Category Archives: Foreign Policy

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Even The New York Times has admitted that Ukraine is slowly losing

On December 2nd, Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, told us what a terrible thing it would be if President Trump’s peace proposal for Ukraine gave up too much to Vladimir Putin and Russia.

On Saturday morning, the Opinion section of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website highlighted four pro-Ukrainian articles by columnist Trudy Rubin, who has been beating the drums hard for support of Ukraine. We have previously noted Mrs Rubin’s continuing attempts to support Ukraine, as well as David J Kramer, Executive Director of the George w Bush Institute and Vice President of the George W Bush Presidential Center, arguing that the only legitimate peace plan for Ukraine is a demand, “Russia, Get out of Ukraine!”

We can all wish that President Putin hadn’t ordered invasions of Ukraine, in 2014 and again in 2022. We can all wish that Ukraine’s territory was strong and inviolable. But sometimes what we wish were the case, and reality on the ground, are two very different things. From The New York Times:

Battlefield Picture Worsening for Ukraine as Trump Pushes Peace Plan

Russian forces have advanced on several fronts recently. President Vladimir V. Putin signaled after talks with U.S. officials that he was not budging from demands.

By Cassandra Vinograd, Oleksandr Chubko, and Maria Varenikova, Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine | Saturday, December 6, 2025 | Updated: 2:54 PM EST

It was a clear attempt to project Russian power.

Hours before meeting U.S. officials in Moscow this past week about their plan to end the war, President Vladimir V. Putin claimed that Russia’s forces had seized the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after a monthslong fight.

The reality was murkier. Slivers of the city were still contested, according to battlefield maps and the Ukrainian military. But Mr. Putin’s claim, even if premature, reflected a trend shaping his unbending approach to negotiations: Russian forces are on the march.

“The Russians do have the upper hand,” said Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group. Ukraine is not yet at the point where it must capitulate, he said, but it “is looking weak enough that the Russians think that they can impose demands.”

Mr. Putin has ordered the Russian military to prepare for winter combat, signaling after the talks with U.S. officials that he is not budging from his hard-line demands. President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has since held a series of discussions in Miami with Ukraine’s delegation that both sides called “constructive.”

The pace of Russian advances remains slow, but they have increased recently. Russia gained roughly 267 square kilometers of territory in October, and 505 km² in November. No one believes that Russia can suddenly ‘win’ the war in the next few months, but there is also little hope that Ukraine can reverse the recent losses on the ground.

At the same time, Russia is using drones to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure, including power plants, as winter begins to set in in a naturally cold land. Russian soldiers will be as affected as those of Ukraine by the cold blasts of Морозко — Father Frost — but many of Ukraine’s civilians will start to feel the same thing. Europe’s civilians will not have that problem, thanks in significant part to their purchases of natural gas from Russia! While we have previously reported on The Wall Street Journal’s article “European Leaders Warn Zelensky to Be Wary in U.S. High-Speed Push for Peace,” more and more people will die the longer this continues.

The issue is manpower, something The Washington Post was reporting on a year ago, and, absent American and/or NATO ground troops going into Ukraine and directly fighting the Russians, is not going to change. We have previously noted how so many, many people want to fight for Ukraine, but they’re doing so in protest marches in Philadelphia rather than picking up a rifle and heading to Ukraine to fight.

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World War III Watch Wouldn't it be great if the Europeans could offer a real peace deal that didn't threaten to start World War III?

Our good European friends in NATO are very, very concerned that President Trump is going to negotiate a peace deal, or at least a ceasefire, between Russian President Vladimir Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy that won’t be as favorable to Ukraine as they’d like, or, more accurately, too favorable to Russia. However, the European NATO nations have had 3¾ years to work out a peace deal more to their liking, and have been unable to do so. More, President Trump has only been in office for 10½ months; no one could seem to negotiate a peace while Joe Biden was President either.

President Trump wants peace, and always has. Some of those who dislike Mr Trump claim that he’s only doing this to try to win the Nobel Peace prize, something we all know he will never do, but really, what difference does that make if he can somehow achieve peace?

