Tag: war

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.

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.

Smells like Lusitanian spirit

The more hysterical the charges we see directed at Putin, and the more strident the demands, the more I suspect that the Russian leader had nothing to do with the downed Malaysian airliner. Mish has been increasingly dubious about the proposed scenario as well:

As I suspected would happen, the exclusive Reuters interview in which “Commander Alexander Khodakovsky acknowledges rebel fighters had BUK missiles” has been challenged.

In my analysis of the Reuters article (see Ukraine Rebel Commander Admits Having BUK Missiles; Damning Contradictions?),  I point out considerable discrepancies in what Reuters author Anton Zverev wrote and actual quotes Reuters presented.

The discrepancies were so big I stated “It appears to me Reuters may have stretched this interview quite a bit.”

Thus I am not surprised to discover Khodakovsky challenged huge aspects of that interview, in terms of things he stated, did not state, and even timing of events….

Khodakovsky neither admitted nor denied the rebels had Buks. Once again, here is the damning contradiction as I presented earlier.

    “Khodakovsky said his unit had never possessed BUKs, but they may have been used by rebels from other units.”

    Now look back at the opening Reuters lead-in: “Alexander Khodakovsky, commander of the Vostok Battalion, acknowledged … the rebels did possess the BUK missile system and said it could have been sent back subsequently to remove proof of its presence.”

    Here is the major contradiction: “What resources our partners have, we cannot be entirely certain. Was there (a BUK)? Wasn’t there? If there was proof that there was, then there can be no question.”

Zerohedge is reporting that the US State Department has not been able to find any signs of Russian involvement. And the Russians themselves are pointing out some awkward facts that may be indicative of Ukrainian responsibility for shooting down the passenger plane.

Remember, many, if not most, wars involve some level of deception, false flags, and deceitful finger-pointing. So it’s always wise to reserve judgment in such matters as long as possible. And it’s also worth pointing out that the Ukrainian puppet government just collapsed and the US-installed prime minister has resigned:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has announced his resignation following turmoil in government. Yatsenyuk made the announcement from the dais of the parliament after two parties said they would pull out of the governing coalition. “I am announcing my resignation [in connection] with the collapse of the coalition,” Yatsenyuk said.

This is not the action of a nation prepared to fight a war with Russia.

Next year in Jerusalem

It’s interesting to observe how this Jew living in England is so terrified to be living amongst the Gentiles, and yet she refuses to go to Zion:

The truth is that up and down this island, Jews are arguing, debating, crying and worrying about what’s going on in an even smaller country across the ocean. Some British Jews are fasting for peace; some are angry at one or both sides; but many are just scared – scared not just about events in Gaza, but events in Europe. These include reports about gangs of Muslims chanting “death to Jews” on the streets of France, and attacking synagogues and setting fire to Jewish-owned stores. Eighteen people were subsequently arrested in the suburb of Sarcelles, just outside Paris, where this particular outpouring of violence happened. The stunned local mayor says the Jewish community is now living in fear.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Germany, too. In Essen, 14 people have just been arrested, accused of plotting an attack on a synagogue. Protesters at a rally in Berlin turned on two Israeli tourists (identifiable by the man’s skull-cap) so viciously that they had to be protected by the police. The city’s authorities have also had to ban pro-Gaza protesters from chanting anti-Semitic slogans and are investigating a sermon last week by Abu Bilal Ismail calling on worshippers at Berlin’s Al-Nur mosque to murder Jews. Jews, not Israelis.

The situation is so bad that the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Italy have issued a joint statement condemning the rise in anti-Semitic protests and violence in response to the Gaza conflict – and saying they will do everything possible to combat it. “Anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility against Jews, attacks on people of Jewish belief and synagogues have no place in our societies,” they felt compelled publicly to state.

