This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Foreign Policy

  • Is Israel Finally Going to Face the Vaunted Hamas Military in Open Battle? [COB6]

    I realize fully that this could be the stupidest question ever but this is apparently the angle that the MSM is poised to take.

    The idea that Israeli ground troops are about to enter Gaza is nothing new and this report from the UK Times online starts fairly good:

    Israel is poised to launch a major ground offensive into Gaza tonight after allowing hundreds of foreigners living in the devastated territory to evacuate.

    After a week of air strikes that have killed at least 420 Palestinians and left scores of buildings in rubble, the Israeli army was set to fling hundreds of troops and tanks into a blitz to stamp out Hamas’s military wing, The Times understands.

    Despite the looming onslaught, more Hamas rockets – which have so far killed four Israelis – were fired into southern Israel today.

    Then the shark is jumped and rather quickly. The Times author decides to build the drama by quoting some savage terrorist who was giving a eulogy at the funeral of the last terrorist who was thoroughly ventilated by the Israelis.

    “I call on the resistance to continue pounding Jewish settlements and cities,” said Sheikh Abdelrahman al-Jamal at the funeral of a hardline Hamas political leader killed, together with his four wives and 11 children, in an Israeli air strike on his home.

    “We will remain on the path of jihad until the end of days.”

    But then the grand prize for idiot reporting comes later in the article:

    Hamas’s military wing has been waiting for a ground offensive to face the Israeli army in open combat, despite Israel’s vast military superiority.

    Does anybody with a spoonful of gray matter believe that the Hamas thugs have been anticipating, with gritted teeth and steeled resolve, an open combat with the Israeli Army? If you believe that, you are a retard.

    When is the last time an Israeli or US soldier was captured wearing women’s clothing surrounded by children? I can’t think of a single occurrence of such battlefield cowardice while I can think of many such occurances from the savage followers of the fake religion of the pedophile murderer.

    Hamas will not face Israel in open combat as every time since 1948 an Arab force has been foolish enough to do so wound up in a humilating defeat. Hamas is and has always been a cowardly terror organization. The overwhelming cultural weakness in manliness in the arab world is astounding. The fact that these seventh century idiots can not possibly stand up to any western power hasn’t hampered their ability to lure more and more intellectual midgets into their ranks. Sadly most of these folks will die for nothing. There are no 72 virgins morons; you are just dead.

    Having said all that, I must confess that I truly wish that they would organize and face Israel in “open combat” for this would result in the absolute destruction of Hamas and that would be fun to watch.

    My advice to the IDF: Don’t take prisoners, kill all of these savages. Trust me, after your election and our future CinC takes office the prisoners will all be released for nothing and they will come back and try to kill your children.

  • IDF’s announcement of ground operations in Gaza [Jonn]

    I found this on YouTube at the Israeli Defense Forces channel;

    AFP quotes the Hamas answer;

    Hamas vowed on Saturday to turn the Gaza Strip into a “cemetery” for the Israeli army, which launched a ground offensive in the enclave following a week of air and naval bombardment.

    So, it’s on.

    Here’s Uncle Jimbo’s official statement, since Obama doesn’t have one.

    Solomonia points us to Israellycool for live blogging the ground assault into Gaza.

  • Pallywood comes to DC [Jonn]

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    The anti-Hamas battle came to DC today. In front of the US State Department to be exact. On an email tip from William Teach at Pirate’s Cove and Right Wing News, Uncle Jimbo, TSO and I were there to bring it to you with all of it’s repetitious chanting blather.

    Today’s rally was organized by ANSWER’s National Coordinator guy Brian Becker;
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    If Becker was in on it, it was the biggest thing going on in the country hippie-wise. If you click on the link you can read what I wrote about him back in January after another anti-Israel protest at the Israeli Embassy. But, their budget must be dwindling because I saw him interviewing himself afterwards – he was the interviewer, interviewee and cameraman.
    This was his sidekick;
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    I know who she is, but I can’t remember her name now. (Editor’s Note: Raoul reminded me that she’s Mara Verheyden-Hilliard from the National Lawyers’ Guild – she’s got a page on Discover the Network) She was working the crowd up into a frenzy of paranoia about how we were ringed by police and people in the State Department were watching us with binoculars. She left out the tiny remote controlled mosquito things flying around the group.
    Here’s the video of her paranoid rantings;We were ringed by police, but we were on State Department property in downtown DC, not everyone there was protesting. I saw at least one panhandler fleecing the crowd.
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    And it was several hundred people;
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    At five o’clock some of them prayed, but certainly a small portion of them. I guess that’s as deep as most of them took those shouts of “God is great” I heard.
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    The most important thing is to listen to the rhetoric and lies in the videos. Notice there are very few Palestinians, very few Arabs speaking. The Arab Community, like IVAW, like every other group of “victims” are being used by the anti-war community to work us all up into a lather. But you can see that for yourself.

