Get this to the border now!!!
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An abbreviated e mail from a new acquaintance of a dear friend who are both fellow memo readers.
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My friend Isi discusses containing Gaza. (See 1 below.)
What Israel faces vis a vis Hezbollah. (See 1a below.)
Why Israel's messaging fails. (See 1b below.)
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A throw away market comment. I believe it would be wise for The Fed to cease raising rates for the entire rest of the year. Why? First, it is an important retail season and Second, there is enough disturbing news and un-settlement at this very moment. The economy is doing well but there are signs some areas are slowing.
Time to let up on the brake pedal and let the private sector take over with capital investments that will improve productivity and offset some of the cost increases.
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This is an abbreviated portion of an interview Horowitz gave on TV:
"David Horowitz to Newsmax TV: Blaming Trump Is 'Sedition'...We live in a world of many enemies and "President Trump is our leader," not an enemy, Horowitz told Winterble.
Our Democracy only works when there is a collective agreement: When you lose an election, you fight to win the next one, you don't conduct a resistance to the sitting president, because that's sabotaging the country," Horowitz added.... You can be critical of Trump all you want, but to call him [Nazi Germany dictator Adolph] Hitler all the time and try to delegitimize him . . . it is sedition. It's treason, actually.
"Trump is a patriot..."
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1) Restore deterrence in Gaza now
By Isi Leibler
All of us abhor military confrontation or war, which inevitably leads to casualties.
Today Israel faces a major threat from Hamas in the south where Iran and Hezbollah could become involved if we go for the military option.
I am not privy to military strategy or intelligence and neither am I aware of what other diplomatic elements are in play which may inhibit us from acting.
The Jewish state was created as a haven for the Jewish people who were powerless in the face of persecution in their countries of birth. Israel has developed as a serious military power and has the obligation to provide security to all its citizens. Yet, it has failed to do so for months and effectively neglected those residents in the south who feel like helpless refugees in their own country. Such inaction would not have been tolerated if the target was Tel Aviv rather than Sderot.
The time has come to say to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman: “Enough is enough.”
Israel has always taken pride in the ability to deter adversaries. Yet the Hamas presence in Gaza – not an existentialist threat – not only undermines our deterrence but causes us to lose credibility on the international scene.
Let us summarize the situation:
- Hamas shamelessly prides itself on the fact that its unyielding objective is the destruction of the Jewish state and murder of Jews. Its spokesmen barbarically recite their genocidal objectives like a mantra at every possible opportunity.
- The bulk of foreign aid to the Gaza Strip has been diverted by Hamas to military purposes, even though most residents there are unemployed and impoverished.
- Hamas receives financial and military support from Iran and has created a military infrastructure throughout the country utilizing mosques, hospitals and schools as weapon-storage bases and missile-launching sites from which they regularly launch rockets into Israel.
- Hamas dispatches terrorists into Israel to murder Jews and those who succeed are hailed as heroes and financially rewarded.
- Hamas has built many tunnels leading into Israel with the objective of infiltrating terrorists behind Israeli lines in the event of a conflict. The IDF now possesses sophisticated equipment that has succeeded in identifying and destroying the majority of the tunnels.
- Since March 30, additional red lines have been crossed. Hamas has orchestrated protests that regularly brought thousands to the Israeli border, intentionally misleading the international community by defining the action as peaceful demonstrations.
However, Hamas spokesmen repeatedly stated that the objective was to break through the border and kill Israelis, thus obliging the IDF to position many troops to defend the border. The “peaceful demonstrations” included hurling firebombs, firing weapons, throwing rocks and trying to break through into Israel. The IDF sought to avoid lethal responses by mostly using rubber bullets, but when endangered, they took firm action and over 200 Palestinians – many of them identified as Hamas operatives – have been killed.
- In addition, the Palestinians have been floating incendiary balloons into Israel carrying flammable material and bombs. To date they have destroyed thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, impoverishing many farmers in the area.
The mutual hostility has led the PA under President Mahmoud Abbas to cut off electricity to Hamas in Gaza and threatened to cease paying their civil servants.
Under such circumstances Hamas became desperate and intimidated and announced it was willing to enter a temporary truce with Israel if the blockade of goods and services was lifted.
Negotiations, with the Egyptians as intermediaries, have led to little progress to date, although in recent weeks statements have been repeated that a truce was about to be implemented. As a condition, Hamas have the ultimate chutzpa to demand $15 million per month to maintain the calm in the area.
In the meantime, the world has become accustomed to the border protests and destructive incendiary balloons. In fact, many – including some misguided Jews – are accusing us of being too tough and needlessly killing “peaceful demonstrators.”
Hamas has repeatedly pledged that it will not halt the border protests or cease the launch of balloons.
Can one visualize any other country in the world tolerating this situation and merely responding to it with tit-for-tat bombing sorties that cause minimal disruption, only destroying buildings used by Hamas after warning the inhabitants to evacuate?
