Emily's Survey! Back To The Norm? J Street and The New York Times - Blinded by Bias!

Hillaryious!












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My beautiful Louisville Granddaughter, Emily,  is working on a college survey project and I, and of course Emily, would be grateful if you took it and returned it to her. This is what she e mailed me:
". I am still working on collecting a large, diverse sample for my statistics project. I was wondering if you would be willing to send out a link to my survey to those to whom you send out your newsletter/weekly update.. You could include background information such as: 

The survey deals with health in America and the results will be used in a research paper for my statistics class at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, Participants have reported that the survey takes two to three minutes to complete. All answers will be kept confidential. "

Thanks for any consideration: Emily and Me.

Here is the link:  http://www.sogosurvey.com/k/SsRSQUTsRsPsPsP 
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Will J Street be crushed along with Hamas' bunkers?

There is a good chance J Street has sealed their own demise because of their out sized bias but those who support J Street will, no doubt,  still read The New York Times and be comforted by their bias.

Go figure? (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Yesterday, I Invited four dear friends and occasional fellow memo readers to lunch.

My guests were  a Methodist Minister, a Rabbi, a liberal Christian  friend a Jewish conservative friend and yours truly.

We discussed religion, its impact and  relevance, the connection between the various major religions, the role of women in religion and , surprise, we avoided politics.

We agreed our next lunch would include an invitation to a local Imam if he would come.

I am agnostic but do believe there is a higher force, call it nature, and the unknown can serve as a spiritual purpose. However, being cynical, I also believe humans are a long way from achieving the ability to live in peace and though civilization has progressed it has never failed to eventually implement the scientific expansion of its technical ability to destroy itself.

Are we nearing the cross over line now that nuclear weapons are most likely to fall into the hands of radical terrorists?

I further believe there is nothing sacrosanct about our world surviving. There could be other undiscovered worlds and cultures superior to ours which are more likely to survive.

Thus, I find the article below interesting.  (See 2 below.)
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FLY EAL!

Malaysian airliner Flight MH17 could have had this on-board equipment made in Israel and which is  fitted on all El AL passenger aircraft.                                                                                                  

The El Bit is based in Haifa. 

No trick photography, it's as real as you see it.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/uVlERTFVSpo?rel=0

Pilot competence is also an important factor.
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Two Gazas! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)

Death knell for J Street

By ALAN DERSHOWITZ

Any pretense that J Street is a pro-Israel organization has been destroyed by that organization’s refusal to participate in a solidarity rally for Israel during the recent crisis in Gaza. 

The Boston Jewish Federation worked hard to create a rally that included all elements of its diverse community. Its goal was to send a single and simple message: at a time when so many in the world are united against Israel’s efforts at defending itself from Hamas rockets and terrorist tunnels, the Boston Jewish community stands in solidarity with the nation state of the Jewish people. In order to assure that this message of unity was sent, no signs were permitted except for the unity message that was intended to be sent. That message was: Stand With Israel. Simple and straight forward.

Speakers were limited to those who were part of the broad Jewish consensus including Rabbis, political and business leaders and the highly regarded head of the Federation, Barry Shrage, whose commitment to peace and the two state solution is well known.

Initially J Street agreed to be a co-sponsor of this unity event, but then—presumably after receiving pressure from its hard left constituency, which is always looking to bash Israel and never to support it—J Street was forced to withdraw its sponsorship. The phony excuse it offered was that the rally offered “no voice for [J Street] concerns about the loss of human life on both sides” and no recognition of the “complexity” of the issues or the need for a “political solution.”

This is total nonsense and an insult to those who spoke at the rally. The executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council spoke of the “suffering” of the people of Gaza and how “painful” it is “to see innocent people dying, including children.” 

Barry Shrage spoke of the “tragedy” of innocent Palestinians being killed. All the speakers acknowledged the “complexity” of the issues and want to see a political solution to the conflict. Yet J Street refused to be part of this unified show of support for Israel.

J Street has whined about being excluded from the mainstream Jewish community, but it is J Street that has excluded itself from joining in community activities such as this rally. It was J Street that decided not to participate in a unity event that was jointly sponsored by the Jewish Federation and the Jewish Community Relations Council. 

