October 7: Who won the war of October 7?

Three years have passed since Hamas committed its October 7 atrocity, invading Israel in hopes of starting a war that it must inevitably lose while winning world opinion to its side. Toward this end, it built 600 miles of tunnels to hide its fighters, with particular attention to putting them under residences and hospitals, knowing that bombing them would horrify the world. Indeed, the first accusations of genocide were leveled on October 8, while the attack was still going on. That was the plan!

The United Nations had recognized a Palestinian state in 1988, though without a capital or specific borders, and 130 member countries established diplomatic relations with this phantom by October 2023. (Wikipedia puts the number at 157, but that includes 27 that voted No!) And after October 7, the Europeans piled in, notably countries that were antisemitic, woke, or worried about a Muslim minority: Ireland, Norway, Spain, Britain, and France. The leaders of Hamas, snug beneath their hospital, must have been pleased with themselves.

And of course they were ready with the genocide libel. Again, Wiki is little help: its main article on the subject is the accusation, presented as fact, and if you search instead for "allegations" you're directed to the more truthful belief that the attack was the atrocity, beginning with a note: "for [the] ongoing genocide by Israel in Gaza since 2023, see...." Well, that's now accepted by much if not most of the world. To me, it seems a hideous reversal of the truth. The first generally recognized genocide of the 20th century was Turkey's expulsion and murder of Armenians in 1915-17. The word itself was introduced in 1948 by Rafael Lemkin, a Polish (and Jewish) lawyer then teaching in the US, and was meant to define the massacre of 6 million of his co-religionists toward the end of the Second World War.

Now, in the 21st century, it's being thrown at the Jewish state, established in 1948 for those who'd fled the Holocaust or (increasingly these days) who fear another. And who can blame them?

Read my earlier musings

Book of the month: The Cauldron

The Cauldron just went on sale, so I've only read the first hundred pages, but I have no doubt it'll be the Book of the Month and probably of the year. The oddly named and defiantly bald Simon Sebag Montefiore is a splendid writer and an admirable historian. He's writing here about the modern Middle East, which he defines as what I learned to call the Near East, plus the whole of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and all the way east to Afghanistan and Pakistan. As for "modern," that includes the 20th century and as much of the 21st as we've so far navigated. In other words: Israel vs Iran, the western democracies vs the Muslim theocracies, and a whole lot of other hatreds besides. Read about it in the Warbird's Book Club.

Ed Overend recalls his year with the AVG

When he came back to the US in the summer of 1942, it seems that Ed Overend worked for a while at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach or Santa Monica CA as a test pilot. While there, the company magazine interviewed him about his year with the AVG. Read it here.

And the useful idiots still celebrate Chinese communism

For more than thirty years now, I've had a Google search looking for references to the Flying Tigers, and hardly a month goes by that it doesn't pop up a mention of how the American Volunteer Group and their descendants love the China and the CCP. It's all bullfeathers, of course. For more, see the Annals of the Flying Tigers.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford. Support Ukraine by contributing to Razom (a tax-deductible US-based charity). Or its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

And welcome to the Warbird's Forum!

Here are a thousand or so files about the the planes, pilots, and warfighters of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: