The Henry Ergas column about Palestine is a must read. One for sharing with friends and relatives.
Open Thread – Wed 8 Nov 2023
- TULIP versus ruinous Labor
- Open Thread – Weekend 18 May 2024
- Bumtree #15
- Bumtree #14
- Open Thread – Thurs 16 May 2024
Please note that skank senator Fati Panhandle wears a pin of the Palestinian flag AND the Aboriginal flag….no Australian flag…
Outstanding post Bushie
Will she order the camps at Victorian universities to be shut down? To have the weekly protest shut down? To…
Ms Ratnum You have abandoned them at their time of greatest need, and they will never forgive you. This is…
Uptime on the Cat exceeds that of Optus.
Great job by the team behind the Cat!
Nice fred!
I never ceded sovereignty, but now assign it to all Australians.
Nice painting. Rouen is a lovely old town.
We sat on a park bench in the sunshine there muching baguettes and gazing over to the town square. Infamous for the martyrdom, but serene in the sunlight.
Left dangling on the previous OT:
There was some suggestion that “Aussies” avacuated from Gaza this week were allowed to bring Gazan relatives with them.
Would be nice to have some confirmation from Penny Wong; if only a journalist would quwery her on it. What visas are they one? What security checks were done?
I can’t even do phone banking. The website is down, too.
Faark. This reminds me of what happened in Canada.
Chanticleer
It’s not just Optus’ network that has failed
Network failures happen. But how the telco so badly botched its response to this episode, 12 months after its hacking disaster, is bewildering.
The failure of the Optus mobile, broadband and fixed line network for several hours on Wednesday morning is a reminder of three important lessons about the Australian economy and the way we do business here.
First, Australia really is a small place.
As such, many of our sectors are dominated by a small number of players (sometimes three or four, but often two really key competitors) who need massive scale to survive.
And when something goes wrong in one part of the system – and remember, these are big systems, with lots of room for potential problems – the ramifications are huge, in this case up to 10 million customers.
Melbourne’s train system goes down. Communications inside hospital networks go down. Large and small businesses spend the morning twiddling their thumbs, unable to communicate with customers or process payments. Millions of retail customers are left scrambling.
Yes, outages happen. Telstra has had them in the past, and probably will again.
But each such episode serves as a reminder that key national infrastructure is in the hands of a very small group of very large players.
Which brings us to our second lesson: a digitised world can also be a vulnerable one.
We learnt this through the infamous hacks at Optus and Medibank, but they did not hamstring the functioning of the economy like Wednesday’s failure has done.
The fact Chanticleer couldn’t get to work today because the trains are down in Melbourne is of no consequence; the fact a doctor may not be able to communicate with a hospital to pass on vital details about a patient’s health matters just a little more.
Communication breakdown
The third lesson here goes to Optus’ woeful response to this episode.
It is completely reasonable that the company’s immediate focus would be on restoring services, rather than giving the community chapter and verse about what has gone wrong.
But the complete lack of communication about anything to do with the outage is baffling.
To have the federal communications minister, Michelle Rowland, go on several radio stations and take to social media to say she’s in the dark and trying to extract information from Optus is appalling.
To have Rowland say in more than one radio interview that she was yet to receive a call from Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin four hours after the outage began around 4am is a stunning failure of crisis communications.
Telecommunications Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert went on Melbourne’s 3AW radio station and admitted that she had only been informed of the outage by the media; she too urged Optus to give customers more information than the limited social media posts it has provided, which essentially say “we’re working on it, sorry about all this”.
Remember, this is a company that went through a searing public and political firestorm last year when it was hacked.
You’d think that it would be well versed in crisis management. You’d think there’d be a list of people that someone inside Optus would call in case of emergency, with the communications minister and the ombudsman near the top. You’d think spokespeople would be bombarding the media with messages of reassurance.
Bayer Rosmarin eventually emerged from the bunker to appear on ABC Radio in Sydney. And for the second time in 12 months, she was in full public apology mode.
“We’re really, really apologetic and sorry that our connection has gone down today, the teams are working with huge effort to try and restore services as a priority. And we’ll keep working on that until everybody’s back in action,” she said.
But Optus may find that contrition isn’t enough this time around. The company’s initial response to this outage would suggest the communications lessons from last year’s hack have not been learnt.
But the telco may also find the inevitable hit to public confidence in Optus’ ability to protect and operate critical national infrastructure that will flow from this episode may be compounded by its decision not to release the independent review into the hack, as Bayer Rosmarin initially promised.
Optus didn’t live up to its promise of transparency then.
This time around, nothing less than a full and public explanation of what went wrong, and why Optus has responded in the way it did, will suffice.
And if Optus won’t provide it, then Rowland should make sure the government does.
This thread dedicated to CGI being responsible for:
9/11
Glenn Maxwell’s 201 red inks last night
The Moon landings
Tartaria
The discovery of penicillin
Nazi salutes
Account balances of Ponzi scheme collaborators
Tony Abbott’s firefighting career
As such, many of our sectors are dominated by a small number of players (sometimes three or four, but often two really key competitors) who need massive scale to survive.
Seperate to the telco issues today, this is why Australian inflation continues to be “sticky” while inflation reads globally are dropping.
The Euro weenie countries are all seeing inflation rollover.
Thanks for posting, OldOzzie
so, Optus seems to have
– no incident management process
– no comms plan for major crisis like network down
– no backup options of any kind for critical services
– clueless CEO in charge
Backed up by another clueless person in Govt running Oz communications.
Hamas terrorists’ last stand at Gaza hospital – Paywalled
In showdown witnessed by a Telegraph reporter, Israeli warplanes, tanks and infantry corner last remains of 1,000-strong battalion
By Paul Nuki IN GAZA
Hamas terrorists were making a “last stand” in a hospital in northern Gaza on Tuesday night in a showdown witnessed by a Telegraph reporter.
Israeli warplanes, tanks and infantry cornered the last remains of a 1,000 strong battalion of the terrorist group’s forces holed up in the Indonesian Hospital and a nearby school.
The fierce fighting came as Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said that Gaza was now “surrounded” and vowed that the operation would continue “to the end”.
A few hundred yards ahead, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tank fired off round after round. The air echoed with the pounding of air strikes, the thud of mortars and the chattering of heavy-calibre machine guns.
All the munitions – an extraordinary volume of them – were targeting a Hamas battalion making what the IDF said was its last stand in a hospital and school in the northern town of Beit Hanoun.
“They talk the talk, but they don’t walk so good,” said Lieutenant Colonel Blick of the Israeli 551 Reserve Paratroop Battalion, which escorted The Telegraph to the front line on Tuesday.
Pointing to the plumes of dust rising about 2km to the south, Lt Col Blick said fewer than 100 Hamas fighters were taking shelter in the Indonesian Hospital, the last survivors of a thousand-strong unit.
“They fought when we came in but folded after a day. Their command lines were cut. Now, where you can see the dust rising, in the hospital, they are making their last stand,” he said.
Until five weeks ago, Beit Hanoun was home to more than 50,000 people. About half would have been under 20. Now it is broken, the devastation total.
The Telegraph was driven in by open-top Humvee, whipping down a dirt track with a gunner poised above our heads. The city’s perimeter was a jagged mess of shattered homes. The convoy stopped at what would have been a communal area but now houses Israeli tanks, heavy armour and a platoon of troops.
One of the soldiers took reporters to see a Hamas rocket launcher, dug into the garden of a house just a few yards from a pool where children would have played. The launcher was so hidden that it would have been close to impossible to spot by drone.
The commanding officer of the 551 Battalion, Lt Col Ido, said booby-trapped houses, tunnels and alleyways were the biggest threat when soldiers first entered the area. Air strikes took out most of the improvised explosive devices (IEDs), but he and his men have cleared more than 150 themselves.
“They are buried in the ground, some in the woods, some in the kindergarten rooms, some in the schools”, he said, adding that some of the charges were designed to pierce armour with technology imported from Iran.
“The biggest threat was the IEDs. But luckily, we didn’t lose anyone,” he said. “Some of these guys are engineers, some of them doctors. They’re reservists. They are mature. They’re specialist. They’ve got life experience. So they work slow and secured.”
Lt Cols Ido and Blich struck a measured tone as they addressed reporters. Lt Col Ido was one of the first into the kibbutzim on the Gaza border on Oct 7 – the “Black Sabbath” – and saw some “very tough sights”.
His concern now, he said, was how to guide his men. “They saw. We all saw it. A massacre. Bodies that were mutilated… We saw bodies of little kids that have been abused.”
But he emphasised that his troops must maintain a level head in combat, adding: “When I did my last brief the night before we came in here, my last sentence was that we are not like them and must not become like them.”
The 551 say they did not find civilian corpses in Beit Hanoun when they came in. People had moved south, and only dead animals and Hamas terrorists lay strewn on the ground.
Asked about the thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, Lt Col Ido said that, for the most part, those people had nothing to do with Hamas.
Choking back emotion, he said: “The people of Gaza are not our enemies. I’m telling you, these houses are ruined but we’re not touching any personal stuff. We’re not taking things from the kitchens here. Because this is not our mission.
“I don’t have any business with the population here. I’m a father. I’ve got three kids. But I know my mission – my mission is to protect Israel.”
As the battle in the Beit Hanoun hospital raged, the IDF said it was pushing into the “the heart of Gaza City” for the first time since its withdrawal from the territory in 2005.
Israeli troops have conducted routine counter-insurgency operations here in the past – cynically described by politicians as “mowing the lawn” – but this latest operation aims to wipe out Hamas and its military infrastructure for good. It’s a war aim around which the Israeli public is united, but one that could yet prove difficult to achieve.
“For the first time in decades, the IDF is fighting in the heart of Gaza City, in the heart of terror,” said Maj Gen Yaron Finkelman, the head of the southern command on Tuesday, describing the ongoing offensive as “a complex and difficult war”.
Despite the firepower being deployed, he said his troops had the 240 hostages held by Hamas uppermost in their mind, and that “returning them is our compass”.
Gen Finkelman’s remarks came after Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, warned that the country has only a matter of weeks to defeat Hamas as international pressure for a ceasefire builds.
Officials in Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health authority claim the Israeli operation has already killed more than 10,000 people, mostly in air strikes, and the US is said to be becoming increasingly concerned.
“They’re watching a train wreck, and they can’t do anything about it, and the trains are speeding up,” a person familiar with the US administration’s thinking told the Washington Post earlier this week. “The train wreck is in Gaza, but the explosion is in the region.”
Israeli forces appear to be in control of the coastal road inside Gaza City, and only about a mile from the Al Shifa hospital, where Israel says senior Hamas commanders are hiding in underground bunkers.
Hospitals, normally off limits in war, loom large in this conflict. Hamas claims the Israeli military is heartlessly shelling medical facilities where civilians are sheltering and doctors are treating the many wounded.
The IDF counters that the facilities are being “cynically” used as military bases by Hamas in a flagrant abuse of the conventions of war.
Most agree that the Indonesian Hospital is empty now of patients and is simply being used by Hamas to wage war. Taking it down with an air strike to finish the fighting must surely be tempting, but the IDF knows that would hand its enemy a propaganda coup.
In the past week, Israeli commanders have produced video evidence showing how hospitals around Gaza are connected to the Hamas “Metro” – the network of underground tunnels and bunkers the group has built.
On Tuesday night, Gaza’s health ministry called on the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross to “protect hospitals, ambulances, and stopping the Israeli threats to the health system and allow it to carry out its duties”.
It appears, however, that the IDF will press on, taking the fight to wherever Hamas seeks shelter.
On Tuesday, it released footage of an air strike on a building close to the Al Quds hospital, where it claimed a number of Hamas operatives had hidden. The strike set off a major secondary explosion, which the IDF said indicated that a Hamas weapons store had been hit.
Meanwhile, Hamas said the Al Rantisi hospital in Gaza City was being evacuated after heavy shelling of nearby roads.
At one point on The Telegraph’s embed, the tempo of gun and mortar fire coming from the Indonesian Hospital increased and was answered with a massive blast from a nearby tank.
None of the soldiers flinched. They’re inured to it. “We’re making tapes so we have them to fall asleep with after the war,” joked one.
Lt Col Ido pressed home the asymmetric nature of the war, saying: “They are hiding inside schools. Just 10 minutes ago, we had a serious battle with a group of Hamas inside the school that they built tunnels in. They fill it with the IEDs. Now the leadership of this battalion is hiding inside the hospital”.
The hospital is empty, something Israeli forces have verified with drones and other “tactical measures”, he said, adding: “They are firing on us from this hospital. So I think the world should understand what we are dealing with… they are terrorists.
Can you imagine the Israeli state or England or Germany putting rockets inside their cities, in the City of London?”
His colleague Lt Col Blich, reflected that, ultimately, the terror of Oct 7 and the war in Gaza may bring a lasting peace. He said it had deeply shocked everyone, Israelis and Palestinians alike.
“My hope is that out of all this tragedy people would come together and rebuild and finish all this,” he said. “Israel is not going anywhere. Jews are not going anywhere. Palestinians are not going anywhere. We need to find a way to coexist, otherwise it’s a nightmare for everyone.