From The Wall Street Journal:

European Leaders Warn Zelensky to Be Wary in U.S. High-Speed Push for Peace

Ukrainian leader must secure a solid pledge from Washington before conceding to Russian demands, his counterparts caution

By Laurence Norman and Noemie Bisserbe | Thursday, December 4, 2025 | 3:19 PM EST

BERLIN—In recent days, European leaders have delivered a stark warning to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: Don’t give in to Russian demands without ironclad security commitments from the U.S.

The message reflects European leaders’ growing wariness of Washington’s high-speed effort to reach a peace deal that has left them on the sidelines.

In particular, European leaders have advised their Ukrainian counterpart to nail down America’s role in security guarantees for Kyiv before accepting Russian demands, according to two European diplomats familiar with the discussions.

This message was delivered on a call Monday between Zelensky and European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the diplomats said. The European leaders insisted on the primacy of the U.S. role in security guarantees offered to Ukraine in any deal.

Really? So, for all of their big, brave words since February of 2022, they still expect the United States to do the heavy lifting. As we noted previously, the United Kingdom and France have held at least some discussions about sending their own troops to Ukraine, though such talks a year ago, while Mr Biden was still in office, but after Mr Trump had won the 2024 election, haven’t resulted in any troop deployments to Ukraine.

Concern is growing in Kyiv and other European capitals that Washington hasn’t detailed what it would do if Russia broke a potential peace deal and attacked Ukraine again.

If a peace deal was brokered, and Russia again attacked Ukraine, presumably after Russia rebuilt the losses from their army, the Unites States would still be 5,000 miles away from the battlefields. The NATO European forces are much closer, but will they risk war with Russia, with nuclear-armed Russia, over Ukraine? They certainly haven’t so far!

Were Ukraine to join NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty would obligate the United States and the European allies to come to Ukraine’s defense, but keeping Ukraine out of NATO is a primary goal for Russia; it’s very difficult to believe that Mr Putin would accept any peace deal which allowed Ukraine to join NATO.

The warnings, made in recent days, are a further example of European leaders’ attempts to insert themselves into peace talks that the U.S. has conducted by going directly to the Kremlin and Kyiv largely without European participation.

President Trump recognizes that European participation would only complicate and draw out matters.

The problem is actually a simple one: after 3½ years of war, Russia is slowly improving its battlefield positions. It certainly hasn’t been the quick war President Putin envisioned, or much of the West feared, but, slowly, Russia’s advantages in population and resources are beginning to tell, and the Ukrainian’s “dire shortage of manpower,” something which is not a recent development, and eventually Ukraine will lose unless the United States and/or NATO send actual ground troops to directly fight the Russians . . . and that’s World War III.

The European Union just scaled back a plan which would have used frozen Russian assets held primarily in Belgium to give loans — not grants, but loans — to Ukraine to fight Russia, but money does not equal soldiers, does not equal the actual combat troops Ukraine needs. The money could have purchased more weapons, primarily from the United States, but advanced weapons still require the personnel to operate them, and manpower is in short supply in that beleaguered country.

I am reminded of our own War Between the States, in which the smaller and lesser resourced Confederacy managed to win a several battles against the larger, more industrialized Union, but it was a war fought almost entirely in the South, in the Confederacy itself, which meant that the civilian casualties and economic damage of the war occurred primarily in the South, continually weakening the military position of the Confederacy.

That is the situation in the Russo-Ukrainian War: the civilians being killed are mostly Ukrainian, and the industrial and economic power of the combatants being degraded is mostly Ukrainian. President Zelenskyy wants American weapons which can strike deeper into Russia, to attack their infrastructure, something they’ve already been doing with drones, but that would not be enough to win the war for them, and the longer the war continues, the more people will be senselessly killed.

We could all wish that Ukraine could have not only fully resisted the Russian invasion and beaten them back, but that didn’t happen. As for me, I am not willing to see World War III over efforts to beat back Russia in Ukraine.

 

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World War III Watch: So many people want to fight, fight, fight for Ukraine who never actually go to Ukraine and fight

We noted, on Saturday, that the proposed peace plan is “a horrible deal for Ukraine, no doubt about that. But it does one thing: it stops the killing! It would be very dispassionate to suggest that Ukraine should keep on fighting, and its people keep on dying, if there were any reasonable prospect that they could eventually win the war.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin opined against it, and wants President Donald Trump, who she clearly hates, to send Patriot missiles and other weaponry to Ukraine, but she, like so many other people who want to help Ukraine, never told us what it would take for Ukraine to actually win its war against Russia.

