In dissent, former Israeli chief justice says Israel can carry out offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city ‘as long as it fulfills its obligations under the Genocide Convention’
"Four of the 15 justices at the International Court of Justice argued that the key operative clause in the court’s ruling, handed out Friday, does not require that Israel immediately halt all military operations in Rafah, but, rather, that it specifically halt military operations that “could bring about physical destruction in whole or in part” of the Palestinians.
"The relevant clause in the ruling stated that Israel must “Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
"Former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, who serves as an ad-hoc judge on the ICJ bench in the case brought against Israel by South Africa, wrote in his dissenting opinion that the majority decision “requires Israel to halt its military offensive in the Rafah Governorate only in so far as is necessary to comply with Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention.”
"Therefore, according to Barak, “Israel is not prevented from carrying out its military operation in the Rafah Governorate as long as it fulfills its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”
" As a result,” Barak continued, “the measure is a qualified one, which preserves Israel’s right to prevent and repel threats and attacks by Hamas, defend itself and its citizens, and free the hostages.”
"His haphazard surrender of Afghanistan did him in. The public saw that he left behind billions of dollars worth of military equipment in a manner reminiscent of Vietnam, a war that helped catapult him into the Senate as a peacenik."
"People forget that before there were chants of FJB, he was pretty popular. He had a plus 23 rating on job approval as his presidency began and six months later he was at plus 9.6, a very respectable score. Trump was never anywhere close to 9.6 — even on his inauguration day.
"Biden was the most unknown president since William Howard Taft to the American people. Most people knew two things about Biden: 1) he was Obama’s VP and 2) he wasn’t Donald Trump. Three years ago, Americans saw No. 2 as a good thing.
"On July 22, 2021, Disney’s 538 gushed, “The first six months in the White House are often frenzied for presidents as they push for big policy changes to try to live up to their campaign promises. President Biden is no exception. In his first 100 days in office, he signed dozens of executive actions and pursued sweeping legislation, like his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package, which offered Americans further relief from the pandemic, and his ambitious two-step infrastructure plan. The hope for Biden, as with most presidents, is that his accomplishments will placate Americans who already support him while also winning over some who don’t.
“ 'But as it turns out, few Americans have changed their minds since the 2020 election. Biden’s job approval rating over his first six months in office was the steadiest such rating of any recent president during that period, according to FiveThirtyEight’s historical approval rating data. His approval has ranged from a high of 55.1% on March 22 to a low of 51.1% on July 15 — a difference of just 4 percentage points.”
"Then came August. As the month began, his approval was 50.8% and his disapproval was 42.8%. That was a plus 8-point approval.
"September began with his disapproval at 47.2% and his approval at 46.8% — a deficit of 0.4 points. FJB’s approval has been underwater ever since. His deficit was 17.8 points on Saturday.
"I would like to think he was done in by a photograph of him looking at his watch as the caskets of 13 American troops killed by the Taliban. This was deliberate. He looked at his watch several times during the ceremony at the airfield in Dover, Delaware." But no... It was the Big Skedaddle.
YouTube"Author Douglas Murray has slammed the “wrongheaded” university students at pro-Palestine protests for being in “lockstep” with someone who planned the October 7 attacks.
“ 'All of those wrongheaded students on various campuses who’ve made common cause with Hamas – they’re on exactly the same page, lockstep with one of the people who planned the 7th of October massacre,” Mr Murray told Sky News host Rita Panahi.
“ 'I hope they’re proud of themselves. History will be horrible to them.' ”
The screen, as Breitbart News noted, was partly funded by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife, Jessica. It was placed in a public area. The video below is another besides Seinfeld's. TD
"Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) criticized University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Chancellor Gene Block on Thursday for allowing pro-Israel counter-protesters to screen “vile” images of October 7 atrocities opposite a pro-Palestinian “encampment.”
"Omar was questioning Block at a hearing of the House Education and Workforce Committee to discuss antisemitism at UCLA and other campuses. He testified alongside college presidents from Northwestern and Rutgers.
"As Breitbart News noted, the pro-Palestinian “encampment,” which was launched on April 25, took over a public area at UCLA, a public university. Activists used antisemitic rhetoric and barred Jewish students, as well as journalists, from entering.
"The university, seeking to avoid confrontation, did not allow University of California police or campus security to intervene, effectively allowing the activists to form their own police force, setting up checkpoints on the campus.
