Christmas Day, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight JS-8243 crashed while attempting an emergency landing at Aqtau Airport in Aktau, Kazakhstan. There were 67 passengers and crew aboard; at least 38 died in the crash, and the body count may climb as hospitalized passengers succumb to their injuries. Russian aviation authorities blamed the loss on a massive bird strike, but the intact tail section bore the tell-tale marks of a hit by a missile fired from an SA-22 Greyhound (Russian name: Pantsir) surface-to-air missile system. Read the background in my post: Azerbaijan Airline Crash Was Most Likely Caused by a Russian Missile.

Despite warnings from the Kremlin not to speculate on the cause of the crash, Azerbaijani officials have told the media Flight JS-8243 was brought down by a Russian missile. //

It was the drone attack, not fog, that prevented JS-8243 from landing.

Near Grozny, the plane was hit by a Russian missile. The plane asked to divert to airports at Makhachkala or Mineralnye Vody, but permission was denied, and it was told to land at Aqtau Airport. Essentially, it was forbidden to land in Russian territory. As the plane left the Grozny area, it was subjected to GPS jamming and other electronic warfare effects. "According to data, the plane’s GPS navigation systems were jammed throughout the flight path above the sea."

By now, the plane had lost steering, and the pilot and co-pilot were managing direction and altitude by using engine power. This is what the flight looked like with altitude changes. //

By any standard, the flight crew on JS-8243 were heroic. By keeping the fatally damaged aircraft in the air and accomplishing a controlled crash near the Aqtau Airport, they saved nearly half the people on board. //

flyovercountry
11 hours ago
It needs to be said over and over, the reason why the Russians denied landing anywhere except Kazakhstan is the hope the airplane, and evidence, would be at the bottom of the Caspian Sea.

Gabriel Noronha
@GLNoronha
·
Follow
The missiles hitting Israel right now are the same ones Biden and Harris worked to lift UN sanctions on the first month he took office.

They said it would help promote diplomacy with Iran.

12:54 PM · Oct 1, 2024 //

Brytek
36 minutes ago
Wars end when you annihilate the opposition or force an unconditional surrender, wars on end begin with proportional responses. Perhaps Israel has learned anyone pushing a proportional response is not their friend and is in fact the worst kind of enemy to have, as all it does is bleed both sides whilst the “allies” military industrial complex sell weapons to both sides, while draining their own populations of wealth to fund it.

But Iran? If Iran were to obtain a nuke, either by building their own or just buying one from North Korea or Pakistan, that might very well be the flashpoint. This is a line that has not been crossed since 1945, and was Iran to torch off a nuke in Haifa - or New York - that would almost certainly plunge the world into conflict.

Watch Iran. Watch the least stable players. Hopefully, reason will prevail, but as von Clausewitz famously said, "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

How Did It Happen?

You don't give the Tsar unpleasant information. The invasion of Ukraine unfolded the way it did because the FSB directorate responsible for intelligence in Ukraine gave optimistic reports about the desire of Ukraine for an Anschluss and said the Ukrainian Army would not fight. According to Bloomberg, something similar happened this time.

Gerasimov and top officials "seemingly dismissed intelligence warnings that Ukrainian soldiers were gathering near the border with Russia’s western Kursk region as much as two weeks before they began the assault," Bloomberg said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was also not briefed on the troop buildup, the unnamed source reportedly told Bloomberg.

True or not true? It's hard to tell. //

Ukraine's challenge is to convert a tactical and operational victory into something that has strategic impact.

Russia has been knocked back on its heels, and Putin has been made to look rather ridiculous. He's not going to take that lying down because if the Tsar is not omnipotent, well, he's not the Tsar. It is hard to see how Gerasimov and most of the Russian General Staff survive this fiasco.

The episode has also demonstrated a degree of operational brilliance that no one expected. So far, the Ukrainians have seemed as mired in Soviet-era tactics as the Russians.

The CEO of Germany's leading defense industry corporation escaped assassination by Russian operatives earlier this year thanks to the timely cooperation and information sharing between the United States and Germany. Armin Papperger, the head of the massive Rheinmetall conglomerate, was targeted for death by Russia because of his company's central role in arming and supplying Ukraine.

