Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Good looks and the Trump campaign
Two prominent figures in the Trump campaign are RFK Jr and JD Vance
In my judgment both are very good looking men in a manly way and will appeal to older female voters for that reason
Women do tend to base their vote on the looks of the candidate and Trump himself probably benefits from that to some extent. He is tall and has a very confident manner.
The female vote is however not monolithic -- With young single females leaning Left and older married women leaning conservative.
And let it be noted that on his first run Trump got 53% of the white female vote overall
Sorry, feminists
health
I have cancer and am taking a lot of medications that make me sleepy so will not be doing much blogging for a while
Monday, October 28, 2024
It is Palestine that is a poltical creation, not Israel
“This is not the end of the war … it is the beginning of the end,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the killing of Yahya Sinwar last week.
So, where and when did this all begin? Oddly, it started in Moscow in 1964. When will it end? It won’t, because it can’t. The Palestinian “leadership” won’t let it.
In 1964, the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti – KGB), was funding and sometimes organising various Marxist armies for national liberation around the world, and is believed to have come up with the idea of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. It reportedly even helpfully drew up a list of members and assisted with its charter.
This blended a disparate people – the Palestinians – and shaped their grievance into a policy calling for the destruction of Israel. At the time, Nikita Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had in recent years brutally suppressed unrest in Georgia and Poland, and a revolution in Hungary, while coming perilously close to superpower nuclear war in 1962. He wanted to destabilise Israel – indeed, eliminate it – and exert more power and influence across the Middle East. A common denominator in the region was a hatred of Jews (Khrushchev wasn’t keen on them either). He would give this unity and focus.
The PLO officially formed in Egypt at a meeting of the Arab League in 1964. The Egyptian president, Gamal Nasser, was a client of Moscow, which supplied Egypt with weapons, trained its military leaders around its Eastern European possessions, and even offered to defend it with nuclear weapons during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
Any would-be nation needs a national anthem and the poet Said Al Muzayin obliged the following year, writing bellicose words pretty indicative of the Palestinian mindset then and now: “Warrior, warrior, warrior,” it starts, before going on about “my determination, my fire and the volcano of my vendetta”. No word here about saving gracious kings. In any case, they were girt by Jews. It continues: “With the resolve of the winds and the fire of the weapons.”
The first leaders of the PLO disappointed Moscow, so they lobbied for their man. After the Arabs’ humiliating defeat in 1967’s Six-Day War, Nasser, who briefly resigned, declared Egypt-born Yasser Arafat to be the leader of the Palestinians. By 1969, Arafat was chairman of the PLO, as well as the KGB’s chief asset in the region. By then Yuri Andropov, who would in 1982 replace Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union, was running the KGB – and Arafat.
Andropov told a senior Romanian colleague, General Ion Pacepa, that: “We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”
The Russians soon started funding and arming the PLO and its terror offshoots with shipments of machine guns, remotely detonated landmines, grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and rifles for long-distance sniper attacks. Some of these were used in the 1970 Black September attacks when the PLO, which had taken up residence in Jordan, sought to take over that country.
They were used in other terror attacks including the hijacking in 1976 of an Air France flight on a stopover in Athens during a Tel Aviv-Paris service. The hijackers directed the plane first to Libya and then on to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, where psychotic dictator Idi Amin, a pro-Palestinian racist, drove to the airport to welcome the terrorists to his country. They demanded Israel free about 40 Palestinian prisoners for the more than 100, mostly Jewish, hostages.
Instead, the Israelis launched their audacious raid on the airport on the night of July 3. They killed the hijackers and left with all but three of the hostages. One Israeli soldier was killed: Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of today’s Israeli Prime Minister.
One hostage, Dora Bloch, 74, had been taken to hospital. An enraged, humiliated Amin ordered that she be murdered. Soldiers killed her. Her body was found three years later in a sugar plantation. Her face had been burned. (It is worth noting that Amin was chairman of the Organisation of African Unity and the following year his country was elevated to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.)
Arafat would remain leader of the PLO until his death in 2004. Indeed, our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese once travelled to Ramallah to meet the man who used to boast that he invented hijacking. Foreign Minister Penny Wong did not go. Very sensible. According to the UN, where Wong likes to have the floor, the Palestinian territories are not safe for women: “Women and girls in the occupied Palestinian territory face discrimination and risk of gender-based violence, including early/forced marriage, intimate partner/family violence, sexual harassment, rape, incest, denial of resources, psychological abuse and risk of sexual exploitation and abuse.”
Arafat defiantly stood in the way of peace and refused generous offers for a separate Palestinian state. He never wanted a two-state solution, even though for years he pretended to. He wanted one Palestinian state and no Jews next door. The map of the world on his office wall had Israel marked as Palestine – a common sight.