"Pro-Israel demonstrators from the surrounding communities, which are heavily Jewish, staged counter-protests. At one point, they set up a large screen showing footage from the Hamas terror attacks of October 7.
"The screen, as Breitbart News noted, was partly funded by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife, Jessica. It was placed in a public area.
"Omar, casting the pro-Palestinian students, and Palestinians, as the victims, complained about the “vile” footage, without acknowledging that the footage showed Palestinians committing atrocities — the “encampment’s” case. Omar participated in an encampment at Columbia University. Her daughter, Isra, was banned from the campus.
"Omar’s own anti-Israel and antisemitic views are a matter of public record, both before and during her time in office.
"If Biden makes it to and through the convention, he and his record remain indefensible. And so expect his campaign largely to be waged through lawfare against Trump, and massive infusions of leftist cash to ensure record mail-in and early voting. In the campaign Biden will become an afterthought, a ghost, vapor, as his party seeks to construct the entire election one of leftwing, blue-city prosecutors, judges, and juries versus serial defendant Trump." VDH
"Senator and Vice President Joe Biden was always sort of a buffoon. He is by nature a grandstander who handsomely profited from his office while posing as good ole Joe from Scranton."
"He is a fabulist who believes that the more animated he misleads and slurs (“semi-fascists” “fat”, “lying dog-faced pony soldier”, “chumps”, “dregs of society”, etc), the more likely he is to get away with it. He is a confessed plagiarist. And he has also invented much of his biography, from would be star, college-scholarship athlete and brilliant law student to semi-truck driver and jailed civil rights activist. His uncle, we are instructed, was eaten by cannibals. Joe assures us that he was the first in his family to go to college.
And he is a racist with a repertory of racial taunts and smears unrivaled among modern politicians (“junkie”, “boy”, “you ain’t black”, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”, “put y’all back in chains”, the Corn Pop and golden-leg hairs sagas, the “racial jungle” memes, the strange brag about Delaware as a “slave state” (e.g., “You don’t know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state.”), and his encomia for the old Democratic racists of the Senate from former Klansman Robert Byrd (Biden’s self-described “mentor” and “guide”) to segregationist James Eastland (“never called me boy”).
"Biden has always had a mean streak that explains why for years he lied about the tragic, fatal auto accident of his first wife and child, using it to libel the truck driver, who was neither drunk nor culpable but smeared publicly for years by Biden as intoxicated and guilty. For years he ignored the pleas of the trucker’s family to please stop libeling an innocent driver.
"Biden just told his greatest whopper that inflation was at 9 percent (actually 1.4 percent) when he took office and yet soon spiked to 9 percent due to his reckless deficit spending and money printing spree.
"But recently Biden has reached a nadir and even the Left is resigned to him as a mere construct. After bragging after October 7 that his support for Israel was rock-solid he is now cutting off military aid as it attempts finally to end the Hamas murderous threat—a reversion to old Joe Biden who in his long past has previously threatened to cut off Israel while boasting later that anyone who did so was reprehensible. (Leveraging congressional mandated aid for political advantage is precisely the (false) allegation of politicking that the Democrats demagogued to impeach Trump—to the then cheers of Biden himself).
"But his sell out of Israel is but a small tessera in his election pandering mosaic. He will again begin drawing down the strategic petroleum reserve to lower gas prices during the campaign. He has badgered Ukraine not to hit Russian oil facilities. He has illegally forgiven billions in student loan aid to regain the elite youth vote. And as the campaign season begins, so too Biden suddenly poses as a border enforcer—after letting in nearly 10-million illegal aliens.
"Biden has always put the agendas of his own and his family above the national interest." . . .
"Granted, Jones was just a low-level Arkansas state employee and Flowers a singer and model. Neither possessed the gravitas of a porn star. But I can't help thinking the media would've been more supportive of the ladies if they'd been accusing a Republican." AC
"I notice a tiny, almost infinitesimal, difference in the treatment of women who accuse Republican presidents of sexual misconduct compared to women who accuse Democrats.
"See if you can spot the difference.
"Stormy Daniels is the stripper and porn star who tried to extort Donald Trump when he was running for president in 2016, threatening to tell the tabloids they'd had sex, a claim he denies. Whether Trump's description of his extortion payment to Daniels as a "legal expense" constituted a criminal violation of the federal campaign finance laws is a central element of New York's prosecution of Trump.
