Category: War

A question for armchair general readers… We are informed that the IDF has surrounded Gaza City, is engaged in urban combat, and is hoping to kill or capture Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad soldiers (“freedom fighters” or “terrorists”, depending on your perspective; 300 University of California professors, who are also designing the state’s K-12 curriculum, say that the heroes of October 7 were fighting for freedom and are definitely not “terrorists” (letter)) via standard military encirclement tactics.

We were previously informed that there is an extensive tunnel network underneath Gaza. A CNN story reports a Hamas claim of having more than 300 miles of tunnels.

What stops the Hamas fighters from simply evading the IDF by proceeding south via tunnel? Once in the southern zone, the fighters can melt into the population that elected Hamas and continues to support Hamas according to opinion polls (example).

Has the IDF already cut the north-south tunnel links?

In other Gaza mysteries… here are Palestinian doctors giving a press conference in which they talk about how horrible Jewish doctors are:

Four weeks ago, we were told that the hospitals in Gaza had just a few days of fuel left for their generators. October 17, United Nations: “Fuel reserves at all hospitals across Gaza are expected to last for an additional 24 hours only.” Yet this video shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer. We are also told that Gaza has been without Internet for 32 days (example), yet a continuous stream of video content emerges from Gaza. (See also, a November 8 broadcast from the ICRC, in which people in clean clothes (both patients and health care workers) move around under blazing overhead lights.)

Paul Graham, of Y Combinator fame, has been dutifully posting press releases from Hamas regarding deaths among the noble Gazans at the hands of the genocidal Jews. Others seem to accept the relevance of body counts, but question whether Hamas is a reliable source. Graham then cites some people who think, as he does, that Hamas is a reliable source. Example:

My response to the above:

One of the first things young doctors learn in training is “don’t order a test unless you know what you’re going to do with the result”. You’ve gathered and broadcast various body counts on one side of an active ongoing battle. What is the practical value of these numbers? Is there a threshold number at which you are planning to take some action or think that, e.g., NATO and the U.S. military should take some action? If so, what’s the threshold and the proposed action?

Graham didn’t answer, of course. From the United Nations side, the answer is never “Hamas should surrender and release its hostages,” but always “there should be a ceasefire [during which Hamas can be resupplied].” Is that the guaranteed subtext of all of these reports of casualties among Gazan fighters and civilians? If so, could Hamas achieve victory simply by killing a lot of civilians and making it look like Israel did it? Suppose that Hamas puts implosion charges around some apartment buildings and detonates them, for example, causing 10,000 civilians to die. Then Gazans use the Internet and electric power that we’re told they don’t have to broadcast images of the destruction. Then General Joe Biden uses the U.S. military to force the Israeli military to withdraw.

(Some more posts from Paul Graham:

A grim month: 31 Israeli and at least 3600 Palestinian children have been killed since October 7. (link)

Is there a threshold number of their constituents’ children dying that should motivate Hamas to surrender? Graham doesn’t say.

One gauge of the civilian toll in Gaza so far: At least 72 United Nations staffers have been killed in Gaza so far, the UN says. Whatever that is, it’s not surgical. (a repost)

Graham was thinking that all fighters in Gaza have RFID tags implanted, thus enabling the IDF to target only estimated 50,000-ish Gazans who carry guns for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad?

Graham reposted an article suggesting that Gazans do not support Hamas (which makes the IDF a liberation force?).

A November 2 tweet from Graham himself:

I didn’t get “Turn the other cheek” when I was a kid. Why let people hit you? But when you combine it with “Hurt people hurt people,” you see the point. You have to absorb hurt instead of merely reflecting it, or it just keeps cycling around forever. (link)

A suggestion that Israel ignore the cross-border excursion of October 7 in the same way that the U.S. ignores the daily cross-border excursions of noble migrants? An accusation that Palestinian Islamic Jihad members are defective “hurt people” rather than brave fighters for what they believe and for what is written in the Koran?

