I’m monitoring the news about the Hamas attack on Israel. I’ve gotten two questions so far. First, how could Israeli intelligence (Mossad), which is supposed to be the best, not know about this attack in advance. Second, Why didn’t the Iron Dome missile defense work to stop the missiles. I’ll answer those below, and see the latest about the Biden administration funding terrorism.

First, the national security / foreign policy people I follow on Twitter and listen to on podcasts are saying that national security and the military in Israel have gone hard woke in recent years, and they have stopped being able to defend Israel from real threats. Similar to how our own federal agencies are now largely engaged in attacking enemies of the Democrat party, while ignoring actual security threats like military-aged foreigners from enemy nations coming over the southern border in droves.

Second, the Iron Dome missile defense system only has a certain number of interceptors available. I think the number is 200 interceptors. (10 launchers x 20 missiles per launcher). Even with careful targeting, they were not able to shoot down all of the 2200 incoming missiles from Hamas.

One more point. Israel is a left-wing country, and has some of the toughest gun laws of any nation. Most law-abiding people are not properly armed to deter the threat of criminals or terrorists. So, the attack did a lot worse than it would have in say, Texas or Tennessee or Florida. Israeli voters thought they could “stop crime” and “stop terrorism” by banning law-abiding people from owning scary, noisy, smelly guns. It didn’t work. Feelings-based policy didn’t work in Israel, and it doesn’t work in America, either.

But where did Hamas, a terrorist group, get all of the money for 2200 missiles? How could a group of rapists and child-murderers plan such an attack? Well, they have said that they had help from Iran. The same Iran that Obama helped with pallets of cash when he was president. And Biden is helping Iran with cash, too.

The Federalist explains:

Many of the articles surrounding the atrocities of the Hamas attacks this past weekend have referenced the recent $6 billion “deal,” in which the U.S. gave this money to Iran in exchange for five Americans. It already seemed like the worst trade in history.

But it’s more nefarious than simply unleashing $6 billion to Iran, a known terrorist state and the most existential threat to the free world. In reality, this one detail hyperlinked quickly in most articles is part of a larger spider web of hidden details.

In a recent article, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former National Security Council official Richard Goldberg traces the money trail. He confirms: It is so much worse than we think.

[…]The revelations do not end there. U.S. officials have also quietly acknowledged that they’ve uncapped Iranian oil exports to China. These export levels, previously held around 775,000 barrels per day under Trump’s sanctions, are now estimated to be between 1.4 and 2.2 million barrels per day. Modest estimates value this relief at $25 billion annually.

Not only that, but the Obama administration and the Biden administration want Iran to have nuclear weapon capabilities:

We know Iran has already ejected international nuclear inspectors and are on their way to building a facility that is believed to be so deep underground that it would be impenetrable to any air strikes. Iran did not even have to stop their production of high-enriched uranium. They’re merely producing it at a slower rate. But the Biden administration chose to pick up the Obama era’s decision to unrestrain Iran based on a pinky promise.

Most recently, we learned that top officials were influencing the U.S. government in favor of Iranian nuclear power. A series of recently leaked emails have focused on Ariane Tabatabai, the chief of staff to the secretary of defense for special operations. Messages show her involvement with the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a direct Iranian government initiative to allegedly “improve the country’s image abroad.”

[…]We’ve also come to learn of other aides who were directly corresponding with the Iranian government from their U.S. government posts, such as Ali Vaez and Dina Esfandiary.

Democrat party policy is not just about putting Israel in harm’s way, it’s also making sure that the American military can’t do anything to save Israel once they are attacked:

We’re stopping oil production in America while allowing Iran to export more, all under the facade of “green energy.” The administration has given the green light to increase oil production in the country that is the greatest existential threat to the free world. Meanwhile, Biden has choked American oil production with the fewest number of offshore oil and gas leases “in history.” This is after Biden canceled all remaining leases in Alaska. But since these leases are for 2024 to 2029, he’s pushed off Americans truly feeling this at the pump until, quite conveniently, after the election.

Squeezing the American wallet is far from the most dire consequence of this policy. Biden has drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to multi-decade lows. Despite claims that they would be replenishing the reserves, the administration has not only yet to refill the reserves, they even pulled an offer at the end of this summer because of “market conditions.” Namely, oil is already too expensive, and we are drained of our most important backup resource.

