You got nowhere to run to baby; nowhere to hide....

[XnavyHMCS]

Well, Team USA strikes again!!!

Not a surprise.

When I grew up all the talk was "how good the Israeli forces are...", but now for the last 18 years it's been hands down the USA.

No smoother running, well practiced, well trained force on the planet today, than the USA!!!

Be it Obama or Trump at the helm, it is the forces at their disposal, those on the sharp-end, which are getting the job done.

Now they need to have JSOC target Snowden and that European (Obs, this one's for you buddy) pedophile Roman Polanski...

Go Team USA!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58UD3jU86pY

[HoldMyBeer]

What am I missing here?

[XnavyHMCS]

What am I missing here?

https://www.dailycelebuk.com/News/Ho...e-TV-link.html

[Beetlegeuse]

A day to celebrate, to be sure. We'll never kill them all but every high-profile killing makes the rest a little more neurotic. If it radicalizes others, all the better, there's plenty more bullets where those came from.

Interesting that the Green Berets were used for this. One has to wonder why they deviated from the customary SEALs for such a HVT. Maybe it's because all the Tier-1 SEALs were too busy negotiating their book deals.

But I would not be so dismissive of the Israelis. What we do with brute force and cubic dollars, they do with finesse, even panache, and on a shoestring budget. They have to because they are a pipsqueak of a nation in a country barely the size of a postage stamp and with hostile neighbors at every border, all champing at the bit to cut their throats.

The Israelis have never shied away from the word "assassination" but all US actors have been expressly prohibited from all "wet work" since President Ford signed EO 11905. But the US has been bending the rules so they could selectively target individuals such as UBL and Al Baghdadi to the point that it's now a distinction without a difference. It's like in baseball it is the obligation of the first batter to each side of the plate to rub out the lines of the batter's box so that the umpire can't call any of the batters to follow 'out' for stepping out of the box. In the post 9/11 world, we have deliberately wiped out the lime stripes around the "assassination box" and any target you can get labeled an 'enemy combatant' is fair game for assassination (you just can't call it that in public).

The big bugaboo for the Israelis is the question of killing versus murder. Contrary to what is written in many Christian bibles, the Jews claim the stone tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain didn't say a damn thing about "killing." And you sort of have to take their word for it because there was nobody there BUT the Jews. The 6th Commandment that's in the Torah transliterates into English as "You will do no murder." The specific Hebrew verb used means "a killing outside of God's law," which gets reduced to "an illegal killing" which gets further reduced to "a murder."

In fact it's pretty silly that so many Christians believe God issued a blanket prohibition against killing because he didn't just tell the Hebrews that some killings were mandatory, there were instances when he ORDERED them to commit GENOCIDE. Exterminate an entire people. Such as when they conquered Canaan land.

But there are very strict guidelines in the Torah and the Talmud that must be followed to avoid a killing from reaching the threshold of a murder, and the Jews will argue without ceasing about everything from the selection of the target to the method of the hit to prevent the blurring of the distinction. Because that's what being Jewish is about. Strictly observing ancient rules and not allowing the lines to be blurred.

Shellfish is not Kosher. That was a rule Moses made up when the Hebrews wandered 40 years in the desert because they all had been slaves in Egypt, and slaves have very limited life experiences. A baker doesn't know how to make brick and a brickmaker doesn't know how to bake bread. If a fisherman finds a clam in the middle of the Sinai desert, he knows better than to eat it. But how does a leather tanner or a wheat farmer know this? The Hebrews all knew because Moses told them. No shellfish.

So (observant) Jews to this day don't eat shellfish. Not because they're still wandering in the desert so all shellfish are yet suspect but because that's how they say "Thank you" to God for allowing Moses and the Children of Israel to survive that journey, and pay respect to those ancestors for what they endured.

And killing while still observing God's prohibition on murder can be tricky. Really tricky.

Wadie Haddad had been behind several terrorist actions including the Entebbe hijacking and Rock'em Sock'em Menachem Begin ordered Mossad to put him out of Israel's misery. It took years but they finally caught up with Haddad living in Baghdad, and Mossad had an Iraqi mole who befriend him. Then as a gesture of his friendship, the mole gave Haddad a box of his favorite Belgian chocolates, which were difficult to come by in that part of the world.

Mossad knew Haddad was a gluttonous lard-ass who would kill for a box of these chocolates so they decided to use them to poison him. But the problem was how to do it without putting innocents at risk. Because unless he ate the whole damn box in one sitting there always would be the chance that a child or a maid might try sneaking the odd piece of poisoned candy. And that would be a murder. So they went to the Israeli Institute for Biological Research for help.

IIBR created a bespoke biological agent that could not be detected as a poison since no one outside of their labs have ever seen its like before. And they calculated how much a lethal dose would be and then dosed the chocolates so that anyone eating just a few wouldn't die. Probably wouldn't even be affected.

