Semper Fi!
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I understand why people are anti-Semitic because everyone needs a scape goat. Some feel economically insecure, some have experienced a rejection by someone or entity and the reasons are numerous. We know Palestinians acknowledge their loss to Israel as one of the saddest periods in their history . Rather than acknowledge their loss they project their feelings on the victorious Israelis.
When it comes to Fascist Islamists their hatred is driven by religion as well as they are taught/trained , beginning at 4 years, to hate. Pictures abound of young children marching in uniforms with weapons shouting "kill Jews." Like Greta, they are being indoctrinated at an impressionable age.
When your adversary is willing to impose suffering on their future generations and sworn to your destruction and death negotiations are impossible and totally illogic as well as dangerous..
Doing so would become a Hatfield and McCoy matter.
Living next to murders who will kill and behead your children leaves no room for negotiations and when they attack and conduct wanton murders of your fellow citizens you would have blood on your own hands if you negotiated anything with them.
One does not go around kissing poisonous snakes.
This is why I have said for years we should quit funding the U.N. . I would not object if we left it to be controlled by the likes of China, Russia etc. Think of all the parking revenue that would accrue.
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The ‘Ceasefire’ in Gaza Mirage
Calls by some Democrats for both sides to end the violence now are a license for Hamas.
By The Editorial Board
Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the assault on Israel. But they followed that up with calls for both sides to end the violence even as Hamas militia were gunning down Israeli women and children in their homes.
“An immediate ceasefire and de-escalation is urgently needed to save lives,” said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Ms. Omar chimed in that “we need to call for deescalation and ceasefire.” These are the first of what are likely to be many such calls from the Democratic left as Israel responds with force to the war Hamas started.
A ceasefire now would reward those who started the war that by this writing had killed 700 in Israel. These include many foreign nationals and probably some Americans. Is Israel supposed to tolerate this deliberate murder and not retaliate against those who planned and executed it?
Israel has a right to self-defense, and that means eradicating the threat from Hamas, and from Hezbollah in Lebanon if it comes to that. The failure to do so will mean more violence in the future as the Islamists who are backed by Iran conclude the Jewish state has lost its willingness to fight. Israel also has a right to rescue its citizens who have been taken as hostages to Gaza, even at the risk of more casualties.
Hamas fighters hide behind Palestinian civilians so they can play to Western sympathy, but that is another reason for eliminating Hamas and Islamic Jihad as threats. They terrorize Palestinians as well. The time for a ceasefire is when Israel has defeated its enemies.
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Israel’s Opportunity to Destroy Hamas
The security establishment has feared engagement in Gaza more than the terror group’s rule. Saturday’s attack may change that.
By Daniel Pipes
Hamas’s surprise attack is a humanitarian horror. It is also a strategic opportunity for Israel, the U.S. and democracies everywhere.
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which author Cynthia Farahat describes as “the world’s incubator of modern Islamic terrorism.” From Hamas’s origins in 1987, it has engaged in violence against Israelis, Palestinians and whoever else might cross its path. A sequence of Israeli missteps led in 2007 to its taking power in the Gaza Strip, an area the size of Omaha, Neb., with a population of two million. It imposed a totalitarian rule on Gaza similar to that of the mullahs in Iran, attempting to implement medieval strictures, oppressing its own population, and threatening to destroy Israel.
There are many indications that Gazans hate Hamas. “There is boiling anger in the streets against the Hamas movement,” Tholfekar Swairjo, a Gazan political analyst, told NPR in 2022. “They are blamed for the very low quality of life in Gaza.” A 32-year-old woman said that “most Gazans have stopped believing in Hamas and the others. You know why? Because they don’t feed us, they don’t provide anything. You have to depend on yourself. How can we build a future with these guys?”
Polling finds overwhelming support among Palestinians, especially in Gaza, for the statement that “Palestinians should push harder to replace their own political leaders with more effective and less corrupt ones.” Gazans also reject Hamas by emigrating in droves. An estimated 250,000 to 350,000 young adults have left the strip since Hamas took over in 2007.
