A ‘Civil’ War

My fellow Americans, we are at war.

No, I’m not talking about the ‘War on Drugs’ or the ‘War on Terrorism.’ I’m not talking about another ‘Cold War’ or a war using all the latest technological horrors our ingenuity can devise. What I’m talking about is something far more insidious that is potentially more destructive to our society than all the car bombs in the Middle East. I’m talking about a war on Civility.

As the Baby Boom Generation's Beat Culture slid into the Hippie Culture and the Age of Aquarius, America’s youth began to openly shrug off the cultural trappings of their parents and grandparents. They dismissed the formalities of interaction used by the previous generations as “hollow”, “meaningless”, and even “dishonest”. They believed that ‘finishing school’ etiquette helped prop up a class system that was designed to make the rich richer and keep the poor under heel. Therefore, they embraced a rebellious culture of brutally frank honesty with no regard for the effects of their words.

To this day, many of the self-proclaimed ‘intelligentsia’ wrap themselves in a cloak made from the words of the First Amendment and practice this crassly insensitive form of communication. In daily conversation, they use language so scurrilous it would blister the ears of a merchant marine, no matter the setting or the age of casual bystanders. In many businesses, not only is it acceptable to use language that would have gotten you fired as recently as the 1980s, but often individuals who try to maintain a polite and respectful vocabulary are either viewed as ‘soft’, or are assumed to be mocking the listener. Often, if someone tries to express discomfort with the abusive language used by someone around them, the person using the vulgarities starts screaming “censorship” and that the person complaining is trying to deprive them of their Right to Free Speech.

It gets even worse if a discussion or debate is underway. When the members of this literati caste find themselves hearing views opposing their own, they often launch immediately into a verbal personal attack on that speaker, especially when said speaker has disproved the literati's position. In most cases, they will either attack with outrageous accusations and offensive name-calling, or they simply spew forth a stream of invectives as loud as they can in an attempt to ‘shout down’ the opposition. Often, they use both tactics together. In any case, at no time do these ‘enlightened’ members of the ‘tolerant’ ranks afford the speaker with the courtesy of allowing her or him to present their case, then rebutting it logically with facts and observations.

When their beliefs are questioned, the intelligentsia usually follows up by 'gaslighting' the speaker, loudly and publicly accusing them of doing what they themselves were doing all along. They play an intellectually dishonest game of political brinkmanship in an attempt to gain as much sympathy from the general public as they can, while demonizing the person who had the audacity to disagree with them.

When these bastions of the social conscience try to hide behind their Unalienable Right to Free Speech, they fail to acknowledge the flip side of that coin. For every Right granted by the Creator and enumerated in the Constitution and its Amendments, there are implied Responsibilities and Consequences. The most commonly used example of a limitation to the Free Speech clause in the First Amendment is that one can’t stand up in a crowded theater and shout, “Fire!” if there is no fire. That isn’t exactly true. We actually do have the Right to do so, but we also have the Responsibility to consider the Consequences of our actions and not casually do something that may cause injury to others. If we choose to ignore that responsibility, then we must accept the consequences of our actions, which in this case could mean a fine, jail time, or even civil penalties sought by those injured by the irresponsible act. Basically, it comes down to an old adage I like to use: “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.”

When the late George Carlin came out with his routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” he created an iconic comedy performance…as well as the basis for the Supreme Court ruling that established that the FCC did have the authority to prohibit the broadcast of ‘indecent’ material over the public airwaves during the hours when children were likely to be in the audience. However, his views of profanity totally dismissed the value of what I like to call, “Civilization Lubrication.” As Robert Heinlein once wrote,

“Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naïve, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as ‘empty,’ ‘meaningless,’ or ‘dishonest,’ and scorn the use of them. No matter how ‘pure’ their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.” (1)

Of course, considering that Carlin also once stated in one of his routines,

“I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it’s natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.” (2)

it’s very possible he was intentionally ‘throwing sand into the machinery.’ This has been going on for several decades, but there are two very good examples of this rampant incivility that occurred in 2009.

