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Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy❤
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Question for you.....do we know if Iran was truly involved?
I made a mistake AGAIN and read about some of the attacks.....and I'm having trouble moderating my reactions.
Is Iran really involved or is this the same old Bill Kristol gang that got us into Iraq, then gave us Obama, and then went on to show they were really Dems to begin with.
No. of Recommendations: 2
No. of Recommendations: 2
Question for you.....do we know if Iran was truly involved?Both the Israeli and American governments are saying "We don't know for sure" but there are 2 news articles out about it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2...The Palestinian militants behind the surprise weekend attack on Israel began planning the assault at least a year ago, with key support from Iranian allies who provided military training and logistical help as well as tens of millions of dollars for weapons, current and former Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials said Monday.
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While Iran's precise role in Saturday's violence remained unclear, the officials said, the assault reflected Tehran's years-long ambition to surround Israel with legions of paramilitary fighters armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons systems capable of striking deep inside the Jewish state.Pretty tepid take from the WaPoo. The Wall Street Journal has much more:
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-israel-...Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave the final go-ahead last Monday in Beirut
DUBAI'Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas's Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions'the most significant breach of Israel's borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War'those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.Bear in mind that both the Israelis AND the US Government have to say the mealy-mouthed stuff. If they come out and say, "Yeah, Iran did it" then that's tantamount to declaring to both the US and Israeli publics that the Iranians are involved in an act of war in Israel that resulted in the murder of American citizens. If that step is taken, there's only one response.
Biden may be a mashed potato mentally, but taking the step to retaliate against Iran is something that should be planned over time, and carefully. Not only that but the Israelis have enough on their plate for the moment (although they've been practicing for years how to conduct airstrikes into Iran and potentially rescue airmen).
Glad you brought up Barack Obama. It's thanks to his coddling and enabling of Iran that we are where we are despite the desperate attempts by people on here to try to claim that he and Biden are somehow tough on the mullahs. That's a fanciful farce.
https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/10/the-specter-o...Certainly, there are many legitimate questions to ask about the government of Israel's behavior, the limits of America's national interest in the region, and whether Protestant America's fetishization of the 'Holy Land' keeps us from seeing issues in the region with moral clarity. However, any fair-minded critique of Israel is a far cry from Obama's well-established and radical views on the Middle East that stem, by his own admission, from his affinity for radicals such as Frantz Fanon, whose brain-dead swagger produced such sentiments as 'decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.'
...
I hardly believe Obama is such a monster he secretly roots for atrocities in Israel, even if it seems he's never met an antisemite he would willingly disown. Regardless, there's no doubt that these horrifying nationwide terror attacks in Israel are Obama's legacy, a result of his arrogant anti-American ideology put into practice. But after the weekend, even Democratic partisans are scrambling to distance themselves from the Biden and Obama administrations' ill-advised cozying up to Iran. Now we need to follow through and make sure the Obama-Biden foreign policy legacy, and the dangerous ideology that motivated it, is rejected and held up for the failure that it is.The article runs through Obama's history of close associates who are, in fact, raving anti-semites from his Chicago pastor to Robert Malley, a high school pal of Antony Blinken's who is now under suspicion of being a spy for Iran.
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Not Dope, but I read the headline that Iran says they were not involved in any way.
LOL. They never accept responsibility for their terrorism.
The WSJ notes that Hamas worked directly with the IRGC for a long time planning the attack.
No. of Recommendations: 11
Dope1: The article runs through Obama's history of close associates who are, in fact, raving anti-semites from his Chicago pastor to Robert Malley, a high school pal of Antony Blinken...
Umm. The Obamas disassociated themselves with Wright in 2008, withdrawing their membership in Trinity United Church of Christ where Wright had previously served as senior pastor, stating that "Our relations with Trinity have been strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright, which sharply conflict with our own views."
High school pal? Anthony Blinken is 61. So 45 years ago?
Jeebus.
So far you've blamed presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden and now Anthony Blinken for everything bad with respect to Iran.
Between 1981 and 1986 president Reagan sold arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. That's only 37 years ago, so why not put some blame there? Or how about president George W destabilizing the entire Middle East? Or how about your Lord and Savior, Trump, pulling out of the nuclear agreement and ratchetting up tensions in the region?
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The Obamas disassociated themselves with Wright in 2008
You mean after it was pointed out to him that he listened to that bile for 20 years?
Real courageous, that.
The rest of your post is mere Whataboutism, and has d1ck to do with the current situation in the Mideast, which I've noticed you haven't said much on.
No. of Recommendations: 2
Meanwhile, back to the subject at hand.
