Setting Good Money on Fire After Setting Bad Money on Fire in Gaza

I was walking down the street yesterday, and suddenly, I heard honking from a bunch of cars. Not sure what it was, I looked over to see a cavalcade of cars driving by, waving big Palestinian flags out their windows. This went on for about five minutes until, eventually, they had all disappeared.

This comes on the heels of seeing the Palestinian flag painted on the sides of buildings or on overpasses or stickers stuck to signs and the windows of various McDonald’s –and not put there by the store’s owners! Thankfully, there was no real disturbance other than a bit of annoyance.

They are, of course, protesting the alleged “genocide” that’s being carried out in Gaza by the IDF. We’ve been told that, in the slightly over 100 days since the beginning of this war, there have been more than 24,000 civilian casualties at the hands of the IDF. Given that that information is coming from Palestinian “authorities” which, in Gaza is Hamas, that number is likely highly exaggerated. Even so, if the actual number is 10% of that total, it’s a tragedy. One civilian death, never mind 2,400 or 24,000, is a tragedy. It’s not genocide, but it’s a tragedy nonetheless.

Simply, it’s war, and most wars include civilian deaths, many of them.

And how did we get to this war? As everyone knows, it started on October 7th when Hamas sent terrorists (“freedom fighters”) into Israel who raped, tortured, and murdered some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, with victims ranging from 10-month-old babies to 80-plus-year-old men and women. And they kidnapped 200 more.

The depravity of the attacks was extraordinary, something along the lines of Dr. Mengele or the Rape of Nanking. We’re told, however, that while the events of Oct 7th were indeed despicable, the Israeli response has been disproportionate insofar as civilians have died. And as such, we’re also told that Israel needs to be stopped. And punished.

Solely for argument’s sake, let’s pretend that there is some moral equivalency here and agree that the terrorist attack by Hamas and the so-called disproportionate response from Israel are somehow equal.

Then the question becomes, how did we get to this place? In November, someone posted a TikTok video showcasing “Beautiful Gaza that you never saw before. Filmed just before Oct 7th, 2023.” The video shows bright Mediterranean colors, beautiful smiling faces, and everything from bustling stores to beach resorts to crowded restaurants and much more. It looks like a Madison Avenue marketing job seeking to induce the world to spend their next vacation in Gaza. (See also this tweet describing what soldiers saw: wealth and militarization.)

Nevertheless, we’ve repeatedly been told that Gaza is a modern concentration camp. That’s why, pro-Hamas factions insist, Hamas was forced to attack Israel in an attempt to break the Israeli chokehold on the Palestinians.

But, if indeed it is true that Israel was turning Gaza into a giant death camp, where was the rest of the world? Why weren’t they helping? Well, it turns out, the world was helping… A lot. And I mean a lot!

Over the decade-and-a-half since Hamas was elected, Gaza has received approximately $40 billion in support from around the world. That included $5 billion from the United Nations, almost $2 billion from Qatar, $20 billion from the Palestinian Authority (which itself receives billions annually from the world community), as well as over a billion dollars each from the US, Europe, and Iran.

The average works out to about $3 billion annually for a population of approximately 2.3 million people or about $1,300 per person living in Gaza. That $1,300 makes up a little less than half of the per capita income of the average citizen of Gaza. Other sources of income are primarily small businesses and agriculture.

We’re told that the citizens of Gaza live in poverty that Israel imposes upon them. The approximate $3,000 per capita income of the citizens of Gaza puts them at about 165 in the world rankings, ahead of 30 nations, most in Africa.

However, the reality is that, if Palestinians live in poverty, it’s the fault of Hamas. The leaders of Hamas have stolen at least $11 billion of the money that was supposed to go to the citizens of the Gaza Strip. They enjoy that fortune relaxing safely in their multimillion-dollar compounds in Qatar.

What’s more, and far more deadly, is that Hamas spends billions of dollars a year on things that have nothing to do with supporting Gazan citizens. Firstly, they have spent over $1 billion on a 350-mile-long network of tunnels under Gaza, a 141-square-mile strip of land. Every mile of those tunnels represents piping or concrete or steel that could have gone to building schools, shopping malls, hospitals or anything else that could have positively affected the lives of Gazans. But they didn’t.