One in which Graham seems to agree with the idea that Israel is killing civilians intentionally and without any military goal (if true, why doesn’t Israel bomb the various outdoor mass gatherings of Gazans that we see on Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok? The IDF could kill thousands of civilians with one bomb if that were its strategy):

Graham reposts an accusation about Israel’s purported “ethnic cleansing” plans. To my knowledge, he has never posted about Kuwait’s cleansing of 400,000 Palestinians in 1991 (Wikipedia) nor about Pakistan’s recent cleansing of 1.7 million Afghans.

Here’s a curious one:

It’s not a sufficient defense of activism to claim that it “increases awareness” of a problem. There are forms of activism that increase awareness and yet set back efforts to solve the problem.

Graham won’t leave his comfortable UK/US homes to help the Gazans defend against the Israeli aggression that he highlights (i.e., increases awareness about).

Graham reposts content from a nonprofit organization that doesn’t want Hamas stripped of its human shields in Gaza City:

Graham’s first posts about the battles in and near Gaza were on October 11. Example:

The events of October 7 were not “a humanitarian catastrophe” for anyone (as far as I can tell, Graham never posted anything about the Hamas freedom fighters’ October 7 operation in which Israeli civilians were the victims). The “humanitarian catastrophe” is that people embroiled in a war will be short of electricity for a while.

(A Ukrainian friend after reviewing the Paul Graham oeuvre: “These people weren’t posting like maniacs when half of Ukraine was without power for several days, including including dozens of hospitals in EACH city.”)

That’s your analysis of world events from the Great Statesman of California Tech.

Circling back, so to speak, to the main topic of this post… how is encircling an enemy effective when the enemy has tunnels leading to safe spaces with millions of friendly civilians on the ground?

Related:

• “Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War” (NYT, today): Thousands have been killed in Gaza, with entire families wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Palestinian neighborhoods to expanses of rubble … But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’s leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel. It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.” … “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times. … [the October 7 attack] broke a longstanding tension within Hamas about the group’s identity and purpose. Was it mainly a governing body — responsible for managing day-to-day life in the blockaded Gaza Strip — or was it still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state? … “Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
• “Dabblers And Blowhards”, a 2005 look at Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters”: Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data. Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick. … Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings – in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface – will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk. Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.

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We’re informed that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) has, literally, tons of fuel. NBC:

As U.N. officials say hospitals in Gaza are running dangerously low on fuel, Hamas is maintaining a stockpile of more than 200,000 gallons of fuel for the rockets it fires into Israel and the generators that provide clean air and electricity to its network of underground tunnels, according to U.S. officials, current and former Israeli officials and academics.

How long will this last?

“We don’t know how much they have, and we definitely don’t know how much they need, because no one is sure to what extent this underground city goes,” said Elai Rettig, an assistant professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv who studies regional energy cooperation. “If it’s just for ventilation and basic communication, it will last for months.”

I wonder if these estimates are wrong. Hamas’s western allies have been demanding fuel deliveries ever since the battle began. Here’s one from the UN Secretary General, just four days after the Gazans’ mostly peaceful attack on Israelis:

Note that fuel is listed first, so we can infer that it is more important than food and water. A week after the latest round of fighting began, state-sponsored PBS wrote that hospitals were “desperately low on fuel”:

Medics in Gaza warned Sunday that thousands could die as hospitals packed with wounded people ran desperately low on fuel and basic supplies. … Hospitals in Gaza are expected to run out of generator fuel within two days,

Every few days we are informed that hospitals in Gaza are 1-2 days from running out of fuel.

Hamas supposedly keeps its fuel reserves directly underneath hospitals so that (1) the fuel will be safe from Israeli bombs, and (2) any fuel delivered to the hospital can be easily transferred into the tunnel ventilation reserve.

If Hamas truly had “months” of fuel, why would their allies be so interested in supplementing this supply? And why did the calls to send in fuel begin just a few days after the October 7 attacks? Is it possible that the “months” of fuel that the Islamic Resistance Movement was estimated to have is actually more like “a month”? Also, what if the IDF is able to clear one or two hospitals of civilians and destroy the Hamas fuel supplies underneath? The useful lifetime of the tunnels could be radically shortened.

