Not a good sign:
I think they knew the attack was coming.
Iran launches missiles. (CNN)
Biden told USA military to help shoot down missiles. ABC
Video of missals raining down.
Bibi met with Trump and decided to delay a ceasefire with Hamas till after November 3rd. Now the war is spreading to Lebanon and Iran. Those two countries were looking for reason to lob some bombs, and they gave it. In the world of asymmetric war, where all the fundamentalist Islam countries take their pot shots at Israel.
Iran will say they killed a Hezbollah leader in Iran, so they have a right to strike back.
Israel invaded Lebanon to stop the Hezbollah bombs coming from there. Luckily Syria is too poor to send too many missiles.
Both sides keep giving each other reasons to strike back. Everyone thinks their righteous killing people.
So many hostile countries lobing in bombs, you root out when they come inside your country, there's going to be no mercy for Hamas. I get that Israel is set up on all sides by enemies. I just don't really see how they don't try to create an inclusive society where Gaza Palestinians feel comfortable and don't want to support Hamas, they don't want to encourage peaceful resolution. Try waging peace, aren't you tired of war?
Foreign countries are going to plant information to stir up Americans about genocide, in an open society, we are all to susceptible to foreign trolling on social media. Russia buys podcasters, and has troll farms. I'm sure other countries do too.
It might even be a genocide, even if they're taking unusual pains to reduce civilian casualties. They've bombed Gaza and killed so many, does Gaza even exist any more?
Did Israel get provoked to do something to ignite this regional conflict? Does their tough guy stance go too far? How complicit is America?
Israel was going to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and that's why Hamas stuck, things were too peaceful and too friendly. Even if thousands of people are dead, you can't have peace, you need to keep stoking the fire of asymmetric warfare, fighting western liberal society. Israel takes the bait, they escalate.
Supposedly Reagan called up Israel and told them to knock it off, and they did. He said he didn't know he could do that. I think that's why so many people blame America, inside America, for the genocide in Gaza. Israeli don't like it called that, but they themselves call it that.
The Israeli who don't like war, the Gaza Palestinians who don't like war, the Lebanon people who don't like war, the Iranians who don't like war, the Americans who don't like war. We're all being subjected to it. The leaders are too much cowards to wage peace, they have a poverty of imagination and humility.
Update 10/3/24: Listen to Christiane Amanpour speaks with Karim Sadjadpour on CNN. I heard in the interview that only about 15-20% of the people support the government, and that it's so ideological that it's really sort of empty of ideas that really adapt to circumstances and understands what's going on, although the resistance and the possibility of overthrowing the government is slim too. Ayatollah Khamenei is the oldest dictator in the world. I didn't know he was born in Mashhad. His 35 years ruling makes him the longest ruling head of state in the Middle East. Their air strike in retaliation of Israel killing the Hezbollah leader only killed one person in Israel. Israel tends to think they really have to whomp anyone who attacks them.
“From Israel’s perspective, we have been in a regional war since Oct. 7, and that war is now an all-out war,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, a historian and one of the country’s more hawkish diplomats. “We are in a war for our national survival, period.” Winning over the next few weeks, he said, is a “duty” for a nation “created in the aftermath of the Holocaust.” NY Times
Further: "The behind-the-scenes negotiations now boil down to Mr. Netanyahu’s intent. Will he send another message to Iran about what Israel could do in the future, as he did in April when he aimed at military facilities in the holy city of Isfahan? Will he take out oil production facilities and ports?
Or will he aim directly for the facilities he has threatened to strike for years, starting with the underground Natanz facility where Iran is enriching uranium to near-bomb grade?
American officials believe they can persuade Mr. Netanyahu to make his point without setting off a full-blown war. But they concede that the Israeli prime minister may see the next five weeks until the American presidential election as a ripe moment to try to set that program back by years. After all, former President Donald J. Trump would not complain about a major attack on Iran’s military infrastructure, and Democrats cannot afford to be accused of restraining Israel after Tuesday’s missile attack.
“Israel will do its best to be disproportionate,” Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, said on CNN on Tuesday. White House officials take the opposite view: Mr. Netanyahu, they say, cannot afford to be anything but proportionate."
Honestly it's hard not to see pro-Palestine people not as dupes of the propaganda of the Muslim nations surrounding Israel, and it's hard not to see the pro-Israel people as justifying fairly exaggerated savage reprisals. Both sides have to chill out, not hunker down in their justifications of violence.
Why does Israel get to kill 41,500 Gaza people for 1,139 Israeli? I suppose in an apartheid, certain lives are more valuable. It's more than the biblical sevenfold or tenfold. That's thirty six fold.
I understand with bombs coming from outside the country, and you want to snuff it out inside the country, and they're going to extra pains to try and avoid casualties supposedly, though it's hard not to see that as spin when you look at the numbers.
Seems like Gaza has almost been bombed out of existence. In some ways I have sympathy that every time Israel is attacked, they enlarge themselves, I mean just quit attacking them. If you launch missiles from Lebanon, they want to stop that and might invade some. They have a right to self defense. In a way you can't blame Israel for the viciousness of their defense given the viciousness of the attacks against them, surrounding them. But at a certain level, you say enough.
Iran only killed one person in Israel with their bombs, it's a pretty feeble attempt to pay them back for Israel launching bombs into Iran to kill a leader of Hezbollah. Iran has to look at itself in the mirror and ask how they knew where he was. Iran has the longest dictatorship in the middle east. The ideology isn't really flexible enough to figure out this situation. They could do some real damage to themselves by getting in a war with Israel, that's not smart.
