===
Tuesday is an important day for those who believe we need leadership in local education and at the national political level.
This is why I am voting for Jolene Byrne, Jack Kingston and Dr. Bob Johnson and urge those of a similar mind and concern to do likewise.
It is becoming increasingly evident, this administration has failed in virtually every endeavor - economic, foreign and domestic policy, health care and education reform, racial divide, energy independence, financial discipline and, most important of all, world leadership and telling the truth to Americans.
The tragedy is that the first black president was not elected because of his noted accomplishments, his vast achievements, his vision and understanding of what it means to be an American but simply because he was a gifted orator and was the choice of elites in academia, the press and media and left wing radicals who have a disdain for our nation and believed it was time to assuage assumed white guilt.
Obama promised hope and change, disappointed on the first and delivered on the latter.
That America, like all nations, has a history of shame is understood and recognized. That said, I challenge anyone to cite a nation that has done more to rectify and improve itself.
America and Americans have paid a heavy financial and human price to lead the world, to redirect the world and this president, by his incompetence and weakness, has created untold vacuums which have been filled by those intent on chaos and wanton murder.
Obama's reset button turned out to be on a missile that brought down a commercial airplane. His apology for American arrogance helped create more discord in Egypt, led to the election and subsequent overthrow of The Muslim Brotherhood, disheartened our lone democratic ally in that region and helped renew war in Gaza in response to kidnapping, murder and rocket attacks upon that sovereign nation - Israel.
And what does our president urge - restraint as if his timidity, and feckless buckets of red paint have brought claimed 'tranquility.'
Can these three candidates solve the problems Obama inherited and made worse? Hardly! They can, however, move us back in the direction where we need to be.
God can only bless America, rational and informed voters are left to save it from 6 catastrophic years of mismanagement, disregard for the Constitutional Separation of Powers clause and blatant lies.
"What difference does/can it make?' Plenty!!! (See 2 below.)
===
Every time you read an Israeli military personnel has died multiply times 50 to get an American equivalent.(See 3 and 3a below.) and do not always believe what you hear and/or see if it comes from many American and/or Arab news sources.. (See 3b below.)
This you can believe, however. (See 3c below.)
Many years ago when I was in Israel I happened to be at The Dead Sea and a former CNN reporter was doing a show.
I walked up to him after he finished and mentioned I was from Atlanta and engaged him in a conversation and asked him his view of Israel, because this was long before FOX News so I watched "Bernie" and detected a negative disposition.
He proved my suspicion was correct but he never gave me any rational, or even factual, explanation. He just repeated what he had come to believe, hear and had therefore, concluded.
We departed, I wished him well and told him he had confirmed my inner thoughts and when I returned to The States I would no longer listen to his bile. He was taken aback but made no comment. (See 3d below.)
===
David Stockman takes stock and sees Black Swans! (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
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The High Costs of Ignoring Islamic Culture
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Yated Ne'eman
Yated Ne'eman
Last week I attended a panel in Jerusalem entitled "Why Have 'Peace Plans' Backfired: How Honor-Shame Dynamics Affect Arab-Israel Relations." Anthropologists have applied the term honor-shame to societies organized around clan and tribe, in which group identity takes precedence over individual identity. Those societies are governed by elaborate codes of honor, the breach of which requires expiation in blood. If, for instance, someone outside of one's clan kills a fellow member of the clan, it is incumbent on members of the clan to avenge that killing, regardless of who initiated the conflict or why, because the death of the clan member weakens the clan.Multi-culturalism, which celebrates the diversity of cultures and treats them as all equally worthy of respect, is all the rage in academia and other precincts of the Left. Yet that celebration of diversity often is little more than a cover for intellectual sloth and a total lack of interest in the actual nature of any particular culture. And where that sloth prevails its corollary is likely to be an unfounded projection of one's own culture onto others. Nowhere is that phenomenon more evident than in American foreign policy in the Middle East.
