Author: VD

Who is the real problem?

It’s not Putin, observes Pat Buchanan:

From FDR on, U.S. presidents have felt that America could not remain isolated from the rulers of the world’s largest nation.

Ike invited Khrushchev to tour the USA after he had drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. After Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, JFK was soon calling for a new detente at American University.

Within weeks of Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Prague Spring in August 1968, LBJ was seeking a summit with Premier Alexei Kosygin.

After excoriating Moscow for the downing of KAL 007 in 1983, that old Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was fishing for a summit meeting.

The point: Every president from FDR through George H. W. Bush, even after collisions with Moscow far more serious than this clash over Ukraine, sought to re-engage the men in the Kremlin.

Whatever we thought of the Soviet dictators who blockaded Berlin, enslaved Eastern Europe, put rockets in Cuba and armed Arabs to attack Israel, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 1 all sought to engage Russia’s rulers.

Avoidance of a catastrophic war demanded engagement.

How then can we explain the clamor of today’s U.S. foreign policy elite to confront, isolate, and cripple Russia, and make of Putin a moral and political leper with whom honorable statesmen can never deal?

What has Putin done to rival the forced famine in Ukraine that starved to death millions, the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels or the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of Czechoslovakia?

As a general rule, the moment you see an American politician pointing at to someone and claiming he is Hitler, you know he’s probably innocent of whatever he’s being accused of doing. It’s not a perfectly reliable device, but when they’re obviously engaging in hyperbolic rhetoric, the chances are they are doing so because they can’t make a reasonable case based on his actual deeds.

It is somewhat remarkable that even the least competent administration in American history is managing to screw up the Middle East, Russia, and the southern border of the USA all at the same time. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama ordered the bombing of London and an amphibious invasion of Uganda.

It’s obvious that the USA is the real problem here. But what is more difficult to understand is what their motivation might be, beyond a short-term pecuniary interest in pillaging Ukraine.

There is NO PLACE for anti-palestinianism….

It’s been interesting to read up on 4th Gen War theory while watching the events take place surrounding the war in Gaza. And I have to say, it appears to be an almost textbook example of Israel winning the conventional Clausewitzian levels while Hamas is winning at the more important moral level. For those unfamiliar with this military theory, this doesn’t say anything about which side has the right of it, only the moral perception of the two sides on the part of the neutral observers. For example, this sort of thing works directly against the Israeli interest:

One Direction star Zayn Malik has been bombarded with death threats by outraged Israelis after posting a #FreePalestine message on Twitter. The 21-year-old, who was brought up a Muslim in Bradford, Yorkshire, shared the #FreePalestine hashtag earlier today to his 13million followers, who retweeted it 140,000 times. However, moments after the post appeared, Zayn began receiving messages telling him to ‘kill himself’ and one even read: ‘Let me kill you’.

The young man has 13 million followers, about .00001 percent of whom actually know or care anything about Gaza. How are death threats against him going to fly in their barely sapient eyes when all he did, as far as they can see, was share a message of freedom? Meanwhile, some Jewish leaders are making the dreadful mistake of demanding that European governments censor their citizens and impose regulations upon them, which would be an excellent way to ensure that those governments, already very unpopular due to the Euro crisis and the corruption of the EU, will be thrown out at the first opportunity:

“We are potentially looking at the beginning of another Holocaust now. These events [violent demonstrations and expressions of anti-Semitism] will only grow in scale across Europe,” he asserted. Addressing the legislators and representatives of a number of European governments, including those of Denmark, Holland and France, the oligarch and former head of the Russian Jewish Congress called for Jewish communities across the continent to “unite and consolidate.”

Sloutsker also called on all European governments to impose what he called “strict regulations” on the format and content of demonstrations in order to prevent further violence against Jews. Citing a recent proposal by Belgian Jewry to establish a position of Special European Commissioner to monitor and combat anti-Semitism and racism, Sloutsker said such measures would “help send a strong message that European leadership is united and committed to combating anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia.”

