Hunter Biden’s opening statement to investigators collides with witness testimony, email evidence - Steven Richards

 

by Steven Richards

Hunter Biden delivered his closed door testimony to the Oversight Committee on Wednesday, conflicting with statements from other sworn witnesses and evidence accepted by the FBI as genuine from his own emails.

 

In his opening statement to the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Hunter Biden told investigators that he did not involve his father in his business deals.

Yet, his assertion directly conflicts with publicly available evidence, Hunter Biden’s own statements, and documentation and witness testimony secured by the committee.

"I am here today to provide the Committees with the one uncontestable fact that should end the false premise of this inquiry: I did not involve my father in my business. Not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist. Never," he said in his opening statement obtained by Punchbowl News.

Contrary to that claim, here are some of the documented instances where Hunter Biden involved his father, Joe Biden, in his business deals with foreign partners:

Cafe Milano Meetings

In 2014, Hunter Biden hosted a dinner meeting at Cafe Milano in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Biden’s emails show that he invited two oligarchs with whom he was in business: widow of the former Moscow mayor Yelena Baturina and Kazakhstani businessman Kenes Rakishev.

Devon Archer confirmed in his testimony with the Oversight Committee both Baturina and Rakishev were in attendance. Another Kazakhstani oligarch, the former Prime Minister Karim Massimov also reportedly attended. He also told investigators that then-Vice President Biden showed up at the meeting and interacted with the assembled partners.

In 2015, Hunter Biden hosted a similar gathering at the same upscale restaurant. He invited Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi, the point man between the Ukrainian gas company and the Biden associates. Emails and Archer’s testimony confirm Pozharksyi was present.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote Biden in an email following the dinner meeting. “It's realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

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Trip to Beijing aboard Air Force Two

In December 2013, Hunter Biden flew to Beijing aboard Air Force Two with his father during an official government trip. During the trip to China, Hunter Biden arranged a meeting between Joe Biden and Jonathan Li in the lobby of the hotel where they were staying.

Jonathan Li is a Chinese businessman who joined with Hunter Biden and his associates in forming BHR Partners, a private equity firm that was backed by several Chinese state owned enterprises, including the Bank of China.

“How do I go to Beijing, halfway around the world, and not see them for a cup of coffee?” Biden told The New Yorker magazine.

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Naval Observatory Meeting

In testimony to the impeachment inquiry, Devon Archer told investigators that Hunter Biden arranged a meeting for a foreign client with his father at the official vice presidential residence, the Naval Observatory, Just the News previously reported.

In 2015, Hunter Biden brought Mark Holtzman – then the top official at Kazakhstan’s largest bank – and former Kazakhstani Prime Minister Karim Massimov, who had previously attended one of the Cafe Milano dinners alongside Rakishev, to the residence.

Archer said the meeting was to discuss Massimov’s candidacy to be the United Nations Secretary General. Hunter Biden and Archer were engaged in trying to secure business for Burisma in Kazakhstan at the time, hence the favor for such a prominent banker and the politically-connected oligarch, Archer said.

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CEFC China Energy meeting in D.C.

According to recent testimony by Hunter Biden business partner Rob Walker, in early 2017, Hunter Biden and his business associates met with a CEFC delegation – including its Chairman Ye Jianming – at a lunch in Washington, D.C., which Joe Biden attended. A private citizen at the time, Biden joined his son and the delegation of CEFC officials at the lunch and even spoke to the assembled group.

Shortly after that lunch where Ye Jianming met the former vice president, a CEFC affiliate wired $3 million to Walker’s company, Robinson Walker LLC, the first transfer in the deal between the Chinese energy company and Hunter Biden’s group, Walker told the Oversight Committee.

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Burisma board meeting in Dubai

In December 2015, Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi and owner Mykola Zlochevsky requested Hunter Biden call his father during a board meeting in Dubai to “help them with some of that pressure” the Ukrainian government was putting on the company with its investigations by Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, Archer testified. Archer said that the call took place and that Pozharskyi later told him Hunter Biden had called his father.

The phone call took place days before then-Vice President Biden visited Ukraine and told President Petro Poroshenko that Shokin, the prosecutor who was putting “pressure” on Burisma, was so corrupt that he had to be fired before Ukraine could receive a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee that it needed.

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Mexican partners visit the White House

Miguel Alemán Velasco and son Miguel Alemán Magnani Jr. – descendants of a former Mexican president – both visited the White House in February 2014, according to White House visitor logs released by the Obama administration and news reports, Just the News previously reported.

Hunter Biden worked closely with the Alemán family at that time until 2016, attempting to drum up business ventures in Mexico that would include roles for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holding Ltd., on whose board he served. 

Joe Biden was captured on camera giving them a tour of the White House Brady Press Briefing room, shown in photographs published by The Daily Mail. The photo memorialized the meeting with the Alemáns, Hunter Biden, the vice president and Jeff Cooper, a friend of Hunter Biden who was involved in the proposed business deals in Mexico.

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In his deposition on Wednesday, Hunter Biden pushed back on this evidence gathered by the impeachment inquiry from witness testimony and other documentation, accusing some witnesses of lying and suggesting evidence from emails may have been altered.

Hunter Biden reportedly told investigators “You have built your entire partisan house of cards on lies told by the likes of Gal Luft, Tony Bobulinski, Alexander Smirnov, and Jason Galanis. Luft, who is a fugitive, has been indicted for his lies and other crimes; Smirnov, who has made you dupes in carrying out a Russian disinformation campaign waged against my father, has been indicted for his lies; Bobulinski, who has been exposed for the many false statements he has made, and Galanis, who is serving 14 years in prison for fraud.”

“Rather than follow the facts as they have been laid out before you in bank records, financial statements, correspondence, and other witness testimony, you continue your frantic search to prove the lies you, and those you rely on, keep peddling. Yes, they are lies,” he protested.

After the first son’s testimony, Chairman of the Oversight Committee James Comer said the inquiry would continue, with the next step being a public hearing to address “contradictory” statements from the witness.

“I think this was a great deposition for us. It proved several bits of our evidence that we've been conducting throughout this investigation,” Comer told reporters, according to an Oversight Committee post on X.

“But there were also some contradictory statements that I think need further review,” he added. Comer believes that a public hearing is necessary to address the discrepancies between Hunter Biden’s statements and testimony from other impeachment witnesses, including former business partners.

“So, I think that the public hearing hopefully will clear up some discrepancies between some of the statements that were made between some of the associates and what we heard today,” Comer said.

