WarSclerotic

Bill Whittle: the case for Israel, You Tube via Truth Revolt, July 23, 2014

(As he always does in other contexts, Bill Whittle presents the situation in Israel, including the Israeli – Palestinian  battle in Gaza, persuasively and articulately. — DM)

Israeli Justice Minister’s Response To UN: Get Lost

By: Weasel Zippers Blogger Posted: July 23, 2101

The UN Human Rights Council declared today it was going to open an inquiry into whether Israel was guilty of war crimes in its actions in Gaza. This is the Justice Minister’s response.

Google translate:

I have [four] words to say about the decision of the UN human rights council – see if I care!
We will keep on making decisions for the safety of Israeli citizens according to our moral compass, the IDF will fight the terror and keep on doing the most to avoid harming innocents, and you [written plural] will keep on encourage the terror – because that is exactly what your decision is doing.

Ted Cruz Sees Obama ‘Economic Boycott’ of Israel as FAA Extends Tel Aviv Flight Ban

By Tom Curry Posted at 2:30 p.m. July 23, 2014

(​Mr. Cruz would make an excellent President of the USA. Of course, after 8 years of Obama, a boat anchor would do better.-LS)

The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday extended its prohibition on U.S. flights to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport for up to an additional 24 hours, following the ban it announced Tuesday.

The FAA announcement drew immediate criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who said in statement, “President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands.”

The agency said it is “working closely with the Government of Israel to review the significant new information they have provided and determine whether potential risks to U.S. civil aviation are mitigated so the agency can resolve concerns as quickly as possible.”

The FAA imposed its ban after a rocket landed about a mile from the airport Tuesday as intense fighting continued between Israel and Hamas.

Cruz said “no one wants to place civilian travelers in harm’s way,” especially in light of last week’s downing of a Malaysian Airlines plane over eastern Ukraine. But he asked whether the FAA’s announcement was in fact “a political decision driven by the White House.”

The Texas Republican, a potential contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, said that tourism is an $11 billion industry for Israel.

“This FAA flight ban may well represent a crippling blow to a key economic sector [in Israel] through both security concerns and worries that additional bans will down more flights and strand more passengers,” Cruz said. “It hardly matters if or when the ban is lifted. At this point, the damage may already be done.”

He asked, “If the FAA’s decision was based on airline safety, why was Israel singled out, when flights are still permitted into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen?”

How selective body counts incite more violence, Gatestone Institute, Alan M. Dershowitz, July 23, 2014

The media has obsessively counted every dead body in the conflict between Hamas and Israel. They rarely explain why so many more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed: Hamas does not allow Palestinian civilians into their shelters, while using civilian areas from which to fire their rockets; Israel, on the other hand, devotes its resources to building shelters and Iron Dome protection. Put another way, while Israel uses shelters and Iron Dome to protect its civilians, Hamas uses its civilians to protect its rockets and its terrorists. A widely circulated cartoon makes this point effectively:

Recently, supporters of Hamas have argued that to say that Hamas uses civilians as human shields is a manifestation of racism and an attempt to dehumanize Palestinians. But it is Hamas’ own leaders who have long boasted of this tragic reality. Listen to Fathi Hammad, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council:

“For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘We desire death like you desire life.'”

Ban-Ki Moon—who is not known for a pro-Israel bias—recently confirmed what every objective observer knows to be true: that Hamas uses hospitals and schools as shields from which to launch rocket attacks against Israeli civilians—a double war crime. Here are his words:

“We condemn the use of civilian sites – schools, hospitals and other civilian facilities – for military purposes.”

He was referring, of course, to Hamas, since Israel does not use such civilian facilities to fire rockets. That is why more Palestinians than Israelis have died in recent weeks.

During a two day period this past week while dozens of Palestinians and several Israelis were killed, the media failed to report that in neighboring Syria, 700 Arabs and Muslims were killed in just two days of fighting. This constitutes only a tiny fraction of the 160,000 people killed in Syria during the ongoing civil war. According to theBritain-Based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 53,978 civilians have been killed including 8,607 children and 5,586 women. Many if not most of these deaths were deliberate—part of calculated efforts on both sides of the conflict to maximize civilian casualties.

Yet this body count has received little notice compared to the far smaller body count in Israel and Gaza. Why is this? Is it because when Arabs and Muslims deliberately kill other Arabs and Muslims, that deserves less attention than when Israelis kill Arabs and Muslims, even in self-defense and in an effort to prevent the murder of their own civilians? If so, this is racism pure and simple, and the application of a noxious double standard. The lives of all human beings have worth, and the death of Arabs and Muslims at the hands of other Arabs and Muslims deserve as much media coverage as the deaths of Arabs and Muslims that are caused by Israel’s efforts to protect its own civilians.

