News bits: TST wins PA lawsuit: Secularism wins or loses?; The evidence game in Gaza; Etc.

The LehighValleyNews.com reports a settlement between The Satanic Temple and the

Saucon Valley School District over denied access to a middle school for After School Satan Club activities:

In what the American Civil Liberties Union is calling a "victory for free speech and religious liberty", the Satanic Temple will collect $200,000 from a school district that previously refused to allow the "After School Satan Club" to meet on school grounds.

According to court documents, the ACLU representing the Satanic Temple, convinced a judge that the group was previously wrongly blocked from holding their After School Satan Club meetings at Saucon Valley Middle School. The ruling includes mention that the school district "likely violated" the First Amendment rights of the group members.

The issue at the core of the Satanic Temple's argument was that they are a religious group just like any other, so they argued they should have the same rights.

The $200,000 is for TST's costs and legal fees. Apparently no punitive damages were awarded.

What makes me nervous about this is that any religion is allowed access to public facilities on any constitutional basis. My preference is to deny all religions any special access to any public or taxpayer facility as a violation of the Establishment Clause. By using free speech as a shield to further force encroachment of religion into government and society, the Establishment Clause is seriously neutered, seriously undermining secular democracy. If people want freedom of religious speech, they can do it in their own damned religious facilities. American are already heavily subsidized churches and church property and income with massive tax breaks. The forced taxpayer subsidy is running at about $100 billion/year.

Maybe my analysis is wrong and this constitutes an actual victory for secular democracy. It just doesn't feel that way to me. It feels like a victory for Christian theocracy and its endlessly greedy corruption (raiding public resources), bigotry, intolerance and closed-mindedness.

I should probably look into this more to see if I'm right or wrong. But at present, what the TST is doing seems to be about the last resort for secularism in the face of a frightful free speech shield that protects religious encroachment everywhere.

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The NYT asks the obvious question (bravo MSM!), how long can it possibly take to prove that Hamas operated a major command center under a hospital in Gaza?:

Israel Says Hospital Held Hamas Command Center: 

How Long Could It Take for Proof?

Israel is trying to produce solid evidence for its assertion that Hamas has been using tunnels under Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza as a command center. But an Israeli military-led tour of the hospital grounds with journalists Thursday night showed directly only a shaft in the ground with a staircase, which did not settle the issue.  

Palestinian officials and doctors at Al-Shifa have denied that the hospital has been used by Hamas’s military.

The NYT article says that military experts say that it could take days, weeks or months for Israel to make a definitive case, or solid proof might never come. One can argue that sounds like BS. Sounds like BS to me. If a major underground military facility cannot be shown to exist in about a few days or maybe a week, then it very likely doesn’t exist. Unless and until definitive proof arises that clearly shows one did exist. While we wait the matter becomes, was the attack on the hospital an honest mistake based on bad intel, or was it just war crimes as usual?  

Israel will no doubt continue to say it’s looking for the command center, while waiting for attention to turn away. The whole stinking mess will fade out of memory and mind. Then the whole thing just goes away. And that’s typical for the miserable story of the endless misery related to Israel and the lands of the former Ottoman Empire where people called Palestinians used to live. (There never was a nation called Palestine)  

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Fun facts: Wikipedia writes about International recognition of the State of Palestine:

The State of Palestine has been accepted as an observer state of the United Nations General Assembly in November 2012. As of 2 June 2023, 139 of the 193 United Nations (UN) member states have recognized the State of Palestine (Israel is recognized by 165).

The State of Palestine had been officially proclaimed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on 15 November 1988, claiming sovereignty over the internationally recognized Palestinian territories: the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. By the end of 1988, the proclaimed Palestinian state was recognized by 78 countries.

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A threat analysis: An 8 minute MSNBC segment, Donald Trump is the greatest threat the world faces, by Ali Velshi did an analysis of the scope of threat the DJT poses to America and the rest of the world. I assess the risk factors about the same way, mostly for the same reasons.

