Dear Weekend Jolter,
The resumption of Israeli air strikes in Gaza, after Hamas continued killing through a pause while trading hostages for prisoners, means the calls for a permanent cease-fire are about to get much louder.
They’ve been building all week. Jordan is hoping to persuade the Europeans to support this goal. Activists and state lawmakers recently went on a hunger strike for it. Oakland’s city council voted unanimously (and symbolically) to back a long-term cessation, though, in a familiar pattern, split on whether to condemn Hamas’s murdering and hostage-taking — following public comment from what I can only describe as October 7 truthers. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said a “temporary pause in the violence is not enough” and called for a permanent one.
This leads to the next question: And then?
The alternative to Israel’s war against Hamas tends to go unmentioned, much in the way the casus belli that drew Israel back into Gaza is. Yet there is little reason to think even a diminished Hamas would abandon working toward its ultimate goal — which, in case you missed the interview with Hamas official Ghazi Hamad, is the annihilation of Israel. “We will do this again and again,” he said of the October 7 terror rampage, which Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar called a mere “rehearsal.”
Israel’s alternative, it follows, is to accept the unacceptably high probability that Hamas will prosecute further terror campaigns against the Israeli people — rape, torture, murder, hostage-taking, all of it, “again and again.” This, while Gazans keep suffering under a self-interested terrorist regime whose platform is actually genocide (and whose rule is seen to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution). No responsible government would choose this option unless forced.
Citing a Times of Israel assessment that at least 20,000 Hamas gunmen remain, Jim Geraghty writes that “the mission of either destroying or incapacitating Hamas is far from finished.” A permanent cease-fire, per NR’s editorial, “would bring an end to the war with Hamas still in power and able to rebuild.” And then?
Abandoning the primary Israeli objective of destroying Hamas in exchange for the release of more hostages would only encourage Hamas and other terrorist groups to take more captives in the future, with the understanding that doing so will ultimately protect them.
Israel faces miserable choices ahead, especially in turning to Hamas’s Khan Younis stronghold in southern Gaza, to where thousands of displaced civilians have fled. Andrew McCarthy writes here about why he’s increasingly pessimistic about Israel’s ability to achieve its aims. Global, and even American, pressure on Israel will only grow now that fighting has resumed. Yet, as Jim also notes and as America’s U.N. ambassador pointedly observed, the international community has shown little interest in holding Hamas accountable or even condemning the horrors that led down this path.
What’s the alternative to Israel’s war on Hamas? A resumption of violence against women, for one. Haley Strack for weeks has highlighted the relative silence of “women’s” groups on this point. Noah Rothman recalls what is being forgotten:
“He didn’t pick up his pants,” said one witness to a gang rape at the Nova rave. “He shot her while inside her.” An Israeli combat medic described the condition in which he found one female body: “There was a liquid on her back that looked like semen. She was shot in the back of the head.” Another responder testified through tears that he encountered “a naked woman with a sharp object stuck in the intimate area of her body.” One Israeli morgue worker testified to the evidence of mass sexual violence. “We saw many women with bloody underwear, with broken bones, broken legs, broken pelvises,” she said.
These atrocities against civilians were committed not only intentionally but with sadistic delight. The distinction — that of intent, crucial as a matter of law and basic morality — cannot be smudged by the eager erasers of the very recent past. Israel’s campaign has unquestionably killed many civilians, and a resumption of fighting will kill more. Anything Israel and neighboring nations can do to minimize civilian deaths, including by securing evacuation routes, they should. But the fundamental fact remains that Hamas intended and intends still to kill innocents. Israel doesn’t. “Leaving Hamas in power is an unacceptable outcome given that the terrorist organization has no plans to stop its indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians,” Zach Kessel writes. As long as Israel’s government feels the full weight of its obligation to protect its people, the reality is: There is no alternative to war with Hamas. Not one Israel could, quite literally, live with.
If there were a nonviolent and friendly way to eliminate the threat from Hamas, I’m sure the Israeli government is all ears. And no, “Just give Hamas what it wants” doesn’t count. The Hamas charter declares, in some of its first words, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On Kissinger: Henry Kissinger, R.I.P.