    If you look closely, you can see Uncle Jimbo trying to blend in with his “Don’t be a Dou-Che” T-shirt;
    And finally, while I was losing the light, they marched off some-damn-where with their mindless chants;

    If anyone in the DC area wants to counter-protest, they’ll be at the Israeli Embassy at 4PM Friday and then they claim they’re marching to the Egyptian Embassy – it’s about 1/3 of a mile. I’ll probably be there, too.
    Jimbo’s excellent camera work is here.

  • Israel rejects truce?

    This morning, we read from Reuters that “Israel rejects truce, presses on with Gaza strikes“. It hints that the Palestinians offered a truce after losing more than 300 dead, doesn’t it? Here’s a screen shot of the headline;

    But actually, we find out in the eighth paragraph, the truce appeal didn’t come from Hamas at all;

    The United Nations has called for an immediate truce. But Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said “there is no room for a ceasefire” with Hamas until the threat of rocket fire had been removed.

    “The Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel,” he told Israel Radio.

    Oh, so it was the United Nations that asked Israel to unilaterally stop shooting. I wonder if the UN asked Hamas to stop shooting since they’ve been shooting for the last six weeks of the “ceasefire”. In fact, most of the news sources make it sound as if israel is the aggressor here. The Washington Post paints them as lunatic war mongers;

    While previous Israeli assaults on Gaza have pinpointed crews of Hamas rocket launchers and stores of weapons, the attacks that began Saturday have had broader aims than any before. Israeli military officials said Monday that their target lists have expanded to include the vast support network that the Islamist movement relies on to stay in power in the strip. The choice of targets suggests that Israel intends to weaken all the various facets of Hamas rather than just its armed wing.

    The Jerusalem Post reports that the strikes over the weekend were ill-considered acts of near-terrorism;

    The announcement came as sources close to Hamas said that the movement’s armed wing had hardly been affected by the IDF operation that began on Saturday.

    The sources told The Jerusalem Post that many of the casualties in the first two days of the operation were “ordinary” policemen who had been recently recruited to various branches of the security forces.

    “These policemen were being enlisted to direct the traffic and fight crime,” the sources said. “These are not the militiamen who are responsible for the rocket attacks on Israel.”

    This explains why Hamas did not rush to evacuate the headquarters of the “civilian” police force in Gaza City before the IDF offensive.

    Reuters reports that a clerical group in Iran is enlisting volunteers to help Hamas in Gaza;

    A group of Iranian hardline clerics is signing up volunteers to fight in the Gaza Strip in response to Israel’s  airstrikes that have killed  at least 300 Palestinians, a news agency reported on Monday.

    “From Monday the Combatant Clergy Society has activated its website for a week to register volunteers to fight against the Zionist regime (Israel) in either the military, financial or propaganda fields,” the semi-official Fars news agency said.

    Israel patrols the coastal waters around Gaza and has declared areas around the enclave a “closed military zone”.

    The hardline Iranian group, which is headed by some leading clergy, says it has no affiliation with the government and was formed shortly after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

    I guess the Iranians are afraid of an Israeli air strike because their head cleric issued a fatwa ordering all Muslims to defend Hamas according to Ynet;

    Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious decree to Muslims around the world on Sunday, ordering them to defend Palestinians against Israel’s  attacks on Gaza, state television said.

    “All Palestinian combatants and all the Islamic world’s pious people are obliged to defend the defenseless women, children and people in Gaza in any way possible. Whoever is killed in this legitimate defense is considered a martyr,” state television quoted Khamenei as saying in a statement outlining the fatwa.

    Yeah, so Israel accepting a truce from the UN would do a lot of good, huh?

  • The Left loves them some Hamas

    The Israelis pounded Hamas pretty good this morning after taking six weeks of rocket attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Some reports of dead Palestinians are over 200 dead and 300 injured. And the Left is hatin’ on the Israelis. From Little Green Footballs, I read this from Daily Koz;

    We cannot seriously expect Hamas to end their barrage of rocket attacks on southern Israel until the Israelis make good faith efforts to recognize the legitimate claims of the Palestinian people.

