It didn’t take long for Hamas to come to power. The PLO wasn’t bloodthirsty enough for Gazans. Unlike the PLO, Hamas has never promised peace. The latest genocidal war follows 23 years of rocket attacks and terrorist incursions. Thus, the road to the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust goes back almost a quarter century. Islam will never make peace with those it calls infidels. It hasn’t since Muhammad’s conquest of Mecca in 629 C.E. Within 100 years of the Prophet’s death, his followers ruled an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the Indus River ― all conquered by the sword. In his classic “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington said future conflicts would not be between nations but religions and ideologies. Mr. Huntington wrote that whenever Muslim populations come in contact with infidels ― Jews, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists ― conflict is inevitable. “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Now the West is allowing mass migration from the Muslim world. Sweden has gone from the safest country in Europe to one of the most dangerous due to the influx. And the terrorists who committed unspeakable atrocities in Israel are infiltrating our borders. The siege of Vienna, the Mughal Empire, 9/11 and the latest Hamas atrocities ― it’s the same story.

As you watch scenes of horror unfolding in Israel, understand that this tragedy has been long in the making. You could say that the latest offensive had its beginnings in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter helped to overthrow our longtime ally, the Shah of Iran, and install what became one of the world’s most murderous regimes. There followed a quarter century of theocratic rule, the brutal repression of the Iranian people and Iran becoming the world’s chief state sponsor of terrorism. In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accord with terrorist chieftain Yasser Arafat, ceding control of most of the West Bank to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, have waged a relentless low-level war against Israel, even paying pensions to the families of terrorists who murdered Jews. Oslo was to be the first stage in a comprehensive peace process that never happened. In 2000, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon under the leadership of Prime Minister Ehud Barak. It went into Lebanon during the 1982 civil war, liberating most of the nation from Palestinian militants, until - under international pressure - all that was left was a security zone in the south to forestall future attacks. Finally, that buffer zone was surrendered, leaving Hezbollah in de facto control of Lebanon and betraying Israel’s Christian allies in the South Lebanon Army. The rockets coming from Lebanon today are a result of yet another monumental strategic blunder. Then there was the crowning catastrophe, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2000 under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad said that Iran had given its support to the Hamas terrorists. Iran reportedly funded and armed the terrorists and helped plan the attack. Israel faces a grim, long and hard fight that may become a two-front war. The terrorist group Hezbollah has fired mortars into Israel from Lebanon. This could be the precursor of a huge escalation of the Hamas war. That’s because Hamas and Lebanon-based Hezbollah are wholly controlled proxies of the Iranian regime. Some pundits and some Israelis are saying that Israel should wipe out Hamas for good. This idea gravely misunderstands the conflict, because there will always be Islamist terrorists whose objective is to wipe Israel off the map. If every Hamas member were killed, another group will rise in its place because this is, at its core, a religious war. This not only a religious war but also a political one based on a fiction that has dominated Western thinking about the Middle East for decades. The Palestinians are a perpetual victim class and nothing is otherwise permitted to be said. The Oct. 7 attack should disprove that fiction for good. The Palestinians are a protected class because Arab nations have found that they are a convenient political tool for them to maintain hostilities with Israel. Hamas’ attack sought not only to kill Israelis but also to assert Palestinian relevance. As the Abraham Accords proved, the Palestinians are irrelevant to peace between Israel and the Arab states. All Hamas can accomplish is to delay the normalization of negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

