Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Part I

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Hamas Brutalizes Even the Palestinians to Hold Onto Power: How the Terrorist Group Brutally Maintains its Power

One of the persistent and morally grave errors of our time is what’s become rather commonplace where people talk about the war between Israel and Hamas, as if it’s a war between two equal adversaries. And of course it is not. Israel is a nation, it is a credible nation. It is a member of the United Nations. It has an elected government. It is a nation in the family of nations. It bears responsibility as a nation and it bears the responsibility to defend itself as a nation, which it has done, which it has had to do bravely over and over again ever since it declared its national existence back in the late 1940s. And Hamas is not a nation. Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Hamas is not a member of the United Nations. Of course not. That’s ludicrous. It is not a member of the family of nations. That’s ridiculous. It is a terrorist organization, which is the enemy of civilization. The family of nations is at least self-consciously the defender of civilization. Hamas is the enemy of civilization. It’s avowed mission is to push Israel off of the map, to do whatever is necessary. And of course we know this leads to terrorist strikes most infamously the October 7th, 2023 attack upon Israel that became one of the most deadly attacks upon Israel in the entirety of its national existence. And remember, it not only killed innocent people, it also took hostages. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Legitimate nations don’t take hostages. Legitimate nations do not kill hostages. As happened just recently. And thus, the mainstream media sometimes confuses this by talking about the war between Israel and Hamas, peace efforts between Israel and Hamas, as if you’re talking about two equal parties here.

But it is true that Hamas is a reality. And all-too-deadly reality. It is a form of government. It has government authority in Gaza and it has a lot of influence elsewhere in the Palestinian communities, even on the West Bank. It is tied to international terrorist systems and is known to be supported by Iran. So we know all of this and the mainstream media sometimes confuses this, but when the mainstream media gets something like this right, we need to credit it. This happened over the weekend. It happened Sunday, front page of the New York Times, by the way, the upper left hand of the front page in the print edition. So that’s drawing attention to the story. And I’m saying the story is very credible and in moral terms, it’s extremely important. The headline: “Hamas Uses Brutal Tactics to Keep its Grip on Gaza,” subhead: “Group Puts Palestinian Civilians in Peril in War and Violently Represses Dissent.”

It’s a team of reporters for the times who produced this story. And I’ll tell you the two main points are these: Hamas is a terrorist organization, and one of the ways it stays in power is by exercising terror on its own people. There’s also an open acknowledgement in this report of what we know and a fact to which we have to return over and over again, and that is that Hamas intentionally mixes its militant soldiers with a civilian population in order to do two things: to make the civilian population suffer, and also to increase the moral cost to a nation like Israel in making an attack upon the troops, the soldiers, the armed agents of Hamas, the group intentionally embeds itself with civilians in order to make civilian casualties unavoidable. And the political pressure it knows is absolutely massive.

Now, Israel at this point is refusing to play the game of simply surrendering to Hamas. And what you see is the world community, and this includes European allies and also at least to some extent the Biden administration sending mixed signals. One signal is unconditional support for Israel, but then a condemnation of specific acts. But the United States is not seen as credible in this in that kind of accusation because there are no apparent consequences. And the reason is inside the Biden administration it’s just as aware of the challenge Israel faces as any other government. It knows exactly what’s going on. It simply is playing the game of acting as if at times it doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Or to speak more carefully, it acts like at times Israel should be criticized for doing what, to be honest, the United States would do under the same circumstances.

And that’s a hard fact. It is a very hard fact. We live in a fallen world. We live in a sinful world where horrible things happen. And one of the horrible things that has happened is the emergence of Islamic terrorism such as what takes the shape of Hamas. So let me go back to that New York Times article. Remember the headline is that “Hamas Uses Brutal Tactics to Keep its Grip on Gaza.” That’s not primarily about efforts against Israel. That’s primarily implying what Hamas does inside Gaza to maintain its grip on the government and power in the communities there. And the real victims of that are the Palestinian people, the Palestinian people who by the way have their lives endangered by Hamas embedding itself within civilian populations, but also the civilians who might protest Hamas, who find themselves under death threat or worse precisely because they dare to thwart Hamas or to criticize Hamas. The article is filled with material about how Palestinians fear Hamas and it’s obvious they fear Hamas for good reason.
There is also an acknowledgement in the first column of this article that the six Israeli hostages whose bodies were recovered last month, “provided a visceral reminder of Hamas’s brutality.” Listen to this, “each had been shot in the head. Some had other bullet wounds suggesting they were shot while trying to escape according to Israeli officials who reviewed the autopsy results.” “But Hamas also uses violence to maintain its control over Gaza’s population.” So this gets to one of the great worldview issues of the late 20th century. Now, it’s not to say the issue is completely new, but it certainly rose in terms of the attention of people in Western countries in the United States and among our allies and among Christians with the recognition that we face an entirely new shape of challenge in the rise of Islamic terrorism.

