Thursday, January 23, 2025

Part I

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Asymmetric Warfare and Morality in Gaza: Hamas is Gaining Power Under Cover of the Cease-Fire

We will come back to the United States, but today we need to start in the Middle East. In particular, we need to start with the ceasefire that has been arranged between Israel and Hamas. Now, the mainstream media has been talking a lot about this, and in international terms, this is probably right now the most important story, but events related to the inauguration and the first couple of days of the presidency, the second term of President Donald J. Trump, that has eclipsed just about everything else in the news media. But we do need to come back to this and we need to remind ourselves of what is happening here.

For our purposes today, we need to start with October 7, 2023, and the brutal massacre undertaken by Hamas. Hamas, an Islamic terrorist organization committed to the annihilation of Israel, went across the border and slaughtered an incredible number of Israelis. It was the largest single death toll going all the way back to Israel’s War of Independence. Furthermore, Hamas, as is its custom, also took a good number of hostages and has been holding those hostages. Israel eventually responded with open warfare. Most of that has taken place in that very narrow strip of land known as the Gaza Strip, and even as the Palestinian people hae suffered a very great deal, Hamas has continued to cling to power. And Israel has understood one thing more than anything else, and it has understood this with crystal clarity. If Hamas is not defeated, one of the military words here is “annihilated.” If Hamas continues as a potent force, Israel is going to be threatened by that force for the continuation of the existence of Hamas.

So Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, has been very clear about his stated goal of defeating Hamas, indeed eliminating Hamas. That has not happened. At the same time, an enormous amount of political pressure has been brought upon Israel. And honestly, Israel, facing so many different military fronts at one time, was in a situation in which for internal and external reasons, it had to turn to some kind of agreement for a ceasefire. And Israel and Hamas through negotiations undertaken by the Prime Minister of Qatar, and with the involvement of both leaders from the Biden and the Trump administrations, eventually the two forces were brought to an agreement, but it’s a very fragile agreement. It’s often described in diplomatic terms as a very provisional or brittle agreement. But before taking that further, we just need to step back for a moment and as Christians understand how this is being presented in the national and in the international media, because what has happened is a basic assumption of moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas.

“It’s good news,” say the headlines, “that Israel and Hamas have reached a ceasefire agreement.” But we’re not talking about two nations here. We’re talking about a legitimate nation, which is Israel, and we’re talking about a terrorist organization, which is Hamas. Hamas is not a government. Hamas is a terrorist organization. It has administered a government there in the Gaza Strip. It supplanted the Palestinian authority after that group basically proved to be incompetent. But Hamas is not officially a state, not even close. It is a terrorist organization, and furthermore, it is absolutely committed to the non-existence of Israel. That’s in its charter, that’s in its declarations, that is very clear in its aims. So it is very telling that just in the days after the ceasefire, you had a major report, for example, in the Associated Press with the headline, “As War Halts, Hamas Still Rules Gaza.”

And here’s one of the most tragic things for us to consider. Even as it’s true that Hamas has survived, it is also true that it appears to be aiming to be right back in power. And even as the ceasefire was called, Hamas uniforms began showing up where they had not shown up previously, and it’s not new human beings, it’s human beings, Palestinians connected to Hamas who had taken off the uniform to avoid being shot, who are put in the uniforms back on as a sign of the show of strength for Hamas. As the Associated Press comments, “For all the military might Israel deployed in Gaza, it failed to remove Hamas from power, one of its central war aims. That could make a return to fighting more likely, but the results might be the same.”

Now, as you look at this, you also understand that the same Associated Press story comes back and tells us that not only did Hamas not disappear, but it has reappeared in power. It has also used this reappearance as justification to add energy to its recruitment program. And so at least some observers believe that Hamas might end up after all of this, stronger rather than weaker. Now, it is still true that Israel eliminated a good many of the most important leaders in Hamas as well as in Hezbollah and in other terrorist organizations, but the reality is Hamas continues as a threat.

Now from a biblical perspective, one of the things this shows us is that this kind of evil is incredibly persistent and it is extremely difficult to expunge. It’s extremely difficult to defeat. One of the reasons for that is that it is ideological, mixed in this case with Islam as well, but it is a deadly ideology, and this ideology is in its deadliest form, extremely infectious. That’s one of the very sad things that has come to light, especially in the 20th century, into the 21st century, where many modern Americans thought that this kind of ideology had disappeared, but it hasn’t disappeared, and the biblical worldview tells us that it will not disappear. Not until Jesus comes and establishes his kingdom. Between here and there, we’re going to be fighting these kinds of ideologies. Civilization is going to be fighting against the agents of disorder.