The media’s exclusive focus on the death toll in Gaza—without explaining that it is largely Hamas’ fault and part of its media strategy—incites hatred and anti-Semitism around the world. It has incited violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in many cities. Much of this violence comes from radicals on the hard left and from radical Islamists. But a recent incident in Italy shows that bigoted hate can come from the mouths of intellectuals as well as the fists of rabble rousers. Gianni Vattimo, who has been called Italy’s most famous philosopher, recently announced that he would personally, “like to shoot those bastard Zionists,” calling them “a bit worse than the Nazis”. He said he was planning to launch a fundraising campaign to buy better rockets for Hamas so that this Jew-hating group can kill more Zionists, by which he means Jewish Israelis. He urged European volunteers to join Hamas and fight alongside of them against Israel, as volunteers fought against Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

If Vattimo is indeed Italy’s most famous philosopher, I cry for the current state of philosophy in a nation that has contributed so much to that field over the millennia. Vattimo reminds me of the intellectual thugs—some of them “eminent” philosophers who provided academic cover and justification for the fascist abuses of Hitler and Mussolini. It is interesting, and perhaps relevant, that Vattimo is a follower of Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who joined the Nazi Party and provided cover for its anti-Semitic policies. Hamas, after all, is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which actively supported Hitler during World War II. It is also interesting that Vattimo, who vociferously supports gay rights, would have such hatred for the one country in the Middle East that accords equal rights to gays and be so supportive of Hamas which punishes gays by torture and execution. Obviously his hatred for the nation state of the Jewish people runs deeper than his support for gay rights.

It is a crime under the law of the United States and several European countries to provide material support to designated terrorist groups, of which Hamas is one. Vattimo has committed this crime and might well be banned from travel to the United States and other countries or arrested if he travels to countries that have such laws.

The media has a moral obligation to tell the whole truth when it shows the pictures of the dead and counts the bodies on each side. If it fails in this obligation, it becomes complicit in the sins and crimes of bigots such as Vattimo and in the war crimes of Hamas.

Israel Says to Hell With PR

By: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu
Published: July 18th, 2014

(This article is five days old and Bibi is still staying the course even as the pressure to withdraw builds to a fever pitch. – LS)

Children are Hamas’ favorite PR tool.
Photo Credit: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash 90

Netanyahu has decided that the lives of Israeli are more important than looking good for Obama, U.N. and the NY Times.

Israel has everything to lose and nothing to gain by standing pat and continuing to gamble that Hamas will not score a direct hit a crowded mall, school or factory while the terrorist regime’s policy of using human shields thwarts the Air Force’s ability to rid Gaza of terrorists and storerooms of thousands of rockets and missiles.

Hamas has nothing to gain from a ceasefire, which would strengthen the hand of its rival Fatah faction, headed by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

“Operation Death Wish” is how The Jewish Press described Hamas large-scale attacks on virtually all of Israel, and by all accounts, Hamas has lived up to the name.

If it was counting on Netanyahu to be too afraid to order ground troops into Gaza, it again was mistaken.

If it was counting on the international community to stop Israel, it again was mistaken.

Israel will not win many compliments from foreign media and from supposedly friendly countries, with the possible exception of Canada.

President Barack Obama has been more or less quiet since Israel launched the Protective Edge counter-terror campaign 10 days ago.  He has opposed a ground operation, but Israel no longer considers him as its de facto Secretary of Defense.

Hamas’ decision to bomb try to explode rockets in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and even Haifa finally got the message across to the Israeli government to stop playing footisie.

After a decade of sustaining approximately 15,000 mortar shells, rocket and missile attacks and  after retaliating only enough to draw a ceasefire until the next round of attacks, the government now is ready to admit it is “kill or be killed.”

Hamas’ best weapon right now is the international media. After Wednesday’s raid of a Gaza beach used by terrorists but also crowded with children, several of whom were killed in the bombing, Hamas is reporting that children have been killed left and right.

Foreign media lap up the reports without verifying the facts.

However, one offsetting factor was an official announcement by Egypt late Thursday night, “It is all Hamas’ fault” for not accepting a ceasefire. Hamas in effect gave Israel the green light to hit back at Hamas as hard as it can.

Israel’s decision hold up its head and enter Gaza, even if it means a long-term operation and turns Israel into an “occupier,” puts the international media in its place. It can report deaths of women and children, but it cannot disguise the well-documented fact that Hamas is guilty of war crimes by using innocent civilians as shields for terrorists.

The discovery by UNWRA of a Hamas stockpile of weapons in one of its schools Thursday is only the tip of the iceberg.

Hamas will have a harder time ever in trying to win the war for PR, but if that is the only war it can win, it will be left with nothing.

Sympathy from The New York Times, CNN and the U.S. State Dept. is not going to buy Gazans a sack of potatoes.

Mashaal: Israel must end ‘siege’ for humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza | JPost | Israel News.

By KHALED ABU TOAMEH

07/23/2014 21:53

Speaking in Qatar, Hamas leader stipulates terms for agreeing to halt in fighting as ending Israeli “occupation” and for the Jewish state to “disarm”; claims no outside party can disarm terror group in Gaza Strip.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal on Wednesday said that his movement was ready for a “humanitarian” cease-fire with Israel.

However, Mashaal said that Hamas would not accept any cease-fire that ‘bypasses” the demands of the movement and other “resistance” groups in the Gaza Strip.

“There is no real breakthrough and many are still insisting on a cease-fire that would be later followed by negotiations,” he said.

At a press conference in Doha, Qatar, Mashaal also rejected demands for the disarmament of Hamas. He said that in order for this to happen, Israel would have to end “occupation” and disarm.

Mashaal called for lifting the siege that has been imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2006 and the reopening of the border crossings.

“Our demands for a truce are legitimate,” he said. “We have presented them to Qatar, Turkey, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. Today we rejected an initiative that called for a cease-fire that would be followed by negotiations.”

Referring to the suspension of international flights to Israel, Mashaal said: “When you lay siege to our airspace, we lay siege to your airspace. The resistance is today in the Gaza Strip and tomorrow it is capable of surrounding you in the West Bank.”

The Hamas leader also called on the PA to end security coordination with Israel.

“Everyone wanted us to accept a ceasefire and then negotiate for our rights, we reject this and we reject it again today,” he said at a news conference in Qatar.

But he said Hamas “will not close the door” to a humanitarian truce if Israel ended its siege of Gaza.

Addressing the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, Mashaal said that he and other leaders of Hamas were prepared to die for the sake of ending the blockade.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Did President Obama Just Launch an Economic Boycott of Israel?, Senator Ted Cruz, R. Texas, July 23, 2014

Sen. Cruz releases statement regarding FAA’s flight suspensions to Israel

“The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today questioned the Obama Administration’s decision to ban flights to Israel while, at the same time, announcing continuing aid that will be funneled to the terrorist organization, Hamas.

“Aiding Hamas while simultaneously isolating Israel does two things.  One, it helps our enemy.  Two, it hurts our ally,” said Sen. Cruz.

He added, “The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands.”

Sen. Cruz is asking the Obama Administration to answer five specific questions regarding the FAA’s decision to suspend flights to Israel.

Sen. Cruz’s full statement is below.

“Today, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it was extending its ban on flights by U.S. carriers into Israel.  The rationale was that because one Hamas-launch rocket had landed in a field one mile from Ben Gurion International Airport, the ‘potentially hazardous security situation created by the armed conflict between Israel and Gaza’ necessitated this extreme action that has so far cancelled some 160 flights and left tens of thousands stranded.

“Obviously, no one wants to place civilian travelers in harm’s way, and the recent downing of Malaysian Airways flight 17 by pro-Russian militants in Ukraine is a stark reminder of the dangers posed by regional unrest.  But security concerns in Israel are hardly breaking news, and given the exceptional challenge Israel faces, Ben Gurion has rightly earned the reputation as one of the safest airports in the world due to the aggressive security measures implemented by the Israeli government.

“Given that some 2,000 rockets have been fired into Israel over the last six weeks, many of them at Tel Aviv, it seems curious to choose yesterday at noon to announce a flight ban, especially as the Obama Administration had to be aware of the punitive nature of this action.

“Tourism is an $11 billion industry for Israel, which is in the middle of a summer high season already seriously diminished by the conflict initiated by Hamas.  Group tours have been cancelling at a 30% rate.  This FAA flight ban may well represent a crippling blow to a key economic sector through both security concerns and worries that additional bans will down more flights and strand more passengers.  It hardly matters if or when the ban is lifted. At this point, the damage may already be done.

“Even given the remarkable resilience and prosperity of its economy, Israel has always been vulnerable to economic blackmail.  In the 1970s, we saw the Arab League boycott, which tried to punish any financial institution that did business with Israel.

“Today we have similar noxious efforts by the Boycott, Divest, Sanction or ‘BDS’ movement, which seeks to punish Israel for the fact that the militant terrorist elements embraced by the Palestinian Authority make any peace deal an intolerable security risk to Israel at this time.  But the Obama Administration has refused to robustly denounce this effort to undermine our ally.

