Even seasoned journalists have been commenting to me repeatedly that they need better source analysis and perspective in this new war to find truth. Hopefully this helps.

The Israeli government alleges it has a recording of Hamas itself identifying the Ahli Arab hospital bombers, as reported by The Guardian.

Israel’s foreign ministry has published what it claims is an intercepted call between two Hamas operatives where they discuss how the al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital has been struck by a failed rocket fired from within Gaza.

Reuters reported additional details provided by the Israeli Defense Forces.

…chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said an investigation had “confirmed that there was no IDF (Israel Defence Forces) fire from the land, sea or air that hit the hospital”. He said there was no structural damage to buildings around the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital and no craters consistent with an air strike. Asked to explain the size of the explosion at the site, Hagari said it was consistent with unspent rocket fuel catching fire. “Most of this damage would have been done due to the propellant, not just the warhead,” he said.

Israel has categorically denied targeting hospitals, however we know they also gave orders to evacuate by October 14 (four days ago) on the premise of reducing civilian casualties by moving them out of harms way.

Al Awda Hospital was struggling to evacuate dozens of patients and staff after the military contacted it and told it to do so by Friday night, said the aid group Doctors Without Borders, known as MSF, which supports the facility. The military extended the deadline to Saturday morning, it said.

As a historian, I am reminded of the Yalta Conference 4 February 1945 when Stalin opened the conversation with Churchill by asking “why haven’t you bombed Dresden?”

The issue for Stalin was this German city had become a weapons manufacturing and military command center. We also know very clearly today that it had become an essential hub of Nazi operations for brutally targeting and killing millions of civilians.

Ten days later, the Allied commanders unleashed nearly 800 Allied planes and upwards of 4,000 tons of explosives to destroy Nazi ability to orchestrate further attacks from Dresden.

Afterwards Churchill expressed disappointment with high civilian casualties, to which Air Chief Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris famously wrote to the Air Ministry in response:

Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.

The Axis also tried to propagandize the destruction of Dresden. Their military was known to regularly target civilians with strafing, indiscriminate bombing and even aiming at ambulances and hospitals. The Nazis thus tried to accuse an Allied “dicker Hund” over Dresden of using same inhumane tactics, yet ultimately none of such targeting accusations were found to be true. The opposite, undermining Nazi propaganda, Churchill was very clearly displeased with the air force adopting inhumane “area bombing” tactics and pressed for improved precision to avoid civilians. Inhumane, and also different from other inhumane acts.

Tragically 25,000 German civilians were killed by British use of widespread area bombing. The operation continues to be debated to this day for many reasons, yet the Nazi occupation of a city to perpetuate and orchestrate their massive Holocaust is front and center to any discussion about nineteen Dresden hospitals destroyed in 1945.

Based on reports so far there has been no evidence that Israel targeted or even accidentally hit the hospital with bombs.

I expect further investigation to continue and reports to evolve. One intercepted call isn’t alone enough to prove fault, which is why Israel also has been providing details that can easily be verified.

Update Oct 19:

The Guardian provides further analysis (OSINT) that the hospital was blown up by Islamic Jihad.

Justin Bronk, the senior research fellow for airpower and military technology at RUSI in London, said that while the results were not conclusive, no crater or obvious shrapnel pattern consistent with standard [Israeli] JDAM bombs was visible in images of the aftermath. “If this is the extent of the damage then I’d say an airstrike looks less likely than a rocket failure causing an explosion and fuel fire,” he added.

And again:

Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon chief of high value targeting during the Iraq war in 2003, told the Guardian: “The number [of casualties] is astronomically high, an absolute high range of all time if true. “The crater is not consistent with an airstrike, it is more likely to be a weapon that failed and released its payload over a wide area. “The crater and surrounding damage is also not consistent with a JDAM aerial bomb. The hole on the ground occurred from kinetic energy.”

Thousands of people had moved into the large open courtyard of the hospital, instead of evacuating the city.

Just hours before the fateful bombing, the refugee children who sought safe shelter at Ahli Hospital gathered in the courtyard of Ahli Hospital together to sing for peace (“Salaam”), in a moving moment of solidarity and joy amidst the darkness. […] We do know that Director Suhaila Tarazi evacuated South before the attack, and is presumed safe.

Then, according to the intercepted Hamas call, a rocket was fired from the cemetery adjacent to the hospital that failed on launch and instead landed directly on the hospital.

Notably, three days earlier the hospital also had been struck by rockets being fired nearby.

The question I don’t see being asked, yet surely on the mind of reporters, is what kind of group would position rocket launches near one of the oldest and most famous hospitals in Gaza being used to shelter children?