Yet since the start of the latest conflict between Hamas and Israel, protesters marching in anti-Israel demonstrations have regularly held up anti-Semitic slogans, shouting for Jews to be gassed, invoking the Holocaust’s chambers of doom. The situation in Britain hasn’t been much better. Last week’s major pro-Palestine rally, which stopped London’s traffic, was littered with placards comparing Israel’s – and Jews’ – actions to the Nazis (“Well done Israel – Hitler would be proud”, read one such sign, accompanied by a swastika). This casual interchange of “Israel” for “Jews” is not just ignorant but often terrifying, especially when linked to references to past atrocities. Indeed, what other group of people get the worst experience in their – or anyone’s – history launched at them like a hand grenade? 

So stop living in fear. England is not the Jewish homeland. It is the English homeland. France is not the Jewish homeland. It is the French homeland. Germany is not the Jewish homeland. It is the German homeland. Israel is the Jewish homeland and it is where the Jewish people belong. The Jewish people have a right to their homeland… and so does everyone else. Dispute the latter and lose your claim on the former.

I staunchly support Israel, both in terms of its existence and its right to wipe out Hamas and colonize Gaza under the legitimate casus belli of having been repeatedly attacked by rockets after generously permitting a thrice-conquered people the opportunity to be left in peace in their reservations. And I have zero sympathy for Jews living in Europe who are afraid of the hatred of Europeans and other immigrants to Europe; everyone has an absolute right to hate whomever they please. Die Gedanken sind frei.

There are no shortage of people who hate me, and yet if I tearfully insisted that laws should be passed banning anti-Vox rhetoric by science fiction writers, and pointed to the thousands of tweets and blog posts aimed at me over the years, people would rightly consider me to be mad. The futile Jewish insistence on trying to outlaw anti-Semitic rhetoric is every bit as insane.

People have a free speech right to anti-Semitic rhetoric, they have a right to be hostile if that is how they feel, and if any Jew seriously wants to try to play thought and speech police in someone else’s country, then he fully merits all the hatred his people have subsequently engendered. When you are a guest in someone else’s home, you don’t make the rules. Either you abide by their rules – such as the ban on circumcision in some European countries, for example – or you leave. You don’t cry Holocaust and then claim that the homeowner doesn’t have the right to make his own rules in his own house.

It’s rather funny to see a Jew complaining about having the worst experience in Jewish history (and their history alone, not everyone’s history, as the Amalekites and the Canaanites, both wiped out by the Israelites, would point out if they were still around to do so) thrown in her face when Jews have been crying Holocaust as long as I can remember. As any child being teased knows, expose a vulnerability to your enemies and that’s precisely the point they will pick at. And the interchange of “Jew” for “Israeli” is hardly ignorant: why are British Jews “arguing, debating, crying and worrying about what’s going on in an even smaller country across the ocean”? The British Scots aren’t. The British Swiss aren’t. The British Russians aren’t. The British Nigerians aren’t. Whatever could the mysterious reason to explain this difference be?

The IDF doesn’t cry Holocaust. It has moved on and become the proud and militarily effective defenders of the Jewish homeland. The remaining Jews of Europe should move on too, because the politicians proclaiming that there is “no place in their societies” for anti-Semitism are soon going to find out that there is “no elected office in their societies” for them. And I don’t know how much longer it is going to be better in the USA; I don’t blame American Jews for the actions of Emanuel Cellar and Arthur Sulzberger and Paul Samuelson and Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and Jane Yellen and Eric Cantor that have decimated American demographics and the American economy alike. But historically, an angry public has tended to prove unable to make such fine distinctions between the culpable and the innocent.

More and more Americans are becoming aware of the destruction of their national demographics, and when they learn that this destruction was the direct and intentional result of a small group of immigrants who openly sought to weaken the American people’s sense of being a European nation, they are not going to be happy about it. If you read the history of how the Holocaust came to be, it is not at all difficult to understand why the German people so loathed the Jews. That doesn’t justify the Endlosung, but it’s impossible for any sufficiently intelligent and informed individual to fail to recognize that a very similar pattern has developed over the last sixty years in the USA.

