Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Friedman’

Israel-Hamas: Why This Time is Different

Saturday, October 21st, 2023

Casual observers of the Israel-Hamas War (which is to say, probably not anyone reading this blog) may wonder what all the fuss is about, given that various Jihadist groups have been attacking Israel their entire lifetimes. In a rare, mostly readable New York Times piece, Thomas Friedman explains why this time is different.

With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories.

And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers.

That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.

And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.

In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”

So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.

The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.

Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.

Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last Saturday.

The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.

Very little about “Biden’s Middle East diplomacy” has anything to do with Biden, and a whole lot to do with Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner pioneering diplomacy first with Saudi Arabia (remember the “glowing orb”?) and later with the Abraham Accords. “Biden’s Middle East diplomacy” seems to largely consist of a retread of Obama’s “throw large sums of money at Iran and hope they play nice” (and possibly kick some back in the form of graft) wishful thinking.

And by “Palestinians feared being left behind” read “Hamas and Iran becoming even more irrelevant and isolated than they already are.”

So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”

Hamas has always been that crazy, always willing to blow up a pizza parlor or a disco. The only reason they didn’t behead Jewish babies before was insufficient opportunity thanks to Israeli security. Remember that Hamas believes all Jews to be apes and pigs and that their continued existence living on the face of the earth is a literal affront to God. Saudi-Israeli rapprochement may very well have been paymaster Iran’s trigger to greenlight the operation, but it wasn’t Hamas’ primary motivation for killing Jews any more than fish need a reason to swim.

Hamas kills Jews because Hamas exists to kill Jews.

Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.

Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.

Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”

Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.

Friedman is only intermittently interesting. Much of the time he’s merely doling out Trans-Atlantic globalist elite conventional wisdom (global trade, China, climate change), and a guy who’s occasionally three months ahead of the curve who’s plodding pronouncements are treated like Delphic declarations. (Ace of Spades offered up an epic parody that’s still worth your attention.)

Eventually the piece devolves into the inevitable “Netanyahu: Bad!” catechisms that run on the internationalist left’s wetware anytime that can spare cycles from their ever-present Social Justice, Trump Derangement Syndrome and Global Warming Alarmism subroutines. But it was a halfway decent piece up to then.

Now the reviled Netanyahu is leading a unity government in a declared war against Hamas, unlike the Second Lebanon War or Operation Cast Lead.

This time will be different, because Hamas will not be permitted to exist for there to be a next time.

LinkSwarm for January 31, 2020

Friday, January 31st, 2020

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! If you’re reading this, you haven’t died from the Coronavirus yet, despite China’s best efforts! And so many Babylon Bee slams of CNN that I couldn’t just pick one:

  • This morning’s contarvirus totals:
    Total Infected: 9,776 (up from 2116 Sunday)
    Total Deaths: 213
    Total Recovered: 187
    Number of Countries Where Cases Have Been Confirmed (new in bold): 22 (China (including Hong Kong), Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Macau, South Korea, United States of America, France, Germany, United Areb Emirates, Canada, Italy, Vietnam, Cambodia, Finland, India, Napal, Philippines, Sri Lanka)

    Thoughts: If that’s not quite exponential growth it’s a pretty good first cousin. A case in Mumbai is scary. 11 cases in Japan is scary for the opposite reason, in that the Japanese take hygiene very seriously and have been unable to prevent spread there. No confirmed cases in Indonesia, which is probably only a matter of time.

  • The Cornoavirus is the demon bedeviling Xi Jinping: “Yes, ‘demon’ is a metaphor for a pathogen capable of killing millions. However, it is a demon the dictatorship’s repressive policies animate and tolerate in lieu of free communication.”

    2019-nCoV, however, is beyond Xi’s dictatorial control. China’s dictatorship may awe Free World idiots, but it cannot intimidate a pathogen.

    The coronavirus and its potential consequences of mass death expose the dictatorship’s brittleness. If you prefer, substitute “incompetence masked by police intimidation and lack of free expression” for “brittleness.”

