Tag Archives: Brett Stephens

Lurch and his magic hat

Is there a bigger clown in Wormtongue’s administration than John Kerry? Slow Joe Biden, who couldn’t pass an entrance exam for first grade, is a genius compared to Lurch who recently dropped his diplomatic mask to blame the rise of ISIS on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The way some yo-yos  blame Israel for fomenting 9/11 and the jihadi conflict ever since

Which the White House later claimed our Lord Nelson of the River Boats ((He still has the hat!) never said despite multiple reports of it from various news sources. But they always do that, back and fill that is, deny the undeniable. Someone’s got to protect Lurch from himself. And, for a supposed diplomat, he is mighty thin-skinned.

Israel’s defense minister Moshe Yaalon mocked him as “obsessive and messianic.” (He still has the hat!) Yaalon’s remark was made in private but leaked to the Israeli press. Yaalon apologized. What did Lurch do? Like the rest of the Worm’s JV administration, he’s still holding a grudge

Yaalon’s “meeting with Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon last week was all smiles. Asked by the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth about the Kerry kerfuffle, he replied, ‘We overcame that.’ Or not.

“’Despite the fact that Yaalon’s requests to meet with [Kerry and Biden] were declined over a week ago, Washington waited until the visit ended before making the story public in order to humiliate the Israeli defense minister,’ Ha’aretz reported. Mr. Yaalon is now said to be under an Obama administration ‘quarantine’ until he performs additional penance…”

As Brett Stephens adds, “The good news here is that at least there’s one kind of quarantine this administration believes in. The bad news is that it seems to give more thought to pursuing personal vendettas against allies like Israel than it does to waging effective military campaigns against enemies like ISIS.”

Shockeroo. Bibi, for one, has had enough. After temporarily calling a halt to such things to appease the White House’s attempt to get the Pallies to talk peace, Bibi recently announced the construction of 1,000 more apartments in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital city, the one the State Department and Lurch (he still has the hat!) refuse to recognize as such. The U.S. embassy is in Tel Aviv.

“The French build in Paris, the English build in London, and the Israelis build in Jerusalem. Why come and tell the Jews not to live in Jerusalem? Because it will heat up the atmosphere?” [Bibi] said in an address to parliament. “We are building like we’ve built since the establishment of the state.…Violence is not the result of building in Jerusalem.”

The building will be in the part of the holy city that Kerry (He’s still lying about the hat.)  persists in referring to as East Jerusalem, as if the Jordanians were still occupying it. Which they did, in addition to the Old City, until 1967 when that little Arab misadventure referred to as the Six Day War went down. 1967 just happens to be the year and the borders the Worm wants Israel to return to “with swaps” to make the Pallies sign a peace treaty. They claim “East Jerusalem” as part of their future “state.” Dream on.

So Kerry reacted. He called Bibi. So far Bibi isn’t backing down and the State Department hasn’t released anything about what Lurch told him. Instead, the White House sent out a surrogate to slur Bibi as a “chickenshit.” And then denied doing it. Reminiscent of the way the adolescent Worm plays a middle-schooler in surreptitiously giving political opponents the finger and then denying he did it to the very few journos bold enough to ask.

Maybe Lurch told Bibi about his lucky hat. Nah. The State Department would have officially announced that one for sure.

Via WSJ, Politico & BeldarBlog.

UPDATE: Heh. Guess who got tasked with an additional denial?  Lurch is shocked, shocked, that any chickenshit in the administration would call Bibi names.

Those “civilian” death totals

The Obamalamadingdong administration and the Democrat news media in general solemnly intone the figure of the day-week-month, now over 1,000 and  counting and usually adds that 75 percent or more are Palestinian civilians. How do they know they’re civilians? Hamas tells them so.

The IDF, by contrast, only says it knows that “hundreds” of them are Hamas soldiers.

“How does the [NY]Times keep such an accurate count of Palestinian deaths? A footnote discloses ‘Palestinian death tallies are provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.’

OK. So who runs the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza? Hamas does. As for the U.N., it gets its data mainly from two Palestinian agitprop NGOs, one of which, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, offers the remarkably precise statistic that, as of July 27, exactly 82% of deaths in Gaza have been civilians. Curiously, during the 2008-09 Gaza war, the center also reported an 82% civilian casualty rate.”

Leave it to CAMERA to vet these suspect figures. CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (good luck with that), analyzed the ages and genders of fatalities reported by the Palestinians in Gaza during the Israeli military operation from July 7 through July 26.

Their findings: the largest portion were young males between 17 and 30 years old...”and a particularly noticeable spike occurs between males ages 21 to 27, a pattern consistent with the age distribution typically found among combatants and military conscripts… adult female fatalities were less than 10% of total fatalities for a group that comprises a quarter of the total population.”

Remember that the next time you see a talking head pull a face and intone the latest Hamas-provided figures.

Via Bad Blue Uncensored News.

UPDATE:  Reminds me of the old Nightline’s intoning: “Day [a number], America Held Hostage” which brought down the Carter administration. This time it encourages Hamas’ use of human shields.

MORE: As always, The Truth Is Very Different, from what you hear & read.

Those murdered Israeli teenagers

Sad to hear of the murders of the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers, but not terribly surprised. Nor of the Drudge headline: “Arabs stone ambulance carrying corpses.” It’s the so-called Religion of Peace at work and play.

As Brett Stephens, former editor of the Jerusalem Post, notes: “As for the Palestinians and their inveterate sympathizers in the West, perhaps they should note that a culture that too often openly celebrates martyrdom and murder is not fit for statehood, and that making excuses for that culture only makes it more unfit.”

Among the “inveterate sympathizers” who should know better, we could start with the Presbyterian Church and their new Israel divestment scheme. And the United Methodists who did it before them. At least we can be pleased that their numbers are steadily dwindling.

Via Simply Jews.

Israelis: Return to status quo with Gaza won’t work

Amid talk of an impending cease fire over Gaza, three prominent Israeli observers indicate that something fundamental changed when Hamas targeted Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and a return to the status quo is unacceptable.

They hope Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood can be convinced to restrain its terror-protege Hamas and cut off future smuggling of unguided rockets and guided anti-tank missiles. Otherwise, an IDF ground invasion will be necessary.

Retired IDF Brigadier General Michael Herzog thinks most of the rockets and anti-tank guided missiles Hamas had were destroyed in the first air strikes, and if Egypt can be persuaded, a ground invasion might be avoided.

Former Mossad director Efraim Halevy agrees that Egypt’s intervention is necessary, but also thinks it’s time for the Israeli government to development a comprehensive Gaza strategy.

And Brett Stephens, former editor of the Jerusalem Post, who wishes he had not supported the Israeli government’s peace-seeking 2005 withdrawal of IDF troops and Israeli settlers from Gaza adds: “Israel can afford to watch only so many reruns of this same, sordid show.”

UPDATE:  Residents in Beersheba, under rocket assault most of the year, don’t want to see any truce until Hamas is whipped once and for all.

MORE: So Barry-the-double-gamer got what he wanted: a ceasefire, so Hamas can live to rocket another day. How long it will last is anybody’s guess. Not long, I’d wager.