Chapter review: Chapter 1, part 2

Christopher Ketcham wrote the 2019 book, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West. This is my 2nd part of my two-part review of the chapter (part 1 is here). Ketcham writes:

“The rainless country was the last frontier,” wrote Bernard DeVoto, who told the story of aridity in the West perhaps more eloquently than any American. If beyond the 100th meridian is the true West, its end lies at the end of the High Sierras of California and the cascades of Oregon and Washington, at the mountain rain shadow cutting off the Pacific Ocean air. (The West does not include the relatively lush California coasts or the temperate rain forests of Oregon and Washington, essentially the Pacific Rim.) .... The forests back of the hundredth meridian had fallen in short order, but the aridlands could not be homesteaded so easily.

.... In the aridlands, the pioneer faced an “iron determinism” where “the limits set by nature were narrow and the terms rigid,” where civilization as we know it was possible only in a  “very narrow life zone.” The mountains where the rain and snow mostly fell, and where the tree held the snowpack were uninhabitable, as they couldn’t be farmed. .... America’s ideology of limitless growth was here rebuffed. This is the key to understanding why so much of the land in the West remains out of private hands and in public ownership.

DeVoto was the first major historian of the West who was also an environmentalist and an activist, the first chronicler of what Wallace Stegner called “the West's curious desire to rape itself.” DeVoto was a Westerner, raised in Utah. He suffered in the provincialism and intolerance of Mormon country, went east to study and then teach at Harvard, settled in Cambridge, but never forgot the beauty of his native ground (“loving the land and history,” said a magazine profile, “but loathing the society”).

.... He called the West “a plundered province,” a resource colony for corporations and absentee landlords who practiced an “economy of liquidation.” He was broad in his attacks on the liquidators. He went after the timbermen, the mining companies, the stockmen, the cattle barons, the opilmen and gasmen, the overgrazers, the deforesters, the denuders, the profiteers of gold rushes and grass rushes. He named the bankers and congressmen who abetted the plundering. The Western hogs, he called them.

.... Ironically, the users in their race to liquidate, helped drive the creation of the public lands system we know today, as they proved the need for federal stewardship to stop their abuses. Massive timber frauds in the 19th century, the largest land frauds seen in the West, led directly to the establishment of the Forest Service in the 20th century, its purpose to stop deforestation. Out-of-control cattle numbers in the steppe, overgrazing that turned the fragile soil to dust, led directly to the federal grazing regulatory service that eventually became the Bureau of Land Management.

I quote this to point out that the modern CARRRP (corrupt authoritarian radical right Republican Party) considers any restraints on exploitation of public federal lands to be evil deep state socialism that must be completely obliterated. The tactics and deeply selfish attitudes and mindset of American capitalists with the rape everything and to hell with social conscience are no different than the tactics and mindset of cruel colonial imperialists that (1) Hannah Arendt described in brutal detail in 1951 in The Origins of Totalitarianism, or (2) Joseph Conrad painfully but beautifully described in 1899 in Heart of Darkness.

Not a damned thing has changed. Humans are going to be human. That includes deceit, brutality and shameless cruelty to people and nature. The plutocratic elites of the modern CARRRP are essentially no different than what Ketcham, Arendt or Conrad wrote about. The CARRRP (and libertarians) hate government and regulations that protect both people and the environment. They glorify the alleged infallibility of unregulated free markets running wild and butt naked as the best hope for freedom, prosperity and peace. They are both wrong and a deadly threat to democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. They are not democrats, they are brutal tyrants and plutocrats.

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“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” ― Fabulously wealthy imperialist and brutal exploiter of people and nature Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) expressing his sincere sadness at not being able to take control of the entire universe and exploit it to dust, including any living creatures in it for his personal wealth, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes; With Elucidatory Notes to Which Are Added Some Chapters Describing the Political and Religious Ideas (the guy that Rhodesia and Rhodes scholarship were named after -- there was not one shred of social conscience in Cecil) 

In my book a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water, cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land would be like God made it and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all.  ― Chris Ketcham quoting Charlie Russel, the Cowboy Artist 

I don't recognize the United States Government as even existing. ― Cliven Bundy, expressing the unflinching attitude of a virulent government hater (also a man of no social conscience; Bundy advocated for limited federal government involvement in local affairs, particularly in ranching. Bundy supported the ideas of the sovereign citizen movement. Many movement adherents argue that the federal government is illegitimate and does not have jurisdiction over individuals, meaning that laws do not apply to them.)

News bits: Dark free speech rising; God's home in the brain; A brain gone woke; Etc.