However, if you were a gluttonous lard-ass and ate half the box, in time all the little bugs the Israelis had put into your gut would multiply until they destroyed your body's immune system, making you susceptible to dying from everything from athlete's foot to a cold sore. When Haddad died in East Berlin several months later, the GDR doctors ruled the cause of death was leukemia.

Today's Snake Eater is an Olympic-class athlete and has to be selected, trained, equipped and maintained like one. It costs US tax payers about half a mil$ to recruit a special operator and get him through SFQC or BUD/S and patched. And another half mil$ for his first year of training, which might to get him up to 'baby operator' speed. He's already cost us a cool million USD$ and but still has to earn a place in a team before he can lay claim to the title "operator."

And every mission is resource-intensive because it includes multi-departmental assets such as overhead surveillance and sometimes mutli-service (like 160th SOAR) as well. Not to mention a QRF in case things go sideways.

Mossad uses accountants, elementary school teachers and farmers who don't even work for them full time. Yet MI6 reckons that the Israelis have perpetrated around 800 assassinations in the past 10 years. Eight hundred. Most were either mis-diagnosed as death by natural causes or mis-attributed to a third party (plausible since few of Israels' enemies have only Israel as an enemy). And this in spite of all the complexities that go along with being an observant Jew.

So don't sell the Israelis short. If you match us up in terms of resources expended versus results delivered, it's the US who is the pipsqueak.

[i_SLAM_cougars]

I was confused when I heard they killed the leader of Isis. Like... wait? Obama’s dead?

[XnavyHMCS]

A day to celebrate, to be sure. We'll never kill them all but every high-profile killing makes the rest a little more neurotic. If it radicalizes others, all the better, there's plenty more bullets where those came from.

Interesting that the Green Berets were used for this. One has to wonder why they deviated from the customary SEALs for such a HVT. Maybe it's because all the Tier-1 SEALs were too busy negotiating their book deals.

But I would not be so dismissive of the Israelis. What we do with brute force and cubic dollars, they do with finesse, even panache, and on a shoestring budget. They have to because they are a pipsqueak of a nation in a country barely the size of a postage stamp and with hostile neighbors at every border, all champing at the bit to cut their throats.

The Israelis have never shied away from the word "assassination" but all US actors have been expressly prohibited from all "wet work" since President Ford signed EO 11905. But the US has been bending the rules so they could selectively target individuals such as UBL and Al Baghdadi to the point that it's now a distinction without a difference. It's like in baseball it is the obligation of the first batter to each side of the plate to rub out the lines of the batter's box so that the umpire can't call any of the batters to follow 'out' for stepping out of the box. In the post 9/11 world, we have deliberately wiped out the lime stripes around the "assassination box" and any target you can get labeled an 'enemy combatant' is fair game for assassination (you just can't call it that in public).

The big bugaboo for the Israelis is the question of killing versus murder. Contrary to what is written in many Christian bibles, the Jews claim the stone tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain didn't say a damn thing about "killing." And you sort of have to take their word for it because there was nobody there BUT the Jews. The 6th Commandment that's in the Torah transliterates into English as "You will do no murder." The specific Hebrew verb used means "a killing outside of God's law," which gets reduced to "an illegal killing" which gets further reduced to "a murder."

In fact it's pretty silly that so many Christians believe God issued a blanket prohibition against killing because he didn't just tell the Hebrews that some killings were mandatory, there were instances when he ORDERED them to commit GENOCIDE. Exterminate an entire people. Such as when they conquered Canaan land.

But there are very strict guidelines in the Torah and the Talmud that must be followed to avoid a killing from reaching the threshold of a murder, and the Jews will argue without ceasing about everything from the selection of the target to the method of the hit to prevent the blurring of the distinction. Because that's what being Jewish is about. Strictly observing ancient rules and not allowing the lines to be blurred.

Shellfish is not Kosher. That was a rule Moses made up when the Hebrews wandered 40 years in the desert because they all had been slaves in Egypt, and slaves have very limited life experiences. A baker doesn't know how to make brick and a brickmaker doesn't know how to bake bread. If a fisherman finds a clam in the middle of the Sinai desert, he knows better than to eat it. But how does a leather tanner or a wheat farmer know this? The Hebrews all knew because Moses told them. No shellfish.

So (observant) Jews to this day don't eat shellfish. Not because they're still wandering in the desert so all shellfish are yet suspect but because that's how they say "Thank you" to God for allowing Moses and the Children of Israel to survive that journey, and pay respect to those ancestors for what they endured.

And killing while still observing God's prohibition on murder can be tricky. Really tricky.

