Daniel J. Boorstin's Prescient Commentary in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America"

Daniel J. Boorstin's 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America is, in the words of the author, "about our arts of self-deception, how we hide reality from ourselves. One need not be a doctor to know he is sick, nor a shoemaker to feel the shoe pinch. I do not know what 'reality' really is. But somehow I do know an illusion when I see one" (p. iii, The Image).

Boorstin explains how society engages in deception and self-deception (pp. 3-4):

In this book I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. I recount historical forces which have given us this unprecedented opportunity to deceive ourselves and to befog our experience...

We want and believe these illusions because we suffer from extravagant expectations...

We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for "excellence," to be made literate by appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to "a church of our choice" and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and be God.

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

Boorstin's commentary is an insightful analysis of the human tendency to always want more, combined with the human capacity--and hunger--for self-deception. The rapid technological developments of the past 64 years since Boorstin's book was published--particularly in terms of computing power and communication--have significantly augmented both tendencies: a child growing up today expects to be continuously entertained, and in general expects instant gratification, because computers, cellphones, and the internet create the illusion that anything and everything that we want can and should be immediately accessible. 

Boorstin notes that the traditional expectation of news reporters was that they would report on significant events that happened; if nothing significant happened, "He could not be expected to report what did not exist" (p. 8). Boorstin observes that in the twentieth century, the expectation of what a news reporter should do shifted dramatically: "If he cannot find a story, then he must make one--by the questions he asks of public figures, by the surprising human interest he unfolds from some commonplace event, or by 'the news behind the news'" (p. 8). Boorstin adds, "Demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabricated to make up for the world's deficiency" (p. 9). Boorstin calls these fabrications "pseudo-events," a neologism based on the Greek word "pseudo," which means false. 

The incessant attempt to create news and excitement where no news and no excitement exists can be observed in the ridiculous questions asked by many reporters at basketball games, at the World Chess Championship, and at almost any press conference pertaining to politics or public affairs.

Boorstin lists four characteristics of a pseudo-event (p. 11):

1) It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.

2) It is planted primarily (but not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced...The question "Is it real?" is less important than, "Is it newsworthy?"

3) Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous...

4) Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy...

Regarding the fourth characteristic, Boorstin cites an example provided by Edward L. Bernays in Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923). Bernays describes a situation in which the owners of a hotel seek to increase their hotel's prestige and boost its business, but instead of making tangible improvements to the hotel's operations they hire a public relations firm to stage a pseudo-event: a celebration of the hotel's 30th anniversary. The purpose of this pseudo-event is to create the illusion that this hotel is prestigious.

Boorstin explains how the focus of news coverage shifted from reporting about events to creating pseudo-events. He writes about this in the context of the rapid evolution of newspapers, radio, and television in the 20th century, but the process he describes can also be observed in modern media outlets and in the ever expanding array of social media outlets in the 21st century (p. 14):

Then came round-the-clock media. The news gap soon became so narrow that in order to have additional "news" for each new edition or each new broadcast it was necessary to plan in advance the stages by which any available news would be unveiled...In order to justify the numerous editions, it was increasingly necessary that the news constantly change or at least seem to change...News gathering turned into news making.

Boorstin singles out President Franklin Roosevelt as "the first modern master" (p. 20) of using media outlets to create pseudo-events suiting his purposes, and Boorstin notes that Senator Joseph McCarthy built his career almost entirely on pseudo-events; for example, McCarthy would hold a morning press conference just to say that he planned to make a big announcement at his afternoon press conference, but then if he had nothing to announce he would state at his afternoon press conference that he did not yet have all of the documents needed for his announcement. In this way, he kept his name in the news cycle, as the media outlets would breathlessly report about each press conference even if those press conferences were pseudo-events devoid of any news pertaining to an actual event.

Boorstin describes how television coverage of General General MacArthur's "triumphal" journey around the country in 1951 provided a distorted impression of how crowds reacted (pp. 26-28); in this way, media outlets shape public opinion and sentiment instead of reporting about it. Referring to how some reporters inflame violence so that they have something to broadcast and then defend their right to engage in such dishonest tactics based on "freedom of the press," Boorstin comments that freedom of the press "is often a euphemism for the prerogative of reporters to produce their synthetic commodity" (p. 29).

Boorstin distinguishes pseudo-events from propaganda: "While a pseudo-event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood. Pseudo-events thrive on our honest desire to be informed, to 'have all the facts,' and even to have more facts than there really are. But propaganda feeds on our willingness to be inflamed" (p. 34). However, according to those definitions the coverage of General MacArthur described above should be classified as propaganda, not a pseudo-event. Regarding the current practices of both legacy media outlets and social media influencers, the line separating pseudo-events from propaganda--if it ever existed--is blurred beyond recognition; today's media outlets and social media platforms operate on a non-stop, 24 hour cycle during which they regularly create pseudo-events, and it is apparent that these pseudo-events are produced not just to inform (or to feed the audience's appetite to be informed) but also to inflame in a way that matches what Boorstin deems to be propaganda: TV's "debate shows" are not about a genuine exchange of ideas for the purpose of informing the audience but rather about a producer screaming "Conflict!" in the earphones of the panelists to goad them to argue, which inevitably creates more heat than light. A more dangerous and pernicious example of using video footage to inflame viewers' passions is staging incidents and then filming those incidents to give a false impression of what is really happening, a technique that is often used in Israel to both denigrate Israelis and to create a false narrative of "Palestinian victimhood"; the disingenuous techniques used to film the movie "No Other Land" are examples of inflammatory propaganda.

The emerging dominance of social media outlets and streaming over broadcast television and print media has accelerated the process of creating both pseudo-events and propaganda at the expense of accurately reporting facts and news. Both pseudo-events and propaganda involve crafting a narrative that often diverges from the facts. I wrote about Narratives Versus Reality in the pro basketball context:

Narratives often overshadow reality regarding player evaluations. During Kobe Bryant's career, an evergreen narrative was when/if Bryant would evolve to become a team player. One such article declared "Kobe Bryant has grown into a consummate team player." The writer quoted Larry Brown, who called Bryant "a model" of what an NBA player should be, and in that same article one of Bryant's teammates said of Bryant, "He doesn't make his game a personal game anymore. You don't see him doing the things on the floor that used to get him in trouble and get us in trouble." You might assume that the article is from the 2008-2010 time frame, when Bryant led the Lakers to three straight Finals appearances and back to back titles--but the article is from 2000, prior to Bryant winning three championships alongside Shaquille O'Neal.

Once the media labels a player, team, or situation a certain way, that label often sticks, and then becomes the template for future stories. The media labeled Bryant a bad teammate early in his career, and that narrative stuck. Then, media members could choose the "Bryant is now becoming a good teammate" story template or they could stick with the "Bryant has never been/will never be a good teammate" story template. Far too many Bryant stories blindly followed one of those templates, without digging deeper to find the truth.

As Fred Carter told me for one of the first stories that I wrote about Bryant, "For some people perception is reality. The echoed word becomes the accepted word. It becomes the choice phrase. But he won titles and he does get the assists. He does get steals and he does get blocks. He's not a guy who just plays on the offensive end. What happens is that people have the tendency to echo the words of everyone else. It's unfortunate."

The larger point that extends beyond the pro basketball context is that media members often create narratives supporting a particular agenda that they are promoting. The narrative supersedes facts and supplants truth.

Such narratives are often created from a pseudo-event and then disseminated by other pseudo-events. A quintessential example of a pseudo-event is a debate between Presidential candidates. Boorstin's description of the series of "Great Debates" between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 is applicable to such debates in general: "The drama of the situation was mostly specious, or at least had an extremely ambiguous relevance to the main (but forgotten) issue: which participant was better qualified for the Presidency. Of course, a man's ability, while standing under klieg lights, without notes, to answer in two and a half minutes a question kept secret until that moment had only the most dubious relevance--if any at all--to his real qualifications to make deliberate Presidential decisions after being instructed by a corps of advisors" (p. 42). Each Presidential debate pseudo-event is inevitably followed by a host of pseduo-events with various commentators debating and discussing how well or how poorly each Presidential candidate performed--and each political party uses these subsequent pseudo-events to compose a narrative that suits its goals and purposes.