The Hill reports about evidence that DJT's violence-inciting rhetoric is poisoning congress:

Trump’s violent talk shows signs of taking over Congress

Trump-allied conservatives are using more pugnacious rhetoric than ever, and in some cases, such as an incident Tuesday featuring Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), are ready to make things physical, a trend that is setting off alarm bells on Capitol Hill.

Republican and Democratic senators say former President Trump’s bombastic threats and insults, which have proved to be a winning political formula for the GOP, are catching on more broadly in Congress.

Senators in both parties say they were shocked when Mullin, a first-term senator and Trump ally, challenged the president of the Teamsters to a fistfight in the middle of a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, forcing the 82-year-old chair, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), to step in to keep blood from being spilled on his carpet.

Mullin told the Teamsters leader to “stand your butt up” and sprung out of his chair while taking off a wedding ring to prepare for melee.

The Oklahoma senator, a former mixed martial arts fighter, told CNN on Wednesday he had “full intentions” of pummeling the labor boss right there in the hearing room.

“First thing I thought of when I stood up I thought, ‘I’m going to break my hand on this guy’s face’ and will take my wedding ring off,” he said

That exemplifies how DJT’s hate speech is getting some radical right Republicans to act, imagine what might happen if DJT asked for people to make a citizen’s arrest of judges and prosecutors in his court cases. 

People like Elon Musk defend this kind of violence-inducing speech as merely free speech. DJT’s inciting rhetoric is mostly legal free speech, but all of it is dark free speech. All or nearly all American pro-tyranny elites (i) ignore or deny the existence of dark free speech, (ii) deny it causes harm to society, democracy or the rule of law, and/or (iii) cynically claim it is honest speech speaking truth to evil socialist liars and deep state pedophiles.

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A 2012 article commented about God in the brains 

"We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it's not isolated to one specific area of the brain," said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. "Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals' spiritual experiences."

A 2019 paper commented:

We conducted a systematic literature review of research on the neurobiological correlates of R/S, which resulted in 25 reports studying primarily R/S with electroencephalography, structural neuroimaging (MRI), and functional neuroimaging (fMRI, PET). These studies investigated a wide range of religions (e.g., Christianity, Buddhism, Islam) and R/S states and behaviors (e.g., resting state, prayer, judgments) and employed a wide range of methodologies, some of which (e.g., no control group, varying measures of religiosity, small sample sizes) raise concerns about the validity of the results. .... The findings implicate several brain regions potentially associated with R/S development and behavior, including the medial frontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, default mode network, and caudate.

A 2022 paper commented:

Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious, with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spirituality and religiosity remain unresolved. .... In two independent brain lesion datasets (N1 = 88; N2 = 105), we applied lesion network mapping to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious belief map to a specific human brain circuit.

These findings suggest that spirituality and religiosity map to a common brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray, a brainstem region previously implicated in fear conditioning, pain modulation, and altruistic behavior.  

Spirituality, or more precisely spiritual acceptance, has been defined as “a stable shift in worldview towards belief in forces that cannot be rationally comprehended or objectively proven.”  

Patients with brain disorders can provide unique insight into the neural substrate of spirituality and religiosity that can complement data from functional neuroimaging. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy can present with hyper-religious symptoms, which has been linked to hippocampal as opposed to amygdala pathology. .... Such patients can allow for causal inferences between neuroanatomy and spiritual or religious behaviors, but multiple different brain regions have been implicated.

PAG = periaqueductal gray

Well, that's clear as mud. It's good to get that straightened out.  

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The Daily Beast reported: Joe Manchin Says Trump ‘Will Destroy’ U.S. Democracy if He Wins in 2024. Another mind has gone woke. And there was much rejoicing -- yaaay. 

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Another tyranny warning from a NYT opinion by Jamelle Bouie:

But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-democratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.

This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.

Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.

It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor.

I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose the majority of votes statewide.

In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future — but the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.

Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities.  

It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice Legislature. Or so they thought.

Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”

Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators.  

To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, [Republicans] always win.

That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question.

Republican elites know that for the most part they cannot persuade and win policy arguments on the merits. That is why they have no choice but to resort to ferocious, often threatening dark free speech. Their rhetoric and propaganda Leviathan deceives, lies, slanders, crackpots, misdirects, and foments as much irrational, unwarranted reason-destroying emotion as possible, e.g., fear, hate, anger, intolerance, bigotry, racism and distrust of democracy and pro-democratic institutions, political opposition, inconvenient facts, true truths and actual history.