Wadie Haddad had been behind several terrorist actions including the Entebbe hijacking and Rock'em Sock'em Menachem Begin ordered Mossad to put him out of Israel's misery. It took years but they finally caught up with Haddad living in Baghdad, and Mossad had an Iraqi mole who befriend him. Then as a gesture of his friendship, the mole gave Haddad a box of his favorite Belgian chocolates, which were difficult to come by in that part of the world.

Mossad knew Haddad was a gluttonous lard-ass who would kill for a box of these chocolates so they decided to use them to poison him. But the problem was how to do it without putting innocents at risk. Because unless he ate the whole damn box in one sitting there always would be the chance that a child or a maid might try sneaking the odd piece of poisoned candy. And that would be a murder. So they went to the Israeli Institute for Biological Research for help.

IIBR created a bespoke biological agent that could not be detected as a poison since no one outside of their labs have ever seen its like before. And they calculated how much a lethal dose would be and then dosed the chocolates so that anyone eating just a few wouldn't die. Probably wouldn't even be affected.

However, if you were a gluttonous lard-ass and ate half the box, in time all the little bugs the Israelis had put into your gut would multiply until they destroyed your body's immune system, making you susceptible to dying from everything from athlete's foot to a cold sore. When Haddad died in East Berlin several months later, the GDR doctors ruled the cause of death was leukemia.

Today's Snake Eater is an Olympic-class athlete and has to be selected, trained, equipped and maintained like one. It costs US tax payers about half a mil$ to recruit a special operator and get him through SFQC or BUD/S and patched. And another half mil$ for his first year of training, which might to get him up to 'baby operator' speed. He's already cost us a cool million USD$ and but still has to earn a place in a team before he can lay claim to the title "operator."

And every mission is resource-intensive because it includes multi-departmental assets such as overhead surveillance and sometimes mutli-service (like 160th SOAR) as well. Not to mention a QRF in case things go sideways.

Mossad uses accountants, elementary school teachers and farmers who don't even work for them full time. Yet MI6 reckons that the Israelis have perpetrated around 800 assassinations in the past 10 years. Eight hundred. Most were either mis-diagnosed as death by natural causes or mis-attributed to a third party (plausible since few of Israels' enemies have only Israel as an enemy). And this in spite of all the complexities that go along with being an observant Jew.

So don't sell the Israelis short. If you match us up in terms of resources expended versus results delivered, it's the US who is the pipsqueak.

WOW!!!

Well, I will agree with you to a point, but with numerous Afgh /Sandbox tours to my name, I will still put my money on the USA. (I don't mean to disrespect you /debate you...)

I would have to concur with Mossad /Israeli Intelligence being on the top, in their own back yard, as their choices are limited; rise to the challenge or becime extict... Yet I wouldn't knock our nation and her ability (post Eagle Claw and especially now) to mount operations globally.

There is a lot of truth to your reference to budgets, but in my view, this detracts nothing from our ability and contemporary resolve.

In closing I want to add:

Beatlegeusse for the PULITZER!!!

You rock brother!!!

[kelkel]

Fascinating Beetle. As always.

[Beetlegeuse]

Fascinating Beetle. As always.

The Jews fascinate me. An incredibly complicated (and conflicted) people.

Jews are about 0.2% of the world population yet 20% of all Nobel Laureates have been Jews. Which makes them over-represented by a hundred fold (100x).

25% of the theoretical physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project were Jews, but they were clustered at the top of the heap. ALL of the department heads were Jews.

After WWII, the influx of Jewish scientist refugees to America sparked a 31% increase in patent applications in those refugees' fields.


How in the hell does such a tiny group of people have such a profound impact on the world around them?

[Obs]

The Jews fascinate me. An incredibly complicated (and conflicted) people.

Jews are about 0.2% of the world population yet 20% of all Nobel Laureates have been Jews. Which makes them over-represented by a hundred fold (100x).

25% of the theoretical physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project were Jews, but they were clustered at the top of the heap. ALL of the department heads were Jews.

After WWII, the influx of Jewish scientist refugees to America sparked a 31% increase in patent applications in those refugees' fields.


How in the hell does such a tiny group of people have such a profound impact on the world around them?

Judeaic-Christian values.
They are best friends and rule the world together. Every great modern feat was performed under the watch of the team.

Islams and leftists greatest enemy.

Of course no one here believes anything about the bible, but... The founder of the jewish faith was told by God in Genesis 12:3.

"And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."

Well what a suprise...
They are wealthy as can be and run half the show as a minority.

Just coincidence.

The blessing was passed on to his son and his son and his son and so on.

Or rather the coincidence until a generation broke the covenant. The tribulation never exceeded a single generation.

Jews were top dog, then the holocaust, and top dog again in a generation.

Just coincidences.

Unless you believe the US is blessed off what it did for israel and the jew in ww2.

I mean the US wasnt exactly doing well leading up to ww2.

Afterwards came the golden era.

Just coincidence.

