Why are a few nattering nabobs of nitwittery on the far Left a indictment of liberalism in general? That's like saying Pat Robertson or (to update the analogy) maybe Andrew Tate or Marjorie Taylor Green is an indictment of conservatism across the board. Apparently they have broad tar brush sales in Hungary too. Meanwhile I have yet to see anyone remotely mainstream defend Hamas. The city of Baltimore-- not exactly a bastion of the GOP, just passed a (yes, feel-good) resolution saying "We stand with Israel". That sort of thing been vastly more common this week.
Rod cites loons in academia all the time. But nutpicking in academia is easier than in a Planters warehouse. Left-leaning commentators do the same thing trawling through the ravings in rightwing Christian bodies where crazy thing are said no less. I really am in the middle on this, and, yes, I decry loony-tunery of every and any sort, be it pompous profs praising terrorists or dim-bulb types speculating about locking up gays, liberals, and anyone else they dislike.
Just say No to nuts-- and then move on to more serious things.
"Nothing in Excess". It really is that simple. And for that reason I have my own complaints with modern day America, since excess is valued almost everywhere across many many tribes.
Is it this nostrum which has led you to refer to the murder of over 1000 people as a “dust-up” and a “fracas”? I fear you are either disingenuous or morally obtuse, although a third option occurs to me as I write this.
In any case, I shall decline to take your nostrum as my own, when I consider where it has brought you.
If your native language is not English I readily forgive your inability to place my words in their full context. Otherwise please work on your reading comprehension, and also learn a little Middle Eastern history.
From academia, the nuttiness, especially when aided and abetted by the faculty and unchallenged by the admin, it flows into society. Nothing good comes after that, except maybe eventually the contaminated universties being razed to the ground and something new coming in its stead.
"Where is the evidence of it flowing into society?" You mean, beyond the products of big entertainment corporations, policies from governement agencies, rogue elements of them doing the same? Prosecutors not doing their jobs, etc etc?
Mass riots lasting for months, with politicos and media types cheering it on and paying the bail of many a crininal?
When the SecDef of the new Administration orders a Department-wide "stand-down for white supremacy?" When the Joint Chief of Staff goes on about "white rage?" Leaders of a Pentagon that currently looks to be a whole bunch of stumblebums who can't handle their primary mission of warfighting and prepping men and women to do the same, so riddled and cowed by activists who despise the flag they salute and the Constitution they swear to?
Top on the conservative agenda at the state level should be the political equality of the professoriate at the state universities. If a state university has forty political science professors, twenty must be right-of-center or funding will be cut off. If the university has fifty history professors, twenty-five must be right-of-center or funding is cut off.
Complete agreement. Sure, they will then screech "ACADEMIC FREEDOM!", which you point out the fate of faculty, staff and students who are openly c onservative, or even worse (shudder) CHRISTIAN (GASP). So much for diversity, eh?
I would absolutely do this. Do it or your funding goes away.
Too many Republican governors and legislators spend all their time on tax cuts and cozying up to big business at the expense of helping mold the colleges. Most states have several state schools run partly on state funds. Conservatives should weaponize that.
Between Academia and Hollywood, almost all degeneracy and moral rot comes from them. Putin would be doing us a favor lobbing a small nuke onto Cambridge and New Haven and Hollywood. Just kidding, kind of.
The problem is that there aren’t just a few loons in academia. There are an awful lot of them. And what happens in academia doesn’t stay in academia. The amorphous consumerist hedonism of the later 1950s was weaponized by the intellectually self-conscious New Left of the early 1960s to launch concerted attacks on one after another traditional nongovernmental institution in American life. By the 1970s, those institutions were in bad shape—the family, organized religion, etc. were all on the ropes and have now been deformed out of all recognition. This happened not because of some impersonal, natural, organic process of cultural evolution, but of deliberate destruction on the part of culturally vigorous parties emerging from academia in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was the students who were reading Marcuse and his epigones who went into the education schools and sociology departments who ended up populating the burgeoning social service bureaucracies of the later 1970s and onward. These are people whose very livelihoods depend on the weakness of traditional institutions and Christian moral culture. No doubt you, like most, view the causation in reverse—that the weakness of tradition led to social service bureaucrats taking over, but that makes little sense if you think about it. No one was crying out for this or that bureaucracy like a thirsty man in the desert crying for water. No, supply creates its demand in a fundamental way and did here, too. I know that basic concept is anathema on the Left—the primacy of supply, but there is no argument against it other than blind assertion.
The death toll at Hiroshima was not. Officially 90,000 deaths were counted, but there were tens of thousands more missing, probably because there was quite literally nothing left to find of them.
The Nagasaki bomb missed its target by some distance, and the death toll was less, but still in the high five digits.
The number of impressionable college kids imbibing leftish ideas and behavioral justifications flooding out of the colleges and universities between 1965 and 1980 certainly did have a huge cultural impact on public schools and such professions as mental health, social work and the like.
We aren’t talking about the esoterica of deconstruction here, but education majors exposed to Paolo Friere.
I went ti the University of Michigan, a school noted for student activism. But I just had to look up Paolo Friere as I had never heard of him.
Unless one deliberately goes looking for crazypants leftwingery in a "grievance studies" department it's very easy to go through college without being much affected by any of that crap, other than to be turned off by it when some protest group gets up to annoying antics. I would say that the "mainstream" stuff they teach business majors has done vastly more harm to the nation.
Jon, something tells me you don't have much experience of universities. I've worked for four, three of them allegedly 'world-leading' institutions. This devilry is not marginal. It's a metastasised cancer.
Universities are hot-houses. Most of us go there (if at all- many do not) for a very few years, we look back fondly on some fun times, and then get on with our lives. As we should. I'm A-OK with criticizing a'holery, even vehemently and vitriolically, in academia, but there's a reason we have the metaphor of an ivory tower to describe college. We shouldn't see outcroppings of assinity in such a place as any sort of general sign of civilizational rot, any more than crazypants stuff coming out of certain churches is the harbinger of theocratic fascism decsending.
"We shouldn't see outcroppings of assinity in such a place as any sort of general sign of civilizational rot..."
This is just blatant whistling past the graveyard, turning your eyes from reality in order to maintain your pose as "serious" and "reasonable".
How else should we see the obvious fact that our cultural and academic institutions (esp the most prestigious) have all surrendered to "Critical Studies", which now that the mask has slipped, is obviously a program of anti-European hatred dedicated to demonizing our culture and history, dismantling our societies and excusing any barbarity from anyone considered a member of a Protected Victim class?
Does none of this really exist until Hamas parachutes into your window? Are you still at this late date claiming that the academic turn against free speech and free thought is a right-wing canard and these kids will grow out of it?
Would you then say that if one person anywhere in the US utters an outrageously wrong, blatantly false, flamingly outrageous comment about anything we are all doomed?
Come on, there's no shortage of foulness coming from the Right these days too, including from people in elected office, or in the running therefor.
The human race is a parade of fools, knaves and idiots-- but you can't freak out every time some such cretin rears his head and shoots off his mouth.
When it becomes echoed in media, government (legistlators, admin and bureacrats), culture makers like Hollywood, and so ingrained, to the point that even those in the hard sciences TRY to pander to it, even though all the math in the world denies them, and our armed guardians, police and armed forces do the same..to the point where to oppose it can get you fired from your job and a visit by armed agents of the state...yeah, it has become something to be concerned about.
Do you subscribe to Rod and then not read his posts but just comment?
We are living through the complete ideological capture of the entire Anglosphere by the ideology that calls itself "Social Justice"—and if you want to deny that, I encourage you to pick any institution in the West from the US Army to CBC to BBC to every single college and museum and see the identical language about "Diversity" "marginalized voices" "historical oppression" etc (which are all euphemisms for racialism and assigning people moral scores based on skin color)—which includes ideological litmus tests for hiring and the hounding of dissidents that's already far surpassed anything experienced during the Red Scare.
If you cannot see and admit to any of this, you're either dishonest or stupid, which makes engaging with you pointless either way.
And yet I am not descrying any utopias, only pointing out that the fearful preoccupation with the passing ephemera of the Here and Now, blinds you to much graver dangers.
no big deal, it's just that the seed of Critical Theory has left the university and germinated into the flower of a new religion that has captured the minds and deeds of our ruling elite.
it's not 2017 anymore. I used to be skeptical of professors like Peterson and Weinstein when they were warning about the new religion jumping the tracks into the mainstream. I always knew it was dangerous, I just didn't think the jump would happen, until 2020...
as Rod has said many times, our situation is similar to what Russia faced with its late-19th-century Nihilists...a generation where the best educated become committed to destruction in the name of "Justice" and a liberal class too impotent to disagree or offer any serious pushback.
this is just the beginning of a very ugly time that looms up ahead...
38% of Democrats support the Palestinian Authority (backers of the PLO).
Democrats are equally likely to say they support either Palestine or Israel.
Those identifying as "liberal Democrat" have a 15 percent differential in support for Palestine vs. Support for Israel (example: 40 vs 55 with 10 percent undecided - the article is not specific on the percents).
I think everyone who accuses the right of being anti-Semitic should see the tremendous support for Israel in these polls.
*****Rod Dreher is right to point out the problem with the far left and its support for Palestine.*****
Is Rod saying they all want to chop babies heads off? No. But he is saying it is a problem, not just a "few academics".
I've replied to you, James, though I know you agree with me, in order to keep my thoughts within this sub-thread.
Surely one have some sympathy for the Palestininians. And US foreign policy should be something that is Made in America, not on Jerusalem (nor in Riyadh)
Rod, you are beloved, as is Jon, but I don’t think Jon is saying he wants Hamas to start an insurgency here while he turns a blind eye to their violence.
It is Israel’s choice to deal with this as they will, but as Christians, we cannot cheerlead war. Yes the Israelis must defend themselves and protect innocent lives, but it is their war, not ours. Like you, I agree we should not be committing cultural or literal suicide here by allowing massive, unvetted immigration of potentially dangerous people; that is our responsibility and we should not turn into an occidental version of what is going on in western Europe. That said, over there IS over there, geographically and culturally. It should stay there. Founding fathers, founding fathers, founding fathers. Peace.
I have zero affection for terrorism, and elsewhere I have affirmed that Israel must crush Hamas- but that should not turn into a general bloodbath of the population.
I suspect it would be more the case of us tied to stakes with evildoers lighting fires at our feet and Jon in the crowd assuring us that it’s not a problem.
The American Left and the American Right are both large coalitions of different factions, each with their own causes. Can you deny it? There's no such thing as a typical Leftwinger or a typical Rghtwinger.
Some of us here, certainly me, certainly Rod, and certainly many others believe we have seen civilizational decline to the extent that we believe civilization as we have known it will fall.
If you have read my comments here you should know I see catastrophe off a ways in the future, and of a magnitude that could easily blow away our Constitution, indeed our nation itself, and leave strife, anarchy and perhaps eventually tyranny as people become desperate enough to trade freedom away. But not yet, not today.
Oh, and the bad news is that any attempt to prevent it will simply trigger it, as in good old Greek tragedy.
I am not Polyanna. I am Cassandra-- and like her my prognostication is scoffed at or simply ignored.
Ok. Point taken. The problem is that the lefties so highly populate higher Ed. And the powers that be in higher Ed don’t seem to care, but reward such folks.
But what do we DO, Rod! Does anyone have an action list of how to actually fight this? Short of "write your Congressman"? I'm not being flippant. I NEVER do protests, but I would over this issue. I just don't know how.
its very difficult because it is so institutionalized (in the academy, in major corporations, in government. For universities, it could be combatted by funding denials to anti-liberal universities by the federal government. Not easy to accomplish. At a local level, the growth of activist conservative organizations of not only students but also local community members to monitor and combat leftism on campus. Additionally, there could be more civil rights law firms on the conservative side to battle institutions over anti-conservative discrimination.
That a man of such low caliber and obvious hatred for the white race like Tommy Curry could be hired at Texas A & M and the University of Edinburgh shows me a civilization that is no longer confident. The Texas A & M of Eisenhower's age or the Edinburgh of Churchill's age would never had hired such a loathsome creature. It should be part of conservative governance at the state level to bring political equality to the academy. If a state college has fifty history professors, half must be right-of-center or funding should be cut off. We must be ruthless. Conservatives have been sleeping at the switch when it comes to education.
in the US, this situation goes back decades. Allan Bloom wrote about it in the late 80s in his book: The Closing of the American Mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind/. At this point, these forces are so entrenched, that it would likely take a century to change the situation with concerted action of donors, politicians, bureaucrats, alumni, etc. It seems highly unlikely a mass movement of that kind on these issues would or even could occur.
What can we do? (1) Pray (2) Tell people (here and elsewhere) who support anti-Semitic rhetoric that they are wrong. (3) Make friends with Jewish people and tell them that you support them. (4) Give to Jewish charities such as Jewish World Relief. (5) Let any group or cause you are involved with, e.g., a university, that you will not donate if they support Palestinian terrorism. (6) If you are Christian, ask your pastor to state support for Israel from the pulpit if that has not been done already. (7) Perhaps take a leadership position in your denomination – even just a parish representative to regional meetings - and put forth resolution in support of Israel. (8) Teach your children and young people that the Jewish people have a right to a homeland and Palestinian terrorism (like any terrorism) is always wrong. (9) Insist that your political party's platform support Israel.
One more - oppose support for Iran. Oppose the present administration's direction. They are fools who give money that ensures Iran can continue to give millions to the terrorists they support (by redirecting their social funds to terrorism since we are not giving them "social money").
Re: If you are Christian, ask your pastor to state support for Israel from the pulpit if that has not been done already.
While you have some good ideas, I'm not sure I would support the above. The Church should not be a place for political preaching. More appropriate would be a position against all forms of political violence no matter who is doing them: a moral statement well within the Christian tradition.
This is self-evident, Ken. I'm talking about the practical steps after that. Politics not grounded in Christ will never lead anywhere, but politics grounded in Christ still requires political knowledge and acumen, which I lack.
I'm supremely uncomfortable taking sides in what is just the latest episode in the long-running conflict between Arabs and Jews. Whilst my first instinct as a European would be to take the Israeli side, having a lot in common with the people who founded Israel, I have also noticed that this terror attack by Hamas has been gleefully used by some on the right to call for the genocide of Palestinians in pretty unequivocal terms. It also seems to be Israeli policy to enact another Naqba and drive out the remaining Palestinians from Gaza in a steamroller move, probably forcing them into Egypt or into their deaths. I cannot condone any of that and I'm appalled that some so-called Christians in the US are apparently baying for blood and are calling for the eradication of an entire people. The rank hypocrisy of not calling out Israelis for doing far worse things to the Gazans than the Russians ever did to the Ukrainians is also galling.
Apparently, when Russia cuts off power and water to the Ukrainians and forces them from their homes, bombs schools and religious buildings, it is a war crime, but not when Israel does it in their own territory. I personally just cannot deal with the double standards in the West regarding this issue. Whilst I'm not taking sides and both are pretty awful, it's pretty clear that Israel is hardly in the right here and has to take some of the blame for the situation in Palestine deteriorating to the extent it has. They elected a far-right government and have made no effort to stop settlements on appropriated Palestinian land for instance.
I have a very poor opinion of, and deep concern for, the people of both sides. I don't think Israel the modern state was a good idea, and I don't think it can last, surrounded by people whose men are willing to give their lives to destroy it and whose women are engaged in womb-battle - the demographic strategy. That said, I hate how Israel supporters lie about how Jews have always lived there (in small amounts, mostly yes they have, but so what?) As for the Palestinians, all they had to do was pretend to convert to Judaism the way the Jews pretended to convert to Christianity when the Catholics took over Spain. Or, as the Israel supporters rightly point out, they could move to other Arab countries, if other Arab countries would have them. Fighting over land costs too much, in terms of human destruction. It isn't worth it. And when I drive down the street, I look forwards, and a bit to the side. I don't look backwards. Everyone agrees this is the best way to drive. And yet when they look at policies, they look backwards, and sometimes lie about what they see in the rear view mirror, so to speak, to justify their chosen policy. I disagree with this. What is happening to the Israelis is barbaric, awful. What is happening to the Palestinians is also heartbreaking. The only way I see for this evil to end is for one side to win, and if it is the Palestinians/Arabs, may the US and Europe open its arms to the Israeli refugees. And if it is Israel who wins, may the other Arab lands take in the Palestinians and give them full citizenship. Both the Koran and the OT are quite clear that God does not want us to sacrifice our children to Him or to idols; no children should be sacrificed for a "country." And when I see this vitriolic hatred of Jews at supposedly pro-Palestinian demonstrations, it strikes me as backwards - they are supporting Israel's continued existence by showing that the world outside of Israel hates them. My heart breaks for both sides.
I broadly agree, though I would add there is a third option, which I would brand the Mandela option or the dreaded one-state solution. Israel could end apartheid and give the Palestinians full citizenship and allow them to participate in elections. I believe they are the majority in the country now (Israel+occupied territories, formerly Palestine), so they would probably end up running the country, just as blacks did in South Africa after 1991. Problem is, that probably wouldn't work for various reasons, just as it really hasn't in South Africa, mostly to do with the revolutionary marxist roots of the ANC. Same problem with any Palestinian party that would end up running the country, most probably they'd be an Islamist one at this point and would utterly ruin the country in short order, forcing Jews to leave anyway.
Yes, in theory that is an option, but I agree with you that it wouldn't work, for the reasons you mentioned, and because their is so much hatred at this point between the factions. Another reason I might be considered slightly pro Israel is because if Hamas were able to get the Israelis to leave (hopefully, I don't want to consider the other option - genocide) the Palestinians would begin fighting amongst themselves - who gets the former Jewish homes which had been Palestinian homes prior? Or the Jewish homes built on land that was once Palestinian occupied? The returning refugees' grandchildren? Or the top Hamas fighters? Governance is fragile, and the Israelis have a system that works pretty well. Human organization is so precious and fragile and hard to create, that I think more people - Arab people - will die if the Israelis leave. Inertia is often underrated.
