Final Jeopardy

Mayim Bialik: “Today’s Final Jeopardy category is ‘Foreign Affairs,’ and the answer is, ‘Yes.’ You have thirty seconds to write down your response, and be sure to put it in the form of a question.”

Jeopardy jingle music plays.

Mayim Bialik: “And now we come to our defending champion, Elwood. What did he have?”

Screen reveals, “Is Joe Biden stupid or senile?”

Mayim Bialik: “That’s correct!”

In noting the Biden Administration’s plans to reopen the American consulate in Jerusalem, where we already have our embassy to Israel, William Teach wrote:

This has the chance of causing big problems, and simply shows that Democrats hate Israel and Jews, and love the terrorists who attack Israel civilians.

Actually, what it shows is that liberalism is just plain stupid. There is a natural tendency to favor the plucky underdog, but that tendency is something which has to be tempered with a realistic assessment of just who the underdog is. Who could have imagined that the homosexual, transgender supporting American left would want to see an ‘LGBTQIA+’ supporting Israeli government defeated by an Islamic, if not completely Islamist, movement which disparages, beats, injures, and sometimes just outright kills homosexuals and ‘transgenders,’ but that’s what we have today. Who could have imagined that an American Democratic Party, the second most loyal voting demographic of which are Jews, would favor a group the stated intention of which is to conquer the Jews and push them into the sea?

We’ve just seen the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and our State Department has expressed dismay that there are no women in the Taliban 2.0 government, when the original banned women from leaving the house without a responsible male escort, and barred girls from being educated.

American liberalism has a collective pair of thick, foggy, rose colored glasses, glasses through which the left see the world not as it is, but the way that they believe it should be. The Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, al Fatah, these groups all tell us what they want to do, but today’s left just blithely ignore it, seeming to think that if we are just nice to them, they’ll behave like good, Western liberals.

Joe Biden is both senile and stupid. The rest of the left? Perhaps not senile, but certainly stupid.

Is it possible to support the Palestinians and not be anti-Semitic? Perhaps, but I've yet to see it done

I have said it before: it is philosophically possible to be opposed to Israeli foreign policy and not be anti-Semitic, but it is a trick I have never seen accomplished. But, let’s be honest: most of the pro-Palestinian agitators don’t even try anymore. Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese-born former porn actress tweeted:

You can see the actual tweet if you follow the link; what is presented here is a screen capture of it, because it’s very possible that the lovely Miss Khalifa will delete it.

Why? As the New York Post noted:

one of the bottles with Khalifa bore the date 1943 and contained champagne produced in Nazi-occupied France.

“Owning the Jewish state by proudly drinking wine from Vichy France,” one user wrote. “About right, yes.”

The Post noted that drinking that wine in Gaza is illegal.

Why do the left support the Palestinians, and the Arabs in general? The Advocate is a very leftist homosexual rights publication, but even they can’t stomach the idea of “Queers for Palestine”:

Queers for Palestine?

By James Kirchick | January 28, 2009 | 12:00 AM EST

Of all the slogans chanted and displayed at anti-Israel rallies over the past month, surely “Queers for Palestine” ranks as the most oxymoronic. It is the motto of the San Francisco–based Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), a group advocating financial divestment from the Jewish State. QUIT contends that Zionism is racism, regularly demonstrates at gay pride marches, organizes with far-right Muslim organizations, and successfully lobbied the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference due to its location that year in Jerusalem.

Mr Kirchick, the author, used the wrong word: it isn’t “oxymoronic” but just plain moronic. Any liberal who supports the Palestinians is just plain stupid.

What makes QUIT oxymoronic is that their affinity for Palestine isn’t reciprocated. There may be queers for Palestine, but Palestine certainly isn’t for queers, either in the livable or empathetic sense. Like all Islamic polities, the Palestinian Authority systematically harasses gay people. Under the cloak of rooting out Israeli “collaborators,” P.A. officials extort, imprison, and torture gays. But Palestinian oppression of homosexuality isn’t merely a matter of state policy, it’s one firmly rooted in Palestinian society, where hatred of gays surpasses even that of Jews. Last October, a gay Palestinian man with an Israeli lover petitioned Israel’s high court of justice for asylum, claiming that his family threatened to kill him if he did not “reform.” He’s one of the few lucky Palestinians to be able to challenge his plight.