The first example happened on Wednesday, 20 May 2009. Political pundit and commentator Glenn Beck was invited to appear on a segment of the daytime television chat show, The View. On his radio program on Tuesday, Mr. Beck related a personal anecdote of a chance encounter with two of The View’s stars that happened on an Amtrak train about two weeks earlier under unusual circumstances. When Mr. Beck appeared on the show, he was suffering from a stomach flu and was trying to remain polite and respectful since he was in, as he put it, ‘their house.’ As soon as the segment began, the two individuals he encountered on the train attacked him…obsessing for over seven minutes about who addressed who first on the train. They demanded explanations and apologies for some imagined sleight, then refused to let him reply. They both called him a ‘liar’ multiple times with one of them going so far as to refer to him as, “…a lying sack of dog mess.” The other went so far as to upbraid him for failing to check his facts before reporting a story, even though he had simply been relating a personal anecdote as he remembered it and not reporting a news story, and he has stated numerous times over the years that he is a commentator, not a reporter. All through this baseless attack, Mr. Beck reacted with civility and dignity, refusing to lower himself to the level of his attackers.

The second example happened on Thursday, 21 May 2009. President Barack Obama delivered an address at the National Archives defending his recent decisions on national security. The speaker who immediately followed The President was former Vice-President Dick Cheney who delivered an address that supported the national security policies implemented by the Bush Administration, and criticizing the Obama Administration's reduction of the security measures implemented by his predecessor. Unfortunately, instead of using this as a wonderful opportunity to open up a discussion on the merits of both speeches, a user of the online social network, Facebook, decided to create a page in support of, “Telling Dick Cheney to shut the hell up.” In other words, those Oh So Tolerant individuals who scream ‘censorship’ every time someone asks them to stop using profanity around children have decided that the former Vice-President of the United States no longer has a Right to Free Speech just because he disagrees with the current President.

In fact, my previous post in this blog contains another perfect example of this behavior. In it, I shared an article by respected historian, Victor Davis Hanson, that illustrates just how the the Progressive apologists for the terrorist organization, Hamas, are using these tactics to blame Israel for the atrocities Hamas perpetrated upon them and to convince the public that Israel is the villain, not Hamas. They are going out of their way to project Hamas' inhuman behavior onto Israel and accuse them of doing to Arabs and Muslims what Hamas has in fact been doing to Jews since their inception. Simply stated, the truth doesn't support their political narrative so they have to destroy it.

So, what makes this incivility “potentially more destructive to our society than all the car bombs in the Middle East” you ask? It’s this: the incivility into which American culture has been plunged is a wedge that has divided the country into ‘Us’ and ‘Them,’ ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ ‘Red States’ and ‘Blue States,’ ‘Originalists’ and ‘Progressives.’ As long as feelings and opinions are regarded as legitimate rebuttle to hard facts and figures; as long as any voices are silenced and prevented from presenting their arguments reasonably, logically, and courteously; we will never be able to span the chasm between us and reunite as One Nation. If we do not heal this divide, the United States will be finished. As the old adage says, "United we stand, Divided we fall."

It is time to heal this country, not separate it further. Put down the donkey and elephant banners; put away your copy of, “Snappy Comebacks to Stupid Questions”; take a deep breath and let the person across from you finish his or her thought before you reply…and occasionally pause to let that other person either ask questions or rebut your points. The important thing is to stop the shouting and name-calling and begin to dialogue with one another. There is nothing wrong with being passionate about your beliefs, just keep in mind that the person on the other side of the argument also has the right to be passionate about their beliefs. Remember that there is a difference between being passionate and being emotional, so leave emotions out of the discussion. Also remember that one can be passionate and still present a logical argument supported by facts. And finally, before you come to the table, triple check your facts to make certain you are not basing your arguments on hearsay, innuendo, opinion, or urban myth. I’m always open to other points of view, but you’d better be able to support your position with cold, hard facts or I reserve the right to point out your errors!

Now, go out there and discuss, debate, and decide. Keep an open mind and end the War on Civility. Just stop all the bickering, gaslighting, name-calling, and shouting!

Until next time, be well, Dear Ones!

(1) Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein © 1973 Robert A. Heinlein

(2) Life Is Worth Losing by George Carlin © 2005 George Carlin

© 2009, 2023 James P. Rice

The Verbal Double Standard of the Progressive Socialist Left

Good day, dear reader!

I had originally planned to address this topic myself, but I discovered an article by a respected historian and expert, Victor Davis Hanson*. Therefore, I'll let him address the linguistic double standard being used in regards to the recent terrorist attack on Israel.

