RUTHFULLY YOURS

“War is peace,” entered our cultural vocabulary some sixty-four years ago. Around the same time that Orwell’s masterpiece was being printed up, an armistice was being negotiated between Israel and the Arab invading armies. That armistice began the long peaceful war or the warring peace.
The entire charade did not properly enter the realm of the Orwellian until the peace process began. The peace process between Israel and the terrorist militias funded by the countries of those invading armies has gone on for longer than most actual wars. It has also taken more lives than most actual wars.

War has an endpoint. Peace does not. A peace in which you are constantly at war can go on forever because while the enthusiasts of war eventually exhaust their patriotism, the enthusiasts of peace never give up on their peacemaking.

Warmongers may stop after a few thousand dead, but Peacemongers will pirouette over a million corpses.

Two decades later the peace process has failed in every way imaginable and cemeteries on both sides are full of the casualties of peace. Two decades which have created two abortive Palestinian states at war with one another and with Israel.

Two decades later, it’s still time for peace.

Peace time means that it’s time to ring up some more Israeli concessions in the hopes of getting the terrorists and their quarreling states back to the negotiating table for another photo op in the glorious album of peacemakers.

And if the photos are properly posed, perhaps there will even be another Nobel Peace Prize in it for all the participants.

It would be nice to think that the peace disease was one of those viruses carried only in the bloodstream of liberals. But it’s not.

What is Hamas doing? Hamas isn’t going to defeat Israel.

It isn’t going to gain any territory. Israel isn’t going to withdraw from Ashkelon or Sderot under a hail of rockets.

So if Hamas can’t win, why is it fighting? Why rain down destruction and misery on millions of Israelis with your Iranian missiles and your Syrian rockets and invite a counter-assault on your headquarters and weapons warehouses, which you have conveniently placed in the middle of the Palestinian people on whose behalf you are allegedly fighting? Hamas is in a precarious position. When the terror group took over Gaza seven years ago, things were different.

It had a relatively friendly regime in Cairo that was willing to turn a blind eye to all the missiles Iran, Syria and Hezbollah were sending over to Gaza through Sinai.

Hamas’s leaders were comfortably ensconced in Damascus and enjoyed warm relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

International funds flowed freely into Hamas bank accounts from Fatah’s donor-financed Palestinian Authority budget, through the Arab Bank, headquartered in Jordan, through the UN, and when necessary through suitcases of cash transferred to Gaza by couriers from Egypt.

Hamas used these conditions to build up the arsenal of a terror state, and to keep the trains running on time. Schools were open. Government employees were paid. Israel was bombed. All was good.

Today, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, faces an Egyptian regime that is locked into a life-and-death struggle with the Brotherhood. To harm Hamas, for the past year the Egyptians have been blocking Hamas’s land-based weapons shipments and destroying its smuggling-dependent economy by sealing off the cross-border tunnels.

Syria and Hamas parted ways at the outset of the Syrian civil war when Hamas, a Sunni jihadist group, was unable to openly support Bashar Assad’s massacre of Sunnis.

Terrorism is a game. The rules are simple. You have three choices. 1. Destroy the terrorists. 2. Live with terrorism. 3. Give in to the terrorists.

There are no other choices.

The first choice comes from the right. The third choice comes from the left. The second choice is what politicians choose when they don’t want to make a decision that will change the status quo.

Despite all the explosions in Gaza, Israel is still stuck on the second choice. The air strikes aren’t meant to destroy Hamas. They are being carried out to degrade its military capabilities which will buy a year or two of relative peace. And that will be followed by more of the same in the summer of 2016 when Hamas will have deadlier Iranian and Syrian weapons that will terrorize more of the country.

That doesn’t sound like much of a deal, but these kinds of wars have bought more peace than the peace process ever did. The peace process led to wars. The wars lead to a temporary peace.

This status quo became the mainstream choice ever since Israelis figured out that the peace process wasn’t going to work and that their leaders weren’t about to defy the UN, the US, the UK and all the other U’s by actually destroying the terrorists.

When Netanyahu first ran against Peres, the difference between the center-right and the center-left was that he campaigned on security first and appeasement second, while Peres campaigned on appeasement first and security second. The center-right has dominated Israeli politics because most Israelis accepted Likud’s security first as a more reasonable position than Labor’s appeasement first.