Steven Richards

Source: https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/hunter-bidens-opening-statement-investigators-contradicts-witness

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The General Who Believes in Winning Wars - Armin Rosen

 

by Armin Rosen

 

Hat tip: Dr. Jean-Charles Bensoussan 

For the past two decades, Gershon Hacohen has been a lonely dissenter in the highest ranks of the IDF. Unfortunately, he was proven right.

 

Gershon Hacohen supervises a parachuting drill, 2012

IDF via Flickr

This article is part of Hamas’ War on Israel.

See the full collection →︎

Four-and-half months after Hamas commandos overran the police station in the center of Sderot, all that remains is a dusty lot of twisted rebar. Although the city’s police killed over two dozen terrorists before the IDF arrived late in the morning of Oct. 7, it took over a dozen tank shells to bring down the hijacked station, where outnumbered officers had fought Hamas’ Nukhba forces to a bloody impasse. An Israeli tank had never fired on an Israeli building on Israeli territory in combat before.

A freshly painted mural next to the former site of the demolished station memorializes this unprecedented breach in the national reality of the Jewish state: A tank is shown bombarding the building against eerily colorful skies. The numinous image of an open Torah scroll hovers above the scene, recalling the desecrated happiness of the holiday on which the fighting took place. On the day I visited, earlier this month, an American family was on a guided tour, feet away from a group of several dozen uniformed policemen who were also on some kind of organized visit to their force’s newest national shrine. On Feb. 11, the Times of Israel reported that rubble from the station, which was bulldozed the morning of Oct. 8, had been dumped in a nature preserve north of the city.

Is the Sderot battle something to be canonized or buried? It isn’t surprising that the answers, as expressed in the present, are so bizarrely incoherent. One of the major features of the war that began on Oct. 7 is its persisting lack of clarity. Israel might be on the verge of defeating Hamas in Gaza—or it could be weeks away from the steep strategic setback of American recognition of a Palestinian state. While the demobilization of reservists and a newly announced government timeline for the repopulation of the Gaza border region has partly relieved the feeling of an active emergency, an even worse crisis looms in the form of a potential war with Hezbollah, a threat that has so far prevented 60,000 displaced Israelis from returning to their homes in the north.

Months after Hamas’ destruction of a 30-year-old illusion of a settled national existence and the discrediting of most of those responsible for theorizing and implementing it, there is societywide consensus on the need to defeat Hamas and a fog over nearly everything else. There are relatively few senior Israelis left who have proved themselves qualified to see through the morass. Of those few remaining former generals, government ministers, and agency heads still worth listening to, almost none held as senior a position in the security apparatus as Maj. Gen. (Res.) Gershon Hacohen.

In 2000, when Hacohen was the head of the IDF general staff’s training and doctrine division, he was asked to produce a paper about how Israel could defend itself without control of the Jordan Valley, which was to be ceded to a future Palestinian state under peace plans that Prime Minister Ehud Barak, nearly the entire top leadership of the IDF, and the next decade’s worth of Israeli leaders did not think were irresponsible. “My paper was very short: It is like asking an F-15 pilot to just rise up without an engine,” he recalled. “No way.”

In the years before his retirement from active duty in the mid-2000s, Hacohen, who was also the commander of Israel’s national defense college, emerged as one of the IDF’s strongest and highest-ranked internal dissenters. Hacohen, now 69, claimed to me that he was the only active-duty general to accurately warn about the likely security consequences of the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, an operation he was then put in charge of.

In a war game in April of 2005, four months before the withdrawal, the IDF general staff simulated a scenario in which terrorists in the coastal strip launched rockets at Ashdod, Sderot, and Ashkelon. Hacohen’s advice in the midst of the exercise was to tell Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that “we don’t have a full way to retaliate because we will not be allowed to cross the border every week, we will not be allowed to launch artillery at a refugee camp of 50,000 residents, we will kill uninvolved people … therefore tell him what will happen will be a disaster, and we will not have a good way for retaliation.” After giving this assessment, Hacohen said he “was warned by chief of staff,” Moshe Ya’alon, “that I was speaking politically. I told him: ‘I am the only one here speaking professionally.’”

Hacohen was given a monthlong time frame for the removal of Gaza’s 9,000 remaining Israeli civilians, a job he finished in only two weeks. “Why did I succeed?” he asked. “Because I convinced the settler leaders to join me, to understand that they must struggle, but not to the fatal end, because in that way they will lose that legitimation they needed for the main battle about Judea and Samaria.” No soldiers died implementing the withdrawal, the settlement movement retained its credibility in Israeli society and dramatically grew in power, and there were no subsequent unilateral Israeli pullouts from the West Bank.

Hacohen is active in the Bitchonistim, an organization of over 20,000 former security and defense officials who are opposed to any overly risky concessions to Israel’s enemies, most notably the Palestinians. In 2022, the organization presented a detailed security assessment in which it argued for the strategic necessity of forcibly disarming the Gaza Strip. Yoav Gallant, the current minister of defense, attended the launch event for the paper—retired Gen. Amir Avivi, the Bitchonistim’s founder, worked closely with both Gallant and Hacohen when he was in the army. Members of the Bitchonistim are perceived, fairly or unfairly, as having access to the current government, which has informally drawn on their advice over the course of the war.

Israel is a country where ex-generals, including the quietly influential ones, have no particular aura to them—within the martial and Jewish-flavored egalitarianism of Israeli society, a former member of the general staff could be mistaken for a professor or a farmer or a bus driver. Hacohen is different even from the typical run of Israeli former officials. He speaks in a hypnotically slow, even, and high-pitched English, and the spindly retired officer often looks and sounds like a poet or a desert hermit who only happened to have commanded men into battle for over 40 years. I met him late on a Thursday night in Tel Aviv in mid-February, at a mostly deserted cafe near the Defense Ministry headquarters. A few hours earlier, protesters had blocked traffic in front of the ministry, demanding new elections and an immediate hostage release deal, even though there is no realistic one on offer. The demonstration was the city’s one glaring pocket of abnormality: Dizengoff was packed even beyond pre-conflict levels; my hotel in Ramat Gan was at capacity with Israelis heading to a concert at nearby Menora Mivtachim Arena.

“Tel Aviv was empty like a dead city at the beginning of the war. It took time to resurrect it. What you can see now is a miracle,” Hacohen said. Was the miracle the performance of the IDF in Gaza? I ventured, given that the army was slowly progressing toward full control of the territory and rocket fire from the Strip hadn’t threatened the city in weeks. “No,” he replied, “it is because of the power of life.”