Gaza and the Corruption of Language

“Apartheid” - Like most leftist smears, it reflects projection. Arab citizens inside Israel…over half of whom are Muslims…vote, run for office, and have organized political parties. As a fifth of the population, they enjoy more security, prosperity, and freedom than do their counterparts in the surrounding Arab nations.

In contrast, can one envision non-Arab Christian or Jewish residents of Gaza voting, running for office, forming political parties, or criticizing Hamas? This projected charge of apartheid, it applies to Hamas, which considers anyone other than Arab Muslims as inferiors to be kept out of Gaza.

“Ceasefire” - A ceasefire, truce, or armistice rarely ends the conflict for good unless both sides are worn out, and mutually agree that neither can win and the war is thus regrettable—a rare phenomenon in military history. More often, ceasefires are mere breathers for one or both sides to frantically resupply and rearm for rounds two, three, four…

Ultimately, wars…even those that last decades…end when one side loses and the other wins (often most clearly via ‘unconditional’ surrender), or both suffer such calamitous losses that each believes victory is unachievable and will in the future continue to be so. Unless the antithetical political agendas that lead to war are resolved, then breathers and truces and time-outs eventually ensure lengthy or multiple wars. Victory leading to the loser’s abandonment of political agendas more often leads to lasting peace.

“Disproportionate” - Can anyone recall a war won by proportionate measures? When war is proportionate it more often turns into a Stalingrad…or perhaps a Ukraine…until one side finds a disproportionate response that will change endless stasis to victory. World War II was not won by a proportionate response to Pearl Harbor. And what would be a proportionate response to the murder of a thousand civilians?

Under the logic of “proportionality,” ought the Israeli state then invade Gaza and likewise murder a thousand of its civilians? The whole concept of a “proportionate" response to an unprovoked massacre of women and children asleep in their homes and during a peace is absurd.

“Civilian casualties” - In this war, almost all intentional civilian deaths are due to Hamas. The civilian dead consist of three unfortunate categories:

1) Over a thousand Jewish civilians, at a time of holiday, butchered by invading Hamas killer squads.

2) Gazan civilian shields whose homes and places of work are deliberately used to protect and enable Hamas rocketeers and shooters to wage war with impunity—in the expectation that Israel regards Gazan life as more valuable than does Hamas, and therefore won’t retaliate to missile launches by indiscriminately killing civilian shields. Hamas expects, even hopes, that they will be killed and thus bring them political advantage by their numerous deaths.

3) The general population of Gaza. The charter of Hamas ensures that its apparat will wage perpetual war at any cost against Israel. Hamas has no interest in a two-state solution, lasting armistices, or using billions of dollars in foreign aid to ensure modern power, water, and sewage plants for its people. Instead, it treats its own population as expendable and subordinate to its own tunnel-making and rocket-launching.

“Cycle of violence” - This phrase almost suggests that violence is organic, autonomous, without culpability, and thus not incited by one side. War, however, never works that way. Instead, there is usually definable 51% and more culpability on one side. In the case of October 7, who invaded the country of another to enact a year-long premeditated plan of savagely murdering and mutilating women and children? Was Israel intent on violence or was Hamas? Did Hamas call up their intended targets and urge them to flee before they arrived? Is that IDF trait even conceivable within Hamas? While Hamas spent the year planning the precivilizational massacres of Jewish women and children, Israel…naively convinced that Hamas was concentrating on domestic affairs rather than its usual savage agenda of torching, stabbing, and shooting Jews…was at the time negotiating détente with Saudi Arabia and inviting nearly 20,000 Gazans a day to enter Israel to work and earn a living?

“Innocents” - All collateral damage is tragic, and, for example, children in Gaza are obviously innocent. But, while any noncombatant can be an innocent civilian, not all innocent civilians are created equal. Their collective innocence or guilt may not be absolute, but it can be fairly determined by their support for the agendas of its combatants and government. That is, whether they are empowering something like the SS or trying to stop it.

If bands of Israeli soldiers surprise-invaded Gaza with orders to grab hostages and focus on murdering women and children and then desecrating their corpses in hopes of psychologically devastating Gazans, they would likely be brought up on charges by the IDF or shunned and ostracized by their own people. In contrast, when hostages were paraded in Gaza, civilians there seemed to enjoy spitting on and striking them. The return from Israel of the Gazan hostage-takers and murderers was met by ecstatic crowds.

The German population, similarly ruled by a “one man, one vote, once” dictatorship, was ebullient over Hitler’s success from 1939 to 1941, but lost their enthusiasm from 1942 to 1945, and feigned innocence (out of alleged ignorance or powerlessness) after the war was over.