Boorstin asserts that until recent times fame and greatness tended to be synonymous: the path to fame was to achieve greatness. The proliferation of media outlets--and, within the past 20 years or so, social media platforms--has not only increased the number of pseudo-events that receive significant coverage but it has also made it possible to become famous simply for being famous without accomplishing anything great. Boorstin explains (emphasis in the original), "The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness...He is neither good nor bad, great nor petty. He is the human pseudo-event" (p. 57). Our society has become oversaturated with such human pseudo-events, and the attention and admiration directed to these people is to the detriment of people and events of actual significance and meaning; instead of living lives of purpose and service, media outlets influence us to focus our attention and energy on the superficial and the banal while pretending that celebrities and pseudo-events are imbued with meaning and relevance, when in fact the opposite is true.

Shifting gears to a different but related topic, Boorstin distinguishes travel from tourism. He notes that in old English the word travel had the same meaning as travail (trouble, work, or torment): "To journey--to 'travail,' or (later) to travel--then was to do something laborious or troublesome. The traveler was an active man at work" (p. 85). In contrast, a tourist--first hyphenated as tour-ist--is defined in one dictionary as "a person who makes a tour, especially for pleasure," and the word was "derived by back-formation from the Latin tornus, which in turn came from the Greek word for a tool describing a circle. The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker" (p. 85). Boorstin notes that a traveler actively seeks adventure, while a tourist passively expects things to happen, and he adds, "Thus foreign travel ceased to be an activity--an experience, an undertaking--and instead became a commodity" (p. 85). 

A traveler seeks to learn about and experience native culture, while a tourist expects to be entertained with something that matches preconceived notions about that culture. Boorstin concludes, "Here again, the pseudo-event overshadows the spontaneous...We go more and more where we expect to go. We get money-back guarantees that we will see what we expect to see. Anyway, we go more and more, not to see at all, but only to take pictures...Whether we seek models of greatness, or experience elsewhere on the earth, we look into a mirror instead of out a window, and we see only ourselves" (p. 117).

Adapting, translating, and mass producing works of art is a modern phenomenon. Boorstin explains, "The 'original' had a priceless and ineffable uniqueness...Approximation was never enough...The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Graphic Revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have done much to change this. If art and literature were to be made accessible to all, they had to be made intelligible (and inoffensive) to all. Popularity was then often bought at the cost of the integrity of the original work. With the rise of liberalism came the rise of the vernacular languages and literatures. Now the common people could read great works in their own market-place English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian, instead of having to know the learned languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin in which classical authors had written" (pp. 119-120).

Much as pseudo-events have replaced events, what one might call "pseudo-art" has replaced art, as great works are edited, emended, and expurgated to become better suited for mass consumption: "Popularity became confused with universality. If the Bible was truly an inspired Great Book, it must have something to say to everyone; by a quaint reversal, it then became axiomatic that anyone could understand the Bible. In the twentieth century, our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa" (pp. 121-122). 

Boorstin adds, "The same technological advances which account for modern journalism and for the flood of political pseudo-events also account for the flood of magazines and books" (p. 131). Now, the flood of political pseudo-events is amplified by the flood of information--and misinformation--pouring from social media outlets 24 hours a day seven days a week. 

Boorstin is particularly critical regarding the increasing prevalence of digests and abridgements: "There is no better clue than the rise of The Reader's Digest to the dissolution of forms and to the increasing secondhandness of our experience in twentieth century America. This, the most popular magazine in the United States, has offered itself not as an 'original,' but as a digest. The shadow outsells the substance. Abridging and digesting is no longer a device to lead the reader to an original which will give him what he really wants. The digest itself is what he wants. The shadow has become the substance" (p. 133).

What happened next set the stage for the deceptive way that modern media outlets operate (p. 135):

Then, by the inexorable law of pseudo-events, The Reader's Digest began to spawn other pseudo-events. [Founder De Witt] Wallace himself later described this innovation as "an inevitable development, perhaps the most important in the Digest's history." Like all great inventions, the idea was beautifully simple. It was merely to "plant" a full-length article (prepared under Reader's Digest direction) in some other magazine, so it could afterwards be digested in The Reader's Digest. The editors of the Digest would conceive a two-page piece for their own magazine. Instead of directly writing the two-page article themselves, they would commission an author to prepare on this topic a "full-length" article--say, five times the length of the predestined Digest abridgment. This proposed article--sometimes even before it was written--was then accepted by some other magazine, which would print it among its regular contents. The Digest paid for the whole process, including the full-length original. Here, of course, was a perfect example of a literary pseudo-event.

It did not take long before more than half of The Reader's Digest's content was not abridged versions of original content that had been published elsewhere--the purported purpose for The Reader's Digest's existence--but instead content that had been produced specifically to appear in The Reader's Digest, foreshadowing the way that mass media content is deceptively produced now. This kind of practice--creating a "pseudo-event" and then treating it as an important news event--saturates not just social media platforms but also the traditional mainstream media outlets. Content is not just king, but slave master, and platforms feel compelled to generate (or invent) content to spike ratings and encourage advertisers to spend money. 

Another method for transforming the high art of literature to low art more suitable for mass consumption is adapting a book into a movie. As movies became a prevalent form of entertainment, the "star system" emerged, and Boorstin's biting commentary about the "star system" is relevant today not only for movies but also for social media's galaxy of "stars" (p. 154):

"Stars" were the celebrities of the entertainment world. Like other celebrities, they were to be distinguished by their well-knownness more than by any other quality. In them, as in other celebrities, fame and notoriety were thoroughly confused. Their hallmark was simply and primarily their prominence in popular consciousness, and it made very little difference how this publicity was secured.

In the "star system," the intrinsic artistic merit of a book or movie is irrelevant; what matters is how well known a book or movie is: "A best seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well" (p. 164). Moreover, "To speak of a best seller--to use the superlative to apply not to one item but to a score of items--is, of course, a logical contradiction...The factual basis for calling any book a best seller is not so much a statistic as an amalgam including a small ingredient of fact along with much larger ingredients of hope, intention, frustration, ballyhoo, and pure hokum" (p. 165).

Boorstin quotes James D. Hart to explain why best selling books are unlikely to have enduring value (p. 167):

The book that time judges to be great is occasionally also the book popular in its own period; but, by and large, the longer-lived work reflects the demands of the moment only in the most general sense. Usually the book that is popular pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past. Books of that sort generally are unreadable for succeeding ages. 

That paragraph describes much of the written material that is published today not just in books, but also in magazines, and online articles. Writers who are famous for being famous are producing "content" of low quality that succeeding generations will find not just unreadable but also uninteresting.

The "star system" is evident not just in the entertainment world but in many other spheres, including politics: "National politics (with the full paraphernalia of make-up, rehearsals, and klieg lights) has adopted the star system which dominates it more with every election" (p. 168). Partisan advocates for a particular political party will be certain that Boorstin's prophesy only applies to the political party that they oppose, but in fact Boorstin predicted the overall coarsening of our political discourse and the triumph of style over substance in our political system, not the rise or fall of a particular political party.  

Boorstin notes a significant consequence of prioritizing style over substance (p. 182):

...we have emptied the word "value." We have moved away from a traditional meaning found in older dictionaries: "Value...Ethics. That which is worthy of esteem for its own sake; that which has intrinsic worth." Toward a newer and more American meaning: "Value...pl. in sociology, acts, customs, institutions, etc. regarded in a particular, especially favorable, way by a people, ethnic group, etc." Our new social scientists speak of "values" all the time. By it they mean the peculiar standards which a society has made for itself. By it they reassure us that we need not worry over the dissolution of ideals, since all ideals are obsolete. The most "civilized" peoples, in fact, are those who know they are guided by values of their own making.

A society based on ideals and values is built on solid bedrock; a society based on images and pseudo-events is built on shifting sands.

Boorstin suggests that there has been a societal shift "from an emphasis on 'truth' to an emphasis on 'credibility'" (p. 212). He adds, "What seems important is not truth but verisimilitude...Finding a fact is easy; making a fact 'believed' is slightly more difficult" (id.). We see this often in agenda-driven media coverage that focuses not on truth and not on facts, but on the preferred narratives of various media outlets: they want their consumers to believe specific things--and their consumers are often inclined to want to believe those things as well--so they present information not grounded in facts but made to seem credible: it does not matter to these media outlets if an event happened the way that they portrayed it happening but rather that their audience finds the portrayal to be credible and aligned with their opinions/biases.  