American and British bombing of Germany wasn’t very efficient in slowing down Germany’s war-fighting capability. As many as 635,000 civilians in Germany were killed, for example, more than 55,000 RAF Bomber Command crewmembers, and 75 percent of the pre-P-51 American bomber crews were shot down or killed. Yet the initial effects on German war production were minimal. Monday morning quarterbacks have concluded that the Allies should have concentrated on bombing energy production, energy transportation, and electricity production facilities. In other words… fuel. If Israel can prevent Hamas from being resupplied, either directly or via hospitals and UN facilities, perhaps Hamas will be forced to fight in the open (or just melt into the civilian population and wait for Israel to leave).

Readers: What’s your guess as to when Hamas runs out of fuel to keep its tunnels ventilated? (“Never, because the United Nations and other allies will keep the fuel restocked” is an acceptable answer.)

Update: A November 6, 2023 video posted from Gaza shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and doctors in clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer.

Related:

• Will the Gaza tunnel network prove to be Hamas’s Maginot Line?
• Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea (explains why tunnels need ventilation; “oxygen would be depleted by things like the growth of aerobic bacteria and the rusting of metals, such as bolts”)

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It has become standard among American and European progressives to refer to the Israel military operation in response to the October 7, 2023 attacks by the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) as “genocide.” We can see the same term used in a comment on a post in this blog.

Let’s assume that the progressives are correct, ignoring the fact that the population of Gaza today is 3X what it was in 1990 (typically a “genocide” involves a population reduction, not a population explosion). Given that assumption, these folks say have identified an ongoing genocide. Why won’t they take meaningful action to stop the genocide?

If brave, they could go to Gaza and pick up a rifle (or a shotgun?) and fight alongside the Islamic Resistance Movement and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. If cowardly, they could advocate for the U.S. military and NATO to go in and destroy Israel or, at least, the Israeli military. Instead, however, they’ve decided to be idle bystanders while a genocide is perpetrated. They’ll perhaps post on Twitter or Facebook or occasionally attend a protest demonstration. “Dozens of students stage walk out at Harvard in solidarity with Palestinians” (CBS):

The Harvard students said Palestinians are facing genocide and they wanted to show their support. They’re calling on the university’s administration to address the conflict.

They’re young and healthy, but they won’t fight against genocide. Instead, they want to send meek Harvard administrators to do battle against the IDF.

Also, high school students in Democrat-run Philadelphia:

Hundreds of Philadelphia high school students walked out of school Friday to march around City Hall in support of Palestinians.

“This is not a war. This is a genocide,” Nora, a student in the School District of Philadelphia who helped organize the action, said of the ongoing Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, even in places where Palestinians were told to seek safety. “The goals of today’s protests are … to get justice, and to fight back, and to use our voices.”

Hamas has soldiers who are the same age as American high schoolers (Daily Mail). These Philadelphians say that they want to “fight back”. Why doesn’t that include volunteering in the real fight against genocide?

Across the pond… “200 Bristol students join pro-Palestine demonstration outside Bristol Uni’s Senate House”:

A student-led pro-Palestinian protest broke out today in front of Senate House, with members calling for the end of the “Israeli Apartheid” and accusing the Israeli state of “ethnic cleansing and genocide”.

Members of the Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS), the student wing of a national Marxist organisation, led the protest with banners and speeches in solidarity with Palestinians.

Chants of “free Palestine” and “in our thousands and in our millions, we are all Palestinians” could be heard during the 45 minute protest.

If they’re healthy enough to go to university and they’ve identified “ethnic cleansing and genocide”, why aren’t they volunteering to put a stop to these crimes against humanity?

Here’s a tweet from Cori Bush, who represents St. Louis in the U.S. House:

We can’t be silent about Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.

Babies, dead.
Pregnant women, dead.
Elderly, dead.
Generations of families, dead.

