Monthly Archives: October 2024

Misleading Headline

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And a misleading article. The headline summarizes the miss:

Israel Said It Was Aiming at Hezbollah. Its Strike Also Killed Dozens of Civilians.

And the lede, which in keeping with newsroom policy across the journalism guild, misleadingly calls the terrorist entity “militants:”

For years, a helpful, middle-aged man lived in the basement apartment of a seven-story residential building on a hillside. Some neighbors in Ain el-Delb said they knew that he was connected to Hezbollah, the militant group. But they said they didn’t think he was important enough to be an Israeli target.

Misleading because what these newsroom writers carefully chose not to mention, at any point in the article other than a passing reference to Israel’s “describing” the building as a headquarters, is that Hezbollah had secreted its facilities and terrorists in apartment building among those civilians, using them as shields. It’s those terrorists who are responsible for the extent of the civilian deaths. It’s those terrorists who maximized the extent of the collateral damage centered on those civilian deaths.

Yahya Sinwar is Dead

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Israel got him in Rafah last Thursday, and the hue and cry in the press, in our government, and in the opposition in Israel is to move quickly to negotiate with Hamas to get hostages back. The “thinking” is that Hamas is running out of leaders to run the terrorist entity and that it’s in a severely weakened state and so ripe for negotiations.

This is badly mistaken.

For one thing, there remain tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists, and included among them are thousands of middle- and senior-level terrorist combat (to use the term loosely and metaphorically) leaders who can be moved up. Hamas also can hire leadership, if only into second echelon levels to get them trained up to Hamas’ methods, from outside: al Qaeda is still a going concern, Daesh is still a going concern, al Shebaab is a going concern. The Muslim Brotherhood continues.

For another thing, Hamas has no incentive for negotiating a release of the hostages they still hold. Releasing them, under any terms however favorable to the terrorists, takes away their last lever over the Israeli opposition. Nor does Hamas have any other incentive for the release: they don’t care about the hostages’ fate or their own; the terrorists only care about the destruction of Israel. One of their senior leaders (not Sinwar) has already promised to repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated, no matter the cost in Palestinian lives or their own.

No.

Hamas is in a weakened state, but that means it’s no time to let up. On the contrary, now is the time to pile on, for the IDF, and for the US to actively support the IDF with our own military forces. Let Hamas come to Israel with a wish to negotiate. It’s Hamas’ war, it’s on Israel to finish it on their terms, it’s on us to help them (France and the rest of Europe be damned) and it’s on Hamas to ask for negotiations. Or to suffer the fate it has promised Israel.

Just One More Reason

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The European Union’s latest attempt to dictate to American companies how they do business is the most pernicious. Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris whole-heartedly agree with the EU’s power putsch, as demonstrated by their silence on the move [emphasis added].

In May the EU adopted the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which converts a range of international conventions into binding law enforceable on American companies. ….
The new regulation forces US companies to adhere to the EU’s “net zero” carbon emissions target and to comply with onerous labor-related standards—even when they exceed the requirements of US law. ….
Though the regulation directly targets US companies with European market revenue exceeding €450 million (about $500 million), it indirectly harms small and medium-size businesses too. It requires big companies to police their subsidiaries and supply chains….

This is just one more reason for American businesses to find other outlets than EU member nations. It’s also justification for foreign policy-centric tariffs, as opposed to protectionist tariffs, to be applied to imports from EU nations, tariffs equal to the cost to American businesses of complying with the EU’s extra-territorial diktats.

Sadly, it will require a change of administrations and Senate makeup (and an expanded Republican House majority) in order to take any action to protect American businesses and American sovereignty. The Harris-Biden administration is so disdainful of American business success that they agree with the EU’s extension of its control over our privately and publicly owned enterprises.

“War Crimes”

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As Eugene Kontorovich’s (of Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum and George Mason University Scalia Law School) in his lede notes,

[A]s Israel fights Hezbollah’s army in Lebanon, it has found a new foe: the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Having failed at its mission of neutralizing the Hezbollah threat, Unifil is now actively interfering with Israel doing the job.

Never mind that, per the UN’s Security Council, UNIFIL’s mandate includes

ensuring that no “armed groups” operate in southern Lebanon

Those barred armed groups include Hezbollah. Instead, UNIFIL

has allowed Hezbollah to entrench itself in southern Lebanon over the years, storing arms in many of the homes and building a network of fully stocked attack tunnels and small outdoor weapons depots in preparation for an Oct. 7-style assault. Israeli troops have found a tunnel about 100 meters from a Unifil outpost.
For 11 months Hezbollah fired more than 8,500 rockets and missiles at Israel, mostly from southern Lebanon, under Unifil’s nose. The area, militia-free by order of the UN Security Council, was soon crawling with the world’s best-armed terrorists. But the peacekeepers said little and did less.

Not just 100m away. In the IDF’s current move into southern Lebanon,

Israeli forces discovered Hezbollah tunnel entrances abutting Unifil posts.

Kontorovich is being generous. UNIFIL has not failed. It has been succeeding, in its internally defined mission to support Hezbollah and to operate against Israel.

Thus, war crimes. UNIFIL, via its conscious decision to abrogate its assignment of keeping Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, and its equally conscious decision to shield Hezbollah politically and lately to attempt physical shielding, is the one committing war crimes. UNIFIL’s guilt is made manifest by its decision to allow Hezbollah to build tunnels for attacking Israel right up against UNIFIL buildings to contribute to those tunnels’ disguise.

UNIFIL is not the only entity guilty of war crimes, though. UN Secretary General António Guterres shares that guilt with his open support for UNIFIL, and for UNRWA, many of whose members are part of the planners for Hamas’ 7 Oct 23 atrocity and ensuing atrocities throughout the last year, and through them his personal support for terrorists and the terrorists’ atrocities.

It’s Not Only That

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The Wall Street Journal notes that the Federal Reserve says it makes its determinations based on what the data tell it, and then the WSJ notes that the Fed has been wildly wrong lately and lays that off to data volatility. The failures, it seems, are in the Fed’s data dependency.

The Fed says it sets policy based on incoming data, especially on inflation and jobs. And those data have been both unreliable and far more volatile than usual….

The WSJ then provides its definition of data dependency:

“[D]ata dependency” has come to mean looking only at recent data, ignoring projections for the effects of interest rates on the economy in future.

The problems with this definition are two. In the first place, projections of the future are just guesses, even if somewhat informed by current data. As a great 20th century American philosopher understood, it’s tough to make projections, especially into the future.

The other problem is that this definition of data dependency wholly ignores realized, empirical data: those that have occurred before “recent.” Decent data reliance requires those past data be included, even if as estimates of the underlying trend through that empirical past into “today” (and some little way into the future).