For the people of Gaza to receive any aid, they must repudiate Hamas and surrender Hamas leadership don't care about the people, because they're living in luxury in Qatar

The current ‘Palestinian’ sympathizer meme on Twitter — as always, I refuse to call it 𝕏, the absolute worst rebranding in history — is that the poor, poor Palestinian children, children! are starving. A gentleman calling himself Dr Mohammed al Najjar tweeted:

Doctors in Gaza collapse in operating rooms from hunger.
Ambulance drivers can’t drive, their stomachs empty.
A hungry doctor treats a hungry patient brought by a hungry driver.
To the free people of the world: Say ENOUGH to this starvation

It’s not just Dr Najjar — assuming he’s a real person and not just another pro-terrorist bot — but many others appearing in my feeds. Continue reading

Why should #Hamas surrender? The 'leadership' live in a well-fed, cushy exile while their people in Gaza can do nothing

Taher al Nunu, the new Hamas spokesfool, does not look as though he has been plagued by food insecurity.

When the Allies occupied Germany following World War II, and the United States occupied Japan, we insisted on, and forced, the de-Nazification of Germany, and the removal of the militarists who led Japan into the war. We required a cultural change which would lead to peaceful governments, governments which would not start wars of conquest.

And it has worked! Neither Germany nor Japan has tried to conquer anyone, at least not through war, though their economic power has expanded far beyond their borders. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is insisting on the same thing when it comes to Gaza:

Netanyahu, leaving for DC: We’re working for Gaza deal on our terms, Hamas won’t be there; chance to greatly expand peace accords

By Lazar Berman | Sunday, July 6, 2025

Before boarding his flight to Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israel has an opportunity “to expand the circle of peace far beyond what we could have imagined.” Continue reading

Mustn’t ‘peace’ mean more than just the absence of war?

People have been crying for peace, peace, more loudly in the civilized West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. We good Westerners have tended to ignore conflicts in other parts of the world.

In our religion studies after Mass on Sunday, we were going over the meaning of the word “peace.” The Gospel reading for next Sunday is Luke 10:1-12, which includes:

3 Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. 4 Carry no money belt, no bag, no shoes; and greet no one on the way. 5 Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’ 6 If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you. 7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking what they give you; for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not keep moving from house to house. 8 Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you; 9 and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

The commentary in the study guides brought up the definition of shalom as it is used in Hebrew.

The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was “to make something whole”. Not just regarding practical restoration of things that were lost or stolen. But with an overall sense of fulness and completeness in mind, body and estate.

Too often in English, we see the word ‘peace’ as meaning the absence of direct violence or war. Thus, when people call for peace between Russia and Ukraine, or between Israel and the Arabs, they too often mean just a ceasefire. A ceasefire in itself is a very basic good, but mustn’t peace actually mean more than that? Mustn’t peace mean more than “I am not trying to kill anyone, and no one is trying to kill me”, but also mean “I don’t want to kill anyone, and no one wants to kill me”? Continue reading

There is only one crime in war, and that’s the losing of it

One of the most controversial episodes of the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is “In the Pale Moonlight,” in which Captain Benjamin Sisko, plagued by the mounting casualty lists in the interstellar war between the United Federation of Planets and Klingon Empire against the Cardassian Union and the Dominion, concocts a plan to bring the Romulans, then technically neutral, into the war on the side of the Federation. The plan involves lying, forgery, deception, and in the end, murder. The story is told in a series of flashbacks, in which Captain Sisko confronts his series of moral choices, and in the end, he confronts the violations of his fundamental principles, and concludes that, with the goal of bringing the Romulans into the war changing the power dynamic, and helping the Federation to reverse the losses it had been sustaining, he can live with his actions.