J Street has sought and received membership in these sponsoring organizations but then made a decision to withdraw its own sponsorship from this community-wide event, precisely at a time when unity was most needed. J Street has always insisted on a double standard. On the one hand, it wants to be part of the Jewish community’s Big Tent, but on the other hand, it refuses to allow dissenters into its own narrow, ideological tent. I know, because I have personally asked to speak to its members at its convention. 

J Street has adamantly refused to allow its members to hear my centrist point of view—I support the two state solution and oppose Israel’s settlement policies—while welcoming extremists speakers who support boycotts of Israel and who refuse to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. 

Its own tent flap is open only on the left side, not in the center. J Street’s decision to refuse to sponsor this community-wide Stand With Israel rally during so critical a time has drawn a line in the sand. If you can’t support Israel now, how can you call yourself a pro-Israel organization? How can any member of J Street now look at themselves in the mirror and say, “I belong to a pro-Israel organization.”

I call on members of J Street who are truly pro-Israel to leave that divisive organization and to join with us who truly support Israel during times of crisis, while remaining critical of some of its policies. If you are pro-Israel, you do not belong in J Street, because J Street can no long credibly claim to be pro-Israel.

If there was ever any doubt about that, J Street’s actions in refusing to join the Stand With Israel Rally should resolve them. So if you want to stand with Israel, stand up against J Street and stand with organizations that support Israel during times of crisis.


1a) THE SITUATION

--  Iran-backed Hamas terrorists in Gaza have fired 1929 rockets at Israel since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, only 15 days ago. 1412 rockets have hit Israel, and 351 were intercepted by the Iron Dome Defense System which has a close to 90% success rate.

--  82 rockets were fired from Gaza, yesterday alone. 14 were intercepted by the Iron Dome. One hit next to a school in Ashdod. Another struck an empty kindergarten in the Shaar HaNegev region.Tuesday morning, a house was hit in Yehud.

--  27 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the start of the IDF's ground offensive in Gaza, Thursday. 114 soldiers are hospitalized around Israel, eight are in critical condition and two are suffering from moderate-to-serious wounds. Oron Shaul, 19, from Poria, is missing in action.

--  7 soldiers were killed yesterday, defending Nir Am, a kibbutz 1.3 miles from Sderot, after Hamas terrorists emerged from a tunnel to attack the community. Four of the Israeli soldiers were killed when their jeep was hit by an anti-tank missile. Three were killed in gunfire.

--  There have been 523 Gazan fatalities, according to Gaza health officials.  On average, for every 8 Israeli airstrikes, one Gazan dies - including combatants. In international conflict comparisons, this is an extremely low figure.

IDF RESPONSE

--  Since the operation began, 2925 terror targets have been struck.  1388 of these were attacked during the ground offensive

--  The IDF has destroyed 23 tunnels, killed 183 terrorists and taken 20 terrorists into custody since the start of the ground operation. The IDF has also unearthed 66 access shafts to these tunnels. IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said, "They're all interconnected, like a huge network of nerves and arteries." The tunnels have water pipes and electricity and are built with the cement that was given in humanitarian aid to Gaza.

--  28 terrorists were detained in the field and taken for questioning by Israeli security forces, and 183 terrorists have been killed by IDF ground force operations.

--  You can see dramatic IDF footage of the attempted murder and kidnapping by Hamas terrorists on Sunday. The Hamas terrorists, one of whom was wearing a suicide vest, are also wearing IDF uniforms.

--  Fighting has been concentrated in the Shuja'iya neighborhood in Gaza, which has seen a concentration of terrorist activity. In Rafah (a town of over 70,000 in southern Gaza), the IDF has located a weapons cache and military compound concealed within a mosque. Another mosque concealed a rocket storage facility and operations room.

--  Tuesday morning, the IDF intercepted an arms shipment being smuggled across the Dead Sea from Jordan.

IMPACT

--   Over 20,000 Israelis were estimated to have attended Sean Carmeli's funeral in Haifa Monday night. A lone soldier from Texas, Israeli social media picked up the story after the soccer club that he supported encouraged people to attend. People travelled from across the country so that "he would not be alone."

--  Despite the security situation, 230 people, including 100 children made Aliya from North America this morning and landed at Ben Gurion Airport.