In military terms, the contest between Israel and Hamas is what is described now as asymmetrical warfare or asymmetric warfare. Why is it called that? It is because you’re not talking about a nation and a nation. You’re not talking about a terrorist organization versus a terrorist organization. You’re talking about a nation representing civilization against a terrorist organization representing the enemies of civilization. This is not to say that the Palestinian people have not suffered greatly, and it’s not to say that they have not been preyed upon routinely, often by those who would seek to gain power in their own name. This is not to say that everything Israel has done is beyond question. That’s also true when the United States and our armed forces are involved, but it is to say that Israel has an absolute right to defend itself.

But the asymmetrical nature of what we’re looking at here is sadly also made clear in the exchange that took place on Monday. In that exchange, which was the result of the ceasefire agreement, this is phase one, this was the very first exchange. What you had was three civilian Israeli hostages of Hamas released, and then Israel released 90 prisoners, that is prisoners who were members of Hamas. These were terrorists who had been found guilty or being held on criminal charges. And so you had the exchange of one innocent civilian for 30 Hamas prisoners. Just consider this. So even as you’re looking at asymmetric warfare, you’re also looking at the fact that when you are looking at Israel, a legitimate nation and you’re looking at its civilians having been taken hostage. To get those hostages back, it is exchanging at a ratio of one civilian for 30 prisoners there in Israel, or one military hostage for 50 of the Hamas soldiers there in Israel, in Israel’s jails.

And so in this sense, we also have to note in moral terms that Israel has given its priority in getting its people back. It has fueled a certain kind of industry in terms of hostage-taking. Hamas knows that if it takes hostages, it’s eventually going to get this kind of deal. That’s why Hamas routinely takes civilian innocent people as hostages. It is brutal, it is evil, it is horrifying, but for Hamas, it pays. Every civilian Hamas took and some of those have died, Israel doesn’t even know how many of the so-called returned hostages are going to come back dead. But the ratio is one Israeli, 30 Palestinians, and then you get to a member of Israeli Armed forces, it’s not one to 30, it’s one to 50. It is a horrifying math. It’s a moral calculation, and Israel is now stuck in this predicament. It is valorous. It is admirable that Israel goes to such lengths to get its own people back, but it is a warning to other nations that if you get into this history of exchange for hostages and soldiers, you are going to end up with a very deadly market. 

And just remember again, the asymmetrical nature here, Israel, it’s a nation. It doesn’t take hostages. Hamas is a terrorist organization. It takes hostages as a business. We are looking at two vastly different moral realities, which makes it all the more dangerous that these things are discussed with a very false equivalence in so much of the national and international conversation.

Part II

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There’s a New U. S. Secretary of State: Marco Rubio Takes the Helm in Vital Position Within the Federal Government and the Trump Administration

Next, as we think about the diplomatic front, it is extremely important to understand that there is a new Secretary of State of the United States. Marco Rubio, who until Monday had been United States Senator from the state of Florida has become the Secretary of State of the United States. That’s the very top diplomatic position in the entire American government. The Secretary of State represents the nation. The Secretary of State serves at the pleasure of the President. He was President Trump’s pick to be Secretary of State in this second term in office.

Marco Rubio has a long history in Florida politics. His family is an immigrant family from Cuba, and he graduated himself from the University of Florida. Later, he gained a law degree from the University of Miami. Very prominent in the Cuban immigrant community there. A very conservative community, by the way, especially conservative in light of Castro’s Communist Revolution. Mr. Rubio went on to serve in the House of Representatives in Florida for a number of years, including service as speaker of the Florida House, and then in 2010, he was elected to the United States Senate. What made news is that here you had a young Latino Republican elected to the United States Senate from Florida. That sent a very, very clear signal. And from the start, it was expected that Marco Rubio was likely to move on to national responsibility.

He ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He didn’t get it, Donald Trump did. He and Donald Trump had opposed each other sometimes bitterly. It is very telling, however, that when Donald Trump has been looking at his second term in office, he was looking for stability and expertise. He was also looking for an ideological alignment with himself in terms of American foreign policy. Marco Rubio was his choice. One of the reasons why Marco Rubio was unanimously affirmed by the United States Senate, is that he has so much credibility in that body. He served for years as members of the Senate committees on both foreign relations and intelligence. Furthermore, he was quite outspoken and was known for his very clear understanding of the dangerous position of the United States in the world, and he has held to a very conservative worldview understanding the role and the conflict between nations and the priority of representing American interests.

He has been very, very clear about the threat of China, and that’s based in his historic understanding of the clear threat of communism as well as blocs that organize themselves in terms of foreign policy against the interests of the United States of America, and that means not only our national interests commercially or militarily, it means our national interests in terms of what we understand about the role of the world order and the role of responsible nations within it. The New York Times article announcing his confirmation by the Senate mentioned the fact that Mr. Rubio, now Secretary Rubio, “Confronts a daunting list of foreign policy tests. They include the war in Ukraine, a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, and in what Mr. Rubio calls the century’s defining challenge, China’s global ambitions.”