While playing along with US plans for peace and a two-state solution, Arafat was reported speaking to a group of Arabs in Sweden in 1996: “Within five years we will have six or seven million Arabs in the West Bank … We will replace Israel with a Palestinian Arab state … I have no use for Jews, they are and remain Jews.” About that time he was also reported as stating: “We will not bend or fail until the blood of every last Jew from the youngest child to the oldest elder is spilled to redeem our land!”
Had there been a lever the pulling of which would obliterate Jews from the earth, Arafat would have elbowed his way to it.
You couldn’t negotiate in good faith with Arafat, he had none. Like his understudy and now Palestinian leader, the poisonous, Moscow-educated liar Mahmoud Abbas. His doctoral thesis insisted that the Jews were secretly partners with the Nazis.
Since October 7 last year, various Palestinian leaders have made it clear that not only was that atrocity welcomed and celebrated, but there was more to come and that it would not end until Jews were wiped out in a new Holocaust. The misguided masses at pro-Palestinian marches in Western capitals are supporting that.
The other day, my friend Itamar Marcus explained what was being said to Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza. Marcus founded Palestinian Media Watch, has negotiated with the Palestinians, and advised governments around the world including in the US, UK, Europe, Canada and Australia. His news was depressing. The Palestinian people are being shepherded, without noticeable resistance, to disaster by a committed death cult. Hamas is more popular now than ever.
Marcus says that even good people will support terror if they believe “it is the right, moral, ethical thing to do”. He described the videos (taken by the terrorists) of joyous, cackling gunmen shooting people running away, raping girls, beheading others, blowing up youngsters and setting fire to Jews as evidence they had been taught that Jews were less than human, indeed evil beings best eradicated.
He says that Palestinians have been convinced that Jews endanger all humanity, and that has become part of their national identity.
And it starts at the top, with Arafat’s replacement, Abbas. The lies to “his” people are on such a scale, they sound absurd to any normal listener. He told a Fatah conference six weeks before the October 7 attacks that Hitler killed the Jews, not because of their religion, but their “social role, which is connected to usury and money … they caused ruin in his opinion, and therefore he hated them”.
Abbas is telling Arabs that killing Jews is just self-defence.
This wasn’t news to anyone. He had addressed the UN a few months earlier where he explained Britain and the US wanted rid of their Jews and had cooked up a scheme after the war to create a place for them, with the added bonus that it would give the West a toehold in the oil-rich region. The UN delegates sat in silence.
That slogan “from the river to the sea” is not about real estate. For Arafat and Abbas and Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Sinwar it is, and was always, what they see as the noble cause of ridding us of Jews. Hitler failed. They and their successors don’t plan to. From the river to the sea, they want the job done. And they have broad support at home and abroad. Even on Australian city streets. But perhaps that is to be expected while Albanese and Wong vandalise Australia’s reputation for fairness in Middle East affairs. Those puerile calls for a ceasefire were morally neutral at best.
Mahmoud Al-Habbash is Abbas’s adviser on religious and Islamic affairs and said in a recent broadcast that there never had been a Jewish nation – it was invented by Europeans to gather them together.
Al-Habbash called Jews “grazing herds of humanoids … those whom Allah has cursed and with whom he became angry and made of them apes and pigs”. They are also Satan in human form. So to kill one is not to kill a human. Advice the attackers of October 7 took to heart. It was Allah’s will. This view was reinforced at mosques across the Palestinian territory in sermons distributed en masse in the days after the attacks.
On July 9 this year a preacher on official Palestinian Authority television said: “O Allah, power of hand and might, support the jihad fighters in the Gaza Strip … strike the thieving Jews … count them and kill them one by one.”
The morning after the October 7 slaughter, a Fatah member was on television delighted with the carnage that had claimed whole families in Israel, including babies. Abd Al-Rahman Abu Al-Rub said: “We say to our people … a morning of victory, a morning of pride. We ask Allah to send a blessing to our heroic martyrs in the Gaza Strip.”
These are the words of a savage. And they sound familiar. A day later, Sydney’s Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun excitedly addressed a crowd gathered at Lakemba in the city’s west. “I’m smiling,” he said. Indeed he was so beside himself, he said it again: “I’m smiling and I’m happy. I’m elated. It’s a day of courage. It’s a day of pride. It’s a day of victory. This is the day we’ve been waiting for.”
Then, bending history, and falling in line with Arafat and Abbas and their repugnant footsoldiers, he said: “Seventy-five years of occupation … What happened yesterday was the first time our brothers and sisters broke through the largest prison on Earth.”
By claiming 75 years of occupation, Dadoun renders illegitimate the state of Israel from 1948. This is river-to-the-sea talk.
