===
I have just taken our son, his wife and their daughter to the airport and am bringing some beach items back in the hope we can make one trip tomorrow when we end our 37th consecutive family week at Tybee.

Before returning for dinner with remaining family at Tybee , I want to send this memo.

Almost every time I go away significant things happen and this past week was no different.

I begin this memo with this premise: The actions and results of all current

presidents will be forever impacted by actions and decisions of prior presidents and I start with:

Woodrow Wilson who was a self contained intellect who inoculated America with the socialist virus.

Calvin Coolidge disproved that actions speak louder than words. In time, I believe, the history of subsequent presidents may serve to elevate "Silent Cal's" standings

Herbert Hoover was an excellent executive but his presidency was overwhelmed by a depression.

President Truman had the good sense to employ Hoover's executive talents during his own presidency

Franklin Roosevelt used the umbrella of a Depression and World War to inflict more socialism upon our nation and was the first to bring many Jews into his government but his response to Hitler's Holocaust was abysmal.

Harry Truman was among the most well read presidents yet, was vilified for firing a general whose enormous ego was exceeded by his larger strategic miscalculations.

Truman made two correct decisions whose unintended consequences still impact the world: the unleashing of the nuclear age and the establishment but unwilling acceptance of The State of Israel.

Dwight Eisenhower was a master at handling divergent personalities as a war leader but led from behind as president when it came to civil rights.

His highway program produces economic benefits to this day but altered rural life.

Jack Kennedy brought charisma which elitist academics, press and media folks dubbed Camelot but covered up JFK's health and amorous peccadilloes.

Lyndon Johnson spent. untold trillions on.the 'war against poverty' which proved largely unsuccessful and then lost the war in Viet Nam because he would. not allow his generals to win.

He will be credited forever for his efforts to change America's civil rights history

Richard Nixon was brilliant and dark and paid the ultimate price. He also recognized China, which has now become a commercial and military challenge not only to America but also to its regional neighbors..

Gerald Ford formed an excellent staff but his trick knee and 'whip inflation now button'

whipped him.

James Carter was inexperienced but learned. However, he will always be remembered for 'The Iran Hostage Situation' and for our economic malaise.

Ronald Reagan understood America but was ridiculed by the same elitists in academia, the press and media who adored Kennedy.

Subsequent presidents and Americans, will forever owe Reagan a great debt of gratitude.

George Bush was a competent technocrat, orchestrated and executed a war that rested on a sound moral basis but politically should never have asked his lips be read.

The same elitist academics, press and media folks attacked him because he could not tell them the price of milk and bread.

William Clinton was politically adept and proved capable of absorbing imposed change but could not change his liberal libido sexual predilections.

Sexually frustrated women were and remain attracted to him and no doubt will vote for his wife given the opportunity

G.W Bush's presidency was shaped by 9/11. Though, he chose the right war in Afghanistan, pursuing radical Islamic terrorists, when he extended this pursuit into Iraq he was vilified because he relied on misinformation. Unlike Johnson, GW listened to his generals and embraced their recommendations. Battle casualties and the incessant pummeling from elitist academics, press and media about the mounting casualties revealed Viet Nam still remains a determining fact impacting American will.

President Obama was the first black president and came into office with an undistinguished record of achievements. He was elected largely by the same elitist academics, press and media who have an avowed deep seated disdain of America.

Obama told us he would bring hope and change and rode into office because of his silver oratory and the fact that voters felt compelled to assuage their white guilt.

Obama's policy initiatives have served his nefarious desire too diminish America's foot print, to buttress his empathy with Muslim Anti- Colonial sentiments and his purposeful acts of spreading discord and cowering to our adversaries.

This is the same president who preached openness, fiscal sanity and healing and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and now we are told the world is more " tranquil."

This is the same president who swore to uphold the law and to protect and defend America and now The Supreme Court, the one he castigated, suggests he has exceeded his authority in matters of "Separation of Powers" and our borders leak like a sieve.

And please do not forget you can keep your doctor and health plan!

