A Ton Of Meaty Reading.

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Very long, very informative, very worthwhile read

 It is the latest assessment DIA has published.  You should, at least, peruse it. 

https://www.dia.mil/Portals/110/Images/News/Military_Powers_Publications/Iran_Military_Power_LR.pdf

And:

 https://open.substack.com/pub/dossier/p/who-actually-commands-the-american?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

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What Marine Sgt. Cole said makes sense to me but maybe Biden disagrees. Semper Fi.

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Sgt. Cole is right: you either kill people in war or you lose.

 

Quote from a WWII veteran overhearing someone say that `You can't bomb an ideology.": "The hell you can't, because we did it. These Muslims are no different than the [Imperial] Japanese. The Japs had their suicide bombers too. And we stopped them. What it takes is the resolve and will to use a level of brutality and violence that your generations can't stomach. And until you can, this shit won't stop. It took us on the beaches with bullets, clearing out caves with flame throwers, and men like LeMay burning down their cities, killing people by the tens of thousands. And then it took 2 atom bombs on top of it.  Plus we had to bomb the shit out of German cities to get them to quit fighting. But, if that was what it took to win, we were willing to do it. Until you are willing to do the same...well I hope you enjoy this shit, because it ain't going to stop!" Back then, we had leadership, resolve, resources and determination. Today we're afraid to hurt people's feelings....and worry about which bathroom to piss in!!!

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Looks Like the Georgia RICO Case Against Trump Just Imploded

By ATHENA THORNE

   

Co-incidental to her zeal for prosecuting front-running presidential candidate Donald Trump, Fulton County, Ga., DA Fani Willis hired herself a special prosecutor with benefits, according to a new court filing. 

The motion alleges that Willis hired private attorney Nathan Wade to act as her special prosecutor in her vast, convoluted RICO case against Trump and 18 others who dared pursue legal remedies for what they believed was a compromised 2020 election. She did this despite having more than one attorney within her own office who was perfectly capable of prosecuting the case. And she did it despite Wade being unqualified to handle the biggest case in Fulton County history, as he has never actually prosecuted a felony RICO case before. So why would Willis hire him?

The alleged answer is that the married father of two was tapping the dirty DA. And this opens up a whole can of big, fat ethical and legal worms that are now squirming exuberantly atop Fanis's prosecution house of cards.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the story Monday:

District Attorney Fani Willis improperly hired an alleged romantic partner to prosecute Donald Trump and financially benefited from their relationship, according to a court motion filed Monday which argued the criminal charges in the case were unconstitutional.

The bombshell public filing alleged that special prosecutor Nathan Wade, a private attorney, paid for lavish vacations he took with Willis using the Fulton County funds his law firm received. County records show that Wade, who has played a prominent role in the election interference case, has been paid nearly $654,000 in legal fees since January 2022. The DA authorizes his compensation.

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I have been opposed to everything Israel was doing so you liberals owe those who suffered and are no longer alive an apology.

I remain a hawk but a clear eyed, empathetic one.  Me

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Five Words for When the War Ends

By Sherwin Pomerantz

When the war ends or, as is more likely, when it drags out for a while as a war of attrition, the five most important words that we will all have to say to each other are:  “I’m sorry…..you were right!” 

If we can do this as a nation, we will have learned the lessons of a war that threatened our future here and rightfully scared the living daylights out of Jews everywhere.

Who needs to say these words and to whom?

Those of us who supported the pullout from Gaza in 2005 need to say to those who warned us of what might happen “I’m sorry…..you were right!”  You warned us that if we pulled everyone out of Gaza and destroyed the 21 Israeli settlements there that ultimately, we would be faced with an enemy in spitting distance of our southern flank.  We thought that the Gazans under the leadership of the Palestinian authority would take that land and possibly convert it into the Singapore of the Middle East.  Sadly, we were the dreamers and you were right, it did become an enemy on our southern flank and October 7th was the result.