The Israelis have yet to learn that in a global media battle, they simply cannot expect to have it both ways. Everything eventually makes its way out. If you want to claim popular anti-semitism is beyond the pale, then you simply cannot engage in anti-palestinianism. And it is truly bizarre to see complaints about the European conflation of diaspora Jew and Israeli, even as other Jews openly conflate them.

The state will not allow one Jew to remain undefended, MK Yisrael Hasson chimed in, asserting that the fates of European and Israeli Jews are intertwined.

Jews is Belgium are being asked “why are you killing children in Gaza?” Rafael Werner, a representative of Belgium’s Jewish community recounted, asserting that there is little distinction being made between Jews and Israelis.

So, are they intertwined or not? Considering that Martin van Creveld, one of the leading theoreticians of state vs non-state war, is an Israeli, I think both the Israelis and the diaspora Jews would do well to familiarize themselves with his books. From what I see from my very limited vantage point, based on basic 4GW principles, Netanyahu has made a common, but critical mistake in attempting to compromise between the De-Escalation model and the Hama model.

And to bring it full circle, I fully support the legality of both anti-semitism and anti-palestinianism. Die Gedanken sind frei. And keep in mind that once one embrace thought and speech policing, one reduces the question to a simple game of will to power.

The bad science of food

You can’t trust scientistry. You simply can’t. Think about how many times, over the last few DECADES, you were told that eating fat and butter and cream and cheese was bad for you. Remember how fettucini alfredo was once called “a heart attack on a plate?” Then read this belated mea culpa from a doctor who admits that he has been giving out worse than useless advice to his patients for years.

Milk, cheese, butter, cream – in fact all saturated fats – are bad for you. Or so I believed ever since my days as a medical student nearly 30 years ago. During that time I assured friends and family that saturated fat would clog their arteries as surely as lard down a drain. So, too, would it make them pile on the pounds. Recently, however, I have been forced to do a U-turn. It is time to apologise for all that useless advice I’ve been dishing out about fat.

The roots of our current confusion lie in a paper by an American scientist called Ancel Keys in 1953. It covered the increasingly common problem of clogged arteries. Keys included a simple graph comparing fat consumption and deaths from heart disease in men from six different countries. Americans, who ate a lot of fat, were far more likely to have a heart attack than the Japanese, who ate little fat. Case solved. Or was it?

Other scientists began wondering why Keys chose to focus on just six countries when he had access to data for 22. If places like France and Germany were included the link between heart disease and fat consumption became much weaker. These were, after all, countries with high fat consumption, but relatively modest rates of heart disease. In fact, as a renowned British scientist called John Yudkin pointed out, there was actually a much stronger link between sugar consumption and heart disease.

But Yudkin’s warnings about sugar were denounced by a fellow scientist as ‘nothing more than scientific fraud’. He was, as one of his colleagues colourfully put it, ‘thrown under a bus’.

Meanwhile, the war on fat gradually gained momentum, to the extent that by the time I reached medical school in the Eighties, there was no mention of Yudkin’s findings. People were cutting down on dairy products and switching to sugary carbohydrates and vegetable oils. This, it turns out, was a mistake. To turn vegetable oil into margarine, manufacturers used a process called hydrogenation (gas pumped through oil at high temperature), which produces trans fats. These are the Darth Vader of the fat world: good fats turned bad.

Unlike saturated fats, there is clear evidence that trans fats damage your heart. They were found in most shop-bought biscuits and cakes until they were removed in 2007.

Think about how many people have suffered ill effects from eating a bad, science-recommended diet. The amazing thing is that this doctor clung to what he “knew” even though “I put on over two stone, despite regular exercise. My cholesterol soared past the healthy range and two years ago I discovered I was borderline diabetic.”

Observation is an important part of the scientific process. Not publishing. Not peer review. And it is eminently clear that too few people in the scientific and medical communities are observing anything.