So too, Gazans on Saturday, October 7 were enthralled by news of a thousand murdered Jews, only two weeks later to pose as innocent civilians not deserving retaliation for the inhuman violence against the innocent that they had so recently and so eagerly supported and cheered on.

Be well, Dear Ones! Until next time...

* Victor Davis Hanson is the Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He has written for several publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New Criterion, and the Daily Telegraph. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the Bradley Prize, he is the author of numerous books, including A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

Housekeeping

Good day, dear reader!

This post is a quick note about some 'housekeeping' issues for this blog.

First, you may have noticed that, since I started posting again, my missives have been longer than my previous posts. Early in the life of this blog, an old friend of mine who'd had a business blog for several years advised me that a good blog post should be no more than 1,000 words in length, so I started applying that guideline to my posts. I have since been advised by other experienced bloggers that, as long as you're not "writing a book," a blog post should be as long as it needs to be to convey the idea you're presenting. Therefore, I have stopped limiting my posts and breaking up topics into muliple posts.

Second, because of my previous format, ther were a couple of topics I failed to complete. I plan in the near future to tie up those loose ends.

Finally, I want to once again encourage everyone to comment on and share my posts. I welcome questions and civil discussion and debate about all the topics I present.

Be well, Dear Ones! Until next time...

The Truth About Palestine and the Terrorist Attack On Israel

Good day, Dear Reader,

Today, I am saddened, disheartened, and angry. This past Saturday, 7 October 2023, The Islamic terrorist organization, Hamas, premeditatively planned and executed, with no military or other specific objective, a barbaric attack on Israel on multiple fronts, indiscriminately butchering, raping, and massacring civilians from the border of the Gaza Strip to Tel Aviv. As of this morning, the death toll is over 1200 souls, mostly civilians, and includes 260 attendees at a musical festival celebrating the Jewish Holy Day of Simchat Torah, as well as 30 Americans. There were also over 2200 people wounded and, at last count, over 160 people of all ages kidnapped whom Hamas has hinted would be executed during live broadcasts. These actions rise to the legal definition of War Crimes.

The attack began with Hamas randomly launching thousands of rockets into various areas of Israel in an attempt to overwhelm the Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, striking civilian targets that included hospitals and apartment buildings as far as 50 miles away from Gaza. While raining destruction down from the sky, Hamas’ shock troopers invaded Israel by land, sea, and air. They swarmed into Kibbitzes (small rural communities) and breeched security checkpoints by force and by dressing in stolen Israeli Defense Force uniforms. They flew over the border security walls using motorized paragliders. They used military-grade Zodiacs to invade seaside communities from the Mediterranean. They used motorcycles and armored cars to crash through border checkpoints. They used the stolen uniforms to infiltrate IDF border security bases, killing soldiers, creating confusion, and hampering Israeli attempts to protect civilians.

Once inside Israel, the terrorists indiscriminately raped and butchered women, children, and men, often in front of their families. They burned homes with people still inside them. They murdered every man and older boy they saw. Then, as they began their retreat, they grabbed women and children and dragged them off to be hostages, often after raping them.

None of this is speculation or hearsay. Because of the inveterate presence of smartphones, hundreds of videos were made of the atrocities as they happened, many by the terrorists themselves, most of which were posted to the various social media sites. The videos clearly show the members of Hamas laughing with unholy glee as they rape, maim, dismember, and kill the terrified civilians.

Israel, in an attempt to reduce the terrorists’ military capability and minimize the possibility of a follow-up attack, blockaded the Gaza Strip, the location of Hamas’ headquarters, and launched rockets at the terrorists’ military and administrative facilities. Unfortunately, being the cowards they are, Hamas routinely places all their facilities in the middle of dense urban areas. In fact, their main administrative headquarters was in a 17 story apartment building. However, not being the pathetic cowards the terrorists are, and wanting to only harm Hamas and not the civilians living in Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force provided advanced warning of their attacks, urging the civilians around and among the targets to evacuate quickly before the IDF began their counterattack. After giving the civilians time to evacuate, they reduced their targets to rubble.

