Hate Crimes II
Iron walls, ghetto life and who benefits from forever wars...
Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Poitou, France...
According to the Israelis, Hamas fighters are “human animals.” Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosar, called them “bloody, thirsty animals.” (English is not his first language.) And here’s Nikki Haley, candidate for the White House:
"This is not just an attack on Israel - this was an attack on America. Finish them, @Netanyahu."
How the attack by Hamas had anything to do with America has yet to be explained. Then again, the US frequently gets involved in foreign wars. The Great War 1914-1919 was no attack on America…nor did Vietnam or Iraq have any plans to attack America. Nor did Russia. Or China.
But how the hate gets around! Once again, it is the bad guys against the good guys. And if it is unclear to you which is which, you are not watching the news. Or, you are guilty of ‘moral ambivalence’…or treason. You’re expected to choose. Americans, with God whispering in their ears, know which hate crime they prefer. Marco Rubio:
I don't think there's any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic offramp with these savages …
You can't coexist. They have to be eradicated.
The Iron Wall
Is urging “eradication” a hate crime? A war crime? We only ask to marvel at how durable and adaptable ‘hate crimes’ are. At home, the idea is to hate on groups that don’t go along with the elite program. Abroad, bad guys provide a suitable enemy for the whole nation.
Descriptions of the ‘ghetto’ in Gaza are impressive. The wall, intended to keep the animals in, is fitted out with a large concrete base, including underground sensors to detect any tunneling. On top of the concrete is a 20-foot high metal fence – impenetrable – topped with razor wire, radar and other sensors. Here’s the Washington Post describing this wonder of prison technology, the Iron Wall:
The project was publicly announced in 2016 after Hamas used underground tunnels to attack Israeli forces in the 2014 war. It required more than 140,000 tons of iron and steel, according to Reuters, and the installation of hundreds of cameras, radars and sensors. Access near the fence on the Gaza side was limited to farmers on foot. On the Israeli side, observation towers and sand dunes were put in place to monitor threats and slow intruders.
In 2021, then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz said the barrier placed an “iron wall” between Hamas and southern Israel.
It was 80 years ago that Jews were confined in their own ‘autonomous areas’ (aka ghettos and concentration camps). They often had no hot water in the Warsaw ghetto; people were dirty, underfed. Their Nazi guards (many of whom were “Askaris”…Ukrainians!) said they were “subhuman.”
Life in the Ghetto
The National WWII Museum describes the construction in Warsaw:
Once completed, the Ghetto’s wall stood 10 feet tall. Barbed wire capped it. By April 1941, almost 450,000 Jews were incarcerated—and there is no more appropriate word—behind the enclosure. Passage in and out was carefully restricted. Leaving the Ghetto without permission was punishable by death, as was aiding anyone trying to escape it.
To use the everyday word “overcrowding” in this context is offensive. The Ghetto’s inhabitants dwelled in an urban space covering a mere 1.3 miles. In this tiny, ultra-cramped place, inhuman calculations informed Nazi food policy. Eventually, rations shrank to about 180 calories worth of food a day per person.
In both ghettos, Warsaw and Gaza, travel in and out was restricted – people as well as goods. Tunnels were dug to bypass controls. There are about 9,000 people per square kilometer in the center of Gaza. That is, however, only about 1/10th of the density in the Warsaw ghetto. Similarly, food and medicine distributions depended on the generosity of the hosts.
Both ghettos were set up to marginalize a victim group. Internally, governments want coherence and obedience. Dissident, or sometimes just different, groups are labeled, canceled, expelled or ‘eradicated.’ Everyone must march to the same drummer…all hearts must beat as one – to the tune set by the elite, of course.
In the words of Heinrich Himmler:
“Man must defend himself against bedbugs and rats, against vermin.”
“Containment to Eradication”
The American elite tries to isolate ‘racists,’ ‘sexists,’ ‘white supremacists,’ etc. The Israeli elite has its Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs to worry about.
The Nuremberg Laws of 1936 stripped Jews of their German citizenship. Auschwitz opened for business in 1939.
In Israel today, Jews from all over the world are free to immigrate and get citizenship. Arabs are not. Children of mixed Jewish-Arab couples do not have the right to immigrate to Israel either. "A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail,” said a Council of Rabbis. Israelis are not necessarily fond of Christians either. Recent news reports tell of Jews spitting at Christians in Jerusalem. And the 11th century Monastery of the Cross, built by crusaders, was sprayed with graffiti saying: Death to Christians.
The Jews of Warsaw fought back against the Germans, but only when it became apparent that the latter intended to exterminate them. They fought for a month…then, they were eradicated.
As for the Palestinians of Gaza, their fate is still undecided. There are many in Israel who say they should be “removed.” Ron Prosar, quoted above, said the policy had gone from “containment to eradication.” Whatever it is, the US war machine will be there to help.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Joel’s Note: It is a sad fact indeed that, as the old saying goes, when goods do not cross borders… soldiers will.
