We do not know the truth about the Hamas attack

It should have been obvious that Hamas planned to attack Israel. 

There was a lot of evidence. 

But this was not an Israeli false flag operation. 

Netanyahu did not want the Hamas attack to happen. 

It destroys his career. 

He is under attack even from his own cabinet. Had he known and permitted the Hamas attack a whistleblower would have come forward.

Had Netanyahu's security services facilitated the Hamas attack he would find out and tell the world, to salvage his career. 

No Israeli or Arab commentator has said this was a false flag operation. 

Of course it was not.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz yesterday confirmed 1,087 dead, as opposed to 1400  claimed by the government. This number may be the total or may rise: it may be that bodies were so damaged that they cannot be identified.

We know, according to many sources, including Max Blumenthal in Grayzone, that many people killed were killed by Israeli 'friendly fire', perhaps even half the dead or more. 

Many, perhaps half according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, were soldiers or police officers.

Mr Blumenthal says: 'Yasmin Porat, an attendee of the Nova music festival who fled into Kibbutz Be’eri, told Israeli Radio that when Israeli special forces arrived during a hostage standoff, “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages because there was very, very heavy crossfire.”

He argues that the pictures of charred corpses distributed by the Israeli government were almost certainly the result of “friendly fire”.

This incompetence is of a piece with the Israeli failure to know the attack was coming or to react swiftly.

Some people held by Hamas say they were treated respectfully. 

The numbers of dead Israeli women and children are already a small fraction of the women and children killed by the Israelis. 

This is not a simple, Manichean battle between good and evil, as the mainstream English language press tell us. Both sides murder.

Ulrich Speck, a German foreign policy journalist, tweeted that Al Jazeera should be banned in the EU. When I said it was better than pro-American propaganda on CNN he blocked me.

Journalists should favour free speech in my opinion.

Quotations

"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization." Georges Clemenceau

Katie Herzog

@kittypurrzog

·

Oct 17

If anti-immigration types want to gain leftist support they should start calling migrants “settlers”

America is the big danger to world peace, obviously

The biggest danger to the world is certainly not Russia or even China but American hawks who want war with the world. 

China and Iran cannot let Russia be defeated. They are next on the neocons' menu and know it.

Andrew Michta is one of the worst warmongers. How can people as unimpressive as him be academics?

Fiona Hill is right to want an opening to China, though I lost my respect for her after she told a congressional committee that the word globalist was an antisemitic trope.

Quotations from Napoleon Bonaparte

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.


In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man. There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity.

In a few years, the Muslims conquered half of the world. They plucked more souls from false gods, knocked down more idols, razed more pagan temples in fifteen years than the followers of Moses and Jesus did in fifteen centuries. Mahomet was a great man. He would indeed have been a god, if the revolution that he had performed had not been prepared by the circumstances.

Quotations

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

George Santayana. Well known but very topical, so worth repeating. General Douglas MacArthur misattributed it to Plato.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

Golda Meir

I came across these today

Decline of the West

“The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilizations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples .... The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought .... The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.” Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931)

The sorely missed Pope Benedict XVI talks in English here about the future of Christianity (as small communities, a bit like Rod Dreher's 'Benedict Option' though he named that after St Benedict).

Homer is original this morning and nothing is as old as today's newspaper

'Homer is original this morning, and nothing is perhaps so old as today's newspaper.' (Charles Péguy)

Nothing is so old as the merciless massacre of thousands of men, women and children currently taking place in Gaza. The British newspapers spare us this by ignoring the Arab deaths and instead tell us about the survivors of the Hamas attack in Israel. The Romanian press is better.

Nothing is more Homeric than the behaviour of Hamas and the IDF. In Book 4 of the Iliad Agamemnon says of the Trojans, 

Sunrise makes the windows of Ceausescu's House of the People pink

'What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!' (Logan Pearsall Smith)

Anca Petrescu, who died in 2013 at the age of 64, was appointed the very young chief architect of Bucharest's Palace of the Parliament (always known here by its Communist name "House of the People") in 1978. It spans 3.77 million square feet and is the biggest building in the world measured by floor space after the Pentagon.

Miss Petrescu worked at the still-unfinished palace until the year she died. She said in an interview in 2012 that Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Versailles were her inspirations for the building, and not North Korean architecture. 

It reminds me slightly of a palace in a painting by Claude Lorrain.

Miss Petrescu said in the interview that Ceausescu, were he alive to see what had become of the palace, "would make the sign of the cross", meaning that he would have been horrified. A charming thought - a communist making the sign of the cross.