One thing I know for certain is if the christians and jews are both against you.... You're toast.

[Beetlegeuse]

For starters, the tendency of the Jews to be intellectuals far predates any association with Christianity. The Jews believe they have a mandate to be intellectuals because, as they like to tell it, when God rested after spending six days creating the world, he hadn't quite finished the job. So he left the final touches to his chosen people, upon whom it is incumbent to "punch above their weight," intellectually, to make sure they don't botch the job.

Then there's the matter of exile and the Jewish diasporas. The first time they were kicked out of their homeland was in the 8th Century BC, so very early on the Hebrews learned the wisdom of something my old Grandpappy told me: Always sleep with your britches where you can find them in the dark.

Because you can never tell when you might have to get up in the middle of the night and hit the floor running. And more than once the Jews have had to abandon everything they owned and leave with nothing but the clothes on their back. And whatever was contained in their brains. So they specialized in knowing how to earn a living using nothing other than their intellect. Which turned out to be a good plan because there have been a number of occasions when Jews were not allowed to own property. Which is why they have long have specialized in being banking and finance.

And speaking of Christianity, for most of their religion's existence, the Christians have been one of the chief persecutors of the Jews. The Jews, after all, did kill Jesus. And the descendants of those murdering Jews still deny him. And in denying the Christ they deny the Godhead, therefore they are Godless heathens. So they've got it coming. Several Popes (beginning with Gregory I) have endorsed their persecution.

Then there's the money-lending thing. Charging interest on a loan used to be a mortal sin under Christianity -- and still is under Islam -- so Jewish bankers served a vital interest (and Christians and Muslims alike reviled the Jews who grew wealthy from the practice). Ever read Shakespeare? The Merchant of Venice? Shylock, the money-lending Jew who demanded a pound of flesh from his Gentile customer for inability to repay a loan? Even the Bard hated the Jews.

For the most of the 2000 years the two religions have coexisted, their relationship has not exactly been ...cordial.


As for "what it did for israel and the jew in ww2," the US did very damn little. We only "rescued" them from the camps accidentally in the regular course of prosecuting of the war against the Nazis. And before that came to pass, 2/3rds of all European Jews already had been murdered.


We knew what was coming -- or should have -- after the Night of the Broken Glass in February of 1939. After "Kristallnacht" (and the escalating refugee crisis it precipitated), two US Congressmen introduced a bill into both chambers of the congress that would have allowed the admission of 20,000 Jewish refugee children under the age of 14.

The bill was prevented from coming to a vote in both houses.

In 1939 the MS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany with more than 900 Jewish German refugees on board seeking asylum in the Americas. First they made port in Havana but (under pressure from US Secretary of State Cordell Hull) the Cuban president refused to accept any of the refugees unless they had Cuban or American visas or were seriously ill. The St Louis left Havana intending to make port in Miami but the US never gave them an answer to their application to dock there. Instead Secretary Hull (with the foreknowledge of President Roosevelt) ordered the US Coast Guard to 'shoo' the St Louis away from US waters.

The St Louis sailed as far north as Nova Scotia but the Canadians refused them entry, too, so they returned to Europe. Neville Chamberlain agreed to accept 288 of them but the rest were settled in France and the low countries. Which got them out of Nazi Germany for the timebeing but left them in the direct path of the Nazi conquest of Europe. 254 of them ended up being murdered in the Holocaust.

German Jewish refugees delivered to our doorstep, free of charge, 900 of them, and we turned them away.

In 1976 a feature film was made about the Jews on the ill-fated MS St Louis titled, fittingly, Voyage of the Damned.

By 1941, months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the US knew a Jewish genocide was underway from two sources. The first came from decrypted Wermacht operational messages being sent by "clean-up" units following the Nazi advance toward Moscow in Operation Barbarossa. They were reporting killing hundreds to thousands of Jews who the front line units were bypassing by each time the Nazis advanced.

It was from these experiences that the Nazis decided that they should try performing executions with poison gas rather than shooting. Why? Because it was kinder. To the executioners.

The second source came from the Warsaw ghetto. In the fall of 1940 the Nazis had cordoned off a small section of Warsaw and imprisoned 400,000 Jews there. And the conditions there were essentially identical to what would come in the camps except they weren't yet killing on an industrial scale. But the Nazis already were killing Jews indiscriminately. And for sport.

By that time the Nazis were speaking to each other candidly in the presence of Jews because they had no fear of them passing any of this information outside of the ghetto. So they heard from the Nazis' own lips their plans for the mass annihilation of their people. They knew beyond a doubt what awaited them ... unless the Nazis could be stopped.

So the Jews 'allowed' some of their own to escape from Warsaw in the hope that their message would be heard and a rescue attempted. I use the term "allowed" because the Nazis were meticulous bookkeepers and every escape was followed by the retaliatory murder of dozens more Jews. So the Jews knew there was a price to be paid for the effort to alert the world to their plight.