Agreed that my approval is irrelevant, as is yours. Biblical and archeological evidence speak to ancient times; in the 1850s the Jewish population in Palestine (historic Palestine) was about 3% and by 1922 when the British had their first census of the area, 25 years after the Balfour Declaration, Jewish population had increased to about 11%. I remember reading in a book by Karen Armstrong that at one point there was only one Jewish family in Jerusalem. And the argument that the "Arabs got there later" is likewise disingenuous. The Arab conquerors of Palestine did not displace the inhabitants, rather, they Arabized them. In American jurisprudence we have this concept called adverse possession . . . My Jewish great grandparents had been in Eastern Europe for a very long time, but left to avoid being murdered in the pogroms. It doesn't give me a right to go take back whatever land they unfairly lost when they fled. History is tragedy, and justice is what wise men aim for and fools chase. But, as I explained above, to me this is irrelevant with regard to moving forward. Israel exists, and therefore it is unwise to try to destroy it.
No one is hand-waving away "ancient times." I was merely stating that the assertion that Jews have ALWAYS lived there is not true in any meaningful sense. The fact (which I concede here for the point of argument) that Jews lived there in ancient times does not mean that they have ALWAYS lived there. The fact that they were 3% of the population at one point, 11% at another point, means that even if Jews controlled/populated the land at one point, they did not ALWAYS live there in any meaningful sense. Rather like if I said I was born in Tennessee and have a birth certificate and witnesses to prove it, and I have always lived in Tennessee, and someone said but hey I knew you when you lived in Alabama for 20 years, I couldn't argue "But I have proof that I was born in Tennessee! You can't handwave that away!" To further "complicate" the analysis, we have to ask "who is a Jew?" My understanding is that the Jews who were massacred by the Western Christians during the Crusades were Karaite Jews, not Rabbinic Jews. Rabbinic Jews were not happy with Karaite Jews, is my understanding. Can Rabbinic Jews, or rather, secular atheists from the Rabbinic Jewish tradition (as most Zionists were) use the former presence of Karaites (and continuous presence of Samaritan Jews) to justify violating the Talmudic injunction to wait for the messiah who will usher the Jews back to Zion? Do you really value human life so little that these questions ever matter? (I'm only persistent in trying to lay out basic facts and questions because I think dishonesty muddies the waters and makes everything worse. As I've made clear to people capable of reading calmly, I am not arguing for the destruction of Israel.)
"I'm not arguing for the destruction of Israel." Their history with the region, regardless of the wax and wane of the numbers. goes back at least 3 thousand years. At least. The history of Islam is not nearly that long. The Israelies have made it clear, you leave them alone, they leave you alone. The same cannot be said about their enemies.
When one begins pleading in the name of "human life", that is an inconvenient fact that cannot be ignored.
Fact is, Israel is not going anywhere. The rest is up to their neighbors. It is really that simple.
Maybe you can point to an objective real source of “Christians in the US baying for blood and calling for the eradication of an entire people” but that seems completely false and libelous to me. I have only heard sadness for Israelis and Palestinians and deep anger towards Hamas. And as horrible as this is for Israel, the 98% or so of Palestinians in Gaza not part of Hamas may end up suffering the most from this. I find your comment above unbalanced and inaccurate at the very best.
There were a number of other on the US far-right and even more in Israel, which is the more worrying one. This kind of dehumanising rhetoric, referring to them as animals to be eradicated, is generally a precursor to genocide. Rod wrote about in his article about the language of disgust. Now, technically it is ambigous whether the people in question were referring to Hamas or the Palestinian people in general, but it sure looks like they are talking about the latter.
I don’t see how any fair reader of that quote could say that. He’s clearly talking about Hamas and accurately. The biased new republic tries to imply he’s talking about everyone, but that’s absurd so to a fair reading of his statements. And hamas for the record deserves to be discussed in that manner. Murdering innocent civilian children, infants, women and elderly is the province of evil barbarians.
True that. Christians in this country clamoring for vengeance, carte blanche for an Israeli response to wipe out these people disgusts me almost as much as what Hamas just did. I am not on anybody’s side because they are all bad. I also find it odd that conservative Christians in the US fawned all over Israel (which is a woke nation in large part- see Bibi’s invite to the acronym marchers a couple years back) even before this massacre, yet at home rage against the LGBT movement. Much of this to me is beginning to look much like the “don’t let a good crisis go to waste.”. Israel fences in 2 million people, the Hamas fighters break out, slaughter innocent Israelis, Bibi gets newfound support despite serious opposition politically, a massive retaliation destroys Gaza and many innocents (not to mention deaths of Israeli soldiers), US defense firms’ stocks head skyward, and who knows, maybe the psychopath neocons get their war with Iran. Even better. Violence begets violence begets violence.
PalestinianChristians and other Christians in the area get the short end of the stick. They’ve been putting up with oppression from both sides of this conflict, most recently having their holy places desecrated by Zionist fanatics. But the Christians don’t rate an honorable mention. BTW, Jewish Israelis dressed up as Priests to test this out and were accosted in public. Who speaks for them?
America should do nothing but broker humanitarian support and push for a cease fire. I’m not buying the “you can’t work with terrorists...” argument because we sure did, and still do in Syria.
O I know all about the USS Liberty. But about Operation Cyanide? That was pure diabolism and apparently involved potential nuclear destruction of Cairo. The Liberty was to be the casus belli, with Egypt blamed for its sinking. Whether that history is true, I don’t know, but the attack being deliberate cannot be disputed.
Is this the interview his son Aaron did with his father? It's excellent. Just listening to Gabor's calming voice and overall equanimity should be sufficient to diffuse the crisis not to mention the substance of his perspective.
Dude - no matter how you slice it, Hamas exists to eradicate jews and israel from the face of the earth. They dont give a shit about palestinians. They use them as bullet-catchers.
You're kidding, right. Blaming Israel for being attacked? That's absolutely preposterous, and offensive.
Israel has cut off services to Gaza because they're in an existential war. They're literally fighting against people who want to see them all dead - people so evil, they'll kill you even if you're not Jewish. If you're Thai or Phillipino, or French or whatever, doesn't matter, they'll just kill you for the crime of being in Israel's borders.
And to top it off, they're *forcing* Gazans to remain in the north, to be killed by the IDF. That's who they are, and Israel is awakening to the proposition that they were never dealing with people operating in good faith. You don't give those people power and water, you show them the pointy end of a missile. Anything less is to be complicit in your own destruction.
"You don't give those people power and water, you show them the pointy end of a missile."
It sure sounds like you're referring to the Palestinians in Gaza here and not just Hamas. Whilst admittedly, Hamas is their government, this is my precise problem with the bloodthirsty language being employed by so many on the far-right. It is ambigous who "those people" or "they" are but people can sure read between the lines. It's a classic dog whistle.
I'm not blaming Israel for being attacked, just pointing out it was inevitable the Palestinians would eventually find a way to hit back at them given the policies of the government in the last several decades. That it happened in this manner, with a terror attack targeting civilians is despicable, but to say the Israeli government is unaccountable and has played no role in the situation getting to where it is now, would be absurd.
'Those people' = Hamas. And as I said, they're forcing civilians to remain in the IDF's path. So Israel is going to target 'those people' and civilians will be in the way, which is Hamas' responsibility.
Israel played no part in being attacked. It is the only functional democracy in that part of the world and it did everything but lay out the doormat for a peaceful settlement with Hamas. It gave Palestinians workers visas. It was providing free electricity and water to Gaza. The latter was needed a) because Hamas was more interested in purchasing weapons to kill people, and b) because the pipes they were given for water were turned into rockets. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and they elected Hamas, which hasn't held an election since.
All you're doing is victim blaming. Given the atrocities that occurred, it's heinous.
That's a very one-sided view. And that's my problem. You have to be able to see both sides' (Israelis and Palestinians) point of view. None of this is happening in a vacuum.
I've never heard of a "victim" being able to shut off their "oppressor's" food, water, and electricity.
When Russia used similar tactics on Ukraine, they were said to be committing war crimes. I guess Israel has a different set of rules than the rest of us
Well one difference is that Israel was invaded by Hamas. Russia wasn't invaded by Ukraine. Another is that Israel is tiny and surrounded by an ocean of potential ethno-religious enemies, whereas Russia is colossal and clearly the dominant military force in Eastern Europe. A further difference is that Israel (as a people) has a history stretching back thousands of years of being pushed to the brink of extinction.
And if that's not justification enough for a zero-sum mentality on behalf of the Jews, then we can talk about the war crimes you mentioned. Here, let me show you some pictures from last weekend's attack by Hamas.
Israel also has the backing of the largest military power in the world in the USA. Furthermore, the people of the West Bank have been slowly displaced by the encroaching Israeli forces since the mid 20th century (look at a map of Israel in the 60s vs today).
Furthermore, Israelis have zero claim to the land around Jerusalem. Zero, zilch, nada. If anything, the holy land is the rightful property of the Catholic Church, as well as the native Christians living in the Levant. Speaking of which, many of those Christians have had their own babies murdered by Israel.
I listened to a long lecture by Ian McGilchrist yesterday, and this leftist habit of treating human beings as fungible parts of a group or category seems like the left brain's modus operandi. I'm not entirely sure that the leftists here in America hate the Jews *as* Jews so much as that they hate the Jewish claim of concrete specificity, which probably hurts their heads. It's a similar thing with the cruelty that you mention: they appear to have turned off the right-brain comprehension that would be required to see what exactly is wrong with their moral picture.
Personally I think McGilchrist is wrong about some very fundamental things about the nature of reality itself so I have a hard time taking him seriously.
I'll take a look; I'm not really familiar with his work other than what I've read about here on this blog, which has seemed fascinating enough. The lecture was mostly on his theory of cognition, and I found it insightful in terms of explaining how abstraction has triumphed over enchantment in our world.
Checked it out. Hm, I'm not sure that McGilchrist is saying that we're co-creating reality per se. It seems to be more that whatever is metaphysically "real" must be phenomenologically received by our consciousness as "meaningful". (I sometimes describe this polarity as solar fact versus lunar meaning.) And when the fact is received by our consciousness, it gains a dimension of meaning that it did not have before—which may or may not add to its previous reality. I don't think he's being a subjective idealist, although I'll need to look into it further.
He has not objected to being described as holding idealist metaphysical views. With regard to co-creating reality here is McGilchrist in his own words:
Whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever-it-is. By this I do not only mean the common sense view that I have an impact on the world, as the world has an impact on me: that I leave my footprints. That would lead immediately to the reflection that I am very small in relation to the world, and so effectively my impact is so small that for all intents and purposes it can be ignored. There is, it might seem, an inexpressibly vast universe and an inexpressibly tiny individual consciousness. Such a reflection seems to posit an objective position – the view outside of history or geography, time or space – a view from nowhere, in which all can be measured and compared. It implies a Measurer of all the measurers, measuring the other scales and putting each part in its place according to its overall worth. But though that cannot be, the alternative is not just a merely subjective position, either: this very polarity – subjective/objective – is misleading. In the fado, in the raga, in jazz, it is what it is because of me, and I am what I am because of it.
This is why he is not and can never be an orthodox Christian, although Rod likes to think McGilchrist has flirted with the idea.
Actually, I think I like that—it sounds almost Blakean. And in that lecture, McGilchrist briefly described himself as a panentheist, which I consider a very proper Christian metaphysics. In my view, your quote from him is fully consistent with my previous comment: it's the paradox of solar spirit reflected in lunar consciousness, which is a co-creation in that every relationship is a co-creation. But I will admit that I'm also rather indifferent to whether his perspective is "orthodox" enough by any given definition.
With respect to idealism: I would say that it is obviously correct if all it suggests is that consciousness (or spirit) is primordial. "In the beginning was the Word" is philosophically idealist; and Platonic realism essentially is a type of idealism, the opposite of materialist realism, so at some point it also becomes a language game. I think that the degenerate slide from idealism to solipsism is a strictly modern problem, not intrinsic to the premise.
Well, it's tough to support the proposition that we co-create reality with God from a biblical perspective. It's pretty clear right from Genesis that we are created beings. There is nothing that we truly create in this world, given that all the matter that exists has been here from the big bang. We can participate in creation but we don't co-create it. "The Lord knows the thoughts of man, that they are but a breath."
I'm a fan of Aristotle over Plato personally. Following after Aristotle, St. Thomas had a brilliant conception of how consciousness works that can align well with a material realist view. I realize many religious people shy away from material realism because they think it necessarily excludes the supernatural but it really doesn't have to. Realism is just the view the world outside ourselves exists and that we can know it as it is and are able to reliably reason about it. (This is different from the moderate realist view which refers to forms, which I also share.)
Idealism definitely does not merely suggest that consciousness is primordial. As I quoted in the essay, "the idealist denies the mind-independent reality of matter". Though McGilchrist denies his view is purely subjective, given the definition of idealism it's very hard to see how it could be anything but essentially subjective.
I'll just add that subjectivist views need not necessarily go all the way to solipsism to cause problems. It is impossible to find any grounds for a shared morality, for example, under an idealist view.
My view is that God made us in His image, and He is the Creator—and therefore, He made us as creators, destined to cooperate with Him in the Creation. I'm essentially a Romantic at heart, who believes that our creative powers can and do partake of the divine nature. Every poem or insight or love is a type of new creation, insofar as *that* specific relationship between the Holy Ghost and a living soul has never happened before and will not recur: a genuinely new thing under the sun.
I understand how you defined idealism, but my opinion is that it is narrow and inaccurate: that isn't what idealism necessarily does. Also, as a practical matter, it is very difficult to find grounds for shared morality in any case. Even granted that objective morality exists, all kinds of people have all kinds of different ideas about what that is or how it should be applied in any given case. So, I think it's more useful to focus on a sort of consensus or harmonization of spirits, granting that we only reach true spiritual objectivity by each of us digging all the through to the far side of our own subjectivities. When we attempt to short-circuit that process, I find that we usually just become very rigid and dogmatic about our own subjective perspectives on objective Truth, which is not good for anyone.
Critical Leftists don't necessarily hate Jews they hate WHITE PEOPLE, and consider all Jews white, esp considering that Israel is a creation of European colonialism.
Critical Leftism, if you haven't noticed at this point, is a program designed to cover white people with so much shame, guilt, scorn and hatred that they either convert (to some form of "allyship" aka submission) or become second-class citizens, too cowed to speak.
The goal being the same it's been for the Left for at least a century: to replace liberal democracy and capitalism with "socialist liberation", and for us to enjoy the same political arrangements and freedoms they had in the Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba etc...
Fair enough—I suppose there's that as well. Either way, it seems somewhat different from classical anti-Semitism per se, although the practical outcome is much the same.
remember these are the same people responsible for such deep intellectual products as Whiteness Studies, white fragility, white tears, white ways of knowing, white science etc—I seem to detect a through-line here...
as a lot of people have been saying this week: when people show you who they are, believe them.
"Critical Leftists don't necessarily hate Jews they hate WHITE PEOPLE, and consider all Jews white, esp considering that Israel is a creation of European colonialism."
is weird how this isn't blatantly obvious to everyone at this point.
i guess it was smart to bombard the American liberal class with the idea that there is no such thing as "antiwhite racism" (or the idea that nonwhites cannot be "racist"), it's sort of like cutting an alarm before a burglary.
Judaism has had so many offshoots in its long history and Social Justice is another of them. (It is after all, in its current incarnation, a product of the Frankfurt School, all Jews, who wanted to combine Freud and Marx, both Jews.)
Secular Left Jews still follow the prophetic tradition of loudly publicly denouncing oppression and corruption by the powers that be, and this has led them to denounce their own people in the name of the abstraction called "Justice".
They are prizing loyalty to their principles over their own people and its history, which is mostly only possible because they lead safe and prosperous lives where other people they rarely see and never know wield violence on their behalf (our police and military).
Just as with the Soviets a century ago, Jews have created, fed and supported the golem that will at some point turn on them. It just seems to be a part of their unfortunate history.
Yes. Antisemitism on European lines is relatively exotic over here. All the left cares about is that brown people are getting picked on by white people.
Ever notice that almost all black-white crime is black on white. But the one time when it is white on black crime, the televisions and newspapers saturate the coverage.
"The people who are celebrating the massacre of innocent Jews in the name of “liberation” are the same people who would celebrate the massacre of you, if they had the chance."
This is what I've really realized this week. If you can cheer the beheading of infants for the sake of "liberation" or "decolonization" or whatever it is - you can cheer it here as well as there; you may in fact TAKE PART in it because you've already excused it morally.
Yesterday hands were wrung over whether or not embrace cancel culture against radical Palestinian apologists like the Harvard kids and if grace was a luxury that society could afford.
Today it seems that some level of cancel culture against those particular monsters should maybe kinda sorta be embraced, but their use of cancel culture against the people they see as monsters is wrong.
Left out of the discussion is that the use of cancel culture doesn't really fix the problem for either side. Another heretic always springs up. In pluralistic societies that keep trying to pretend diversity is a strength, you will always have this tension that eventually turns into violent confrontation.
What works is active steps to limit your plutality and diversity. That's what Hungary is doing by refusing to take Islamic immigrants. They decided, quite correctly, that certain types of people would not be beneficial to the type of society that they want to have.
If you don't let certain people into your society, you don't have to deal with their issues. You don't have to worry about canceling them later or them achieving enough power to cancel you.
The term "cancel culture" itself was a bit of a red herring because it mainly emerged from Libertarian and Secular anti-woke types who really cared more about Procedural sins rather than questions of right or wrong.
For true social conservatives, this perspective misses the mark of determining right from wrong
Canceling is not (in the general sense) wrong? Yes, there are some things polite society should shame and shun-- but that should be fairly short and well-delineated list, understood across multiple generations not made up on the fly, and no, the behavior should not taken to excess either.
the left has for decades been percolating and metastasizing on American university campuses. Training undergraduates in radical political theory, identity politics, intimidation, gaslighting - and releasing those undergrads into the world where they attach themselves to corporations, government agencies, educational institutions and bureaucracies. the terrorism in Israel saw a groundswell of support among the left in America. Now it is clear what left wing notions like decolonization mean in real life. So far in America it has been statues representing what the left calls colonizers that have been torn down. It seems reasonable to assume that humans that resemble the so-called colonizers could be next - as they were in Israel this week.
