Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Build So They Can Diet! Thinking - Becoming Obsolete? Have Obama Blunders Educated Livni?

Build so they will die! (See below.)

PMW           
Bulletin  

 
August 5, 2014
Hamas TV:
"Perhaps all this [destruction in Gaza] 
is for the best...
we'll build them better and more beautiful,
and that will be a testimony
to the victory of the Palestinian people."

by Itamar Marcus

Hamas is attempting to convince Palestinians that its military actions during the Gaza conflict were victorious and that the war it caused, with all its destruction, was beneficial to the Palestinians. As Palestinian Media Watch previously reported, Hamas justified the civilian deaths it caused in Gaza, claiming that it was beneficial to those killed to have died for Allah as Shahids - Martyrs. Now, Hamas is justifying the widespread destruction it caused to infrastructure and homes, saying, "Perhaps all this [destruction] is for the best":

Al-Aqsa TV host: "[Israel] has bombed everything: homes, factories, institutions, organizations and mosques, because it wants to keep us busy with reconstruction. Maybe it's for the best, so we'll build them again
better and nicer, as evidence of the Palestinian people's victory. We'll build them bigger, with monuments for the extent of the crime and of [our] achievement in Shuja'iya, Beit Hanoun and other places." 
[Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), July 29, 2014
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Is education in America more likely to un-educate? Has PC'ism ruined education?  Does teaching of mush  impact  the mind's ability to reason? (See 1 below.)
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My friend, Bret Stephens, and I are generally on the same page.

I recently had lunch with the retired regional head of a Protestant sect and he made the cogent observation that everytime the world came up with a new  directional concept there was fierce resistance, ie. Magna Carta, Civil Rights.  I guess the same could be said for ridding the world of anti-Semitism.(See 2 below.)
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Obama blunders because he is a narcissistic blunderer. Has Livni stopped drinking the Kool Aid? (See 3 below.)
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Stratfor's Minnich, tries to get into China's collective political  head.  (See 4 below.)
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Interview with Netanyahu, regarding his long war thesis and China hackers.  (See 5 and 5a below.)
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Dick
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1

1)  Is Thinking Obsolete?

By Thomas Sowell |

Some have said that we are living in a post-industrial era, while others have said that we are living in a post-racial era. But growing evidence suggests that we are living in a post-thinking era.
Many people in Europe and the Western Hemisphere are staging angry protests against Israel's military action in Gaza. One of the talking points against Israel is that far more Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli military attacks than the number of Israeli civilians killed by the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel that started this latest military conflict.
Are these protesters aware that vastly more German civilians were killed by American bombers attacking Nazi Germany during World War II than American civilians killed in the United States by Hitler's forces?
Talk show host Geraldo Rivera says that there is no way Israel is winning the battle for world opinion. But Israel is trying to win the battle for survival, while surrounded by enemies. Might that not be more important?
Has any other country, in any other war, been expected to keep the enemy's civilian casualties no higher than its own civilian casualties? The idea that Israel should do so did not originate among the masses but among the educated intelligentsia.
In an age when scientists are creating artificial intelligence, too many of our educational institutions seem to be creating artificial stupidity.
It is much the same story in our domestic controversies. We have gotten so intimidated by political correctness that our major media outlets dare not call people who immigrate to this country illegally "illegal immigrants."
Geraldo Rivera has denounced the Drudge Report for carrying news stories that show some of the negative consequences and dangers from allowing vast numbers of youngsters to enter the country illegally and be spread across the country by the Obama administration.
Some of these youngsters are already known to be carrying lice and suffering from disease. Since there have been no thorough medical examinations of most of them, we have no way of knowing whether, or how many, are carrying deadly diseases that will spread to American children when these unexamined young immigrants enter schools across the country.
The attack against Matt Drudge has been in the classic tradition of demagogues. It turns questions of fact into questions of motive. Geraldo accuses Drudge of trying to start a "civil war."
Back when masses of immigrants from Europe were entering this country, those with dangerous diseases were turned back from Ellis Island. Nobody thought they had a legal or a moral "right" to be in America or that it was mean or racist not to want our children to catch their diseases.
Even on the less contentious issue of minimum wage laws, there are the same unthinking reactions.
Although liberals are usually gung ho for increasing the minimum wage, there was a sympathetic front page story in the July 29th San Francisco Chronicle about the plight of a local non-profit organization that will not be able to serve as many low-income minority youths if it has to pay a higher minimum wage. They are seeking some kind of exemption.
Does it not occur to these people that the very same thing happens when a minimum wage increase applies to profit-based employers? They too tend to hire fewer inexperienced young people when there is a minimum wage law.
This is not breaking news. This is what has been happening for generations in the United States and in other countries around the world.
One of the few countries without a minimum wage law is Switzerland, where the unemployment rate has been consistently less than 4 percent for years. Back in 2003, The Economist magazine reported that "Switzerland's unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9% in February." The most recent issue shows the Swiss unemployment rate back to a more normal 3.2 percent.
Does anyone think that having minimum wage laws and high youth unemployment is better? In fact, does anyone think at all these days?
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2)