“So hopefully out of this tragedy – and it is a tragedy – what we’ll see is a new Middle East or a new Israel or a new Palestine, whatever you want to call it.
Something [positive] like what happened to Europe after the defeat of the Third Reich”.
Chanticleer. Several of the better business writers of past half-century.
Australia’s leading anti-business daily…
The lucky country.
With too many just relying on luck.
And I’m typing on a very small keypad.
Roger
Nov 8, 2023 12:45 PM
And I’m typing on a very small keypad.
Pftt – Try iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) – Technical Specifications
Full Spec with Max on everything – large keyboard and the most inportant thing of all
Apple Magic Mouse – Like Greased Lightning
Start with de-Hamasification.
And good luck.
So why is the font the same size as before
I predicted that things like the Optus crash would become more common. We’re seeing what happens when competent engineers are replaced by meddling bureaucrats with not the faintest grasp of their own ignorance. The net zero rubbish is more of the same.
Hamas leaders worth staggering $11B revel in luxury — while Gaza’s people suffer
While their people languish in poverty and are treated as human shields, the leaders of Hamas live billionaire lifestyles.
The terror group’s three top leaders alone are worth a staggering $11 billion between them and enjoy a life of luxury in the sanctuary of the emirate of Qatar.
The emirate has long welcomed the leaders of the terror group and installed them in its luxury hotels and villas at the same time as hosting a vast American military presence.
Now Republican Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles is co-sponsoring a bill that would strip Qatar of its status as a key US ally, The Post has learned, unless it kicks out the Hamas leadership.
The terrorist group, which is responsible for the antisemitic Oct. 7 massacre of more than 1,400 innocent civilians in southern Israel, continues to hold 200 hostages in Gaza.
Hamas runs an office in Qatar’s capital, Doha, and leaders Ismail Haniyeh, Moussa Abu Marzuk and Khaled Mashal live a luxurious lifestyle.
They have been seen at its diplomatic club, photographed on private jets and traveled widely. The leadership would have been there for the 2022 soccer World Cup.
In contrast, most of the population of more than two million in the Gaza Strip, which Hamas has ruled since 2007, live in abject poverty.
Haniyeh, 61, the head of Hamas’s politbureau, was prime minister of all of Palestine following elections in 2006 although he was booted from office a year later.
He continued to rule the Gaza Strip until 2017 before ending up in Qatar.
Haniyeh, a father of 13 who presides over one of the world’s wealthiest terrorist groups, is worth more than $4 billion.
Mac? Nooooo!
My HP desktop provides me with everything I require.
Except an internet connection atm, thanks to Optus.
Filing this from a notebook via phone hotspot.
Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval — but no one knows how they work
BDNF is important but perhaps they also need to look at how growth factors like BDNF impact on inflammation. There tends to be a mutual antagonism, growth factors suppress inflammation and vice versa. Inflammation has long been known to play a role in some mental health issues. That is one reason why diet can help. A recent study even argued that the rise in depression and anxiety is in part due to poor diets driving inflammation. Uber and Door Dash don’t help. Is cooking a dying art?
Yes, this is small beer indeed compared to the eastern grid falling over.
You don’t miss your mod cons until the power goes off.
Is there Anything Wind Turbines can’t Do?
Wind turbines encroach on US nuclear silos – media
Air Force officials have reportedly requested legislation imposing buffer zones to protect access to underground missile sites
Expansion of America’s wind power industry has reportedly raised concerns that the massive turbines dotting the prairies are making it dangerous for US troops to access underground nuclear missile silos during emergencies.
The US Air Force is urging members of Congress to pass legislation requiring two-mile buffer zones around each missile silo, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday. With windmills getting larger and being installed closer each year to the nation’s underground silos – hundreds of which are spread across the US, in such states as Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota – it’s becoming more dangerous for helicopter crews to swoop into missile sites when alarms are triggered.
“When you think about a wind turbine, and even fields of wind turbines, they’ll stretch for miles,” Staff Sergeant Chase Rose, a helicopter flight engineer at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, told the AP. “They’re monstrous, and then you have gigantic blades spinning on them as well.
Not only is that a physical obstacle, but those turbines, they create hazards like turbulence as well. That can be really dangerous for us to fly into.
So, it’s a very complex situation, when you have to deal with those.”
The US Senate version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act includes the proposed silo buffer zones, but previously installed turbines would not be affected, the AP said.
The Air Force has estimated that 46 of its 450 underground silos are already “severely” encroached upon, meaning that more than half of the potential helicopter routes to the launch site are obstructed.
Some of the current turbines have towers as high as 650 feet (around 200 meters) and rotor diameters spanning 367 feet.
The issue has arisen amid a push by President Joe Biden’s administration to derive 80% of US electricity generation from emissions-free sources by 2030.
Renewable energy accounted for just 22% of power output last year. Wind power had a 10.2% share of the pie.
Air Force officials acknowledge that the prioritization of renewable energy and the importance of enabling farmers to profit from turbine leases on their land have put the nation’s nuclear forces in a difficult position, the AP said.
The military continues to work with power producers to “ensure the country’s green energy needs are met,” said Major Victoria Hight, a spokeswoman for F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. However, she added, “the encroaching turbines limit safe helicopter transit and nuclear security operations.”
‘I’m so done’: Sky News host reacts to ADF’s latest woke move
Sky News host Liz Storer has taken aim at the Australian Defence Force’s latest woke move.
The Australian revealed the ADF’s initiative to remove “gender-specific” language.
“The ADF has renamed its drone fleet, replacing ‘unmanned aircraft’ with ‘uncrewed aircraft’ as it seeks to eliminate gender-specific language across the armed forces,” Ms Storer said.
“Look I’m done – send the asteroid.
“I’m so done that we have anyone in the ADF who genuinely thinks that’s an issue that needs to be addressed.”
Just for emphasis – for the second time, after the massive data hack last year.
She needs to be jobsacked toot sweet, along with Beryl Gladyschlocklian who has inexplicably ended up at shloptus as Managing Director, Enterprise, Business and Institutions (she certainly belongs in one of the latter).
I had the misfortune to briefly catch a simpering piece last year on that bloody infuriating Sunday business show on Sky (just after Outsiders) hosted by the shouty utterly incoherent Dross Greenfilth, featuring Bayer Rosmarin and Gladyschlocklian gushing about how wonderful it was that Oz’s second largest telecom had wymminzes in such senior exec positions.
Several weeks later, the massive data hack happened.
Oops!
Presumably this Optus bint is going to experience great work life balance as she’s dumped over the glass cliff.
She can use the time to wroie a book about how the patriarchy had it in for her.
No woman of their kind, part of the feminocracy elite, can fail. They will instead be promoted to boards and sinecures based on their connections and virtue-signalling points.
What caused the Optus outage?
ByDavid Swan and Ben Grubb
What caused the Optus outage?
Optus is yet to confirm the issue behind the outage, but the fact it started about 4am points to a likely issue with a software or firmware update, or an incorrect message sent from either inside or outside the Optus network that provided dodgy traffic routing instructions, according to network engineers. The vast majority of network updates occur overnight, between 2am and 4am, while most of us are asleep.
In 2012, Dodo took the blame for an outage affecting many Australian internet connections, saying it was caused by a hardware fault on a router that triggered crippling flow on effects at Telstra. That outage only lasted 45 minutes, while the Optus outage has so far lasted at least nine hours.
Matt Tett, the managing director of Enex TestLab, said the issue appeared to be caused by a so-called “BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] prefix flood”.
Essentially, it means that one of Optus’ routers has likely been fed incorrect routing information in an update, leading to total network gridlock. This could have been caused by either Optus or an external party. Optus has been contacted to confirm whether this is indeed the case.
Network operators suggested this possible scenario after Optus sent a message to them stating that the suspected root cause of the issue lay with “route reflectors, which are currently handling an excessive number of routes, leading to session shutdown and a complete traffic halt”.
“Our on-site technician is actively prioritising establishing a console connection [a physical cable connection],” the message to Optus’ partners early on Wednesday said. “Rest assured that said technician is also being provided additional technical support remotely.”
Publicly available information appears to support the BGP flood theory. Just before 4am, BGP “route” announcements were hovering between 10,000 and 20,000. Then, about 4am, they rocketed up to 940,000.
Tett said Border Gateway Protocol is where network owners and operators’ routers share information.
“Take for example the fence you share with your neighbour. I have a note for you to pass to the neighbour next door that says ‘I love them’. Instead of putting the one address to next door, I accidentally put ‘everyone’, then you go off and try to deliver that note that I love them to EVERYONE. Which results in you handing off that note to everyone on your BGP routes.”
An Optus source, who did not wish to be named because they were not authorised to speak publicly, said a BGP prefix flood from a peer was likely causing the issues on the telco’s core network.
The dodgy instruction could have been sent from an internet exchange (a physical location similar to a data centre, where multiple internet providers and network operators interconnect their networks) or directly from an internet provider itself or a content provider.
Is a cyberattack to blame?
It’s too early to rule out a malicious attack, though Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin says there are no indications of the outage being due to a hack or cyberattack, despite Optus suffering one of Australia’s most significant data breaches late last year.
“There’s no indication that there’s anything to do with cyber at this stage,” the CEO told ABC Sydney.
How long will it take to fix?
Optus is yet to provide a timeline for a fix, but it will likely take hours, according to Tett.
“The problem with routers, particularly if it is configuration [issue and] not an attack, is that one major change has to propagate throughout the network and then a fix also then needs to propagate,” he said.
“[The fix] can take hours, particularly if the network is slammed through mis-routing.”
Why is the Optus network outage connected to public transport and hospitals?
Optus’ network infrastructure runs far deeper than just 4G and 5G mobile phone towers. Fibre networks like that from Optus are the backbone for all telecommunications services, including 5G and 4G, as well as eftpos, public transport infrastructure and hospitals, which were all affected on Wednesday.
What’s the government saying?
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has called on Optus to “step up” its public communications to customers as people are “hungry for information”.
“I think Optus needs to make sure they step up and communicate with people because, as I understand it, this started in the early hours of this morning,” she said. “We’re now at 11 o’clock and for a lot of people who are trying to get on with their day and their business this is absolutely vital that they get back to normality.”
Will customers be eligible for compensation?
If you have been disadvantaged or lost money due to a phone or internet outage, you might be able to claim compensation, according to ACCAN, the peak advocacy group for Australian communications consumers.
“Compensation should make up for your loss,” ACCAN says. “For example, if your internet is out for one week you could ask for your money back for that week. You may be able to claim for costs incurred, like getting your internet fixed or using extra mobile data.”
“Work out how much money you or your business has lost because of the outage, including any costs for an interim service. Keep documents such as bills and receipts as evidence, record when the outages happened, and how long they lasted.”
“Contact your service provider to explain the problem, and to ask for compensation, and give your service provider the evidence you have collected.”
Just a pity she won’t end up on a street corner with a begging bowl and sign reading “will sabotage telcos for food”.
Rear Window
Singtel’s board gets front-row seat to Optus debacle (again)
Myriam Robin and Mark Di Stefano
Optus chief Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is the Australian-based chief of a company owned by a Singaporean giant.
She should, ideally, have an unusual level of distance from her boss’ bosses, visible to them primarily in board briefings and earnings figures, the governor of a foreign outpost only noticed when in crisis.
She’s on their radar now. And it’s even more excruciating than you think.
She and Optus chairman Paul O’Sullivan were, this week, hosting the entirety of the Singtel board. It’s mostly-Singaporean based delegation are Australia for the first time since late September 2022. And yes, the earlier visit coincided with the last time Rosmarin was overseeing a major crisis at the network, when cybercriminals hacked its customer data to steal the identifying information of four in ten Australians. What are the odds?! At least this time there isn’t a fancy gala at the Art Gallery of New South Wales to cancel in light of mounting customer fury.
Now, to have the Singaporean heavies in town while the network spectacularly fails is obviously very, very bad. But Bayer Rosmarin’s early actions mean the board now have a front row seat to an unfolding PR disaster.
Rather than hold a press conference, Bayer Rosmarin called into Sydney’s ABC radio, via WhatsApp (obviously she’s an Optus customer), to address anxious customers about the issue. You’d think Optus execs would have benefitted from getting out in front of a larger audience than the non-working mid-morning ABC listeners.
Meanwhile Optus used Facebook and Twitter to put out a totally anodyne “important message”, switching off comments, lest the more than half a million followers sound off with anger. Obviously she who controls the airwaves controls the message, and General Bayer Rosmarin is keeping a lid on this one.
Too bad Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has a microphone too.
It’s widely known in Canberra circles the minister dislikes holding pressers, which is why holding her own nationally broadcast event on Wednesday morning to repeatedly call for Optus to “step up” in communicating was significant.
Rowland clearly feels she’s been kept in the dark, whether from Bayer Rosmarin or the company’s government affairs suit Andrew Sheridan (who is ironically also on the board of the telco ombudsman). Rowland couldn’t answer any basic questions about the outage, which means the press conference had an intended audience of one: Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.
As for Singtel’s head honchos, they saw first-hand how their CEO handled things 12 months ago and were surely assured many lessons were learned.