In short, most Gazans loathe Hamas, but they dare not rise up against their power-hungry oppressors, who enjoy support from Iran. What about Israel? It has the motive and the means to end Hamas rule, but its security establishment has preferred that Hamas, for all its horrors and threats, stay in power rather than have the Israel Defense Forces move back into Gaza (from which they withdrew in 2005) and run the territory again. For one sign of Israel’s acquiescence to Hamas rule, note that it permits and even encourages the government of Qatar to send Hamas $30 million a month.
As a result, nothing changes. Perhaps the moment has come for American leadership. In 2003, President George W. Bush said that “the free world, those who love freedom and peace, must deal harshly with Hamas” and that “Hamas must be dismantled.” President Barack Obama said in 2014: “I have no sympathy for Hamas. I have great sympathy for ordinary people who are struggling within Gaza.”
Joe Biden should join their ranks. In a statement Saturday, he said he “unequivocally condemns this appalling assault”—a good start. The next step is to urge Israel to remove Hamas. Perhaps this, along with the size and barbarism of the latest assault, will change the Israeli security establishment’s reluctant acceptance of Hamas and persuade it to rid the world of this scourge.
Once Gaza has been secured, Israel would find a great number of its inhabitants ready to start over and build productive lives rather than focus endlessly and hopelessly on the destruction of Israel. Gaza could aspire to become the “Singapore of the Middle East” of which optimists dreamed decades ago. None of this can happen as long as Iran’s medieval-minded agents run the enclave.
The Hamas charter of 1988 calls for Islam to “obliterate” Israel. After this vicious assault, the time has come for Israel to obliterate Hamas.
Mr. Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum.
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Israel Faces Its 9/11
Amid the shock and horror, the nation stands together with moral clarity and resolve.
By Gil Troy
Historical analogies are always tricky, but it’s hard to avoid the thought that Saturday was Israel’s 9/11. At least 600 are dead, hundreds wounded, and possibly dozens kidnapped in a country the size of New Jersey. Death, destruction and mayhem rained down on the Jewish state. But so did a moral clarity and resolve that characterizes democracies under attack—and that terrorists always underestimate.
It shouldn’t be necessary to say, but the vicious, wide-scale attack Hamas launched against Israelis sleeping at home, waiting in bus stops, walking the streets, going to synagogue, living in nursing homes, is reprehensible and inexcusable. The videos Palestinians have proudly posted—of terrorists going house-to-house, an Israeli man in shorts handcuffed, a woman screaming on a motorcycle, being taken to Gaza as hostages—are chilling. The story of Yoni Asher, 37—whose wife, 5- and 3-year-old daughters and mother-in-law were apparently abducted to Gaza—is heartbreaking. Videos of an Israeli woman’s corpse being spit on by terrorists are barbaric.
One wonders if any of those left-wingers who have spent years justifying and thus encouraging Palestinian terrorism will re-evaluate their narrative, of poor defenseless Palestinians victimized by Israeli bullies.
The 9/11 analogy goes deeper than the sheer evil terrorists perpetrated and the delight their enablers took in the massive loss of life. America on Sept. 10, 2001, was complacent. The 9/11 Commission reported not only that “the nation was unprepared” for the attack, but that President Bill Clinton had passed over opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden. It turned out that hours before the attack, Mr. Clinton said of Bin Laden that “I nearly got him” but he feared the collateral damage. Israel has been too divided over domestic politics, ignoring that the true dangers lurked outside the country.
Both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 demonstrate the perils of being too sentimental about your enemies. Since 2005, when Israel withdrew from all of Gaza for the sake of peace, it has repeatedly struggled with Mr. Clinton’s dilemma: What do you do when your enemy hides behind civilians? A functional nation is most responsible for protecting its own citizens, especially when threatened by adversaries who respect no rules of war or simple decency.
Israel needs to fight this latest battle with a clarity that its many previous conflicts with Gaza lacked. We all need to remember the assurances in 2005, that Gaza would flourish once the Israeli “occupiers” left. We need to recall how Hamas brutally seized power in June 2007, slaughtering rivals and throwing Mohammed Sweirki, an officer in the Palestinian Presidential Guard, off the top of a 15-story apartment building.
And Israel needs to do what it takes to protect its citizens. As President Biden tweeted on Saturday: “Israel has a right to defend itself—full stop.” Hamas doesn’t care about Israeli life—or Palestinian life for that matter. Palestinian culture, however, worships land. This round of fighting mustn’t end until Israel has created an extended buffer zone protecting every Israeli, even if it requires bulldozing houses and evacuating Gazans.