“Instead, Secretary of State John Kerry issued a veiled threat last February when he encouraged boycotts of Israel and said that absent serious Israeli concessions at the negotiating table, Israel’s economic prosperity was ‘not sustainable’ and ‘illusory.’ Secretary Kerry unfortunately reprised this theme just this April, when he threatened that Israel risked becoming an ‘apartheid state’ if Israel did not submit to his chosen solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis.

“Taken in the context of Secretary Kerry’s comments, yesterday’s action by the FAA raises some serious questions:

• Was this decision a political decision driven by the White House?
• If the FAA’s decision was based on airline safety, why was Israel singled out, when flights are still permitted into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen?
• What was the FAA’s ‘safety’ analysis that led to prohibiting flights to Israel, while still permitting flights to Ukraine—where a commercial airline flight was just shot down with a BUK missile?
• What specific communications occurred between the FAA and the White House?  And the State Department?  Why were any such communications necessary, if this was purely about airline safety?
• Was this a safety issue, or was it using a federal regulatory agency to punish Israel to try to force them to comply with Secretary Kerry’s demand that Israel stop their military effort to take out Hamas’s rocket capacity?

“When Secretary Kerry arrived in Cairo this week his first act was to announce $47 million in additional aid to Gaza, which is in effect $47 million for Hamas.  In short order, this travel ban was announced by the FAA.  Aiding Hamas while simultaneously isolating Israel does two things.  One, it helps our enemy.  Two, it hurts our ally.

“Until these serious questions are answered, the facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands.

“If so, Congress should demand answers.”

The Reid Report, You Tube, July 23, 2014

(This new video from Truth Revolt pits a pro-Hamas MSNBC  interviewer against a spokesman for PM Netanyahu. She tries to blame Israel for Gaza “civilian” casualties, and he responds to her claims. He’s good. — DM)

Palestinians’ Prize for Terror, Front Page Magazine, Joseph Klein, July 23, 2014

As usual, while the Obama administration is prepared to reward the Palestinians, it seeks to pressure Israel into agreeing to a short term peace that will simply buy Hamas more time to build up an even greater arsenal of deadly weapons.

Secretary of State John Kerry – who was heard last Sunday on an open mike between Sunday TV appearances disparaging Israel’s efforts to limit civilian casualties in Gaza – arrived in Cairo on July 21st to frantically cobble together an immediate ceasefire. Seeking the help of Egypt and the United Nations, and even the Hamas-friendly countries of Turkey and Qatar, Kerry is looking for some kind of consensus by the major players in the region for a peace-at-any price formula. He is insisting on a premature ceasefire before Israel is able to find and destroy all the tunnels built under Palestinian civilians’ homes, schools and hospitals, which Hamas is using to hide its weapons and as bases from which to sneak its jihadists into Israel for the purpose of abducting or killing its citizens.

“The objective here is to get the fastest possible ceasefire. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to be fast, and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, but that’s the goal,” a senior US official travelling with Kerry was quoted by AFP as saying on condition of anonymity.

Kerry is even throwing in additional money for Gaza to help seal the deal. On top of the half a billion dollars that the Obama administration is continuing to send to the Palestinian “unity” government in which Hamas is a partner, Kerry has just offered a $47 million bribe in the form of so-called “humanitarian” aid for Gaza. Some of the $47 million would flow through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). This is the very same agency which found at least twenty Hamas rockets in one of its schools and which is reported to have returned those rockets to the “local authorities.” In Gaza, the “local authorities” are presently the Hamas operatives who govern Gaza. Presumably, UNRWA will be sharing the Kerry-provided windfall with those same “local authorities.”

As usual, while the Obama administration is prepared to reward the Palestinians, it seeks to pressure Israel into agreeing to a short term peace that will simply buy Hamas more time to build up an even greater arsenal of deadly weapons. Before Kerry left on his latest jaunt to Cairo, he was heard on the open mike issuing a not-so-subtle warning to Israel not to try the Obama administration’s patience. “I hope they don’t think that’s an invitation to go do more,” apparently referring to the Obama administration’s rhetorical support for Israel’s right of self-defense. “That better be the warning to them.”

After arriving in Cairo, Kerry acknowledged Israel’s right to defend its citizens from Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks, but then added: “We are deeply concerned about the consequences.”