They now have a chance to verify that, while being brutally exposed to precisely how the rest of Australia thinks she’s doing (we hope they enjoyed news of REA director Bayer Rosmarin’s trip with the rest of that company’s board being reported in this column on Tuesday).
The intended purpose of Singtel’s Australian board trip was to conduct a series of scheduled meetings with stakeholders, though who knows how many of those are going ahead now. Sitting around the board table are several Singaporean sovereign wealth types and a few familiar faces, like former Westpac chief Gail Kelly and former Westpac CFO John Arthur, who is presently also the chairman of the Sydney Metro.
This is some luck: unlike their Melbourne counterparts, Sydney’s trains were, on Wednesday morning, still running.
… because Optus could never have expected BGP updates that were malicious or just plain wrong to be sent to their routers. And this kind of attack has never, ever happened before … except to Youtube, IBM, other major Telco’s in Asia
Incompetence runs deep @ Optus, it seems
KELLY BAYER ROSMARIN
Chief Executive Officer, Optus
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin commenced as CEO of Optus and Consumer Australia on 1 April 2020.
A respected senior executive, Kelly joined Optus as Deputy CEO on 1 March 2019 following a variety of executive roles including Group Executive, Institutional Banking and Markets at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Raised in South Africa, Kelly earned a scholarship at the prestigious Stanford University in the United States where she attained a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering and a Master of Science in Management Science, with an Academic Excellence Award for being the top Masters graduate.
Her career began in Silicon Valley with exposure to start-up and established software companies which developed her business acumen across a variety of disciplines including product development, business development, marketing, M&A and strategy.
Following a stint as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, Kelly joined Commonwealth Bank in 2004 and held a variety of senior roles across the Institutional and Business Banking divisions, before being appointed to the Bank’s Executive in December 2013.
Kelly was named amongst the Top 25 Women in Asia Pacific Finance, the Top 10 Businesswomen in Australia, and 50 Most Powerful Women in Australian Business. She is also a Fellow of Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE).
Kelly is currently a non-Executive Director of Airtel Africa plc, and REA Group and a member of Chief Executive Women. Kelly was previously a board member of Openpay, JCA, the Football Federation of Australia (FFA) and served on the University of New South Wales Engineering Faculty Advisory Board, the Australian Government’s FinTech Advisory Group and NSW Government Digital Advisory Panel.
Kelly lives in Sydney with her husband and two children.
Optus and Telstra provide a reasonable 3rd world service for a 3rd world country.
Qantas turned off my microphone at the AGM. Here’s what I think
My sin was to challenge the morality of board decisions.
But it is the company that needs to relearn what the spirit of Australia means.
Chris Maxworthy Qantas shareholder
At last week’s annual meeting of Qantas, board chairman Richard Goyder directed that my microphone be cut off during questions from the floor.
My sin was that I questioned the morality of board decisions: the illegality of Qantas shedding 1700 ground handling staff; the ACCC’s prosecution of Qantas for allegedly selling 8000 ghost flights; and Goyder’s approval for Alan Joyce’s $17million share sale.
What a trifecta.
Goyder’s initial reply was: “I have absolutely zero concern about the ethics of the [board members] here.” My reply was that having had the High Court back the Federal Court decision on the TWU members, “you might have justified it at the time on a commercial basis, but we are paying for your lack of ethics now”.
I moved on to Goyder’s approval of Joyce’s sale of his $17 million of Qantas stock.
Joyce received his parcel away before the ACCC announcement that it was pursuing Qantas over the ghost flights.
This was too much for Goyder, and he demanded that my microphone be switched off. Jeers and calls of “shame on you” spread throughout the venue. I pointed to the board and added “shame on all of you”.
After 40 years as an investor, that Qantas meeting was the worst I have attended. It was carefully scripted, with an excess of security staff and board members who looked ill at ease with their owners.
What the board knew, but the audience was yet to learn, was that the remuneration report had been voted down by a stunning 83 per cent.
That result means that almost all shareholders, including the institutional holders of Qantas stock, have had enough of brand damage.
Of the 178,000 owners in Qantas, just 160 shareholders control 80 per cent of the company; that is, holdings greater than $5 million.
I am just one of the other 107,000 shareholders with fewer than 1000 shares.
Goyder’s petulant silencing of me has tainted his reputation.
The meeting was a miserable experience for the board such that none – repeat none – of the members attended tea and sandwiches with their owners after the formalities.
Goyder had stated that the board could spare “five to 10 minutes to speak personally with shareholders”. It never happened – the first time in my experience.
Weak argument
Goyder’s plan to remain in place until November next year is now in tatters. CEO Vanessa Hudson and board member Todd Sampson should also consider falling on their swords.
I am profoundly saddened at how the board and the executive management of Qantas have conducted themselves.
Witness the complicated and weak argument explained at the annual meeting as its defence with the ACCC.
Facing heavy fines and a competition watchdog prepared to pursue Qantas under the Trade Practices Act, the fresh argument is that booking a Qantas flight is not really a good but an array of rights. I have never seen that explained in a Qantas advertisement!
Qantas has been adept at channelling national sentiment to build up a profitable customer base.
But Australians are not mugs.
We have a healthy scepticism of national leaders and businesses that do not match up to our collective sense of what is fair and ethical.
Qantas was a national institution, and the distinctive branding of the Flying Kangaroo previously generated pride among Australians.
But that sentiment has long gone.
Price gouging, political special pleading to exclude competition, delays in refreshing the fleet, hard practices with Qantas frequent flyer points, and acting as a monopolist – that is not the spirit of Australia.
From here on, the senior management must work at rebuilding Qantas’ social licence. It needs to be real and tangible, with marketing pushed to the rear.
Real answers, genuine care and not taking patronage for granted, not just cozying up to the influential and powerful through access to the Chairman’s Lounge.
No more playing fast and loose with definitions of what a flight is, or the nature of the customer relationship.
Up to $16 million of Joyce’s recent performance incentives are within the board’s control to claw back now.
If the board wants to restore the airline’s reputation, then a starting point would be to repudiate a large portion of these bonus incentives.
In the court of public opinion, that would receive strong backing, and show that the board is now more in tune with the real spirit of Australia.
Speaking of tech fails…
Last week we had the pest dude out. Cost $500 and we paid via eftpos.
Yesterday we noted the $500 hadn’t been deducted from our bank. But! The pest guy said he received it and the bank said they paid it.
We spoke to both sides (after an hour’s wait for ANZ) who reassured us the money had been deducted and paid to pest guy who confirmed he’d received it.
But it is still there.
May I humbly commend today’s posters..
Factual, informative, interesting content
and
minimal or no scrolling required.
Mes hommages!
Fun incident at the shops. This is what Malcolm Roberts had to say on Xwitter:
I was about to buy lunch after having dropped into the Optus shop to see what the problem was. Young tradie trying to pay for his with is phone. Likewise young guy doing the serving tried the widget half a dozen times. Finally asks bemusedly do you have any cash? No, says he, waving his battered phone. So they tried another couple times. Nope. I said to them there’s an outage, without much of that penetrating. The other two of us in line were older guys, yes we said we’ve cash although the guy in front of me tried his card first before going to his emergency stash in his wallet. Which was clearly for such circumstances as this. Poor tradie had to hand the food back. I should’ve dived in a paid for him, it was only $20, but I never think quickly in such situations, but the kid has learned something about life, so that’s probably worth the mess they got themselves into.
Does anyone remember the several Telstra outages in 2016?
COO at the time was one Kate McKenzie, who in response to yet another outage on her watch threw a male tech under the bus rather than taking responsibility for the processes that enabled the error in question.
This resulted in a very angry backlash from the engineering and technical staff at the time, who blasted management for 1) isolating one individual for blame and identifying in the mainstream media that person as “he” and 2) not having any understanding at all of the processes and risk management around the change which caused the outage.
Not long after this, Ms McKenzie “retired” from Telstra, turns out her immediate next place of employment was as CEO of a telco in NZ
Failing upwards in the affirmative action way.
Were the Optus engineers on-call?
Lol!
My Amaysim connected phone back to normal so they (Optus) must have fixed the problem or some of it ……….
For all the scoffers who didn’t believe yesterday’s poll, a new one out today:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/07/trump-lead-biden-cnn-poll-00125945
My optus is back.
The Australian revealed the ADF’s initiative to remove “gender-specific” language.
“The ADF has renamed its drone fleet, replacing ‘unmanned aircraft’ with ‘uncrewed aircraft’ as it seeks to eliminate gender-specific language across the armed forces,” Ms Storer said.
And how will the RAN handle “Man Overboard”?
Join the navy and ‘feel’ a Man.
My optus is back.
Our ABC still isn’t.
Hey sailor! I’m drowning… throw me a buoy!
Rum, sodomy and the lash…
Looooxury.
Good afternoon to Calli and her troll.
Forget cats and pigeons; the Cat’s new secret ballot ticking system has certainly put wolves among the sheep.
Optus is back up in the Springvale area.
If the issue was down to poor network management, then these are actions typically seen previously in companies located in Sgp, UK, USA
– sack the head of networks
– sack the head of technology
– sack the director or directors on the board hired for their tech smarts
– sack the CEO for letting this event happen
then
– hire 3 companies based outside Oz(no mates) to conduct full network scan and test
– hire someone who knows how to manage incidents
– hire someone to handle communications during outages & sack whoever does it now
– run scenario tests on short notice with results delivered to Govt who can remove license or CEO for persistent failures
– implement network and security monitoring with results published to Govt, Signals etc
– publish full report on how/who/when/why this happened
This is usually enough to get people to take this stuff seriously instead of relying on luck and connections.
I noticed on the news instead of saying fishermen they now say ‘fishos’ – as if anyone anywhere called fishermen that. Still say gunmen though.
If the ombudsman had any teeth they’d push government to force any duopoly to cover for the other in the event of downtime, with a fast track to recover expense at cost plus x%.
How much did today cost customers with EFTPOS machines, appointments to confirm, emergency calls to make, let alone day-to-day stuff?
I know of at least two who were forced into the office to work today rather than work from home. 🙂
Telstra actually needs real competition.
Opus is not it and should go One.Tel.
I know of at least two who were forced into the office to work today rather than work from home. ?
The horror! .. is there no end to such inhumane punishment(s) … LOL!
perhaps invite chinese and others to bid for 3rd, 4th license. that would set the cats among the tele pigeons. lotta hard work for the Labor incompetents to do, tho.
The memory-holed massacre
One month on, the Hamas atrocities of 7 October are already being denied, obfuscated and forgotten.
7 October 2023 ought to be a date that will live in infamy.
One month ago today, Hamas terrorists smashed through the Israeli border, killing, torturing and kidnapping innocent civilians in their path.
Simply repeating the number of those murdered – now believed to be 1,400 – cannot do justice to the savagery and wickedness of this attack.
Hamas butchers mowed down teenagers at a music festival.
They paraded young women naked through the streets.
They raped others next to their friends’ dead bodies.
They slaughtered a grandmother in her home and uploaded a film of her murder to social media so her family could see it.
They sliced open a woman’s womb and then stabbed her unborn baby.
Some children were burned. Others were decapitated.
The terrorists’ glee was visible in the depraved footage they willingly broadcast to the world.
This vile pogrom in southern Israel was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
A month on, the horror has yet to subside. Funerals continue to be held daily in the Kfar Aza kibbutz, as bodies are still being identified from their remains.
At least 52 people were massacred in this small community of just 400 residents.
A further 20 or more from the kibbutz are missing – presumed to be among the 240 hostages taken from Israel and held captive by Hamas in Gaza’s underground tunnels.
But while 7 October remains raw in Israel, here in the UK the atrocities are already starting to fade from view.
Turn on the television, open up a newspaper or scroll through social media and you will see endless condemnation and vilification – not of Hamas and its barbarism, but of Israel and its attempts to defend itself.
Certainly, the tragic plight of innocent Gazan civilians deserves the world’s attention.
But a month on from 7 October, so much of the coverage and commentary now skips over the pogrom entirely.
You could be forgiven for forgetting why this conflict even started. You might even have the impression that Israel is attacking Gaza because… well, that’s just what evil old Israel does.
What we are witnessing right now is the memory-holing of the 7 October massacre.
This memory-holing takes many forms.
Some Hamas spokespeople and their useful idiots continue to actively deny the atrocities.
Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas figure, told the BBC this week that ‘women, children and civilians were exempt’ from the 7 October violence, even though civilians were Hamas’s primary targets.
Then there are the legions of online cranks, Islamists and anti-Semites who say the worst of 7 October, from the butchering of babies to the rapes of young women, did not actually happen – despite the vast documentary evidence of these crimes, most of it filmed by Hamas terrorists themselves.
It’s a kind of ‘Holocaust denial in real time’, as journalist Bari Weiss has described it.
Then there are those who seek to violently erase the memory of the attacks. In New York and London, posters of Israeli hostages have been defaced and torn down.
One man scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ over the faces of kidnapped children.
So intense is these people’s loathing of Israel, so unhinged is their anti-Semitism, that they cannot bear to be confronted with Jewish suffering, even that endured by children.
What happened on 7 October must be forgotten and suppressed, it seems, so that these activists might once again feel at home on the ‘right side of history’.