Living with terrorism was a viable choice in the 80s. It stopped being a viable choice after Israel allowed terrorist states to be set up under the peace process. It’s one thing to manage terrorism in territories that you control. It’s another thing to deal with entire terrorist states inside your borders. Even physical separation isn’t enough. Not when terrorist groups can shell all your major cities.

Israel responds to that threat with light air strikes which damage Hamas’ military capabilities. Hamas loses a few commanders, fighters and rockets, but scores a PR victory. Israel buys two years of peace while encouraging its enemies to attack it as a bunch of racist baby killers. Then Hamas replaces the rockets and fighters and launches a new operation and the whole thing begins again.

As is often bemoaned by scholars, genuine classical education in American schools is virtually non-existent. Whereas 100 years ago, university students learned Greek and Latin, today, remedial math and English instruction is the norm.

Yet, if people had a glimpse of Solon who lived approximately from 640-560 BCE, they would take to heart his warning about the “Signs of Dictatorship.”

The power of hail and snow springs from a cloud,

and thunder from the fire of lightning.

Strong men destroy a city, and a tyrant

enslaves a people through their ignorance.

A ship once out of port is hard to capture:

know this now before it is too late.

Near the end of his life, Solon warned the citizens that Peisistratus, the general in the final war for Salamis and leader of northeastern Attica, was becoming tyrannical. Yet Solon’s warnings were ignored — in fact, the people dismissed them as the ravings of a madman. Solon responded with “[a] little time will show the citizens my madness. Yes, will show, when truth comes in our midst.” And, indeed, he was proven correct when Peisistratus did show his true tyrannical colors.

Barack Hussein Obama consistently flouts American law, disregards the separation of powers, and seemingly could not care less about the swirling scandals surrounding him. As of May 2014 there have been 23 executive alterations of Obama’s own Affordable Care Act. Chris Conover at Forbes highlights the egregious and unilateral changes to Obamacare when he explains that “[t]he Constitution and its carefully crafted system of checks and balances matters. If President Obama disagrees with a statutory provision enacted into law (and that he signed!), the proper course of action is to go back to Congress and get the law changed.”

All you need to do is look at the headlines out of Central America to see why tens of thousands of children are ending up at our border.

“In Columbia [sic], Rising Violence Breeds New Doubts” (New York Times); “Guatemala Seen Slipping Into a Haven For Drugs” (Los Angeles Times); “Democracy Jeopardized as New Wave of Violence Sweeps Guatemala” (AP); “The Volcano That Is Guatemala” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); “A New Dark Age for Latin America?” (Miami Herald); “Murder Soars in El Salvador” (Washington Post); “Social Breakdown Turns Deadly in Guatemala” (Washington Post); “Roadside Rampage: Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala Raise Stake of Central American Drug-Addled Violence” (States News Service); “Drug Cartels Take Toll on Guatemala’s Politics” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

No wonder we have so many refugees at our door.

Except there’s one hitch: All of these headlines are very old. The first is from 1987, the last from 2007. And yet, over those two decades, we never saw anything like what we are seeing today.

Something else is going on. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that the children at the border aren’t fleeing horrible conditions, violence, and poverty. But horrible conditions are not exactly new to Central America.

In other words, the new variable isn’t what’s happening down there, it’s what’s happened up here.

President Obama has gotten a lot of grief from his base for being the “deporter-in-chief.” But the basis for this charge is rooted in some statistical sleight of hand that he uses on the stump to show that he’s tough on illegal immigration. President Obama likes to claim that he’s deported a lot of people. But he hasn’t. What he’s done is count people caught and turned around at the border as “deportations.” If previous administrations had counted thwarted illegal immigrants that way, Obama’s number of “deportations” from the border would likely still be much lower than that of other recent presidents. Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April, “expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40 percent since 2009.”

“If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen,” John Sandweg, the former acting head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told the Times.

As a defender of the nation’s borders, President Barack Obama is a hell of a pool player.

The president enjoyed a game at a bar in Denver with Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on Tuesday, without the noir atmosphere of his furtive visits to pool halls with his grandfather as a kid, when he felt “the enticement of darkness and the click of the cue ball, and the jukebox flashing its red and green lights.”

Obama’s game the other day was bright and cheery, as one would expect of a president who didn’t have any depressing visits to frightened ranchers, overwhelmed border agents or desperate migrants on his future itinerary.