One of those Warsaw Jews was Szmul Zygielbojm (Sch-mool Zee-gul-boim). Zygielbojm traveled to England and the US (where he spent 18 months) trying to alert the world to Warsaw's plight. In a 1942 interview on BBC radio, he said this:

It would be a crime and a disgrace to go on living, to belong to the human race, unless immediate action is taken to stop the greatest crime ever known to human history.

But no one acted. At least no one who counted.

In April of 1943, the Nazis 'exterminated' the Warsaw ghetto. Zygielbojm's wife and older son, who had remained in the ghetto, were among those murdered. This took place during the 10 days of the Bermuda Conference, which the US and the UK co-hosted, and at which the participants agreed to do ...nothing.

On receiving the news of his family, Zygielbojm penned a letter to the president and prime minister of Poland in which he said:

I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.

He dropped the letter in the post, went home and took a lethal dose of sodium amytal in the hope that his death would bring notoriety and recognition to the cause.

But he died in vain because the Nazis still killed 300,000 of the Warsaw Jews, either by shooting or after being sent to death camps.

In April of 1944, two Jews escaped from Auschwitz carrying with them extensive details of the industrial-scale murder taking place there. Most convincingly they brought the label from a can of the Zyklon-B cyanide that the Nazis were using in the gas chambers. But again their warning fell on deaf ears because by the time their message had reached England and the US, the Allied invasion of Europe was under way.

The upshot was that the Auschwitz Jews were asking that the Allies bomb Auschwitz. Not the camp but the gas chambers, which were not in the camp itself but some two miles away in Brzezinka. But they naïvely believed that WWII bombing was so precise that they could bomb the gas chambers and not endanger the camp. The Allies did examine the question but decided against it entirely because it would have diverted resources from the greater war effort.

The Allies did in fact bomb Auschwitz, once, but that was the city, not the concentration camp. The target was an IG Farben plant engaged in the manufacture of synthetic fuel and rubber, both critical to the Nazi war machine. Ironically, a subsidiary of IG Farben also was the manufacturer of Zyklon-B but not at this facility.

The Soviets liberated the first concentration camp (Majdanek) on 22-23 July of 1944, and then another (Lublin) on the 24th. The Americans didn't stumble across a camp until Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.

When the Brits liberated their first camp (Bergen-Belsen) on 14 April, 60,000 Jewish prisoners were still alive, but there also was an outbreak of typhus. Between disease and malnutrition, more than 10,000 of them died in the weeks to follow despite having been freed.

So, yeah, the US was part of the effort that prevented the Jews being exterminated, I'm just not sure God was particularly thrilled that they allowed 6 million-ish of his chosen people to murdered before they got around to it.


And the experience taught the Jews not to rely on anyone else. Particularly for their survival. So they'll take aid from the US, they just don't count on it.


EDIT:
On top of which, if it hadn't been for the European Jews working on the Manhattan project, the Nazis might have got The Bomb first. So I'm not too sure who owes whom.

[Beetlegeuse]

Another interesting point is how the Manhattan Project Jews reacted to the surrender of Germany. They -- by and large -- didn't want 'their bomb' used against Japan. And were very vocal about it.

There was a perception at the time that this was a case of "it's no longer my ox getting gored," as if they only wanted the bomb used against Hitler because he was the one persecuting the Jews. But knowing how complex the Jews' view of the killing/murder thing is, it also could have been that the believed that an atom bomb only was fair play against the Nazis because they were working full steam ahead on a bomb of their own. Whereas the Japanese had (no Jews and) only a fledgling nuclear program. Which would have made the use of such a device against Japan 'murder.'

Complex and conflicted.



But the dying Nazi regime had sent an atom bomb care package to Japan.

On the 15th of April, 1945, U-234 set sail from Norway to Tokyo. Her cargo included 1210 lbs of uranium oxide (enough to make 7.7 lbs of "weapons-grade" U-235) and an ME-262 twin-engined German fighter jet, the plane that would have turned the tide of the air war in Europe, if the Nazis had managed to build enough of them.

U-234 surfaced on 10 May to check radio messages and received a blanket broadcast from Admiral Dönitz to all German submarines stating that German had surrendered and ordering them to surface, hoist a white flag and surrender to the first US Allied vessel to approach. Her skipper complied.

If U-234 and her cargo had reached Japan, and if the US had opted for a ground war on mainland Japan rather than nuking them, the war in the Pacific might have dragged on long enough for the Japanese to produce its own fighter jets. And maybe a nuke or two. Which could have made it a whole new game.