"The truth of Daniels' supposed sex romp with Trump is utterly irrelevant to the criminal charge, but it's humiliating to Trump, so the prosecutors put her on the stand for hours, and the media covered her testimony like it was the 9/11 attack.
"Most grippingly, Daniels testified that she became unglued upon seeing Trump in his underwear, an unlikely story from a woman who'd had sex on camera with fully naked men in literally hundreds of porn films. She said she blacked out during the sex and, afterward, her hands were "shaking so hard" she could barely put on her shoes.
"Obviously, Trump attorney Susan Necheles questioned Daniels' credibility on this point. She raised Daniels' extensive experience with seeing naked men and then having sex with them, to suggest that maybe it wasn't that much of a bombshell to see a guy in his underwear.
"The media promptly exploded in indignation on behalf of the hothouse flower Daniels, howling about "slut-shaming." (In this case, the "slut-shaming" consisted of asking the witness, "What do you do for a living?" . . .
[W]hen [Palestinians] talk about "liberating" the land, what they really mean is that they want to murder all Jews or expel them from Israel, and replace it with an Iran-backed Palestinian terror state.
"In the past few days, Hamas and other terrorist groups have been rejoicing over the decision by Ireland, Norway and Spain to recognize a Palestinian state. The terrorists are so delighted that they have released several statements praising the three countries and stating that the Palestinians view the recognition as a direct result of their terrorist attacks against Israel. Germany, not to be left out, said it would "detain Benjamin Netanyahu if he were to set foot on German soil and if the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant..."
"The recognition of a Palestinian state, even if it is merely a symbolic action that has no bearing on the reality on the ground, sends two messages to the Palestinians. First, that terrorism against Jews is justified and worthwhile because the world, instead of punishing you, will reward you for your crimes.
"Second, that the Palestinians will not need to negotiate thorny issues with Israel, such as borders and the status of Jerusalem, because the international community will grant them everything on a platter.
"Ireland, Norway and Spain should have advised the Palestinians that if they wanted anything from Israel, they should sit down and negotiate with the Israelis, and not try to impose any solution on them with the help of the international community.
"They also should have told them that there will be no peace negotiations with Israel unless the Palestinians repudiate and renounce terrorism and recognize Israel's right to exist.
"The three countries, however, chose not to make any demands from the Palestinians before they announced their decision to recognize a non-existent Palestinian state. These countries appear to have been motivated more by a desire to put a finger in the eye of Israel than a genuine concern for the Palestinians." . . .
Palestinian terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip said that they view the decision by Ireland, Norway and Spain as a reward for the October 7 carnage and the many years of terrorism against Israel.
Ireland and the Nazis: a troubled history – The Irish Times. . ."The notorious character and conduct of Charles Bewley, the Irish minister to Germany in the 1930s, would appear to substantiate this unkind depiction. Arriving in Berlin in July 1933 after Hitler’s seizure of power, he betrayed a lack of professionalism time after time. Disturbing signs of his anti-Semitism, dogmatic Anglophobia and insolence are clear throughout his career from the early 1920s. After 1933 he engaged in an unashamed charm offensive to curry favour with the Nazi regime. During his accreditation ceremony with President von Hindenburg, Bewley referred to the “national rebirth of Germany” in an unconcealed endorsement of Nazism. During his tenure, he recurrently endorsed Nazism as a safeguard against the expansion of Soviet Communism. He downplayed or apologised for the reprehensible Nazi regime’s negative features such as the persecution of Jews, the suppression of Christianity and its aggressive expansionism." . . .
. . ."In the past few days, Hamas and other terrorist groups have been rejoicing over the decision by Ireland, Norway and Spain to recognize a Palestinian state. The terrorists are so delighted that they have released several statements praising the three countries and stating that the Palestinians view the recognition as a direct result of their terrorist attacks against Israel. Germany, not to be left out, said it would "detain Benjamin Netanyahu if he were to set foot on German soil and if the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant..." ...
What happens when "good" nations lose all sense of right and wrong? This.