According to reports, US intelligence uncovered the plot and enabled German counterintelligence and security forces to put Papperger under close protection. The missing part of this story is the German GSG9 hauling the Russian assets off to prison. The assassination operatives and planners are still at large.

This episode is not a one-off. It is part of a campaign of hybrid warfare that is being actively waged against the West by Russia as part of its campaign to eradicate Ukraine.

Hybrid warfare involves blending kinetic and non-kinetic actions to exploit an enemy's weaknesses without crossing the line between peace and war. //

In the current case, Russia wants to keep NATO off balance and damage critical assets, but it doesn't want to tickle that fine line between painful annoyance and an Article 5 consultation.

There are two main characteristics of hybrid warfare. First, the level of violence must fall below the threshold the adversary would consider an attack requiring military response. Second, the source of the attack must remain ambiguous and difficult to definitively attribute to a foreign actor. These two factors make it difficult for a state to develop a coherent response to various lines of attack.

For the past months, the Russian OPTEMPO of hybrid operations in Germany has accelerated: //

Natasha Bertrand @NatashaBertrand
·
A senior NATO official said today that Russia's sabotage campaign across Europe is a "more concerted, more aggressive effort, than what we’ve seen certainly since the Cold War...we’re seeing sabotage, assassination plots, arson — real things that have cost human lives.”
1:46 PM · Jul 9, 2024. //

Per-Erik Schulze @PerErikSchulze
·
Nothing to see here. Just perfectly normal russian bottom trawling back and forth repeatedly just on top of the main fiber optic internet cable between Svalbard and the Norwegian mainland. From NRK.

4:29 PM · May 26, 2024. //

All of these are examples of hostile action from Russia becoming gradually normalised because nobody is willing or able to deal with it. In this way, Russia pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable, or at least accepted, by doing something that should be outrageous, and then doing it more when there is no response from the West. //

Russia is engaged in a very aggressive hybrid war against Europe that includes propaganda, economic attacks, cyberwarfare, and kinetic operations on the ground. That war's objectives are to increase internal divisions in European countries, damage their economies, and weaken their resolve to resist Russian demands.

In the case of Estonia, Russia is amplifying a border dispute so that it can become a plausible potential casus belli. As I've pointed out before, Estonia is a particularly tempting target for Putin because it is about 24 percent ethnic Russian. If Putin can successfully encroach on Estonia without consequences, NATO will become very unstable. See How Putin Dismembers NATO Without Firing A Shot: A Scenario From the Cold War for more details.

Europe is treating these attacks as individual data points and not as a coherent Russian destabilization campaign. As long as that goes on, Russia is winning this hybrid war, and it has no reason to stop.

How do we know that Biden's forces would shrug off his orders and refuse to act out his will? Because it already did happen in Texas. Texas was ordered by the Supreme Court to do as Biden says and take down the measures they set up to stop illegal immigration into the country, to which the Texas National Guard indicated they were in a "Come and take it" kind of mood and Biden's Border Patrol union refused to take things further knowing that it would escalate things to a very dangerous point.

As I said then, if Biden can't even count on his own border patrol to act against open defiance from a state's national guard, what chance does he have of having a military that would obey his command to assault their fellow Americans? Sure, there'd probably be a couple of thousand willing to get bloody, but even they would lose their taste for it once they found out how overwhelmingly outnumbered and unpopular they were.

Biden wouldn't have any F-15s because he'd likely have no one to fly them. //

Mongo FKA ya think?
4 hours ago
I never imagined an American president would actually talk about killing American citizens with the American military. Joe Biden is a demonic scumbag. //

kamief
4 hours ago
Can you just imagine if Trump said something like that?
Headline news on every alphabet network, 24/7 none stop.
Problem is nobody besides the most die in the wool of us has an idea in hell that the puppet said this.
What gets me more nervous is the closer the election gets the more desperate the rats seem to get.
I would put nothing past the rat bastards, even starting a civil war. The right would be blamed. Every killing they would show on the news would be the fault of the right. No matter what.
At that point I think these wise words come into play. Then all hell breaks loose.

