Thomas Wictor

Almost everything has an upside and a downside. My posts on Pallywood have made literally thousands of Israelis feel better. I know because I’ve gotten thousands of messages. But by immersing myself in the media coverage of the story, I confirmed my worst fear: The uninformed rule the world. Uninformed people vote for uninformed politicians who appoint uninformed cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and judges. The same uninformed public reads stories by uninformed journalists and watches uninformed TV pundits.

My fantasy world is one in which everyone uses the brain God gave them. It won’t happen.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

—T. S. Elliot

Alas, this hollow man is still bloviating after four decades.

Geraldo’s take is so superficial that it would be hard to top, but former president Jimmy Carter and former Irish president Mary Robinson have found a way.

Now that’s a brilliant idea! After we reward Hamas terrorism with official recognition, take a wild guess at what they’ll do: give up violence forever, or quadruple the number of missiles they fire, tunnels they dig, and Israelis they kidnap?

As I was conversing with an Israeli on Facebook, this landed near her house.

Another view.

The exhaust system, shape, and lack of tail fins would indicate that it’s an Iranian Fajr-3 rocket. The uninformed tell us that Hamas fires harmless “junkyard” rockets that they cobble together from scrap metal and broken dreams, but in reality, the Fajr-3 is a potent weapon.

Part of legitimizing Hamas is meeting their demands that all smuggling routes be opened again and the naval blockade be lifted. It really doesn’t take a genius to see that within, say, two years of recognizing Hamas the way Presidents Carter and Robinson suggest, the Israelis will be forced into an all-out war, since Article Seven of the Hamas charter says in plain language that the group won’t stop fighting until every Jew on earth is dead.

Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim).

Jimmy Carter has a long history of magical thinking.

After several hours, Carter looked around the room at the group of diplomats assembled and said, “None of you have told me what I need to know,” according to a former State Department official involved in briefing the former president.

“You haven’t told me what Kim Il Sung wants,” Carter told his briefers. “What he wants is my respect. And I am going to give it to him.”

What he meant was that he would grovel at the feet of the North Korean dictator, and he would do so because Kim Il-sung was not a Caucasian. Kim Il-sung was a merciless butcher. He deserved nobody’s respect. The North Koreans had broken every agreement they’d made up to that point, and then Kim Jong-il went ahead and acquired nuclear weapons anyway.

The people who said that Jimmy Carter’s trip had saved us from a nuclear-armed North Korea then moved the goalposts and said, “Well, now that they have nukes, they’ll be more cooperative because they’ll feel safe.” You know what North Korea did after it had nukes?

1. Fired missiles over Japan.

2. Sank a South Korean naval corvette without provocation, killing forty-six sailors.

3. Shelled civilians on the island of Yeonpyong, again without provocation.

Zounds! It’s almost like North Korea is much more dangerous now that it has nukes! Legitimizing Hamas will have precisely the same result, but Carter is so rigid that he refuses to admit when he’s wrong. He’s also ruled by idées fixe, which means he’s not rational.

A primer on recognizing the cause of explosions

Carter and Robinson wrote a gem of excrement in their execrable piece.

There is no humane or legal justification for the way the Israeli Defense Forces are conducting this war. Israeli bombs, missiles, and artillery have pulverized large parts of Gaza, including thousands of homes, schools, and hospitals.

Even Israelis who support Operation Defensive Edge are uninformed. Author Amos Oz made a remarkable statement to Deutsche Welle.

Would you consider the present ground offensive to be limited or unlimited?

I think in some points it is excessive. I don’t have detailed information on what is actually happening on the ground, but to judge from some of the hits that the Israeli army caused in Gaza, I think at least in some points the military action is excessive—justified, but excessive.

If you don’t have information, you shouldn’t opine. I have information, which I will now share with you. This is an artillery strike on a city.

The dark smoke is the explosion of the shells, and the gray is concrete dust. Notice how wispy the smoke clouds are.

An artillery strike in the Ukraine. Again, not much smoke, and a huge crater.

Next, explosive aerial bombs, in this case American JDAMs dropped on Baghdad.

Explosive aerial munitions always make gray mushroom clouds with thin stalks and narrow tops.

Here’s a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBEID).

The bright white, heavy smoke is from ammonium nitrate/fuel oil (ANFO).

Another VBIED.

Thick, dark mushroom clouds or massive, black, chubby, boiling, cumulonimbus-style clouds are characteristic of IEDs.

Watch the shape and color of the big explosion at 0:42.

These are explosions in Gaza.

You can see the gray mushroom cloud from the aerial strike. It took at least two or three seconds to reach that height. The orange is a secondary explosion, and on the right are the dark smoke arms of another secondary explosion, almost certainly from an IED. The Israelis targeted a structure full of explosives.

Another.

It’s exactly the same as the first photo: gray mushroom cloud from an air strike and at least two secondary explosions. Note that Robert Tait believes that defending yourself against terrorism is what causes terrorism. He’s an idiot.

This is a series of IEDs going off, leveling an entire city block. Black, chubby, boiling clouds are the giveaway. The gray smoke on the right is concrete dust from the collapse of a building.

From July 8 to July 30, 2014, Hamas detonated over one thousands IEDS, destroying thousands of houses, apartment buildings, and businesses. To show you the unprecedented magnitude of this rampage, from May of 2003 to December of 2008, Iraqi insurgents blew up 1869 roadside bombs, VBIEDS, and suicide vests. In three weeks Hamas has used more than half the number of IEDs that were exploded in Iraq OVER FIVE YEARS.

Photos tell the truth. This is Hamburg, Germany, after the Allies bombed it from the air.

Aerial munitions gut buildings. They turn structures into empty shells with no roofs.

Here’s what most of the ruins in Gaza look like.

This is classic damage caused by the pressure waves of street-level explosions, which make the fronts and sides of the buildings slide off. Roofs and floors are intact, there are no giant craters, and we can see no sign of munitions that spray shrapnel or fragments. The overwhelming majority of the destruction in Gaza is from Hamas IEDs, not Israeli aerial bombs, artillery, or missile strikes.

It’s ironic that in their dishonest, irrational op-ed recommending that the US recognize Hamas, Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson provide us the ironclad evidence that the Israelis aren’t doing what these two uninformed numbskulls claim.