There is another dimension to this that we ought to note, and that is the fact that when you look at an incoming president, he immediately needs a foreign policy and national defense team around him. When it comes to the role of Secretary of Defense, both sides, both parties, Democrats and Republicans, understand that there has to be a steady hand at the helm, and thus, president Trump was very wise to choose a respected member of the United States Senate, because it is the Senate that has the power to confirm his nomination. The fact that it was done unanimously is a very strong sign of support for Marco Rubio. Few people in history are handed the size and magnitude and diversity of the challenges now presented to Marco Rubio. He’s going to have his hands full. And his success in this role was not only important for the Trump administration, it’s not only important for the United States of America, it’s important for the larger world.

Part III

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When Pardons Subvert the Rule of Law: The Major Issues Behind Biden’s Familial Pardons and Trump’s Blanket Pardon over January 6

But now coming back to the United States of America, there are so many huge stories this week, so many huge developments, so many issues of massive worldview implication. But before the week comes to an end, I have to discuss what has taken place in what can only be described as a crisis of very significant proportions when it comes to American presidents and the power of the pardon. In the last few weeks of the Biden administration, he exercised the presidential prerogative for pardon and clemency in a most irresponsible manner. President Biden pardoned his own son. President Biden ended up in the last few hours of his administration even issuing preemptive pardons to many people, including his own brother and sister. That sounds more like the mafia, than the White House. 

And it’s not just that. President Biden also issued clemency orders for most of the prisoners on death row in terms of federal crimes. Now, as I noted, he didn’t do this with any kind of moral consistency because he didn’t extend that clemency to those who, having committed such atrocious crimes well known to the American people, would’ve led to a political backlash. Instead, he took what was apparently a symbolic act, offering this kind of clemency simply to signal his opposition to the federal death penalty. But again, if he were morally serious, he would’ve sought legislation to end the federal death penalty. I would oppose it, but that would at least be an honest action. President Biden, by the time he left office, was bragging that he had issued more pardons and clemencies than any president in American history. He said that as a matter of pride. It should have been seen as a matter of shame. 

But then within just a few hours after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, President Trump issued another set of unprecedented pardons. In this case, President Trump pardoned just about everyone who had been accused of, charged with, or found guilty of crimes related to the incidents, including the breaking in of the United States Capitol on January 6th of 2021. That was one of those days that led to an incredible soul-searching on the part of the American people. It was also one of those events that, to be fair, has been twisted in the national media. It’s been twisted in terms of all kinds of claims on both sides, but here’s what is undoubtable. Here’s what all of us remember just by seeing the images in the video of that day.

At the very least, you had hundreds of persons, in the case of this pardon, it may be extended to 1,500 persons. When you look at these persons, they clearly were not only engaged in protests, they were engaged in violent behavior in terms of invading the United States Capitol, in terms of riotous behavior inside the Capitol, and they clearly had some amorphous and misdirected political intent. 

On the other hand, it is not exactly accurate to call them an insurgency. I believe the word “insurgency” should be reserved for more serious and more widespread efforts to try to say topple a government. It’s hard to remember those images from January 6th and believe that this was a serious force that served as a serious threat to topple the United States government. Nonetheless, they did clearly break the law. Not only that, but there were some who broke the law to the extent of causing injury to police officers and others involved in law enforcement. And so there were different levels of culpability, different levels of criminality, and there is no doubt that a large number of them broke laws.

President Trump simply said they had been mistreated. They were the victims of lawfare undertaken by the Democrats and the Biden administration, and at least in the last days of his campaign and even in the days of his transition, he seemed to indicate that he was going to pardon most of them, but he went further than that and pardoned almost all of them. And that includes some who had been convicted of very serious crimes against, for example, federal officials and law enforcement officials. 

And so we are looking at something very serious here, and I think there are a lot of Republicans, a lot of supporters of President Trump who cannot go so far as to justify these pardons. And furthermore, it points to the fact that now we have two presidents in a row. As a matter of fact, two presidents who within just a matter of hours of each other, have both misused the pardon power invested by the Constitution in the American President. And one of the most frightening things is that this could set an example for how future presidents could abuse the power and extend this abuse.

President Biden went so far as to offer preemptive pardons. That’s basically an invention. Pardoning people who haven’t yet even been charged with crimes. And now you could just see that you can have a president who could do this for just about everyone in his administration, could do this for all kinds of people simply as a preemptive act. That is an affront to the rule of law. In this case, the pardons and clemencies extended by President Biden cannot be justified. Furthermore, I don’t believe it’s justifiable to argue that President Trump should have extended such an expansive set of pardons related to January 6th. Now, you could have partisans on both sides who are going to argue, “That’s my man.” The other side says, “That’s my man.” The point is, if you do believe in the rule of law, you believe in the rule of law.

