Hate and It's Children (January 2008)

"Hate and it's children" is a long-form stream of consciousness posted at my old blog about fifteen years ago. Much has changed since then including the disappearance of links and personalities as the appearance of Substack and podcasts replaces old-fashioned blogging. This backup enables me to add editorial adjustments since I have no control over the original Hootsbuddy's Place. 

This morning's post by The Anchoress is one of those treasures worth keeping, found on the shore of the ocean we call the blogworld. I'll get to that in a moment, but first I want to address a question someone asked me a few days ago.

I told one of my children who does graphic design work that for Christmas I wanted some cards, like business cards, that I could give to people I meet identifying my blog. A blog card, if you will, instead of a business card. She came up with a layout of ten to be printed on photo paper that I chop up into cards. I gave one to someone who asked what made me start blogging and I realized I didn't have an answer. Not a good one, anyway.

In the beginning there was a fantasy about becoming well-known as a sage or thinker, someone whose insights and opinions would be sought by those seeking clever or wise commentary about matters large and small. I admired the wit of James Lileks, sharp insights of Michelle Malkin, over-the-top excesses of Rachel Lucas, timely scoops from Matt Drudge, and catholic attention to the whole universe by Glenn Reynolds. I knew that Steven Den Beste and Bill Whittle were writing long pieces that were atypical of blogs generally, but even they had respectable followings. I could tell by the comment threads how people were perceived. This was before the TTLB ecosystem emerged as a gold standard for traffic and links. All I knew was that the ocean was out there and the water looked fine, so in I jumped.

I realized as time passed that the sites that had excited me most shared a common political undercurrent I had not noticed at first. I saw myself as a veteran of the Civil Rights movement, a child of the Sixties whose anti-war predilections led me to change my draft status to conscientious objector, later to be drafted as such to serve two years as an Army medic. Yet here I was, twenty or thirty years later, having gone into the world of business, serving as a manager and boss, attracted to the Conservative wing of political writing like an ant to sugar. Like Freddy said to Eliza, "It's the new small talk...you do it so awfully well!" I didn't particularly appreciate the content, but the form was truly wonderful.

Oh, there were places from what can be called "the Left" that also were pumping out stuff. But they were the lunatic fringe, you know...conspiracy theorists, astrologers, practitioners of exotic (typically Asian) alien philosophies, Marxists (who never tire of endless fountains of words, words, words) and other cranks who were hard to peg. Pejorative use of the word "moonbat" came about quite naturally because those of us from the nether edge of the political spectrum do tend to be poorly coordinated, less focused on practical details and more taken with crazy dreams. (Two of my favorite lines are Will Rogers' I'm not a member of any organized political party...I'm a Democrat and Ambrose Bierce's definition of a "Conservative" as One enamoured with prevailing evils as opposed to a Liberal who wished to replace them with new ones.)

Pajamas Media represents the Right perfectly, creases pressed and colors coordinated, small points of discussion notwithstanding. That venerable assembly preceded Netroots by a few years, but that latter-day rag-tag outfit with all its profanity and outrage, emerged as the Left's reply to Pajamas. I have watched helplessly as the aftermath of 9/11 and a knee-jerk reaction have polarized national politics to the point that I no longer identify easily with either pole. When I started blogging I felt comfortable with a messy but principled Left, such as it was, but I have been embarrassed by extremes from that side. Excoriating the name of General Petraeus and failing to recognize positive efforts by the president to bring about meaningful immigration reform come to mind (not to mention uncoupling health insurance from employment, an idea which has great practical appeal to me but which no one is speaking about openly...though it is an idea specifically from the White House).

Anyway, getting to what The Anchoress said, she opens by describing an important difference between what I call partisan hate and personal hate. Partisan hate is rather generic, enabling the hater to close ranks with others of like persuasion in a feeling of power or solidarity. Personal hate, on the other hand, tends to be individual, more inner-directed and as a result more corrosive to one's character and temperament than an outburst at a rally or surge of excitement seeing one's letter to the editor in print. Personal hate is like tinnitus, always ringing or buzzing in your head, never going away. Sometimes, even in your sleep, grinding teeth and nightmares nurture the poison, leaving a kind of mental pus staining the rest of life, dampening happiness and excitement into dull tolerance.

That is the end of Part One of my thinking this morning.

In order to fully appreciate the pain and suffering that grows from what I have termed Personal Hate, go there now and read this woman's incredible confession, self-examination, and journey toward absolution. She is articulate to the point of tears. Her description of personal hate and how her family members, the angels that God has given her to let her know He loves her, lead her out of her darkness into the light that only comes from faith.

What upset me more than anything is that for the first time in my life, I was actively hating someone. I’ve never hated anyone - not even people who have done me physical and spiritual harm. But I was hating this fellow. And hating him even more for “making me” hate him.

Which, of course, he could not do. No one can “make” you hate; I simply allowed hate in; I welcomed it in, gave it an honored chair and fed it. And fed it. And it was incredibly destructive and oppressive - to me, mostly - but it did nothing good for anyone who had to be around me if the subject had my head. My whole family, and a few friends, have had to endure watching me give myself over to this resentment, allowing it to have its way with me, and to own me, body and soul.

I'll wait here while you read the rest. She tells her story better than any excerpt can capture.

(The Anchoress is the blog name of Elizabeth Scalia who is still blogging but her old posts are not easily found. She also has an X account these days.)

§§§§§

For Part Two I want to redirect the reader's attention to what I have called Partisan Hate. 
Partisan hate is importantly different from personal hate. Partisan hate derives from groups more than individuals, although individuals plant the seeds and nurture its growth. What impulse attracts others to this or that category of hate is not clear. The reasons are probably as diverse as the numbers attracted. My instinct is that partisan hate may be an outgrowth of personal hate, but I don't want that laid on me. MY partisan hate is not as bad as YOURS, of course, so we know there are exceptions to such a rule.

I don't want to run down that road too far because it will have us all running in circles. What I want to point to is a partisan argument now developing over the use of the word "fascism." Individuals are involved in the discussion, so I want to be clear here: my aim is not to "disrespect" (I think that's the right modern usage of that neologism) any person, but to point to an idea or trend with which I find problems.

With September 11, 2001 now six years past, we divide contemporary history into Pre- and Post-9/11 eras. Thanks to what seems to have been a carefully-orchestrated narrative America's response to that event has had two misleading concepts at the core.
• The first is that there is no significant difference between Muslim extremists and Muslims as a population.
• The second is that the attack on the World Trade Center was an act of war, not just an act of terrorism.

Recently a voice of reason in Britain finally pointed to the naked king, stating the obvious:

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: 'We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language."

London is not a battlefield, he said.

"The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers," Macdonald said. "They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way."

His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the "war on terror" language has officially been ditched.

This important moment has gone unnoticed both there and here but a few people have taken note and perhaps one day in the future, when more reflective than reflexive observers are doing an analysis of the post-9/11 era that moment will find "new" meaning.

Regarding the other misleading idea, that there is little or no difference between Muslim extremists and Muslims as a population, it was plain to me from the start that there was a serious disconnect between the Muslim faith and terrorism. Having worked with a few people who were Muslim, both devout and nominal, I had and continue to have a clear impression of them standing in sharp relief to the images being fashioned and fed to Americans for popular consumption.

Helplessly I watched as preparations for the invasion of Iraq got underway. I had mixed feelings about what was being advanced as a "preemptive" invasion, and along with everyone else I gave credibility to the "threat"scenario. Once the war was underway, matters got out of control and there was little that anyone could do to bring about coitus interruptus in an international violent rape.

In the aftermath we see that General Petraeus and his insights should have been involved from the start, but you know what they say about hindsight...

