Sunday, October 8, 2023

It’s still early, but there are patterns to what’s happening in Israel - Andrea Widburg

 

​ by Andrea Widburg

The news is changing at warp speed, so it’s impossible to have a long view of what’s happening, but we can already understand some things.

 

The situation in Israel is changing with incredible rapidity, but it’s still possible to understand some of what’s going on. This post puts together a few ideas about what’s happening.

One. The date of this attack is symbolic to the Muslim attackers. On October 6, 1973—fifty years ago, almost to the day—the Yom Kippur War began when a coalition of Arab states attacked Israel. After 19 days of fierce fighting, Israel won a decisive victory. Muslims never forget military victories or losses and, as we’ve seen before, they like to time their attacks to coincide with those anniversaries. This attack is intended as revenge for and a re-do of that war.

Two. Unlike the Yom Kippur War, which started with an attack by state actors, this is terrorism funded by state actors (almost certainly Iran, of course). What this means is that the combatants aren’t making even a pretense of abiding by the Geneva Convention’s rules of warfare. Using military-grade weapons, this is an attack targeted almost entirely against civilians.

Moreover, as the Twitter links below show, this is a war being fought in a decidedly pre-modern way. One of the books I like to recommend is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Another book I like to recommend is Nicholas Wade’s politically incorrect A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (which a black friend recommended to me).

Image: A bloodied female hostage. X screen grab.

Taken together, the books spell out this message: Humans, like the apes from which they descended, are an inherently violent species. In Stone Age times, warfare was a perpetual activity, killing as many as 25% of any given tribe.

However, in certain cultures, the Rule of Law rose to replace violence as a solution to conflict. Might didn’t make right; justice made right. In these societies, whether through imprisonment or execution, violent actors were removed from the gene pool. The societies reserved violence only for sanctioned warfare and, since WWII, the Geneva Convention has tried to restrain even the horrors of war.

However, other societies have never abandoned their Stone Age approach to violence. They do not believe in a negotiated peace, the miracle of trade as a path to coexistence, or the inherent value of human life, especially the most vulnerable lives (i.e., children). Violent people are not removed from the gene pool, and their cultures accommodate, encourage, or even celebrate violence.

When these people go to war, they do not distinguish between trained and armed combatants, on the one hand, and civilians, on the other hand. They merely see good targets—and the best targets are the ones who cannot fight back and who can be brutalized as a warning to all who would dare to stand against the victorious tribe.

With that in mind, here is a series of tweets about the nature of the attack from Gaza:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can find hundreds of other tweets making these same points: Hamas is deliberately targeting the civilian population as cruelly as possible, and the ordinary citizens in Gaza are delighted.

Three. The Biden administration’s first instinct was to render Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, helpless in the face of a vast, sustained terrorist attack against its civilian population. Only when that idea went over like a lead balloon because most Americans dislike seeing Jews subject to attacks that perfectly mimic Nazi activity did the Biden administration change its message.

The following tweet, since deleted, was the State Department’s first instinct (keeping in mind that the State Department’s anti-Israel animus goes back decades but got beefed up under Obama and Biden):

 

The new message is that Israel does, in fact, have a right to defend her population:

That message, of course, is meaningless. What will matter going forward is what the Biden administration does, rather than what it says.

Four. The only way to fight this war is to fight to complete victory. As I’ve written annually at Passover for years, totalitarian states do not stop until the leadership is defeated. Hamas will happily see its people killed and, indeed, will view their deaths as a public relations triumph. This war must be fought to Hamas’s annihilation and, because Hamas uses women and children as shields, it will be a bloody, disheartening war.

However, when evil is abroad, the innocents will always suffer. The only question is how long you will allow that suffering to continue. Do you go for a quick victory or a drawn-out one that sees ever greater numbers of children killed on both sides of the battle lines?

Naturally, the Biden administration and the Europeans will urge Israel to abandon the war before achieving victory. Israel has yielded to these demands for decades. At some point, though, Israel must choose victory over an endless bloody war waged relentlessly against it by a fanatic, genocidal opponent.

Five. Hamas is an Iranian satellite. It doesn’t move without Iran, and the thousands of missiles and rockets it used against Israel almost certainly came from Iran. That means that, when Biden flooded Iran with funds, he enabled Iran, in turn, to enable Hamas. Iran is thrilled:

 

Six. The leftist media are disgusting.

It's also time for Israeli leftists to recognize that the enemy isn’t Netanyahu; it’s the Muslims and their Western allies who want them dead.

Seven. If the surrounding Arab states stay out of this, the war will end quickly, either with Israel finally defeating Hamas or, more likely, with Israel yielding to international demands that she walk away without achieving anything. However, if the surrounding Arab states, looking at the Biden White House’s barely-hidden animus toward Israel, decide that this is a good time to attack…well, Armageddon (i.e., Megiddo) isn’t located in Kansas or Ukraine. It’s in Israel.

 

Andrea Widburg

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/its_still_early_but_there_are_patterns_to_whats_happening_in_israel.html

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