He had a static view of the world, where only small improvements in productivity were possible. Many of the current crop of greenies are latter-day Malthusians - only seeing limits to growth and hence the need for more population control. In chapter three of his book, “The Making of Modern Economics,” Mark Skousen has one of the clearest descriptions of the arguments and key players in the limits-of-growth debates during the past two centuries. Dutch farmers and others are now in widespread protest against so-called green policies that will destroy their ability to produce many foods. The bureaucrats who devise these policies are often ignorant about how food is produced, the effects of production limitations on prices, and the impact on lower-income people. The irony was that just as Malthus was presenting his arguments, the Industrial Revolution was underway. The steam engine - which was being commercialized - could power boats and trains, freeing man and animals from physical drudgery. Food could be shipped much greater distances without spoiling, thus allowing for more productive specialization in agriculture. Cyrus McCormick developed the mechanical reaper in the 1830s, leading him and his competitors to develop many other agricultural machines, greatly increasing the productivity. Robotic farm machinery is now being developed (and some of it is in use) that will enable farmers to prepare and harvest their fields without having to leave their homes or offices. The widespread use of chemical fertilizers and the genetic revolution is less than a century old. And scientists who have expertise in the field argue the potential is almost unlimited to produce healthier and more abundant food.

The increase in agricultural productivity was nothing short of amazing. One hundred and fifty years ago, the average farmer in the U.S. produced enough to feed three people; by the 1950s, that number had increased to about 75 people; by 2016, one farmer could feed 164 people; and now, some high-tech farmers feed twice that many. But the global and government bureaucratic elite neither understand nor care about the cost of food and energy. They still receive their salaries, which are usually adjusted for the inflation they caused, and other perks, including paid for travel. The great famines of the last 100 years have all been in authoritarian or socialist countries ― like Ukraine, Russia, China, North Korea and several African countries, where the governments killed property rights and free markets. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said it best: “In the terrible history of famines around the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.” Adam Smith (1723-1790), the founder of modern economics and a leading figure of the Enlightenment, and many of his followers were optimists. They believed economic well-being and governance would steadily improve. And then along came Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) and his friend, the great economist David Ricardo (1772-1823), with a much more pessimistic view. Malthus was an economist, theologian and philosopher who argued that the population would grow faster than the food supply, thus putting endless downward pressure on wages, as well as leading to periodic famines.

There was a revolt against the government of Sri Lanka, where the president was forced to flee the country. During the past half century, Sri Lanka became a global success story - from a poor country to a middle-income country with a very high literary rate. In part, this success was a result of embracing the agricultural policies of Norman Borlaug, the American agronomist, who was instrumental in developing and promoting high-yield agriculture, which ended famines that were not created by corrupt and incompetent governments. High-yield agriculture involves the proper use of chemical fertilizers and genetically modified seeds that are more disease resistant and greatly increase food production per acre. The World Economic Forum and members of the global elite, along with so-called eco-friendly and self-serving corporations like Google, Disney and JPMorgan, urged Sri Lanka to become a “net zero” nation. The government bought into the nonsense, banning the import of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which were used by 90% of the farmers, to encourage “organic farming.” The result was predictable - rice production dropped by 43%, and other important crops like tea and rubber were also seriously undermined in the rush to go organic. The U.N. has reported that more than three-quarters of the population have reduced their consumption of food due to shortages. Over the last 30 years, most of the world’s population has moved out of poverty due to low-cost energy and cheap food. Inexpensive food necessitates low-cost fossil fuels to serve as feedstocks for fertilizer and to fuel farm machinery, crop storage and transportation.

Specifically, Israel is pioneering the development of critical biotech and quantum computing advancements that China’s rulers are simply gaga over. There’s also Israel’s budding space sector, which China has already attempted to gain access to over the years. Israel is now a target of what David P. Goldman refers to as “Sino-forming,” which is China’s practice of remaking the world in its own image. It’s not that China wants to destroy Israel. It’s that it wants to pressure Israel’s leaders through China’s Iranian proxies into abandoning Israel’s alliance with the United States. In so doing, Beijing hopes to isolate Israel from its traditional allies and then force Israeli leaders to turn to China (and Russia) for help in keeping the nuclear-arming Iranians back from destroying Israel. The price of such a deal would be complete access to Israel’s high-tech sector. Israel would be absorbed in China’s growing Eurasian-and-African-wide trade belt that would empower Beijing at Washington’s expense. By fusing China’s impressive high-tech sector with the growing high-tech development sectors of Saudi Arabia and Israel, China would not only ensure its dominance of the geostrategically vital Middle East but would also become stronger in the ongoing race to dominate the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Beijing would effectively make the rest of the world dependent on Chinese-developed high-tech infrastructure in much the same way the Americans made the world dependent on American-developed high technologies in the previous two industrial revolutions. China is devouring the geopolitical system. After Beijing finishes eating the world, no one could stop Beijing.

