ROLLAND GOLDEN LITHOGRAPH.
ROLLAND WAS A GREAT ARTIST, A DEAR FRIEND AND WILL EVENTUALLY RECEIVE INCREASING RECOGNITION FOR HIS DEDICATION AS A SERIOUS TALENTED ARTIST.
THERE IS A RETROSPECTIVE SHOW OF HIS WORKS OPENING IN NEW ORLEANS TODAY. (4/6)
HIS WIFE,STELLA, IS A DEAR FRIEND.
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Biden’s Pentagon Used Debunked McKinsey Studies To Justify DEI In The Military
'The Biden administration is using junk science to transform our military into a far-left social experiment,'
Rep. Jim Banks tells The Daily Wire.
By Spencer Lindquist
The Biden administration’s Department of Defense leaned on debunked McKinsey and Company studies touting the benefits of diversity as justification to embed the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda into the military.
The consulting giant’s debunked studies, with titles such as “Diversity Wins” and “Diversity Matters,” are referenced in multiple reports from the Navy, a Pentagon newsletter, and a document from the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, all of which advocate for the DEI agenda to be embedded deeper into the operations of the U.S. military.
McKinsey and Company published a number of studies claiming that the use of DEI policies led to increased profitability for corporations, stating that companies become more profitable as their executive levels become more diverse. But now the results have come under scrutiny, with a study from Econ Journal Watch finding that McKinsey’s studies were deeply flawed.
“Caution is warranted in relying on McKinsey’s findings to support the view that US publicly traded firms can deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives,” the study reads. It goes on to point out that the McKinsey study measured “firm financial performance over the four or five years leading up to the year in which they judge the race/ethnicity of firms’ executives,” a testing structure that the Econ Journal Watch says is unable to substantiate the claims of the McKinsey study.
The flawed findings from McKinsey were used to justify the DEI agenda, not just by corporations, but by the Biden administration’s Department of Defense. The DOD’s embrace of the far-left ideology came in the wake of Biden’s Executive Order 14035 in June of 2021, which directed the federal bureaucracy to embrace the DEI agenda.
The revelation comes as the Pentagon and other federal agencies work relentlessly to embed the DEI agenda into policies and practices, spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do so.
Various different entities within the DOD justified their DEI policies by appealing to the flawed McKinsey studies. One edition of the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service Newsletter explicitly referenced studies from McKinsey.
“[T]here is a business case for the Department’s prioritization of DEI as normal operations,” the newsletter reads. “McKinsey & Company reports diversity in executive teams makes them stronger and ‘the most diverse companies are now more likely than ever to outperform less diverse peers on profitability,’” it goes on to say, referencing a study called “Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters.”
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), who serves as the Chairman of the Anti-Woke Caucus and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, warned that Biden is leveraging faulty studies to further an explicitly political agenda.
“The Biden administration is using junk science to transform our military into a far-left social experiment and push conservatives away from service. DEI divides, shrinks, and weakens our military, all to the benefit of Communist China,” Banks told The Daily Wire.
At least two different documents published by the Navy also rely on the findings of the flawed McKinsey studies. The Navy’s “Health of the Force” report in 2021 reads “Gender-diverse organizations are 15% more likely to outperform other organizations, and diverse organizations are 35% more likely to outperform their non-diverse counterparts,” citing McKinsey’s 2015 study, “Diversity Matters.”
Then again in the Navy’s “Task Force One” report, the military branch asserted that “gender-diverse” organizations are likely to outperform “non-diverse counterparts,” again citing the same study from McKinsey.
There’s also a collection of news articles compiled by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, which exists to “advance an agile and inclusive force.” The Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute highlighted one article that touted the flawed McKinsey studies.
“They found companies in the top quartile of gender diversity and those in the top quartile of racial/ethnic diversity were more likely to generate financial returns above their national industry median,” the article says, also directly referring to a McKinsey study.
While the DOD has used the flawed studies to grant legitimacy to Biden’s DEI agenda, the Pentagon has aggressively pushed leftwing ideological material and policies on the federal bureaucracy and armed forces at great cost to the taxpayer. The DOD has spent as much as $270 million on the DEI agenda from fiscal years 2022 to 2024.
The ideological bias within the military was exemplified recently when the United States Air Force Academy hosted a transgender military official who led the effort for the military to recognize “transgender day of visibility” at a leadership symposium, where he told the cadets to push for transgender inclusion within the military.
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THE MASS MEDIA REFUSES TO SUPPORT BRILLIANCE YET, PURPOSELY LIED TO THIR LISTENERS AND READERSHIP BY SUPPORING SLEAZY HILLARY'S EFFORTS TO FALSELY LINK TRUMP TO PUTIN.
Woody Allen’s Cancellation Is a Crime Against Culture
The great director made his 50th film far from Hollywood, which has unjustly shunned him.