News bits: Rut roh for poor Rudi; DJT-related legal sleaze; Russian brutality

Poor Rudi, the Tutti Frutti. The former federal prosecutor, Mayor of NYC and all around idiot dictator supporter just can't seem to git 'er done. His fumbling and bumbling just doesn't produce the results he and DJT want, i.e., kleptocratic dictatorship. The New Republic reports:

Uh-Oh: Giuliani’s “Biden Sources” Charged With Being Putin Agents

The Ukrainian officials Rudy Giuliani used to investigate Joe Biden were just charged with treason

Ukraine’s Security Service notified Rudy Giuliani’s top Ukrainian allies on Monday that they are suspects of treason, citing evidence that the officials participated in activities aiding Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A Ukrainian member of parliament, Oleksandr Dubinsky, ex-Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, and ex-prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk are suspected of joining an organization founded by chief members of Russia’s Military Intelligence while Giuliani worked to dig up dirt on President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in 2019, according to a statement.

We can rest assured that (AARR) America's authoritarian radical right will either deny this as fake news or more likely just ignore it to minimize the embarrassment. It certainly won't tarnish Rudy's image with the AARR as a valiant patriot fighting for God Almighty against the evil socialist pedophile deep state hoards, and evil Joe and evil Hunter and the evil missing laptop. Just about everything anywhere near DJT is just plain sewage.

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The legal sleaze coming from DJT's court cases is breathtaking, terrifying and outrageous. The Hill reports about who leaked videos of co-defendants doing plea deals in the Georgia criminal state RICO prosecution:

Leaked videos. An apparent confession, later represented as a “typo.” Demands for a protective order.

Media reports detailing confidential interviews with four defendants who were divulging their knowledge to state prosecutors in the Georgia racketeering case involving former President Trump set off a bizarre “whodunnit”-style hearing in state court Wednesday afternoon.

It culminated with a confession by one defendant’s lawyer and a Georgia judge weighing whether to issue a protective order placing restrictions on how defendants can disseminate materials they receive in discovery.

“In being transparent with the court and to make sure that nobody else gets blamed for what happened — and so that I can go to sleep well tonight — Judge, I did release those videos to one outlet,” said Jonathan Miller, an attorney for defendant Misty Hampton. “And in all candor, I need the court to know that.”

Miller’s admission capped a whirlwind series of developments that began Monday, when footage surfaced of proffer sessions the four defendants who pleaded guilty — ex-Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, plus former Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall — participated in as part of their deals with state prosecutors. 

Their confessions, published first by ABC News and the Washington Post, bolster the narrative laid out in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s 98-page indictment that Trump led the charge on efforts to subvert Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results in his favor.

Like I said, just about everything anywhere near DJT just turns into sewage, most of which never generates any serious repercussion for the sleazy scumbags involved.

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Ethnic cleansing:  Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal, extermination, deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.

Putin publicly says he wants to obliterate the Ukrainian language and culture. He is dead serious about it. Ukrainian children are being taken into Russia and undergoing “re-education” to speak Russian and hate their Ukrainian heritage. China is currently doing the same kind of brutal ethnic cleansing or “re-education” to the Uighurs in China. The NYT reports about Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied territory fleeing to avoid being brutalized and re-educated:

The Russian soldiers turned up at her home close to midnight with an ominous message.

“They said, ‘If in two weeks you don’t have a Russian passport, we will talk to you in a different way,’” recalled Evelina, a social worker who until this month lived under Russian occupation in southeastern Ukraine.

She didn’t wait to have that conversation. Instead, she bundled a few possessions into a suitcase and left with her teenage daughter, heading for territory controlled by Ukraine.

In the Russian-governed lands, she said, it has become so tense that “you are afraid to look out your own window.”

The military deadlock that has settled in across southeastern Ukraine poses a looming security threat to the rest of the country, and menaces Europe with a long period of instability. But for the estimated 4 million to 6 million Ukrainians living in Russian-held areas, as Evelina was, the stalemate means something more dispiriting: an occupation with no end in sight.

Emptied of about half of its population and under the thumb of a harsh military rule, the swath of Russian-occupied territory, an area the size of the Netherlands, is stuck in a distressing state of limbo: run by Russia but recognized by most of the rest of the world as Ukrainian.