It is easy to recognize that Boorstin's analysis of pseudo-events is even more relevant now than it was in the 1960s, but it should not be surprising that many people only see part of the picture--the part that reflects favorably on their beliefs and their preferred narratives; if you think that Boorstin's book is only about the political party, narratives, and media outlets that you do not like then you have missed the book's point. We are being bombarded by delusions and illusions from multiple directions; the focus of contemporary mass communication systems is not to broadcast truth or spread knowledge, but to inflame emotions in a way that attracts attention and generates revenue.

Embrace of Socialism Highlights The Difference Between Being Educated and Being Informed

There is a significant difference between being educated and being informed. To become educated, one merely has to fulfill the requirements of a specific degree-granting institution; upon doing so, one receives a doctoral degree--but it is a dangerous fallacy to confuse being educated with being informed, because education far too often involves being indoctrinated with false narratives. In contrast, being informed means thinking with an open mind, consuming information from objective sources while considering information from subjective sources with skepticism, and then synthesizing the acquired information to base opinions on facts and logic.

Our politics, our schools, and our media outlets have far too many educated people and far too few informed people. Educated people often spew ideas that Vladimir Nabokov would correctly dismiss as "poshlost." One such idea is that socialism is good. 

In an August 6, 2025 Wall Street Journal Op-Ed titled "The Scholar Who Saw Zohran Mamdani Coming in 2003," Daniel Shuchman noted that over 20 years ago Alan Charles Kors foretold the circumstances under which socialist ideas could take sway in the West:

Mr. Kors lamented that socialism has yet to be held accountable for the scale of its crimes: "No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than socialism with power." The failure to acknowledge and come to terms with this reality in the West, he believed, eventually would allow socialism to resuscitate itself, even with millions of skeletons hiding in plain view.

Zohran Mamdani, the New York Democratic mayoral nominee, has proposed government-run grocery stores as a hallmark of his campaign. This is a perplexing platform because, as Mr. Kors reminded us in his paper, socialism's "collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering" and the starvation of millions...

As Mr. Kors noted, wherever socialism was implemented, "its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty."

It is demonstrably false that Mamdani is promoting some form of "democratic socialism" that can be distinguished from the socialism that failed in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere. The socialism that failed in those countries advertised itself as "democratic socialism" before showing its fangs and true nature after its leaders had full control of the power levers. Socialism starts with a utopian dream and ends with a dystopian nightmare; informed people understand this, but educated people often have been indoctrinated to believe in the dream while ignoring the inevitable nightmare.

As I noted in a 2021 article, former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov--who had firsthand experience with socialist tyranny while living in the former Soviet Union--laments the Western embrace of socialism. The contrast between how an informed person like Kasparov speaks and how educated Leftists speak is profound:

Asked to expound upon the difference between America and the Soviet Union, Kasparov begins by stating, "The problem with Americans is you take things for granted. You keep forgetting the wise words of Ronald Reagan...that freedom is a fragile thing that is never more than one generation away from extinction." Kasparov adds that when he lived under Soviet tyranny, "We knew America had problems. Again, there is no perfection in this world! Compare this country to any other place on the planet and you will not find a place that offers more opportunities for people of all races, genders. That is why people like me are getting so concerned when self-criticism turns into self-flagellation." He rightly calls it "nonsense" to assert that America was built on evil, and he adds, "I know that a lot of people may feel uncomfortable with what I am saying, but I speak on behalf of millions and millions and millions of people from Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, other places who look at America and they are confused and scared and don't understand why this great power is in retreat." 

America is not evil, and it is not courageous or "speaking one's truth" (what a vacuous phrase that is!) to call America evil. America is not perfect, but America is--in the timeless words of Abraham Lincoln--"The last, best hope of Earth." It is courageous to speak that truth in a time and place where speaking truth can get you canceled. I applaud Garry Kasparov, and I hope that his message plays a role in helping to reverse the deplorable trend of American self-flagellation that has become a badge of pride to some but is in fact a badge of ignorance and shame.

Kasparov concludes by noting that the free world is at war with tyrannical forces and regimes, whether or not we understand and accept that challenge--and it is a fight to the death. He wisely notes that America did not end the war in Afghanistan and we certainly did not win the war; we retreated. We must be eternally vigilant to build a better world not only for ourselves but for our children.

The New York mayoral campaign is not just of local significance. New York City is the largest city in our country, and is a symbol of what our country represents (or should represent): a melting pot of different ethnic groups and religious groups living side by side while enjoying the unparalleled freedoms and opportunities that exist only in America. Free countries like America build fences to keep out illegal immigrants, while tyrannical countries build fences to prevent people from leaving. It would be an unspeakable tragedy if New York City became a bridgehead for implementing the socialist nightmare on our shores. 

It may seem overwhelming to confront the hordes of educated people who promote socialism and the "useful idiots" who blindly follow them, but two years ago in the wake of Hamas' mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel--and the outpouring of "progressive" support for Hamas--I outlined the methods for combating the self-proclaimed "progressives":

1) Don't vote for self-proclaimed "progressives." We need to vote the self-proclaimed "Squad" and all of their allies out of Congress (and out of any other elected offices) as soon as possible.

2) Don't contribute money, time, or any other support to organizations that are founded on Marxist, anti-democratic principles. If you do a little research, it is not difficult to identify these organizations, and it is also helpful to understand that most of them use the same catchphrases/terminology that provide great warning signs of their true nature/goals.

3) Fight against the infiltration of pseudo-intellectual nonsense into the education system. No reasonable person is saying that slavery should not be taught about in the schools, or that racism should not be discussed--but the notion that entire groups of people can be classified as oppressed or oppressors (or racists or antiracists) should be consigned to the dustbin of discredited concepts. 

4) If you went to college, urge your alma mater to sign up with Universities United Against Terrorism. My undergrad alma mater Excelsior University signed up after I contacted the university president; shamefully, my law school alma mater University of Dayton has not signed up. Make it clear to colleges, corporations, and charities that you will redirect your contributions away from institutions that lack the moral clarity/courage to condemn Hamas and toward institutions that display moral clarity and courage. 

The self-proclaimed "progressives" are defiant, loud, and strident, but they have not taken over society--yet. It is our duty to make sure that they never do while also being aware that our society is not perfect and while working toward improving our society in the areas where it falls short of its foundational ideals.

The Ceasefire is a Perverse Farce: Israel Must Win This War Decisively, or Israel and the West are in Grave Danger

In the latest of a series of disgusting Hamas propaganda events presented in conjunction with the International Red Cross, Hamas transferred four caskets to Israel today. The caskets purportedly contained Ariel Bibas (who was four years old when terrorists murdered him in Gaza), his brother Kfir Bibas (who was 10 months old when terrorists murdered him in Gaza), the children's mother Shiri, and Oded Lifshitz (a grandfather who was 84 years old when terrorists murdered him in Gaza). It should be emphasized that forensic examinations proved that the Bibas children were murdered in captivity, and did not die in an airstrike, contrary to the propaganda that Hamas has spewed for over a year and that Hamas boldly put on the banner that they proudly displayed at today's propaganda event. Forensic investigators also determined that the body that was supposed to be Shiri is in fact not Shiri, and does not match the identifying characteristics of any of the hostages. 

Congratulations, President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu--you just traded terrorists to Hamas in exchange for a random dead body. President Trump keeps talking about "unleashing hell" on Hamas, but all that has been unleashed so far is humiliation on Israel for agreeing to this dangerous foolishness, and humiliation on the United States for brokering this deal.  

Congratulations, "Free Palestine" and "From the River to the Sea!" advocates--you are the proud supporters of child-killing terrorists who bring their own children to celebrate the deaths of Jewish children, and who pledge to kill more Jewish children in the future.

This flagrant (and ghoulish) violation of the ceasefire's terms should be met by an immediate, appropriate Israeli military response. This ceasefire is doomed to be a disaster for Israel (and the rest of the West), as were previous lopsided exchanges of murderers for hostages/dead bodies. 

In Israel Must Not Repeat the Mistake of Releasing Terrorists, I urged Israel to not agree to a ceasefire and to not release a single terrorist:

In the wake of Hamas's October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack, I explained the Islamic concepts of Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb, and I defined what victory must look like for Israel: 

1) Hamas is eliminated as a functioning terrorist, military, and political entity.

2) Hamas' state sponsors--including but perhaps not limited to Iran and Qatar--must pay reparations for the killed, for the injured, and for the destruction of property.

3) All hostages held by Hamas must be released immediately and unconditionally.

Israel has fought Hamas--and Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis--for over a year and has failed to accomplish any of the above goals while losing over 800 soldiers in combat. It is not enough to kill a few top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders and to kill or capture several thousand foot soldiers, because doing so did not eliminate Hamas as a functioning entity, did not punish Hamas' state sponsors, and did not secure the unconditional release of all hostages.