So here we are, after almost 6 years of buckets of red painted desert sand, a mis-named reset button policy with Russia and a continuing series of economic folly and lingering unemployment.

The reset button apparently turned out to be on a missile operated by Ukrainian Separatists trained by Russian advisers who mistook a commercial plane for an enemy one and proceeded to shoot it down killing all on board.,

And what of Obama's questionable appointments?

Attorney General Holder has an endless supply of race cards he plays whenever his boss fails.

Obama's Secretary of Defense is a hapless lackey and his two Secretaries of State have proved unequal to the many challenges of Obama's misguided policies.

And then we have all those 'no smidgens of scandal' appointees and their lies and deceitful actions Obama always brushes aside by blaming others.

Finally, we have General Dempsey, our pitiful Chief of Staff, who seems willing to ignore desertion and presides over a diminished military which has reached levels that are both dangerous and idiotic.

Yes, this is where we are today as our president divides his time between golf, fund raising and vacations and as always I could continue but I assume you get the point!

(See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Below.
===
And now just a few articles on the 'tranquility' taking place in Gaza! (See 6, 7 and 8 below.)
===
Dick
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1) Moral Clarity in Gaza
By Charles Krauthammer

Israel accepts an Egyptian-proposed Gaza cease-fire; Hamas keeps firing.
Hamas deliberately aims rockets at civilians; Israel painstakingly tries to avoid them, actually telephoning civilians in the area and dropping warning charges, so-called roof knocking.

"Here's the difference between us," explains the Israeli prime minister.
"We're using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they're using their civilians to protect their missiles."
Charles Krauthammer writes a weekly political column that runs on Fridays.
View Archive

Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity.
Yet we routinely hear this Israel-Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent "cycle of violence." This is absurd. What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting? Everyone knows Hamas set off this mini-war. And everyone knows the proudly self-declared raison d'etre of
Hamas: the eradication of Israel and its Jews.

Apologists for Hamas attribute the blood lust to the Israeli occupation and blockade. Occupation? Does no one remember anything? It was less than 10 years ago that worldwide television showed the Israeli army pulling die-hard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as Israel uprooted its settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians. There was not a soldier, not a settler, not a single Israeli left in Gaza.

And there was no blockade. On the contrary. Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had produced fruit and flowers for export. It opened border crossings and encouraged commerce.

The whole idea was to establish the model for two states living peacefully and productively side by side. No one seems to remember that, simultaneous with the Gaza withdrawal, Israel dismantled four smaller settlements in the northern West Bank as a clear signal of Israel's desire to leave the West Bank as well and thus achieve an amicable two-state solution.

This is not ancient history. This was nine years ago.

And how did the Gaza Palestinians react to being granted by the Israelis what no previous ruler, neither Egyptian, nor British, nor Turkish, had ever given them - an independent territory? First, they demolished the greenhouses. Then they elected Hamas. Then, instead of building a state with its attendant political and economic institutions, they spent the better part of a decade turning Gaza into a massive military base, brimming with terror weapons, to make ceaseless war on Israel.

Where are the roads and rail, the industry and infrastructure of the new Palestinian state? Nowhere. Instead, they built mile upon mile of underground tunnels to hide their weapons and, when the going gets tough, their military commanders. They spent millions importing and producing rockets, launchers, mortars, small arms, even drones. They deliberately placed them in schools, hospitals, mosques and private homes to better expose their own civilians. (Just Thursday, the U.N. announced that it found 20 rockets in a Gaza school.) And from which they fire rockets at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Why? The rockets can't even inflict serious damage, being almost uniformly intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system. Even West Bank leader Mahmoud Abbas has asked: "What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?"

It makes no sense. Unless you understand, as Tuesday's Post editorial explained, that the whole point is to draw Israeli counterfire.

This produces dead Palestinians for international television. Which is why Hamas perversely urges its own people not to seek safety when Israel drops leaflets warning of an imminent attack.

