Quote of the Day
Yesterday was a victory. For freedom fighters to break out of a 15-year blockade so successfully under the inhuman genocide of Israel was so beautiful and inspiring to see. It shows the world that we will always fight and always resist and we need to celebrate these acts of resistance because this was a success. Revolutionary violence initiated by Palestinians is not terrorism – it is self-defence…
Hanin Barghouti
October 7, 2023
Pictured: Activist who called Hamas attacks ‘beautiful and inspiring’
It has been said that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. In this case I think the more applicable adage is that in war the truth is the first victim.
Even if you were to accept the claim Hamas is a group of freedom fighters, Israel gets a vote on what to call them. There is probably some Yiddish phrase that I am clueless of but is the rough equivalent of “dead meat”.
My guess is that the leaders of Israel have a thought process something like, “What price did Hamas think they would have to pay for this evil treachery? Okay, now multiply that price by 1,000. We are now going to deliver that price it as quickly as possible.”
By the time the IDF has finished with Hamas, people like Ms. Barghouti will no longer call Saturday’s attack “beautiful and Inspiring”. She will realize what she called “genocide” on Saturday will soon be “the good old days.” And the most positive name for Saturday’s attack will be “The Great Mistake.”
Some people say Israel should mount a “proportional response”. By this they actually mean surrender to their friends the terrorists.
If they thought it through, they would not use that phrase. The enemy’s goal is “to wipe Israel off the map” or “to kill all Jews”. So a proportional response would be to wipe Iran off the map, or to treat Gaza the way the Romans treated Carthage. Neither of those answers is actually on the table.
What does appear to be underway — eliminating Hamas fighters and political power — is therefore, obviously, a much milder than proportional response. Similarly, any conceivable response to Iran — for example, bombing every nuclear installation into dust — would be much milder than proportional.
I heard the calls for “proportional response” and thought, “What an absolutely stupid request.” It’s right up there with the “regulate guns like we do cars”, and all the unintended consequences that would cause.
What type of response is “proportional” to heavily-armed, highly-organized groups of terrorists invading a sovereign nation; killing hundreds of young people campaigning for peace (nobody’s talking about what that “outdoor festival” was stumping for); torturing and beheading small children in front of their parents; kidnapping, raping, and executing hundreds of women; and parading and desecrating their bodies through the streets of Gaza?
What response is “proportional” to an unprovoked attack by a neighbor state whose official charter includes killing all of your people (another thing nobody talks about), specifically targeting civilians, women, and children?
A “proportional response” would be IDF forces invading Gaza and doing exactly what Hamas did to them, in roughly the same numbers. Israel isn’t going to do that.
Whatever Israel’s response is, I predict it will be swift, calculated, surgical, and violent. They will track down and eliminate everyone who invaded, everyone who helped plan the attack or gave the orders, and everyone who provided them weapons and funding.
But it will not even begin to approach “proportional”; if anything, it will be extremely understated.
That’s a good point. Considering that the attack did not appear to involve much in the way of detectable “restraint”, a response void of restraint, moral, ethical, or otherwise… would be “proportional”. As they say: “Turnabout is fair play”.
I would not want to subject myself to this level of moral risk. Sometimes we find ourselves subject to things we don’t want.
I’m not there yet. Perhaps the Hatfields and the McCoys are.
I do see it coming here, though….
Israel supplies Gaza with their electricity water and food.
Mossad created hamas to counter arafat and the PLO
Amen, Joe.
I was utterly sickened by the images, on Saturday and Sunday, of a brazen terrorist attack – on a freaking international peace rally! – that resulted in hundreds dead, dozens of hostages, and a German peace activist’s corpse bring dragged, naked, through the streets of Gaza.
I don’t know what frame of mind is required to consider that sort of brutality “beautiful” or “inspiring”… and I’m not sure I want to know.