Palestine and Double Standards

The world is outraged by Israeli self-defense but only 'concerned' when Muslims kill Muslims.

By Bret Stephens

What follows are excerpts from a June 30, 2014, news account by Tim Craig, the Washington Post's bureau chief in Pakistan:

"Pakistan's military launched a major ground offensive in the northwestern part of the country Monday, beginning what army commanders say will be a 'house-to-house search' for terrorist leaders and other militants.

"The offensive began after two weeks of airstrikes in North Waziristan. . . .
"In a statement, Pakistan's military said its soldiers discovered 'underground tunnels' and 'preparation factories' for explosives during the initial hours of the ground assault. . . .

"Backed by artillery and tanks, troops killed 17 terrorists Monday, the army said. Combined with the toll from airstrikes that began June 16, a total of 376 terrorists have died in the offensive, the army said. . . .
"More than a half-million residents fled North Waziristan ahead of the ground offensive. The mass evacuation of the area, which has a population of about 600,000, was intended to limit civilian casualties during the operation. The military also set up checkpoints in the area to trap militants."

***

Underground tunnels, explosives factories, weeks of airstrikes, artillery bombardment, mass displacement of civilians—leaving aside the probability that this is the first that you've heard of any of this, does it ring a familiar bell? If so, maybe the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the various self-described antiwar groups that marched near the White House on Saturday to protest Israel's military campaign in Gaza can organize another big rally outside the Pakistani embassy. No more U.S. aid to Islamabad! Boycott Pakistani products! Divest from Pakistani companies!

I'm dreaming. Over the weekend there was saturation coverage of an Israeli strike near a U.N.-run school that killed 10 people, three of them members of Islamic Jihad. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the hit "a moral outrage and a criminal act" that had to be "swiftly investigated." The State Department pronounced itself "appalled." If the Secretary-General, the Secretary of State and other arbiters of international decency have expressed themselves similarly with respect to the conduct of Pakistan's army—take a look at the picture accompanying this column to see how that one looks—I must have missed it. More than 1,500 Pakistani civilians have been reported killed since the government's offensive began in mid June.

Here's what else one might have missed in the midst of the media's saturation coverage of Gaza.
Not Gaza: Pakistani soldiers after a military operation in North Waziristan. aamir qureshi/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

In Iraq, some 1,600 people were killed in the month of July. "I am concerned about the rising number of casualties in Iraq, particularly among the civilian population," U.N. envoy Nickolay Mladenov told the AFP. "Children and women are most vulnerable."

Note the verb. Not outraged or appalled, merely concerned.

Syrian Network for Human Rights reported the deaths of "at least 130 people, including seven children and 10 women," at the hands of forces loyal to Bashar Assad.

As for the State Department, its only Syria-related press release from Monday was an announcement that it was funding a project to "document the current condition of cultural heritage sites in Syria and assess the future restoration, preservation, and protection needs for those sites."

In Libya, roughly 200 people were killed last month in artillery and rocket clashes between rival militias. Another 22 were killed over the weekend as Islamist groups attacked Tripoli's airport.

A joint statement by the governments of France, Italy, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. noted only that "we strongly condemn the ongoing violence across the country . . . which jeopardizes the continuation of a peaceful transition and severely affects the life of the Libyan people."

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has turned its fury on Muslims who try to fight back against the jihadist group. Nearly 3,000 people have been killed so far this year, and another 500,000 have been made refugees. A spokesperson for the U.N.'s Mr. Ban issued a statement in his name, condemning Boko's attacks.

