Long. Informative. Something to read with your hurried morning coffee before you start all the Thanksgiving things — if you’re hosting — or to enjoy over your leisurely breakfast if someone else has the responsibility. ;-)
[JustTheNews] Part of President-elect Donald’s Trump plan to rein in censorship, which he disclosed on Nov. 9, involves tweaking section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
Section 230 gives social media companies liability immunity for user posts, though Trump wants it to apply only to those with “high standards of neutrality,” not just those who appear to routinely take down posts that lean conservative.
Without calling out by name Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or a legacy media, Trump referred to “a sinister group of deep-state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists and depraved corporate news media.”
Coinciding with Trump’s bold plan, Just the News has launched a four-part series exploring the media watchdogs who censor.
In the first part of this the series, we explored the Trusted News Initiative. In this second installment, we look at NewsGuard.
NEWSGUARD
Unlike the other media watchdogs in this series, NewsGuard is a for-profit company, making money in a variety of ways that include licensing its ratings, dubbed “Nutrition Labels,” that search engines and Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, use to warn users against news sources NewsGuard deems unreliable.
For $4.95 a month, consumers can attach NewsGuard’s nutrition labels to all of their Internet search results, allegedly so that they’ll know if what they are reading is true or not, based on the opinions of the dozens of researcher/journalists the company employs.
NewsGuard discloses who those journalists are and their credentials in a bio page.
In the five years since its founding, NewsGuard has ingrained itself into schools, libraries and hospitals, and it has struck contracts with the Defense Department (though the company told Just the News it does not currently generate revenue from the government).
Among its products is BrandGuard, used by advertisers and the agencies that represent them, to ensure their ads don’t appear alongside news stories and at media outlets to which NewsGuard assigns a low rating.
Thus, it wields unusual power for such a young company, given that media outlets that get a low grade will most likley suffer a decline in traffic and advertising revenue.
Its claim of nonpartisanship, though, appears dubious, given its team of human fact-checkers rarely deviate from the legacy media’s approved narrative, and outlets that stray – often conservative ones – are more often than legacy ones given lower marks.
Thus, right-leaning outlets such as Breitbart News and the Daily Wire score Nutrition Labels of just 49.5%, while The Washington Post scores 100%.
That perfect rating stands in contrast to the august newspaper insisted for months – until after the election – that first son Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake; appeared to frame stories to insinuate that Trump was acting as an agent for Russia during his first term as president; and dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. All these turned out to be false.
Insiders at multiple media outlets told Just the News that many companies arbitrarily choose a 70% NewsGuard rating as a minimum threshold before they’ll consider buying an ad, notably just above the 69.5% rating it gives to Fox News. NewsGuard, though, told Just the News that 60% is a more common threshold.
The Nutrition Labels are based on several categories including: false or misleading content; how an outlet gathers and presents news responsibly; effective practices for correcting errors; avoiding deceptive headlines; the disclosures of ownership and financing, potential conflicts of interest; whether advertising is clearly labeled; whether the names of an outlet's content creators are disclosed and their biographies are provided; and how an outlet handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.
The New York Times lost 12.5 points in that latter category, depriving it of a perfect score.
“It’s nuts. They hold different outlets to different standards,” said one media executive who has dealt with NewsGuard. Indeed, media insiders pointed out that while the Daily Beast was penalized for reporting that Biden’s laptop was likely fake, more traditional outlets like The Post and The New York Times were not.
“It’s not an unbiased tool. It’s arbitrary categories with arbitrary weighting from people who think they know best because they were once journalists,” the media insider also said. “It’s terrible to begin with, and a shame it ever got traction.”
Just the News asked NewsGuard why, if the disclosure of financing is important, does it not take into account revenue from advertisers, given how often media companies are accused of bias in favor of pharmaceutical companies, for example, because they are the nation’s largest buyer of ads.
NewsGuard replied: “Simply receiving some ads from an industry that a site also covers, among many other ads from other industries, would not cause a site to lose points.”
