The Bookworm Beat: From Israel to Indiana Jones

Woman writingAs you’ve probably noticed, I’ve re-jiggered these portmanteau posts, with a new name and a new image. I’d like to thank all of you for your suggestions. I’ve gone with a vaguely newsy title and a picture from one of my favorite illustrators, and it just feels right.

I’ll continue tweaking the format until it works optimally. Today, for example, I’ll use mini-titles, instead of numbers, to separate items. Please let me know which system you prefer.

How many did you say died in Gaza? And are you really sure they’re dead?

Col. Richard Kemp (Brit. Army, Ret.) reiterates something we’ve heard before, although that vast numbers of people around the world need to be reminded about on a daily basis: Even as Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties (something America and her allies never did in past wars or in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Obama certainly hasn’t done with his drone strikes of dubious legality in Pakistan), Hamas lies about the nature and number of its casualties:

[W]e know now that Hamas have ordered their people to report all deaths as innocent civilians. We know too that Hamas has a track record of lying about casualties. After Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-09 fighting in Gaza, the IDF estimated that of 1,166 Palestinian deaths, 709 were fighters. Hamas – backed by several NGOs – claimed that only 49 of its fighters had been killed, the rest were innocent civilians. Much later they were forced to admit that the IDF had been right all along and between 600 and 700 of the casualties had in fact been fighters. But the short-memoried media are incapable of factoring this in before broadcasting their ill-founded and inflammatory assertions.

Oh, and regarding my parenthetical point about the Muslim blood on Obama’s own hands, let me just reiterate a poster I created a couple of weeks ago:

Barack Obama - Muslim Killer

In reality, when it comes to deaths in Gaza, official IDF casualty figures point to a somewhat different demographic than legions of dead children: According to the IDF’s calculations, 47% of those who died were terrorist fighters.

There’s one thing more that should make people suspicious about casualty figures issuing from Gaza: Elder of Ziyon noticed that Hamas is re-using a strategy first seen in 2008, when Israel engaged in Operation Cast Lead, trying to shut down Hezbollah: Hamas is dragging children’s dead bodies around to create media-friend, anti-Israel photo ops. I’m not surprised. Islamists have always been renowned for the horrors they inflict on the enemy dead, so it stands to reason that they wouldn’t be squeamish about their own dead.

Given that Hamas, primarily through threats, controls completely the “news” emerging from that region, and given that the media doesn’t want to admit that this limited access dovetails perfectly with its anti-Israel bias, it’s small wonder that The New York Times has taken to slandering its own photographers for their failure to produce any useful, independent photographs from within Hamas.

Lives interrupted.

Zionism: It’s a good thing!

Michael Oren writes a rich, full-throated, compelling defense of Zionism. It’s not, and should not be, a dirty word. Instead, it’s reviled because it succeeded in a region that many in the world (Muslim autocrats, Leftists, America-haters, anti-Semites) would prefer to see fail.

Bibi finally remembers to say “You’re not the boss of me.”

This is a couple of days old, but it’s so nice to see that Bibi Netanhayu has remembered that he’s a seasoned military fighter and war leader, while Obama is an effete, decadent, dangerous putz:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angrily warned the White House “not to ever second-guess me again” on matters involving Hamas — and followed up by vowing that Israel will deal with Palestinian terrorists on its own terms.

And an illustrated reminder of that point:

Young Obama Young Bibi and Bib Netanyahu

UNRWA is Hamas.

One wishes that Bibi could also kick out UNRWA. It’s not just complicit with Hamas, says Daniel Greenfield (aka Sultan Knish) — it is Hamas:

The UNRWA is not an international organization operating in the Middle East. Effectively it’s a local Arab Muslim organization funded and regulated internationally. Since the UNRWA classifies 80% of Gazans as “refugees”, it administers the biggest welfare state in the world on their behalf.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

As I predicted when Obama became president and wooed Iran, it looks as if Israel is developing actual ties with those regimes in the Middle East that fear both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

When it comes to Israel, geography is destiny.