We need to keep making a hard distinction between Liberalism and the Left. Liberals dream of peace, equality under the law, equality of opportunity, fairness, economic and personal freedom, among other things. They dream of the day when little Jewish and Muslim children can play together in safety. The Left dreams of a violent revolution where the blood of oppressors with run in the streets.
As Rod says, there are left leaning Liberals and right leaning Liberals, but a left leaning Liberal is not a Leftist. The same is true of right leaning Liberals and the Far Right. Along with fascism, there is the toxic brew of racism, vitalism, and eugenics that we say in Nazism.
I'm not sure how to categorize Socialism and Conservatism, but they too need to be distinguished from the Left and the Far Right.
Part of the point of my piece today is that now is the time for liberals to make a hard distinction between themselves and progressives -- and stick to it. This is where "No Enemies To The Left" gets you. And if the Right sticks to the Charles Haywood NETTR program, it will find itself defending atrocities too.
I call myself a red-letter Christian, which means that I can come across as "right" to some Leftists and "left" to some Rightists. What I do know is that antisemitism needs to be fought root and branch, because (1) it's a sin and (2) it spreads like the plague.
I think all hatred of the other is wrong. The worse things get in the world the less I want to join any tribe other than that of the followers of Christ. Not the admirers of Christ, mind you, the followers.
[34] Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. [35] For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
To follow Christ is to take up the cross as He did, not the sword. Yes, it has been and will always be contentious but Jesus taught that to give in to anger is a sin. We are taught to forgive each other not 7 times but 70 times 7. We are taught not to assume we see more clearly than others do and not to consider ourselves above anyone else. We are also taught to shake the dust from our feet when we encounter those who categorically reject His word and are cautioned against casting pearls before swine. The mission is not to win a battle against other people, rather it is to win the battle in our own hearts against evil and follow Him upward along the narrow way to the end.
I agree with much of what "Red-letter" Christians say. There's very little theologically that I'd disagree with in the "Red-letter" parts of the Bible (indeed, if you ever watch online debate between Muslims and Christians, frequently Muslims will quite Jesus (AS) in support of our positions). And there are some excellent ethics, too (though I'd challenge any kind of absolute "turn the other cheek" pacifism).
It seems to me that purely nonviolent resistance depends on your enemy having some sense of decency and shame. It worked when the Indians used it against the British; if people had tried it against the Nazis, then probably not so much. Pure pacifism is basically a license for the worst among us to engulf the earth. It would seem that resistance on the physical plane (i.e. violence) is necessary against people who only understand physical things, although I definitely don't like it.
Like celibacy or deliberate poverty, I see it as a virtuous ascesis in individuals who are capable of it, but something that can never work on any scale. And I don't think we need to worry that those things will ever be embraced by some great mass of people.
It doesn't ring a bell right away, but if he said that, it would have probably been in *The Rebel*.
More generally, I've thought about how on strictly worldly terms, amoral men have an advantage over men with living souls: since the amoral man could do literally anything in the pursuit of what he wants, whereas the man with a living soul is rather constrained in his options for action, for the sake of spiritual freedom.
It all depends on how important the soul is. "For what shall it profit a man though he should win the whole world, if he lose his own soul? or what shall a man give for recompense of his soul?" Matthew 16:26
If you really believe that the soul is immortal, then the amoral man may indeed (as we have often seen throughout history) gain EVERYTHING they want in this world. But there's more coming...
From 1 Corinthinians 9:
"25 Everyone who seeks a prize submits himself to rigorous self-discipline in every respect. They do so to win a perishable crown, while we seek an imperishable one. 26 Therefore, I do not run without purpose, nor do I fight like a man beating the air. 27 Rather, I discipline my body and bring it under control, for fear that after preaching to others I myself may be disqualified."
Yes -- I'm very much working from memory here, but I believe that that is what Camus (if it indeed was Camus) was getting at. In a strictly temporal sense the amoral person will often have somewhat of an advantage over the more scrupulous one. One of the common generalizations of this is "Nice guys finish last."
Exactly, put forth by people who buy into the warm, fuzzy hippy Jesus, which a. is in incomplete, inaccurate, self-serving image of Jesus which does not reflect him at all and b. not Christianity at all. Christianity is the whole word of God. The whole word of God is there for one to get to know and understand God and to spiritually armor us against the world, to wade into it and face its dangers. Christ himself used the Scripture when directly confronted by Satan in the wilderness.
And no, Christians are not to be pacifists. Violence is not our first tool we reach for, but it is an available tool in fighting evil and defending those who need it.
Christ himself told his people to "buy a sword, sell your cloak if you have to," because he knew just what kind of world he would be leaving his people in when he left. We have the full armor of God and the authority granted to us by him to use in facing the powers and principalities of this world. But when dealing with mortals, when we must, we have the sword.
But again, not our first choice. And there may be times that martyrdom is what we must face.
But we are not obliged to bare our necks to a marauding enemy who wishes to cut our throats.
Yes, you’ve said that before about "warm, fuzzy hippy Jesus". In fact, at least once directly to me after I'd quoted the Sermon on the Mount: “Don’t turn my Jesus into some free love hippie peace freak.” But there are 3 chapters of the Sermon on the Mount as opposed to one sentence where He tells his disciples go buy a sword, and almost immediately afterwards, when Peter uses that sword on the High Priest’s servant ear, Jesus tells him, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword." (Matt. 26:52)
Meanwhile, I would like you to consider a thought experiment: If you had been actually there at the Sermon on the Mount, what do you think would have been your reaction to it? After all, Jesus preached this to people living under the brutal Roman occupation. So, would you have asked a lot of “What about ___?” questions? Would you have walked away in disgust at this pacifist BS? Would you go and join (or you might have already joined) the Zealots?
I’m not saying you have to be completely pacifist to be Christian, because that’s like saying you have to be completely perfect to be Christian. We are all sinners. But I do agree with Chesterton: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” That’s from his book "What's Wrong with the World?", and his answer to that question was “I am.” That's also my answer as well.
Yes, there are three chapters of the Sermon on the Mount. And I do not discount that when I say it is the last resort. But buying a sword is there. And the disciples were working men and no doubt armed with all kinds of implements. Jesus had no problem with that, either. Again, his teaching was not about tools, but how they are used, more exactly, the heart that directs those tools.
I have no idea how I would have reacted to the Sermon on the Mount. I was not there.
Neither do you.
How would you have reacted to when Jesus instructed you to arm yourself, if you weren't already?
Of course we are what is wrong with the world. That is why Christ came.
But Christ was also a realist as well as an idealist. No one knew what the human heart was like more than he did. And he knew what that world would mean for them.
He meant those who follow him to go into the world, to spread the good news, increase his kingdom and to help and heal where they could.
But at no point did he ask them to be voluntary victims.
I have mentioned the Jesus the hippie cliche, btw, but this "“Don’t turn my Jesus into some free love hippie peace freak," was not mine. But no, Jesus was no hippy. He was no pacifist.
Suffering is the lot expected of Christians, in one form or another.
Victimhood is something you volunteer for. He did not ask you to do that.
Also, again, Christianity is the whole word of God, not just the Beattitudes or the "red Letters." That is nonsense and Biblically unsupportable.
But Christ was not "just a prophet." He is God, and the Son of God. Muslims deny that completely, and depending where you go in the world, you can get tortured or killed for that.
I personally have met a former Muslim who preaches the Word in just one such area of the world. He testified to this reality, and what Christ followers risk there.
And that's Turkey, one of the less savage areas, as far as that goes.
No, there can be no real sharing, of the type you envision.
Jesus comes to you in your state of sin. But by no means does he leave you there. "Go and sin no more," and there is only one unforgivable sin, the grieving of the Holy Spirit, the denying of his salvation.
It is the very reason why he came.
"No one shall come to the Father but by me," no mere prophet could offer that.
Let me start by saying that Professor Curry's views are loathsome and antisemitism is always bad no matter who is doing the hating. That said, any hatred of the other taken to the point of dehumanization is always dangerous and leads to atrocities like those being committed right now by Israel against the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel has been indiscriminately bombing a city of over 2 million people, half of whom are under 19, for a week. How many innocent children have they wantonly killed in their rage against their attackers? How many bloodthirsty ghouls on the so-called right are cheering this on? That is a hideous moral sickness every bit as bad as Hamas' and Professor Curry's. This is not a liberal/conservative problem. The problem is the evil that abides in all of us and the lengths to which we will go in our pride when we feel our righteous rage is justified.
I know that Rod likes to cling to classical liberalism because he sees it as the only way possible for societies to organize themselves around values resembling Christian values. Maybe he gives it too much credit though because without those Christian values liberalism is an empty shell, easily crushed by other more primal and powerful ideologies. I think the days of left v. right are over because those categories don't really mean anything anymore beyond a kind of watered down tribalism. Examine your own heart and choose where you stand based on what you believe in and disregard labels. I want to stand with Christ, not Israel and not Palestine.
1. Who says it's indiscriminate? 2. Hamas could stop the bombing an instant by giving back some of their elderly and children hostages. But they aren't. Really makes you think. 3. The good people of Gaza voted for Hamas. They sowed and are now reaping. Vote for terrorists, get counterterrorism. The bastards absolutely deserve it.
Children do not deserve to be killed for the sins of their parents, that's insane. Israel itself encouraged the foundation of Hamas as an alternative to the PLO, which was much more secular. The only elections ever held in Gaza were held long before many of the children being killed by Israeli bombs were even born. Those children are, first of all, absolutely innocent, and second of all they had no choice about where they were born. Third, the residents of Gaza have nowhere else to go. They are prisoners of both Hamas and Israel.
If they stopped and thought about it they would see that right now they have the moral high ground in the eyes of the world. The more defenseless people they kill in Gaza the more quickly they will lose that high ground. We look at the world from an American perspective that is very pro-Israel and is not shared by much of the world. The UN has already warned them about what they are doing, so far to no avail. If they were rational they would immediately cease fire and begin to negotiate some kind of international force to go into Gaza to retrieve the hostages while also providing a safe exit for the civilians who want to leave, especially women and children. Of course no one will entertain such an idea because our hatred of the Palestinians is just as visceral as Hamas' hatred of the Jews. It's also very unfortunate that the discourse here has been co-opted by the usual American us v. them nonsense with regard to the stupidity of those Harvard students and other woke people.
"If they stopped and thought about it they would see that right now they have the moral high ground in the eyes of the world."
The term "the world" is doing a lot of work here. Countless millions of Muslims and their governments don't see Israel as having "the moral high ground." If Israel stopped and did nothing in response to the recent atrocities, the Muslim world would see them as cowardly pussies and would consider Israeli inaction as a victory for the Palestinians.
That's not me trying to justify anything; it's just how the Ummah thinks, as evident from the past 25 to 50 years and even explicit statements to that effect from guys like Osama Bin Laden.
I meant they had the moral high ground in the west. I should have made that clear. If they keep indiscriminately killing people in Gaza they will lose that high ground even in the west. Even Joe Biden of all people was moved to express sympathy for the people of Gaza today.
This is the failure of western thinking at work. 'If we are reasonable, then we will have won the day!'
That sort of thinking doesn't understand how to deal with the most vicious, savage, ruthless enemy imaginable. Decapitated babies, and you want them to care about the moral high ground?
No, go in and turn Gaza into a parking lot and save your people from destruction!
Hostages--who also have "no choice" and "nowhere else to go" do alter the situation and make idle armchair speculation about the motive of "vengeance" irrelevant. Innocence versus innocence--so the speculation tie goes to Hamas? There are a lot of assumptions not being stated here.
According to the WSJ, 1799 people have been killed so far in Gaza and 7388 wounded. This is in a city without water or power so really there appears little chance of treating the wounded. I don't think I used the word vengeance, but for comparison sake, the civilian death toll in the Ukraine war is under 10,000 and that conflict has been going on for nearly 20 months. Gaza deaths now exceed Israeli deaths but Israel is not even close to being done punishing them. Now they are demanding all the citizens in the north to leave within 24 hours. They have nowhere to go. Remember half the citizens of Gaza are under 19. Half. This is the ugly reality that is happening as we speak. Look, you can support Israel all you want, and I certainly don't support Hamas, but I absolutely cannot support what Israel is doing right now. It's wrong.
David French wrote a pretty informative article yesterday for the NYT about the rules of war and the difficult but not insurmountable problems Israel faces as it proceeds to defend its people--within the international rules, which Hamas does not recognize or follow. There is a great deal of popular misunderstanding--as your comment reflects--upon what those rules require. I understand, and I am sure the Israelis agree, that the noncombatant citizens of Gaza must somehow be given a way to get out. Hamas, Egypt, and perhaps others bear some responsibility for this. I have confidence that the planners of the Gaza military action will make their plans for action within the rules. The test, as always, will be the capacity of individual soldiers to act within the rules under conditions of great physical and psychological hardship.
One of us is certainly operating under a misunderstanding. Here is what French says:
"For example, a nation that disregards the law of war often approaches urban combat by destroying as much of the city as it can to weaken defenses before the attack and then, when it enters the city, it presumes structures are full of enemies and destroys buildings at will."
Have you seen the pictures of Gaza? If not, come back when you have. Here's a NYT article for you:
Israel gave the Palestinians in northern Gaza 24 hours to leave, which of course they couldn't do in such a short time. No matter, Israel has already gone into the city.
And no, the Israelis do not agree that civilians must be given a way out, they have blockaded every exit, including the one to Egypt, which they have bombed multiple times. Your confidence is completely misplaced. What is happening is ethnic cleansing and you are cheering it on. Oh and military sieges are illegal, which David French, as a lawyer, ought to know.
I voted for him & there is a house in my area where they have a memorial to their grandson who was killed in Iraq. Every time I drove by it, I felt like I’d killed that kid myself.
I understand your guilty feeling but you are not guilty. You had an election choice that decided the presidency for four years. You voted with the knowledge that you had at your disposal. You had no role in Bush's governance. George W. Bush is not an evil man but he was foolish and arrogant and too self-confident. That got our boys killed and hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
Well I actually voted for him in 2004 after we went up to Iraq but before it really went sideways. I just didn’t have any confidence in Kerry & as for Edwards, what a sleazebag. I agree that Bush is not evil but was foolish & arrogant. I think he really thought it would be easy to remove Saddam & the Taliban & bring Jeffersonian democracy to countries that never had it. Kinda naive as well. Too bad he didn’t listen to his dad on why removing Saddam was neither easy nor a good idea.
A universal theme I have always noticed among racists is that they hate Jews. It can be white racists, black racists, Hispanic racists, the one thing they can all agree on is that they hate Jews. It has always struck me as odd, but maybe it shouldn’t. God created a covenant with the Israelites, and leaving nitpicking and hair splitting off the table, the first Christians were Jews. Christians may not be Jews by ethnicity, but the continuation of Judaism into Christianity is unbroken.
If God made covenant with the Jews, then they are of God, just as Christians are. Our baptisms are a covenant as well, perhaps less in outward stature, but the commitment of our service to God in return for guidance and eternal life. Satan hates all that is claimed by God, and especially those who turn from the corrupt ways of this fallen world. Racism itself is a thing of evil, because it completely contradicts Christ’s commandments to us. To hate a person is to not love another as Christ loves them, so racism is anti-Christ behavior in a very explicit form.
Racists hate Christ, whatever they might otherwise say, engage in anti-Christ behavior, and hate those who are in a covenant with God. The Jews were the first and most visible form of that covenant, and Christians are a close second. Christians have not born as much of the brunt of this as Jews have, and have at times partaken in that hatred, but persecution of Christians has been accelerating as well.
The persecution of Christians in modern form is not the same as what happened in Rome. It is not the actions of Christians now which invites persecution, but the simple essence of being Christian. In other words, just to be a Christian is to be a target of persecution. Furthermore, the Christians who are persecuted are not people who have much in the way of any political or social power these days, much as all Christians are becoming. It is like the Nazis, who claimed that Jews were behind every bad thing that happened, and controlled the world in secret, but could somehow not stop Hitler from gaining power or keep themselves out of the camps. In America, politics are not informed by Christianity, but the other way around. The Republican Party, with cynical lip service to God and prayer, uses Christianity as a tool to seduce voters from the holy and into the worldly, to take their eyes from beyond this world and to see nothing beyond it. The Democrats, leading the charge, merit no discussion.
We are again surrounded by a pagan, and therefore satanic, fastness. Worship of what has been made for and from a sinful and fallen world, is the worship of sun, whatever form it takes. Money, sex, the degrading of a human form we have authority to degrade, the absence of reason from daily life, it encroaches. When there is nothing left to sweep side into corruption, the focus then becomes on directly destroying what is left.
The times ahead will be stark and difficult. We are coming to the end of the age, perhaps the end of ages. We have squandered Creation and been poor stewards. We have sought comfort in earthly things. We have believed that we are eternal and that the world is born with us and dies with us. There has been so much sin.
There will no longer be the comforts. Our modern existence has always been balanced on the edge. The events of the past week or so are the beginning, the first breath of the Apocalypse. Things may more quickly or slowly, but we are no longer living in the wealth of the past, itself having been squandered in the name of insulation from the hardships of life. Food is already expensive, but will become more difficult to obtain at any price. Warmth in winter, cooling in summer, these will no longer be possible except for a tiny and shrinking minority, easy travel, safety, protection, these things will be gone. There is no schadenfreude in recognizing that, no eagerness for the coming suffering, only the recognition that it is coming.
Things became stark at that point, and people will redouble their hatred, because the world they have tied their souls to will be vanishing and they will be fearful and uncertain. We will be far more persecuted in that time, unless we can withdraw to communities that can be shelter. The Benedict Option, at the core, was never really going to apply to a modern world that was in flux but largely stable. It was always going to apply to a time when surviving the coming darkness did not simply mean making sure everyone prayed before Sunday dinner. In the hearts of the faithful, they will begin to gather and keep watch. I have already been seeing that, even if people are not sure what they are watching for.
All this was never about a simple conflict between Israel and Hamas. They are just the first actors taking the stage in the first scene as the veil is lifted.
“A universal theme I have always noticed among racists is that they hate Jews. It can be white racists, black racists, Hispanic racists, the one thing they can all agree on is that they hate Jews.” When I read that I couldn’t help but think of Tom Lehrer’s classic, and perennially relevant, ditty, “National Brotherhood Week”:
“Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.
But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
It's National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week.
