Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

 

Joe Doakes

After well over a week, the Administration is putting our money where it’s mouth is as re Hurricane Helene.

Just kidding:

It’s sending money to get Hezb’allah back on its feet. 

It’s been a year since the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 Israelis – the worst pogrom since World War 2. 

It’s a year that’s made me even more ashamed of America’s foreign policy than the previous 2.5 years of POTATUS and Harris had managed to do. 

But it tracks with the same I feel when I look at what the American left has done:

The number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. has surged over 200 percent this past year, as Israel’s war against Hamas sparked an outpouring of Jewish hatred on college campuses and elsewhere.

From October 7, 2023, to September 24, 2024, the U.S. saw more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents, an increase of over 200 percent from the same period a year before, which saw 3,325 incidents, according to preliminary data released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a left-wing antisemitism watchdog…

…On college campuses, roughly 1,200 antisemitic incidents took place, a 500 percent increase from the year before, when the ADL had recorded about 200 of them. Earlier this year, anti-Israel demonstrations and tent encampments formed on college campuses nationwide, especially after Columbia University’s anti-Israel encampment received national attention and required the NYPD to break it up.

Antisemitic activity and outright advocacy for the extermination of Israel were common around the encampment sites. A prominent example was the Jew-free zones at the University of California, Los Angeles. A judge ruled in August that UCLA must stop aiding and abetting the antisemitic campus activists who attempted to prevent Jews from passing by certain parts of campus unless they disavowed Israel. UCLA initially decided to fight the ruling but quickly pulled its appeal.

Outside of college campuses, rallies across American cities often featured terrorist banners and chants calling for the destruction of Israel. The ADL found that more than 3,000 antisemitic incidents occurred at anti-Israel demonstrations, where protesters chanted in support of Hamas and other terrorist groups.

The potential of a Harris/Walz administration that continues passive-aggressively coddling Iranian aggression seem to be prompting the Israelis to swing for the proverbial fences, to try to resolve the issue before Harris screws it all up, if worse comes to worst. 

The BIden/Harris administration seems to be slowly figuring out something that most of the rest of the world knew last October 6: Hamas are evil people who don’t want a “deal”, except one that leaves them able to keep killing Jews.

Not that it’s sitting well with them:

They could not get Hamas on board, but that did not stop the president from retreating into what must be the comforting fiction that Benjamin Netanyahu is all that stands between Joe Biden and the Nobel Prize. “No,” Biden said simply when asked if, in the wake of the execution-style murder of six Hamas hostages, including an American citizen, Netanyahu was doing enough to secure a peace deal. And yet, not only had the Israeli government agreed to the conditions Biden floated for a temporary cease-fire back in June, it had agreed to the terms Biden outlined in January, March, April, and May in similar fashion. Know who didn’t? Hamas!

If there is a political strategy in the Biden administration’s performative exasperation, it’s hard to see its value. The White House has cast itself as an impotent, easily dismissed bit player in a drama over which it still maintains it has some control. Even now, the administration seems incapable of admitting to itself what most Americans already know: The terrorists who murder Americans without fear of U.S. reprisal are meting out near-daily embarrassments to the country and its president.

And yet, in her disastrous interview the week before last, Harris’s view was still “We support Israel but there has to be a cease-fire”.

It’s pure delusion.

To be fair, it’s better than Walz’s version:

I’d mock him for running away, but really, Biden and Harris are doing exactly the same thing. 

Jamaal Bowman, perhaps the dumbest member of a dumb “Squad”, is on his way to his non-profit reward:

Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., suffered a primary defeat Tuesday to a moderate challenger who was backed by pro-Israel groups, NBC News projected, following a bitter and expensive race that exposed the party’s divisions over the war in Gaza.

The race between Bowman and Westchester County Executive George Latimer in New York’s 16th District drew more ad spending — $25 million, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact — than any other House primary in history. Nearly $15 million of that spending came from the United Democracy Project, a super PAC linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which backed Latimer.