The endurance of even a superficially normal existence in wartime Tel Aviv was a fragile miracle in the former military man’s view, and not only because of the long-range missiles that Hezbollah has aimed at the city. “The idea of President Biden to build a Palestinian state is a threat much more serious to the existence of Israel than the nuclear bomb in Iran—definitely,” he said. “And if Israel will not struggle against this idea, we are just opening the door for the fatal end of Israel.”

Hacohen’s injunctions might sound unduly alarmist. Then again, few military professionals foresaw the current nightmare on the eve of the Gaza pullout, and many serious Israeli security types thought that Operation Guardian of the Walls was a game-changing victory just a couple of years ago, showcasing Israel’s technological superiority and ability to dictate to its enemies. “The fact that Tel Aviv is still full with life is due to the fact that we are controlling Judea and Samaria,” Hacohen said. The loss of that control would bring Israel to a dire existential crux.

Hacohen then rapidly moved on to the bigger question of why the country needs to exist at all. Security is a necessary condition of life anywhere, he said, but that was not the point of Jews being sovereign in the land of Israel. “If the American administration thinks that we are here just for security, as they are always telling us, I’m telling them, always, that our story is not security. If all our anxieties are just security, why not look to find that in New Jersey? What’s bad there? Why struggle here for more than 100 years, only for security that’s still not achieved? Security is only the means for another goal. The main goal is redemption … Tel Aviv without being a gateway to Jerusalem is nothing beyond Brooklyn on the Mediterranean.”

“I spoke like that always while in the army,” Hacohen said. The religious register was once a commonplace of the worldview and vocabulary of Israeli military figures who are now considered icons of the country’s snuffed-out era of hopeful secular liberalism: “This was the way in which Moshe Dayan spoke. Yitzhak Rabin spoke like that,” Hacohen said. Over time, that mutually reinforcing sense of danger and purpose grew dimmer in Israel, even though the basic realities of the country hadn’t really changed. In Hacohen’s view, the country’s elite lost sight of continuities in the Israeli condition, the nature of war, and the connection between war and national survival, a mass delusion that Hamas shattered in horrifying fashion.

Hacohen began his career in the army in the early 1970s and was one of the soldiers who crossed the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. One day in 1977, as a company commander along the front line in the Golan Heights, he loaded a dozen tanks onto flatbed trucks to send them to a nearby live-fire exercise. Gen. Rafael Eitan, soon to become IDF chief of staff, was on hand and suddenly ordered a different kind of drill: Hacohen was to imagine the Syrians were attacking across the line of control, right that very second, meaning he had to get the tanks off the trailers as fast as humanly possible. “He did that to emphasize that the enemy is coming by surprise: Everything could happen at the very definite wrong moment, unexpectedly,” Hacohen said.

“The basic principle of defense is that you are not dependent in the field upon an alert,” he continued. “It is a part of the military profession as commander to keep the ritual of readiness.”

The ritual lapsed, along with the culture and the mindset that allowed it to exist in the first place. Even now, months after Oct. 7, it is possible to trick yourself into thinking that Eitan’s snap exam in the Golan belonged to a different era in warfare. It is true enough that the Syrian army of the late 1970s, whatever its myriad faults, was at least a uniformed regular military with a doctrine based around actual combat and a sense of honor that compelled it to stand and fight against other soldiers. In contrast, on Oct. 7, Hamas commandos fled from active confrontation with armed Israelis in order to maximize the number of Israeli civilian dead, and the group’s tactics in Gaza are based on sacrificing the largest possible number of Palestinian civilians while avoiding combat altogether. But if the long-ago Syrian army is a different kind of opponent than today’s Hamas, it requires a similarly inventive and broad-minded approach to military leadership to see each enemy clearly. Hacohen believes that mentality has all but vanished within the IDF.

In Hacohen’s view, the army lost the institutional memory of what it really means to “participate in a huge war,” something the IDF hadn’t done since the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In time, Hacohen said, “most of the commanders did not have that experience of warfare.” The end of the Cold War tricked the world’s leading militaries into believing that generals no longer needed to think or even care that much about the prospect of major combat for military leadership, and that wars would be small and manageable from now on—as Hacohen noted, even the viciously unsentimental Vladimir Putin was convinced that a handful of special forces could conquer Ukraine in a couple of days.

Hacohen, at right, speaks with a settler during the Gaza disengagement, 2005

Yagil Henkin/Alamy

 

In the post-Cold War era of the Oslo Accords, peace with Jordan, and near-peace with Syria, the Israeli establishment became convinced that the country had fought its final existential battle. The rising generation of IDF generals were people who seemed well-suited to the smaller, more contained, lower-stakes conflicts of the post-historical world. “Those who were promoted came from special forces,” Hacohen said. “They cannot understand warfare in the same way that a very excellent brain surgeon cannot understand [general] medicine.”

According to Hacohen, the belief that mass-maneuver warfare was a relic of military textbooks from the past, and that the skills involved in fighting such conflicts no longer had any relevance, fed a growing institutional malaise within the IDF. The country’s strategic complex, busily preparing itself for peace with Yasser Arafat, generated self-fulfilling excuses for why the army needed to move away from the rough business of large-scale conflict. The profession of an IDF general went from existential warfare to “fire dominance by standoff,” as Hacohen explained—the idea that enemies could be fought at a distance through specialized units, airpower, and technological superiority. This was convenient, given that these were areas in which Israel already excelled, and which were central to the country’s newfound economic prosperity.

Candidates for high rank in the IDF weren’t prized for their ability to think creatively or deliver victories—victory being an outmoded concept in the new age of surgical operations in the service of peace—but for being good organizational functionaries. As war itself became hopelessly abstracted, the Israelis responsible for its theory and practice grew alienated from their core civic function, which is to prepare for the unthinkable, to live at the brink of national doomsday so that civilian life could be as orderly and productive as possible. Hacohen said that in his experience, when given the chance to study in the United States, most active-duty Israeli generals chose to learn industrial management at the National Defense University in Washington, rather than field command at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. Even chiefs of staff, Hacohen said, saw these stints in Washington as a chance for officers to educate themselves for their post-military careers.

“Warfare is a realm of uncertainty,” Hacohen said. “It is definitely a different profession. Most of the generals are not at all fitted to the profession of warfare. They are not educated enough, and actually also in Israel generals don’t like warfare. They don’t like their profession. They are not learning about it—not learning enough.”

Instead, he said, they are learning “bullshit, management, studying in the Wexner program at Harvard—knowing how to speak nicely.”