“The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. TRUE TERROR will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone.”

– Author Unknown //

Robert A Hahn
3 hours ago
The Viet Cong had no F-14s. The Taliban didn't even have biplanes. It is just very difficult to beat committed, sneaky people in their own country.

Alternative historical fiction is a popular genre in America, where readers explore possibilities such as Napoleon deciding not to invade Russia or a Confederate victory in the Civil War, pondering the hypothetical impact on world history. In honor of Maritime Day 2024, let's consider what would have happened if the United States had fought the Second World War without a strong Merchant Marine and the tens of thousands of courageous mariners who delivered crucial supplies, troops, and weapons across dangerous waters.

It's clear: we would have lost the war or failed to achieve a decisive victory.

During WWII, an estimated 250,000 mariners served, and nearly 10,000 gave their lives, resulting in a higher per capita casualty rate than any of the armed services. Over 700 Merchant Marine ships were sunk by enemy attacks, and hundreds of mariners were held as prisoners of war.

FDR recognized the indispensable role of the Merchant Marine, which he considered the "fourth arm of defense" on par with the navy, army, and air force.
As we observe current global instability and brutal Eurasian conflicts, who will be the visionary leader and advocate who ensures the readiness of our Merchant Marine for the challenges ahead? Its current state is far from adequate. //

The distinction between admirals, generals, and media commentators who freely opine on strategy and theory neglects or casually assumes away the hard reality of logistics. Lately, the strategists have not fared well in deterring conflicts, and the logistic shortcomings in Ukraine and the Middle East are glaring. While those deficiencies are apparent, they pale in comparison to a potential war in the Pacific.

Policymakers properly acknowledge China as the pacing threat, but so few seriously consider the critical importance of logistics and the availability of highly trained and militarily obligated maritime personnel. Decades of war in the Middle East have conditioned us to the luxury of uncontested sea and airspace. We enjoyed large support bases close to combat operations. Our fleet had uninterrupted access to intact and secure port facilities. //

The People's Liberation Army knows that sealift is key to our success. While many debate the vulnerability of our aircraft carriers, they gloss over that our combat power will be short-lived without robust sealift and persistent combat logistics in a war at sea.

Regrettably, we are no longer a true maritime nation; we are now a naval nation.

China, now a bona fide maritime nation, has made significant investments in its merchant fleet and can call on over 5,000 merchant vessels during war. The US has around 80. We must expand our commercial fleet to align with our strategic interests. That means acquiring more ships and enhancing our ability to build, maintain, and quickly repair them. Above all, we cannot prevail without a significant number of merchant marine officers who are ready and obligated to serve the nation when called upon.

Negotiations don't start from a position of maximalist demands unless you are able to enforce them. Even the alleged Putin confidants who talked to Reuters for the report admit that Putin is tired of the war and wants to move on.

Let me stop here for a moment and say that anyone who thinks five members of Putin's entourage talked to Reuters about Putin's personal position on peace talks without acting under orders from Putin to do so. Those people are a danger to themselves and to others. The fact that no one in the Kremlin has acknowledged this alleged cease-fire offer on the record tells you all you need to know about its seriousness.

This means that Russia is not only demanding to keep the territory it has overrun, but it is actually requiring Ukraine to relinquish more territory as a condition of negotiations. //

If we look at this offer as anything other than a propaganda ploy aimed at bolstering the spirits and imaginations of Putin's fan club in the West, we are probably idiots who deserve whatever comes next. //

The Russians are simply advancing a narrative ahead of the international peace conference Switzerland is hosting on June 15-16.

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. All the Russian proposal does, to the extent it is even a serious proposal, is reward Russia for criminal behavior, return control of Russian overseas assets to Moscow, remove war-related economic sanctions, and set the stage for another Russian invasion. Nothing in the Russian scheme is even vaguely just, and no sane government would consider it. Russia knows that and they don't want it considered, they want big social media accounts and some Republican Members of Congress and Senators to have talking points to advace Putin's agenda.