Millions of people in Gaza with nowhere to go being slaughtered.

The U.S. must stop funding these atrocities against Palestinians. https://t.co/IlhoZvDD3P

— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) October 30, 2023

Israel is guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “slaughtering” civilians, presumably with no military justification or rationale (unlike the U.S., which always protected civilians). Israel is committing “atrocities”. Does she advocate sending in the Marines to stop the Israelis? No. Airstrikes on every Israeli military base? No. Cori Bush suggests only that we cut off foreign aid to Israel, which can’t possibly deliver the hoped-for victory to the Islamic Resistance Movement or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even after shutting down for coronapanic and spending a ton of money on early Covid-19 vaccination (end result: a higher excess death rate than Sweden’s) Israel has a GDP of about $500 billion per year.

Related:

• International Brigades, in which progressives 100 years ago fought for their beliefs

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An Israel-supporting friend was expressing gloom about the latest battle in the 75-year Arab-Israeli war. He cited an article by an armchair warrior about the IDF’s track record of failure in ground offenses:

Despite three weeks of bombing and 17 years of siege, Israel has been unable to curb Hamas’s ability to launch missiles deep within Israel. Israel lacks strategic depth, being one of the smallest countries in the region and with hostile or cold neighbors on all sides. It has nine power stations, out of which the second largest has been damaged by Hamas rockets.

Israel has not won a major ground campaign since the Battle of Jenin refugee camp in 2002. In 2006, Israel failed to advance four kilometers from Israel into Lebanon to capture the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil. It even failed to fully capture Maroun El-Ras, a small village two kilometers from the border. There was much handwringing in Israel over the lessons of the 2006 Lebanon War, with many recommendations supposedly implemented by the IDF. This, however, did not change the fact that Israel was barely able to enter Gaza City’s Shujaiyya neighborhood in 2014, despite overwhelming firepower. Israel has not attempted a major ground incursion since then.

The article describes the tunnels built by Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and the Party of Allah (“Hezbollah”) as strengths for Israel’s opponents. I wonder if these could instead be weaknesses (I wondered about this before in Can Israel find all of Hamas’s tunnels with ground-penetrating radar? And then what?) The tunnels are surely strong against any foreseen threat, but perhaps the IDF can come up with some unforeseen threats to the tunnels, e.g., against their ventilation systems or by using smarter radar and well-drilling equipment to insert explosives. In this case, the tunnels would become the Maginot Line, Jihad Edition. Built by the French, the Maginot Line is famous as an example of flawed military thinking. The Germans wouldn’t be able to go through it, so they wouldn’t be able to invade France. In 1940, however, the Germans simply drove around the line.

[Note that Wikipedia says that the real-world Maginot Line was not the Maginot Line of metaphor and the French were not as incompetent as we like to think:

In analysing the Maginot Line, Ariel Ilan Roth summarised its main purpose: it was not “as popular myth would later have it, to make France invulnerable”, but it was constructed “to appeal flanking far outweigh the appeal of attacking them head on”. … before construction in October 1927, the Superior Council of War adopted the final design for the line and identified that one of the main missions would be to deter a German cross-border assault with only minimal force to allow “the army time to mobilise.” In addition, the French envisioned that the Germans would conduct a repeat of their First World War battle plan to flank the defences and drew up their overall strategy with that in mind.

In other words, the line perhaps did function as designed.]

This is not to say that the Islamic Resistance Movement, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Party of Allah are doomed to defeat (I’m not confident in my armchair strategy skills). I’m just questioning whether the tunnels will prove to be a source of significant strength. Consider that if the battle goes on long enough and the West doesn’t resupply Hamas with fuel as a “humanitarian” effort, Hamas could simply run out of the fuel that it needs to generate electricity to ventilate the tunnels. A tunnel without ventilation has no military value. (See Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea)

[On the third hand, maybe the Islamic Resistance Movement and friends did not expect to use the tunnels during an Israeli ground offensive. In that case, the tunnels would be exactly like the real Maginot Line.]