To deliberately wage war so that your own people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian state of the world's treatment of Israel (see:
the U.N.'s grotesque Human Rights Council), fueled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance and reflexive sympathy for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel's legitimacy and right to self-defense.

In a world of such Kafkaesque ethical inversions, the depravity of Hamas begins to make sense. This is a world in which the Munich massacre is a movie and the murder of Klinghoffer is an opera - both deeply sympathetic to the killers. This is a world in which the U.N. ignores humanity's worst war criminals while incessantly condemning Israel, a state warred upon for 66 years that nonetheless goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming the very innocents its enemies use as shields.

It's to the Israelis' credit that amid all this madness they haven't lost their moral scruples. Or their nerve. Those outside the region have the minimum obligation, therefore, to expose the madness and speak the truth.
Rarely has it been so blindingly clear.

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2)Rabbi Steven Pruzansky is the spiritual leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, New Jersey

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo - for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted.

But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.

Romney lost because he didn't get enough votes to win.

That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues - the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness - no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate.

The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff.

Every businessman knows this; that is why the "loss leader" or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama's America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who - courtesy of Obama - receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.

The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which "47% of the people" start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money - "free stuff" - from the government.

Almost half of the population has no skin in the game - they don't care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese.

They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else's expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.

It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.

That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is ignorant anduninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters - the clear majority – are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich.

During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" Stevenson called back: "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!" Truer words were never spoken.

Obama could get away with saying that "Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules" - without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the "rich should pay their fair share" - without ever defining what a "fair share" is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to "fend for themselves" - without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending.

Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions - in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone.

Obama also knows that the electorate has changed - that whites will soon be a minority in America (they're already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different America . Obama is part of that different America , knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.

Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his "negative ads" were simple facts, never personal abuse - facts about high unemployment,
lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil's bargain of making unsustainable promises.

It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan - people of substance, depth and ideas - to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare - never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. If an Obama could not be defeated - with his record and his vision of America , in which free stuff seduces voters - it is hard to envision any change in the future.

The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy - those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe - is paved.

For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a
president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel . They voted to secure Obama's future at America 's expense and at Israel 's expense - in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin.

A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon - and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality.

But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline.
Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations.. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come.

The "Occupy" riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead - years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.

If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3) MILINET: A DISCUSSION--Naval Aviation War Fighting Ability is Waning; Going Critical

This exchange between John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, and Adm. Bill Wyatt, with contributions from several 'old school' Flag Officers, will be instructive. Naval Aviators are resigning from the Navy in droves, presenting the very real possibility that there will soon be not enough aviators in active service to fill the seats of all the aircraft in inventory, and forcing the selection into department head and command billets from the ranks of weak performers. The reasons are many, and are elaborated in the following thread, but stand-outs are: 1) a lack of Trust and Confidence in senior leadership that cares more about 'sucking up' to politicians than defending their war fighting culture and fighting for the mission resources they need; 2) Asking for too much, with too little; e.g., back to back, extended deployments, with insufficient work up time and resources for training, and then having to take the blame if they come up short; 3) 'Demonizing' the warrior culture via Political Correctness; e.g., instead of focusing on flying hours and training to hone war-fighting capability, must sit in classrooms for interminable hours of 'insulting' compulsory Diversity Training, Alcohol Awareness, or Sexual Abuse Class where intelligent young men of good moral character are told, essentially, "Rape is bad, don't do it."

Les Horn

CAPT USN (Ret)

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4) The Full-Time Scandal of Part-Time America

Fewer than half of U.S. adults are working full time. Why? Slow growth and the perverse incentives of ObamaCare.

By Mortimer Zuckerman

There has been a distinctive odor of hype lately about the national jobs report for June. Most people will have the impression that the 288,000 jobs created last month were full-time. Not so.

The Obama administration and much of the media trumpeting the figure overlooked that the government numbers didn't distinguish between new part-time and full-time jobs. Full-time jobs last month plunged by 523,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What has increased are part-time jobs. They soared by about 800,000 to more than 28 million. Just think of all those Americans working part time, no doubt glad to have the work but also contending with lower pay, diminished benefits and little job security.