History is a harsh and unforgiving bitch and one ignores her lessons at one’s peril. The economy is not going to improve. The demographic time-bomb is not going to self-defuse. Gen X and the Millennials are impervious, at best, to crying Holocaust. There are now more Muslims than Jews in Europe and the USA. Nationalism is growing rapidly in reaction to the abuses and injustices of globalization and transnationalism. The debt limits are being stretched perilously thin everywhere from the USA to China.

I strongly suspect Israel’s chief strategists already know what Israel will eventually be forced to do with regards to Gaza, the West Bank, and the remaining Jews of Europe. They really don’t want to bite the bullet, understandably enough, considering the gargantuan hailstorm of outrage it will provoke. The current invasion of Gaza is nothing more than a delaying measure. And yet, the sooner they address the Gordian Knot, the sooner they will be in a position to deal with the potentially bigger US problem.

There are several Jews who are regular readers here who have moved to Israel, and others who have not. It might be informative to get their perspective on events in Gaza and Europe as well as their reasons for moving or not moving.

The Facets of False Rhetoric

Something I’ve noticed over nearly 15 years of being involved in polemics on various subjects is that a certain rhetorical pattern reliably emerges on the side that has the weaker case, especially when it has the benefit of mainstream endorsement. I’ve named the elements of this pattern the Facets of False Rhetoric.

  1. It tends to refrain from specifically mentioning the advocates, adherents, and works of the other side.
  2. When it does mention them, it is primarily in an effort to disqualify them in some way rather than substantively addressing them.
  3. It fails to directly address the relevant points raised, and instead tends to mischaracterize them.
  4. It regularly sets up straw men and attacks them in lieu of the actual arguments presented. It often resorts to bait-and-switches and hides behind ambiguity.
  5. It falsely claims the other side is ignorant or misguided on the basis of petty irrelevancies and ignores the fact that the other side is discussing substantive matters in sufficient detail to belie any such charges.
  6. The other side is declared to be “dangerous” for reasons that are seldom specified or substantiated.

I’ve seen this pattern at work in the American political discourse. I’ve seen it in the atheism discourse. I’ve seen it in the Theorum of Evolution by Natural Selection and Various Other Means discourse. I’ve seen it in the global warming discourse. I’ve seen it in the economic discourse. I’ve seen it in the EU discourse. I’ve even seen it in what passes for the science fiction and fantasy discourse.

And every single time, it has been the behavior exhibited by the side that I consider to have the observably inferior case. In fact, it has reached the point that when I witness such behavior on the part of an advocate, I now consider it a reliable indicator of being fundamentally wrong even when I don’t know the subject.

For reasons that will eventually become clear, I have been reading up on what is known among military theorists as 4th Generation War. This is a highly relevant topic these days, as both the undeclared wars in Ukraine and Gaza are direct examples of 4th Generation asymmetric wars between a state actor and a non-state actor. Even the media headlines appear to be ripped out of articles on 4th Gen theory, such as the New York Times piece today: “Israel Is Facing Difficult Choice in Gaza Conflict”.

So, it was with some initial puzzlement, followed by a growing sense of recognition, that I read Antulio Echevarria’s Fourth-Generation Warfare and Other Myths, published by the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College.  Consider the boxes checked.

1. There are eleven references in 17 pages to mysterious “proponents”. Not until we get to the footnotes at the end is there a mention of William S. Lind, the most well-known proponent of 4GW, or of Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary I. Wilson, his co-authors of the seminal 1989 article in the Marine Corps Gazette. Col Thomas Hammes merits a pair of mentions in a single paragraph, only to set up checkbox number two.

2. From the Foreword: “He argues that the proponents of 4GW undermine their own credibility by subscribing to this bankrupt theory.”

“However, the tool that [Hammes] employs undermines his credibility. In fact, the theory of 4GW only undermines the credibility of anyone who employs it….”

