This tweet was taken down, though only after 12 hours had passed. Watch: the Biden Administration will now soon claim it was posted by a rogue intern. [ UPDATE: I was close!] The U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem also tweeted for “all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks” on the very day of Hamas’s invasion of Israel. That post also was deleted.
Satire though it is, the Babylon Bee’s reaction is spot on:
“It seems that US Secretary of State Blinken deleted yesterday’s tweet where he ‘encouraged’ Hamas-supporting Turkey arranging a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. Are there any actual adults in charge in Foggy Bottom?” tweeted retired US diplomat Alberto Miguel Fernandez. Who is surprised? Many on the Left opposed any military action against Afghanistan after the 9-11 bombings. Meanwhile, as the whiff of moral equivalency wafts through the wokified air, Hamas has threatened to execute civilian hostages on live TV, stating, “From this moment on, we announced that any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met, regretfully to say, by executing one of the hostages in our custody and we will be forced to broadcast this execution.” The ethical distinction should be clear, but to frighteningly many, it is not:
Maybe Biden will make more billions of dollars available to Iran if it can get Hamas to stop…
___________________
Pointer and Source for the cartoon above: Instapundit.
Ethics Alarms 
Hamas has the same choices Japan did in 1945.
Israel should broadcast the following message.
All persons taken during the Hamas attack must be returned within 24 hours or there will be no Palestinians left alive in Gaza. Any interference or aid provided to Hamas by Iran or any other neighbor shall be treated as a declaration of war against Israel and will result in an immediate massive retaliatory strike against population centers in those nations.
Israel believes this recent attack poses an existential threat to our nation and people and Israelis will never again allow its citizens to be brutalized by those that hate that the Jewish people exist.
Despite forcible relocation of a people from their homes being one of the definitions of genocide…we’re looking at a situation where that form of genocide is the only ethical solution.
At this point, Israel *must* forcibly evacuate substantial portions of the Gaza Strip – at a bare minimum, the urban center and associated suburbs of Gaza City.
There’s no other solution to a generations-long problem that is not going to solve itself because the very Palestinian children we pity today are going to be the very Palestinian adults who are teaching their own children to hate Jews and be the very same adults who are pulling triggers and murdering Jews in 20 years. It’s not going to stop.
And Israel *cannot* live that way. No nation would live that way. But for some odd reason, we demand the Jews live under constant assault. And then we get mad, when after they’ve waited *longer than another other nation would wait* to respond, finally respond with the kind of overwhelming force *every other nation* would respond with in that situation.
Nah. There’s no “good” solution to this problem. But forcibly removing the Palestinian people from at least Gaza City, if not the entire Gaza strip, is the “least bad” option.
The cartoon needs an update. The Hamas member need to have a US-made M4 or SAW they got from the Taliban (after we left them for the Taliban).
It’s a great (and very apt) cartoon, though.
I cannot help but marvel at the differences in the coverage when compared to the last time a country swept into another without provocation or warning – that is, when Russia moved into Ukraine. It’s a year later, and some of my proflgressive friends still harbor bloodlust towards Russia for having the audacity to invade Ukraine. They didn’t make it 12 hours before they felt the scales were balanced in Israel.
The ‘invasion’ of Israel is troubling on several counts.
(1) The border wall with Gaza had been left almost completely unmanned by the IDF. Most of the troops had been sent to the West Bank or were home for holidays. The remaining troops were told to take shelter in the bunkers during the rocket attack. The Gazan force just walked through the ‘barrier’.
(2) Every video I see shows groups of 4-8 men, with what looks like US plate carriers and US M4 rifles or similar armament. One group was 3 motorcycles. The group that killed hundreds at the festival looks like it could have been as few as 8 men.
I am wondering if this ‘invasion’ force had more than 100 men total. This is what happens to a disarmed populace. Who wants to bet we let more than 100 people on the terrorism watch list through our border every day?
So, possibly 100 men, armed similar to the average American family, is able to paralyze Israel, kill ~1000 people, and take 100’s of hostages.
The selective outrage, whether leftists recognize it in themselves or not, is because they hate Jews.
Their hostility to Russia was magnified by the whole Trump Colluded with the Russians®™ to Steal the 2016 Election propaganda campaign.