Those of us who were in favor of the Oslo Accords when they were presented for a vote in 1993 need to say to those who warned us that the accords would result in the death and maiming of Israelis by an enemy on our eastern flank were accurate in their predictions.  We later had to build a wall in order to minimize the damage, yet terrorist attacks continue until today.  So we need to say to you as well, “I’m sorry…..you were right!”

 

Those of you who came into power with a right-wing coalition in November, 2022 and pursued a framework of judicial reform that caused the biggest political rift in the history of Israel need to say to those of us who objected, “I’m sorry…..you were right!”  Your pursuit of that reform in the face of nine months of civil unrest projected weakness to our enemies who then took the opportunity to attack us while we were otherwise engaged. You made a mistake and you are obligated to acknowledge it. 

On this same subject, the leadership of Israel’s Supreme Court in the years prior to 2022 also need to say to all of us, “I’m sorry…..you were right!”  Their arrogating power to themselves to regularly override the prerogative of the elected representatives of the people to make laws was, in itself, a festering wound which culminated in the push by the right last year to “take the country” back at they liked to say.  You were as guilty of acting without consensus over the years as the current government was in 2022.   You are both to blame and need to recognize it.

While it is true that in this period of conflict there is lot of discussion of what will happen with Gaza, who will rule there, who will be in charge of security issues, how will Israelis feel safe living in the area of the “Gaza envelope”, and how best to move forward, those are administrative issues similar to those faced by any nation that gets drawn into war and comes out victorious.  They are important questions to be sure but they don’t deal with the soul of Israel.

For us to move forward as a nation, we will need to heal our collective souls and ensure that we do not slip back into the kind of civil strife we experienced in the first nine months of 2023.  Our challenge will be to take the unity that developed almost instantaneously on October 8th and internalize that as the norm among our people both here and abroad, for they too have been traumatized by the events of October 7th.

How do we do this?  How do we make this happen?

I believe that we need to start speaking this way now and hear these words from our senior political, religious and commercial leadership, led by the President of Israel.  President Herzog needs to use his office to set the tone for our communal effort to heal our collective soul and underscore the fact that a country our size and a people so relatively small in numbers, cannot, must not, should not ever again allow itself to be split by civil strife.

We are a smart people in a nation that has used that intelligence in so many ways to make the world a better place.  It is time we took those “smarts” and used them to ensure that this country will, once again, be a safe and secure haven for the Jewish people. We do not ever want to see a “next time.”

It was Ben Gurion who said: “Suffering makes a people greater, and we have suffered much. We had a message to give the world, but we were overwhelmed, and the message was cut off in the middle. In time there will be millions of us - becoming stronger and stronger - and we will complete the message.”  Today there are millions of us here and it is time to complete the message…..it is in our hands to do so and we dare not miss the opportunity.

  And:
  

More evidence why being a doubting hawk is the preferred route.

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Rashid Khalidi’s Happy Dhimmi Jews Whitewashing Islamic Jew-hate. by Andrew Harrod

Posted By Ruth King

https://www.frontpagemag.com/rashid-khalidis-happy-dhimmi-jews/

“The idea that Jews in the Arab countries have always been subject to persecution culminating in their being forced to flee from the Arab countries is fundamentally false,” stated Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi in a December 14 webinar. Thus, this Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) propagandist whitewashed historic Islamic anti-Semitic doctrines that continue to threaten Jews to this day.

Khalidi spoke to the anti-Israel website Jadaliyya’s as part of its “Gaza in Context: Collaborative Teach-In Series” in an episode on “Colonial Narratives (Part 2).” Jadaliyya’s moderator was Bassam Haddad, director of George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

Khalidi propagated the well-worn trope, discredited as the “Happy Dhimmi” myth, that Jews, a subjugated non-Muslim minority, “lived in relative security and with relative prosperity” in Muslim countries across the centuries. Rather, “Europe was the source of antisemitism. Christian doctrine was the source of antisemitism,” he simplistically stated. Jews with backgrounds in the Mizrachi (Hebrew: Eastern) diaspora in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) vigorously refute such one-sided assertions.