9,000 homes were demolished, many churches were razed, 15 were moved on wheels and two mountains of marble were hacked down to build it.

Ceausescu never addressed the crowd from the huge balcony in the front of the building. Only two men did: Ion Iliescu who had him shot and Michael Jackson.

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Translations are like mistresses: the faithful ones are apt to be ugly and the beautiful ones false

Robert Adams: "Translations are like mistresses: the faithful ones are apt to be ugly and the beautiful ones false."

C.S. Lewis: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

Marcel Proust: "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Eyeless in Gaza - I posted this in 2018

 

I was originally angry with the Israeli army for killing fifty civilians trying to storm the border with the Gaza Strip, but reading about it - in particular what was written by Colonel Kemp, a retired British officer, in the Telegraph - it seems the Israelis did what they could to avoid fatalities and are not to blame for the civilian deaths. 

The army did not shoot indiscriminately and it has now been revealed by the Palestinians themselves that 50 of the 62 dead were Hamas members.

Hamas wanted to breach the wall and to flatten the fence at numerous points to allow hundreds or even thousands of Gazans to enter Israeli towns, overwhelming the Israeli security forces ability to protect the townspeople from the infiltrators, thus requiring the Israeli security forces to use lethal force against all those who infiltrated.

Similar demonstrations have taken place each week since March. The reason that this demonstration was a very big one was that it marked the 70th anniversary of the creation of Israel, rather than the Americans moving their embassy to Jerusalem, but it was moved a day to take advantage of the publicity around the opening of the embassy. 

Behind the women and children who died were, in some cases, armed men intent on killing Israelis. So the Israelis claim, at least. Israeli soldiers would rather kill 100 of the other side's people than have one Israeli soldier killed, which I think is reasonable.

I am reminded of Frauke Petry, the AfD leader in Germany, who got into trouble for saying in the last resort border guards have to shoot. She, of course, was right.

Pope Pius IX said "If a Future Pope Teaches Anything Contrary to the Catholic Faith, Do Not Follow Him!”

“Pope Francis’ pontificate is like a standard lifted up before Catholic integralists and those who equate material continuity and tradition: Catholic doctrine does not just develop. Sometimes it really changes: for example on death penalty, war." Professor Massimo Faggioli, joint editor of the Oxford Handbook of Vatican II

"The tradition of the church is always in movement." Pope Francis

“Rigidity [in the church] is a sin against the patience of God.” Pope Francis

“Let nothing new be introduced, but only what has been handed down.” Pope Benedict XV

“Nothing new is allowed, for nothing can be added to the old. Look for the faith of the elders, and do not let our faith be disturbed by a mixture of new doctrines.“ Pope St. Sixtus III

Lord Sumption, retired Supreme court judge and mediaeval historian, in Unherd today

'War is crucial. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the two principal collective activities of mankind were religion and war. The purpose of the state was to serve the second of those things, but usually the first as well. War is at the heart of the experience of societies. It is what created the state, in that war made it necessary for the state to find a way of organising the resources of a country.' 

'Medieval societies had a completely different attitude towards conflict. We regard war today as an unwanted catastrophe that periodically breaks in on us against our wishes. They regarded war as the norm, the normal way of settling international disputes, and quite a few internal disputes.'

'In the 14th century, the English adopted what I can only describe as terrorist tactics to try and batter the French government into submitting to their demands. They conducted huge raids in which they indiscriminately killed large numbers of people and burned whole villages. This is what we would call terrorism. It really wasn’t until the 18th century that war became a battle between organised armed forces. We’re now reverting to an earlier pattern in which at least one side in any war is a disorganised group of people. Hamas is a good example. They’re semi-organised, and their object is indiscriminate violence because they do not have the resources to confront whoever their enemy is with the same sort of weapons. If you are a semi-state, and the underdog, this is how you wage war. England was 100% of a state in the 14th century, and they still waged war that way.'

The interview is here.

'The righteous bloodlust of the sensible centrists has been awoken once again'

It is not true that what became Palestine, then Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, has always been at war. For centuries it was a pretty quiet backwater. 

Nor is it true that Jews and Muslims have always fought. Far from it, they mostly cooperated reasonably well, often happily, until 1917.

An American Episcopalian priest with whom I stayed in Nazareth told me that the Israeli police kept out of crimes committed by Muslims against Muslims. 

'It's never a good idea if outsiders get involved in Muslim affairs. For example, if a Muslim murders another Muslim the police leave it to Muslims to sort out.' 

