One reason the GOP won

NOTE: I was going to make this part of a larger blog entry “New Rights and Lefts” but at this point it seems like that will be more a book than a blog entry.  Rather, I’d like to make this one instance of how new politics is escaping old paradigms.

But I was just forwarded this video where AP writer Matt Lee quizzes WH Spokeswoman Jen Psaki.  Like the rest of us, he was trying to reconcile Dempsey’s remarks that Israel went to “extraordinary lengths” to protect Gaza civilians with Psaki’s earlier remarks about “appalling casualties”.  To wit: “When you say the Administration is appalled, did you just mean the State Department?”

Now let’s get some things straight, as if I need to.  I voted for Obama, twice.  If anything, I think Obamacare needs to go further.  I think global warming is real and a threat to civilization.  All that being told, this right here encapsulates everything that so quickly disillusioned me about the Obama administration.  This is one of those things that I thought had a priori bipartisan support.  If not being explicitly pro-Israel, at least fact-checking before making official statements on behalf of the President of the United States.

I know a lot of people wonder why so many GOP candidates won last Tuesday, but as a lifelong Democrat who actually talks to the other side, I hope this sheds some light on it.  Obama has certainly been the butt of a lot of vicious attacks and conspiracy theories.  Benghazi has been a rather noxious one.  But when taken as a whole, it reveals a distinct policy difference that more stately likes of McCain can certainly address and exploit.

I, for one, am looking forward to seeing McCain chair the Armed Services Committee. I hope he will elevate so many conspiracy theories (like Benghazi) into needed policy debates. If he shines in that role, he could play kingmaker for the 2016 GOP presidential run.

And if the Democrats want to thwart this advance on the American center, they can’t just fire back with “they cut funding for the VA” or arguments which, while technically valid, miss the point of what voters are looking for.  The presidential election isn’t about pork or benefits.  It’s about a grand overarching policy and vision for America.  When even the Economist is asking “What will America fight for?”, it’s a legitimate and pressing question that Democrats will ignore at their peril.

 

Blood Libel in Los Angeles

photo

I found this walking down Santa Monica Blvd. just west of Sawtelle, on the South side of the street.  I registered this with ADL and they worked with the city of Los Angeles to have it removed.  I also posted it on Facebook, but they removed it after a week without giving a reason… along with a few threads that went along with it.

I’m not sure what I can do to contest Facebook’s decision to drop this picture, but it’s either gross negligence or flat-out anti-Semitism on their part.  This was a shock to everyone who saw it, and we had a good thread going on how to deal with it.

Here’s the old link:  facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154568647330637&set=a.64370195636.141227.591625636

More later.

“Do you agree Hamas fired 4000+ rockets at Israeli civilians?”

People tend to think wars are complicated.  They try to disentangle it with endless debate like some unmanageable Gordion knot. But wars are usually quite simple, and come down to a simple question that gets debated over with guns. Much like Alexander the Great did, when he cut through that Gordion knot with his sword.

The Gaza conflict is no exception. After many debates with people over Twitter, I found the whole war can be distilled into one question:

“Do you agree Hamas fired 4000+ rockets at Israeli civilians?”

Without fail, the answer of everyone who supported Hamas in this war was either crickets, deflecting the question, or outright hostility.  Occasionally someone makes a grudging admission but immediately qualifies it with some crazy lie or excuse.

It certainly explains the historic need for an inquisitor.

This is by no means a conclusive or exhaustive list of the replies I got. Rather it’s a small sample that I will keep adding to as my debates continue. Enjoy.

Philip D Clarke ?@PhilipdClarke Sep 3
@rbassilian @proadstudio @Miguelcubells @riwired No #Zionazi has ever admitted to #ethniccleansing #Colonisation #GenocideinGaza

Sadaf Ahmed ?@OscarChilde Sep 3
@rbassilian @buberzionist That’s not the beginning. The beginning is the Nakba dork. Go away you know nothing.

@QueenNzinga13 Sep 3
@rbassilian @HotInfidel74 @hotspur007 @lennydogin @FIREFIGHTER3899 @ink_spilled There’d be peace if government changed wicked policies

ameer ?@ameer6691 Sep 2
@rbassilian @HotInfidel74 @rondbusa who in the earth r u to question me?