“The proponents of 4GW failed to perceive this particular flaw in their reasoning because they did not review their theory critically….”

“this new incarnation repeats many of the theory’s old errors, some of which we have not yet discussed.”

“it is rather curious that the history and analyses that 4GW theorists hang on current insurgencies should be so deeply flawed.”

3. The author goes on at length about the nonexistence of nontrinitarian warfare and what he calls “the myth of Westphalia”, neither of which have anything substantive to do with 4GW theory. Westphalia merely serves as a useful starting point from which the state began claiming a monopoly on warfare, it’s completely irrelevant otherwise. I was astonished to observe that the author never even mentions what the four generations of 4GW are, let alone attempts to explain why they are a myth.

4. The fact that the Germans never formally incorporated the blitzkrieg
concept into their military doctrine doesn’t change the observable fact
that the Germans did, in fact, adopt a maneuver-and-initiative based
model to replace the centralized steel-on-target, command-and-control
French model to which the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force still
subscribe.

5.  “The fact that 4GW theorists are not aware of this work, or at least do not acknowledge it, should give us pause indeed. They have not kept up with the scholarship on unconventional wars, nor with changes in the historical interpretations of conventional wars. Their logic is too narrowly focused and irredeemably flawed. In any case, the wheel they have been reinventing will never turn.”

6.  “the theory has several fundamental flaws that need to be exposed before they
can cause harm to U.S. operational and strategic thinking.”

“despite a number of profound and incurable flaws, the theory’s proponents continue to push it, an activity that only saps intellectual energy badly needed
elsewhere.”

I am not a military expert, but one doesn’t have to be one to recognize the way in which this critic is setting off a smokescreen rather than engaging in a substantive critique, let alone presenting a conclusive rebuttal.

(NB: for future reference, the first cretin to say “Link?” is going in the spam file. If you can’t figure out how to use bloody Google, then immediately stop reading this blog and never, ever attempt to comment here again. Google or don’t Google for confirmation as you see fit, believe that I am accurately quoting the subject matter or not as you like, but do not EVER ask me for a “Link?” It’s obnoxious and the answer is always “No”.)

That being said, William S. Lind wrote a response to Echevarria’s article, which I did not read until after writing this post above. Compare the checkboxes ticked in the article compared to Lind’s response. From literally the first paragraph, the differences are observable.

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II is a Director at the
Strategic Studies Institute, the U.S. Army War College’s think tank,
and the author of an excellent book, After Clausewitz: German Military
Thinkers before the Great War. It was therefore both a surprise
and a disappointment to find that his recent paper, Fourth-Generation
War and Other Myths, is really, really ugly. Far from being a sober,
scholarly appraisal, it is a rant, a screed, a red herring seemingly
written to convince people not to think about 4GW at all. It is built
from a series of straw men, so many that in the end it amounts to a
straw giant.

I suspect it would be useful to further develop this pattern of critical observation, add additional checkboxes, and see how reliable it is across disciplines and subject matters. If anyone has any insights into this, I’d be interested in hearing them. I feel this may be Vox’s Third Law of Critical Dynamics taking shape, but I have not yet articulated it in a form I find both succinct and satisfying.

First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.
Second Law: If I can imagine it, it must be assumed
true. If you can’t conclusively prove it, it must be assumed false.
Third Law (first draft): The probability of a position’s falsehood increases with the number of applicable facets of false rhetoric.

A hand overplayed

I think we can safely say that the world is now officially holocausted out, as more and more people across the West are unwilling to give Jews the benefit of the doubt when they cry anti-semite:

A new, unofficial report indicates that a Jewish doctor who claimed she was the victim of an antisemitic when she was thrown off of a JetBlue flight earlier this month was actually the aggressor in the mid-air dispute with a Palestinian woman who she said was a ‘murderer’ and that she probably had explosives in her bag.