Israel has a pathetic history of turning not quite victory into total defeat. In 2011, Netanyahu signed off on a deal with Hamas, releasing over 1000 terrorists in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas. One of those released terrorists was Yahya Sinwar, the architect of Hamas's October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack during which Hamas killed more than 1200 people and took more than 250 hostages. One lesson that Sinwar learned while he was incarcerated in Israel is that Israel will pay almost any price in exchange for hostages, and that is a major reason that the October 7, 2023 attack included plans to take hostages.

While we mourn the Bibas children, Lifshitz, and all of the other murdered hostages, we should not forget the Simon Tov family and the many other men, women, and children who were massacred on October 7, 2023. Their blood cries out to us; we owe it to them, and to potential future victims of Islamist bloodlust, to win this war as decisively and quickly as possible.

I previously discussed how "postmodern" concepts have wrecked Israel's military, and I offered a battle plan for the future:

Israel should abandon postmodern military doctrines that have repeatedly failed to yield desired results, and embark on a better, bolder path:

1) Scrap all of the "precision-guided munitions" and revert to using good old-fashioned "dumb" bombs. Israel's enemies would then directly pay the heavy price of attacking Israel, and they would know that Jewish blood is no longer cheap.

2) Stop bragging about military successes (real and imagined). Move in silence. Don't let the enemy know what to expect, and don't tell the enemy afterward what you did or did not do.

The harsh reality is that Israel and the West will either defeat the Islamists, or the Islamists will force the world to submit to Islamic law. This war will not be ended by negotiations or concessions, and it certainly will not be ended by delusional postmodern military doctrines focused on "effects" and deterrence.

President Trump should be commended for supporting Israel's right to "unleash hell" in Gaza, but those words are meaningless as long as the United States sponsors ceasefires that enable Hamas to rearm. Further, President Trump must confront Qatar for its primary role supporting Islamist terrorism. Qatar is a major part of the problem, and most assuredly is not an honest broker for peace. 

Israel's survival and the United States' status as the leader of the Free World both depend on the total defeat of the Iran-Qatar-Hamas-Hezbollah alliance. It should be glaringly obvious that this war is not about land, and it certainly is not about helping Palestinian Arabs or creating a state for them. Egypt occupied Gaza from 1948-67 and did not even attempt to create a Palestinian Arab state there, and Jordan similarly controlled Judea and Samaria from 1948-67 without attempting to create a Palestinian Arab state there. Why should Israel be expected to be "more Arab" than the Arabs? The Arabs know that "Palestinian nationalism" is just an inversion of the historical truth that Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, and that is why they never tried to create a Palestinian Arab state.

Anyone who still supports a "Two State Solution" is delusional at best, and evil at worst. I have already described the history of the Land of Israel and the fact that there has never been a Palestinian Arab state:

Much has been said and written about the "Palestinian" nation and about "Palestinian " rights. I agree with anyone who fights for the basic human rights of every single human being, but I have some questions about Palestine as a nation. When did a sovereign country named "Palestine" exist? What was its capital, and what were its borders? What distinct, unique language was spoken there? Such questions arouse outrage and venom from some people, but I have yet to hear or see any answers--and there is a simple reason for that: it is a demonstrable historical fact that no such sovereign country ever existed. 

Palestine is a geographic term, much like the term Midwest is used to describe the portion of the United States that includes Ohio, Michigan, and a few other states. In the early 20th century, the geographic term Palestine was used to describe a territory including what is now known as Israel, Gaza, the so-called West Bank (the areas properly called by their historic names Judea and Samaria), and Jordan; after World War I, the League of Nations approved a Mandate granting control of Palestine to Great Britain with the express understanding that the territory would be a homeland for the Jewish people. Great Britain sliced off the eastern 80% of the Palestine Mandate to create Transjordan (which later became the independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). After the demise of the League of Nations and after World War II, the United Nations proposed that the remaining 20% of the Palestine Mandate be divided into a Jewish state and a second Arab state (in addition to Jordan). The Jewish leadership in Palestine accepted the UN's proposal--but the Arab leadership in Palestine rejected the UN's proposal and joined forces with armies from the surrounding Arab nations in what they expected to be a war of annihilation against the nascent Jewish State--but Israel won the war, and ended up controlling less than 20% of the original Palestine Mandate, with most of the remaining territory under Jordanian control (Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, which has never been historically part of Egypt).

Throughout history, the aftermath of a war includes the resettlement of refugees and the redrawing of borders. This situation is no different; the Arabs rejected the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan, and they have lost every war that they launched against Israel since that time. Israel gave the Sinai Peninsula to Israel as part of the Camp David Accords, gave up parts of Judea and Samaria in the Oslo Accords, and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Israel not only withdrew militarily from Gaza, but she forcibly removed Jewish civilians who lived there and she even dug up Jewish bodies buried there. Israel left behind greenhouses and other infrastructure that the Arabs promptly and gleefully destroyed, because this is not about land and has never been about land; this is about hating Jews, killing Jews, and destroying the Jewish State.

Giving up land and setting free terrorists has not brought peace to the Mideast or security to Israel. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results. The only way to defeat Islamism is to actually defeat it: kill the terrorists, kill their leaders, and make it clear that starting a war has a permanent territorial cost. Israel should immediately annex Judea and Samaria, and the Arab population there that is not willing to peacefully accept Israeli citizenship should be resettled in any of the more than two dozen Arab/Muslim countries. Israel has every right to annex Gaza as well, but if Israel prefers that Gaza be administered by the United States--as President Trump proposed--that is fine, provided that the current Gazan population is resettled in Arab/Muslim countries, both for the benefit of that population and to ensure the safety of Israel from a populace that has repeatedly demonstrated its overt support for Hamas' genocidal aims: the Gazans can start over elsewhere, and Gaza can finally be built up in a way that the Arabs have been unwilling or unable to do.

As a postscript to today's gruesome spectacle in Gaza, three empty buses exploded in Tel Aviv, and bombs were found on two other buses. Had those bombs exploded as intended during morning rush hour, hundreds of people could have been killed. The source of that terrorist attack is most likely the very population in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza that must be resettled--a population that has proven that it is unwilling to live side by side with Israel in peace. Israel is not going anywhere and should not have to go anywhere; the people who are creating the problem need to go somewhere else. If the Arab/Muslim countries refuse to take in their brethren then (1) that confirms how dangerous these people are, and (2) the United States should take that into consideration when allocating aid and when providing the military support that Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab/Muslim countries expect to receive. Israel resettled nearly 1,000,000 Jewish refugees from Arab/Muslim countries after 1947, and the time has come to complete that population exchange by resettling Arab/Muslim refugees in Arab/Muslim countries.

Today could be a momentous day: Hamas clearly violated the ceasefire, and terrorists attacked within the heart of Israel. Israel should not sit on her hands just because a mass casualty terrorist attack was averted, because next time Israel may not be so fortunate--and there will always be a next time until Israel wins this war as decisively and quickly as possible. 

We must all hope that Israel understands the gravity of the moment, and does what needs to be done to eliminate the Islamist threat to not just the Mideast but to Western civilization.

How Flawed "Postmodern" Concepts Wrecked Israel's Military

This is one of the most insightful and important articles/interviews that I have read in a long time: Why Hamas is still standing – analysis. Ran Baratz, who teaches military doctrine at the IDF's National Defense College, asserts that Israel's military has been negatively impacted by postmodern military doctrines, and he says that this is also a major problem for other Western democracies. He identifies the development of nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War as two events that influenced postmodern military doctrines that rely on "precision-guided munitions" and "shock and awe" in contrast to the traditional military doctrine that focuses on obtaining victory by destroying the enemy's capability to fight.

After Israel's failure to win the Second Lebanon War (2006), former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Shomron pointedly noted that Israel's tactics had shifted from results-oriented to "effects"-oriented. Shomron lamented, "We used to hit the enemy on the head with a club—and then he felt the effects."

Baratz explains, "The postmodern IDF's approach was to try to reach the 'effects' stage without the intermediate clubbing phase, which, unsurprisingly, turned out not to work in the real world." He correctly identifies former Prime Minister Shimon Peres--one of the all-time darlings of the Left--as someone who played a major role in Israel's embrace of flawed postmodern military doctrines.