I protested, but he was right.

This, he said, applies to Middle Eastern affairs generally. We should not, for example, have invaded Iraq.

I strongly agreed with him on that. 

It seems to me today that all the problems in the Middle East are caused by British and, later on, American interference, from 1917 to their recent interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria. 

52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered

The Vatican website says that "according to the report “Martyred Christians in Nigeria” issued by Intersociety, over the past 14 years at least 52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered at the hands of Islamist militants." British, European and American public opinion is indiferent. Public opinion is mainstream media opinion to a large extent.

Journalist Alessandra Bocchi is worth following on Twitter

German Chancellor forced to lie on the ground at Tel Aviv airport

 

The Chancellor and other passengers had taken their seats on the plane when the alarm suddenly sounded. Everyone was instructed to disembark, crawl across the ground and lie there because of rockets shot towards the airport.

Francis Stuart

"We are Catholics, but of the School of Pope Julius the Second and of the Medician Popes, who ordered Michaelangelo and Raphael to paint upon the walls of the Vatican, and upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the doctrine of the Platonic Academy of Florence, the reconciliation of Galilee and Parnassus. We proclaim Michaelangelo the most orthodox of men, because he set upon the tomb of the Medici “Dawn” and “night”, vast forms shadowing the strength of antedeluvian Patriarchs and the lust of the goat, the whole handiwork of God, even the abounding horn. We proclaim the we can forgive the sinner, but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers and Bishops of all denominations. “The Holy Spirit is an intellectual fountain”, and did the Bishops believe that Holy Spirit would show itself in decoration and architecture, in daily manners and written style? What devout man can read the Pastorals of our Hierarchy without horror at a style rancid, coarse and vague, like that of the daily papers? We  condemn the art and literature of modern Europe. No man can create, as did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe with all his blood and nerve, that man’s soul is immortal, for the evidence lies plain to all men that where that belief has declined, men have turned from creation to photography." Signed H Stuart and Cecil Salkend in the second and final issue of the modernist journal To-morrow in August 1924, but attributed variously to W.B. Yeats, Liam O'Flaherty and Francis Stuart. 

Auden: "Those to whom evil is done do evil in return"

Patrick Cockburn, one of the best journalists when it comes to the Middle East, quotes W.H. Auden.

"I and the public know


What all schoolchildren learn:


Those to whom evil is done


Do evil in return".

I was revolted by the Hamas attack but am horrified by the coming massacres in Gaza. The 1200 Israeli dead will be a tiny number compared to the numbers of Arab civilians who will die.

Afterwards the world will not look well on Israel.

Half of the people in Gaza are children, locked in an open-air prison. You can recognise that the actions of Hamas are evil while at the same time pointing out the wrong done by Israel.

I remember the Comte de Tilly, in his wonderful memoirs, said that to start ones life by being raped was a very poor school for virtue. 

So is being bombed in an open air prison. The harm rape does goes on generation after generation, as do the horrors in Palestine.

Former Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych: Now we are at an impasse. The Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them.

Mr Arestovych on Twitter yesterday said that rather than get sucked into fighting for Bakhmut the Ukrainian army should have concentrated on breaking through the southern frontlines and preparing its own defences.

 Translation: Google Translate.

Now we are at an impasse. The Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them. For a decisive shift in the war, either side needs to be able to dramatically increase resources, but there is no such possibility. What's the solution? The Russian leadership is radically increasing its military budget, intensifying production, trying to secure supplies from North Korea/China, improving smuggling schemes and building a “Global South versus Global West” policy. Its task is to hold out until the US presidential elections (November 2024), and then negotiate to his advantage. Our leadership is suppressing business, civil liberties and political competitors, quarrelling with neighbours and key partners, encouraging corruption. It is also trying to establish production, resolve something with military and financial assistance, form international coalitions and support, but Russia, for all its shortcomings, has real sovereignty, and we do not. Russia makes cannibal decisions, but adequate to the current situation, and our leadership is corrupt and inadequate - as our Aspen sponsors and partners constantly point out. This policy leads us to a dead end. Our leadership, in my assessment, has exhausted the limits of its competence a long time ago. We can no longer expect them to make adequate decisions that suit the situation. They don’t even want to tell the people the truth - there will be no return to the borders of 1991, and there will be no Crimea in the near future, but there will be defence, blood, sweat, tears. And instead of making defense easier, sweat, blood and tears expanding civil liberties, freeing up the economy and concentrating resources on defence, there is a tightening of screws, rubbish points and persecution of those who tell people the truth.