Tag: israel

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The following quote comes from Jonathan Sacerdoti’s Israel’s triumphant response to 7 October, published in The Spectator on October 7, 2024:

Much of the concern surrounding Israel’s actions in the last year was not genuine, but a veiled excuse to criticise the state for defending itself. Critics lamented that Israel might sacrifice global goodwill in its pursuit of victory, but these criticisms are superficial and often placate those who have long sought to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. The notion that Israel should refrain from defending itself to preserve its reputation overlooks a critical reality: a nation’s first responsibility is its own survival, not global approval.

I could not have said it better myself. The essay, which discusses Israel’s national interest and the importance of deterrence in the specific context of surving in the Middle East (and especially as surving as a Jewish state in the Middle East) is worth reading in full.

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I came across an interesting Reuters report from July 9, 2024, titled: How Hezbollah used pagers and couriers to counter Israel’s high tech surveillance (headline has shifted over last few weeks). I quote from the article:

Cell phones, which can be used to track a user’s location, have been banned from the battlefield in favour of more old-fashioned communication means, including pagers and couriers who deliver verbal messages in person, two of the sources said.
Sounds like checkmate to me. But the article left out one important detail: Where did Iran-Hezbollah get the pagers? Well, no way such a minor detail could be too important.

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Putin Uses Mongolia to Mock the ICC by Elena Davlikanova (cepa.org)

Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia is his first to a member of the International Criminal Court. That’s not a coincidence.

I have read several articles about Russian President Vladimir Putin using a visit to Russia’s small, once-mighty, land-locked neighbor, Mongolia, to poke the International Criminal Court (“ICC”). Mongolia is an ICC member, but being a country of 3,000,000 people which is sandwiched between and largely dependent on Russia and China, it is hardly in a position to do what the ICC cannot, even if it were so inclined. One headline from CEPA caught my attention: Putin Uses Mongolia to Mock the ICC. My take: Wholly gratuitous move by Russia. The ICC is more than capable of making a mockery of itself without any acts of diplomatic aggression from the always self-aware Russian government.

(Aside: Many foreign policy commentators who are into concern trolling about the “global south’s” views of supporting Israel are oddly unconcerned about how the “global south” may view big, wealthy, powerful countries trying to pressure Mongolia into picking a fight with one of the two nuclear powers it shares a border with.)

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Pro-Hamas protesters spent January 15, 2024 loudly protesting outside of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, yelling that the cancer hospital is complicit in the so-called “genocide” in Gaza, or even “supporting” it. Far be it from me to offer any sort of advice to supporters of a foreign terrorist organization, but in light of the fact that Hamas uses hospietals as command centers and many of the so-called or actual doctors are Hamas members or at least complicit in Hamas’s activities, you have to wonder whether choosing this line of argument is part of the kink for Team Hamas, much like their fellow travelers in Beijing and Moscow make similar claims about the war.

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Israel Has No Right to Self-Defense as ‘Occupier,’ Russia Says by The Moscow Times (The Moscow Times)
Israel has no right to self-defense against Hamas militants in Gaza as an occupying power in Palestine, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations said Wednesday.

The Russian government is appropriating Soviet humor. (I dare say that this is a better example of Russia’s questionable Iran-coddling commentary than the one I used for an October 14 article at The New Leaf Journal.)