Nonetheless, Khalidi superficially claimed that the “situation of Jews in Europe was infinitely worse than in any other part of the world.” Therefore, Jews after 1492 “took refuge as a result when they were expelled in particular from Spain and Portugal in Morocco, in North Africa, in other parts of the Ottoman Empire,” he stated. Sultan Bayezid II’s supposed response to this influx of enterprising Jews into his empire prompted by Spanish royal intolerance has become historic. “Can such a king be called wise and intelligent—one who impoverishes his country and enriches my kingdom?” Bayezid II is recorded as saying.

Complicating Khalidi’s myopic thesis, however, other Iberian Jews fled to destinations in Europe such as Germany or Poland, while Ottoman rule also had its fair share of Jew persecution. Ultimately, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth(1569-1648) became home to the majority of world Jewry and known as the Paradisus Judeaorum for the religious tolerance Jews enjoyed there. By 1860, 90 percent of world Jewry was in Europe, which raises the question why these Jews did not follow Khalidi’s analysis and move to a supposedly more tolerant Muslim world.

Europe remained a global Jewish center until before the Nazi genocide during World War II, with 57 percent of world Jewry, 9.5 million of 16.6 million Jews, living in Europe in 1939. When anti-Semitic persecution had arisen in Europe, the New World remained the preferred refuge of Jews, countries such as Argentina, home to about 200,000 Jews by the 1930s, and, above all, America. Accordingly, by the time the United States instituted immigration restrictions in 1924, American Jews numbered some 3.5 million, the world’s second-largest Jewish community after Eastern Europe.

While Jews throughout history have confronted bitter discrimination and oppression in Muslim societies, only in Western countries where citizenship has separated from religion have Jews ever experienced any sense of equality. Precisely for this reason, Jews and other non-Muslim communities in MENA often supported European colonialism, which eliminated Islam’s second-class sharia status for non-Muslims. Meanwhile in the West itself before World War II, for example, Jewish communities throughout Europe were increasingly assimilated while America has become the “golden land” for Jews alongside Israel, the “Promised Land.” Due to immigrationfrom the former Soviet Union, even modern Germany saw its Jewish population by 2010 grow to over 230,000, slightly more than the 195,000 who lived in Nazi Germany in 1939 before the Holocaust’s ravages.

In contrast to the wildly varying historical experiences of Jews in the Western world, Khalidi bases his assessment on MENA Jews, who numbered only about one million in 1945. In the years following Israel’s establishment in 1948, brutal waves of repression against Jews spread across the MENA region, causing a long-term ethnic cleansing. Now only a few thousand Jews remain there in isolated, dying communities.

Such animosity, Khalidi suggested, arose merely because of modern Zionism, which “raised the specter of dual loyalty for Arab Jewish communities.” “There were never any conflicts between Arabs and Jews in Palestine before the rise of modern political Zionism,” he stated, notwithstanding the history of depredations and pogroms endured by Jews there in the nineteenth-century. Jews also “lived completely peacefully for centuries in Iraq,” he added, a ludicrously superficial assessment unsupported by centuries of history.

These views flow logically from Khalidi’s apparently key inspiration on Jewish-Muslim relations, namely Iraqi-born, British-Israeli historian Avi Schlaim, who has become a vociferous anti-Zionist. Khalidi seemed particularly enamored with Schlaim’s thesis that Israel through its Mossad intelligence service organized a bombing spree in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1950-1951 to scare Iraq’s supposedly otherwise content Jews into fleeing to Israel. Schlaim “discovered that the attacks that ultimately led the Jewish community to panic and flee were mounted, most of them, by the Mossad,” Khalidi claimed.