In honor-shame cultures, win-win thinking is absent; rival clans bear a zero-sum relationship to one another – whatever brings honor to one of necessity brings shame to the other, and honor is achieved by defeating and thereby shaming the other. Disputes tend to last forever. Harold Rhode of the Gatestone Institute, who served as a Middle East analyst in the Defense Department for nearly 30 years, noted that in Hebrew the verb for payment comes from the same root as completeness and peace. The payment represents the end of a transaction in which ownership passes once and for all to the other party. In Arabic, the three-letter root for payment is the same as that for pushing – in other words, the transaction is never complete, what is yours today may be mine tomorrow; your possession is only temporary.
Rhode began by arguing that it is first crucial to know the cultural context within which one is acting. Only then can one begin to develop a strategy. Knowledge of one simple fact could have spared all the futile peacemaking efforts since 1967: Any land that was under Islamic sovereignty is forever considered Islamic territory, dar al Islam, and it is duty of Muslims to secure its return to Islamic sovereignty. The very idea of a Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim Middle East was thus unthinkable for Muslims from the beginning. Rahman Azzam Pasha, the first head of the Arab League, declared on the eve of the end of the British Mandate, "If the Zionists dare establish a state, the massacres we would unleash would dwarf anything Genghis Khan and Hitler perpetuated."
Not only was the creation of Israel a sacrilege, but the defeat in arms of seven Arab armies by the Jews, who were second-class citizens dhimmis in every Muslim society and thereby feminized, constitutes a humiliation that must to be reversed by force of arms. The refugees of the 1948 War of Independence have been frozen in time since then, expressly forbidden from integrating into another Arab state, so that they would remain a permanent attack force to avenge the humiliation of 1948.
The honor-shame dynamic and the Islamic prohibition on ceding territorial sovereignty has not only left Arabs and Muslims unreconciled to Israel's existence. They have not even accepted the loss of Andalusia (Spain) to the Christians in 1492. Rhode shared a story of how his mentor Bernard Lewis, the greatest living scholar of the Middle East, once joined a group of Turkish friends on a tour sponsored by an Islamic research institute in Cordoba. Not suspecting the Turkish-speaking Lewis of being Jewish, the tour guide confessed, "We are determined to bring back Islamic control of Spain."
At Camp David, Ehud Barak conceded to Arafat all of the Temple Mount, retaining nothing for Israel except the land under the Temple Mount. Upon hearing the offer, Arafat jumped up and shouted, "I will not be having tea with Sadat." He meant that were he to agree to any concession he would be assassinated just as Sadat was for bringing dishonor to the Arab nation.
The upshot is: Temporary treaties and arrangements can be worked out with the Palestinians and relations between us might be managed, but the hope of a truly final agreement in Palestinian eyes is impossible given the present nature of Arab society.
That perspective, however, has been totally ignored by American policymakers. As in so much concerning the Muslim world, they have been cowed by Edward Said's Orientalism, in which he argued that any discussion of the Muslim world as being driven by an honor-shame culture was derogatory. So instead our foreign policy experts apply the various "rational actor" models of game theory from which cultural and religious considerations are excluded. That the Palestinians may have different goals and priorities that Western rational actors, and that achieving statehood, as long as Israel continues to exist, is not high on the list, does not occur to them. Perhaps it is too painful to consider that there are those not eager "to give peace a chance."
Professor Mordechai Kedar provided an amusing example of the type of misunderstandings that arise out of different cultural assumptions. In the heady early days of the Oslo process, an economic conference was held in Casablanca to which Israel was invited for the first time. Shimon Peres led a very large Israeli delegation. The point of the delegation was to demonstrate to the Arab delegations Israel's productivity and creativity as a way of cementing their support for peace. Peace would be a win-win for Israelis and Palestinians alike, Peres urged.
But that is not the message the Arabs heard. They saw in the delegation an Israeli intent to colonize the Arab world. Arabic language papers of the time reported on Israel's desire to take over the Arab world and have the Arabs working for the Jews. For them, Israel's glory could only bring their shame. A thriving Israel is the mirror constantly thrust in the face of the Muslim world reflecting back its shame. Apart from the oil taken out of the ground for it by others, the Muslim world produces nothing of marketable value and contributes nothing to civilization.