    Brutal authoritarian political control exacts overt and covert systemic costs. Western commentators — The New York Times’ Tom Friedman is a particularly smarmy example — admire authoritarian China’s alleged skill at solving major problems that dithering Western democracies cannot. What really dazzles Friedman and his ilk is the regime’s one-command-solves-it pose. Information control, especially control of dissent, bolsters this fraud.

    Since 1980, China has made extraordinary economic progress, but its government’s destructive decisions are telling. The notorious one-child policy produced a demographic devil. What Western admirers touted as a farsighted plan to promote zero population growth killed millions of baby girls, skewed female-male sex ratios and, as of 2010, began creating a worker shortage.

    Doctors in China and several Asian countries — the virus is on the verge of savaging Thailand — advocate isolating infected patients. The Great Firewall of China isolates the Chinese people from global information access and sharing. Beijing demands its citizens use state-sponsored social media in lieu of global alternatives. Isolation from information sharing hinders angry citizens from criticizing the communist leaders.

    But this system isolates Chinese leaders from bad news — like mass illness — that caring human beings must share….As the party bigwigs dither, a deadly pathogen kills.

  • More thoughts from Richard Fernandez:

    It was an example of ‘No Borders’ but not in a good way. The pathogen got on a plane abetted by a delay in acknowledgement. “The Chinese government failed to act quickly enough to curb the spread of the Wuhan virus, risking further outbreaks,” Guan Yi, the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong told the Asia Times. The Chinese government’s own data, hosted on Wikipedia, confirms this. It shows how at the beginning the numbers were small, the infection still all in one place. After a week it blew up.

    This illustrates how giant totalitarian governments like China’s can be at a disadvantage in dealing with emergent events. What it gains in ruthless response cannot always make up for lost response time caused by the official denial of embarrassing facts. That explains why establishments are often surprised by events like Brexit and Hillary Clinton’s shock loss. They are unexpected because they were not in the 5 year plan. They arrive like a bolt from the blue.

    When the unexpected happens the official Narrative often increases the reaction time of the system. While events are slow moving there may be no penalty but in the fast moving global world threats like the coronavirus may hit the public even before institutions admit it exists. The old model of globalization has paradoxically both speeded up the rate at which events occur and slowed the rate at which behemoth transnational institutions can respond.

    The result is a mismatch and failure of institutions is the theme which unites Brexit, the US impeachment and the repeated viral threats from China.

  • Back on January 1st, eight Chinese doctors tried to warn people about a “viral pneumonia” going around. Want to guess what happened? That’s right. They were punished for spreading rumors.
  • First person-to-person coronavirus transmission case confirmed in Chicago, bringing the total to six cases in the U.S.
  • Kurt Schlichter thinks that President Donald Trump needs to get ahead of the coronavirus curve by communicating with the public, lest the impeachment-thwarted Democrats and media (but I repeat myself) make it into his “Katrina.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Meet Dr. Peng Zhou a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Leader of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunization Group. You know, the same institute that posted a “help-wanted” ad to research Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats just before the local coronavirus outbreak there. What are the odds?
  • Seems that the college station student reported on last week tested negative for the coronavirus. Indeed, all four suspected Texas cases tested negative.
  • Speaking of China, I meant to blog this and forgot until Dwight reminded me: Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, “a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.”

    Dr. Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.

    Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. They said he had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.

    The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. Prosecutors said she hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.

  • If one pandemic were not enough, there’s also an outbreak of Lassa Fever in Nigeria.
  • Know how the MSM keeps harping on President Donald Trump’s “unpopularity?” A deep dive into various poll metrics suggests “not so much.”
  • This is pretty interesting:

    (Hat tip (and more at) The Other McCain.)

  • More on that CNN clip I talked about yesterday:

    63 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Are they all slack-jawed yokels motivated by hostility to geography, and facts? Do they all — or even most — have strong Southern accents? And, irrespective, is a Southern accent a predictor of stupidity? Many of my neighbors have strong southern accents. One of them is a surgeon. Whither nuance?