The bigger problem is the Biden Crime Family's close ties to the Chinese government, and because of those ties, Joe Biden is afraid of pushing the Chinese too hard. Calling them out for providing lethal aid to Russia could very well be a red line in Beijing's relationship with Joe, Jim, and Hunter. //

anon-aqgv Ed in North Texas
6 hours ago
Russia population: 144 million
Ukraine: 38 million

Which side do you think will run out of manpower first?

DaveM anon-aqgv
5 hours ago
1960:
US Population 173 Million
Vietnam Population 30 Million.

Which side do you think will run out of manpower first?

JSobieski anon-aqgv
5 hours ago edited
Population of American colonies in 1776: 2.5M

Population of Great Britain in 1776: 8M

Which side did YOU think ran out of manpower first?

JSobieski anon-aqgv
5 hours ago edited
Population of USSR in 1989: 286.72M

Poulation of Afganistan in 1989: 10.67M

Which side did YOU think ran out of manpower first?

JSobieski anon-aqgv
7 hours ago
Non-symmetrical demands for manpower, which shouldn't be too hard to understand.

Russia cannot apply 100% of its manpower to Ukraine, while Ukraine can and does apply 100% of its manpower to fighting Russia.

Russia has extended supply lines, while Ukraine does not.

Ukraine is fighting in its home territory, Russia is the invader.

These concepts are difficult to understand, but I get that some people just refuse to understand.

A great example of non-symmetrical warfare was 9/11. Fewer than 20 people with boxcutters shut down US airspace.

Dieter Schultz JSobieski
7 hours ago edited

These concepts are difficult to understand, but I get that some people just refuse to understand.

I keep recalling one of the most insightful comments I ever encountered on the web, namely: "And now we get to the crux of the matter, I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you."

Anyway, when some champion of human liberty in a Che Guevara T-shirt and Mao jacket was haranguing his audience with claims like “A single Hiroshima bomb set off downtown would annihilate this university and all of us in the blink of an eye”, what better way to burnish one's Strangelovian credentials than to whip out a handy-dandy nuclear bomb computer slide rule, whip—slip—slide, and interrupt, “Naaah…fifteen kilotons at five miles? Surface burst? Why, that's only a quarter to a third of a pound per square inch overpressure—it'll probably break some window glass but that's about it.” Flipping the slide rule over, “The flash isn't even enough to cause sunburn, and the immediate radiation is next to nothing.” For some unfathomable reason, this never seemed to either carry the argument or suitably impress chicks. //

My nostalgia for this particular relic of the Cold War was such that I've had a project to produce an online edition on my to-do list for more than five years. Like many items on this embarrassingly long and all too infrequently shortened list of unrealised ambitions, it's something I half expected someone else to do long before I got to it. This would be perfectly fine with me—I undertake these projects because I want to see them done, and crossing off an item without the wear and tear of doing it myself couldn't make me happier. In fact, scanning (and possibly OCR-ing) The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was an item on my list before the fine folks at Princeton got the job done.

Carey J Texas Vol Fan
12 hours ago
It will take Russia YEARS to rebuild what it has already lost, in Ukraine. Ukraine is wrecking the Russian Army for us, with our third-rate hand-me-down crap, and giving us an excuse to modernize our stuff. It's the best deal since the Dutch bought Manhattan Island for twenty-odd dollars worth of glass beads. //

Min Headroom llme Carey J
7 hours ago
Best deal: it certainly is, although Seward’s Folly was a pretty good deal too.

An unstated, but possibly beneficial side affect is that this spectacle might give Chairman Xi a little pause as well, although self deception might cause him to miss the lesson. //

Ready2Squeeze Min Headroom llme
an hour ago
Louisiana purchase should rate in there as well! //

Bryon Grosz
5 hours ago
Not for them, for us.

Opposing Russian aggression is in our interest just as opposing Chinese aggression or Iranian aggression. In a world full of evil, there are no good options, but you should still choose the least bad option.

