Author: A.T.

If I were writing the movie, a huge fleet of U.S. cargo planes would be flying over Gaza 24/7 air-dropping pallets of food — ideally avoiding Hamas strongholds — with leaflets in Arabic saying:

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We Israelis and you Palestinians are victims of the same scourge — Hamas — who slaughtered our innocent civilians in a long-planned surprise attack and now sit eating and drinking in their tunnels while you starve.

This food comes from us Israelis — with the assistance of the United States Air Force — with the same good will that has long led us to treat wounded Palestinians in our hospitals; to train Palestinian doctors in our universities; and to welcome more than a million Palestinians as Israeli citizens, with full voting rights and the right to serve in our Knesset.

All we have ever wanted is to be left alone.  When we left Gaza in 2006, we hoped you would build a prosperous nation.  Instead, some of you attacked us even as we were leaving . . . devoting enormous resources to building tunnels and weapons to kill Jews, Hamas’s stated goal.

We have never wanted to kill you any more than most of you have wanted to kill us.  Our goal is to free you — and us — of Hamas once and for all.  It is the only road we see to peace.  May God be with you.  Shalom.

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Obviously, it would be written much better.  But that’s the gist.

Make any sense?

Any chance?

> Reich Is Right.  Or always worth listening to, at least.

“The tragedy unfolding in Gaza,” he writes, “requires clear thinking and a moral compass. I’m not observing a lot of either.”

He debunks what he believes are six wrong-headed views.  See whether you agree.

> Does a black guy have to be crazy to support Donald Trump?

Well, yes, judging from Kanye West’s remarkable story.

Immensely talented and a force of nature; but . . oh, brother.

> I bought HYMC yesterday at 22 cents a share . . . down from $15 three years ago, and from the $1.19 AMC paid 18 months ago (though they also got warrants to buy shares at $1,07, which sweetens the deal if the stock goes up).

According to HYMC’s website, the company was sitting on well over $100 million in cash at the end of June — and a whole lot of gold and silver.

They have debt about equal to their cash — but no payments due until 2027.

The bet is that mining will be underway by then at a large profit.

My bet is that “tax-selling” has helped drive HYMC down of late . . . that the folks selling yesterday at 22 cents are completely disgusted with this awful stock and don’t much care what price they get; they just want to lock in their loss before year-end.  (If it drops a bunch more, I may buy a bunch more.  That’s how crazy I am.)

Meanwhile, the company will be reverse-splitting one-for-ten in a couple of weeks.

Reverse splits are usually the kiss of death (or, perhaps more aptly, a “death rattle”) and that may well prove true here.

Or it could be a gold mine.

Only with money you can truly afford to lose.

I hate Halloween, but that’s another story.  Have fun.

> Jews have never wanted to kill Arabs; Hamas has Israeli genocide as its stated goal.

> Jews have never celebrated the death of Palestinian civilians (indeed, Israel treats Palestinians in its hospitals and trains Palestinian doctors); Palestinians behead Jewish babies, then dance in the streets.

You’ve probably already read Tom Friedman: Please, Israel, Don’t Get Lost in Hamas’s Tunnels.

Equally worth your time is Joseph Cox: Getting to a Free Palestine!

Have a good week.

Watch this Pakistani Brit, Kasim Hafeez.

Or read the transcript:

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I was born to hate Jews

It was part of my life. I never questioned that. I was not born in Iran or Syria. I was born in England. My parents moved there from Pakistan. Theirs was the typical immigrant story: Move to the West hoping to create a better life for themselves and their children.

We were a devoted Muslim family, but not extremists or radicals in any way. We only wanted the best for everyone – everyone except the Jews. The Jews, we thought, were aliens living in stolen Muslim land, occupiers involved in a genocide against the Palestinian people. Our hatred was therefore justified and just. And it left me and my friends vulnerable to radical extremist arguments. If the Jews were as evil as we’ve always believed, shouldn’t those who support them – Christians, Americans and others in the West – be just as evil?

