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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
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Do we notice in this GroundhogDay recurrence of human shielding something slightly different from all the last rounds? I think we might, which though the object of our notice has been mentioned elsewhere, it may not have been fully developed as an idea possibly governing the outcome of this latest round.
So, what is it? That the Arabs ruling in the West Bank are ever so slightly less willing to pretend that human shielding by Hamas is not taking place, and are in consequence actually seize the opportunity to distinguish themselves in a few subtle regards (their ends — power — aren’t the question in this).
That the ruling Arabs in Egypt clearly see the human shielding going on, and utterly oppose it.
That the ruling Arabs in Saudi Arabia stay mostly quiet and hence can be read to oppose the Hamasians.
That the ruling Arabs in Jordan plainly oppose the Hamasians and offer opposition.
So there seems to be an opening for Israel to put an end to Hamas with the willing acquiescence of many (obviously not all, since these sorts of 180 degree changes in direction of march take time, after all) of the locally interested Arabs. There are even small signs that the Arab residents of Gaza are catching on to their plight as slaves and cannon-fodder of their madmen rulers Hamas.
That’s the hopeful business.
What’s the other new wrinkle in this round of GroundHogDay which vies for the continuation of endless rounds of murder from Hamas?
The idiot in the cartoon holding up the amnesty baby — America has not had a CinC who objectively stood on the side of Hamas, not even the moron JimmyHeartLuster.
That’s the rotten business.
Ouch. Well played, Ramirez.
Falla: Danza rituel del fuego, Danza del terror
– Progressives add themselves to the “victim hood list“.
When Susan Rice pronounces the words “the reality is John Kerry . . . . ” does everyone with half a brain stop to think, “hey, hmm, this ‘reality’ stuff isn’t at all what it’s propped up to be, is it?”
Well no. It isn’t.
Gill Hoffman tweets: Obama told @netanyahu in tough conversation Sunday he trusts Turkey, Qatar & that Israel’s not in a position to choose mediators. -Channel1
If only Latin American immigrants voted Republican and Hamas were radical Christians.
Tablet: Top Secret Hamas Command Bunker in Gaza Revealed — And why reporters won’t talk about it
The Independent: ‘Women Should Not Laugh In Public’, says Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister in morality speech
If only Latin American immigrants voted Republican…..
– The vast majority of them are Conservative, religious, and would normally vote Republican. It’s only due to the immigration issue that turned them for the Damn-a-rats.
“Women Should Not Laugh at my penis In Public”
TFTFY
sdferr, it’s not surprising that the Egyptians and Jordanians are not enamored with the Gazans. Gaza was a part of Egypt until 1967, but when Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, Egypt didn’t want it back. Further, the Jordanians hate the Palestinians and tried to wipe them out during “Black September” of 1970 IIRC.
Latinos seem to have a displaced love for big government.
Ah, but the price of eggs in China, shermlaw.
sdferr, I don’t about the price in China. My daughter’s in Taipei at the moment teaching English. I can text her, if that will help. Are we talking regular eggs or those 100 year old, buried in dirt things?
Since tunnelling — i.e. buried things — seems to be highly salient to the current conflict, it’s possibly best to go with the fermented eggs, I reckon.
An interesting conversation, if accurate:
*** 21:33 — Hebrew transcript of Obama and Netanyahu’s phone call
Israel’s Channel 1 publishes a Hebrew transcript of a portion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama’s telephone conversation Sunday, in which Obama is insistent that Israel unilaterally halt all military activities in the Gaza Strip.
The following is an English translation of the Hebrew account of the talk given in the report:
Barack Obama: I demand that Israel agrees to an immediate, unilateral ceasefire and halt all offensive activities, in particular airstrikes.
Benjamin Netanyahu: And what will Israel receive in exchange for a ceasefire?
BO: I believe that Hamas will cease its rocket fire — silence will be met with silence.