I was in Israel earlier this month as part of a fact-finding mission organized by the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum—I met Hacohen the evening after the program concluded. Early in the trip we got a vivid sense of what Hamas accomplished within the strategic blind spots of the IDF’s standoff doctrine, which Hacohen said the Islamists had started to counter in the mid-2000s by putting tarps up over the streets of Khan Yunis, creating a highly effective, low-cost shield against Israeli surveillance aircraft.

The group saw a display of weapons recently recovered from tunnels in Gaza. The dozens of stubby metal cylinders capped with flat-topped cones were antitank mines; a wide plastic tube connected to a hoselike detonator was a tunnel bomb, cemented into the boundary between an underground passageway and the street above. There were frisbee-shaped antipersonnel mines, as well as an explosive metal frame used for breaking through fencing. Hamas figured out that with a little clever modification, a gardening hose could be used as a delivery system for a strip of TNT. All of these devices were produced in Gaza, where Hamas had developed a capability that even the most generous two-state outcomes do not envision a Palestinian state possessing: a domestic military industry that can equip a vast army for tactical and even strategic victories over its Israeli enemy through the mass production of “improvised” weapons.

Hamas’ strategy is based on “deniability of superiority,” Hacohen said, which is strategically though not tactically reminiscent of Egypt’s area-denial strategy in 1973, in which Soviet-made antitank and antiaircraft missiles stopped Israeli armor and air power during the Egyptian army’s advance across the Suez Canal. In today’s world, far vaster disparities in military power can be bridged though even simpler means. An adversary no longer needs even a single warship to successfully fight the United States Navy—they just need Chinese-, Russian- or Iranian-produced land-to-sea missiles, like the Houthis in Yemen have, that can collapse the Navy’s advantages over a much smaller force, at least within the context of current U.S. naval warfighting doctrine in the Red Sea. Similarly, much of the IDF’s comparative strengths against Hamas threaten to evaporate if they’re fighting on the Islamists’ terms—the size or sophistication of the invasion force might not matter if Hamas can slow down the IDF’s advance and hold out underground long enough for the U.S. or the international community to order a stop to any Israeli operation.

“Hamas, Hezbollah, and other militia are postmodern military organizations,” Hacohen explained. “They don’t need an air force, a navy, or artillery, and yet they are creating an enormous strategic threat.”

What they did need was displayed for our group: Mass-produced simple explosives, North Korean-made rocket-propelled grenade launchers, locally made rockets, Iranian-built drones just a couple meters in length. We got the fortunately rare and psychologically jarring chance for a hands-on examination of a real-life suicide belt, with the ice pack-like explosives swaddled in plastic to insulate them against the muggy atmosphere of a Gazan tunnel. The vest had two color-coded arming plugs connected to a 5-volt battery and a pair of identical green buttons ensconced in black rectangular holders, a redundancy in case one of the mechanisms failed. Pressing either button is the culmination of an entire lifetime. In much the same way, the Hamas statelet’s decision to launch a self-destructive, genocidal war on Israel fulfilled the intended end result of what is objectively the Palestinian people’s freest and most advanced project of national autonomy. The vest, like Oct. 7, was the enemy’s way of proclaiming their fundamental worldview as loudly as possible.

Hacohen is not a believer in peace with the Palestinians, but he does not think violence alone can solve Israel’s strategic dilemmas. Two days before I met him, the MEF group had been in the north of Israel, looking through binoculars into the dread stillness of communities that had been ghost towns since early October. The naked eye could spot a white building on a far ridge, a U.N. post 80 meters inside of Lebanese territory where Hezbollah staged a military demonstration in April of 2023. The evacuation of 60,000 Israelis from 43 towns within 5 kilometers of the border had created a free-fire zone for the Shiite jihadists, who have blown up over 500 Israeli houses since October, and severely wounded a 15-year-old in Kiryat Shmona earlier that same day. Without an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, Iran-backed militants seemed unlikely to withdraw to the Litani River, their farthest permitted position under the worthless U.N. Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 Lebanon war.

Hacohen does not think such an invasion will be easy. “First of all it is a mountainous area,” he said. “We must learn from the Allied forces, the United States and the British in their march under the command of Patton from Sicily to Monte Casino. It took them too much time. … The Germans succeeded to stop them for nine months in Monte Casino.” Southern Lebanon “is a land, a very specific infrastructure, and a terrain giving all conditions for a small army to stand against a huge army,” he said.

Even if Hezbollah were chased back to the Litani, Hacohen thinks that peace would be unlikely to dawn over northern Israel, or any other part of the country for that matter, because so much of the Jewish state would still be within range of Hezbollah’s surviving arsenal. “They intentionally build themselves so that they can fight even by losing that southern part of Lebanon. They have depth,” Hacohen warned. Hezbollah would be able to bombard the center of Israel even if the IDF made it all the way to Beirut. “The idea that [Hezbollah] can go ahead with warfare, even though they are defeated in the battlefield, it is one of the [things] explaining the difference between the 1967 war and now,” he said.

There was one more crucial layer of complication: The Lebanese army, like the Palestinian Authority security forces, is a project of the United States, meaning Israel’s closest ally is now supporting two regional military forces who see their paramount foe as Israel, and provide practical support and political cover for Iranian-backed terror militias. “We must admit that there is huge strategic embarrassment for Israel,” Hacohen said.

“The first solution is to be aware about the dilemma,” he explained. The way out of the morass might involve careful diplomacy with the U.S., clever war-planning, and a high national threshold for chaos—above all, it means steeling the Israeli public for a second unprecedented national crisis in six months.

If Hacohen is optimistic about anything, it is the Israelis themselves, who “decided to fight for the honor of the Jewish people” after Oct. 7. Hacohen, who says he has 50 family members on active IDF duty, credits the army’s successes in Gaza to the rank-and-file rather than their commanders. The IDF had spent three decades avoiding massive face-to-face combat. Its soldiers have now dismantled three-quarters of Hamas’ brigades and chased its terrorists through hundreds of miles of cramped and booby-trapped tunnels without any sag in morale.

Hacohen used an unlikely example to illustrate how this fight for survival might change Israel. During World War II, Marlene Dietrich’s “Lili Marleen” became a favorite of both Allied and Axis soldiers. Dietrich, who as Hacohen noted performed in Israel in 1960, knew that she was the last female voice that thousands of young men would ever hear. In light of her significance to the deadliest event in human history, a postwar career in Hollywood proved unsatisfying to Dietrich, who opened a club that veterans from across America flocked to. The German actress, like the soldiers who had heard her over the radio and who now came to hear her sing in person, realized that the war had been more than just an episode, and that it had become a defining aspect of her own identity.

