According to the piece, the gun used can be reasonably accurate even at 200 maters because of adjustments that can be made to the sight. Says it’s a very accurate gun.

I hear that Kamala Harris has information that will lead to the arrest of Hilary Clinton…

Hillary & Bill have already endorsed Harris.

One would expect the party machine will now rally behind Kamala.

I doubt they want a contested convention.

Journalists ignorant of Israel’s history

Chris Mitchell The Australian 21 July, 2024

More than nine months into Israel’s war in Gaza, much of the world’s media still has not understood Gazan civilians are the deliberate victims of Hamas’s tactics and continue to report without scepticism everything coming from journalists inside the city, who are largely Hamas members or sympathisers.

Of course the death toll of 40,000 Palestinians* – 2 per cent of Gaza’s population – is far too high. So too is the destruction of hospitals, schools, mosques and private homes.

Yet journalists have known for decades that Hamas fights all its Gaza campaigns from tunnels deliberately hidden under civilian facilities. The more tragic the circumstances of the dead the better for the terrorist death cult to boost support in the West.

Former IDF spokesman Peter Lerner told Patricia Karvelas on RN Breakfast last Wednesday that the IDF had killed or captured 14,000 fighters. Yet in much of the Arab and Iranian media the war is covered as if Hamas is winning. Odd, since the IDF has lost 350 soldiers.

The calculation in the Islamic world is about damage to the image of Israel. It is a foolish misreading of Israeli public opinion, military power and economic strength. As this column argued on June 16: “Much of the media, many university leaders and some of our politicians … (are) allowing themselves to be used in an Iranian-sponsored propaganda war to entrench Islamic fundamentalism.”

Closer to the truth about Hamas’s prospects was former Palestinian Authority Minister for Prisoners’ Affairs Ashraf Al-Ajrami, who wrote in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Ayyam on July 3 that Hamas was deluded. He argued October 7 would not liberate Palestinians “but cause them harm that will last for generations’’.

Hamas would precipitate “a new Nakba greater than that of 1948”. While Israel was undoubtedly being damaged by the global peace movement it was not going to collapse and the real price for Hamas’s ill-considered actions on October 7 would be paid by Palestinian civilians for years to come.

It’s not the sort of analysis you hear on the ABC or read in The Guardian. But such reassessments are being published in the northern hemisphere, even by the BBC.

On July 4 BBC online published a story by Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson and Gaza correspondent Rushdi Aboualouf: ‘Hamas faces growing public dissent as Gaza war erodes support’.

“Open criticism of Hamas has been growing in Gaza, both on the streets and online. Some have publicly criticised Hamas for hiding hostages in apartments near a busy marketplace or firing rockets from civilian areas,” they wrote.

They quote one resident saying, “They ask what the 7 October attacks were for – some say they were a gift to Israel.”

The New York Times is also being forced to examine Hamas’s tactics.

In a piece published by the Times on July 13 and republished by the SMH and Age on July 15, the NYT examined Hamas’s use of civilians and civilian sites as cover. The Times story – “Hamas’s tactics explain why Israel has been forced to strike so much civilian infrastructure, kill so many Palestinians and detain so many civilians” – could have run any time since the war started, as many such pieces did here.

Yet most of the coverage in the West remains one-sided. Think of all the over-hyped warnings about famine in Gaza in March and April when the UN’s own aid dashboard – published in this column online on April 7 – showed the IDF was letting through more aid trucks daily than before the war. Did your preferred news source report early this month new official aid data confirming there never was a famine?

If much of the world’s media have failed to come to terms with Hamas’s tactical aims in Gaza, none seem to have understood the wider strategic aims of Hamas’s supporters – Iran, Qatar and Turkey. All seek a return to former imperial glory and all want to exclude non-Muslims from the Middle East. All are profoundly anti-Semitic governments.

Western dupes schooled in identity politics side with Palestinians they imagine are indigenous to the area between the river and the sea. They lack historical background.

Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity, and a recent religion to boot. Jews, direct descendants of the original Canaanite inhabitants of the area, are an ethno-religious grouping.