Hugo recommendations: Best Novella

Equoid by Charles Stross. I am a fan of the Laundry novels. After Accelerando, they are Stross’s best work. Equoid is a Laundry novella, so I went into it with high expectations, having recently read and enjoyed The Rhesus Chart. Unfortunately, Equoid is absolutely void of the humor and light-hearted feel of the novels in the series, its attempt to subvert the “virgin tames unicorn” trope reads more like tentacle rape slash child abuse porn (talk about sending the very wrong message in light of the recent MZB/Kramer revelations), and Stross’s attempt to recreate HP Lovecraft’s style in a series of letters falls more than a little flat. As the reviewer at Tor.com noted: “it’s the sort of confounded feeling I get when I’m sure that a writer
was trying to gross me out on purpose with some problematic imagery and
succeeded, yet I’m not sure that the depths gone to were necessary in
the story.” As if monsters raping young girls isn’t enough, there is also a government project entitled EMOCUM. Get it? Stross has written fiction that merited awards in the past. He may well do so in the future. This isn’t it. This is something he’ll want to disown someday.

The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad Torgersen. I read this when it was published as part of Torgersen’s collection Lights in the Deep, and while it wasn’t my favorite of the stories in that collection, it’s not at all difficult to see why Torgersen keeps getting nominated for awards; more than any SF/F writer today, he sits astride the fence that separates Blue SF/F from Pink SF/F. The novella is a tale of alien enemies forced to join together in cooperation by circumstance; somehow Torgersen manages to seamlessly blend Pink tropes such as female military commanders with Blue tropes such as devout religious characters, combining them with a dash of Golden Age optimism. Stylistically, he writes well, and if the we-can-all-get-along theme seems a bit vanilla, it can also be taken as rather brilliant metacommentary on the current SF/F divide. I mean, religious people on one side, insect army on the other? Anyway, it’s the best of the bunch.

The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells. A surprisingly sensitive take on an epically brutal monster from a game-tie in series. This was, in some ways, my favorite of the five nominees; Wells portrays a man unhinged by loss in an adroit manner, so much so that the reader is momentarily confused at times as to what is story-reality versus story-delusion. Stylistically, Wells is competent, but he’s not at the same level as the other four writers (if one counts Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages as one writer) and worse, his take on human sexuality is the same “I’m not worthy” gammatude of Joe Abercrombie. His nominally badass slaughtering machine, who doesn’t shirk at butchering large quantities of men, women, and children, would faint at the very thought of ever raping a woman. The psychological inconsistency is jarring. It’s a good story and a worthy nominee, but I’d put it at number two.

Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente. The title is good. The story isn’t. It’s a haphazard, incoherent attempt to force-fit the Snow White story into the Wild West, complete with a weird attempt to also bring in Indian folklore. Continent-spanning cultural appropriation doesn’t even begin to describe this admittedly creative attempt to find a new way to portray more kick-ass women. Yawn. That being said, it is identifiable as fantasy. Credit where credit is due.


Wakulla Springs by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages. This pair are easily the best writers of the lot from a stylistic perspective. Unfortunately, as with several works in other categories, this novella isn’t science fiction or fantasy. It’s much more concerned with historical racism in the American South, (with repeated reminders that black folk weren’t permitted to swim in certain places or stay in certain hotels, and this made the black individual feelbad) than with any science fictional or speculative elements. There are the occasional nods to magical realism, such as Cheeta the chimp who may or may not be talking, but this novella simply isn’t of the genre.


My vote for Best Novella, and my suggestion to others, is The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad Torgersen. My vote will go as follows:

  1. The Chaplain’s Legacy
  2. The Butcher of Khardov
  3. No Award
  4. Six-Gun Snow White

I recommend leaving the other two novellas off the ballot.

OTHER HUGO AWARD RECOMMENDATIONS

Best Novel
Best Novelette
Best Short Story
Best Editor 
Retro 1939 

Mailvox: contra suffrage

Chris Gerrib asks

VD, why shouldn’t every free adult human be able to vote in the country they are a citizen of?

