Fact Check: Ted Cruz is Awesome - Part (I've lost count)

(The following is an Op Ed by Ted Cruz written 9 years ago about the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which has been much in the news since Israel was attacked by Gaza on Oct 7th this year.) 

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Israel saves its enemies; Hamas endangers its friends

From The Washington Times:

If you want to judge a nation, look at how it treats its most vulnerable civilians. Hospitals are a good place to start.

Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, is housed in a converted British army barracks. Some 126 miles north is Israel’s Ziv Medical Center in Zefat.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, is using the civilian population as human shields. The terrorist group has placed its missiles in schools and mosques and, even more deplorably, burrowed its command center underneath the al-Shifa hospital.

Hamas‘ activities are taking place in plain sight. Just two weeks ago, The Washington Post described al-Shifa as “a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders.” These terrorist facilities are of course well known not only to the foreign journalists who interview Hamas fighters there, but also to the Israelis, who would by necessity consider such a location a legitimate target for any action against Hamas. However, the terrorist group has tried to immunize their headquarters by digging it under a hospital, leaving Israel no option but to target al-Shifa if they want to get rid of the Hamas terrorist leadership.

Hamas sees no downside in this arrangement. Knowing that Israel prioritizes protecting civilians, the terrorists can be reasonably confident that al-Shifa will not be targeted, and they can continue their murderous activities undisturbed. If the Israelis finally decide that these activities are intolerable and that to destroy Hamas they must target their headquarters, Hamas will have pictures of the quintessentially innocent martyrs — hospital patients unable to flee — to plaster across international media in their ongoing propaganda war to demonize the Jewish state.

The medical care and even survival of the Gazan people are of no concern to these terrorists, for whom casualties are not an unintended consequence of war, but rather a deliberate objective. Like the rest of the population stationed around the many civilian institutions militarized by Hamas, they must either make do with a substandard medical facility being exploited by a terrorist organization, or die in the service of that organization’s savage campaign to destroy Israel.

Meanwhile in Israel, Ziv is a center for pediatric and orthopedic medicine. Given its proximity to Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria, Ziv has seen its share of violence, but despite taking direct rocket fire during the 2006 Lebanon war, it has remained in continuous operation.

During the past three years of the Syrian civil war, Ziv has treated more than 1,000 Syrians injured in that conflict — all free of charge.

In a visit to Ziv this spring, I met the social worker whose job it is to explain to the patients who wake up grievously injured and surrounded by Israelis that they are not in hell, but that the people who they have been told from birth are the devil are, in fact, working very hard to heal them.

I met a Syrian child who had lost three limbs but has been fitted with revolutionary prosthetics and will, God willing, walk again.

All of this means that many of Ziv’s hospital beds and a substantial portion of its funding are not available for Israelis, but the staff has concluded it is worth it if their work can start to reverse the intractable hate that has been relentlessly leveled at Israel by its neighbors.

The contrast in this tale of two hospitals could not be more clear: Hamas exploits their medical facilities as a human shield to launch terrorist operations against Israel, while Israel uses theirs to provide cutting-edge medical care to people whose government’s avowed goal is to destroy the Jewish state. Hamas‘ actions are a war crime. Israel’s are one of the great, unsung humanitarian missions on the planet.

Fact Check: Could there be another Holocaust?

Watch this compelling speech by Columbia Professor Shai Davidai.  Yes, there are Nazis among us, but they no longer organize in beer halls:

  

 

The Syrian Refugee Problem - Part 1

Battle lines have been drawn on the issue of Syrian refugees.  (Whether or not the refugees are actually from Syria is beside the point.)  The questions everyone is struggling with are these:

• Are the refugees fleeing a war?
• Are they coming here for a better life?
• Do we owe them a better life? 
• Are they coming here to conquer us?  
• Is coming here the best way for them to have a better life?
• Can we know they are not terrorists?
• Can we discriminate against refugees based on religion?
• Does the West have an obligation to absorb every civil war torn population?

All good questions.  Before I answer them, please watch some Syrians sing about one of their favorite events:  

(YouTube has deleted this content, and as we now know this censorship is often done at the direction of the U.S. government in direct violation of the First Amendment to The Constitution of The United States.)



I'll answer the questions in my next post - Part 2.