GOVERNMENT

--  Prime Minister Netanyahu said Monday, "There are some in the West who tell us, we support Israel's right to defend itself... as long as you don't exercise that right. Well what else could we do, what would you do... if 80 percent of your people were in bomb shelters?...While we try to avoid Palestinian civilian [deaths], Hamas wants Palestinian civilian [deaths]; the more the better, so they can give you telegenic fodder...This is the cruelest, most grotesque war that I've ever seen. Not only does Hamas target civilians, ours, and hide behind civilians, theirs, it actually wants to pile up as many civilian deaths as possible."

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2)  The World is Returning to Normal

PJMEDIA.COM 

By Michael Ledeen 

Of all the popular myths about “how the world works,” the most dangerous to us at this moment is the one that goes “peace is normal, war is an aberration.”  Truth is, war is normal and peace very unusual.  We’ve lived through a happy time, ever since the Second World War.  Thanks to American superpower, and the destruction of the totalitarian regimes in Rome, Berlin and Moscow, we’ve had a happy period of relative peace.  Very few big wars.  Little genocides (China is exceptional, but they changed to accommodate the global pattern).  Deterrence (as in “Mutual Assured Destruction”) mostly worked.

That was a rare time.  Now we’re getting back to normal.  There’s a good 

reason for that old Roman wisdom “if you want peace, prepare for war.”  It’s because “peace” most always happens when somebody wins a war, and then imposes conditions on the losers.  That’s what “peace conferences” are all about.  Our recent happy time was the result of war, and our adoption of the Roman wisdom.  We smashed our enemies, we created military alliances to deter our new enemies (NATO, etcetera), we built and maintained a big arsenal on land, air and sea.

We prepared for war to make peace possible.

It worked so well and lasted so long that we forgot why we were doing it. Over time, the “peace is normal” myth took hold and its attendant policies “future wars will be economic, not military” and “guns to butter” came to define our strategic thinking.

Moreover, Americans have always been conflicted over foreign policy.  We have always wanted two incompatible things at once:  we want to export the American model, and we want to stay out of other countries’ affairs.  We have invariably waited until the eleventh hour before fighting.  In the last century, we were torpedoed into the First World War by the Germans, bombed into the Second World War by the Japanese, and frightened into the Cold War by Stalin.

Then came 9/11 and we were reminded that there are (always) enemies out there.  In time, we forgot that, too, and now, having deceived ourselves into believing that peace is normal, we are trying to talk our way out of the global war.  It won’t work.  It never has.

So we’re back to normal.  War, and the run up to more war, is the order of the day, as it has for most of human history.  Our real options are the same as they have always been:  win or lose.  Both lead to “peace,” but the one is a happy peace while the other is an extended humiliation.

If we accept that war, and the preparation for war, is the basic leitmotif of human history, we might also overcome the parallel myth:  that all men are basically the same, and all men want the same (good) things.  Not so.  Just ask Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, and their friends, proxies, and agents.  They want bad things for us, namely death and domination.  And they’re not likely to change, which is why it’s very dangerous to give Khamenei more money, and try to make Putin more “reasonable.”  They’re going to continue the war.

“Man is more inclined to do evil than to do good,” Machiavelli wrote, and he knew whereof he spoke.  Which is why war is normal, and peace so rare.  And why we’d better get used to it.

That happy time is done and gone, at least for now.  We’d better stop whining and get about the business of winning.

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3) A Tale of Two Gazas
Author:  Joseph Klein 


There are two Gazas. One is at street level, where Palestinian civilians serve as Hamas’s human shields in the face of Israel’s narrowly targeted response to the more than 1500 rockets that have rained down on its citizens in recent days. The other is the subterranean Gaza, consisting of a labyrinth of elaborate tunnels where Hamas military commanders hide in relative comfort and which they use as their bases for rocket launchings and incursions into Israel. Hamas’s political chief Khaled Mashaal is too cowardly even to live in these bunkers. He is living luxuriously in Qatar while proclaiming recently that Hamas will not accept a simple ceasefire and that “It’s normal that you see those cycles of violence.”

Hamas launched an incursion into Israel through its tunnel network with the evident intent to abduct or massacre Israeli civilians in a kibbutz, after rejecting a ceasefire proposed by Egypt and accepted by Israel.  That had been the third time in the previous two weeks that Hamas used its tunnels to infiltrate Israel for the purpose of carrying out attacks.  After Hamas subsequently ended a brief humanitarian ceasefire, arranged by the UN, with renewed rocket fire and infiltration into Israel through Hamas’s tunnels, Israel finally responded to Hamas’s ground invasion with one of its own.

