Hamas Logic

If you think about it a moment incidents such as the alleged drone strike on a Gaza Hospital (which happens to be where a fair number of Hamas leaders congregate) which turn out to be errant Hamas rockets make a perverse sense.

for Hamas there is no chance of military victory. Their only chance is to muster world opinion to force Israel to stop its activities. To achieve this they need one thing: lots of dead Palestinians – preferably babies and children but any will do. The Israelis know this and risk their soldier’s lives to avoid hitting civilians. So, if Israel is failing to bring the body count up fast enough, what would make sense for Hamas, is to train its rockets on its own population. Lord knows they don’t have an Iron Dome. Not all the rockets of course. Just enough to produce a civilian slaughter every few hours to keep CNN supplied with fresh, bloody, pictures of dead children.

“Resistance” comes in many forms. One is human shields, another is rejecting or violating ceasefires, and another may very well be blowing up your own people “accidentally”. As long as the all important body count keeps going up the barbarians who run Hamas are not going to be particularly concerned as to why.

UPDATE: Oooops.

At least Obama

retains the might of France…or, so far I have not seen any indication they are joining the rush to stand down.

Cameron will likely lose the Headboy position, what happens to the Big Zero now that he proposes to attack with no UN Resolution, no Arab League official support, no Anglosphere endorsement?

Well, nothing. His watery pinkish line in the Syrian sand is now not worth the death of a single American cruise missile because, without at least a tiny international fig leaf, the poor idiot will, in the eyes of progressives at least, be a war criminal.

He’s blown this from the day he decided to demand that Assad step down without being willing to get the job done himself.

The anti-American “rest of the world” has to be delighted that a President could be so completely out of his depth; those of us who are resolutely pro-American can only shake our heads at the stupidity of electing this doorknob.

(I suspect the Israelis are more than a little relieved. Fun as it would have been to whack Hezbollah under cover of the fog of war, the ineptness of American and international policy has allowed the accumulation of thousands of missiles in Lebanon and Syria. Those will not be fun but they are not likely to be fired this week.)

Where have all the Muslims Gone

Iran may be one of the world’s most secular countries; some reports put mosque attendance in the Islamic Republic at just 2%, lower than Church of England attendance. When the odious Islamist regime falls at length, we probably will find that there are as few Muslims in Iran as there were Communists in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like other religions rooted in traditional society, for example the nationalist-Catholic faith that Europeans abandoned after the two world wars, Islam cannot abide the onset of modernity. Some forms of religion can flourish in modernity; Islam is not one of them.

The variable that best predicts fertility across all Muslim countries is education: as soon as women become literate, they stop having children. That is a hallmark of a faith that melts away in the harsh light of modernity. David Goldman (aka Spengler)

For all of the noise about Islam rampant and Iranian religious aggression, the reality is that much of the Islamic world is in demographic decline.

Goldman thinks this may explain a good deal about the belligerence of the current Iranian regime. I suspect he is right. But it is not just Iran. Virtually every Muslim nation is experiencing a sharp decline in birth rates.

Or, at least they are in the more secular, less fundamentalist sections of the society. Because the other demographic truism – faith leads to babies – means that the more militant/less educated sectors of the society are still having five or six children per woman. Which, in turn, means that the battle of the cradle may be won, in the mid-term, by the groups most stridently anti-Western and anti-modern.

Demography can be ideological – in parts of the Muslim world (and in parts of the West) – the decline of the secular birthrate has distinct political implications.

(The fundamentalist settlers in Israel have a birthrate three times higher than more secular Israelis.)

15 seconds

Imagine.

OK, Israelis, hit them hard and long. Walk through Gaza and clear the rockets.

There is nothing disproportionate about that.

God’s Speed.

Let’s hope Israel gets seriously “disproportionate”

Last night, Downing Street declared Hamas bears “principal responsibility” for the escalating crisis, branding rocket attacks on Israel “completely unacceptable”.

He gave an unrepentant defence of the decision to launch Wednesday and Thursday’s attacks on Gaza, which killed Hamas’s military leader Ahmed al-Jaabari.

“Israel will continue to take whatever action is necessary to defend our people,” he said. Officials last night however, said that no decision had yet been made to enter Gaza. the telegraph (behind a paywall so get the Tor browser or a public proxy like hotspot)

Dickheads who fire unguided missiles at population centers deserve a pretty severe thumping. Unfortunately, there will civilian casualties which, I suspect, the world’s press and bleeding hearts will whine about. (Advice to women and children – stay away from the Hamas “militants” as they are likely to attract fire.)

Hamas really is pretty dim.

Update: “Knesset member Tzipi Hotovely, who often is described as the “intellectual voice” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, tells Newsmax: “I must say, for many Israelis this is a big issue. Shooting into the most important city is like shooting rockets into New York.

“This is something that is unbearable and impossible for any country to suffer and to accept,” she says. “We will do anything to prevent our people to suffer from terror and rocket attacks.” newsmax

Sending in ground troops to target specific cells, arms dumps and such like makes sense.