"Christians may not be Jews by ethnicity, but the continuation of Judaism into Christianity is unbroken."
I would really quibble with that point. Modern Judaism is a definite split from the pre-Christian Israelites. The Second Temple is the most recent point of contact between Christianity and modern Judaism, but the similarities really do veer off from there.
To get to 21st century Judaism, you need to reckon with the emergence of the Rabbinic traditions, heavily influenced by the Talmud and, in some sects, Kabbalah, which is very starkly anti-Christian in its theology. To make an analogy, the split between the Reformers and Catholicism happened a mere 400 years ago and produced such radically different cultures that religious wars were immediately manifest.
All this is to say that today's Israelis have very little in common with the religion of Abraham and David.
God still loves them and has plans for them. And the modern days is hardly the first, or even the worst the Jewish people have turned their backs on God.
Come to think of it, that might be my main reason for liking the Jews: the fact that various scoundrels appear to hate the Jews, even when they have practically nothing else in common. That probably activated my contrarian instinct and made me think that if they all agreed on that one point, then there must be something good about the Jews. And I stand by that.
All sin has its origins in Hell. Sin is ultimately spiritual, with man's fallen heart and the powers and principalities acting in tandem. Absolutely, racism is right up there. Anti-semitism kicks it up a notch. Satan has a very personal grudge against the Hebrew people, being the first tribe which turned to God after the flood (and trace their line all the way back to Adam). God gave them a special place of prominence, and even now, has special plans for them, even though they denied his Son and are on iffy terms with him now as a nation. He has not forgotten them or his promises to them. He still blesses those who bless them as well, because of that.
As for your statement about the GOP, not sure if it is that simple. I think the relationship between the GOP and the body of Christ is a combo of factors. The GOP, as opposed to the Democrats, is superficially welcoming to Christians (the Dems have for all practical purposes out and out rejected God, with the logical results following on). In the GOP, you have a percentage of real followers and God-lovers, who still have some influence, especially locally. But you are right, you also have lots of cynical bastards who could not care less, and use such posturings to manipulate Christians and help ensure their power base. ESpecially on the national level.
That's mortal realm politics in our corrupt times. It is what it is. One should be clear-eyed about it.
As a result, the Evil One's hate waxes hot. So when these algae blooms of anti-Semitism occur and one begins to wonder where it comes from? Same place it always has, throughout thistory.
But you are also right, in Christians inheriting their own version of that hatred. Christ's arrival and actions with his incarnation was the greatest blow Satan has endured to date, and he knows the worst is coming and his time is short.
So, he hates us, too. And is determined to do what damage he can before he goes down.
It is good, but the reality is that so many people are just horrified at the defense of the Hamas atrocities (you won't find them in these boxes) that it may set the Left staggering. They'll get their footing because the media is in their corner, but it's fun to see them on the ropes.
I'm struggling with the "Israel Is Just As Bad So I Won't Take Sides" comments. So Israel somehow slaughtered people for decades, so that makes it right to behead babies? Why don't you say what you really think, Israel got what it deserved so you won't "take a side" because the Palestinians "own" the land. Is the right answer to just wipe out Israel? Is that how we're going to do things now? I don't have an issue with someone having an opinion. At least we know where they stand. "I won't take sides" is the shield of cowards.
Israel has every right to defend itself, and they must take action in this case. But like the US after 9-11 they can and perhaps will go too far. War may be a necessary evil. But if you leave the "necessary" part in the dust you are doing just plain evil.
I keep wondering: if we're really doing a reset, forcibly "decolonizing" land and restoring "rightful" inhabitants, what's the argument for stopping with Palestine and who gets to decide the reset dates? Would it be fairest to have one global date? Or do we choose them on a location by location basis? Obviously the Palestinians believe 1947 would be fairest in their case (Allah forbid they acknowledge that Jews were living in Israel a millennia or two before Islam even came in to existence).
Human history is an ongoing story of migrations and conquerings and displacements, so I'd love to know what the fair mechanism is for determining whose "rightful" claims are the valid ones.
It's a fair question, and I think most people draw the line based on their own prejudices.
As far as Canaan/Palestine/Israel itself, as I've said before, the ancient Canaanites, Arab-Speaking Palestinians, and Jewish people all have the same genetic roots (though Ashkenazi Jews have a lot of European DNA in their mix).
So in other words, we're largely talking about the same genetic group, who are differentiated by language, religion and culture. Despite all of the various wars and Conquests in the Levant, there wasn't a significant genetic replacement.
So, in this particular case, it would be wrong to say "you kicked us out 2,000 years ago, we're coming back to take what is ours" (or even "the Romans kicked us out 2,000 years ago, you kicked the Romans out, now we're kicking you out.")
Rather "we were kicked out 2,000 years ago, you managed to stay, both you and we culturally evolved differently after that, and now we think our cultural evolution deserves the land more than yours, bro."
In other places, such in North America, it was largely a replacement, mainly due to a combination of disease (the biggest aspect) and forcible removal--and little genetic overlap between the previous occupants and the current ones.
But getting back to your question, I'd say that we obviously don't accept all Conquests as "done deals". We didn't accept Germany's conquest of France in 1940 as a done deal, or the Soviets conquest of the Baltics as a done deal...but we do, by and large, accept the conquest of the American west as a done deal. (And the fact that there are really so few Native Americans left kind of makes it a moot point.)
Germany's conquest of France was an unambiguous war of aggression that involved subjugation and purging of people by a megalomaniac tyrant with genocidal ambitions. The same cannot be said regarding the (re)creation of the modern state of Israel. It also seems that Israeli Jews in general would be willing to live peaceably with Palestinians if Palestinians were willing to live peaceably alongside Jews. But too many of them aren't. It's all or nothing in their view, so the battles rage on.
My larger point in my original comment is that there is no truly impartial or objective way to adjudicate these claims fairly, exactly because everyone has their prejudices from which their view of "fairness" proceeds. So it isn't at all obvious to me that Palestinians have an obvious right to that land without any obligation to share. And it should go without saying that slaughtering unarmed people who are waking up to begin their day (or who are ending a night of celebration and dancing) in the name of pressing that claim is both preposterous and unconscionable.
"Germany's conquest of France was an unambiguous war of aggression that involved subjugation and purging of people by a megalomaniac tyrant with genocidal ambitions. The same cannot be said regarding the (re)creation of the modern state of Israel."
Not *precisely* the same, of course--Hitler was certainly a whole different level of evil. But the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was a pretty clear policy of the creation of modern Israel (see Ilan Pappé's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", for example).
"It also seems that Israeli Jews in general would be willing to live peaceably with Palestinians if Palestinians were willing to live peaceably alongside Jews. But too many of them aren't. It's all or nothing in their view, so the battles rage on."
I have no doubt that many feel this way. But with the continual expansion of the settlements into the West Bank, and official policies of every Israeli government from its founding, it doesn't seem to be sincerely held at the highest levels. Remember Netanyahu's statement: "Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.” (2019) Ehud Barak criticized Netanyahu's government in 2017 by stating: "This “one-state solution” that the government is leading Israel toward is no solution at all. It will inevitably turn Israel into a state that is either not Jewish or not democratic (and possibly not either one), mired in permanent violence. This prospect is an existential danger for the entire Zionist project." And yet here we are, six years later, with Israel under Netanyahu, continuing to pursue these same policies.
"My larger point in my original comment is that there is no truly impartial or objective way to adjudicate these claims fairly, exactly because everyone has their prejudices from which their view of "fairness" proceeds."
Agreed; a world body, outside of the affected people, is inevitably going to disagree on this, based on some presuppositions.
"So it isn't at all obvious to me that Palestinians have an obvious right to that land without any obligation to share."
Let me ask you this: is it an obvious right that the United States has a right to its land without any obligation to share with, say, Mexicans who used to own a huge chunk of it (and many Mexicans can demonstrate that they have Native American DNA that existed in the Americas for thousands of years before the formation of our nation)? Why or why not? And regardless of what you feel, would the United States have to accept the decision of the UN if they said we needed to cede all that territory back to Mexico?
"And it should go without saying that slaughtering unarmed people who are waking up to begin their day (or who are ending a night of celebration and dancing) in the name of pressing that claim is both preposterous and unconscionable."
I totally agree, and I hope that's very clear from what I posted. A claim, no matter how just, is no excuse for intentionally or carelessly harming non-combatants. And likewise, no matter how scrupulous one is to not harm non-combatants, an unjust invasion is still unjust. The reasons of a war are one thing; the conduct of a war is another.
You offer some useful insights and I truly appreciate your reasonable tone and effort to find agreement where it can be had.
I don't know enough about the entire conflict and the details of its roots to hold a clear or strong opinion about whose claims carry the most moral weight. I can certainly sympathize with the Palestinian people who were displaced in 1948, though my guess is that few of them who experienced that tragedy would still be alive today. So now we are talking further generations with a historical connection, but no personal experience or actual memory of living in Palestine/Israel. I also wonder at the unwillingness of other Muslim Arab nations, many of them wealthy, to welcome or provide for the Palestinians...it's a curious thing given that their shared hatred of Israel is so widespread throughout the region. One would think they might offer aid and comfort to their Muslim brothers and sisters, help with material needs rather than leave them isolated and impoverished. How is it that the Palestinians' plight elicits so little from them?
Your question re: Mexico is well taken, though it's hard to answer since there isn't a real causal parallel in that Mexicans don't have an ongoing legacy of being persecuted, much less a holocaust in their recent past. But it does bring into focus the stickiness of Israel's claim to the land...I get that it's not slam-dunk obvious theirs is stronger than the Palestinians'. What a tragic and horrifying mess it all is.
No-one has any trouble acknowledging that. There were plenty of Jews in the Ottoman empire and at the time, it was safer for them than much of Europe. But they were not in charge, of course.
The point about 1947 is that millions of Palestinians were literally forced from their homes and land and massacred in order to make room for Jewish refugees. And they were just supposed to be ok with it, because of a genocide they had nothing to do with.
No one has said that and you know it. If you don't, then quote back to someone in these boxes who took that line, verbatim, please. I concede the guy who thinks that kids who go to raves deserve it, that's just cretinism. I mean tell me where somebody said it's right to behead babies because of the occupation. Take your time.
The CNN reporter, Sara Snider, apologized for the misinformation she spread about Hamas beheading babies. The Israeli government officials first lied to her and now walked it back. This is how the propaganda game is played.
There's one important aspect and one moral to this story that everyone seems to miss.
This is the fact that Hamas is a monster birthed by the Israeli state - literally. The foundation of Hamas was encouraged and financed by Israel in a cynical mover to undermine the secularist PLO - in the classical ploy to divide and rule the Palestinians. This is not a conspiracy theory but a well documented fact acknowledged even by the mainstream media both in the US and Israel itself. See below for just a few examples:
The moral is that you cannot give birth to a monster and hope to tame it and control it. A monster by its own very definition - can neither be tamed or controlled. It will turn on you at some point and you either have to slay it or it slays you.
Israel spent 20 years building Hamas and 20 years trying to destroy it. It may very well end destroying both.
But of course we never learn - just like the US pumped the muhajideen in Afghanistan to spite the Soviets only to see them transform into Al Qaeda and the Taliban.... we will keep on creating ''proxies''... and then blame it all on them
"I prefer civilization. If we aren’t prepared to fight for it, and fight not only in word, but also in deed, then we will lose it."
Do we understand that "also in deed" means that, at some point, we MAY have to start killing people?
Do we have the will to do this? I don't mean just a few of us crazies (metaphorically speaking, of course) but the majority of western peoples. Do we have that will? I bet we don't. At least not as long as we have physical comfort.
Rod, the Israeli military and government has been killing civilian Palestinians, and engaging in evil atrocities, within the context of its ongoing occupation of Palestine, for over half a century. Gaza has been administered as a prison for well over a decade.
What Hamas has done in response here, as they and some other Palestinians have in the past, engaging in atrocities of their own, is likewise evil.
Personally, I have no trouble saying, 'I condemn the evil atrocities and killings of civilians by both sides', and then moving on to address the substance of the matter, the occupation. I could also choose to dwell, for one reason or another, on the evil atrocities and killings of civilians, but then I would presumably mourn comparably over the atrocities and killings performed by both sides, and also underline the roots of it in the ongoing occupation, and the entirely disproportionate nature of the violence and power of each side.
If one does otherwise, one misleads and functions merely as a propaganda mouthpiece ('live not by lies', my foot). I understand your disgust and outrage at the Hamas attacks in isolation; but they were not and are not in isolation, and it does no service to truth, justice, or peace for anyone to pretend otherwise.
Agreed, what Hamas is doing, and the way it is doing it, is wrong. What Israel has done, however, and is doing, and the way it is doing it, is also wrong. What I would genuinely find interesting, rather than just hearing how Hamas are Nazis (it takes precious little imagination to make *those* comparisons go the other way), are Rod Dreher's musings on what a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would look like and how that might be achieved.
Rod, I understand the reflexes, I really do. But you're often able to appreciate and speak to the complexities and tragedies of history and the human heart, in a way that you're only occasionally and vaguely gesturing at here. For someone who cares for the Palestinian people and what they have endured since 1948, almost all of the coverage of Israel and Palestine by those on the American right seems bizarrely and dishonestly one-sided (which doesn't help the impression that the American right views - in reality, not nominally - Palestinians and Muslims generally as dehumanized - 'human animals') and detached from realities; those of history and the human heart, precisely.
As a traditional conservative, I have always found the American right's two greatest 'blind spots' to be the fantastical attitudes toward and evaluations of Israel, on the one hand, and Islam and Muslims, on the other. On these two subjects, the American right has been greatly duped (with a few exceptions, perhaps most notably Russell Kirk).
Well said. This has been a week of horrors, and as so often happens they seem poised to grow into a deluge because of fallen human nature. Personally, while I know I am fallen and prone to anxiety and anger at injustice, this is a situation where I can condemn the massacres of the Israelis, the rationalization of the massacres as horrific bloodlust, and also continue to deplore Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, which is long, well-documented, and consistently ignored by American media. It doesn't matter if the Palestinians like me. It doesn't matter if the Israelis do. I am for the path of reconciliation however impossible it seems. There will be pointless bloodshed until more are exhausted. Let us not wait 20 years to admit the Iraq invasion was wrong. The time to make new choices is now.
Israel's policy towards the Palestinians is fairly straightforward. The Palestinians attack and Israel responds. You may disagree with the response, but presenting it as Horrible Israel murdering Innocent Palestinians is wrong.
Why are a few nattering nabobs of nitwittery on the far Left a indictment of liberalism in general? That's like saying Pat Robertson or (to update the analogy) maybe Andrew Tate or Marjorie Taylor Green is an indictment of conservatism across the board. Apparently they have broad tar brush sales in Hungary too. Meanwhile I have yet to see anyone remotely mainstream defend Hamas. The city of Baltimore-- not exactly a bastion of the GOP, just passed a (yes, feel-good) resolution saying "We stand with Israel". That sort of thing been vastly more common this week.
As is often the case, the most reasonable takes lie somewhere between Rod’s overheated catastrophism and Jon’s chilly nothing-to-see-here-ism.
Rod cites loons in academia all the time. But nutpicking in academia is easier than in a Planters warehouse. Left-leaning commentators do the same thing trawling through the ravings in rightwing Christian bodies where crazy thing are said no less. I really am in the middle on this, and, yes, I decry loony-tunery of every and any sort, be it pompous profs praising terrorists or dim-bulb types speculating about locking up gays, liberals, and anyone else they dislike.
Just say No to nuts-- and then move on to more serious things.
"I really am in the middle on this...."
May I suggest that you - in an effort to be succinct - simply say that you are... lukewarm.
"Nothing in Excess". It really is that simple. And for that reason I have my own complaints with modern day America, since excess is valued almost everywhere across many many tribes.
“Nothing in Excess.”
Is it this nostrum which has led you to refer to the murder of over 1000 people as a “dust-up” and a “fracas”? I fear you are either disingenuous or morally obtuse, although a third option occurs to me as I write this.
In any case, I shall decline to take your nostrum as my own, when I consider where it has brought you.
If your native language is not English I readily forgive your inability to place my words in their full context. Otherwise please work on your reading comprehension, and also learn a little Middle Eastern history.
Your last sentence is particularly appropriate to any comment of yours.
Yes. it's good advice. As is my signature nostrum: Live not by fear.
I like that very much.
From academia, the nuttiness, especially when aided and abetted by the faculty and unchallenged by the admin, it flows into society. Nothing good comes after that, except maybe eventually the contaminated universties being razed to the ground and something new coming in its stead.
Where's the evidence of it flowing into society? Apart from the obvious stuff that comes out of science and become technology?
Out here in Reality most people get an earful of the cant and babble of the academy and shake their heads saying "What a bunch of simpering twits!"
"Where is the evidence of it flowing into society?" You mean, beyond the products of big entertainment corporations, policies from governement agencies, rogue elements of them doing the same? Prosecutors not doing their jobs, etc etc?
Mass riots lasting for months, with politicos and media types cheering it on and paying the bail of many a crininal?
When the SecDef of the new Administration orders a Department-wide "stand-down for white supremacy?" When the Joint Chief of Staff goes on about "white rage?" Leaders of a Pentagon that currently looks to be a whole bunch of stumblebums who can't handle their primary mission of warfighting and prepping men and women to do the same, so riddled and cowed by activists who despise the flag they salute and the Constitution they swear to?
Why, there is none, John. You are so right.
Top on the conservative agenda at the state level should be the political equality of the professoriate at the state universities. If a state university has forty political science professors, twenty must be right-of-center or funding will be cut off. If the university has fifty history professors, twenty-five must be right-of-center or funding is cut off.
Complete agreement. Sure, they will then screech "ACADEMIC FREEDOM!", which you point out the fate of faculty, staff and students who are openly c onservative, or even worse (shudder) CHRISTIAN (GASP). So much for diversity, eh?
I would absolutely do this. Do it or your funding goes away.
Too many Republican governors and legislators spend all their time on tax cuts and cozying up to big business at the expense of helping mold the colleges. Most states have several state schools run partly on state funds. Conservatives should weaponize that.
I'm not sure I can agree with quota hiring in any context, dthough I do agree more diversity of opinion is needed.