I am puzzled and upset when Israel almost immediately announces after a terrorist attack, in triumphant fashion, that it knew where the terrorist lived and has now destroyed the terrorist's house after first evacuating the inhabitants. If Israel has such in depth knowledge about where her enemies are, then why doesn't Israel destroy her enemies and end the war without allowing so many of her civilians to be slaughtered? Israel's actions makes no sense unless you buy the twin delusional notions that (1) peace is possible with an enemy who has sworn to stop at nothing to destroy you and (2) limited reactions to terrorist murders provide effective deterrence. The tragic reality is that (1) Israel's enemies will kill or be killed because they have pledged their lives to their goals of subjugating Israel followed by subjugating the rest of the non-Islamic world and (2) such "deterrence" not only has no military effect but it also has a negative public relations effect, because media outlets much prefer to show a destroyed house owned by Arabs/Muslims than the victims of Arab/Islamic terrorism.

Israel also brags about using "precision-guided munitions" that can target one person while leaving other people in close proximity unharmed. Israel seems to be blissfully unaware that no one is impressed by her "precision-guided munitions." Her enemies scoff at Israel's softness while simultaneously complaining to credulous media outlets that Israel is committing "genocide."

Israel should abandon postmodern military doctrines that have repeatedly failed to yield desired results, and embark on a better, bolder path:

1) Scrap all of the "precision-guided munitions" and revert to using good old-fashioned "dumb" bombs. Israel's enemies would then directly pay the heavy price of attacking Israel, and they would know that Jewish blood is no longer cheap.

2) Stop bragging about military successes (real and imagined). Move in silence. Don't let the enemy know what to expect, and don't tell the enemy afterward what you did or did not do.

The harsh reality is that Israel and the West will either defeat the Islamists, or the Islamists will force the world to submit to Islamic law. This war will not be ended by negotiations or concessions, and it certainly will not be ended by delusional postmodern military doctrines focused on "effects" and deterrence.

Baratz concludes: "When do you need the military? For the moment that deterrence fails. So the military shouldn't be allowed to think about deterrence. It should live by the assumption that deterrence has failed and now it is required. As long as the enemy understands that your military is capable of winning, they are deterred. It's a byproduct of your actual war abilities. You do not deter your enemy by persuading him and by psychological effects."

In Israel Must not Underestimate Hezbollah the Way that Israel Underestimated Hamas, I warned, "I fervently do not want to be the prophet of Israel's destruction, but Israel's destruction is possible if Israel underestimates or ignores the threats posed by Iran, a weakened but not defeated Hamas, and a weakened but not defeated Hezbollah. I warned for many years about the threat posed by Hamas, and I was proven right. I have also warned repeatedly about the threat posed by Iran in general and Hezbollah in particular, and I hope that Israel has learned from her previous grievous mistakes and will act decisively to defeat her evil enemies."

Trump Should Think Twice Before Claiming Credit for this Disastrous Deal

Soon to be U.S. President Donald Trump is taking credit for the reported Israel-Hamas deal that will apparently result in cessation of hostilities in Gaza for at least six weeks, the release of 33 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza (some of whom may be dead), and the release of hundreds--if not more than 1000--Arab terrorists, many of whom have blood on their hands and publicly stated murderous intentions in their minds. Trump portrays himself as the ultimate deal-maker, and he asserts that this deal is the first step toward bringing peace to the Mideast--but the reality, as I explained in Israel Must Not Repeat the Mistake of Releasing Terrorists, is that this deal is a painful, humiliating defeat in the life and death battle versus Islamist terrorists whose goal is to subjugate the non-Muslim world (which they refer to as Dar-al-harb): "If this deal takes place, it will be an unmitigated disaster not only for Israel and the Jewish people, but for the West, because this will represent a tremendous victory for Hamas specifically and Islamic terrorists in general; it will demonstrate that terrorism works, that Israel is weak, and that if you resist Israel long enough then Israel will surrender."

In Is this the best deal they could come up with?, Gary Willig wrote:

Hamas' leaders are dead. Its battalions are smashed. 20,000 of its fighters are dead, with thousands more injured or in prison. Its rocket arsenal has been reduced to a few hundred at most. Its ally Hezbollah is in shambles and unable to help it anymore. Its masters and sponsors in Tehran are reeling from losses throughout the region, the destruction of their air defenses, and an economic crisis that will make rebuilding from this war far more difficult for Hamas than previous conflicts. Hamas has 5 days until the deadline set by the next American President to release its hostages or there will be "all hell to pay."

With everything that is going against Hamas, this is the best deal Israel and the US could come up with?

David M. Weinberg details the disastrous and sordid history of Israel's lopsided hostages for terrorists exchanges in Terrorist releases in exchange for hostages threaten even more Israeli lives (emphasis in original):

Every deal involving the release of terrorists has led to more bloodshed, planned and carried out by these released terrorists.

There are no exact statistics on this (because unsurprisingly the security establishment refuses to release such statistics), though estimates range from 10% to 50% of released terrorists swiftly return to hard-core terrorist activity with devastating effects.

The 1,150 Palestinian Arab prisoners released by Israel in the 1985 so-called Jibril deal, in which three Israeli soldiers who had been taken hostage in Lebanon by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were released, proceeded to fuel the First Intifada, which ran from 1987 to 1993 and lead to the deaths and injuries of Israeli and other citizens. According to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, about 10% of the released Palestinian terrorists returned to active terrorist duty.

Then came the Oslo Accords, when Israel mistakenly allowed at least 60,000 Palestinian Arabs from "abroad" into the Palestinian Authority territories, including 7,000 card-carrying PLO terrorists. Between 1993 and 1999, Israel released additional Palestinian Arab terrorists as "gestures" to the PLO, which fueled the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2005. These shocking figures were revealed in an Israel Defense and Security Forum report from last year.

In 2004, Israel released more than 400 Palestinian Arab prisoners and some 30 Lebanese prisoners, including leaders of Hezbollah, for one civilian captive—Elhanan Tannenbaum—and the bodies of three IDF soldiers. The Second Lebanon War against Hezbollah followed not long after.

The 2011 deal for Gilad Shalit was the worst; more than 1,000 terrorists were released in exchange for the 25-year-old IDF soldier, including Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Hamas-led attacks and atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023. In fact, almost the entire Hamas command structure involved in planning last year’s Simchat Torah assault on Israeli towns and cities, in which more than 1,200 Israelis were killed on a single day, was made up of terrorists released in the Shalit deal.

Joe Biden's foreign policy consisted of one disastrous decision after another, including but not limited to his funding of the the PLO's "Pay for Slay" Jew-Killing program, but Donald Trump is not starting his second term well; his bragging about his role in the upcoming Israel-Hamas deal indicates that Trump pressured Israel into accepting unfavorable terms so that he could claim a foreign policy "success" that will turn out to be disastrous for Israel and the United States.

It will give me no pleasure to say "I told you so" when the terrorists released by Israel in this deal kill Israelis, Americans, and other innocent civilians. This deal will also inspire more terrorism in the United States along the lines of the recent attack in New Orleans, because terrorists will sense and exploit the weakness now being displayed by Israel and the United States.

Israel Must Not Repeat the Mistake of Releasing Terrorists

It has been reported that Israel is close to reaching a deal with Hamas stipulating that Israel will release hundreds of terrorists--including convicted killers--in exchange for 33 hostages. Allegedly, the price for each released female Israeli soldier will be 50 terrorists. If this deal takes place, it will be an unmitigated disaster not only for Israel and the Jewish people, but for the West, because this will represent a tremendous victory for Hamas specifically and Islamic terrorists in general; it will demonstrate that terrorism works, that Israel is weak, and that if you resist Israel long enough then Israel will surrender. Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich blasted the proposed deal as a "catastrophe for the national security of the State of Israel. We will not be part of a surrender deal that would include releasing arch-terrorists, ending the war, and erasing the achievements that cost us so much."

In the wake of Hamas's October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack, I explained the Islamic concepts of Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb, and I defined what victory must look like for Israel: 

1) Hamas is eliminated as a functioning terrorist, military, and political entity.

2) Hamas' state sponsors--including but perhaps not limited to Iran and Qatar--must pay reparations for the killed, for the injured, and for the destruction of property.

3) All hostages held by Hamas must be released immediately and unconditionally.

Israel has fought Hamas--and Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis--for over a year and has failed to accomplish any of the above goals while losing over 800 soldiers in combat. It is not enough to kill a few top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders and to kill or capture several thousand foot soldiers, because doing so did not eliminate Hamas as a functioning entity, did not punish Hamas' state sponsors, and did not secure the unconditional release of all hostages.