Those tunnels had to be used for something, of course, and that something was and is preparing to attack and actually attacking Israel. Of course, to do that, they need weapons and Hamas has spent $5 billion on weapons over the last decade and a half. Everything from small arms to bombs to missiles.

Together, the total theft for the tunnels and the military spending equals $17 billion or 42% of the world’s contributions to Gaza over that 15-year period. But here’s the thing: As bad as it was that Hamas squandered at least 42% of Gaza’s donations, the reality is that the real damage isn’t the money. The real damage is that, instead of focusing the people on building a thriving, robust economy, Hamas instead focused on teaching children to hate Israel and launching tens of thousands of rockets into Israel.

So, Hamas pushed the hate narrative and launched missiles into Israel on a regular basis, actions that would, of course, prompt reprisals, which would, in turn, reinforce the hate. It was and is a never-ending cycle of victimization, hate, and poverty. Hamas, not the Gazans, profited from this. Yet, somehow, the money keeps coming... because most relevant actors don’t care about actual progress or peace.

Nonetheless, they say that hindsight is 20/20. That’s true, and so too is the reality that, had Hamas taken a different path and its leaders pushed for living in peace with Israel rather than cultivating a perpetual war footing, we wouldn’t be watching Gaza turned into a parking lot. But they didn’t, and we are.

This is simply another example of leaders using their citizens as cannon fodder so that they can accumulate fortune and power. When the dust settles, one can only hope the Gazan people look at the difference between their world and the luxury their leaders enjoy and decide to vote for a different path forward, one that doesn’t include perpetual war and tragedy. Sadly, I’m not holding my breath.

What We are Seeing in the Streets and on Campuses is not Fringe...

Like most Americans, I was of course shocked by the vicious inhumanity that the coward terrorist group Hamas carried out in Israel three weeks ago. Unfortunately, organized evil is neither unique nor surprising. The Nazis were equally evil across Europe, as were the Japanese at Nanking and Stalin with Ukraine and Mao with his own people. Sadly, evil happens, devils exist and thankfully they are rarely celebrated.

But rarely doesn’t mean never, and the most shocking thing was not the evil perpetrated, but rather the extraordinary support it has received. Not only is Hamas’s evil finding exuberant support in places like Iran and Qatar where you might expect it, but there were tens of thousands of Muslims – and their liberal comrades – in places like New York, Detroit, and Washington out en masse vocally demonstrating their support for these monsters.  And it wasn’t just on the streets, in places like Harvard and Yale and NYU you had students and professors and organizations blaming Israel for Hamas’s inhumanity.  Even as the full extent of the carnage emerged, days after the world was able to see the barbarity of what the savages carried out, the rallies in support not only didn’t diminish, they seemed to grow.  I couldn’t help wonder what that portends for our future. 

As an American I shook my head, stunned as I watched the scenes play out. I wondered how so many people, with smiles on their non hidden faces, could cheer such evil.  How supposedly intelligent people could put their names in support of such barbarism.  My reaction to a few posts on Twitter was “Send them to Gaza”. Not that it was going to happen, but it’s one thing to cheer the beheading of babies and raping of women from five thousand miles away, it’s another thing to do so when there’s a realistic possibility of the IDF ending you.

Of course that’s not going to happen, but then I wondered to myself, what is wrong with these people and why are they allowed to do this? Before the words even formed in my head I answered my own question:  Free speech… that extraordinary thing we have which most Muslim countries don’t.

All of that led my brain to a quote that is often falsely attributed to Winston Churchill:  “When Muslims are in the minority they are very concerned with minority rights, when they are in the majority there are no minority rights.” The British Bulldog may not have said that, but a look at a map of nations with Sharia law suggests the reality of it.

“But we don’t live in one of those countries” you might say, “these people are just fringe wackos.” Not so much. A 2015 poll of Muslims in America showed the following: “More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.” It also found “nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, ‘It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.’” and “Nearly one-fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the United States is justified in order to make shariah the law of the land in this country.” Anyone watching the thousands of protesters in Atlanta, Chicago, and Tampa could easily see that it’s likely the numbers listed above have only grown worse – from a free republic’s perspective.