Starting from the 90s, speakers and teachers in mosques and schools began repeating this theme endlessly: We were not western. We were not British. We were Muslims, first and foremost. Our allegiance was to our religion and to our fellow Muslims. We owe nothing to western nations who welcomed us. As westerners, they were our enemies.

All of this had its desired effect. At least it did on me. It changed the way I looked at the world. I began to look at the suffering of Muslims, including in Britain, as the fault of Western imperialism. The west was at war with us, and the Jews controlled the west. My experience at the university in the UK only reinforced my increasingly radical conviction. Hating Israel was a badge of honor. Set up an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rally, and you were sure to attract a huge, approver

While in uni, I decided that the protests and propaganda against Israel were not enough. Real jihad requires violence. So I made plans to join the real fight.  I wanted to drop out of college and join terrorist training camp in Pakistan. But, fortunately for me, fate intervened — in a bookstore.

I came across a book called The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. The case for Israel? Which case could that be? The title itself infuriated me, and I started reading the pages almost like a travesty. How ill-informed, how stupid, can this guy be to defend the defenseless? Well, he was a Jew. That must have been the answer

Still I am reading. And what I read challenged all my dogmas about Israel and the Jews: I read that it was not Israel who created the Palestinian refugee crisis, it was the Arab countries, the UN and the corrupt Palestinian leadership. I read that Jews did not exploit the Holocaust to create the state of Israel; the movement to create a modern Jewish state dating back to the 19th. century, and eventually to the beginning of the Jewish people almost 4000 years ago. And I read that Israel is not engaged in genocide against the Palestinians. On the contrary, the Palestinian population has actually doubled in just twenty years.

All of this just pissed me off. I had to prove Dershowitz wrong to see with my own eyes how racist and oppressive Israel really was. Then I bought a plane ticket. I would go to Israel, the home of my enemy. And that’s when everything changed.

What I saw with my own eyes was even more challenging than what Dershowitz had written. Instead of apartheid I saw Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisting. Instead of hate, I saw acceptance, even compassion. I saw a violent, modern, liberal democracy, full of flaws, for sure, but fundamentally decent. I saw a country that wanted nothing but to live in peace with its neighbors. I watched my hate melt before my eyes. I knew just then what I had to do.

Too many people on this planet are consumed by the same hate that consumed me. They have been taught to despise the Jewish state – many Muslims through their religion, many others by their university professors or student groups.

So here’s my challenge to anyone who feels this way: do what I did – seek the truth for yourself. If the truth can change me, it can change anyone.

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Another book to read — highly and quite properly sympathetic to the Palestinian people: Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth.

Bill Maher on Israel (a couple of years ago) — under two minutes.

Tom Friedman on what needs to happen — long but worth it.

And Steven Erlanger — also long but worth it, concluding:

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Only Washington, which now has unprecedented moral prestige in Israel, is capable of assembling the pieces from this war, said Bernard Avishai, an American-Israeli who has taught at both Dartmouth College and Hebrew University.

“Only the United States can provide some degree of hope,” he said, that a new paradigm will be established “in which Palestinian self-determination will finally be addressed.” American statements on a two-state solution and the settlements “have been seen as platitudes,” he added. “But to do something concrete now, it’s not too late.”

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This clip is worth your time:  former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens on The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy.

Near the end, Claire McCaskill makes the point that all 8 of yesterday’s Republican candidates for Speaker were white males who had voted against re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act, against women’s right to birth control, and against codifying equal pay for equal work.

Stevens thinks this is one of the reasons the Republican Party is drawn to Putin – “How many women in power do you see in Russia?”

But watch the whole thing.

And surely you’ve seen some version of Trump’s favorite chief of staff flipping on him.

I’m guessing Trump will no longer be calling Meadows his “great chief of staff — as good as it gets.”