BN: Hamas broke all five previous ceasefires. It’s a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
BO: I repeat and expect Israel to stop all its military activities unilaterally. The pictures of destruction in Gaza distance the world from Israel’s position.
BN: Kerry’s proposal was completely unrealistic and gives Hamas military and diplomatic advantages.
BO: Within a week of the end of Israel’s military activities, Qatar and Turkey will begin negotiations with Hamas based on the 2012 understandings, including Israel’s commitment to removing the siege restrictions on Gaza.
BN: Qatar and Turkey are the biggest supporters of Hamas. It’s impossible to rely on them to be fair mediators.
BO: I trust Qatar and Turkey. Israel is not in the position that it can choose its mediators.
BN: I protest because Hamas can continue to launch rockets and use tunnels for terror attacks –
BO: (interrupting Netanyahu) The ball’s in Israel’s court, and it must end all its military activities. ***
Sound too articulate for Obama. Maybe it gains something in translation.
Heh.
ClownDisaster says “Within a week of the end of Israel’s military activities, Qatar and Turkey will begin negotiations with Hamas based on the 2012 understandings, including Israel’s commitment to removing the siege restrictions on Gaza”, but notice he fails to mention that within two weeks Hamas will be back firing missiles into Israel and shuttling terrorists in and out of Israel through its remaining tunnels. Probably slipped his mind.
The following is a Squid translation of the supposed conversation:
Barack Obama: I demand that Israel agree to an immediate, unilateral ceasefire and halt all offensive activities.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Why the fuck should I care what you demand? When was the last time any world leader gave a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut(1) what you had to say?
BO: What did you just say to me?
Bibi: You heard me, Jugears. You tell your boy Lurch to let his Hamas buddies know that they’re about to learn the literal meaning of ‘making the rubble bounce.’
BO: You can’t be serious.
Bibi: Serious as a rocket attack, Barry Choom. Tell you what — you need a diplomatic victory for the folks back home? How’s this: “Israel immediately lifts its blockade of all outgoing ships from Gaza, and encourages civilians to get aboard something that floats before we bulldoze their entire fucking neighborhoods.” Catchy enough for you?
*click* *brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr*
(1) Alternate translation is “bagel.”
Caroline Glick: Israel, Hamas and Obama’s Foreign Policy
*** The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and the imperative of winning – however defined.
But then the telephone rang. And Obama told Netanyahu that Israel must lose. He wants an unconditional “humanitarian” cease-fire that will lead to a permanent one.
And he wants it now.
And by the way, the eventual terms of that cease-fire must include opening Hamas-controlled Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel and ending Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza coast. That is, the cease-fire must allow Hamas to rebuild its arsenal of death and destruction quickly, with US political and financial support.
Until Obama made the call, there was lingering doubt among some Israelis regarding his intentions. Some thought that US Secretary of State John Kerry might have been acting of his own accord last Friday night when he tried to force Israel to accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms.
But then Obama made his phone call. And all doubts were dispelled.
Kerry is just a loyal steward of Obama’s foreign policy.
Obama is siding with Hamas, and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons in Qatar and Turkey, against Israel, and its Sunni Arab supporters – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. ***
– What are you talking about “within a week”. The murdering Hamas morons broke their own ceasefire 20 minutes after it started.
Hamas propaganda work: tunnel attack from this morning, video heavily edited and uploaded to youtube.
“Barky, here is Israel’s counter-demand: You come to Israel, and every single Israeli citizen, Jew and Arab, will line up to have you kiss their asses, one by one. Hope you’ve got lots of Chap-Stik.”
– You can trust that Lurch is on a very short leash, both because he’s an idiot and because of Bumblefucks ego, so any idea that IWonPenPhone wasn’t calling all the shots is pure fantasy.
– As in the case of the phony impeachment rumor. Jug ears and the Dems are desperate for any good news they can generate before the elections.
– If the Reps pick up the House, especially a majority, he will give a whole new meaning to lame duck.