Now, support for Sharia doesn’t necessarily equate to support for the actions Hamas took last week, but a Venn Diagram would likely demonstrate a great deal of overlap. 

But then you say, “Muslims are barely 1% of the population, this can’t be a threat.” Maybe, but think about this: trans people are far fewer yet today we find ourselves in the midst of national fights about bathrooms, sports and the “medical” butchering of children. Interestingly, most of the people who support the LBGTQXYZ123 agenda also support “Palestine”, where many would likely be thrown off the top of buildings were they to actually go there.

So the question becomes, how does a pluralistic, secular state that puts value on individual liberty deal with vile ideas that are repugnant to the basic elements of the culture and those who espouse them? Is the Constitution a suicide pact that allows those who object to its foundational principles to use the document’s freedoms to take power in order to eliminate it?

In his autobiography Malcom X talks about being invited to speak at Harvard and other prestigious universities, this at the time he was spewing much of his pre enlightened anti-white racist venom. He marvels that while he was invited to speak and said things that most of the audience disagreed with, they were always courteous and usually engaged in a healthy, respectful dialogue. Contrast that with today’s conservative speakers such as Heather MacDonald, Ann Coulter or Ben Shapiro who have had events cancelled or found themselves drowned out and threatened by leftists who equate speech they don’t like with violence. Not surprisingly, a recent poll showed that 66% of college students find this acceptable while another showed that 65% of Democrats supported censoring “misinformation”.

Now, maybe this vile and public championing of hate will be a tipping point where the Democrat coalition fractures as the various victim classes it has nurtured twist themselves into pretzels trying to be good team players. I doubt it, because Democrats in toto hate America, hate freedom and most of all hate Donald Trump & MAGA and put power above everything else.

Nonetheless, what we saw over the last week causes one to stand up and take notice about those who would use our freedoms to end them for everyone else. The adage of “One man, one vote, one time.” refers to the idea of someone or some group using the democratic norms of a nation to win an election then use that victory to eviscerate freedom. Think Hitler in Germany, Chavez in Venezuela, or Erdogan in Turkey. If we’ve learned anything since the reign of Barack Obama it’s that America is not immune to the danger of political parties weaponizing government for their own purposes. Given that the people cheering on the butchers of Hamas are a core part of the Democrat coalition, we should not be too quick to dismiss them as fringe… we could all live to regret it.  

Barack Obama And Iran - A Love Story: How Far Will One Man Go To Validate His Nobel Peace Prize? And What Price Will The World Pay?

Thirty two years ago Ronald Reagan introduced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to the world with this quote: “We maintain the peace through our strength; weakness only invites aggression.” Derided by the left as being scientifically impossible and having the potential of reigniting the arms race with the Soviets, “Star Wars” as they called it, became a sufficient worry for the Soviets that it actually hastened their demise.

Later that year in one of my Political Science classes we discussed peace treaties in general and those with the Soviets in particular. Given the history of failed treaties from Munich to Moscow, the professor asked a simple question: “If it’s someone’s goal to kill you, to destroy you, is it unreasonable to expect them to lie about it in the first place?” The obvious answer was no, it’s not unreasonable at all.

That apparently is not a concept Barack Obama has ever picked up on. Today when it seems that we are but days or weeks away from an agreement with the Iranians – not to be confused with a treaty –the obviousness of that reality is crystal clear. In seeking to garner support for his “agreement” with Tehran, President Obama said this: "Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and President Rouhani has said that Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon,"

As these words came off of the President’s lips, he had never sounded more like Neville Chamberlain, who on September 30, 1938 told the world: “This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine. Some of you, perhaps, have already heard what it contains but I would just like to read it to you: ' ... We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.” Less than one year later Hitler invaded Poland… not surprisingly, in concert with the Soviets.

Apparently, in Barack Obama’s world, we’re supposed to believe what the leaders of a terrorist state say… but only sometimes. When they endorse an EMP attack against the United States that would leave half the country in a blackout for months… not so much. When they suggest Israel, our strongest ally and the only liberal democracy in the region should be annihilated…nah.  When they boast about cheating on the last nuclear agreement they entered into with the West… obviously not.

