COMMENTARY / OPINION
Victor Davis Hanson: 2024 — the year of our reckoning By Victor Davis Hanson
In 2024, the tab for our current apathy, toxic politics, and incompetence will come due.
December 25, 2023 – (American Greatness) — We should remember the now modern proverb of Nixon-era economic advisor Herb Stein to the effect that what cannot go on (without destroying the nation), simply will not go on.
In some sense, the country for recent years has been cruising on the fumes from prior and likely better wiser generations and institutions. In 2024, the tab for our current apathy, toxic politics, and incompetence will come due.So next year we will likely see the climax to a number of current dangerous ideas, events, and forces, which finally will either overwhelm us or be addressed and remedied. We live in a Neronian age but can recover if we first understand how we got here and the nature of the suicide we are committing.
CENTCOM botches name of institution that tried to help them locate missing SEALs By Monica Showalter
January 22, 2024 – A major unreported story — and I know nothing except that they aren’t saying much — is on the fate of two missing Navy SEALs, who were declared dead by CENTCOM following a 10-day search at sea.
It’s serious stuff and raises many questions among the military-minded on Twitter as to what kind of incompetence was going on that they could not trace the two men, and perhaps even more disturbing, whether Iran knows where they are.
While the focus rightfully goes to that kind of potential incompetence, and that story will probably rise in the news as the U.S. gets more involved in action against the Houthi terrorists attacking commercial ships and interfering with sea passage from Yemen, it appears that even the press office isn’t very good at its job.
What’s wrong with this list of people they thanked for their help? I highlighted the line in yellow.
That’s weird stuff because there is no University of San Diego – Scripts Institute of Oceanography that I could find on Google. There’s a University of California, San Diego department known as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which specializes in cutting-edge oceanic research, and while the Catholic University of San Diego several miles away does produce top-notch engineers with oceanic specialties, the famous place is Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, which is so famous it holds booked-solid tours. Every school kid in San Diego knows about it.
Yes, it’s a tweet, but it’s also an official communication from the powerful CENTCOM military command — with three errors in that communication: Scripps, not Scripts, Institution, not Institute, and University of California, San Diego, not University of San Diego.
Wow. They couldn’t be bothered to get the name right of a group that helped them try to locate Navy SEALs missing at sea?
I wonder what Scripps thinks.
As for the rest of us, we wonder how much DEI is going on in that office that they can’t even get people to write official communications without a slew of errors. Besides the errors on the name, the web link to CENTCOM is insecure with an http:// rather than an https:// link and on my computer I couldn’t get either to work.
This is such basic stuff and yet they are falling down on that front, too.
A Navy that can’t communicate properly probably has trouble doing a lot of things right.
[Ed.: But can they get their pronouns right? Surely, their lipstick is also in question...]
Empty Chairs, Flu Shots, and Brainwashing Everywhere Chananya Weissman
January 22, 2024 – Last week I had occasion to visit a Maccabi dental clinic and two Meuhedet “healthcare” clinics. People who enter these places tend to be preoccupied, so they are unlikely to take note of their surroundings. Even self-proclaimed “awake” people lose sight of the fact they are entering the teeth of the devil, and, if they must do so, should proceed with the greatest of alertness and caution.
The dental clinic had one of those nauseating yellow “empty chairs”, with a poster taped to it declaring that we won’t stop until we “bring them home now”. In other words, we won’t stop sending our men into a meat grinder, breaking up families, traumatizing children, abandoning our land, destroying small businesses, and preventing our farms from growing the food we all need to eat, until we “bring home all the hostages”.
Of course, this is an entirely grassroots movement, with expertly designed, hugely expensive posters and billboards plastering the entire country (except “haredi” communities…) created by the families of the abductees less than 24 hours after thousands of terrorists expertly penetrated our southern border on paragliders, trucks, motorcycles, while our intrepid IDF was powerless to stop them. Now we’re going to get revenge and rescue our hostages, no matter the cost. Right. An extremely powerful machine with unlimited resources is working overtime to make the masses believe this, or at least continue to play along.
