The deep sickness of the left is evident here. Of course the right has its problems but they tend to be non ideological. The January 6th crew didn’t really have much of an ideology beyond dedication to Trump. The left, however, is ready to send everyone to the camps until humans become perfected. As a middle of the road person who believes things that would code on both sides, I find myself increasingly repelled by that deep sickness in the left. How can people not condemn what Hamas did as pure evil even if you have deep sympathy for Gazans? For those who are worried about their organizations having people with both views, morale courage is just that, courage. Most of our leaders lack it.
Social justice always & everywhere ends in genocide because all collectivist notions require mass murder to cover-up their inevitable errors - that's just basic economics.
I am afraid you are quite correct. Worse, I think western Jews, whether European or American, are underestimating the not only the antisemitism of the left, but also how persistent that feeling is among immigrants from e.g. Palestinian groups. People seem to be downplaying the cheering in the streets in western nations, but it is important to really grasp what that is: openly celebrating the murder of specific groups based on religion or race. That should give people pause, as it represents immigrants not coming for a new life, but rather bringing their old life with them. The implications for continuing the Israeli/Palestinian (or Jewish/Islamic) conflict here in the States, with tacit political support from the left, are not good.
“This is so strange and evil that it should appall any decent person. Contrary to conventional commentary, this is not a human shield strategy. It’s a human sacrifice strategy.” But isn’t that the strategy of suicide bombers - why are we surprised? And... the evident willingness of a ‘leadership’ to sacrifice its population, hundreds of thousands, millions if necessary, rather nullifies MAD - Mutual Assured Destruction - when it comes to nuclear weapons and the restraint on using them. So is Iran getting nukes OK?
Suicide bombers are a different strategy than aiming to get your own civilians killed. Suicide bombers sign up for it; they know they aren't coming home. Aiming to get uninvolved civilians on your own side killed to make your enemy look bad is a whole other kettle of crazy.
As to MAD, that doesn't require the leaders to care about their populace, just themselves. It works, in so far as it does, so long as the leaders making decisions either can be assured of dying, or wishing they had, from a nuclear exchange. Granted, that requires a lot of assumptions about those decision makers' beliefs about the afterlife and their place in it.
Aren’t suicide bombers civilians of the society sending them? MAD - aren’t the leaders safe in their bunkers with 10 years worth of food, water, medical equipment?
Whether or not the guy who decided to wear a vest made of TNT with the intent to go kill enemy civilians is himself a civilian is not very relevant. The suicide bomber decides to go blow himself up. Choice is important.
With regard to MAD, those leaders might be safe, but not 100%, and 10 years is a long time to be in a box. How miserable were the COVID lockdowns, which weren't even total isolation and still involved access to outside goods and production; now scale that up to multiple years without there being an outside to provide goods and services.
And what do you do after 10 years? Die in an irradiated wasteland? Hope everything goes back to normal quick?
It's one thing to decide to sacrifice your own life in service to some cause. It's another to decide you're going to sacrifice a bunch of other people's lives without their consent.
I started reading 'dissident right' online sources out of curiosity following the election of Trump. Commenters on these sites who argue that the US waged wars in Iraq (and Syria) on behalf of Israel emphasize that some of the most prominent ''neocons" (Kristol, the Kagan clan) are Jewish. Apart from the issues surrounding foreign policy and the neocons, however, commenters emphasize that most Jews are progressives who support social justice causes that are antithetical to the commenters' interests, such as BLM and 'open borders' (note: I'm trying to be delicate in my wording). Before the Hamas attacks, negative comments about Jews tended to be limited to snide references to 'small hats' and so forth. In the aftermath of the attacks, I was taken aback at how excited many commenters were about Jews being slaughtered, even though, unlike those on the left, they tend not to be particularly sympathetic to the Palestinians either. So the gas chamber problem may be worse than you think.
With regard to decolonization, I noticed this term cropping up on the website of a leading academic Russian studies center after the attack on Ukraine. In the Russian context, the term refers to the break-up of Russia as a result of nationalist movements by certain non-Russian ethnic minorities (for example, the Tatars, who are Muslim). I hadn't realized where the idea came from. I find it appalling that Western academics would borrow decolonization ideology and apply it to Russia. In any event, it is a Western fantasy, if only because the Russian government is not constrained by the double standard applied to Israel.