Underscoring my instincts, I heard General Sir Michael Rose say in an interview last night that "by invading Iraq, of course we were going to make it almost impossible for the West to be able to mobilize the very people we need to help us fight Al Qaeda and that are the Muslim people of the world."

Which leads me to a neologism that has bothered me ever since I first heard it: Islamofascist. I'm not sure where the term originated, but I don't think it came from any confessing Muslim. Since no one wants to be associated with fascism (even those who are by definition fascists, I believe) it becomes a perfect label to attach to any group or individual one wants to discredit. Since the end of World War II the word fascism has the same stench to the children of the Allies that terms like Commie and fellow-traveler had in the Fifties or Nigger-lover had in the deep South about the same time. In fact, the term fascist is worse. I know people not ashamed to have been associated with the idealistic Communists of the past. And I, myself am satisfied -- no, honored, to be called Nigger-lover.

But that word fascist is another matter. I haven't met anyone who wants to own that designation, just as I have yet to meet anyone (or hear of anyone) pleased to be called Islamofascist.

All of which gets me to the point of this post.

The book Liberal Fascism and it's cute logo, a happy face with a Hitler-type mustache, is emerging, thanks to its provenance, from the mire of pulp slime trolling to the status of acceptable commentary. If a less well-known writer had produced this book it would not have attracted as much attention. It certainly would not have been viewed with as much respectability. But we are living in a time when the Ron Pauls of the world can go tromping across the national carpet with muddy boots and get away with it because what they say scratches a national itch that just keeps getting worse.

I saw the logo before I saw reference to the book. I dismissed it as so much sillyness. Then I saw it was a book, but I didn't pay much attention. We who openly call ourselves Liberal are accustomed these days to all kinds of personal invective. Then I noticed David Niewert's remarks followed by Jonah Goldberg on C-SPAN talking about his book. That got my attention. I see now that a heated argument is underway among pundits, historians and other experts regarding the pros and cons of Goldberg's book.

It's not hard to discern which side of this discussion is which.

I'm not enough of a scholar to say comment about the derivation of the word fascism. Moreover, I'm not interested in doing the homework when people like David Niewert are on duty. (Someone in the comment thread even linked to a critical review by Michael Ledeen.)

But I am smart enough to know it is an execrable insult to anyone to be called a fascist. There is an old saying in the South that even a dog knows when he's been kicked. There's a difference between being kicked and being tripped over. And I, as a self-identified Liberal, feel kicked and it really pisses me off. I'm not to the point of personal hate as referenced above, but it is fair to say that in the same way that The Anchoress draws the line between partisan hate and personal hate, I have to say I am full in the glow of partisan hate, resentment and insult.

This rant is as far as I will allow myself to go. But the issue has been stuck in my craw ever since I became aware and I had to get it out so I can move on with my blogging.

Israel/Hamas Thread by Mouin Rabbani

Mouin Rabbani is a Dutch-Palestinian Middle East analyst specializing in the Arab-Israeli conflict and Palestinian affairs. Rabbani is based in Amman, Jordan and was a Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group, the Palestine Director of the Palestine American Research Center, a Project Director for the Association of Netherlands Municipalities, and a volunteer and General Editor for Al Haq. Rabbani is currently a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, a co-editor of Jadaliyya, and a Contributing Editor to the Middle East Report. 

THREAD:

On 7 October Israel vowed to destroy Hamas. To eradicate it as an organization. To neuter it as a military force, political movement, and governing entity. More recently Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in true mob boss style, stated that he had given Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, orders to assassinate all Hamas leaders residing in exile. 

Fifty days into the war, how close is Israel to achieving its objectives? The short answer is that it requires zero knowledge of military affairs to conclude that 

•  Israel’s proclaimed objectives are unattainable, and 
• Israel has additionally failed to significantly degrade either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). 

The elimination of Hamas is unattainable for several reasons. Most importantly, unlike for example ISIS or the European Union, Hamas has – much like the IRA/Sinn Fein or Facebook, in the decades since its establishment in 1988 become deeply rooted within society, and today exists wherever Palestinian communities are to be found. So even if Israel succeeded in eradicating Hamas from the Gaza Strip – or, more accurately, driving it underground – the organization will survive in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere. 

Indeed, the combined efforts of Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank since 2007 have yet to succeed in eliminating either its military, political, or social presence. FYI it is now 2023. 

Previous campaigns to eradicate Palestinian movements have not only generally failed, but as a rule enhanced their stature. The scale of the current onslaught has catapulted Hamas’s stature to unprecedented levels among Palestinians, and indeed among Arabs and in the Global South more generally. That’s not a challenge that can be resolved by a fleet of F-35s armed with tons of high explosives. 

Israel’s extraordinary self-regard and capacity for self-glorification notwithstanding, the elimination of Hamas is a non-starter, least of all at the hands of the thoroughly mediocre Israeli military and intelligence capabilities revealed on 7 October. Let’s for example take a closer look at those charged with assassinating Hamas leaders abroad. 

When a Mossad cell tried to poison Hamas leader Khalid Mashal in Amman in 1997, the assassins were caught and arrested by one – just one– of his bodyguards, after a long chase. On foot. 

King Hussein threatened to publicly execute the James Bond wannabes, and Israel (in the person of none other than Netanyahu) was forced to deliver to Jordan not only the antidote that saved Mashal’s life but also imprisoned Hamas founder/leader Shaikh Ahmad Yassin. 

In 2010, when the Mossad inexplicably dispatched a team of some two dozen agents to Dubai to assassinate a single Hamas operative, Muhammad Mabhouh, they forgot to observe elementary principles of operational security (e.g. hiding their faces from hotel CCTV monitors), and all ended up on Interpol’s wanted list. Their amateurish use of foreign passports additionally strained relations with key international allies, like Israel acolyte Stephen Harper of Canada. 

There’s no indication the agency has gotten any better during the intervening years. Unless you’re watching a Hollywood movie produced by Mossad asset Arnon Milchan, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency is not your go-to outfit for a campaign of high-profile foreign assassinations against an organization on high alert. I suspect American and European intelligence agencies are slowly reaching similar conclusions. 

Mossad’s domestic counterpart, Shin Bet, hasn’t fared better. Not only because it has been unable to eliminate Hamas military chief Muhammad Deif for decades, but more importantly because Hamas was able to arm, prepare, and launch the 7 October attacks right under its noses, and it hadn’t a clue. While Israel was busy “mowing the lawn” in the belief it was keeping Gaza’s armed groups in check, the Palestinians constructed an entire rainforest in plain sight. 

Israel may well get a few high-profile scalps and proclaim the End of History, but the organizational impact will be minor and temporary. Yassin was assassinated in 2004, a time when the most powerful rocket in the Hamas arsenal had difficulty making it across my living room. Its successful assassination of Hizballah leader Abbas in Mussawi in 1992 produced Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s worst nightmare. In 2006, a daring midnight wartime raid in the Bekaa Valley finally captured Hassan Nasrallah. But there was a minor hiccup: the Mossad, which constantly proclaims itself the greatest and most sophisticated intelligence agency in recorded history, confused the head of Hizballah with a greengrocer bearing the same name. 

Similarly, Israel’s assassination campaign against Iranian nuclear scientists has been – to put it mildly – ineffective. Even the 2004 assassination of Yassir Arafat was counterproductive, as it set the stage for not only the obedient non-entity that is Mahmoud Abbas but also made possible the rise of Hamas as a genuinely national movement. 