Professor Richard Landes, who chaired the evening, published an article the last week in Tablet Magazineentitled "Why the Arab World is Lost in an Emotional Nakba, and How We Keep it There," in which he argued that the Western response to Muslims' sense of humiliation achieves just the opposite of its intent. The profuse apologies for every offense real or imagined against Islam and its founder – apologies that would not be tendered to adherents of any other religion -- and the constant pressure on Israel for concessions, will not salve Arab shame or make them more conciliatory. All that such efforts do is convince Muslims of the weakness of their adversaries and whet their appetite for more aggression.
THE REFUSAL OF AMERICAN AND WESTERN policymakers to understand the Arab/Islamic world in its own cultural terms has fueled decades of futile peacemaking. But that is far from the most costly outgrowth of the unwillingness to take culture seriously. The whole project to build a stable democracy in Iraq was predicated on a materialist assumption that all human beings desire personal freedom as their highest priority, and that given the proper constitution and government structure they can all realize their desire to live in a stable representative democracy.
But all people are not the same, and all cultures do not place the same value on individual freedom. As David Goldman argues in How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too), representative democracy depends on very high levels of trust between citizens. They must believe that the members of rival political factions or parties share a commitment to a set of procedures and structures embodied in the constitution that guarantee each side that if their views do not prevail today they may yet do so tomorrow.
But members in tribe and clan based societies trust no one outside their own clan or tribe. Trust in abstract constitutional principles that all sectors of society agree to uphold is not something that is within their frame of reference. And as a consequence, the blood and treasure expended by America to create a stable democracy in Iraq was spent in vain.
BUT THE MOST COSTLY outgrowth of the refusal to take culture and religion seriously may be yet to come in the form of a nuclear Iran. The West would prefer to ignore the jihadi impulse, as well as the jihadi's willingness to sacrifice his life to preserve the tribe to which he belongs.
The most sacred act of pagan society is war through which the individual consecrates himself to the future of the tribe or clan by risking his life in aggressive warfare against enemies. He risks nothing, according to the German Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig, by sacrificing himself for his tribe since he has no existence except through his tribe. Rosenzweig viewed tribal Muslim society as essentially pagan in nature, and Allah ruling as an arbitrary oriental potentate, according to his wholly arbitrary will, as the entire pantheon of pagan gods rolled into one.
Indeed never has suicide, in the form of Muslim suicide bombers, played such a large role in military conflict as it does today. The danger that should keep us all awake at night is that a nuclear Iran would become the first suicide bomber nation.
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2) These are the comments of a former high-ranking British military commander at the United Nations session last week on the fighting in the Middle East.
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3) http://www.jpost.com/Operation-Protective-Edge/Seven-Golani-soldiers-killed-in-Gaza-363528
13 IDF soldiers killed in Gaza as Operation Protective Edge death toll climbs to 18
Seven soldiers were killed when an anti-tank missile fired from a home in Gaza struck their APC on Saturday; others killed in separate firefights with terrorists throughout the Strip.
Eighteen IDF soldiers have been killed since the start of the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza in multiple exchanges of fire with Hamas. The majority of the casualties occurred throughout Saturday and Sunday.
Seven soldiers were killed when an anti-tank missile fired from a home in Gaza struck their APC on Saturday. The vehicle also came under attack simultaneously from a second location. The missile was fired from a Gazan home in a built-up area, army sources said.
The IDF was still completing the process of identifying the fallen soldiers. The families had been notified of the soldiers' deaths.
Additionally, Col. Rasan Alian, commander of the Golani Brigade, was moderately injured in an exchange of fire in Gaza. He has been hospitalized at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva Dozens of wounded IDF soldiers were brought from the fighting in Gaza to a number of hospitals across Israel on Sunday morning.In total, fifty three wounded Israeli soldiers have been hospitalized from the fighting in Gaza.
Fifteen soldiers were brought to the Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva. Four were in serious condition and eleven were in light to moderate condition.
Two lightly injured soldiers were brought to Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem's Ein Kerem.
Three soldiers were brought in moderate condition to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. Two others were brought to Soroka with light wounds. Since the ground operation in Gaza began, eleven wounded soldiers have been evacuated to Soroka.