Then, to add insult to injury, Islamic immigrants and refugees…as well as many Progressive/Liberal Marxists…in cities around the world took to the streets to celebrate the rape, dismemberment, and murder of the women, children, and men of Israel. Pro-Hamas celebrants took to the steps of the Sydney Opera Hall in Australia and chanted, “gas the Jews.” Here in the United States, traditionally Israel’s staunchest ally, four members of the House of Representatives refused to condemn the actions of Hamas and instead bemoaned what they considered to be Israel’s “overreaction” to some “civil unrest” displayed by Hamas. Thirty-five different student organizations at Harvard University, one of America’s most revered educational institutions, issued statements expressing support for the ‘Palestinians’ and declaring that the attacks were Israel’s own fault. Every disgusting one of them have openly and cheerfully expressed support for vicious animals who raped and murdered children.

Aside from the abominable actions by the terrorists, these fools are actually expressing support for a lie: THERE IS AND NEVER HAS BEEN A NATION CALLED PALESTINE NOR A PALESTINIAN PEOPLE! What many people call “Palestine” was originally a sparsely populated southern region of Canaan. Ethnically, the area has primarily been populated by Canaanites, Akkadians, Semitic Hyksosians, the nomadic Philistines, outcast Egyptians and Arabs (known regionally as the Habiru), and remnants of the various empires who conquered and controlled the area throughout the millennia. The first recorded mention of the name, “Palestine,” came from the Romans when they moved into the area in 63 BC and established the ‘Administrative District of Palestina’ in Judea, based in the market village of Palestine. Some historians believe that the name came from the Greek name for the Philistines.

In 31 AD, during the reign of Augustus, the Romans put their puppet king Herod the Great in power and renamed the region that included the ‘Administrative District of Palestina’ to the ‘Province of Roman Judea’ and moved the administrative and military headquarters to Jerusalem. A hundred years later, after the Bar-Kochba Revolt, Emperor Hadrian renamed the region, ‘Syria Palestina,’ after the Syrians and the Philistines (the two traditional enemies of the Israelites) and banished all Jews from the region as a way to punish them for revolting against the empire. Even in the 7th Century, the Muslims who conquered the Levant renamed the region ‘Jund Filistin,’ (Military District of Filistin).

The region changed hands numerous times over the next thirteen centuries. Then, in World War I, the British won most of the central part of the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, making them a Protectorate within the British Empire. After the war, the British Foreign Minister issued the Balfour Declaration that promised to create a Jewish National Home in the historically Canaanite portion of the Protectorate, in addition to the Arab State promised in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. The newly formed League of Nations initially issued the British and French Mandates, splitting control of the region between the two nations, but toward the end of WWI, British forces captured Jerusalem and solidified their control of the Central Levant by defeating the Turkish forces at the Battle of Megiddo.

Under the authority of the British Mandate, the United Kingdom administered the southern and western portion of what before the Great War had been known as “Ottoman Syria,” which included the Emirate of Transjordan on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, the State of Iraq to the east and south of Transjordan, and the southern region adjacent to the Egyptian border which was given the English designation ‘Palestine,’ derived from the Arabic ‘filastin’ and the Hebrew ‘palestina’. The entire British Mandate was administered from the city of Jerusalem. North of the British Mandate lands were the Kingdom of Syria and Lebanon, both of which were part of the French Mandate.

From 1920 AD to 1948 AD, the British dealt with rising nationalism in both the Arab and Jewish communities, working to keep the peace between the two cultures through the Arab riots and revolts before World War II, and the influx of Jewish refugees during and after the war. The very first historically documented reference to ‘Palestinians’ without qualifying them as Arabs was in a series of formal complaints submitted by the Permanent Executive Committee (composed of Christians and Muslims) to the British authorities on 28 July 1928.

When the United Nations was created to replace the League of Nations, the devastated nations of France and the United Kingdom worked with the new UN to create the Partition Plan as a means to resolve regional unrest in several British Colonies and protectorates, and return all of the Mandatory lands to local, autonomous governance. The Partitioning of the British and French Mandate lands in the Middle East resulted in the creation of the separate, autonomous nations of the Kingdom of Iraq, the Republic of Syria, the Republic of Lebanon, and the Emirate of Transjordan. The region of Palestine was to be divided evenly…shared by an unnamed Arab state in the north, and the State of Israel in the south, with the City of Jerusalem to be made a neutral international city, or ‘Corpus Separatum,’ because of its importance to the adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The majority of the Arabian Peninsula, to the east across the Gulf of Aqaba, was ceded to the powerful House of Saud and became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Unfortunately, the Arab world categorically rejected the compromise for the region of Palestine, declaring that they wanted all Jews exiled from the region, and violence broke out as soon as the UN resolution was announced. The sectarian violence soon escalated to a full civil war between the Arab and Jewish residents of the region, with the independent Arab states creating an all-volunteer Arab Liberation Army that entered the region to fight for the Palestinian Arabs. For three months, the Yishuv (Jewish community) was constantly defending itself, occasionally pushing the aggressors back, until they mounted a counter-offensive in April 1948 AD that completely defeated the Arab forces. Without the support of the Arab Liberation Army the Arab society in the Palestine region collapsed. On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion announced the official birth of the State of Israel.