NewsGuard told Just The News that it employs 40 "analysts" to rate news outlets. It wouldn’t say whether more are Democrats or Republicans, though an insider familiar with the situation estimates 65% lean left.
NewsGuard also argues many conservative outlets score higher than liberal ones, using as an example Fox News' 69.5% compared to MSNBC's 49.5%.
BULLYING AS A BUSINESS MODEL
NewsGuard also pointed out that co-CEO Gordon Crovitz is a long-time conservative writer for The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation and Regnery Publishing.
If a media outlet scores poorly, NewsGuard will tell it what to do to raise its rating.
Sometimes the advice is ambiguous. One media executive told Just the News that his outlet was informed that NewsGuard was “uncomfortable” with some of their opinion pieces.
“Who are they to say to say what our audience and advertisers should be comfortable with?” said the executive, who chose to remain unnamed. “It’s like they saw a space to launch a company to bully conservative news sites and promote the ones they like. They don’t look at every story, they pull out the ones they disagree with to downgrade your newsroom.”
NewsGuard said its criteria is based on “apolitical criteria of journalistic practice,” and that it was founded as “an alternative to government censorship or the continued dominance of the secret ratings of news publishers by the social media companies and left-wing advocacy groups.”
But conservatives don’t buy it, hence a House Judiciary Committee report criticized the company for its stories that correctly reported that a Gaza hospital explosion was due to a misfired Hamas rocket but not penalizing outlets that falsely reported that Biden’s laptop was "Russian disinformation." (NewsGuard penalized the Daily Beast until it corrected its reporting, two months after The New York Times and Washington Post, which were not penalized, corrected theirs).
One interesting aside is that retired General Michael Hayden, who in 2020 along with 50 other former security operatives signed the now-infamous and debunked statement positing the Biden laptop as fake, serves as an "advisor" to the board of NewsGuard. A congressional report indicated that the statement was drafted and circulated by then Biden campaign staffer Antony Blinken.
GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE MEDIA
Republicans also held a hearing on July 10 to explore possibe collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, another watchdog accused of censorship that was sued by X (formerly Twitter) and Rumble in August and folded a few days later.
At the hearing this summer, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro testified that NewsGuard “has penalized us openly for being a conservative site. When we mention that we are actually honest about our bias, what they said is, ‘Well, that means you are not objective,’ as opposed to other outlets which claim to be objective but actually are biased toward the left.”
As first reported by Newsmax, on Nov. 13, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote a letter about NewsGuard to the CEOs of Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube); Meta (the parent of Facebook and Instagram); Microsoft; and Apple.
Just as Trump referenced how tech companies risk liability protection under Section 230 if they don’t act in good faith by allowing diverse viewpoints, so does Carr, whom Trump has picked to lead the agency.
But the major point of his letter, reviewed by Just the News, is to seek intel on how the four major tech companies employ “the Orwellian named NewsGuard,” as Carr put it.
“NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” writes Carr, pointing to a report from the conservative Media Research Center. The report includes that NewsGuard co-founder and co-CEO Steven Brill went on CNBC in 2020 to claim the laptop story was probably a Russian hoax.
[Townhall - Kurt Schlichter] It is right and proper to be thankful at Thanksgiving, particularly when our country has just avoided a communist nightmare of epic proportions. Take a moment to sit back and think about how bad it would be right now if we were going to have another four years of leftist rule, probably followed by leftist rule in perpetuity, as these bastards would’ve solidified their hold on power so that we could never hope to rule ourselves again. You know that was their intent because that’s exactly what they said Trump would do, and they always accuse us of doing what they are doing or intend to do. The best case, and it’s a pretty terrible case, would have been us wrenching back our freedom through some sort of rebellion against their anti-constitutional tyranny. When civil war is the best-case scenario, you’ve got a bad set of scenario options. Conservatives never look on the bright side, but this time we should. Be thankful we missed out on all that. Be thankful we reelected Donald Trump.
But Donald Trump didn’t win the election building a conservative coalition. He built a coalition that averaged out to the center of American politics 20 years ago before the left went completely insane.