***

Since the war in Gaza began nearly a month ago, I have been bombarded with indignant letters and tweets calling me a "racist" for my views and asking whether I would like to live in Gaza.

My answer to the second point is that I would no more want to live under Hamas than I would under any other fanatical dictatorship that starts gratuitous wars, uses civilians as human shields, punishes political opposition with death, and sends others to die while its leaders hide beneath hospital sheets.

As for racism, people often point out how peculiar it is that the Jewish state seems to arouse a level of condemnation that never seems to apply equally elsewhere. But perhaps the real racism is the indifference to Muslim suffering around the world when the person dropping the bomb or pulling the trigger is another Muslim. A world that makes a fetish of the alleged guilt of Israel is also a world that holds too much Muslim life cheap.
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3)  Obama Blunders at Israel's Expense


President Obama’s poll numbers are sinking fast.  Even his ardent supporters are beginning to have second thoughts about him.  It’s easy to understand why.  He’s been in office for almost 6 years, and like Pig-Pen in the Peanuts comic strip, he makes a mess of everything he touches.  It’s becoming impossible to deny, and until recently, his follower’s denial was Obama’s ace in the hole.

From Europe to Russia to Asia to Africa to Latin America to the Middle East, Obama has left mayhem in his wake.  His penchant for abandoning friends, making nice with enemies, and cutting-and-running has made the United States weaker today than it has been in my lifetime.  From time immemorial, the strong have never respected weakness.  Like it or not, they still don’t, and I doubt they ever will.  Obama’s policies have made him and the U.S. a laughingstock. 

Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s “reset” with Russia is a perfect example.  Given what is taking place in Ukraine today, do you honestly think that Obama’s ill-timed and ill-conceived gestures toward Vladimir Putin motivated the Russian president to become a good neighbor?  Hardly.  Putin views our weakness as an opportunity to advance his agenda, and he has done that with reckless abandon.  Obama has finally begun to talk tough to Russia, but he never mentions the fact that his distorted view of reality caused the problem in the first place.
And what about the Middle East?  It was the first stop on Obama’s apology tour.  Since that day, the Middle East has come unglued.  Radical Islamists correctly interpreted Obama’s apology as weakness, and they have taken advantage of our weakness to build their strength.  Obama has integrated Islamists into his administration and made other friendly gestures toward them, but they still don’t like us. Even more, they don’t respect us.  They can never be our friends.  They don’t even like each other.

Islamists see us as infidels -- the enemy.  Their mission, their jihad is to subjugate or kill us.  I’m not scaremongering.  That’s what they say.  Every day, they chant “death to America” and “kill the infidels”.  Under Obama’s nose, they are actively involved in insurgencies around the world hoping to take control and rule by Sharia law which is in reality nothing more than tribal tyranny.

I don’t know about you, but if someone threatened to kill me and my family, I would take him seriously.  I definitely wouldn’t invite him into my home and offer him a cup of tea.  The first thing I would do is take steps to defend myself just in case he meant what he said, and we know for a fact that Islamists mean what they say.  Does “9/11” ring a bell?  At this point, ignoring them is suicidal.  If you are President of the United States, it’s criminal because he has a constitutional duty to defend us.

One Israeli journalist said that Obama sees the world as “la la land”.  That’s a benevolent interpretation Obama’s screw-ups.  People at the other end of the spectrum have said that Obama is inherently evil.  Regardless of his inclinations, though, judging by outcomes alone Obama’s presidency has been a dismal failure. 

No one knows that better than the people of Israel.  They have borne the brunt of Obama’s blunders.  Even left-wing Israelis are beginning to recognize and talk publically about his incompetence.  In Israel, feelings toward Obama have intensified to the point that even Tzipi Livni, Israel’s left-wing Minister of Justice, is trying to distance herself from him.  That speaks volumes. 

If Livni stays the present course, I may have to stop calling her Obama’s lapdog.  I doubt that will happen, though, because I think she’s just another politician of the charlatan variety.  Maybe that’s why she and Obama are such good friends.