Four wounded soldiers were brought to Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer. Two of the evacuees were in serious condition, one was in serious to moderate condition and another was in moderate condition.
Since the beginning of the ground operation twelve soldiers were evacuated to Sheba.
Large numbers of Ground Forces entered the Gaza Strip overnight between Saturday and Sunday as Israel expanded its operation against Hamas. The increased presence in Gaza is aimed at destroying Hamas infrastructure, the IDF said.
It came after the government decided to move into the next stage of the operation, and after the units sent into Gaza completed intensive training and preparations.
Earlier on Saturday, two soldiers were killed in the Gaza Strip, the IDF announced.
Staff Sergeant Bania Roval, a 20-year-old soldier from Holon, serving in the Paratroopers 101st Battalion, was shot dead by a terrorist in Gaza who emerged from a tunnel shaft and opened fire at soldiers. The terrorist was shot dead in return fire.
"Controlling tunnel shafts doesn't give us full control of the entire tunnel," a senior military source said.
The second soldier, 2nd-Lt. Bar Rahav, 21, from Ramat Yishai, from the Engineering Corps, was killed as a result of the activation of the Trophy missile defense system in a nearby tank. The system successfully blocked an anti-tank missile fired at the vehicle, but the soldier was killed in the process. The IDF is investigating.
Also on Saturday, two soldiers were killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while thwarting the attempt to murder Israeli civilians. Their names were Sgt. Adar Barsano, 20, of Nahariya, and Maj. Amotz Greenberg, 45, of Hod Hasharon, the army said.
On Friday, in the IDF's first casualty, twenty-year-old Sergeant Eitan Barak from Herzliya was killed in Gaza under still unclear circumstances.
Military sources said Hamas gunmen have increased their attacks on soldiers who are searching and finding tunnel entrances in Palestinian homes near the border with Israel. Simultaneously, Hamas has ordered its members to use remaining tunnels for immediate cross-border attacks against Israeli civilians and military targets. Thirteen cross-border tunnels have been destroyed since Thursday night. The air force had struck some 500 targets since the start of the ground operation.
The IDF feels it has gained "significant control" of cross-border attack tunnels, and that this development is "upsetting Hamas," the source added. Hamas is doing its best to hamper the army's efforts, and attempts to send a donkey with explosives and a suicide bomber on a motorcycle on Friday are part of those attempts. Hamas is also trying to kidnap soldiers.
Additionally, two terrorists attempted to attack a D-9 armored bulldozer used in uncovering tunnels by the Engineering Corps. In the attack, two terrorists emerged from a tunnel entrance. One, a suicide bomber, detonated his explosives, and the second fired an anti-tank missile. Both were killed in the incident.
3a) CNN removed correspondent Diana Magnay after she called Israelis “scum” in a tweet (since removed).
She was in Sderot, on a hill overlooking Gaza, watching Israeli airstrikes in the distance. Off camera, a crowd of Israelis watching the night-time action were cheering, which Magnay described.
But Magnay got into trouble for posting a tweet calling the Israelis scum. (Screengrab’s from Russia Today).
The tweet was quickly removed, but the damage was done. CNN reassigned her to Moscow, a city not known for press freedom or Mediterranean weather; Magnay’s Twitter account has gone silent for the time being.
So what the heck was Magnay thinking?
A CNN spokesperon told Michael Calderone:
“After being threatened and harassed before and during a liveshot, Diana reacted angrily on Twitter,” a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement to The Huffington Post.“She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew,” the spokeswoman continued. “She certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.”
“Threatened and harrassed during a liveshot?” If Magnay and her team were threatened or intimidated by the Israelis, she should have mentioned that in her report as a routine matter of transparency.
Perhaps Magnay thought for professional reasons she had to play the macho journalist who couldn’t be ruffled by trash talking arm-chair general Israelis on live TV so close to real war zone. If the threat was serious enough to claim on Twitter, it was serious enough to mention on air.
Without the “scum.” That wasn’t professional. Here’s Magnay’s last dispatch from Israel.
3b) The same family that was killed in Syria by Assad was also killed by IDF bombing in Gaza few days ago!
