The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Israel Fostered The Rise Of Hamas, Even After It Turned To Terror Deliberately undermining the peace process by eliminating acceptable counterparties BRIAN MCGLINCHEY Members of the Hamas al-Qassam Brigade at an event marking the anniversary of Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza  (EPA-EFE/Mohammed Saber via  Euractiv ) In the aftermath of Saturday’s terrorist and military attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  declared , “The forces of civilization must support Israel in defeating Hamas…In fighting Hamas, Israel is not only fighting for its own people, it is fighting for every country that stands against barbarism.” Those sentiments are quite different from ones Netanyahu privately shared in 2019. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,”  Netanyahu  told  Likud Party legislators. Doing so would help prevent the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority from r

  A Message to Donald Rumsfeld’s Ghost About My Known Knowns Edward J. Curtin, Jr. On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any  evidence  that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists.  Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.” He never said he had evidenc