Neil Snyder is the Ralph A. Beeton Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia.  His blog, SnyderTalk.com, is posted daily.
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4) The End of Consensus Politics in China

)By John Minnich

Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign is the broadest and deepest effort to purge, reorganize and rectify the Communist Party leadership since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the rise of Deng Xiaoping two years later. It has already probed more than 182,000 officials across numerous regions and at all levels of government. It has ensnared low-level cadres, mid-level functionaries and chiefs of major state-owned enterprises and ministries. It has deposed top military officials and even a former member of the hitherto immune Politburo Standing Committee, China's highest governing body. More than a year after its formal commencement and more than two years since its unofficial start with the downfall of Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, the campaign shows no sign of relenting.

It is becoming clear that this campaign is unlike anything seen under Presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Both carried out anti-corruption drives during their first year in office and periodically throughout their tenures as a means to strengthen their position within the Party and bureaucracy and to remind the public, however impotently, that Beijing still cared about its well being. But that was housekeeping. This appears to be different: longer, stronger, more comprehensive and more effective.

With this in mind, we ask: What is the fundamental purpose of Xi's anti-corruption campaign? An attempt to answer this question will not tell us China's political future, but it will tell us something about Xi's strategy -- not only for consolidating his personal influence within the Party, government and military apparatuses, but also and more important, for managing the immense social, economic, political and international pressures that are likely to come to a head in China during his tenure. Getting to the heart of the anti-corruption campaign -- and therefore understanding its inner logic and direction -- provides insights on the organization and deployment of political power in China and how those things are changing as the Party attempts to remake itself into an entity capable of ushering China safely through the transformation and crises to come.

The Campaign Continues

The announcement July 29 of a formal investigation into retired Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang marked something of an end to the first major phase of Xi's anti-corruption campaign. By all accounts, Zhou was one of the most powerful men in China throughout the 2000s. During his tenure on the Standing Committee, Zhou controlled the country's domestic security apparatus, a pillar of the Chinese government's power. Prior to that, he had served as Party secretary of Sichuan province, an important inland industrial center and breadbasket with historically strong regionalist tendencies. And before Sichuan, Zhou chaired state-owned China National Petroleum Corp., the country's most powerful energy firm and the direct descendent of the Ministry of Petroleum. Zhou was known to sit at the apex of at least these three power bases, and his influence likely extended deep into many more, making him not only a formidable power broker but also, at least in the case of his oil industry ties, a major potential obstacle to reform. Certainly, Zhou and his vast networks of influence and patronage were not the sole targets of the Xi administration's crackdown, but he and his associates, including former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, widely seen as an early competitor of Xi, formed its central axis.

Now begins another phase. There are indications that it will center on the military. There are other signs that it will target Shanghai, the primary power base of Jiang Zemin and the locus of financial sector reform in China. Further neutralization of Zhou's allies in energy and public security will likely be necessary as well as the Xi administration seeks to accelerate market-oriented reforms in the oil and natural gas sectors and to reinforce its internal security footprint in peripheral regions like Xinjiang as well as the Han Core. But ultimately, it is unclear which individuals and networks will anchor the next phase. The possibilities are as numerous as the Xi administration's myriad near- and medium-term policy goals.

The question of who or what will be targeted next is subordinate to that of why. Not why, specifically, they will be targeted, but why the campaign must and will continue. This brings us back to our question regarding the fundamental purpose of the anti-corruption campaign. It may be impossible to divine, beyond mere speculation, its future on a tactical level -- that is, what will come in three, five or eight months' time. But the direction of the campaign so far, combined with other actions by Xi, such as the formation of a unified National Security Council chaired by Xi himself and his apparent wresting of the reins of economic and social reform from Premier Li Keqiang, suggest that some other and deeper shift is underway, one for which the anti-corruption campaign is at once a vehicle and a symptom. Stratfor believes this shift involves nothing less than an attempt to rework not only the way the Communist Party operates but also the foundations of its political legitimacy.

To understand why, we look first not at Xi and what he has done thus far but at China and what it will undergo over the next decade. This will give us a sense of the external constraints and pressures of which Xi's administration is no doubt aware and to which it has no option but to respond. These constraints and pressures, more than any other factor, will shape Xi's actions and the Communist Party's evolution in the years to come.

A World Constrained

Over the next decade, the defining constraints on China will emanate from within. They are fundamentally economic in nature, but they cannot be disassociated from politics and society.