They will call it “ethnic cleansing,” but it is wholly justified self-defense. Going forward, any violence of any kind from the Gaza Strip should be met by an expansion of the buffer zone, 10 yards at a time.
This Saturday morning, my family and I awoke to sirens in Jerusalem at 8:20 a.m.—approximately two hours after Hamas terrorists started swarming Israel’s border less than 50 miles from our home. Despite three sirens over the next 40 minutes, we kept to our routine, and I went to pray with friends in our regular outdoor minyan, an informal prayer group we started during Covid. We celebrated this special Sabbath, which coincided with Simchat Torah, the Jewish holiday rejoicing in the teaching and values of the five Books of Moses. We ended by spontaneously singing “Ani Ma’amin,” the Holocaust martyr’s ballad of eternal faith, and “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem.
Amid the chaos—and seven more sirens—I stood outside the front yard where we pray. Guarding 40 of your friends, unarmed, with terrorists all over your country rampaging, simplifies things in a profound way. When you know what you are willing to die for, you also know what you are willing to live for. That sense of purpose is why Israel will prevail. It makes clear what seems from afar the great anomaly of Israel, which every Israeli understands up close. Israel may have brutal enemies and continuing political challenges. But Israelis rank as among the world’s happiest people, because they share a sense of common destiny, a sense of community, and a sense of purpose that gives their lives meaning amid the danger.
Mr. Troy is a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University and editor of “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings.”
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Thomas Sowell on the Trouble With ‘Social Justice’
The eminent economist faults intellectuals who expect equal outcomes and treat individuals as if they were mere ‘chess pieces.’
By Jason L. Riley
Thomas Sowell is best known for his insights on racial controversies, but race isn’t the main topic of most of his books in a career that spans more than six decades. Mr. Sowell, 93, is an economist who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where his professors included Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other future Nobel laureates. His specialty is the history of ideas, and his most recent book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” harks back to his writings on social theory and intellectual history, which include “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980), “The Vision of the Anointed” (1996) and “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” (1999).
In his 1987 classic, “A Conflict of Visions,” Mr. Sowell attempted to explain what drives our centuries-old ideological disputes about freedom, justice, equality and power. The contrasting “visions” in the title referred to the implicit assumptions that guide a person’s thinking. On one side you have the “constrained” vision, which sees humanity as hopelessly flawed. This view is encapsulated in Edmund Burke’s declaration that “we cannot change the nature of things and of men—but must act upon them as best we can” and in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can ever be made.”
The opposite is the “unconstrained,” or utopian, view of the human condition. It’s the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. Mr. Sowell begins “Social Justice Fallacies” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”
Mr. Sowell has been a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution since 1980. In a phone interview, he describes the central fallacy of social-justice advocacy as “the assumption that disparities are strange, and that in the normal course of events we would expect people to be pretty much randomly distributed in various occupations, income levels, institutions and so forth.”
He says that’s an assumption based on hope rather than experience or hard evidence. “We can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition—in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history,” he writes in the book’s opening chapter on “equal chances fallacies.” He acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination exist and contributed to disparate outcomes. But he notes that “these vices are in fact among many influences that prevent different groups of people—whether classes, races or nations—from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms or other terms.”
For Mr. Sowell, the tremendous variety of geographic, cultural and demographic differences among groups makes anything approximating an even distribution of preferences, habits and skills close to impossible. The progressive left holds up as a norm a state the world has never seen, and regards as an anomaly something seen in societies all over the world and down through history. “There’s this sort of mysticism that disparities must show that someone’s done something wrong” to a lagging group, Mr. Sowell says. The social-justice vision “starts off by reducing the search for causation to a search for blame. And for so much of what happens, there is no blame.”
To illustrate the point, the book’s chapter on racial fallacies cites recent census data on poverty. “Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race—either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination,” Mr. Sowell writes. Liberals argue that higher black poverty rates are mainly a product of slavery, Jim Crow and of lingering “systemic racism.” Yet there are pockets of the U.S. populated almost exclusively by white people who experience no racism and who nevertheless earn significantly less than blacks.