The new report, which WPBF says it did not receive from the airline, Queens Doctor Lisa Rosenberg ‘accused customer 9C of being a Palestinian murderer, and that her people were all murderers and that they murder children,’ the station reported on Wednesday.

At the time of her getting escorted off the flight, on July 7, at an airport in Florida, Rosenberg told a local news outlet that she was called a ‘Zionist pig’ by the woman seated next to her.

In a phone interview with WPBF, the airline said that Rosenberg’s version of events ‘in no way reflects the report that we have.’ In the unofficial report, a flight attendant described how Rosenberg ‘went even further to suggest 9C had explosives in her bag and it would bring the aircraft down.’

In similar fashion, I noticed that both the French and British press have exposed Jews as the aggressors in the recent “street battles” in Paris, although you won’t see this reported in any of the American newspapers, which inaccurately described the demonstrations as attacks and the subsequent attack of the demonstrators as a defense of the synagogue. But no synagogues were attacked that day; the various claims that two and three of them were attacked were confirmed to be false and there is video to prove it.

A group of 150 Jewish men were seen brandishing iron bars and cans of pepper spray as they clashed with Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Paris. Video footage of the clashes show the group chanting racist slogans as they roamed the streets. It came as President Francois Hollande warned that he did not want to see ‘the Israeli-Palestinian conflict imported into France’.

A still taken from the video shows dozens of men in Paris walking down the streets armed with chairs and other weapons, before clashing with pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Around 150 mainly young men were seen carrying weapons, like chairs, and chanting racist slogans as they went on the rampage. French Jewish groups have complained about an increase in anti-Semitism in recent months, with many accusing Muslim youths of targeting them.

But a video shot close to the Place de la Bastille on Sunday, and verified by police before being posted on YouTube, appears to show pro-Israel groups are also actively involved in clashes. In Paris, CRS riot police did not arrest any of the group, thought to be linked to the Jewish Defence League, despite them openly fighting in broad daylight. In the video, those amongst the group can be heard chanting ‘**** you Palestine’ as they smash up chairs and metal tables to be used as missiles….

Alexis Bachelay, a Paris MP for the ruling Socialist party, said: ‘There has evidently been a media manipulation about who really got assaulted. These are extremely serious facts that need to be investigated thoroughly by the police. It is not the first time that young French people of Muslim origin are stigmatised by the media. French people of Muslim origin should be protected by the law when demonstrating. They should not be attacked by radical groups like the LDJ’.

Having been falsely accused many times of anti-semitism myself for nothing more than refusing to assume that all Jews are innocent angels at all times and devoid of all human failings (and I’m probably one of the very few individuals who has been personally cleared of the charge by the Jewish Defense League itself), I have learned to be extremely skeptical of all assertions of anti-semitism presented without evidence. As with women with sexism and blacks with racism, crying anti-semitism has become the first resort of any Jew caught with his hand in a cookie jar.

That doesn’t mean anti-semitism doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean there aren’t people who wish to kill Jews for any number of reasons. That doesn’t mean that every last synagogue in France isn’t going to be burned to the ground. But it does mean that one should no more accept the word of a Jew on the matter than one should accept the word of a woman that she has been raped.

I am a Zionist because I am a nationalist. The Jews have a right to their homeland, Israel. They also have a right to invade Gaza because they were being attacked; hundreds of rocket launches is a legitimate casus belli. But they have no more right to Paris than the Arabs do, and the French would be wise to repatriate all of these bold defenders of their various homelands to let them fight it out there rather than in the heart of their capital city. Because it is patently obvious that neither side gives a damn about France.

Passenger plane shot down in Ukraine

A Malaysian Airlines passenger plane has been shot down on the Russian-Ukraine border, killing all 295 people on board, according to a Ukrainian interior ministry official.

Flight MH17, which was carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew, was flying between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur after taking off at lunchtime today.

The Interfax news agency reported that the aircraft went missing near Donetsk, where pro-Russian rebels have been fighting Ukrainian government forces.