China is in the midst of an economic transformation that is in many ways unprecedented. The core of this transformation is the shift from a growth model heavily reliant on low-cost, low value-added exports and state-led investment into construction to one grounded in a much greater dependence on high value-added industries, services and above all, domestic consumption. China is not the first country to attempt this. Others, including the United States, achieved it long ago. But China has unique constraints: its size, its political system and imperatives, and its profound regional geographic and social and economic imbalances. These constraints are exacerbated by a final and perhaps greatest limit: time. China is attempting to make this transition, one which took smaller and more geographically, socially and politically cohesive countries many decades to achieve, in less than 20 years.

The bulk of this work will take place over the next 10 years at most, and more likely sooner, not because the Xi administration wants it to, but because it must. The global financial crisis in 2007-08 brought China's decadeslong export boom cycle to a premature close. For the past six years, the Chinese government has kept the economy on life support in the form of massively expanded credit creation, government-directed investment into urban and transport infrastructure development and, most important, real estate construction. In the process, local governments, banks and businesses across China have amassed extraordinary levels of debt. Outstanding credit in China is now equivalent to 251 percent of the country's gross domestic product, up from 147 percent in 2008. Local governments alone owe more than $3 trillion. It is unknown -- deliberately so, most likely -- what portion of outstanding debts are nonperforming, but it is likely far higher than the official rate of 1 percent. 

Despite claims that China's investment drive was and is irresponsible -- and certainly there are myriad anecdotal cases of gross misallocation of capital -- it nonetheless fulfills the essential role of jumpstarting the country's effort to "rebalance" to a new, more urban and more consumption-based economic model. But the problem, again, is time. China's real estate sector is slowing. Sales, home prices and market sentiment are falling, even in the face of continued expansion of the overall credit supply. The days of high growth in the housing construction sector are numbered and prices, along with overall activity, are on a downward trend -- one that can and will be hedged by continued high levels of investment and credit expansion, but not one that can be stopped for long. Real estate and related construction activity will remain the crucial component of China's economy for the foreseeable future, but they will no longer be the national economic growth engines they were between 2009 and 2011.

This means that in the next few years, China faces inexorable and potentially very rapid decline in the two sectors that have underpinned economic growth and social and political stability for the past two or more decades: exports and construction. And it does so in an environment of rapidly mounting local government and corporate debt, rising wages and input costs, rising cost of capital and falling return on investment (exacerbated by new environmental controls and efforts to combat corruption) and more. Add to these a surge in the number of workers entering the workforce and beginning to build careers between the late 2010s and early 2020s, the last of China's great population boom generations, and the contours emerge of an economic correction and employment crisis on a scale not seen in China since Deng came to power.

The solution, it would seem, lies in the Chinese urban consumer class. But here, once more, time is China's enemy. Chinese household consumption is extraordinarily weak. In 2013, it was equivalent to only 34 percent of gross domestic product, compared to 69-70 percent in the United States, 61 percent in Japan, 57 percent in Germany and 52 percent in South Korea. In fact, it has fallen by two percentage points since 2011, possibly on the back of the anti-corruption campaign, which has curbed spending by officials that appears to have been erroneously counted as private consumption. There is reason to believe that household consumption is somewhat stronger than the statistics let on, but it is not nearly strong enough to pick up the slack from China's depressed export sector and depressive construction industries. China's low rates of urbanization relative to advanced industrial economies underscore this fundamental incapacity.

Whatever the Chinese government's stated reform goals, it is very difficult to see how economic rebalancing toward a consumption- and services-based economy succeeds within the decade. It is very difficult to see how exports recover. And it is very difficult, but slightly less so, to see how the government maintains stable growth through continued investment into housing and infrastructure construction, especially as the real estate market inevitably cools. This leaves us with a central government that either accepts economic recession or persists in keeping the economy alive for the sake of providing jobs but at risk of peril to its reform initiatives, banks and local governments. The latter is ugly and very likely untenable under the current political model, which for three decades has staked its claim to legitimacy in the promise of stable employment, growth and rising material prosperity. The former is absolutely untenable under the current political model.

The pressures stemming from China's economy -- and emanating upward through Chinese society and politics -- will remain paramount over the next 5-10 years. The above has described only a very small selection of the internal social and economic constraints facing China's government today. It completely neglects public anger over pollution, the myriad economic and industrial constraints posed by both pollution and pervasive low-level corruption, the impact of changes in Chinese labor flows and dynamics, rising education levels and much more. It completely neglects the ambivalence with which many ordinary Chinese regard the Communist Party government.