More (or most of the rest) of Glick’s column:
*** The discovery that the Obama administration is entirely in Hamas’s corner hit all of Israel hard. But it hit the Left the hardest. Few on the Right, which recognized Obama’s hostility from the outset of his presidency, were surprised.
As for political leaders, the government cannot risk giving the administration justification for its anti-Israel policies, so senior ministers have all said nothing.
Consequently, the harshest criticisms of the administration’s pro-Hamas position were heard from quarters where rarely a peep of criticism for Obama has been heard.
The Israeli Left went ballistic.
Haaretz, the far-left broadsheet that has seldom taken issue with even the harshest rejections of Israel’s rights, went bananas after its reporter Barak Ravid received the details of Kerry’s cease-fire agreement. As Ravid put it, Kerry’s document, “might as well have been penned by Khaled Mashaal. It was everything Hamas could have hoped for.”
Ravid continued, “What Kerry’s draft spells for the internal Palestinian political arena is even direr: It crowns Hamas and issues Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a death warrant.”
And that is really the crux of the issue. The crowd at Haaretz is far more wedded to the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas than it is to the government of Israel. And the administration’s support for Hamas exposed the PLO as an irrelevance.
As the paper’s Amos Harel wrote the next day, Kerry’s pro-Hamas behavior convinced the Egyptians and other actors that the administration is “continuing its secret love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region.”
The Left understands that the administration’s behavior has destroyed it.
Leftists can no longer say that Israeli territorial withdrawals will win it international support.
They can no longer say that Israel will receive US support if it places the security of Palestinian civilians above the security of its own civilians and military forces.
They can no longer say that the PLO is the answer.
The Israeli Left has been Obama’s ace in the hole since he first ran for office, fresh from the pews in Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic church. They were the grease in the wheels that legitimized the administration’s anti-Israel pressure group J Street. They were the ones who could be counted on to tell the US media and the American Jews that Netanyahu is to blame for Obama’s hostility.
Yet, rather than backtrack, and try to save the Israeli Left, the administration doubled down on Monday, releasing a series of statements condemning the Israeli media’s condemnations of Kerry’s pro-Hamas position.
By Monday afternoon, the administration went so far as to say that by criticizing Kerry, Israel’s media were endangering their country’s alliance with the US.
In other words, through his actions, Obama demonstrated that his “love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region,” are so central to his foreign policy calculations that he is willing to destroy the Israeli Left in order to strengthen the Brotherhood.
And this leads us to the larger point about Obama’s foreign policy, which his Sunday night telephone call to Netanyahu revealed. As rattled as Israelis are over Obama’s decision to support Hamas against Israel, Netanyahu made clear in his remarks Monday night that Israel has no choice but to keep fighting until we defeat this barbaric enemy.
Netanyahu didn’t mention Obama, but it was obvious that he was respectfully refusing to hand Israel’s head on a platter to Hamas’s friend in the White House.
And while it is hard for Israel to ignore Obama, it is impossible for Americans to ignore him. He runs their foreign policy.
Americans are the ones who need to be most alarmed by what Obama’s actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.
For the past five years, Americans from all quarters have concluded that the manifold failures of Obama’s Middle East policies – from Iraq to Iran, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and beyond – owe to a combination of Obama’s personal disinterest in foreign affairs and his presumed preference for withdrawal and isolationism over engagement.
Obama himself has often encouraged this perception with his endless golf games and his talk about fighting “the war at home.”
Obama’s open, public engagement in Hamas’s war against Israel shows that the popular assessment is wrong.
Obama is as involved in the Middle East as all of his immediate predecessors were. He is personally leading US policy on every front. Kerry is not an independent actor.
The problem is that in every war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, against America’s allies.
Under Obama, America has switched sides. ***
Which would tend to place Andrew McCarthy’s comment — “Is that the end of the matter? Not by a long shot. As I’ve also contended, the president’s failure to comply with a dubious statute is a mere footnote to his truly egregious offense: replenishing enemy forces at a time when the enemy is still conducting offensive terrorist operations against our armed forces. It would be difficult to fathom a more outrageous dereliction of duty by the commander-in-chief.” — in a rather harsher, more complete light, no?