Gaza terrorists launching large rockets so near to a hospital, immoral acts to intentionally use civilians as shields while also targeting civilians, increasingly are being proven to be the predictable and sole cause of the Ahli Arab tragedy.

Update Oct 23:

The NYT has apologized formally to its readers for bad reporting on this incident (parroting terrorist propaganda).

The early versions of the coverage—and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels—relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. […] The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was. […] Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation.

“Taken more care” implies editors did more than nothing. It reads to me more like the NYT should have taken care.

Kudos to the Guardian for showing how to do a better job of it. Should be obvious to not parrot terrorist propaganda.

Here’s a fascinating story told in 2019 from way back in the day about an obvious Bay Area criminal conspiracy and how it was investigated.

Several people were paid a small fee to quickly slash train seats with a knife using a specific pattern, a signature if you will. The brand new seats, instead of being patched quickly and cheaply, were removed and re-upholstered, generating a huge source of overtime pay for train workers and boosting material orders from suppliers.

In January 1981, another jump in the number of vandalized seats caused BART to once again extend and increase its contract with Service Systems, this time for $75,000, or $221,170 today. (The San Francisco Examiner estimated the contract amounts to be even higher — $100,000 in 1980, and $175,000 in 1981.) The slashes were always the same, however. One slash on the back of the seat, with another slash in the front. … It was estimated that “possibly 85 percent of the more than 7,000 BART train cushions damaged since August 1979” was the work of this company, the Examiner reported at the time. All said and done, BART had paid the company $115,000 for the repairs, a total of about $339,128 in today’s money.

That “always the same” slash helped the conspiracy identify which seat damage would reward their slashers. Of course such a signature move also should have helped stop the slashing of thousands of seats; years were wasted before it was finally investigated and ended in 1981.

Related: In 2017 BART quickly replaced its many fake cameras with real ones.

After an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that, harrowingly, more than two thirds of the cameras on BART trains were fake, the Bay Area transit agency has reportedly replaced those bogus cameras with real ones.

Lawsuits related to personal property theft during mob attacks prompted the sudden change.

A new book “Klan War: Ulysses S Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction” sheds light on widespread American domestic terrorism that has been far too often overlooked or forgotten. The Guardian gives it a nice report.

“[The organized terror movement after Civil War] stock-in-trade was violence – intimidation and violence. People were beaten, people were flogged, people were lynched, people were shot. People’s homes were raided, they were dragged outdoors and flogged in the streets.”

And, he says, the violence often included “truly horrifying sadism”.

“It liberated the absolute worst impulses among” its members, Bordewich says, adding: “You can see this in today’s terrorist movements in other parts of the world – al-Qaida, IS. These are the organizations the Klan should be compared to. We think of terrorism today as something happening in other countries. It happened here in the 1870s.”

This is an intriguing and accurate perspective. However, it’s important to note that Fergus Bordewich, the author, claims that the Ku Klux Klan was the “first organized terror movement in American history,” which could be misleading as it overlooks the actions during Andrew Jackson’s 1830s Presidency as well as earlier examples.

To provide further clarity, one can view the Ku Klux Klan as an extension of pre-existing organized terror movements in America before the Civil War. It’s worth noting that Abraham Lincoln also spoke about these organized terror movements during his campaign for office. Additionally, it’s important to remember it was nation-wide organized terror movements that were cited as the “Casus belli” in John Brown’s famous pre-war defensive actions.

Bordewich’s analysis of the KKK’s prosecution also highlights that this wasn’t a sudden change following the Civil War; rather, a more rational view is to see the continuation of tactics long used by figures like George Washington. It was no coincidence he recruited white immigrants into an American “revolution” with the expressed aim to violently take control away from Native Americans, Black slaves, and especially monarchies who were abolishing slavery. A long-standing pattern of organized white nationalist terror in America is evident throughout its history from its very creation.

Why hadn’t local or state authorities intervened before? Often, it was because they were themselves members of the Klan. It was up to the federal government to step in, and that’s what it did under Grant and capable subordinates including the attorney general Amos Akerman and Maj Lewis Merrill of the seventh cavalry.

Akerman, a New Englander who moved to Georgia and joined the Confederate army in the civil war, saw Reconstruction as a way to reform his adopted home. He turned in invaluable work as Grant’s top prosecutor. In arguably the epicenter of Klan violence – upcountry South Carolina – Merrill was the point man who used troops and espionage to bring the Klan to bay.

“Akerman personally went to South Carolina and worked hand-in-hand with Lewis Merrill, a heroic military figure,” Bordewich says.