It also neglects external pressures and risks, whether economic or military. What would another global economic crisis and recession do to China's already hobbled export sector? What would a prolonged spike in oil prices -- the result, perhaps, of deepening crises in Russia or Iraq -- mean for Chinese industry and its change to China's growing army of car drivers? What impact will structural changes in the East Asian and world systems, such as Japan's attempt at a national economic and military revival, have on China's overseas economic and maritime interests, or on Chinese society's confidence in the strength of its military and government? The potential risks, many of them of moderate to high probability, are legion. It takes only one to materialize to dramatically reduce the likelihood that the Communist Party, as currently constituted, survives China's transformation.

The Old Model Breaks Down

Xi knows this. He and his advisers know China's virtually insurmountable challenges better than anyone. They know how little time China has, how fragile the Party's political legitimacy -- its claim to the Mandate of Heaven -- has become over the past three decades and how great the consequences of inaction will be. But they also know how much potentially greater are the consequences of failure. Knowing all these things, they are acting to reconstitute the Party one cautious step at a time.

The anti-corruption campaign is one of those steps. It serves many overlapping functions: to clear out potential opponents, ideological or otherwise; to consolidate executive power and reduce bureaucratic red tape so as to ease the implementation of reform; to remind the Chinese people that the Communist Party has their best interests at heart; and to make it easier to make tough decisions.

Underlying and encompassing these, we see the specter of something else. The consensus-based model of politics that Deng built in order to regularize decision-making and bolster political stability during times of high growth and that effectively guided China throughout the post-Deng era is breaking down. It can no longer hold in the face of China's transformation and the crises this will bring. Simply put, now that its post-1978 contract with Chinese society -- a social contract grounded in the exchange of growth for stability -- is up, the Party risks losing the public support and political legitimacy that this contract undergirded. A new and more adaptive but potentially much less stable model is being erected, or resurrected, from within the old. This model is grounded more firmly in the personality and prestige of the president and more capable, or so Chinese leaders seem to hope, of harnessing and managing the Chinese nation through what could well be a period of turmoil.

This does not necessarily mean a return to Imperial China, nor does it mean a return to the days and methods of the Great Helmsman, Mao. It doesn't even mean the new model will succeed, even remotely. What it means will be decided only by the specific interplay of structure and contingency in the unfolding of history. But it is this transformation that serves as the fundamental, if latent, purpose for Xi's anti-corruption campaign.

Editor's Note: Writing in George Friedman's stead this week is Stratfor Asia-Pacific Analyst John Minnich.
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The prime minister views Operation Protective Edge as only one episode in a long war in which Israel is engaged against those who seek its destruction.
By Jonathan Speyer

.As a number of former senior Israeli officials pointed out in the course of Operation Protective Edge,  Jerusalem had only two possible strategic options to choose from as it entered this fight.

The first involved seeking to inflict serious damage on Hamas’s military capabilities in an operation limited in scope. The goal of such a course of action would be to achieve deterrence against Hamas.  Implicit in this option is that, at its conclusion, the Hamas authority in Gaza would still be in existence — chastened, but alive.
The second, more ambitious option would have been to have pushed on into the Gaza Strip, and to have destroyed the Hamas authority there. This would have resembled Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Israeli forces would have needed to remain in Gaza for months, or years, in order to suppress and destroy the continued guerrilla resistance which Hamas and other Palestinian groups would no doubt have undertaken.
This second option would also have required Israel to re-establish the civil administration in Gaza, taking responsibility for the lives of the 1.8 million residents of the Strip. This is because it would be politically impossible for the Ramallah Palestinian Authority to receive the Gaza Strip on a silver platter, as it were, from the Golani Brigade and its sister units of the Israel Defense Forces.
It is also likely that the insurgency which would have followed the destruction of Hamas rule would have proven a magnet for the jihadi forces which are currently proliferating in the neighborhood. ISIS and similar organizations are already in the Gaza Strip in small numbers.  But the “global jihad” would like nothing more than to find a platform from which to begin war against the Jews.
Given all this, it is not surprising that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have chosen the first option.
Netanyahu, in stark contrast to his image in Europe and to a lesser extent in North America, is deeply cautious when it comes to the use of military force.
Indeed, the record shows that Israel elected to begin a ground campaign on July 18th only when it became clear from its actions and its statements that Hamas was not interested in a return to the status quo ante.
This caution does not come from a temperamental inability to manage military action. Indeed, the Israeli prime minister’s performance in recent weeks may go some way to dispelling the image which his opponents have sought to disseminate in Israel in recent years. That is, Netanyahu is a man who buckles under pressure and is easily swayed from his course.  This is the first time that one of Israel’s longest-serving prime ministers has led the country in a military confrontation. The general sense in Israel is that his performance as a leader has been relatively effective — setting clear and limited goals and pursuing them with vigor.
Netanyahu’s caution derives, rather, from his perception that what Israel calls “wars” or “operations” are really only episodes in a long war in which the country is engaged against those who seek its destruction.  In the present phase, these forces are gathered largely under the banner of radical Islam, though this was not always so.