By Kyle Smith
In August 2017, a year after Prime Video aired Woody Allen’s comic miniseries “Crisis in Six Scenes,” the director signed a deal with Amazon Studios to produce his next four films for a reported minimum payment of $68 million. A few weeks later, allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein emerged and the #MeToo movement was born. In December, Mr. Allen’s adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times with the headline “Why Has the #MeToo Revolution Spared Woody Allen?”
Mr. Allen wasn’t spared much longer. Ms. Farrow’s op-ed accused Mr. Allen of molesting her in 1992, when she was 7—a charge that her mother, Mia Farrow, had raised at the time in a custody dispute with Mr. Allen. Authorities in two states thoroughly investigated, and no charges were filed against Mr. Allen. Child-abuse investigators at Yale-New Haven hospital reported that “it is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen.”
Yet a quarter-century later, Mr. Allen found himself an unperson. Though in the intervening decades he had worked with acclaimed actors at major movie studios, been nominated for Oscars and won one for writing “Midnight In Paris” (2011), he became a target of obloquy and outrage.
Several of Mr. Allen’s collaborators, including Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, Timothée Chalamet and Greta Gerwig, publicly turned against him. Others, such as Diane Keaton, Alec Baldwin and Scarlett Johansson, rallied to his defense. Amazon Studios canceled the deal with Mr. Allen, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court on terms that weren’t disclosed. Amazon Studios also declined to release to theaters the third film he had made for them, “A Rainy Day in New York” (2019).
In 2020 Mr. Allen’s son Ronan Farrow, whose reporting on Mr. Weinstein helped launch #MeToo, said he was severing ties with his publisher, Hachette Book Group, after it agreed to publish Mr. Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.” Dozens of employees staged a walkout to pressure the company into dropping the book, which it did. It was later picked up by the much smaller Skyhorse Publishing, which has become something of a refuge for the canceled.
Mr. Allen has maintained his innocence, and key witnesses such as his adopted son, Moses Farrow, who was in the house when the sexual assault was alleged to have happened, have cast doubt on the version of events told by Ms. Farrow and her mother, Mia. Yet today it seems no major American movie studio, distributor or publisher will accept Mr. Allen’s work. His 50th film, “Coup de Chance”—which, like “Rifkin’s Festival” (2020), was financed with European backers—was released on the Continent last year but is coming out in the U.S. only now, through an obscure distributor called MPI Media Group.
Mr. Allen, 88, exists in a weird space: forgotten but not gone. The New Yorker magazine, where he placed dozens of short stories over nearly 50 years, last published him in 2013. When Mr. Allen had a new story ready last winter, he published it not in his longtime literary home or another big-budget magazine but a small arts-and-culture monthly, the New Criterion (for which I also write). “Coup de Chance,” which has almost no publicity machine behind it and is playing in only a handful of theaters, happens to be the finest work he has done in more than a decade. Few will see or even hear of it. It exists—but barely.
Mr. Allen is unlike many others accused in the #MeToo era. His alleged transgression was taken seriously and investigated by police. There exists a compelling counter-narrative that exonerates him. Yet popular culture’s mandarins have turned against him like the townspeople who form a bizarre hostility brigade tormenting the character he played in his marvelous Kafkaesque parable, “Shadows and Fog” (1991). He is a pariah in a situation that to him makes no sense.
Why, for instance, did Amazon find “A Rainy Day in New York” so repellent that it refused to release it—only later to boost the film by placing it among its Prime Video offerings? Why, asked the essayist Freddie de Boer, does Hollywood ostracize Mr. Allen yet treat Mike Tyson as a beloved kitsch figure? Mr. Tyson is invited to goof around on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, even though the former boxer is a convicted rapist who has admitted to hitting his ex-wife Robin Givens so hard that “she flew backwards, hitting every room in the apartment. . . . That was the best punch I’ve ever thrown in my entire life.” Why do people lump Mr. Allen together with Mr. Weinstein, whom a jury convicted of sexual crimes, and Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to one?
Mr. Allen may shrug and say he’ll keep doing what he does even if every company shuns him. But the cultural forces that condemned him ought to put down their pitchforks and torches. This great artist shouldn’t end his career in shadows and fog.
Mr. Smith is the Journal’s film critic.
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A Disinformation October Surprise Is Coming
Will the press be ready if, for the third election in a row, our national-security state meddles?
Will the press be ready if, for the third election in a row, our national-security state meddles?
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Two of the most interesting things ever to happen in American politics happened in the past few years. A Democratic presidential campaign, representing the incumbent party, fabricated evidence that its Republican opponent and the eventual president-elect was a Russian agent, and the in-power party’s FBI legitimated the evidence in the eyes of the media so it would be widely reported and believed by the public.
To make sure it was believed, top intelligence officials of the outgoing administration went on cable television to call the new president a Russian mole and Vladimir Putin his case officer.