The pardon authority granted in the Constitution to a President of the United States is invested in the President in the same way a similar kind of power was in the hands of Caesar, a similar kind of power is in the hands of most monarchs. It is because in some situations, the system of justice at lower levels fails. The idea of a pardon power is to afford the chief executive, the head of state, the opportunity to correct a wrong, to make right something that is wrong. Now, for this reason, pardons have been debatable they’ve been controversial throughout much of American history. Nevertheless, we’re now looking at a scale in both the Biden and the Trump administrations that go beyond anything we have seen before. I don’t mean that just in terms of the number of persons involved. Jimmy Carter’s amnesty toward those who have been draft evaders during the Vietnam War, that may include more people. But in terms of specific criminal charges, we’re now looking at something unprecedented in our nation’s history.

The supporters of Donald Trump rightly looked to him to disrupt the status quo. They see much of the present governmental structure as not only incompetent, but sometimes conspiratorial against the people. They want someone to correct this. President Trump needs to meet that expectation and to take those actions, but they have to happen according to the rule of law, or they will lead to even greater injustices in the future. In this case, there will be a president after Donald J. Trump, and we don’t want that president to use the examples set by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in such a way that pardon power simply becomes a way of completely subverting the rule of law and don’t say it can’t happen. It has happened elsewhere to disastrous effect. To be blunt, I believe that President Trump could rightly have pardoned many people who have been involved in the January 6th events, but to offer this kind of blanket pardon, including a pardon of some who were found guilty of assaulting police officers, that’s a step too far, and I believe most Americans will see it that way.

Part IV

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Davos 2025 and the Hypocrisy of the Global Elites: Carbon Emissions Aren’t the Only Thing Being Swept Under the Rug at the World Economic Forum

But finally, for today’s edition of The Briefing, it is interesting that the Davos meeting in Switzerland overlapped with the presidential inauguration in the United States. 

The Davos meeting is basically a shorthand for the global elite and all of its elitism, and that includes a very heavy investment basically in liberal ideologies, or at least an openness to liberal or progressivist ideology, certainly on the culture war issues, and also a basic commitment to what can just be with shorthand referred to as wokeism. It is really interesting though to note that the Davos crowd–formerly known as the World Economic Forum, very committed to a globalist understanding–it has drawn as kind of a marquee event, so many of the people who actually on Monday were pictured sitting at the inaugural ceremony for the President of the United States, so many of those titans of Silicon Valley. That shows you where they know the power really is.

Now, nonetheless, after the inauguration, many people made the pilgrimage there to Davos where the cultural elite is meeting, and we will be following what is going on there. But the bottom line is that they’re not giving up, but it’s also very telling that they don’t know what to do with the United States at the moment, and they don’t know what to do with Donald Trump, but at least according to some who are the conversations and the presentations there at Davos, it is interesting that so many of the people there simply see Donald Trump now as such a powerful force that they are going to have to reckon with him. They can’t, as they decided to try to do in 2016, in 2017, they can’t just wait him out. But as you look at all of this, also recognize that so many of these titans and the elite, they flew in their expensive private jets all the way to Davos and they’re going to be sitting in seminars and speaking about their agreements on why we must seriously confront the problem of climate change.

And I’m not saying they have no legitimate concerns about climate change. I’m simply saying that those concerns do not keep them from fueling the problem, pun intended, by their private jets. Like so many of these world gatherings, there are so many celebrities and others, there’s a lot of entertaining and other things that take place. One individual connected to Davos just a couple of years ago was asked why the group didn’t adopt a Zoom meeting or some kind of virtual gathering. He stuttered a bit, but the answer is if they met in a virtual situation, they wouldn’t be able to enjoy after the meetings, what evidently they give themselves to after the meetings. That tells you a lot.

A news report on the Davos gathering published in The Wall Street Journal in recent days pointed to something interesting, and that is that the Davos crowd complained they didn’t have much access to now former President Joe Biden. Well, his condition at the end I think helps to explain why that access was limited. The same article indicates that the group gathered there now wants greater access with President Donald J. Trump. I’ll just say at this point, if it happens, that ought to be very interesting. But listeners of The Briefing should understand that what goes on in this massive event at Davos, Switzerland and has for years, Samuel Huntington referred to the kind of globalist individual that was the elite model for the future was simply described as “Davos Man”. There is no doubt that this meeting is indicative of the agenda of that kind of global elite. It will be very interesting to see what they report out of this meeting. That also is likely to make at least some news.