The Meuhedet clinics displayed so many brochures for the flu “vaccine” all over the place that they felt like a hall of mirrors. Whoever paid for all those brochures really, really wants you and me to take these shots. Does anyone else remember that these are the same people who really, really wanted you and me to take the Covid “vaccines” not too long ago, which coincided with so many unfortunate coincidences that surely had nothing to do with said shots?
They sure are counting on that. With good reason. No matter how many times they recycle the same tricks, no matter how much carnage they cause, they keep getting away with it, and their victims (the ones who survived the last round) keep believing in them, and keep buying into the next thing.
Admit it: you still spend hours and hours on “news” sites, listening to controlled opposition, forwarding around memes, and believing we all just need to vote smarter next time, flatten Gaza, and maybe get a gun license. Or maybe move to some rural place and grow your own food until this all blows over.
Despite the ubiquitous calls to take a flu “vaccine” lest I harm myself and others, I resisted the tremendous fear and overpowering temptation to assuage it with an injection. I did, however, take a brochure and scrutinize its contents, which I will now critique. This is not what they expect people to do, but of course that too is part of the conditioning we have all been subjected to from the moment we entered this world.
The brochure is a tour de force of propaganda and brainwashing that is both cheap and highly sophisticated. The front page states in big letters: “We take the vaccine and not the risk”.
This is a gentle command with the implied social pressure that everyone is doing it, and therefore you must as well. Unity!
Underneath the Communist directive is a statement of fact that the vaccine has no risk; the only risk is in not taking it. It’s a no-brainer, in more ways than one.
Hope is not a strategy: The futility of a possible Palestinian Authority return to Gaza BY NITSANA DARSHAN-LEITNER
01/15/24 11:30 AM ET – More than three months have passed since the Oct. 7 attack against Israel, and officials have warned that eradicating Hamas and its military capabilities will take many months, if not longer. Hamas spent 17 years and untold billions of dollars establishing a terror mini-state inside and underneath the Gaza Strip. Destroying the hundreds of miles of terror tunnels, eliminating battalions of trained killers and searching for hostages, all the while trying to avoid civilian casualties, is a slow-moving deliberate process. But still, as the fighting rages on, the talk in many world capitals — especially inside the beltway of Washington, D.C. — is about what to do the “day after” Hamas is removed from power.
Most Western leaders, including President Biden, are calling for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to assume control of the Gaza Strip and its 2.2 million inhabitants. Pinning Gaza’s future on the PA is a recipe for surefire disaster.
The Southern Front – Opening the Egyptian Border: Jonathan Pollard and Rabbi David Bar-Hayim: [15:08] Machon Shilo
January 22, 2024
Jonathan Pollard and Rabbi David Bar-Hayim: Israel Must Not Rely On America Machon Shilo
January 16, 2024
Accusing Israel of genocide is a perverse moral inversion By Ephraim Mirvis
If there is a genocidal force in this war, it must be Hamas. Incorrect use of the term will harm the cause of peace
20 January 2024 – Of all the deplorable crimes ever conceived by the human mind, one stands alone in its utter depravity, as the very epitome of evil.
The English word for it, ‘genocide’, was first coined by the Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who had narrowly avoided becoming a victim of genocide himself, having been forced to flee Europe when the Nazis invaded Poland. As we approach Holocaust Memorial Day, I shudder to think what he would have made of the increasingly frequent, disingenuous misappropriation of the term, not least the recent representations made by the South African government at the International Court of Justice.
