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In this mailing:
* Alan M. Dershowitz: Civilian Deaths in Gaza: Relatively Low.
* Daniel Greenfield: The Domestic Terrorists of Tomorrow are Blocking Traffic Today
* Amir Taheri: Iran-Pakistan: The Beautiful Vase Has Been Chipped


** Civilian Deaths in Gaza: Relatively Low. ([link removed])
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by Alan M. Dershowitz • January 28, 2024 at 5:00 am
* Critics of Israel almost never cite comparable data from other military encounters. This omission creates the false impression that the civilian death tolls in Gaza are among the highest in history, when they are in fact among the lowest.
* The New York Times' conclusion that the new data suggests that it is "wrong to accuse [Israel] of wanting to maximize civilian deaths" is highly relevant to the false charges of genocide that are being considered by the International Court of Justice.
* The decreasing civilian death rate among Gazans should also end the campaign to impose a ceasefire on Israel before the IDF completes its legitimate mission to destroy Hamas' military capacity. Successfully completing that mission will save civilian lives in the long run, by reducing Hamas' capacity to keep its promise of repeating the barbarism of October 7 and also by reducing its use of civilian shields.
* The time has come, indeed it is long overdue, for the world to stop imposing a double standard on the nation-state of the Jewish people. Double standards are a form of bigotry, and when bigotry is addressed to the only nation-state of the Jewish people, it becomes a form of international anti-Semitism against the Jew among nations. It must stop.

Israel's military actions have produced far fewer deaths and a far lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than in any comparable urban warfare. This is especially significant considering the reality that Hamas deliberately increases civilian deaths by using women and children as human shields and by hiding its military personnel and equipment among civilians. Pictured: Gazans, protected by the Israeli military, walk along a safe corridor in the northern Gaza Strip, leaving the battle zone towards the southern Gaza Strip, on November 10, 2023. Hamas terrorists had ordered Gazans not to move to safety, and shot at them as they tried to flee. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

You wouldn't know it from the hectoring decision just rendered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel, but the death toll among civilians in Gaza — even including children and women — is among the lowest in the history of comparable warfare. Over the past several months, it has become even lower.

According to The New York Times, "The daily death toll in Gaza has more than halved in the past month," and has fallen almost two-thirds since late October. Moreover, the percentage of civilian to combatant causalities has gone down considerably as well.

In a massive understatement, The New York Times also reported that these considerable reductions in civilian deaths have been "somewhat overlooked" by the media and critics. "Somewhat"! They have been totally buried and ignored. The New York Times also opined that Israel's "harshest critics are wrong to accuse it of wanting to maximize civilian deaths."

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** The Domestic Terrorists of Tomorrow are Blocking Traffic Today ([link removed])
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by Daniel Greenfield • January 28, 2024 at 4:30 am
* Reasonable people, usually old school liberals, still don't understand the Left. And so they also don't understand what happened to their movement, their party and their country.
* A quarter century of smashing Starbucks windows clearly has nothing to do with Gaza.
* They don't care about black lives, the lives in Gaza or Iraq, or the lives of the poor: these are just the pretexts that provide them with moral superiority so they feel justified smashing things.
* The pro-Hamas riots are a carbon copy of the BLM riots. Like the eco-terrorists, who have taken to vandalizing classical art in museums, their goal isn't persuasion through awareness, it's terrorism.
* Individual causes, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, Gaza, Iraq, income inequality, unions, Wall Street, abortion or criminals, are just gateway drugs to radicalize a base for the leftist revolution.
* Blocking traffic or airports isn't really about ending Israeli attacks on Hamas, but about inflicting misery on Americans and making the leftist perpetrators feel powerful and self-righteous by expressing their malice. Don't think of these as protests; think of them as initiation sessions like those of gangs and cults in which new members prove themselves by hurting someone.
* Blocking school buses, ambulances and people coming home from work, or shouting, "shame on you" at kids with cancer is just part of the radicalization process. Its purpose is to make the activists cause pain while being so emotionally detached from their victims that they not only feel nothing when inflicting pain, but that doing so makes them morally superior.
* The process produces people capable of not only blocking traffic, but planting bombs.
* Communist revolutionaries have exploited wars and food shortages to seize power, only to then inflict even worse wars and food shortages.
* But following the Cloward-Piven model, leftists only make things worse. The purpose of leftist governments is to destroy countries by exacerbating every social, economic, geopolitical and cultural problem until they have brought societies to their knees and can seize total power.
* Revolutions need causes, but the only real cause of a revolution is its own power. Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984, "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."
* DEI educational activists may not be as blatant about it as Hamas, but they share a similar goal of radicalizing a base until it is willing to commit any atrocity and still consider itself morally superior. The processes that produced men willing to rape and murder for Islam in Israel are also producing men and women in the West who are willing to cheer that and to wage war against their own societies in order to protect those rapists and murderers.

