After a far right Jewish zealot murdered Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, I mostly stopped paying attention to the endless Middle East peace process. With Rabin’s death, it was clear that the Palestinians would be forever hosed and trapped in poverty, rage, violence and misery.[1] So far, that prediction has been mostly accurate. The NYT writes on the miserable, God-forsaken end game playing out in Israel:
In West Bank, Settlers Sense Their Moment After Far Right’s Rise
After a surge in violence, there are fears of a wider escalation in the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlers see an opportunity, and Palestinians fear what’s next.The remains of Or Haim, an illegal settlement outpost, lie strewn across a windswept hilltop in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Two dozen Israeli settlers erected a few flimsy huts there one night last month, and by morning, the Israeli Army had demolished them.
But the settlers plan to try again. The most right-wing government in Israel’s history, which includes settler leaders among its key ministers, entered office late last year, and the settler movement has been emboldened, sensing a window of opportunity to expand its enterprise faster than ever before.
“Now I expect things to go differently,” said Naveh Schindler, 19, a settler activist leading the effort to build the Or Haim outpost. “If I persevere enough,” Mr. Schindler said, “hopefully the government will build it themselves.”
Settlers like Mr. Schindler hope to build more Israeli settlements across the West Bank, which is illegal under international law, on land that Palestinians hoped would be the core of a future Palestinian state. Palestinians, meanwhile, are watching with fear and anxiety as the settlements expand, and as the number of attacks on Palestinians increase as more settlers come.
United Nations officials documented at least 22 settler-led attacks and vandalism from Jan. 26 to Jan. 30, while Palestinian officials said the real number was roughly seven times higher. More than 70 settler attacks occurred throughout January, U.N. officials said — a rate that, if maintained throughout the year, would be the highest in at least a half-decade.
Once again, we see that (i) politics and religion do not mix, and (ii) religious extremism is aggressive, will not compromise, and is brutal with opposition, murderous when deemed necessary. There is no reasonable hope for a reasonable Palestinian state. All that is left for the Palestinians is endless poverty, rage, violence and misery.
Footnote:
1. No, I am not arguing that Israel is the only bad player here. Palestinian leadership leading up to Rabin’s assassination was incompetent, deeply corrupt and self-serving. It probably still is. Despite the Palestinian human garbage that Rabin had to negotiate with, he almost pulled off a miraculous, reasonable settlement. That was why the Israeli radical right hated Rabin's guts and had to murder him.
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From the ripping off the taxpayers files: The NYT writes about another instance of corrupt politicians forcing taxpayers to spend billions on crap the pentagon does not want and does not work:
The Pentagon Saw a Warship Boondoggle. Congress Saw Jobs.
After years of crippling problems and a changing mission, the Navy pushed to retire nine of its newest ships. Then the lobbying started.The Pentagon last year made a startling announcement: Eight of the 10 Freedom-class littoral combat ships now based in Jacksonville and another based in San Diego would be retired, even though they averaged only four years old and had been built to last 25 years.
The decision came after the ships, built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity.
“We refused to put an additional dollar against that system that wouldn’t match the Chinese undersea threat,” Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, told Senate lawmakers.
Then the lobbying started.
A consortium of players with economic ties to the ships — led by a trade association whose members had just secured contracts worth up to $3 billion to do repairs and supply work on them — mobilized to pressure Congress to block the plan, with phone calls, emails and visits to Washington to press lawmakers to intervene.
“Early decommissioning of littoral combat ships at Mayport Naval Station would result in the loss of more than 2,000 direct jobs in Jacksonville,” a coalition of business leaders from the Florida city wrote last summer.
The Navy estimated that the move would save $4.3 billion over the next five years, money that Admiral Gilday said he would rather spend on missiles and other firepower needed to prepare for potential wars. Having ships capable of fulfilling the military mission, he argued, was much more important than the Navy’s total ship count.
The Freedom-class ships were first conceived of after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as part of an effort to combat nontraditional threats. They ended up costing more than twice what had been expected, about $500 million per ship, compared with an early estimate of $220 million. It had taken a dozen years longer than expected to get them operational, at which point the Navy’s war-fighting needs had shifted back to countering global rivals.
The Navy and Lockheed are still negotiating how much the contractors should have to pay to resolve design flaws in the ships’ propulsion systems.
But having largely won the battle, at least for now, to keep the Freedom-class ships operational, the contractors who built them have already returned to promoting a new class of vessels with an even higher price tag.
Without any evidence other than past history, I bet that the claimed 2,000 lost jobs the business lobbyists claims is a garden variety capitalist lie. Job losses might amount to about 500. But even if 2,000 is correct, those jobs are for work on something that is broken and cannot be fixed. Some members of congress, including some Republicans, got a prohibition on getting rid of the broken boats put into a military spending bill. That forces the Navy to keep the bad boats. Taxpayers are on the hook for this wasteful spending.
So when radical right Republicans howl about wasteful spending, that is just more garden variety Republican Party lies and hypocrisy.
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The unrepentant, lying 1/6 traitors: Politico reports on false claims to the judge of contrition about participating in the 1/6 coup attempt. Some say to the judge they are sorry and then publicly say they aren’t:
A Jan. 6 defendant’s boast in an interview this week that he had no regrets about his role in the Capitol riot — just days after he acknowledged his guilt in a federal courtroom — may upend the man’s efforts to resolve the criminal case against him.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta issued an order Friday instructing defendant Thomas Adams Jr. and prosecutors to explain why the guilty findings the judge entered on Tuesday, following a brief “stipulated” bench trial should not be overturned in light of Adams’ comments to a reporter the following day.“I wouldn’t change anything I did,” Adams told the State Journal-Register Wednesday outside his home in Springfield, Ill. “I didn’t do anything. I still to this day, even though I had to admit guilt [in the stipulation], don’t feel like I did what the charge is.”
In a brief order Friday morning, Mehta gave both sides one week to provide reasons “why the court should not vacate Defendant’s convictions of guilt in light of his post-stipulated trial statements” included in the article. The judge also attached a copy of the news report.
Those feisty 1/6 traitors. There’s some exceptionally immoral or evil scumbags in the bunch.
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