The book cites Clay and Owsley counties in Appalachian Kentucky, places “that are more than 90 percent white, where the median household income is not only less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole, but also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole.”
It’s been true for some time, Mr. Sowell says, that black behavioral patterns play a bigger role in racial disparities than racism does. Black married couples have had poverty rates in the single digits for more than a quarter-century. And black married couples “in which both husband and wife were college-educated earned slightly more than white married couples where both husband and wife were college-educated.” He adds that in a landmark 1899 study of blacks in Philadelphia, the race scholar W.E.B. Du Bois “said that if white people were to lose their prejudices overnight, it would make very little difference to most black people. He said some few would get better positions than they have right now, but for the mass it would be pretty much the same.”
Noting today’s black-white wealth disparities, authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi have advocated reparations in the name of social justice. So have such prominent organizations as the NAACP and Black Lives Matter. Mr. Sowell can’t take their arguments seriously. “The situation of slavery in some ways is much like the situation of conquered people,” he says. “There’s no question whatsoever that conquered people have been treated in a terrible way. Being conquered by the Romans was not a fate you would wish on anyone. But the fact is that the net result has been that those parts of Europe conquered by the Romans have been the most advanced parts of Europe for centuries.
“Similarly, when someone black says . . . ‘I’m worse off because of slavery,’ there’s no way in hell you can say that with a straight face. If you’re going to base reparations on the difference between where blacks today would be if it were not for slavery, then blacks would have to pay reparations to white people.”
Mr. Sowell is no stranger to poverty, prejudice or discrimination. He was born in segregated North Carolina in 1930, orphaned as a toddler and raised in Harlem from age 9. He never finished high school and earned his GED after serving a stint in the Marines during the Korean War. The GI bill enabled him to enroll in college, first at historically black Howard University, before moving on to Harvard, Columbia and finally the University of Chicago.
He says that whether social-justice proponents are pushing for slavery reparations or higher taxes on the rich, their real agenda is the confiscation and redistribution of wealth. Enthralled by what he calls the “chess-pieces fallacy,” progressives treat individuals like inert objects. “I got that from Adam Smith, who had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who feel they can move around people much as one moves around chess pieces,” he says.
“That fallacy takes many forms, and taxation is a classic example.” The fallacy is assuming that “tax hikes and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction, when often they move in the opposite direction.” Liberals say, “ ‘We need more money, so we’ll make the wealthy pay their fair share,’ which is never defined, of course. But the wealthy are not just going to sit there and do nothing.”
A historical example is when “the British decided they would put a new tax on the American colonies. It turns out they not only didn’t get any more revenue, but they lost the tax revenue they had been getting.” In modern times, Mr. Sowell says, studies have shown repeatedly that people and businesses move their money to avoid high tax rates, and that includes migrating from states with higher levies to states with lower levies.
Although the social-justice vision isn’t new, Mr. Sowell observes that these ideas didn’t have much currency before the 20th century, in an era when intellectual elites mostly talked among themselves and reached a far smaller segment of the population. Mass communication changed that by greatly expanding their ability to shape public opinion and, by extension, government decisions: “One example was the period between the two world wars, when intellectuals managed to convince a lot of people that the way to avoid war was to avoid an arms race, and therefore that disarmament was the key to preserving peace.”
The growing influence and arrogance of the social-justice crowd bothers Mr. Sowell, which is one of the reasons he wrote the book. “Someone once said that people on the political left think that they would do what God would do if he were as well-informed as they are,” he says. He’s especially vexed by the quashing of dissent. “The fatal danger of our times today is a growing intolerance and suppression of opinions and evidence that differ from the prevailing ideologies that dominate institutions, ranging from the academic world to the corporate world, the media and government institutions,” he writes. “Many intellectuals with high accomplishments seem to assume that those accomplishments confer validity to their notions about a broad swath of issues ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments.”
Mr. Sowell’s own accomplishments cover a broad swath. He’s published more than 40 books, and “Social Justice Fallacies” is his sixth since he turned 80 in 2010. What recommends it is what recommends so many of the others: clear thinking, a straightforward prose style that combines wide learning with common sense, and an uncanny ability to take our preening elites down a notch.
Mr. Riley writes the Journal’s Upward Mobility column and is author of “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell.”
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