Of course we all know that Iran has a checkered past… the taking of American hostages in 1979, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, their longtime financial support for Hezbollah and Hamas, the US embassy attacks in 1998 and of course their active support for those fighting the US in Iraq for much of the last decade. But maybe they’ve changed over the last few years. (Or maybe in the last few hours as apparently just yesterday Supreme leader Ali Khamenei called for “Death to America".) Maybe they’ve seen the error of their ways, washed their hands of their terrorist proxies and turned over a new leaf… No, not really. At least not according to the governments of Israel in 2012, Peru in 2013 and Uruguay just last month.

One has to ask, how is it even remotely possible that President Obama would consider an agreement with a country with more than three decades of duplicity and active support for terrorism against the United States and its allies? Why would he want to make life easier for a serial terrorist regime by pushing to drop sanctions against them?  How is it even possible he would consider an agreement that would facilitate the world’s most dangerous regime maintaining its nuclear capabilities and beginning a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile neighborhood? How is it possible that a Harvard trained lawyer would think that a fig leaf of an international “agreement” would somehow keep a duplicitous regime – that boasts of cheating on just such agreements – from actually developing a nuclear weapon?

Is his need to validate his unwarranted Nobel Peace Prize so strong that he will put the world at risk? Does he so feel the need for a foreign policy “victory” of some sort that he will put the security of the United States in peril? Is his narcissism so great and his belief in his ability to bend the world to his will so absolute that he need not bother to actually pay attention to reality? Is he a Manchurian plant?  Or has the marijuana and cocaine he did in school finally caught up with him and started to impair his brain function?

Whatever the explanation, Barack Obama’s willingness to ignore reality that virtually everyone else on the planet can see and plunge the nation and the world into a universe where a messianic regime preparing for the “end of times” is on the road to nuclear weapons is the ultimate betrayal of his office. If he goes ahead with his agreement with Iran he will not only be seen as the anti-Ronald Reagan, he will rightly go down in history as the 21st century’s Neville Chamberlain.  Hopefully the cost of Obama's folly won't be nearly as high as that paid for Chamberlain's appeasement.  That might really tarnish his Nobel Prize.

UPDATE:  Of all the options I think the Nobel Prize option has risen to the top.  It seems clear now what is happening.  The Nobel Prize is only the first step.  Now that Barack Obama has ruled the United States for six years with impunity and little resistance, he has his sights set on bigger fish. Barack Obama now seeks to be King of the World.  And how does he do that?  By becoming the Secretary General of the United Nations.  And how does he accomplish that?  By first making himself worthy of his Nobel Prize on the world stage.  While the Middle East may be imploding, he can stand above it by making peace with the world's biggest troublemaker.  His leadership is demonstrated by his willingness to go where no one before him would go.  Even to the extent of suggesting "Death to America" doesn't really mean "Death to America".

 And of course he wants to make sure the position is as powerful as it can be once he gets there.  Given that the UN is the ultimate international organization, giving away power to lesser international organizations makes the leader of that ultimate organization that much more powerful.  Thus explains his attempt to give away control of the Internet to an international organization.  Thus explains his desire to lead from behind in... numerous places.  Thus explains the hidden push to make the fed and the Treasury Department subject to international regulation. Finally, given the fact that the UN is a democratic organization in the sense that majority rules, it makes perfect sense that an obsequious Barack Obama would bend over backwards to cater to the developed world nations in the Middle East, Africa and South America.  If he curries favor with them then he has his majority and will likely be able to implement just about anything he wants.  Sure there is an American veto on the Security Council, but with President Pocahontas in office, what are the chances that their goals will differ?

 And so it goes.  Barack Obama is a man who has conquered the single most powerful nation in the history of the world and now the Megalomaniac in Chief has his sights set on the only bigger target on this planet... an organization that runs the world.  While they are not likely to give him the title "King of the World" that won't really matter. He will be nonetheless.  Given his willingness to ignore the Constitution here in the United States, what makes anyone think that any sort of limitations might stand up to the King when he makes his desires known.  And as his administration in the UN won't have a Tea Party to try and keep it in line, the possibilities are endless.