A Monster Produced by Hatred

Yahya Sinwar is a monster.

As the supposed mastermind of the the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel that left some 1,200 Israelies dead and another 200-plus hostage, Sinwar is a product of the half-century of Israel-Palestinian violence and one reason that Israel-Hamas war won’t end until he is dead.

Israeli officials have intoned ominously that Sinwar is a “dead man walking.” And after the smoking mountain of ruble that Israel left in what once was Gaza City, that cannot be taken as just an idle threat.

But death, his own or that of Palestinian civilians, appears to mean little to him.

Asked if Oct. 7 was worth the deaths of 10,000 Gazan civilians, Sinwar replied recently: “Even 100,000 is worth it.”

Sinwar was born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Egyptian-ruled Gaza in 1962 to a family who had been expelled or fled from Ashkelon, a city 30 miles south of Tel-Aviv, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

For organizing the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians considered to be collaborators in 1989, he was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel, of which he served 22 years until his release in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Now Sinwar is believed to be in Rafah, where Israel has vowed to wage an all-out assult to destroy Hamas, despite the presence of 1.4 million refugees.

The hatred and extremism appear to be equal on both sides.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister, recent said, for example, that there was “no such thing” as the Palestinian people. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has demanded “wide security zones around the settlements and roads to … prevent the Arabs from approaching them.”

These settlements in the Occupied Territories are, of course, illegal under international law and such security zones would prevent Palestinian farmers from harvesting olives, an important cash crop.

For his part, Sinwar has said “we would rather die as martyrs than die out of oppression and humiliation. We are ready to die, and tens of thousands will die with us.”

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 34,844 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israel in the conflict as of April 30. Among the confirmed dead are 4,959 women, 7,797 children and 1,924 elderly.

George H.W. Bush

George H.W. Bush was not my favorite president, not by a long shot. I thought he was effete, aloof and untethered to the nation and the world he presumed to lead.

But as the national editor of a national news magazine, I was not paid to have opinions. What I was paid for was to ensure the fairness and felicity of the reporters’ copy I was assigned to edit.

I edited only the reporters, not the columnists who wrote for the magazine, and when one of them included the word “wimp” in a piece about the president, I objected.

Anyone who had flown fighter aircraft, taking off and landing from aircraft carriers, could not accurately be called a wimp, I argued.

After reading a new book about President Bush, “When the World Seemed New,” by Jeffrey Engel, I have come to a whole different conclusion about the 41st president. Mr. Bush may well have effete and aloof, but it was I who was untethered from reality, I learned from the book.

Engel, the the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, has obtained new released archival documents from governments around the world including those of China and Eastern Europe and the book paints a much more comprehensive picture of President Bush.

The 41st president may have been all of the above but it any “w” word could have been applied to him, the correct one might have been “wise.”

And you can make that a capital W!

Katie Wedding Toast

I was running out the door one day when I grabbed a ringing phone, thinking it might be work.

It wasn’t.

Rather, a warm, welcoming voice was saying, “Mr. Duffy, we have just had the most beautiful baby girl born down here in Florida. Could you and your wife possibly be here by 9 am tomorrow?”

We could and we were.

When we walked into the adoption agency we saw that the woman on the phone had not been lying. The baby before us was indeed the most beautiful baby either of us had ever seen, with large, liquid brown eyes and a shy, sweet smile.

She looked up at us adoringly, uncomprehendingly. We named Katherine for my father’s mother and brought her back to Washington where we both worked.

Today, Katie is a beautiful young woman with two beautiful kids of her own, Caroline and Derek, and is married to her fiancé of many years, Casey.

Seldom does fortune smile on us with such unlooked for blessings. but in bestowing the gift of Katie on us, she blessed us beyond our wildest imaginings and beyond even the bounds of our measureless love.

Congratulations, Katie, today is your day, and Casey’s and the kids too! We love you all so much and don’t feel as if we are losing a daughter but gaining a family.

Iran Strikes Back

“Don’t!”

That was President Biden’s blunt, one-word warning to Iran on Friday after its supreme leader promised to punish Israel for its April 1 strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.

Iran’s response was to launch 300 drones and cruise missiles at Israel on Saturday night, the vast majority of which were shot down by Israeli air defenses.

Although Iran said that the matter can now “be deemed concluded,” the chief of Iran’s armed forces warned that the regime will stage a “much larger” attack if Israel launches a counterstrike.

Meanwhile, Biden reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. will not participate in any offensive operation against Iran, a senior administration official told NBC News.

Biden will reportedly convene a meeting of G7 officials today to discuss a united diplomatic response to the attack.

Intelligence officials say the Iranian response to the April 1 Israeli attack on Damascus was inevitable. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could not afford not to retaliate, as that would have have exposed the Iranian government as weak.

The question is what happens now. Netanyahu and is so called “war cabinet” have rebuffed all US requests to de-escalate, while of course demanding an uninterrupted flow of U.S. military aid and U.S taxpayer dollars..

“We set a simple principle: Anyone who hits us, we hit them,” the Israeli prime minister said recently.

Meanwhile, in Gaza at least 33,729 Palestinians have been killed and 76,371 wounded in Israeli attacks on since Oct. 7. The death toll in Israel from Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks stands at 1,139, with dozens of people still held captive.

MaryBeth

On good days, when the weather was warm and the wind fair, MaryBeth would make sure I walked — walking being the best way, we were told, to come back from a stroke

I had had a stroke some months before and relied on MaryBeth more than I would have liked.

