Aug. 13, 2024: Walz on Hitler Imam: ‘Master Teacher’

Harris trolls Tablet with Jewish liaison pick; Reshaping the electorate; Israel ramps up arms production

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The Big Story

In the Aug. 9 Big Story, The Scroll reported, citing evidence uncovered by the Washington Examiner, that Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had officially hosted, on at least five occasions, an imam, Asad Zaman, who shared pro-Hitler content on Facebook and praised the Oct. 7 attack as Palestinian “self-defense.” Under Walz, the Minnesota state government also routed more than $100,000 in public funds to the Zaman’s nonprofit, the Minnesota branch of a group called the Muslim American Society (MAS) that was founded as an “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to U.S. federal prosecutors. 

In response to the original story in the Examiner, Walz, who has also been pictured with National Students for Justice in Palestine founder Hatem Bazian, strenuously denied that he had any relationship at all with the man he’d once invited to deliver the invocation at his 2019 state address. (Well, we say “Walz,” but Walz, like Harris, does not take questions from the media; rather, surrogates and anonymous campaign aides issue “clarifications” to friendly journalists to explain that, for instance, Walz “misspoke” when he said he’d carried assault weapons “in war” despite never serving in a war, or hat Harris no longer supports banning fracking, banning private health insurance, defunding the police, or abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, despite voicing support for all of those policies in the past and never personally walking back her prior statements or offering any justification for the apparently radical change in her views). In a Friday statement, the Harris campaign said that Walz does not “have a personal relationship” with Zaman. 

Case closed, conspiracy theorists! Except … except, well, on Tuesday morning, the Examiner published a video of Walz, as a gubernatorial candidate, praising Imam Zaman in extremely personal terms while speaking at a 2018 gathering of MAS. Here’s the video:

And here’s a partial transcript:

I would first of all like to say thank you to imam [Zaman]. I am a teacher, so when I see a master teacher, I know it. Over the time we’ve spent together, one of the things I’ve had the privilege of is seeing the things in life through the eye of a master teacher, to try and get the understanding.

Walz then discusses the 2017 bombing of the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, before moving to describing the “lessons” he had learned from Imam Zaman, among them to “go speak to people.” It was by speaking to people, apparently, that Walz learned he had unwittingly contributed to Islamophobia while serving as a congressman, as he then launched into a profuse apology for voting for a piece of 2015 House legislation imposing additional national-security screening measures on refugees from Syria and Iraq. 

“Imam Zaman is right on this,” Walz went on after concluding the apology. “There is Islamophobia. There is a hatred that is being stirred. There are people in leadership positions who are making this situation worse.”

But then again, maybe we’re being unfair. Whom among us doesn’t learn lessons from conversations with “master teachers” with whom we have no personal relationship? We hope that the Harris camp will issue another clarification shortly. 

Read the Examiner report here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Israel is on the verge of victory in Gaza, Andrew Fox explains, and Western media is incapable of understanding it

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The Rest

→Michael Doran’s Monday essay in Tablet described Obama administration veteran Ilan Goldenberg as playing a “very enthusiastic role” in the Biden administration’s interagency task force entrusted with crafting sanctions designed to topple the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Monday, hours after Doran’s essay went live, Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign named Goldenberg as its “liaison to the Jewish community.” As Joel Pollak reports at Breitbart, Goldenberg was born in Israel, but renounced his Israeli citizenship to take a job in the U.S. government, working under Obama on “the Iran file at the Pentagon.”

For a quick rundown of some of Goldenberg’s greatest hits, consult this post from David Milstein.

→Quote of the Day: 

“The surge in naturalization efficiency isn’t just about clearing backlogs; it’s potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” said Xiao Wang, chief executive of Boundless, a company that uses government data to analyze immigration trends and that offers services to immigrants who seek professional help in navigating the application process.

“Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency,” Mr. Wang said. 

That’s from a Thursday article in The New York Times on the Biden administration’s attempts to accelerate the naturalization process for lawful permanent residents ahead of the November election. Naturalization processing times have been cut in half since 2021 and are now at their lowest level in more than a decade. About 3.3 million people have become citizens since 2021, most of them from demographics that have historically “leaned Democratic,” according to the Times, and there are about 9 million more green-card holders who are eligible for naturalization. 

