Compassionate Israelis, complicit Gazans
The heroic hostage-rescue operation brought out the best in the Jewish state and typical sociopathy in the Strip.
Posted By Ruthie Blum
When the news broke in Israel on Saturday that four hostages had been rescued in a daring military operation, the entire country wept with joy. Literally. Even typically cynical broadcast journalists couldn’t contain their tears as they reported from the field and in-studio.
Beachgoers who learned of the event via cell phone alerts urged the lifeguard to announce it in his megaphone. Once he obtained permission from the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality to do so, he happily obliged.
As he belted out the names of Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv—and punctuated the declaration with “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The Jewish People Lives”)—the crowds on the coast erupted in ecstatic applause.
Israelis at cafes, parks and movie theaters had a similar collective reaction. Ditto for those vacationing abroad.
The only members of society initially unable to participate in the celebration were the Shabbat-observant. Not wishing them to miss out on the jubilation, Israelis hung signs in stairwells to let their religious neighbors know what had transpired.
Others yelled out windows to passersby walking home from synagogue. Such scenes of solidarity made everyone resume crying.
They served as a reminder that Israelis have a familial bond and consider it urgent to share good tidings with one another. Later, everybody would find out about the day’s tragedy: that Ch. Insp. Arnon Zamora from the National Counter-Terrorism Unit succumbed to wounds sustained in the heroic operation.
Compare this with social ties in Gaza. The terrorist enclave is where Noa, Almog, Andrey and Shlomi spent 246 days in captivity, after being brutally abducted on Oct. 7 from the Nova music festival.
It is also the location of an additional 120 hostages whose fate is in the hands of Hamas and the “uninvolved” civilians who willingly aid and abet their uniformed counterparts. This fact is intentionally omitted by the antisemites bemoaning the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces during the rescue raid.
The undertaking was particularly complex, since the captives were being held in two separate buildings in the densely populated residential area of Nuseirat. Almog, Andrey and Shlomi were reportedly imprisoned by the family of a doctor and his son, a correspondent for The Palestine Chronicle.
The apartment—the last of a string of private homes to which they were taken over the past eight months—was a lot less shabby than the tunnels underneath, as the members of the household liked to remind them when deigning to give them something to eat.
Chalk it up to the heartwarming hospitality of a physician. Or maybe it was the kindness of his daughter and daughter-in-law that kept the confined Israelis from starving. When the time is right for all four, they will recount the details of their harrowing experience.
That their captors were eliminated is fitting. Ditto for anyone in the vicinity who began firing at the Israeli units and anti-terrorism squads engaged in saving the young woman and three men snatched from a party on Simchat Torah.
There’s camaraderie for you: a neighborhood filled with men, women and children banding together to prevent terrorized Jews from escaping their enslavement. Hamas is surely proud of its handiwork, especially in light of the international outcry on its behalf.
One thing that can be said of Gaza is it lacks internal dissent. The opposite is the case in Israel.
Indeed, by Saturday night—when Palestinians were unified in their hatred of the Jewish state for saving four of its citizens—many Israelis who had celebrated earlier in the day were out in the streets demanding that the government make a deal with Hamas to return the rest of the hostages. That Hamas refuses to enter into any agreement that removes it from power doesn’t seem to register with them.
But at least they care about human life. The Gazans, on the other hand, are too busy worshiping death to have compassion for hostages in their midst—or to replace the regime responsible for their woes.
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When you fail to stand tall you eventually shrink and take everything with you. Liberal Jews have allowed their leadership to rotten.
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One of the most brilliant interviews I ever heard. A must listen to the end:
Murray shares his thoughts after spending six months in Israel following October 7th:
https://youtu.be/iTXB8sWfCDE?si=kaSPtdZGHb2lnEVq
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Only Biden Can Keep Russia Out of Moscow
This one confusing sentence might determine if thousands of Americans die in combat.
[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]
“When Putin decided to go into Russia—I mean, he’s gonna go from Russia into Ukraine,” Biden told Time. “Trump—what he never understood—which is that Russia, he wasn’t just going into Moscow, I mean from Russia into Ukraine.”