But I digress. How significantly has Israel weakened Hamas since 7 October? If you listen to Daniel Hagari (the tunnel meme celebrity), Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (who looks like death warmed over when delivering good news), or Netanyahu, it’s clear there is very little left of the Palestinian movements, their leadership, or infrastructure. Antony Blinken, Jake “All Quiet on the Western Front” Sullivan, and John “Tearstosterone” Kirby, who seem to prefer receiving news after it has been vetted by the Israeli military censor, appear similarly confident. 

But once you step outside their echo chamber, reality tells a very different story. 

A significantly degraded organization would not have been able to uniformly and simultaneously cease firing throughout the Gaza Strip at the very moment a truce went into effect. 

Or to continue firing coordinated rocket barrages until moments before. Or to record, edit, and centrally broadcast video footage of its military operations from multiple locations on a nearly daily basis. Or collect and deliver captives from multiple locations, to multiple locations, during the truce – including deliberately choosing a location in central Gaza City that the Israeli military claimed is under its control. The most important functions of any military organization – command and control, communications, logistics, reconnaissance, PR, and last but not least the ability and will to fight, appear intact and at best marginally affected. 

As pointed out previously, Israel has killed more UN staff than Hamas commanders. The same in fact holds true for journalists and medical personnel. And the Israeli military has yet to unearth a fraction of the tunnels found in Hagari memes. It's inconceivable that Hamas has not been weakened and degraded during the past 50 days, or not lost important cadres and commanders, or depleted a significant proportion of its arsenal. But significantly degraded? The evidence for this is entirely absent. The Israeli military is admittedly a highly efficient killing machine, but also a mediocre fighting force, particularly in ground operations. 

Wars are not won by slaughtering children by the thousands, or turning Gaza City into rubble and depriving an entire society of basic necessities. The Germans tried this in the Soviet Union, and the Americans in Iraq, and it didn’t end well for either of them. 

Many have expressed disgust at the video of an Israeli major dedicating the destruction of a building to his daughter on her second birthday. One could also point out that when a military reaches the point of celebrating the demolition of an apartment building, it should repurpose as a municipal engineering corps and can no longer be considered a serious fighting force. 

This also helps explain why the US – by any standard an active participant in this war – and Israel decided to not only negotiate with Hamas, but specifically with Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 7 October attacks, and to accept most Hamas’s conditions for the agreement reached several days ago. 

Before the truce was concluded US and Israeli officials – who previously rejected anything of the sort – explained that it would be an important agreement because it would legitimize a subsequent continuation and escalation of the war against the Gaza Strip. Several additional months on the scale of what we have witnessed this past month or even greater, as Gallant and Hagari keep promising, now seems increasingly unlikely. 

To be sure, Israel has an overwhelming advantage in military power. But when a serving cabinet minister advocates using a nuclear weapon against the Gaza Strip (a threat that has yet to be acknowledged by a single Western leader), it suggests the conventional military is having difficulty succeeding. Given its overwhelming power Israel can of course inflict very severe damage on not only Palestinian society but also Hamas. It will almost certainly make another effort to do so in the coming days or weeks. 

But it seems increasingly unlikely it is prepared to expend the blood and treasure required to achieve a meaningful military result. Its US and European sponsors also appear to be reaching a point where they would prefer to gradually wind this down before it gets completely out of hand and Israeli conduct ends up damaging rather than promoting their interests in the region. Israel’s systematic, deliberate attacks on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, should be understood in this context. 

In addition to being motivated by a lust for revenge and desire to achieve a body count many time higher than that inflicted by the Palestinians on 7 October, such campaigns, for example by the Nazis in occupied Europe, the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, the US in Iraq and before that in Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia, and indeed Israel in Palestine and Lebanon, deliberately target civilian society in order to put pressure on armed groups that superior military force is unable to eliminate. The British after all pioneered the concentration camp during the Boer War for this objective, decades before the Nazis repurposed it for mass extermination. 

Given the above examples one might conclude that such tactics rarely end well for the occupiers. They often don’t. 

Yet it is also true that the dustbin of history is littered with just causes. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, and despite the colossal imbalance of power, it appears that Israel is increasingly losing the plot. END

The world was warned about Hamas years ago

Few people now remember that Fatah was elected in Gaza in 2006 -- nearly eighteen years ago -- in an election approved even by Israel and monitored by none other than Jimmy Carter, the president whose diplomatic acumen had yielded the Camp David Accords. 

Soon after that Carter issued plain advice on how positive results of that election could be lost if Israel and her allies failed to respond carefully.

During this time of fluidity in the formation of the new government, it is important that Israel and the United States play positive roles. Any tacit or formal collusion between the two powers to disrupt the process by punishing the Palestinian people could be counterproductive and have devastating consequences.

Unfortunately, these steps are already underway and are well known throughout the Palestinian territories and the world. Israel moved yesterday to withhold funds (about $50 million per month) that the Palestinians earn from customs and tax revenue. Perhaps a greater aggravation by the Israelis is their decision to hinder movement of elected Hamas Palestinian Legislative Council members through any of more than a hundred Israeli checkpoints around and throughout the Palestinian territories. This will present significant obstacles to a government's functioning effectively. Abbas informed me after the election that the Palestinian Authority was $900 million in debt and that he would be unable to meet payrolls during February. Knowing that Hamas would inherit a bankrupt government, U.S. officials have announced that all funding for the new government will be withheld, including what is needed to pay salaries for schoolteachers, nurses, social workers, police and maintenance personnel. So far they have not agreed to bypass the Hamas-led government and let humanitarian funds be channeled to Palestinians through United Nations agencies responsible for refugees, health and other human services.

This common commitment to eviscerate the government of elected Hamas officials by punishing private citizens may accomplish this narrow purpose, but the likely results will be to alienate the already oppressed and innocent Palestinians, to incite violence, and to increase the domestic influence and international esteem of Hamas. It will certainly not be an inducement to Hamas or other militants to moderate their policies.

President Carter's good intentions notwithstanding, even at the time he spoke Hamas was already a clearly malevolent group. This is from another source I came across at the time.

Calling the Hamas "militant" is more than an understatement. It is like saying Stalin was an "outspoken activist." Hamas began about 1985 as a seemingly innocuous charity and religious group that even got the support of the Israeli government. However, when the first Intifada started, Hamas turned militant. They drew up their charter, which explains their views on negotiations and what might be called "the Jewish question." It is hard to imagine a more racist and terrifying document. Some quotes:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."

The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. "

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."

 The Hamas victory was also noted by 3Quarks Daily at the time. 

Journalist and blogger, Laila el-Haddad, on the Palestinian elections and Hamas' victory in The Guardian's news blog.

The latest events can only be described as a political earthquake, both locally and regionally. Not only are these the first truly democratic and hotly contested elections in the Arab Middle East, but also the first time an Islamic party has come to power through the system and the popular will of the people.

To say we are entering a new stage is an understatement. Everyone knew Hamas would do well in these elections and that they would constitute a significant challenge to the ruling party. But this well?

Voters in Gaza were shocked.

"I cast a sympathy vote for Hamas but truthfully I did not expect them to win at all. It was a surprise to everyone; no one expected this to happen," a young college student said.

Even Hamas members and supporters were surprised.

"We thought we'd get at most 50% of the votes," one Hamas insider told me.

"We didn't expect the security forces and the upper classes to vote for us, but it seems they might have tipped the balance. I guess we're more popular than we realised."

How the new government will take shape and whether western positions towards it will evolve have all yet to answered. It's likely that Hamas will form a kind of national unity government, or a coalition of some sort, with a mixture of other parties. The burden of the sudden and overwhelming responsibility for running a state and answering to their constituents' long and varied list of demands may be more than they can deal with alone at the moment.

That "burden of the sudden and overwhelming responsibility for running a state and answering to their constituents' long and varied list of demands" did, in fact turn out to be "more than they can deal with alone at the moment."