“Who is Arnold?” Arnold is a wise and learned observer who--in a society as free as it claims to be--should be given space to speak. And be heard. Agreement is optional but, as with all options, rejection is not risk-free
I don't like the use of the word "anti-semetic" here at all. It's highly inaccurate.
Do you think your average white progressive simping for Palestine is "anti-semitic". Do you think there is any actual anti-semitism in the middle class and professional west? These people are incredibly afraid of being seen as remotely racist, and I'm sure they would spin some yarn about how they don't hate jews they just hate what Israel is doing and well you gotta break a few eggs, etc.
They aren't lying and secretly hate Jews, they really just have terrible terrible ideas.
I think part of the reason people like Larry Summers issue ridiculous statements like calling for the "moral clarity of George Floyd" is that Jews just can't give up on this ridiculous idea that they are "victims".
Say it with me now "Jews are rich white people and they aren't victims of anything."
That's how anyone with an ounce of awareness is going to see the situation. There is no way Jews are going to play the Victim Olympics and end up even close to the Palestinians.
The people protesting Israel do see the moral clarity of George Floyd. They just think Israel is Derek Chauvin. Just like how BLM was dead wrong about the reality of policing, people who support Palestine are dead wrong about Israel. But it's not because they are anti-semitic, it's because they are fucking morons. More charitably, they either don't know or have been taught the opposite of the facts on the ground, and their repellent views are a natural outgrowth of bad assumptions and reasoning.
I think it would be a good move going forward for Jews to recognize that trying to compete in the Victim Olympics and calling everything anti-semitic actually fuels the culture of victimhood that they are now seeing. The Holocaust happened a long time ago. Lots of people died by the millions in WWII, a lot of them moved on. It would be better to reject the entire Telos of victimhood and embrace and accept Jews success without an asterisk.
Jews should be on the Right because the right is the side of winners. The left is the side of losers and whiners. Jews should recognize they are winners and start to act like it. You can't be one of the most powerful and successful groups in the entire world and keep playing the victim.
Jewish progressives often remind me of those Jewish communists who remained in the party after Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin. Ironically, the anti-Semitism on the Right that Jews seem to fear the most is often stoked by progressive Jews’ fierce commitment to identity politics. Some Jews attack the anti-white identitarians (knowing that Jews are white in the eyes of POC), but most progressive Jews who were shocked by the Left’s support of Hamas were silent about anti-white hate on the Left.
The deep sickness of the Left is not just about radical ideology - although that is indeed terrible enough. But a significant proportion of the people (and especially the young) who get frothy-mouthed at fashionable-cause 'protests' are not serious grown-up people with any coherent philosophy of any kind. We are also up against an epidemic of plain Spoilt Brats - drunk on their own inchoate self-righteousness. Brats in schools, brats in politics, brats in administrative positions and - above all - brats in 'higher' education. I still remember the drug-addled anti-Zionist 'sit-in' at my UK university in 1973. And some of this kind never do grow up and can still be brats at 50.
Not strictly true—recall, in particular, ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill, who used the phrase "little Eichmanns" to describe some of the victims of the World Trade Center attack. To put the phrase in context:
"As to those in the World Trade Center . . .
"Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."
The rich and propertied have tended to view Social Justice and DEI more broadly as a cheaper way to buy off rabble-rousers than direct suppression through some combination of violence and subversion. It's starting to look more expensive than the alternative, however.
Hamas cannot be destroyed without emptying Gaza of all the Palestinians. Even if Israel were able to kill every single member of Hamas in Gaza and then leave again (not even possible itself), Hamas would be reformed in Gaza within a year, and with an even bigger chip on its shoulder. There simply isn't a solution to the problem of Hamas in Gaza that doesn't require Gaza to be emptied of almost all the Palestinians living there.
Outcomes:
(1) Israel settles, or is forced to settle, for a tit-for-tat. It launches airstrikes for the next two weeks and then settles for a truce. The Israelis stop supplying anything to Gaza and fortify the entire border to stop any incursion like that of October 7th. This will necessarily require Israel to keep the naval blockade and inspections of ships coming in to prevent the importation of weapons. I thought this outcome was about 30-40% a week ago, and now see it as about 70-80% today.
