Democratic Leadership and President Biden’s handlers are insisting that vote for President Biden as Democracy is at stake. It seems they are actually trying more to save Biden than Democracy. If they are really concerned about saving Democracy, then they should have eased out Biden and bring some new candidate as the grass root constituents are crying out loud. It also raises the question whether Biden himself is running to save Democracy or because of his son’s legal troubles as Trump is running to washaway his own legal troubles.

Biden’s handlers and Democratic leadership do not care if Biden has angered unnecessarily key constituents by his cold heart and callous response to deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, children, and babies, and refuses to say even few words of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians. Biden could have supported Israel and at the same time acknowledge Palestinians’ rights.

Biden’s handlers and Democratic Leadership is having an air of arrogance and is telling everyone we are keeping Biden no matter what, but Democracy is at stake and you vote for him whether you like him or not. We know you will do it, because you have no other choice. But there is always a choice. They are underestimating the power of resentment, anger, and insult of being disregarded. If many young, independents, Arab Americans, and American Muslims decide to sit out, it will have impact in battleground states and competitive congressional races.

(The article in NYT is unbelievable. Israel knew about Hamas plans of attack one year in advance, but ignored it. It is possible Israel may have even lured Hamas to attack Israel so that it can be an excuse to flatten Gaza, occupy it and have access to Gaza shoreline gas reserves. Perhaps Israel did not expect that Hamas could do so much damage. f.sheikh)

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.

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There has almost been too much to read since Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died on Wednesday. But I think the best obituaries and retrospectives on Kissinger have emphasized his paramount role in the spread of human misery across the globe, in the name of realpolitik and what he determined were America’s “national interests.”

Let’s start with Kissinger’s full participation, as Nixon’s national security adviser, in the decision to authorize the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia, during which the United States dropped more than 500,000 tons of explosives on the country, killing as many as 150,000 civilians. These bombings, which destabilized the country, played a role in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who went on to kill approximately 2 million people during his four-year stint in power.

Kissinger was also an architect of the U.S. effort to undermine the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. In the wake of the 1973 coup d’état that installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet at the head of a military dictatorship, Kissinger also pushed the United States to back the new regime, which killed, tortured or imprisoned tens of thousands of Chileans.

“I think we should understand our policy — that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was,” Kissinger said to his deputies, according to declassified transcripts, in the weeks after the coup. A few years later, in 1976, Kissinger would tell Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.”

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Thousands of children have been killed in the enclave since the Israeli assault began, officials in Gaza say. The Israeli military says it takes “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian deaths.

Barefoot and weeping, Khaled Joudeh, 9, hurried toward the dozens of bodies wrapped in white burial shrouds, blankets and rugs outside the overcrowded morgue.

“Where’s my mom?” he cried next to a photographer for The New York Times. “I want to see my mom.”

“Where is Khalil?” he continued, barely audible between sobs as he asked for his 12-year-old brother. A morgue worker opened a white shroud, so Khaled could kiss his brother one final time.

Then, he bid farewell to his 8-month-old sister. Another shroud was pulled back, revealing the blood-caked face of a baby, her strawberry-red hair matted down. Khaled broke into fresh sobs as he identified her to the hospital staff. Her name was Misk, Arabic for musk.

“Mama was so happy when she had you,” he whispered, gently touching her forehead, tears streaming down his face onto hers.

She was the joy of his family, relatives later said — after three boys, his parents were desperate for a girl. When she was born, they said, Khaled’s mother delighted in dressing Misk in frilly, colorful dresses, pinning her tiny curls in bright hair clips.

Through his tears, Khaled bid farewell to his mother, father, older brother and sister, their bodies lined up around him. Only Khaled and his younger brother, Tamer, 7, survived what relatives and local journalists said was an airstrike on Oct. 22 that toppled two buildings sheltering their extended family.

A total of 68 members of the Joudeh family were killed that day as they slept in their beds in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, three of Khaled’s relatives recounted in separate interviews.

Several branches and generations of the Joudehs, a Palestinian family, had been huddling together before the strike, relatives said, including some who had fled northern Gaza, as Israel had ordered residents to do. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

In the end, members of the family were buried together, side by side in a long grave, relatives said, showing footage of the burial and sharing a picture of Misk before she was killed.

Gaza, the United Nations warns, has become “a graveyard for thousands of children.”

Determining the precise number of children killed in Gaza — in the midst of a fierce bombing campaign, with hospitals collapsing, children missing, bodies buried under rubble and neighborhoods in ruins — is a Sisyphean task. Health officials in Gaza say that 5,000 Palestinian children have been killed since the Israeli assault began, and possibly hundreds more. Many international officials and experts familiar with the way death tolls are compiled in the territory say the overall numbers are generally reliable.

If the figures are even close to accurate, far more children have been killed in Gaza in the past six weeks than the 2,985 children killed in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N. tallies of verified deaths in armed conflict.

The Israeli military says that, unlike the “murderous assault against women, children, elderly and the disabled” by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israeli forces take “all feasible precautions” to “mitigate harm” to civilians.

Hamas, the military said, deliberately caused “the maximum amount of harm and brutality possible to civilians.” During the attack on Israel, parents and their children were gunned down inside their homes, witnesses and officials say, with children taken as hostages.

In response, the Israeli military says, it is waging a war “forcefully to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.” It notes that Israeli forces have told residents to flee to southern Gaza, and says that they issue warnings before airstrikes “when possible.”

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