For the same reason unfree children who are not citizens are not permitted to vote: it is expected that their votes will not be in the long-term interests of the country or its citizenry.

Another commenter, Shelles, appears to be of the David Futrelle school of debate, in which her inability to imagine an effective argument is confused with the nonexistence of such arguments. Which I found a little amusing here, since she somehow manages to touch on two effective arguments while missing the aspects that make them effective.

The only way to win the argument that women should not have the vote is to be able to successfully equate them with others that do not have the vote: minors, felons. The condition of being a woman is in no way like either of these.

The other possibility is to argue that the country will be better off if women don’t vote because women have a tendency to for for X, Y and Z, all of which will harm, if not destroy the country. The obvious problem with this argument is that it depends on one’s personal on view of exactly how the country ought to operate. This is countered by offering another personal view of how the country ought to be that is best advanced by women having the vote.

Done.

In essence the argument is: Women should not have the vote because it’s in the interests of a certain group.

It is certainly not the only way, but it is true that one will win the argument that women should not have the vote when one is able to
successfully equate them with others that do not have the vote: minors,
felons, and so forth. However, the fact that “the condition of being a woman is in no way like either of
these” is irrelevant and does not suffice as a counterpoint. The way women are successfully equated with others who do not have the vote is to demonstrate that their votes are equally incompatible with the long-term national interest as the other classes of current non-voters.

This can be done using a variety of metrics, including what Shelles describes as another possibility to the only way. Just to give one example, if the reason children are not permitted to vote is due to their limited time preferences, a comparison could be made between children’s time preferences, women’s time preferences, and men’s time preferences. If women’s time preferences were determined to be more akin to those of children than those of men, that would be a clear justification for denying the vote to them.

But to return to the option to the only way, Shelles says “the obvious problem with this argument is that it depends on one’s personal on view of exactly how the country ought to operate”. But since the argument rests on the country’s freedom, well-being, and future existence, her counter relies upon arguing that the country should be unfree, worse-off, and nonexistent. This is not a successful or convincing counter, even if it truly represents the personal view of the interlocutor rather than a hypothetical position of Shelle’s imagination.

One should always be careful when attempting to summarize an opponent’s position. Words like “in essence” or “basically” tend to be red flags alerting a critic to holes in one’s arguments.  They aren’t necessarily so, but in this case, they are. Because the statement is true: Women should not have the vote because it’s in the interests of a certain group, so long as that “certain group” is defined as “all the citizens of the country, including the women”.

There are very solid rational, Constitutional, and historical reasons for denying female suffrage. John Adams summarized them best in his famous written exchange with his wife:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.

“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.
 
“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
– Abigail Adams, 31 March 1776

“Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects.

“We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.”
– John Adams, 14 April 1776

Events have proven John Adams correct. Free men are accustomed to voluntarily limiting the use of their power and not pushing it to the full extent of its capabilities. Women, to say the least, are not. Just as an angry woman does not pull her punches, women in politics do not restrain their instincts to attempt to control the uncontrollable. Abigail Adams is projecting: she wrongly assumes all men would be tyrants if they could because she knows that is true of herself and other women. And women do not hold themselves bound by laws in any case, regardless of whether they have had voice or representation or not. They are bound by fear.

This is why a nation that wishes to remain wealthy and free does not permit female involvement in its governance, and why totalitarians from the Italian Fascists to the Soviet Bolsheviks have historically made a priority of female involvement in the political process.

Mailvox: maintain the frame

Paleo asks about teaching Christian submission:

My wife and I (deacons / community group leaders) have been helping a late-twenty something single woman understand what it means to be a Godly woman. Surprise, surprise, *submission* and male-only eldership have been huge stumbling blocks for her. She is familiar with the pertinent scripture (she is a PK) so we decided to do two things:

  1. let her see how it works in practice (My wife is a successful business executive – VP level – who puts her family first and has no problem reconciling wifely submission)
  2. begin sharing a (non-biblical, secular) historical rationale for the idea that civilization is predicated on patriarchy. And conversely that Feminism and civilization are ultimately incompatible.