Say what you will about the Fox News debate this past week, but the two governors provided a true contrast of visions: Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom Give America a Real Debate
Never take the First Amendment for granted. An outrageous proposal in Ireland shows, once more, why these protections are special and how much power governments will seek to claim in their absence: Banning Ire in Ireland
ARTICLES
Jeffrey Blehar: Gavin Newsom Is Not Ready for Prime Time
Audrey Fahlberg: In Miami-Dade, the Political Tides Turn Toward Republicans Ahead of 2024
Audrey Fahlberg: No Labels’ 2024 ‘Unity Ticket’ Continues to Torment the Biden Coalition
Haley Strack: U.N. Women Retracts Statement Condemning Hamas Attacks on Israel
Ari Blaff: Jewish High Schoolers Abandon Ivy League Aspirations in Response to Campus Antisemitism
Philip Klein: It’s the Indictments, Stupid
Christian Schneider: Elizabeth Warren’s Beef with Big Sandwich
Wilfred Reilly: There Is No ‘Trans Genocide’
Caroline Downey: Financial Illiteracy, Vandalism, and Sidewalk Parties: Inside the Month-Long Portland Teachers’-Union Strike
Frances Hui: The Long Arm of the CCP Attacks Protesters in the U.S.
Dan McLaughlin: Sandra Day O’Connor: The Supreme Court’s Last Politician
Dan McLaughlin: Darkening Skies for Sports Journalism
Brittany Bernstein: Bank Investigator Flagged ‘Unusual’ Chinese Payments behind $40k Check to Biden, Raised Possibility of Influence Peddling
CAPITAL MATTERS
Jon Hartley says the evidence is now clear that the Trump-era tax cuts had a positive effect: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Actually Spurred Investment and Hiring
Dominic Pino, with the riddle for our time: How Long Does It Take the Federal Government to Build One Electric-Vehicle Charger?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White ventures into the horror genre: Thanksgiving Serves Up American Trauma
Brian Allen speaks truth to Frida Kahlo, and highlights the work of a better artist: Dallas Does Abraham Ángel, a Mexican Modernist Lost Too Soon
Rich Lowry weighs in on Napoleon, the movie, and Napoleon, the man: Was Napoleon a Dullard?
FROM THE NEW, JANUARY 2024 ISSUE OF NR
Noah Rothman: The Great Unlearning
Jerry Hendrix: Save the Military–Industrial Complex
Charles C. W. Cooke: ‘Not Trump’ Is Not Enough
Christine Rosen: Nikki Haley’s High Heels
Mario Loyola: The Guns of Austerlitz
Jack Butler: What’s a Medieval Castle Doing in Ohio?
NOTABLE QUOTABLE EXCERPTS
Kissinger is dead at 100. From NR’s editorial obituary on his life and legacy:
Turmoil was Kissinger’s, and his generation’s, birthright. Studying it, managing it, trying to tamp it down, became his life’s work. Avoiding it, he knew, was an impossibility. . . .
His record as Nixon’s national-security adviser, then secretary of state, is the foreign-policy record of the Nixon administration. Nixon, intelligent and experienced, set his own course. But Kissinger approved, implemented, and, in professorial media turns, publicized it. The tilt to Pakistan, the opening to China, the Yom Kippur War and shuttle diplomacy, toppling Allende, Vietnam peace talks — all bore Kissinger’s fingerprints. Kissinger’s reading of the Cold War’s power balance and of America’s capabilities was meliorist, and struck conservatives as defeatist. (WFB’s NR columns on Nixon’s trip to China were savage.) Kissinger thought he was doing the best in a bad world.
Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy in the GOP changed the party’s, and the country’s, attitude. Reagan’s view of the Cold War, as he told an associate early on, was, “We win and they lose.” But Kissinger kept his hand in, as an adviser and commentator — in Washington lingo, a wise man. One of his latest pieces of advice was among his least wise: He was a lifelong advocate for engagement with Communist China. He profited as a consultant, but the more important motive was pride: He could not bear to see his historic opening becoming a dead end. That was a tragedy he could not face.
When WFB retired as editor in chief of NR, Kissinger offered to throw him a dinner at his East Side river-view apartment. You make the guest list, he said. WFB invited all his youngest colleagues to hear the wise man’s tour d’horizon. Two affectionate gestures, two of many.
Audrey Fahlberg reports from Hialeah on political trends that could redound to Republicans’ benefit:
Sipping on café con leche in one of his favorite Cuban coffee shops earlier this month, Hialeah mayor Esteban Bovo could barely contain his excitement that former president Donald Trump chose his Hispanic-dominated enclave of Miami-Dade County to counter-program the third Republican presidential debate.
“We had some people sleep there last night,” Bovo told National Review the morning of November 8, the same day five lower-polling rivals took the stage in Miami to debate one another as the former president rallied a few miles away in Hialeah.
It’s here in traditional blue Miami-Dade — Florida’s most populous county — where the political tides are turning toward Republicans for the first time in two decades. The GOP’s electoral gains and continued grassroots presence here in the fundraising, candidate-recruitment, and voter-registration departments suggest Democrats can no longer take this county for granted in 2024 and beyond.
“The Republican Party in the state of Florida, I think, has been doing a very aggressive and concerted effort to get it to the grassroots level and not concede anything,” Bovo tells National Review.