As Grant’s administration dismantled the Klan, it suspended habeas corpus in nine counties of South Carolina. To Bordewich, this was essential. “Why was this necessary?” he asks. “Because the so-called judicial system in the states was so infected by the Klan, so co-opted by the Klan … Akerman mobilized federal prosecutors to prosecute the Klan and the army to arrest members of the Klan.

“Without the suspension of habeas corpus, it would have been impossible to bring them to justice,” Bordewich concludes…

Similar to the invasion and occupation of Germany to remove Hitler after World War II, it’s inconceivable to imagine the U.S. occupying army using Nazi courts for justice. Likewise, we shouldn’t expect Grant to have asked the KKK to investigate and prosecute itself.

The name “Washington and Lee University“, for simple example, was created to make a clear statement by Americans committed to white supremacist goals. Imagine being in Ukraine and asking why a school is named Stalin and Putin. There are many other cases, such as the obviously racist slogan “remember the Alamo,” and Texas asserting itself to be the “lone star” of white supremacy by forever denying an abolition of slavery.

To bring it into modern context, considering AI companies engaging in repeated instances of racism and bias while claiming support for government regulation, it’s worth contemplating what strategy President Grant would take on matters rather than repeating the gross mistakes of another Andrew Jackson (or his protegee President Woodrow Wilson, who restarted the KKK in 1915).

That’s why I’ve been giving presentations for years on the premise that Grant’s establishment of the Department of Justice to combat the KKK on paper, and Roosevelt’s 1934 creation of the Federal Communications Commission to counter Nazism on the airwaves, provide valuable frameworks for addressing white supremacists on the Internet.

If we still can’t directly address antique racist propaganda like a university being named Washington and Lee, we can at least work towards regulating on the Internet those who seek to continue America’s long history of organized campaigns of white nationalist terror. What would Grant do?

Sergej Sumlenny, the Russian-born managing director of the European Resilience Initiative Center in Berlin, says this morning’s bomb-dropping drone video in Israel has Russian fingerprints.

The reported widespread electronics jamming, effectively disabling countermeasures, coupled with such a single precision anti-armor bomb does seem a bit contrived to be just Hamas.

Marko Mihkelson, Chairman of Estonia’s Foreign Affairs Committee, has also pointed out the relevance of Russian attempts at destabilizing regional security.

The timing and reasons for the Hamas attack are linked to Russian and Iranian interests. Hamas is known to be strongly supported by both countries. Hamas leaders have twice held consultations in Moscow in the last 12 months and it is quite obvious that Russia has a wider interest in both distracting attention from Ukraine and, on the other hand, complicating Israel’s rapprochement with Saudi Arabia by creating tension in the region.

It’s worth noting that while the majority of the world is quick to condemn Hamas for initiating terrorist attacks on Israel, Russia is officially adopting a “both sides” narrative.

We call on the Palestinian and Israeli sides to implement an immediate ceasefire…

Already in three ways you should be able to see the problem.

We have tactical evidence showing the sophistication of an invisible bomb-dropping drone, political evidence indicating recent consultations between Hamas and Moscow, and then we see Russia taking a weak-kneed stance on terrorist attacks.

Moreover, as if three ways weren’t enough, there is additional evidence of Russia’s hand in the form of unusually sophisticated attacks targeting civilians.

…planned, coordinated and large-scale attack by militants, which resulted in dozens of victims in the first hours of the attack. At the same time, the victims were civilians who were shot by Hamas militants in towns near the Gaza Strip.

Hamas suddenly demonstrated unusually coordinated (loud) multi-front incursions and immediately started shooting to kill any civilians they encountered anywhere. One reporter described nine Israelis simply waiting at a bus shelter being gunned down in cold blood. A music festival for peace was ambushed, with at least 240 people murdered in a “killing field“. Another report described Hamas targeting and killing a civilian paramedic in a marked ambulance while he was engaged in medical duties.

The unfortunate twist to these escalating terror attacks, before we delve too deeply into Russia pushing such horrible events, is that Hamas also may have been pulled into Israel’s far-right extremist strategy of provocation and wait.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has welcomed the return of Benjamin Netanyahu as head of the most far-right Israeli government the country has known and signaled an intention to strengthen cooperation, the Kremlin said.

Israel’s newly elected PM had “chosen Putin over Biden” and refused to arm Ukraine against Russia. Meanwhile he instructed his government to “pursue” full annexation of the West Bank and put a “professional extremist troll” in charge of police. A former chief of staff for the Israeli leader revealed in April 2023 that Netanyahu was aligning himself with Russia’s “win at all costs” mentality, seeking unilateral undemocratic control much like Putin.