(2) Israel goes for a full ground invasion of Gaza from the north to the south, fighting in the rubble for months and upwards to a year in a Stalingrad sort of manner, attempting to drive the Palestinians into Egypt or being evacuated to Europe across the Med. I am not convinced the IDF can even manage this for much longer than a couple of months, and it might not even be possible if they are forced to fight Hezbollah, too. I think the Israelis might well lose such battles enough to be forced into a cease-fire.
Sacrifice AND suicide, so as to maximize Jewish death. The addiction to brutal cruelty, my words for what Helen Dale described among Nazi killers, seems to be a 2-10% part of most human groups. She didn’t mention the Turkish Muslim genocide of Armenian Christians, but that seems similar as well, with women raped then crucified naked, with pictures.
The Spanish Inquisition also comes to mind (unexpectedly?).
There is something truly diabolical about “doing good” thru cruel methods, and enjoying it.
The existence of Jews living in peace around Jerusalem is so offensive to many Muslims, that they justify violence because of their feelings. They also rationalize their actions claiming some Israeli injustice is the reason, but actually it’s their feeling of being offended. Using feelings about things one doesn’t like to justify violence is the deep dark place Democrats are leading America towards.
The recent ethnic cleansing of Arminians by victorious Azeris, barely known, publicized, nor condemned, shows how the anti-semites hugely dominate the anti-ethnic cleansers.
Perhaps you’ve seen how all the 19 Muslim majority countries stand with Palestine, but none are accepting thousands of refugees, especially not Egypt with a Gaza border.
Unconditional Surrender is what the Israelis should demand. Even that might not stop the Jew killing, but anything less certainly won’t.
Stalins comments about "useful idiots" applied to the liberal left of half a century ago still applies but now it is fused with the Nazi beliefs. It is the same strange true-believing mentality that supported starving the successful farmers that is now supporting Hamas.
The deep sickness of the left is evident here. Of course the right has its problems but they tend to be non ideological. The January 6th crew didn’t really have much of an ideology beyond dedication to Trump. The left, however, is ready to send everyone to the camps until humans become perfected. As a middle of the road person who believes things that would code on both sides, I find myself increasingly repelled by that deep sickness in the left. How can people not condemn what Hamas did as pure evil even if you have deep sympathy for Gazans? For those who are worried about their organizations having people with both views, morale courage is just that, courage. Most of our leaders lack it.
Social justice always & everywhere ends in genocide because all collectivist notions require mass murder to cover-up their inevitable errors - that's just basic economics.
I am afraid you are quite correct. Worse, I think western Jews, whether European or American, are underestimating the not only the antisemitism of the left, but also how persistent that feeling is among immigrants from e.g. Palestinian groups. People seem to be downplaying the cheering in the streets in western nations, but it is important to really grasp what that is: openly celebrating the murder of specific groups based on religion or race. That should give people pause, as it represents immigrants not coming for a new life, but rather bringing their old life with them. The implications for continuing the Israeli/Palestinian (or Jewish/Islamic) conflict here in the States, with tacit political support from the left, are not good.
“This is so strange and evil that it should appall any decent person. Contrary to conventional commentary, this is not a human shield strategy. It’s a human sacrifice strategy.” But isn’t that the strategy of suicide bombers - why are we surprised? And... the evident willingness of a ‘leadership’ to sacrifice its population, hundreds of thousands, millions if necessary, rather nullifies MAD - Mutual Assured Destruction - when it comes to nuclear weapons and the restraint on using them. So is Iran getting nukes OK?
Suicide bombers are a different strategy than aiming to get your own civilians killed. Suicide bombers sign up for it; they know they aren't coming home. Aiming to get uninvolved civilians on your own side killed to make your enemy look bad is a whole other kettle of crazy.
As to MAD, that doesn't require the leaders to care about their populace, just themselves. It works, in so far as it does, so long as the leaders making decisions either can be assured of dying, or wishing they had, from a nuclear exchange. Granted, that requires a lot of assumptions about those decision makers' beliefs about the afterlife and their place in it.