Moreover, from that day to this Israel's response to that election has been to seize the moment and make it a divide-and-conquer strategy (Hamas vs. Fatah) controlling and overcoming the entire Palestinian population inside the official borders of the country, in Gaza and the Occupied Territories (aka the West Bank).

Gaza was already tightly controlled, but since then Hamas has, in fact become more militant than before, and Israel's controls have become progressively more severe, making it one of the world's biggest open-air prisons, housing a civilian population half or more of whom may not have even born when when Hamas was elected. 

I don't know if these links will be active as I publish this post. I gleaned them from my old blog which has somehow survived for searches but with no one in charge. When I go there I see many now-inactive urls but the old ship without a captain somehow survives somewhere in the cloud...

 

David Rothcopf Thread

David Rothkopf  @djrothkopf  (Twitter thread)

The sides are so deeply entrenched that having a reasonable discussion about what is happening in Gaza is nearly impossible. Part of the problem is the large number of "facts" that are stated by one side or the other that are either untrue or misleading. Let's debunk a few.

First, to place them in context, let my frame briefly my view. 

• What Hamas did on 10/7 was indefensible and horrific. Any nation would respond. Israel has a right and an obligation of self-defense. Removing the threat posed by Hamas is essential.
• Both Israeli and Palestinian innocents have an equal right to living secure lives and to controlling their own destiny. There is no justification for killing members of either group. The long term path to their security requires a two-state solution.
• In my personal view, both sides have an equal right to self-determination. The lives of the people of both groups should be equally cherished and protected. It is very important to distinguish between the people of Israel and Palestine and their leaders.
• The people of Israel and Palestine have been badly served by their leaders for many years in multiple ways that provide the context for the current crisis. The current crisis cannot be removed from that context no matter how it may suit either side to do so.

You can calibrate all that I am about to say against the above nutshell description of my views on this complex issue which I have studied closely for many years.  I am Jewish. I do not just acknowledge I actually celebrate Israel's existence. But I believe the rights of any nation to exist are conditional based on whether it derives its existence from the consent of the governed, respects and protects equally lives of all those within its borders, honors international laws and boundaries, etc.

• I am an American and I carry plenty of biases associated with that with me too. 
• I believe in the separation of church and state. 
• I believe in democracy. 
• I believe states are imperfect but should strive to perfect themselves.

That said, here are a few things I view as the big distortions and misconceptions that are distorting the current debate:

Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel. It is a threat. But it is small and weak compared to Israel. It can inflict damage as we have seen but whatever the malevolent aspirations of its leaders may be it cannot destroy or substantially weaken the state of Israel.

Israel cannot "eradicate" Hamas. It can eliminate its leaders. It can target and likely eliminate all those that took part in the 10/7 raids it can eliminate its stores of weapons. It can cut off its financial resources. But there are tens of thousands of members of Hamas. And to eradicate them all would produce such high civilian casualties it would likely lead to massive new recruitment of Hamas terrorists.

Suggesting Israel is culpable in setting the stage for Hamas' brutal 10/7 attacks is "blaming the victim." Hamas is culpable for its crimes. But Hamas was propped up the Israeli government. The conditions that left Israel vulnerable were created by the Israeli government.

The history of Israel's mistreatment of Gaza and Palestinians matters. The worsening conditions and prospects for Palestinians under the Netanyahu government matters. The prospect of a regional normalization accord between the Israelis and the Saudis that would have very likely papered over the problems of the Palestinians and weakened their leverage to achieve crucial political progress matters. Security in the future will depend on political progress that addresses grievances and issues raised in the past.

War is hell. I see plenty of folks saying Hiroshima and Dresden and the like prove that civilians have to die in "just" wars. Killing civilians, collectively punishing societies is against international law for a reason. 

• It is unjust. 
• It was unjust in Hiroshima
• it was unjust in Dresden
• it is wrong in Ukraine
• It was wrong in Syria
• it was wrong in Iraq. 

It is always wrong. It is never acceptable. There is no magic formula for acceptable civilian losses. They must always be avoided. Yes, it is hard when an adversary uses civilians as shields. But tactics must be adapted accordingly. Care must be taken. But also, the focus should in such cases be focus as suggested above on where the blows will be to greatest effect--against leaders, supply lines, flows of financial support.

We also should not forget the lessons of past such conflicts. In Iraq, the US estimated that each civilian killed resulted in 10 more new adversaries being recruited. Whatever the specific number, killing civilians is both wrong and undermines tactical and strategic goals.

Military action is essential to restoring stability. If a military solution could solve this conflict, it would be over. Israel is vastly more powerful than Hamas. It has punished Hamas frequently. It has imposed its will on the people of Gaza (and the West Bank) for years.

None of these steps have worked in making Israel more secure (as 10/7 proves) or solving the underlying problems. That can only be achieved by finding a lasting political solution that treats the aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians equally.  The international community must make that its objective. (In so doing, it must recognize that Iran's malign influence and aspirations here must be contained. Iran is an existential threat to Israel. Its proxies are what could spread this into a regional war. The collaboration of Russia and Iran compounds the threat posed by those proxies. Defeating Russia in Ukraine, punishing the sponsors of the proxies financially, recognizing they are pulling the strings with Hamas, is critical to actually solving this problem. We must be realistic about this and we need to be resolute in addressing those threats. And, just as Hamas must effectively be removed from the equation in Gaza, so too must the Netanyahu government go. ASAP.

I could go on. The point is to solve this serious problem and to protect the lives of innocents we must be honest about the issues involved and see them for what they are and not for one side or the other tries to present them as. We require clarity to go with our resolve and our compassion. We can only hope that the urgency of this crisis helps us achieve that clarity.

      https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1718627028126023941

David J. Rothkopf is an American foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator. He is the founder and CEO of TRG Media and The Rothkopf Group, a columnist for the Daily Beast and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. 

Gaza Flashback

This is a flashback about Gaza from my old blog posted fourteen years ago in 2009. As you will see, much has changed since then. 

------------------

Here is a great story that NPR ran four years ago (now eighteen)  that caught my attention at the time. It describes a curious symbiosis between Israel and Gaza reflected in how automobiles were tagged in Gaza City. This was prior to Sharon's removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza, making me wonder if some of them may have had a surreptitious part in the story.
Much has changed since then, and not for the better as this little snapshot shows. 
The audio and transcript have since disappeared but here is what I captured at the time.

An Odd Hierarchy of License Plates in Gaza

The local government in Gaza issues a unique kind of license plate: one for stolen cars. Driving school owner Raeed el-Sa'ati decodes the region's vehicle license plates.

SIEGEL: Last week, as we were riding through the streets of Gaza, our interpreter, Hosam Arhoun(ph), pointed out something that is, so far as we know, unique to that isolated strip of Mediterranean coast. It's a kind of license plate. I thought he was kidding. We would be behind a car, and he would say, `See that pair of Arabic letters on the tag? That indicates this is a stolen car. And that one,' he said, `that's an official stolen car.'

Well, we dropped in on Raeed el-Sa'ati, who owns the Ekhlas Driving School in Gaza, to get more details. And he explained that Gaza license plates can be red for official, green for taxis, and white for private vehicles. The lower the number on the red plates, the higher the position of the official. The number 30 designates a truck.

All this is pretty conventional stuff for license plates. But then...

Mr. RAEED EL-SA'ATI (Ekhlas Driving School): (Through Translator) And then the cars which, written in Arabic, the letters M and F, it is the stolen cars.

SIEGEL: The stolen cars?