→Israel plans to begin domestic production of 2,000-pound bombs and 155 mm artillery shells within two to three years, according to a Tuesday report in Israel Hayom. The move, according to the report, is intended to get around the de facto arms embargo (aka “the Italian strike”) imposed on Israel by the Biden administration over the past 10 months. The Israeli Ministry of Defense recently announced large procurement deals with the domestic arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, a move that the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Eyal Zamir, described (translation from Hebrew via Google Translate) as “a wide-ranging strategic move … to establish production independence.” 

→Donald Trump and Elon Musk spoke last night on X after an hour-long delay caused by what Musk said was a major distributed denial of service attack against X’s servers. During the conversation, Trump backed the idea of Musk—whom reports have suggested could serve in an advisory role in a second Trump administration, serving on a “government efficiency commission” to track public spending—while the Tesla and X CEO attempted to convince the former president of the wisdom of taking action on climate change. Musk also offered his own rationale for his enthusiastic backing of Trump during the current election cycle (transcript courtesy of @charliekirk11 on X): 

I’ve not been very political before. … They try to paint me as a far-right guy, which is absurd because I like to make electric vehicles. … I supported Obama. I stood in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand. … Historically I was a moderate Democrat. But now I feel like we’re at a critical juncture for the country. … For the people out there in the moderate camp, I think you should support Donald Trump for president.

→Yesterday, The Scroll reported that Thierry Breton of the European Commission had warned Musk prior to the interview that the commission would be monitoring the conversation for “content that may incite violence, hate and racism” in violation of the European Union’s Digital Services Act. But it’s not just the Eurocrats: During a Monday night White House press conference, Washington Post White House reporter Cleve Wootson asked Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre what steps the Biden administration was taking to censor the political opposition:

Elon Musk is slated to interview Donald Trump on X tonight. … I think that misinformation is not just a campaign issue. It’s a—you know, it’s an America issue. What role does the White House or the president have in stopping that, or stopping the spread of that, or sort of, intervening in that? Some of that was about campaign misinformation but you know, it’s a wider thing, right?

Jean-Pierre didn’t discuss any specific measures but did offer Wootson a pat on the head, telling him, “It is incredibly important to call that out, as you’re doing.” And in Wootson’s defense, he’s merely following the lead of the Harris-Walz ticket: As The Scroll reported last week, Walz told MSNBC in 2022, “There’s no guarantee to free speech for misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” 

→Chart of the Day: 

That’s from a Monday article by Leor Sapir in City Journal on the unraveling of the medical consensus behind “gender-affirming” pediatric care (in July, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major U.S. medical association to publicly distance itself from the practice). According to Sapir’s calculations, taken from the national all-payer insurance database, between 5,288 and 6,294 “gender-affirming” double mastectomies were performed on girls under the age of 18 between 2017 and 2023, including between 50 and 179 on girls who were 12.5 years old or younger. Sapir notes, however, that this is likely an undercount, since it only tallies surgeries covered by insurance (the out-of-pocket cost for a double mastectomy can be as low as $3,000) and does not include cases in which providers have used false billing and insurance codes in states with restrictions on gender-affirming care, as a whistleblower recently told Christopher Rufo was the practice at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. 

→Of course, the claim that minors were being subjected to “gender-affirming” surgery was, until recently, officially considered “misinformation.” An August 2022 fact check from PolitiFact, for instance, rated as “mostly false” a statement by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that doctors were “chopping the private parts off of young kids” because, it claimed, it could find only two examples in the entire country of teenagers receiving “transition-related surgeries.” Indeed, the Biden Department of Justice is currently prosecuting a whistleblower, Dr. Eithan Haim, for revealing that Texas Children’s Hospital was performing “gender-affirming” procedures on minors as young as 11 years old, despite publicly claiming otherwise. Haim faces up to 10 years in federal prison for accessing medical records without proper authorization, according to the DOJ. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Yazidis’ Long and Winding Road to Justice, by Maggie Phillips

A decade after a genocide committed by ISIS in Iraq, a civil lawsuit in the U.S. against a French company finally offers survivors a chance for financial reparations

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The IDF’s Boot Is on Hamas’ Throat

At this point, the only obstacle to an Israeli military victory in Gaza is Washington

by Andrew Fox

There is desperation in Western media to declare Israel’s campaign in Gaza, Operation Swords of Iron, a failure. Over the past several months, there has been a steady supply of analysis beating the same drum: Israel is not winning. Hamas remains intact. The Israeli government has no plan. The very notion of a military victory is illusory. And so on. It’s a genre unto itself—one which, unsurprisingly, tracks precisely with the official talking points of the Biden-Harris administration and other Western governments that have been trying to bend Israel’s operation against Hamas to fit their own failed paradigms.