Bari Weiss went on msnbc and dropped some truth bombs on their heads. I'm glad their smug, misinformed ignorant viewer base is hearing things like this - for too long the left has been the intellectual home of anti-semitism in this country, nurturing it in the halls of academia and in their elite sinecures:
https://twitter.com/TheFP/status/17117782314166642...This is the biggest massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But unlike the Holocaust, in which the Germans tried to hide their war crimes ' it took the Allies, remember, years to uncover all that the Nazis did ' here, we have people streaming it, on real-time, on TikTok, on live stream, and on Instagram. A message just went out to parents all over the State of Israel begging them to delete the apps from their children's phones because Hamas has warned that it is going to livestream the execution of hostages, and they don't want their children seeing it.
I want to tell you just a few stories of some of the people that I've been speaking to in Israel ' people who are desperate for their family members to come home. I spoke yesterday morning to Shaked Haran. Shaked is a young mother of two; she's eight months pregnant with her third child. On Saturday morning, she got a WhatsApp message from her father...on Kibbutz Be'eri. They said that they were in trouble, and they said that they loved her. This woman has 10 members of her family currently missing: her father, her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law, three children ' three children under the age of 10 are missing. The reason they know that they have not been killed is a friend of the father's kept calling his phone, hundreds and hundreds of times. At some point, a voice picks up, in Arabic, and shouts: "Hostage! Hostage! Gaza ' Gilad Shalit!" And people will remember that Gilad Shalit is the Israeli prisoner ' the soldier that was held for more than four or five years, and released in exchange for a thousand prisoners, which gives you a sense of how Israel thinks of the importance of a single life.
Another mother I spoke to ' she asked that she remain anonymous because she is so scared that if her name is in public, it will make the lives of her children, who are held hostage, even worse. She was on the phone with her boys, age 12 and 16, as they hid in a safe room on another kibbutz at the south ' a few kilometers from Gaza ' and she heard her youngest child, 12 years old, begging not to be taken, because he said that he is too young. And she wants the world to know that this is not about an occupation ' Israel does not occupy Gaza. It has not occupied Gaza since it pulled out almost a decade ago ' ruled by Hamas. She said, "These are just teenagers, like anyone's teenagers. I am just a mother, like any mother who's watching this."
I want to tell you about another person: Hersh Goldberg Polin. He sent a text message to his parents at 8:00 a.m., on Saturday morning, that said: "I love you, and I'm sorry." And they haven't heard from him since. They brought a toothbrush and his hair and his pillow to the police station in the hopes that they might find him. He was at the music festival like so many others ' like Amit Tal.
Someone on my team spoke to Amit Tal yesterday. He hid in a grapefruit grove for hours from the terrorists, and he dug a hole to shove his feet into the earth because he was scared that they would see his bright shoes. He describes what he saw as a slaughterhouse ' that him and his friends were like sheep to be slaughtered.
We now know that more than 250 bodies have been recovered from that music festival. The terrorists, who filmed themselves, came on paragliders with automatic rifles to slaughter and maim and mutilate as many people as possible. Women were raped at that music festival next to the dead bodies of their friends.
The woman whose story I began with, Shaked Haran, 10 percent of that kibbutz where her family members were taken from ' 10 percent, it is the literal meaning of the word "decimated" ' were slaughtered. More than 100 bodies have been recovered from that kibbutz.
I want to emphasize what Jonathan was saying before: This is not a situation with two sides, with militants versus an army. This ' the two sides in what just happened over the past 72 hours ' is the side of rapist, barbaric people, who we are now learning beheaded babies ' beheaded babies ' versus innocent people. That is what is going on here. And anyone who is found cheering, celebrating in the streets of London or Paris or Berlin or New York or Sydney, where they are screaming: "Gas the Jews!" They are not cheering for the liberation of the Palestinian people in Gaza, who languish under the jackboot of Hamas. They are cheering for barbarism and bloodshed. And we should be absolutely clear about what is going on here. Amen. The Gazans voted for this and they've been wanting this for years. Their initial euphoria is quickly wearing off as a few of them are starting to realize what happens when you poke the bear one too many times.
No. of Recommendations: 3
Dope: Bear in mind that both the Israelis AND the US Government have to say the mealy-mouthed stuff. If they come out and say, "Yeah, Iran did it" then that's tantamount to declaring to both the US and Israeli publics that the Iranians are involved in an act of war in Israel that resulted in the murder of American citizens. If that step is taken, there's only one response.
No, that's not how to think of it. Firstly, when Blinken was asked he responded that Iran likely helped with it, given their history of being involved with Hamas and hostility to Israel, but there was nothing solid pointing to Iran and they were looking for that. This is a normal response - it isn't mealy mouthed at all, it's prudent. I know in Dope world you can go off on little, but we want our Presidents and Secretaries of State to be prudent - we are a world power after all. As for your Federalist hit piece - it's just that, a hit piece.
No. of Recommendations: 2
Firstly, when Blinken was asked he responded that Iran likely helped with it, given their history of being involved with Hamas and hostility to Israel, but there was nothing solid pointing to Iran and they were looking for that. This is a normal response - it isn't mealy mouthed at all, it's prudent.
Which is what I said. Thanks for repeating it back to me; maybe next week in 3rd grade they could cover reading comprehension.