And that’s only in the relatively benign West Bank. The Gaza Strip, which has stagnated under the heel of Hamas’s Islamofascist rule since 2007, is an even more dangerous place for gays, “a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick,” in the words of a senior Hamas leader. As in Iran, Hamas’s patron and the chief sponsor of international terrorism, even the mere suspicion of homosexuality will get one killed in Gaza, being hurled from the roof of a tall building the method of choice.

Virtually none of the current political left’s opinions fare very well in the Muslim Middle East. Women’s rights? While the laws differ in the specifics, in no country in the Muslim Middle East do women have equal rights with men. Racial equality? Among the Arabs, blacks are considered inferior, and have far fewer rights. Freedom of religion? To varying degrees Islam is the official religion in these areas, and not only are adherents of other faiths, or of atheism, subject to discrimination, apostasy laws exist throughout the Muslim Middle East, and Muslims renouncing Islam, or anyone criticizing Islam, can be subject to criminal penalties, up to and including capital punishment.

Miss Khalifa? She’s an idiot. In a video, she complains about the difficulty of getting into a non-pornography workforce, but she’s wearing a suit jacket without a blouse, to show off deep cleavage. Now, she’s drinking wine from Vichy France, which was controlled by the Nazis, and proudly saying that her wine is older than the state of Israel. But if she is a particularly clueless advocate, she isn’t qualitatively different from the American and European left in their support of the Palestinians.

The #woke really do hate them some Israelis! The left love the people who would kill them first

The Israelis made a huge mistake in 1967-68. When they conquered Gaza, the Sinai, Judea and Samaria, they should have decided, right then, that if they wanted to keep that territory, that they needed to round up and expel every last Arab living in those lands. It would have been harsh, it would have been brutal, and it would have been too reminiscent of the Nazis’ roundup of the Jews, but it would have settled things over fifty years ago. Israel would have the land they want, along with shortened, more defensible borders, while the Palestinians would be problems for Jordan and Syria, not Israel.

The world might not have liked it, the world might have shaken its collective finger in disapproval, but the world would have gotten used to it.

That they didn’t do. Rather, Israel decided to just make life tough on the Arabs living there, thinking that they’d all emigrate to Syria and Jordan and Egypt. That didn’t happen, and now hundreds of thousands of Arabs have turned into millions of Arabs. The Israelis are strong, tough, and smart, but they have proven to be piss poor conquerors.

So, now they are stuck with millions of Arabs who hate their guts, and don’t know what to do about them. The Israelis want the land in Judea and Samaria, and are slowly trying to colonize it, but that isn’t really going to work.

Arial Sharon ordered the Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005, turning the land over to the ‘Palestinians’ to do with what they would. The hope was that the Arabs would actually be responsible, and turn Gaza into a peaceful, self-governed Palestinian enclave. Gaza is on the resource-poor side, but it does have the best beaches in the Mediterranean. The Arabs could have built a tourist Mecca serving all of Europe, but, instead, they let their hatred of the Jews fester and flourish, and simply built a stronghold for Hamas.

So, every so often, Hamas shoot rockets into Israel, and Israel returns the favor, in kind and in spades. The majority of the Palestinian population are too f(ornicating) stupid to realize that all they are doing is setting up getting their own homes destroyed, and keeping themselves poor, by providing cover and support for Hamas. The Palestinians couldn’t turn Gaza into a peaceful, self-governed area because they are too stupid to do so, and have proven that for the past 15½ years.

You think the NYT isn’t liberal? This is a screen capture from today’s NYT webpage.

William Teach noted how the Grey Lady, The New York Times, believe we can control the Israelis through our tax dollars. In the land of the left, the Palestinians are the poor, down-trodden good guys while the Israelis are the big, bad bullies of the Middle East. If the Israelis were truly the big, bad bullies, they’d have done what I said they should have done in 1967.

The Biden administration has been timid and restrained, slowing the U.N. Security Council’s engagement on the issue, and it has yet to name an ambassador to Israel. But the stakes are too high for evasions, and President Biden should stand with others on the Security Council to demand a cease-fire before this escalates further.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken helpfully said “it’s vital now to de-escalate.” The administration should also express strong concern about the planned evictions of Palestinians that provoked the crisis. Dithering and vacillation help no one.

Nicholas Kristof, the column author, admitted that the United States have little influence on Hamas, but that our aid to Israel gives us more leverage, and he believes we should pressure the Israelis to back off. The notion that the US should be pressuring Hamas to stop shooting is regarded as silly.