3c) PA libel: "Children have become the fuel
for Israel's Holocaust...
Children have become a target
hunted by the Israeli warplanes"
PA leader Jibril Rajoub:
Israel is carrying out a "mass extermination
as the Nazis did in Europe in the 1940s"
PA and Fatah ignore
Hamas' use of civilians as human shields,
claiming Israel's evacuation warnings are "false"
Fatah Central Committee member Mahmoud Al-Aloul:
"The occupation government
is continuing to step up its crimes
against the Palestinian people,
the most barbaric being the sending of messages
to residents of entire neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, ordering them to evacuate their homes
in order to destroy them."
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
During the current conflict between terror organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Israel, Israel
has been warning Palestinian civilians ahead of Israeli bombings to evacuate their homes in
order to minimize civilian casualties.
Hamas has continuously instructed Palestinians to ignore the warnings and stay in their homes,
in order that they may act as human shields to protect Hamas terrorists, their weapons and
tunnel systems. Palestinian Media Watch has documented that Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party expresses support and unity with Hamas in its war against Israel.
Fatah Central Committee member Mahmoud Al-Aloul recently described the Israeli warnings
(delivered by phone or fliers distributed from planes) as one of the "most barbaric" Israeli
"crimes" and part of an Israeli "plan to expel a larger number of Gaza Strip residents":
"Al-Aloul said that the occupation government is continuing to step up its crimes against
the Palestinian people, the most barbaric being the sending of messages to residents
of entire neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, ordering them to evacuate their homes in order
to destroy them. The Commissioner of the [Fatah] Mobilization and Organization
[Commission] said that the occupation government is seeking to carry out a plan to expel
a larger number of Gaza Strip residents, and to repeat the expulsion it has been carrying
out against the Palestinian people from the Nakba to this day."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 17, 2014]
Earlier in the week, the Palestinian Authority's official daily referred to Israel's warnings as
"false messages" and "one of the forms of the psychological war Israel is waging against
peaceful citizens in their homes." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida,July 16, 2014]
The PA daily is further promoting the libel that Israel deliberately targets children, ignoring the
fact that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties, and that it is Hamas who has been urging
Palestinians to stay in their homes and "oppose the Israeli fighter planes with their bodies
alone." An article in the official PA daily entitled "Israel's war - hunting the children of Gaza
" asserted:
"Children have become the fuel for Israel's Holocaust and war against Gaza. They are
now the largest balance in what the Israeli army calls the 'target bank' of the fighter planes
in the Gaza Strip... In Gaza, children have become a target hunted by the Israeli warplanes
." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 15, 2014]
Similarly, Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub last week called
Israel's bombing of Hamas' terror infrastructure and missile launching sites a "mass
extermination as the Nazis did in Europe in the 1940s":
Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub: "Never before this
assault - not in 2012, not in 2008 and not in all our history - did the occupation have the
courage to carry out mass extermination as the Nazis did in Europe in the 1940s, while
the world remains silent - except for a few voices here and there - and our Arab home
front is paralyzed..."
Awdah TV host: "In what ways can the Arab response - if we can call it that - be
strengthened, while they are saying in Israel, 'what is happening in Gaza
is one percent of what is happening in Syria and Iraq and Libya'?"
is one percent of what is happening in Syria and Iraq and Libya'?"
Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub:"Disgraceful,
those are despicable words, despicable as they [the Israelis] are. [Arab civil wars] are
not their concern and not mine. Let it [Israel] also say that it is one percent of what Hitler
did. Fine? Let it also say so. Let it admit that it is doing to the Palestinians - sorry for
the expression - what Hitler did to them [the Jews]."
[Awdah independent Palestinian TV channel, July 14, 2014]
Click to view Palestinian Media Watch's coverage of the current Gaza conflict.
The following are longer excerpts of the articles reporting on Al-Aloul's presentation
of Israel's warnings to civilian Palestinians as a "barbaric" crime, and the paper's own
claim that these warnings are "false messages":
Headline: "Al-Aloul: 'The occupation's attempts to expel citizens from the border areas is
a plan for a 'new Nakba'"
"[Fatah Commissioner for Mobilization and Organization and] Fatah Central Committee
member Mahmoud Al-Aloul warned against the occupation government's plan to expel
hundreds of thousands of citizens in the Gaza Strip, and said this plan constitutes a 'new
Nakba (i.e., 'catastrophe,' Palestinian term for the establishment of the State of Israel)'
against our Palestinian people.
