Yom Shnee
Monday
8 Elul 5781
August 16 2021
Photos of the Night
One of several arson fires consuming forests around Jerusalem.
And another:
Another ridge consumed by fire.
According to this morning’s update from the Fire and Rescue unit of the Jerusalem District, the fire has scorched about 17,000 dunams (4,200 acres) and is still burning in five areas: Tzova-Ksalon, Beit Meir-Shoresh Shoeva, Eitanim-Givat, Ye’arim-Tzova, and Har Eitan-Steph.
70 firefighting teams are now on the ground trying to extinguish the fires.
The Quote of the Day
“Are the Palestinian rioters in Beta aware of what they are doing? Raise the Nazi flag and support Hitler? I doubt these bastards know the degree of Hitler’s crimes–which they glorify. Shame on them. This does not reflect the values of Palestinian society.”
IDF Spokesman in Arabic, Lt. Col. Avichai Adrei
What the colonel was referring to was this:
A giant Magen David with a Nazi swastika in the middle burning two nights ago in Beta.
Well, the colonel was right about one item: the rioters who erected and burned this are bastards. However we doubt that they do not know who Hitler was and what he did, and we certainly doubt that this does not represent the values of Palestinian society.
The News on the Israeli Street
Palestinian terror overnight . . .
A major firefight took place in Jenin where our undercover forces (Yamam and the Border Police) attempted to arrest a wanted terrorist. In the battle that ensued, 4 (or 5 depending on the report) terrorists were killed. There were no casualties among our forces.
Migdal Oz, Luban A-Sharqiya, Al-Aruv, the Gush Etzion-Hevron Road, Beit Omer, Huwara, Road 446, Karmi Tzur, near Yitzhar, and Nokdim: these were 10 places among many in Judea and Samaria where Israelis were attacked with Molotovs and “rocks” yesterday.
The daily Corona update . . .
4,176 more Israelis were confirmed on Friday and Saturday as having Corona bringing to 47,893 active cases in the country.
939,360 Israelis have tested positive since the pandemic began last year.
525 Israelis are in serious condition with another 91 in critical condition on ventilators.
6,668 Israelis have died of the virus an increase of 36 since yesterday.
There is some hope that the 3rd dose is beginning to take effect as the number of seriously and critically ill may have stabilized (we seriously doubt this). However, the number of people who died yesterday is a shocking reminder of the virulence of Corona.
TODAY’S BLOG:
Connecting The Dots: Afghanistan, Vietnam, South Lebanon?
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Let your humble servant state at the outset that we all knew what would happen when American forces left Afghanistan. We knew it last week, last month, last year, and even 20 years ago.
We all knew that any attempt at rebuilding Afghanistan in a Western image was doomed to failure. We knew that the Taliban mentality is as embedded in the country as are the barren rocks of Tora Bora.
And many of us said it.
We said that there should have been a surgical strike lasting 1-3 months after 9/11, and then American forces should have gotten out.
The absolute tragedy of Afghanistan from my point of view is that most of the 2,448 American soldiers, 3,846 American “contractors”, and 1,144 Allied service members died in the Afghanistan for nothing more than a liberal delusion.
Helping Afghanis create a liberal Afghanistan where everyone, especially women, has equal rights and opportunities was a noble idea, but not one that Americans or anyone else (except Afghanis perhaps) should have been dying for.
As for the U.S. military’s inglorious departure, it is just tuck tail and run in the same way that the U.S. left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, and Israel left south Lebanon on May 24, 2000.
President Biden who ludicrously claimed barely a week ago that Afghanistan would not fall to the Taliban has gone into media hiding.
Secretary of State Blinken’s pronouncement this morning that the chaotic scenes from Kabul this morning are “nothing like” what happened in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War should be forever filed among the most idiotically absurd statements ever uttered by an American official.
We can only “doubtfully” hope that the clueless Biden Administration has made provision to protect all the local Afghanis who worked for the U.S. during its 20 year nightmare there.
There are those arguing that America’s departure opens the door to the wholesale export of drugs from Afghanistan, and that it shows that America’s word can never be trusted, and and and . . .
All of that may be true, but leaving Afghanistan is something that should have been done long ago.
Despite the fact that the chaotic American withdrawal leaves America looking weaker than ever, leaving now is the right thing to do for two reasons.
First, with an incompetent Biden Administration supposedly calling the shots, the situation would only get much worse resulting in more American deaths.
Second, Afghanistan poses no existential threat to the United States.
Similarly, the U.S. leaving Vietnam was the right thing to do even if the cut and run was atrocious. With 58,000 brave American soldiers dead for a dubious cause at best, the thought of even one more dying was unconscionable.
Moreover, the Communists in Vietnam did not pose an existential threat to the United States.
Israel’s departure from south Lebanon was both the same and different as those of America from Vietnam and Afghanistan.
On the one hand, the thought of another IDF soldier dying in the south Lebanon buffer zone was intolerable.
However, as we all know, another war with Lebanon took place within six years and claimed the lives of more Israeli soldiers as Iranian proxy Hezbollah swiftly moved into the vacuum and quickly began to build up a missile arsenal that poses an existential threat to Israel.
In sum, the American departures from Vietnam and Afghanistan were the right actions to take “albethey” extremely belated. Whether the Israeli departure from south Lebanon was the right action to take remains an open question.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.