Israeli Interesting How The Times They Are A-Changin' But Don't Be Russian To Conclusions Just Yet
Is Ben Shapiro Elon Musk's IDF Handler?
How to treat the Israelis is where so many presidencies, business leaders, and political careers come crashing down. My view is simple enough: treat them like human beings, not as gods or as demons. I prefer the Mossad to the IDF but then I have always preferred the professionals to the butchers.
In America, this likely means enforcing the law against them and no, it isn’t anti-Semitic to enforce the law, especially the one about registering foreign spies. And yes, that does include Ben Shapiro, who has long worked as an agent of the Netanyahu Israelis. We’re going to need to have that conversation when he’s handling the cash for the Wilks brothers’ cult. Shapiro is losing his access to Facebook — Sheryl Sandberg, Israeli agent, was forced off the board — so now he’s managing Musk.
“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock,” Ben Shapiro once said. Now we see that it’s the Israelis who like to bomb the Palestinians. Oh, and the tallest building in the world is in the United Arab Emirates. None of the top 100 buildings are in Israel. Oh, and how is that fence holding up exactly?
At some point the Arab states are going to have to ask themselves the obvious questions about Elon and his enablers. At some point America is going to have to ask obvious questions about Elon and his FBI and Likud enablers.
Maybe President Biden — who will be the last pro-Israel Democratic president — will be forced to answer these questions. Maybe he will not be. But someone will have to.
There were three flares which went up to show Biden that his policy in Israel isn’t working as intended.
Then again, maybe it’s working very well indeed. There’s a certain cope going around. A friend of mine suggests that Biden could simply be a really good actor at the moment and we hold the upper hand by positioning ourselves to call our own bluff and do a sudden 180° pivot at a time and place of our choosing. Maybe our European allies are simply acting along.
We know that Biden and Netanyahu last spoke shortly before Christmas and then again recently and now we see that Netanyahu’s publicly opposed a two-state solution.
There’s been all these efforts to normalize relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia but you can’t normalize ties when you have an abnormally corrupt leader. To do so would be to normalize corruption. We can’t have that.
The first was David Remnick’s piece in New Yorker laying out a conflict of interest between Netanyahu’s personal corruption and the State of Israel. You can’t normalize ties when you have an abnormally corrupt leader. It just doesn’t McGurk work.
Think of this missive from Israel as the Jewish bien-pensant coming to terms with what needs to happen. Jewish American Matt Yglesias, who was read by Jewish American chief of staff Ron Klain, calling for a coup of Netanyahu is a tell. Among my Mossad friends Bibi’s assassination is a foregone conclusion. The only question is who will do it. Is there no patriotic Israeli willing to step up?
The second was Ed Luce’s column in Financial Times which laid out Biden’s weakness at confronting Netanyahu and warning that such hesitancy may lead to his electoral defeat. I don’t think things are all that dire but I do read Luce as the British deep state telling Biden to get it together vis à vis Bibi.
Biden’s reluctance to go there probably stems from his own understanding of how Bush the elder conditioned aid to Israel — and found himself with a third party challenger in the form of Ross Perot, whose company did the backend of the shah of Iran’s computer systems. Biden knows a lot more than he tells regarding the Israelis but voters might wonder if Biden’s inability to protect his son from the Israeli defamation campaign might also extend to his unwillingness to protect Americans. This is, I think, the largest looming risk to his presidency. Call it the liberal Zionist lament.
Were I Trump, the first thing I would do when I won the GOP nomination would be to publicly oppose Netanyahu. Is Trump wild enough to do such a thing? Probably not. Is there no Republican willing to call out Netanyahu’s bad behavior? I had hopes for Christie but then so many did. Alas, Luce was supposed to meet with me but elements in the British world didn’t want him to. That’s a shame. We had a lot to talk about. Maybe later, Ed.
The third was Senator Chuck Schumer’s signaling that he would open to tying Israel aid to Israel behavior. I’ve long thought that the real home of the Jews was Williamsburg and that if you lowered the rents you’d change the politics. There are a lot of people who want to prop up the rents and they’ll bring in illegal immigrants to do it. There’s a specter stalking New York politics — and that’s AOC challenging Schumer for the U.S. Senate seat.
Britain, for her part, is calling for seizing the billions from Russia. Good. About time. Maybe even past time.
You may recall this policy was preferred by Congressman Matt Gaetz to the one pursued by the Biden Administration. He said as much at the time. I know because I wrote the speech.
The chaos in Washington is a feature not a bug and maybe even a virtue. I’m perfectly OK with there being a pause in funding the Ukraine war provided there’s minimal money for Israel to commit genocide in Gaza.
We should not only seize Russian assets but we should free their serfs. If Putin’s the latest czar maybe he needs a peasant uprising. We should try to find a home for the millions of Central Asian migrant workers who are effectively hostages of the new Russian empire. Putin is all too quick to use remittances as a form of leverage on these Central Asian countries. Maybe we should help the Kyrgyz or Uzbeks find new employment in Japan or South Korea.
There’s some indication that the costs of the war are being felt disproportionately on the marginal peoples one the Russian federation. Among the sadder moments of the Russo-Ukraine War has been the numbers of foreign-backed mercenaries who the Russians have thrown into the Ukrainian conflict. Putin gets a double effect here — wiping out the male population in the provinces while also making the cost of the war less visible to the Muscovites who might end it. And sure enough Clearview.AI has helped to identify Central Asians committing war crimes.
I dated a girl from Kalymkia — the only Buddhist Russian republic — not so long ago. She was an honest to goodness beauty queen. The way she described where she was from was altogether bleak and I eventually had to end the relationship when I learned she was engaged in something akin to a marriage fraud.
I’ve long been of the view that the solution on the border is to crack down on the human smugglers — many of whom are Israeli incidentally — and to have internal enforcement of immigration. This practically means cameras and it means facial recognition, both of which the organized crime world is going to oppose.
Americans might well be willing to accept larger numbers of guest workers, provided, of course, that they feel as if they aren’t going to suffer due to the migrants. The oh so cute Matt Yglesias view that cracking down on illegal immigration will lead to higher prices for meat is probably true but maybe we shouldn’t be eating so much meat — or maybe we’d allow in more guest workers once we got a handle on the people coming and going. It’s also unclear how we build all this housing that Yglesias imagines without marginal labor.
Palantir let the mask drop and went full genocide tech. This was an error.
If Palantir is the future why are so many of its insiders selling its stock?