If you understood that gibberish, you too are qualified to serve as leader of the free world.
What’s left of it.
In a wide ranging interview showcasing Biden’s foreign policy accomplishments, he confused Iran and Iraq, Russia and Ukraine, South Korea and Taiwan, Putin and Xi, and blamed his misspeaking on a cold, his voice and then claimed that the magazine thought he was crazy.
The Time transcript is notable for its incomprehensibility. The same party that used to mock ‘Bushisms’ has given us a president whom even his own supporters can’t actually understand. At times the Time transcript has no choice but to mark sections ‘unintelligible’ while other sentences just make no sense. And that’s a problem when speaking on a world stage.
Whether or not we end up in a war with China might depend on this sentence about Taiwan.
Ready? Get set, go! “It would depend on the circumstances. You know, by the way, I’ve made clear to Xi Jinping that we agree with—we signed on to previous presidents going way back—to the policy of, that, it is we are not seeking independence for Taiwan nor will we in fact, not defend Taiwan if they if, if China unilaterally tries to change the status.”
Trump was accused of using chaos to confuse and deter foreign adversaries while Biden unintentionally uses chaos to confuse them so that they don’t know what he’s talking about.
Biden promised to defend Taiwan in 2021, then claimed in 2022 that he would only do so if there was “an unprecedented attack” (echoing his warning to Putin that a “minor incursion” into Ukraine would be okay) and all the way to now with “nor will we in fact, not defend Taiwan”.
How well China interprets Biden’s double negatives could determine if it invades Taiwan. And whether we go to war with China. And whether thousands of American soldiers die in combat.
And yet with national misery reaching new heights, Biden’s only reelection arguments are that democratically electing Trump threatens democracy, abortion and foreign policy.
Trump doesn’t understand Russia, Biden insists, even while confusing Russia and Ukraine. And warning that Russia shouldn’t go into Moscow. He suggests that China is “rooting” for Trump even while accusing Trump of wanting to put “10% tariffs on everything”. Biden insists that “Trump wants to eviscerate NATO” and wouldn’t cut a deal to control North Korea’s nukes.
Not only is much of this untrue or backward, but what has Joe Biden done for foreign policy?
If Biden’s closing argument is Ukraine, Putin invaded other countries under Obama and Biden, not Trump. Likewise, China and Iran amped up their aggressive tactics under Biden. The madman theory of geopolitical deterrence works better with Trump than with Biden’s ambiguity.
Biden’s fixation on NATO impresses globalist elites, but Trump understood correctly that NATO was useless without the United States. Biden’s big idea of having Europeans handle the Ukraine war was a disaster. “We spent a lot of money in Ukraine, but Europe has spent more money than the United States has, collectively,” Biden brags. But that’s nothing to brag about.
America and Europe have spent a lot of money and prestige on Ukraine with little result except a lot of dead Russians. And while any Cold War general would have appreciated the (likely vastly overstated) number of Russian casualties, the war didn’t need to happen in the first place.
Biden adopted Obama’s strategy of leading from behind. Rather than bolstering American military credibility, he undermined it in Afghanistan and around the world. Putin accurately read Biden’s unwillingness to fight as an opening and he took it. When it did happen, he kept on leading from behind, providing weapons that slowly escalated the war rather than ending it.
The United States could have either averted or quickly ended the war by signaling clearly what its position was and what it intended to do. Instead, Biden slowly allowed the war to escalate until American weapons are being used to strike targets in Russia and Ukraine is up for NATO membership without actually having any idea of what the next step is. That’s not how you win.
China’s growing threats to Taiwan and Iran’s drone strikes on Israel are both a response to lessons learned from the Ukraine war. If Xi attacks, it’s because he will be betting that a rapid invasion can be accomplished in a matter of days or weeks while Biden is convening international conferences and waiting months or years to provide meaningful military support.
Biden would like us to believe that he is on top of foreign affairs. “I did it. And we’re now the strongest nation. We have the strongest alliance in all of America,” he brags. But then why is the world such a mess? Unable to take credit for actual accomplishments, he instead boasts about all the international organizations he helped set up. Even the ones he didn’t set up.