The point of Dietrich’s story is that “if you are a real warrior, a real general, participating in a war that is almost like independence warfare, it is just the highlight of your life,” Hacohen said almost wistfully. “After that, just to be something else, it is not really to respect what happened in that huge challenge that you overcame.”

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have fought in such a war for their national existence since Oct. 7. How they understand what they’ve fought for and why could determine the country’s future as much as any geopolitical event. Against a sometimes-bleak horizon of official failure and looming conflict, the strength of Israel’s people is perhaps the most important remaining unknown.

Armin Rosen is a staff writer for Tablet Magazine.

Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/general-who-believes-in-winning-wars

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Houthis knock out underwater cables linking Europe to Asia - report - Jerusalem Post Staff

 

by Jerusalem Post Staff

The successful targeting of the four cables, which are believed to belong to the AAE-1, Seacom, EIG, and TGN systems, marks a serious disruption of communications between Europe and Asia.

Workers operate on an (unrelated) lead line connected to fiber optic cable at Arrietara beach, near Bilbao, northern Spain, June 13, 2017, as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. join forces to build an underwater fiber optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean, linking Europe and the USA.

(photo credit: REUTERS/VINCENT WEST/FILE PHOTO)

Four underwater communications cables between Saudi Arabia and Djibouti have been struck out of commission in recent months, presumably as a result of attacks by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, according to an exclusive report in the Israeli news site Globes.

The successful targeting of the four cables, which are believed to belong to the AAE-1, Seacom, EIG, and TGN systems, marks a serious disruption of communications between Europe and Asia.

Most of the immediate harm will be absorbed by the Gulf states and India, Globes said.

The AAE-1 cable connects East Asia to Europe via Egypt, connecting China to the West through countries such as Pakistan and Qatar. 

The Europe India Gateway (EIG) cable system connects southern Europe to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, the UAE, and India. 

The Seacom cable connects Europe, Africa, and India, and is connected to South Africa.

Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi addresses followers via a video link at the al-Shaab Mosque, formerly al-Saleh Mosque, in Sanaa, Yemen February 6, 2024. (credit: REUTERS/KHALED ABDULLAH)

Houthi attacks continue despite Western responses

Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi movement, which is not the internationally recognized government of the Arab country but which controls its most populous segments, has been attacking international trade for months, proclaiming solidarity with Palestinians as Israel wages war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. 

The United States, United Kingdom, and allies have begun in recent months to take offensive actions against the Houthis in response to attacks, but the missile, helicopter, and underwater drone assaults on merchant ships have continued.

Jerusalem Post Staff

Source: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-788888

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UK Politician Makes a Dark Observation About Her Country Today - Robert Spencer

 

by Robert Spencer

And ours in the future.

 

[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

Former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman sounded an ominous warning on Friday: “The Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now.” This was politicians’ hyperbole, and couldn’t possibly be true, could it? Unfortunately, every day brings new confirmation of the fact that truer words have seldom been spoken.

Braverman made her chilling statement after events on Wednesday in London, when members of the British Parliament debated motions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. A vote for a ceasefire is really a vote for Hamas, for if Israel stopped fighting, Hamas would escape annihilation and survive to murder more Israeli civilians on another day. As the debates went on, pro-Hamas protesters projected the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” which is a veiled call for the total destruction of Israel, something that would almost certainly involve a new genocide of the Jews, onto Big Ben. This was widely seen as a veiled threat to the members of parliament, and with very good reason.

Konstantin Kisin noted in The Free Press on Friday that the parliamentarians certainly felt threatened. Their fears led to a change in the established rules of the Parliament, so that members of the leftist Labour party could escape having to vote for an anti-Israel measure that even many of them thought was too extreme, or voting against it and risking the wrath of the Muslim protesters outside the parliament building.

Nor was this the first time that members of the British parliament have faced threats from Muslims who were inclined to violence. It was only a few weeks ago, Kisin points out, that Conservative MP Mike Freer, “who represents a constituency with a significant Jewish population, announced that he would not be seeking reelection because of threats to him and his family over his support for Israel.” On Oct. 15, 2021, “another Conservative MP, Sir David Amess, was stabbed to death by an Islamist at such a meeting. In 2017, an Islamist terrorist mowed down pedestrians before stabbing an unarmed police officer to death outside the gates of Parliament.”

In light of all this, Braverman’s statement Friday made perfect sense. Beyond parliament there is a great deal more evidence that “the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now” in Britain. In London in December, a policeman ordered pro-Israel protesters to take down an Israeli flag after repeatedly allowing multiple Palestinian flags to be flown. In early February, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, wife Nava and their two children were forced into hiding after they received numerous death threats, including a phone call from someone who said: “Us Muslims are coming for you, you dirty Zionist motherf***er.” Pro-Palestinian protesters have become so brazen that they flew ISIS flags at a mid-February demonstration in London.

A housing association official was fired for pointing out that Hamas was operating under UNRWA headquarters. Signs pointing to Mecca have been installed on hiking trails after the British countryside was declared “racist.” Gangs of Muslim rapists escaped arrest and prosecution for years, and some are still operating, because British officials were afraid of appearing “racist” and “Islamophobic.” And Khairi Saadallah, a Muslim migrant from Libya who admitted to being a member of an ISIS-linked jihad terrorist group there, was nonetheless allowed to stay in Britain. He demonstrated his gratitude to British authorities by murdering three Englishmen in 2020.

Saadallah’s case is particularly egregious, but it is not singular. In January, a Bangladeshi Muslim preacher, Abdur Razzak Bin Yousuf, who called foes of child marriage “Satan,” went on a UK speaking tour. He was only the latest in a long line of pro-jihad preachers who have been allowed to enter Britain and speak to Muslims there. Meanwhile, the British government, in an attempt to show that it opposes “extremists” of all kinds and to appease Muslim leaders who claim counterterror measures are “Islamophobic,” has banned a large number of foreign critics of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women (including me) from entering the country, despite the fact that none of the people who have been banned advocated or approved of any violence or vigilantism.

So are the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites really in charge now in Britain? Certainly. The question now is this: what, if anything, are Britain’s ostensible authorities going to do about it?

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 27 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest books are The Critical Qur’an and Empire Of God. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/uk-politician-makes-a-dark-observation-about-her-country-today/

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The chase continues: IDF arrives at 'Room 6,' where Sinwar left evidence and quickly escaped - Amir Bohbot

 

by Amir Bohbot

Military sources said that Sinwar had planned to fight from an underground fortified base called "Room 6" - a place equipped for a long stay.