Ahmed Khalil #Gaza ?@alKhalilA Sep 1
@rbassilian @IDFSpokesperson And Palestinian rockets are not military grade or carry warheads, they are just fireworks that make holes.

Acer Jamal @AceJam13 • Aug 31
@rbassilian are you Jewish big boy? Don’t dodge the question? <<@IsraSupremacist do you think this mofo is circumcised?

 

 

Ending the six day war – after 47 years

I think the best way to describe the world’s response to the latest Gaza conflict is: confused.  Who won?  Who lost?  What did people die for?  With the right optic, the conclusions are really quite simple.  It’s a lesson as old as the Iliad: wars are not fought over land or money, they’re fought over RIGHTS.  The land and money are just spoils.  What Israel achieved in this latest episode was the right to do as it will with the occupied territories.

But let’s back up a bit … 47 years, to be exact.  When Israel was REALLY surrounded by sworn enemies on all sides.  Enemy governments, with militaries, ready to invade and quash the adolescent state from all sides.  The only way to stay alive was to wage a pre-emptive war and push their armies back to safer borders … annexing Sinai, the west bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights.

Taking the land, in that case, was the easy part.  They took over the territory so they could demilitarize them and give them some breathing room against invading armies.  But what to do with it?  What to do with the people?  This is where we see how important rights are.

Since 1967, Israel has been stuck in a quandary.  They didn’t want to annex the territories, since that would mean granting citizenship to predominantly Arab areas, thereby diluting Israel’s Jewish identity and sovereignty.  A double-whammy considering the outright hostility of local Arab states to Israel.  They couldn’t just catch-and-release, since that would defeat the purpose of the entire war.  So the solution was to just maintain them in some limbo where those living in the occupied territories became refugees.

Now when it comes to refugees, the UN has some jurisdiction.  And this is the same UN that equated Zionism with Racism in 1975 – it wasn’t exactly friendly to Israel.  Israel basically had to suffer the next 47 years dealing with Intifadas, Arafats, a UN that both funded the refugees and readily condemned Israel for its treatment of these refugees at every chance it could.  Meanwhile, the other Arab countries refused to grant them citizenship within their own borders.

Indeed the whole “Palestinian” cause originated in 1967 as a political move against Israel.  Where the Arabs couldn’t win militarily, they would win diplomatically.  They would goad the refugees to make life as difficult as possible for Israel, and as soon as Israel was forced to respond militarily, they would rush in and call for an immediate end to Israel’s “aggression”.  A UN friendly to their agenda made sure Israel had no choice but to comply.

And so It would take several decades – the Camp David accords, 9-11, an Intifada, Israel’s exit from Gaza, the Arab Spring – to shift the winds of diplomacy into Israel’s favor.  The president of the USA no longer talks about Israel as an “apartheid state” but talks about its “right to security”.  Jordan has dropped its hostility towards Israel, even the UAE talks about the need to normalize relations with Israel.

But what really sets this conflict apart from the last few is that this is the first one since the Arab Spring and subsequent crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  General Sisi has blown up the tunnels leading from Egypt into Gaza, making them completely blockaded.

So where once Hamas and Gaza had open support from the Arab world, they now were cut off with no way to survive.  This is why they unleashed such an irrationally suicidal mission against Israel – they had no other choice.  It was a Hail Mary (so to speak) in hopes that they could spark enough sympathy for their plight that Egypt or somebody similar would break the blockade.

Instead, whereas in previous conflicts other Arab countries would rush to their aid, this time they stayed back.  Yes, we heard of the anti-Semitism and demagoguery flaring through Europe and Turkey and the like, but the relevant fact is no government offered them any official support.  No military aid, no diplomatic pressure.  The words against Israel were just words.

So, when Netanyahu says Israel came out victorious, what he means is that Israel set out its mission – Operation Protective Edge – and completed it as fully as possible with no need to scale back or cancel.  This is a first.  To go any farther than that against Hamas would have required invading with ground troops, and that was never a part of this mission.