And late Sunday, the Inky published a straight news story on a demonstration by Ukrainian Americans:

Philadelphia’s Ukrainian American community rebukes proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan

Rallygoers outside a North Philadelphia Ukrainian American club condemned Sunday a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine. The plan has been criticized for capitulating to Russia’s demands.

by Maggie Prosser | Sunday, November 23, 2025 | 4:38 PM EST

About 60 people gathered at a North Philadelphia Ukrainian American club on Sunday afternoon to condemn a U.S.-brokered proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Waving Ukrainian flags and hoisting signs that read, “Appeasement Isn’t Peace,” demonstrators outside the Ukrainian American Citizens’ Association described the plan as a laughable, “copy-and-paste” of Russia’s demands, signaling America’s willingness to capitulate to the Kremlin.

The peace deal put together by Washington and Moscow calls for Ukraine to cede territory, reduce its military, and give up on NATO membership — stipulations that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has categorically rejected in the past.

And here comes the money line:

“Nobody in their right mind would ask a country to give up its territory,
its military, its freedoms,” said Ulana Mazurkevich, president of the Philadelphia-based Ukrainian Human Rights Committee. “They do not know Ukrainians. … We will not give up — we fight, we fight, we fight.”

Really? Who’s this “we” about whom President Mazurkevich speaks? In the photograph accompanying the article, which you can see as part of the Inquirer’s tweet reproduced above — I prefer to use tweets as article illustrations, because those tweets are not under copyright, and can specifically be embedded — there are several men and women as part of that about 60 people demonstrating, but as part of “we fight, we fight, we fight,” they are doing so in North Philly, not on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Even Mrs Rubin admitted Ukraine’s “dire shortage of man power,” a shortage exacerbated by all of the Ukrainians not living in Ukraine, not fighting in Ukraine. We have at least twice mentioned that the vocal and vociferous supporters of the Palestinians certainly didn’t actually go to Gaza to fight the Israelis, and I have to ask here: why aren’t these Ukrainians in Philly picking up a rifle and heading to Kiev? Don’t tell me that you fight, you fight, you fight if you aren’t there, actually fighting.

We noted, eleven months ago, a Washington Post article telling readers about “exhausted soldiers” on the front lines and men in their late thirties, and their forties, and their fifties, on the front lines, of a few women on the front lines, not the soldiers the Kiev government would prefer to have, but the ones they do have.

It’s easy to say “we fight, we fight, we fight,” when you are not the ones out there actually fighting. It’s easy for the brave people in the United States and the capitals of democratic Europe, people who are not facing the bullets and bombs of the Russian army to advocate for continuing the war.

David J Kramer, Executive Director of the George w Bush Institute and Vice President of the George W Bush Presidential Center, argued:

The United States and the democratic community of nations must stand with Ukraine against Russia’s brutal, forcible seizure of Ukrainian territory. Ukraine represents the frontline of freedom, and its heroic citizens, who endure deadly and daily Russian bombardments and who have pushed back against a much larger military, deserve Western support. If not stopped in Ukraine, Putin will target other nations, which he already has been doing, but more aggressively. If we want to prevent the possibility of a Chinese attack against Taiwan, an important way to do so is by showing unstinting backing for Ukraine and imposing greater costs on Russia and its accomplices.

The United States should not be discussing the future of U.S.-Russian relations while Russian missiles and drones continue to wreak havoc on Ukraine, killing innocent civilians and trying to freeze and force the population into submission with winter coming.

The 28-point plan should be dropped and replaced with a simple one-point plan: Russia, get out of Ukraine!

It’s easy to make those arguments from the safety of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It’s easy to say that Russia must “get out of Ukraine” when he’s not there to force such. It’s beyond naïve to think that Russia would somehow accept a military defeat — “get out of Ukraine” — that no one has inflicted on them.