In an interview for the Mawtini radio station yesterday [July 16, 2014], Al-Aloul said that
the occupation government is continuing to step up its crimes against the Palestinian
people, the most barbaric being the sending of messages to residents of entire
neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, ordering them to evacuate their homes in order to
destroy them. The Commissioner of the [Fatah] Mobilization and Organization
[Commission] said that the occupation government is seeking to carry out a plan to
expel a larger number of Gaza Strip residents, and to repeat the expulsion it has been
carrying out against the Palestinian people from the Nakba to this day. In addition, he
called on the international community to assume its responsibilities regarding these crimes,
and to demand accountability from the occupation government for its crimes.
Al-Aloul emphasized that the expulsion of [such] a large number of Palestinians is a
preparation for genocide and barbaric crimes to be perpetrated by the extremist occupation
government. He emphasized that it is important that our people be resolute in the face of
these contemptible crimes, and adhere to its basic national principles."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 17, 2014]
"The false messages [of the Israeli army, calling on civilians to evacuate their homes] are one of the forms
of the psychological war Israel is waging against peaceful citizens in their homes.
The Shbeir family, which lives in the central Gaza Strip, received a phone call from the Israeli 'Ministry of
Defense' at 9:30 p.m., in which it was told to evacuate the house. It was given five minutes to evacuate
before the bombing. The father took his children and told his neighbors, who ran together with him after
hearing this false message.
Muhammad Shbeir, 10, said: 'I feel sad because of the bombings and because of the deaths of children,
young people, old people and women in the Gaza Strip. The Jews are defeating us. We did not welcome
Ramadan joyfully like we do every year...'
Lujin Shbeir, 11, cried when she heard about the evacuation, and said: 'Why are the Jews doing this to us?
They should leave Palestine and get out. Let them go to America or any other big country. We can't take
any more suffering. The Jews are merciless. They kill everything mercilessly.'"
“Then the Philistines seized Samson, gouged out his eyes and took him down to Gaza.” Judges 16:21.
Something about Gaza, and the way its Hamas bosses periodically goad Israel into military action, turn
otherwise sensible observers into sightless chumps — incapable of distinguishing between initiating and
responding to force, and blind to the difference between attempted murder and self-defense.
We see that day after day after day in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, CNN, and other
mainstream media outlets, which report on the crisis as if it were a contest between two antagonists
competing on a morally level playing field. It appears in the television graphics of careful neutrality: charts
showing the number of Israeli air strikes compared to the number of Hamas missiles and mortars;
comparisons of the number of casualties on both sides; and reports on the relative suffering of the
noncombatants.
This is nonsense. Three important principles underlie this crisis, which ought to be evident to anyone with
eyes to see. First, there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Second, inchoate crimes are still
crimes, and in wartime, they are war crimes. And third, “proportionality” has no proper role when thugs are
trying to murder your children.
I. There is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
Israel is a democratic state, whose government is elected by its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim citizens. The
rights of those citizens are safeguarded by an independent judiciary, which frequently rules against the
government. An Israeli Arab sits on the Supreme Court; he authored the 2011 decision upholding the rape
conviction of a former President of Israel.
Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. The goal of
Hamas is not to end the occupation of Gaza. That occupation ended in 2005. The goal of Hamas is not a
Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel. Its Charter calls for the destruction of Israel – along with, for
some reason, the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, and B’nai B’rith. And even after Israel is gone, its
mission of killing Jews will go on. ItsCharter reads:
The time [to implement Allah’s promise] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them
until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me,come on and kill him!
Israeli society offers full participation to women and gays.
The Hamas Charter assigns women the “duty of caring for the home and raising the children.” They are also
assigned to “manufacture men” for the war of liberation. Gays are subject to violent suppression.