Could sanity be on the edge of the verge of beginning to return?

Now that Tucker Carlson is known to hate Trump?

To have called him “the world champion of destroying things“?

That may be too much to hope for — cults are not called cults for nothing — but if any of our Trumpist friends or relatives show signs of wavering, I hope we can find ways to show that we share their concerns — the border crisis is serious; the price of gas and groceries does sting; crime (though higher in many “red” states than blue and lower than it was in many decades past) is a very real concern — but then make the case that, all things considered, it may make sense to give the Biden team four more years to address these problems and to build on their very real successes. 

And to preserve the dignity of the office. 

And a calm, steady, pro-democratic approach to governing.  

My two cents.

But first . . .

> I repeat: The “Speaker Problem” — Solved.  (Robert Reich reached the same conclusion a few days later.)  Who knows?  Maybe this week it will happen.

> Dept of Hope: Scientists Used Cement to Make a Supercapacitor.

> Whoever’s really president, he’s doing a great job: Viral Tweets Baselessly Claim Biden Is A Body Double Wearing A Mask.

Posted before last night’s Oval Office address:

Robert Reich on POTUS.

(But why is the line drawing of the late George H.W. Bush???)

Have a great weekend.

You know what’s so interesting about this quote?

Read it first and then I’ll tell you:

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The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

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It was written 11 years ago!

Even before Trump and his alternative facts.  Even before the burn-the-House-down election deniers.  By Norm Ornstein, et al, in their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, condensed here in the Washington Post.

Wish we had a leader who did not want to burn the House down?  Whose goal were not “retribution?”

Who, in his quiet dignity, wanted to get things done to move our country forward — with low unemployment and higher wages, with better health care and cheaper drugs, with revitalized infrastructure and cleaner energy, with domestic manufacture of critical computer chips?

With respect for women and minorities and straight white Christian males like himself?

With a preference for compromise and bipartisanship?

With deep domestic and international experience?

With empathy and humility — and an effective team of 4,000 competent experienced appointees who, like him, respect the rule of law?

A leader who stands up for democracy against authoritarians?

Oh, wait.  We do.

If you have time, watch this interview from a couple of weeks ago, before Kevin McCarthy was ousted for failing to shut down the government.

And then watch his Oval Office address scheduled for 8pm Eastern tonight.

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens in the indispensable New York Times:

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This column doesn’t always abound with praise for President Biden and his administration. This week’s is an exception.

On Oct. 8, the day after the greatest atrocity in Jewish history since Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Jews in Israel and the diaspora woke up without a leader. The prime minister of Israel has never been, in a formal sense, the leader of the Jews — even when the office was held by people far worthier than Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the prime minister does have the most important job in the Jewish world, which is to ensure that Israel be a safe haven for Jewish life. The Jewish people have long memories; whatever happens next, Netanyahu will be remembered, irrevocably, as the man who failed — not tragically, much less heroically, but selfishly, arrogantly, despicably. He maintains political authority but is devoid of moral authority. I cannot imagine a future for him or his cabinet of blowhards and toadies except in exile, walled compounds or prison cells.

Biden stepped into the vacuum. I have read, probably a half-dozen times now, his Oct. 10 speech about the massacres. For its moral clarity, emotional force and political directness it deserves a place in any anthology of great American rhetoric. Without equivocation, without the mealy-mouthed clichés and evasions that typified so many institutional statements about the assault, the president said what Jews desperately needed to hear.

That the massacres were “pure, unadulterated evil.” That there is “no excuse” for what Hamas did. That Israel has an affirmative “duty” to defend itself, not simply a passive “right.” That the United States will make good on its commitment to a Jewish state not with feeble statements of solidarity but with the surge of military force. A few days later, in an interview with “60 Minutes,” he called the assault “barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust.”