Aren’t suicide bombers civilians of the society sending them? MAD - aren’t the leaders safe in their bunkers with 10 years worth of food, water, medical equipment?
Whether or not the guy who decided to wear a vest made of TNT with the intent to go kill enemy civilians is himself a civilian is not very relevant. The suicide bomber decides to go blow himself up. Choice is important.
With regard to MAD, those leaders might be safe, but not 100%, and 10 years is a long time to be in a box. How miserable were the COVID lockdowns, which weren't even total isolation and still involved access to outside goods and production; now scale that up to multiple years without there being an outside to provide goods and services.
And what do you do after 10 years? Die in an irradiated wasteland? Hope everything goes back to normal quick?
It's one thing to decide to sacrifice your own life in service to some cause. It's another to decide you're going to sacrifice a bunch of other people's lives without their consent.
I started reading 'dissident right' online sources out of curiosity following the election of Trump. Commenters on these sites who argue that the US waged wars in Iraq (and Syria) on behalf of Israel emphasize that some of the most prominent ''neocons" (Kristol, the Kagan clan) are Jewish. Apart from the issues surrounding foreign policy and the neocons, however, commenters emphasize that most Jews are progressives who support social justice causes that are antithetical to the commenters' interests, such as BLM and 'open borders' (note: I'm trying to be delicate in my wording). Before the Hamas attacks, negative comments about Jews tended to be limited to snide references to 'small hats' and so forth. In the aftermath of the attacks, I was taken aback at how excited many commenters were about Jews being slaughtered, even though, unlike those on the left, they tend not to be particularly sympathetic to the Palestinians either. So the gas chamber problem may be worse than you think.
With regard to decolonization, I noticed this term cropping up on the website of a leading academic Russian studies center after the attack on Ukraine. In the Russian context, the term refers to the break-up of Russia as a result of nationalist movements by certain non-Russian ethnic minorities (for example, the Tatars, who are Muslim). I hadn't realized where the idea came from. I find it appalling that Western academics would borrow decolonization ideology and apply it to Russia. In any event, it is a Western fantasy, if only because the Russian government is not constrained by the double standard applied to Israel.
“Who is Arnold?” Arnold is a wise and learned observer who--in a society as free as it claims to be--should be given space to speak. And be heard. Agreement is optional but, as with all options, rejection is not risk-free
Arnold is one of the most reliable insightful observers of current events that I follow anywhere, that’s who 🍻
I don't like the use of the word "anti-semetic" here at all. It's highly inaccurate.
Do you think your average white progressive simping for Palestine is "anti-semitic". Do you think there is any actual anti-semitism in the middle class and professional west? These people are incredibly afraid of being seen as remotely racist, and I'm sure they would spin some yarn about how they don't hate jews they just hate what Israel is doing and well you gotta break a few eggs, etc.
They aren't lying and secretly hate Jews, they really just have terrible terrible ideas.
I think part of the reason people like Larry Summers issue ridiculous statements like calling for the "moral clarity of George Floyd" is that Jews just can't give up on this ridiculous idea that they are "victims".
Say it with me now "Jews are rich white people and they aren't victims of anything."
That's how anyone with an ounce of awareness is going to see the situation. There is no way Jews are going to play the Victim Olympics and end up even close to the Palestinians.
The people protesting Israel do see the moral clarity of George Floyd. They just think Israel is Derek Chauvin. Just like how BLM was dead wrong about the reality of policing, people who support Palestine are dead wrong about Israel. But it's not because they are anti-semitic, it's because they are fucking morons. More charitably, they either don't know or have been taught the opposite of the facts on the ground, and their repellent views are a natural outgrowth of bad assumptions and reasoning.
I think it would be a good move going forward for Jews to recognize that trying to compete in the Victim Olympics and calling everything anti-semitic actually fuels the culture of victimhood that they are now seeing. The Holocaust happened a long time ago. Lots of people died by the millions in WWII, a lot of them moved on. It would be better to reject the entire Telos of victimhood and embrace and accept Jews success without an asterisk.
Jews should be on the Right because the right is the side of winners. The left is the side of losers and whiners. Jews should recognize they are winners and start to act like it. You can't be one of the most powerful and successful groups in the entire world and keep playing the victim.