Mr. EL-SA'ATI: (Through Translator) And then there is these plates which, M-H-F--it is stolen cars, but working at the authority, means, aha, it is a stolen governmental car. There's also another kind, but this is the same plates; the numbers are different. The numbers which started with 25, it is a stolen car, but it is allowed to work as taxis. This is a very modern law in the world.

SIEGEL: As you can hear, our man Hosam could hardly stop laughing as he translated this.

It turns out this system is a legacy of the most efficient but embarrassing example of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in the 1990s: auto theft. The Palestinian Authority took over Gaza, and the Israeli police were out, so Israeli car thieves fenced thousands of stolen cars into the Gaza Strip, about 15,000 of them, where they were then sold. Thousands are driven by Palestinian security and other officials. A lot of them are in that stolen taxicab category, vehicles that provide income while costing a lot less than a legal yellow minivan.

When their cars were stolen, the Israeli car owners would get reimbursed by their insurance, and they would go buy new cars. So in effect, Israeli insurance companies were paying for Gaza's used car trade. When the insurance companies sued, the Palestinian Authority settled, and the settlement cost was offset in part by much higher registration fees for cars that had been stolen. So to designate those cars, they were given special license plates. According to the Transportation Department in Gaza, the news is that the Authority has decided in principle to end stolen car plates. Everyone will pay the same registration fees. But since this may put a lot of self-employed taxi drivers out of work, no one is saying how long it will take to abolish the license plate that says, `This car was stolen.'

Thread from Israel

🧵

Exclusive: 100s of young party-goers have been killed or are missing feared kidnapped to Gaza by Hamas militants, who attacked a festival yesterday. Among them is Brit Jake Marlowe. Me & @natalielisbona spoke to witnesses who survived, relatives, friends

2. The witness accounts are frightening. At around 6.30am a rocket barrage started, the event was interrupted as everyone hit the floor. The problem was most people at this festival had no transport, they came on buses. They had no way to get to safety.

3. Those who survived, who were not killed or kidnapped left in a crucial window immediately after the rocket barrage before militants stormed the festival with automatic weapons and grenades. They described coming across cars of dead civilians riddled with bullets.

4. Those who didn't and couldn't  get out - which reportedly included a woman who had a broken leg and was in a cast so couldn't run - tried to hide as best they could. They furiously messaged friends and relatives for help, begging the military to intervene but no help came.

Thread from Breaking the Silence -- Another Palestinian Uprising

Breaking the Silence posted this thread.

Hamas's attack and the events unfolding since yesterday are unspeakable. We could talk about their cruel and criminal actions, or focus on how our Jewish-supremacist govt brought us to this point. But as former Israeli soldiers, our job is to talk about what we were sent to do

🧵

Israel's security policy, for decades now, has been to “manage the conflict”. Successive Israeli governments insist on round after round of violence as if any of it will make a difference. They talk about “security”, “deterrence”, “changing the equation”.

All of these are code words for bombing the Gaza Strip to a pulp, always justified as targeting terrorists, yet always with heavy civilian casualties. In between these rounds of violence we make life impossible for Gazans, and then act surprised when it all boils over.

We talk about "normalization" with the UAE and now Saudi Arabia, while hoping the world will turn a blind eye to the open-air prison we built in our backyard. Apart from the unfathomable violation of human rights, we've created a massive security liability for our own citizens.

The question Israelis are all asking is - where were the soldiers yesterday? Why was the IDF seemingly absent while hundreds of Israelis were slaughtered in their homes and on the streets? The unfortunate truth is that they were “preoccupied”. In the West Bank.

We send soldiers to secure settler incursions into the Palestinian city of Nablus, to chase Palestinian children in Hebron, to protect settlers as they carry out pogroms. Settlers demand that Palestinian flags are removed from the streets of Huwara; soldiers are sent to do it.

Our country decided - decades ago - that it's willing to forfeit the security of its citizens in our towns and cities, in favor of maintaining control over an occupied civilian population of millions, all for the sake of a settler-messianic agenda.

The idea that we can "manage the conflict" without ever having to solve it is once again collapsing before our eyes. It held up until now because only few dared to challenge it. These heartbreaking events could change that. They must. For all of us between the river and the sea.

Snapshots of Migrants in New York

Tom Watson posted this thread about the crush of migrants in New York.

I just took a walk over to the Roosevelt Hotel, ground zero of the so-called "migrant crisis" in New York. It's an easy set-up for news crews, an easy target for anti-immigrant protesters, and frankly, the current Mayor used it as an easy prop when he declared a crisis.

So I took a slight detour to walk around and briefly duck into the lobby to see for myself. Didn't take photos out of respect for the asylum seekers. There were no protesters. A few cops, which is prudent because of the outrageous threats against those temporarily housed there.

The first thing I noticed was the presence of children in the lobby, or tightly gripping their parents' hands at the entrances. I didn't wander around because I was probably not supposed to be there. But wearing a suit and tie (and being an old white dude), nobody stopped me.

This Times piece from a couple of weeks ago has some great photos that capture the setting of a once palatial railroad station hotel serving as a makeshift processing center.

The second thing I noticed is the rather vast corral of scooters, ebikes, and motorcycles lined up outside - the product not of immigration policy but our modern "gig economy" and the workforce of Uber Eats and Door Dash couriers. Yes, workforce! You see where this is going... And the third thing? Relative calm. Yeah there was some weed smoke (but where is there not these days?) Yeah the bikes block the street and the drivers do not - shall we say - obey traffic laws. But where are they not these days? And how come the vast NYPD doesn't enforce them?

But for a "crisis" it was rather mundane. Yet we're fed a constant barrage of angry, screaming, hateful mini mobs in Staten Island or on Vanderbilt Avenue. The truth is much quieter! Yes, there is a policy and budget challenge. No question. But New York is hardly falling apart.

Don't believe me? Head over to the Roosevelt Hotel.

[Reader advisory] This is a Disturbing Report from Syria

I'm noting this grotesque report from Syria for future reference. The link is passed along by Joshua Landis.

“They Buried Them Silently.” The Stations Of The “Death Journey” From Assad’s Prisons To Mass Grave“

They were carrying me and beating me on the ground in the halls of Tishreen Military Hospital. This lasted a quarter of an hour, after which they expected that I was finished, so they placed me with the dead. The bodies were placed on top of each other, so my share came on top of two bodies, then they placed two more on me, who were killed after me.”

It is the story of the detainee Muhammad, who comes from the Hama countryside and was detained for two years in Saydnaya prison, which Amnesty International described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

Muhammad tells his story while he was transferred from prison to Tishreen Military Hospital, which is considered a station for sick detainees, who are transferred from prison to the hospital before being killed and buried in mass graves, according to what human rights reports documented.

Mahmoud continues his story by saying, “After about half an hour, I woke up and a shiver ran through my body, starting from my toes and gradually extending to the rest of my body. I moved a little and the two bodies fell on top of me and I started screaming in a voice that I had no idea where it came from.”

“They started hitting me on the head, stomach, kidneys and everywhere, and I would not stop screaming (..) After I left the prison, I told one of the doctors what had happened, and he said my heart had stopped, then it came back to life and began pumping blood again

Muhammad’s story is one of dozens of stories documented by the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison, and included in a report called “Bury Them Silently,” which talks about the mechanisms of killing and disappearance in Tishreen Military Hospital between 2011 and 2020.

The report was based on 154 interviews with 32 detainees, doctors and nurses who worked in Tishreen Military Hospital, and others who worked in military intelligence, the military police, political security, and the military judiciary.

The report explains the structure of military hospitals in Syria, their importance to the security branches, the network of relations between them, and the distribution of responsibilities between them in torturing, killing , and burying detainees in mass graves.