 When I gently argued that female suffrage is directly related to the precipitous decline of the family and that the current declining peace and prosperity is directly related to that – well she lost her mind and has just notified us that she’s leaving the church.

Long set-up for my question: Is it possible to winsomely argue against feminist disasters like female suffrage in this day and age?

Is it possible? Of course. Does that mean a stubborn, prideful, rebellious woman is going to accept a logically flawless train of reasoning? To ask the question is to answer it.

The extent to which these attitudes are rooted in sinful rebellion are obvious from the fact that women holding them would rather leave the church than accept the Biblical and historical truths. And the church is as much better off without them in the fold as it is without unrepentant murderers, adulterers, thieves, and homosexuals. This may be a sub-optimal outcome, but it is by no means a negative one.

Paleo did make one mistake. He “gently argued”. He says that he would like to “winsomely argue” with these women and logically convince them of the error of their ways. (I will pause so the veteran players and masters of Game can stop laughing before I continue. Everybody done? All right then.) The problem is that women simply don’t respond to logic and sweet reason. They’re not wired that way. They respond to strength, confidence, and authority, all of which a man in a position of legitimate authority throws away when he starts treating her as if he’s insecure and afraid of hurting her feelings with the truth.

The Church grows when men thunder from the pulpits. The pews are filled when its leaders fearlessly reject sin and tell the sinners they must repent before they can stand in communion with the Body of Christ. If anyone is offended by the Word, the problem is with him, not with the man who speaks it.

Now, I don’t wish to be hard on Paleo or even to criticize him. He’s doing a lot more than the average feminized Churchian, who fears the female membership more than the Lord God Almighty and worships the unholy spirit of equality. But the fact that his heart is in the right place doesn’t mean that he’s going about it in the right way.

Jesus said “Fear not”. Game says “be bold”. The fact that the lesser truth is in harmony with the greater Truth should lend confidence that speaking the truth boldly, whether it makes the listeners uncomfortable or not, is the only way for every leader in the Church. Never back down. Never temporize.

How to win a debate every time

David Futrelle demonstrates his mastery of dialectic in a remarkably brief debate with me concerning women’s suffrage on Twitter:

David Futrelle
I’ll take on any “dark enlightenment” bloggers (that’s hard to say w/ a straight face) in a cat pic duel.

Vox Day
Why not take me on in an actual debate. An easy topic like: should women have voting rights?

David Futrelle
Yes, women should have voting rights, because they, like men, are human. I win the debate! The end. Thanks!

Vox Day
Sorry, David, you haven’t won yet. Yes, you are human. Did you vote in the recent EU elections?

David Futrelle
No. I vote where I live, in the US.. So are you contending that no women live in the countries they vote in?

Vox Day
I’m demonstrating to you that merely being human grants no voting rights. Do you concur?

David Futrelle
There are a few basic requirements for having the right to vote besides being human but being male isn’t one

David Futrelle
There is no reasonable reason to deny anyone the vote because of gender.

David Futrelle
… and that’s preetty much the end of the argument, despite whatever spurious reason you come up with to deny women the vote. Debate over.

A performance for the ages! Socrates had nothing on this guy. I had no idea that simply begging the question was sufficient to declare a debate over and announce yourself the winner. But I can see where this tactic would be extremely useful and plan to incorporate it into all my online discourse in the future. I shall be unstoppable! There is more at Alpha Game.

You feel poorer because you are poorer

This proves that various “recovery packages” which amount to tens of trillions of issued credit and trillions in federal government spending were all predicated on a lie. Just as the money nominally spent to “save” the household sector went directly to the mortgage banks as housing prices continued to plunge, the money that was supposed to “stimulate” the economy stimulated nothing but Wall Street and the bottom lines of the financial institutions. Notice that this supports what both Karl Denninger and I have been saying for years: there has been ZERO REAL ECONOMIC GROWTH in the USA for more than 30 years.