Mr Teach pointed to another article:

Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?

The global woke loathing for Israel is taking an even darker turn.

by Brendan O’Neill | May 12, 2021

Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.

But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?

This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?

The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’

No other nation would be expected not to respond either to internal disarray – Hamas supporters have rioted in parts of Jerusalem and around Al-Aqsa Mosque – or to foreign attack. Imagine if the Isle of Wight was home to a movement whose founding constitution expressed loathing for all ethnic Britons and which regularly fired hundreds of missiles into Sussex, Kent, Hampshire. Wouldn’t the British military respond? Of course it would. But the woke demonisation of Israel is now so acute that Israel is expected to take the military assaults of the radical Islamists to its south. To Western activists who find the very existence of Israel abhorrent, any effort Israel makes to protect its borders or its citizens is an affront to global peace and decency. They cannot understand why Israel doesn’t hate itself as much as they hate it, and therefore will not allow itself to be punished by its righteous enemies. How dare you live?

The article is so good that I’d like to reprint the whole thing, but that would be plagiarism. But it doesn’t take much awareness at all to see how der Führer was able to get millions, tens of millions of Germans, and of Frenchmen and Ukrainians and Poles and Belgians and Czechs and others in lands they occupied to cooperate in the Shoah — the Israeli name for the Holocaust — in turning in Jews, in exposing Jews in hiding, in helping to put Jews into the railcars, in helping the Einsatzgruppen and the rest of the Schutzstaffel to guard and herd the Jews right into the gas chambers and the mass graves.[1]Three different Dutch have been suspected as being the informants who turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Nazis, but this has never been proven. The Jews are not allowed to defend themselves, don’t you know?

More, it explains how the British, one of the victors against the Third Reich, one of the countries which saw Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Sobibor first hand, could have erected their own prison camps and set up their blockades, trying to keep the dispossessed Jewish survivors of the from leaving a blasted Europe, a Europe in which they had no homes, to immigrate back to their ancestral homelands in the Levant. The British Foreign Office, eager to retain what was left of their Empire after World War II, were friendly with the Arabs, and the oil under the Arab lands.

Max Boot, from his Twit pic.

As Mr O’Neill noted, the #woke hate them some Israelis, so much so that #NeverTrumper Max Boot, of Jewish descent himself, tries to blame the whole thing on, you guessed it, President Donald Trump, who helped get the ‘Abrahamic Accords’ between Israel and several Muslim nations signed, and who has been out of office for 3¾ months. But, then again, I never expect anything sensible from Mr Boot.

The silliness of the left when it comes to the Palestinians, to the Arabs in general, and to Muslims, is obvious. Israel is the only functioning democracy on the Middle East. Human rights? The left almost unanimously support homosexual and transgender rights, but try being homosexual in the Muslim-ruled nations: if you get caught, Da’ish will throw you to your death off a tall building, Iran will hang you, and other Islamic countries have their own punishments. Six countries, all majority Muslim, impose the death penalty for consensual same-sex sexual acts: Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia.

Women’s rights? Women are, to varying degrees, second-class citizens throughout the Middle East . . . except in Israel. Virtually nothing for which the American and Western left stand is supported in any Middle Eastern country except Israel.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev once said that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope by which the communists would hang them; in today’s left, “LGBT” groups support the Islamic groups which would, were they living under Islamic rule, throw them in jail, at the very least.

References

References
1 Three different Dutch have been suspected as being the informants who turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Nazis, but this has never been proven.

This is why I have no sympathy for the Palestinians!

Given the chance to build something, and some of the best beachfront property in the world — the Palestinians could have created a real tourist Mecca to bring in literally billions of euros into an otherwise poor land — the irredentists decided that what they really wanted to do was continue to attack Israel. They didn’t care about their families, they didn’t care about Palestinian poverty, they didn’t care about anything but their own seething hatred of the Jews.

The Hamas terrorists are actually few in number, but like guerrilla fighters everywhere, they depend upon the support, tacit or otherwise, of the larger populations around them. The Hamas terrorists live among the Palestinian people, are housed and clothed and fed and supported by them; they are no different from the inner-city thugs in Chicago and Philadelphia and St Louis, hiding from the police and destroying their own neighborhoods with destruction and death.