Henry celebrates his birthday with Jessica eating a hamburger.
He loves the simple tings in life ad tha tis one of the reasons I love him/
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You can hide but Mossad eventually finds yo, the IDF takes you out. and then you can live with those "virgins."+++
Iran Says a Top Hamas Leader Was Killed
Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran on the day that he was attending the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president, according to a statement by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.
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With 2 you, in America, you normally get egg rolls. In Israel if you are radical Islamists and you like to kill you get your own death handed to you!
MEF Experts: Assassination of Terrorist Leaders Means 'Israel Intends to Crush Hamas'
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Two for two last night
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As I saw the news over the last 24 hours that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyah and Hezbollah’s #2, Fa’ad Shakar had both been assassinated, I couldn’t help but smile and think that this was good and that they both deserved that.
After all, Haniyah for sure was instrumental in the planning of the October 7th massacre of over 1,200 of our citizens and continued pushing the leadership in Gaza to continue the war with Israel. This, of course, while he was flying around the region from his plush home base in Qatar and participating in negotiations for the release of the hostages Hamas is still holding for 299 days (about 120 at this writing,…..who knows if they are dead or alive?).
His decision to go to Tehran and prance around publicly knowing that there was an Israeli price on his head, made him a great target. Killing him in Tehran was also a good warning to the Iranians that whoever was responsible for the killing is able to do this inside Iran. While all of us here believe it was an Israeli missile that took him out (Iran stated it was a weapon fired from a long distance from Tehran), Israel has not claimed credit for the assassination. But who else could it have been eh?
As for Shakar, he has been Hizballah’s chief military strategist for some time and we believe he was the mastermind behind the attack on the Druze soccer field last Saturday that killed 12 Israeli children and injured dozens of others who were simply having a good time.
He was also responsible for the October, 1982 bombing of the US military installation in Beirut which killed 220 US troops and for which America had offered a $5 million reward for his apprehension. Many members of the US Congress today expressed their appreciation that Israel had found Shakar and killed him, as we did claim responsibility for this one. I wonder if we can send the US Department of Defense an invoice for the $5m bounty payment? Hmm.
However, we are cautioned not to gloat over the deaths of others, even if they are our enemies. When our ancestors crossed the Reed Sea during the exodus from Egypt, they began to rejoice when they saw the waters recede and drown the Egyptians who were pursuing them. At that point a voice called out from heaven and said that the Egyptians were also God’s children and it would be inappropriate to gloat. To this day, during the intermediate days of the Passover holiday when singing Hallel, the traditional order of six psalms in praise of God, two of them are omitted so that our joy at being saved is muted somewhat in recognition of the deaths suffered by our enemies.
Frankly, not sure that either Shakar or Haniyah deserve such concern as they certainly have a lot of our blood and that of others as well on their hands. Nevertheless, suffice it to say that they got what they deserved and that the world will be a better place without them.
Now we wait and see what the response, if any, will be from Hizballah and/or Hamas, both of whom take their marching orders from Iran, of course.
But we don’t hear any calls from the nations of the world directed at any of their leaders to practice restraint, as we heard directed at us after Saturday afternoon’s killing of our young people. Do you ever wonder why?
Well, Chris Como, in his syndicated television show, earlier this week explored the conundrum of why when it comes to Israel and our enemies, it is always us asked to practice restraint. Cuomo has a really good analysis of this issue and you can find it here.
It is worth the 7-1/2 minutes it will take to watch it. He doesn’t solve the problem, nobody can. However, the analysis is interesting and the warning that the double standard may start with us but it will eventually consume everyone is instructive. Hope you find it of interest.
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Israel’s Five Wars
By Bret Stephens
The world will soon know the full shape and scale of Israel’s response to Hezbollah for Saturday’s rocket attack on a Druze town in the Golan Heights, which killed 12 children. But it’s not too soon to ask what purpose the expected retaliation will serve in the context of Israel’s five wars.
Five wars? Yes. And they are more about ideas than they are about geography.
That’s the proportional equivalent of roughly two million Americans forced out of their homes by the threat of terrorism. Those who condemn Israel now for its allegedly disproportionate response to the attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah would be a little more intellectually honest if they asked themselves what they would demand of their own governments if they were in the same situation.
The second war fuels and explains the first. It’s about existence. Israel’s most strident critics insist that the current conflict is about Palestinian existence, about Israel’s alleged refusal to grant a Palestinian homeland. But that’s a historically ignorant claim — and a dishonest one. Israel agreed to a Palestinian Authority in 1993, offered a Palestinian state in 2000 and vacated the Gaza Strip in 2005. When campus protesters at Princeton chanted, “We don’t want no two states, we want ’48,” they weren’t asking for Israel to accept a Palestinian state. They’re demanding Israel’s abolition.
They are also adopting the views of Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s Ali Khamenei — leaders of the so-called Axis of Resistance, which believes that the only solution in the Middle East is a final one: Israel’s annihilation. The pundits who incessantly fault Israel’s means of defense might at least pause to ask what Hamas would have done to Israeli civilians on Oct. 8, 9 or 10 had Israel’s armed forces not been able to finally stop its slaughter.
The third war is metaphorical. It’s also dangerous and corrosive. It’s Israel’s war for the legitimacy of its actions, a war against the “yes but” thinking that now describes the middle ground of Western opinion on the conflict. That’s not a demand that people turn off their brains when it comes to judging Israel’s behavior. On the contrary, it’s a request that they turn their brains on.
To wit: How exactly do the people who say Israel has “the right to defend itself” propose that it do so against an enemy that entrenches itself beneath civilians in hundreds of miles of tunnels? What’s their strategy for lawful urban warfare against an enemy that fights unlawfully from hospitals and mosques and homes? Despite their notional acceptance of Israel’s right of self-defense, are they really calling for anything more than a unilateral cease-fire? The least the yes-but critics can do is recognize the fact that these questions have no easy answers.
The fourth war is global, ideological — and fundamental. It’s the war against antisemitism. Among the many toxic and defamatory charges leveled against Israel since Oct. 7 is that the war in Gaza has caused a surge in antisemitism, a sly way of charging the Jewish state with being the agent of anti-Jewish hate.
The truth is precisely the opposite: Anti-Semitism is the cause of Oct. 7, not the consequence of it. Mountains of documentation attest to this and predate the creation of the state of Israel: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, met Adolf Hitler in 1941 to avow their shared struggle against “the English, the Jews and the Communists.” Today, it’s no surprise to see those who cheer Hamas’s aims are assaulting synagogues in Berlin or Los Angeles. Hatred of Jews will always find a convenient explanation or excuse; Israel is the latest, but hardly the first.
Finally, there’s the war within the state of Israel and among the Jewish people worldwide. It’s a war that has been one of the most enduring, and often fatal, features of Jewish history. Its contours were visible during the fight over Israeli judicial reform before Oct. 7, and now in the lawlessness of right-wing Israeli mobs charging into Israeli army bases. It’s also a war between diaspora Jews who recognize that the assault on Israel is ultimately an assault on them, and the “As a Jew” Jews who provide moral cover and comfort to Israel’s enemies. Addressing these divisions is as central to Israel’s long-term security as confronting any other threat.
Israel struck Beirut on Tuesday, targeting the official it blamed for Saturday’s attack.
Whatever Israel does next, it should be calculated to advance the national interests on all these fronts. If that means postponing a fuller response to explain its rationale, necessity and goal, so much the better.
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