By contrast, all evidence indicates that 110,000 Jews who fled Iraq in these two years needed no incentive to flee an increasingly antisemitic, dangerous Iraq. These bombing incidents remained little-noticed and only claimed four deaths in one instance. While linkages between these bombings and Mossad is flimsy, most analysts think that Iraqi nationalists lay behind the bombings, as with previous anti-Jewish bombings in Iraqi history.

Yet Khalidi continues to suggest that Mizrachi Jews in Israel are just imagining the Islamic oppression they fled. In Israel, these Jews “became indoctrinated in Israel in ways have led them to become in some cases even more extreme in their views towards Arabs than other Israelis,” he stated. He could learn much from what Mizrachi Jews in the United States have felt after Hamas’ October 7 atrocious assault upon Israel from the Gaza Strip. As one Mizrachi Jewish activist noted, “violent imagery coming out of Israel has triggered a wave of anxiety and post-trauma among some of our elders who faced anti-Semitic mobs and ethnic cleansing” in MENA.

Similarly, Kibbutz Be’eri has become notorious as the October 7 “Ground Zero,” which cost this kibbutz 100 dead, a tenth of the community’s residents. The kibbutz’s founders include Iraqi Jews, who had trekked the desert to the outgoing British League of Nations Palestine Mandate in 1947 after having witnessed the horrors of Baghdad’s 1941 Farhud pogrom. Meanwhile Sderot, a town often targeted by Hamas rockets, developed from an Israeli transit camp (ma’abara) for North African and Iranian Jewish refugees.

Fantasizing about Jews at peace with Islam comports with Khalidi’s embrace of the longstanding trope that Zionism is not truly indigenous to the Middle East. “Zionism is a modern Eastern European nationalist movement transplanted to the Middle East,” he stated, which ignores Zionist traditions among Mizrachi Jews. He also asserted that “about 70 percent of the immigrants to Israel come from Europe and North America,” which might have been true during Israel’s pre-state settlement, but today over half of Israel’s Jews are from Mizrachi backgrounds.

Khalidi also found “questionable” whether Western diaspora Ashkenazi Jews “have any genetic connection to” the MENA region. This invoked the discredited thesis that Jews in the European diaspora merely descended from converts. Contrarily, modern genetics has demonstrated the connections of Jews from European and other diaspora backgrounds to one common Jewish nation.

Israel’s defenders, Khalidi complained, resort to the “last refuge of scoundrels, using power to prevent speech, using power to prevent organization, they have no arguments,” but merely call opponents “anti-Semitic” and “genocidal.” Yet his denial of Islam’s historically rampant Jew-hatred is not only substantially anti-Semitic, but only aids and abets the rhetoric supporting the modern genocidal jihad against Israel’s existence. Khalidi is just one more sickening example of how radical ideology has poisoned the Ivy League and wider academia.

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Let the brilliant Cliff May's words reach God's ears because Biden and all his lackeys are deaf an dumb.

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Israel’s long war

Israelis won’t cease firing until Tehran’s proxies do

By Clifford D. May

The war Hamas launched against Israel on Oct. 7 is unlikely to end soon.

Hamas is still firing missiles. It still has snipers in schools and mosques, and trigger-pullers blending in with civilians on Gaza’s streets.

Its two top military commanders, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, are believed to have surrounded themselves with hostages deep in the elaborate tunnel network constructed over the years since Israelis withdrew from Gaza.

But Israel is changing the way it fights. The first phase was an air campaign targeting buildings in which – and under which –Hamas had command-and-control centers and armories.

In the second phase, Israeli infantry engaged in grueling urban combat.Phase III is to be lower intensity with fewer boots on the ground. Elite units will conduct special operations. More tunnels will be destroyed. Attempts to rescue hostages will continue.

The goal remains unchanged: to cripple Hamas’ military and governing capabilities.

One senior Hamas leader was killed last week, but not in Gaza. Salih al-Arouri was conducting a meeting in a high-rise building in a Beirut suburb. According to the Lebanon24 news website, a missile eliminated him and his deputies. No one else in the building was hurt.

