COLLECTIVE MADNESS
“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
Belligerent Hamas is an improvement.
ReplyDeleteHow would you like a homicide tunnel dug under your digs in Philly?
Every missile shot at Israel is an act of war.
Really, this shooting off missiles into Israel every few months must stop.
Much of this stuff comes from Iran.
And Iran calls a lot of the shots in Gaza.
DeletePartition North Philadelphia from the rest of the city, Let them in and out at whim. Cut off theri trade, water and freedom to pursue their livelihood. Do that for twenty years and check in and lecture us about the consequences.
Hamas's Useful Idiots
ReplyDeleteBy Rich Lowry - July 26, 2014
Sound bites are usually meant to obfuscate as much as clarify. Rarely is one so incisive as the line uttered by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu the other day about the difference between Israel and Hamas: “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”
This is the ground truth of the latest Gaza War that gets obscured by the relentlessly repeated stark disparity in casualties between the Gazans, hundreds of whom have died in the conflict, and the Israelis.
Each civilian death in Gaza is a tragedy, but who is ultimately responsible? The moral calculus here is simple. Hamas precipitated the war and persisted in waging it even when Israel was willing to accept an Egyptian offer of a cease-fire. Hamas hides its rockets in schools and places its command bunkers under hospitals. It wants war, and it wants civilian casualties.
Joseph Stalin infamously said that one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Hamas is happy with either a tragedy (the four kids killed on the beach by Israeli shells last week) or a statistic (the climbing civilian toll), so long as it is death and so long as it can be used in the propaganda war against Israel.
This isn’t hard to understand. Yet even supporters of Israel give in to the twisted logic that the Gaza conflict is somehow an indictment of the Jewish state. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright said on CNN “that this is hurting Israel’s moral authority.” Which is exactly the conclusion Hamas wants “the international community” to draw from its depraved indifference to the safety of Gazans.
Jon Stewart did a controversial bit last week about how Israel has all the advantages in the conflict, what with its warnings via app to its civilians about incoming rockets and its ability to neutralize those rockets with its missile defenses.
Yes, how unfair. Israel invested in systems entirely devoted to protecting its civilian population from unprovoked attack. What dastardliness is the Zionist entity capable of next?
Of course there is an asymmetry between Hamas and Israel. There will always be a technological gap between a ramshackle terror force with medieval religious views and a dynamic, liberal society. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda had box cutters. We had B-52s. Did that make us the unsympathetic Goliath to al-Qaeda’s David?
DeleteIsrael might well undertake an indiscriminate, scorched-earth campaign in Gaza — if it were run by, say, the Assad regime in Syria, with its taste for chemical weapons and barrel bombs. Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out in The Atlantic that 700 people were killed in Syria last weekend alone, outpacing the total death toll in Gaza so far, but the deaths received almost no media coverage.
Whatever their failings, the American news media are paragons of balance and context compared with their international counterparts. Still, Italian-Palestinian Rula Jebreal complained on MSNBC that the media, including MSNBC itself, are “disgustingly biased” in favor of Israel. Chris Hayes had her on his MSNBC show and explained the difficulty in giving representatives of Israel and Hamas equal time. It turns out that it’s hard to book spokesmen from the terror group.
None of this is to deny the very real suffering of Gazans. No rational person interested in their welfare would govern the way Hamas does. Its technical proficiency is smuggling. Its infrastructure program consists of building tunnels for acts of murder and kidnapping. Its civil-defense system is to admonish endangered civilians not to heed Israeli warnings to flee buildings about to be hit. Its peace plan is annihilation of the Jewish state.
It can’t achieve that by force of arms. Its objective is, with support from fellow travelers and useful idiots the world over, to make Israel the new South Africa, toward the goal of its ultimate destruction. If it takes countless dead Palestinians to do it, so be it.
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/07/26/hamass_useful_idiots_123471.html#ixzz38arB6bZF
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
So tell us, Robert Peterson, are you willfully ignorant or are you losing your mental capacity?
DeleteDo you not remember things or just maintaining a "Selective Memory"?
You used to proclaim the quality of Judaic literature..
I see make no comments about the content of the Talmud, why is that?
Willful ignorance or a lack of comprehension of the written word?
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DeleteThe moral calculus here is simple. Hamas precipitated the war and persisted in waging it even when Israel was willing to accept an Egyptian offer of a cease-fire.
This particular war was precipitated by Bibi for those who can see and are willing to look.
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The war was precipitated by the Zionist invasion of Palestine in 1948, the taking control of Gaza in 1967 and the initiation of the war on the people of Gaza in June of 2007.
DeleteOthers think it was precipitated by Iran.
Delete......................
Dear Rodent -
The Talmud is something like 6 or 7,000 pages long. I don't have a copy by my bed. Do you?
When I speak of Jewish literature I mean the Jewish Bible along with some commentary from sources I like.
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Delete...along with some commentary from sources I like.
:-)
American Thinker
The Sarah Palin Cookbook and Foreign Policy Thingies
WiO and Allen's Alternate History of the Universe
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This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete.
DeleteIS is at it again.