Lemkin wrote that genocide is, “…the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves”. After a lifetime of campaigning, his definition was later enshrined in international law as, the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
What is clear from this wording is that the difference between the tragic loss of civilian life in a just war and the crime of genocide, lies in the purposeful annihilation of a people as an objective in and of itself. It is a crime in which no distinction is made between the combatant and the non-combatant, because both are ‘other’. It is a crime fueled by hatred and dehumanisation, rather than any desire for peace or security. It is a crime characterised by the absence of any objective at all, beyond the erasure of the victims.
This context makes abundantly clear the spurious nature of the claims of ‘genocide’, made by a number of agenda-led, opinion journalists, politicians and campaigners. It should be obvious that if Israel’s objectives were genocidal, it could have used its military strength to level Gaza in a matter of days. Instead, it is placing the lives of its own soldiers at risk in its ground operations, securing humanitarian corridors and providing civilians with advance notice of its operations, even to the detriment of its military objectives.
Indeed, to make the case that genocide is taking place, one would have to ignore the scores of military lawyers, engineers and humanitarian aid coordinators working within the Israel Defence Forces, who spend hours every day, planning how they might strike targets in a way that minimises collateral harm, facilitating the entry of aid into Gaza, collecting intelligence about civilian presence around targets and aborting attacks accordingly. One would also have to ignore the fact that Israel has begun formulating proposals for how Palestinian civilians in Gaza might yet govern themselves, freed from the tyranny of Hamas, when this conflict is over.
[Ed.:
“An Attack on Hamas is an Attack on Qatar. An Attack on the Muslim Brotherhood is an Attack on Qatar.” by Daniel Greenfield
“If the Qataris are willing to use their state espionage capabilities to protect terrorist groups by targeting senators…”
January 22, 2024 – In 2022, I wrote about Global Risk Advisors, a spook connected firm that Qatar was using to spy on Republican House and Senate members opposed to the Muslim brotherhood.
Global Risk Advisors created “Project ENDGAME” and “boasted in internal records that it had ‘developed an approach to a close contact of the congressman’ who sponsored legislation that year to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.”
“’Developed an approach’” is intelligence jargon for seeking to recruit a potential asset.”
At least one previous GRA effort had allegedly involved a Facebook “honey pot” operation.
While GRA appears to have done a lot of work for Qatar, the AP revealed that “its affiliates have won small contracts with the FBI for a rope-training course and tech consulting work for the Democratic National Committee.”
There’s more material now that sheds new light on the GRA/Qatari agenda.
The clandestine document, titled “Project ENDGAME” and drafted by U.S. company Global Risk Advisors (GRA), which was founded by the ex-CIA employee Kevin Chalker, reads, “High Alert: An attack on Hamas is an attack on Qatar. An attack on the Muslim Brotherhood is an attack on Qatar.”
The March 2017 Qatari-funded plan of action to torpedo anti-Hamas and anti-Muslim Brotherhood legislation and policies noted that “Sen. Ted Cruz has reintroduced his bill to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. Unless you act soon, your enemies will inject Qatar into this fight.”
The “Project ENDGAME” proposal says, “Qatar’s Enemies Must Be Identified” and, “In the U.S., your enemies operate in the shadows. You can’t stop the enemies that you can’t find.”
A former employee of GRA who obtained the “Project ENDGAME” document from the company’s office in Doha told Fox News Digital that Qatar’s ruling Al-Thani family, via GRA, aimed to also discredit Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas.
Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., who has broad expertise regarding Qatar’s power politics, told Fox News Digital, “As a member of Congress, I will continue to use my office to hold Qatar accountable. Qatar must be exposed and their years-long hacking campaign to silence critics not just of Qatar but also critics of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas cannot go unchecked.”
Bergman, a retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant general, added, “If the Qataris are willing to use their state espionage capabilities to protect terrorist groups by targeting senators and the [former] chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, then how can we be confident in the security of our servicemen and women—and our secrets—at CENTCOM’s forward headquarters in Doha?”
We can’t. Qatar is an Islamic terrorist state whose operatives have targeted members of the United States government.