An anonymous group has funded and constructed a giant screen with loudspeakers outside the @UCLA Pro-Hamas Encampments showing footage of the October 7 Massacre on loop. Bravo to these geniuses. #StandWithIsraelpic.twitter.com/t6bl12gvxl
"A lot of people have commented on the nasty and divisive racism that permeated Joe Biden’s speech to the Morehouse College class of 2024. Biden assured the grads that they’re entering a world that hates them and blocks them at every turn. However, that’s par for the Democrat course. What really struck me, aside from Biden’s obsession with himself, was the complete absence of any aspirational ideas. These graduates weren’t told to go forth and be wonderful. They were told to “abandon all hope, ye who exit here,” and that their only salvation was the government.
"I have a hard time listening to Biden. His slurring, mumbling, and shouting, along with his reptilian appearance (it’s something around the eyes), irritate me. I do better when I focus solely on his words, which I found on the White House website. To spare you the agony of reading it, I've listed his topics in the order in which they appear. Take a minute to read them because a few things will jump out at you: . . ."
"The gist, as most know by now, involves the false claim that Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville “fine people”.
"As PolitiFact points out, Biden repeatedly leaves out the context of Trump explicitly saying, “And you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally.”
"It’s an important quote since the “Contempt” ad states flatly: “Trump stood with violent white supremacists” and shows an image of him at the press conference in question.
. . ."The contrast with President Joe Biden couldn’t be starker. In three decidedly non-raucous speeches within the last week or so, Biden leaned into racial grievance politics. At a speech at the National Museum of African American History and Culture last Friday, Biden claimed America was beset by “forces trying to deny freedom of opportunity for all Americans.” He claimed there was an “insidious” resistance and an “extreme movement” led by his political opponent to hurt black people. In another disaster of a speech to the NAACP, the White House later had to make 10 corrections to it." . . .
"The administration’s decision to abandon Jerusalem and side with its enemies is a terrible development. But the fortuitous timing allows Israel and the American people to minimize the damage in the coming months, and, if Biden is denied a second term, over the next four years." . . .
CarolineGlick.com"Delegations to the Egyptian-hosted hostage negotiations left Cairo on Thursday night after talks collapsed. A member of the U.S. delegation led by CIA director Willian Burns briefed reporters that the talks failed “due to Israel’s operations in Rafah.”
"Under normal circumstances—circumstances that would see the United States siding with Israel in its demands for the release of all hostages, as well as the eradication of Hamas’s forces and its regime of terror—such a statement could easily have been interpreted as supportive of Israel’s operation in the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, where terrorist strongholds still function.
"Israel made an offer to Hamas that U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken praised as “incredibly generous.” Hamas rejected it completely, so Israel renewed its offensive entering Rafah. Nothing weakens Hamas’s negotiating position more than defeat. And now, having rejected the deal, Hamas can only expect a much worse offer from its perspective whenever talks are renewed.
"Unfortunately, that isn’t what the U.S. announcement meant at all. It meant that the Hamas and the U.S. positions are in complete alignment. This isn’t new information. The fact that the United States, like Hamas, views the hostages as a means to force Israel to capitulate to Hamas’s demands—including ending the war with Hamas victorious, leaving more than 100 held captive behind in Gaza and thousands of terrorists freed from Israeli prisons—became clear last Saturday.
"On May 4, Arab media outlets reported that behind Israel’s back, Burns had agreed to serve as guarantor that Israel will not renew its combat operations in Gaza in the event that a temporary ceasefire is enacted during the course of a hostage release. Israel never agreed to such a position. Indeed, Israel’s refusal to agree to an end of the war in exchange for a small fraction of the 132 hostages Hamas is holding in Gaza is the only thing preventing Hamas from rightly declaring victory in its jihad against Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly felt compelled to stop the story—and the American plot—in its tracks. He issued a statement denying that Israel had agreed to such a deal and rejecting it out of hand as a non-starter.
"The news that Washington had now made strategic concessions to Hamas that involved a U.S. guarantee of Hamas victory meant the Biden administration had switched sides. By guaranteeing Hamas’s survival, the administration made it official U.S. policy to stand with a genocidal jihadist terror group against its principal Middle East ally: Israel.
"Since then, it’s all been downhill. Biden’s announcement on Wednesday to CNN that he is effectively halting the transfer of vital munitions for Israel’s Air Force and ground forces to prevent Israel from achieving its goal of defeating Hamas’s last four battalions in Rafah marked the official end of the U.S.-Israel alliance.