 

Yahya Sinwar highlighted in a video published by the IDF on February 13, 2024

(photo credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON'S UNIT)

Yahya Sinwar was surprised by the IDF's maneuver deep into Palestinian territory, according to a statement released by senior security officials on Wednesday. The Hamas leader intended to conduct fighting from an underground fortified base called "Room 6," which was equipped for extended stays with military personnel and communications lines, according to IDF intel.

"Sinwar plans and acts accordingly to each situation and doesn't necessarily trust those around him," the military source said. "He will make mistakes, and we need to be there or in proximity to recognize it."

Now, he moves from place to place and plans his actions accordingly. "The distance between us and him will be shortened by one mistake too many of his."

The hunt for Sinwar

According to a senior security official, Yahya Sinwar planned to conduct the war as he moved through the underground infrastructure in Gaza City, constantly moving underground according to developments in the situation. Therefore, he built the tunnels while focusing on a prolonged stay in the densely woven tunnels and was surprised when the IDF began to maneuver deep into Palestinian territory.

The source also added that Sinwar was surprised every time. Left with no choice, he decided to move the focus of his activity, command, and control efforts towards the Khan Yunis area, pushing him to move from point to point underground using strategic tunnels.

"Room 6" is the name of the fortified center Sinwar arrived at. "Room 6" is an underground hub dug very deep compared to other Hamas tunnels. The center includes living rooms, security guards, communication lines, and a diverse number of openings meant to trick the IDF and intelligence forces.

As soon as Sinwar realized that the IDF was closing in on him quickly, the military source said, he decided to leave several locations, one after the other, hastily. In each case, he left behind money, documents, and other tell-tale signs that he was there.

Increasing pressure 

According to the analysis of the findings discovered by the IDF's special forces, engineering, and intelligence agencies, it appears that Sinwar feels enormous pressure. "Sinwar conducts himself based on his constantly changing surroundings, and as such, he does not necessarily trust his immediate environment since it is not a natural environment," a senior military source told Walla! "When he moves from place to place, he meets factors he is not used to. It can be estimated that he does not even trust who brings him the food and what he is served to eat. This is a pressure point that cannot be ignored."

A video released by the Israeli army says to show Mohammed Sinwar, brother of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, travelling in a car through a tunnel near the Erez crossing, close to the Israel-Gaza border, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, as seen in this s (credit: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS)

Now, IDF sources estimate that due to the military's progress above and below the ground in the Khan Yunis area and in the background of Israeli statements about the intention to maneuver in Rafah, the pressure on Sinwar and other senior Hamas officials is increasing every day. Now, he is expected to move, or has already moved, to underground infrastructure in Rafah.

Continuing IDF operations in Gaza

"If he rises above the ground, his chances of making more mistakes with the team that secures and surrounds him are increasing, and therefore, the IDF should continue to press all the points in the Gaza Strip regardless of the negotiations for the release of the hostages," said a senior military source. "Sinwar, who is very suspicious by nature, will make mistakes, and when he makes mistakes, we have to be there or in the same space to recognize it."

"Every hour that passes is to his detriment," the source added. "The rate of progress in searching tunnels is indeed slow, but it is progressing, and it prevents another place where he, his family members, and the other senior Hamas terrorists can hide. My assessment is that he is on the verge of moving to Rafah or has already moved. One way or another, we will get him, even if it takes us hours or months. According to what he left behind, the distance between us and him will be shortened by one mistake too many of his."

Amir Bohbot

Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-789516

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Anti-Semitism may be Coming to Your Radio Station - Bruce Holberg

 

by Bruce Holberg

George Soros, via Soros Fund Management (SFM), has acquired via a bankruptcy bailout a majority position in Audacy Inc, the licensee of 235 radio stations in the United States.

 

Don’t be shocked if you tune in to your favorite conservative talk-radio show and instead hear someone of the same political stance as Rachel Maddow or Joy Reid. Before you crash your car or fall out of your chair, you should know what is taking place, why it is taking place, and your role in preventing what could be a severe reduction in conservative and pro-Israel voices on terrestrial radio.

George Soros, via Soros Fund Management (SFM), has acquired via a bankruptcy bailout a majority position in Audacy Inc, the licensee of 235 radio stations in the United States, plus digital programming, and podcasting outlets. Nationally, Audacy, the second largest radio company in America, claims to reach 200 million people a month through its various distribution channels including a near-monopoly on news and talk-formatted stations in many markets.

Here is what happened: Audacy, headquartered in Philadelphia, recently declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In its recovery plan, it agreed to have various revenue sources buy its bank debt, and convert the debt to an equity stake in the new Audacy. SFM stepped up and acquired $415 million or about 40% of the broadcaster’s senior debt, making it the largest and controlling shareholder.

Here is why this should be of concern to all Americans, and especially for Jews across the country: Soros has shown us exactly what his game plan is. In 2022, the Soros-backed Latino Media Network, an affiliate of SGM, acquired an 18-station group of Spanish-language radio stations located in Florida serving the Cuban-American community. When the Latino Media Ntetwork bought them, they were center-right in their programming orientation and doing very well. Afterward, the stations’ programming flipped far to the Left in order to influence their audiences in that direction. Likely, this is his prototype for Audacy.

As the Federal Communication Commission is barred from controlling programming, SFM (via station management) can mostly do what it wants with the stations it is acquiring -- unless listeners and other interested parties (that would be us) can show the FCC commissioners that the company is unqualified to be a licensee.

SFM is largely owned by the same George Soros who, as reported in the New York Post, funneled $15 million to pro-Hamas groups in the United States between 2016-2023. Much of this went to the Tides Center, which in turn granted the money to the virulent groups organizing pro-Hamas and BDS protests in the U.S. Now they may be getting a big. megaphone for their views.

What about American support for Israel? Exactly where does this leftist icon stand on the nation-state of the Jewish People? Soros has a long history generously supporting organizations whose goals are to undermine or to outright destroy the Jewish state. In October, 2023, hundreds of protesters representing two anti-Israel groups funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) -- Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow -- infiltrated the Capitol to protest Israel’s alleged but false “genocide” and blaming Israel for the October 7 mass rape and massacre. In 2007, Soros wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Times headlined “America and Israel Must Open the Door to Hamas,” and in 2023 George Soros called for Israel to immediately begin a ceasefire and all the while funded a pro-Hamas organization called Al-Shabaka with more than half a million dollars.