With 84% of the vote in as of Wednesday morning, Latimer led Bowman by a wide margin, 58.4% to 41.6%.

Don’t get too excited – Bowman “represents” (for now) a very Jewish district. His approach to the Gaza war may have been the most tone deaf in history.

Still, it’s good to see him gone.

There’s really no other word to describe what happened in Los Angeles on Sunday:

Nothing small or isolated about it.

I’m old enough to remember when Jews feared the right in America. But barely.

This guy…

…looks like a skinhead reliving his “glory days” from the ’80s. That the modern “Palestinian” movement allies with them tells you something.

And the mayor of Berlin…er, Los Angeles had a predictable response:

Of course, that’s scarcely worse than what POTATUS is doing.

The closest thing to good news?

Apparently The New Kristallnacht isn’t polling well outside LA, Dearborn and, probably, south Minneapolis.

Normally I’d call this evidence that Joe Biden is the worst president of my life time, Foreign Policy division:

Of course, that’s not quite true; Obama is still the president, in every way that matters.

So Obama remains comfortably ahead of Jimmy Carter.

When President Potato promised, during his State of The Union address, to build a supply pier so the US could, er, “feed starving people in Gaza”, I’m sure my prediction at the time could have been seen as partisan and cynical. I’ve got the receipts right here.

I could have just as easily worded it like this:

We – and if we like it or not it is Uncle Sam and his taxpayers – inherited stewardship of the global system that cannot prosper when it’s primary force continues to demonstrate abject incompetence – from Afghanistan to Gaza – all the while holding no one accountable. Our enemies are encouraged and our friends disheartened. It is almost as if the humiliation and failure is the actual goal.

Provide another explanation if you have one.

We have three branches of government for a reason. Each branch is supposed to check the other.

Congress – this is in your corner. It appears the Executive Branch is incapable of policing its own competence. Do work.

…but they beat me to it, and brought the authority to support it.

The pier fell apart. Bits and pieces spent last weekend driving along the Eastern Med coastline.

That, of course, was the least of the problems – not just the easily-anticipated results:

From the time the first load came off the pier, the aid barely made it past 300 meters until it disappeared into Hamasistan.

But the overall concept:

An interesting note; this is not a Navy operation, but an Army operation. Remember what I told you about the fate of the East Coast Amphibious Construction Battalion TWO (ACB2) last summer? This story aligns well with the Anglosphere’s problem with seablindness we discussed on yesterday’s Midrats with James Smith.

As for my general thought on doing this? I’ll avoid the politics as much as I can, but I have concerns.

Generally speaking, no operation starts out on the right foot with a lie.

Read the whole thing.

It may feel like deja vu.

…that at least some of the baby-boomers who protested against Vietnam have got to be looking at today’s mass of bobbleheaded students…:

…and thinking “dial back the crazy, kids”?

Leftists, 2020: “Punch a Nazi!”

Leftists, 2024, being thwarted in their protests in support of actual modern-day Nazis [1]:

“Heeeeeeey! No fair punching!”

[1] In the “fascist dictatorship founded on racial obsession, focused on murdering Jews” sense of the term, rather than the “I’m a leftist and I don’t whatever it is” sense.

Holy crap.

US aid being supplied to Gaza via the potato’s “pier from nowhere…”

…is being looted.

Unexpectedly!

Hamline University in Saint Paul is an exquisitely expensive instution that seems to be not quite as prestigious as Saint Thomas, and always a couple of degrees behind Macalester in terms of the impeccability of their leftist orientation.

But they aren’t to be left behind.

Here’s their “pro-Palestine” neo-Brownshirt “encampment”, as a rainy night ended this morning.

So maybe we’ll have Hamline kids puking on their own lawns for a change this weekend.

Believe me – the Biden Administration has kept on giving me moments; the Afghan debacle,, the Nurembadelphia speech; yapping about “shinkflation” of potato chips.

But this may be the big daddy of them all.

So far.