Glasses...the first step towards “death”

According to the report, the bodies of detainees, who were killed under torture in prisons and security branches, in addition to sick detainees, are transferred to Tishreen Military Hospital, so that torture stations in hospitals begin.

The first stop is in a place called “Al-Nadara” in Tishreen Military Hospital, which is a place where sick detainees are received as well as the bodies of the deceased, whether they were sick or those who lost their lives in a detention center.

The report confirmed that the process of transferring detainees from detention centers to hospitals is accompanied by brutal attacks that reach the point of loss of life in many cases.

The report says that the “glasses” is “the first stop for a sick detainee upon his arrival to the hospital, and it is also the place where the bodies of detainees are collected before they are loaded and transported to mass graves.”

He added, “The bodies are placed at the outer door of the prison, and the detainees are forced to carry the bodies of their colleagues and place them in the vehicles prepared to transport them to the cemeteries.”

Sometimes there are patients among the corpses who are between life and death, and the assistant in the hospital kills them. Members of the National Defense Forces who are arrested on criminal charges are also brought in to assault the sick detainees and kill them before bringing them to the doctor.

Alternative ambulance station

The second station is the “Alternative Ambulance Department,” which is the second station for detainees who survive death in the “Al-Nadara” station.

It is an old, one-story underground warehouse adjacent to the main ambulance department. Its area is about 100 square meters and contains 30 beds, and the medical staff in it is between 30 and 40, including nurses and doctors.

Sick detainees are presented to the “alternative ambulance” department only as a routine procedure and are given painkillers at best, without being presented to the relevant departments.

One of the detainees says: “They took me to the emergency department in the hospital. An assistant and a regular conscript entered and showed me to a doctor who looked nothing like doctors. I later learned that he was a colonel or brigadier general.”

“He entered angrily and started shouting at them, ‘Why are you bringing him to me?’ I mean, we are bringing him to sign a death certificate for him. The assistant replied to him, ‘Sir, his soul has not yet returned.’”

After that, the doctor left due to the end of his shift, and “the recruit turned to the assistant and said to him: What do we want to do with him?” The assistant replied: Put him back on the glasses so that he will vomit and give us relief from him.

The goal of this section, according to the report, is to completely isolate the detainees from anyone, and deprive them of any opportunity to communicate with the outside world or get to know one of them in any way.

The medical staff in the department carries out torture on patients, as the medical staff allowed to enter this place are strictly loyal to the regime, and it can be said that the majority of them are from the Alawite sect, according to the report.

Transport station for mass graves

The third station is transferring the bodies of detainees who were killed under torture in prisons and patients who were liquidated in the hospital to mass graves, after a death certificate is issued to them by the “forensic medicine” team.

According to the report, the role of the medical team is to “legitimize the process of liquidating opponents and hiding their bodies,” by writing a report on the causes and manner of the detainee’s death.

But in reality, doctors do not examine or autopsy the bodies of deceased detainees, and the causes of death are almost always written as related to heart diseases.

The bodies of detainees who died under torture in prisons and branches and who are being liquidated in the hospital are collected in several places next to the detainees’ cells and in the hospital’s transport area, and are loaded from their collection places into transport vehicles to be buried in mass graves.

There are six large refrigerated cars in the hospital’s transportation area for transporting bodies, as well as closed Mazda cars that have been modified to become ambulances that move within Damascus and its countryside.

There are also Chevrolet cars belonging to the Forestry Foundation in the Ministry of Agriculture, in addition to 16 Mazda microbuses with a capacity of 14 passengers, old military sanitary cars, and modern sanitary cars with about 20 cars (donations from Japan and Korea before the revolution).

The report confirmed that the detainees in the prison were forced to carry the bodies of other detainees in cars to transport them to mass graves.

The report also confirmed that bodies were being “beaten, insulted,” and trampled in the hospital by security personnel, nurses, and nurses.

One of the detainees said, “The bodies were brought by dump trucks, and they were lifted and lowered like sand. After filming was completed and the records were organized, they were transported to the dump cars by a truck if the number was large.”

The bodies are being transported, accompanied by members of the military police and two security vehicles from Branch 227, to three mass graves in Najha, Al-Qutayfa, and Baghdad Bridge near the labor city of Adra.

A former worker in the machinery factory in Damascus Governorate says in the report that he was asked to dig a trench 10 to 15 meters long and more than 3 meters deep.

After that, cars containing more than 450 bodies arrived, and “a security officer asked me to shovel them and lower them into the ditch. The bodies lying on the ground were disrupting my movement. I tried to get around them so as not to crush them under the bulldozer.”

“But he waved his hand and ordered me to come forward and forced me to crush them under the wheel, and I started carrying the bodies with the bulldozer bucket and throwing them in the middle of the trench that I had dug.

Early Morning Racism Note

Listening to Morning Edition in the early morning darkness I heard a story about a Sikh family in Canada disappointed to be denied visas to return to India because the two countries are having a diplomatic conflict. One man was disappointed about not being able to bring his children to celebrate Diwali in the place where he was born and raised.

Listening I had a flashback from childhood of my maternal grandmother, who was a teacher of elocution, correcting me when I said something about a woman who was "raised" to believe something or other. She corrected my use of the term raised by saying "Don't use that word for people because people are reared, not raised. Animals are raised, and people are reared."

On another occasion she corrected me for referring to a woman of color as a lady. "Say woman, not lady. We say Negro woman and white lady." She is also the only person I knew who used the word octoroon in conversation suggesting someone she saw on TV likely had a black great-grandparent.

I was spoon-fed polite prejudice and racism from an early age. I already knew not to use the word "black" because it was how ignorant people spoke. Also we were always taught to pronounce the word properly: NEE-grow. We never used the N-word. 

I was nearly twenty when I realized how prejudiced I had been "reared", becoming pro-active overcoming it in myself and others. And now, pushing eighty, I'm still fighting the same level of ignorance in the world around me.

Morning Reflections

Early morning reflections...

One consequence of the Hawaiian tragedy was the resignation of the management chief in Maui. He cites health reasons but the real reason is his being targeted for what is being called the "failure" to sound the alarm systems that might have saved lives by triggering an evacuation. The reason the alarms were not sounded is that the system that has been in place for years is designed to move people out of the way of possible tsunamis by moving to higher ground. Such a move in this case would have sent people into the fires, not away. Moreover, there were no plans to evacuate people from areas deemed safe from tsunami threats so the alarm systems would have just added to the danger. 

As I listened my mind wandered to all the times I have heard similar warnings about weather threats, child abductions, road closures and such. I wondered how many agencies, commissions and other regulatory authorities we have and realized how much they affect our ordinary lives. Interstate commerce, stock trading, food safety, work rules, labor laws... the list seems endless. 

My web search "How many federal commissions do we have?" (noting two billion-plus responses) was reworded to read "The President also appoints the heads of more than 50 independent federal commissions, such as the Federal Reserve Board or the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as federal judges, ambassadors, and other federal offices." 

Before moving on with the rest of my day, I finally settled on the Wiki article Independent agencies of the United States government which lists a remarkable array of agencies and commissions. This, I suppose, is what cynics call the deep state, or swamp, in an effort to suggest political implications. 

Take a look at the list and decide for yourself what life would be like this population of technocrats -- nearly all of which are non-political -- were somehow fashioned into the political resources authoritarian leaders typically use to control non-democratic regimes. FTC, ICC, GSA, NLRB, NRC, Peace Corps, Social Security, Postal Service, the list seems endless.

"Agencies outside of the executive branch" are also noted...

• Fannie May
• Freddie Mac
• National Gallery of Art
• Smithsonian Institution

That's enough. 
Time to start my day...

Polite racism, spoon-fed from my childhood

Blind Tom, polite racism and other notes from my original blog sixteen years ago. 