Dadoun was born in Sydney. We cannot cancel his citizenship, even if he is among the most dangerous Australians. But those chanting “Allah” as he spoke may not yet be Australians. Or they may be naturalised Australians. That could be a problem for them and some of the thousands of Australians wearing keffiyehs and demanding the Jews be murderously swept from the Middle East.
Two days after October 7, some of the world’s most significant buildings – the Brandenburg Gate, 10 Downing Street, the EU headquarters, the Eiffel Tower – were illuminated in Israel’s colours. At only one was there a riot: Sydney’s Opera House, where police stood mute as thugs burned Israeli flags, lit flares, even throwing them at police, and chanted “F..k the Jews” and “Where’s the Jews”.
None of them was arrested that night. Not one. Jews were warned not to attend. The government and NSW police had abandoned them.
The names of each offender should have been taken and checked against their immigration status. Any of them here on a variety of student, business, family or visitor visas should have been removed from the country. And those who had gained citizenship should have had their migration status reviewed.
It’s pretty simple. The Australian Citizenship Pledge states: “From this time forward, I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.”
Clearly anyone who had taken that pledge and criminally rioted that day lied at the time they uttered the pledge. Anyone who has defaced the offices of our members of parliament, smashed windows and painted crude pro-Palestinian slogans, and who has taken that pledge, lied while doing so. Those are acts against our democracy. Indeed, they are terror attacks, even if governments indolently leave the investigations to suburban police.
Anyone who daubs buildings and signs with Hamas slogans is supporting a terrorist organisation and, if they took the pledge, lied at that time.
The Australian Citizenship Pledge is important and serious. I thought so when I took it. Those words define how we choose to live in this country. If you choose not to live that way then this is not the place for you.
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My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Iran couldn't prevent Israeli strike even though they knew it was coming
Strike showed Iranians that they were defenceless
Shortly before 2am on Saturday in Israel, airmen and women wearing bomber jackets bearing the Star of David climbed into the cockpits of about 100 jet fighters, spy planes and refuelling aircraft at an Israeli military base. They were following commands from an underground bunker known as the pit.
Israel’s wartime leaders, who were gathered in the bowels of the military headquarters in Tel Aviv, had just given the green light for the largest attack against Iran in Israel’s history — and its most politically perilous. They called the operation “Days of Repentance”. The assault was calibrated to punish Iran for an attack on Israel but aimed to avoid setting off a full-scale war between the two foes involving American forces and other countries in the region. The attack steered clear of the oil and nuclear facilities that Iran had warned would prompt a retaliation, and appeared to heed the caution urged by US officials.
The attack, however, marked a dangerous new phase of confrontation between Israel and Iran, which began striking each other directly earlier this year. It left Iran even more exposed to further air attacks, with Israel destroying several of the country’s Russian-made S-300 batteries, according to an Israeli official.
“The message is that we don’t want an escalation but if Iran decides to escalate and attack Israel again, this means that we have increased our range of freedom of movement in the Iranian skies,” an Israeli official said.
For weeks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had signalled that Israel would hit back over Iran’s ballistic-missile assault on Israeli territory on October 1. Pulling it off required weeks of planning and delicate diplomacy.
Iran “knew that Israel was coming, and still they couldn’t prevent anything,” said Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general.
The US — sensing an opening after Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar — has been pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel and other Middle East capitals this week in an effort to reach a deal that has eluded negotiators for months. The calibrated nature of the attack appeared to leave room for those talks to continue, with negotiators set to meet in the Qatari capital Doha on Sunday.
Videos carried by Iranian media on Saturday (October 26) showed an air defense system continuously firing at apparently incoming projectiles over central Tehran, as Israel's military said it launched three waves of strikes on military sites in Iran.
But even as Israel worked diplomatic channels that could end the war in Gaza and cool tensions with Tehran, Israeli officials were completing details of the retaliatory attack.
On Friday evening, as the sun set marking the start of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, Israel’s cabinet in a phone conversation led by Netanyahu agreed to move ahead with an attack that night, according to an Israeli official.
Hours before the attack began, Israel alerted the U.S. and several Arab-world and European capitals about the nature and scope of the attack, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials in some of those countries then alerted Iran.
Israel’s prime minister’s office later said the idea that it informed Iran about the nature or timing of the attack was “false and absurd.” When they finally began, the Israeli strikes unfurled in waves. The attack involved Israel’s most-advanced aerial weapon, F-35 jet fighters, adept at evading radar, people familiar with the mission said.
As the jet fighters were airborne, Israeli officials, conscious that their U.S. counterparts were frustrated that Israel hadn’t forewarned last month that it would kill Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, also made a point of actively briefing their U.S. counterparts about their attack.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called his U.S. counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who assured him of America’s readiness to defend Israel against backlash from Iran and aligned militant groups.