As it relates to Israel, the OSF has been accused in the Israeli press of funding anti-Israel activist groups including Adalah, I’LAM and “Palestinian Citizens of Israel.” In 2013, Israel’s NGO Monitor released a report that OSF funding “contributes significantly to anti-Israel campaigns in three important respects:

1. Active in the Durban Strategy, which declared Palestinian residents of Israel are treated as second-class citizens and (falsely) equated Zionism with racism (this draft of the Declaration was so offensive that the U.S. and Israel withdrew from the conference;)
2. Funding aimed at weakening United States support for Israel by shifting public opinion regarding the Arab war against Israel, and Iran;
3. Funding for Israeli political opposition groups on the fringes of Israeli society which use the rhetoric of human rights to advocate for marginal political goals.”

Finally, Soros, through OFC, created a $1.8 million fund intended to train budding journalists to be assigned to keep track of “state government issues.” He created a boot camp of sorts in which to school them, no doubt, in his progressivism. In fact, this effort was done in cooperation with National Public Radio (NPR), the anti-Semitic public radio network. Some say NPR stands for “National Palestinian Radio,” its reporting is so biased. The Soros “trained” journalists are placed at NPR stations throughout the country.

What can be done to prevent this massive radio group from coming under the control of the Soros affiliates? A bankruptcy judge has approved Audacy’s plan to come out of bankruptcy, including Soros’ acquisition of majority interest in the company. However, because this constitutes a change in control of the broadcasting company, it needs the approval of the FCC to take place. An outpouring of letters to the FCC Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel, and other commissioners might get them to take a closer look at the transaction and possibly question Soros’/SFM’s fitness as a licensee. Contact information for the FCC can be found here.

Having hundreds of stations and digital outlets under Soros’ influence is dangerous for America and especially Jewry, and although time is very tight, the control of Audacy by an avowed anti-Zionist is something we Americans must try to derail.

Image: Audacy, Inc.

Bruce Holberg

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/antisemitism_may_be_coming_to_your_radio_station.html

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Truth is More Important Than Civility - Bruce Thornton

 

by Bruce Thornton

Dartmouth University President Sian Beiloc takes a stand for "brave spaces”.

 

Hamas’ savage attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 sparked “woke” leftist protests at prestigious universities. The protestors sided with the terrorists butchers, indulged antisemitic and genocidal chants and slogans, and threatened the well-being of Jewish students. Campus “cancel culture,” the silencing of dissenting opinions and ideas, ran amok.

Worse, many university administrators sided with what could only be described as “hate speech,” and refused to commit to a clear condemnation of the terrorists and their student cheerleaders. Instead, they relied on weasel words like “context” to avoid their students’ wrath. The First Amendment and academic freedom, long ailing in our premier universities, are now languishing on life-support.

One exception, however, was Dartmouth University. Its president, Sian Beiloc, has created the Dartmouth Dialogues program. “I don’t want safe spaces, I want brave spaces,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “The idea is to be around the brightest minds and to be pushed and to be a little uncomfortable. Even if you’re not going to change your mind, the ability to hone your arguments and to think differently from different perspectives, these are skills and tools of higher education.”

Universities have been so corrupted by “political correctness” and its “woke” iteration, that any university president who publicly acknowledges the importance of challenging students’ ideas and opinions is welcome. We need to encourage more academics to return to the traditions of liberal education before our heritage of political freedom and equality, under assault in this country for more than a century, descends further into despotism.

But we need more than just politely listening and pondering the “other side.” We must restore and strengthen the role of reasoned argument, empirical evidence, and truth as the premier arbiter of political opinions. These foundational metrics for evaluating political ideas and ideologies, however, have been deformed in our universities and replaced with various incoherent ideas like radical relativism and amoral utilitarianism.

For the truth is, there are defining differences between our country’s two major political ideologies that are more than just party loyalty, grubby self-interest, or the lust for material wealth and power. One faction––which supports our Constitutional limited government founded on the universal reality of innate human vulnerability to destructive passions––acknowledges tradition and common sense, the collective experiences of billions of human beings that over time and space provide evidence of human behavior and motivation.

The other faction is the ideal of endless progress and improvement brought about by “experts” trained in the “human sciences”––Stalin’s “engineers of the soul.” Such technocracies must concentrate and centralize power, and discredit all rivals, particularly family, faith, tradition, customs, and common sense that challenge the authority of the “managerial elite.” Only by discrediting and displacing these traditional authorities can the “guardians,” as Plato called them in his technocratic utopia, create heaven on earth.

Yet despite pretensions of “scientific” knowledge and rational debate, despite their Orwellian rhetoric of “social justice” and “equity,” the left’s ideologies are mere pretexts for seizing power and dominating others “by any means necessary.” Hence their penchant for violence, intimidation, “cancel culture,” and censorship. They respond to pleas for reasoned debate and open minds as did the young Nazi whom philosopher of science Karl Popper tried to reason with: “You want to argue? I don’t argue, I shoot.”

Next, today’s leftists share a cult-like, extravagant certainty of their moral superiority that brooks no challenges, especially from facts that clash with their political narrative, and offend their righteous self-esteem. Their recourse to hysteria rather than reasoned, empirically supported arguments, gives the game away, as do the preposterous, illogical, and mendacious claims such as “systemic racism” or “transgenderism.” For the “woke,” differing opinions are not opportunities for sharpening the mind or exposing weak arguments, but stages on which exorbitant emotional melodramas are performed with “passionate intensity.”

Searching for the truth, however, and weeding out empirically false claims have never interested the evangelical left. They want to change the world, not their own minds. Moreover, the abandonment of truth, traditional faith, and sound arguments has left a void in our mental landscapes, which abhor a vacuum no less than nature does.

Dennis Praeger recently described the consequences:

“Instead of good and evil, we now have a set of other ‘moral’ categories: rich and poor, white and black, colonizers and colonized, strong and weak, oppressors and oppressed. Those in the latter groups — the poor, people of color, the colonized, the weak and the oppressed (real or alleged) — are, by definition, good, while those in the former categories are, by definition, bad.”

This Manichean catalogue makes the idea of respectful, open-minded debate on contested political ideas nearly impossible. A generation nursed on therapeutic pabulum and intolerance of discomfort, along with a ridiculous sense of entitlement and self-regard, will not stand for any challenges to their “woke” doctrines and victim-based identities. Careful thought and reasoned language must give way to hysterical virtue-signaling, and often violence. As leftist determinism tells us, the “personal is political,” a question of power, status, and a spurious moral prestige rather than truth.