The latest installment came in last week, courtesy of CNN. An acme of the genre, the article cast aspersions on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim, which he made in his address before Congress last month, that “victory is in sight.” Instead, CNN claimed that of 24 Hamas battalions, only three are considered “destroyed” and another eight are combat effective, with 13 having only a “moderate” reduction in their fighting capability.

CNN was merely repeating talking points from months ago. In December, The Washington Post ran an article titled “Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas. Yet the group remains largely intact,” and NBC News published “Israel says it has degraded 10 out of 24 Hamas battalions and killed thousands of fighters. But Hamas is still fighting and its top leaders are still alive.” In May, CNN itself claimed that Israel’s military strategy was failing because the IDF had renewed fighting in northern Gaza, which raised “doubts about whether Israel’s goal to eradicate the group in the enclave is realistic.”

Never mind the veracity of such claims that demolished Hamas battalions are in fact still operational. The IDF, for what it’s worth, has dismissed them as false. The more important fact is that they are irrelevant.

The goals of the IDF operation are to dismantle Hamas’ administrative and fighting capabilities, which are almost entirely contingent on Gaza’s network of underground tunnels. The tunnels are the main focus of IDF ground-holding operations along the Philadelphi Corridor in Rafah, while IDF maneuver brigades strike Hamas wherever they coalesce. The IDF is having to fight a determined enemy that hides among and weaponizes the civilian infrastructure and population as human shields—all with the eyes of the world ready to condemn the slightest Israeli error. This takes time. It’s a long war against a consolidated and tenacious terror army. IDF sources I spoke to predicted another six to 18 months to finish the job, assuming no cease-fire is agreed.

This is not, and never has been, a counterinsurgency or counterterrorism operation—It is a conventional urban war against an irregular but fully formed terror army, with their own underground citadel. Yet many Western analysts are incapable of seeing the conflict through anything but the lens of post-9/11 operations. The refrain, echoing official Biden-Harris administration talking points, is that Israel should be doing what the West tried and failed to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, Israel needs to make sure it follows our lead and lose.

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The IDF’s way of war is not the West’s way of war. It is not designed, either operationally or logistically, to carry out protracted campaigns of attrition. It is a raiding army, and that is what its operational design reflects. It is not articulated in sequential phases in the way a Western planner would articulate a concept of operations. Rather, many of the following have occurred simultaneously:

Phase A was defense against Hamas’ incursion on Oct. 7; airstrikes; and evacuation of Gaza’s civilian population from combat zones.

Phases B1 and B2 were the Gaza City break-in. The IDF assessed this location as the Hamas center of gravity, which Clausewitz defined as “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.” Gaza City was Hamas’ power base, and the IDF plan was to destroy what Hamas capability it found.

Phase B3 was the first cease-fire and hostage return.

Phases B4 and B5 saw continued operations in Khan Yunis and northern Gaza, focusing on Hamas’ central battalions, and undertaking the Rafah operation to seize and clear the Philadelphi Corridor of Hamas tunnels. This is still ongoing.

Phase C will be to continue to dismantle Hamas’ administrative and military capabilities in those areas through intelligence-led raids. The second Shifa hospital raid in March was an example of this, which aims to create the conditions for administrative alternatives to Hamas. It is fair to say that this has not yet happened, and indeed, as I wrote in Tablet in May, may not happen at all.

Phase D will be to stabilize an alternative governance structure and maintain IDF freedom of operation within the Gaza Strip.

Each of these stages is underpinned by maintenance of operational freedom; humanitarian efforts; protection and return of the hostages (the IDF have a “no strike” policy where there may be hostages in any location in Gaza); and eliminating Hamas’ leadership where they are not using the hostages as their own human version of Iron Dome.