    This particular clip has landed with such a bump because it also serves as an example of how inaccurately mediocrities tend to see themselves. Rick Wilson’s joke was second-rate and obviously pre-written, and yet Don Lemon reacted as if Wilson was Dave Chappelle — even going so far as to say he “needed” it. This behavior is learned. Since Donald Trump was elected, a certain set of political “strategists” — many of whom aren’t actually strategists, Ana Navarro — have come to see CNN as a clearing house for their bad one-liners, each sitting at home preparing zingers that they hope, once delivered, will go viral. This one has gone viral, of course, but for the opposite reason than its architects hoped: Because it is pathetic.

  • “CNN Announces Daily ‘Two Minutes Hate‘ Segment”
  • “CNN Unveils New Format Where Hosts Just Watch Fox News And Yell At It.”
  • Possibly my fav: “Flock Of Monocled Geese In Top Hats Joins Don Lemon In Round Of Laughter At The Commoners.”
  • Political correctness and liberalism are literally killing people in Seattle.

    It’s about squishy prosecutors and judges who let repeat offenders walk free. It is about a city council that has designed this because anarchy will allow them to rebuild the city in a socialist image.

    Today, a woman is dead and seven others are injured. A 9-year-old remains in the hospital. It is shameful but unfortunately predictable, given who we have running things around here.

    Snip.

    We do not let the cops do their jobs. The cops know who the gang members and drug dealers are. They also know that if they see a drug transaction and write it up for the prosecutor’s office, it’s going to get kicked because it’s not a serious enough crime. And when prosecutors pursue criminals, judges let them walk free.

    The two suspects in this downtown shooting have been arrested 44 times with 20 convictions and 21 times with 15 convictions. Marquise Tolbert, the one with 20 convictions, had three felonies last year alone. You tell me how someone with three felonies in 2019 is walking around free and able to engage in a shootout that kills a woman and injures a bunch of other people, including a 9-year-old kid. Both Tolbert and William Tolliver, the other suspect, are just 24 years old. They both have previously been arrested and charged with drive-by shootings and unlawful possession of a firearm in 2018. So the courts knew full well that these were gun-toting gang members. Why did our justice system let them walk free? Why do we place criminals above law-abiding citizens?

  • “Trump at the March for Life Seals Irrelevancy of Never Trumpers.”

    Never Trump Republicans looked even more ridiculous at the end of the March for Life than they did that morning.

    Trump was embraced by the largest gathering of pro-life Americans and Trump embraced them. Trump at the March for Life:

    Sadly, the far-left is actively working to erase our God-given rights, shut down faith-based charities, ban religious believers from the public square, and silence Americans who believe in the sanctity of life. They are coming after me because I am fighting for you and we are fighting for those who have no voice.

    Never Trump Republicans can’t imagine a man like Trump attending the March for Life.

    Never Trumpism is built on a foundation of sanctimony.

    These sanctimonious few don’t like how Trump speaks. They don’t like his bombast. They don’t like his past. He’s not George Bush.

    Get over it. He’s winning.

    That he is not George Bush might be Trump’s greatest transgression to Never Trumpers. Much of the hatred is mercenary, as so many have suffered financially from the end of their consultancy gravy train.

    But Trump actually attended the March for Life. If you don’t think that matters to the 100,000+ who marched, then you can’t judge prevailing winds.

    Snip.

    What’s also striking about the Never Trumpers is how their hatred resembles a pathology, like some deep raw childhood memory. Trump is their aunt’s cat who used to viciously scratch them each visit. Trump is the playground bully who threw the football at their face. Trump is the twisted cousin who made you look at his dead animals in jars hidden in the back shed. He’s the bogeyman of their nightmares.

    It all wells up in them, decades later, in outbursts, fears, and rage. It’s unhinged.