Between Academia and Hollywood, almost all degeneracy and moral rot comes from them. Putin would be doing us a favor lobbing a small nuke onto Cambridge and New Haven and Hollywood. Just kidding, kind of.
The problem is that there aren’t just a few loons in academia. There are an awful lot of them. And what happens in academia doesn’t stay in academia. The amorphous consumerist hedonism of the later 1950s was weaponized by the intellectually self-conscious New Left of the early 1960s to launch concerted attacks on one after another traditional nongovernmental institution in American life. By the 1970s, those institutions were in bad shape—the family, organized religion, etc. were all on the ropes and have now been deformed out of all recognition. This happened not because of some impersonal, natural, organic process of cultural evolution, but of deliberate destruction on the part of culturally vigorous parties emerging from academia in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was the students who were reading Marcuse and his epigones who went into the education schools and sociology departments who ended up populating the burgeoning social service bureaucracies of the later 1970s and onward. These are people whose very livelihoods depend on the weakness of traditional institutions and Christian moral culture. No doubt you, like most, view the causation in reverse—that the weakness of tradition led to social service bureaucrats taking over, but that makes little sense if you think about it. No one was crying out for this or that bureaucracy like a thirsty man in the desert crying for water. No, supply creates its demand in a fundamental way and did here, too. I know that basic concept is anathema on the Left—the primacy of supply, but there is no argument against it other than blind assertion.
PS: the Trimmers were in hell too. Beware.
Relative to the population as a whole (330 million more or less) dumbass academics are a rounding error.
Relative to the number of explosive devices in existence in August 1945, atomic bombs were rounding errors too.
The death toll at Hiroshima was not. Officially 90,000 deaths were counted, but there were tens of thousands more missing, probably because there was quite literally nothing left to find of them.
The Nagasaki bomb missed its target by some distance, and the death toll was less, but still in the high five digits.
The number of impressionable college kids imbibing leftish ideas and behavioral justifications flooding out of the colleges and universities between 1965 and 1980 certainly did have a huge cultural impact on public schools and such professions as mental health, social work and the like.
We aren’t talking about the esoterica of deconstruction here, but education majors exposed to Paolo Friere.
I went ti the University of Michigan, a school noted for student activism. But I just had to look up Paolo Friere as I had never heard of him.
Unless one deliberately goes looking for crazypants leftwingery in a "grievance studies" department it's very easy to go through college without being much affected by any of that crap, other than to be turned off by it when some protest group gets up to annoying antics. I would say that the "mainstream" stuff they teach business majors has done vastly more harm to the nation.
Jon, something tells me you don't have much experience of universities. I've worked for four, three of them allegedly 'world-leading' institutions. This devilry is not marginal. It's a metastasised cancer.
Universities are hot-houses. Most of us go there (if at all- many do not) for a very few years, we look back fondly on some fun times, and then get on with our lives. As we should. I'm A-OK with criticizing a'holery, even vehemently and vitriolically, in academia, but there's a reason we have the metaphor of an ivory tower to describe college. We shouldn't see outcroppings of assinity in such a place as any sort of general sign of civilizational rot, any more than crazypants stuff coming out of certain churches is the harbinger of theocratic fascism decsending.
"We shouldn't see outcroppings of assinity in such a place as any sort of general sign of civilizational rot..."
This is just blatant whistling past the graveyard, turning your eyes from reality in order to maintain your pose as "serious" and "reasonable".
How else should we see the obvious fact that our cultural and academic institutions (esp the most prestigious) have all surrendered to "Critical Studies", which now that the mask has slipped, is obviously a program of anti-European hatred dedicated to demonizing our culture and history, dismantling our societies and excusing any barbarity from anyone considered a member of a Protected Victim class?
Does none of this really exist until Hamas parachutes into your window? Are you still at this late date claiming that the academic turn against free speech and free thought is a right-wing canard and these kids will grow out of it?
Would you then say that if one person anywhere in the US utters an outrageously wrong, blatantly false, flamingly outrageous comment about anything we are all doomed?
Come on, there's no shortage of foulness coming from the Right these days too, including from people in elected office, or in the running therefor.
The human race is a parade of fools, knaves and idiots-- but you can't freak out every time some such cretin rears his head and shoots off his mouth.
Is courage even valued anywhere these days?
I don't get the Cult of Fear. I really don't.
"Would you say that..."
When it becomes echoed in media, government (legistlators, admin and bureacrats), culture makers like Hollywood, and so ingrained, to the point that even those in the hard sciences TRY to pander to it, even though all the math in the world denies them, and our armed guardians, police and armed forces do the same..to the point where to oppose it can get you fired from your job and a visit by armed agents of the state...yeah, it has become something to be concerned about.
"one person anywhere in the US..."
ONE PERSON!?? ONE PERSON!!??
Freak out?? Courage?! Fear!??
You really do seem to live on your own planet.
Do you subscribe to Rod and then not read his posts but just comment?
We are living through the complete ideological capture of the entire Anglosphere by the ideology that calls itself "Social Justice"—and if you want to deny that, I encourage you to pick any institution in the West from the US Army to CBC to BBC to every single college and museum and see the identical language about "Diversity" "marginalized voices" "historical oppression" etc (which are all euphemisms for racialism and assigning people moral scores based on skin color)—which includes ideological litmus tests for hiring and the hounding of dissidents that's already far surpassed anything experienced during the Red Scare.
If you cannot see and admit to any of this, you're either dishonest or stupid, which makes engaging with you pointless either way.
And yet I am not descrying any utopias, only pointing out that the fearful preoccupation with the passing ephemera of the Here and Now, blinds you to much graver dangers.
Again, I am not being an optimist.
no big deal, it's just that the seed of Critical Theory has left the university and germinated into the flower of a new religion that has captured the minds and deeds of our ruling elite.
it's not 2017 anymore. I used to be skeptical of professors like Peterson and Weinstein when they were warning about the new religion jumping the tracks into the mainstream. I always knew it was dangerous, I just didn't think the jump would happen, until 2020...
as Rod has said many times, our situation is similar to what Russia faced with its late-19th-century Nihilists...a generation where the best educated become committed to destruction in the name of "Justice" and a liberal class too impotent to disagree or offer any serious pushback.
this is just the beginning of a very ugly time that looms up ahead...
According to Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/350393/key-trends-views-israel-palestinians.aspx
38% of Democrats support the Palestinian Authority (backers of the PLO).
Democrats are equally likely to say they support either Palestine or Israel.
Those identifying as "liberal Democrat" have a 15 percent differential in support for Palestine vs. Support for Israel (example: 40 vs 55 with 10 percent undecided - the article is not specific on the percents).
I think everyone who accuses the right of being anti-Semitic should see the tremendous support for Israel in these polls.
*****Rod Dreher is right to point out the problem with the far left and its support for Palestine.*****
Is Rod saying they all want to chop babies heads off? No. But he is saying it is a problem, not just a "few academics".
I've replied to you, James, though I know you agree with me, in order to keep my thoughts within this sub-thread.
Surely one have some sympathy for the Palestininians. And US foreign policy should be something that is Made in America, not on Jerusalem (nor in Riyadh)
Word. Try living in Berkeley.
Reforming the universities should be first on the conservative agenda on the state level. Tax cuts aren't enough.
Good luck negotiating with satan.
Good luck and intervention from God would be needed.
Derek , they are hubs of Satanic garbage!
Jon, you will be tied to a stake with the evildoers lighting a fire at your feet, and you'll be denying there's a problem.
And Rod, my friend, you have predicted five of the last zero ends of the world as we know it.
Rod, you are beloved, as is Jon, but I don’t think Jon is saying he wants Hamas to start an insurgency here while he turns a blind eye to their violence.
It is Israel’s choice to deal with this as they will, but as Christians, we cannot cheerlead war. Yes the Israelis must defend themselves and protect innocent lives, but it is their war, not ours. Like you, I agree we should not be committing cultural or literal suicide here by allowing massive, unvetted immigration of potentially dangerous people; that is our responsibility and we should not turn into an occidental version of what is going on in western Europe. That said, over there IS over there, geographically and culturally. It should stay there. Founding fathers, founding fathers, founding fathers. Peace.
I have zero affection for terrorism, and elsewhere I have affirmed that Israel must crush Hamas- but that should not turn into a general bloodbath of the population.
Jon...Brother...listen to these words.
I suspect it would be more the case of us tied to stakes with evildoers lighting fires at our feet and Jon in the crowd assuring us that it’s not a problem.
No true Scotsman…
The American Left and the American Right are both large coalitions of different factions, each with their own causes. Can you deny it? There's no such thing as a typical Leftwinger or a typical Rghtwinger.
Some of us here, certainly me, certainly Rod, and certainly many others believe we have seen civilizational decline to the extent that we believe civilization as we have known it will fall.
Obviously, you have not seen this.
What do you need to see?
If you have read my comments here you should know I see catastrophe off a ways in the future, and of a magnitude that could easily blow away our Constitution, indeed our nation itself, and leave strife, anarchy and perhaps eventually tyranny as people become desperate enough to trade freedom away. But not yet, not today.
Oh, and the bad news is that any attempt to prevent it will simply trigger it, as in good old Greek tragedy.
I am not Polyanna. I am Cassandra-- and like her my prognostication is scoffed at or simply ignored.
OK, but catastrophe is off a ways but what causes it?
What do you need to see?
One word: Money.
Once again, money is just a tool, whose use is determined by the character of those wielding it.
Of course you are right about that. I should instead say avarice--and I will add hubris (the sin of Satan)-- will make our ruin.
Good Jesus, Jon.
The Squad in Congress had trouble with messaging on this stuff. Members of Congress are pretty much mainstream by definition.
Ok. Point taken. The problem is that the lefties so highly populate higher Ed. And the powers that be in higher Ed don’t seem to care, but reward such folks.
But what do we DO, Rod! Does anyone have an action list of how to actually fight this? Short of "write your Congressman"? I'm not being flippant. I NEVER do protests, but I would over this issue. I just don't know how.
its very difficult because it is so institutionalized (in the academy, in major corporations, in government. For universities, it could be combatted by funding denials to anti-liberal universities by the federal government. Not easy to accomplish. At a local level, the growth of activist conservative organizations of not only students but also local community members to monitor and combat leftism on campus. Additionally, there could be more civil rights law firms on the conservative side to battle institutions over anti-conservative discrimination.
That a man of such low caliber and obvious hatred for the white race like Tommy Curry could be hired at Texas A & M and the University of Edinburgh shows me a civilization that is no longer confident. The Texas A & M of Eisenhower's age or the Edinburgh of Churchill's age would never had hired such a loathsome creature. It should be part of conservative governance at the state level to bring political equality to the academy. If a state college has fifty history professors, half must be right-of-center or funding should be cut off. We must be ruthless. Conservatives have been sleeping at the switch when it comes to education.
in the US, this situation goes back decades. Allan Bloom wrote about it in the late 80s in his book: The Closing of the American Mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind/. At this point, these forces are so entrenched, that it would likely take a century to change the situation with concerted action of donors, politicians, bureaucrats, alumni, etc. It seems highly unlikely a mass movement of that kind on these issues would or even could occur.
A lot if it is NOT DOING. Don’t give to your alma mater if it’s gone over the edge. Etc. Avoid strengthening these people in any way possible.
Off the top of my head:
What can we do? (1) Pray (2) Tell people (here and elsewhere) who support anti-Semitic rhetoric that they are wrong. (3) Make friends with Jewish people and tell them that you support them. (4) Give to Jewish charities such as Jewish World Relief. (5) Let any group or cause you are involved with, e.g., a university, that you will not donate if they support Palestinian terrorism. (6) If you are Christian, ask your pastor to state support for Israel from the pulpit if that has not been done already. (7) Perhaps take a leadership position in your denomination – even just a parish representative to regional meetings - and put forth resolution in support of Israel. (8) Teach your children and young people that the Jewish people have a right to a homeland and Palestinian terrorism (like any terrorism) is always wrong. (9) Insist that your political party's platform support Israel.
One more - oppose support for Iran. Oppose the present administration's direction. They are fools who give money that ensures Iran can continue to give millions to the terrorists they support (by redirecting their social funds to terrorism since we are not giving them "social money").
Re: If you are Christian, ask your pastor to state support for Israel from the pulpit if that has not been done already.
While you have some good ideas, I'm not sure I would support the above. The Church should not be a place for political preaching. More appropriate would be a position against all forms of political violence no matter who is doing them: a moral statement well within the Christian tradition.
“But what do we DO, Rod! Does anyone have an action list of how to actually fight this? “
YES.
Dispense with your ideas and trust the words of Jesus Christ unto death.
Can you handle that?
This is self-evident, Ken. I'm talking about the practical steps after that. Politics not grounded in Christ will never lead anywhere, but politics grounded in Christ still requires political knowledge and acumen, which I lack.
Ahh. Yes. Thank you for the clarification.
I agree. 👍
I'm supremely uncomfortable taking sides in what is just the latest episode in the long-running conflict between Arabs and Jews. Whilst my first instinct as a European would be to take the Israeli side, having a lot in common with the people who founded Israel, I have also noticed that this terror attack by Hamas has been gleefully used by some on the right to call for the genocide of Palestinians in pretty unequivocal terms. It also seems to be Israeli policy to enact another Naqba and drive out the remaining Palestinians from Gaza in a steamroller move, probably forcing them into Egypt or into their deaths. I cannot condone any of that and I'm appalled that some so-called Christians in the US are apparently baying for blood and are calling for the eradication of an entire people. The rank hypocrisy of not calling out Israelis for doing far worse things to the Gazans than the Russians ever did to the Ukrainians is also galling.
Apparently, when Russia cuts off power and water to the Ukrainians and forces them from their homes, bombs schools and religious buildings, it is a war crime, but not when Israel does it in their own territory. I personally just cannot deal with the double standards in the West regarding this issue. Whilst I'm not taking sides and both are pretty awful, it's pretty clear that Israel is hardly in the right here and has to take some of the blame for the situation in Palestine deteriorating to the extent it has. They elected a far-right government and have made no effort to stop settlements on appropriated Palestinian land for instance.
I have a very poor opinion of, and deep concern for, the people of both sides. I don't think Israel the modern state was a good idea, and I don't think it can last, surrounded by people whose men are willing to give their lives to destroy it and whose women are engaged in womb-battle - the demographic strategy. That said, I hate how Israel supporters lie about how Jews have always lived there (in small amounts, mostly yes they have, but so what?) As for the Palestinians, all they had to do was pretend to convert to Judaism the way the Jews pretended to convert to Christianity when the Catholics took over Spain. Or, as the Israel supporters rightly point out, they could move to other Arab countries, if other Arab countries would have them. Fighting over land costs too much, in terms of human destruction. It isn't worth it. And when I drive down the street, I look forwards, and a bit to the side. I don't look backwards. Everyone agrees this is the best way to drive. And yet when they look at policies, they look backwards, and sometimes lie about what they see in the rear view mirror, so to speak, to justify their chosen policy. I disagree with this. What is happening to the Israelis is barbaric, awful. What is happening to the Palestinians is also heartbreaking. The only way I see for this evil to end is for one side to win, and if it is the Palestinians/Arabs, may the US and Europe open its arms to the Israeli refugees. And if it is Israel who wins, may the other Arab lands take in the Palestinians and give them full citizenship. Both the Koran and the OT are quite clear that God does not want us to sacrifice our children to Him or to idols; no children should be sacrificed for a "country." And when I see this vitriolic hatred of Jews at supposedly pro-Palestinian demonstrations, it strikes me as backwards - they are supporting Israel's continued existence by showing that the world outside of Israel hates them. My heart breaks for both sides.
I broadly agree, though I would add there is a third option, which I would brand the Mandela option or the dreaded one-state solution. Israel could end apartheid and give the Palestinians full citizenship and allow them to participate in elections. I believe they are the majority in the country now (Israel+occupied territories, formerly Palestine), so they would probably end up running the country, just as blacks did in South Africa after 1991. Problem is, that probably wouldn't work for various reasons, just as it really hasn't in South Africa, mostly to do with the revolutionary marxist roots of the ANC. Same problem with any Palestinian party that would end up running the country, most probably they'd be an Islamist one at this point and would utterly ruin the country in short order, forcing Jews to leave anyway.
Yes, in theory that is an option, but I agree with you that it wouldn't work, for the reasons you mentioned, and because their is so much hatred at this point between the factions. Another reason I might be considered slightly pro Israel is because if Hamas were able to get the Israelis to leave (hopefully, I don't want to consider the other option - genocide) the Palestinians would begin fighting amongst themselves - who gets the former Jewish homes which had been Palestinian homes prior? Or the Jewish homes built on land that was once Palestinian occupied? The returning refugees' grandchildren? Or the top Hamas fighters? Governance is fragile, and the Israelis have a system that works pretty well. Human organization is so precious and fragile and hard to create, that I think more people - Arab people - will die if the Israelis leave. Inertia is often underrated.
Read from Genesis to Revelation.
"In small amounts, I suppose they have..." Not according to just about all the Biblical and archaological evidence that has been compiled to date.
Israel will continue to exist until the Lord says otherwise.
Your approval is irrelevant.
Agreed that my approval is irrelevant, as is yours. Biblical and archeological evidence speak to ancient times; in the 1850s the Jewish population in Palestine (historic Palestine) was about 3% and by 1922 when the British had their first census of the area, 25 years after the Balfour Declaration, Jewish population had increased to about 11%. I remember reading in a book by Karen Armstrong that at one point there was only one Jewish family in Jerusalem. And the argument that the "Arabs got there later" is likewise disingenuous. The Arab conquerors of Palestine did not displace the inhabitants, rather, they Arabized them. In American jurisprudence we have this concept called adverse possession . . . My Jewish great grandparents had been in Eastern Europe for a very long time, but left to avoid being murdered in the pogroms. It doesn't give me a right to go take back whatever land they unfairly lost when they fled. History is tragedy, and justice is what wise men aim for and fools chase. But, as I explained above, to me this is irrelevant with regard to moving forward. Israel exists, and therefore it is unwise to try to destroy it.
Goes back further than 1850. We've already covered this. You cannot handwave away "ancient times."
I won't.