Israel has a pathetic history of turning not quite victory into total defeat. In 2011, Netanyahu signed off on a deal with Hamas, releasing over 1000 terrorists in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas. One of those released terrorists was Yahya Sinwar, the architect of Hamas's October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack during which Hamas killed more than 1200 people and took more than 250 hostages. One lesson that Sinwar learned while he was incarcerated in Israel is that Israel will pay almost any price in exchange for hostages, and that is a major reason that the October 7, 2023 attack included plans to take hostages. Sinwar terrorized Israel in three ways on that day (and ever since, even after Israel belatedly eliminated him): 

1) Hamas not only raped, tortured, and beheaded victims but Hamas livestreamed these horrors to inspire their followers and break Israel's spirit while proudly displaying the barbarism at the heart of radical Islam.

2) Hamas committed mass murder to devastate the Jewish people with a one day death toll not seen since the Holocaust.

3) Hamas took hostages to use as bargaining chips for the release of thousands of terrorists.

The title of Caroline Glick's column about the Shalit deal--"A Pact Signed in Jewish Blood"--says it all, and she wrote some prescient words about Israel's colossal blunder (emphasis added):

Untold numbers of Israelis who are now sitting in their succas and celebrating Jewish freedom, who are driving in their cars, who are standing on line at the bank, who are sitting in their nursery school classrooms painting pictures of Torah scrolls for Simhat Torah will be killed for being Jewish while in Israel because Netanyahu has made this deal. The unrelenting pain of their families, left to cope with their absence, will be unimaginable.

This is a simple fact and it is beyond dispute.

It is also beyond dispute that untold numbers of IDF soldiers and officers will be abducted and held hostage. Soldiers now training for war or scrubbing the floors of their barracks, or sitting at a pub with their friends on holiday leave will one day find themselves in a dungeon in Gaza or Sinai or Lebanon undergoing unspeakable mental and physical torture for years. Their families will suffer inhuman agony.

The only thing we don't know about these future victims is their names. But we know what will become of them as surely as we know that night follows day.

Netanyahu has proven once again that taking IDF soldiers hostage is a sure bet for our Palestinian neighbors. They can murder the next batch of Sinais and Gals, Noas and Ruths. They can kill thousands of them. And they can do so knowing all along that all they need to do to win immunity for their killers is kidnap a single IDF soldier.

There is no downside to this situation for those who believe all Jews should die.

In 2011, Glick predicted the hostage crisis that has taken place in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and it must be emphasized that the current proposed deal will ultimately not be about rescuing 33 hostages but rather about condemning hundreds--if not thousands--of people to be slaughtered. 

It is heart-rending to read the pleas to Netanyahu "Leave no hostage behind," because Netanyahu is compounding the insanity underlying previous lopsided deals by not even bringing every hostage home with this proposed deal. Minister Orit Strock (Religious Zionist Party) declared, "There are prices that should not be paid, certainly not before everything in the world changes, just before we can fight again without any restrictions. Just before the end of Biden's term, to come and make a deal whose exorbitant price suits a period that is almost over--it's not an achievement, it's an injustice and a lack of national responsibility. We need to cry out these things, we need to awaken these things. We need to talk about the hostages who, as it seems now, will be left behind. I call on all my friends in the government, do not ignore this price. Be brave enough to say no to this agreement."

There are still approximately 100 hostages (or bodies) being held by Hamas; what happens to the dozens who are not included in this deal? Netanyahu is betraying Israel and the Jewish people, and in one fell swoop he is poised to wipe out whatever hard-earned gains Israel made on the battlefield, because Hamas' leaders lounging in luxury in Qatar* do not care about the Hamas foot soldiers Israel killed in Gaza; those foot soldiers are just cannon fodder to Hamas, which also not only does not care about Arab civilian suffering but uses (and exaggerates) that suffering for propaganda purposes. 

Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack exposed Israel's strategic and tactical vulnerabilities, and this proposed exchange reveals Israel's political weakness: Israel consistently permits her enemies to fight limited liability wars in which her enemies never suffer significant, permanent consequences for their actions. Israel should make it clear that the response to terrorism and war waged against her will not only be total victory on the battlefield but also the enactment of permanent political and demographic changes--Israel should annex Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and Israel should complete the population exchange initiated in 1948 when the Arab and Islamic states expelled almost 1,000,000 Jews. We have seen for over 100 years--dating back to before the rebirth of the Jewish State in the Land of Israel--that a large number of Arabs and Muslims will never accept peaceful coexistence with the Jewish people, so we have passed the point where the obvious solution must be enacted: Jews (and any Arabs/Muslims who will live in peace with Jews) living in Israel, and Arabs/Muslims who are unwilling to peacefully coexist with Israel living in any one of their more than 20 Arab/Muslim sovereign states spread out from Morocco all the way to Pakistan (a legacy of Arab/Muslim colonization of Africa, the Mideast, and Asia).

No self-respecting nation suffering what Israel suffered at the hands of Hamas would leave Hamas intact in Gaza--or leave Gaza under Arab/Muslim control--in the wake not just of the October 7 atrocities but in the wake of 20 years of Hamas atrocities. Israel tried the experiment of letting the Arabs/Muslims rule in Gaza, and the result of that experiment proved that the experiment should never be repeated. Israel must control Gaza to be safe, and Hamas must lose Gaza as a consequence of losing a war that Hamas started.

Imagine if Israel had never given up the land that she captured in self-defense in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. The Arabs/Muslims would be much less inclined to attack Israel if they knew that losing the ensuing war would mean permanently losing land. That is the way that normal nations wage war. Israel has tried to live by a "purity of arms" concept that is neither acknowledged nor respected by the rest of the world that slanders Israel as a genocidal apartheid state--but it is better to be slandered while controlling land and having peace than to be slandered while losing land and having no peace.

The Islamic terrorists boast that they will defeat Israel (and then the West, mind you--never forget that) because "We love death more than you love life." The  foundational documents for Hamas and Hezbollah explicitly state their goal to destroy Israel; unless Israel comes to grips with the reality that this is a kill or be killed situation, Israel's survival is in deep peril. 

*--As I noted in a recent article, it is imperative that President Trump confront Qatar for sponsoring Islamic terrorism and no longer perpetuate the lie that Qatar is a helpful mediator.

President Trump Must Confront Qatar for Sponsoring Islamic Terrorism

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is doing a major international public service with the Qatar Monitor Project (QMP) documenting the threat that Qatar poses not just to Israel but to the United States and the entire West (footnotes omitted):

Qatar is a big winner in the Syrian revolution, having supported the U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hay'at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Muhammad Al-Joulani (formerly ISIS and Al-Qaeda and now Muslim Brotherhood) who has a $10 million bounty on his head. This is Qatar's classic game: support the Islamist terrorists and then present itself as a mediator, liaison, and even peacemaker – the arsonist playing firefighter. As in Afghanistan, as in Egypt in 2010, and as in every Muslim country.

In every Muslim country where there is a battle between the Islamists and the secularists, Qatar supports the Islamists, as in Gaza supporting Hamas for years, building its military might and enabling October 7. And now, guess what – they are back in the saddle as mediators.

Who brought them back to the negotiations after the secular pro-U.S. president of Egypt threw them away? The U.S. – the country that has suffered more than any country from Qatar's duplicity and hidden subversive, anti-U.S. activities, including the 9/11 attacks.

While the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were mainly Saudis, recruited to Al-Qaeda as individuals, the mastermind of the attacks, Khaled Sheik Mohammad (KSM), was a former Qatari government employee at the Ministry of Electricity and Water in the capital Doha, who frequently was allowed to embark on terrorist missions in the world (see below). And when, in 1996, the FBI came to arrest him and told only the Emir, KSM disappeared within hours.

All of this has been substantiated in American intelligence and judicial documents, including KSM's confession.

Indeed, President-elect Trump threatened those holding hostages in Gaza with "all hell to pay" if they are not released by January 20. But this threat was not directed to any specific address and therefore devoid of any practical result. Had he directed it to Qatar, the patron of Hamas and the enabler of October 7, it would have helped, because without Qatar, Hamas is doomed. And Hamas will listen to Qatar's demands.

But since he did not point to the culprit, Qatar, but on the contrary brought Qatar back to the negotiations as an honest broker who tells him, together with a choir of "pundits" – former and current lobbyists of Qatar – that the pressure should be directed against Israel – the hostages are doomed.