Blocking traffic or airports isn't really about ending Israeli attacks on Hamas, but about inflicting misery on Americans and making the leftist perpetrators feel powerful and self-righteous by expressing their malice. Don't think of these as protests; think of them as initiation sessions like those of gangs and cults in which new members prove themselves by hurting someone. Pictured: New York Police Department officers block an anti-Israel convoy from reaching LaGuardia Airport on January 1, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images)

After Hamas supporters were caught screaming "shame on you" at children receiving cancer treatment at a Manhattan hospital ("make sure they hear you, they're in the windows") some people wondered what they were trying to accomplish.

Questions like that only reveal the vast gap between the pro-Hamas mob and everyone else.

The pro-Hamas protests, allegedly in pursuit of a ceasefire, but in reality celebrating Hamas and now Houthi terrorism, have picked random fights with Starbucks, Christmas tree lightings and Alec Baldwin, to name a few. They are not so much for anything as they are against things.

Reasonable people, usually old-school liberals, still don't understand the Left. And so they also don't understand what happened to their movement, their party and their country.

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** Iran-Pakistan: The Beautiful Vase Has Been Chipped ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • January 28, 2024 at 4:00 am
* Despite attempts by both sides to pretend that the recent clashes were a passing storm, it is clear that something deeper and more lasting may be involved.
* Tehran is sore that China decided to locate the trade-cum-security hub it wants to build in the Indian Ocean in the Pakistani port of Gawadar on the Arabian Sea rather than in the Iranian port of Gavatar a few kilometers to its west.
* Tehran fears that China's choice indicates Beijing's lack of confidence in Iran's stability once the "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei bows off stage, while Pakistan would retain a measure of stability because its system does not depend on a single leader.
* Both Tehran and Islamabad are anxious to patch things up as quickly as possible. But one thing is clear: the beautiful vase filled with flowers has been chipped.

Despite attempts by Iran and Pakistan to pretend that the recent clashes were a passing storm, it is clear that something deeper and more lasting may be involved. Pictured: An anti-Iran protest in Lahore, Pakistan on January 19, 2024, after Iran launched an airstrike in Baluchistan province. (Photo by Arif Ali/AFP via Getty Images)

If you had asked me just a couple of weeks ago, I might have assured you that Pakistan is the last county with which the Islamic Republic of Iran would pick a fight.

I might have cited many reasons for that opinion.

First, A recent demise of the classical reasons for antagonism between nation-states. Their border, almost 1,000 kilometers long, was fully demarcated in 1964, ending ambiguities left behind by the British when they withdrew from the subcontinent in 1947. Relations were never marred by irredentist pressures on either side.

Nor did Iran and Pakistan compete over access to natural resources, including water, or competition over markets.

History, too, designated Iran and Pakistan as natural friends. Iran had been a source of inspiration for two generations of Muslims in the subcontinent who dreamt of a separate homeland. Many of them even adopted surnames that indicated an Iranian rather than Indian origin: Gailani, Isfahani, Shirazi etc.

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