Mr Kramer’s site biography tells us that he is ” a leading expert on Russia and Ukraine,” and lists all sorts of impressive credentials, but his policy proposals amount to giving Ukraine more weapons and more money, but conspicuously avoids the only thing that could actually help Ukraine win, sending actual United States or NATO ground troops to directly fight the Russians. There is virtually no support for doing that, as Mr Kramer certainly knows, irrespective of what he might believe in his heart. He wants to:

Seek accountability for Russian war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Putin, after all, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his kidnapping of Ukrainian children

when a man who earned “his M.A. in Soviet studies from Harvard University and his B.A. in Soviet Studies and Political Science from Tufts University” has to know that war crimes can only be prosecuted on men who led nations and lost, and were then captured. Does Mr Kramer seriously believe that we can capture and drag Vladimir Putin before the bar? You’d have to spent a lot of time in a bar to think that!

Russia invasion of Ukraine is a terrible thing, something we all hate, but I have yet to see anyone present an actual plan to enable Ukraine to win the war. Simply sending money and weapons to a nation whose army has a “dire shortage of man power” is no plan at all.

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Kristallnacht in New York City? It’s not so far-fetched! As long as their protests remain peaceful, they are protected by our First Amendment, and its provisions protecting freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. But make no mistake about it: these people are total scum.

This site noted, on Friday, how self-proclaimed ‘imam’ and ‘Islamic scholar’ Abdullah Mady led a walkout of about 100 attendees at an interfaith service at the City University of New York because there was a ‘Zionist’ there.

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch apologizes to famed synagogue’s congregants for botched response to antisemitic protest

By Rich Calder | Saturday, November 22, 2025 | 4:53 PM EST

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch issued a heartfelt apology to the congregation of an historic Manhattan synagogue Saturday — conceding cops should have done a better job of keeping away hateful anti-Israel protesters.

Tisch told a crowd of 150 congregants attending service at Park East Synagogue that this week’s protests are legally allowed outside houses of worship — no matter how vile the topic — but said the NYPD failed to keep the front entrance clear and ensure “people could easily enter and leave shul.

“That is where we fell short, and for that, I apologize to this congregation,” the 44-year-old top cop said during a 10-minute speech which drew a standing ovation.

“Our plan didn’t include a frozen zone at the entrance. As a result, the space right outside your steps was chaotic.”

This story makes me appreciate the recently ended television series Blue Bloods and sadly fictitious Police Commissioner Frank Reagan.

Some 200 demonstrators gathered outside the Manhattan synagogue and heckled Jews attending an event by Nefesh B’nefesh, a Zionist organization that helps Jews immigrate from North America to Israel.

Many chanted “Globalize the intifada” and sinisterly urged the “resistance” to “take another settler out.”

Internal hyperlink not in the original, but added by this site.

Can someone tell me how such chant would not be seen as direct threats by the attendees? That was the direct intention of at least some of the protesters:

“It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events,” one protest leader told the crowd.

“We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared,” the agitator repeated emphatically.

The crowd also chanted “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada” to the beat of a drum.

“Resistance you make us proud, take another settler out,” the hate-filled group chanted at one point, video shows.

It’s not as though the NYPD did not have advance warning about the protest, as we reported last Wednesday.

Counter protestors were also on the scene, calling the masked demonstrators “cowards” and “pussies” for not showing their faces.

Cops set up metal barricades to keep protestor at bay, but some of the barricades were left too close to the synagogue entrance – putting event attendees coming and going in potential risk.

Pal-Awda NY/NJ, the anti-Israel activist group leading the protest, said it was demonstrating against an effort to “recruit American settlers to illegally occupy stolen Palestinian land.”

Again, internal hyperlink not in the original, but added by this site.

I find it amusing that Pal-Awda is whining about “stolen Palestinian land” while living on what some of our friends on the far-left call stolen Indian indigenous land.” They don’t want American Jews to immigrate to Israel, but they also try to make life miserable for Jews who live in the United States.

Oddly enough, of the four women most visibly protesting the Jews, three looked like very white Americans.

American Jews, in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel, are learning the hard way, as have their brothers in the Holy Land, that such virulent anti-Semitism has to be resisted from the very beginning. The history of Nazi Germany, and of Kristallnacht, has demonstrated for Jews the dangers of hoping that anti-Semitism just disappears, just goes away.

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World War III Watch: the neocons want to see the fruitless fighting in Ukraine go on and on and on

If there is one thing that The Philadelphia Inquirer’s ‘Worldview’ columnist has been adamant on is arming Ukraine to fight the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Russia. But even she couldn’t hide the fact that after 3½ years of war, Ukraine is starting to lose.