China has implemented a deft strategy to peel the Middle East away from the United States. Many observers have fixated on the fact that China is doing this to lay claim to the vast oil and natural gas wealth that exists beneath the sands of the region. Certainly, this is true. Yet China’s plan goes much deeper than just control over fossil fuel. China wants to partner with and gain access to the budding high-tech development projects throughout the region. In places like Saudi Arabia and Israel, cutting-edge scientific innovation is underway that will directly affect the outcome of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the name experts have given to our current moment of socioeconomic development. It is the creation of new innovations. The nation that innovates the most in new domains will be the dominant superpower for the next century. Previously, the second and third industrial revolutions were dominated by the United States. This was the true source of America’s power and the reason why the U.S. has been the world’s dominant superpower for as long as it has been. Unfortunately, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China dominates 37 of the 44 key areas of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. China’s state-backed telecommunications firm, Huawei, has announced that it will move its Middle East headquarters to the Saudi capital of Riyadh. But that is just the start of China’s movement into the Middle East. Its true target is Israel. In the progressive democracy of Israel exists one of the world’s most advanced high-tech industries.

Mr. Xi should be proud to be recognized as a dictator ― indeed, the most powerful dictator in the world today. He is a Leninist, after all, and it was Lenin’s great achievement ― surely Comrade Xi sees it that way ― to establish the first “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Mr. Xi is also a Maoist, and when Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China, he called it a “people’s democratic dictatorship.” Don’t misunderstand the adjectives in that phrase. In the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist sense, a dictatorship is democratic because it empowers communists to do whatever they consider necessary to serve the people who matter: the proletariat, aka the working class. A priority task is to prevent the establishment of a “liberal democracy,” which would act in the interests of the bourgeoisie and other counterrevolutionary classes. Then there’s Mr. Xi’s pet bulldog, Kim Jong Un, the third generation of the North Korean dynastic dictatorship. Mr. Xi’s most important ally, however, is Vladimir Putin, who, over 23 years, has transitioned from Russian leader to Russian dictator. His rivals have ended up in prisons or graveyards. This leads me to briefly digress about Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose checkered career has included serving time for robbery, running a hot-dog stand, and amassing a fortune as a caterer to the Kremlin. More recently, he’s been the generalissimo of the Wagner Group, a private military company. Mr. Prigozhin was loyal to Mr. Putin until last Saturday, when he launched a mutiny. However, Mr. Prigozhin accepted a truce brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Cracks are emerging in China’s vaunted industrial policies. Although it has accomplished parity or superiority in manufacturing technologies, supercomputers, artificial intelligence, solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries, much of it is driven by protectionism, subsidies and technology theft. U.S. multinationals are finally getting smart. New foreign investment in China is at its lowest level in 25 years. More capital is leaving the country than coming in. China’s exports are plummeting, and it’s becoming more dependent on Russia ― not a great bet considering the impact of Western sanctions on the likely growth of that market. Through the first six months of this year, U.S. purchases from China were down 25% from last year, and its share of U.S. imports is down by one-third from just before former President Donald Trump took office. Coming off the COVID-19 lockdowns, China’s economy will expand about 4.5% this year, but in the future, Beijing will have to pump an awful lot of liquidity into its banks, trust companies and LGTVs to avoid a financial crisis. Eventually, that will turn the nation’s deflation problem into rapid inflation. In the near term, the impact on the major advanced industrialized countries is not huge because China has always been more hellbent on exporting than buying our products. Things are tougher for China’s South Asian trading partners, but as Western supply chains for products like iPhones move into that region, new and more open centers of growth will expand ― markets more receptive to U.S. and European exports and a sounder basis for interregional South Asian trade. Don’t sweat China’s meltdown. Leave the sleepless nights to President Xi Jinping.