Biden, as we noted yesterday, is playing pattycake with military supplies to Israel as it fights an existential war against Iranian proxies in Gaza:

They are most particularly threatening to cut off supplies of the precision-guided weapons that make it feasible to fight an urban war without indiscriminately slaughtering the civilians that Hamas are using for human shields.

Biden defends his action by saying he wants to emphasize “Defensive’ weapons, like “Iron Dome”.

The problem with seeing defense as being entirely about defending is that it gives the initiative to the attacker.

Let’s say you are worried about a gang of 2-3 people who’ve been doing home invasions. You have two doors (and no windows large enough to let someone larger than Nicole Mitchell) into your house. You have your significant other. All covered, right?

Well, sort of. The home invaders control who comes, and when, and through which door or doors. You have to defend just as actively against them at noon on Wednesday at at 4AM on Sunday morning. And when they come, it’ll be at a time of their choosing, through the door (or, having read about Nicole Mitchell) window of their choosing.

So much better to hit the home invaders first – to choose the time and place of your showdown, and not have to worry nearly as much about your windows and doors, right?

Of course, if it was you and your significant other, literally, you’d be breaking the law – but the metaphor holds for nations. Saying a nation can “just defend their borders, using only defensive, not offensive, weapons”, is simplistic, even childishly naive. It presumes that attackers are stupid, and will attack you exactly when and how you predicted.

Unfortunately, attackers are creative; they’ll attack you in ways you never expect as you stand ready to defend against an attack they never intended to make, or never expected to see again, or by finding weaknesses in your defenses they can exploit at a time and place of their choosing.

“We’ll just defend ” is the fallback position of the illiterate at best, the deluded and bufuddled at worst.

Or, in the case of our current, vile administration, both.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

US put a hold on an ammunition shipment to Israel.

The United States is now objectively supporting terrorism. 

Joe Doakes

When you remember that:

• Biden’s biggest funders (other than sending 10% to the Big Guy) are people like George Soros, who detest Israel, and
• Biden needs that “Uncommitted” pro-genocide vote to “come home” by November…

…it all starts to make sense.

Watching our “Best and Brightest” in action…:

…I’m reminded of a coach we had in college.

A famously blunt man, he would have likely looked at kids like this best/brightest and said “You’ve got a kind face. The kind of face I’d like to throw shit at”.

Let’s just say it resonates.

By the way – is it just me, or is “Best and Brightest” joining “Vibrant!” as a new sarcastic antonym?

It’s high time we stopped calling Ivy Leaguers like this Columbia spokesbeing:

…as “our best and brightest”.

By the way – at “Mitch Berg University”, students who infringe other students rights – Jewish, conservative, liberal, communist, I don’t care – by depriving them of the use of the campus they pay to attend will be blockaded into their “autonomous zones”; no water or food go in, no sewage comes out.

Only way out is through a checkpoint where they either make a videotaped apology and commit to pay restitution to the students they’ve adversely affected, or sign the acknowledgement on their expulsion paperwork.

…that Ilhan Omar is a truly reprehensible person:

But hey, if you live in CD5 [1], feel free to vote for her, whether you are pro-corruption, graft and antisemitism, or against it.

[1] Or are buried within the borders of CD5

Israel has always had a paternalistic but pragmatic view of civilian firearms. As a general rule, they are opposed – but there’ve been exceptions. After a series of school massacres fifty years ago, they liberalized teacher carry in the kibbutzim – until they turned the job over to security (successfully, so far, where “success” doesn’t include civil liberty).

And now, as of last week…:

Israel Police will allow civilians to come armed to performances at Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park, Army Radio reported Monday morning. 

This decision comes as huge concert events are set to return to venues, with the first being Israeli star Omer Adam’s upcoming show. The return of these large events brings the need for increased security. Security forces decided to allow civilians to attend events with personal firearms, rather than increasing the amount of security personnel, Army Radio report noted.

Can’t say I didn’t try to warn them, where “them” = everyone that treats self-defense as a privilege.

Harvard and MIT disgraced the nation’s “elite academia” last year.

Columbia says “hold my kombucha”:

Yep – progs standing in the door of the schoolhouse, trying to keep the race they hate out.

