Daily Archives: 18 October 2023

Some Things Must Go Both Ways

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The opening of the Rafah crossing from Gaza to Egypt remains a sometime thing.

A deal to open the border crossing has been held up…by Egyptian concerns that Israel hadn’t given assurances it would pause airstrikes and by Israeli insistence that trucks entering via Egypt be thoroughly searched, Egyptian officials said.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, in particular:

Unfortunately, Israel has not yet allowed humanitarian aid to enter Gaza[.]

Israel has a big enough problem from its practice of telling Gazans where and when (if on short notice) Israel will strike. The idea is to let Gaza’s civilians in the target zone leave before the strike goes in. Those warnings, though, also let the terrorists alternatively trap the civilians there in order to run up the body count of innocents or, with longer term risk to Israel, let the terrorists escape among the evacuating civilians.

The other problem, though, is Egypt’s reluctance to let the trucks, allegedly carrying humanitarian-related supplies, to be searched before being allowed into Gaza. It’s very likely that the vast majority of those trucks would be carrying only humanitarian-related supplies, but some likely would be smuggling supplies for the terrorists in Gaza, also. It wouldn’t take very much of those latter to sustain the terrorists and to support their continued attacks on Israel.

Israeli reluctance is entirely justified. Israel is acting to not allow terrorist supplies to enter Gaza; the humanitarian aid is collateral to Egypt’s refusal to allow the trucks to be searched.

Common Ground and Mutual Understanding

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Michael Schill, Northwestern University President, in a message to “members of the Northwestern community” regarding the terrorist Hamas attack on Israeli women, children, and babies:

This is a moment for us to pull together, to support each other, and seek common ground. That does not mean we need to agree with each other about divisive issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But we must have empathy for each other and strive to build understanding.

Common ground is precisely that shared territory of overlap that disparate positions and whole belief systems have. How can there be any shared territory, any overlap, between those who butcher innocents as their goal and method in pushing their position and those who support…civilization?

How can there be any empathy for those who inflict such evil with deliberation and careful planning?

It’s easy enough to understand such evil and those who seek to inflict it—the evil is plain before us. But such understanding neither requires, nor supports, empathy, nor is there common ground with such. If evil cannot be eradicated, those who do evil certainly can be destroyed, and they must.

Schill’s moral equivocation (his words are so far afield that I almost did not use “moral”) is illustrative of the utter failure of the management teams of our higher “education” edifices.