Separately, my friend is a loyal California Democrat who has spent two years expressing hatred for Ron DeSantis, the one presidential candidate who says flatly “no” to interfering with Israel’s military efforts and also “no” to accepting Gazans as immigrants to the U.S.:

Like my other California Democrat friends with advanced degrees and elite jobs, he enjoys pointing out how stupid working-class Americans are for voting Republican. They’re “voting against their own interest”, he has said. He, by contrast, has supported (a) increased immigration of Muslims, (b) the election of progressives such as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib to Congress, and (c) the defeat of Ron DeSantis, who has proved to be the most unequivocal supporter of Israel.

Related:

• video: a Russian reporter goes into the Hamas tunnel system (Faucists will be delighted to see that the reporter and all of the Islamic Resistance Movement soldiers inside the tunnels are wearing masks)

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Prior to this latest over-the-fence attack, Hamas’s (“officially the Islamic Resistance Movement”) main military strategy was tunneling under the fence with Israel and emerging to fight on the unprotected side or tunneling under the border with Egypt and bringing weapons in. (see “Palestinian tunnel warfare in the Gaza Strip” from Wikipedia).

I’m wondering what stops the Israelis from finding all of the tunnels via ground-penetrating radar. Before we decided to open our border, we attempted to find tunnels connecting the U.S. and Mexico (DHS 2009). This 2014 article from The Times of Israel discusses the technology’s limitations:

Ground-penetrating radar, known as GPR, is among the most promising technological responses to the tunnels, Israeli and American experts say. The radar – which can “see” into the ground – has been used from the surface to search for smuggling tunnels under the US-Mexico border. Radar installations are also installed in deep holes in the ground to search for attack tunnels under the Korean Demilitarized Zone.

The experts say the Korean type of of cross-borehole ground-penetrating radar could be installed along the border to create a permanent detection barrier – deep enough to spot any tunnel Palestinians militants could dig. The barrier could be monitored for changes from a remote center, and in combination with other technologies could provide the best method of securing the border.

A limitation of ground-penetrating radar is that even in ideal conditions, it only provides an accurate image from the surface up to a depth of about 15 meters. The known tunnels in Mexico are as much as 27 meters below ground.

In the DMZ between North and South Korea, four tunnels have been found from the north running as deep as 160 meters below ground. The South Korean army – previously with guidance from the US Army Corps of Engineers – has on an ad hoc basis used cross-borehole ground-penetrating radar to look for tunnels as deep as 600 meters, …

In cross-borehole ground-penetrating radar, pairs of narrow holes are drilled deep into the ground and antennae are lowered into them — one for sending and the other for receiving the signals. From the boreholes, the radar can provide an image all the way down to the water table. However, there have been no reports of tunnels being found this way in the DMZ.

Maybe the water table is an issue? The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza gets most of its water (pumping it out via wells) is only 20-50 meters below the surface and perhaps some of Hamas’s tunnels are deeper?

If Israel (or “the Zionist entity” as Hamas officials refer to the enemy) is on the surface inside Gaza, can they drill underground to place radar gear and come up with a complete subsurface map?

It looks like some USGS folks tried to do this in the mid-1990s to find old mine tunnels:

If the answer to the above is “yes”, then what? Suppose that someone with control of the surface wanted to destroy the tunnels. How can they do it? (I’m assuming that there won’t be any people inside the tunnels at this point. Presumably the Hamas fighters will migrate south and mix seamlessly into the civilian population, live off U.S. and E.U. taxpayers, then come back in 2024 or 2025 with a renewed vengeance.)

There are “bunker buster” bombs designed to destroy stuff underground, but wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper to drill a shaft down into a previously-mapped tunnel and drop a modest-sized explosive into the shaft? If so, will Gaza be transformed for a few months into what looks like an oil-drilling field?

Related (very loosely):

• “Address by President Nelson Mandela at International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People, Pretoria” (1997): “… our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”

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The public high school for kids in our former suburb of Boston has a new principal (source):

The Lincoln-Sudbury Regional District has appointed Dr. Andrew Stephens as the new Superintendent/Principal of Schools. Stephens had been principal of Lexington high School since 2017.