He wants to be like Putin, is seeking unlimited power.

And so earlier today we heard of Hamas throwing themselves abruptly into a brazen attack, and then the phrase…

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared earlier: “We are at war and we will win”

Netanyahu was facing heavy and growing domestic political resistance before this massive terror campaign erupted. What does Russia have to lose by throwing Israel’s leader a sad excuse to end democracy, attack Hamas and invade Gaza (let alone annex the West Bank)? Russia is desperate for allies, and Israel’s increasingly far-right extremist political government seems willing to oblige for a small favor — starting a war.

The most straightforward argument against any notion that Putin and Netanyahu have conspired to manipulate this situation, with the aim of cornering Hamas militants in an untenable position of killing hundreds of civilians, is that this war is being reported as a significant intelligence failure on Israel’s part.

How is it possible that, on the most heavily surveilled border in the world, equipped with cutting-edge defensive technology and an extensive intelligence network, Israel was caught off guard by a group of gun-waving irregulars on tractors, motorboats, motorcycles, and paragliders?

Yes, I said paragliders, for those who remember the 2014 Malaysian-trained Hamas arrests followed by a very strange July 2023 German diplomatic gaffe.

Israel has condemned the EU’s outgoing envoy to the Palestinians after he paraglided over Gaza’s coast to draw attention to the blockade of the strip. A video showed Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff declaring he had carried out “the first Gaza paragliding flight in history”. “Once you have a free Palestine, a free Gaza, you can do exactly the same thing,” the German diplomat adds. Israel’s foreign ministry said it was a “provocative action” that served as propaganda for militant groups in Gaza.

And now, surprise!

Historians also will undoubtedly highlight and contrast today with Prime Minister Meir’s situation on October 6, 1973. She had intelligence suggesting an impending attack on Israel but, based on her military advisors’ counsel, chose not to launch a preemptive strike. This controversial decision led to an establishment of the Agranat Commission of Inquiry to investigate “military failings” and ultimately resulted in her decision to resign.

She is shown taking the fall for the egregious errors of her military leaders — in particular Chief of Military Intelligence Eli Zeira and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan — to protect the public’s faith in its army. Documents declassified in 2020 showed that Zeira ignored intelligence warnings that Cairo and Damascus were poised to attack, withholding the communications from the government in his belief that the chance of imminent war was “lower than low.” Meanwhile, Dayan objected to fully mobilizing troops in the hours before the war, according to his testimony to the Agranat Commission, which was declassified in 2008.

That article about the war of October 1973 was published only a couple months ago in August. It concludes with an interesting prediction.

…leadership blinded by hubris and power can poison a society. He referenced the current political crisis in Israel, in which Prime Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court have triggered mass protests that have been ongoing since January. “It’s kind of crazy that today we see the Yom Kippur of democracy in Israel,” said Nattiv. “The blindness again, the same debacle that happened in 1973 is returning now.”

Here we are, witnessing a situation that mirrors the events of 1973. Some people speculate now whether Netanyahu will face consequences for either knowingly or unknowingly allowing a Yom Kippur War II, but historically his reputation has been marked by a lack of accountability.

One has to wonder whether Netanyahu (in consultation with Putin) has planned this whole thing, including of course how to avoid a fate similar to Meir’s through various means.

Firstly, Netanyahu has shown no intention of stepping down for any reason. Furthermore, the element of surprise could enable Netanyahu to gain control over the military and enforce military service through declarations of war. This is especially important given recent protests against his leadership and refusals to serve in the military. Additionally, it might contribute to the growing normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel by forcing them to choose sides in a conflict. Lastly, it fosters radicalization among Israelis, pushing them into an “us versus them” mindset that undermines compromise and moderation, which aligns with the goals of Netanyahu (and Putin).

Hamas is Iran so that’s the obvious part for me, but too few are talking about the gift from Russia. Iran gives basic munitions stock to Russia for their ongoing occupation of Ukraine, Russia then gives sophisticated operations training and coordination to proxy Iran’s intentions of… Israel’s occupation of Gaza?

I can hear now the Russian Wagners laughing cruelly as they say “sure, yeah our mercs in Belarus can get your Hamas across that line and blow stuff up, sure yeah whatever you want Iran. We’re sick of Ukraine too. Just show us the money”.

Electronics jamming and high precision anti-armor attack drone? That’s Russia practically begging to be recognized. The only thing more Russian is trolling the world with an official statement for “both sides” to ceasefire in a terrorist attack.