We need political leaders who maintain the capacity to call out barbarism by name and who commit themselves to its defeat. We need it especially on the political left, certain corners of which waited only a few days before returning to their usual program of denouncing Israel for its alleged or anticipated war crimes. These are the same people who sometimes pretend to believe in Israel’s right to self-defense but offer no plausible strategy for how Israel can exercise it against a terrorist enemy that hides behind civilians.

We also need Biden’s leadership given the moral void on the right. I spent the years of Donald Trump’s presidency being hectored by a certain type of Jewish conservative who insisted that Israel had never had a better friend in the White House. Today, Trump takes a dimmer view of Netanyahu — less because of his failed performance than because he can’t forgive the prime minister for calling Biden in 2020 to congratulate him on his victory. Four days after the Hamas attacks, Trump also called Hezbollah, without reprobation, “very smart.” About Vladimir Putin, he said, “I got along with him very good.”

Very good. Very smart. The Republican front-runner.

Now Biden is going to Israel. It’s a brave trip, even for a president with his vast security apparatus, given that Hamas’s rockets continue to fall indiscriminately on Israel and a second front with Hezbollah could open at any time. He is going, almost surely, to do what he does best: console the bereaved and bereft, give courage to those in fear. This is statesmanship in the teeth of far-left opposition and incessant right-wing criticism. It’s the president’s finest hour.

I have seen some criticism that the hidden purpose of the trip is for Biden to hug Israel close so that he can stay its hand, or at least slow it. I doubt it, since he could hardly have been clearer in his “60 Minutes” interview that Hamas would have to be eliminated entirely, even as there needed to be a path to a Palestinian state. That path is a long one, but Biden gets the big thing right — the former is the basic precondition for the latter. No Israeli leader can ever allow a Palestinian state to exist if a group like Hamas has even the whisper of a chance of gaining power.

I expect Biden to caution Israel’s war cabinet that a military campaign that concludes with a long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza would be a Pyrrhic victory. I expect the Israelis to reply that they cannot be asked to eliminate Hamas as Gaza’s dominant military and political actor without the cooperation of the United States and moderate Arab regimes, particularly Egypt. This is not a confrontation; it’s a potentially fruitful dialogue that will work much better once Netanyahu is out of office and cannot put his personal needs ahead of the national interest.

I also hope that Biden’s leadership can remind the decent left — and what’s left of a decent right — of what American moral leadership looks like. To stand with our allies and hold our friends. To see our enemies for what they are and treat them accordingly. To remind ourselves that as others see us, so should we see ourselves: as the last best hope of earth.

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WHO BOMBED THAT HOSPITAL?

It appears to have been Islamic Jihad, not Israel.  A horrible, horrible tragedy, but an important distinction.

MAHER / MUSS / KIRCHICK ON GAZA

Ten minutes.

Spot on.

(Well, maybe not the part about defunding Harvard, but that was a joke . . . directed not at President Gay’s statement, but at some egregiously-misled students, all of whom must read Noa Tishby’s Israel: A Simple Guide To The Most Misunderstood Country On Earth forthwith.)

WHAT’S GOING ON WITH SQNS?

Suggested here in July at $2.37 it hit $2..80 two weeks later on news it would be acquired for $3.03.  With that expected pay-out imminent, it reached $2.90 last week — but closed at $2.74 last night.

The company announced last week that few of its shares had been tendered, far short of the 90% required.  The offer is being extended, but it sure seems to me as though its largest shareholders think the price is too low (or else why not tender?) . . . which may not be a bad thing for us small fry.  One can imagine their working something out to accept a higher price.  Good!  Or one can imagine the deal falling through altogether — which could mean anything from a disaster someplace down the road (“Why didn’t we tender?” those large and presumably knowledgeable shareholders might ultimately moan) to a triumph in a year or three (“victory!” they might ultimately cry).

I have no clue.  But because the friend who brought this to my attention said he had been hoping for $6 or more, and the largest holders seem to think $3.03 is inadequate, I’m going to wait to see what happens. Famous last words?