As the Journal points out, in April the Dartmouth Dialogues program’s ambitions will be “put to the test”–– “a moderated discussion between Samieh El-Abd, a former Palestinian Authority official, and Gilead Sher, who served as chief of staff to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.”

No doubt the organizers are thinking about the reaction of their “woke” students, which experience tells us will be as unhinged and disruptive as possible. It will be embarrassing if an event supposedly promoting the pedagogical value of hearing alternative ideas, becoming “a little uncomfortable,” and learning “to think differently from different perspectives,” as the university’s president said, ends up being shut down by a mob that disdains all those ideals.

Indeed, given the shameless indulgence of antisemitic tropes, celebrations of brutal violence, and genocidal slogans, one doubts the deranged protestors will benefit from being “a little uncomfortable,” nor will they be in the mood “to think differently.” In their minds, they are absolutely certain of their virtue and righteousness. Like Lenin, they believe, as Gary Saul Morson explains, “that there was no need to understand opposing views before denouncing them, since the very fact that they were opposing views proved them wrong—and what was wrong served the enemy.”

More important, the century-long conflict between the Jews and Palestinian Arabs has produced such an abundance of lies and bad history that they comprise their own dialect of Newspeak. Most of the discourse about the conflict comprises gross distortion or patent lies: “imperialism,” “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” “occupation,” “racism,” “disproportionate,” “Palestinian.” All that vocabulary serves political propaganda, which can never be the subject of the sort of critical “dialogue” that leads to truth, or at least identifies, as did Socrates, what is false or mere opinion.

And if there is no foundation of accepted facts, then there can be no rational conversation about issues steeped in such extravagant emotions. Without truth as our lodestar, no discussion can end in anything but intimidation, censorship, or violence.

No doubt, Dartmouth’s president is sincere, and she is right about free speech and its boons. But our “woke” battalions marching for Hamas are not interested in growing intellectually, or searching for truth, or changing minds through sweet reason. Like Goldfinger, they don’t expect their ideological enemies to talk. They expect them to die.

Bruce Thornton

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/truth-is-more-important-than-civility/

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The West’s rot from within - Douglas Altabef

 

by Douglas Altabef

The increasingly vitriolic hatred of Israel and Jews should be ringing alarm bells about Western civilization itself.

 

In an anti-Israel "Christmas is Canceled" protest, hundreds marched on Rockefeller plaza and in Midtown Manhattan on Dec. 25, 2023. Credit: Lev Radin/Shutterstock.

Like almost everyone else, I watch the news about the latest wave of anti-Israel hate—and increasingly Jews in general—with a sense of the surreal. Is this really happening? Who are these monstrous haters? And where is the reaction, the condemnation, the revulsion in the face of this vile stuff?

The tropes are all too familiar: Israel is attacked as a genocidal, apartheid, colonialist enterprise.

What is increasingly unnerving to me, however, are the wider implications of this hate. In other words, putting Israel aside, what does all this venom say about those who spout it and the societies from which they are emerging?

Simply stated, the disdainful rejection of Israel represents the disdainful rejection of what has made Western countries successful, prosperous and strong. Israel is the present-day embodiment of the spirit, energy, resolve and courage that were once characteristic of Western societies, particularly the iconoclastic United States of America.

We need to distinguish between political hatred and metaphysical hatred of Israel. Political claims can be countered with the facts. There is rampant ignorance that can be addressed, and the historical record can be clarified. Whether the other side has any interest in these facts is another question, but errors can be corrected.

Far less susceptible to any kind of engagement are the metaphysical differences between Israel and much of the West, differences that are becoming increasingly, even jarringly, apparent.

These differences are manifold, but are perhaps based on the fact that Israel is still a “project,” a “cause,” an evolving movement that can be addressed and impacted by any and all of its citizens.

Israel is still an adventure. That adventure requires an appreciation and embrace of Israel’s particularity. Israel proudly sees itself as pursuing its own unique destiny, one that seemed in danger of dissolution on Oct. 6, but which received a painful but necessary corrective the following day.

Religious Israeli Jews see that destiny as the fulfillment of God’s promise to the Jewish people that we would be restored to our own Land. Many other Jews see it as an opportunity to build a homeland for the historically embattled and besieged Jewish people. They believe this is a world-class undertaking in and of itself, regardless of any theological dimensions.

This is the stuff of dreaming, creating and, yes, adventure.

My organization, Im Tirtzu, founded in 2007, took its name from Theodor Herzl’s clarion call: im tirtzu. “If you will it, it is no dream.” The reason we chose this name was simple yet profound: Israel must continually be willed into existence.

Israel was born as a state in 1948, but its existence is formative, fluid and always dependent on the efforts and resolve of its citizens.

The same mindset and resolve are the roots of the founding of the United States. The Puritans were, like the Hebrews, a covenanted people with a particular mission. That sense of mission empowered and directed generations of Americans, culminating in Abraham Lincoln’s prophetic-like awareness of the need to cleanse the horrific stain of slavery from the soul of the nation.

But can we say that such awareness still exists?  In an America that increasingly prizes victimhood rather than excellence, that seems to prefer dumbing-down into a morass of identical misery to a nation in which some uber-achieve, can we say that the America of Lincoln can still be found?

I believe that, to an increasing cohort in the West, Israel has come to represent an enemy that is the same enemy they perceive in their own societies. Call it neo-Marxist, call it nihilism, call it whatever; it is a spirit of resentment of that which has traditionally been extolled and prized.

America’s rush into wokeism and DEI repression has inevitably led to hatred of both Israel and the American Jews who somehow, unaccountably, punch above their weight in American society.

To the woke mind, Israel’s success must be a product of oppression, because this mindset cannot accept that differently abled people and peoples could possibly succeed without rigging the system.

It is frightening for Israelis to see the hatred on ready display on campuses and in communities across the United States. But it is far more frightening to consider the corrosiveness, the self-destructiveness that such madness represents for the West itself.

Whether it is the craven fearfulness of England’s political class or the clueless leadership of America’s elite academic institutions, those of us who root for the West and understand that, while particular, Israel is not an island unto itself, shake our heads and plaintively ask: What will turn this around? Can it be turned around?

For Israelis, I believe, Western nihilists’ growing irrational hatred of us and of themselves must be seen as a red badge of courage—a reminder that we are doing something profoundly right.

Douglas Altabef is chairman of the board of Im Tirtzu and a director of the Israel Independence Fund. He can be reached at: dougaltabef@gmail.com.   

Source: https://www.jns.org/the-wests-rot-from-within/

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