If there was such a thing as a "good Nazi," Karl Dönitz was one. He was both a gentleman and a sailor of the old school. To him the old rules of chivalry and the sea must never be forsaken, not even in time of war. At the war's end, a lot of men were spared from a needless death because of him. Still, the Nuremberg tribunal convicted him of war crimes, the most egregious of which probably was ordering the practice of "unrestricted submarine warfare," to include attacks on civilian vessels. Attacks on civilian supply vessels probably had been a standard naval practice ever since the invention of the warship but it did constitute a violation of the 1936 Second London naval treaty, to which Germany was a signatory. So he got 10 years in Spandau.


The 1210 lbs of uranium oxide mysteriously vanished shortly after U-234 surrendered at Newport News naval base. Not to belabor the point but it was only a short drive from there to the centrifuges in Oak Ridge, Tennessee's plant K-25. There is no official story of what happened to it but it is possible that the 7.7 lbs of U-235 in it made its way to Japan after all .... as one-fifth of the fissile material in the Little Boy bomb.



So we probably will never know how many lives Dönitz's orders saved, not just in the European theater but also in the Pacific.

[Obs]

For starters, the tendency of the Jews to be intellectuals far predates any association with Christianity. The Jews believe they have a mandate to be intellectuals because, as they like to tell it, when God rested after spending six days creating the world, he hadn't quite finished the job. So he left the final touches to his chosen people, upon whom it is incumbent to "punch above their weight," intellectually, to make sure they don't botch the job.

Then there's the matter of exile and the Jewish diasporas. The first time they were kicked out of their homeland was in the 8th Century BC, so very early on the Hebrews learned the wisdom of something my old Grandpappy told me: Always sleep with your britches where you can find them in the dark.

Because you can never tell when you might have to get up in the middle of the night and hit the floor running. And more than once the Jews have had to abandon everything they owned and leave with nothing but the clothes on their back. And whatever was contained in their brains. So they specialized in knowing how to earn a living using nothing other than their intellect. Which turned out to be a good plan because there have been a number of occasions when Jews were not allowed to own property. Which is why they have long have specialized in being banking and finance.

And speaking of Christianity, for most of their religion's existence, the Christians have been one of the chief persecutors of the Jews. The Jews, after all, did kill Jesus. And the descendants of those murdering Jews still deny him. And in denying the Christ they deny the Godhead, therefore they are Godless heathens. So they've got it coming. Several Popes (beginning with Gregory I) have endorsed their persecution.

Then there's the money-lending thing. Charging interest on a loan used to be a mortal sin under Christianity -- and still is under Islam -- so Jewish bankers served a vital interest (and Christians and Muslims alike reviled the Jews who grew wealthy from the practice). Ever read Shakespeare? The Merchant of Venice? Shylock, the money-lending Jew who demanded a pound of flesh from his Gentile customer for inability to repay a loan? Even the Bard hated the Jews.

For the most of the 2000 years the two religions have coexisted, their relationship has not exactly been ...cordial.


As for "what it did for israel and the jew in ww2," the US did very damn little. We only "rescued" them from the camps accidentally in the regular course of prosecuting of the war against the Nazis. And before that came to pass, 2/3rds of all European Jews already had been murdered.


We knew what was coming -- or should have -- after the Night of the Broken Glass in February of 1939. After "Kristallnacht" (and the escalating refugee crisis it precipitated), two US Congressmen introduced a bill into both chambers of the congress that would have allowed the admission of 20,000 Jewish refugee children under the age of 14.

The bill was prevented from coming to a vote in both houses.

In 1939 the MS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany with more than 900 Jewish German refugees on board seeking asylum in the Americas. First they made port in Havana but (under pressure from US Secretary of State Cordell Hull) the Cuban president refused to accept any of the refugees unless they had Cuban or American visas or were seriously ill. The St Louis left Havana intending to make port in Miami but the US never gave them an answer to their application to dock there. Instead Secretary Hull (with the foreknowledge of President Roosevelt) ordered the US Coast Guard to 'shoo' the St Louis away from US waters.

The St Louis sailed as far north as Nova Scotia but the Canadians refused them entry, too, so they returned to Europe. Neville Chamberlain agreed to accept 288 of them but the rest were settled in France and the low countries. Which got them out of Nazi Germany for the timebeing but left them in the direct path of the Nazi conquest of Europe. 254 of them ended up being murdered in the Holocaust.

German Jewish refugees delivered to our doorstep, free of charge, 900 of them, and we turned them away.

In 1976 a feature film was made about the Jews on the ill-fated MS St Louis titled, fittingly, Voyage of the Damned.

By 1941, months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the US knew a Jewish genocide was underway from two sources. The first came from decrypted Wermacht operational messages being sent by "clean-up" units following the Nazi advance toward Moscow in Operation Barbarossa. They were reporting killing hundreds to thousands of Jews who the front line units were bypassing by each time the Nazis advanced.

It was from these experiences that the Nazis decided that they should try performing executions with poison gas rather than shooting. Why? Because it was kinder. To the executioners.