The silence and inaction in the face of this remains as outrageous as it did two years ago when this was first revealed.
We know previously that Qatar hacked the emails of its political opponents in America, including an RNC figure, Elliot Broidy, and then “leaked” them to top media outlets. But targeting House and Senate members remains a major escalation.
The failure to act against Qatar raises questions about just how its connections in the intelligence and law enforcement community go.
Alpha News cartoon: Something’s missing By Alpha News Staff –
January 20, 2024
[Ed.:
RIP OUT THE OCTOPUS: Jonathan Pollard and Rabbi David Bar-Hayim [15:32] Machon Shilo
Love and care for Hamas in Israeli hospitals Jack Engelhard
The world is always ready to let us pull up a chair at any game of chance, because they can spot a sucker from a mile away. Opinion.
Jan 21, 2024, 4:00 PM (GMT+2) – This much must be said…the Hamas terrorists know how to play Israel…for suckers.
They’ve been doing it for years. They are still laughing about how they got Gaza in the first place. One morning, a few decades ago, the Israelis simply gave it to them.
That is worth a knee-slapping guffaw whether you are Hamas, or the Palestinian Authority, which was also gifted with numerous concessions.
Land for peace…you know? No peace? Well, we tried…with sacred Jewish territory. According to some, leftists, for example, nothing in Israel is sacred.
Everything, even Jerusalem, is negotiable.
At the bargaining table, surely the poker table, the Jews always lose, even when they hold a winning hand; Moshe Dayan, for instance, and the Temple Mount.
Jordan is still laughing at that giveaway to the Islamic Waqf. Too often, we Jews try to be more merciful than G-d. Abraham contested the Almighty for Sodom, and lost.
We’ve been lousy gamblers ever since, and the world is always ready to let us pull up a chair at any game of chance, because they can spot a sucker from a mile away.
CHAPTER 2: The Art of Psychological Warfare by Linda Goudsmit
Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is [upcoming release March 2024]
January 21, 2024 – Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses psychological, informational, asymmetric warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of the globalist predators is America’s children.
Parents must adopt a wartime mentality in order to understand and challenge the dangerous government policies affecting their children. Globalist strategists based their tactical and operational plans for their War on America on Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The differences between Sun Tzu’s strategies of the 6th century BC and 21st-century globalist psychological/informational warfare are the advances in science and technology available for implementing the weapons of mass social engineering and mass psychological destruction today.
Modern psychological warfare (PSYWAR) and psychological operations (PSYOPS) utilize the 21st-century digital environment and its integrated communications landscape to communicate and coordinate censorship, disinformation, and misinformation. The hearts and minds of unsuspecting viewers are being manipulated with websites, cloud servers, search engines, social media outlets, mobile apps, audio, video, podcasts, webinars, and even immersive digital environments using artificial, interactive, computer-generated scenes. Information wars are 21st-century propaganda wars, foundational to PSYWAR and PSYOPS because the information presented is socially engineered to produce a desired political effect.
Consider the following quotations from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and how COVID-19 was a medical PSYOP with real and lethal consequences.
Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment—that which they cannot anticipate.
Americans have always trusted their doctors, expecting them to honor the Hippocratic Oath that protects every patient. In late fall 2019 when the Wuhan virus first appeared, it was simply inconceivable to the American public that their trusted doctors, and the government medical institutions doctors rely upon for information, would deliberately participate in political medicine, which is not and never was about public health. The public expected honesty and protection.
Javier Milei at the WEF- Attacking Socialism, Defending Monopolists? ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS
Argentine self interest or fundamental principles?
JAN 20, 2024 – Having taken the time to research and cover (in this substack essay) the CV and anarcho-capitalist logic of Argentine President (and economist) Javier Milei, I was familiar with most of the points made during his speech at the WEF earlier this week. However, his comments supporting monopolies were new to me, and have been nagging at me ever since.