The first rule in a crisis for any executive is put on your windbreaker and your boots and get out on the ground. President George W. Bush didn’t do it soon enough after Hurricane Katrina and, politically, could never make up for it, no matter how many times he visited New Orleans subsequently. Obama’s bizarre resistance to visiting the border on his fundraising swing out West fueled talk of the influx as Obama’s “Katrina moment.”

The Katrina analogy is both over the top and too generous. It is over the top because the border influx isn’t a deadly catastrophe swallowing an American city. It is too generous because Bush didn’t do anything to bring on Hurricane Katrina, whereas Obama’s policies are responsible for the influx of immigrants from the border. It is, in the argot of his administration, a “man-caused disaster.”

According to The Los Angeles Times, the number of immigrants younger than 18 who were deported or turned away from ports of entry declined from 8,143 in 2008 to 1,669 last year. There were 95 minors deported from the entire interior of the country last year. This occurred as the number of unaccompanied alien children arriving from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras exploded from less than 4,000 several years ago to 40,000 since last October.

It’s not hard to do the math and understand the incentives. “Deportation data won’t dispel rumors drawing migrant minors to the U.S.” is how the L.A. Times headlined its story.

The White House brushes off criticism that Obama is avoiding the border as mere “optics,” in contrast to its highly substantive focus. But it is still not taking the crisis seriously.

Dear God save me, but it’s started again: the puerile body-counting and mindless moralizing that eventually worms its way into nearly every news report whenever fighting breaks out between a Palestinian faction and the Israel Defense Forces.

Here it is — I call it the dueling-body-count cliché — in yesterday’s Guardian. It is clear, says the author, “that Israeli life is deemed by the western media to be worth more than a Palestinian life.” There is “a hierarchy of death,” he contends. (White-skin privilege and all that.) His evidence? The numbers. “According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, 565 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces since January 2009, while 28 Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli security personnel have been killed. The asymmetry of this so-called conflict is reflected in the death toll . . .”

After reviewing the tallies, the MSM types, like this Guardianista, always arrive at the same conclusion: Israel is somehow taking unfair advantage, and the international community must immediately intervene to stop it. The usual term is “disproportionate response.” (It never seems to occur to them that by their logic, a cop trying to stop a rape would have to drop his handgun and radio and attempt to pry the rapist off the victim with his bare hands in order to even the contest.)

But here’s the heart of the problem — and, when Jews are concerned, it has ancient, ugly echoes: The media love victims, and the Jewish state is done with being a victim. Jews simply don’t go quietly to their deaths any more. They insist — arrogantly, selfishly, piggishly — on living. They do brutish things like create great hospitals and great civil-defense systems, and train great soldiers, all in this greedy quest for life.

The main reason the Israeli civilian casualties are always in the single digits is that Israel maintains a huge network of bomb shelters; folks know where to run for protection (though they have on average only 15 seconds to get there). Israel has developed an early-warning system and deployed many of its best minds to work on the paradigm-changing “Iron Dome” for in-air rocket interception.

Meanwhile, Palestinians, both Hamas and PA, have gone in the opposite direction. At a minimum, the Hamas government, the recipient of millions in foreign aid, could have set up a shelter system for its civilian population. Instead it has simply chosen not to because, as a Palestinian journalist I know puts it, “They don’t care.” Dead civilians are more useful than live ones.

Obama Talks to Netanyahu—Did Bibi Tell Barry to Stuff It?Posted By Roger L Simon

Well, maybe not stuff it, but finally someone may be standing up to America’s ultra-reactionary, fumbling, paleo-narcissistic and now hugely unpopular president — and his name is Benjamin Netanyahu. If we are to believe the Jerusalem Post, Bibi should be the leader of the free world. Arrivederci, Barry. Take your favorite nine iron and head off to Maui or the Vineyard or wherever you want to be with our blessings — as long as you stay there.

From the JPost [1]:

The United States is prepared to facilitate a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas [2] in the Gaza Strip, US President Barack Obama told Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu by phone today.

In the call, Obama “reiterated the United States’ strong condemnation of continuing rocket fire into Israel by Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza and reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself against these attacks,” the White House said in a readout of the conversation.

But Netanyahu has ruled out a ceasefire with Hamas in the short-term. On the contrary, the Israeli leader has vowed a series of additional stages to Operation Protective Edge [3]—his government’s response to continued rocket fire on Israeli towns and cities, after Hamas, a terrorist organization, stockpiled tens of thousands of rockets in the coastal territory over the last several years.