That means we conservatives are not the coalition but simply a part of the coalition. And that means we’re not always going to get what we want. Oh, I don’t like it. I don’t like it much at all, except for the fact that it allowed us to beat Harris and her coterie of communist cadres. I like that a lot. I’m very thankful for it.
So, stop dooming about what was inevitable and what is necessary. Yes, we’ve got to push Trump to be as conservative as we can. It’s not unusual for competing coalition elements to push their own agenda. Factions compete — that’s why they are factions. But let’s not freak out and cry and run around like a little female-identifying child because Donald Trump must manage a coalition that consists of much more than just us. Be thankful that our problem is that his administration is conservative, but not quite as conservative as we’d like it to be, as opposed to something that would make Karl Marx turgid.
So, enjoy your Thanksgiving. And let me throw this hand grenade down the hall: Thanksgiving is the worst meal of the year because Thanksgiving food is the worst food there is. Turkey? What the hell is that? Stuffing is like eating rosemary-infused pillow filling. Don’t even get me started on yams.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/28/2024 08:32 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11131 views]
Top|| File under:
[FoxNews] The US national debt is more than $36 trillion
Business magnate Elon Musk, who has been sounding the alarm about America's gargantuan, ever-expanding national debt, claimed that many people are unaware of the problem.
"A significant % of people don’t even know that there is such a thing as a national debt!" Musk declared in a post on X.
"Those that do often don’t know how big it is or that our interest payments now exceed what we spend on our military. Only a small % understand that government overspending causes inflation," he added.
The national debt has soared past $36 trillion.
"America is going bankrupt fast," Musk warned in another post.
"The excess government spending is what causes inflation! ALL government spending is taxation. This is a very important concept to appreciate. It is either direct taxation, like income tax, or indirect via inflation due to increasing the money supply," he asserted in a tweet earlier this month.
[TheConservativeWoman] ISRAEL is on the front line in the fight against the Islamists. But now we share that front line. The Islamists go first for the Saturday people and then the Sunday people.
The Islamists go first for the Saturday people and then the Sunday people.
The violent mostly peaceful organised mass attack by Moslems —mostly Moroccans with an admixture of assorted non-Moroccan Arabs as well as Turks — against Jewish and Israeli fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football club in Amsterdam two weeks ago is another expression of the anti-Israel/anti-Semitic sentiment infecting our own country, using the Israel/Paleostine issue as the ’acceptable’ excuse for anti-Semitic hatred and rage. So too was the weekend’s violent mostly peaceful Paleostinian protest in Montreal. Emboldened by the Canadian Prime Minister’s announcement that he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for alleged war crimes (thereby siding with Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... and opposing the United States), the protesters descended into violence and anarchy, chanting for Israel’s demise, threatening a new Holocaust of Jews, and throwing Hitler ...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days, sometimes every few hour if it's an election year, as a politician somebody doesn't like... salutes at bystanding Jews. It left Montreal’s Jewish community shaken and fearful for their safety; their leaders comparing it to historical anti-Semitic attacks.
Amsterdam was a planned attack, with rioters travelling from outside the city to join in. The full-scale violence began after the match, co-ordinated by Moslem taxi drivers who had mapped out the hotels where the Maccabi supporters were staying, and gave a running commentary on the locations of the Maccabi supporters during the attacks. There are reports of police collusion and participation in the attacks. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is a former Dutch politician, has talked about the takeover of Amsterdam’s internal security apparatus: ’Today, a large part of the Amsterdam police force is made up of second-generation migrants colonists from North Africa and the Middle East.’
One of the fans who was attacked said: ’The Dutch chief of police says officers are human being[s] and they can enforce the law however they want. He gave a legal right to the police not to protect us.’ Regarding the Moslem attackers, he added: ’They want to apply the Sharia law all over Europe. They will kill us, you, everyone. We know this, and Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... needs to as well.’
The Israeli government sent planes to the Netherlands to take Israeli citizens home. Local Jews organised transport to the airport as taxis were not deemed safe for Israelis.