This implies Israel now has other rights.  And you hear the conversation around Jerusalem shifting to reflect it.  For the first time, people are openly discussing programs to help the refugees emigrate to other Arab countries.  It’s still in hushed tones, but give it time.  The US is preparing a motion in the UN for an international effort to demilitarize Hamas.

Meanwhile, Israelis are clamoring for more to be done.  More will be done, for sure.  The irony of Bibi’s “decrease” in popularity is that people veered towards his RIGHT.  They wanted him to go in immediately and finish them off.

So give it time.  Already Netanyahu went and annexed the 1.5 square miles associated with the kidnapping of the three teenagers: a bold move that asserts Israel’s new confidence in its security position.  The opposition has been vocal — but only a voice.

Meanwhile, a ground invasion, a feasible program to incorporate the occupied territories into Israel, abandoning the “two-state solution” or the “right of return”: these things were all unheard of just two years ago.  Expect to hear these more and more from here on out.

These are the rights Israel has fought for, and won.

Open letter to the Guardian

Yeah, I’ve been writing a couple letters lately.  If people want peace, the first necessity is a common understanding of basic realities.  Feel free to write them yourself at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

——————
Regarding your defence of the anti-Hamas advertising:

While I admire your defence of an advert, the dithering language in which you defended it distresses me. You are a newspaper. You could have easily countered the clamor among your readers with an investigation on whether the human shields argument is TRUE or not. Which, it is. There’s plenty of evidence out there to make that assertion, or at least defend it. I’m sure I, Rabbi Shmuley, or any number of your readers would be happy to engage people on this topic. Indeed this is what needs to be done in a forum where more Israel opponents deny Hamas is even firing rockets into Israel.

If all you are is a gossip column for those who want to believe a propaganda line, then by all means continue what you’re doing. But if you aspire to be journalists, I urge you to at least research a bit and not just be a weather vane for public opinion.

 

Open letter to The Economist

SIR – I will spare you any vitriol about your coverage of Israel last week Losing the War – I’m sure your mailbox has been full of it already. Rather I’ll say I’m disappointed. It was so focused on Israel, and whether you find it legitimate, you blinded yourselves to the real news and opportunities coming out of the entire region. Egypt is discarding politicised Islam, what seems to be a popular move and not just dictatorial fiat. They destroyed the tunnels to Gaza and are railing against Hamas in their media. Even Saudi Arabia is jumping on board. Israel is looking at its neighbors and seeing itself NOT surrounded by sworn enemies, for the first time ever.
It’s setting the stage for an entirely new politics and economy in the Middle East. To not report on this, and discuss the opportunities involved, well that’s like refusing to cash your dividend check because it was signed by a dirty Jewish banker.
Meanwhile, your analysis of people’s perception of Israel seems to only be a census of social rot. Ironic that it follows on the heels of “Tethered by History” and a rather weak defense of why the Jews should feel safe in Europe in the face of renewed anti-Semitism. It would be more interesting to see the demographics involved in this. If I am correct, classic European neo-Nazis and Muslim immigrants are getting together to bash Jews. Politics makes strange bedfellows indeed, and it’ll be a nasty hangover when they wake up from that orgy and look across the bed at each other. It calls into question the deepening decay of Europe.
A whole new world is being born out of this conflict in Gaza. The Economist’s mission is smart capitalism which is aware of political events and the economic opportunities they bring. Failing to see and analyze this would be a catastrophic failure on your part.

When New Worlds are Born

“Hannibal Tactic” – it’s the new term my mom told me the Israeli left was using about the Israeli military.  That somehow they killed those three soldiers themselves and blamed it on Hamas so they could break the truce.

The current conflict in Gaza, with all its Fog of War, has no shortage of such conspiracy theories.  Some on the left have even proposed that there’s oil under Gaza and the war is a pretext to exploit it. I’m not going to debunk them here, I’ll just say I’ve seen enough of them at work in my many years of political activity to notice what’s really going on.

The real issue is that people tend to get their worldviews at a certain point in their lives, and it works for a while, but then they never stop to examine their views.  Meanwhile, the world changes in ways that boggle the imagination and needs to constantly be rethought and re-analyzed.  So they keep trying to jam current events into a worldview that’s been obsolete for years, even decades, and only come across as more and more ridiculous.