No one is hand-waving away "ancient times." I was merely stating that the assertion that Jews have ALWAYS lived there is not true in any meaningful sense. The fact (which I concede here for the point of argument) that Jews lived there in ancient times does not mean that they have ALWAYS lived there. The fact that they were 3% of the population at one point, 11% at another point, means that even if Jews controlled/populated the land at one point, they did not ALWAYS live there in any meaningful sense. Rather like if I said I was born in Tennessee and have a birth certificate and witnesses to prove it, and I have always lived in Tennessee, and someone said but hey I knew you when you lived in Alabama for 20 years, I couldn't argue "But I have proof that I was born in Tennessee! You can't handwave that away!" To further "complicate" the analysis, we have to ask "who is a Jew?" My understanding is that the Jews who were massacred by the Western Christians during the Crusades were Karaite Jews, not Rabbinic Jews. Rabbinic Jews were not happy with Karaite Jews, is my understanding. Can Rabbinic Jews, or rather, secular atheists from the Rabbinic Jewish tradition (as most Zionists were) use the former presence of Karaites (and continuous presence of Samaritan Jews) to justify violating the Talmudic injunction to wait for the messiah who will usher the Jews back to Zion? Do you really value human life so little that these questions ever matter? (I'm only persistent in trying to lay out basic facts and questions because I think dishonesty muddies the waters and makes everything worse. As I've made clear to people capable of reading calmly, I am not arguing for the destruction of Israel.)
"I'm not arguing for the destruction of Israel." Their history with the region, regardless of the wax and wane of the numbers. goes back at least 3 thousand years. At least. The history of Islam is not nearly that long. The Israelies have made it clear, you leave them alone, they leave you alone. The same cannot be said about their enemies.
When one begins pleading in the name of "human life", that is an inconvenient fact that cannot be ignored.
Fact is, Israel is not going anywhere. The rest is up to their neighbors. It is really that simple.
Maybe you can point to an objective real source of “Christians in the US baying for blood and calling for the eradication of an entire people” but that seems completely false and libelous to me. I have only heard sadness for Israelis and Palestinians and deep anger towards Hamas. And as horrible as this is for Israel, the 98% or so of Palestinians in Gaza not part of Hamas may end up suffering the most from this. I find your comment above unbalanced and inaccurate at the very best.
This is Senator Marco Rubio:
https://newrepublic.com/post/176107/marco-rubio-eradication-extreme-langauge-hamas-gaza-israel
There were a number of other on the US far-right and even more in Israel, which is the more worrying one. This kind of dehumanising rhetoric, referring to them as animals to be eradicated, is generally a precursor to genocide. Rod wrote about in his article about the language of disgust. Now, technically it is ambigous whether the people in question were referring to Hamas or the Palestinian people in general, but it sure looks like they are talking about the latter.
I don’t see how any fair reader of that quote could say that. He’s clearly talking about Hamas and accurately. The biased new republic tries to imply he’s talking about everyone, but that’s absurd so to a fair reading of his statements. And hamas for the record deserves to be discussed in that manner. Murdering innocent civilian children, infants, women and elderly is the province of evil barbarians.
I always knew this hack would return to his default position. What a jerk.
True that. Christians in this country clamoring for vengeance, carte blanche for an Israeli response to wipe out these people disgusts me almost as much as what Hamas just did. I am not on anybody’s side because they are all bad. I also find it odd that conservative Christians in the US fawned all over Israel (which is a woke nation in large part- see Bibi’s invite to the acronym marchers a couple years back) even before this massacre, yet at home rage against the LGBT movement. Much of this to me is beginning to look much like the “don’t let a good crisis go to waste.”. Israel fences in 2 million people, the Hamas fighters break out, slaughter innocent Israelis, Bibi gets newfound support despite serious opposition politically, a massive retaliation destroys Gaza and many innocents (not to mention deaths of Israeli soldiers), US defense firms’ stocks head skyward, and who knows, maybe the psychopath neocons get their war with Iran. Even better. Violence begets violence begets violence.
PalestinianChristians and other Christians in the area get the short end of the stick. They’ve been putting up with oppression from both sides of this conflict, most recently having their holy places desecrated by Zionist fanatics. But the Christians don’t rate an honorable mention. BTW, Jewish Israelis dressed up as Priests to test this out and were accosted in public. Who speaks for them?
America should do nothing but broker humanitarian support and push for a cease fire. I’m not buying the “you can’t work with terrorists...” argument because we sure did, and still do in Syria.
More to the point, Israel is not a reliable ally either (as is ant country in the middle east)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
As a nation, they have also instigated terrorist attacks against the US, not to mention continued espionage of our defense tech a la China.
It's really not too smart to cozy up with them
O I know all about the USS Liberty. But about Operation Cyanide? That was pure diabolism and apparently involved potential nuclear destruction of Cairo. The Liberty was to be the casus belli, with Egypt blamed for its sinking. Whether that history is true, I don’t know, but the attack being deliberate cannot be disputed.
Also, see Gabor Mate’s video on this subject. He has great clarity on this subject.
Is this the interview his son Aaron did with his father? It's excellent. Just listening to Gabor's calming voice and overall equanimity should be sufficient to diffuse the crisis not to mention the substance of his perspective.
As the saying goes, Nations have interests not friends.
Dude - no matter how you slice it, Hamas exists to eradicate jews and israel from the face of the earth. They dont give a shit about palestinians. They use them as bullet-catchers.
You're kidding, right. Blaming Israel for being attacked? That's absolutely preposterous, and offensive.
Israel has cut off services to Gaza because they're in an existential war. They're literally fighting against people who want to see them all dead - people so evil, they'll kill you even if you're not Jewish. If you're Thai or Phillipino, or French or whatever, doesn't matter, they'll just kill you for the crime of being in Israel's borders.
And to top it off, they're *forcing* Gazans to remain in the north, to be killed by the IDF. That's who they are, and Israel is awakening to the proposition that they were never dealing with people operating in good faith. You don't give those people power and water, you show them the pointy end of a missile. Anything less is to be complicit in your own destruction.
"You don't give those people power and water, you show them the pointy end of a missile."
It sure sounds like you're referring to the Palestinians in Gaza here and not just Hamas. Whilst admittedly, Hamas is their government, this is my precise problem with the bloodthirsty language being employed by so many on the far-right. It is ambigous who "those people" or "they" are but people can sure read between the lines. It's a classic dog whistle.
I'm not blaming Israel for being attacked, just pointing out it was inevitable the Palestinians would eventually find a way to hit back at them given the policies of the government in the last several decades. That it happened in this manner, with a terror attack targeting civilians is despicable, but to say the Israeli government is unaccountable and has played no role in the situation getting to where it is now, would be absurd.
'Those people' = Hamas. And as I said, they're forcing civilians to remain in the IDF's path. So Israel is going to target 'those people' and civilians will be in the way, which is Hamas' responsibility.
Israel played no part in being attacked. It is the only functional democracy in that part of the world and it did everything but lay out the doormat for a peaceful settlement with Hamas. It gave Palestinians workers visas. It was providing free electricity and water to Gaza. The latter was needed a) because Hamas was more interested in purchasing weapons to kill people, and b) because the pipes they were given for water were turned into rockets. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and they elected Hamas, which hasn't held an election since.
All you're doing is victim blaming. Given the atrocities that occurred, it's heinous.
Sorry for the duplicate posts. Substack is giving me issues.
That's a very one-sided view. And that's my problem. You have to be able to see both sides' (Israelis and Palestinians) point of view. None of this is happening in a vacuum.
"Both sides" are not always historically, intellectually or morally equivalent.
No, they"re not. But it is possible to have empathy for the suffering of Gazans whilst also condemning Hamas.
I've never heard of a "victim" being able to shut off their "oppressor's" food, water, and electricity.
When Russia used similar tactics on Ukraine, they were said to be committing war crimes. I guess Israel has a different set of rules than the rest of us
Well one difference is that Israel was invaded by Hamas. Russia wasn't invaded by Ukraine. Another is that Israel is tiny and surrounded by an ocean of potential ethno-religious enemies, whereas Russia is colossal and clearly the dominant military force in Eastern Europe. A further difference is that Israel (as a people) has a history stretching back thousands of years of being pushed to the brink of extinction.
And if that's not justification enough for a zero-sum mentality on behalf of the Jews, then we can talk about the war crimes you mentioned. Here, let me show you some pictures from last weekend's attack by Hamas.
Israel also has the backing of the largest military power in the world in the USA. Furthermore, the people of the West Bank have been slowly displaced by the encroaching Israeli forces since the mid 20th century (look at a map of Israel in the 60s vs today).
Furthermore, Israelis have zero claim to the land around Jerusalem. Zero, zilch, nada. If anything, the holy land is the rightful property of the Catholic Church, as well as the native Christians living in the Levant. Speaking of which, many of those Christians have had their own babies murdered by Israel.
I am supremely comfortable in taking sides: Death to hamas and iran.
Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
I listened to a long lecture by Ian McGilchrist yesterday, and this leftist habit of treating human beings as fungible parts of a group or category seems like the left brain's modus operandi. I'm not entirely sure that the leftists here in America hate the Jews *as* Jews so much as that they hate the Jewish claim of concrete specificity, which probably hurts their heads. It's a similar thing with the cruelty that you mention: they appear to have turned off the right-brain comprehension that would be required to see what exactly is wrong with their moral picture.
Personally I think McGilchrist is wrong about some very fundamental things about the nature of reality itself so I have a hard time taking him seriously.
https://achanceencounter.substack.com/p/enchantment?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
I'll take a look; I'm not really familiar with his work other than what I've read about here on this blog, which has seemed fascinating enough. The lecture was mostly on his theory of cognition, and I found it insightful in terms of explaining how abstraction has triumphed over enchantment in our world.
Checked it out. Hm, I'm not sure that McGilchrist is saying that we're co-creating reality per se. It seems to be more that whatever is metaphysically "real" must be phenomenologically received by our consciousness as "meaningful". (I sometimes describe this polarity as solar fact versus lunar meaning.) And when the fact is received by our consciousness, it gains a dimension of meaning that it did not have before—which may or may not add to its previous reality. I don't think he's being a subjective idealist, although I'll need to look into it further.
He has not objected to being described as holding idealist metaphysical views. With regard to co-creating reality here is McGilchrist in his own words:
Whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever-it-is. By this I do not only mean the common sense view that I have an impact on the world, as the world has an impact on me: that I leave my footprints. That would lead immediately to the reflection that I am very small in relation to the world, and so effectively my impact is so small that for all intents and purposes it can be ignored. There is, it might seem, an inexpressibly vast universe and an inexpressibly tiny individual consciousness. Such a reflection seems to posit an objective position – the view outside of history or geography, time or space – a view from nowhere, in which all can be measured and compared. It implies a Measurer of all the measurers, measuring the other scales and putting each part in its place according to its overall worth. But though that cannot be, the alternative is not just a merely subjective position, either: this very polarity – subjective/objective – is misleading. In the fado, in the raga, in jazz, it is what it is because of me, and I am what I am because of it.
This is why he is not and can never be an orthodox Christian, although Rod likes to think McGilchrist has flirted with the idea.
Actually, I think I like that—it sounds almost Blakean. And in that lecture, McGilchrist briefly described himself as a panentheist, which I consider a very proper Christian metaphysics. In my view, your quote from him is fully consistent with my previous comment: it's the paradox of solar spirit reflected in lunar consciousness, which is a co-creation in that every relationship is a co-creation. But I will admit that I'm also rather indifferent to whether his perspective is "orthodox" enough by any given definition.
With respect to idealism: I would say that it is obviously correct if all it suggests is that consciousness (or spirit) is primordial. "In the beginning was the Word" is philosophically idealist; and Platonic realism essentially is a type of idealism, the opposite of materialist realism, so at some point it also becomes a language game. I think that the degenerate slide from idealism to solipsism is a strictly modern problem, not intrinsic to the premise.
Well, it's tough to support the proposition that we co-create reality with God from a biblical perspective. It's pretty clear right from Genesis that we are created beings. There is nothing that we truly create in this world, given that all the matter that exists has been here from the big bang. We can participate in creation but we don't co-create it. "The Lord knows the thoughts of man, that they are but a breath."
I'm a fan of Aristotle over Plato personally. Following after Aristotle, St. Thomas had a brilliant conception of how consciousness works that can align well with a material realist view. I realize many religious people shy away from material realism because they think it necessarily excludes the supernatural but it really doesn't have to. Realism is just the view the world outside ourselves exists and that we can know it as it is and are able to reliably reason about it. (This is different from the moderate realist view which refers to forms, which I also share.)
Idealism definitely does not merely suggest that consciousness is primordial. As I quoted in the essay, "the idealist denies the mind-independent reality of matter". Though McGilchrist denies his view is purely subjective, given the definition of idealism it's very hard to see how it could be anything but essentially subjective.
I'll just add that subjectivist views need not necessarily go all the way to solipsism to cause problems. It is impossible to find any grounds for a shared morality, for example, under an idealist view.
My view is that God made us in His image, and He is the Creator—and therefore, He made us as creators, destined to cooperate with Him in the Creation. I'm essentially a Romantic at heart, who believes that our creative powers can and do partake of the divine nature. Every poem or insight or love is a type of new creation, insofar as *that* specific relationship between the Holy Ghost and a living soul has never happened before and will not recur: a genuinely new thing under the sun.
I understand how you defined idealism, but my opinion is that it is narrow and inaccurate: that isn't what idealism necessarily does. Also, as a practical matter, it is very difficult to find grounds for shared morality in any case. Even granted that objective morality exists, all kinds of people have all kinds of different ideas about what that is or how it should be applied in any given case. So, I think it's more useful to focus on a sort of consensus or harmonization of spirits, granting that we only reach true spiritual objectivity by each of us digging all the through to the far side of our own subjectivities. When we attempt to short-circuit that process, I find that we usually just become very rigid and dogmatic about our own subjective perspectives on objective Truth, which is not good for anyone.
Fuck em
Critical Leftists don't necessarily hate Jews they hate WHITE PEOPLE, and consider all Jews white, esp considering that Israel is a creation of European colonialism.
Critical Leftism, if you haven't noticed at this point, is a program designed to cover white people with so much shame, guilt, scorn and hatred that they either convert (to some form of "allyship" aka submission) or become second-class citizens, too cowed to speak.
The goal being the same it's been for the Left for at least a century: to replace liberal democracy and capitalism with "socialist liberation", and for us to enjoy the same political arrangements and freedoms they had in the Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba etc...
Fair enough—I suppose there's that as well. Either way, it seems somewhat different from classical anti-Semitism per se, although the practical outcome is much the same.
remember these are the same people responsible for such deep intellectual products as Whiteness Studies, white fragility, white tears, white ways of knowing, white science etc—I seem to detect a through-line here...
as a lot of people have been saying this week: when people show you who they are, believe them.
"Critical Leftists don't necessarily hate Jews they hate WHITE PEOPLE, and consider all Jews white, esp considering that Israel is a creation of European colonialism."
Yes, this.
is weird how this isn't blatantly obvious to everyone at this point.
i guess it was smart to bombard the American liberal class with the idea that there is no such thing as "antiwhite racism" (or the idea that nonwhites cannot be "racist"), it's sort of like cutting an alarm before a burglary.
Judaism has had so many offshoots in its long history and Social Justice is another of them. (It is after all, in its current incarnation, a product of the Frankfurt School, all Jews, who wanted to combine Freud and Marx, both Jews.)
Secular Left Jews still follow the prophetic tradition of loudly publicly denouncing oppression and corruption by the powers that be, and this has led them to denounce their own people in the name of the abstraction called "Justice".
They are prizing loyalty to their principles over their own people and its history, which is mostly only possible because they lead safe and prosperous lives where other people they rarely see and never know wield violence on their behalf (our police and military).
Just as with the Soviets a century ago, Jews have created, fed and supported the golem that will at some point turn on them. It just seems to be a part of their unfortunate history.
Yes. Antisemitism on European lines is relatively exotic over here. All the left cares about is that brown people are getting picked on by white people.
Ever notice that almost all black-white crime is black on white. But the one time when it is white on black crime, the televisions and newspapers saturate the coverage.
Word.
"The people who are celebrating the massacre of innocent Jews in the name of “liberation” are the same people who would celebrate the massacre of you, if they had the chance."
This is what I've really realized this week. If you can cheer the beheading of infants for the sake of "liberation" or "decolonization" or whatever it is - you can cheer it here as well as there; you may in fact TAKE PART in it because you've already excused it morally.
Yesterday hands were wrung over whether or not embrace cancel culture against radical Palestinian apologists like the Harvard kids and if grace was a luxury that society could afford.
Today it seems that some level of cancel culture against those particular monsters should maybe kinda sorta be embraced, but their use of cancel culture against the people they see as monsters is wrong.
Left out of the discussion is that the use of cancel culture doesn't really fix the problem for either side. Another heretic always springs up. In pluralistic societies that keep trying to pretend diversity is a strength, you will always have this tension that eventually turns into violent confrontation.
What works is active steps to limit your plutality and diversity. That's what Hungary is doing by refusing to take Islamic immigrants. They decided, quite correctly, that certain types of people would not be beneficial to the type of society that they want to have.
If you don't let certain people into your society, you don't have to deal with their issues. You don't have to worry about canceling them later or them achieving enough power to cancel you.
The term "cancel culture" itself was a bit of a red herring because it mainly emerged from Libertarian and Secular anti-woke types who really cared more about Procedural sins rather than questions of right or wrong.
For true social conservatives, this perspective misses the mark of determining right from wrong
Canceling is not (in the general sense) wrong? Yes, there are some things polite society should shame and shun-- but that should be fairly short and well-delineated list, understood across multiple generations not made up on the fly, and no, the behavior should not taken to excess either.
Harvard has outlived its usefulness. Fence it off and let the Marines use it for maneuvers.
A lovely fantasy.
the left has for decades been percolating and metastasizing on American university campuses. Training undergraduates in radical political theory, identity politics, intimidation, gaslighting - and releasing those undergrads into the world where they attach themselves to corporations, government agencies, educational institutions and bureaucracies. the terrorism in Israel saw a groundswell of support among the left in America. Now it is clear what left wing notions like decolonization mean in real life. So far in America it has been statues representing what the left calls colonizers that have been torn down. It seems reasonable to assume that humans that resemble the so-called colonizers could be next - as they were in Israel this week.