Again, the Arabs in the region were offered an Arab state separate from Israel, but they refused to accept anything but the entire region, free of Jews. Transjordan took advantage of the confusion after the conflict to grab and annex land on the west side of the Jordan that was meant to be part of the proposed independent Arab state, creating the contested West Bank region that included the eastern part of Jerusalem. Egypt also took advantage of the confusion to occupy and claim the Gaza Strip. Syria and Iraq also tried to take advantage of the turmoil and sent a combined expeditionary force to attack Israel in what was to become known as the Arab-Israeli War, but it was a failure. The most intense fighting took place between Transjordanian forces and the Israelis over control of Jerusalem.

On the same day that Ben-Gurion made his announcement, the Arab League announced that it would establish a single Arab administration for all of the region of Palestine. The All-Palestine Government was established by the Arab League on 22 September 1948, during the Arab-Israeli War, and was soon recognized by all the members of the Arab League except Transjordan. While this new government claimed jurisdiction over the entire Palestinian region, it really only had power in Gaza, under Egyptian protection, and only for a short time. By the end of 1948, the All-Palestine Government had fled to Cairo where it remained until absorbed by the United Arab Republic in 1959 AD.

In 1949 AD, the neighboring Arab nations grudgingly signed an Armistice Agreement with the State of Israel, but publicly continued to state that there can never be an independent Arab state in Palestine as long as Israel exists. That same year, King Abdullah I of Transjordan, as part of a program to gain control of all of Jerusalem and the northern portion of the Mandate lands all the way to the Mediterranean, changed Transjordan’s name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, outlawed the terms “Palestinian” and “Transjordanian,” and granted Jordanian citizenship to all Arab land holders of the Palestinian region of the British Mandate.

In June 1967 AD, the neighboring Arab states (primarily Egypt, Jordan, and Syria) tried to attack Israel once again, initiated when Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping and placed a major military force along the border with Israel. Within six days, the Israeli forces had driven the invaders back to their respective borders. When the ceasefire was signed on 11 June 1967, Israel had Syria’s Golan Heights (the location of Syrian artillery shelling civilian settlements around the Sea of Galilee), the Jordanian West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. Israel chose to keep the captured territories so as to create a strategic buffer between themselves and the belligerent Arab states.

After the Six Day War, in September 1967, the Khartoum Arab Summit convened. The eight participating Arab states…Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, and Sudan…passed a unanimous resolution that there would be no peace, no recognition, and no negotiation with the State of Israel. This ultimately led to a coalition of Arab states…led by Egypt and Syria…attacking Israel yet again on 6 October 1973, the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur. Israel handily drove the Syrians back to their border, but the Egyptians, supplied by the Soviet Union, proved to be more difficult. It wasn’t until the Israelis drove the Egyptians back to within 65 miles of Cairo and the Suez Canal that Egypt agreed to a ceasefire. The Yom Kippur War ended on 25 October.

As with every other Arab aggression against Israel, the Arabs were offered their own autonomous state in the region of Palestine as proposed in the original UN Partition Resolution and in UN Resolution 242. Even after the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979, where Egypt became the first Arab nation to officially recognize the existence of the State of Israel, the other Arab nations continued to maintain that there would be no peace as long as one Jew resided in the region. The rhetoric was even intensified by Lebanon, Syria, and Iran in the late 1980s and through the 1990s as they all declared that there would be no rest until “Israel is driven into the sea.”