Indeed that’s why I got into political theory.  It recognizes at its heart that there’s nothing absolute about reality, that it’s a social construct that is actively fought over by various political powers in a life and death struggle.

And what we’ve been seeing in the past three years, beginning with the Arab Spring and culminating in this conflict over Gaza, is our entire understanding of world politics being rewritten.

You could say the current understanding of the Middle East comes from two events: the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, and the Camp David accord declaring peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978.  This set a framework where Israel was isolated by Arab neighbors who were steadfast enemies, while Egypt maintained a shaky peace that everyone thought was only maintained by a dictator against the population’s will (Anwar Saddat, the Egyptian signatory, was assassinated).

And the world watched and interpreted those events in Israel and the Occupied Territories according to that framework.  This gave Israel very few options for dealing with Palestinians in those territories, since any military action met with swift calls for a cease fire by its neighbors.  And Arabs both in the occupied territories and neighboring countries like Lebanon felt much bolder to take potshots at Israel.

Enter the Arab Spring. Which I called a pro-Western, secular democratic revolution in earlier blog posts.  Others quickly lamented all the shortcomings of these revolutions, which is complaining that the newborn can’t speak, but I saw world-changing potential.

And now those potentials are coming forth.  The major change in this current conflict with Gaza is Egypt is no longer a friend of Hamas.  Egypt destroyed the smuggling tunnels leading into Gaza, their media rails against Hamas, and as I write this they are negotiating with Hamas without Israel’s presence, and it sounds like they’re just trying to bring Hamas back to reality.

Indeed it seems like Hamas is still operating with the demands and politics of the 80s, and their unpleasant surprise is now – there’s a new reality in the Middle East.

And, while the world continues to rail against Israel, Egypt quietly dissolved the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing .  A quick search of the comments section shows that Egyptians welcome this move.   But very few news channels are really exploring this.  CNN posted this, which is a start:

And even they aren’t noticing the elephant in the room.  Wait a minute – Egypt is ALLIED with Israel?? Wait another minute … SAUDI ARABIA and JORDAN are allied with Israel?  Even if it’s under the radar, even if overtly they insert an obligatory “death to Israel” at every speech (like this guy) we’ll take it with jubilation!

Because at the same time, they’re alerting Hamas and the rest of the world to a new political reality.  It’s a reality where Israel will look around at its neighbors and see, if not friends, at least people with similar interests and temporary alliances.  And that is HUGE for a country that’s been isolated since its inception.

Like I told my mom, just wait another month.  Everything you know about the Middle East is going to be thrown out the window, and a whole new world will be born.

UN Out Of Gaza

In case you haven’t heard, Israel shelled a UN school.  It’s been on the news for two days straight.  It’s the worst atrocity since … I dunno, Fallujah?  Boko Haram?  Two weeks ago?

But I kid.  The real issue is people are trying to make moral statements about the war without any attempt to peek through the fog of war and see what’s actually happening.

So before I make my moral assertions about this war, let’s cut through that fog of war to see the events surrounding the shelling.

The basic issue is that the UN school was sheltering an alleged 3000 people.  Of those people, 20 died.

Now, if Israel were directly targeting the school with artillery fire, a lot more people would have died in that attack.  It’s pretty safe to say that entire structure and everyone in it would have been decimated in a minute.

Let’s also keep in mind that the whole compound is in a crowded neighborhood, where Hamas fighters are engaging Israeli troops all around it.

Now, I don’t make any apologies for engaging Hamas fighters with overwhelming force.  You don’t attack without it, all militaries use it.  That means softening up their hiding spots with artillery fire.

So, the likeliest explanation is that Israeli troops engaged Hamas relatively close to the school.  And a couple of artillery shells, which are “blunt instruments” exploded a bit too close for comfort to the school.

This certainly jives with what we’ve seen in videos, even from CNN’s lookout tower, where artillery shells were falling all around them.

So, for the UN to make this moral assertion without bothering to peek through the fog of war; to make this assertion that Israeli troops were targeting a UN school despite some serious contradictions: this now makes the UN the target of moral scrutiny.

Just what are they doing there?  Are they there to shelter innocents?  Or are they there to erode Israel’s moral authority for self defense?