It’s very simple to see. Just compare the increase in real GDP to the increase in credit. Is the ratio above or below 1.0? If the growth in the amount of credit is greater, then there has been no real economic growth. Since GDP is measured in monetary terms, this means the nominal growth is merely the increase in the number of promises to pay in the future chasing each other around.

That’s why the infrastructure is crumbling. That’s why fewer people are working. That’s why you feel stressed. American median wealth has substantially declined even as the amount of debt has skyrocketed. The Samuelsonians claim this doesn’t matter, because Peter still owes Paul. But both common sense as well as the wealth statistics demonstrate otherwise.

Key quote: “a full 25% of American Households have a net worth of just $3,200; and that 5% (1 out of 20) households has a negative net worth of -$27,416!”

As a youth, I never understood the Biblical concept of a 50-year debt jubilee. It sounded so ignorant and prehistoric. Now, as an adult trained in various schools of economics and having witnessed two major boom-bust peaks in Japan and the United States, I tend to regard it as one more example of the divine inspiration of Scripture.

This chart from Steve Sailer might put the matter more starkly to those who prefer numbers to pictures. Note that the 27 million additional immigrants who entered the USA from 2003 to 2013 have not, contrary to the insistence of neo-classical and Samuelsonian economists, enriched the economy or the native population.

Gun rights in the capital

It’s another step forward for Gun Freedom in America:

A federal judge on Saturday overturned the Washington, D.C., ban on carrying handguns outside the home, saying it was unconstitutional.

“There is no longer any basis on which this court can conclude that the District of Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny,” said Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr. of the District of Columbia District Court.

“Therefore, the court finds that the District of Columbia’s complete ban on the carrying of handguns in public is unconstitutional,” he added in his 19-page ruling on the case, Palmer v. District of Columbia, which has been dragging on for five years.

The court ordered the city to allow residents to carry handguns outside their homes and to let nonresidents carry them as well.

I’d prefer to see the Constitutional language implemented more completely and for all gun-related laws to be thrown out, but it’s good to see gun rights advancing, however slowly. Always make it harder for the government to kill its people. The harder it is for the government to do it, the higher the risk to its agents to try it, the less likely it is to happen.

Celebrate Palmer this week and buy a handgun.

Hamas is Israel’s al-Qaida

Keep the history of Hamas in mind when you read about how terrible they are and how Israel has no choice but to eradicate it due to its implacable religious opposition to the existence of Israel. And notice that the article is twelve years old, although it reads as if it was published yesterday.

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),” said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” said a former senior CIA official.

According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were “weak and dormant” until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.

After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da’wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.

“Social influence grew into political influence,” first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement’s spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.

According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini’s Iran….

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.

But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: “The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

“Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with,” he said.

All of which disgusts some former U.S. intelligence officials.

“The thing wrong with so many Israeli operations is that they try to be too sexy,” said former CIA official Vincent Cannestraro.

According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, “the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer. They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it,” he said.

And notice how the utterly idiotic meme that some Jews like Howard Stern are trying to push, that to be “anti-Israel is to be anti-America”, is based in part upon this 2002 theme about Israel being “the only democracy” in the Middle East.

The plan of the Israeli Right may well be at work here in the 2014 conflict. Hamas’s implacability may permit them to convince the Israeli moderates that ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank is ultimately necessary. Which, thousands of years of military history suggests, is absolutely true. But don’t shed too many tears or spare too much sympathy for a strategic plan playing out exactly as it is supposed to. If the strategists of the Israeli Right decided to sacrifice a few hundred Jews in order to justify the PR cover necessary for the expulsions, it’s a bit much to expect Americans to be overly concerned about the fate of those sacrificial lambs.

However, the growing world disapproval of Israel, and the declining level of American approval, indicates that no PR-based strategy is likely to succeed in the short- or long-term. Then again, perhaps the Hamas Plan is primarily intended for domestic consumption.

UPDATE: Speaking of Jewish strategy, I’m not sure this is the optimal way to convince Muslims that Jewish women are not the collection of whores they are often accused of being.