UPDATE: And now Israel has begun an invasion of Gaza.

IDF ground forces began to move into the Gaza Strip on Thursday evening, the prime minister’s office confirmed.

“In light of Hamas’ continuous criminal aggression, and the dangerous infiltration into Israeli territory, Israel is obligated to act in defense of its citizens,” a statement from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office said.

Ironically, the Gaza invasion is considerably smaller than the US one. Perhaps Netanyahu should have simply sent in 60,000 Jewish children, then no one would have seen anything to complain about.

Foreign policy as Humane Society

William S. Lind observes that the Obama administration’s foreign policy is not so much ill-advised as precisely backward:

After meeting with Ukraine’s newly elected president, Petro O.
Poroshenko, President Obama added, “The United States is absolutely
committed to standing behind the Ukrainian people and their aspirations,
not just in the coming days and weeks but in the coming years.”
Unaccountably, Ruritania and Graustark were forgotten.

This is an animal shelter foreign policy. Based entirely on
sentiment, we are taking in any and every little country that somehow
feels threatened by a state that actually counts. We equally “stand
with” Vietnam and the Philippines against China, in an area long known
as the South China Sea. Just what “standing with” means is left vague.
Does it mean that if they get knocked down, we’re in a fight with
whomever threw the punch? If so, the Obama administration is making one
of the worst foreign policy errors a country can make, casually and
thoughtlessly offering commitments that can lead to war.

Even apart from that risk, we are making a fundamental mistake. These
little countries can do nothing for us. A commitment to them benefits
them, but does absolutely nothing for us. It is to such a “giveaway”
foreign policy that sentiment invariably leads.

This tripwires have historically proven to be one of the primary causes of war for centuries; the fact that various administrations have so eagerly committed US military forces on behalf of small countries of no possible national interest to the American people tends to indicate that war is the ultimate purpose of making these commitments.

As Lind notes: “History shows over and over again that foreign policies based on
sentiment lead to disaster….
Whether or not we “like” the current governments of Russia and China,
our relations with them involve very important interests. We have no
important interests at stake in Ukraine, or Poland, or the Baltics, or
Vietnam, or the Philippines.”

It’s understandable why the governments of these little countries would instinctively seek out the “protection” of military commitments from larger countries, but they before electing to do so they would do well to keep in mind the usual fate of a dog sent to a shelter. It is dangerous to be the USA’s enemy. But as governments from Vietnam to Iraq have learned, it can be fatal to be the USA’s ally.

The Japan That Can Invade

So much for the Japanese Peace Constitution. It lasted 72 years, from 1947 to 2014.

On July 1, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe announced that for the first time since the end of World War II, Japan would now be able to fight wars on foreign soil.

In the past, Japan’s military has been reserved strictly for defence – hence its official title, the Self Defence Force (SDF). But thanks to this new reinterpretation of the constitution, the only thing that is necessary for military mobilisation is for one of Japan’s allies to be “attacked”. This is a scary prospect if we consider that Japan’s biggest ally is the US (and when we consider how many enemies the US has made over the past few years).

Perhaps the pros and cons of re-militarisation is a topic worth discussing. Unfortunately for the people of Japan, and of the East Asian region, this discussion has never occurred, as Abe’s administration is making the decision for them.

In response, there has been an unprecedented amount of opposition. Protests are happening every other day, and seem to only be growing in size and intensity.

Some Euro-American press outlets have grazed the surface of this phenomenon, but they seem to be missing the gravity of the situation. Perhaps because reporters are unable to see the Japanese as anything but docile and passive, or because they are attempting to portray the protesters in a “respectable” light, they have overlooked the anger and confusion that is beginning to grip Japan.

Notice how useless constitutions are when they are permitted to be reinterpreted by judges and politicians. It is but a trivial effort to manufacture an emanation or identify a penumbra, or redefine black as white. This would appear to be a preparation for the second War of the Suns, the eventual renewal of hostilities between China and Japan.