Around the same time as the Amsterdam attacks, Belgian police arrested six suspects who were allegedly planning an Amsterdam-inspired ’Jew hunt’ in Antwerp, and teenagers in a Jewish youth football team were attacked by a knife-wielding pro-Paleostine mob in Berlin — ’hunted down’ by Arab youths. The Berlin police chief has admitted Berlin is not safe for ’openly gay’ or Jewish people: ’Unfortunately, there are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people are of Arab descent, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups.’
How many police chiefs in the UK would openly admit to such ’no-go’ zones here, or that dozens of Sharia courts are allowed to operate freely and give out ’Islamic’ judgments to Moslems living in UK communities?
Internationally, inflammatory pronouncements such as that from UNICEF that the Israeli UNRWA ban ’means a new way has been found to kill children’, or the announcement that Canada is reaching out to ’allies’ in its quest to recognise a Paleostinian state, can only give further encouragement to jihadists. The UN has voted to stop Israel defending certain parts of its own territory, and to force it to withdraw entirely from key areas that serve to make its country defendable against its enemies and direct attack. The thinking appears to be that Israel should not be allowed to fight back.
Perversely October 7 was the trigger that released this new anti-Semitic onslaught against all Jewry, and all those who stand in defence of Israel and its legitimate place in history, in what must be one of the most egregious act of victim-blaming in history.
In March this year I wrote: ’How much longer will it be before I will need to go to Israel to look a Jew in the eye, because there are none left in the UK?’ As the year has progressed, I have seen nothing to change that view. Indeed, after the installation of the Labour government of Two-Tier Keir Starmer and election of several independent Moslem Vote MPs, my fear increased. Now, with the Prime Minister Starmer’s shocking backing for the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Israeli PM Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, it has doubled. It can but give direct encouragement to Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... in particular and Islamist ambitions in general.
UK politicians have also given credence to the lie that Israel is now the unwarranted aggressor in its conflict with Hamas, recently voting at the UN Security Council to impose a ceasefire on Israel (vetoed by the US) with no dependent clause for Hamas to release the hostages it kidnapped on October 7. This is despite clear evidence that the former head of UNRWA repeatedly met and expressed unity with Hamas and Islamic Jihad ...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah... leaders and let them influence UNRWA operations; that UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 atrocities; and despite that Hamas-originated inflated casualty numbers and Israel deliberately starving Gazooks are based on on lies and propaganda — in a word, faked.
What happened in Amsterdam on November 7 and in Montreal this weekend is a warning of what could come to Britannia in the not-too-distant future. Is this what we want in this country? Do we stand aside as Israel-haters continue to pack our streets, populate social media with anti-Semitic and hate-inciting bile, and whose representatives sit in Parliament and local councils and undermine police neutrality?
At the start of the Second World War the Dutch Jewish population was around 150,000. Three-quarters of them were murdered in Hitler’s extermination programme. The current core Jewish population is 30,000. The new Nazis of fashionable anti-Semitism — the fundamental Islamists in our midst, the woke, the intellectually deceived, and the purely ignorant — act as though they would like to continue the work of 1930s and 1940s Nazis across Europe and in the UK. For UK and European Jews, surely all roads must now lead to Israel. But where do the rest of us go, once the Saturday people have departed, and it’s the turn of the Sunday people?
The power of purchasing polls. If Mr. Plouffe really was surprised at the difference, he’s in the wrong profession. Video and transcript can be seen at the link.
[RealClearPolitics] During a "Pod Save America" discussion with leading Harris campaign staffers, Obama 2008 campaign manager and senior advisor to the Harris campaign David Plouffe revealed that their internal polls never showed Harris with a lead and they were surprised to see public polls that did.
He described the first part of the race, "Biden-Trump 1.0," as "catastrophic," but when Harris took over they had some guarded optimism: "I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, okay, this is tied, and if a couple of things break our way..."
"I think it surprised people because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw," he said. "It was just basically a race that in the battlegrounds was 46-47, 47-48."
"We started behind. She was able to climb out. I think even after the debate, we might have gained, what, 0.5-1? It wasn’t a race that moved a lot."