I do know this. Hamas is an organization that does its utmost to kill innocent people, and will endanger its own innocent people to do it. The IDF does its utmost to protect innocent people, and puts its own people at risk to protect the innocent on the other side.
That should make it crystal-clear where I stand.
The images were meant to horrify people, it wasn’t a mistake, I think Hamas wants a disproportionate response.
I think they know they’ll be wiped out.
If that is what they want I hope the IDF delivers. The one characteristic all martyrs to a cause share is they remain dead. If they want to die for a cause, I want the IDF to arrange that with utmost haste.
Proportional response? Old Testament, salt the earth comes to mind.
That would in fact be proportional — matching but not exceeding the explicitly stated goals of Iran and Hamas.
Call it the “Carthaginian solution”. Though from much more recent history (as L. Neil Smith pointed out) it could be called the “Hama solution”.
“Genocide”
I don’t thing that word means what she thinks it means. She might find out in the near future
I think you are way too overconfident.
It’s pretty clear that the left wing elites in Israel, who have been trying to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu, allowed this to happen deliberately. And their plan was 100 percent successful. Netanyahu will now fall from power. There will be a brief phony war with Hamas, followed by giving them everything they want.
By this time a decade from now, Israel will be no more.
They will next target America. Granted that their ally is in the White House, they still want to exterminate gun owners, not only because gun owners can resist, but also because gun owners are productive citizens, while neither “Palestinians” nor the gun control swine who cheer them on have ever produced anything other than little boys who walk bowlegged.
It’s probably too late to save Israel. But there is something that can be done here.
Governors in red states can make lists of the Hanin Barghoutis in this nation. And they can say, “If you kill any of these ‘people,’ I will pardon you.”
It’s not going be so beautiful and inspiring to see when it shows up at her door. Karma is a bitch!
Ken: Israel is reeling, back on its heels. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in many ways, Israel is dealing with challenges that are unprecedented.
But don’t write off Israel yet. Israel was utterly written off, by all the best experts, in 1948, 1967, 1973, and so on.
More to the point: the spirit in Israel is strong. Grass-roots efforts, to cheer on soldiers who are en route to the front, to feed them to capacity, to fund-raise for extra equipment for them, are astonishing and amazing. I’ve seen videos of jeeps and APCs on their way, passing crowds of cheering Israelis waving flags… and demanding that they eat something.
Remember the words of David Ben-Gurion. The history of modern Israel makes no sense, no sense at all, unless you believe in miracles.
Yeah, you know what the problem has been all this time? Israel hasn’t been trying to win.
If you believe that, I’ve got a war in Ukraine to sell you.
Who said that? Not I. What I would say is that Israel has tried to win by extremely limited war (occasionally) and diplomacy (more often), against enemies whose express goal is genocide. I suspect and hope that now diplomacy is off the table as worthless, and war is no longer limited.
Up to now it’s been Marquis of Queensbury Rules vs baby killers. As you say, I hope that now the worthless diplomacy is off the table and war is no longer limited. If they are going to fight like it was the Russian Front in WW2, I see no reason the Israelis shouldn’t do likewise.
If Marquess de Queenbury means the Geneva Conventions, then Israel violates them as a matter of policy. For example, Israel just announced that they are prohibiting hospitals from treating Hamas. That’s a black letter violation.
Face it, Israel has been doing everything it can to win, and hasn’t been able to.
There’s no sleeping dragon to awaken, only a tired, wounded old snake.
Good comments all. But what are the odds that the world’s most prestigious intel. org .(Mossad). Missed all this?
Not a snowballs chance in hell. Hamas was created as a counter balance to the PLO in Gaza. They’re a known quantity and have been since their creation.
Having an enemy is how you rally your own people and keep them under control. And you in power. That’s older than Sun Tzu cause it works.
And the excuse that they were busy other places that’s been tossed around?
Oh please.
What I see is Zelensky shitting rings around himself. The Russian’s have won. Ukraine’s 15 minutes are over. And what little we have left is going to go to fight the middle-east baba-yaga now.