As Ukraine falters, Trump tries to hand the country to Putin with a shamefully pro-Russia peace plan

As Russia cracks Kyiv’s defenses and attacks Europe, the president refuses to send aid and kowtows to the Kremlin.

By Trudy Rubin | Thursday, November 20, 2025 | 5:01 AM EST

While America has been obsessing over Jeffrey Epstein, Vladimir Putin has been making dangerous headway in Ukraine — and expanding his war into Europe.

Under such circumstances, genuine peace negotiations are impossible because Putin thinks he is winning. America’s top foreign policy priority should be to reverse the Russian leader’s mindset by increasing military sales to Ukraine — which the Europeans will pay for.

Instead, the Trump team and Russian officials together have drawn up a new 28-point “peace” plan, without first consulting Ukraine or European allies. This pro-Russian plan calls for major Ukrainian concessions and would leave the country naked to further Russian aggression.

The White House has already denied Ukraine the weapons that could still stop the Russians, thereby effectively helping Putin slaughter Ukrainian civilians nightly with missiles and drones that target apartment buildings and heating systems.

Mrs Rubin knows, though she never says it, that many of President Trump’s voters, 77,302,580 Americans, were in part motivated by the fact that he did not want us to get more involved in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The United States has been involved in too many wars, costing us blood and treasure, and we haven’t actually won any of them. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were both expensive failures, with thousands of Americans killed and more wounded. It’s hard to forget that as the Wounded Warrior Project keeps running advertisements seeking donations on television. Saddam Hussein might be gone, but the government of Iraq is little better than it was, and the Taliban we deposed upon entering Afghanistan are back in power today.

And some of us still remember the debacle in Vietnam. I’ve said it dozens, if not hundreds of times: Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without American/NATO troops on the ground, directly fighting Russians. Does Mrs Rubin believe that the American people would stand for that?

Mrs Rubin wants us to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine, but even she admitted to the country’s “dire shortage of man power,” which begs the question: who’s going to operate the Patriot systems? Ukrainians are not trained to operate the complex systems, and cannot spare anyone from the front lines. The Patriots would have to be operated, at least at first, by American or NATO technicians, which puts the US and NATO directly at war with Russia, and that’s World War III. At least some of us don’t think that’s a particularly good idea.

Although things look bleak for Ukraine, I believe its fighters will manage to hold back the Russians this winter, but at a brutal cost to civilians’ and soldiers’ lives. Trump will bear much blame for the suffering to come.

Will they? Who knows, but Russia has made at least some small progress even during the распутица, the autumn mud time, but the fields of Ukraine are about to freeze over, once again providing solid surfaces for military vehicles. Nevertheless, the eastern European fields are no great place for soldiers, and much of the country is north of the 49th parallel, which is the same latitude as our longest border with Canada. The winter will be just as cold on the Russians, so it is at least reasonable to think that there won’t be much movement in the lines over the winter, but then there’s that “brutal cost to civilians’ and soldiers’ lives,” something Ukraine simply cannot afford.

And so the Russian leader is doing with a disastrous plan pushed by Trump’s supremely naive negotiator, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, who has has no grasp of Putin’s history or goals and seems to swallow his lies whole.

That “supremely naïve negotiator” was, along with the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the one who got Hamas to accept the ceasefire deal which has (mostly) stopped the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Witkoff’s draft plan would reportedly require Ukraine to give up the 14 per cent of the Donbas region it still controls, and cut the size of its armed forces by half. It would require Ukraine to abandon key categories of weapons, endorse a permanent rollback of vital U.S. assistance including long-range weapons, and ban foreign troops from basing on Ukrainian soil.

Yup, it’s a horrible deal for Ukraine, no doubt about that. But it does one thing: it stops the killing! It would be very dispassionate to suggest that Ukraine should keep on fighting, and its people keep on dying, if there were any reasonable prospect that they could eventually win the war.

But if there is no reasonable prospect that Ukraine could win the war, could reverse the military situation and force the Russian army out of Ukraine, it has to be asked: to what purpose does the continual bloodshed serve? Hamas waited over a year beyond their military loss to Israel, before they finally agreed to release the hostages and agree to a ceasefire; how many ‘Palestinians’ died in those months, died for nothing? As the people of Gaza are now whining about worn-out tents not offering any real protection from the oncoming winter, how many of them are living in those tents because Hamas refused to surrender for well over a year following the Israel Defense Forces complete occupation of Gaza?