Demographics in these regions are changing as working-age people flee, leaving an older and poorer population.

Russian soldiers quarter in abandoned houses and crime has risen. Russian businessmen are strong-arming local business owners into selling stores and farms, and Central Asian migrants have shown up to trade in markets and work as laborers.  

Repression, including torture in makeshift detention sites in basements, targets those who reveal pro-Ukrainian views, altering the political makeup of the area in Russia’s favor but also shifting the cultural landscape away from Ukrainian language and identity.

Russia now controls about 17 percent of Ukrainian land, a half-moon-shaped expanse of farmland, villages and cities in the southeast. The region is off-limits to rights groups and most independent reporters, but accounts by people who have left the occupied areas offer a window into this portion of Ukraine.  

Evelina took an unusual but increasingly popular route back into Ukrainian-controlled territory: traveling into Russia and heading north and west, then back into Ukraine through an unofficial border crossing near the northern city of Sumy.

That path is taken by about 100 Ukrainians daily. They hire drivers or take public transportation in Russia to get to the border. From there, they stagger into Ukraine, a thin stream of exhausted families walking two miles on a rutted rural road between the two armies, an unlikely corridor of peace between two nations fighting a violent war.

Russia is just like China. The dictators brutalize innocent people, torture or murder the recalcitrants and keep the press and NGOs the hell away. What the world and local populations get to hear are propaganda fake stories about happy re-educated people who now see the errors of their obliterated past. 

To sharpen and localize the criticism, the Russian and Chinese dictators are the people that DJT and radical right elites admire and publicly praise. Knowingly or not, admitting it or not, that is what most of the American authoritarian radical right supports. What they support is disgusting and evil, not merely debatable and maybe immoral.

Q: Is that over the top or reasonable criticism of the Putin, Chinese dictators and American dictator-lovers?

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The WaPo reports (not paywalled off) about Israel's ongoing attack on a Gaza hospital: 

Israeli troops scour Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital for evidence of Hamas presence

The presence of Israeli forces inside Gaza’s largest hospital stretched into its second day Thursday, amid the wait for more concrete evidence of extensive Hamas infrastructure at the facility that precipitated the raid.

Israel also said no further evidence of Hamas activities in the hospital was scheduled to be made public for now, following the release Wednesday of photographs and video showing small caches of rifles and laptops that the Israel Defense Forces identified as Hamas material. The military did not show evidence of tunnels or a command center it has said exists under the hospital.  

Israel described the incursion as a “precise and targeted” mission to push Hamas from one of its main command centers. The operation was in compliance with international law, Israel said, because the military gave the staff days of warning to evacuate patients and Hamas activities there had stripped the hospital of its protected status under the Geneva Conventions.

But humanitarian groups condemned the incursion and said Israel’s actions highlighted the need for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, calls for which Israel and the United States have rejected.  

“There has been a breakdown of the most basic respect for humane values, the killing of so many civilians cannot be dismissed as collateral damage. The only winner of such a war is likely to be extremism and further extremism,” [Volker Turk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights] said. .... The absence of electricity and fuel for generators has led to a breakdown in the enclave’s sewage systems and hospitals so that “massive outbreaks of infectious disease, and hunger, seem inevitable,” he said. 

Commentators in Israel said the military would need to show more evidence to support assertions that Shifa has been a Hamas stronghold for more than a decade, something doctors working there have denied.  

Anger at Netanyahu has been high as even some of his supporters blamed him for both the failure to prevent the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. and his long-standing policy of bolstering Hamas in the first place, a strategic attempt to sow division between Palestinian factions.

Polls taken in the weeks after the attack showed two-thirds of Israelis wanted to see Netanyahu replaced.

Other sources are reporting that Israel is having a hard time finding evidence of a major Hamas operation, but is still looking. Does it make sense that a major underground Hamas military facility under a building is hard to find and report evidence of? Maybe Israel’s intelligence was wrong and there was no major Hamas presence there. Maybe we will know in the next few days. Maybe we will never know. What if there was a small Hamas presence, does that make any difference?

Did Israel really allow innocents to safely flee? Maybe. Maybe not.

Have one or more Israeli governments supported Hamas? Very likely yes.

So many questions, too much uncertainty, and too much propaganda.