The main preoccupation of Israelis is the pursuit of happiness. They innovate, they work hard, they live as
well as they can. Since 2005, when Israel disengaged from Gaza, its economy has grown by 60%. Israeli
per capita income is $31,000, an astounding number for a tiny state with few natural resources, and with an
economy drained by the constant need for military preparedness.
The main preoccupation of Gazans is hate. When Israel disengaged, it left behind 3,000 state-of-the-art
greenhouses, which had generated hundreds of millions of dollars in flowers and agricultural products. The
hope was that their transfer to Palestinian control would help jump-start the local economy. The Gazans
demolished them within hours of the departure of the Israelis – about the same time required to destroy the
synagogues abandoned by the Jewish settlers. The per capita income in Gaza is $2,000.
The principal reason for the economic disparity is that under Hamas, Gazans make rockets, and little else. In a press release issued in December 2011, Hamas boasted of having fired more than 11,000 rockets at
Israel between 2000 and 2011, to have killed more than 1,360 Israelis and to have injured more than 6,400
others. Since then, it has fired another 2,500 rockets and mortars at civilian targets in Israel. Trying to
murder Jews is the chief industry of Gaza.
The Israeli government has built its Iron Dome missile defense systems and underground shelters to
safeguard its citizens from Hamas attacks. Hamas also builds shelters, but only to safeguard its personnel
and weapons. It does not permit civilian Gazans to use the shelters. On the contrary, Hamas positions
civilians – particularly women and children – near its launchers to deter attacks on them. As many have
noted, Israel uses rockets to protect its children; Hamas uses children to protect its rockets. 
If there is any kind of equivalence between Hamas and Israel, it resides in the fact that both sides possess
the power to end the fighting. Hamas can end the Israeli airstrikes by ceasing to fire rockets and mortars
on Israeli civilians. Israel can end the Hamas attacks – by ceasing to exist.
II. Inchoate crimes are still crimes, and in wartime, they are war crimes.
If a man fires a gun wildly into a crowd, he commits a crime, whether the bullets hit an innocent bystander or
not. Such actions are considered “inchoate” crimes, because they are incomplete. But whatever the result,
the same repugnant conduct is involved. Therefore, inchoate crimes are generally punishable, both under
international law and under the American Model Penal Code, even if the evil consequence is somehow averted.
The mainstream press invariably reports on the fact that missiles fired by Hamas hardly ever hit their targets,
as if incompetence were some kind of mitigating factor. In fact, every single rocket fired by the Hamas thugs
at Israel is a crime, whether it hits its target or not. It may fall harmlessly onto an open area. It may be
intercepted by Iron Dome. It may even fall, as many have, back onto Gaza itself. Still, each rocket is an attempted murder.
To his credit, Ibrahim Kraishi , the Palestinian ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, has
recognized the nature of inchoate crimes. In aninterview with Palestinian Authority TV, Ambassador Kraishi
said:
The missiles that are now being launched against Israel, each and every missile constitutes a crimeagainst humanity, whether it hits or misses, because it is directed at civilian targets.
The mainstream press, with its preoccupation with calculable carnage, also neglects to take into account the
psychological effect of living under constant bombardment. According to a report by IRIN, a service of the
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 75% of children aged 4 – 18 living in the border town
of Sderot suffer from post-traumatic stress, including sleeping disorders and severe anxiety. Symptons
include bed-wetting, nightmares, and fear of being alone. Each child is a victim, even if not sufficiently photogenic to appear in the New York Times.
III. “Proportionality” has no proper role when thugs are trying to murder your children.
Perhaps the biggest blindspot in the Western media pertains to “proportionality.” They note the numbers.
Because of the fact that Israel goes to great lengths to protect its civilians while Hamas goes to great
lengths to expose its civilians to maximum danger, there is no evenness in the casualties suffered by the
two sides. Many more Palestinians than Jews are dying. To the sightless, this means Israel must be
resorting to disproportionate measures, and that must be wrong. This attitude was on display when
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviewed Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Netanyahu, and led off
with this:
populations and people dying in large numbers. How long can you politically withstand the pressure for aThe situation is that on one side you’ve got missile defense and on the other side you’ve got civilian
cease-fire?