When the formerly incumbent party’s candidate was seeking to reclaim the White House four years later, the same former officials concocted a new lie to cover up embarrassing information about the candidate’s family. These highly connected former officials had five days to check things out before claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop had “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The New York Post included a receipt showing the FBI had already been in possession of the data for 10 months. Its story documented how the Post acquired the same data. Specific, dated and verifiable events and messages weren’t denied by the Biden's, etc.
Obama intelligence officials James Clapper and John Brennan, and their 49 colleagues, lie today when they say they weren’t lying then.
These realties have been acknowledged on these pages, in a few other papers around the country, on Fox News and at some partisan websites. They might as well never have happened as far as most of the press is concerned.
New York Times resident chin-stroker Thomas Edsall, in the Trump era, has devoted 380 articles, many of them 3,000 words or longer, to raking over voter surveys and long quotes from political scientists psychoanalyzing the U.S. electorate. Not one examined the effect of these glaring events on voters or even acknowledged that they happened.
Democratic and anti-Trump Republican political spinmeisters, from David Axelrod to Mike Murphy to Bill Kristol, spend a hours a week on TV and in podcasts holding forth on politics, talking endlessly about Donald Trump, yet leave the collusion episodes unanalyzed as if they never occurred.
After years, the press finally acknowledges that pollsters find Trump voters every bit as concerned about democracy as Biden voters. “The two men are essentially tied on the issue of protecting democracy, with 43% of voters preferring Biden and 41% picking Trump,” says NBC. Unasked is why.
You might assume a utilitarian motive—Mr. Trump would benefit politically if the truth were acknowledged. Unless correlation has no relation to causation, unless participants in a thousand focus groups are lying, the opposite is true. The dishonesty of his opponents remains Mr. Trump’s great legitimizer, helping him past Jan. 6 and on the road to the White House again.
The real motive for the press silence is fear and shame over acts that are close to treasonous.
Mr. Trump’s many demerits don’t need to be enumerated here, but, after nine years, the tone of cable coverage has become more like primate gibbering than reasoned commentary. If it stops, even for a moment, other truths might come up for air. Plainly false campaign memes—he called neo-Nazis fine people, he advised drinking bleach—usually have their season and disappear. The anti-Trump tropes never get a day off, constantly dunning viewers with Mr. Trump’s unique iniquity as if to rationalize his enemies’ behavior.
If the simple truth were admitted, Hillary Clinton would be a pariah. Adam Schiff would never appear on another ballot again. I’m not forgetting the complicity of the press, whose normal role is to take an interest in matters that are, you know, interesting. If it’s true that cowards die a thousand deaths, our media will bankrupt the fisc with all the end-of-life care it’s going to consume.
Mr. Trump turns out to be less of a danger to our institutions than they are to themselves. Worry about a future leader with President Obama’s gifts not Donald Trump’s—while remembering that the collusion hoaxes were promoted by official U.S. agencies in exactly the manner of Mr. Putin’s Russia.
All this is possibly going to matter a great deal this fall. Mr. Trump will tell his lies and tall tales and make his fabulous claims and the media will have to deal with it.
There’s also a significant likelihood that 2024 will see lies manufactured by agents and veterans of the national-security state, as in 2016 and 2020. Then the press will get a third opportunity. Those reporters and editors who are still capable of participating in the media business in good faith need to start thinking now about how they will deal with this if it happens again.
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ALL WARS ARE ACCOMPANIED BY TRAGIC MISTAKES. ISRAEL'S IDF AND IAF ARE NO EXCEPTION. THAT SAID, THESE TWO ISRAELI MILITARY SEGMENTS ARE ACKNOWLEDGED AS AMONG THE MOST MORAL AND CAREFUL. DESPITE THIS "FACT" SLEAZY BIDEN CONTINUES WITH HIS CHEAP SHOTS TO WIN VOTES.
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Israel Takes Responsibility. Who Else Does?
All war is hell. Not all who wage it admit their mistakes.
By Matthew Hennessey
The breaking-news alerts on your smartphone seldom tell the whole story. Journalists are masters of compression, and the alert is a direct line to readers’ eyeballs. No room for elegance. No space for slant. So instead of complexity you get the short version—the convenient take or the capsule commentary.
Usually that’s enough to get the gist in a busy world. But every once in a while you get more than you bargained for in a bubble notice. You get facts that go beyond the news and reveal a deeper truth.
“Breaking News,” bleated my iPhone Tuesday morning with an alert from the Journal. “Israel has taken responsibility for a strike that has killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu said it was unintentional.”
War is hell. Everyone knows that. Bullets don’t discriminate. No bomb is smarter than the person who dispatches it. When the skies are full of lead, accidents are bound to happen, and when they do, political spinmeisters step forward to deny, deflect, delay and distract.
Not here. Israel has taken responsibility. What a concept.