In the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel agreed to self-rule for the Palestinian Arabs in the territories they captured during the Six Day War. The Palestinian Authority was created, which was openly accepted and recognized by Israel. However, terrorist organizations such as the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLO), Hezbollah, and Hamas began to infiltrate the Palestinian Authority, as well as the commuters traveling between the areas under the jurisdiction of the Authority and the Israeli-controlled areas. Once again, the flames of a jihad (holy war) against the “Zionist infidels” began to be fanned. Palestinian suicide bombers indiscriminately murdered countless civilians in attacks on restaurants, markets, hotels, and concerts, which inspired Israel to create secure borders around the Palestinian regions with limited secure access points in order to protect its citizens and visitors.

As we saw this past weekend, the terrorist violence has continued into the Twenty-first Century, in spite of the attempts by the UN and multiple nations around the world to mediate and stop the violence between the Israelis and the Arab Palestinians. In 2002 AD, the UN, United States, European Union, and Russia came together to jointly propose the Israeli-Palestinian Road Map to Peace which proposed an independent Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel. Israel embraced it and, in 2004 AD, unilaterally began to implement it by removing Jewish settlements from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, relocating the inhabitants into the main body of Israel. However, in January 2006, the terrorist organization Hamas managed to win control of the Palestinian Authority Legislature in the general elections and drove the moderate Fatah party out of Gaza and to the West Bank. When the President of Palestine (a member of Fatah) tried to dismiss the Hamas-controlled legislature and call for a new election, Hamas turned on their own and attacked all Fatah supporters in Gaza, ultimately winning. Now, there are two Palestines: Gaza Palestine controlled by the terrorist organization Hamas, and West Bank Palestine controlled by the moderate Fatah.

In the last 16 years, terrorist attacks upon Israel from Gaza have only gotten worse. Hamas primarily targets civilian facilities such as schools, apartment buildings, hospitals, hotels, and entertainment venues, rarely going after military targets. They have constructed a network of tunnels running under the Israeli security wall from Gaza into Israel for the sole purpose of killing Jews. Since 1948, every action by the Israelis has been in self-defense, while every action by the Arabs in the Palestinian region has been an attempt at eradicating the Jews.

The pro-Palestinian activists claim that the Jewish citizens of Israel are ‘colonizers’ who took the land from the Palestinian Arabs. The truth is that the area was the Kingdom of Israel and Judah centuries before any of the Arabs lived there. If they really want to go after ‘colonizers,’ they should go after the descendants of the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Aram-Damascans, and the Philistines…all who occupied the area before the Israelites; not to mention the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Hellenic Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Mamluks, and even the Mongols…all who conquered and occupied the region after the fall of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah.

These activists also maintain that there is ‘ethnic cleansing’ occurring in this region. In this, they are correct, but it is not Israel who is perpetrating this heinous act. Rather, it is Hamas and other terrorist organizations in the Middle East who are determined to ‘cleanse’ the region of every last Jew. Basically, these terrorists are not Human Beings. The actions of these terrorists are clearly inhumane and depraved. These terrorists are nothing but rabid, cowardly animals who should be treated as all rabid animals are treated…they need to be eradicated.

I know this post is longer than my usual posts, but I feel it is too necessary to edit or expurgate this topic. If you read to this point, thank you for staying with me.

Be well, Dear Ones! Until next time…

The True Origins of GPS Technology

Good day, dear reader!

Ok, so contrary to what I declared in my last post, I didn’t ‘do better’ about posting to my blog as it has been three and a half years since that post.

In any event, I have several things on my mind that I plan to post here, the first of which is the concerted effort by the organized Progressive movement over the last seven decades to rewrite…or, as they call it in their own literature, “revise”…history in an effort to remold America and the world into the format they desire. I suspect that that this is an example of that plan.

On the 31st of August 2023, "The Federalist" published an article on its website by G. W. Thielman entitled, "How American Soldiers Invented GPS On Labor Day Weekend In 1973." Regrettably, even though Mr. Thielman has earned a Master’s Degree in Engineering and is employed as a Patent Attorney, his article is woefully lacking in the true details of the actual origin of the concepts and systems that would eventually be called GPS.