Implicit in her question was the notion that if Israel is inflicting more casualties than it is suffering, it must be
doing something wrong. It must be responding disproportionately. Therefore, it will and ought to be s
ubjected to political pressure.
Perhaps the best way to see through this moral miasma is to imagine a mother at home at night with her
children. Outside is a gunman. Intermittently, the gunman fires into the home. The house is large and dark,
and the gunman fails to hit a human target.
Now imagine the mother frantically calling 911 for help. The policewoman answering the call – let’s call her
“Andrea”, just to pick a random name – asks her how many gunmen are outside. When the mother answers
that she believes there is one deranged assailant outside, Andrea replies: “In that case, we’ll send one
policeman over to help you.” The distraught mother begs her to send the largest squad available: ten men,
twenty, one hundred. And a SWAT team. Her children’s lives are threatened. Andrea asks: “Do you really
want such a disproportionate response? Aren’t you overreacting? How will you withstand the pressure from
your neighbors?” Israel’s children are in the paths of the missiles fired from Gaza. Its government has the
right – in fact, it has the duty – to do whatever it takes to stop those missiles. Proportionality has no place in
calculating a response.
It is not always easy to recognize the obvious in the fog of war. But those reporting on events from a safe
distance have an obligation to exercise some modicum of moral judgment and common sense. Observers
who convey the notion that the current crisis is a contest between equals; or who minimize the criminality of
firing rockets at civilian targets because those rockets usually miss or are intercepted; or who expect the
Israeli military to ratchet down its response to somehow equalize the casualties on both sides of the
conflict — all such observers are clueless, exhibiting blindness of truly biblical proportions
4) Former Reagan Budget Head David Stockman:
Russia Could Be the Next 'Black Swan'
The Federal Reserve has created bubbles in asset markets, and the conflict in Ukraine and Russia may
pop them, says David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under the
Reagan administration.
"We're at the very edge of a bubble which has been inflating since early 2009, and as a result of that any time
now we could be hit by something you don't expect like this incident in the Ukraine or anything else that will
take the market down in a big way," he told CNBC.
He was referring to the downing of a Malaysia Airline plane over eastern Ukraine Thursday. He said turmoil
He was referring to the downing of a Malaysia Airline plane over eastern Ukraine Thursday. He said turmoil
in Russia could spark the next series of "black swan" events and cause the S&P 500 to lose "hundreds" of
points. (Editor's Note: The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes
an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.)
Meanwhile, the Fed has gone way too far in its easing program, Stockman argued.
"The short interest has been killed by the Fed's constant intervention," he noted. "As a result you have
Meanwhile, the Fed has gone way too far in its easing program, Stockman argued.
"The short interest has been killed by the Fed's constant intervention," he noted. "As a result you have
dangerously fragile markets, so it could easily drop by hundreds of points if things [in Ukraine] go far enough."
The Dow closed at 16,976.81 Thursday, after dropping 0.9 percent.
Stockman agrees with the Fed's assessment that valuations are stretched in some parts of the stock market.
The Dow closed at 16,976.81 Thursday, after dropping 0.9 percent.
Stockman agrees with the Fed's assessment that valuations are stretched in some parts of the stock market.
"If you look at obviously the small caps in the speculative sectors, we're way over the deep end," he
explained.
"We've had 68 months of 0 percent interest rates running. There's nothing like this in history. . . . We'll be
"We've had 68 months of 0 percent interest rates running. There's nothing like this in history. . . . We'll be
lucky to get a 2 percent growth, which is really the natural capacity of the economy that has nothing to do
with all this Fed stimulus that is creating bubbles," Stockman stated, noting that the Fed "has really lost control
of policy."
"We've set ourselves up for a big fall and where this leads to, I'm not sure," he said.
While concern about the jet shoot-down jolted stocks Thursday, the effect may not last long, some experts
"We've set ourselves up for a big fall and where this leads to, I'm not sure," he said.
While concern about the jet shoot-down jolted stocks Thursday, the effect may not last long, some experts
say. "People are using any downward movement as an excuse to buy the market," JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade, told The Wall Street Journal
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