Moreover, instead of helping in the negotiations, Qatar is leaking false information about a deal cut, just to disrupt the Egyptian efforts, without the U.S. even understanding what Qatar is doing.

President Biden's foreign policy decisions have been disastrous across the board, from the appeasement that emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine to funding the PLO's despicable "Pay for Slay" Jew-killing program to pressuring Israel into not achieving a decisive victory against Hamas to his defining moment: the triumph of the Taliban in the wake of his chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. President Biden not only failed to confront Qatar but he depicted Qatar as a helpful mediator. President Biden is not the only one to blame for Qatar's emergence as a major financier and supporter of Islamic terrorism, but matters became worse during his Administration, culminating in Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel.

QMP notes, "For decades, Qatar has been the foremost global sponsor of Islamist terrorist organizations and movements, both Sunni and Shia, across the Muslim world. These organizations and movements seek to topple non-Islamist regimes and replace them with Islamist ones – and have succeeded in places like Egypt and Afghanistan."

The success of President Trump's foreign policy will be determined in no small part by the extent to which he fixes (or least mitigates to the greatest degree possible) all of the disasters that President Biden created or made worse, and a major component of President Trump's agenda must be to confront Qatar and expose Qatar's malevolent actions that threaten the West.

Israel Must not Underestimate Hezbollah the Way that Israel Underestimated Hamas

Prior to Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel, the Israeli military/political "concept" was that Hamas was either incapable of such an attack or afraid of the consequences of launching such an attack; in either event, Israel need not worry about Hamas doing anything more than "minor" terrorist attacks that "only" killed or wounded a few people. Any sensible person reading those words immediately understands many reasons why such a "concept" is both flawed and dangerous, including (1) a nation should not accept as a matter of course that a terrorist group will regularly launch fatal attacks on her territory, and (2) it is reckless to assume that a terrorist group that speaks of launching a massive attack is not planning to launch a massive attack given the right conditions. Israeli hubris after the Six Day War paved the way for Israeli vulnerability at the start of the Yom Kippur War, and the "concept" about Hamas displayed similar hubris.

Israel is now at great risk of falling prey to such hubris yet again. Hezbollah (which can also be spelled Hizbullah) is, like Hamas, an Iranian-funded terrorist group with global reach and global aspirations; for Iran and the terrorist groups funded by Iran, fighting Israel is just one battle in a much larger war. The Islamist quest to not only destroy Israel but to kill Jews worldwide can only be understood in the context of the concepts of Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-harb:

The barbarism at the core of radical Islam will not be cured by any concession made by Israel short of complete dissolution of the Jewish State--and even if that tragic outcome happened, radical Islam would not be placated but would instead turn its full attention toward the United States and other democratic countries that are part of the Dar al-harb--the portions of the world that radical Muslims have yet to conquer, with the emphasis on "yet": they believe that such conquest is promised to them by Allah, and they will not rest until they achieve such conquest, transforming all of the world into Dar al-Islam (territory governed in strict accordance with Islamic law, which means--among other things--no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no independent judiciary, and very limited rights for women and any other minority group not favored under Islamic law). 

Israel has had some success in diminishing Hezbollah's capabilities in the past year or so, but Israel should not rest on her laurels or feel safe until the job of destroying Hezbollah is complete. It is no secret that for quite some time Hezbollah has been planning a massive invasion of Israel from the north that, if successful, would dwarf the scale of what Hamas did in southern Israel. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has done a tremendous job of compiling in great detail a massive amount of evidence regarding Hezbollah's goals and capabilities. Unmasking The Religious Dimensions Of Hizbullah's Decades Of Planning For An October 7-Style Invasion And Massacre Of Jews is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the grave danger facing Israel. The opening sentences of the report are chilling to read:

Since the 2006 Israel-Hizbullah war, Hizbullah has been speaking openly, in Arabic and in explicit detail, of its plan to carry out a future massacre in Israel. Hizbullah's plan, two decades in the making, was to begin by invading the Galilee using missiles, rockets, and drones, along with advanced technology, intelligence, and surveillance, and with a tunnel network far more extensive than Hamas's. Yet Hamas's October 7 attack turned out to have preempted what Hizbullah had been planning – plans that were confirmed by documentation found by Israeli forces in their counteroffensive in southern Lebanon.

Self-proclaimed "progressives" and other "useful idiots" in the West and elsewhere falsely assert that they and their Islamist brothers in arms are anti-Zionists but not antisemites, and they falsely claim that Israel is an evil colonizer of Arab lands. The reality is that Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism, and Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel. Further, there is a deep religious dimension to the war against Israel, as discussed in MEMRI's report:

In its communications, Hizbullah often refers to the seventh-century slaughter of the Jews in the Arabian Peninsula by the army of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, during the seventh-century Battle of Khaybar. In fact, Hizbullah considers all its current strikes against Israel to be part of its "Operation Khaybar" in revenge for the killing of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. An October 1 post by the Hizbullah Al-Electroni account featured a 25-second video warning, in Hebrew and English: "The Khyber [i.e. Khaybar] Gate will be uprooted twice, and the field will testify that we are the people of decisiveness."

A video released in February 2023, further highlighting Hizbullah's framing of its current battle against Israel in religious terms, showed the elite Radwan Force simulating an invasion of northern Israel. The narrator quoted the Old Testament in Hebrew: "If there is a serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. Exodus, 21:24-25." The video concluded with a verse from the Book of Jeremiah: "From the north, disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land [Israel]. Jeremiah 1:14."

This theme, and this verse from Jeremiah, also appeared in an October 2020 video on Hizbullah's media outlet Al-Manar. In it, a Hizbullah official stressed that the next phase of the "resistance" would include two "blades" – Hizbullah missiles and legions of fighters who will storm the enemy's barracks and settlements – in an operation named "The Gates Of Khaybar Will Be Smashed Again."

It is notable that Hizbullah supporters in the West – in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and elsewhere – have revived the historic Muslim call to kill Jews in chants threatening local Jewish communities: "Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return." This occurred at a September 29 vigil for Nasrallah in Dearborn, Michigan, where it was heard; the crowd chanted "Death to Israel" for good measure.

The slogans "Free Palestine!" and "Land for Peace!" are not calls for righteous action but rather calls for disarming and weakening Israel as a prelude to destroying Israel. Hezbollah makes no secret of its goal to destroy Israel, which means that the people chanting "Free Palestine!" and "Land for Peace!" either want Israel to be destroyed or are brainwashed and have no idea what they are talking about. 

MEMRI's report describes Hezbollah's detailed plans to destroy Israel: 

Days after the September 17-18 detonation of Hizbullah operatives' pagers and other communication devices across Lebanon, came Israel's elimination of the top tier of Hizbullah's leadership, including, on September 27, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. He was killed deep in his bunker, as he and senior Hizbullah officials were reportedly finalizing their plans that would likely have gone into action for the Jewish New Year on October 2 or for the anniversary of October 7. In its Lebanon ground offensive, which began September 30, Israel has found in the tunnels – that North Korean experts are known to have helped construct – anti-helicopter missiles, anti-tank missiles, mortar shells, ammunition, weapons, and explosives, as well as motorcycles, for Hizbullah's "Conquer the Galilee" operation.

Hizbullah believed that its invasion would bring about Israel's destruction. In interviews, and in Arab media and social media posts, Hizbullah officials, including Nasrallah, his deputies, and senior commanders, detailed the organization's goals and aims.

According to these statements, as noted, Hizbullah's plan would begin with the Galilee. In 2019, Nasrallah explained: "Part of our plan, both theoretically and in practice... It is a plan for which we train, and prepare... We have prepared this plan. It is complete. Yes, part of our plan for the next war is to enter the Galilee."

In August 2023, two months before October 7, Hizbullah operations officer "Hajj Jihad" underlined that the plan for the Galilee operation had been in the works for over 15 years. Calling it "one of the most important plans prepared by the Islamic resistance," he added that when the war starts, "we will see Israeli soldiers deserting their posts, and fleeing." He underlined that "the Islamic resistance that will wage this war" will not conduct it "like we have done it in the past" because "in the 17 years since 2006, we have been diligently preparing for this war."

It should be noted that Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000--under the disastrous leadership of Prime Minister Ehud Barak--emboldened Hezbollah, and paved the way for Hezbollah to develop into a terrorist organization with global reach. Barak did not have the necessary wisdom or courage to properly secure Israel's northern border, so now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must finish that most important task.