The forebears of many of today’s Palestinians came to the Levant as part of the Arab conquests after the birth of Islam in 610 AD. These conquests also took much of northern Africa, but no one would claim such Arabs were ethnic Africans.

Many other ethnic groups, neither Jewish nor Islamic, have been driven out of the Middle East since World War 1 as Muslim intolerance surged. Think of the hundred of thousands of Kurds killed, the Christan Assyrians driven from the region, the persecution of Maronite and Yazidi Christians in Lebanon and Iraq or the pogroms against Copts in Egypt. Most of those groups live peacefully within Israel and vote there.

The UN lists characteristics of indigeneity. Self-identification is number one. Jews self-identify as indigenous to Israel. Some Palestinians do but they also self-identify as Arab. Yet Arabs are not indigenous to the area.

Jews speak Hebrew, the same language used by the Israelite descendants of the original Canaanites. They called themselves Jews in ancient times. Many Palestinians migrated in the 19th and 20th centuries from Egypt, including the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat. Many prominent Palestinian family names indicate their origins: al-Masri (Egypt), al-Husseini (Arabia), al-Kurd (Kurdish).

Almost all the major cities of Israel have Jewish names that predate by many centuries the birth of Mohammed. The only Arab-founded city in all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is Ramle, the original administrative centre under Arab Islamic rule, not Jerusalem. Even modern Ramallah was built on top of an ancient Jewish town that predates Islam.

But it’s more than just ahistorical delusions by activist Palestinian supporters.

Much of the Western left recoils at the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine but seems unaware Arab, Turkish and Persian leaders have been working to restore past imperial glories.

Fathom Journal in June published “Imperial rollback in the Middle East: A necessity for regional peace”. The author, Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki, Canadian academic and co-founder of the Tel Aviv Review of Books, asks why so many who see the end of the German, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese and Soviet empires as positives are blind to imperial aspirations in the Islamic world.

She argues the Mullahs in Iran seek a return to Persian glory, Turkey’s President Erdogan imagines a new Ottoman era and some Arab states – think Qatar’s funding of Hamas – hope for a return to former Arab glories. All want the Islamic world free of other religions.

“Palestinian maximalism is an extension, under a different name, of the Arab imperialism present in all post World War 1 states, which claimed that where Arab Muslims are a significant part of the population, they should rule,” Kirschbaum-Shirazki writes.

Of course Gaza is a tragedy. But more journalists need to understand the fundamentalist groups and regimes backing Hamas are not concerned with improving life on the Arab street, let alone peace with Israel.

*I’d suggest a critical review of the claimed 40 000 civilian death toll.

Not entirely surprising Kamala got the nod. No one else would want to run since their first tilt at the Oval Office will be a defeat.

Kamala, on the other hand, seems to have delusions as to her own genius (she thinks those inextricable tangles of words she utters are brilliant), but also the benefit that might come with the right running mate – if they are popular…

He will be a steady hand on the till, which is all that is needed.

No.
He will be an unsteady hand in the till.

Harris had one job.

She failed.

I take it you mean the border?

I’m going to make a prediction that next week Biden will resign and Kamala will become the president. As a sitting president she would be deemed to have a better chance of winning or at least getting a bump in the polls to justify cheating.

The USN was investigating the ability to remove CO2 from seawater via a membrane. Sea water has 140 times the amount of CO2 than air, and with the nuclear reactor aboard their carriers, they could make jet fuel.
I don’t have the URL but there was a US company which reckoned they had a tested process to do this at a price competitive with delivering jet fuel on board from conventional sources.
Removing CO2 from the sea to make hydrocarbon fuels, which gets replaced by CO2 from the air, is carbon neutral, if you worry about that sort of thing. It means all existing fuel infrastructure and distribution as well as the vehicles that use it are already in place. Forget hydrogen, batteries etc which are all silly attempts at carbon neutrality.

1. Even if that scenario doesn’t play out, Harris would be limited to one full term.

Not as I understand it as we are way more than half way through the term.
Not that Kamala can win once, let alone twice, as she presides over the smoking wreckage of the former USA.

Biden had an excuse for being demented, he was like a thousand years old.
What’s Kamala’s excuse?