    Keep in mind, this is after the Israelis endured six weeks of rocket attacks without returning fire until the ceasefire ended. Not to mention the other concessions Israel has made over the last several years. And even though readers of this blog knew that counter attacks were imminent, one writer at Firedoglake called it a surprise attack against Hamas;


    Another, calls it a “first strike”;

    Well, so much for peace. Looks like Siun was right, and the deliveries yesterday were just a pathetic public relations ploy. Israel managed to assassinate the police chief, governor, and security chief. A first strike bombing like this can do a fair bit of damage, as it did, but Hamas will now disperse its people and assets, and future bombings will be less effective.

    Of course, this second writer doesn’t mention the Hamas rocket falling short yesterday and killing two Gazan girls. But he does drag out a picture of a dead Palestinian baby from February for his piece;

    I’m sure this writer figures Hamas should be forgiven since they didn’t kill many Israelis;

    Hamas missile counterattacks killed, oh, one person.

    So because they’re bumbling buffoons, they should be allowed to continue firing their rockets into Israel with no response because they don’t usually hit much anyway. Besides, who knows, practice might improve their aim. Oh, and Fatah are apparently the Israelis’ lap dog which might come as a surprise to both parties;

    Israel keeps thinking it’s going to get a cheap peace or that its problems with the Palestinians can be solved with violence. Short of full-scale ethnic cleansing they can’t. Nor can they make peace with their lapdogs in the Fatah, the only people who might be able to enforce a peace are Hamas. You have to make peace with your enemies and it has to be those enemies who are able to enforce peace. Only Hamas can do that. Fatah can’t and Israel can’t, and they can’t bomb or assassinate Hamas into peace either.

    So the Left sees Hamas as the key to peace – the same Hamas that slaughtered hundreds of Fatah Palestinians a while back. The same Hamas that has fire fights with the Egyptian Army. Others on the Left are so tight with the language usage that they attack the Huffington Post for “taking cues from Fox News” because a writer at HuffPo called the strikes “retaliatory”.

    It looks like the American Left is being as obstinate as Hamas and hezbollah. Of course, it’s easy for them to be obstinate as long as the whole rest of the world pays the real price and finally comes up with a solution that they can gripe about.

  • Palestinians kill 2 girls in Gaza

    The actual Associated Press story is entitled “Palestinian rocket misfires, kills 2 girls in Gaza” but the rocket didn’t actually misfire, it was misdirected.

    First of all understand that weeks before the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire ended, the Palestinians were firing rockets at Israel and the AP along with every other news service were wringing their hands over Israel’s reaction. Israel hasn’t done anything up to this point.

    Then, while still firing missiles, some clumsy doofuses in Gaza fired a homemade rocket which fell short.

    A crude rocket fired by Palestinian militants fell short of its target in Israel on Friday, striking a house in the northern Gaza Strip and killing two schoolgirls.

    So we should probably blame the Palestinians, right? Nope. AP says it’s Israel’s fault;

    The attack came as Israel sent mixed signals over its plans to respond to continuing Palestinian rocket fire. Israeli defense officials say politicians have approved a large-scale incursion into the territory once rainy conditions clear.

    Oddly enough, no one has claimed responsibility for the misdirected rocket;

    None of Gaza’s militant factions claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on the house in Beit Lahiya.

    You can read the entire story and not find a reference to the fact that Hamas fired missiles into Israel weeks before the ceasefire ended last week, only with a nebulous reference to the ceasefire collapsing;

    The girls were the first Palestinian civilians inadvertently killed by militants since their truce with Israel began collapsing six weeks ago.

    Now, if these girls had been killed by Israeli forces, their bodies would have photographed and splashed across the internet as evidence of the cruelty of Israel’s “occupation” of Palestine. There would have been shots of Palestinians tossing rocks and bottles at checkpoint guards and the volume of rockets would have increased and the AP would have made excuses for their fury. But, in this case;

    But, as with similar cases involving unintended civilian casualties in the past, there were no immediate signs of backlash against the militants after the girls’ death.

    And there won’t be any backlash, because Hamas is much more brutal in quashing dissent than the Israelis.

