What is the “Iron Dome“?
Iron Dome (Hebrew: כִּפַּת בַּרְזֶל, romanized: Kippat Barzel) is a mobile all-weather air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. The system is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells fired from distances of 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) to 70 kilometres (43 mi) away and whose trajectory would take them to an Israeli populated area.
Iron Dome was declared operational and initially deployed on 27 March 2011 near Beersheba. On 7 April 2011, the system successfully intercepted a BM-21 Grad launched from Gaza for the first time. On 10 March 2012, The Jerusalem Post reported that the system shot down 90% of rockets launched from Gaza that would have landed in populated areas. In late 2012 Israel said that it hoped to increase the range of Iron Dome’s interceptions, from a maximum of 70 kilometres (43 mi) to 250 kilometres (160 mi) and make it more versatile so that it could intercept rockets coming from two directions simultaneously.
In November 2012, official statements indicated that it had intercepted over 400 rockets. By late October 2014, the Iron Dome systems had intercepted over 1,200 rockets.
In addition to their land-based deployment, it was reported in 2017 that Iron Dome batteries would in future be deployed at sea on Sa’ar 6-class corvettes, to protect off-shore gas platforms in conjunction with Israel’s Barak 8 missile system.
Simply put, the Kippat Barzel is a system which does not have an offensive capacity; it is entirely defensive. So, why would the Squadristi be so opposed to the system?
Adela Suliman | Saturday, September 25, 2021
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) penned a lengthy and emotional open letter apologizing to her constituents on Friday for effectively abstaining in a vote over funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, which overwhelmingly passed in the House a day earlier.
Ocasio-Cortez, who could be seen weeping in the House after the vote, used her letter to criticize both the substance of the bill and what she described as the “reckless” and “rushed” process to pass it. She opposed the “unconditional aid to the Israeli government,” she added in her letter, but ultimately switched her vote from “no” to “present,” meaning a member takes no position in favor or against but records their presence.
The House voted for the measure 420 to 9.
However, Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to effectively abstain attracted ire from some liberal supporters.
“Normally I find AOC a person with moral values … This time though, as a few other times, I must say she should’ve stuck with other “Squad” members,” wrote one person on Twitter. Another said, “AOC primes people to believe she will never compromise, then does.” Meanwhile, an opinion piece accused her vote of being “a tactical mess” and a “worst-of-both-worlds solution,” and suggested that it indicated she could have higher political ambitions.
Describing her actions in her letter, Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Yes, I wept. I wept at the complete lack of care for the human beings that are impacted by these decisions, I wept at an institution choosing a path of maximum volatility and minimum consideration for its own political convenience.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez glamour photo for her 2018 campaign.
There’s more at the original. You can also read it
here, and avoid
The Washington Post’s paywall.
How, I have to ask, was voting to support the system a “complete lack of care for the human beings that are impacted by these decisions”? The Kippat Barzel is designed to protect people, primarily innocent civilians, and, in this case, innocent Jewish civilians, from mortar, artillery and rocket fire launched by the Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Lebanon. What are we to conclude other than the lovely Miss Ocasio-Cortez wants the Palestinians to have a way to shoot rain death and destruction upon an innocent, civilian population?
Miss Ocasio-Cortez is the most infamous of the squadristi for one simple reason: she’s the only one who isn’t, to be blunt about it, ugly. They all share one characteristic: they’re all full-blown anti-Semites.
But anti-Semitism is ugly, bone-deep ugly, and that’s what the squadristi are. Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s pretty face can’t hide an ugly philosophy, an ugly soul. To be pro-Palestinian, as the squadristi are, is to be in favor of the destruction of Israel, and everybody knows it.
One could be opposed to providing offensive weaponry, that the Israelis could use to attack the Palestinians, and claim that they just want to save lives, but to be opposed to a shield to protect innocent Israeli citizens from being killed is to want innocent Israeli citizens to be killed, because killing innocent Israeli civilians is what Hamas and Hezbollah want to do.
By Donna Cassata | September 23, 2021 | 6:07 PM EDT
The House overwhelmingly approved $1 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system Thursday after a blowup among Democrats as Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) called the Mideast ally an “apartheid state” guilty of war crimes and Rep. Ted Deutch (Fla.) accused her of antisemitism.
The debate again exposed the political and religious fault lines in the party caucus over Israel, pitting members of the so-called Squad, some of them Muslim, against Israel’s longtime Jewish supporters.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, said Palestinians are living under a “violent apartheid system” in opposing the money for the Iron Dome program.
“I will not support an effort to enable and support war crimes, human rights abuses and violence,” she said, calling the Israeli government an “apartheid regime.”
Mr Deutch is right, of course: Mrs Tlaib is an anti-Semite, and favors a ‘one-state’ solution for the Middle East, which is to say that she wants the Palestinians and Israelis to share one nation, hoping that the high birthrate of the Palestinians will allow them to eventually outnumber and outvote the Jews. Of course, I supported a one-state solution as well, but I favored the Israelis expelling all of the Arabs from the land, pushing them into Jordan and Syria, and annexing all of the territory they control, but, alas!, the time for that was 1967 and 1968, right after the Six Day War, and it would no longer work.
The tensions among Democrats over Israel flared earlier this week when leaders included the funding for the Iron Dome in a stopgap spending bill to keep the government funded into the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
A handful of progressives threatened to vote against the bill, which would have sunk the spending package. House Democratic leaders pulled the missile defense funding and put it into the stand-alone bill passed Thursday.
Translation: the Democrats’ margin in the House is so small that the squadristi could have stopped the spending bill completely. What a shame that it wasn’t stopped!
Jewish Americans are the Democrats’ second most loyal voting demographic, but the non-Jewish Democrats pretty much hate their guts. Americans of Jewish descent need to realize that their real friends are conservatives, and stop voting for people who would gladly see the one Jewish nation in the world pushed into the sea.
As we previously reported, on Friday the 13th, Marc Rowan, University of Pennsylvania alumnus, Wharton school of business graduate and CEO of Apollo Global Management based in New York, called on UPenn alumni and supporters to “close their checkbooks” until President Liz Magill and Chairman Scott L. Bok step down, saying that under their leadership, the college had embraced anti-Semitism. The linked article from The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that all four of the protesting trustees were Jewish.