When I was young, I got radicalized by events around me. Now that I'm older, the same disease is returning. I don't know which is easier to take, a young person who doesn't know his head from a hole in the ground, or an old person getting ready to go into one. David Neiwert mentioned "sundown towns" and how the phenomenon is spreading . For those who don't know what is meant by the term, sundown town refers to a community that makes it clear, one way or another, that the good people of that place do not want anyone there who is not like them in every fundamental way. (Gives meaning to the word fundamental, by the way.)

Sundown Towns

I am familiar with the term from childhood. I never saw an actual sign, but my dad said there were places in Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee where signs were posted at the city limits that said "Nigger, don't let the sun go down on you in [town or county name]." The meaning was clear. If you were black you are not only unwelcome but likely to be at risk for injury or death if you were still there at sundown. It's one thing to visit, spend your money or work in a place. It's very different if you expect to live and be accepted there socially.

I was spoon-fed racial prejudice from an early age. I know what it feels like, tastes like and how it penetrates to the core of your very being. Thanks to an epiphany sometime in my youth, I left that part of my heritage behind. Unfortunately, like a reformed alcoholic or abuser, I was left with a higher awareness of the problem than normal, and so the rest of my adult life it has been my portion to point and inform every chance I get. This is the purpose of my post this morning.

Flashback: as I wrote that last paragraph, I remember a story about my maternal grandmother. About 1959 I was listening to a record of someone reading short-stories by Somerset Maugham. There was a passing reference to "Blind Tom, a Negro half-wit who played the piano." We were living in Columbus, GA at the time which is where Blind Tom, a slave, also had lived. I noticed a historic marker about that which piqued my curiosity.

My grandmother, who was in failing health, was living with us at the time, and I mentioned Blind Tom to her in conversation. She said that her father got a chance to see Blind Tom once while traveling on a train. He didn't hear him play the piano, but he met Blind Tom's master, or as she said, "the man who owned him." He asked permission to feel the man's head, which he did, because it was thought at the time that the shape and growth patterns of the skull had something to do with mental development. It was nothing more than a layman's interest in phrenology, but this great-grandfather of mine didn't want to miss the chance to feel for himself this remarkable man's head to see if he noticed it to be any different from anyone else's head.

My grandmother told the story as dispassionately as if she were remembering a dress her mother had made. There was no hint that there was anything out of the ordinary, other than what we now call a savant's gifted ability to play the piano. No hint of racism, note. It was not necessary to mention that. The Brown decision was not yet five years past and a national movement was not to reach where we lived for a couple more years.

Getting back to Naomi Wolf and Dave Neiwert...

At the end of Neiwert's post he referred to yesterday's defeat of the DREAM Act, a test vote in the Senate that once again reveals that the country is not yet ready to come to terms with what to do with illegal immigrants. That piece of legislation would have opened the doors of opportunity to the children of undocumented immigrants to start the slow, tedious process of becoming Americans the old-fashioned way: facing an uphill struggle like that which faced the progenitors of nearly everyone who lives here now. I remembered a great story from two years ago of some kids in Arizona who make the realization of the "dream" a possibility.

A blog search for DREAM Act is my wake-up call.

Scanning down the list of hits, I realize that the opposition to that piece of legislation is widespread and tight-knit. The angry rhetoric of shock-jocks, Fox News and journalists who claim to speak for the "conservative" side of American society is gripping the body politic in a way that makes Naomi Wolf's arguments sound a lot less shrill. Her credibility shoots way up when I come across one blog's commentary. Documenting statistics from Investor's Business Daily about widespread opposition to the DREAM Act, the blogmaster feels the need to add:

Please consider this: no matter how large or small the turd is and, no matter what color one paints said turd, the fact remains as follows; a turd is still a turd and no, you cannot pick up a turd by the clean end.

That language is not remarkable. It is an idiom not only understood but appreciated by a growing number of otherwise decent Americans. Lots of folks will think it's cute.

Nor is the Congress to blame. They know, both in the Senate and the House, that their jobs depend on not pissing off their constituencies too much. They can lean this way or that and call it leadership... but in the end, if they don't do pretty much what they were sent there to do, they will not be re-elected. Simple as that. Why else do earmarks outweigh common sense? The old-fashioned dilemma was "guns or butter" We now face "guns or bacon." Why else would a multi-billion-dollar war keep sucking up money when the price of S-CHIP is trivial by comparison? And yet, the bacon (earmarks) keeps coming home.

Daniel Mackler, LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) is a filmmaker, musician, and lover of life-and for ten years was a psychotherapist in New York City. He writes extensively on healing childhood trauma and reclaiming the true self. (Google Books)

His You Tube channel is loaded with videos like this about a variety of subjects. I cannot find links to professional peer-review journals but his common-sense observations and obvious curiosity seem harmless enough. 

The Real Goal of the New Mar-a-Lago Charges Against Trump

This is a backup copy for future reference.

The Real Goal of the New Mar-a-Lago Charges Against Trump

BY DENNIS AFTERGUT
JULY 27, 2023

On Thursday, the Florida grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and his valet, Walt Nauta, in June for obstructing a grand jury investigation and conspiring to willfully retain classified documents, filed a superseding indictment. That means the grand jury issued a new charging document to replace the old.

It’s a bombshell.

The new indictment adds a new defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, Trump’s property manager at his Mar-a-Lago property. More importantly, it also adds explosive new charges that include allegations of a conspiracy to corruptly persuade another person to alter, conceal, delete, and mutilate security camera footage at Mar-a-Lago.

That footage presumably documented the unlawful retention of government documents. The new allegation is that Trump sought to have it destroyed after receiving a grand jury subpoena for it.

Of course, an indictment is only an accusation, not proof. And the defendants are innocent until proven guilty.

Without minimizing the importance of those legal facts, one can state the obvious: These allegations are dynamite for a trial jury. Special Counsel Jack Smith would not have allowed the grand jury to include the charges unless he had compelling evidence to prove them. That evidence at the very least appears to include testimony from Yuscil Taveras, a Mar-a-Lago IT employee whom de Oliveira allegedly cornered in an audio closet days after Trump received the subpoena and told “the boss” wanted the server deleted.

This May Be the Strongest Legal Case Against Trump

As an experienced prosecutor, Smith knows that defense lawyers’ bottom-line job is complete if they provide a jury with enough reasonable doubt so that a single juror resists voting to convict and hangs the jury. Smith is not blind to the fact that Florida, where the trial will take place, is Trump country, and that jurors who start out leaning strongly his way are likely.

What Smith appears to have done with this superseding indictment, however, is to have assembled the kind of case that that is so strong—and alleged misconduct that should be so offensive to any law-abiding citizen—that any majority in the jury room for conviction will be armed with the kind of ammunition that could overpower even the most recalcitrant hold-out.

Here are four reasons why the new charges are packed with punch for jurors.