And so if you talk about Islamic terrorism, say in 1954, it’s assumed that that’s something taking place in Islamic-dominated lands. There must be something going on in terms of an attempted coup in this Middle Eastern country or in this Emirate, et cetera. If you talk about Arab terrorism going back even into previous decades, it can be people who are saying, look, this is pushback against the British mandate or against Imperial governments in much of the Middle East. If you go back before that, you can look at challenges faced by political realities such as the Russian Empire, just think of the Muslim populations in the areas, sometimes referred to as the Stans. When you look to the South and when you look to the east of Imperial Russia, when you look to the Southwest, you see some very significant challenges that were faced by the Russian Empire, or for that matter, faced by Russia sometimes even now when it comes to Islamic terrorism, that’s a very live prospect in many Russian cities right now.

But as you go to the end of the 20th century, you look at America coming to the dawning, sometimes the shocking realization that Islamic terrorism is very real. And a part of this came with the taking of the American hostages in Iran during the Jimmy Carter administration. But then of course we just marked the anniversary, the 9/11 attacks that took place in New York City and in Washington D.C. And that included the plane that was also crashed in rural Pennsylvania. And it’s because they were all a part of a concerted plan by the Islamist group, Al-Qaeda to inflict maximum damage on the United States of America. And so this is a real issue. It is a live issue. And as you’re talking about Hamas, we just need to update our understanding of these issues because Hamas is an updated version of this threat. There’s a series of sentences in this article in which I think we see a major American media source trying to deal with this kind of issue straightforwardly.

So I just want to read it as it’s written. “Much international attention is focused on Israeli hurdles to delivering aid to Palestinians. It’s military operations that have killed tens of thousands of people and a bombing campaign that has reduced cities to rubble. American officials have repeatedly expressed deep frustration with Israel for those failures too, as well as for not providing basic security in the territory.” But this section continues, “But the reality of the war according to US officials is that the Israeli military and Hamas carry out questionable acts nearly every day. Many of the reports reviewed by American intelligence analysts involve Israeli actions, military strikes that kill large numbers of civilians, errant attacks on aid convoys or other deadly incidents. But a large number of reports involve Hamas, both in its acts of terrorism against hostages and its abuses of Palestinians.”
So one of the things I think you note there, even when I’m saying I think they’re trying to get at saying truth in both of these arenas, the fact is that they can document what goes on in terms of Israeli responsibility to a much greater extent than they’re able to document what Hamas is doing, but they know Hamas is doing it.
And so there’s a sense in which, once again, the key critical understanding that Israel is a legitimate government and a legitimate state and Hamas is a terrorist organization and the distinction has to be made when you’re looking at combat, you’re looking at this kind of military operation, well, you end up with Israel having far more documentation precisely because it’s Israel than you find among Hamas. And there’re far too many people who are afraid to say the truth about Hamas because after all, there are credible reasons why they would fear for their lives. One Palestinian person cited in the article said, “I’m totally against mixing prisoners and civilians,” but he was a lawyer we are told, “who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used to avoid retribution from the Hamas authorities,” “we saw what the operation resulted in. It was horrific, a very high price.”

The article also documents the fact that Yahya Sinwar is, “the unchallenged leader of Gaza,” and I continue, “while his day-to-day control of the government is attenuated as he tries to avoid being captured or killed by Israel, he still sets the broad goals and policies for Gaza according to the officials briefed on the intelligence.” Let me remind you that he is the person Western authorities are absolutely certain plotted and planned and directed the murderous attack of October the 7th against Israel. And so Israel knows who it’s dealing with here. And so honestly do the leaders of other nations, including the leader in the White House. He knows what’s going on here.

This is part of the reason why the United States has to keep repeating the fact that we are standing by our ally Israel. And at the same time, what you see among many Western allies is a refusal just to state adequately that when we’re talking about Israel’s effort against Hamas, we’re not talking about two governments. We’re not talking about two legitimate entities. We’re talking about a nation defending itself against a terrorist organization. And we also see that the people on whose behalf supposedly the terrorists are acting are terrorized themselves by the terrorist organization.
Who would’ve thought?