Mark Langham explains that, given Israel’s geographic position, she is both the first and last line between rampant Islam and Europe:

Obama’s unpleasantly mystic relationship to Hamas.

Today — August 4 — is Barack Obama’s 53rd birthday. This August 4th is also the anniversary of Tisha B’ Av, which is the 9th of Av in the ancient Jew calendar (meaning that it’s coincidence that Obama’s birthday coincides with it this year).

Yid With Lid says that, going back to the time of Moses, bad things have happened to the Jewish nation and the Jewish people on Tisha B’Av. Coincidence, of course, isn’t anything more than that — coincidence — but it still is fascinating to see how Obama’s name pops up on the Jewish screen on this day.

Los Angeles pro-Hamas rally reveals that those who oppose Israel also hate America.

I’m a shrinking violet when it comes to rallies. I’m just claustrophobic enough that it’s very difficult for me willingly to go to a situation in which I’ll find myself surrounded by people, many of them hostile. Fortunately for Israel’s defense, Donald Douglas isn’t so shy, so he took the time (and the risk) to check out an pro-Hamas rally down in L.A. Sadly for him, there was no overwhelming spontaneous pro-Israel rally to offset the hate.

Who really wants Obama’s impeachment?

Although there are many conservatives who believe that Obama is committing impeachable offenses, insofar as he’s abrogated legislative power even while abandoning his own executive obligations, no serious conservatives are demanding that he be impeached in the near future. With most of the country opposed to impeachment, doing that would be a suicide mission, especially before the mid-term elections. Nevertheless, talk of impeachment is swirling around the country. Why? Simple. It’s this year’s “war on woman” campaign strategy, aimed at terrifying the base and raising money.

Unlike the War on Women strategy, though, which was merely offensively dishonest, the current strategy is a cynical move that threatens to undermine our constitutional system. Ross Douthat took to the pages of the New York Times to make that argument:

[I]n political terms, there is a sordid sort of genius to the Obama strategy. The threat of a unilateral amnesty contributes to internal G.O.P. chaos on immigration strategy, chaos which can then be invoked (as the president did in a Friday news conference) to justify unilateral action. The impeachment predictions, meanwhile, help box Republicans in: If they howl — justifiably! — at executive overreach, the White House gets to say “look at the crazies — we told you they were out for blood.”

[snip]

This is the tone of the media coverage right now: The president may get the occasional rebuke for impeachment-baiting, but what the White House wants to do on immigration is assumed to be reasonable, legitimate, within normal political bounds.

It is not: It would be lawless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark.

And an American political class that lets this Rubicon be crossed without demurral will deserve to live with the consequences for the republic, in what remains of this presidency and in presidencies yet to come.

Interestingly, when I linked to Douthat’s article on my “real me” Facebook, asking only “Do the ends justify the means?” everyone, Left and Right, was silent. I don’t know what to make of that.

Just because you’re a Native American tribe doesn’t mean you’re a nice tribe.

Years ago, I wrote a post about the Aztecs. The point of that post was that a small band of Spaniards didn’t single-handedly destroy one of the greatest pre-Colombian American empires the world has ever known. Instead, the Spaniards had lots of help from surrounding indigenous Indian populations. These Indians helped because the Aztecs were nothing more or less than the Nazis (or perhaps the Islamists) of the ancient world. They waged perpetual warfare against surrounding tribes, using captives as slaves and as human sacrifices in the bloody rituals that could claim tens of thousands of lives in just a few days.

What reminded me of that old post, and the fact that there was little noble about the Aztec savages, is a challenge to the current-day effort to paint Kit Carson as a genocidal Indian killer for his role in having relocated the Navajo. According to John T. Bennett, just as with the Aztecs, surrounding Native American tribes desperately wanted to see the aggressive, blood-thirsty Navajo go:

The Navajo were so disdained that several neighboring Indian tribes joined in the U.S. mission to relocate them. Interestingly, PBS’s series The West reveals this point: “When Utes, Pueblos, Hopis and Zunis, who for centuries had been prey to Navajo raiders, took advantage of their traditional enemy’s weakness by following the Americans onto the warpath, the Navajo were unable to defend themselves.”