– Well whats so surprising about dumping supporters under the bus as soon as it’s more convenient to stab them in the back. It’;s what Progressives, Marxists, and everyone on the Left always does.
– The Jewish Left won’t be voting in the elections so they’re expendable, and Bumblefuck needs some red meat to rally the base.
ObaZma needs his jewman shields back:
@NSCPress: We have seen reports of an alleged POTUS-Netanyahu transcript; neither reports nor alleged transcript bear any resemblance to reality 1/2 — Shocking and disappointing someone would sink to misrepresenting a pvt convo between POTUS and PM in fabrications to Israeli press 2/2
– Israeli war blog notes:
4:40 p.m. Forces from the IDF’s Givati Brigade opened fire and killed five terrorists from Gaza on Tuesday who emerged from a tunnel.
The IDF forces suffered no casualties.
The forces seized a large amount of weapons, including Kalachnikov rifles, bullets and explosives.
– The GD Russians just can’t help themselves. Link.
“BO: I trust Qatar and Turkey. Israel is not in the position that it can choose its mediators. ”
But who trusts you Baracky? What position have you placed the US into that IT can choose the mediators? You’re a bad joke about a worse train wreck with a peace prize. STFU. Water is flowing around your big caring hands and you can’t hold anything any more. You’re a pointy haired boss in a Dilbert strip now. Israel sees you as a retarded child emperor weakening his own world position such that instead of obeying you Israel’s goal is now to keep you busy while blowing your demands off and if possible embarrass you in the process. Go play more golf and raise money for the party that is slowly backing away from you, idiot.
I’m sure an NSC tweeter working for the Unicorn Prince can always be trusted to set the record straight.
“So there seems to be an opening for Israel to put an end to Hamas with the willing acquiescence of many (obviously not all, since these sorts of 180 degree changes in direction of march take time, after all) of the locally interested Arabs. ”
ISIS is proof that all the regional islamist rage cannot be continuously fed to keep it docile and successfully channeled into Israel/Palestine, and that the US is not going to be a real counter to Iran if they break loose. A massive rebellion is brewing that will quite probably flatten the whole damned region and they cannot afford to pretend that it is only Israel and the west’s problem. They cannot play sides off against each other while riding a fence any more.
A lot of arab powers, such as they are, are getting serious about finding a new paradigm to stave off the long suni-shia revolutionary slaughter march. I expect to see sixty million people flee that region in the next ten years. EASY.
It’s a very good point you make palaeomerus about ISIS new presence on the scene. CNN, in it’s desperation to find some hook whereby to save Hamas from destruction trots ISIS out in the mouth of Robert Baer to boogie-man the rubes with, saying “if Hamas goes, only something like ISIS can possibly replace them”.
Somehow or other, I don’t think CNN’s gambit is going to work.
Third rocket arsenal found in UN school in Gaza
– So, along with His highness we can now add the UN as officially on the side of our enemies.
It always was, BBH, it always has been since it’s creation by people like FDR and Alger Hiss.
*** More details emerge on the booby-trapped tunnel uncovered in the southern Gaza Strip today: An Israeli elite squad searching for tunnels near Khan Younis uncovers a booby-trapped opening in a small UNRWA health clinic.
The troops send in sniffing dogs and a small robot to minimize damage to the structure, but despite the precautionary measures, the explosives rigged to the tunnel are detonated, demolishing the building on top of the soldiers.
Earlier reports indicated that a number of soldiers were injured.
Brig. Gen. Micky Edelstein says militants have used more than a thousand IEDs so far, destroying thousands of buildings in the Gaza Strip.
For instance, he says, in sweeps of a single street of 28 buildings last night, 19 were found to be booby-trapped. ***