The second source came from the Warsaw ghetto. In the fall of 1940 the Nazis had cordoned off a small section of Warsaw and imprisoned 400,000 Jews there. And the conditions there were essentially identical to what would come in the camps except they weren't yet killing on an industrial scale. But the Nazis already were killing Jews indiscriminately. And for sport.

By that time the Nazis were speaking to each other candidly in the presence of Jews because they had no fear of them passing any of this information outside of the ghetto. So they heard from the Nazis' own lips their plans for the mass annihilation of their people. They knew beyond a doubt what awaited them ... unless the Nazis could be stopped.

So the Jews 'allowed' some of their own to escape from Warsaw in the hope that their message would be heard and a rescue attempted. I use the term "allowed" because the Nazis were meticulous bookkeepers and every escape was followed by the retaliatory murder of dozens more Jews. So the Jews knew there was a price to be paid for the effort to alert the world to their plight.

One of those Warsaw Jews was Szmul Zygielbojm (Sch-mool Zee-gul-boim). Zygielbojm traveled to England and the US (where he spent 18 months) trying to alert the world to Warsaw's plight. In a 1942 interview on BBC radio, he said this:



But no one acted. At least no one who counted.

In April of 1943, the Nazis 'exterminated' the Warsaw ghetto. Zygielbojm's wife and older son, who had remained in the ghetto, were among those murdered. This took place during the 10 days of the Bermuda Conference, which the US and the UK co-hosted, and at which the participants agreed to do ...nothing.

On receiving the news of his family, Zygielbojm penned a letter to the president and prime minister of Poland in which he said:



He dropped the letter in the post, went home and took a lethal dose of sodium amytal in the hope that his death would bring notoriety and recognition to the cause.

But he died in vain because the Nazis still killed 300,000 of the Warsaw Jews, either by shooting or after being sent to death camps.

In April of 1944, two Jews escaped from Auschwitz carrying with them extensive details of the industrial-scale murder taking place there. Most convincingly they brought the label from a can of the Zyklon-B cyanide that the Nazis were using in the gas chambers. But again their warning fell on deaf ears because by the time their message had reached England and the US, the Allied invasion of Europe was under way.

The upshot was that the Auschwitz Jews were asking that the Allies bomb Auschwitz. Not the camp but the gas chambers, which were not in the camp itself but some two miles away in Brzezinka. But they naïvely believed that WWII bombing was so precise that they could bomb the gas chambers and not endanger the camp. The Allies did examine the question but decided against it entirely because it would have diverted resources from the greater war effort.

The Allies did in fact bomb Auschwitz, once, but that was the city, not the concentration camp. The target was an IG Farben plant engaged in the manufacture of synthetic fuel and rubber, both critical to the Nazi war machine. Ironically, a subsidiary of IG Farben also was the manufacturer of Zyklon-B but not at this facility.

The Soviets liberated the first concentration camp (Majdanek) on 22-23 July of 1944, and then another (Lublin) on the 24th. The Americans didn't stumble across a camp until Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.

When the Brits liberated their first camp (Bergen-Belsen) on 14 April, 60,000 Jewish prisoners were still alive, but there also was an outbreak of typhus. Between disease and malnutrition, more than 10,000 of them died in the weeks to follow despite having been freed.

So, yeah, the US was part of the effort that prevented the Jews being exterminated, I'm just not sure God was particularly thrilled that they allowed 6 million-ish of his chosen people to murdered before they got around to it.


And the experience taught the Jews not to rely on anyone else. Particularly for their survival. So they'll take aid from the US, they just don't count on it.


EDIT:
On top of which, if it hadn't been for the European Jews working on the Manhattan project, the Nazis might have got The Bomb first. So I'm not too sure who owes whom.

Christians and jews share parralells and christians pre christ were jews or gentiles.

Jews are accepted as Gods chosen people by christians.

Jews were punished severely by God, in the bible; every time they deviated from abrahams pact with God.

I dont expect you are the religious type and are most limely the scientific academic type so I wont get in a big religious discussion as I am sure you have already made the determination that it is a bunch of made up stories meant to control mankind via fear of hellfire.

I am sure this all happened happenstance and were are flying around the sun in a terrarium carrying smart phones of some chance and our own amazing intelligence that also is just by happenstance.

Without christians and jews there would be no europe or the US as it is today.

Atheism is the single leading cause of the worlds genocides 10 fold.

The thing that lays most genocide to rest is usually the bloodthirsty christians like myself with our message of forgiveness after we kill the people stirring the shit. (Jews stirred some shit a few times) So whether it was God punishing them or christians persecuting them.... I guess it had the same end effect.


Jews and christians are not the same but the duo simply controls the outcome of damn near everything.

Have you ever read the commandment god gave the jews?

Its boring as shit.
And no not the ten commandments.
Theirs is much much much more in depth.