For the last few months we were together MaryBeth was dying of cancer, though I didn’t know it at the time. I tried to make as few demands on her as possible and do as little as I could to drain her dwindling energy.

Her family had a history of cancer and she was a chronic smoker. I tried to get her to see a doctor but she rebuffed my requests repeatedly.

In the end, MaryBeth would die and I would live, somehow, without her.

Katie

I was running out the door one day when I grabbed a ringing phone, thinking it might be work.

It wasn’t.

Rather, a warm, welcoming voice was saying, “Mr. Duffy, we have just had the most beautiful baby girl born down here in Florida. Could you and your wife possibly be here by 9 am tomorrow?”

We could and we were.

When we walked into the adoption agency we saw that the woman on the phone had not been lying. The baby before us was indeed the most beautiful baby either of us had ever seen, with large, liquid brown eyes and a shy, sweet smile.

She looked up at us adoringly, uncomprehendingly. We named Katherine for my father’s mother and brought her back to Washington where we both worked.

Today, Katie is a beautiful young woman with two beautiful kids of her own and engaged to be married to her fiancé of many years.

Seldom does fortune smile on us with such unlooked for blessings. but in bestowing the gift of Katie on us, she blessed us beyond our wildest imaginings and beyond even the bounds of our measureless love.

Israel’s Strike on Damascus

After pursuing Iran’s proxies from behind its borders through many parts of the world, Israel this past week finally struck at Iran’s heart — sort of.

Israeli jets pounded Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, it’s closest ally in the region, killing at least seven officials including Mohammed Reza Zahedi, a top commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards , and senior commander Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, according to Iran’s Foreign Ministry.

At least six Syrian citizens were also killed, Iranian state television reported.

Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, have been striking at Israel from its southern and northern borders. Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,160 people, mostly civilians, while Hezbollah has been firing heavy rockets at towns in northern Israel.

Houthi rebels in Yemen, meanwhile, also backed by Iran, have been striking at shipping lanes in the Red Sea to protest Israel’s war on Hamas.

Should the strike on Damascus lead to a wider war in the Middle East, Israel will certainly incur the world’s wrath, but in truth it was only doing what it had to do to defend itself.

Let the world say what it will, but in a tough neighborhood, such as the one Israel lives in, one has to use all the tools at its disposal to show you are tougher than the other guy.

The Moscow ISIS Attack

The terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall music venue in Moscow that left 137 dead is a graphic reminder that the killing machine known as the Islamic State is alive and well.

Russia, of course, has experienced terrorist attacks before, particularly from the restive former Soviet states with their repressed Moslem minorities.

And President Vladimir Putin has, of course, used such attacks to his own political advantage. The 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, for example, which killed more than 300, helped elevate Putin to the presidency.

The danger now is that he uses this latest ISIS outrage as an excuse to wage an even more murderous assault on the civilian population of Ukraine.

France, the UK and other European countries have warned Putin not to “instrumentalize” the attacks but Putin has already said the attackers had planned to flee into Ukraine.

Putin also needs to cover his tracks on why Russia did not respond to a US warning earlier this month that an ISIS attack was planned for Moscow.

Deflecting blame is a Putin specialty and he will certainly be pulling out the playbook for this one.

A World Under Threat

The world has always been a dangerous place but never, is seems, has it been as dangerous as it is today.

In testimony before Congress last week, top US intelligence officials warned of a “complex and interconnected threat” to US security, coming from multiple sources.

The US faces “an increasingly fragile global order, strained by great power competition, transnational challenges and regional conflicts,” the intelligence chiefs said, citing their annual Threat Assessment report.

The report warned that “an ambitious but anxious China, a confrontational Russia, some regional powers, such as Iran, and more capable non-state actors are challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as US primacy within it.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Congress that the Israel-Hamas war has resulted in “record” numbers of threats from Islamic militants, especially with the start of the Muslim holy week of Ramadan this week.

The report also warned in stark terms that Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu’s viability to lead Israel is in jeopardy due to his hard line in the war that has not brought home Israeli hostages but has resulted in the deaths of more than 31,000 Palestinian civilians.

“Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy,” the report said.

“Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility,” the report concluded.

No Truth in True the Vote

In a county courthouse in Georgia not long ago, lawyers for an election advocacy group called True the Vote filed court papers saying they had no evidence whatsoever that election rigging caused Donald Trump to lose the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

Though it has not been acknowledged as such, Texas-based True the Vote and its allegations about the 2020 election fraud have been the basis for assertions by former President Trump and his associates that the 2020 election result was a sham and should be overturned.

Those assertions also figured prominently in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.

True the Vote had filed complaints with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in 2021 that it had “a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta” during the November 2020 election and a January 2021 runoff.

A Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected. The organization now concedes it has no such evidence.

“TTV has no such documents in its possession, custody, or control,” the group’s attorneys told the court.

Some of True the Vote’s accusations were recycled into a movie by conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, including surveillance videos that allegedly showed ballot boxes being stuffed. A subsequent investigation by the state board found that those claims were unfounded: The individuals identified in D’Souza’s movie were dropping off ballots filled out by family members, which is legal under Georgia law.

US intelligence officials have cautioned that efforts by the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, confirmed the investigation by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, have extended into other programs designed to exploit cleavages in the US electorate based on race, ethnicity economic status and other factors.

True the Vote has not been specifically linked to any such Russian efforts but the similarities between their respective campaigns and the divisiveness they cause among voters are striking, election experts say.