TGIF: Israel Humiliated

TGIF: Israel Humiliated

To more fully understand the ferocity of Israel's massacre of the people of the Gaza Strip, it's perhaps worth considering that on October 7, 2023, the reputedly invincible Israeli Defence Forces and intelligence services were made to look like fools caught sleeping on guard duty. While Hamas's murder, assault, and kidnapping of noncombatants must be strongly condemned, we should be able to see how humiliating that was for the Israeli government, which brags as much about its awesome power as it does about its allegedly unequaled moral stature. Israel has blockaded Gaza for 20 years,...

read more

Ban “Ethnic Cleansing”

I propose that we defenders of individual rights stop using the term ethnic cleansing. Why? Because it is the sort of euphemism bad people would use to disguise what they are doing when they expel or annihilate large numbers of people viewed as members of the wrong group. The Nazis used the word hygiene when writing about "purifying" the Aryan "race." That word was meant to soften the truth and dress it in scientific garb. But we all know what it meant. Ethnic cleansing would fit well into that lexicon. Remember, it was the Nazis who talked like that -- not the victims or outraged onlookers....

read more

Israel Grabs More Palestinian Land in the West Bank

From The Washington Post, March 22, 2023: Israel announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Blinken visit Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, announced the seizure of 10 square kilometers (3.8 square miles) of Palestinian territory in the West Bank on Friday. The move marks the single largest land seizure by the Israeli government since the 1993 Oslo accords, according to Peace Now, a settlement watchdog group. “While there are those in Israel and the world who seek to undermine our right over the Judea and Samaria area and the country in general,” Smotrich...

read more

What She Meant

By calling yesterday's UN Security Council's Gaza ceasefire resolution "nonbinding," US Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield was delivering Joe Biden's message to Israel: Feel free to ignore this. Israel has obliged. The U.S. had abstained.

read more

But Hamas…

When Israel's defenders bring up Hamas's execrable anti-Semitic and genocidal charter, they should be reminded that for decades before the 1948 self-declared founding of Israel, Zionist leaders and settlers had talked about reclaiming and sanctifying the "Promised Land" for the "Chosen People"; supported the "transfer," by force if necessary, of the Palestinian Arabs (those non-Jewish people who for generations lived inexplicably in the "land without a people"); treated them with utter contempt to their faces (to the dismay other Jews); expelled over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948, the...

read more

Netanyahu as Haman

The fable of Purim ends with the slaughter of over 75,000 non-Jewish Persians by the Jewish Persians after one official's (Haman's) plot to kill the Jews is exposed when the king is alerted by his Jewish wife. That's a mighty big conspiracy! God makes no appearance. An inspiring story for sure! The closest thing today to the villain, Haman, is Netanyahu and his team. Boo!

read more

Beware: The Government Is People

Nearly everyone complains about capitalism's defects, or market failures. In fact, those are social failures, not specifically market failures, which show up when many rational individual actions create a social situation that displeases everyone. This means that government dirigisme -- state direction or displacement of the market -- cannot be a remedy because who do you think staffs the government and how do they get there? A big difference between the two systems -- market and state -- is that while the market diminishes social defects, the government magnifies them.

read more

Who’s the Real Foreign-Policy Realist?

The establishment debate over foreign policy isn't between realists and whatever their opponents call themselves. It's a debate over who's more realistic. It reminds me of the debate between the Federalists and Antifederalists. No one wanted to be considered against federalism, but the centralizers had beaten the real federalists to the label Federalist.

read more

Pin It on Pinterest