A ceasefire is “not even on the agenda,” Netanyahu told members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, just hours before his call with the US leader.

Let’s hope Netanyahu does not fall prey to pressure and keeps on keeping on because someone sometime has to stand up to Islamofacism or it will continue its unstopped march across the Middle East and beyond. It certainly won’t be Obama, who has allowed violent jihadists to flourish across Iraq, Syria and Iran — not to mention North Africa, Nigeria, the Sudan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines and now the Islamic State (aka ISIS) installing their own caliphate. Obama previously tried to help shore up Islamofascism in Egypt (Morsi) and Turkey (Erdogan). And all the while he has been chasing a nuclear deal with the monstrous mullahs of Iran who want nothing more than the extinction of the West and a caliphate of their own to compete with the Sunnis of ISIS.

I’m confused. Weren’t “progressives” supposed to be for religious freedom and opposed to misogyny, homophobia and theocracy? Oh, well. Maybe I was misinformed.

California Dem Blasts Al-Jazeera on Al-Jazeera: ‘The Owners of This Network Fund Hamas’ Posted By Bridget Johnson

Bradley James “Brad” Sherman has been a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives since 1997, representing California’s 27th, and 24th congressional districts. At present he represents District 30. A poster boy for all Obama policies and a fave of the environmentalists, he did stand up to the Al Jazeera crowd…..rsk

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) may not get an invitation to reappear on Al-Jazeera America, but he sure gave the network an earful in the segment he did get this week.

“Every one of those rockets is a war crime… every rocket that is not aimed at a military target but is aimed at a city,” Sherman said on a live feed from Capitol Hill. “The owners of this TV network help fund Hamas.”

He went on to call the Hamas offensive launched against Israel “open season on those of the Jewish faith.”

“The idea that you would have a TV clear effort to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible and then you on this TV station say, ‘well, maybe it’s not a war crime because it’s not successful — the rocket didn’t hit a kindergarten. It was aimed at a kindergarten but it didn’t hit a kindergarten. So then it’s not reprehensible.’”

Sherman defended Israel’s response to the Gaza rockets as “proportionate.”

“I don’t think there are always two sides to every story. Those who are trying to kill as many babies and children and women as possible, who rejoice in their death… no, you have one side in this conflict that is doing everything it possibly can to reduce and avoid civilian casualties and to prosecute those who engage in acts against civilians,” the congressman said.

“And then you have the Hamas side… which of course Qatar supports, which rejoices in how many babies they can kill, how many children they can kill. They name squares and provide subsidies to those who are able to kill civilians and they aim their rockets at civilian targets. That’s not two equal sides.”

Sunny with light missile cover in Tel Aviv this morning. I awoke to muffled thuds in the distance, Iron Dome shooting down Syrian-made missiles launched from Gaza, according to news reports. I attended the obligatory morning mixer for hotel guests at the bomb shelter, which fortunately lasted only five minutes before the all-clear sounded. I’ll write something more comprehensive on this soon — Tablet is scheduled to run my essay next Monday — but the thumbnail version is that Hamas is making a demonstration out of weakness. Money is tight, 44,000 Gaza civil servants haven’t been paid for weeks, and the IDF did significant damage to its infrastructure on the West Bank after the kidnapping-murder of the three yeshiva boys. Netanyahu will look indecisive and confused, because he has to deal with an openly hostile U.S. administration on one side and his nationalist camp on the other. Time, though, is on Israel’s side: economically, demographically, strategically. The proportion of Jewish births continues to soar. The fruits of a decade of venture capital investing are ripening into high-valuation companies. And the Arab world is disintegrating all around Israel’s borders.

I have no idea whether the IDF will go into Gaza on the ground, or what they will do if they do so: that’s a tricky cost-benefit calculation, and no-one outside the government has relevant information. But the broader point is that Israel will win a war of attrition. Hamas has shot off hundreds of rockets (including one that landed a few kilometers from me up north in Zichron Yaakov while I had lunch there yesterday) without causing a single injury. Iron Dome has worked brilliantly. Traffic was a bit lighter than normal last night, but there wasn’t a free table at any of the hundred or so cafe terraces on Dizengoff St., Tel Aviv’s main drag.