And what a contrast with its adversary. The only thing Hamas takes responsibility for is doing what it loves: spreading terror and delivering death. When a bomb goes off in a marketplace, it claims responsibility. When a crazed maniac knifes random people on a bus, it claims responsibility. But when the subject is its failure to give Gazans a better life, Hamas throws up its arms. It didn’t take responsibility for the lies it told about the misfired terrorist rocket that hit Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital in October, or for that matter for using the hospital as a command center. It doesn’t take responsibility for the human calamity it has unleashed on its people with the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7.
No. Hamas, in its rhetoric and propaganda, pushes all responsibility for the suffering of Gazans onto Israel—and not just Israel, onto Jews and Americans. Hamas is always innocent, always at the mercy of perfidious forces.
This performative helplessness allows Hamas to play the perpetual victim when, in fact, it is a murderous gang of dead-end losers. It intentionally killed 1,200 people in a single day. Hamas lusts for blood.
Not so Israel, a nation that stands for life, for hope, for freedom. Israel desires peace and has offered it to the Palestinians repeatedly, who always refuse. The offer stands.
Israel is engaged now, as always, in a fight for survival. Often lied about, Israel nevertheless respects the rules of war. It fights with precision and restrains its soldiers to protect the innocent. It provides food and aid to its enemy. It owns up to its mistakes.
The author of the news alert might not have intended to convey all that. Writing, like war making, is a business rife with unintended consequences. The ripples often outpace the pebble.
Yet here we are: “Israel takes responsibility.” You’ll never hear the same said of Hamas.
Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.
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Israel Says Troops Lacked Grounds for Strike That Killed Aid Workers in Gaza
Seven workers were killed after an item, possibly a bag, was mistakenly thought to be a gun, according to investigators
By Dov Lieber, Rory Jones and Margherita Stancati
TEL AVIV—The Israeli drone team that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen after mistaking them for Hamas militants lacked the evidence to order the strikes and twice violated the military’s operating rules, an Israeli military investigation found.
The team earlier this week struck each of the aid group’s three vehicles in succession after spotting something slung over the shoulder of one passenger, possibly a bag, which it assumed to be a weapon, the military said. That wasn’t enough to justify the strike on that passenger’s vehicle or the other two vehicles in the convoy, the military said in a briefing on its findings that included snippets of drone video of events leading up to the attack.
The Israeli military said it dismissed two officers and reprimanded three.
The military doesn’t publicize its rules of engagement, which officials say shift depending on the situation, making it difficult to determine what standard was in place when Monday’s strike occurred. The military also didn’t share video showing the item slung over the shoulder or any audio from the events.
The drone team that killed World Central Kitchen workers violated the military’s operating rules, an Israeli investigation found. Photo: Omar Ashtawy/Zuma Press
The fatal strikes followed a series of mistaken assumptions that could have been prevented had the military properly passed along the details of the humanitarian convoy to the commanders who ordered the strikes. World Central Kitchen had shared those details with the proper military authorities, but they were lost somewhere in the chain of communication, the investigation found.
The killings—the latest of nearly 200 aid workers who have lost their lives during the six-month-old war—sparked a global outcry. President Biden spoke Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said future U.S. support would depend upon progress in protecting civilians and aid workers.
World Central Kitchen said the investigation’s results indicate the need for systemic change in the Israeli military to prevent more failures and unjustified deaths. “Their apologies for the outrageous killing of our colleagues represent cold comfort,” Chief Executive Erin Gore said.
The organization, which has been one of the most important providers of food assistance in Gaza, renewed its demand for a credible investigation independent of the Israeli military. It said Israel must take concrete steps to insure the safety of aid workers. Its operations remain suspended.
According to the military briefing, the Israeli drone operators had followed a convoy of trucks carrying aid that was unloaded by 10 p.m. Monday from a seaside jetty. Around 10:30 p.m., they observed a gunman on one of the trucks, according to the briefing. The Israeli military showed drone footage of what looked like the gunman firing briefly, in what the drone operators interpreted to be behavior typical of militants.
After arriving with the trucks at a warehouse in the central city of Deir al-Balah, four cars split off. One went north to another warehouse, while the three carrying the World Central Kitchen workers went south tracked by two drones.
At this time, according to the investigators, the commanders were under the assumption that the cars weren’t part of the humanitarian convoy but were carrying militants.
At 11:09 p.m., the drone team struck the car it mistakenly believed to be carrying a gunman. Passengers fled to a second car, which was also hit. Then passengers fled to the third car, which was hit, in strikes that played out over about four minutes, according to material shared by the military.
While the targeted vehicles had large stickers on their roofs that marked them as belonging to World Central Kitchen, those signs weren’t visible to the drone operators at night, the probe found.
Maj. Gen. Benny Gal, who took part in the investigation, said militants over the past month had commandeered aid convoys by joining them in vehicles that looked similar to those the aid workers used. This convinced commanders they were witnessing a similar phenomenon, he said.