Like the Hamas leadership living in luxury in Qatar, Mrs Rubin lives very well, thank you very much, in Philadelphia, 4800 miles removed from the war in Ukraine. She can advocate that the Ukrainians fight on, she can argue that President Trump should send Patriots, tanks, and the kitchen sink to Ukraine, but she is calling for more death and destruction in a war Ukraine cannot win.

We don’t have to like the end result of that war, we don’t like to have to see President Putin ‘win’ a war he started, but that doesn’t mean we ought to advocate that it continue.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well-reasoned conservative commentary.

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Poor, poor #Hamas terrorists, trapped in their own tunnels I can't put into words just how sorry I feel for them!

Last Sunday, The First Street Journal reported on the approximately 100 to 200 Hamas terrorists trapped in one of the organization’s tunnels. And, unless there has been a breakthrough too recently to have been reported, they’re still trapped down there. As was said then, these aren’t holdout Japanese troops isolated on some Pacific island, who didn’t know the war was over, and were determined to fight on for their Emperor, but simply trying to stay alive in the jungles. Rather, these are Hamas fanatics, who can, and will, and already have tried to continue the war. From The Jerusalem Post:

Hamas terrorists intentionally stayed in IDF zone, security expert claims

National Security researcher Kobi Michael: ‘Hamas is trying to insert a new deal into an existing deal, and this is something Israel must reject.’

By Giorgia Valente | Friday, November 14, 2025 | 4:26 EST

As negotiators argue over maps and timelines, one of the most sensitive tests of Gaza’s US-brokered ceasefire is unfolding out of sight, deep under Rafah.

Israeli and foreign officials estimate that around 100 to 200 Hamas terrorists are holed up in a tunnel network on the Israeli-controlled side of the so-called “Yellow Line” in southern Gaza, unable to move back into Hamas-run territory without surfacing into areas patrolled by the Israel Defense Forces. For Washington, what happens to those men is more than a tactical problem; for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, it has become a political red line.

At stake is not only the fate of a few hundred fighters but the credibility of a broader ceasefire architecture that is supposed to end large-scale fighting in Gaza and gradually strip Hamas of its weapons, even as violence spirals in the West Bank.

There’s much more at the original.

President Trump has been pushing Israel hard, as have Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt, all the supposed guarantors of the cease-fire agreement, but when last we heard, Hamas have said that the trapped fighters would not surrender, even though their only way out is an entrance that the Israel Defense Force control. We don’t know how much food and water they have down there, but eventually they’ll run out.

The article notes Media Line’s claim that the Hamas fighters intentionally remained in the tunnels in the Israeli controlled areas, ostensibly to be behind IDF lines and able to pop out and fight again. But, if true, it’s like so many Hamas operations, not particularly well thought out. I’m not certain that the fighters get their 72 bacha bazi boys for being martyrs if they die of starvation.

Me? I think back to Judges 1:4-7, somewhere around 1,400-1,200 BC, in which Adoni-Bezek states that he defeated 70 kings, and had their thumbs and big toes cut off — a fate he suffers himself after being defeated — to prevent them from ever acting as warriors again. A lot of Israelis do not want these fighters to ever be released, believing that they were part of the October 7 massacre, but at the very least, they should be rendered unable to fight again.

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Poor, poor #Hamas terrorists, trapped in their own tunnels I can't put into words just how sorry I feel for them!

These aren’t holdout Japanese troops isolated on some Pacific island, who didn’t know the war was over, and were determined to fight on for their Emperor, but simply trying to stay alive in the jungles. Rather, these are Hamas fanatics, who can, and will, and already have tried to continue the war. From The Wall Street Journal:

Hundreds of Hamas Fighters Are Stuck in Tunnels in Israeli-Controlled Gaza

The presence of the militants, who have killed three Israeli troops, is threatening to unravel the cease-fire

By Dov Lieber in Tel Aviv, and Summer Said in Dubai | Thursday, November 6, 2025 | 5:43 AM EST

A detachment of Israeli engineering troops was demolishing tunnels behind the withdrawal line in Gaza last month when Hamas militants sprang from a hidden shaft, fired an antitank missile toward their excavator and killed two soldiers.