Those consequences are of Hamas’s own making. It is holding its own people hostage. It has rejected one ceasefire proposal after another, including a ceasefire proposed by Egypt last week that Israel had immediately accepted. Hamas also balked at extending the humanitarian pauses that the UN had brokered in order to enable relief to reach Palestinian civilians in need.  Hamas is insisting on entirely unacceptable conditions such as the end of the blockade and opening of border crossings by Israel and Egypt, as well as the release of Hamas operatives from Israeli prisons.

Indeed, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, offered this chilling promise of more bloodshed: “Gaza has decided to end the blockade by its blood and by its courage.”

More accurately, Hamas and its cohorts have decided to spill the blood of Palestinian children and other civilians whom they regard as pawns in their jihad to destroy the Jewish state – a goal enshrined in its founding charter. Israel is going after the tunnels, rockets and rocket launchers used by Hamas to target Israeli civilians for death. Israel is not trying to kill Palestinian civilians. To the contrary, Israel has repeatedly warned Palestinian civilians for their own safety to leave the areas that Hamas has deliberately chosen to place the entrances to those tunnels as well as the rockets and rocket launchers.

As Israel’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN said to the Security Council on July 22nd:

What other nation supplies millions of tons of humanitarian aid or sets up a field hospital to treat the wounded on the other side even as its enemy fires on it indiscriminately?

What other nation sends messages to warn exactly where it will strike – giving the enemy time to set booby-traps and deploy snipers?

Israel spent four days warning Palestinians in northern Gaza that the military would soon enter their neighborhoods to uproot Hamas. That gave Hamas four days to prepare an assault on our troops.

Every time we drop a leaflet or make a phone call or send a text message warning of an imminent attack, we are endangering our soldiers so that we may keep their children safe.

The Palestinian observer state representative Riyad Mansour did not even try to refute these incontrovertible points in his own statement to the Security Council. Instead, he pushed every emotional button he could, including reading off names and ages and holding up pictures of Palestinian children killed in Gaza in just the last few days. He neglected to mention that the blood of all of these children, shed since Hamas rejected the Egyptian ceasefire proposal last week, is on Hamas’s hands alone.

Yet President Obama is telling Israel that, since in his uniformed view Israel has done enough “significant damage” to Hamas’s military infrastructure, it’s time that Israel stop in its tracks for the sake of the civilians.

Hamas is also scoring a propaganda victory, thanks to the Obama administration’s decision to discourage travel by Americans to Israel.  Perhaps fearful of a repeat of the tragic downing of the Malaysian passenger plane over territory controlled by the armed pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine last week, the Federal Aviation Agency is also requiring all U.S. airlines to suspend their flights to Israel. This followed confirmation that at least one Hamas rocket landed near Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. The FAA notice read:

Due to the potentially hazardous situation created by the armed conflict in Israel and Gaza, all flight operations to/from Ben Gurion International Airport (LLBG) by US operators are prohibited until further advise.

Some European countries are doing likewise.

This is a gift to Hamas, which is now able to brag that it has been able to bring a key portion of Israel’s economy to a virtual halt and effectively isolate Israel from the world air transportation system.

Nevertheless, Israel has little choice but to soldier on until Hamas’s tunnel network and military infrastructure are largely destroyed, whether it takes a week or two as currently estimated by former Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Dr. Ephraim Sneh, or longer. In the meantime, the current blockade and securing of the border crossings against the flow of all but truly humanitarian aid must continue. They cannot be eased so that Kerry can go home with a premature ceasefire in his pocket.

Gaza Massacre Scam Exposed – 78% of Casualties are Male, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 23, 2014

The data finds that the vast majority of dead are male. These results are statically impossible if Israel were bombing a civilian population randomly or with the intent of inflicting civilian casualties.

And this is data that Israellycool found using Al Jazeera’s data which is run by Qatar, a state sponsor of Hamas. The data finds that the vast majority of dead are male. These results are statically impossible if Israel were bombing a civilian population randomly or with the intent of inflicting civilian casualties.

Women are half the population. For them to be so underrepresented in casualty lists clearly indicates that the targets were not civilian and that Israel took great care to avoid civilians.

77.7 percent of the dead are male. Only 22.3 percent are female.

44 percent of the dead are men 18-28. Another 20 percent are men 29 to 48. Of the dead, 12 percent of the casualties are clearly children. Another 7.6 percent are in a broad 11-17 group which includes both children and possible combatants. This classification is dishonest since a 17-year-old participating in terrorism is not a child and would be tried as an adult.

These numbers seem high, but Gaza demographics place 45% of the population in the 0-14 age group due to the high birth rate. That means there are a lot of children which dramatically increases the probability of children being killed during the fighting.

While they make up nearly half the population, they make up a disproportionately smaller percentage of the dead, demonstrating once again that Israel is going out of its way to limit civilian casualties and that its targets are military.