World Central Kitchen had fully coordinated its mission with the Israeli military, communicating that cars would be accompanying a convoy of trucks that night, the investigation found. But the details of the convoy weren’t known to the brigade commanders tracking the humanitarian mission, the investigation found. It isn’t clear where the line of communication broke down, the investigators said.
Following Biden’s Thursday call with Netanyahu, Israel said it would allow more aid to enter Gaza and would reopen the Erez border crossing, which has been closed since the Oct. 7 attacks, as a new route for aid to reach northern Gaza. It said it also would allow the use of Ashdod port in southern Israel for aid delivery.
Israeli officials later said the aid would transit into northern Gaza along a track near the Erez crossing, which was damaged during Hamas’s Oct. 7 assaults, which Israel says killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Israel’s subsequent air-and-ground invasion has caused more than 33,000 deaths in Gaza, according to figures from Palestinian health authorities that don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The opening of the crossing near Erez could help improve the situation in northern Gaza, where aid groups say the worst of the humanitarian crisis is unfolding and some 300,000 people still live. More than a million people across the strip are experiencing starvation, and very limited supplies of food and other aid have reached the north since the start of the war.
The Israeli military tightly controls access from the south to the north and in recent months has denied most aid missions there on security grounds. Humanitarian organizations have often paused their food deliveries there for long stretches owing to the intense fighting and widespread lawlessness.
It couldn’t be determined when the crossing near Erez will reopen.
Israel will also increase the number of aid trucks entering Gaza from the southern Kerem Shalom crossing and open the border facility there for an extra three hours a day to help process the trucks, according to Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner. One hundred Jordanian trucks will be allowed to pass through Israel and enter Kerem Shalom, an Israeli official said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the U.S. welcomed Israel’s move to increase aid to the strip and that it was awaiting further steps from Netanyahu that would ensure the safety of humanitarian workers.
“We’re going to be looking very carefully at what those steps are, how it achieves better deconfliction, better coordination, so that aid workers are protected,” Blinken said, adding that Israel also needs to give priority to the protection of civilians in Gaza. “It has to make that job No. 1.”
Netanyahu’s decision to allow more aid into Gaza illustrates Israel’s deepening diplomatic isolation over its killing of the aid workers and failure to protect civilians. Still, the decision is likely to be politically sensitive for the prime minister, whose ultranationalist, right-wing coalition partners have called on the government to use aid as a tool to stifle Gaza and Hamas. These partners have conditioned their support for Netanyahu’s fragile coalition on Israel acting aggressively to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities.
In the phone call Thursday, Biden demanded an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and urged Netanyahu to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal to bring Israeli hostages home, according to a White House statement.
On Friday, Biden wrote to the leaders of Egypt and Qatar urging them “to secure commitments from Hamas to agree to, and abide by, a deal,’’ a senior administration official said.
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The drone team that killed World Central Kitchen workers violated the military’s operating rules, an Israeli investigation found. The military said it dismissed two officers and reprimanded three.
William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is due to travel to Cairo this weekend for talks on a Gaza cease-fire and the release of hostages, a person familiar with the matter said. Burns is expected to meet with officials from Israel, Egypt and Qatar, which maintains ties with Hamas.
The head of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, and the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, are planning to go to Cairo, but the timing of the visit isn’t clear, an Israeli official said.
Israel’s security forces remained on high alert for attacks against its civilians after airstrikes this week on a diplomatic building in Syria killed top Iranian military commanders, increasing regional tensions and threatening to expand the war beyond Gaza.
Mohammad Jamshidi, a senior official in charge of political affairs at Iran’s presidential office, said Friday that Tehran had warned the U.S. not to get involved in its standoff with Israel. A spokesperson for the State Department confirmed it had received the message from Iran but said it had told Tehran not to use the tensions “as a pretext to attack U.S. personnel and facilities.”
Anat Peled, Stephen Kalin, Alan Cullison, Michael R. Gordon and Benoit Faucon contributed to this article.
Write to Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com, Rory Jones at Rory.Jones@wsj.com and Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.coM
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Behind the Deadly Mistakes of Israel’s Military in Gaza
A missile strike on a convoy of aid workers reveals the shortcomings of safety measures Israeli forces have in place to protect civilians
By Jared Malsin, Stephen Kalin and Margherita Stancati
A convoy of three vehicles ferried workers with aid group World Central Kitchen along the Gaza Strip’s coastal road on Monday night.
In the darkness above, an Israeli military drone scanned for enemy forces. The aircraft’s operators identified the convoy as a hostile target and opened fire. Missiles slammed into the vehicles, one after the other, killing seven people heading back from bringing food to the hungry.
The deaths have crystallized a broad international backlash against Israel’s war in Gaza. President Biden called for an immediate cease-fire during a phone conversation Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden suggested that further U.S. support would depend on Israel taking steps to protect aid workers and civilians.