I don’t know who I dislike more in circumstances like this, the actual pacifists, or the pacifists whose passive isn’t is dependent on who is involved and who is in the White House. Israel is one very small nation, albeit one that punches well above its weight, among 20 or more Arab and Muslim nations.
There is not and never has been a nation of Palestine, that is a regional designation created by the Romans when they wanted to wipe Israel off the map and destroy the memory that it had ever been there. In 1948, after Israel came into being, the surrounding three Arab nations decided they were going to destroy it, and strangle the baby in the cradle. They failed, and those Arabs who had fled to those surrounding Nations, thinking they were just going to walk back in, were out of luck. They decided they were going to become a force for the destruction of israel, rather than become part of one of the other Arab nations. This intern only LED to the seizing of Gaza, the West bank, and the Golan heights, to prevent them being used for assaults on Israel.
The fact of the matter is also that the destruction of Israel has become an article of faith among certain sectors of the left. This sometimes results in a split in the left as Jewish intellectuals find themselves at odds with their lefty colleagues when this issue comes up. Go ahead and inquire, you’ll find out that the left generally does not like Israel. They don’t like Israel because it represents a powerful nation that can fend for itself against any enemy and it represents Jews as effective fighters and advocates for themselves. This takes away their ability to use the Jews as yet another victim community to demand concessions for. It also conflicts with their reflexive wish to side with whoever is the enemy of the United States and the West generally, who they generally see as bad.
Of course they also see the Palestinians as victims, which they reflectively side with. Anyone who claims victim status must be oppressed, and they must battle the oppressor. The fact is that Israel would be quite content to leave the other nations alone if they would leave it alone. The fact is also that as the years have gone by the surrounding nations have mostly decided that they are not interested in an endless war, and both Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel. Syria has not, but they did withdraw from Lebanon, which puts them in less of a position to attack Israel. The nations interested in still attacking Israel include the Saudis, who support terror financially, although they try to keep it on the down low, and Iran, which still holds dreams of being the regional great power.
In the meantime, as with the cold war, there are plenty of useful idiots here in the US to support this cause. As I said, some are actually committed pacifists who believe that all conflict is wrong and prefer not to follow their thinking beyond that point. I sort of pity people like that, because they are generally decent-hearted idealists who really want the world to be a better place, they just have unworkable ideas as to how to get it to that place. More than a few, however, claim to believe in peace, but it depends on whose terms that peace is. Now deceased terror handmaiden lawyer Lynne Stewart was all for peace, but was also all for Fidel Castro, the Vietnamese leaders, and other various dictators locking up dissenters, since descent could be used to undermine a successful people’s revolution.
There were plenty of supposed pacifists who popped out in the aftermath of 9/11 to say it will be wrong for the United States to retaliate War move against Afghanistan. Somehow, though while Obama was leading from behind in Libya and Bill Clinton was getting us in deeper and deeper in Haiti and the balkans, these pacifists never showed up. That’s because they’re not really past this, they are leftists who paint a veneer of pacifism on when it’s useful. A lot of these same people are all four the war in Ukraine, as long as it keeps going and for as long as it takes to defeat the Russians. Committed pacifists would be trying to put a ceasefire together there. I haven’t heard of anyone doing it. In the meantime, a ton of tax money and a lot of our stockpiled weapons go there, leaving us in a weakend position. I have read a very few articles by the most committed pacifists who say the war in Ukraine is Ukraine’s fault and our fault for propping up NATO, an alliance which should be dissolved since it ceased to have any meaning with the end of the Cold War. The majority of the left really doesn’t want to hear it, and are convinced the Ukraine is the hill that the West needs to die on. They cheer on the Ukrainians, say we need to fight like the Ukrainian, and so on. Bring up another Nation fighting against an invasion, and suddenly they change their tune. Make that Nation Israel fighting for its own existence, or at least fighting off what would be considered and invasion anywhere else, and suddenly they say we have to hurry up and get a ceasefire in place.