"When you think about our own internal analytics, you know, if you have Wisconsin at 47-47, or Pennsylvania 48-47 Trump, let’s say, which I think is where we had it at the end, you know, you’ve got to have undecideds break your way more than your opponents, and you’ve got to get a little benefit from turnout, which we weren’t able to do," he said.
#1
...Proof - if any more was needed - that the polling companies are either incompetent or 'bent', to use a wonderful term from our Cousins across the pond.
[JustTheNews] Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova says there is “no doubt” there was a conspiracy to take down President-elect Donald Trump and violate his civil rights. “The President of the United States Barack Obama authorized the FBI to investigate [the Russia collusion theory] knowing that it was false,” he explains. “Barack Obama should get the first grand jury subpoena. There needs to be a grand jury, there needs to be a special counsel. The grand jury needs to be in the southern district of Florida where the Mar-a-Lago raid occurred because that was one of the ultimate outcomes of the beginning of that conspiracy to violate Donald Trump’s civil rights.”
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Kirill Semenov
[REGNUM] On November 26, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that his security cabinet had approved a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
The prime minister did not elaborate on the terms of the ceasefire or the date it would come into effect. He said the duration of the ceasefire would depend on how events unfold in Lebanon. " We will ensure compliance with the agreement and respond harshly to any violations. We will continue to work together until victory," he said.
Netanyahu stressed that Hezbollah is no longer "the same" as it was before the war: "We have set them back decades." He also promised to focus on confronting Iran and continuing the war with Hamas.
Obviously, this decision was not easy for the head of the Israeli cabinet, which was under external pressure. It was the administration of US President Joe Biden that finally managed to convince Netanyahu to agree to a truce.
Although it was much easier to do this than in Gaza. Many in Israel understood that the war in Lebanon was reaching a dead end, and new major successes were unlikely to be forthcoming, so now was the very chance to put an end to it, even if not quite a victorious one. At the very least, there was a reason to declare success.
However, it should be noted that there were certainly no fewer opponents of this decision in Israel from the very beginning than supporters. Many are not talking about success, but about “giving up the game” and even “capitulation.”
But Israel appeared to be forced to the negotiating table after Washington warned that its failure to reach an agreement would prompt the United States to renounce its veto over a UN Security Council resolution that would have demanded a ceasefire on far less favorable terms and with international legal consequences for Tel Aviv if it refused to comply.
The hardening of the US position was prompted by fears of a regional escalation that threatened to draw Iran, Hezbollah's main ally, into the conflict. So the White House has recently made efforts to persuade Netanyahu's government to accept the deal. France has joined the Americans, and President Emmanuel Macron has stepped up contacts with Lebanese political forces over which Paris retains influence.
"Today's agreement will end the fighting in Lebanon and secure Israel from the threat posed by Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations operating from Lebanon. This agreement will create the conditions for the restoration of lasting calm and allow residents of both countries to safely return to their homes on both sides of the Blue Line," the US-French joint statement on the deal said.
Paris and Washington also said they would work with Israel and Lebanon to ensure the agreements are fully implemented and respected, and would "lead and support international efforts to build the capacity of the Lebanese armed forces" and "economic development throughout Lebanon to promote stability and prosperity."
Iran, in turn, has also signaled that it is ready to conclude a ceasefire and will push Hezbollah to do so. In return for acceptable ceasefire conditions, Tehran has likely decided to postpone or even abandon a retaliatory strike against Israel.
Tehran also did not object to “separating the fronts” of Lebanon and Gaza for the sake of a deal that would not only allow interaction with the new American administration of Donald Trump to begin on a positive note, but would also be able to reduce the risks of Hezbollah losing its influence in Lebanon, which would preserve not only its military potential, but also its future on the Lebanese political scene.
The Party of God, its Lebanese partners, and its rivals supported the cessation of hostilities and, in fact, pushed the movement to accept the agreement. It was not without “blackmail and threats.” The decision was no less difficult for Hezbollah than for Israel. Finally, Lebanese Deputy Parliament Speaker Elias Bou Saab said that the ceasefire was approved in Beirut after Hezbollah authorized its ally from the Shiite Amal Party and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri to conduct the negotiations.