“This is not a stand-alone incident,” Biden said Wednesday about the deadly strike. “Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians.”
The Israeli military on Friday said its investigation into the incident found that troops lacked the evidence to order the strikes and twice violated its operating rules. It said it had dismissed two officers and reprimanded three.
For six months, Israeli forces, responding to the Oct. 7 attack that killed more than 1,200 men, women and children, have waged a broad campaign to destroy the Islamist militant group Hamas. More than 20,000 people who shouldn’t have been targets are believed to have been killed by the army—the majority of them Palestinian civilians, but also captive Israeli hostages, relief workers and journalists, according to Palestinian health officials, the U.N. and organizations tracking the war. Israel said it doesn’t target civilians.
Since the start of the war, nearly 200 aid workers have been killed, including 175 U.N. staff in Gaza, making it the U.N.’s deadliest, according to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
Aid groups making efforts to alert the military about their plans and movements have been hobbled by miscommunication between Israel’s civilian and military branches. The World Central Kitchen convoy coordinated its trip ahead of time with the Israeli military. It passed through Israeli checkpoints, traveled a road used for aid deliveries and yet was struck anyway.
The scale of civilian deaths since Oct. 7 stems, in part, from the way Israel is going about the war, which is waged in a densely populated urban area where combatants mix with civilians. Israeli troops have wide latitude to carry out orders to destroy the enemy, and many are exhausted after nearly six months of urban fighting.
“When you get nonspecific tasks from the national authority—destroy, annihilate Hamas, wipe them out—at some point, those kinds of things actually have to be translated into tasks on the ground for soldiers and units to actually orchestrate,” said Gen. Joseph Votel, a former chief of the U.S. Central Command during the U.S.-led war on Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The Israeli military often grants wide authority for commanders on the ground to call for airstrikes during wartime, said people familiar with the operations of Israeli forces. The rules are more like a broad set of procedures that depend on the situation, current and former Israeli military legal advisers said. They described two types of airstrikes.
The first are planned strikes on known targets. The second type of strikes are based on real-time information. They are usually carried out by drones against suspected combatants identified by soldiers on the ground. A commanding officer, located in a room with drone operators at an air force base, works with commanders at division, brigade or company level who can order strikes.
Both types of strike can require higher approval, depending on location and the potential for collateral damage, according to an Israeli military legal adviser.
A drone-operations room seen by The Wall Street Journal last year, under the command of a 27-year-old major, had three worn chairs in front of three video monitors showing the grainy black-and-white images from drones: One soldier pilots the aircraft while another manages its cameras. A red button fires the missile. The soldiers work in four-hour shifts.
Israeli soldiers don’t always see a clear distinction between civilians and militants. Reservists said in interviews that Hamas militants dress in civilian clothes and roam about unarmed, picking up weapons hidden in residential areas when they engage Israeli troops. Israel has said Hamas operates from hospitals and hides among civilians. Hamas denies using civilians as human shields and says Israel is responsible for killing civilians.
In Gaza, an urban area with a prewar population of 2.2 million people, the need for humanitarian organizations to coordinate with the Israeli forces is crucial.
The United Nations and other aid groups share the coordinates of their guesthouses, warehouses and other premises with the Israeli military, which adds them to a list of what should be protected sites that are shared with pilots and ground troops. Aid groups also share their movements with Israeli forces ahead of time. In particularly dangerous areas, such as northern Gaza, the Israeli military mostly denies aid missions on security grounds.
American Near East Refugee Aid paused its operations in Gaza after the strike on the World Central Kitchen convoy, said Sean Carroll, president of Anera. Its staff for the first time in the war no longer felt comfortable with the risks, he said. The U.S. relief organization has operated in the occupied Palestinian territories for more than five decades.
Carroll said he doesn’t know what safety measures to seek from the Israeli military. Giving advance notice of plans and movements, known as deconfliction, is already standard procedure. World Central Kitchen has employed security consultants and even some armored cars, he said: “That’s not going to help, so what is? The only thing you can think of is deconfliction, but that’s what we’ve done. So I don’t know what it is.”
Communication between humanitarian groups and the Israeli military passes through the military’s civil administration agency, called Cogat, before heading to Israeli forces on the ground. A senior U.N. humanitarian official said she saw problems with the process during the months she participated after Oct. 7. “We would have an agreement with Cogat, but it wasn’t necessarily conveyed by IDF to their soldiers at the checkpoint,” the official said.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday that the Israeli military planned to set up direct coordination with international aid organizations. The war has taken an unprecedented toll on U.N. and other aid workers.
The majority of the dead were Palestinian employees of UNWRA,, which is leading the humanitarian response on behalf of other U.N. agencies and aid groups. UNWRA workers supply food to an estimated 1.1 million people, as well as staff medical centers and run shelters for displaced Gazans. UNWRA said around 160 of its facilities have been damaged in the fighting.
