RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/propalestine_maniacs_destroy_painting_of_balfour_at_cambridge_university.html

A menacing new low from the savages and barbarians who attack art.
So now we learn again why we can’t have nice things:

According to the New York Times:

A pro-Palestinian group slashed and spray-painted a century-old portrait of Arthur James Balfour at the University of Cambridge on Friday, defacing a painting of the British official whose pledge of support in 1917 for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” helped pave the way to Israel’s founding three decades later.

The group, Palestine Action, said in a statement that the destruction of the portrait in Trinity College, Cambridge, was intended to call attention to “the bloodshed of the Palestinian people since the Balfour Declaration was issued,” particularly in light of the current conflict in Gaza.

A spokeswoman for Trinity, whose alumni include King Charles III as well as Balfour himself, said in a statement on Friday that the college “regrets the damage caused to a portrait of Arthur James Balfour during public opening hours” and that it had notified the police. A Cambridge police statement said officers were on the scene to investigate a report of “criminal damage.”

We’ve been outraged before by this rubbish from activists, none of whom could draw a stick figure if they were playing ‘hangman.’

But this represents a new low in activist barbarism. In the past, environmental activists, such as those I described here, in 2022, merely chose to damage glass covering artwork, or color water of historic fountain sculptures, or glue themselves to the floor or the frame of western masterpieces, they always justified their acts by claiming they weren’t actually damaging the paintings, though that is arguable to some extent.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20469/europe-fear-trump

European dislike for the person of Trump, who is cast as the antithesis of the Davos-approved globalist worried about global warming, not interested in chest-beating about Palestine, and demanding that others not treat the US as a “room service” reachable by pressing a button, is running shivers down many spines in Paris and Berlin among other places.

This is why many Europeans prefer to see the Democrat donkey rather than the Republican elephant in the room. They miss the fact that the absent, that is present in the room, is neither the elephant nor the donkey but the leviathan.

In the recent summit in Paris of European Union leaders on Ukraine, there was an elephant in the room: The US Republican Party and its current mahout, former President Donald J. Trump.

According to those who were able to peep into the session, much of the discussion was about what the US will or won’t do in case the volatile mahout rides his elephant into the White House in November.

Trump’s musings about ending the war in Ukraine and taming Vladimir Putin without war and his quip about refusing to support a NATO member not paying its share, if attacked by Russia, took up a disproportionate part of the discussions. Then came the French President Emmanuel Macron’s bombshell about boots on the ground in Ukraine.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20465/iran-sham-elections

Iran’s so-called “elections” stand out as a grotesque parody of democracy. Yet… the mainstream Western media persistently mislabel these charades as “elections,” thereby bestowing legitimacy upon a regime entrenched in authoritarianism and dictatorship.

For decades, Iranians have endured oppression, censorship, and violence at the hands of a regime that masquerades as a legitimate government while trampling on their basic rights. To dismiss their struggle by equating their aspirations for freedom with a sham electoral spectacle is to disregard the sacrifices made by countless activists, journalists and ordinary citizens who dare to dream of a better future.

It sends a dangerous message to the Iranian people and to the world at large: that autocracy masquerading as democracy is acceptable, and that tyranny can cloak itself in the trappings of legitimacy.

Now, as the Iranian regime is about to realize its dream of obtaining nuclear weapons, does anyone think that a government that treats its own people so brutally will treat its neighbors any better?

Iran’s sham “elections” are nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to legitimize authoritarian rule. By mislabeling these orchestrated spectacles as elections, mainstream Western media perpetuate the regime’s propaganda and undermine the struggle for democracy within Iran. It is time to call out this charade for what it is and lend our voices to the chorus demanding true democracy and freedom for the Iranian people.

In the annals of political theater, Iran’s so-called “elections” stand out as a grotesque parody of democracy. Yet, despite the blatant manipulation and lack of genuine choice, the mainstream Western media persistently mislabel these charades as “elections,” thereby bestowing legitimacy upon a regime entrenched in authoritarianism and dictatorship.

https://victorhanson.com/the-mythologies-of-the-middle-east-part-two/

The Myth of “Proportionality”

As a general rule, in the long history of war, victory is found only by being disproportionate in the use of force. That is a truism so banal as to need little elaboration. When both sides are “proportionate” in their ability to harm their opponents, the result is either a bloody tactical deadlock such as at Verdun or the Somme, or an open strategic sore like Vietnam and Afghanistan, or decades-long “proportionate” killing such as the Peloponnesian War or Thirty Years’ War.

The whole point of Western aid to Ukraine apparently and logically is to allow it to harm Russia disproportionally, especially given the vast imbalance in resources, both human and material. The great tragedy of this horrific two-year war is the reality that Ukraine has only been able to achieve proportional success against Russia, as the current deadlocked map of the battle space attests.