On July 2 President Obama boasted that the jobs report "showed the sixth straight month of job growth" in the private economy. "Make no mistake," he said. "We are headed in the right direction." What he failed to mention is that only 47.7% of adults in the U.S. are working full time. Yes, the percentage of unemployed has fallen, but that's worth barely a Bronx cheer. It reflects the bleak fact that 2.4 million Americans have become discouraged and dropped out of the workforce. You might as well say that the unemployment rate would be zero if everyone quit looking for work.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-DR120_edp071_D_20140713125300.jpg

Last month involuntary part-timers swelled to 7.5 million, compared with 4.4 million in 2007. Way too many adults now depend on the low-wage, part-time jobs that teenagers would normally fill. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen had it right in March when she said: "The existence of such a large pool of partly unemployed workers is a sign that labor conditions are worse than indicated by the unemployment rate."

There are a number of reasons for our predicament, most importantly a historically low growth rate for an economic "recovery."Gross domestic product growth in 2013 was a feeble 1.9%, and it fell at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.9% in the first quarter of 2014.

But there is one clear political contribution to the dismal jobs trend. Many employers cut workers' hours to avoid the Affordable Care Act's mandate to provide health insurance to anyone working 30 hours a week or more. The unintended consequence of President Obama's "signature legislation"? Fewer full-time workers. In many cases two people are working the same number of hours that one had previously worked.

Since mid-2007 the U.S. population has grown by 17.2 million, according to the Census Bureau, but we have 374,000 fewer jobs since a November 2007 peak and are 10 million jobs shy of where we should be. It is particularly upsetting that our current high unemployment is concentrated in the oldest and youngest workers. Older workers have been phased out as new technologies improve productivity, and young adults who lack skills are struggling to find entry-level jobs with advancement opportunities. In the process, they are losing critical time to develop workplace habits, contacts and new skills.

Most Americans wouldn't call this an economic recovery. Yes, we're not technically in a recession as the recovery began in mid-2009, but high-wage industries have lost a million positions since 2007. Low-paying jobs are gaining and now account for 44% of all employment growth since employment hit bottom in February 2010, with by far the most growth—3.8 million jobs—in low-wage industries. The number of long-term unemployed remains at historically high levels, standing at more than three million in June. The proportion of Americans in the labor force is at a 36-year low, 62.8%, down from 66% in 2008.

Part-time jobs are no longer the domain of the young. Many are taken by adults in their prime working years—25 to 54 years of age—and many are single men and women without high-school diplomas. Why is this happening? It can't all be attributed to the unforeseen consequences of the Affordable Care Act. The longer workers have been out of a job, the more likely they are to take a part-time job to make ends meet.

The result: Faith in the American dream is eroding fast. The feeling is that the rules aren't fair and the system has been rigged in favor of business and against the average person. The share of financial compensation and outputs going to labor has dropped to less than 60% today from about 65% before 1980.

Why haven't increases in labor productivity translated into higher household income in private employment? In part because of very low rates of capital spending on new plant and equipment over the past five years. In the 1960s, only one in 20 American men between the ages of 25 and 54 was not working. According to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, in 10 years that number will be one in seven.

The lack of breadwinners working full time is a burgeoning disaster. There are 48 million people in the U.S. in low-wage jobs. Those workers won't be able to spend what is necessary in an economy that is mostly based on consumer spending, and this will put further pressure on growth. What we have is a very high unemployment rate, a slow recovery and across-the-board wage stagnation (except for the top few percent). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost 91 million people over age 16 aren't working, a record high. When Barack Obama became president, that figure was nearly 10 million lower.

The great American job machine is spluttering. We are going through the weakest post-recession recovery the U.S. has ever experienced, with growth half of what it was after four previous recessions. And that's despite the most expansive monetary policy in history and the largest fiscal stimulus since World War II.