At one point, Biden argued that “NATO is considerably stronger than it was when I took office. I put it together” and also and claimed credit for having “put together a Quad that never existed before” which was actually put together by George W. Bush twenty years ago.
Biden wants to make it seem like he’s in control. What does that look like?
“When Putin decided to go into Russia,” Biden postures. “The reason why I cleared the intelligence so we can release the information we knew that he was going to attack, was to let the world know we were still in charge.”
Did the United States releasing intelligence about a planned Russian attack really “let the world know we were still in charge?” Is releasing intelligence what countries that are in charge do?
Being in charge means taking decisive steps, not issuing a press release.
And Biden issues press releases. He talks and boasts, and then he reacts to what someone else does, whether it’s Russia, China, Iran or any of the other players on the board. The final tragic summary of Biden’s foreign policy isn’t that he sold out allies or wasted American lives, it’s that he never does take charge because he reacts, rather than acts. Whatever position he takes can be reversed by a forceful enough foreign or domestic campaign because he’s weak.
Biden got into a war in Ukraine that he initially opposed because he’s weak. And he betrayed Israel after his initial support because he’s weak. Given a chance, he’ll betray Taiwan too.
“We are, we are the world power. And what I inherited, as a consequence of the mistake that we made in Afghanistan is a—was not a loss in Afghanistan, excuse my cold,” Biden tremulously opened the interview.
This is not how a world power acts or talks. The Ottoman Empire used to be called the Sick Man of Europe. Under Biden, America is the Sick Man of the World. But hopefully it’s only a cold.
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And:
Only Biden Can Keep Russia Out of Moscow
This one confusing sentence might determine if thousands of Americans die in combat
by Daniel Greenfield
“When Putin decided to go into Russia—I mean, he’s gonna go from Russia into Ukraine,” Biden told Time. “Trump—what he never understood—which is that Russia, he wasn’t just going into Moscow, I mean from Russia into Ukraine.”
If you understood that gibberish, you too are qualified to serve as leader of the free world.
What’s left of it.
In a wide ranging interview showcasing Biden’s foreign policy accomplishments, he confused Iran and Iraq, Russia and Ukraine, South Korea and Taiwan, Putin and Xi, and blamed his misspeaking on a cold, his voice and then claimed that the magazine thought he was crazy.
The Time transcript is notable for its incomprehensibility. The same party that used to mock ‘Bushisms’ has given us a president whom even his own supporters can’t actually understand. At times the Time transcript has no choice but to mark sections ‘unintelligible’ while other sentences just make no sense. And that’s a problem when speaking on a world stage.
Whether or not we end up in a war with China might depend on this sentence about Taiwan.
Ready? Get set, go! “It would depend on the circumstances. You know, by the way, I’ve made clear to Xi Jinping that we agree with—we signed on to previous presidents going way back—to the policy of, that, it is we are not seeking independence for Taiwan nor will we in fact, not defend Taiwan if they if, if China unilaterally tries to change the status.”
Trump was accused of using chaos to confuse and deter foreign adversaries while Biden unintentionally uses chaos to confuse them so that they don’t know what he’s talking about.
Biden promised to defend Taiwan in 2021, then claimed in 2022 that he would only do so if there was “an unprecedented attack” (echoing his warning to Putin that a “minor incursion” into Ukraine would be okay) and all the way to now with “nor will we in fact, not defend Taiwan”.
How well China interprets Biden’s double negatives could determine if it invades Taiwan. And whether we go to war with China. And whether thousands of American soldiers die in combat.
And yet with national misery reaching new heights, Biden’s only reelection arguments are that democratically electing Trump threatens democracy, abortion and foreign policy.
Trump doesn’t understand Russia, Biden insists, even while confusing Russia and Ukraine. And warning that Russia shouldn’t go into Moscow. He suggests that China is “rooting” for Trump even while accusing Trump of wanting to put “10% tariffs on everything”. Biden insists that “Trump wants to eviscerate NATO” and wouldn’t cut a deal to control North Korea’s nukes.
Not only is much of this untrue or backward, but what has Joe Biden done for foreign policy?