In February, an UNWRA convoy carrying food was hit by the Israeli navy along a coastal road while it waited for permission from Israeli forces to cross into northern Gaza. The Israeli military said the convoy was struck by mistake. Unrwa suspended aid deliveries to the north.
The war has been the most lethal war for journalists: 95 killed since Oct. 7, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which began collecting data in 1992.
Israeli fire also has killed some of the more than 200 Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, as well at least 20 of its own soldiers in friendly fire, among the more than 250 soldiers killed since Oct. 7.
In total, the war has claimed the lives of more than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza, some 72% of them women and children, according to the territory’s health officials. The military campaign has obliterated schools, hospitals and cultural centers. Airstrikes have hit residential high-rise buildings and crowded refugee camps. The scale and speed of the killing of civilians in Gaza has surpassed other conflicts in recent history, according to many humanitarian groups.
A key principle of international law is that the level of civilian casualties resulting from any military strike should be proportional to the military value of the target.
Israel has chosen to take “a capacious definition of what constitutes necessity for military actions,” said Craig Jones, the author of a book on Israeli and U.S. military legal strategy and a lecturer in political geography at the U.K.’s Newcastle University.
The urban landscape of Gaza makes precision difficult. Hamas is a guerrilla force fighting in and among civilians, in an area about the size of Philadelphia. People are trapped in the coastal enclave by Israel on one side and Egypt on the other. Israeli population centers are in close range, increasing the urgency for intercepting threats.
“The whole purpose of targeting is to kill the ones that we are after, that is the Hamas terrorists, and to avoid unintended casualties among civilians, which is very hard to do in such a condensed place like Gaza,” said Maj. Gen. Tamir Heyman, a former head of intelligence for the Israeli military.
The lack of clarity about Israel’s rules of engagement or explanations for strikes on noncombatants has led many civilians in Gaza to feel deliberately targeted. One journalist said her family, fearful of harm to her children, asked her to stay somewhere else.
Among the civilians killed in Gaza was 6-year-old Hind Rajab. On Jan. 29, she was caught in heavy fighting in Gaza City. The relatives she was with were killed, and the girl was able to reach emergency responders.
“I am so scared, please come. Please call someone to come and take me,” Hind told a phone operator of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, according to a recording of the call. The medical aid group dispatched an ambulance. It never returned. Hind’s body was found 12 days later near the charred remains of the ambulance.
“There was coordination for safe access with the Israeli military. We were given a map and a route to follow,” said Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the PRCS. “In the end it didn’t matter. Hind was killed, along with our two colleagues.”
U.S. officials urged Israeli authorities to investigate what happened to Hind. The Israeli military at the time told Israeli media that a preliminary investigation suggested its troops weren’t in the area. An Israeli military spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“We have to use this moment to say, ‘OK, not just World Central Kitchen,’” said Carroll, president of the aid organization Anera. “We want all of the incidents investigated.”
Dov Lieber, Omar Abdel-Baqui, Chao Deng, Anat Peled, Nancy A. Youssef and Fatima Abdul Karim contributed to this article.
Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com, Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com and Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com
AND:
Hamas’s Casualty Numbers Games
Journalists and Joe Biden lend credence to bogus counts from the Gaza Health Ministry.
By David Adesnik
As Israeli troops batter Hamas and drive its surviving forces to the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, the Gaza Health Ministry has etched in the public mind a statistic that casts Israel’s war of self-defense as a bloodbath: 70% of the dead in Gaza are women and children, the Hamas-run ministry says, and more than 30,000 lives in total have been lost. Is it true?
President Biden, who pledged in October that Israel would never stand alone, has recently talked about “red lines” to prevent the Jewish state from eliminating Hamas’s final stronghold—because, as Mr. Biden put it, “they cannot have another 30,000 Palestinians dead.”
Mr. Biden isn’t alone in taking Hamas’s numbers at face value. The United Nations also relies on the Health Ministry’s data. The U.S. news media include the ministry’s latest numbers in its daily updates on the war. In October the Washington Post’s Adam Taylor vouched for Hamas, writing: “Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements.”
Yet in a series of lengthy reports, the ministry admits that the figures the media treat as authoritative rely in part on reporting from . . . the media. The ministry says its casualty counts include two types of fatalities: those recorded by medical facilities and those reported by “reliable media sources.” In its March 31 report, the ministry attributes 15,070 of the dead, or 45.9%, to news reports. From which outlets? The ministry never says.
Its choices are limited, since Gaza has no independent media. It has networks like al-Aqsa that are extensions of Hamas and other armed factions. It has Al Jazeera, the Qatari state network that describes the atrocities of Oct. 7 as an “incursion” and denies that any “widespread and systematic” sexual assault took place. Western outlets report from Gaza, but they rely on the ministry for their casualty data.