The Syrian Refugee Problem - Part-2

Ted Cruz Is Awesome! III

Last week Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee were the lowest forms of scum on the planet, and that was just what the GOP establishment was saying about them!  Democrats went even further calling them arsonists, terrorists, and hostage takers among other things.  Why?  Because they wanted to defund or delay Obamacare.

Now a week later there are probably enough Democrats leaning towards delaying Obamacare to pass the senate with a majority!  You can't make this stuff up.  Are these Democrats arsonists, terrorists, and hostage takers?  Is a comedian like Jon Stewart, who is the de-facto news anchor for Democrats under 90,  also an arsonist and a terrorist?  He too has brutally addressed Obamacare pointing out the obvious - it is simply not ready.    

Cruz and Lee were arguing, among other things, that Obamacare (Officially the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", a name straight out of "Atlas Shrugged"!) had ceased to exist in it's original form.  Yes, it had passed on a party-line vote in 2010 and it survived one Supreme Court challenge in 2012, but Barack Obama has unilaterally rewritten it several times since then.  The legislature is supposed to rewrite laws under our system, not the executive.  Big employers were granted waivers for a year, Congress was given government subsidies in direct opposition to the law, income verification was waived, out-of-pocket caps were waived, and the penalty was rewritten by the SCOTUS as a "tax".   Defund or delay was predicated in part on the premise that the passed law no longer existed.  That, and the self-evident truth that if the law was ready to implement, Obama himself would not have rewritten it several times!  Turns out they were right.

So the good news for Cruz and Lee is that they have been vindicated on that aspect.  The science is settled, as they say.  The bad news comes via others who came before them and similarly challenged the establishment:  recall, Galileo Galilei was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life for asserting that the earth revolved around the sun, in direct opposition to the "establishment" belief that it was the other way around.

Anatomy of a Myth V – Obama Deserves Kudos for “Ramping-Up” the Drone Attacks

Even the most ardent Obama detractors manage to offer the President kudos for “ramping-up” the drone attacks on terror targets. Then they usually throw in a nice word or two about him “getting bin Laden” and then it’s right back to berating him for just about everything else. Well, I’m not going to play that game. Nope. I give him no credit for bin Laden OR the increased drone attacks. In fact, I think both are emblematic of perhaps Obama’s biggest failure of all: losing the intelligence war. To understand why, let's go back in time to the very beginning.

The very first item on Obama’s to-do list was to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. This had nothing to do with making America stronger. It was a political promise motivated by a mistaken belief that the prison violated international norms and/or the Geneva Conventions. Some prominent Republicans, including John McCain, were also among those calling for closing the prison. But Obama went much further. He wanted to close the prison, move the prisoners onto US soil, try them in civilian courts, treat them like citizens, offer them defense attorneys, place them in witness protection programs, provide them with high-paying union “green jobs”, and get them all slots on American Idol.  (OK, I made those last ones up.)

Of course, Gitmo is still up and running but the administration has pledged to add no new prisoners there. No prisoners? What to do? The answer: kill them all. Rather than engaging in the hard work of capturing live terrorists and interrogating them, Obama prefers dropping bombs on them and their villages from un-manned drones at thirty thousand feet. To the left, indiscriminate death from above is morally just, but capture and interrogation, while perhaps saving hundreds of innocent lives, is unthinkable! The result of this kill-all policy has been a dearth of new first-person intelligence. Are we safer? Are we morally better-off executing suspects than we were holding and questioning them? Are we making more friends in Pakistan and Yemen this way?

Bin Laden’s assassination was part of that same pattern. By now everyone accepts that bin Laden would never have been found were it not for the policies of George W Bush which Obama universally opposed. Moreover, Obama had no way of dealing with a live terrorist, so his only option was execution. Had he been interested in learning as much as he could about al-Qaeda and preventing future attacks, he would have captured bin Laden and dealt with the political ramifications. But his interest was to make the headline and avoid the sticky politics. As for any intelligence gathered from that raid, its value was instantly undermined by the administration's leaks. Why tell the enemy what we found? Why not keep hush or say everything was destroyed?

No, on this 10th anniversary of 9/11 if I’m going to praise President Obama, it will have to be on the grounds that he seems to be a decent father. In fact, he’d make an excellent full-time father!