Why us? Who else? It's us or no one. Some will follow our lead, but there is no one else capable and willing to lead in this regard.

My Glock is an ugly little monument to the historic threat facing my family, my neighbors, and all of Israel. //

Comments --

As a former soldier who has been to war in your region, Matti, I call upon the notion of self defense; when your government fails to protect you as seen throughout the world, you need to defend yourself regardless of the weapon. The last thing rational People want to do is morph into a killer of others, but when another man puts a gun to your face you have two choices...

The Men Who Wanted to Be Left Alone

“The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. True terror will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone.”

– Author Unknown

As a former soldier who has been to war in your region, Matti, I call upon the notion of self defense; when your government fails to protect you as seen throughout the world, you need to defend yourself regardless of the weapon. The last thing rational People want to do is morph into a killer of others, but when another man puts a gun to your face you have two choices...

The Men Who Wanted to Be Left Alone

“The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. True terror will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone.”

– Author Unknown

I was trying to focus on the historian Michael Oren, who was talking to me not about the war raging around us but about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general who walked the world 500 years before Jesus was born, some 200 kilometers from the spot we were standing.

“Cincinnatus was a farmer. All he wanted was to be at his plow,” Oren told me as the winter rain poured down. “But every time he went back to his farm the Roman Republic came to him and said, ‘We need you to come back. We need you to lead an army.’ ”

“The Cincinnatus myth was the foundational myth for the American Revolution, specifically for Washington himself,” Oren said. “It is also the most foundational Israeli myth. It is David Ben-Gurion. It is Moshe Dayan. It is Ariel Sharon. These people just wanted to farm. But they were called to pick up arms and defend their country. Israel is the Cincinnatus nation.”

Many have never heard the name Cincinnatus in Israel, where the Romans are remembered more as the empire that destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, slaughtered and sold its inhabitants, and renamed the land Syria Palestina. But the Jewish people—who long outlived that empire and reconstituted the Jewish national home in the land the Romans had once conquered—are also democratic heirs to Cincinnatus. //

There was not a single conversation that I had in the week I spent in Israel where the person did not say a version of the following: There was an October 6 version of me and an October 7 version of me. I am forever changed. I am a different person.

And that is another sense in which the story of the ancient Roman requires modification. The binary of war and peace, the pastoral and the military, is a retrospective luxury of powerful nations or empires. A small democracy, whose very existence is contested by populous autocracies, does not have the privilege, as Cincinnatus did, of going from the field of battle to the field to till. Israel’s citizen-soldiers are scientists, artists, and farmers, just as they are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Israeli citizens, whether they serve or not, are not—as one Hamas leader said of Gazans—someone else’s problem. //

Israel’s founding fathers and mothers, having known a period when Jews didn’t have a state—a period in which six million Jews were murdered—understood the difference between statelessness and sovereignty in their bones. The paradox of their extraordinary achievement is that modern Israelis, who might appreciate the distinction intellectually, could dismiss the dread alternative even when presented with visible evidence of a fragility they consigned to the past. Or at least they could until October 7. On that day, the thought exercise became real.

If Israel, in other words, is currently fighting a second war of independence—an existential war necessary for the survival of the state, as everyone here believes—then the young men and women of this country are more than soldiers. They are latter-day Ben-Gurions. They are a new generation of founders. Indeed, as Gadi Taub told me in Tel Aviv, one of the slogans of this war is lo noflim midor tachach! Which loosely translates to do not fall short of the ’48 generation. //

And yet before October 7, despite the country’s universal draft, many Israelis say they, too, believed that history and heroism were things that belonged to the past. Theirs was a nation, like ours, that was addicted to likes and to TikTok, hopelessly unserious, run by an elite with all of the noblesse but none of the oblige.

That Biden would prop up Russia and throw Israel under the bus is just about as shocking as George H. W. Bush trying to keep the Soviet Union from imploding. These decisions are made by small men with inflated egos who are desperately afraid to do what is right because the new security paradigm will render their experience useless.

