — the vice president of the National Union of Cuban Jurists and member of the Cuban National Assembly will discuss 'the newest developments in Cuba’s public health law'…Ferrer, 54, is enjoined by Cuba’s 'Code of Ethics of jurists' to 'be faithful to the ethical principles emanating from the history of the Cuban nation of the Communist Party of Cuba' and to be faithful to the teachings of Fidel and Raul Castro.”

Given former President Trump’s recent legal issues with so many New York City “jurists,” might this invitation reflect on the legal convictions and/or aspirations of many of its members?

After all, Cuba’s legal system was imported lock, stock and barrel from Stalin’s.  "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime," famously quipped Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria.

But there’s no need to go back so far in history. "I don't need proof to execute a man," snapped the Castro regime’s co-founder Che Guevara to a judicial underling in 1959. "I only need proof that it's necessary to execute him!"

If only the New York City Bar Association had visited Cuba in 1959 when every paper from The New York Times to the London Observer - when every pundit from Walter Lippmann to Ed Murrow, every author from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer, every TV host from Jack Paar to Ed Sullivan were touting the judicial outrages, mass larceny and firing-squad orgies instituted by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the most glorious events since VJ day. 

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," they’d have heard from the chief executioner, named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the pardon (The firing-squad wall)!" 

To be fair, Ed Sullivan later recanted. He saw through the murderous farce and was not above a public act of contrition. Indeed, two years later he featured several recently liberated Bay of Pigs freedom fighters - some hobbling on crutches, others missing limbs - on his show for a fundraiser where he declared them heroes and led the thunderous applause himself. I sure miss Ed Sullivan.

Che Guevara, co-founder of the very regime the New York City Bar Association just invited to address them with its judiciary wisdom, famously boasted that:  "we execute from revolutionary conviction!" Edwin Tetlow, Havana correspondent for London's Daily Telegraph, reported on a mass "trial" orchestrated by Che Guevara in early 1959 where Tetlow noticed the death sentences posted on a board before the trial had started.

Harvard Law School (no less!) merits special attention regarding the celebration of Castroite legal procedures, and from April 1959, well before “woke” and “affirmative action’’ policies kicked in. To wit: 

By April 1959, almost a thousand Cubans had been “judged” (see above) and murdered by Castro and Che’s firing squads. Cuba’s prisons were packed to suffocation with ten times the number of political prisoners as during “the Tyrant” Batista’s reign. Among Castro and Che Guevara’s prisoners were hundreds of women, a Stalinist horror utterly unknown in our hemisphere until it was introduced by the “leader” swooned over by Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and many other “feminists.” Furthermore, the death penalty was being applied retroactively (none had existed under the unspeakable Batista regime).

Habeas Corpus had also been abolished. Cuban defense lawyers attempting to defend the accused were being jailed themselves. That’s when Fidel Castro received a fawning invitation from Harvard Law School asking the honor of his addressing them. Seems that both the student body and faculty were smitten with the Cuban Revolution’s shining judicial record. Castro accepted on the spot, making Harvard the last gig on his 1959 US tour.

“Castro Visit Triumphant!” headlined Harvard’s Law School Forum for April 30, 1959. “The audience got what it wanted: the chance of seeing the Cuban hero in person!”

“Viva Fidel!” roared these fervent foes of capital punishment and double jeopardy upon first glimpsing their hero. Though the adoring crowd was too enormous to fit into any campus arena they remained chipper, “even if we didn’t see Castro at as close a range as might have been desired,” an attendee was quoted as saying. 

Interestingly, Fidel Castro had actually applied to Harvard Law School in 1948. This was brought to light by Harvard’s Arts and Sciences Dean, McGeorge Bundy, (later to serve as JFK’s national security advisor). “Caught up in the exuberance of the event,” continues the Harvard Law Forum, “Harvard Dean, McGeorge Bundy, declared that Harvard was ready to make amends for its mistake in 1948. ‘I’ve decided to admit him!’ declared Dean Bundy.”

“Viva Fidel!” The Dean’s quip brought the house down and shook the very roof. “Viva Fidel!” roared and cheered the cream of America’s law students (and their faculty).

Alas, given the law of averages, an independent thinker was bound to pop up—even among ten thousand Harvard students and faculty. One such wiseacre brought up the questionable legal procedures preceding those hundreds of executions in Cuba. 

“If the defendant has a right to appeal,” answered a smirking Castro, “then so do the people! And don’t forget, Cuba’s is the only people’s revolution in Latin America!” 

Well, this assembly of America’s most nimble verbal gladiators went absolutely wild over Castro’s brilliant riposte. They erupted again, roaring and whooping at the mass-murderer’s incontestable rejoinder. This creme de la creme of America’s most cunning ratiocinators found the Stalinist’s logic not only perfectly airtight but positively dazzling in its ingenuity and completely sound in its principle of justice!

A delirious pandemonium swept the hall as America’s most ingenious and best-tutored law students (along with their tutors) went absolutely berserk with veneration and joy at this point-blank elucidation of Castroite justice. 

Similar receptions had come at the National Press Club, Overseas Press Club, United Nations, and on Meet the Press. Not one heckler from among America’s brightest and cheekiest college kids. Not one rebuttal from America’s biggest assemblies of its top journalists. Not one snigger or frown from the top cut of America’s “adversarial” press. Not one raised eyebrow from the nation’s most hard-boiled “investigative reporters.” 

In sum, most Cuba watchers know that “Fake News” by the mainstream media and the eastern establishment is hardly a recent phenomenon.

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HOOVER WEEKLY HIGHLIGHTS:

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Beware of “Body Count” Foreign Policy
By Russell Berman via National Interest

In this essay, Russell Berman compares the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths recorded to date in Gaza with that of other major urban warfare operations of the last few decades. He argues that even using the most severe casualty figures available, the Israeli campaign against Hamas is causing fewer civilian deaths per militant killed than operations in Chechnya, the Syrian Civil War, or the US occupation of Iraq. He urges the Biden administration to stop measuring their responses to the war only through the lens of reported Gazan casualties.

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This “Election” Won’t Kickstart Any Change in Russia—but a Defeat for Putin in Ukraine Can
By Timothy Garton Ash via The Guardian

Timothy Garton Ash writes on the presidential show election completed in Russia this week, dwelling on the quiet acts of resistance by supporters of the late Alexei Navalny, and the fates of other pro-democracy campaigners now languishing in Russian prisons. He argues the only real way to knock Vladimir Putin from power now is to ensure Ukraine defeats Russia on the battlefield. He writes that the West must continue support for Ukraine, reach out to Russians opposed to Putin still in the country, and prepare for any eventuality, as Putin may escalate the war to stave off domestic instability.

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