If Biden’s closing argument is Ukraine, Putin invaded other countries under Obama and Biden, not Trump. Likewise, China and Iran amped up their aggressive tactics under Biden. The madman theory of geopolitical deterrence works better with Trump than with Biden’s ambiguity.
Biden’s fixation on NATO impresses globalist elites, but Trump understood correctly that NATO was useless without the United States. Biden’s big idea of having Europeans handle the Ukraine war was a disaster. “We spent a lot of money in Ukraine, but Europe has spent more money than the United States has, collectively,” Biden brags. But that’s nothing to brag about.
America and Europe have spent a lot of money and prestige on Ukraine with little result except a lot of dead Russians. And while any Cold War general would have appreciated the (likely vastly overstated) number of Russian casualties, the war didn’t need to happen in the first place.
Biden adopted Obama’s strategy of leading from behind. Rather than bolstering American military credibility, he undermined it in Afghanistan and around the world. Putin accurately read Biden’s unwillingness to fight as an opening and he took it. When it did happen, he kept on leading from behind, providing weapons that slowly escalated the war rather than ending it.
The United States could have either averted or quickly ended the war by signaling clearly what its position was and what it intended to do. Instead, Biden slowly allowed the war to escalate until American weapons are being used to strike targets in Russia and Ukraine is up for NATO membership without actually having any idea of what the next step is. That’s not how you win.
China’s growing threats to Taiwan and Iran’s drone strikes on Israel are both a response to lessons learned from the Ukraine war. If Xi attacks, it’s because he will be betting that a rapid invasion can be accomplished in a matter of days or weeks while Biden is convening international conferences and waiting months or years to provide meaningful military support.
Biden would like us to believe that he is on top of foreign affairs. “I did it. And we’re now the strongest nation. We have the strongest alliance in all of America,” he brags. But then why is the world such a mess? Unable to take credit for actual accomplishments, he instead boasts about all the international organizations he helped set up. Even the ones he didn’t set up.
At one point, Biden argued that “NATO is considerably stronger than it was when I took office. I put it together” and also and claimed credit for having “put together a Quad that never existed before” which was actually put together by George W. Bush twenty years ago.
Biden wants to make it seem like he’s in control. What does that look like?
“When Putin decided to go into Russia,” Biden postures. “The reason why I cleared the intelligence so we can release the information we knew that he was going to attack, was to let the world know we were still in charge.”
Did the United States releasing intelligence about a planned Russian attack really “let the world know we were still in charge?” Is releasing intelligence what countries that are in charge do?
Being in charge means taking decisive steps, not issuing a press release.
And Biden issues press releases. He talks and boasts, and then he reacts to what someone else does, whether it’s Russia, China, Iran or any of the other players on the board. The final tragic summary of Biden’s foreign policy isn’t that he sold out allies or wasted American lives, it’s that he never does take charge because he reacts, rather than acts. Whatever position he takes can be reversed by a forceful enough foreign or domestic campaign because he’s weak.
Biden got into a war in Ukraine that he initially opposed because he’s weak. And he betrayed Israel after his initial support because he’s weak. Given a chance, he’ll betray Taiwan too.
“We are, we are the world power. And what I inherited, as a consequence of the mistake that we made in Afghanistan is a—was not a loss in Afghanistan, excuse my cold,” Biden tremulously opened the interview.
This is not how a world power acts or talks. The Ottoman Empire used to be called the Sick Man of Europe. Under Biden, America is the Sick Man of the World. But hopefully it’s only a cold.
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Another fine piece:
+++Christian D. Brose is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and chief strategy officer of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company. He is also a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and author of The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare (Hachette, 2020). He previously served as staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee
The US defense enterprise must remake itself to bolster deterrence with China. Instead of investing in small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned military platforms, the United States must rapidly field large numbers of smaller, lower-cost, autonomous systems. This alternative force will not emerge from the Pentagon’s antiquated, central planning process. Instead, we must create a parallel defense system that looks less like Communist China and more like capitalist America. The US’s own procurement process has suffered delays, with delivery of two new attack submarines, for example, running as much as two years late. The country is also racing to revive production of basic artillery for Ukraine. General Dynamics and HII are supposed to be completing two submarines a year but instead are averaging the completion of one plus 20% of the work building a second sub. The Navy projects the contractors hitting the two-a-year rate by 2028. The slow pace is the prime reason the Navy requested one instead of a planned two Virginia-class submarines in fiscal 2025, officials said.