1. First, you don’t need to be a criminologist, or even to have binged Law and Order episodes to understand that destroying evidence is what mobsters do to cover their tracks and try to stay out of the joint. Prosecutors call it “consciousness of guilt,” which can be the best available evidence of corrupt intent.
2. Second, the new indictment makes clear that Jack Smith has an inside witness to the conspiracy—the indictment’s “Employee No. 4,” whom the New York Times has reported to be Taveras. The indictment details how the new defendant, de Oliveira, attempted to enlist Taveras in the newly charged obstruction by telling him, “The Boss wants to delete the server.”
   Per the indictment, when Employee No. 4 equivocated, Nauta repeated the statement insistently and asked, without apparently subtlety, “What are we going to do?” Again, this would sound to any juror like mobster talk.
   You can be sure of three things. First, there’s only one “Boss” at Mar-a-Lago. Second, Taveras testified to those words to the grand jury, or it wouldn’t have included them in the superseding indictment. Last, Jack Smith will not be relying on the word of Taveras at trial without a mountain of corroboration.
   Just to take a wild guess about one possibility: It could well be that there is video tape footage in the grand jury’s possession that show de Oliveira and Taveras stepping into that audio closet together. There’s also voluminous texts between de Oliveira and Nauta immediately after Trump would have been informed of the subpoena for the server that points to the pair plotting, as well as documentation of respective phone calls between the two men and Trump.
3. Third, the time sequences detailed in the indictment scream cover up. Smith would not have described them so precisely without proof beyond any doubt of the timeline. It adds a layer of culpability that will be hard for any common-sense juror to resist.
   For example: On June 22, a Trump lawyer was informed that the grand jury was going to subpoena the security footage tapes. The next day, Trump talked by phone to de Oliveira for 24 minutes. The day after that the formal subpoena was delivered and Nauta, meanwhile, immediately changed his travel plans, returning to visit Florida instead of travelling with Trump from Bedminster to Illinois. At this point he contacted de Oliveira and Taveras to enlist them to meet at Mar-a-Lago. The conversations between de Oliveira and Taveras about “deleting the server” occurred first thing that Monday morning, June 27.
4. Fourth, the grand jury has charged de Oliveira in a separate count of making false statements to the FBI about his role in the conspiracy. Again, the timing is critical. The recounted false statements occur in an interview months after the grand jury subpoena was received and after de Oliveira is on video moving boxes of classified documents, which the FBI had subpoenaed and acquired. In the FBI interview, de Oliveira denied six times—count them—that he had any role in the subterfuge.
   That count puts enormous pressure on de Oliveira, just as a parallel count charges Nauta with virtually identical falsehoods. To a prosecutor, and likely a jury, that strongly suggests they got their stories together.
   The pressure on these two Trump loyalists, whose lawyers are reportedly being paid by Trump’s PAC, does not mean that either will “flip.” Any one of us can just guess what promises Trump has made to them if he is reelected president and they keep quiet.
   But do note this: These separate counts give them a lesser crime to plead guilty to if either decides to protect himself. The maximum penalty for a false statement to the FBI is five years imprisonment. The maximum penalty of concealing or destroying documents from a grand jury is 20 years behind bars.
5. Fifth, the superseding indictment does something for the nation. Trump himself, and his many defenders, have repeated the argument falsely equating the classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s office and those that Trump has claimed he had a right to. Many citizens not paying close attention may have fallen for that talking point.

But even for citizens who have to date failed to see the difference between Biden’s immediate cooperation in returning the documents in his home versus Trump’s 18 months of stonewalling, here we have something new: There is simply no way to misunderstand the new, even sharper contrast between Biden and Trump: There is no report that Biden sought to conceal anything from a grand jury, much less to have security camera footage obliterated.

And by the way. If, as Trump claims, he had every right to keep the classified documents after his presidency ended, why on earth did he feel a need to destroy tapes or a server?

Just to hammer the point, in this new superseding indictment, Smith added one more charge against Trump under the Espionage Act for a document he allegedly showed a reporter who was working on a book about Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. As we know from the initial indictment, Trump is on tape discussing the document and saying that he never declassified it, an admission that blows a hole in one of his biggest previous defenses.

He has since claimed that there was never any document and that he was just discussing news clippings. Previously, the document had been missing—not recovered in the search of Mar-a-Lago—and Trump’s attorneys had said they couldn’t find it. Well, apparently now Jack Smith has found it. This newly discovered document—reportedly a plan of attack against Iran—will be hung on Trump to show how careless he was with the nation’s top secrets and how he knew that he had no right to show them to anybody.

These charges seem as close to bulletproof as they come.

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1684883320029765632

Twitter thread from Ukraine

Day 500 of the Russian war in Ukraine.

I am president of the Kyiv School of Economics, a former minister of economy of Ukraine, and a professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. I left the US for Kyiv 4 days before the war. These are the lessons I learned.

1. We owe our survival to unity and ingenuity
2. Empathy holds more power than rationality.
3. Understanding is out of reach without personal experience
4. War can forge you into a better person, tuned into the world's real problems
5. Our Ukrainian success hinges on knowledge and continual learning
6. The harshness and monotony of war quickly become the norm
7. Life's singular purpose is to persist and advance towards victory for Ukraine; all else is secondary.

Let me expand on each of this points.

1. Unity and ingenuity.
Russia was hoping that a politically polarized Ukrainian society won't be able to provide a quick and unified response to the invasion. They expected that Ukrainians will be slow to react. And surrender its state and government. After all, in the Russia view, people don't have agency. Russian people are no one for the Kremlin, why should Ukrainians be any different. But we are. The war has shown unprecedented unity, willpower, and innovation by the Ukrainians 

2. Empathy holds more power than rationality.
This one is difficult to explain. Because it is irrational. People sacrifice their lives so that others can survive. On the individual level, to a rational person, educated in the West, or living in Russia, it might not make sense  But when you are in the war, you are not doing careful rational calculus. You are often driven by emotions, a much more powerful motivator. In the case of Ukraine, these are primal emotions. Ukraine has been attacked, people are tortured and killed. 

This is the biggest injustice there could be in the world, and it must be corrected. This is what drives people. While it might not be rational, it saves Ukraine and it will ensure our independence and safety from Russia in the future. At the unbelievable high cost of lives  Now I understand that it must be how nations are created and that not any tribe or people could be a nation. Independence and freedom are not free. I just wish fewer people would have to die. 

3. Understanding is out of reach without personal experience
The war is covered in fog. Literally and through disinformation. Also, most of our cognitive and learning frameworks that we are humans and societies have developed - fail. They are not adequate for this environment. So, unless you see and experience it, you don't really know what to believe. This is why it is critically important to visit the front lines, to speak with the soldiers, to interact with the survivors of occupation, and visit all kinds of places in Ukraine. Ukraine is large and the war is diverse. Sometimes two villages a couple of miles apart have had very different experiences and now have different attitudes and culture. So, I have learned to be humble and try to learn first from eyewitness to form my own opinion.

4. War can forge you into a better person, tuned into the world's real problems
This one is simple. War makes you a better person because it cleans you of all secondary thoughts and ambitions. The human life, dignity, freedom become key for me.  Now I truly understand the meaning of the human rights. They are not an abstraction for me anymore. Yes, they can be taken away. They can disappear from your life without warning. You can wake up occupied. But human rights must be defended at all costs.

5. Our Ukrainian success hinges on knowledge and continual learning
Russia is powerful, bigger, has a lot of weapons and people willing to fight or too afraid to desert. So, we need to be smarter, better educated, more tech savvy. We have to deploy technology to win. And we have to be educated to continue to run our society and economy, during and post war.

6. The harshness and monotony of war quickly become the norm
Before the war I was afraid of the war. I was not sure whether I would behave in a decent way. Would I run away from Ukraine? Would I be afraid to be at the frontlines? Clearly, people are differently programmed. But what I learned about the fear of war is that it also comes from ignorance, from the loss of control over your life. Over time one get used to the war, one learns how to live through. Humans are amazing at adapting. The war shows it to you.

7. Life's singular purpose is to persist and advance towards victory for Ukraine; all else is secondary.
That's for me. And for most Ukrainians. We want to survive. So, while I miss my academic career in the US and regret that I might not be a good economist as a result of coming back to Ukraine before the war, I think I have made the right choices as a human. I have one life and I want to liver it true. So, Ukraine must win, and the rest can wait.

Thank you for reading this. I feel we are not alone in this. It will be over one day. X