They need aircraft carriers to fight street thugs? Ya, that will help!
The good part is clown-world is going to stick to what worked in the passed. So, what you see in around Gaza. What those punk-asses were doing to little girls and old alike. (Kind of reminds one of the heady days of Obama’s ISIS monster, don’t it?)
That’s coming to hometown America. In spades. And were going to get the same response from government. Our intel agencies was busy and didn’t see it coming. But don’t worry, were bringing our aircraft carriers back to protect you.
And the 25 million fighting age males we imported?
Look, not all immigrants are bad and the one’s doing this. Besides, we needed the landscapers, OK?
Now shut up, give up your guns, and let and police do their job!
Well ya, we gave the Chinese Taiwan and the Sacramento valley for what we owed them. And their going to be making chips and growing food for us now.
Never forget the real objective is to disarm us, take us off the world stage, and depopulate the world as much as possible.
Well, we get to die anyway. So, the real question is. How better to die? Not the way they got planned. That’s for sure.
*That’s* the truth: We’re not getting the whole story.
I can find plenty of examples of alleged attrocities from both “sides” of this issue, spanning centuries. I have little confidence in anything not in front of me anymore, and not all of that either. Got my hands more than full trying to prepare for the comming festivities *here*. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
I cannot remember how long ago I read somewhere “If Israel was really the genocidal state they claim, there would be no Palestinian problem because there would be no Palestinians.”
There’s a striking resemblance to the old saying “if gun owners were as violent as the victim disarmers claim…”
First off, the only thing I know for sure is that the official story is mostly rubbish and propaganda; to what expected end is largely speculation. That said, this is just one piece moving in a vary fast changing world.
The five sec recap: to expect one of the best intelligence / surveillance services in the world to miss an attack on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, when attacks and splashy things happen on almost every important anniversary, is preposterous. They had specific warnings from Egypt, etc. To think that Iron Dome would be down at that time, AND their Apache helicopter rapid response teams would stay on the pads for six+ hours (with a 15 min normal time) AND the tanks would stay parked for even longer AND the border guards were “asleep,” AND they had an unusually high number of soldiers on leave, AND their fixed-wing air force remained grounded for quite a while AND the rave (after being planned for over a year) was moved from a secure location to a place near the Gaza strip with minimal security just two days before this, AND while a package of tyrannical legislation was stalled in Knesset while facing protests for months, AND-AND-AND… is all “coincidental” is… unlikely.
Vox Day coined the term recently “Green Flag,” rather than False Flag, to describe when an attack is “allowed” by the defender in order to gin up support for a response.
https://voxday.net/2023/10/10/green-flag-or-neoclown-bait/
He also penned something related almost a decade ago:
https://voxday.net/2023/10/09/a-forgotten-script-resurfaces/
There is a LOT going on that this ties in to. The US is stretched thin; we have a major military recruiting crisis. Our ammo stockpiles are low (UKR). Our heavy industrial production has been gutted / outsourced so we don’t have the industrial capacity to shift over to increase it quickly as we did in the lead-up to WWII. (We have less than 1/10 of 1% of the world shipbuilding capacity by tonnage, and only one dockyard that can service nuke ships, even though all our carriers and subs are nukes), so getting involved in the Med, in the Gulf with Iran, near Taiwan, in UKR with RUS via NATO, etc., would be a really great time to activate sleeper cells of young men who have flooded across the southern border in the last few years. Meanwhile, the pols are trying to distract us from a collapsing economy, high inflation, lots of “died suddenly,” epic money-printing by the Fed (a quarter-trillion last week), a huge housing bubble, and low commercial real estate occupancy causing that sector to get ready to melt down.
A major war to rally the people would be the traditional answer… except we are low on ammo and can’t replace our capital losses and nobody we want in it wants to join the military any more.