Reliable Sources for Information on the Middle East By Alex Grobman
January 18, 2024
Part III
Jewish Virtual Library (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org)
The Jewish Virtual Library (JVL) is the most comprehensive online encyclopedia of Jewish history, politics and culture. With nearly 25,000 entries, the JVL is a one-stop shop for students of all ages interested in anything from antisemitism to Zionism. The Library has a vast global audience.
The Library has 13 wings: Antisemitism, Biography, History, the Holocaust, Israel, Israel Education, Myths & Facts, Politics, Religion Travel U.S. & Israel, Vital Stats and Women. In addition, the JVL has a bookstore, glossary, links, news, publications, a timeline of Jewish history, and the Virtual Israel Experience (VIE), an educational tool and virtual tour of Israel designed especially for students going on Birthright and other trips to Israel.
The VIE highlights Israel’s ancient history accentuated against its timeless beauty and modern culture. Much of the information in the Library cannot be found anywhere else in the world, such as material on joint U.S.-Israel projects, cooperation between Israel and the individual states, and the treatment of Americans during the Holocaust.
From the website: “We received permission from the Library of Congress to put its Judaic and Hebraic treasures on our site. We have also received permission to use material from government and non-government sources around the world.
We also publish primary documents from archives, including declassified materials from the United States and the United Kingdom. One of our goals is to offer visitors a single source for information so they don’t need to search thousands of other “Jewish” websites.”
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (https://jcpa.org/)
A leading independent research institute specializing in public diplomacy and foreign policy. The Center has produced hundreds of studies and initiatives by leading experts on a wide range of strategic topics.
Jerusalem Center Publications:
Daniel Pipes: Making Sense of the Hamas-Israel War Middle East Forum Webinar
January 15, 2024 – It’s a great pleasure to be back on the Middle East Forum webinar (video). I actually initiated the series almost four years ago in March 2020. It’s my first time back as a solo speaker.
I’ve just finished a book on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, so I watch what’s happened since October 7 with a special interest. I’d like to take up five topics, which I find somewhat mystifying and will attempt to clarify. I’ll go through four of them fairly quickly and dwell a bit on the final one.
First point: What is wrong with Israel’s military, and more broadly, its security establishment? How could it let something like October 7 happen? Answer: the Zionist and then the Israeli security establishment – the military, the intelligence, law enforcement – have been in precipitous decline over the past half-century. The Zionists were very clever and very accomplished when they had few means, and the Israelis won an extraordinary war of independence in 1948-49, then what was probably the most lopsided victory in modern history in 1967.
From then on, which is now over half a century, they have declined. Famously, in 1973, they failed to see what was coming from Syria and Egypt. Further terrible problems followed. In 1993, the Oslo Accords made no sense at all; bring in your most violent and vehement enemy to be your nearly sovereign neighbor? In 2005, leave Gaza and allow your enemy to take over there? The Israeli security establishment is not what it used to be. And so, 2023 comes not as such a great shock after 1973, 1993, 2005. That establishment needs a real kick, such as it just got, to recognize its deep problems.
Second, while the Israelis responded to October 7 with a great deal of talk about victory, which was music to my ears, they quickly reverted to a non-victory approach. One sees that over the last three months, with its reversion. For example, even though the Gazan workers are now in retrospect understood to have been spies, Israelis immediately allowed in some 6,000 West Bank workers – who presumably could be spies as well. The Israeli government decided to send monies to the Palestinian Authority. It appeased Qatar as an intermediary. It supplied Gaza with fuel and water. It ignored the threat of West Bank buildings. There’s talk of allowing the Hamas leadership to flee Gaza and set up somewhere else, perhaps in Qatar or Turkey. There has been a surge in electoral support not for those who are intent on ending Hamas’s presence, but for those who are more moderate and less intent on victory.
So, I don’t see fundamental change. As in the United States after 9/11 when “everything changed,” so one heard in Israel after October 7. But I don’t think everything changed.