During a visit to Israel last month, the IDF Southern Command showed me designs for the whole Gaza operation. It is truly impressive: Hamas defensive positions were oriented from west to east, and the IDF operational plan outflanked them by coming in from the north, along the coast, and then turning east to hit Hamas from behind. In military terms, Hamas was completely dislocated.

Operations are, of course, severely hampered by the IDF’s remarkable efforts at civilian protection—a factor that condescending international media analysis either ignores or cynically uses as further evidence for the need to end the operation in line with Washington’s demands. The IDF has moved hundreds of thousands of people out of harm’s way, and it has sacrificed surprise to ensure civilians are protected. Of course Hamas fighters have moved to humanitarian zones along with the civilians. This is why they are “safer zones” rather than “safe zones”: The IDF reserve the right to strike Hamas fighters where they reasonably and proportionally can. It is unquestionable that the IDF’s extraordinary efforts to protect civilians have made the war far more difficult to fight. These are the actions of a moral army. The constant disruption and interference by a U.S. administration seeking a quick end to the operation have prolonged both the war and the suffering of the people of Gaza.

Hamas, by contrast, is a terror army, with well-dug-in and planned defensive positions among the population, a clear command structure, and a motivated and well-trained fighting force. The war has only been ongoing for nine full months. No other army in recent history has confronted an enemy of this nature. It is ludicrous and unrealistic to expect the IDF to fully dismantle Gaza’s government and military of 20 years in a few short months.

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It is also worth noting that Hamas, whether it still has cohesive battalions or not, has been unable to land a decisive blow against the IDF since the start of ground maneuver operations. The IDF has killed some 17,000 Hamas fighters, and Hamas’ senior leadership has taken significant casualties, including the group’s former head, Ismail Haniyeh, and before that, its top military commander Muhammad Deif. Those who are still alive are in hiding. The group’s battalion command structure is badly damaged. Their weapons manufacturing capability is diminished. They cannot launch a repeat of Oct. 7. The Philadelphi Corridor has been seized and the tunnels to Egypt are being dismantled. Importantly, Netanyahu’s office has stressed that Israel has no plans to cede control of the corridor.

At the start of the war, Western analysts and government officials told us that none of this could be done. In less than 10 months, this is an impressive achievement by the IDF, given the remarkable built-in defensive capabilities of Hamas. Finishing the job will take longer still.

What’s more, IDF combat operations in Gaza have led to an astonishing degree of operational freedom. The IDF’s 162nd Division, which led the charge in Gaza City and Rafah, has only lost four armored vehicles in nine months of fighting; 2,831 vehicles have been damaged by enemy action, but every single one has returned to the front lines. In the second Shifa hospital raid—a masterpiece of operational design—the IDF was on objective within 15 minutes of the start of the mission. It deployed Special Forces and killed 200 members of Hamas, and captured 600 more. Interestingly, the reason so many Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters were present in the first place is that the IDF applied both pressure and deception to encourage them back into the hospital, thinking it was safe.

The impact of IDF operations on the behavior of Hamas’ leadership has also been noteworthy, because the destruction of the tunnels is beginning to force them above ground. At the start of the war, senior commanders stayed inside underground; as of this writing, the 162nd Division alone has destroyed 1,635 tunnel shafts and 90 kilometers of tunnel network. The tunnels’ dwindling viability forces Hamas commanders to hide in the humanitarian zones aboveground instead, presenting the IDF with opportunities for high-value targeting—this is how Deif was killed—despite the difficulties of operating against the human shield strategy. The IDF will continue to strike in these zones when circumstances require it.

Hamas will fight for as long as its commanders remain in control. The IDF’s operational plan at this point is to force them to crack when they understand their own lives are in danger. The IDF has its boot on Hamas’ throat and will keep pressing until it quits.

This, in turn, is why Washington’s unrelenting campaign to force a cease-fire is so pernicious: It attempts to ensure Hamas will survive and have a vote in the outcome of the war. So far, Netanyahu has resisted the pressure, allowing the IDF to continue tightening the vise until Hamas is forced to agree to Israel’s terms for a cease-fire. Israel does not accept the artificial Western separation of diplomacy from military force, as if they were opposite tools with conflicting objectives. It is leveraging both toward the same goal.

The IDF is only midway through a gargantuan task. The job is far from finished, but it is making progress. At this point, the only thing that can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and ensure the survival of the Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist group on Israel’s border, is Washington.