Saw a story on one of the news stations yesterday. IS has dictated that the heads of all female mannequins in department stores now be fitted with head scarves and veils, one assumes so that their macho warriors won't be tempted to try to hump them.
.
Well, I always hate it when I go to the Mall and see some arab humping a mannequin
DeleteIf head scarves and veils will stop this behavior, I'm all for it.
In a Mall, go God's sake, right out in public.........disgusting humping in the display case
Meanwhile, on the Homefront ...
ReplyDeleteU.S. Targets Deposits Paid to Smugglers Bringing Kids to the U.S.
Brian Bennett | Los Angeles Times
'Operacion Coyote' has resulted in 192 arrests and the seizure of $625,000 in U.S. bank holdings, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced.
ReplyDeleteObama administration sends military advisers to assess Mexican border needs
The Obama administration has sent a team of military and national security officials to the Texas-Mexico border to assess whether there is a need for National Guard troops to help deal with the influx of unaccompanied foreign children, senior White House officials said.
A team of experts from the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security will conduct their study in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas to determine whether the military can "temporarily assist" U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the officials said.
The tunnels are the cause of the ground operation. Netanyahu did not dig the tunnels.
ReplyDeleteThe years' long bombardment of Israel by Hamas was the cause of the Israeli air campaign.
Just so.
Deleterat crapper, do you read your Talmud in Tannaitic Hebrew or Aramaic?
ReplyDeleteJust curious.
Robert Peterson, do you read the Koran in Arabic?
ReplyDeleteYes, of course.
DeleteSo much can be lost in translation. The rhythmic quality of the words, the inner meanings......
How about you, rat crapper?
So all you Muslims read Arabic, that's what I thought.
DeleteLearned it so you could read it.
Good job Robert Peterson-Islamic acolyte.
http://news.yahoo.com/mortars-fired-gaza-israel-extends-humanitarian-ceasefire-172700384.html
ReplyDeleteMortars Fired from Gaza as Israel Extends Humanitarian Ceasefire
“According to Channel 2, the IDF says it might not be an intentional violation of the truce, but a lone terror cell acting without orders from Hamas’s central command.”
For the record, Palestinians fired first.
And?
DeleteIt is over.
DeleteIsrael needs to start looking for a new leader, one who recognizes that no state can long exist which will not defend its citizens and territorial integrity.
Netanyahu must go. With any luck, he may share a cell with the criminal Olmert.
ditto
Delete.
DeleteWere those burps, hiccups or a simple stutter?
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What an incredibly odd question.
DeleteAre you a connoisseur of bodily sounds, Quirk?
DeleteDo you tape record?
You could start a new enterprise, a rave TV show, Quirk's Name That Bodily Sound.
Delete.
DeleteMerely innate curiosity.
My first thought was they might be simple brain farts but because of my overarching courtesy and discretion, I chose not to mention it...well...until you brought it up, that is.
:-)
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territorial integrity. ...an ironic term to be used for Israel.
DeleteWhen may we expect to see you use "Zionist Entity"?
DeleteHamas should be disarmed and beaten to within an inch of its life but not allowed to die.
ReplyDeleteDead, Fatah takes over. That means both the west bank and Gaza under one control. Then the pressure for a two state 'solution' grows.
But there is no solution, short of an all out mid east war in which no one any longer cares if the arabs of Palestine exist, or not.
Fox is saying the cease fire seems to be crumbling.....Hamas having rejected a four hour extension.......if I heard aright.....
Here you go, Robert Peterson, my gift to you.
ReplyDeleteSarah Palin: Not impeaching Barack Obama "affront to God"
Mrs Palin, an expert on both Black Men and God.
Sorry, but I don't accept gifts from anti-semitic criminals.
DeleteSince Jack Hawkins is neither of those things, enjoy the video, Robert Peterson.
DeleteKnow you want to, gotta see her ....
DeleteGo for it Robert Peterson, get your jollies ...
Satisfy that Basketball Jones !
Bob OreilleSat Jul 26, 02:32:00 PM EDT
ReplyDeleteFox is saying the cease fire seems to be crumbling.....Hamas having rejected a four hour extension.......if I heard aright.....
Hamas has rejected a continuation of the phony ceasefire and has been firing into Israel for the past few hours. From appearances, Netanyahu is going to sign off on a “permanent” phony ceasefire and let Hamas off the hook. From his behavior I gather that he has been able to bribe a few religious fanatics in the government to stick with him, preventing a vote of "no confidence". The criminal Olmert was able to do this several times as prime minister. May Netanyahu suffer the same fate as Olmert, the criminal.
I really want to be pleasantly surprised by the Israeli cabinet and Knesset working hastily to summarily removal of Netanyahu, but I think not. Netanyahu is far too cagey a rat to betray his country unless he is absolutely sure of having the votes to survive. That said, he has made implacable enemies who will pounce at any opportunity to bring him down. Think of Benedict Arnold being retained by Washington following his treason, if you want the feeling now coming to a rapid boil in Israel.
Were I Netanyahu, I would be changing my security detail regularly and staying in my safe room as much as possible. Like Qaddafi, he may have to change sleeping quarters nightly.