That is why the June numbers are so distressing. Five years after the Great Recession, more than 24 million working-age Americans remain jobless, working part-time involuntarily or having left the workforce. We are not in the middle of a recovery. We are in the middle of a muddle-through, and there's no point in pretending that the sky is blue when so many millions can attest to dark clouds.

Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.

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5) Russia reportedly strikes deal with Cuba to reopen Cold War-era listening post

P1

December 13, 2000: The secret Russian listening station at Lourdes some 19 miles south of Havana is seen in this file photo.Reuters

Russia has reportedly reached a deal with Cuba to reopen a Cold War-era listening post that was used to intercept U.S. communications and provide information to Russian Navy ships in the region.

Government sources who spoke to Russian newspaper Kommersant said the deal was reached while President Vladimir Putin was visiting Havana Friday.

The sources said Moscow began talks with Cuba years ago to re-open the post in the Havana suburb of Lourdes, but increased negotiations at the beginning of this year. Russia is also agreeing to write off 90 percent of the $32 billion debt Cuba owes Russia, Kommersant reports.

The post, which opened in 1967, is located 150 miles off the coast of Florida.

At its peak use, the post was worked by 3,000 Soviet military and intelligence personnel, who intercepted communications and relayed the information to Russian Navy ships and submarines in the Western hemisphere, according to The Telegraph.

But the post was closed in late 2001 due to a lack of Russian financing and pressure from Washington to improve ties between the two countries.

Vyacheslav Trubnikov, a former director of Russia’s intelligence service, said the post “gave the Soviet Union eyes in the whole of the western hemisphere.”

"For Russia, which is fighting for its lawful rights and place in the international community, it would be no less valuable than for the USSR,” Trubnikov told The Telegraph.

The listening post was the most powerful Soviet electronic intelligence center located outside Russia’s territory, Kommersant reports.

U.S. State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki has not commented on reports of the alleged deal due to the lack of an official statement from Russia or Cuba, the newspaper reported, citing Interfax news agency.

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6)

Daniel Greenfield's article: Winning the Moral High Ground is a

Loser's Game

Winning the Moral High Ground is a Loser's Game

In our modern age, things no longer exist to perform their function. Washing machines aren't designed to clean clothes, but to save water and energy. Food isn't there to be eaten, but not eaten. And armies aren't there to win wars, but to be moral. And the truly moral army never fights a war. When it must fight a war, then it fights it as proportionately as possible, slowing down when it's winning so that the enemy has a chance to catch up and inflict a completely proportional number of casualties on them.

Forget charging up a hill. Armies charge up the slippery slope of the moral high ground and they don't try to capture it from the enemy, because that would be the surest way to lose the moral high ground, instead they claim the moral high ground by refusing to try and capture it, to establish their moral claim to the moral high ground, which they can't have because they refuse to fight for it.

Israel has been engaged in a long drawn out struggle for the moral high ground. The moral high ground is to the modern Israel what the land of Israel was to their pioneer ancestors who drained swamps, built roads and shot bandits; some of whom were later discovered to be the oppressed peoples of the region, fresh from Syria or Jordan, and protesting the settlements built on that stretch of swamp that had been set aside in their revisionist history as belonging to their great-grandparents, complete with oversized house keys to some of the choicer logs in the swamp.

Sadly the only way to win the moral high ground is by losing. Just look at the massive Arab armies who repeatedly invaded Israel, did their best to overwhelm it with the best Soviet iron that the frozen factories of the Ural could turn out, and lost the bid to drive the Jews into the sea, but won the moral high ground. Then their terrorist catspaws spent decades winning the moral high ground by hijacking airplanes full of civilians, murdering Olympic athletes and pushing old men in wheelchairs from the decks of cruise ships.

All these killing sprees accomplished absolutely nothing useful, aside from the killing of Jews, which to a certain sort of mind is a useful thing in and of itself, but that failure won the terrorist catspaws the moral high ground. Their failure to win a war by hijacking buses full of women and taking the children of a school hostage conclusively established their moral superiority and nobility of spirit.