However, Hezbollah has already made reservations that would allow the movement to withdraw from the ceasefire. They said they had not seen the text of the final version of the ceasefire agreement with Israel.
“After reviewing the agreement signed by the enemy (Israeli – Ed.) government, we will see if there is a correspondence between what we stated and what the Lebanese officials agreed on,” the movement reported.
The pre-approved agreement is in line with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 36-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 but was never fully implemented. In fact, the resolution's lack of new input and retention of the old name without adding any plus signs to its numbers allows Hezbollah to save face.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is now expected to withdraw its troops entirely from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is also expected to withdraw its units and heavy weapons north of the Litani River, about 25 kilometers from the border.
During the 60-day transition period, the Lebanese army will be deployed in the border area along with UN peacekeeping forces. All border disputes over the Blue Line, which serves as the border, will be discussed after 60 days and after the withdrawal of Israeli and Hezbollah troops.
The implementation of the agreement will be monitored by a US-led oversight mechanism, which will act as an arbitrator in case of violations. Although the guarantor clause is not formally part of the deal, it is reportedly intended to ensure Israel has a free hand if Hezbollah is found to be maintaining or reintroducing forces south of the Litani.
PYRRHIC VICTORY
Of course, such an outcome can be declared a success for Israel. But it is obvious to many that this is not a victory, but only a temporary respite that both Hezbollah and the IDF are using. The latter is also extremely important. The IDF is extremely exhausted, and this is directly called one of the weights on the scale that tipped Netanyahu toward a truce.
"Israel will welcome the chance to rest its tired ground forces and reservists, and to repair equipment, replenish ammunition and stock up on supplies. It will also welcome the direct involvement of the US, its main ally, in mediating breaches," The Guardian writes.
Israel's success can also be seen in Hezbollah's rejection of the demand that a ceasefire in Lebanon be synchronized with and dependent on a suspension of hostilities in the Gaza Strip. However, this possibility cannot be discounted. Even if a ceasefire is established in Lebanon, the lack of progress in Gaza on a ceasefire could lead to the collapse of the agreements.
There are serious doubts that Israel is really interested in achieving peace in Palestine. In fact, a new Zionist project of creating Jewish settlements and permanent occupation of the enclave is currently being openly discussed in the country.
While it is not the official position of Israel's leadership, senior defense officials recently told Haaretz that the government intends to annex large swaths of Gaza rather than negotiate an end to the war.
On the other hand, despite its apparent success in “disengaging” the Gaza and Lebanon fronts, before the deal was accepted, it provoked ire from the most radical wing of Netanyahu’s coalition.
Thus, the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on Monday called the deal a “historic mistake” that failed to achieve the main goal of the war: the return of displaced Israelis to their homes in the north. Ben Gvir was also the “breakwater” against which all attempts to reach a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip were broken. But this time, his efforts did not lead to results.
Mayors of Israel's northernmost communities were also outraged by reports that Netanyahu's government intended to approve the deal, with one calling it a "surrender agreement" and a "disgrace of historic proportions."
National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz also spoke out against the deal, saying that “the current withdrawal of troops and the dynamics created create difficulties for us and will facilitate the reorganization of Hezbollah.”
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett also said the agreement "does not address any of the three threats that the people of the north face, as reported," referring to possible Hezbollah infiltration, direct ATGM and close-in strikes, and deep-launch rocket fire.
He said this is possible because the agreements do not include the creation of a buffer zone where Hezbollah and the Lebanese government are prohibited from rebuilding homes and buildings that could be used as shelters for rocket attacks or as undetected staging areas for sabotage groups.
Thus, Israel fears that Hezbollah will use the time allotted for the ceasefire to regroup and recuperate. It is not possible to expect the “Party of God” to voluntarily disarm, as Resolution 1701 envisaged, so it will continue to be an existential threat to Israel.