Everything from cutting their weiners to what they ate to what their priest wore. Ffs a woman on the rag was to shut herself away from males.

Their original holidays are too much to remember.

[Beetlegeuse]

Getting back on topic ...

[Beetlegeuse]

Back on the topic of "Nowhere to hide," we know ISIS was so afeared of drone strikes that when they occupy a town they sometimes dig tunnels to connect the buildings so they can get about without exposing themselves to the light of day, then they dedicate a building to storing the soil they've excavated so it isn't obvious that they're tunneling. Except a building full of dirt is detectable on infrared, if you know to look for it.


I figure them DARPA guys are smarter than I am. Hell, they're smarter than me and anybody I know. It's 120 or so of the cleverest people on earth. Not just IQ-wise intelligent but fiendishly clever intelligent. Inventive sumbitches. So on the rare occasion that I have an idea, my default position is that DARPA had the same thought ages ago and already is working on it.

Case in point. Once upon a time, in a land far away, I was watching a video feed of American drones blowing up Islamo-Fascists. Then it occurs to me that the only point-and-shoot weapon we then had that we could fire from drones was the Hellfire, an anti-armor missile, so I knew that had to be what they were using to disassemble these guys.

There's 18-20 pounds of high explosive in a Hellfire's warhead. There's only 6-1/2 ounces of high explosive in the standard issue hand grenade (which has a "killing radius" of five meters), so 18 pounds of HE is a whole lotta overkill when used on what euphemistically are called "thin-skinned targets." I've seen guys hit on thermal video who were in a very cold place and after there were no hot pieces lying about. None. Nothing big enough to show on the thermal cameras. Like they'd evaporated.

For that matter, it's a 100-lb weapon flying about 1400 fps so the explosives are completely unnecessary. If they hit you with 100-lbs of marshmallows going 1400 fps, it'll kill you stone dead every. damn. time.

So at that moment (more than 10 years ago) I figured that DARPA had to be working on precision-guided weapons more appropriate to human-sized targets. Because they're much, much smarter than me.

And sure enough in the past few years, there have been several creatures of the Military-Industrial complex that were hawking their version of such a weapons system, some deployable down to squad level. I don't know how many of them originated in a DARPA program, but even if it was none it still validates the belief that I probably can't conceive of a weapon that the bright kids aren't already tinkering with.

The Israelis definitely have an inventive streak, as the Iron Dome anti-missile system (which the US is licensing from them) shows. And they already have a man-portable precision anti-personnel missile.

And the Norgies are no slouches. Their .50BMG Raufoss round, which explodes only after having penetrated a cinderblock wall, is an absolute must-have for anyone using the Barrett .50-cal rifle.

DARPA even came up with a Hellfire variant that I hadn't thought of. 20 lbs of HE used against a fleeing Land Rover can produce significant collateral damage so DARPA modded it into something jokingly referred to as "the flying ginsu," a tongue-in-cheek reference to TV telemarketer's "legendary" never-needs-sharpening ginsu knives. Because the Hellfire R9X doesn't have the customary explosive anti-tank warhead, in fact no explosives at all. It has six pop-out blades that rip through the target. Ergo the "flying ginsu" moniker.



I swear you couldn't make this shit up. It slices, it dices, it even juliennes .... (oh, wait, ...that was the Veg-o-Matic)

And there's one other weapon I've thought of that hasn't yet seen the light of day, but I know it has to be out there because, ...well, ... I thought of it. It's a kamikaze drone that knows what you look like.

It probably could be several people just as easily but the point is it has a digital map of a certain number of faces, and it flies around the battlefield looking for them. Just them. If/when it finds them, it flies into them and/or explodes when in their proximity. And if it fails to locate its target(s), it climbs to a safe altitude and self-destructs, preventing us making any of our 'friends' a gift of its technology.

Which further wipes out the batter's box between what's fair killing in war and what's an assassination.

In fact the whole drone thing frightens me because it's not secret technology, as was the case during the nukular arms race. This shit you can buy at Radio Shack. Or Walmart. There ain't no way to limit the spread. The only way possible to stay ahead is by ceaselessly out-developing all of your competitors. All of our big hitters (Honeywell, Raytheon, etc) already are making tactical anti-drone weapons. These already are being field-tested in southwest Asia:



The Battelle Drone Defender. It'd be nice if they'd make a civilian model, in case of terrorist attack. Or if you'd like to piss off Amazon/G**gle [pick one].

And I just thought of another one. The anti-anti-drone weapon. An anti-radiation missile specifically targeting anti-drone weapons so your drones can get through. Which would lead to the anti-anti-anti-drone weapons, targeting the HARM/ARM systems so your anti-drone measures still work.

Jeez, finally I might have got a step ahead of the bright kids, maybe I should copyright that one, just in case ....