Others try to reframe the slaughter as a righteous act of resistance. 7 October was ‘a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human-rights worldwide’, according to one pseudo-radical journalist.
It has been celebrated as a blow for ‘decolonisation’ by academics the world over.
Before the bodies were even cold, a joint statement was issued by 31 social-justice campaign groups at Harvard University, insisting that Israel’s ‘apartheid regime’ be held ‘entirely responsible’ for the unfolding violence.
In other words, forget Hamas’s decision to wage a genocidal campaign against Israel’s Jews – Israel is the aggressor here.
Massacres like that on 7 October apparently cannot be allowed to intrude on this simplistic identitarian worldview, of colonised against coloniser.
And so the grotesque anti-Semitic savagery of Hamas is, at best, excused. At worst, it is rebranded and transformed into a progressive struggle for justice.
Finally, there are those who were unmoved by 7 October, but have leapt at the chance to condemn Israel’s response.
Artists for Palestine UK, a group including Tilda Swinton, Steve Coogan and Maxine Peake, has produced an open letter denouncing Western governments for supporting Israel.
It makes no mention of Hamas, 7 October or the deaths of 1,400 Israelis.
We must not let Hamas’s evil be forgotten, obfuscated or downplayed. The forces of irrationalism and racism that drove this pogrom are arguably even more potent today than they were just one month ago.
If we memory-hole this massacre, then we are in serious danger of greenlighting the next one. Those who have excused or denied this evil ought to be ashamed.
Here is the person responsible for all of Optus’ problems. Why wasn’t she sacked last year when she mishandled the hacking attack? Sack her now. Then the whole board should be sacked for leaving her in the job. Shareholders should take care of it at the earliest opportunity.
Incompetence seems to be the norm in our corporations and these sort of crises will continue to happen until they make a u-turn to protect their businesses instead of concentrating on political correctness vapidity.
What is the main produce or GDP of “Palestine”)?
Details are very sketchy depending on which site you visit?
It is clear that the software that installs Optus software failed. e.g. not reversible
What a clustersham.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
Nov 8, 2023 2:12 PM
Join the navy and ‘feel’ a Man.
Rum, sodomy and the lash…
Zulu – A Reminder – Nelson at Trafalgar
Nelson: “Order the signal, Hardy.”
Hardy: “Aye, aye sir.”
Nelson: “Hold on, this isn’t what I dictated to Flags. What’s the meaning of this?”
Hardy: “Sorry sir?”
Nelson (reading aloud): „ England expects every person to do his or her duty, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious persuasion or disability.’ – What gobbledygook is this for God’s sake?”
Hardy: “Admiralty policy, I’m afraid, sir. We’re an equal opportunities employer now. We had the devil’s own job getting „ England ” past the censors, lest it be considered racist.”
Nelson: “Gadzooks, Hardy. Hand me my pipe and tobacco.”
Hardy: “Sorry sir. All naval vessels have now been designated smoke-free working environments.”
Nelson: “In that case, break open the rum ration. Let us splice the main brace to steel the men before battle.”
Hardy: “The rum ration has been abolished, Admiral. Its part of the Government’s policy on binge drinking.”
Nelson: “Good heavens, Hardy. I suppose we’d better get on with it full speed ahead.”
Hardy: “I think you’ll find that there’s a 4 knot speed limit in this stretch of water.”
Nelson: “Damn it man! We are on the eve of the greatest sea battle in history. We must advance with all dispatch. Report from the crow’s nest, please.”
Hardy: “That won’t be possible, sir.”
Nelson: “What?”
Hardy: “Health and Safety have closed the crow’s nest, sir. No harness; and they said that rope ladders don’t meet regulations. They won’t let anyone up there until proper scaffolding can be erected.”
Nelson: “Then get me the ship’s carpenter without delay, Hardy.”
Hardy: “He’s busy knocking up a wheelchair access to the foredeck Admiral.”
Nelson: “Wheelchair access? I’ve never heard anything so absurd.”
Hardy: “Health and safety again, sir. We have to provide a barrier- free environment for the differently abled.”
Nelson: “Differently abled? I’ve only one arm and one eye and I refuse even to hear mention of the word. I didn’t rise to the rank of admiral by playing the disability card.”
Hardy: “Actually, sir, you did. The Royal Navy is under- represented in the areas of visual impairment and limb deficiency.”
Nelson: “Whatever next? Give me full sail. The salt spray beckons.”
Hardy: “A couple of problems there too, sir. Health and safety won’t let the crew up the rigging without hard hats. And they don’t want anyone breathing in too much salt – haven’t you seen the adverts?”
Nelson: “I’ve never heard such infamy. Break out the cannon and tell the men to stand by to engage the enemy.”
Hardy: “The men are a bit worried about shooting at anyone, Admiral.”
Nelson: “What? This is mutiny!”
Hardy: “It’s not that, sir. It’s just that they’re afraid of being charged with murder if they actually kill anyone. There are a couple of legal-aid lawyers on board, watching everyone like hawks.”
Nelson: “Then how are we to sink the Frenchies and the Spanish?”
Hardy: “Actually, sir, we’re not.”
Nelson: “We’re not?”
Hardy: “No, sir.. The French and the Spanish are our European partners now. According to the Common Fisheries Policy, we shouldn’t even be in this stretch of water. We could get hit with a claim for compensation.”
Nelson: “But you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil.”
Hardy: “I wouldn’t let the ship’s diversity coordinator hear you saying that sir. You’ll be up on disciplinary report.”
Nelson: “You must consider every man an enemy, who speaks ill of your King.”
Hardy: “Not any more, sir. We must be inclusive in this multicultural age. Now put on your Kevlar vest; it’s the rules. It could save your life”
Nelson: “Don’t tell me – Health and Safety. Whatever happened to rum, sodomy and the lash?”
Hardy: As I explained, sir, rum is off the menu! And there’s a ban on corporal punishment.”
Nelson: “What about sodomy?”
Hardy: “I believe that is now legal, sir.”
Nelson: “In that case………………. Kiss me, Hardy.”
In inner-West Sydney. Our Optus home internet has worked all day. But my optus mobile phone has not worked all day up to this point.
I had lunch today with former workmates of all ages and this very subject was discussed. I was rather surprised that all of them have emergency stashes of cash for disasters like today’s. BTW, I paid for lunch with cash.
Government forcing quotas for women and the deranged is a big factor. Ignorant, meddling bureaucrats put them up to it.
Dear god may have mercy on us all.
https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/about-nbn-co/our-people/board-member-biographies/kate-mckenzie
Affirmative action, DEI and political correctness must be slew like the living dead.
She has a passion for innovation and technology and for building great cultures and teams as well as delivering growth, productivity and change management.
Ms McKenzie has a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws
She wouldn’t even know how to find the downloads folder on her PC.
Metal detectors in every airport and shipping port in the world are a monument to the memory of Arafat.
The Venture Capitalists Of Autism
Can venture capital drive innovation in the autism field, as it has in other fields? Can the dynamism of capital markets be applied to autism’s stubborn challenges of diagnosis, therapies, services and employment?
In the past few years, several autism-focused venture capital funds have been launched, including Moai Capital, Autism Impact Fund, and Neuvation Ventures. Their founders and chief leaders have family members on the autism spectrum, and come to their funds with a strong sense of mission and urgency.
The funds are structured as traditional venture capital funds, aiming to maximize investor returns, but with focus on products for improving the lives of individuals with autism.
Anyone in the autism community today—persons with autism, family members, advocates—will be encouraged to see the innovation already underway in the field.
Companies in the venture capital portfolios are rapidly advancing the sciences in diagnostic techniques, early intervention, and therapies/therapeutics to address autism co-morbidities.
· Currently the autism diagnosis is a behavioral one—behaviors are observed and evaluated and fit into categories. The process is given to wide variation in interpretations and to misuse. Companies in the venture capital portfolios are developing blood tests and brain imaging tests that can far more effectively give meaning to any autism diagnosis.
· The main behavioral intervention today is Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). ABA is difficult to access, very uneven in quality of services, and effective with only a limited number of children with autism. Portfolio companies, drawing on speech and language technologies as well as big data insights, are developing alternatives to ABA.
· The medications prescribed for autism co-morbidities are primarily antipsychotics, with potential serious side effects. Portfolio biotechnology companies—one that is targeting neurotransmitters, another that is targeting microbial metabolites—hold promise of far safer and more effective medications.
The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver.
– Jay Leno
Real Deal
Nov 8, 2023 2:37 PM
In inner-West Sydney. Our Optus home internet has worked all day. But my optus mobile phone has not worked all day up to this point.
The nbn® connections Optus offers provides internet via a hard-wired broadband network.
Optus has a range of great value plans with different speeds and inclusions available. 5G is a wireless internet network. We also have a selection of 5G plans and speeds to choose from. Both offer fast, reliable
Lately if I see a woman CEO I instantly think that it’s a disaster just waiting to happen. I am in no mood to give these women the benefit of the doubt, I did in the past as those women earned their positions, the new crop were given theirs to satisfy some affirmative action criteria. Having said that, the Reserve Bank of Australia and Qantas are on track to give it to us good and hard.
As boomers leave the workforce incompetence is going to head sky high. Boomers may not have been good at much but the one thing about them was that they were competent at their jobs.
What is the main produce or GDP of “Palestine”)?
Manure.
Here is the person responsible for all of Optus’ problems. Why wasn’t she sacked last year when she mishandled the hacking attack? Sack her now. Then the whole board should be sacked for leaving her in the job. Shareholders should take care of it at the earliest opportunity.
Unfortunately, for Ms. McKenzie , Qantas has already filled it’s “top wimminz” quota ..!
When that phrase “… since the Holocaust” gets repeated, pause a moment and think what it must mean for Jews to say that phrase. It’s not a description of a time span “since the Holocaust”. It’s not like “since last Tuesday”.
I wouldn’t go that far, there are many competent females who make it to the top. But behavior during crisis shows the real leader (or not) – thats not something you can fake or deflect from or put down to “female leadership style”
Lets see what happens after the Optus omnishambles … will see if the Comms minister is a leader or just a placeholder of the right type (female, left faction, …)
By The Numbers: Israel’s Campaign Demonstrates Incomprehensible Restraint
Data reveals Israel’s prioritization of civilian protection amid challenging circumstances.
Israel has struck over 11,000 terror-related targets in Gaza since October 7, according to a report last Wednesday.
In a separate report, the Gaza Ministry of Health claims that Israeli strikes have killed over 8,500 people in Gaza over the same period.
Even if the Gaza Ministry of Health can be trusted (it cannot), that would mean that Israel has killed, on average, less than one person per strike and that over 20% of Israel’s strikes have killed no people at all.
For an army with firepower and accuracy capable of killing hundreds or even thousands in a single strike, these figures represent an absolutely astonishing degree of precision and restraint.
The Massacre Of October 7
Hamas, the US-designated terror organization that controls Gaza, perpetrated on October 7 the largest massacre of Jewish life since the Holocaust: including burning alive and beheading some 40 babies, raping hundreds of women, murdering over 1400 innocents, and kidnapping hundreds of hostages. Most of the (at least) 245 hostages still in captivity are civilians, many are women and elderly, and 30 are children and babies.
In an action reminiscent of America’s targeting of Al Qaeda after 9/11, Israel has responded with a military campaign, the stated goal of which is not only freeing the hostages but also ending the Hamas terror organization.
As the campaign proceeds, there has been much discussion of how many civilian casualties have occurred on “both sides,” yet developing an accurate count is not as easy as it seems.
The Gaza Ministry Of Health Is Intentionally Misleading
The Gaza Ministry of Health, the sole source of information on Palestinian casualties, is not an independent health agency but merely an arm of Hamas: a terror organization designated on the same international lists as ISIS and Al Qaeda.
An unusually frank report last week by the Associated Press revealed that “the [Gaza] ministry [of health] never distinguishes between civilians and combatants.”
The report further states that “The Health Ministry doesn’t report how Palestinians were killed, whether from Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages or other means, like errant Palestinian rocket fire.
It describes all casualties as victims of “Israeli aggression.”
This reality plays out in numerous real-world examples: for example, on October 17, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror organization fired a rocket that hit the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, killing about ten people.
Hamas immediately announced that Israel had struck the hospital, killing over 500, despite knowing this was not the case.
This is just one example out of a long and well-established history of Hamas’ dishonest behavior.
Hamas Kills Palestinians
Hamas both endangers and directly kills Palestinian civilians itself before subsequently, and dishonestly, blaming the deaths on Israel.
For example, last week, Israel released a mountain of evidence, including intercepted conversations by Hamas operatives, revealing that a major Hamas military headquarters is located inside Gaza’s Shifa hospital.
Reports this week indicate that Hamas is firing on the civilian evacuation corridor established by Israel inside Gaza.
Both of these acts result in the death of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Hamas – whether through direct attack or indirectly by using civilians as human shields – and all such deaths are included in Hamas’ unreliable figures.
An Accurate Figure
To arrive at an accurate figure of civilian casualties caused by Israel, one might start with Hamas’ claim of 8,500 deaths, but one must then subtract from that figure: 1. Terrorist combatants,
2. Civilians that Hamas intentionally placed in harm’s way, and
3. Civilians that Hamas killed directly.
Even after these adjustments, one would also have to discover and subtract those “deaths” that simply did not happen at all, such as the dishonest claim of 500 casualties at the Al-Ahli hospital.