Macron was asked about the prospect of sending Western troops to Ukraine, which he publicly raised last month in comments that prompted pushback from other European leaders. "We're not in that situation today," he said, but added that "all these options are possible."

Macron said that responsibility for prompting such a move would lie with Moscow – "It wouldn't be us – and said France would not lead an offensive into Ukraine. But he also said, "Today, to have peace in Ukraine, we must not be weak."

He said that the continent's security was "at stake" in the conflict which he said "is existential for our Europe and for France." He added that "if the situation should deteriorate, we would be ready to make sure that Russia never wins that war."

He said there had been "too many limits in our vocabulary" since the Russian invasion in February 2022. "Two years ago we said we would never send tanks. We did. Two years ago, we said we would never send medium-range missiles. We did," he said. "Those who say 'let's not support Ukraine' do not make the choice of peace, they make the choice of defeat," he added. //

Inadvertently, Putin admitted what I and others have said all along. The only way to bring Putin to the negotiating table is to dangle the specter of a military defeat in front of him. This bullsh** of worrying about "off ramps" and "escalation" when Putin is clearly not interested in the first and unable to credibly do the second has increased the length of this war and its destruction. While Putin bears all the responsibility for the start of this war, Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have much to answer for in how it has been conducted.

We constantly hear from pro-Russian voices on social media (like David Sacks) and in Congress (looking at you, JD Vance) that all that is needed to stop this war is for negotiations to begin on how much of Ukraine has to be surrendered to make Putin feel good about himself. We have the answer. There is no limit on the amount of territory that Russia declares to be its own.

In this speech by Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of the Russian Security Council, he flat out says that Ukraine does not exist. //

As Lithuania's minister of foreign affairs noted:

Gabrielius Landsbergis🇱🇹 @GLandsbergis
·
Some people say NATO is no longer necessary while the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia stands in front of a huge map of the planned imperial conquest of Eastern Europe 🤷🏼‍♂️
1:03 PM · Mar 4, 2024 //

Again, a war that was conceived to dismember Ukraine and reduce the rump state to a Muscovite satrapy has expanded NATO and anchored Ukraine more firmly to the West than anything possible without the war.

Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the relationship between the citizens of the USSR and the government in this way.

We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country. //

As I've said many times, a stalemate tends to help Putin because his only strategy is to convince the West to accept defeat in Ukraine. It doesn't matter how many men Russia has available for conscription; Russia's ability to arm, train, and supply troops is limited, as is its ability to get them to the right place on the front at the right time with the right equipment. Ukraine's strategy is to continue to convince the West that it has the will to win. When you throw in Zelensky's relief of a popular commander-in-chief, you have a political imperative to chalk up a win somewhere.

In the words of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

Trey Yingst
@TreyYingst
·
Follow
Hamas and Islamic Jihad have reportedly rejected an Egyptian ceasefire proposal that would end the war.

The Palestinian factions are unwilling to consider a proposal that sees new leadership in Gaza.

The Israelis have been clear that Hamas will not control Gaza after the war.
9:16 AM · Dec 25, 2023

This plays into something I've mentioned before, which is that the "Palestinians" want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they pretend to be oppressed victims who just want a peaceful utopia, a claim that is often repeated by intellectuals within Western circles. On the other hand, they refuse to make the slightest concession, even in the face of utter defeat, that would ensure some level of peace. How many deals over the years have various Palestinian leaders rejected that would have produced a two-state solution? How many ceasefires have they broken for no other reason than to continue their delusional intifada?

Yet, most of the international community hand-waves all that away, pretending that it's Israel that is the biggest stumbling block to peace. It's not Israel that's running United Nations schools in Gaza teaching kids to be terrorists and to hate Jews. It's not Israel that's hijacking billions of dollars in aid to build useless terror tunnels while funneling the rest of that money to wealthy leaders in Qatar. Hamas is not a viable peace partner and never has been. If they don't step aside and allow new leadership, there can be no end to the hostilities.

How quickly would this have all ended had the international community stood up and demanded Hamas surrender following the October 7th attacks, with a threat to cut off aid if it didn't do so? How many lives would have been saved?