Hamas has engaged Israeli troops in their own turf, in Gaza.  There’s no shortage of evidence showing their willingness to hide behind civilians.  This means no neighborhood is now safe from the conflict.  Gaza City is imminently an occupied city, much in the tradition of Atlanta, Dresden, Berlin, Fallujah.

Why insist on keeping civilians so close to the line of fire?  You want to tell me there’s no other way for them to keep civilians safe, if this is their mission?  How about barges on the coast?  Buildings on the border?  Something that Israeli troops can secure?

And let’s not forget the video footage being shown for two days straight.  It’s the same stock footage of Palestinian mothers screaming and crying, which cries out propaganda video.  If people were seriously wounded, mangled, killed, the footage would be a lot more grisly.

And for the UN to take it and run with it like this, this makes them sound like a propaganda arm.   Not so much for Hamas, but for the millions of anti-Semites in the streets right now, calling for death to Jews.

UN, J’accuse.  Get out of Gaza, now.  You serve no purpose there other than to foment further conflict around the world.

Suspension bridge of disbelief

suspensionbridge

I need to nerdrage about this Dawn of the Planet of the Apes poster for just a second here.  Just because I see so many of them all over town.  Notice the Golden Gate Bridge is demolished in the center, and the two sides hang helplessly in mid-air.  Defying gravity and physics.

But does anybody know how a SUSPENSION bridge works?  SUSPENSION is the key word.  The bridge SUSPENDS from the giant cable which SUSPENDS between the two main trusses, much like a power cable SUSPENDS between two power poles.

What happens if you cut that power cable in the middle?  Would the power cable just hang there in mid-air?  NO!  Each side would flop to its respective pole, dangling vertically, ends hovering right around ground level.

The same happens with suspension bridges.  If those two main cables hanging between the two trusses snap, they and everything below them are falling into the water as quickly as gravity can take them.  And probably also the trusses themselves.

Maybe you can call suspension of disbelief (so to speak) and say well the plot is good, the effects are (otherwise) good, blah blah blah.  But I call this out because I want to call out this new nerd-movie-excitement movement that I can’t get into.  Here is a prime example of why.

You can say it’s cool new plots, cool new stories, but if they can’t even get Gravity 101 going in their effects, it just convinces me that it’s the same coke-addled retards squatting out another one for the masses.

Seriously guys.  Hire a physicist if you’re this dumb.  Then listen to them.

End nerdrage.

Protest bid for Los Angeles free wifi

I posted this on slashdot.org per the advice of a Linux’y friend, but it looks like I have better success posting here.  So here you go:

The Los Angeles Times reported that the City Council wants to provide free wifi to the entire city. They’re quoting basic wifi internet infrastructure at $60-100 million dollars, and $5 billion for upgrading it to fiber speed. This all seems really high for a city with less than 500 square miles. I’m assuming someone is getting rich off all this.

We want to do a protest bid, and give a proper plan for wireless internet, based on the fact that the internet is actually free, and a city government can bypass businesses and take advantage of that. So I’m posting this to gather ideas.

Our basic plan so far is a central grid of high-powered routers, say about one for every square mile, that would plug into fiber channels. We could then crowdsource the high demand areas to plug in repeaters to make wifi communication reliable.

The central grid of routers would cost about $200k in parts and could be set up almost immediately. We would need about 1000 fiber channels to plug into, but this should be relatively simple, provided there’s already fiber all over town at this point.

Repeaters will be the bigger issue, since their range is ultimately limited by the strength of the laptop transmitter that communicates with them. But that’s why I think crowdsourcing high-demand areas is the best way to go about this. People can go to a website and pinpoint where they’d like to see better wifi internet access, then we can have a department do triage to see which locations need repeaters most. But at $50-100 a pop, we can keep costs low.

The other issue is how this grid will communicate with the internet at large, what peer arrangements we’ll need, what business we’ll need to suck up to until we build our own fiber infrastructure. But there are advantages to this. With such a large fiber internet infrastructure set up, the city of Los Angeles can become its own ISP, providing wired fiber internet to homes all over the grid.

Anyway, this is enough information to get the ball rolling.