Is a single Democrat office-holder or leader anywhere going to condemn this?

“Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students safety”.

Oh, I suspect the NYPD could do it, if there were any political will to do so.

The fact that there isn’t should make every American sick to their stomach.

Bonus question: as someone else put it (I wish I could claim credit) – if Trump was responsible for what happened in Charlottesville, why aren’t Biden and his boss responsible for this?

In the wake of three episodes of pro-Palestine protesters burning themselves to death, the sixties – the radical-chic version – called to tell the left of the 2020s to dial back the crazy:

I mean, if “interests of power” = weeding out the most insane elements of the crowd that also wants to self-immolate Western Civilization, she may have a point.

On the other hand, it’s a teeeeeny little step from this to “not immolating other ‘serves the interests of power'”.

Hamas*holes in Florida try to block a road.

Get dragged.

Literally and figuratively.

I want to send this video to the Minneapolis City Council, just to see if any of them retreat to a crying room…

Allegations in the Jerusalem Post: the Potato Administration knew that Iran was going to attack Israel over the weekend:

The United States had contact with Iran through Swiss intermediaries both before and after Tehran’s mass drone and missile attack on Israeli territory overnight, a senior Biden administration official said on Sunday.

The official declined to provide details on the contact, saying only that the US and Iran had “a series of direct communications through the Swiss channel.”

The theory: Iran needed to launch a face-saving attack after alleging Israel killed one of their terror leaders. Biden wants the mullahs to save that face.

Every time I think I couldn’t possibly be more ashamed to be an American, President Potato Obama digs the bottom of the barrel a little lower.

As Sergeant Esterhaus on HIll Street Blues used to say, be careful out there.

It appears the Vegetable In Chief has browbeaten Netanyahu into letting Hamas live to rape, burn and mutilate another day:

Very discouraging news out of Israel today that the IDF is pulling its forces out of southern Gaza, supposedly to “rest, regroup, and re-supply” after four months of hard fighting. Let us hope this is true, but one can’t help but suspect that this move may be in response to demands from the Biden Administration that will inevitably lead to a permanent cease-fire which will amount to a Hamas victory, because Hamas will have survived a hard Israeli punch but will now have time and room to rebuild. (Axios is now reporting that Biden delivered an ultimatum to Netanyahu.)

Biden appears to be well on his way to making Jimmy Carter look like a foreign policy titan:

When I heard the news of the IDF strike that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, my first instinct was that the aid workers were set up by Hamas through false or deceptive intelligence sent to the Israelis. We know Hamas uses civilians as human shields and welcomes civilian casualties as a means of propaganda, and foreign civilian casualties are the best propaganda of all. Maybe an Israeli officer was hasty and had a twitchy trigger, but I doubt it. In any case, it gave the feckless and craven Biden Administration the excuse it needed to break with Israel (as I predicted it eventually would), in the biggest betrayal of an ally since Munich in 1938.

I have never been more ashamed to be an American.

Exasperated conservatives sometimes refer to the media as “the enemy”.

It’s understandable – the media at the editorial and national level is in general a PR firm for Big Left – and accurate in terms of long-term effect.

But not since Walter Duranty has it been quite this literally true.

Five Israeli families are suing the AP and Reuters for their “journalists” obvious collusion with Hamas on October 7:

The lawsuit filed by the victims’ parents last week alleges that five photojournalists, Hassan Abdel Fattah Eslaiah, Hatem Ali, Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa, Ashraf Amra, and Ali Mahmoud who filed photographs in real time of the atrocities being perpetrated by Hamas terrorists were in fact a component of the attacks themselves, and were not conducting legitimate journalistic work.

The journalists were either aware ahead of time that a mass invasion and terror attack was about to be staged by Hamas or, being present from the very outset of the attacks, were culpable for doing nothing to stop the assault, including failing to warn the Israeli authorities, the suit asserts.

While the free market is having its real final say with Big ProgressiveMedia, a little economic justice would be welcome. FIngers crossed.