    Here’s a screen shot in case the story disappears later;

    There’s more on the ceasefire’s collapse by Lisa Goldman at Pajamas Media.

  • Generals plot against Obama [Jonn]

    There’s an article floating around the Left side of the web written by a goofball named Gareth Porter in which he claims that the generals are plotting against Obama’s (and Bush’s, by the way) to withdraw combat troops from the cities and towns of Iraq to isolated posts in the countryside.I found a linkable copy of the story in the Asia Times.

    Apparently the plot is to redesignate combat forces as non-combat forces to get around the wording of the status of forces agreement between the US and Iraq.

    By redesignating tens of thousands of combat troops as support troops, those officials apparently hope to make it difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to insist on getting all combat troops of the country by mid-2010.

    General David Petraeus, now commander of CENTCOM, and General Ray Odierno, the top US commander in Iraq, who opposed Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan during the election campaign, have drawn up their own alternative plan rejecting that timeline, as the New York Times reported on Thursday. That plan was communicated to Obama in general terms by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen when he met with his national security team in Chicago on December 15, according to the Times.

    First of all Professor Porter, the goal is to remove the troops by the end of 2011, not the middle of 2010. Please pay attention. Secondly, the generals are subordinates of the President, they are required by law to obey his orders, not find a way around his orders. And believe me, if the job is done, the generals want to get out of Iraq as badly as we want them out. Why would they want to sit around on their dead asses directing public works projects when they can be somewhere else killing jihadists? We are not an Army that likes occupation duties.

    Porter writes that Petreaus and Odierno opposed Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan without mentioning that Obama first started that blather 21 months before the election. In the nearly two years of the Obama campaign, Patreaus’ and Odierno’s efforts changed the events on the ground for a 16-month withdrawal schedule to be possible. Time marches on, Gareth, situations change and they don’t remain static.

    So what’s Porter’s evidence that the Bushites are plotting to keep combat troops in cities and town of Iraq?

    The determination of the military leadership to ignore the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and to pressure Obama on his withdrawal policy was clear from remarks made by Mullen in a news conference on November 17 – after US ambassador Ryan Crocker had signed the agreement in Baghdad.

    Mullen declared he considered it “important” that withdrawal of US forces from Iraq “be conditions-based”.

    Gasp! Condition-based!? Ya mean, if there’s a war going on, we want to be part of it? Of course we do, ya dumbass. This isn’t a withdrawal for the sake of withdrawing. This isn’t an evacuation under fire, it’s not a retreat. I know you idiots on the Left aren’t used to it, but this is what victory looks like, Gareth, m’boy.

  • Love is only a click to a phony email address away![TSO]

    You guys friggin slay me.  Seriously.  Girls do not exist who like to frolic naked, make sandwiches and play tonsil hockey with other girls, and who also love lonely men dwelling under the dim lights of their basement.  Which was quite unfortunate for me until I hit jackpot with my girl who likes nerds.  (Not the candy, she’s young, but not quite that young.)

    Nonetheless, we have identified the young lady from Russia.  Actually, we identified her twice, but sources inside the media tell us that she is Anna Federova.  Other sources have suggested it is Katerina Azrekova.  All I know is that I think I can speak for all men here when I sincerely hope these women someday appear in Maxim Magazine saying Do Svidaniya to their clothing.  Unless it is like wolf or bear pelts or something which is totally hot.  (Isn’t Saran Wrap Russian?)

    Welcome Anna.  I agree with the commenter at Michelle Malkin who suggested that you would be the perfect replacement for Keith Olbermann.  Hell, even O’Reilly would switch channels during his own show.

    Anna Fedorova is an Entertainment Presenter

    Anna covers all aspects of the entertainment world, although personally she has a special interest in installations, graffiti, flash animation and the fashion world. She loves water sports, which she swaps for snowboarding in winter.

    Anna, who spent five years of her life in Australia, graduated from the International University of Moscow where she majored in Linguistics and International Communications. But later her deep and long-lasting interest in the Arts brought her to journalism.

    She speaks English, French and Italian.

    If I were a single man (Hi honey!), I would love to teach her to also speak Braille, but of course I am not, so…

    You must go look at the pictures brought to you by Naira Oganesyan who may be the best photographer in the world.

    I believe Jayne Cobb said it best in the TV show Firefly:  I’ll be in my bunk.

    BTW- What is the most click through used most here the past couple of days you ask?  (Nah, you don’t really need to ask)