Part II

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There’s Good Reason to Get Rid of the Department of Education: Former President Trump Repeats Conservative Talking Point, But He Needs to Clarify His Policy

Okay, well now I need to come back to the United States and I want to return to an issue that has not received adequate attention in terms of the American presidential election. And there have been statements made about what President Trump would do, the former president, if he were to be elected president again. And the former president has been more generalized than clear in some of these policy proposals, but he has made some clear statements that are in very short sentences. And one of them is that he says he wants to abolish the United States Department of Education. And so there are many people in the media, there are many people in the political class, in the commentary class who have said, “this is a radical idea. We’ve never heard anything like this before. It’s absolute insanity to say we should get rid of a federal department.”
But I want to say: there is a lot of good reason why you would get rid of the Department of Education. And I also want to say there’s a lot of clarification that needs to be brought to this. And I could just wish that former President Trump followed up on that statement about what he would want to see happen by explaining how he would make it happen. I’m also old enough to remember that he is not the first Republican presidential nominee to make such a pledge or to announce such an ambition. The very first Republican nominee after the creation of the Department of Education also campaigned on the call to abolish the US Department of Education. That nominee’s name was Ronald Reagan, and he was successful in his candidacy in 1981 in a landslide against Jimmy Carter, who’s the president who brought into being the Department of Education in the 1970s, and the story behind that is worth recounting.

So how did the United States government operate before there was a Department of Education? Well, it operated well, less expansively than it does now. You probably figured that out. But it is also clear that the federal government didn’t start out with a mandate for education at all. This was something left to the states. And even in the states left to most local communities. Even now, the vast majority of policy decisions, at least it is claimed, are made at the state and local level, not at the federal level. But as you might expect, there’s more to this than meets the eye.

So why did there appear a Department of Education in the United States government in the late 1970s? Well, it is because Jimmy Carter, when he was running for office in 1976, he was running for the White House, he made the pledge to a meeting of teachers, in particular to teachers unions who were pressing for a department of education because there is one thing that a group as liberal as these teachers’ unions want, and that is a federal department to further their liberalism. And that’s exactly, precisely, largely why the Department of Education exists.
So I decided to go back in the archives and this particular archive is dating all the way back to 1981, and I’ll just cite this article that appeared in 1985, looking back at this, the Los Angeles Times in a UPI report, “President Reagan citing little congressional support will not recommend closing down the Education Department” And then the next words, “a major goal when he took office in 1981, it was revealed today.” So this revelation is that the Reagan administration, after having run on a platform to abolish the Department of Education, was backing off.

Why did it back off? Well, very clearly because it didn’t have adequate political support. President Reagan said then, in 1985, even as his administration is backing off of a call to abolish the Department of Education, it did so because even too many Republicans in Congress were supportive of the Department of Education. Or to put it more accurately, even as the press reports were clear, it’s not so much that they were for the Department of Education, it is that they were for getting reelected, which meant not having the active opposition of the labor unions who have organized on behalf of public school teachers.

And so the machine won. President Reagan said “as you know, I previously recommended the abolition of the Department of Education.” He went on and said this: “This was because I believed that federal educational programs could be administered effectively without a cabinet level agency. President Reagan went on to say then, “While I still feel that this is the best approach, that proposal has received very little support in the Congress.” A reminder that a president can sign legislation causing the Department of Education to be established. But a president cannot, by executive order, eliminate a federal agency, though it must surely be tempting.

Part III

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The Left Loves the Department of Education: The Leviathan of the Administrative State and the Dangers of Federal Bureaucracy

Well, there’s a story behind why there was a Department of Education. As I said, the teacher’s unions wanted it, but what they really wanted was more federal control over education at the state level and at the local level. What they also wanted was a lot more federal spending. If you can have a federal department with a cabinet secretary, a US Secretary of Education, you can contend for a lot more funding. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for decades. But as I said, this was a pledge that candidate Jimmy Carter made when he was running for president in 1976. He actually followed through with the pledge.

Before that, where was education? It was in a federal department that came into existence in 1953, known as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It was known as HEW. And so you had a cabinet secretary who was the cabinet director, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. But education was taken out. By the way, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare did not want education to be taken out, but it was. And ever since 1979 by the action of the Congress, signed legislation by President Jimmy Carter, the Department of Education came into existence in 1979. Since then, we’ve had it. Even President Reagan couldn’t get rid of it. Candidate former President Donald Trump says he wants to get rid of it. I want to say I wish he would get rid of it. I wish he could get rid of it, but it’s like a virus. Getting rid of it’s a lot easier to say than to accomplish.