The first crop of jet fighters destroyed air-defence batteries in Syria and Iraq, clearing the flight path for the second and third sorties to funnel through to Iran.
Their exact route, which hasn’t been shared by Israel, appeared to dodge airspace in Jordan after the Arab nation said it wouldn’t be part of an attack on Iran. Most of the attacks were launched from outside Iranian airspace, said Amir Aviv, a former senior Israeli military official who is often briefed by the defence establishment. Iran said Israeli planes attacked from within Iraqi airspace, around 70 miles from its border.
At around 3.30am in Israel, the country’s military launched the second of at least three waves of attacks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Israel’s strikes targeted Iranian facilities involved in the production of missiles like the cruise and ballistic missiles that targeted Israel twice this year.
One of Israel’s hits was at the sprawling Parchin military site, where Iran once worked on nuclear weapons capabilities, according to the U.N. atomic agency. Four buildings were hit there, including three solid-propellant facilities for missiles, said Fabian Hinz, research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies focused on Iran’s missile program.
Just before sunrise, Israel’s military said its attack and retaliation were complete. The planes returned at the end of the four-hour assault with no losses.
Soon after, Iranian officials began privately telling Arab nations that the attack hit sites with great accuracy. In public, the regime said it led to “limited damage” and that Iran reserved the right to carry out a response at a time of its choosing. Four Iranian soldiers were killed in the attacks, Iran said.
Israeli officials said they hope that the attack would end a tit-for-tat exchange of fire with Iran and Israel’s military could now focus on its war goals fighting Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iranian allies.
Orion, the retired brigadier general, said the attack was calibrated but doesn’t mean the end of tensions with Iran. “It allows both sides to finish for now until the U.S. elections, and then see where it goes,” he added.
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Why does the ‘Right Side of History’ always get it so wrong?
Comment from Nicholas Jensen in Australia
Several months ago, after a terse exchange of views at a local pub, I was shocked to learn I’d landed on the Wrong Side of History. “Christ,” I thought. “Not again.” Quite how I ended up there on this occasion – and I’ll come to this soon – remains something of a mystery, though it’s clear polite society won’t be welcoming me back anytime soon.
For those unfamiliar with the expression, the essential thing to know about the Right Side of History is that it is the good side of history, the side of the gods. As for everyone else – you know who you are, you know what you’ve done. You’re not just a lost cause but you’re a lousy person, hopelessly out of step with the rest of humanity.
The other thing to know about the Right Side of History is you can’t dodge it. Occasionally, this can be awkward because some of its most ardent advocates can be very nice, well-meaning people – like teal voters without a cause, though much more authoritarian by nature.
The heavy-duty warriors tend to be familiar characters, easy to spot. In politics, the Obamas and Clintons stand unique among the Right Side of History warriors. “My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history,” was a stock-standard Barack Obama line wheeled out on more than a dozen occasions in his big presidential speeches.
Over on planet celebrity, Taylor Swift recently confessed that she “needed to be on the right side of history” when it came to engaging in politics, while our very own Senator Fatima Payman produced a classic of the genre when she wrote earlier this year of the Middle East: “Let historians write of us that we were on the right side of history, that we boldly reinforced international law, and that we were a shining beacon and voice for freedom.”
It’s worth remembering that we survived a near-lethal overdose of the Right Side of History not so long ago, when public debate of the voice descended into an absurd Manichean struggle between saints and sinners, heroes and villains. As it happens, that little pub skirmish I mentioned earlier occurred when I was asked by a group of mates how I’d voted at the referendum. When the reply came “No”, off to Siberia I trod. (Yes, millennial No voters do exist, in case you’re wondering.)
One obvious trap with this kind of thinking is the belief that the Right Side of History is unique to the puritans of our own age. Every depraved despot and potentate worth their salt, at one time or other, has claimed some guiding force, some special insight into an imagined future that seeks to vindicate their odious deeds. In that sense, the Right Side of History is the perfect weapon, perhaps the most dangerous of all.
Still, there’s no getting around one big problem: history doesn’t work this way and, what’s more, it never has. The Right Side of History presupposes a direction, a teleology, in which history moves inexorably towards an endpoint, a synthesis, from which it can reset and go again. Next to Hegel, Marx and the Whig conception of history, modernity is strewn with the corpses of a thousand dead-end theories on the causes of development and progress. In the end, chance, randomness and indeterminacy seem the more likely candidates.
In these febrile times, where the weaponisation of the past and the debasement of language seems virtually universal, it’s curious to observe just how casually the Right Side of History has morphed into a progressive article of faith, a kind of gibbering battle cry for the self-righteous and the condescending. Still, its expression contains a stark warning, worthy of our attention – namely, that it is better to stick to the sceptical side of history than cling to the wisdom of false prophets.
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My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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