  • “Trump Derangement Syndrome is burning out the core audiences that made the media profitable. The Impeachment Eve rallies failed miserably with turnouts in the hundreds in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. A month later, turnout at the Women’s March had declined from the hundreds of thousands to the thousands. Even as impeachment was underway, the audience wasn’t there.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Chip Roy produce a proposal to fix health care.
  • James Younger case ends with joint custody and crazy mom not allowed to inflict hormone therapy on her eight-year old.
  • Border agents find longest smuggling tunnel yet discovered in San Diego, over three-quarters of a mile. “It includes an extensive rail/cart system, forced air ventilation, high voltage electrical cables and panels, an elevator at the tunnel entrance, and a complex drainage system.” (Hat tip: CutJibNews at Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Leaked French Internal Intelligence Report Claims 150 Neighborhoods ‘Held’ By Radical Islamists.”
  • Minority kids perform better in conservative school districts.
  • Democrats caught teaching illegal aliens how to break the law and vote. Yet again. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Bernie Sanders is backing hard left challenger Jessica Cisneros against Texas Democratic incumbent congressman Henry Cuellar for the 28th Congressional District. The winner will face Republican Sandra Whitten in the general.
  • Germans have proof Huawei colluded with Chinese intelligence agencies. Duh, of course they did.
  • IBM replaces longtime CEO Virginia Rometty with Arvind Krishna. Probably a good move. The few people I knew who worked at IBM under her tenure had little good to say about the company, whose longterm trend has been offshoring and outsourcing rather than hiring fulltime U.S. employees. But every group in IBM seems like its own little fiefdom.
  • Dwight offers a moderately deepish dive into two fraud cases, including a celebrated social scientist and a celebrated organic farmer.
  • Congrats to Republican Gary Gates for winning the Texas House District 28 special election runoff over Democrat Eliz Markowitz. This is Gates’ first successful race in eight tries, and he supposedly threw a ton of money into it.
  • Noted without comment: “2nd California child molester dies after beating with cane.”
  • Florida New Jersey Man Mayor.
  • “Utah man builds bulletproof stormtrooper suit with 3-D printer.” Caveat: Not all of it is bullet-proof and it took 400-600 hours to make.
  • Gaming the buffet. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Too painful to laugh, too funny not to laugh. Bet she was pissed off… (Hat tip: Michele Frost.)
  • Looks staged. Still funny.

  • Thomas Friedman Gets Stabbed

    Wednesday, November 18th, 2015

    Nice work, Ace of Spades HQ.

    Nice work indeed…

    Half-Blind Squirrel Finds Acorn (not ACORN)

    Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

    I’ve often fantasized about being elected President. (I suspect I’m not alone among political pundits in this regard. But I have a cunning master plan. &#60strokes white cat&#62Soon, my precious, soon!&#60&#47strokes white cat&#62. One thing I’ve thought about is answering that question: “What will you do to facilitate the Middle East Peace Process?” To which I would reply: “Stay as far away from it as possible. It’s a scam and illusion and it only makes things worse.” Shock! Outrage! How dare you criticize our beloved emperor’s splendid new garments?

    However, Thomas Friedman beat me to the punch:

    “The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play. It is obvious that all the parties are just acting out the same old scenes, with the same old tired clichés — and that no one believes any of it anymore.”

    I would be lying if I said I knew exactly where to place Friedman on the political map. Since (like everything else in the New York Times) I don’t read him on a regular basis, only when one of his columns gets linked to by someone else, my impression of him (a squishy moderate with a “globalization will solve everything” outlook, a healthy distaste for jihad, and an occasional a voice of reason on foreign policy) could be woefully mistaken. But to have someone who was previously a big peace-process backer in the heart of NYT-dom turn around and call it for the sham it is, that’s a huge turnaround.

    The penultimate paragraph:

    “If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional ‘peace process,’ which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility.”

    Actually, I don’t think the Obama Administration has any credibility left to lose, especially on foreign policy, but that’s a quibble. Sadly, I also think there’s very little chance of Obama and his foreign policy team taking Friedman’s advice…