Incomprehensible Restraint
If Israel were determined to act without restraint, it could likely accomplish its mission of destroying Hamas and protecting Israelis by bombing Gaza indiscriminately and thoroughly from air, sea, and long-range artillery in the style of the Allied attacks on Dresden and Berlin in World War II.
Yet, as a rule, the Israel Defense Forces prohibits its forces from intentionally targeting civilians.
Accordingly, Israel has sent in ground troops to act against military targets with a precision not possible from afar. Dozens of Israeli soldiers have already fallen in these operations, with many more likely to follow.
Israelis have been holding painful funerals almost daily since the ground campaign began, with many of the dead no older than 20 or 21.
It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that Israelis are literally giving their lives to protect Palestinian civilians. Such an act is simply extraordinary in the history of human civilization.
Even if one were to accept Hamas’s exaggerated figure of 8,500 casualties, the math shows that each Israeli attack results in an average of between one and zero actual casualties.
Given the horrific massacre of Israelis on October 7 and the enormous military machine that Israel is now tasked with destroying to prevent further such massacres, this degree of restraint is not only impressive, it’s barely even comprehensible.
I’d not only drive Faruqi to the airport and wave her away, I’d pay her fare to Pakistan – one way.
I’m very thankful that Orstralia has maintained her essential network of simple, robust and reliable copper-in-plastic communication wires.
Especially now we’re going into the season of bushfires, car crashes, assaults, monsoons and cyclones.
And double especially with all these new-fangled failures in the electricity supply, too.
Brilliant.
Something like that has been suggested at the lunch today. That ordinary people can see what needs to be done yet our leaders cannot is an another spotlight on corporate incompetence. It is not surprising seeing as what the universities are concentrating on teaching recently rather that business management.
Winston Smith
Nov 8, 2023 1:53 PM
Or you can have the US situation where they ‘voted’ in a pack of liars who hated the US and everything the Constitution stood for, who had bought the Supreme Court, and even if the USSC stood up to the government, it is ignored.
The damage that the Obama & Obama lite administrations have inflicted on the US may just kill it.
The US has reinvented itself before after crooked administrations, but this time, I think it’s a coup too far. The institutions that guaranteed the Constitution has primacy are now devoted to tearing it up.
Winston Smith
Nov 8, 2023 2:47 PM
Just blew >$200 on spotlight. I have no idea what I’m going to use $200 worth of blankets on up here, but just in case there’s another ice age…
Winston Smith
Nov 8, 2023 2:53 PM
They can’t stop pushing, JR. As Hillary said “If we don’t win, we all swing from nooses.” And she’s right.
Treason has the death penalty for a reason.
Hmmmm!
Daylesford pub crash: Driver’s side of the story is revealed for the first time
. The 66-year-old driver from the Daylesford pub crash remains in hospital
. His lawyer said he suffered a diabetic episode while behind the wheel
Witnesses at the scene claimed the driver appeared to have suffered a medical episode with his eyes ‘glazed over’.
Tests found the driver did not have drugs or alcohol his system.
On Wednesday, the man’s lawyer, Martin Amad, confirmed the horror incident was triggered by a medical episode.
[The driver] is deeply distressed and feels great empathy with the families and friends of the victims and of the wider Daylesford community,’ he said.
‘My client is a 66-year-old family man who has no criminal history. He returned a negative alcohol reading at the scene.
‘He is an insulin dependent diabetic and required immediate treatment by paramedics at the scene.
‘He remains in hospital.’
Mr Amad described the incident as ‘a terrible tragedy’.
‘My client has been interviewed by Victoria Police. He has not been charged with any offence,’ he said.
‘It’s anticipated the investigation will take some time.’
It was until it went woke.
Just remembered, isn’t Gladys Berejiklian now working for Optus?
Hanson should point out that Mossad, CIA and ASIO likely have files on Faruckted.
Palestinians?
Bab news. If you’re the CEO you do. That’s why they are paid the big bucks. Suddenly those old, white males aren’t looking so bad.
“When that phrase “… since the Holocaust” gets repeated, pause a moment and think what it must mean for Jews to say that phrase. It’s not a description of a time span “since the Holocaust”. It’s not like “since last Tuesday”.”
Yes, since the pogrom of 7 October, I and other Jews have been walking around in a daze, with a permanent lump in our throats. We are all of these things, we are dismayed, disoriented, horrified, disconcerted, rattled, fearful, shocked and shaken.
I feel pessimistic about the future for us Jews in the West, and that includes Australia, because I can tell you here and now that this federal government, led by the very ugly Sleazy, does not like Jews.
Daily Mail. I express the uncharitable wish that none of his baristas find a job for a long, long, time.
Example of propaganda:
“Hottest Cup Day for 50 years.”
They didn’t say “it was hotter at the Melbourne cup 50 years ago.”
I see the Democrats have had another excellent day in state elections, including Ohio voting for abortion rights.
Trump is a loser who will lose even more bigly than last time.
Good.
I just googled the change.org.au petition regarding a boycott of Annaconda/Spotlight. I almost cannot bear looking at the comments. Evil Jew hatred in every comment. I haven’t been to Annaconda for a while. I’ll have to buy something there soon. They used to have good bike shops in store.
Roger
Nov 8, 2023 12:42 PM
IMO Australian executives aren’t really the problem. Plenty of foreign (mainly US) executives haven’t worked out because they don’t know the Australian environment either. Australia’s predominantly oligopoly market structure requires plenty of care.
Speaking of Jew hatred.
Pallywood? Rockets?
Billionaires in Qatar?
“Real Deal
Nov 8, 2023 3:22 PM
Speaking of Jew hatred.”
Yep.
Can one nasty message to a network router bring down half the country?
(cursive script) ‘yes’
Cassie of Sydney
Nov 8, 2023 3:24 PM
“Real Deal
Nov 8, 2023 3:22 PM
Speaking of Jew hatred.”
Yep.
Popped out of a Hamas Bunker Tunnel?
Yet she didn’t win and she didn’t swing from a noose.
*www.madeupquotes.com
AH DARN IT!
I just realised:
I’ve been radicalised.
But according to the pervert apologist, there are “legitimate grievances” for what was done on 7 October 2023.
I wonder if he’s appeared at any of the Jew hating rallies in Melbourne?
The CFMEU really need to pull their finger out.
I bought some stuff from Anaconda this morning.
Thinking about what I could want from Spotlight.
Greetings from Brisvegas aerodrome. Watching activities from the B Lounge. It’s at the “little aircraft “ end, so I get to see all the Dash 8s and Embraer jets disgorge their passengers. Looks like another FIFO has arrived – much Hi-Viz and mostly men.
In the distance, the great container gantries and cranes at the port, the mangroves in between.
“The owner of Caffe Aronne, Aaron Dahan”
JC, if you’re in NYC, make sure you go and buy a coffee from this guy!
“Thinking about what I could want from Spotlight.”
Love Spotlight. It’s also, along with Sportscraft, my mother’s favourite store.
These folk seem to be doing very concise daily reporting job on the Gaza front ..
https://youtu.be/EK3vLob4JZM
Hey Cranky: do you condemn Israel’s widespread and systematic killing of innocent children in Palestine?
Simple yes or no question.
Some unsightly misogyny on the Cat this morning.
Very quick to blame wymminses in the board room rather than hackers in the wiring closet.
She went on the radio about it this morning. When no ultimate cause had been identified (and still hasn’t), what exactly was a CEO supposed to say? Would himminses have said any different? Really?
I bought a very nice down puffer jacket from Anaconda, and we both got a stack of thermals and Merrell boots.
My halo is a tad brighter for the news.
Close enough to steal, eh Monty? Yes I read the stories, seems obvious, since there were only a few races, lots of developed resources available, and every bit of power helps in the the current fragile political landscape, especially to gain and maintain control over state election systems.
The Dems are going to steal 2024, it’s dead certain. They are terrified. Scared men are very dangerous, and the Dems are so deeply corrupt that they will do absolutely anything to keep the reins of power. I doubt the USA can survive.
It’s fun that the illegal election apparatus built by the Dems is now being used by Dems to steal primaries from other Dems.
Return the hostages.
Stop using children as meat shields.
Hi Monty. Remember what is most important: condemning local political opponents.
I absolutely condemn the deaths of innocent Palestinian children, which are 100% caused by the genocidal Hamas using them as human shields and propaganda victims.
And remember: the International Left provide encouragement and ideological cover for their genocidal pets. They have a share inresponsibility; their money and their words help sustain the evil.
“Hey Cranky: do you condemn Israel’s widespread and systematic killing of innocent children in Palestin”
Firstly, Jew hater, do you condemn the widespread and systematic butchering of innocent Jewish men, women and children in southern Israel on 7 October 2023? Simple yes or no question.
Secondly, Jew hater, do you condemn the widespread kidnapping of innocent Jewish men, women and children from southern Israel on 7 October 2023? Simple yes or no question.
Thirdly, Jew hater, Israel isn’t engaging in any widespread and systematic killing of innocent children.
Finally, Jew hater, PISS OFF. You’re a grub.
widespread and systematic killing
That would imply that they are deliberately targeting civilians, mUnts.
AnnaCondos? That’s Wellcamp, innit?
I’m another Spotlight and Anaconda fan.
Dumped Katmandu a few years when the owner went all Rainbow Woke Green on me.
I won’t be told what to do by the likes of the pig swill that created that disgusting piece of hate speech on X.
I have more than enough of everything I could buy at Spotlight or Anaconda but I’m twitching to head over to their Norflands stores to support them where it matters.
We have entered one of those dark tunnels that history has constantly warned us about.
Return the hostages.
After the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, it would have been nice to show a modicum of humanity and compassion. But you’ve sat out a month since 7/10 and now you have just reset with your usual progressive tropes. Whatever else you are, you are a thoroughly predictable bore.
That comment to Cassie is low, Monty, even by your utterly in the gutter standards.
She’s been proven right. You are a nasty antisemite and everyone can see it.
You should ask Hamas that question Monty, they’re the ones preventing families from refugeeing out to the South Gaza safe zone.
The culpable people are Hamas and possibly the parents, although the parents may, as I intimated, not be free to act as they might wish to. Everyone in Gaza knows the warning the IDF has given, therefore if they stay of their own volition they are responsible. And if someone else is preventing them those people are the ones responsible. Since Israel is attempting to exterminate Hamas I would expect you to welcome the release of these poor people from captivity to the bloodthirsty jihadist monsters.
This war could be ended in minutes if Hamas released the captives and surrendered unconditionally, like Japan eventually did. If they don’t it’s their responsibility for not doing so. Remember Pearl Harbor.
I have a troubled relationship with Spotters.
When the vaxxes first became available , management mandated all staff be inoculated. This, in my opinion, was wrong on many levels.
However, if you live in a place where there are no haberdashery shops within an hour’s drive, you’re sunk.
My response…buy little and guiltily. Most of my work these days is for charity projects, so there’s that.
OldOzzie at 1:30 – nice spray from the QAN shareholder. Owning a bit of the Mangy Roo has always involved holding your nose and looking away.
Oh, that’s nice.
My petal wants the hostages to remain with Hamas and little Gazan children riddled with bullets.
Classy.
Monty defending Hamas baby cooking genocidists is not a good look, even for him.
Ms McKenzie has a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws
Those bits of paper mean you should never be allowed near a hammer/nail, screwdriver, spanner, axe, lawnmower, dartboard.
Anything that normal people may use every now and then.
As much use and liked as a fart in a lift.
Lol mOnty would be asking Jews in WW2 if they condemn the Allies killing innocent German children, using Goebbels’ death toll figures.
Here’s something to think about: How come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’?
– Jay Leno
The question to be asked now is “Has Optus lost its social licence to operate?”
Or should it be put on notice that it gets its shit together or the licence will be cancelled?
Otherwise what is the point of having a Department of Communication if it will not punish those not up to the standard required?
Seeing Monty poking his head up from his dung pile while the little mound of pooh on top stays in place is actually quite heartening.
His appearances are directly proportional to the fortunes of the left – and how long as it been since he thought he had something to gloat about?
Any day now.
Aaaaaany daaaaaaay…
I answered that in the affirmative last time I was here, in response to your question, which is why I thought I would reciprocate this time. And yes, Hamas should release their hostages and I condemn their ongoing terrorism.
It seems you don’t have the ability to return any sort of similar courtesy towards me. Or Palestinian children, about whom you evidently do not care at all.
I do not hate any race or creed. Except maybe the Poms in a sporting context, but that goes without saying for real Australians.
The whole war has been a tragedy from start to finish. Strong moral justifications that Israel had at the start have been swept away by Netanyahu repeatedly flaunting the Geneva Conventions. Hamas never had casus belli at all.
Everyone loses, and looks guilty doing it.
The whole war has been a tragedy from start to finish. Strong moral justifications that Israel had at the start have been swept away by Netanyahu repeatedly flaunting the Geneva Conventions. Hamas never had casus belli at all.
And the hostages, mong?