These factors include an industrial base that is inadequate to meet our needs and stalled emergency spending that includes a long overdue revitalization of our defense production capacity for crucial platforms such as submarines and ships. With China already vastly outpacing the United States in fleet size and production capacity, ramping up our own capabilities is a time-sensitive priority. The Defense Department is reportedly rushing to develop the all-important implementation plans to carry out its new industrial base strategy.
The fact that it plans to classify these plans is a mistake. If we truly are to pursue the generational change the strategy notes will be required, we will need all possible transparency to start those changes now and ruthlessly monitor progress, adjusting and adapting along the way. Classifying our efforts to modernize our industrial base is a recipe for disjointed, incomplete execution and more delays.
"Speed is essential in making this shift: Even as the stated U.S. view is that conflict is “neither imminent nor inevitable” in the Taiwan Strait, numerous U.S. officials have warned that conflict could plausibly occur in the region this decade. This urgency is catalyzing constructive action across multiple U.S. alliances and every U.S. military service as they seek to make the strategy real in the limited time that may be left," Brose offers in his presciently written essay.
According to the Pentagon’s most recent public report on Chinese military power, for instance, Beijing now possesses roughly 1,000 medium-range ballistic missiles with a range of between 1,000 and 3,000 kilometers and 500 intermediate-range ballistic missiles with a range of between 3,000 and 5,500 kilometers. If a war were to break out, the PLA could now target nearly all U.S. forces within hundreds of miles of the Chinese coast.
The result is a weakening of America’s ability to project power in a crucial region. A quarter century ago, China could barely detect, let alone destroy, U.S. aircraft carriers operating near its coast. Into the early 2010s, the Pentagon could—according to think tank reports—pursue a strategy that envisioned defeating Chinese aggression with a devastating precision-strike campaign against radars, missile bases, command-and-control centers, and other targets on Chinese soil.
"Today, however, Beijing can threaten aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away, as well as the surface ships that escort them and the bases they visit. A growing inventory of advanced fighters, as well as the world’s densest air defense network, can take a heavy toll on U.S. strike aircraft. Meanwhile, China’s rapid nuclear buildup makes the prospect of carrying the war onto its territory much riskier by giving Beijing more credible nuclear response options. In short, the days of easily projecting power to China’s shores are over," historian and Professor Hal Brands writes in a recent CSIS senior fellow and distinguished China scholar Jude Blanchett edited Marshall Papers essay.
Washington, despite defense industrial base limited progress, has secured or expanded U.S. access to bases in countries from Japan and the Philippines to Australia and Papua New Guinea, a crucial step in making U.S. forces more survivable if China attacks. There is significantly more work to do, but 2023 has been the most transformative year in a generation for America’s Indo-Pacific posture.
The United States needs Japan's help to cope with strategic challenges in Europe and Asia that are straining its defense industries, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan said on Monday as the countries kicked off talks on military industrial cooperation.
"Our national security strategy calls for us to be able to handle one and a half theatres, that's a major war and another one to a standoff, and with both the Middle East, Ukraine, and keeping our deterrence credible in this region (East Asia) you can already see that we are in two plus," Rahm Emanuel told reporters, Reuters reported.
The Forum on Defense Industrial Cooperation, Acquisition and Sustainment—a series of meetings in Tokyo this week, dedicated to improving our nations’ collaboration on defense. That this forum is taking place less than two months after it was announced illustrates how serious the task is. Advanced missile co-production, aircraft sustainment and ship repair are only a few items on the agenda, Emanuel wrote in an opinion column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Emanuel in trademark candor also added, "the defense industrial bureaucracy could use a dose of urgency. Business as usual no longer suffices, and there is no time to lose. The credibility of our deterrence and ability to defend our global interests is at stake."
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