One of the reasons why the Department of Education has become so dangerous is that it issues regulations, it issues advisories, it issues warning, it issues, policies having to do with issues such as LGBTQ. And right now, of course, the Biden administration through the Department of Education has been trying to force through Title IX policies related to transgender students in the schools. And the federal mandate here is what makes it most dangerous. Local control is a much better system. And let’s also understand that local control has to do with the fact that the vast majority of funding still comes from the local level. It is still controlled by local and state authorities. But just in case you were wondering what else the Department of Education is up to, about 70% of its budget is directed towards higher education. And most importantly, or let’s just say most significantly, in terms of student aid programs. And now at the same time, you had reports coming out over the weekend that an unprecedented number of those who have taken out federal student loans, guess what? Aren’t paying them.

You also have an incumbent President of the United States, Joe Biden, who’s been trying to wipe out student loans. And remember, not only is this grossly unfair to the taxpayers, it’s grossly unfair in this sense to the taxpayers who took up those loans and actually paid them back. Now, there are situations in which those in hardship can have their loans dealt with in various ways. But when you’re looking at the messaging coming from the Democratic Party right now, it’s basically take out the loans and you’re not going to have to repay them. By the way, the big beneficiary of that is not the people taking out the loans. I want to be very clear about that. The students aren’t the big beneficiary of all of this federal funding. Rather, it’s the institutions that receive those monies and their institutions have become radically bloated over decades, sometimes simply in the competition to keep up with the attractiveness to students who are borrowing money in order to pay those fees. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s a very unhealthy cycle.

It’s also interesting to note that as Dana Goldstein of The Times reflects, “opposition to the Department of Education is today associated with Republicans, but the agency began its life with fierce opposition on both sides of the aisle.” So both Democrats and Republicans were quite concerned about the development of a Department of Education. And it’s also very interesting that you had liberals, at least some liberals, who were opposed to the establishment of a Department of Education because they thought education really did belong with health and welfare in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. But nonetheless, the Left is really adamantly opposed to any change in the system now, and that’s because here’s another lesson in a fallen world, bureaucracies become self-referential. Bureaucracies become very self-directed.

I’m not saying that there are no honorable people working in these federal agencies. Of course, that’s not what I’m saying. I am saying that the leviathan of an expanding administrative state is not only strangling the federal budget, granted entitlement programs are the biggest part of that, but that comes out of the administrative state as well. But even as the administrative state is strangling the nation when it comes to procedures and policies, and for that matter economic impact, it is also increasingly always self-referential and under the control of the political left. And that is because people committed to more leftist ideologies are far more likely to want to work for such agencies and to be hired in such agencies.

Or to put the matter another way, you’re probably not going to get a job in the Department of Education if in the interview process, if you are lucky enough to get an interview, you said, I really don’t believe in the Department of Education. I believe the federal government should not be involved in these issues. Well, guess what? I’m just going to predict you’re not going to get the job. But let’s just remind ourselves of what I said. Even President Reagan wasn’t able to kill the Department of Education, and it’s unclear right now what kind of priority this would have in a second Trump administration.

But I want to say whether he recognizes it or not, the former president is on to something big here. And I think if he actually talked about it and explained it as on so many other issues he would advance in terms of making his case to the American people. What we need is a presidential candidate who will make the case on these issues because I think we still have a significant number of Americans who care about such things and would be persuaded by such arguments.

Part IV

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Space X’s Successful Space Walk: A Big Step in Space Exploration — And More Evidence of God’s Glory From Space

But okay, as we come to a conclusion, let’s just remind ourselves that giant headline news really was made in recent days with a private industry space mission, which simply extended the envelope of safe travel in outer space and included a spacewalk with the entire enterprise undertaken by private industry, in this case, a division of SpaceX. And you had people who, by the way, invested a lot of their own money in terms of this particular mission, who, using newly developed spacesuits and of course newly developed space vehicles undertaken in private industry, actually went further than NASA has gone in manned space flight in a very, very long time. It also reminds us, once again, of the human scale that became such a shocking awareness to Americans back during the Apollo mission, when all of a sudden there was a vision of planet Earth from the realm of outer space.

And even as the spacewalk took place just days ago, it did so with the image of planet Earth in the background with Australia and New Zealand, very clearly visible, beautifully visible. This is a real world. This is a real creation. It has a real glory that it reveals. But the glory, of course is not the glory of planet Earth, it is the glory of the creator. That acknowledgement was missing from all the news reports. But if you saw that image, I hope you had that impression. Only God could create something like this and he did to His glory. And human beings get to see that glory now in a way that in previous centuries, it would’ve been unimaginable. We are the first in terms of those living over the last several decades who’ve been able to look not only from earth to the cosmos, but from outer space at Earth. And of course, that experience should bring us not only wonder, but a bit of humility, which is also a good thing, however it comes.