Monty should be able to see how careful Israel is to avoid both civilian casualties and the deaths of her own soldiers but instead parrots hamas terrorist rhetoric.
When you think he couldn’t stoop any lower, there he slithers, like a jihadi out of a terror tunnel.
Incidentally it was fantastic to see how many Gazans again took advantage of the humanitarian corridor provided by the IDF to escape south.
Emirates and Egypt are setting up field hospitals to allow the transfer of patients from Shifa, soon hamas will only have the liked of Monty to hide behind.
More lies.
Israel had not ostentatiously displayed the Geneva conventions.
Nor has it flouted them.
Hey Monty. How is your bashing of Nazis in Lakemba going? Once you finish there I have suggestions for the next group of Nazis for you to take down.
1. Arts and Humanities staff and students in any University in Australia.
2. Australian Greens and Far Left factions of the ALP.
3. Media Entities such as the Guardian, 9News and the ABC.
Plenty of work there mate. Go get them!. You are Stunning and Brave!
m0nty
Nov 8, 2023 3:59 PM”
As I’ve said before, PISS OFF. You’re an immoral despicable disgrace, a Jew hater of the first order. Isn’t it funny how, for years, you’ve come here and screamed, shouted and screeched Nazi, Nazi, Nazi at anyone who disagrees with you. Well, we now know why you have such an obsession with Nazis, it’s because every day you have to look at yourself in the mirror, and you’re only screaming, shouting and screeching the pathetic reflection you see when you look in the mirror.
I don’t know.
Israel seems to be controlling a lot of ground with minimal casualties.
Hamas seems to be bunkering.
We’ll see.
Yes, since the pogrom of 7 October, I and other Jews have been walking around in a daze, with a permanent lump in our throats. We are all of these things, we are dismayed, disoriented, horrified, disconcerted, rattled, fearful, shocked and shaken.
Cassie, I know that none of us, except those who are Jews, can feel what you are feeling.
But I want you to know that many of us have felt the most profound shock, despair and crippling sorrow when confronted with the events of 7/10. We all know what the Islamists are capable of – we saw that during the temporary ascendance of Islamic State. Even so – the extent of the barbarity of 7/10 and the suffering that was perpetrated is beyond comprehension.
The strength of the opposition to this descent into the barbaric past is finally being seen in the recent ARC meeting. Let us hope it gathers momentum. It is a long road ahead.
Sure! now go say that at a pro pali rally. I doubt you’ll get just some nasty words in return.
Your not helping them by stirring the pot.
LOL, that’s black comedy of the blackest possible variety.
Let me remind you Monty.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad planned an executed a surprise attack of brigade strength on a Jewish holy day. They them massacred over a thousand innocents. This included ripping babies out of wombs, cooking at least one baby, beheading a number of others, raping and killing hundreds of women, abducting civilians including elderly women, and booby trapping childrens’ toys.
I cannot recall a more evil act in my lifetime, by anyone. Except perhaps the ISIS commander in Syria who liked to rip the livers of his victims out of their living bodies then eat them. You can look it up, if you have a strong stomach.
The whole war is a ploy by Hamas to get everyone in. So far the other players have had the sense to stay out. No one is dumber in the Middle East than Hamas, and now they will pay for their despicable evil.
That never happened, idiot. Only a reptoid seeing, Protocols reading idiot who has never gotten out of their basement believes this garbage.
As for Hamas literally cooking babies – you’re two rungs above defending cannibalism.
Now go and livestream your defence of abortion rights in Gaza City.
Compare a Jew in Gaza and the Arabs in the Knesset.
One exists (8% of the institution) and the other does not.
The really disturbing past of the ALP supporting Arab terrorism to hurt a US proxy comes up again. It is tankie-level stupidity. Supporting the USSR in 2023.
Calli, Spotlight have a saving grace: cheap (and nasty) flannelette.
It is excellent for cleaning guns.
I just acquired a complete roll of the old ‘Forby’ flannelette and its quality is of a different age.
I also used to buy from Spotlight the fabric called ‘ticking’. Unfortunately it is now much cheaper and nastier than the olden days of 2012. I use a micrometer to buy within my targeted thickness range. I aim for around 0.012″ under moderate compression, and 0.015″ on the light touch ratchet of the micrometer.
Ticking is supposed to have a weave tightened with a second weft that makes it good for confining straw or feather in pillows or mattresses.
It also is the ideal fabric for wrapping around historic lead balls fired from rifles. In that role it confines the burning powder behind the ball, and centres the ball in the bore.
Lol. It’s where we go most days for a coffee. It’s literally 200 yards from our apartment. I’m going for two coffees a day now.
No kidding, it’s where we grab a cup everyday and it’s a really decent drop. The back entrance to our building is on 71st near in between Lex and Third. The cafe is on Lex one door down from 71st.
How about that. Next week.
gaza lol
/mUnter
A good summary of the evil that day, Bruce.
They had a couple of gals working there – one with a huge nose ring. No loss.
Hamas are fortunately, they have among their supporters……
Gays for Gaza
Queers for Palestine
Monty for Hamas
“A good summary of the evil that day, Bruce.”
I second that.
H B Bear
I think the claim can be made that Boomers made the jobs look a lot easier than they were. Something the GenX are realising and slowly coming to grips with. The Millenials are still polishing their degrees and accepting that history started when they were born and they learned everything they needed to know when they ‘Graduated’ from Kindy.*
*Normally I wouldn’t state something like that, but when GenX and Millenials keep pissing on us Boomers, what do they expect will happen?
My bucket of patience got kicked over and spilled several years ago.
Not that for the last several years Boomers haven’t been pissing on them as snowflakes and wimps.
Wow, just got off the blower to my sales elf- turns out we’ve been boycotted by the ragheads, and the flaming queens, and the Baptists, and the Nips, AND the Welcome To Country Troupers because of a slightly off-colour routine I posted to my TikTok about a queer quadroon being thrown off of a roof by the Yakuza highrise developers this Chrismas.
Hope that online sales might get a bump in support. Buy Me A Coffee?
Monty that is just sad.
Netanyahu is not the author of Israel’s actions now, just one of the team. Of course, leftist hate-monkeys trigger each other by using his name.
Then, if western leftists are the tiniest bit concerned about Geneva Conventions why are they supporting such evil people? Its not like the 7 October atrocities were somehow new; they are consistent with Palestinian Arab choices for genocide not peace, since 1928 and before. When we see the result of their support and funding, it is clear that the western leftists bear much responsibility for these atrocities.
For a start the “himminses” would not be almost in tears when talking to the media only after the crisis was over. This was only a year after the last disaster. What is wanted is gritted teeth and fronting up the media and critics as soon as humanly possible. If this tearful girl is not sacked I will seriously consider leaving Optus.
But Mikey Trumble told us that you had to be smart like him to make money!
Hector the Convector’s finally started smacking up the Tiwi Islands, 90-odd km to the north.
This bodes well for a bit of wet stuff.
I read an interview with a commander going in to Beit Hanoun where there are now no civilians because they have all left.
His soldiers had witnessed the worst of some of the atrocities including ‘abused’ children in one of the kibbutz.
He said he had cautioned his men and reminded them that they were not like them (barbarous terrorists).
Seriously if Israel was intent on genocide and considering they control the sea and the sky and the density of the population wouldn’t the casualty rate be a just a little higher, especially considering those numbers include hamas terrorist death and the deaths caused by the well over 550 misfires by hamas and friends?
Can they afford Wentworth?
ZK2A:
It looks like deliberate planning on behalf of the bureaucracy, while disregarding the wishes of 60% of the voting citizenry wishes. This is the sort of arrogant bullshit that gets governments chucked out on their ear.
Military briefing: the battle for Gaza City
The ground invasion exposes Israeli troops to the perils of close combat in an urban environment against dug-in Hamas fighters
First came a month-long aerial bombardment. Then Israeli armour and infantry moved in behind a rolling barrage of air and artillery strikes that cut besieged Gaza in half and isolated Hamas’s military stronghold in the north of the territory.
The encirclement this week of Gaza City by Israeli forces is the latest step in their mission to destroy the militant group — striking at what one official called Hamas’s “centre of gravity” with a campaign that will stretch Israel’s military resources and expose its troops to the perils of close combat.
The Israel Defense Forces will be dragged into “urban fighting in a packed-in dense city, and below that you have these tunnel systems that proffer every advantage to the defence”, said Joe Buccino, a former official at US Central Command, which includes Israel.
“They’re going to encounter layers upon layers of complexity?.?.?.?It’s obviously very tough and they haven’t even started.”
Israel, the region’s most advanced fighting force, has evolved over the decades to focus on distant threats, from targeted raids in Syria to preparing for conflict with Iran and its Middle East proxies.
But its war with Hamas, which was responsible for the October 7 killing of at least 1,400 Israelis, according to Israeli officials, has meant adapting to the complexities of battle in an urban environment an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, against militants who have spent years preparing for just this clash. This week, an Israeli F-35 fighter designed to fly 1,200 miles was tasked with hitting a target 200 meters ahead of Israeli soldiers.
As Israeli troops moved into Gaza, Hamas fighters have harried the logistics lines supplying them. The militant operatives are adept at popping out of hidden tunnels and half-destroyed buildings to fire anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, with one attack on an armoured vehicle killing 10 Israeli soldiers.
“It’s back to Guerrilla 101,” said a former Israeli soldier with combat experience in Gaza. “On top of that you’ve got hostages,” Buccino added, referring to the more than 240 people taken by Hamas and held in Gaza.
More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s month-long aerial bombardment of Gaza, according to officials in the Hamas-run territory. The scale of the destruction is such that the UN and other aid agencies say that a humanitarian disaster is unfolding.
Communication blackouts make it hard to assess the IDF’s progress. But satellite imagery, combined with interviews with current and former Israeli soldiers and military experts, give a sense of the coming battle for Gaza City, which had a prewar population of about 600,000.
Israel’s aim, military officials and analysts say, will not be to fight street by street, as US-led forces did in Fallujah during the second Iraq war. Instead, its plan is to clear out pockets of territory and use them as bases for urban raids. The result will be a series of small battles and skirmishes for sections of the territory.
Itamar Yaar, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, said Israeli forces did not need to take control of “every square inch of Gaza City?.?.?.?to achieve their main objectives. Step by step they’ll take control of every part they see as important”.
The aim is for each raid is to gather fresh intelligence on Hamas and its military infrastructure. Israeli forces will then withdraw and call in air strikes, leading to more raids, in an iterative process.
The Israeli military has also shifted the focus away from targeting the high-ranking Hamas planners behind October 7 to include mid-level field lieutenants leading the fight against Israeli troops. This would “significantly undermine Hamas’s capabilities to carry out counter attacks”, said a spokesman.
Complex operations lie ahead. The Israeli military has already indicated it plans to take control of al-Shifa hospital, the largest in the strip, in the heart of Gaza City. Israel says Hamas has built a vast underground headquarters beneath the medical facility. Taking over Shifa would also be “symbolic”, according to Yaar.
But to take control of a site such as Shifa “you have to become a static force from a moving force”, said the Israeli soldier with experience in the field.
Infantry will be required to leave their armoured vehicles and maintain roadblocks, while protecting themselves from Hamas. The Financial Times last week reported that dozens of buildings around Shifa had already been destroyed by air strikes.
Hamas has denied using Shifa for military purposes, saying Israel’s “false allegations are criminal and dangerous, and pave the way for targeting of the entire headquarters of the hospital”.
Israeli forces have also been able to move armour right across the strip, roughly along the newly built Number 10 Road to the Mediterranean Sea, completing their encirclement of Gaza City.
It is unclear how many people remain in northern Gaza, where Israel’s military last month ordered residents to evacuate to the territory’s south. The IDF has estimated a figure in the low hundreds of thousands, while Gaza’s interior ministry said at least 900,000 people were still north of the evacuation line.
This week, the Israeli military published images of hundreds of Palestinians walking along one of the evacuation routes, with their hands in the air and some waving white flags.
Two densely populated refugee camps, Jabaliya and Al-Shati, have also been targeted by Israeli air strikes. It is not known whether the Israeli military will do more than strike the camps. If troops moved in, they would be easy targets, while images of them among dense crowds of refugees would provide rich propaganda imagery for Hamas to broadcast through the Arab world.
Alongside the ground offensive, there is an information war. Advancing Israeli forces claimed to have found rocket launchers in a children’s scout clubhouse and a mosque, buttressing claims that Hamas uses civilians as shields.
Hamas has also produced its own videos. In one, a fighter aims an RPG at an Israeli armoured personnel carrier rumbling down the street. After he pulls the trigger, his headcam jolts upwards with the recoil, and there is a flash as the grenade explodes against the vehicle, followed by an exultant cry of victory — although there was no evidence that the carrier was destroyed.
“It’s part of the overall information battle where every tactical engagement becomes strategically important,” said Samuel Cranny Evans, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London. “But in this case, getting hit by an RPG doesn’t guarantee anything. Although the Hamas videos give the impression that Hamas is dominating, modern Israeli armour can soak up multiple hits.”