Uh, can you check that thermometer again? I don’t think it’s right.

If you think climate panic is new, think again. Although this latest round of climate panic is more effective than past efforts have been, for 120 years scientists have been throwing Americans into a frenzy about imminent freezing or cooking.

Reading about that relentless and endless back and forth between hot and cold made me think of these guys:

It also made me think of a classic Twilight Zone episode called The Midnight Sun.

Look who’s horrified by Richard Dawkins’ atheism now.

Although I’ve shifted to an amorphous theism, grounded in Jewish values, as I get older, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to atheists. It takes a lot of faith to have faith, if you know what I mean. I’m no fan of Richard Dawkins, though, because he’s made his name being obnoxious, heaping crude, fact-free invective on Christianity and Judaism.

To give Dawkins credit where it’s due, though, he’s also brave. He’s now turned his anti-religious venom on Islam, something Theo van Gogh discovered is a dangerous thing to do. And here’s where it gets funny: The same people (i.e., Leftists) who applauded Dawkins’ atheism when it was turned on Christians and Jews, are besides themselves with horror that he would dare to defame Islam. Kind of telling, isn’t it? The Left isn’t really atheists, because it doesn’t really care about God one way or another.  What it is is anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. Clarity — it’s a good thing.

“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘a**hole’ is.”

As a veteran of arrogant law school professors (not all were arrogant, but enough were), I took more than the usual delight in watching Trey Gowdy make a Leftist law prof squirm as he tried desperately to pretend that Lois Lerner, when she called conservatives “a**holes,” wasn’t showing bias:

Help! I’ve forgotten how to work.

One of the problems with a lengthy recession is that people lose the knack for work. I know that’s been true for me.

I walked away from a traditional law practice more than twenty years ago. At that time, I worked full-time as a research and writing attorney. When kids came along, I worked part-time as a research and writing attorney. When the recession came along, I began to work full-time as a homemaker, mother to my children, and daughter to my elderly mother.

When my husband periodically makes noises about my going back to work full-time, I just look at him funny. I’m too far away and too out-of-shape for that to happen (not to mention that we’d have to pay people lots of money to do what I do for home, children, and mother).

“American life is bifurcating into the undocumented and the overdocumented.”

Mark Steyn turns his gimlet eye and acid pen on the grossly misnamed Department of Homeland Security.

“What I like about you!”

If you’re in the mood for something frivolous, you can see what some Watcher’s Council members have to say about what attracts them to someone of the opposite sex.

Maybe this will have a Hollywood ending too.

Please tell me that you’re able to look at this video, out of Jordan:

All the disgrace-afflicted Arabs, whose honor has been defiled, and who have been kissing the boots of the Zionists and the Americans, are collaborating in the killing of Hamas, in the killing of the people in Gaza, in the killing of Islamic Jihad, and in the crushing of the Al-Qassam Brigades. I say to all Arab leaders,” before moving to his right and brandishing a large sword. “By Allah you deserve nothing but this sword. If you are real men, let the real men fight. If you are not real men, support the people of Gaza. Let them fight the Zionist enemy. Where are you Al-Sisi- who purports to be the president of Egypt? Where are the Arab leaders?” Al-Abdalet pondered as he waved the sword on TV. “Saudi Arabia bought $63 billion worth of weapons, which it hoards. Why? Because America showed up and used Iran to scare them: “Iran is a boogeyman, coming for you. You’d better watch out.”

Without thinking of this video:

It’s picture time!

Respectable anti-Semites

Friends with an idiot

Taking care of Bobby

No freedom of assembly in Gaza

Expansionist Israel

Hanging up Palestinian children
I have my doubts about the veracity of this image (it’s entirely possible that the boys were just being punished, Pally-style, for being naughty), but I include it here FWIW.

Introducing two liberals