Florida Republicans have dominated statewide elections in recent decades, holding unified control of the state legislature and the governorship since the nineties, even as presidential races here have remained competitive. But Miami-Dade was always considered a firewall for Democrats, voting blue in every presidential election since 1992 (and propelling Barack Obama to victory in Florida two cycles in a row). Recent election cycles suggest the pendulum is now swinging toward Republicans. After Hillary Clinton romped to victory in Miami-Dade by 29 points in 2016, Joe Biden carried the county by a mere seven points in 2020 — a double-digit swing toward Trump in just four years.
Then came the 2022 midterms, when Governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by 19 points and carried the county by eleven — Republicans’ first gubernatorial victory in Miami-Dade since Jeb Bush in 2002.
These electoral gains are stunning considering Democrats still outnumber Republicans in Miami-Dade, though voter-registration data suggest their numbers are shrinking here as they are on the statewide level. Last month, the county reported 523,902 Democrats, 433,651 Republicans, and 468,064 unaffiliated voters. Those are much closer voter-registration margins than even five years ago, when the county reported 601,261 registered Democrats, 377,550 Republicans, and 446,789 unaffiliated voters.
As Elizabeth Warren descends into self-parody with warnings about the creation of a “sandwich shop monopoly” — as if such a thing could ever work in the United States, land of sandwiches — Christian Schneider is ready to slather mockery all over the situation:
Presumably, Warren thinks that when Arby’s says they “have the meats,” they hold exclusive control of America’s strategic roast-beef reserves. Warren was appropriately toasted online, with economists mocking her belief that sandwich shops can create a monopoly by simply “seiz(ing) the Meats of Production.”
Of course, to Warren and her progressive ilk, a “monopoly” is simply a company that has gotten so successful it suddenly deserves regulation. As Adam Smith put it, “a monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures.”
But, of course, there is no monopoly on sandwich-making primarily because there is no trade secret. It is simply surrounding a filling with two slices of bread. This is a process so rudimentary that people do it at home. They do it on picnics. They do it with lettuce and braunschweiger. They do it with peanut butter and jelly. It is a meal so simple we teach children to make it themselves.
Further, regulating Big Sandwich would give America’s most insufferable people — those who argue online about what constitutes a “sandwich” — police powers. Is a hamburger a sandwich? A hot dog? Is a quesadilla a sandwich? How about that KFC sandwich that uses two fried-chicken patties as the bun? (Mark the Double Down right next to the Constitution as evidence of American exceptionalism.)
The fearless and statistic-armed Wilfred Reilly pushes back on the idea that trans discrimination is leading to a campaign of systemic violence in America and the West:
The only catch is that no such systemic violence exists. According to [Karine] Jean-Pierre herself — and, presumably, to an LGBT-rights group with every interest in magnifying the phenomenon — the total number of trans-identified Americans known to have been killed in 2023 is 26. If we round that up to 30 (to account for December) and assume that just 1 percent of the U.S. population is trans (given that, as one very limited survey shows, around 3 percent of young Americans are), we obtain an annual transgender-murder rate of 30 in 3.32 million, or just 0.9 people per 100,000 people. Even if we, alternatively, assume an American trans population of just 1.6 million — to gel with one high-quality but conservative recent estimate — the resulting murder rate would be merely 1.9 per 100,000 people.
To put that in context, the murder rate for blacks in the U.S. is currently 30–33 per 100,000 people. The African-American community is an outlier but not necessarily a remarkable one: In a representative recent year, 4.5 percent of black-male deaths were the results of homicide, versus 2.3 percent for American Indians, 2.2 percent for Hispanics, 2 percent for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders . . . and 4.9 percent for all whites under full majority. To say the obvious, all of these groups are currently living far more dangerously than “trans women.”
Further, almost none of the small number of murders of trans people recorded in 2023 were due to “transphobia” from the MAGA-hat set. According to an excellent breakdown posted to social media by writer Pi Campbell, the “victims” highlighted by the Human Rights Campaign included such citizens as Banko Brown (the San Francisco thief/robber shot during a confrontation with a security guard), Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán (an armed environmental activist killed during a shootout with Atlanta police during the violent Stop Cop City protests), and DéVonnie J’Rae Johnson (a trans woman who attacked a security officer with a fire extinguisher).
Shout-Outs
Liel Leibovitz, at Tablet: #MrFAFO Is Real
Jessica Anderson, at RealClearPolitics: The Crime Crisis Destroying America’s Cities
Paul Kix, at the Free Press: Liberals Once Embraced Interracial Marriages Like Mine. What Changed?
CODA
I’ve been feeling this one lately; maybe it’s the weather. Speaking of Simon & Garfunkel, here’s Jeff Blehar, on their importance.
Thanks for reading, all. Have a great weekend.
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