I just wrote this about the resurgence of barbarism earlier today - couldn't agree more with the sentiments in your piece.
Hang Gliders and Helicopter Rides
https://substack.com/inbox/post/137931844
We need to keep making a hard distinction between Liberalism and the Left. Liberals dream of peace, equality under the law, equality of opportunity, fairness, economic and personal freedom, among other things. They dream of the day when little Jewish and Muslim children can play together in safety. The Left dreams of a violent revolution where the blood of oppressors with run in the streets.
As Rod says, there are left leaning Liberals and right leaning Liberals, but a left leaning Liberal is not a Leftist. The same is true of right leaning Liberals and the Far Right. Along with fascism, there is the toxic brew of racism, vitalism, and eugenics that we say in Nazism.
I'm not sure how to categorize Socialism and Conservatism, but they too need to be distinguished from the Left and the Far Right.
Part of the point of my piece today is that now is the time for liberals to make a hard distinction between themselves and progressives -- and stick to it. This is where "No Enemies To The Left" gets you. And if the Right sticks to the Charles Haywood NETTR program, it will find itself defending atrocities too.
I'm with you.
I’m with you.
I call myself a red-letter Christian, which means that I can come across as "right" to some Leftists and "left" to some Rightists. What I do know is that antisemitism needs to be fought root and branch, because (1) it's a sin and (2) it spreads like the plague.
I think all hatred of the other is wrong. The worse things get in the world the less I want to join any tribe other than that of the followers of Christ. Not the admirers of Christ, mind you, the followers.
I'm with you.
Ok. Follow Christ:
Matt. 10 Verses 34 to 39
[34] Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. [35] For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
To follow Christ is to take up the cross as He did, not the sword. Yes, it has been and will always be contentious but Jesus taught that to give in to anger is a sin. We are taught to forgive each other not 7 times but 70 times 7. We are taught not to assume we see more clearly than others do and not to consider ourselves above anyone else. We are also taught to shake the dust from our feet when we encounter those who categorically reject His word and are cautioned against casting pearls before swine. The mission is not to win a battle against other people, rather it is to win the battle in our own hearts against evil and follow Him upward along the narrow way to the end.
I found this pertinent poem a week or two before the most recent reminder of what we humans are capable of:
https://gretchenjoanna.com/2023/10/11/if-you-have-the-courage/
I agree with much of what "Red-letter" Christians say. There's very little theologically that I'd disagree with in the "Red-letter" parts of the Bible (indeed, if you ever watch online debate between Muslims and Christians, frequently Muslims will quite Jesus (AS) in support of our positions). And there are some excellent ethics, too (though I'd challenge any kind of absolute "turn the other cheek" pacifism).
It seems to me that purely nonviolent resistance depends on your enemy having some sense of decency and shame. It worked when the Indians used it against the British; if people had tried it against the Nazis, then probably not so much. Pure pacifism is basically a license for the worst among us to engulf the earth. It would seem that resistance on the physical plane (i.e. violence) is necessary against people who only understand physical things, although I definitely don't like it.
Agreed. I cannot think of pure pacifism as being ethically a good choice.
Like celibacy or deliberate poverty, I see it as a virtuous ascesis in individuals who are capable of it, but something that can never work on any scale. And I don't think we need to worry that those things will ever be embraced by some great mass of people.
Was it Camus who said something about those who are willing to hurt innocents having an advantage over those who aren't? (at least on a wordly level)
It doesn't ring a bell right away, but if he said that, it would have probably been in *The Rebel*.
More generally, I've thought about how on strictly worldly terms, amoral men have an advantage over men with living souls: since the amoral man could do literally anything in the pursuit of what he wants, whereas the man with a living soul is rather constrained in his options for action, for the sake of spiritual freedom.
It all depends on how important the soul is. "For what shall it profit a man though he should win the whole world, if he lose his own soul? or what shall a man give for recompense of his soul?" Matthew 16:26
If you really believe that the soul is immortal, then the amoral man may indeed (as we have often seen throughout history) gain EVERYTHING they want in this world. But there's more coming...
From 1 Corinthinians 9:
"25 Everyone who seeks a prize submits himself to rigorous self-discipline in every respect. They do so to win a perishable crown, while we seek an imperishable one. 26 Therefore, I do not run without purpose, nor do I fight like a man beating the air. 27 Rather, I discipline my body and bring it under control, for fear that after preaching to others I myself may be disqualified."
Yes -- I'm very much working from memory here, but I believe that that is what Camus (if it indeed was Camus) was getting at. In a strictly temporal sense the amoral person will often have somewhat of an advantage over the more scrupulous one. One of the common generalizations of this is "Nice guys finish last."
No offense, but red-letter Christianity is poppycock -- it's just a new version of the old Gospel of Thomas Jefferson.
Exactly, put forth by people who buy into the warm, fuzzy hippy Jesus, which a. is in incomplete, inaccurate, self-serving image of Jesus which does not reflect him at all and b. not Christianity at all. Christianity is the whole word of God. The whole word of God is there for one to get to know and understand God and to spiritually armor us against the world, to wade into it and face its dangers. Christ himself used the Scripture when directly confronted by Satan in the wilderness.
And no, Christians are not to be pacifists. Violence is not our first tool we reach for, but it is an available tool in fighting evil and defending those who need it.
Christ himself told his people to "buy a sword, sell your cloak if you have to," because he knew just what kind of world he would be leaving his people in when he left. We have the full armor of God and the authority granted to us by him to use in facing the powers and principalities of this world. But when dealing with mortals, when we must, we have the sword.
But again, not our first choice. And there may be times that martyrdom is what we must face.
But we are not obliged to bare our necks to a marauding enemy who wishes to cut our throats.
Be ready to take your stand.
Yes, you’ve said that before about "warm, fuzzy hippy Jesus". In fact, at least once directly to me after I'd quoted the Sermon on the Mount: “Don’t turn my Jesus into some free love hippie peace freak.” But there are 3 chapters of the Sermon on the Mount as opposed to one sentence where He tells his disciples go buy a sword, and almost immediately afterwards, when Peter uses that sword on the High Priest’s servant ear, Jesus tells him, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword." (Matt. 26:52)
Meanwhile, I would like you to consider a thought experiment: If you had been actually there at the Sermon on the Mount, what do you think would have been your reaction to it? After all, Jesus preached this to people living under the brutal Roman occupation. So, would you have asked a lot of “What about ___?” questions? Would you have walked away in disgust at this pacifist BS? Would you go and join (or you might have already joined) the Zealots?
I’m not saying you have to be completely pacifist to be Christian, because that’s like saying you have to be completely perfect to be Christian. We are all sinners. But I do agree with Chesterton: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” That’s from his book "What's Wrong with the World?", and his answer to that question was “I am.” That's also my answer as well.
Yes, there are three chapters of the Sermon on the Mount. And I do not discount that when I say it is the last resort. But buying a sword is there. And the disciples were working men and no doubt armed with all kinds of implements. Jesus had no problem with that, either. Again, his teaching was not about tools, but how they are used, more exactly, the heart that directs those tools.
I have no idea how I would have reacted to the Sermon on the Mount. I was not there.
Neither do you.
How would you have reacted to when Jesus instructed you to arm yourself, if you weren't already?
Of course we are what is wrong with the world. That is why Christ came.
But Christ was also a realist as well as an idealist. No one knew what the human heart was like more than he did. And he knew what that world would mean for them.
He meant those who follow him to go into the world, to spread the good news, increase his kingdom and to help and heal where they could.
But at no point did he ask them to be voluntary victims.
I have mentioned the Jesus the hippie cliche, btw, but this "“Don’t turn my Jesus into some free love hippie peace freak," was not mine. But no, Jesus was no hippy. He was no pacifist.
Suffering is the lot expected of Christians, in one form or another.
Victimhood is something you volunteer for. He did not ask you to do that.
Also, again, Christianity is the whole word of God, not just the Beattitudes or the "red Letters." That is nonsense and Biblically unsupportable.
Since Islam accepts Jesus as a prophet, there can be not just an exchange, but sharing between us.
But Christ was not "just a prophet." He is God, and the Son of God. Muslims deny that completely, and depending where you go in the world, you can get tortured or killed for that.
I personally have met a former Muslim who preaches the Word in just one such area of the world. He testified to this reality, and what Christ followers risk there.
And that's Turkey, one of the less savage areas, as far as that goes.
No, there can be no real sharing, of the type you envision.
Jesus comes to you in your state of sin. But by no means does he leave you there. "Go and sin no more," and there is only one unforgivable sin, the grieving of the Holy Spirit, the denying of his salvation.
It is the very reason why he came.
"No one shall come to the Father but by me," no mere prophet could offer that.
Yes, Christ is the Son of God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.
But I can share a love of Jesus with Muslims, and by sharing that, it may lead to something else.
Let me start by saying that Professor Curry's views are loathsome and antisemitism is always bad no matter who is doing the hating. That said, any hatred of the other taken to the point of dehumanization is always dangerous and leads to atrocities like those being committed right now by Israel against the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel has been indiscriminately bombing a city of over 2 million people, half of whom are under 19, for a week. How many innocent children have they wantonly killed in their rage against their attackers? How many bloodthirsty ghouls on the so-called right are cheering this on? That is a hideous moral sickness every bit as bad as Hamas' and Professor Curry's. This is not a liberal/conservative problem. The problem is the evil that abides in all of us and the lengths to which we will go in our pride when we feel our righteous rage is justified.
I know that Rod likes to cling to classical liberalism because he sees it as the only way possible for societies to organize themselves around values resembling Christian values. Maybe he gives it too much credit though because without those Christian values liberalism is an empty shell, easily crushed by other more primal and powerful ideologies. I think the days of left v. right are over because those categories don't really mean anything anymore beyond a kind of watered down tribalism. Examine your own heart and choose where you stand based on what you believe in and disregard labels. I want to stand with Christ, not Israel and not Palestine.
1. Who says it's indiscriminate? 2. Hamas could stop the bombing an instant by giving back some of their elderly and children hostages. But they aren't. Really makes you think. 3. The good people of Gaza voted for Hamas. They sowed and are now reaping. Vote for terrorists, get counterterrorism. The bastards absolutely deserve it.
Children do not deserve to be killed for the sins of their parents, that's insane. Israel itself encouraged the foundation of Hamas as an alternative to the PLO, which was much more secular. The only elections ever held in Gaza were held long before many of the children being killed by Israeli bombs were even born. Those children are, first of all, absolutely innocent, and second of all they had no choice about where they were born. Third, the residents of Gaza have nowhere else to go. They are prisoners of both Hamas and Israel.
What would you have Israel do?
If they stopped and thought about it they would see that right now they have the moral high ground in the eyes of the world. The more defenseless people they kill in Gaza the more quickly they will lose that high ground. We look at the world from an American perspective that is very pro-Israel and is not shared by much of the world. The UN has already warned them about what they are doing, so far to no avail. If they were rational they would immediately cease fire and begin to negotiate some kind of international force to go into Gaza to retrieve the hostages while also providing a safe exit for the civilians who want to leave, especially women and children. Of course no one will entertain such an idea because our hatred of the Palestinians is just as visceral as Hamas' hatred of the Jews. It's also very unfortunate that the discourse here has been co-opted by the usual American us v. them nonsense with regard to the stupidity of those Harvard students and other woke people.
"If they stopped and thought about it they would see that right now they have the moral high ground in the eyes of the world."
The term "the world" is doing a lot of work here. Countless millions of Muslims and their governments don't see Israel as having "the moral high ground." If Israel stopped and did nothing in response to the recent atrocities, the Muslim world would see them as cowardly pussies and would consider Israeli inaction as a victory for the Palestinians.
That's not me trying to justify anything; it's just how the Ummah thinks, as evident from the past 25 to 50 years and even explicit statements to that effect from guys like Osama Bin Laden.
I meant they had the moral high ground in the west. I should have made that clear. If they keep indiscriminately killing people in Gaza they will lose that high ground even in the west. Even Joe Biden of all people was moved to express sympathy for the people of Gaza today.
This is the failure of western thinking at work. 'If we are reasonable, then we will have won the day!'
That sort of thinking doesn't understand how to deal with the most vicious, savage, ruthless enemy imaginable. Decapitated babies, and you want them to care about the moral high ground?
No, go in and turn Gaza into a parking lot and save your people from destruction!
Except it's not the Israelis who are being threatened with destruction right now.
Hostages--who also have "no choice" and "nowhere else to go" do alter the situation and make idle armchair speculation about the motive of "vengeance" irrelevant. Innocence versus innocence--so the speculation tie goes to Hamas? There are a lot of assumptions not being stated here.
According to the WSJ, 1799 people have been killed so far in Gaza and 7388 wounded. This is in a city without water or power so really there appears little chance of treating the wounded. I don't think I used the word vengeance, but for comparison sake, the civilian death toll in the Ukraine war is under 10,000 and that conflict has been going on for nearly 20 months. Gaza deaths now exceed Israeli deaths but Israel is not even close to being done punishing them. Now they are demanding all the citizens in the north to leave within 24 hours. They have nowhere to go. Remember half the citizens of Gaza are under 19. Half. This is the ugly reality that is happening as we speak. Look, you can support Israel all you want, and I certainly don't support Hamas, but I absolutely cannot support what Israel is doing right now. It's wrong.
David French wrote a pretty informative article yesterday for the NYT about the rules of war and the difficult but not insurmountable problems Israel faces as it proceeds to defend its people--within the international rules, which Hamas does not recognize or follow. There is a great deal of popular misunderstanding--as your comment reflects--upon what those rules require. I understand, and I am sure the Israelis agree, that the noncombatant citizens of Gaza must somehow be given a way to get out. Hamas, Egypt, and perhaps others bear some responsibility for this. I have confidence that the planners of the Gaza military action will make their plans for action within the rules. The test, as always, will be the capacity of individual soldiers to act within the rules under conditions of great physical and psychological hardship.
One of us is certainly operating under a misunderstanding. Here is what French says:
"For example, a nation that disregards the law of war often approaches urban combat by destroying as much of the city as it can to weaken defenses before the attack and then, when it enters the city, it presumes structures are full of enemies and destroys buildings at will."
Have you seen the pictures of Gaza? If not, come back when you have. Here's a NYT article for you:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/world/middleeast/gaza-siege-humanitarian-un-israel.html
Israel gave the Palestinians in northern Gaza 24 hours to leave, which of course they couldn't do in such a short time. No matter, Israel has already gone into the city.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/now-is-time-war-says-israels-military-chief-2023-10-12/
And no, the Israelis do not agree that civilians must be given a way out, they have blockaded every exit, including the one to Egypt, which they have bombed multiple times. Your confidence is completely misplaced. What is happening is ethnic cleansing and you are cheering it on. Oh and military sieges are illegal, which David French, as a lawyer, ought to know.
The election was held 17 years ago and there has never been one since. Hamas won by 3 percentage points and less than 50% of the vote.
If we had never had an election since 2006, GW Bush would still be President.
On that note, how responsible are the people who voted for him for all the bloodshed he caused?
President Bush for twenty-three years. What a prospect. What a nightmare.
I voted for him & there is a house in my area where they have a memorial to their grandson who was killed in Iraq. Every time I drove by it, I felt like I’d killed that kid myself.
I understand your guilty feeling but you are not guilty. You had an election choice that decided the presidency for four years. You voted with the knowledge that you had at your disposal. You had no role in Bush's governance. George W. Bush is not an evil man but he was foolish and arrogant and too self-confident. That got our boys killed and hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
Well I actually voted for him in 2004 after we went up to Iraq but before it really went sideways. I just didn’t have any confidence in Kerry & as for Edwards, what a sleazebag. I agree that Bush is not evil but was foolish & arrogant. I think he really thought it would be easy to remove Saddam & the Taliban & bring Jeffersonian democracy to countries that never had it. Kinda naive as well. Too bad he didn’t listen to his dad on why removing Saddam was neither easy nor a good idea.
You are absolutely right.
Too many words. Fuck Curry.
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A universal theme I have always noticed among racists is that they hate Jews. It can be white racists, black racists, Hispanic racists, the one thing they can all agree on is that they hate Jews. It has always struck me as odd, but maybe it shouldn’t. God created a covenant with the Israelites, and leaving nitpicking and hair splitting off the table, the first Christians were Jews. Christians may not be Jews by ethnicity, but the continuation of Judaism into Christianity is unbroken.
If God made covenant with the Jews, then they are of God, just as Christians are. Our baptisms are a covenant as well, perhaps less in outward stature, but the commitment of our service to God in return for guidance and eternal life. Satan hates all that is claimed by God, and especially those who turn from the corrupt ways of this fallen world. Racism itself is a thing of evil, because it completely contradicts Christ’s commandments to us. To hate a person is to not love another as Christ loves them, so racism is anti-Christ behavior in a very explicit form.
Racists hate Christ, whatever they might otherwise say, engage in anti-Christ behavior, and hate those who are in a covenant with God. The Jews were the first and most visible form of that covenant, and Christians are a close second. Christians have not born as much of the brunt of this as Jews have, and have at times partaken in that hatred, but persecution of Christians has been accelerating as well.
The persecution of Christians in modern form is not the same as what happened in Rome. It is not the actions of Christians now which invites persecution, but the simple essence of being Christian. In other words, just to be a Christian is to be a target of persecution. Furthermore, the Christians who are persecuted are not people who have much in the way of any political or social power these days, much as all Christians are becoming. It is like the Nazis, who claimed that Jews were behind every bad thing that happened, and controlled the world in secret, but could somehow not stop Hitler from gaining power or keep themselves out of the camps. In America, politics are not informed by Christianity, but the other way around. The Republican Party, with cynical lip service to God and prayer, uses Christianity as a tool to seduce voters from the holy and into the worldly, to take their eyes from beyond this world and to see nothing beyond it. The Democrats, leading the charge, merit no discussion.
We are again surrounded by a pagan, and therefore satanic, fastness. Worship of what has been made for and from a sinful and fallen world, is the worship of sun, whatever form it takes. Money, sex, the degrading of a human form we have authority to degrade, the absence of reason from daily life, it encroaches. When there is nothing left to sweep side into corruption, the focus then becomes on directly destroying what is left.