Two important points must be emphasized:

1) If Hezbollah launches a mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel, no one--including Israeli leaders--can dare say that there was no way to predict or know that this could happen. The information is readily available publicly, which means that Israeli military and political leaders no doubt have access to even more information. When Netanyahu set free more than 1000 terrorists in 2011, I criticized Netanyahu and every minister who supported the deal: "These 26 Israeli Cabinet Ministers have signed death warrants for countless innocent Jewish men, women and children--and when the Hamas murderers execute those death warrants Benjamin Netanyahu and these 26 Ministers should be held accountable for setting terrorists free." I did not know when Hamas would attack, but I knew that Netanyahu and the other ministers had set the stage for such an attack to happen.

2) The Israeli government has a legal and moral responsibility to destroy Hezbollah (and Hamas) in order to protect her civilians and her sovereignty; any Israeli politician who is unwilling to fulfill that duty should immediately resign from office. Over a decade ago, I warned about a defeatist mentality in Israel that could lead to Israel's destruction: "The Rabin-Peres-Netanyahu-Barak-Sharon-Olmert plan--surrender land to bloodthirsty enemies, set child killers free so that they can kill more innocent, defenseless children, force children to cower behind concrete desks as deadly rockets pummel schoolyards and become giddy when an anti-missile missile that costs $100,000 shoots down one of a nearly endless supply of cheap rockets--falls just a bit short of Churchill's standards."

I fervently do not want to be the prophet of Israel's destruction, but Israel's destruction is possible if Israel underestimates or ignores the threats posed by Iran, a weakened but not defeated Hamas, and a weakened but not defeated Hezbollah. I warned for many years about the threat posed by Hamas, and I was proven right. I have also warned repeatedly about the threat posed by Iran in general and Hezbollah in particular, and I hope that Israel has learned from her previous grievous mistakes and will act decisively to defeat her evil enemies. 

The U.S. Should Defund UNIFIL and UNRWA

I previously explained that The United Nations is Antisemitic, Worse Than Useless, and Should Be Disbanded. Two of its constituent organizations are particularly despicable: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). I discussed UNRWA in depth in The Pathetic "Progressive" Response to Hamas' War Against Israel:

During Israel's War of Independence, several hundred thousand Arabs fled from Israel, exhorted by Arab military leaders to temporarily evacuate in order to make way for the planned massacre of Israel's Jewish residents. These Arabs expected to triumphantly return to a land with no Jews but instead Israel defeated the combined armies of her Arab neighbors. In most wars, the losing side is responsible for resettling its refugees or else a de facto population exchange occurs (few people talk about the fact that, at the same time that hundreds of thousands of Arabs voluntarily left Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Arab countries, with most of those Jews fleeing to Israel). Not only did the Arab countries refuse to resettle their Arab brethren who they had exhorted to leave Israel but the so-called Palestinian Arabs are the only group in the world that has an entire UN organization devoted exclusively to their particular concerns: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). All other refugee crises in the world are dealt with by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At the end of 2012, the UNHCR listed listed 45.2 million displaced people worldwide, the largest such number since 1994. The biggest single displaced person crisis in the world is focused in Pakistan, a result of decades of war, tyranny and instability in that region. The disproportionate attention paid to a fictional Palestinian nation and a real--but eminently solvable--Arab refugee problem not only does injustice to both Israel and the refugees in question (who have been exploited as political pawns by Israel's enemies for decades) but it also hinders efforts to solve other more severe refugee crises.

It is bad enough that there is an entire UN organization focusing on refugees of a fictional nation, people who share a common language, culture and religion with most of the other Arab countries in the Mideast and who should have been accepted by those countries decades ago, much like Israel welcomed Jewish refugees from Arab countries--but what really makes the UNRWA completely disgusting is that the UNRWA is complicit in war crimes committed against Israel. Three times in the past month, Hamas rockets have been found at UNRWA facilities. The first time that rockets were discovered in a UNRWA facility during the current conflict, the UNRWA handed over the rockets to Hamas, a flagrant violation of the UNRWA's purported neutrality.

Note that I wrote the above passage in 2021, two years before Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel. UNRWA actively collaborated before, during, and after October 7, 2023, further demonstrating the extent to which the organization has been completely corrupted by Hamas.

UNIFIL is just as bad as UNRWA, and Eugene Kontorovich persuasively argues that Donald Trump should make a campaign pledge to defund UNIFIL:

Created in 1978 to monitor an Israeli withdrawal in a long-forgotten skirmish with the Palestine Liberation Organization, the UN "interim" force has remained and grown, with a mission creep inversely related to its record of success. UNIFIL failed to prevent or ameliorate the Second Lebanon War in 2006, which Hezbollah began with a cross-border raid to take Israeli hostages and continued with a heavy rain of rockets on Israel...

Hezbollah has placed its armed positions within sight of UNIFIL observation posts. Yet the UN peacekeepers have done nothing to stop Hezbollah as it has turned southern Lebanon into an armed camp from which to attack Israel...

On Oct. 8, 2023, the magnitude of UNIFIL's failure became clear when Hezbollah joined Hamas' attack on Israel. Hezbollah's missile fire has continued all year, killed dozens of Israeli citizens, and made much of the tiny country's north uninhabitable. 

Now that Israel has finally moved into Lebanon to clear out Hezbollah, UNIFIL is getting in the way--knowingly providing the terrorist group cover...

U.S. taxpayers pay nearly 30% of UNIFIL's $550 million budget--essentially subsidizing indirect assistance to Hezbollah. But unlike other dysfunctional UN organizations, which are structured to be unaccountable and weather reform, UNIFIL is easy to fix. Its mandate must be reauthorized every year, or it simply ends...

UNIFIL's current mandate expires in August 2025, and there is no rational basis for reauthorizing it.

Yonah Jeremy Bob notes that Hezbollah--emboldened and financed by Iran--has spent 17 years making a mockery of UN Resolution 1701 that prohibited Hezbollah from operating in southern Lebanon:

Imagine a generation of children growing up believing that it is normal living among weapons of war. This is the monster that Hezbollah built across dozens of villages in southern Lebanon. I saw it first-hand on Oct. 10, riding in a convoy of Israel Defense Forces humvees. The IDF asked me not to identify the village lest it endanger their operations.

Almost half the village was destroyed by a mix of room-to-room battles and the Israeli military's exploding Hezbollah weapon stockpiles. IDF soldiers in tanks or bulldozers rumbled from house to house to catalogue weapons Hezbollah had buried, then demolished the homes. The terror group had hoped to tap its infrastructure in southern Lebanon to invade northern Israel in a replay of Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023 attack...

As Israel tears apart Hezbollah's presence in southern Lebanon, it is also wiping out the West's view that this is an Israeli problem that can be solved by diplomacy alone. Since the invasion of southern Lebanon began on Sept. 30, the IDF has showered the West with evidence of weapons and materiel hidden in every third or fifth house...

The West should be raining fire and brimstone down on Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran, for making a farce of United Nations Resolution 1701. That resolution, adopted in 2006, said that Hezbollah couldn't operate in southern Lebanon.

The West can no longer deny that Hezbollah is out of control and must be restrained, preferably by diplomacy but if necessary by force. Yet the West's priority seems to be reaching a cease-fire so it can go on ignoring the dangers of these Middle Eastern actors...if the West presses Israel into a cease-fire that merely reverts to Resolution 1701--which has been ignored for 17 years with no consequences--all of Israel's successes will have been for nothing.

Rendering Israel's unprecedented successes versus Hamas and Hezbollah into nothing is precisely the tragically misguided policy being followed by President Joe Biden and fully endorsed by Vice President/presidential candidate Harris. After Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel, Biden gave lip service to supporting Israel and then consistently took steps to restrict Israel's ability to defeat Hamas (and Hezbollah). Biden declared that if Hamas diverted humanitarian aid to their coffers then "it will end," but instead Biden has publicly insisted that Israel keep providing aid that he knows is sustaining Hamas--and thus prolonging the suffering of Hamas' hostages, including American citizens. Biden keeps bleating "Ceasefire!" with full knowledge that a ceasefire would not end Hamas' war to destroy Israel but would only give Hamas time to rebuild and reload. If Israel had listened to Biden then Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah would still be alive sowing mayhem and destruction. 

Israel is defeating Hamas and Hezbollah despite Biden, not because of him--and if Harris is elected, the Mideast and the rest of the world will be set on fire in a way that will make the last four disastrous years of Biden's rule look like a pleasant walk in the park.