Prior to that he spent 10 years as Principal of Duxbury High School and four years heading Hull High School. He began his career as a history teacher in Vermont before returning to Massachusetts, where he taught for three years at Newton North High School spent another three as an assistant housemaster. Stephens is a graduate of Colgate University, where he obtained a B.A. in history, and Johnson State College in Vermont, where he got his master’s degree in education. He also holds a Certificate of Advanced Educational Studies from Boston College and an Ed.D. from Northeastern.

Dr. Stephens applied all of the above education to an analysis of the flare-up in the war that Arabs declared 75 years ago, with an email to the students, taxpayers, and parents who enjoy life in means-tested public housing (they’re not “on welfare”, though they pay nothing for housing, health care, food, home broadband, and smartphone):

Dear [Lincoln-Sudbury] Students and Families:

I write tonight with a large measure of sadness over the events that occurred over the past few days and want to acknowledge the violent conflict occurring between Israel and Palestine. While the conflict seems very far away from LS, it is not. We have members of the LS Jewish and Muslim communities who are directly impacted by this conflict and its consequences both from an affinity standpoint, and from the fact that folks here may have family and friends who live in that area. It is important that we as a school and learning community are cognizant of this fact.

Given the news coverage and access we all have to images of the atrocities from the past weekend, there is an emotional impact on all of us, particularly with our young people and those with connections to the region where this conflict is occurring. It is essential that we as a learning community acknowledge what is happening and express empathy and kindness to one another, especially during times like this. It is essential that we all work to provide our students and staff with safe spaces at LS that bring life to our values that everyone belongs and that we will support those who need it.

To that end, it is likely that our students and staff have been following the events over the past few days and engaging in conversations about the causes and impact this conflict may have from a global and local standpoint. Here are some resources to help families navigate such conversations with our young people. At school, we want to support anyone impacted during this significant and impactful conflict and strongly urge students who are impacted by the recent events to access in-school supports from their counselor and/or any trusted adult.

These are difficult times in the world and I hope that you join me in sending thoughts and prayers to the Israelis and Palestinians who are living through this terrible conflict.

This is a strange thing for Dr. Stephens to be concerned about when one considers that both Lincoln and Sudbury are crammed with Climate Doomers (maybe this is why “These are difficult times in the world”?). If humanity is going extinct in the medium-term, what difference does it make if a small percentage of humans are killed via war?

The email gives full nationhood status to “Palestine”. Note also the assumptions that Muslims from, e.g., Pakistan or Indonesia, will be anti-Israel and pro-Hamas (“an affinity standpoint”) and that a public school counselor in Massachusetts will be able to “support” a Muslim student who is upset that some of those who carry guns on behalf of Hamas have been killed by the Zionist entity.

Apparently, some recipients complained about the above email. Part of a follow-up from Dr. Stephens:

The message was not clear with respect to the fact that the attacks on Israel over the past weekend were perpetrated by terrorists and resulted in violence and atrocities that have shocked the global community. These attacks, which do not represent the views of many Palestinians and Muslims, should be condemned and were impactful at a deeply personal level to many people in our school and community.

Note the inconsistency with the first message. If Palestine is a country and Hamas is the government of that country (with broader support than Joe Biden enjoys among Americans), why are the armed men directed by Hamas “terrorists”? Why aren’t they “soldiers”? In the first message, the assumption was that Muslim students at the school would naturally have “affinity” for Hamas. In the second message, it turns out that there are “many” Muslims (among 1.8 billion worldwide) who do not support Hamas.

When did school bureaucrats start having sufficient time to comment on climate change, shootings thousands of miles away, wars on the other side of the globe, etc.? Maybe it coincides with a reduced workload on the job due to an increase in the number of school employees per student? Example:

Finally, let’s have a look at the expert on events in what he refers to as the country of Palestine:

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