The times ahead will be stark and difficult. We are coming to the end of the age, perhaps the end of ages. We have squandered Creation and been poor stewards. We have sought comfort in earthly things. We have believed that we are eternal and that the world is born with us and dies with us. There has been so much sin.
There will no longer be the comforts. Our modern existence has always been balanced on the edge. The events of the past week or so are the beginning, the first breath of the Apocalypse. Things may more quickly or slowly, but we are no longer living in the wealth of the past, itself having been squandered in the name of insulation from the hardships of life. Food is already expensive, but will become more difficult to obtain at any price. Warmth in winter, cooling in summer, these will no longer be possible except for a tiny and shrinking minority, easy travel, safety, protection, these things will be gone. There is no schadenfreude in recognizing that, no eagerness for the coming suffering, only the recognition that it is coming.
Things became stark at that point, and people will redouble their hatred, because the world they have tied their souls to will be vanishing and they will be fearful and uncertain. We will be far more persecuted in that time, unless we can withdraw to communities that can be shelter. The Benedict Option, at the core, was never really going to apply to a modern world that was in flux but largely stable. It was always going to apply to a time when surviving the coming darkness did not simply mean making sure everyone prayed before Sunday dinner. In the hearts of the faithful, they will begin to gather and keep watch. I have already been seeing that, even if people are not sure what they are watching for.
All this was never about a simple conflict between Israel and Hamas. They are just the first actors taking the stage in the first scene as the veil is lifted.
“A universal theme I have always noticed among racists is that they hate Jews. It can be white racists, black racists, Hispanic racists, the one thing they can all agree on is that they hate Jews.” When I read that I couldn’t help but think of Tom Lehrer’s classic, and perennially relevant, ditty, “National Brotherhood Week”:
“Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.
But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
It's National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It's only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!”
"Christians may not be Jews by ethnicity, but the continuation of Judaism into Christianity is unbroken."
I would really quibble with that point. Modern Judaism is a definite split from the pre-Christian Israelites. The Second Temple is the most recent point of contact between Christianity and modern Judaism, but the similarities really do veer off from there.
To get to 21st century Judaism, you need to reckon with the emergence of the Rabbinic traditions, heavily influenced by the Talmud and, in some sects, Kabbalah, which is very starkly anti-Christian in its theology. To make an analogy, the split between the Reformers and Catholicism happened a mere 400 years ago and produced such radically different cultures that religious wars were immediately manifest.
All this is to say that today's Israelis have very little in common with the religion of Abraham and David.
God still loves them and has plans for them. And the modern days is hardly the first, or even the worst the Jewish people have turned their backs on God.
Come to think of it, that might be my main reason for liking the Jews: the fact that various scoundrels appear to hate the Jews, even when they have practically nothing else in common. That probably activated my contrarian instinct and made me think that if they all agreed on that one point, then there must be something good about the Jews. And I stand by that.
All sin has its origins in Hell. Sin is ultimately spiritual, with man's fallen heart and the powers and principalities acting in tandem. Absolutely, racism is right up there. Anti-semitism kicks it up a notch. Satan has a very personal grudge against the Hebrew people, being the first tribe which turned to God after the flood (and trace their line all the way back to Adam). God gave them a special place of prominence, and even now, has special plans for them, even though they denied his Son and are on iffy terms with him now as a nation. He has not forgotten them or his promises to them. He still blesses those who bless them as well, because of that.
As for your statement about the GOP, not sure if it is that simple. I think the relationship between the GOP and the body of Christ is a combo of factors. The GOP, as opposed to the Democrats, is superficially welcoming to Christians (the Dems have for all practical purposes out and out rejected God, with the logical results following on). In the GOP, you have a percentage of real followers and God-lovers, who still have some influence, especially locally. But you are right, you also have lots of cynical bastards who could not care less, and use such posturings to manipulate Christians and help ensure their power base. ESpecially on the national level.
That's mortal realm politics in our corrupt times. It is what it is. One should be clear-eyed about it.
As a result, the Evil One's hate waxes hot. So when these algae blooms of anti-Semitism occur and one begins to wonder where it comes from? Same place it always has, throughout thistory.
But you are also right, in Christians inheriting their own version of that hatred. Christ's arrival and actions with his incarnation was the greatest blow Satan has endured to date, and he knows the worst is coming and his time is short.
So, he hates us, too. And is determined to do what damage he can before he goes down.
Douthat's column today is good on this theme:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/opinion/hamas-israel-land-acknowledgements.html?unlocked_article_code=KYVnuJfnOfNJWeSpxyZbz4s1IvdaMy3AsFKHiM1aNDjTCLyCYhYSNloWs0goIrzm6xloweq3OiewQ06we7aujRtB9rlEOYHltDzhpr8RW4nFd42cUStOsdzduyosHkakKCeQUqXFsHzUw888RnsNZkxYq1OI8UaaHg8752bmAgljWIYh_fgRZfMWacmg-fX3z9XjUWj80KJLfRj2-6r21nZFngzU6q05s8kXYYucLkFghpHLpn5eniK6XmpOVpmqMVgNBF2wz99I9xe6gHL12vQC86mlwo3g_qUV2pD1h0dNPC81qgXoUTpgBaLDvzlsO_wbrD-Rskbb1Dn8dtrQebwJpiIWtZkUtyvo&smid=url-share
It is good, but the reality is that so many people are just horrified at the defense of the Hamas atrocities (you won't find them in these boxes) that it may set the Left staggering. They'll get their footing because the media is in their corner, but it's fun to see them on the ropes.
I'm struggling with the "Israel Is Just As Bad So I Won't Take Sides" comments. So Israel somehow slaughtered people for decades, so that makes it right to behead babies? Why don't you say what you really think, Israel got what it deserved so you won't "take a side" because the Palestinians "own" the land. Is the right answer to just wipe out Israel? Is that how we're going to do things now? I don't have an issue with someone having an opinion. At least we know where they stand. "I won't take sides" is the shield of cowards.
Israel has every right to defend itself, and they must take action in this case. But like the US after 9-11 they can and perhaps will go too far. War may be a necessary evil. But if you leave the "necessary" part in the dust you are doing just plain evil.
I keep wondering: if we're really doing a reset, forcibly "decolonizing" land and restoring "rightful" inhabitants, what's the argument for stopping with Palestine and who gets to decide the reset dates? Would it be fairest to have one global date? Or do we choose them on a location by location basis? Obviously the Palestinians believe 1947 would be fairest in their case (Allah forbid they acknowledge that Jews were living in Israel a millennia or two before Islam even came in to existence).
Human history is an ongoing story of migrations and conquerings and displacements, so I'd love to know what the fair mechanism is for determining whose "rightful" claims are the valid ones.
It's a fair question, and I think most people draw the line based on their own prejudices.
As far as Canaan/Palestine/Israel itself, as I've said before, the ancient Canaanites, Arab-Speaking Palestinians, and Jewish people all have the same genetic roots (though Ashkenazi Jews have a lot of European DNA in their mix).
So in other words, we're largely talking about the same genetic group, who are differentiated by language, religion and culture. Despite all of the various wars and Conquests in the Levant, there wasn't a significant genetic replacement.
So, in this particular case, it would be wrong to say "you kicked us out 2,000 years ago, we're coming back to take what is ours" (or even "the Romans kicked us out 2,000 years ago, you kicked the Romans out, now we're kicking you out.")
Rather "we were kicked out 2,000 years ago, you managed to stay, both you and we culturally evolved differently after that, and now we think our cultural evolution deserves the land more than yours, bro."
In other places, such in North America, it was largely a replacement, mainly due to a combination of disease (the biggest aspect) and forcible removal--and little genetic overlap between the previous occupants and the current ones.
But getting back to your question, I'd say that we obviously don't accept all Conquests as "done deals". We didn't accept Germany's conquest of France in 1940 as a done deal, or the Soviets conquest of the Baltics as a done deal...but we do, by and large, accept the conquest of the American west as a done deal. (And the fact that there are really so few Native Americans left kind of makes it a moot point.)
Germany's conquest of France was an unambiguous war of aggression that involved subjugation and purging of people by a megalomaniac tyrant with genocidal ambitions. The same cannot be said regarding the (re)creation of the modern state of Israel. It also seems that Israeli Jews in general would be willing to live peaceably with Palestinians if Palestinians were willing to live peaceably alongside Jews. But too many of them aren't. It's all or nothing in their view, so the battles rage on.
My larger point in my original comment is that there is no truly impartial or objective way to adjudicate these claims fairly, exactly because everyone has their prejudices from which their view of "fairness" proceeds. So it isn't at all obvious to me that Palestinians have an obvious right to that land without any obligation to share. And it should go without saying that slaughtering unarmed people who are waking up to begin their day (or who are ending a night of celebration and dancing) in the name of pressing that claim is both preposterous and unconscionable.
"Germany's conquest of France was an unambiguous war of aggression that involved subjugation and purging of people by a megalomaniac tyrant with genocidal ambitions. The same cannot be said regarding the (re)creation of the modern state of Israel."
Not *precisely* the same, of course--Hitler was certainly a whole different level of evil. But the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was a pretty clear policy of the creation of modern Israel (see Ilan Pappé's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", for example).
"It also seems that Israeli Jews in general would be willing to live peaceably with Palestinians if Palestinians were willing to live peaceably alongside Jews. But too many of them aren't. It's all or nothing in their view, so the battles rage on."
I have no doubt that many feel this way. But with the continual expansion of the settlements into the West Bank, and official policies of every Israeli government from its founding, it doesn't seem to be sincerely held at the highest levels. Remember Netanyahu's statement: "Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.” (2019) Ehud Barak criticized Netanyahu's government in 2017 by stating: "This “one-state solution” that the government is leading Israel toward is no solution at all. It will inevitably turn Israel into a state that is either not Jewish or not democratic (and possibly not either one), mired in permanent violence. This prospect is an existential danger for the entire Zionist project." And yet here we are, six years later, with Israel under Netanyahu, continuing to pursue these same policies.
"My larger point in my original comment is that there is no truly impartial or objective way to adjudicate these claims fairly, exactly because everyone has their prejudices from which their view of "fairness" proceeds."
Agreed; a world body, outside of the affected people, is inevitably going to disagree on this, based on some presuppositions.
"So it isn't at all obvious to me that Palestinians have an obvious right to that land without any obligation to share."
Let me ask you this: is it an obvious right that the United States has a right to its land without any obligation to share with, say, Mexicans who used to own a huge chunk of it (and many Mexicans can demonstrate that they have Native American DNA that existed in the Americas for thousands of years before the formation of our nation)? Why or why not? And regardless of what you feel, would the United States have to accept the decision of the UN if they said we needed to cede all that territory back to Mexico?
"And it should go without saying that slaughtering unarmed people who are waking up to begin their day (or who are ending a night of celebration and dancing) in the name of pressing that claim is both preposterous and unconscionable."
I totally agree, and I hope that's very clear from what I posted. A claim, no matter how just, is no excuse for intentionally or carelessly harming non-combatants. And likewise, no matter how scrupulous one is to not harm non-combatants, an unjust invasion is still unjust. The reasons of a war are one thing; the conduct of a war is another.
You offer some useful insights and I truly appreciate your reasonable tone and effort to find agreement where it can be had.
I don't know enough about the entire conflict and the details of its roots to hold a clear or strong opinion about whose claims carry the most moral weight. I can certainly sympathize with the Palestinian people who were displaced in 1948, though my guess is that few of them who experienced that tragedy would still be alive today. So now we are talking further generations with a historical connection, but no personal experience or actual memory of living in Palestine/Israel. I also wonder at the unwillingness of other Muslim Arab nations, many of them wealthy, to welcome or provide for the Palestinians...it's a curious thing given that their shared hatred of Israel is so widespread throughout the region. One would think they might offer aid and comfort to their Muslim brothers and sisters, help with material needs rather than leave them isolated and impoverished. How is it that the Palestinians' plight elicits so little from them?
Your question re: Mexico is well taken, though it's hard to answer since there isn't a real causal parallel in that Mexicans don't have an ongoing legacy of being persecuted, much less a holocaust in their recent past. But it does bring into focus the stickiness of Israel's claim to the land...I get that it's not slam-dunk obvious theirs is stronger than the Palestinians'. What a tragic and horrifying mess it all is.
No-one has any trouble acknowledging that. There were plenty of Jews in the Ottoman empire and at the time, it was safer for them than much of Europe. But they were not in charge, of course.
The point about 1947 is that millions of Palestinians were literally forced from their homes and land and massacred in order to make room for Jewish refugees. And they were just supposed to be ok with it, because of a genocide they had nothing to do with.
Human history is an ongoing tale of bloody fucking monsters thinking that they wont fry in eternal hell because “they know better”.
HAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
GO FOR IT, GENIUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When you are burning in hell maybe i will piss down the hole to give you something to drink. N’est Pas?
Allah akkb- KABOOM!!!!!!
What does "taking sides" mean? Thoughts and prayers? Cheerleading? Giving military aid? Sending in the troops?
If it's not actionable, I'm not sure how meaningful anything we say is.
Truth vs lie.
This is the thin edge of the blade, be-otch.
No one has said that and you know it. If you don't, then quote back to someone in these boxes who took that line, verbatim, please. I concede the guy who thinks that kids who go to raves deserve it, that's just cretinism. I mean tell me where somebody said it's right to behead babies because of the occupation. Take your time.
5 minutes on Twitter will sort that out for you.
I said in these boxes. You lose.
The CNN reporter, Sara Snider, apologized for the misinformation she spread about Hamas beheading babies. The Israeli government officials first lied to her and now walked it back. This is how the propaganda game is played.
There's one important aspect and one moral to this story that everyone seems to miss.
This is the fact that Hamas is a monster birthed by the Israeli state - literally. The foundation of Hamas was encouraged and financed by Israel in a cynical mover to undermine the secularist PLO - in the classical ploy to divide and rule the Palestinians. This is not a conspiracy theory but a well documented fact acknowledged even by the mainstream media both in the US and Israel itself. See below for just a few examples:
https://archive.ph/oZ5oO
https://archive.ph/mW6YW
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hamas-israels-own-creation/
The moral is that you cannot give birth to a monster and hope to tame it and control it. A monster by its own very definition - can neither be tamed or controlled. It will turn on you at some point and you either have to slay it or it slays you.
Israel spent 20 years building Hamas and 20 years trying to destroy it. It may very well end destroying both.
But of course we never learn - just like the US pumped the muhajideen in Afghanistan to spite the Soviets only to see them transform into Al Qaeda and the Taliban.... we will keep on creating ''proxies''... and then blame it all on them
"I prefer civilization. If we aren’t prepared to fight for it, and fight not only in word, but also in deed, then we will lose it."
Do we understand that "also in deed" means that, at some point, we MAY have to start killing people?
Do we have the will to do this? I don't mean just a few of us crazies (metaphorically speaking, of course) but the majority of western peoples. Do we have that will? I bet we don't. At least not as long as we have physical comfort.
As such, I believe our future is ruin.
Rod, the Israeli military and government has been killing civilian Palestinians, and engaging in evil atrocities, within the context of its ongoing occupation of Palestine, for over half a century. Gaza has been administered as a prison for well over a decade.
What Hamas has done in response here, as they and some other Palestinians have in the past, engaging in atrocities of their own, is likewise evil.
Israeli, in response, is likewise now performing further evil atrocities and war crimes in Gaza: https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/israels-evacuation-order-is-a-prelude
Personally, I have no trouble saying, 'I condemn the evil atrocities and killings of civilians by both sides', and then moving on to address the substance of the matter, the occupation. I could also choose to dwell, for one reason or another, on the evil atrocities and killings of civilians, but then I would presumably mourn comparably over the atrocities and killings performed by both sides, and also underline the roots of it in the ongoing occupation, and the entirely disproportionate nature of the violence and power of each side.
If one does otherwise, one misleads and functions merely as a propaganda mouthpiece ('live not by lies', my foot). I understand your disgust and outrage at the Hamas attacks in isolation; but they were not and are not in isolation, and it does no service to truth, justice, or peace for anyone to pretend otherwise.
Agreed, what Hamas is doing, and the way it is doing it, is wrong. What Israel has done, however, and is doing, and the way it is doing it, is also wrong. What I would genuinely find interesting, rather than just hearing how Hamas are Nazis (it takes precious little imagination to make *those* comparisons go the other way), are Rod Dreher's musings on what a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would look like and how that might be achieved.
Rod, I understand the reflexes, I really do. But you're often able to appreciate and speak to the complexities and tragedies of history and the human heart, in a way that you're only occasionally and vaguely gesturing at here. For someone who cares for the Palestinian people and what they have endured since 1948, almost all of the coverage of Israel and Palestine by those on the American right seems bizarrely and dishonestly one-sided (which doesn't help the impression that the American right views - in reality, not nominally - Palestinians and Muslims generally as dehumanized - 'human animals') and detached from realities; those of history and the human heart, precisely.
As a traditional conservative, I have always found the American right's two greatest 'blind spots' to be the fantastical attitudes toward and evaluations of Israel, on the one hand, and Islam and Muslims, on the other. On these two subjects, the American right has been greatly duped (with a few exceptions, perhaps most notably Russell Kirk).
Well said. This has been a week of horrors, and as so often happens they seem poised to grow into a deluge because of fallen human nature. Personally, while I know I am fallen and prone to anxiety and anger at injustice, this is a situation where I can condemn the massacres of the Israelis, the rationalization of the massacres as horrific bloodlust, and also continue to deplore Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, which is long, well-documented, and consistently ignored by American media. It doesn't matter if the Palestinians like me. It doesn't matter if the Israelis do. I am for the path of reconciliation however impossible it seems. There will be pointless bloodshed until more are exhausted. Let us not wait 20 years to admit the Iraq invasion was wrong. The time to make new choices is now.
Are you able to share what Kirk said about this?
Israel's policy towards the Palestinians is fairly straightforward. The Palestinians attack and Israel responds. You may disagree with the response, but presenting it as Horrible Israel murdering Innocent Palestinians is wrong.
There is quite a backdrop you are ignoring in order to maintain the very Horrible/Innocent dichotomy you've (wrongly) projected onto my own stance.