5a)   
China Hacking Iron Dome, Arrow Missile Defense Systems
Author):  Debalina Ghoshal
Source:  Gatestone Institute.     


According to security expert Brian Krebs, writing in Krebs on Security, Chinese hackers have gained access to crucial information related to Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. Iron Dome has been successfully intercepting rockets fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip into Israel, protecting the Israeli population from harm.

Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system launches a missile to intercept a rocket fired from Gaza. (Image source: IDF)
Krebs writes that according to Cyber Engineering Services [CyberESI], these latest cyber attacks, to steal crucial information regarding the missile defense system, were made by using “sophisticated tools” which resemble those used by Chinese hackers to steal information from U.S. defense firms.
According to CyberESI, more than 700 documents were stolen from three leading Israeli defense contractors: Israel Aerospace Industries [IAI], Elisra Group, and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The stolen data were “in the form of Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, spread sheets, email messages, files in portable document format (PDF), scripts, and binary executable files.” CyberESI also reported that the data included information on other systems such as the Arrow missile defense system and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
CyberESI suggests that this hacking was done by the Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as the “Comment Crew”. Members of this group, also known by the official designation “People's Liberation Army Unit 61398,” were charged in May by the U.S. Justice Dept. “with a raft of criminal hacking and espionage offenses against U.S. firms”.
“We allege that members of Unit 61398 conspired to hack into computers of six US victims to steal information that would provide an economic advantage to the victim's competitors, including Chinese, state-owned enterprises,” said John P Carlin of the FBI when announcing the charges in May.
According to John Lindsay, a researcher with the University of California, the Chinese breach and theft of this classified information could either be the result of routine espionage practice, or it could be China's attempt to gain information specifically regarding the missile defense system. The latter claim is clearly more likely, given China's efforts at developing its own ballistic missile defense system. China is also reported to be working on interceptor missiles and anti-satellite [ASAT] weapons.
According to Uzi Rubin, former head of missile defense at Israel's Defense Ministry, “[t]he Chinese have been doing that to all defense contractors in the West.”
John Lindsay, as well, has said, “The Chinese style of espionage is more like vacuum cleaner than a closely-directed telescope,” although seemingly a highly-targeted vacuum cleaner, and that Beijing goes only after leading firms in particular industries.
According to Israel Aerospace Industries, the Chinese hacking is “old news.” IAI spokeswoman Eliana Fisher further clarified that “[t]he information was reported to the appropriate authorities. IAI undertook corrective actions in order to prevent such incidents in the future.”
In 2000, there were reports that Chinese government had hired hackers to steal information from an the Los Alamos nuclear weapons research laboratory in New Mexico, and obtained information from the laboratory on every nuclear warhead. Those included US W-56 warheads used for their Minuteman II, W62 and W-78 warheads from Minuteman III, W70 warhead for Lance SRBMs, W76 warhead for the Trident SLBMs and W87 for Peacekeeper. A report from 1999 also confirmed that China gained access to information regarding the W-88 nuclear warheads and their miniaturization process from the same laboratory.
For the future of the free world, the U.S. and the international community must put an immediate end to China's regular practices of cyber espionage and theft of classified information from the defense industries of other countries.
Debalina Ghoshal is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Air Power Studies, New Delhi, India.
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