A little over a week earlier, Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire. Israel responded to the deadly encounter with a round of airstrikes on Gaza that killed dozens of people.

The early test of the fragile truce pointed to a bigger problem: Hundreds of armed Hamas fighters are trapped in tunnels under the Israeli-controlled side of Gaza, and willing to take shots at Israel.

The situation is the result of Israeli efforts that began in May to flush out militants and destroy Hamas’s extensive tunnel system where the group has hidden fighters, hostages and weapons throughout the conflict. The strategy was to cut off sections of the underground web from one another. But Israel’s partial withdrawal under the U.S.-brokered cease-fire last month has left militants who remain behind the line trapped underground with no means of escape and dwindling supplies.

Don’t read that last sentence wrong. It does not mean that the Hamas fighters cannot get out of the tunnels; it means that they have no means of leaving and escaping capture by the Israel defense Force.

While Arab and Israeli guesstimates put the number of trapped Hamas fighters at between 200 to 300, Hamas negotiators claim that the number is closer to 100, and Hamas want the IDF to grant the fighters safe passage to ‘Palestinian’ controlled areas. Israel, on the other hand, wants them to surrender and be disarmed, or to kill them. But Israel doesn’t really have to do anything; if the terrorists don’t come out and surrender, they’ll eventually die of thirst or starvation. The IDF could simply seal them in, or flood the tunnels with sea water, but it’s simpler to just wait them out and let the Lord decide their fate.

According to the Kenya Times early Sunday morning, the IDF have already “eliminated dozens of Hamas terrorists and dismantled hundreds of the group’s infrastructure sites in the Khan Yunis area of Gaza over the past two months.”

The IDF also said the operatives are commanded by a Hamas deputy battalion commander from Rafah and that mediating countries have been able to communicate with the Hamas operatives, according to the military.

In recent days, IDF troops killed several Hamas terrorists attempting to cross the Yellow Line, the boundary separating ceasefire zones between Hamas- and IDF-controlled areas.

It’s simple: with the last remaining living hostages released, Hamas have no leverage at all. By any Western civilization logic, the trapped terrorists should surrender, surrender their weapons, and have a realistic hope that they’ll be allowed to rejoin their comrades on the other side of the ‘Yellow line.’ If they’re determined to keep killing Jews, they can at least hope that they could get back to that in a few years.

But Hamas’ logic, if we can stretch the meaning of the word, is that it’s better to hold out, and the trapped terrorists starve to death. I would guess that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is just fine with that. I just can’t seem to put into words just how sorry I feel for them.

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to!

Will Bunch, the “national opinion columnist” for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is as thoroughly eaten up with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome as anyone on earth, and his rant this morning on Bluesky — he’s mostly abandoned Twitter — is thoroughly amusing. Mr Bunch is bemoaning “the media’s anemic (or non-) coverage of the massive No Kings movement,” which led me to check his own newspaper’s website. As of 8:11 AM EDT this morning, there were no stories showing up on the website that mentioned or even hinted as coverage of the #NoKings protests.

Even the Inquirer’s Editorial Board had to give President Trump (grudging) credit for the ceasefire and return of the hostages, so perhaps, just perhaps, the No Kings protests, scheduled for this coming Saturday, are not proving to be particularly well-timed. That he’s scheduled to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday to discuss ways to end the 3½-years-long Russo-Ukrainian War means that, despite his earlier failure to get an agreement there — something the left widely mocked — President Trump is still trying to work on a peace agreement there as well.

Can you imagine the apoplexy on the left if he did manage to get such an agreement? Imagine that: the “literally Hitler” demon to the left forging agreements to end two major wars?  🙂

Of course, the No Kings protests last summer were mostly a dud, despite the hype the left gave them, but at least they mostly avoided turning into riots. Perhaps that’s what the organizers think they need to become, to get much attention. William Teach noted that the global warming climate change protesters who have moved beyond peaceable assembly into destroying art and gluing themselves to the road to block traffic are now facing real punishment, so there’s that issue.