Yet Israel’s sophisticated armour has its limits. With new, windowless Eitan armoured personnel carriers in short supply, older Namer infantry fighting vehicles are being used. Last week one was pierced by back-to-back anti-tank missiles fired by a Hamas crew, killing all 10 Israeli soldiers inside.
The pace of combat has also changed as the IDF has moved to encircle Gaza City, according to an account by Eado Hecht, a military analyst at the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, with “the intensity of the fighting escalated considerably” since October 31.
One IDF tactic is to use its battlefield earth movers, the D9R bulldozers, to dig out large berms to protect troops from incoming fire while combat engineers close off tunnels. Tanks have also been fitted with newly designed metal cones to bounce off grenades dropped from drones.
Unmanned aerial vehicles have spread out over the territory, feeding signals back through algorithms that compare each image with those that came before. Any changes are analysed to see whether they represent a potential threat.
But just as Gaza is not impregnable, neither is the IDF’s cutting-edge technology. Hamas released a video last week of a drone dropping what appeared to be a grenade on a group of Israeli soldiers sitting in a circle.
In the last frame, at least half a dozen soldiers lie prone on the ground, casualties of an enemy determined to exploit any crack in Israel’s armour.
Why does the world apply a special standard of conduct to Israel?
By Victor Davis Hanson
November 6, 2023
We are told that the Palestinians after more than 75 years of residence in the West Bank and Gaza are “refugees.” If that definition were currently true, then, are the 900,000 Jews who were forcibly exiled from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia after the 1947, 1956, 1967 wars still “refugees?”
Most fled to Israel. Do they now live in “refugee” camps administrated by the UN? Are they protesting to recover their confiscated homes and wealth in Damascus, Cairo, or Baghdad? Do Jews on Western television dangle their keys to lost homes in Damascus a half-century after they were expelled?
How about the 150,000-200,000 Greek Cypriots who in 1974 were brutally driven out of their ancient homes in Northern Cyprus? Are they today living in “refugee” camps in southern Cyprus? Are Cypriot terrorists blowing themselves up in “occupied” Nicosia to recover what was stolen from them by Turkey?
Turkish president Recep Erdogan lectures the world on Palestinian “refugees,” but does he mention Turkey’s role in the brutal expulsion of 40 percent of the residents of Cyprus?
Are there campus groups organizing against Turkey on behalf of the displaced Cypriots? After being slaughtered and expelled, are the Cypriots a cause celebre in academia? Do the “refugee” cities of southern Cyprus resemble Jenin or Jericho?
For that matter, how about the 12 million German civilians who between 1945-50 were expelled, and mostly walked back from, East Prussia and parts of Eastern Europe, some with Prussian roots going back a millennium and more. Perhaps 1 million died during the expulsions.
Are any current survivors still “refugees?” If so, are they organizing for war to get back “occupied” “Danzig” and “Königsberg” for Germany? So why does the world damn Israel and romanticize the Palestinians in a way it does not with any other “refugee” group?
“Apartheid”
Israel is said to practice “apartheid,” although since 2005-06 Gaza has been autonomous. Mahmoud Abbas runs in his fashion the West Bank. Like the Hamas clique, he held elections one time in 2005, and then after his election, of course, cancelled any free election in the fashion of the one election, one time Middle East. Who forced him to do that? Zionists? Americans?
At any time, Gaza could have taken its vast wealth in annual foreign aid and become completely independent in fuel, food, and energy, without need of any such help form the “Zionist entity.”
Gaza could have capitalized on its strategic location, the world’s eagerness to help, and the natural beauty of its Mediterranean beaches. Instead, it squandered its income on a labyrinth of terrorist tunnels and rockets. Today, it snidely snickers at any mention of following the Singapore model of prosperity–a former colonial city whose World War II death count vastly surpassed that of the various wars over Gaza.
Are the Israeli Arabs—21 percent of the Israeli population—living under apartheid?
If so, it is a funny sort of oppression when they vote, hold office, form parties, and enjoy more freedom and prosperity than almost anywhere else in the Middle East under Arab autocracies. Are those in sympathy with Hamas fleeing from Israel into Gaza or the West Bank or other Arab countries to live with kindred Muslims under an autocratic and theocratic dictatorship, or do they prefer to stay in the “Zionist entity” under “apartheid?”
Where then is real apartheid?
The Uyghurs in China, fellow Muslims to Middle Easterners, who are ignored by Israel’s Islamic enemies, but who reside in China’s segregated work camps to the silence of the usually loud UN, EU, and Muslim world?
How about the Muslim Kurds? Are they second- or third-class citizens in Muslim Turkey? And how about the tens of thousands of foreign workers from India, Pakistan, and other Asian countries who labor under the kafala system in the Arab Muslim Gulf countries, and are subject to apartheid protocols that allow them no free will about how they live, travel, or the conditions of their labor?
Are campuses erupting to champion the Uyghurs, the Kurds, or the subjugated workers of the Gulf?
“Disproportionate”
Israel is now damned as “disproportionally” bombing Gaza. The campus subtext is that because Gaza’s 7,000-8,000 rockets launched at Israeli civilians have not killed enough Jews, then Israel should not retaliate for October 7 by bombing Hamas targets–shielded by impressed civilians— because it is too effective.
Would a “proportionate” response be counting up all the Israelis murdered, categorizing the horrific manner of their deaths, and then sending Israeli commandoes into Gaza during a “pause” in the fighting to murder an equal number of Gazans in the same satanic fashion?
Does the U.S. lecture Ukraine not to use to the full extent its lethal U.S. imported weaponry since the result is often simply too deadly? After all, perhaps twice as many Russians have been killed, wounded, or are missing than Ukrainian casualties. Should Ukraine have been more “proportionate?” Has President Biden ordered President Zelensky to offer the Russian aggressors a “pause” in the fighting to end the “cycle of violence?”
Or did U.S.-supplied artillery, anti-armor weapons, drones, and missiles “disproportionally” kill too many Russians? Or does the U.S. assume that since Russia attacked Ukraine at a time of peace, it deserves such a “disproportionate” response that alone will lose it the war?
For that matter, the U.S. certainly disproportionately paid back Japan for Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese brutal take-over of the Pacific, much of Asia, and China—and the barbarous way the Japanese military slaughtered millions of civilians, executed prisoners, and mass raped women. Should the U.S. have simply done a one-off retaliatory attack on the imperial fleet at Yokohama, declared a “cease-fire,” and thus ended the “cycle of violence?”
Civilian casualties
Campus activists scream that Israel has slaughtered “civilians” and is careless about “collateral damage.” They equate retaliating against mass murderers who use civilians to shield them from injury, while warning any Gazans in the region of the targeted response to leave, as the moral equivalent of deliberately butchering civilians in a surprise attack.
So did protestors mass in the second term of Barrack Obama when he focused on Predator drone missions inside Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen to go after Islamic terrorists who deliberately target civilians?
At the time, the hard-left New York Times found the ensuing “collateral damage” in civilian deaths merely “troubling.” No matter—Obama persisted, insisting as he put it, “Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us.” Note Obama did not expressly say the terrorists in Pakistan or Yemen were killing Americans, but “trying” to kill Americans. For him, that was, quite properly, enough reason “to kill” the potential assassins of Americans.
What would the Harvard President today say of Benjamin Netanyahu saying just that about Hamas?
We have no idea how many women, children, and elderly were in the general vicinity of a targeted terrorist in Pakistan or Yemen when an American drone missile struck. Then CIA Director John Brennan later admitted that he had lied under oath (with zero repercussions), when he testified to Congress that there was no collateral damage in drone targeted assassinations.
Obama was proud of his preemptive assassination program. Indeed, in lighthearted fashion he joked at the White House Correspondence Dinner about his preference for lethal drone missions, when he “warned” celebrities not to date his daughters: “But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming. You think I’m joking.”
Did the campuses erupt and scream “Not in my name” when their president laughed about his assassination program? After all, Obama had also admitted, “There is no doubt that civilians were killed who shouldn’t have been.” Did he then stop the targeted killings due to collateral damage—as critics now demand a cease fire from Israel?
“Genocide”
Genocide is now the most popular charge in the general damnation of Israel, a false smear aimed at calling off the Israeli response to Hamas, burrowed beneath civilians in Gaza City.
But how strange a charge! Pro-Hamas demonstrators the world over chant “From the River to the Sea,” unambiguously calling for the utter destruction of Israel and its 9 million population. Are the Hamas supporters then “genocidal?”
Is genocide the aim of Hamas that launched over 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities without warning? What is the purpose of the purportedly 120,000 rockets in the hands of Hezbollah if not to target Israeli noncombatants? Is all that a genocidal impulse?
Do Hamas and Hezbollah drop leaflets to civilians, as does Israel, to flee the area of a planned missile attack—or is that against their respective charters?
Hamas leaders in Qatar and Beirut continue to give interviews bragging about their October 7 surprise mass murdering of civilians. They even promise more such missions that likewise will be aimed at beheading, torturing, executing, incinerating, and desecrating the bodies of hundreds of Jewish civilians, perhaps again in the early morning during a holiday and a time of peace.
Is that planned continuation of mass killing genocidal? Does the amoral UN recall any other mass murdering spree when the killers beheaded infants, cooked them in ovens, and raped the dead?
Perhaps students at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Stanford will protest the real genocide in Darfur where some half-million black African Sudanese have been slaughtered by mostly Muslim Arab Sudanese. Did the Cornell professor who claimed he was “exhilarated” on news of beheaded Jewish babies protest the slaughter of the Sudanese? Did the current campus protestors ever assemble to scream about the Islamists who slaughtered the indigenous Africans of Sudan?
Are professors at Stanford organizing to refuse all grants and donations that originate from communist China? Remember, the Chinese communist Party has never apologized for the party’s genocidal murder of some 60-80 millions of its own during the Maoist Cultural Revolution, much less its systematic efforts to eliminate the Uyghur Muslim population?
These examples could easily be expanded. But they suffice to remind us that the Middle-East and Western leftist attacks on Israel for responding to the October 7 mass murdering are neither based on any consistent moral logic nor similarly extended to other nations who really do practice apartheid, genocide, and kill without much worry about collateral damage.
So why does the world apply a special standard to Israel?
To the leftist and Islamist, Israel is guilty of being:
1) Jewish;
2) Too prosperous, secure, and free;
3) Sufficiently Western to meet the boilerplate smears of colonialist, imperialist, and blah, blah, blah.
Re above
But just as Gaza is not impregnable, neither is the IDF’s cutting-edge technology. Hamas released a video last week of a drone dropping what appeared to be a grenade on a group of Israeli soldiers sitting in a circle.
In the last frame, at least half a dozen soldiers lie prone on the ground, casualties of an enemy determined to exploit any crack in Israel’s armour.
Ukraine/Russia SMO has highlighted use of Drones
It is worth going back through the posts of
https://askeptic.substack.com/p/russia-ukraine-reports-2023-11-07
&
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/western-officials-increasingly-pushing
and looking at the use of the very numerous Drones Videos – it is quite eye opening
Israel has bombed hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities and humanitarian corridors.
No side has moral authority in this war. People talk about Cold War 2… well this is very much a Cold War kind of deal: empires feeding arms to proxies to benefit nobody except weapons manufacturers and warlords. It’s a throwback to an age I had hoped we had evolved past.
Cold War 2 is going to be at least as grim as the original.
“Israel has bombed hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities and humanitarian corridors.”
Except it hasn’t. The Jew hating, pervert apologist is a liar.
And yes, one side has complete and absolute moral authority in this war. One side doesn’t rape or murder innocents in cold blood.
I think it is pretty clear which side the Jew hating pervert apologist is on. He is on the side of terrorists, he believes in “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which is a call to genocide. Well, at least now we know why he’s been so obsessed with Nazis all these years, it’s an obsession with himself.
If he had any decency, he’d disappear.
John H.
Nov 8, 2023 4:33 PM
Millenials keep pissing on us Boomers, what do they expect will happen
Not that for the last several years Boomers haven’t been pissing on them as snowflakes and wimps.
Pftt – John H
I am going to flounce off and look for My Smashed Avacardo
Back in 2016, Bernard Salt attacked the Millennial generation, claiming they’d rather spend their money on $20 smashed avocado breakfasts than making the sacrifice their parents and grandparents made to forgo consumption in order to accumulate a deposit.
PS we live in a 3 Generation Family under 1 Roof
Which is where Hamarse (pig’s arse) are hiding underneath, in the tunnels or storing arms. The Israelis would be freaking crazy not to kaboom those places, you big fat idiot. You’re such a NPC that I feel for you. Unable to think for yourself, you have to commit to memory all the bullshit you picked up from left left rags in the morning. It’s actually sad. I’m saddened.
Real Deal
I just had a look. Surely those comments are hate speech? I tried to report the site to the Telecom Ombudsman, but you cannot complain unless you go through the change site – which you can’t do unless you sign the petition.
Rosie:
“Yet” is the operative word here, rosie.
Cassie, you have the strong support of every decent man and woman who has knowledge of what happened on 7th October.
On the other side you have to worry about a
handful of degenerates, including m0nty, who confuses flaunting and flouting.
I know which side I’m backing.
Nooo, that wouldn’t be correct Monty.