While Jerusalem has not claimed responsibility, David Barnea, chief of the Mossad, has pledged that all those involved in planning or carrying out the atrocities of October 7 will face justice.

On October 8, Hezbollah, the most valued foreign legion of Iran’s rulers, began firing rockets into northern Israel, causing close to 100,000 Israelis to flee their cities, villages, and farms.

Hezbollah is capable of such aggression due to failed diplomacy. Under U.N. Resolution 1701, the Israelis agreed to a ceasefire in the Second Lebanon War of 2006. In exchange, southern Lebanon was to become “free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon.”

Hezbollah went on to install as many as 200,000 missiles in southern Lebanese mosques, schools, and hospitals, while both the Lebanese Armed Forces and the U.N. forces charged with enforcing 1701 looked on with bovine passivity.

Israel is now demanding the belated implementation of 1701, so that Israeli civilians can feel safe enough to return to their homes.

“There is a short window of time for diplomatic understandings, which we prefer,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant last week told Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein. “We will not tolerate the threats posed by the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, and we will ensure the security of our citizens.”

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah responded: “If the enemy thinks of waging a war on Lebanon, we will fight without restraint, without rules, without limits and without restrictions.” As you may have inferred, Hezbollah has never been punctilious about rules, limits, and restrictions.

With one war simmering and another brewing, debates have nevertheless begun about what should happen in Gaza the “day after.”

Last week, Mr. Gallant presented to the U.S. a plan not approved by Israel’s coalition government, which though united on the necessity of defeating Hamas and Hezbollah, remains divided on other issues. 

Under this plan, “Hamas will not rule Gaza, and Israel will not rule Gaza.” However, the IDF will retain “operational freedom of action and take necessary steps to ensure no terror resurgence.”

Responsibility to restore basic government services would be taken on by Palestinian civil servants regarded as more technocratic than ideological. Israel’s Defense Ministry reportedly has a list of such people.

The Biden administration, however, is insisting that a “revitalized Palestinian Authority” be given a leading role. How such revitalization might be achieved remains unclear.

Between 2006 and 2007, Hamas fought a civil war to force the PA out of Gaza. Since then, the PA has governed only the West Bank, and by no means effectively.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas was elected to a single four-year term that began in 2005. He’s remained in office ever since, not bothering to ask Palestinians for their vote a second time.

In November, Mr. Abbas celebrated his 88th birthday. A December poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, found that 90 percent of Palestinians want him to resign.

An idea that’s come from the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) would involve empowering traditional Gazan leaders, the heads of tribes and clans whom Hamas stripped of any authority, often through violence.

No one expects such figures to sing kumbaya with Israelis. But they might prefer to put their energies and additional aid from “the international donor community” into rebuilding Gaza rather than preparing for another round of slaughtering, torturing, raping, and baby-stealing leading to another catastrophic war.

Yahya R. Sarraj, the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City, last month published an essay in The New York Times, lamenting the destruction of his hometown’s “intricately designed Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center,” its theater, its public library, its zoo, its “Children’s Happiness Center,” its “squares, mosques, churches and parks,” its seafront which includes “a promenade,” and “recreation areas.”

He didn’t address how it’s possible that the Gaza he describes is so dramatically different from the picture painted by Israel’s enemies: a territory under “occupation” (despite the 2005 withdrawal of every Israeli farmer and soldier); “blockaded” (despite the huge quantity of weapons Hamas managed to import); with Gazans subjected to Israeli “genocide” (even as the population has burgeoned); an “unliveable” (sic) “open-air prison” (in the words of the U.N.).

“Why can’t we live in peace and have open borders and free trade?” the mayor asks at the end of his essay.

I’ll answer: You can, Mr. Sarraj, if new Gazan leaders are willing to nonviolently coexist alongside Israelis rather than exterminate Israelis. That outcome, I hope you understand, can come about only after Hamas is defeated

Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.

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