The world was deeply moved when Arafat waddled up to the UN podium, with his gun, wearing a mismatched cotton rag on his head that would decades hence become the modish apparel of every third hipster standing in line with a can of 20 dollar fair trade Lima beans at Whole Foods, because his commitment to killing people in a failed cause that even he didn't believe in exchange for money from his backers in the Muslim world showed his deep commitment to the moral high ground.

In the seventies, after Israel had won a few too many wars, Henry "Woodcutter" Kissinger, suggested that it lose a war to gain the sympathy of the world. Golda wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea, but with the old woodcutter in charge of handing out the axes, there wasn't much choice about it. Israel came close to being destroyed in '73, but just when it might have won the sympathy of the world, its armies of young men dashing from synagogues into overcrowded taxis to get to the front lines, turned the tide. Israel won. The woodcutter of Washington lost and Israeli scrapyards filled up with piles of Soviet steel, which was good news for the big sweaty guys who ran them, but bad news for those pining for the lofty fjords of the moral high ground.

In '91 the Israelis went nuclear and decided to beat Arafat at his own game. Rabin and Peres talked the old terrorist out of retirement and down to Washington D.C. where they surrendered to him in an official ceremony at the Rose Garden overseen by a beaming Bill Clinton. Finally Israel had won the moral high ground. And the United States had carved off a chunk of that delicious moral high ground, even though Clinton was forced to fidget in his chair at Oslo when his Nobel Peace Prize went to the greasy terrorist, though perhaps he should have considered that defeat to be another victory of the moral high ground.

But the moral high ground proved notoriously elusive for the Jewish State. There was a brief lull when it seemed that the original sin of kicking ass had been atoned for in the Rose Garden, but then the terrorists started killing Israelis again and the Israelis insisted on fighting back. In no time at all the moral high ground was roped off with a special reserved section for terrorists and a sign reading, "No Israelis Will Be Admitted Unless They Renounce Their Government, Zionism and the Right of Self-Defense."

Peace was the last best hope of the new Israeli Hatikvah, not to be a free people in their own land, but to be a moral people in a land that didn't really belong to anyone in particular, but that they were optimistic everyone could live in harmony in.

But peace with terrorists meant not fighting back and there was a limit to what the 70 percent of the country that didn't go to sleep fantasizing about peace would accept in the name of peace.

And so, terrorists killed Israelis, Israelis killed terrorists, that part of the world located in an ugly modernist building overlooking Turtle Bay, which the turtles would like to have back, condemned Israel and demanded that it resolve things peacefully by surrendering more land to the terrorists in order to build up their confidence in Israel's commitment to a peaceful solution.

The terrorists were not expected to reciprocate and build up Israel's confidence in their commitment to a peaceful solution because they already had the moral high ground by way of losing the last thirty engagements with the IDF, including the battle of the school they set up snipers in, the church they took over and the hospital that they used as an ammo dump.

The great quandary for Israeli leaders is how to win a war without losing the moral high ground. This is a tricky matter because it requires winning the war and winning the peace. And you can't do both at the same time.

Israel's solution has been to fight limited wars while remaining absolutely committed to peace. No sooner does a war begin, then it is pressed to accept a ceasefire. To show its commitment to peace, Israel is expected to accept the ceasefire. At which point Hamas will begin shooting rockets again and the whole dance will begin all over again. But Israel has trouble refusing a ceasefire because its leaders still believe that they can get at the moral high ground by showing that they are more committed to peace than the other side.

The peace is however unwinnable. It's not even survivable in the long term. Peace either exists as a given condition or it is maintained by strong armies and ready deterrence. Peace cannot be found on the moral high ground, only the mountains of the graves of the dead.

Seeking the moral high ground is a fool's quest. Wars cannot be fought without hurting someone and trumpeting your morality makes it all too easy for your enemies to charge you with hypocrisy. The man who spends the most time vociferously protesting that he isn't a thief, that he has never touched a penny that belonged to anyone else and that he will swear on a floor-to-ceilling stack of bibles to that effect, looks far guiltier than the man who scowls and tells his accusers to mind their own business. The more Israel defends its own morality, the more it winds the chains of the accusers around its own neck.