Eventually, American voters are going to realize how electing Democrats creates problems here at home:

At this point, America has not simply left the world stage — it is funding terror.

The extent of this hidden money trail has yet to be fully realized. It isn’t only Gaza. It’s Lebanon. It’s Syria. It’s Iraq. It’s Afghanistan. It will be Paris and London. It is likely pouring over the U.S. southern border.

And it’s coming to a neighborhood near you.

Why do so many self-described Jewish people vote for the Democrat party, when the Democrat party clearly hates them? Well, when I listen to real Jews, like Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, they seem to think that many self-described Jews are just secular leftists, who disagree with what the Bible teaches.

Below is a guest post from my friend Eric, who has an interest in origins science.

1. Many immediately reject creation or ID from the many embarrassingly bad “why are there still monkeys” arguments used by laymen. They assume there’s nothing beyond that.

2. It’s what they were taught in school and they never questioned it. “I didn’t give it much thought; It wasn’t my area of concern”, as Michael Behe reflected of his postdoc research days as an evolutionist. “college students have not been shown the weakness of Darwinian evolution” as Joseph Kuhn wrote in 2012.

3. A lot of biologists aren’t exposed to problems outside their own field. For example paleontologist and ID critic Don Prothero wrote that “Nearly all metazoans [meaning animals] show stasis, with almost no good examples of gradual evolution… the prevalence of stasis is a puzzle that has no simple answer” but lamented, “by and large the neontological [non-paleontologist] community still ‘doesn’t get it’… The journal Evolution continues to publish almost no contributions by paleontologists”.

4. Others just don’t talk about the problems. Renowned chemist James Tour (inventor of nanocars) describes his own experience: “Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone… I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go ‘Uh-uh. Nope.’ These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, ‘Do you understand this?’ And if they’re afraid to say ‘Yes,’ they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.”

5. Some see anything other than materialistic naturalism is seen as a violation of scientific professionalism. At one conference, “Chinese scientists encouraged the investigation of a variety of new hypotheses to explain the Cambrian explosion: hydrothermal eruptions, sudden seafloor changes, even intelligent design. This last was too much for one American paleontologist who stood up and shouted, ‘This is not a scientific conference!'” Likewise the famed Lynn Margulis (proposed symbiogenesis theory) said, “The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or ‘God did it.'”

6. Many biologists don’t have much training in engineering. Many of the patterns claimed to only arise by common descent are the same I see in the code I write or among other objects designed by humans.

7. Some recognize insufficiencies in evolutionary theory, but hope new theories will arise to resolve them. Evolutionists Depew & Weber published in 2012: “Darwinism in its current scientific incarnation has pretty much reached the end of its rope… however, we are confident that a new and more general theory of evolution is evolving.”

8. A bias toward sensationalism in the media–which is true everywhere and not just with evolutionary biology.

9. It’s taboo to publish anything from the ID movement. As one example, Springer (a large scientific publisher) was going to publish 20-so-papers from ID proponents. They had already passed Springer’s internal peer review and Springer agreed to publish them. But a public campaign threatened to boycott Springer if they published, even though none any of the critics had even read the papers. Springer complied, but the papers were still published in World Scientific after also passing peer review there.

10. A small number of rather popular evolution “evangelists” shame anyone who dissents from the Party line. For example see Jerry Coyne’s response to Lynn Margulis claiming evolution doesn’t work (cited above). Coyne says she’s “dogmatic, willfully ignorant, and intellectually dishonest,” “wrong in the worst way a scientist can be wrong,” and “embarrasses both herself and the field.”

11. Rigged debates. Sean B. Carroll (well known biologist) wrote a critique of Michael Behe’s work in the journal Science: He cited “the tuning of color vision in animals” as a response to Michael Behe as an example of observed evolution creating through a long process of gradual steps. To support this, Carroll cites his own book where he describes (based on phylogeny) lineages would have had to evolve color vision multiple times, lose it, and then evolve it again. This would have happened among the presumed ancestors of reptiles, fish, and mammals so none of it is even observed to begin with. Behe correctly noted that Carroll’s papers show “different species have different protein binding sites” but “they demonstrate nothing about how the sites arose.” Behe submitted a brief response, only to have Science to trim the last 100 words. Science gave Carroll a far longer response chastising Behe for not addressing this very point he addressed in the 100 words that were trimmed.