The first documented case of this concept being presented and promoted to the general public was in the February 1945 issue of "Wireless World" when a letter to the editor from astronomer, inventor, futurist, and author, Arthur C. Clarke was published. In the letter that he called, "Peaceful Uses for V2," he described how the scientific concepts that made the German V2 rocket program successful could be used to launch communication satellites into geostationary orbits. He explained that using a minimum of three evenly spaced satellites would provide ideal telecommunications relays. In May 1945, Clarke wrote a paper he entitled, "The Space Station: Its Radio Application," which he privately circulated among scientists and engineers. This paper expanded upon the concepts in the earlier letter and provided detailed analysis of how it would work. It was reprinted in the March 1968 issues of "Spaceflight" (Vol. 10, No. 3) and "Ascent to Orbit". There is currently a copy of this 1945 paper in the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

In June 1945, he wrote "The Future of World Communications," a detailed technical article on the subject, and submitted it to the RAF censor on the 7th of July. Once it was approved, Clarke submitted it to "Wireless World". The article was published in the October 1945 issue, though the publisher renamed it, "Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?".

From late 1945 through the middle of 1946, Clarke and other scientists had several meetings with representatives of the governments of Great Britain and the United States, promoting his concept and explaining that by triangulating the orbital radio relays, they could also be used as navigational aids and course guides for cargo trucks on land and ships at sea. Unfortunately, the post-war governments did not believe they could invest funds into an ‘experimental technology’.

In a 1954 speech, John R. Pierce, one of the engineers on Bell Labs’ Echo and Telstar satellite projects, stated that he and his team were using ideas that were “in the air”, but that he had never seen and was unaware of any of Clarke’s articles or papers. In an interview he gave shortly before his death in March 1988 (Final Thoughts from Sir Arthur C. Clarke), Clarke was asked if he ever thought that one day his concept would become so important. His response was, “I’m often asked why I didn’t try to patent the idea of communication satellites. My answer is always, ‘A patent is really a license to be sued.’ “ As part of his legacy, though, the geosynchronous orbit used by all communications and GPS satellites is known by scientists and engineers worldwide, and particularly by NASA and the Royal Astronomical Society, as the ‘Clarke Orbit’.

As you can see, the concept that would be eventually called the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System was conceptualized, designed, published, and promoted 12 years before the launch of Sputnik 1, and 21 years before the U.S. Air Force’s Proposal 621B. This, however, is not the only shortfall of Mr. Thielman’s article.

In 1956, a civilian programmer by the name of Mrs. Grace West was hired to work at the Naval Proving Ground (now known as the Naval Surface Warfare Center). Mrs. West was only the second black woman ever hired at that facility, and one of only four black people working there. After the Sputnik launch, she was moved to the Dahlgren Division and became a satellite data analyst. In the early 1960’s, she was part of an award-winning team that proved the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to that of Neptune, and was subsequently assigned to analyze altimeter data from NASA’s Geodetic Earth Orbiting satellite program. Her superlative work earned her a promotion to Project Manager of the SEASAT Radar Altimetry project where the process improvements she implemented cut her team’s processing time in half and she was recommended for a commendation.

From the early 1970’s through the 1980’s, Mrs. West kept improving the computer programs used to analyze satellite data, allowing for more and more precise calculations of the shape of the Earth. Her efforts enabled her to prove that the Earth, rather than a sphere, was in fact an ellipsoid with geoid undulations. She created complex algorithms to allow for variations in gravitational, tidal, and geoidal forces that distort the Earth’s shape, allowing for exponentially more accurate topographic mapping. Culminating with her technical report, "Data Processing System Specifications for the Geosat Satellite Radar Altimeter," published by the Naval Surface Weapons Center in 1986, Mrs. West created all of the computer programing that allowed Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s vision to be fully realized and made the modern Global Positioning System accurate to within less than 50’ of an object’s true location.

While I have the utmost respect for the members of all branches of the U.S. military, I am a pragmatist and firmly believe that ”Lügen haben kurze Beine“, i.e., the Truth will out. The Truth is that Col. Parkinson’s focus group of Air Force officers invented nothing over Labor Day Weekend in 1973. All they did was identify the then-modern technologies that would allow them to implement a prototype version of the system originally invented, first documented, and repeatedly proposed in 1945 by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Furthermore, the Truth is that their ‘beta‘ version would never have gone any further than plotting the location of objects within an area of 2 – 3 square miles of their true location if not for the original programing work of Mrs. Grace West. While Mr. Thielman did give a ‘hat tip‘ to Kepler, Faraday, Maxwell, Planck and Einstein for doing the work and making the foundational discoveries that allow Humanity to understand the science necessary for the GPS system, he, or possibly the source of his research, has completely ignored the two people who are the foundation of the technology, without whom Global Positioning wouldn’t be much more than a ‘best guess‘.

Be well, Dear Ones! Until next time...