3gunGorilla tweeted an exchange from the Dave Ramsey Show:

“So you’re having protests all over the country next weekend?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re calling them ‘No Kings’ protests?”
“Yes, Dave.”
“But the person who you claim is trying to act like a King isn’t stopping the protests?”
+“Well …”
“And you don’t see the irony?”

‘Nuff said!

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The hostages have been released, but some on the left are just very upset that Hamas have been defeated

At 10:40 PM EDT on Sunday, October 12, 2025 — the real Columbus Day! — a distinguished gentleman calling himself simply “matt” quoted a tweet by Ivanka Trump Kushner, showing her praying at the Western Wall, responding “girl fuck you and your pedophile dad AND israel”. Please pardon the language, but I’m not going to soft-peddle it. Matt’s Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — biography self-describes him as “queer jew w very long nails, host of a bit fruity, he/they”, so make of that what you will.

President Trump and Mrs Kushner’s husband, Jared Kushner, were part of the negotiation which got the first phase of the Trump Peace Plan accepted by both Israel and whatever passes for the leadership of Hamas, and the remaining living hostages held by Hamas are being released. Israel has accepted the ceasefire provisions, and the killing has stopped. What, I have to ask, does Matt want, for the IDF to keep blasting and bombing Gaza, to keep killing more ‘Palestinians’?

Then there was Antony Blinken, who was Secretary of State under President Biden, who tweeted:

It starts with a clear and comprehensive post conflict plan for Gaza. It’s good that President Trump adopted and built on the plan the Biden Administration developed after months of discussion with Arab partners, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. It centers on temporary, transitional authorities for Gaza’s governance, security, humanitarian assistance, and rebuilding, led by Arab and international partners alongside Palestinians, backed by the United States, and ultimately handed over to full Palestinian control.

That was part of a twelve-tweet series praising the Trump Peace Plan, trying to take some credit for what President Trump and his people accomplished, what Messrs Biden and Blinken and their staffers failed to accomplish. The war in Gaza went on for 15 months and 13 days while they were in office, and only 8 months and 23 days after Mr Trump took office.

Mr Blinken admitted one reason that President Trump was able to achieve what Messrs Biden and Blinken could not:

First, what changed to make this breakthrough possible? Hamas is finally and fully isolated. Arab states and Turkey have said “enough.” The misery Hamas provoked and would allow to persist has delegitimized it among most Gazans. And Hamas realized that the cavalry (Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis) are not coming to the rescue.

Let’s tell the real truth: Mr Trump told Hamas, explicitly, that if they didn’t agree to the plan, Israel would have complete American support to not only continue the war, but to intensify it and totally obliterate Gaza. President Biden never went that far, and limited American assistance to Israel, which is at least part of the reason Hamas continued what was essentially a hopeless fight.

Then there was this:

Israel has long since achieved its war aims — destroying Hamas as an organized military force so October 7 can never be repeated and eliminating those responsible for its horrors – but at terrible cost to Palestinian civilians caught in a crossfire they did not start and were powerless to stop. Only the hostages remained. Israelis want them home and the war to end, putting pressure on the Israeli government to take the deal, not move the goalposts.

“Palestinian civilians caught in a crossfire they did not start”? Bovine feces! While it were Hamas and their allies who launched the October 7th attack, the people of Gaza wildly cheered it on when they knew it has happened, when the Hamas savages dragged the kidnapped hostages through the streets, celebrating the attack, celebrating the killings, and protecting Hamas.

Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left British politician, tweeted:

It is not up to Blair, Trump or Netanyahu to decide the future of Gaza. That is up to the people of Palestine.

Also read: William teach, “Trump Heads To Israel, Hostages Should Be Released“

Has he forgotten that the Allies of World War II occupied defeated Germany, denazified it, and set Germany on the path to becoming a peaceful Western democracy, rather than the threat to peace in Europe it had been? Has he forgotten that the United States occupied Japan, transforming its government and writing its constitution, to transform Japan from a militaristic conquering state to a peaceful one? Some cultures cannot be trusted, and the culture of the ‘Palestinians’ after twenty years free of Israeli occupation is one of them.

It goes way beyond those two: my Twitter feed is full of the irredentists of big, big words but who didn’t have the balls to go to Gaza to fight for the ‘Palestinians.’

I am concerned that not enough will be done to pacify Gaza, to end the reign of the irredentists, but only time will answer that.