The observation in the title of this post is pretty obvious but, apparently, not to Tom Friedman at least not as expressed in his most recent New York Times column. He opens by singing the praises of Manmohan Singh’s response to Lashkar-e-Taiba’s terrorist attack in India fifteen years ago. Admirably, his reaction was restrained. He follows with remarks about Israel:
I understand that Israel is not India — a country of 1.4 billion people, covering a massive territory. The loss of more than 160 people in Mumbai, some of them tourists, was not felt in every home and hamlet, as the deaths, maiming and kidnapping of roughly 1,400 Israelis by Hamas were. Pakistan also has nuclear weapons to deter retaliation.
Nevertheless, it is instructive to reflect on the contrast between India’s response to the Mumbai terrorist attack and Israel’s response to the Hamas slaughter.
What he doesn’t seem to appreciate is that there’s a difference in kind between India’s 2008 terror attacks and what Israel has just experienced. A difference in scale really is a difference in kind. Although LeT has a similar objective to Hamas’s, in LeT’s case the conquest of India for Islam, no one seriously thinks that LeT is capable of doing it. Hamas’s threat to Israel’s existence is significantly more proximate, especially considering that the number of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is expected to outstrip the number of Jews in Israel soon. By some accounts that’s already the case.
That places Mr. Friedman clearly in the “Israel has a right to exist but…” camp.
In an address at CIS in Australia John Mearsheimer outlines the fix we are in. The first 21 minutes are devoted to Ukraine; the next 15 minutes to Israel.
The TL;DR version is
The “unipolar moment” when the U. S. was the sole superpower extended from 1989 to 2017. It’s over now.
Largely due to our mismanaged foreign policy, we have pushed the Russians towards the Chinese.
The Ukraine cannot prevail in its war with Russia. The war will never end and we cannot disentangle ourselves from it.
We are similarly entangled with Israel.
Those two conflicts are distractions from dealing with the emerging situation in Asia.
What he does not say but I will is that our present predicament has been greatly aggravated by our own actions. Through a combination of hubris, those promoting American hegemony, and getting our foreign policy advice from the wrong people we are now in a very serious situation.
In 1942 Val Lewton was appointed head of RKO’s new horror unit. He was given two directives:
The maximum budget for a movie was $150,000
No picture should run more than 75 minutes
Over the next four years Lewton made ten pictures for RKO and they include some of the finest horror movies ever made. $150,000 in 1942 is roughly equivalent to $3 million today. By comparison Killers of the Flower Moon cost $200 million with a running time of three hours and 26 minutes.
Lewton, a Russian emigre (original name: Vladimir Leventon), had been working for David Selznick. He was story editor for Gone With the Wind. If you recall the movie, the elevator scene showing wounded soldiers was written by him (Selznick never realized it had been written as a sort of joke).
Lewton’s picture relied on mood, writing, and acting rather than special effects or gore. They include a very creepy story of Satanic worship (The Seventh Victim in 1943), a werewolf picture with a cat instead of a wolf (Cat People in 1942), a vampire picture without a vampire (Isle of the Dead in 1945), and the best zombie movie made until Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 (I Walked With a Zombie—1943).
I’m not sure any pictures made today can actually be compared with the Val Lewton horror movies. M. Night Shyamalan’s perhaps?
As we are deluged with slasher pictures over the next week or so, I recommend seeking out Val Lewton’s RKO horror movies. They’ll be 75 minutes well spent.
Propaganda isn’t a fake news article or a deliberately poor-quality meme, nor is it disinformation or misinformation—though these are all tactics of information warfare. Propaganda is a communication, often a story, geared to a large audience designed to influence perspectives and inspire actions that support the interests and objectives of its creator. Good propaganda works through framing and narrative; it is attractive and even entertaining. It evokes emotion and, if done well, colors the way one sees the world and evaluates a particular situation.
In the weeks since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, we’ve seen propaganda in action.
She proposes three measures for responding to Hamas propaganda:
Raise awareness of the problem of state backed media pushing Hamas propaganda.
When it comes to Hamas, PIJ, and others, both show and tell.
Pre-bunk Hamas lies.
My advice would be simpler. If it comes from Hamas, assume it’s a lie until categorically proven otherwise. And sites that publish Hamas propaganda are not news sites. They’re propaganda outlets.
As a final bit of advice I think we should recall Jonathan Swift’s counsel: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it”. There is literally nothing than can be done to prevent that other than not publishing propaganda.
I was going through a little mental exercise. Like everybody else I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents. I have photographs, of course, of my parents and all of my grandparents. I have photographs of all but one of my great-grandparents and three of my great-great-grandparents. None of any of my great-great-great-grandparents.
The oldest go back to the 1860s and 1870s.
I’ll start assembling them and post them.
Sadly, I do not much resemble any of my better-looking ancestors.
Lower-tier manufacturers are layered throughout the weapons production process, even if the branding on the end-product bears the name of a well-known, multi-billion dollar company. Boeing relies on 55,737 suppliers, Lockheed on 17,722 suppliers, and General Dynamics on 17,701 suppliers, according to an investigation by the Financial Times.