This situation evokes a strong feeling of déjà vu. For months we have heard hollow statements from the prime minister and defense minister threatening Hamas with dire consequences. One day, the defense minister demands drastic action and the next day, he backtracks by suggesting that an outright military conflict must be avoided. It is not surprising that Hamas spokesmen now mock these empty Israeli threats.
The horrible reality is that, despite being perceived as a tough high-tech superpower, we are in fact negotiating with a terrorist entity while our own military acts as though Hamas represents an equal, mutual deterrent. The government even stooped to the depths of providing safe passage through Israel to Gaza for Saleh al-Arouri, a Hamas deputy leader who is responsible for a series of bestial terrorist acts and who has even boasted of involvement in the notorious kidnap and murder of three youths in 2014 (a claim doubted by Israel).
If Israel is to restore any vestige of deterrence, it should announce that unless the border provocations and incendiary balloons cease, its military will take drastic action.
The nature of the action can only be determined by the IDF. It does not require the conquest of Gaza – which would lead to many casualties and we have no desire to reoccupy the area and take responsibility for its inhabitants. But it requires a significantly tougher response than what we have seen until now. We should consider destroying the homes of the leaders and, if matters deteriorate, even targeted assassinations, which achieved a dramatic impact some years ago.
Israel is a military superpower. It is time for the IDF to impose a solution in which Hamas is punished to the point of deterrence. If not, its leaders should sit in a conclave until they devise a solution.
A “semi-truce” is the worst of all options. Acting with restraint does not inhibit the terrorists and is perceived by Hamas leaders as cowardice. It allows the barbarians to continue to engage in terror and gives them the opportunity to strengthen themselves and determine when they find it most advantageous to strike. They admit that any truce is temporary, and they remain committed to our annihilation.
Last week, Lieberman predicted a quite weekend and another truce was proclaimed. But just one day later, on Friday, Hamas launched 37 rockets into Israel, allegedly orchestrated by Iran, injuring two Israelis. Sixteen thousand people protested along the Gaza border and bombs, grenades and rocks continued to be hurled at the IDF in further unsuccessful efforts to penetrate the border. Five Palestinians were killed in the violent protests and a sixth was killed from the premature explosion of a bomb he was preparing to throw at IDF soldiers.
The IDF claimed it struck 95 targets in Gaza in response – merely destroying more buildings and weapons manufacturing locations.
Prime minister: The people, including your supporters, demand action. You should warn our adversaries and allies that if this terrorism continues, Israel will act like any other nation and employ the full might at its disposal to protect its citizens. Failure to act now guarantees a full-scale conflict at a later stage with a strengthened Hamas having accumulated more effective and lethal weapons to use against us.
Otherwise, you must address the nation and convince it that the government has some strategy and intends to restore deterrenENCE.1a) Hybrid Warfare Task Force on
Israel’s Next Northern War: Operational and Legal Challenges
Amid the looming backdrop of Israel’s next, unprecedentedly destructive, armed conflict with Hezbollah and potentially other adversaries including Iran, this new report from JINSA’s Hybrid Warfare Task Force examines how Israeli military operations will comply with the law of armed conflict (LOAC) even as Hezbollah intentionally exploits the same laws to stymie and delegitimize Israel’s self-defense operations.
The next conflict that erupts between Israel and Hezbollah will bear little resemblance to anything that has come before.
Today Hezbollah possesses more firepower than 95 percent of the world’s conventional militaries and more rockets and missiles than all European NATO members combined. Yet, despite this quantum leap in its ability to visit devastation on Israel since their last conflict in 2006, Hezbollah is under no illusion about its ability to inflict a strategic military defeat on Israel.
Instead, Hezbollah’s objective will be the political defeat of Israel. This conflict will be waged not just with missiles and tanks, but in the information domain with legal claims and media statements. Victory will be secured in the court of public opinion, not the valleys of Lebanon or the skies over Israel.
1b) DEMONIZING ISRAEL VIA THE HI-JACKING (PERVERSION) OF LANGUAGE By Melanie Phillips
The world's “mainstream media” swoon over terrorists and their agendas.
With malice aforethought, painting Israel up against a black propaganda exercise inverting truth and lies, unfortunately, with devastating effect
If there’s one refrain which gets me chewing the carpet, it’s the plaintive question, “Why is Israel unable to get its message across?”
The naivety behind this question is itself a large part of the answer. It’s not just the fact that – as has now become all too obvious – the demonization and delegitimization of Israel is inextricably linked to the ineradicable poison of anti-semitism.
More pertinently, Israel has been up against a black propaganda exercise which has inverted truth and lies with devastating effect. Its only equivalent in scale, skill and evil intent is the manipulative mind control practiced by totalitarian regimes.
No coincidence: This strategy of psychological warfare deployed by the Palestinians was devised by Yasser Arafat in cahoots with the Soviets, who knew a thing or two about subverting the values of an entire culture. And the war against the Jews is part of the broader war against the free world and the core tenets of Western civilization.