Refining its war fighting with the object of fighting a truly moral war leads to refined techniques that kill terrorists but still cause some collateral damage, and to soldiers that are more afraid of shooting than of being shot at. And all this painstaking effort goes for naught since it really makes very little difference to Israel's enemies whether they have one photo of a dead Muslim civilian to brandish or a thousand. Either one makes for the same manner of indictment. In aiming to win the peace, Israel instead, like all modern states, loses the war.

The father of an Israeli soldier told his son after he was called up for duty that he would rather visit him in prison than visit him in the cemetery. "If you are fired on, fire back." That is good advice not just for that young man, but for his entire country, and for the civilized world. It is better to fire than be fired upon. It is better to be thought a criminal, than mourned in Holocaust museums. It is better to leave the moral high ground to those who worship the romance of endless bloodshed and defeat. It is better to lose the peace and win the war.

No surprise then that the New York Times has given op-ed space to Nathan Thrall from the International Crisis Group whose analysis of the current situation beggars belief:

As Hamas fires rockets at Israeli cities and Israel follows up its extensive airstrikes with a ground operation in the Gaza Strip, the most immediate cause of this latest war has been ignored: Israel and much of the international community placed a prohibitive set of obstacles in the way of the Palestinian “national consensus” government that was formed in early June.

These obstacles include preventing the payment of salaries to Hamas appointed civil servants and not easing Gaza’s border restrictions. Hamas itself is conveniently whitewashed as the Palestinian unity government “pledged to comply with the three conditions for Western aid long demanded by America and its European allies: nonviolence, adherence to past agreements and recognition of Israel.”

Thrall cannot begin to contemplate that Hamas itself, still entrenched in the Gaza Strip, has not changed its violent and rejectionist policies towards Israel. And what of the thousands of rockets that have been launched from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilians even before this recent escalation? For Thrall, they are not even worthy of a mention.

Ditto for the kidnapping of three Israeli teens by Hamas-affiliated terrorists. Instead, according to Thrall:

Hamas is now seeking through violence what it couldn’t obtain through a peaceful handover of responsibilities.

Why should Israel be responsible for the payment or rather, non-payment, of Hamas salaries? This bone of contention was a major cause of the breakdown of the Palestinian unity government due to the Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness or inability to pay up rather than Israel, which had no part to play.

Understandably, the U.S. was not prepared to be part of a transfer of funds to a terrorist organization:

Speaking to The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity, an Israeli security official said that the funds were not transferred to Hamas “due to international sanctions” imposed on the movement, but would not elaborate. He called Hamas’s decision to break a 20-month ceasefire last week by launching rockets at Israel “an internal Palestinian issue that has been thrust upon Israel.”

Why then is firing rockets at Israel an acceptable reaction to an internal dispute between Hamas and Fatah?

Regarding the unity government, did Thrall really expect Israel to reward Hamas for what was a barely aesthetic change? Was Hamas really attempting to follow a peaceful path but was blocked at every turn by Israel? According to Thrall, the answer is an unequivocal yes:

The current escalation in Gaza is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the April 2014 Palestinian reconciliation agreement. The road out of the crisis is a reversal of that policy.

We are left to wonder exactly what world Nathan Thrall is living in and, indeed, what would possess the New York Times to publish such tripe. But then, the New York Times is merely following a pattern of blaming Israel for Palestinian terrorism.

Ultimately, Thrall cannot tell the difference between cause and effect. It was Hamas violence that prompted Israel to blockade the Gaza Strip, not Israel’s actions that caused Hamas to initiate what has now escalated into a full-on Israeli ground incursion.

8) click on:http://www.prageruniversity.com/Political-Science/Do-You-Pass-the-Israel-Test.html#.U7ILF_ldXAk

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