Many of these smaller suppliers are “tier five, six, and seven,†in the defense supply chain, said Jerry McGinn, a former senior career official in the Defense Department’s Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy. “We’re talking wiring, harnesses, fasteners, those kinds of things.â€
The Defense Department also works directly with over 39,000 small businesses, not including subcontractors working for bigger firms, according to a 2020 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.
So if Lockheed wants to boost production for its missiles, those small machine shops must also increase production. “You can’t just go to a hardware store and buy a nut and bolt, it has to meet certain specs,†said Berardino Baratta, the CEO of MxD.
Meanwhile, the number of those firms is shrinking. The number of small businesses working in the defense industry between 2010 and 2020 fell by 40 percent, and an estimated 15,000 firms will go out of business in the next decade if trends continue, according to a Defense Department study.
In the past I’ve known small defense contractors like this that consisted of a guy wiring cables on his kitchen table.
In other words increasing production of munitions is more than a matter of ordering more. A lot more. The capacity might not be there, the management of such a supply chain is daunting, and some of the suppliers are reluctant to modernize their operations without a dependable stream of orders.
rab Barometer’s survey of the West Bank and Gaza, conducted in partnership with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy, provides a snapshot of the views of ordinary citizens on the eve of the latest conflict. The longest-running and most comprehensive public opinion project in the region, Arab Barometer has run eight waves of surveys covering 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa since 2006. All surveys are designed to be nationally representative, most of them (including the latest survey in the West Bank and Gaza) are conducted in face-to-face interviews in the respondents’ places of residence, and the collected data is made publicly available. In each country, survey questions aim to measure respondents’ attitudes and values about a variety of economic, political, and international issues.
Our most recent interviews were carried out between September 28 and October 8, surveying 790 respondents in the West Bank and 399 in Gaza. (Interviews in Gaza were completed on October 6.) The survey’s findings reveal that Gazans had very little confidence in their Hamas-led government. Asked to identify the amount of trust they had in the Hamas authorities, a plurality of respondents (44 percent) said they had no trust at all; “not a lot of trust†was the second most common response, at 23 percent. Only 29 percent of Gazans expressed either “a great deal†or “quite a lot†of trust in their government. Furthermore, 72 percent said there was a large (34 percent) or medium (38 percent) amount of corruption in government institutions, and a minority thought the government was taking meaningful steps to address the problem.
and
In terms of attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, support for the two-state solution in the West Bank was slightly lower than in Gaza (49 percent versus 54 percent), and opposition to Arab-Israeli normalization was slightly higher.
I don’t know how to reconcile those findings with the other poll I’ve cited here taken in May which found, well, pretty much the opposite. I also don’t know how to reconcile the reported findings with the finding in the Arab Barometer poll that more Gazans supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad combined than supported Fatah. I doubt that opinions have changed that much since May (but before Hamas’s attack on Israel). One or both of the polls could be flawed or erroneous. I simply don’t know but I wanted to report this polling result anyway.
Israel refuses to let the Palestinians have a state of their own.
The Palestinians were offered a separate state of their own by the British in 1937, by the United Nations in 1947, and by the Israelis in 2000 and 2008. In each instance, they turned down the offer, rather than live as neighbors with a Jewish state. No wonder the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban once said: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.â€
The post is definitely one-sided. If I find a comparable pro-Palestinian post, I’ll link to it similarly.
My sole observation is completely tangential. I often hear it claimed that not all Palestinians support Hamas. I’m sure that’s true. However, what also seems to be true is that as of the most recent polling information from last spring a majority of Palestinians believe a two-state solution is unworkable. That would appear to differ from Hamas’s position only in detail.
In an op-ed in Newsweek Brad Palumbo points out something distressing. According to a recent Harvard-Harris poll although among Americans, generally, there is a consensus of support in favor of the Israelis following Hamas’s attack on Israel, the situation is quite different among Generation Z (Americans aged 18 to 24). 62% think that Hamas’s action was genocidal and 48% support Hamas. He remarks:
This is not normal. Such a moral perversion is not an organic belief that naturally emerges among decent people. On the contrary, it’s in large part the consequence of a corrosive and malevolent “social justice” ideology that’s being spoon-fed to young Americans on college campuses.
In this depraved worldview, which Elon Musk has dubbed the “woke mind virus,” the world is divided into two groups of people: oppressors and oppressed. Black people, for example, are oppressed in America. So, under this lens, Black Americans cannot be racist: They can only be victims of racism.
He attributes it to miseducation. While distressing I don’t think that’s quite right. I agree that it’s egoism if not narcissism but I suspect that much of it is due to an almost complete lack of anything resembling moral education. They only know what they see on TV (or maybe on Instagram) and that is largely amoral or immoral. I think that Mr. Polumbo is assuming that American young people are naturally moral and only through “miseducation” could they possibly hold such a view. I think contrariwise that human beings are naturally self-centered and that inculcating a moral sense in them is hard.
It sounds like a problem to me. Can it be remediated? Will it fix itself over time?