My friend in Iran says the government is about making the people miserable.
Like I wrote, both sides need to work on justifications for peace and not war. Israel and Palestinian, and Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Iran.
10/1/24 argument for letting Israel take the gloves off. The Free Press.
10/9. I don't like Brett Stevens but he has a powerful op-ed piece. He says essentially that this is a war between Iran and Israel and in a way really between Iran and USA. Iran is funding and supporting these surrogates Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
I'm especially concerned about this war because I have friends in Iran. They don't support the wars as far as I know, but we don't really talk about politics, we talk about spirituality, meditation and the Dharma. I can't imagine they're not revolutionary if they're not practicing Islam under a fundamentalist Islamic regime. The longest dictatorship in the region. Ali Khamenei is 85 years old, and has been in power since 1980, that's 44 years. My friend thinks the government is about making the people miserable.
Time: "It was one year ago that Hamas militants breached the security barrier separating the Gaza Strip from Israel, initiating a rampage killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 in the bloodiest day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. More dark milestones followed. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its bombardment of the Strip, “the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.” More women and children were killed in Gaza over the past year than any other conflict over the last two decades, according to a new analysis by Oxfam. Famine, of which there have only been two in the 21st century, is a persistent risk."
The new cold war isn't communism versus capitalism. It's fundamentalism versus liberal open western society. It's asymmetrical warfare that can never win, it's just trying to jar, disorientate, wobble and wound liberal open western society.
America isn't so much into the democracy part any more, if you think of the 73 million who voted for Trump, and it's crony corrupt capitalism, and they'd like to close it if they could with Christofascism. Those forces use this violence as fodder. People tend to identify more now with ideology now, the right wing of America aligns with the right wing of Israel.
Time: "Since Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2007, the 2 million Palestinians of Gaza had seen five wars, fighting so routine that Israeli officials referred to them as “mowing the grass.” But the Oct. 7 attack both traumatized and enraged Israelis, and 12 months later much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble, with many inhabitants squeezed into an area smaller than London’s Heathrow Airport."
Time: "Israel was profoundly shaken by Oct. 7. The massacre and kidnappings not only summoned the collective vulnerability accumulated across 2,000 years of Jewish history. It also shattered the sense of security that Israel exists to assure. Neither of those things is visible to the outside world, however, and when international sympathy shifted to the people in Gaza dying under Israeli bombs, many Israelis defaulted to a familiar refrain: “The whole world’s against us.”"
I resent Jill Stein aligning the Green Party against Israel. If you want to align with the weakness and victimhood of the persecuted Palestinians and the voice for environmentalism, that's just not smart in my opinion.
I'm against everyone dying, but I see Iran attacking and Israel has a right to self defense. Iran wants Israel to war and look bad because they're a fundamentalist dictatorship and Israel is a democratic country aligned with liberal western democracies. Israel is the meat bag taking shrapnel for the west.
Another knock on Stein is that she only pops up around election time, she doesn't build grass roots. To me the Green Party needs a new leader.
USA complicity (Time): "While the U.S. holds considerable leverage over Israel, most acutely in the form of billions in military aid, the Biden Administration hasn’t been seen to use it to secure an as-yet-elusive ceasefire. “The only force that can change that calculation, that can actually impose the real costs on Netanyahu that could change his behavior, is the United States,” says Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former chief foreign policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the most vocal proponents of conditioning U.S. aid to Israel. “Biden is refusing to do that.”"
Unfortunately Biden is unlikely to change or do anything in the next month, so Bibi has free reign.
Nobody Wants This is a Netflix romcom about a rabbi and a secular California hedonist podcaster. Spoilers ahead. This is the perfect show for now. Not only is it compelling romance, but in the end, she declines to convert to Judaism, to marry him, even though she loves him. He might turn down being the head rabbi, it's not clear. He has pressure to only marry a Jewish woman because of his role leading a spiritual community.
‘I don’t have much hope for a Harris presidency’: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israeli apartheid and what the media gets wrong about Palestine (Guardian).
See the thing is if you're going to pick a single issue for the USA election, I'm more inclined to think Harris is more amenable to pushing Israel to stop the self defense and self protective genocide of Israel. Nobody ever deserves to die, but launching those missiles gave Israel the pretext. If you agree with the strategy you might say they exposed Israel for their horror, but I don't agree with the strategy. When people die, blame can go both ways and I think Israel needed to work harder to find peaceful ways of getting along. You can counter that Palestinians demanded too much. This is a complicated back and forth that can go on forever. I see all of reality and the genocide of Gaza Palestinians can't be justified under the guise of self defense. I know bombs are flying into Israel from all sides, outside of the country, and you want to erase the means for doing it inside the country. I have sympathy for that. This will only end when there are no good arguments for slaughter on both sides, and even more so, no money for conducting war.
To the left wing people who are disappointed in Harris for not fulfilling their wishes on this matter: Trump will be worse. You don't always have the choices you want in life, but making the right choices anyway, based on what's on offer is often better than punting. You like American politics, then get in there are start fighting for what you want, I love the idealism. I think the right is composed of disappointed idealists. But don't lose sight on the bigger picture, this election is about avoiding the monster that is Trump, so we can get onto holding him accountable in court, so Musk doesn't get a raft of pardons for what he wants to do, and on and on.
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