Hamas began its war on October 7, seeking to achieve a disproportionate success; that is, to kill more Jewish civilians in any single day since the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It knew the Israelis possessed a disproportionate ability in strictly military terms to retaliate and do real damage to Hamas. But the Hamas terrorist leaders in turn assumed they had a disproportionate ability to appeal to the larger Muslim and Arab Middle East of 500 million people, as well as hundreds of millions of supporters in the old Third World as well as in the U.S. and Europe. Their logic was brutally simple: while the West, the UN, and the rest would for a moment deplore their tactics, Hamas assumed that privately they either would approve of the damage inflicted on Israelis or at least tolerate it and thus use their various levels of influence to restrain the Israeli response.

https://victorhanson.com/the-mythologies-of-the-middle-east-part-three/

The Myth of the Oppressed Palestinians

There are lots of refugees in the world with much longer claims of displacement than the Palestinians, and also some with much more recent suffering. And yet we hear nothing about them. Does anyone challenge Turkish president Erdogan for his ongoing threats to send missiles into Athens or to brag that he has a solution like his “grandfathers” for the Armenian “problem”?

Or do they lament the 1974 ethnic cleansing of northern Cyprus that resulted when the Turkish military invaded the island, created a puppet separatist regime in the north, appropriated land that had been Greek for three millennia, and then slaughtered Greeks and drove them down into the south of the island? Are there protests today demanding justice and a “right of return” for the Greek Cypriots? Do we talk of “colonialist” or “settler” Turks who were moved from the mainland to Cyprus to alter the demography of the island?

For that matter, do any lament the fate of the Volga Germans (nearly two million) who were packed up by Joseph Stalin and uprooted from their ancient homes in 1941–42?

Are we aware that until 1939 western Ukraine was the ancient home of millions of Catholic Poles, who were driven out by communist Russia in its hideous 1939 deal with Hitler and never returned after the war?

Or do we lament the 13 million East Prussians who were ethnically cleansed after World War II to give lands to a new Poland that was robbed by Stalin of its old domains? Are any of these peoples today considered UN refugees? Do octogenarian Germans dangle the keys of their old homes in Danzig to cameras, as if they will someday have “a right of return” to present-day Poland?

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/07/the-ukrainian-verdun-2/

Ukraine has ossified into something like the modern version of the horrific Battle of Verdun, fought 108 years ago on the 1916 Western Front of World War I. That meat grinder cost France and Germany some 700,000 dead and wounded.

The nightmare ended ten months later, after the heroic French defense stopped the final German push. But the respective armies ended up in the same position as when the battle started.

After the failed preemptive Russia attack on Kyiv in February 2022 and the subsequent collapsed Ukrainian 6-month-long “spring” counter-offensive of spring 2023, the Ukrainian war has now similarly deadlocked.

Russia has failed to annex Ukraine. It has not expanded much beyond occupied Crimea and Donbass.

Yet Ukraine seems unable to push back the Russians to where they started in February 2022, much less recover lost areas grabbed earlier in 2014.

Although neither side has published reliable and comprehensive dead and wounded statistics, the war has now likely reached a horrific Verdun-like total of 600-700,000 combined casualties.

Perhaps 10 million of Ukraine’s prewar population have fled the country. Due to the massive refugee exodus, the country may have shrunk below 35 million.

In other words, Russia now has a population seven times larger, a gross national product ten times greater, and an area over 30 times the size of current Ukraine.

Still, if NATO and the United States can continue to arm Ukraine, it is as unlikely that Russia can annex Ukraine, even as it is doubtful that Ukraine can ever regain territory lost prior to 2014.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20458/iran-oil-funds-genocide

History is filled with the terrible retribution inflicted on America’s foes when those enemies underestimate the United States.

Consider Imperial Japan, which totally underestimated the United States. Hitler thought we could manufacture cars but never have the ability to produce tanks, an air force, a two-ocean navy and the willpower to fight and win. The Soviets told the West: “We will bury you.” And Osama Bin Laden’s ashes will never be found.

So when US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warns Iran that their role in supporting the terrorist murder of some 1,400 Israelis by Hamas has the potential to result in immensely serious “consequences,” he is attempting to ensure that Tehran does not make the fatal mistake of underestimating the United States.

Looking on the surface, it might be easy to do so. Japan saw that the U.S. Congress debated and delayed for months before finally instituting a military draft in 1940. Hitler saw the American-based Nazi Bund convene a rally at Madison Square Garden. We currently have a president whose ability and political will have openly been questioned. The House of Representatives is in disarray. We are facing a multi-trillion dollar debt. Surely we must be distracted and incapable of action.

All the more reason that Graham’s warning, which included “tak[ing] down an oil refinery” for every hostage killed. “The only way you’re gonna keep this war from escalating is to hold Iran accountable,” Graham recently stated.

On October 22, Graham said: “We’re here today to tell Iran: We’re watching you. If this war grows, it’s coming to your backyard.” And to make a point, he made that statement from Tel Aviv, as part of a delegation of ten U.S. Senators. “There won’t be two fronts, there’ll be three,” he added, allowing the recipient of that message to ponder what and where that third military front would be.