I can’t think of a better time for a series of coordinated events designed to stretch our economic, military, and political resources thin. Ort a better time for our pols to “green-light” it so allow them cover to demand “emergency powers.” After all, what better time to ram through “emergency” legislation, like FDR did in WWII, and Bush with the Patriot Act for two big, obvious examples?
Meanwhile, we are barely able to realize that the war in UKR has shown us we have massive, gaping holes in our doctrine, systems, and force structure if we get involved in a land war with anything like a peer enemy, while we can’t replace our heavy weapons, naval or aircraft losses in a timely fashion. Great time to make some coordinated attacks on things, like, oh, I don’t know, the USS Gerald R Ford, our newest super-carrier that can’t even cycle aircraft launches as fast as the previous generation that used ‘old tech.’ We need more arty, more mines, WAY more ammo production, more no-EM-emission doctrine and tools.
So… Israel….
Did the attack really happen? Yes.
Are people really dying? Yes.
Is it tragic and unnecessary (from our normal human perspective)? Yes.
Is it all how it’s being presented? NO. They trying to play us like a fiddle.
Next shoe to drop in three… two….
Some relevant links (some long, most have many other links, too):
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/israel-flashpoint-localized-skirmish
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/10/israel-confesses-war-crime.html
https://voxday.net/2023/10/08/a-tale-of-two-invasions/
https://twitter.com/Sprinter99800/status/1711075990351262061
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=249842
https://voxday.net/2023/10/08/an-informative-analogy/
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/army-war-college-report-predicts
My bet is that collective West will put pressure on Israel to not finish the fight. That is what happened every time since 1948. Can Israel ignore that pressure? Will the decent people in the West put pressure on the governments to not do that?
I’m not in favor of either side in this one. Nothing against anyone involved, either. I think the best position would be total neutrality. Ukraine, too.
People have been fighting over that particular slice of the Middle East since sometime before recorded history, and over eastern Europe almost as long. I don’t see how we can help. I see a lot of ways we can make everything at least ten times worse.
Time to sit out a few wars and tend to business back at home, for once.
Exactly. One side wants to kill Christians, and the other side “just” wants to treat them as second class citizens who need to be deprogrammed to better obey their “masters”.
Why would I want to be on either side?
I say instead of giving weapons to Israel, we just drop them in on parachute pallets like in a Battle Royale game and let them work it out.
There are calls for Israel to make a proportionate response.
I agree, as follows:
Israel will continue its military action to prevent further Hamas atrocities, permanently and irrevocably annexing any territory taken in that pursuit, until the craniums of every individual involved in the rape, torture, kidnap and murder of Israeli noncombatants is delivered to Israel with a note detailing the involvement of each individual. This includes all members of Hamas that organized and funded the operation.
Also, no backsies.
Another proportional proposition: The Israeli border will move outwards into the territory of the responsible polity by 50m per noncombatant killed, 10m per noncombatant wounded. Maybe people will get the hint when Israel’s border goes from the Euphrates to the Red Sea to the outskirts of Mecca.
If you’re going to act like a stone age barbarian tribe, I’ll remind you of the stone age barbarian tribe consequences for losing: All males over the age of 10 slaughtered, all under 10 castrated, all females distributed as concubines to the victors, allow none of the remnant to contact each other, abolish their language and culture, let no edifice to their existence to remain, no stone mounted atop another stone. Just because we know new ways doesn’t mean we don’t remember how to do the old ways, so don’t play the old ways.
That’s the Israeli ultimate plan. It’s a commandment of the Talmud, just like killing all the jews in an ultimate day of judgement is the commandment of the Koran.
This is why we should stay out of it completely — either way, we will be a party to genocide.
The solution to such insufferable cunts who support savagery is to give them a large dose of it first hand. I would sentence her to be stripped to a two piece bathing suit, strapped to a parachute then airdropped into Gaza. There she could experience the warmth and hospitality of the Palestinian culture as she’s gang raped to death.
It amuses me that a people whose numbers have quintupled say they are victims of “genocide”.