“We know that Hamas terrorists are operating underground, and that’s where we will meet them,” the IDF said in a statement, as Israel’s ground operation to find and destroy the tunnels got underway.  The IDF said it has already found 13 tunnels across Gaza, with 34 access points. But it is suffering mounting casualties in the process – at least seventeen soldiers killed so far including from the IDF Golani Brigades which lost 13 soldiers on July 20th in combat with Hamas in the Gaza Strip district of Shejayia, a center for reportedly manufacturing and storing Hamas rockets. Four of the Israeli fatalities resulted from attacks by Hamas operatives emerging from their tunnels on the Israeli side of the border.

According to DEBKAfile, the tunnels are Hamas’s main strategic asset which Hamas will fight to the death to preserve: “Around 16,000 men, around 15 percent of Hamas’ fighting strength, were assigned to the tunnel project in the last five years and substantial funds. The IDF will not be permitted to demolish this flagship project without a savage fight.”

Hamas commanders believe they can fight on for several weeks at least to defend their tunnels, the civilian population be damned. Khaled Mashaal has reportedly continued to spurn calls for a ceasefire coming not only from Egypt but also from the Arab League.

Yet, predictably, much of the so-called international community has lashed out at Israel for defending its own citizens. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who decided to visit the Middle East to explore ways to de-escalate the conflict, criticized Israel’s launch of its ground operation.  Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman told an emergency session of the UN Security Council last Friday afternoon that while “we condemn the indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza into Israel” that ended the brief UN-brokered humanitarian ceasefire, “we are alarmed by Israel’s heavy response.” He mentioned the killing of Palestinian children in this context.

Palestinian UN Ambassador Mansour used his speech to the Security Council to exploit the tragic loss of life of these children. He recited the names and ages of Palestinian children who lost their lives because of what he called Israel’s “murderous rampage,” “savage aggression,” “state terrorism” and every other pejorative that he could muster. But Israel did not put those children in harm’s way. Hamas’s cowardly leaders did, while operating in their secure underground bunkers built beneath the homes, schools, mosques and hospitals that they have used as their weapons storage facilities and portals to their tunnels. Indeed, if Hamas had not summarily rejected the ceasefire proposed by Egypt and accepted by Israel early last week, Palestinian children could be playing safely outside rather than cruelly sacrificed by Hamas’s leaders as “martyrs” for their jihad.

Mansour charged that Israel’s military operation was designed to bring about the “collapse” of the Palestinian “unity” government between Hamas and Fatah.  In truth, it is Hamas that is bringing about the collapse of the Palestinian “unity” government all by itself.  A mere one week after Hamas signed the reconciliation pact with Fatah, Khaled Mashaal made crystal clear what every clear thinking person already knew. Hamas had no intention of abiding by Palestinian Authority President Abbas’s commitment against the use of violence. “Our path is resistance and the rifle, and our choice is jihad,” he declared. “Jihad is our path.”

Palestinian civilians including children, living in street level Gaza, are Mashaal’s jihad cannon fodder.

As Israel’s UN Ambassador Ron Prosor described Hamas’s exploitation of civilians to the Security Council: “From the safety of their luxury hotels in Qatar, Hamas leaders like Khaled Mashaal order room service with one hand and order Hamas to use Palestinians as human shields with the other.”

Commenting on the discovery of rockets stored in a Gaza school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Ambassador Prosor said that “Hamas is using UN facilities to commit a double war crime by targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians.”

Palestinian propagandists are doing their utmost to train the “international community’s” eyes on the civilian casualties occurring in street level Gaza. They are succeeding. As this article is being written, the United Nations Security Council is meeting in an emergency session requested by the Palestinians. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that “Israel must exercise maximum restraint and do far more to protect civilians.” Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to be criticizing Israel for civilian casualties in remarks captured by a live microphone.  Meanwhile, in subterranean Gaza, the Hamas jihadists are criminally sacrificing those civilians to save their tunnels built with concrete that could have been used to build real schools and hospitals to educate and care for their people.

Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.