Initially, the ministry’s data earned the confidence of foreign journalists because Gaza health officials had direct access to information from local medical facilities. Yet the ministry’s reports concede there has been an “interruption of communication” with many hospitals in the strip—meaning those from which Hamas withdrew amid the Israeli offensive. At present the ministry receives fresh data from only two facilities, both in southern Gaza.
While acknowledging the issues with its data, the ministry hasn’t made much effort to educate those who rely on its numbers. It distributes its statistical reports via Telegram, a social-media app, and only in Arabic. The ministry’s daily updates don’t disclose underlying issues with the data.
All the same, an enterprising correspondent with a willingness to question the dominant narrative could easily have found and translated the reports. Gabriel Epstein, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, did this soon after the ministry published its first statistical report in December. He found that the deaths attributed to “reliable media sources” consisted almost entirely of women and children. Of the 6,629 fatalities attributed to media, 1,941 were women, 4,678 children and only 10 men.
Over time, media reports have accounted for an ever larger share of the ministry’s data. Of nearly 11,000 fatalities reported between Jan. 1 and March 31, the ministry derived 77.7% from media reports. Adult males account for only 9% of fatalities attributed to the news, even though Gaza’s sex ratio is close to even and more than half its residents are adults.
If one removes the questionable data from the ministry’s numbers, it becomes clearer that Israel has made considerable efforts to minimize the war’s effect on civilians, while Hamas continues to use hospitals as fortresses. Instead of drawing so-called red lines for a U.S. ally, as if it were a threat to American values and interests, Mr. Biden should encourage Israel to dispatch Hamas swiftly, since the terror group has brought nothing but misery to Gazans and Israelis alike.
Mr. Adesnik is director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
FINALLY:
Biden Exploits a Tragic Israeli Mistake
He forgets the mistaken U.S. missile strike that killed 10 innocents in Kabul in 2021.
By The Editorial Board
Israel did the right thing this week by immediately investigating, taking responsibility and apologizing for its missile strike on Monday that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in Gaza.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Israel’s top military officer said. “It was a mistake that followed a misidentification.” Israel’s Prime Minister, President and Defense Minister have also apologized and announced steps to try to prevent it from happening again
We say “try” because many people who know better, including President Biden, seem to have forgotten that errors are a tragic and inevitable part of war. The President pandered to the anti-Israel faction in his party on Tuesday by harshly condemning Israel, lecturing it and then blaming it (not Hamas) for the larger humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
That apparently wasn’t enough. Egged on by the emerging anti-Israel liberal media consensus, Mr. Biden called on Thursday for an “immediate cease-fire” and urged Israel to make new concessions in hostage negotiations. The President then threatened, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, that “if we don’t see the changes we need to see” from Israel, “there will be a change in our policy.”
This is Biden Administration opportunism, using the World Central Kitchen tragedy to push Israel to cut short the war and let Hamas survive. It’s also the worst thing the President could do to free the hostages.
The message Hamas will take away is clear: Keep rejecting hostage deals, do whatever you can to worsen the humanitarian catastrophe, and watch Mr. Biden blame and pressure Israel to compromise on its war aims. After Oct. 7, the U.S. demanded that Hamas release the hostages “unconditionally.” It is now closer to demanding that Israel unconditionally stop fighting.
Mr. Biden also seems to have forgotten his own mistaken missile strike. When the President’s Irish goodbye from Afghanistan was spoiled by a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops, he ordered retaliation against ISIS-K. On Aug. 29, 2021, a U.S. Hellfire missile struck a car at a family home in Kabul in what Gen. Mark Milley called a “righteous strike.”
It turned out the strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children. But the Biden Administration wasn’t quick to apologize. “Almost everything senior defense officials asserted in the hours, days and weeks after it turned out to be false,” the New York Times reported.
The explosives supposedly in the targeted car’s trunk were probably water bottles. The driver, an aid worker, had no ISIS ties. It took weeks for the Pentagon to own up to what it called a “tragic mistake.”
The fog of war is real, and for Mr. Biden this and other U.S. strikes were mistakes. But he now holds Israel to a different standard.
The President’s statements on the Israeli strike have moved from “outrage” to recrimination: “This is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult—because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers.” Left out is a critical word about Hamas, which started this war, steals aid, and murders Palestinians who facilitate aid.
Rather than hold Hamas accountable and demand at every opportunity that it release the hostages, including five Americans, Mr. Biden places the full burden on Israel. He puts Israel on trial each day from Washington lecterns, undermining support for its war effort.
Mr. Biden has mostly resisted pressure from his left to cut off Israel and deny it the weapons it needs to defeat Hamas. But in the wake of this tragic Israeli mistake, and while Israel goes on high alert for an Iranian attack, he threatens to reverse even that support.
If he does so, he will send the wrong message to our friends and especially our enemies in the Middle East. He may also pay a bigger political price at home than he realizes.
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