Make no mistake of this: Hamas is flush with cash and weaponry that mostly came from the money that was freed up in Iran to sponsor them. They felt strong enough to launch a major assault on Israel. They did this despite knowing that the prime minister of Israel is the last prime minister you want to screw with, and is likely to retaliate in a very heavy-handed manner, and in a manner which they cannot match, like airstrikes with 5th generation fighters, which they have none of. This means one of the few things: either they legitimately think they can defeat israel, which I doubt even the most committed islamist thinks, they have a death wish, which might characterize some of them, but I don’t think characterizes all of them, or, and this is the most likely, they feel strong enough that they can make this assault, do some damage, embarrass Israel on the world stage, and gain another step by doing the two steps forward, one step back bit, which they will be supported in by the useful idiots. I think the latter is likely the truth, and, as we know to be true but would rather not believe of anyone, they are willing to sacrifice their own people to achieve that goal. They are also banking on weakness at the top here in the United States and the fact that we are already so deeply involved in the Ukraine.
They may find out otherwise soon, as we are currently deploying our newest and most powerful carrier to the region, reinforcing our combat aircraft units in the region, and quite possibly also deploying special forces to the region. I’d like to think that our military is powerful enough that they can still win even if they are badly led, but, after the serious botch that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the apparent greater interest in using the military as a social engineering experiment than using it for what it’s meant for, I have some serious questions. Israel probably has some serious questions too, which is why the word of anyone in the United States might not carry the same weight it often does. Israel May well decide that they need to defend their nation their way. That might well include the use of their limited but powerful nuclear arsenal, which we really can’t blame them for.
So, to recap, we are at the point where we have let ourselves become distracted by another conflict, weakened by another conflict, embarrassed by our own actions to the point where our respect is diminished, while at the same time reinforcing and emboldening our enemies to the point where they feel like they can assault supposedly are strongest ally, and the same people responsible for this situation now want our strongest ally to become deliberately helpless, probably in the name of not making these same people look bad. Good job, everybody!
Remember, the “Palestinians” were supposed to be settled in Jordan. Then, in 1970, Yassir Arafat and the PLO tried to take over Jordan and they were expelled. Lebanon took many of them in. Then, in 1975, Yassir Arafat and the PLO tried to take over Lebanon resulting of the death, exile, or forced conversion of the majority of the population that was Christian. It also turned that rather pleasant country into the hellhole it has become.
Then they gave Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize. Go figure. That’s about when that award stopped meaning anything and you could get it for simply serving, relatively unsuccessfully, in a political post at the top of a useless organization (Kofi Annan), getting shot (Malala Yousafazi) or being not named Bush (Obama).
The fact that MSM operatives all have the tone of voice of “we call on Israel to show restraint in its response” as though Israel actively and eagerly targets non-combatants is abhorrent. The left fundamentally believes about Israel what they believe about America- that it is an evil force in the world and that it delights in killing indiscriminately.
Sickening the attitude they have.
How restrained was the response against Pearl Harbor?
Nikki Haley said it best: “Finish them.”
It is interesting that there was almost no news footage of the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh a few weeks ago. I am assuming that anyone who didn’t escape was killed. It is OK, though, because it was probably only 60-70 thousand Christians.
When Christians are slaughtered for their faith, the news media doesn’t cover it much. If it doesn’t cover it, they become ‘Easter Worshippers’, not Christians.
All that an early ceasefire would accomplish is that it will provide the terrorists time to regroup and rearm in relative safety for their next in a seemingly endless series of atrocities. The Israelis must continue their retaliatory actions until Hamas is virtually destroyed. No doubt some other islamic countries will soon portray Hamas as victims to justify their own aggression against Israel, but they should be ready for the consequences.
Finally, it seems there is an abundance of support in this country for Hamas and its slaughtering of Jews and making no distinction between men, women, children, babies and the elderly. There were even a few lgbt types holding a banner saying “Queers support Palestine”, apparently oblivious to their fate were they actually in Palestine and singled out.
With pundits droning on about this 24-7, they seem to miss the obvious.
If Hamas took hostages, we know that they will be released safely, if you just give them money.
Problem solved!
-Jut
The Babylon Bee put some historical perspective on the situation with this satirical headline: “Emperor Hirohito Calls For Ceasefire After Bombing Of Pearl Harbor.”
Ah, the dangers of commenting without reading the post (I included that BB gag above…)
Well, I thought I read the post but must have skimmed over the reference. My apologies for the redundancy.
No apologies necessary.
Happens to me all the time.