RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-we-fight/

If you live somewhere other than Israel, I know what you’re thinking. I get it. I’ve seen the TV reports that you’ve seen, and I’ve read the slanted coverage that you’ve surely read by now, painting Israel as the aggressor. I understand why you think Israel is overreacting. So let me make it personal for you:

What is the first thing you do when you step off the bus in a new city? Pull out a map to get a sense of your surroundings? Perhaps ask a fellow passenger where you might find a nice place to have lunch? When you get off the bus in Sderot, Israel, the first thing you do is locate the nearest bomb shelter. When a rocket is fired at Sderot from Gaza, just over a half-mile away, the siren sounds, as it has thousands of times in the past decade, at which point you have 15 seconds, at most, to find cover. I say fifteen seconds at most because after speaking to several Sderot residents during Monday’s visit, I learned that many times the missile lands before the siren goes off, or as little as seven seconds thereafter. Seven seconds to run for your life. Accompanying the sound of the blaring siren is the terrifying sound of the rocket launching, a loud, explosive, hissing that always seems as if it’s heading directly towards you. Imagine, for a moment, what your life might be like if you lived in Sderot.

What would wear if you lived in Sderot? Sandals in the summer, or running shoes, which might spell the difference between reaching shelter before the rocket hit or not? How would you sleep at night? Would you ever know the relief of resting your head on a cool pillow, burrowing under the covers, and falling into a deep, peaceful slumber after a long day at work? If you had young kids, would you ever have intercourse with your spouse? All married couples are entitled…right? Not if you live in Sderot. The time you would spend getting dressed if the siren went off would cost you the time you needed to grab your kids from their rooms and take them to the bomb shelter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaLjLfT6Pl8&feature=youtu.be

From Berkeley to Boston and from Paris to Sydney, the season is upon us again. Hipsters twirl Keffiyahs from some Shanghai factory around their necks, don army surplus jackets and Decembrist t-shirts and head to the nearest Israeli embassy to scream about a new Holocaust.

Shiites and Sunnis temporarily put aside their blood feuds and entire families of Syrian Alawites and
Turkish Sunnis stand in London or Berlin screaming “Death to the Jews”.

Joining them are elderly Trotskyists and aging Stalinists, normally as mutually hostile as Shiites and Sunnis, who put aside their differences to feebly wave cardboard signs about the Zionist war machine.

Fake blood is everywhere. Aspiring art students who can’t draw try to figure out new ways of intersecting a Swastika and a Star of David. Latuff cartoons are printed out along with bloody photos of dead people from Syria, Hollywood horror movies and on the rare occasion, Gaza, and shoved in everyone’s faces.

The organizers take a break from submitting angry Truth Dig articles about Brazilian cocoa exploitation and dive headfirst into a rally that, unlike all their other rallies, the media will actually cover. They prowl the police barriers like hungry hyenas looking for a reporter.

Any reporter.

On the last few struggling Pacifica affiliates, Amy Goodman invites Noam Chomsky to talk about the war. Chris Hedges phones in to promote his new book, which is only 90 percent plagiarized from a Hemingway novel he thought he once read. Max Blumenthal shows up to lead a Students for Justice in Palestine protest while shouting about colonialism. Then he tags himself on Instagram.

At the Israeli embassy, the hipsters imagine that they’re guerrilla fighters. They scream themselves hoarse about oppression, duck into a Starbucks, come out with a few cinnamon lattes and then begin screaming again. Recruiters for the International Socialist Organization, the World Revolutionary Front, the International Workers Fourth Front Uprising and the always popular Brotherhood of Revolutionary Workers and Peasants push smeared pamphlets into their pockets hoping for a bite.

Once again, Islam takes centre-stage, while the West watches anxiously on. From Brussels to Beijing, terrorists are still slaughtering civilians. Across Africa, from Libya to Nigeria and Kenya, fragile states are falling apart under the Islamist assault. In the Middle East, the Syrian civil war has now spread to Iraq and threatens to destabilise other states.

Further East, Pakistan is under Taliban attack even before Afghanistan is evacuated by Nato. We are now seeing the results of President Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq, his encouragement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, his irresolution in Syria, his appeasement of Iran and his failure more generally to grasp the scale of the Islamist challenge to the West.

Elliott Abrams and Alexander Woolfson show how the world is paying a heavy price for a US administration that lacks a coherent strategy and a Nato that is not fit for purpose.

In Britain, the dispute between Michael Gove and Theresa May over the infiltration of schools by “extremists” has overshadowed the equally alarming consequences of such indoctrination. Hundreds of young Muslims emerge from the schools and mosques of cities such as Birmingham and Bradford, volunteer to fight for the Islamist cause in Syria, then return to bring jihad back to Britain.

The attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels was the work of just such a jihadist from France, and it may only be a matter of time before horrors perpetrated in the name of Islam on the road to Damascus are repeated on the streets of London.