Israel has bombed fake hospitals, fake refugee camps, fake schools and fake universities. They haven’t bombed humanitarian corridors, that was Hamas, who’re desperately trying to prevent the people refugeeing out to the safe zones. The news today suggests increasing numbers are successfully doing so despite Hamas, which suggests the Hamas terrorists are finding a more pressing thing to do other than shoot at and blow up their own people. Like dying under IDF fire.
You are not covering yourself with glory Monty. Layers of vile evil nastiness would be the better name for it.
I’ve never seen someone defend baby exterminators before. This is eyeopening. I can see why the mask being ripped off the antisemitic progressive left is so surprising. I never knew there was so much horrible nasty hatred of Jews in the souls of so many people.
Great episode. I think 99.9% here know about the joint … ( :
—-
REMOTE AUSSIE ISLAND YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF – CHRISTMAS ISLAND || 4x4ing in hire cars & GIANT CRABS
m0nty
Nov 8, 2023 4:46 PM
Monty should be able to see how careful Israel is to avoid both civilian casualties
Israel has bombed hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities and humanitarian corridors.
No side has moral authority in this war.
m0nty – You have got to be Joking – What sort of Inhuman are You” – Do you really belong to the Human race?
Gazan Palestinian Hamas Atrocities
In addition to
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/11/04/open-thread-weekend-4-nov-2023/comment-page-5/#comment-630755
Vicki
Nov 5, 2023 1:15 PM
Crisis of courage in the face of unspeakable Hamas barbarism
By GEMMA TOGNINI
A family of four. Two young children, a boy and a girl, six and eight years old. They sat at their breakfast table and were made to watch as their father had his eyes gouged out in front of them. Then someone cut off their mother’s breast. The same savages turned then to the little girl, the eight-year-old, and cut off her foot before turning to her little brother. Just six years old. They sliced the fingers from his hand. Only then was this family killed. After their execution, the Hamas terrorists sat down and helped themselves to a meal.
I’m willing to bet some of you couldn’t finish reading those words. Maybe you skimmed over them; reading them was too much.
It’s understandable. Who wants to believe something so barbaric, so inhuman, could be real? Who wants to chance these words taking shape and lodging themselves in the imagination?
To you I’d say, go back. Read it again. Let the words break your heart as they did mine. Face the truth of what happened, feel the devastating weight of it. This isn’t the time for sanitising facts or avoiding them to preserve some falsely constructed idea of comfort.
I feel as if we are caught in a moment. Suspended, like a bracing breath held in fear of what’s next. The movement of a hand on a clock, in painful, drawn-out slow motion.
This thought, this imagery, has been fluttering around my head and my heart all week, like a butterfly hovering to and fro looking for a place to land.
The Israel UN Ambassador 1 Page QR from photo UN Ireland Desk
Erdan shows attempted beheading in uphill bid to block UNGA resolution ignoring Hamas
As I had said previously
Further to the Video above of the Hamas savages beheading an wounded Thai civilian with a Garden Hoe whilst he is still alive – Not a Jew, Not an Israeli Citizen, just like any number of Thai People around the World, working overseas to earn money to send back to his Family in Thailand
His crime? Being alive in Israel.
This is the true face of Hamas??
As I said on Michael’s Post on Labor Tony Burke supports the terrorists and their flag.
https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2023/10/tony-burke-supports-the-terrorists-and-their-flag.html
I suggest you put your Mobile Phone to the QR Code referenced below and see the Horrors & Barbarity of Gazan Palestinian Hamas
the images on the QR Code of the 1 page on UN Ireland Desk are absolutely Horrendous – https://www.timesofisrael.com/erdan-shows-attempted-beheading-in-uphill-bid-to-block-unga-resolution-ignoring-hamas/
– The Dumpster Bin full of Charred Bodies – God only knows what happened to the Women with the Gag in her mouth, looks like she was burnt alive – the body burnt to a crisp with their hands tied together -the charred, totally blackened skull with white teeth standing out – bodies side by side burnt to a crisp – the 4 min video of brave Hamas Palestinian Barbarians shooting unarmed young people enjoying themselves
Charred bodies everywhere, beheaded soldiers, charred babies
How could any Australian especially The Australian Labor Party, Greens, some TEALS etc, support the Palestinian Gazan’s who rejoice at Hamas, having seen those images & video?
https://www.hamas-massacre.net/
I sent dover a copy of the above images – you can ask him to email them to you
because Google seems to be blocking access to the QR Link again, but I had downloaded the following
After reading about that NY coffee place I would even buy JC a coffee to support them.
JC make sure you tell the owner he has plenty of fans down under.
Oops, the channel is Wild Touring.
A throwaway bullshit line, devoid of meaning.
An unprovoked attack on a civilian population. Grandmothers killed on social media. Children having limbs amputated while watching their fathers’ eyes gouged out.
Other children tied together with wire and burnt to death. Pregnant mothers disembowelled and their unborn babies stabbed to death.
Infants being cooked alive in household ovens while their mothers are raped in front of them.
All conducted by an organisation beloved by the citizens it represents.
Israel has absolutely every moral right to carpet bomb everything and everyone remaining in Gaza, particularly after it gave ample warning for people genuinely wanting to leave to do so.
As a legitimate self-defence mechanism the entirety of Gaza should be turned into a car park, occupied and any surviving residents pushed over the nearest border regardless of whether other countries want them.
Israel should then withdraw from the UN and absolutely dare anyone to have a crack at them.
Hamas actively targets Israeli women and children. Israel actively sought to save the lives of ‘Palestinian’ women and children, thus preserving their moral authority before they started this necessary exercise in pest control.
They are now facing a housing crisis that is driving rents to new highs so even working people are struggling to find accommodation. Ya think that might be something worth complaining about and why they have to move back in with their parents? Or that the inflation surge is easily outpacing wages growth so they are falling behind. Or that up to 20% of residential purchases are cash down by the older set driving up both rents and house prices. Should they do as Panahi stated a couple of years ago : they achieved nothing and should shut up. Attitudes like that echoed by Boomers and the current economic climate make them angry. I don’t blame them because it is the older generations that have created these problems.
Real Deal
There are 3 people here at the NewCat I would never turn my back to.
Monty is top of the list.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls for discipline as cracks emerge in Kyiv’s unity
Ukrainian president fires head of special forces and rebukes top commander who said war with Russia was at a ‘stalemate’
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s video address on Monday night was blunt.
“We need to pull ourselves together,” the Ukrainian president said. “We cannot relax or allow ourselves to be divided by disputes or different priorities.”
It was a message to the Ukrainian people feeling the heavy strains of 19 months of Russia’s war of aggression. It was also a message to his own team of advisers and military officers whose morale has been hammered by limited progress on the battlefield and deep concern over faltering western support for Ukraine’s war effort.
Kyiv’s ironclad communications discipline has faltered in recent days as differences over messaging and, potentially, strategy have spilled into the open.
Over the weekend Zelenskyy repudiated the assessment of his own top military commander that the war with Russia was at a “stalemate”.
In an interview published alongside an opinion piece and a longer essay in The Economist last week, Ukraine’s chief of the general staff Valeriy Zaluzhnyi used the word “stalemate” to describe the state of the war. The general’s point was that fighting had become “positional” and that big technological breakthroughs would be needed to change the dynamic and give Ukraine back the advantage.
It was a lengthy exposition of his military thinking and an attempt to argue for more sophisticated weaponry. But Zelenskyy and his closest aides believe that by using the word stalemate, Zaluzhnyi gave the wrong signal to western allies — that there was no point in sending more weapons to Ukraine because it cannot win the war.
Ihor Zhovkva, one of Zelenskyy’s senior advisers, appeared on Ukraine’s national news broadcaster on Friday to denounce the general’s public intervention. Zhovkva said there were private forums where Zaluzhnyi could voice his opinions. The op-ed had “made [Russia’s] work easier”, he added.
As well as the public rebuke meted out by his office, Zelenskyy asserted his authority over his military chief by firing the head of the special forces, Viktor Khorenko.
Khorenko told journalists he found out about his sacking through the media and claimed that Zaluzhnyi had not been aware of the decision.
The dismissal was a “signal to Ukraine’s military and first of all to Zaluzhnyi — to show who has the power”, said Oleksiy Goncharenko, an opposition MP.
Following a long-awaited summer counteroffensive that has fallen short of its objective to free territories under Russian occupation, Zelenskyy told NBC news on Sunday that the Ukrainian military would be coming up with “different plans, with different operations in order to be able to move forward”.
Ukrainian forces are continuing to press Russia’s along the frontline but fortified Russian defences and deep minefields have resulted in an advance of just 17km in five months.
A gloomy account of Ukraine’s prospects — and a less than flattering picture of a stubborn Zelenskyy — also appeared in a report by Simon Shuster in Time magazine late last month. Shuster is the author of a forthcoming biography of Zelenskyy and has enjoyed close access to the president and his inner circle.
Shuster recalls one of Zelenskyy’s closest aides saying that the president “deludes himself?.?.?.?We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”
The reaction to the article in Zelenskyy’s entourage was confused. Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential office, described it on Telegram as a “very important text” before deleting the post. Others said it reached the wrong conclusions or questioned the veracity of its sources.
Rumours of tensions between Zelenskyy and his top military commander have surfaced before — for example over Ukraine’s staunch defence of Bakhmut, an eastern city with little strategic value — but have proved hard to substantiate.
“There is a definite political crisis happening in the presidential administration,” said Goncharenko. “I don’t really understand their reaction because Zaluzhnyi wrote about things that are obvious. I think the reaction reflects the fact that they don’t just see Zaluzhnyi as a general but as political competition.”
Past opinion polls have shown Zaluzhnyi to be the best-placed figure who could challenge the president and that Ukrainians want to see former soldiers take on a bigger role in political life. However, there is no evidence he harbours political ambitions and Zelenskyy on Monday ruled out holding elections during the war.
An official in the office of the president denied there was disunity between the political leadership and top brass, describing it as disinformation and “one of the favourite Russian narratives?.?.?.?it comes up at any suitable occasion”.
From the changeorg petition, wanting Spotlight banned. Don’t go near your mother’s computer…
1500 alone were killed in Israel.
Why does everyone parrot hamas lies?
“1500 alone were killed in Israel.”
Yep, in one day.
Millennials vs Boomers.
I approve.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls for discipline as cracks emerge in Kyiv’s unity
Last year the fake Zelensky video asking for cocaine would have had you banned quick smart.
Over the past 24 hours I’ve seen it widely shared in twitter, insta & TikTok.
No bannings.
Community notes on twitter have caught up with it though, showing it’s the most adaptive & responsive of the platforms.
Doe the atrocities committed by Hamas come into the equation?
Boomers aren’t running the government and they aren’t importing 600,000 migrants per annum and allowing wealthy foreign nationals to buy in in an already overcrowded market.
And people like Matthew Bach think pushing geriatrics out of the leafies will give people like him a foot in.
No, just about every house sold is going to wealthy new Australians.
If you don’t have at least two million, don’t bother.
Given hamarses behaviour in October, they would be best to not complain about Israeli tactics.
IF it was up to me, by this time all of the [censored…]
So, when will Israel’s neighbours thank the Israelis for being so restrained?
Name them.
Then tell who is committing them.
My money is on Hospitalamas.
It’s my local, of course I’ll support them. I just texted wifey and the kid with the NY Post story to make sure they’re buying a coffee there each day before I arrive
What a great link.
I actually remember possibly meeting the dude when they were opening up. I went in but he ( or whomever) said they were opening the next day. We were heading back that evening and told him I’d come back when I returned. We got into small talk about we’re we were going etc and said he looked forward to my return.
Then, there was the heffer with the huge nose ring. You could’ve stuck a bell on it.
It’s really a small world.
There’s a nauseating piece on the Age website about a meeting of ABC staff protesting about the coverage of the war. Even before reading it, it was obvious what they were protesting about. Sure enough, among other things they were concerned that the ABC apparently won’t let them use the word “Palestine” and was repeating too much info from the IDF. It read like an orgy of Jew hatred.
The ABC is a disgrace to this country and needs the Rabz treatment very urgently. Lets hope that if the SFLs ever get back into power that they make defunding that cesspool of leftist woke propaganda a priority.
Jack the Insider has a good column up at the Oz.
Compares Ukrainian defenders to Hamas defenders.
Fortunately Israel doesn’t care a hoot about the opinions of ‘Australian Lawyers for Hamas’.
Quite a few by the fighting ladies of the Caracal Battalion.
Ok, this is outrageous I know.
I just upticked a JC comment.
Guess that means I don’t have a dog in the fight. A few Millennials now realising they’ve been screwed. What to do about it? Just wait for Gramps to shuffle off stage left?
Then, there was the heffer with the huge nose ring. You could’ve stuck a bell on it.
Did she at least make a good coffee?
Can we send Australian lawyers (as many as we can fit on a plane) to Gaza, so they can have a cultured discussion with Hamarses?
Just wait for Gramps to shuffle off stage left?
In Victoria & the ACT, it’s more of a push by the greedy kids (some kids that is).
Really ignorant and opportunistic.
perhaps someone should sent lawyers for hamas this graph showing how much aid is entering gaza and no, there’s no additional fuel for the terror tunnels sorry.