"Thursday’s story that the United States is blaming Israel’s operation in Rafah for the failure of the hostage talks was simply another blow below the belt. Although the lumps Israel has taken from Washington this week have been unprecedented, they aren’t surprising." . . .
I have not seen it. I have been advised, from a much older and wiser person who HAS seen it, NOT to go looking for it (I believe it’s possible to find the raw footage—not the IDF compilation—online). He still does not sleep at night; he sees it every time he closes his eyes.
I know a young person who serves as a lone soldier in the IDF. They haven’t seen the footage; they were deployed to the Gaza border on October 7th, and documented the evidence of the Hamas attack at Kibbutz Be’ri a few days later. That young person now has nightmares and a diagnosis of PTSD.
No, I don’t believe the Israeli government will ever make that film available to the general public; and I believe that if they did, the apologists for Hamas’s brutal atrocities would simply look away, and say it wasn’t real. They know the truth; they don’t WANT to believe it.
ADDENDUM: ‘When Leaders Fail’, Eliot Cohen, The Atlantic:
“That film,” my friend Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general, said to me, “should be shown to all senior national-security officials and military officers. It is the most profound demonstration of what happens in the wake of slovenly strategic thinking.”
The occasion was a visit to Israel with a small group of military and national-security experts. The film was a 47-minute compilation of videos taken from dashcams, body cameras, and closed-circuit-television cameras. Some smartphone clips came from the perpetrators of the October 7 attacks in Israel, who delighted in the footage, and others from victims documenting their last moments. It is the most horrifying thing I have ever watched. It includes subtitles but no commentary on scenes of murder, mutilation, and bestial cruelty. It shows a beheading, performed before a cheering Gazan mob, and the despairing cries of sobbing, blinded, blood-smeared orphans. And it concludes with a chilling fact: This was only a tenth of the mayhem wrought on Israel that day…
To understand the dimensions of October 7, Americans should apply a rule of 30—Israel’s population being about one-30th that of the United States. So imagine that, in a single day, pitiless enemies had attacked the length of one of our borders, killing some 35,000 Americans, 9,000 of them soldiers—some surprised in their sleep, some fighting heroically in doomed bands of fewer than a dozen. A dozen simultaneous 9/11s, if you will. Imagine some 6,500 hostages taken, and 3 million to 6 million people displaced from their home along America’s borders. And instead of hundreds of rapes and mutilations, thousands. Imagine, too, that the ensuing war has already taken another 5,000 or 6,000 soldiers’ lives, with perhaps 10 times as many wounded, and no end in sight.”
Mr. Maher isn’t one of us, but in supporting Israel, protecting free speech, and pushing back against far-left insanity, he is on our side, and those happen to be some pretty big issues and topics of debate.
"Bill Maher is on an extended media tour promoting his book, “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You,” though it’s more like Sherman’s March if you’re a progressive. The man isn’t a conservative, but it’s devastating having an ardent liberal torch the straw man arguments of the woke Left. Instead of recognizing that liberalism has gone off the reservation, Maher’s side of the aisle opted for the lazy approach by branding him a conservative or a fake progressive.
"As if Maher would care, you can’t cancel him. He’s not on cable. He’s on HBO and will likely have a place there until he calls it quits. Maher isn’t a Trump fan but has been adamant that you can’t hate half the country. He’s been on Fox News’ Gutfeld, interviewed by Megyn Kelly, and now the ladies of The View, where he took the panel to school over Israel, Hamas, and the insane far-left nonsense that’s engulfed the Democratic Party. The audience is uncomfortable; everyone is on edge because Maher isn’t afraid to throw grenades into his tent.
"Sunny Hostin tried to challenge Maher, who is many football fields smarter than her, claiming that ‘woke’ has been weaponized by the Right, which Maher sort of rolled his eyes at since he knows words migrate. Not wanting to be rude, he conceded to use any other phrase but circled back to his original point, which is that the Left has become insane on many issues. The one he brings up the most is college campuses waving flags and supporting terror groups like Hamas. " . . .
"Amidst the inferno of Jew hatred burning through more than a hundred American college campuses, President Biden continues to dither, progressive university administrators genuflect before the jihadist rioters and the Jews find themselves with no rights or protection.
"I analyze the nature of the campus mayhem, its connection to the war with Hamas in Gaza, and consider the implications moving forward for American Jews and Israel."