The world is still reeling from one of the periodic waves of fundamentalism that have expanded the Umma since the days of the prophet. Looking back to the first rise of Islam in the 7th century, Gibbon reflects on the secret of its success in Volume the Fifth of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“Mahomet was alike instructed to preach and to fight, and the union of these opposite qualities, while it enhanced his merit, contributed to his success: the operation of force and persuasion, of enthusiasm and fear, continually acted on each other, till every barrier yielded to their irresistible power.”

Paris in Flames as Pro-Palestinian Rioters Clash with Police

Despite a first-of-its-kind-in-Europe ban on demonstrations in Paris, pro-Palestinian protestors gathered to demonstrate against Israel on Saturday. When police tried to break up the protest, rioters threw rocks and other debris while chanting “Israel, assassin.”

Protests in Paris were banned following the demonstration last weekend that ended up threatening two synagogues.

The government of President Hollande has come under fire for the ban, as far-left groups accused Hollande of favoring Israel while far-right groups criticized him for policies they say encourage lawlessness among immigrants.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The clashes underscore a dilemma facing France’s Socialist government. President François Hollande has faced searing criticism in France—home to Europe’s biggest Muslim minority—for what pro-Palestinian groups say is his failure to take a stand against Israel’s incursions in the Gaza strip.

At the same time, Mr. Hollande is under pressure from even broader swaths of the French public, which blames minorities and immigrants for a perceived rise in violent crime and delinquency. The far-right National Front is garnering support by accusing Mr. Hollande’s ranks of being soft on crime and illegal immigration.

Saturday’s clashes occurred at the tail end of a large rally that had been called by several French political organizations, including the far-left New Anticapitalist Party, despite a French government ban.

The rally had been banned on Friday after government officials expressed concern that it could turn violent. Last Sunday, a similar rally in Paris sought to steer the march toward two synagogues and clashed with riot police, and eight arrests.

The irreplaceable basis for a prosperous and decent society is property.
There is not very much good to say about the life and career of Vladimir Lenin, but give the pickled old monster this much: He cut through more than two centuries’ worth of bull and straight to the heart of all politics with his simple question: “Who? Whom?” Which is to say: Who acts? Who is acted upon? Even here in the land of the free, meditating upon that question can be an uncomfortable exercise.

The foundation of classical liberalism, and of the American order, is not the rule of law, a written constitution, freedom of speech and worship, one-man/one-vote democracy, or the Christian moral tradition — necessary as those things are. The irreplaceable basis for a prosperous, decent, liberal, stable society is property. Forget Thomas Jefferson’s epicurean flourish — John Locke and the First Continental Congress had it right on the first go-round: “Life, liberty, and property.” Despite the presence of the serial commas in that formulation, these are not really three different things: Perhaps we should render the concept “lifelibertyproperty” the way the physicists write about “spacetime.”

But we do not have any property.

The governments of these United States, from the federal to the local level, have managed to insinuate themselves between citizens and their property at every point of significance. In that, our governments are very much like most other governments, liberal and illiberal, democratic and undemocratic. We have allowed ourselves to be in effect converted from a nation of owners to a nation of renters. But while medieval serfs had only the one landlord, we have a rogue’s gallery of them: the local school board, the criminals at the IRS, the vehicle-registry office, etc. Never-ending property taxes ensure that as a matter of economic function, you never really own your house — you rent it from the government. Vehicle registration fees and, in some jurisdiction, outright taxes on automobile ownership ensure in precisely the same way that you never really own your car: You rent it from the government. Stock portfolio? Held at the sufferance of politicians. A profitable business? You’ll keep what income they decide you can keep. Your own body? Not yours — not if you use it for profitable labor.

A Who down in Whoville? You should be so lucky: Welcome to Whomville, peon.

Good government is a constable — it keeps the peace and protects property. Parasitic government — which is, sad to say, practically the only form known in the modern world — is at its best a middleman that takes a cut of every transaction by positioning itself as a nuisance separating you from your goals. At its worst, it is functionally identical to a goon running a protection racket.

How would you feel if you sent your son or daughter to an Anti-Defamation League summer camp only to find out that the camp’s youth coordinators are supporters of a convicted Al Qaeda terrorist?

Brothers Bilal and Ammaar Mirza have been involved with Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL’s) Camp Interfaith in beautiful Andover, New Hampshire since they were teenagers, first as campers and then as staffers. Yet at the very same time, they have also been active in a Boston area extremist Islamist movement that is viciously anti-American and tinged with anti-Semitism, a movement that has coalesced around the cause of a local jihadist celebrity, Tarek Mehanna.

Tarek Mehanna, a Sudbury native, is currently serving a 23 year sentence in Federal prison for conspiracy to provide material support to Al Qaeda, conspiracy to murder in a foreign country, and lying to the FBI about his attempts to join up with Al Qaeda in Yemen. Tarek Mehanna liked to refer to himself as “the media wing of Al Qaeda in Iraq” and told his friends that he felt Osama Bin Laden was like a father to him. He and his co-conspirators had visited the 9/11 Ground Zero site in NYC, where he snapped photos of himself grinning and holding up the index finger salute used by Islamic extremists.