Hezbollah has retained its military potential, having lost 1,660 fighters since October 8, 2023, including those killed in Syria, which is generally not so critical for the movement. And the high-profile raid of the IDF's 91st Division on the Litani River on the eve of the approval of the deal should be viewed as a significant event only with a big caveat.
Israeli forces reached the river where it comes closest to the Blue Line in the Golan Heights. The distance from the border to the river in this section is only 3 km, not the average 20-25 km along its course in the south.
That is, in military terms, Israel's successes in the current war are the least tangible compared to past large-scale clashes, despite the killing of Hezbollah's top leadership.
In the first Lebanon war in 1982, the Israelis were able to reach Beirut. In the second, they reached the Litani River at a distance of 25 km from the border. In the third, they managed to penetrate only 3 km, and only in one small area on the Golan Heights side.
HEZBOLLAH AND IRAN NOT READY TO ADMIT DEFEAT
It is clear that the Party of God could have continued to hold back the IDF's attempts to advance into Lebanon, but the barbaric bombing of Lebanese cities by the Israeli Air Force, in which civilians were killed every day, increased the pressure on Hezbollah from the country's population and political forces.
Thus, in Lebanon, about 100,000 residential buildings were destroyed, 37 towns and villages were turned into ruins, more than 3,000 civilians were killed, and 1.2 million Lebanese became refugees and internally displaced persons.
Naturally, not only Hezbollah's political opponents, but also its partners did not want Lebanon to turn into dead ruins like Gaza, where women and children suffered the most, and every day hundreds of residents were buried under the rubble of their homes, which became mass graves.
The IDF used this strategy, essentially taking the entire population of Lebanon hostage. The “suspicion” that a Hezbollah functionary was hiding in a multi-story building was enough to destroy not only that building and all its inhabitants, but also an entire neighborhood and its entire population.
At the same time, Israel did not divide the members of the “Party of God” into civilians and soldiers, and killed Lebanese day after day in the expectation that Hezbollah would be forced sooner or later to agree to Israeli demands, transmitted with the help of the United States.
Hezbollah now faces a difficult choice, since full compliance with these demands could deprive it of its future. However, an important positive outcome for it in the current phase of the conflict is that it was able to fight off a much more powerful enemy with the most modern weapons.
In addition, the movement demonstrated particular resilience. The loss of virtually all of its leadership did not lead to its collapse or loss of combat capabilities. The "Party of God" fully retained its missile potential and continued to strike Israel, including Tel Aviv, until the very end.
"The first result of this agreement is that the resistance remains and that its capabilities, as recent months have shown, are not linked to its location south or north of the [Litani] River," Lebanese outlet Al-Akhbar reported.
In other words, it is a question of Hezbollah not having a problem returning to the south and attacking Israel if the situation changes. In fact, the Israelis are afraid that the sword that remains in the hands of the Party of God has only been lowered and can once again be brought down on the northern regions of the country.
The main problems of Hezbollah and Iran in the current conditions are now aid to Hamas and the need to restore the authority of the "Party of God" in Lebanon. Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into its war under the slogans of supporting Gaza, brought death and destruction to the country, but did not achieve its goal: a truce was concluded only in Lebanon, while Hamas and Palestine remain under attack. And was it worth starting a campaign because of this?
At the same time, from a military point of view, it was justified in any case. The fact that Hamas was able to survive and continues to resist to this day is a great merit of Hezbollah. It did not allow Israel to throw all its forces at Gaza, pulling the most combat-ready units to the north. But for many Lebanese, this is small consolation, especially since the future of Gaza remains uncertain.
Therefore, there are big risks that the current ceasefire will be just a short respite in a big war. The new Trump administration, of course, would like everything to end there. Iran, which is ready to resume dialogue with the Republicans, wants the same.
But there are many factors that could bury these intentions. And the main one is Netanyahu and his determination to crush Gaza at any cost, regardless of civilian casualties.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
But Donald Trump didn’t win the election building a conservative coalition. He built a coalition that averaged out to the center of American politics 20 years ago before the left went completely insane. 
...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days, sometimes every few hour if it's an election year, as a politician somebody doesn't like...