The attempt to counter this by Israel’s defenders has been woefully misjudged. There’s the defensive-crouch response (“Hey guys, why are you dumping on us – can’t you see we’re the victims here?”) which, by responding on the enemy’s own distorted grounds of purported Israeli aggression, is itself halfway to conceding defeat.
Or there’s the attempt to persuade the world of Israel’s elevated standards of ethical behavior (“Hey guys, look at all the Palestinians we’re treating in our hospitals, even including the ones who’ve just tried to murder us!”)
Since the one thing the Western world does not want to hear is the perceived moral superiority of the Jews – of which it is pathologically, irredeemably and sometimes murderously jealous – this particular approach turns abject stupidity into an art form.
Given that the demonization of Israel is the key strategy in the war of extermination being waged against it, “getting Israel’s message across” is the equivalent to using a leaky bucket to ward off a tsunami.
The essence of such psychological warfare is as simple as it is seismic. It is the manipulation of language.
Words have been hijacked so that they come to be understood as the opposite of what they really signify. The importance of this tactic can hardly be overstated.
Many people know little or nothing about the Middle East and have even less interest in finding out. For them, it’s just background noise. But if the language which forms that background noise is hijacked, then the story of the Middle East is hijacked too.
Key concepts have been presented as if in mirror writing so that Israel, the victim of aggression, has been turned falsely into the aggressor while its would-be exterminators are transformed into its victims.
And that’s been achieved not just by telling lies about what’s going on today or happened in the past. Crucially, those falsehoods have been framed by language which conditions the listener to accept them because the language itself has been turned into a lie.
Consider, for example, the word “colonialism.” In left-wing ideology, colonialism is the crime of crimes that defines Western iniquity: the subjection of indigenous peoples in the developing world by white-skinned westerners who occupied their lands and ruled, enslaved and oppressed them.
Left-wingers believe that white, Western Israel has occupied the lands of the indigenous Palestinians whom it is proceeding to rule, enslave and oppress.
EVERY ELEMENT of this is demonstrably false. Israel is neither predominantly white nor Western. More than three quarters of its population, Jews as well as Arabs, are brown-skinned and originally hailed from the Middle East.
Crucially, the Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land which today comprises Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza. The Arabs merely formed one of the many waves of conquerors, including Romans, Persians, Greeks, Christians and Turks, who first drove out the Jews and then colonized their rightful and historic home.
It is therefore not the Jews who are colonizing, and thus enslaving or oppressing, anyone at all. It is the “Palestinians” who are would-be colonizers threatening again to dispossess the indigenous Jewish people of the land.
So Israel and its defenders should talk routinely about “Palestinians” as colonialists.
Many other words which have been turned into weapons of war against Israel need similarly to be reclaimed from their hijackers and restored to their true meaning.
Israel and its defenders should replace the term “peace process” with “appeasement process.” The “occupation” of the disputed territories should be replaced with “liberation.”
Because of its lethal attacks against Israeli civilians, as well as the abuse of their own civilians as human shields, Hamas should routinely be termed “Palestinian war criminals.”
Similarly, Mahmoud Abbas should always be tagged not just as a “Holocaust denier” because of his infamous doctoral thesis. On account of his continued hero-worship of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who was Hitler’s chief ally in the Middle East and planned to exterminate the Jews of the entire region in Auschwitz-style crematoria, Abbas should be described as a “neo-Nazi sympathizer”.
Some may say this is merely to hijack the language in the opposite direction. Not so. This is using it to express truths backed by evidence rather than lies. To claim the Israelis are Nazis is an obscene lie; but Abbas really is a sympathizer with the would-be leader of the Nazi extermination program in the Middle East.
And truth and evidence cannot ever be said to be hijacking the language.
As a result, background verbal noise composed of truth would begin to permeate the collective Western brain in place of the current background verbal noise of lies.
The consequence would be that the verbal conditioning which is so essential to influencing the collective mind would produce a very different outcome. The falsehoods and distortions about Israel would begin to jar badly against the story implicitly understood by the term “Palestinian colonialists.”
Totalitarian regimes understand the connection between language and thinking. The Soviet communists repeated formulaic slogans over and over again.
In his book The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer wrote that the Nazis used language to indoctrinate virtually the entire population. Through their repeated use of particular words in propaganda, speeches and publications, they changed their meaning and context to serve their purposes.
Exactly the same tactics of language control and the hijacking of meaning are being used by today’s “progressive” cultural totalitarians against both Israel and the West – where words and phrases such as “liberal,” “social justice” or “equality” have been turned into their precise opposite.
Language and thinking are linked. The issue is whether that link is to be used to service truth or lies.
Words are being used to twist and enslave the Western mind and to empower the destroyers of the innocent. Language has to be reclaimed from its hijackers and restored to its real meaning if truth, justice and collective sanity are to be restored.
The writer is a columnist for The Times (UK). Her novel The Legacy and her memoir Guardian Angel are available from Amazon.com.
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