Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel » Lynette Nusbacher

He’s not a wise fool. Hawking is a foolish savant.

Lynette Nusbacher — Sun, 12 May 2013 18:15:30 +0000

I didn’t play Sun City, not that anybody asked me. I didn’t drink Paarl wine. I didn’t eat Cape apples. I avoided South African products because Apartheid was wrong and I didn’t want my nice clean money in their filthy pockets. In the same context, I supported the Helsinki Watch groups and wore a bracelet [...]

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Palestine Isn’t a State. Neither is Google.

Lynette Nusbacher — Sat, 11 May 2013 13:57:15 +0000

We created Palestine, we British. A. J. Balfour famously wrote, ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. It wasn’t a state on the 2nd of November 1917, or even a League of Nations Mandate, but ‘Palestine’ was the common English name of the place. [...]

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Margaret Thatcher, Patron Saint of Disruption

Lynette Nusbacher — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:41:46 +0000

Opinion on Baroness Thatcher was undivided when I came to the UK in the mid-90s. Among people my own age she was considered more evil than the most evil thing that ever was. My contemporaries could not imagine voting Tory regardless of Conservative policies, so tainted was the brand by the wicked witch who had [...]

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Anonymous, Defend Your Brand!

Lynette Nusbacher — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:40:09 +0000

You can’t put your name down for Anonymous because it’s anonymous. Anonymous is not an organisation because it isn’t organised. Anyone can claim to act for Anonymous, and sometimes anyone does. Over the last two days, a second wave of cyber attacks on Israeli web sites has largely fizzled. Enthusiastic tweets rejoice today in claiming hacks [...]

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Saddam Hussein: My Part in His Downfall

Lynette Nusbacher — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:28:00 +0000

The day after I got my call up papers for the Iraq War I had a briefing to give. Still in civvies, in my role as a military academic, I stood up in front of the general in charge of the British Army’s doctrine and development. I predicted that the invasion of Iraq would be much like [...]

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Lord Ahmed needs to go down to the mosque and apologise.

Lynette Nusbacher — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:04:15 +0000

There is an ancient story about a Russian Jew in the Olden Days who saw his friend reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “How can you read that horrible forgery,” he demands. ”It’s an anti-Semitic tissue of lies by the Tsar’s secret police!” “Yes,” his friend replied. ”But when I read about how [...]

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Drones in America’s Dining Rooms

Lynette Nusbacher — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:48:28 +0000

Sen. Rand Paul blasted Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that drone strikes could be carried out on U.S. soil under extreme circumstances, with the Kentucky Republican suggesting that means Americans could be killed while they’re “eating dinner” or “at a cafe.” When I was a young Army officer, a drone was a drone. The [...]

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The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Ride Again in Tel Aviv

Lynette Nusbacher — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:18:11 +0000

Early this afternoon, on reading on Lyse Doucet‘s Twitter feed that Hamas had owned up to today’s bus bombing, I assessed that Hamas was making a big move. Immediately, Avram Piha, a blogging colleague here at Times of Israel, suggested that it could have been someone else. A wise man is our Avram, and we [...]

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Hamas goes to war

Lynette Nusbacher — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:44:51 +0000

The bitter joke going around Twitter this morning is that Israel didn’t invade Gaza, Hamas invaded Israel. It has been clear since the outset of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas that the insurgency in control of Gaza has felt that the time is right to increase the intensity and violence of its conflict [...]

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Hamas: Crazy or crazy like a fox?

Lynette Nusbacher — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:04:53 +0000

Until last week I assessed Hamas to be one of the most effective insurgencies currently operating. Apart from Hizballah it is difficult to think of one more effective. The question now is whether they’ve gone crazy, or crazy as a fox. Hamas was born in the days of the original Intifadah, when the PLO were [...]

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The German philosopher and the Gaza Strip

Lynette Nusbacher — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:05:18 +0000

Gaza and Clausewitz came together on Friday morning in my seminar room. This isn’t remarkable. I teach a lot of Carl von Clausewitz because that particular Prussian had a lot of very sharp things to say about war. He soldiered from the time he was a teenager, observed keenly throughout his life, and wrote his [...]

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Israel needed Obama to lose? Now there’s a swing State!

Lynette Nusbacher — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:56:34 +0000

I was at a briefing by General Itzik Mordechai in Jerusalem once, back when he was Officer Commanding IDF Northern Command. Somebody asked him, from out of a crowd of academics, whether he could countenance returning sovereignty over the Golan Heights to Syria if the US guaranteed that Syria would keep the Heights demilitarized. Never [...]

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President Obama’s most important speech, ever

Lynette Nusbacher — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 22:34:00 +0000

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, after Mitt Romney phones up to concede, Barack Obama will have to make the speech of his life. Like another Illinois politician who sat in the White House, Obama presides over a house divided against itself. The toxic narratives of the 2012 presidential campaign (many of which date [...]

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MEK is OK, Says Clinton. Times of Israel Says Nothing

Lynette Nusbacher — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 23:50:20 +0000

Up and down Sunset Boulevard there isn’t a dry eye. The Kodak Theatre will be sad and sober come March. From Culver City to Universal City the American film industry rues the day the Iranians chose to boycott the Oscars. Perhaps eleventh-hour efforts will avert this disaster, and shuttle diplomacy between the offices of the [...]

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One year on: Iran says they’re at war and losing

Lynette Nusbacher — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 23:40:14 +0000

It’s been almost a year since I posted on another site about the dangerous theater of confrontation between Israel and Iran. Iran has an imperative to confront, and Israel has an imperative to deter a serious threat. No change there. The big change over the past year has been successful American efforts to pressure Iran [...]

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