Curtis LeMay was put in charge of our strategic bombing command, and he was the one who switched much of our bombing attacks on Japan from some relatively ineffective high-altitude bombing to the incendiary night attacks which devastated the island nation’s highly combustible cities. From Wikipedia: Continue reading

World War III Watch The nukes make all the difference

Trudy Rubin, who writes the ‘Worldview’ column for The Philadelphia Inquirer, states in her bio that she “tries to make sense of the world’s chaos and conflicts,” but, alas! sense is the one thing she doesn’t seem to have. In her column of Saturday, published before news of the United States strike on Iranian nuclear weapons sites, she wonders why the United States doesn’t want to fight against Russia for Ukraine, but seemed willing to fight for Israel against Iran: Continue reading

World War III Watch Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

9:36 PM EDT — As we noted yesterday, the potential of launching an air attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran was something which had to be based on intelligence estimates, and sometimes intelligence estimates are wrong. As William Teach noted on the 20th, President Donald Trump had set a two-week window for negotiations with Iran to produce an acceptable result, but the President loves misdirection, and like the monitored communications between Captain Spock and Admiral Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when hours could seem like days, apparently days could seem like weeks . . . or vice versa.

I cannot say that I am unhappy that the United States attempted to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons sites, because, in the end, Iran simply cannot be allowed to develop and possess nuclear weapons. But I certainly am concerned, because we have, in effect, entered yet another foreign war. The President is scheduled to address the nation at 10:00 PM EDT, and I very much hope that he will tell us that this was one-and-done, that we are now staying out of the war between Israel and Iraq. But, of course, one nation cannot simply call off a war; there is the little matter of the enemy, and whether he will consider it called off. Iran will certainly talk big, and the Houthis will threaten American shipping, but only the Lord knows how this will play out.

I guess that I have to add the video Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran! Continue reading

Midnight Oil Blogging

Burning the midnight oil

The specter of war with Iran is giving everyone pause, most certainly including me. Israel launched air strikes against the Islamic Republic a few days ago, supposedly with foreknowledge communicated to President Trump. The G7 group, many of the members of which don’t particularly like either President Trump or Israeli Prime Minister, nevertheless agreed that:

“Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” the statement added and said the G7 was “clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”

One reason for writing around midnight is that morning has broken over Tehran, which is an odd 7hours and 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Daylight Time in the United States. Iran issued the statement before Wednesday night, “tonight we’ll deliver a surprise the world will remember for centuries,” but in fact the Islamic Republic did nothing. Someone, presumably Israel, hacked Iranian television, pushing messages that civilians should take to the streets and overthrown the government of the mad mullahs. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly rejected negotiations, but Iran has sent out mixed mesages from other sources.

At least as of this writing, there are no reports of belligerent action between Israel and Iran, but while Israel has, reportedly, significantly damaged Iran’s ability to produce weapons-grade uranium, the job of completely ending the country’s nuclear weapons program has not been completed.

The New York Times reported, at 12:14 AM EDT:

The Israeli military said on Thursday morning that missiles had been launched from Iran toward Israel. It called on the public to enter protected spaces such as communal shelters or safe rooms until further notice.

What will happen? We honestly don’t know.

Overnight, an Iranian missile that got through struck a hospital in Tel Aviv.

What did they think would happen?

Let’s tell the truth here: Western liberals are, collectively, as dumb as a box of rocks. Images of the border wall between Gaza and Egypt are all over the internet, and anyone who can use Teh Google could have looked up the fact that the Egyptian government see Hamas as just another facet of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group outlawed in Egypt. Egypt has been ‘helping’ with negotiations between Hamas and Israel, because Egypt still dislikes Western civilization — other than Western nations’ money that is! — but sees political Islam as a real threat. That border wall, built by Egypt, not Israel, certainly more of an impediment than the big, beautiful wall President Trump has been building between the United States and Mexico, was meant to keep ‘Palestinians’ from getting into Egypt, because Egypt sees them for what they are: nothing but radical malcontents who have caused trouble everywhere the’ve gone.

Knowing all of that, why would the #GlobalMarchToGaza think that the Egyptian government would go along with their plans? Continue reading