The most righteous of men cannot live in peace if his evil neighbor will not let him be.
– Wilhelm Tell, Act IV, Scene III, by Friedrich von Schiller, 1804

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.
– Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

There is always a cost to defeat an evil. It never comes free, unfortunately. But the cost of failure to defeat a great evil is far higher.
– Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman, BBC News, May 31, 1999, on civilian casualties inflicted by NATO in the Balkans.

As Operation Protective Edge – which could have been dubbed “Pillar of Defensive II” or “Cast Lead III” – drags on, it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is misconstruing its role..

Running the country vs. leading the nation

It seems to believe that its primary role is to run the country, rather than lead the nation. This is a disastrously inappropriate misperception of its task

The manner in which the current round of military operations is being conducted clearly reflects a state of mind preoccupied with tactical management of existing realities, rather than strategic leadership, which strives to forge new realities.

The objective of the campaign – articulated as the restoration of calm – makes any other conclusion difficult to reach. Indeed, when “calm” is chronically impermanent, the desire for a return to the precarious status quo ante has a ring of despairing resignation to it, and conveys little hope of any better realities.

This debilitating syndrome was diagnosed in a perceptive opinion piece titled “Defeatism at its worst” (Jerusalem Post, July 14) by Anya Zhuravel Segal – who interestingly enough served on Binyamin Netanyahu’s staff prior to the 2005 disengagement from Gaza: “We are facing a deep crisis of political leadership, and a deep disbelief in our power to shape reality.”

Sadly, it is difficult to imagine a more fitting characterization of the mindset of Israel’s leadership in recent years, underscored not only by the definition of the objectives of military campaigns undertaken, but by the means employed to wage them.

Tactical brilliance, strategic imbecility

This week marks the 70th anniversary of a plot whose success might well have spared millions of lives, while claiming that of history’s most infamous mass-murderer, Adolf Hitler.

The elaborate conspiracy centered on Claus von Stauffenberg was the most well-prepared and organized attempt to put an end to Hitler, but it was scarcely the first. The number of serious attempts on Hitler’s life would fill a book and indeed have; Roger Moorhouse’s Killing Hitler (2006), for example, covers the ground of several such attempts from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, at which time his security detail was remarkably small and haphazard. Early, amateurish attempts, however, put him on his guard and before the Second World War had begun, Hitler never moved anywhere without a phalanx of security. Weaknesses in his security were nonetheless identified and exploited by attempted assassins –– yet fortune favored Hitler.

Thus, one of the most remarkable attempts on Hitler’s life was carried out in November 1939, just weeks into the Second World War. The idea was brilliantly conceived, painstakingly prepared, carried into execution and ought to have succeeded but, because it failed, its author is largely forgotten today. Johann Georg Elser, a carpenter from a humble family of lumber traders, had decided Hitler was a menace to Germany and the world who had to be eliminated. He conceived his plan the previous November in Munich, watching commemorations of Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putschof 1923. This event was a fixture of the Nazi calendar and thus followed a fixed, ceremonial pattern which included Hitler delivering an address in the Bürgerbräukeller.

Elser planned to kill Hitler at the next commemoration during his speech. In the course of the next twelve months, Elserstole gunpowder, obtained a job which gave him access to explosives and detonators, and taught himself the rudiments of their use. He dined nightly at the Bürgerbräukeller, secreting himself upstairs when it closed, and set to work by night, hollowing out a cavity in the pillar beside the dais used by Hitler each year in order to instal a bomb inside it. Elseringeniously modified a clock to enable him to have a timer that could be set 144 hours in advance, and lined the cavity with cork to conceal the sound of its ticking, before sealing the cavity and sedulously concealing all evidence of his work. He timed the bomb to detonate at 9.20 PM on November 8, 1939, in the middle of Hitler’s speech.

Elser’s bomb worked perfectly, exploding punctually and bringing down the gallery supported by the detonated pillar on the appointed date at 9.20 PM –– except Hitler had altered his schedule, shortened his speech, delivered it early and thus departed the scene 13 minutes earlier. Taken in for questioning at the Swiss border while seeking to cross it, Elser’s possessions were self-incriminating and under interrogation he eventually confessed all. He was kept as a special prisoner until April 1945 when, in the dying days of the war, he was murdered along with other special prisoners warehoused by the Third Reich.

Thousands of anti-Semites have today succeeded in bringing central
London to an almost total standstill.

They marched though the centre of the city before congregating to
scream outside the Israeli Embassy in Kensington. It was interesting
to watch this rather non-diverse crowd pass. Most of the women seem to
be wearing headscarves or the burka, while their men-folk were
naturally more appropriately dressed for a sweltering summer day.

But what a picture. These are the people who stayed at home throughout
the Syrian civil war, stayed at home when ISIS rampaged across Iraq,
stayed at home when Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab carried out their
atrocities across central Africa and showed no concern whatsoever when
the Muslim Brotherhood was running Egypt into the ground. Yet they
pretend to care about Muslims.