Whether that border stands between Russia and the Ukraine, Gaza and Israel or North and South Korea hardly matters. Citizens the world over are better off as a result of the free market exchange of goods and services. It is the elites – often on both sides of the conflict – that benefit from the unfettered exchange of weapons and terror...and almost always at their citizens’ expense.
War, as Randolph Bourne once observed, is the health of the state.
One only need look at the booming trade in the weapons and “defense” industries to see who’s in the money these days. The following chart, forwarded by Dan this morning, tracks the iShares US Aerospace and Defense ETF.
Nothing keeps a weapons manufacturer awake at night quite like the imminent outbreak of peace. As you can see on the chart, when the so-called “summer offensive” in the Ukraine petered out and public support for a protracted war in Europe waned, so too did the fates of arms dealers around the world begin to swoon, particularly those in the United States.
Then came the latest attacks in Israel and the promised response in Gaza. You can see the abrupt upturn in the “blade” of the hockey stick way over on the far right of the chart.
“Defense” stocks posted their best single day trading in years on Monday, following the weekend’s bloodshed. Shares of Raytheon rose 5% for the session… Lockheed Martin surged 9%... Northrop Grumman rocketed 11%…
Happy days for weapons manufacturers and the rich men north of Richmond, in other words... bad news for poor civilians, many of whom will pay the ultimate price, if they have not already.
The tone of Bill’s essay today suggests that the Israeli treatment of the Gaza inhabitants is similar to the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. The implied point is that the Jews are doing to Gaza what the Nazis did to the Jews in Warsaw. I disagree. The Nazi thugs barricaded all the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and kept them there until they were sufficiently pacified and could be easily herded into rail cars for shipment into the killing camps. The Palestinians that live in Gaza that are not know Hamas members live somewhat-normal lives without conflict, without threats to their existence, and with no ultimate fate of dying in a gas chamber. They were not indiscriminately attacked and murdered if they left the ghetto.
The Gaza population is not the the stated enemy of the Jews. Hamas, which hides within the Gaza population, are the stated enemy of Jews. They hide amid the Gaza residences, and routinely use the Gaza population as shields against Israeli responses to aggression. Why the Gaza residents tolerate this exposure to peril is partially due to tolerance to the Hamas perspective and probably because they do not have the capability to eradicate the Hamas vermin from their midst.
However, whatever position one takes on who is more right in the Israeli-Hamas , there can be NO excuse or acceptance of the brutality of the Hamas raid on Israeli citizens. I am disappointed that Bill failed to make any statement on the brutality and murder we have seen in the news this past few days. At the same time, the Israeli military response will be brutal and well exploited by the left-wing media. I don’t believe the Israeli military will be beheading anyone, especially babies. They won’t be raping women and then murdering them and sending the videos of their crimes to the victims’ families. The Israeli military won’t be tying up civilians and setting them on fire. They won’t be taking hostages from the non-Hamas citizenry and using them as ransom for whatever reason. Bill, it would have been nice if you would have mentioned some part of this commentary while seemingly speaking against the Israelis.
It is inconceivable to me that Mr. Bonner compares the walls to keep Jews from escaping concentration camps where they were starved, frozen and left to die, to walls surrounding Gaza, where Israel provided electricity, food, water, and housing to assist an independent area outside their own country, an area which for over 20 years has proven to all that they are incapable of providing their own infrastructure. Gaza walls were created to protect the Jewish population from terrorist attacks to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth, and which were promised by Hamas daily. I am truly disgusted by the comparisons. And for your information, as opposed to what your column claims, Arabs ARE permitted to have not only Israeli citizenship but also voting rights. Furthermore, all people born to Jewish women are automatically given the rights to citizenship REGARDLESS of who the father is, including Arab fathers. Only those descended from non-Jewish mothers (ie those with Jewish fathers) are denied automatic citizenship. This is the definition of what a Jew is, under Jewish law, as written in the Bible, if you should ever care to read it. Your column is filled with flawed declarations and fuels the fire of hatred.
No Arab country will permit the entry of Gaza citizens- why is this? Could it be that the Arabs want to maintain a worldwide illusion that Palestinians are victims? Meanwhile Hamas places rockets around Gaza schools and hospitals, thus ensuring that citizens are killed if the rockets are taken out, thereby providing further fodder for victimhood. They couldn’t care less about their own citizens.
While I too have serious questions as to why Israeli security had been completely turned off for over 8 hours (I too question what the WEF “elites” are up to) and whether this bears any resemblance to the lack of government attention to the Lahaina fires, and why Israel forced a major poisoning of the Jewish population with their vax mandates and electronic “green” cards (which unvaxxed citizens have paid thousands of $ to get placed in their phones), and although I am wondering what the hell is going on in this world, I am discontinuing my subscription to this newsletter. I cannot read this hateful, flaw-filled pap any more.