Or maybe don't bother being victim cuz anti semitism is an inexplicable decree from G-d.
https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/im-jewish-so-maybe-you-hate-me
Jewish progressives often remind me of those Jewish communists who remained in the party after Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin. Ironically, the anti-Semitism on the Right that Jews seem to fear the most is often stoked by progressive Jews’ fierce commitment to identity politics. Some Jews attack the anti-white identitarians (knowing that Jews are white in the eyes of POC), but most progressive Jews who were shocked by the Left’s support of Hamas were silent about anti-white hate on the Left.
The deep sickness of the Left is not just about radical ideology - although that is indeed terrible enough. But a significant proportion of the people (and especially the young) who get frothy-mouthed at fashionable-cause 'protests' are not serious grown-up people with any coherent philosophy of any kind. We are also up against an epidemic of plain Spoilt Brats - drunk on their own inchoate self-righteousness. Brats in schools, brats in politics, brats in administrative positions and - above all - brats in 'higher' education. I still remember the drug-addled anti-Zionist 'sit-in' at my UK university in 1973. And some of this kind never do grow up and can still be brats at 50.
"Nobody in the West praised 9/11."
Not strictly true—recall, in particular, ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill, who used the phrase "little Eichmanns" to describe some of the victims of the World Trade Center attack. To put the phrase in context:
"As to those in the World Trade Center . . .
"Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."
The rich and propertied have tended to view Social Justice and DEI more broadly as a cheaper way to buy off rabble-rousers than direct suppression through some combination of violence and subversion. It's starting to look more expensive than the alternative, however.
The Left always eat their own, and Jews are the first to be sacrificed.
The writing has been on the wall since Jews were excluded from the Women's March in January 2017.
Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of Jews have fostered identity politics as a means to weaken the right.
We reap what we sow. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Hamas cannot be destroyed without emptying Gaza of all the Palestinians. Even if Israel were able to kill every single member of Hamas in Gaza and then leave again (not even possible itself), Hamas would be reformed in Gaza within a year, and with an even bigger chip on its shoulder. There simply isn't a solution to the problem of Hamas in Gaza that doesn't require Gaza to be emptied of almost all the Palestinians living there.
Outcomes:
(1) Israel settles, or is forced to settle, for a tit-for-tat. It launches airstrikes for the next two weeks and then settles for a truce. The Israelis stop supplying anything to Gaza and fortify the entire border to stop any incursion like that of October 7th. This will necessarily require Israel to keep the naval blockade and inspections of ships coming in to prevent the importation of weapons. I thought this outcome was about 30-40% a week ago, and now see it as about 70-80% today.
(2) Israel goes for a full ground invasion of Gaza from the north to the south, fighting in the rubble for months and upwards to a year in a Stalingrad sort of manner, attempting to drive the Palestinians into Egypt or being evacuated to Europe across the Med. I am not convinced the IDF can even manage this for much longer than a couple of months, and it might not even be possible if they are forced to fight Hezbollah, too. I think the Israelis might well lose such battles enough to be forced into a cease-fire.
Sacrifice AND suicide, so as to maximize Jewish death. The addiction to brutal cruelty, my words for what Helen Dale described among Nazi killers, seems to be a 2-10% part of most human groups. She didn’t mention the Turkish Muslim genocide of Armenian Christians, but that seems similar as well, with women raped then crucified naked, with pictures.
The Spanish Inquisition also comes to mind (unexpectedly?).
There is something truly diabolical about “doing good” thru cruel methods, and enjoying it.
The existence of Jews living in peace around Jerusalem is so offensive to many Muslims, that they justify violence because of their feelings. They also rationalize their actions claiming some Israeli injustice is the reason, but actually it’s their feeling of being offended. Using feelings about things one doesn’t like to justify violence is the deep dark place Democrats are leading America towards.
The recent ethnic cleansing of Arminians by victorious Azeris, barely known, publicized, nor condemned, shows how the anti-semites hugely dominate the anti-ethnic cleansers.
Perhaps you’ve seen how all the 19 Muslim majority countries stand with Palestine, but none are accepting thousands of refugees, especially not Egypt with a Gaza border.
Unconditional Surrender is what the Israelis should demand. Even that might not stop the Jew killing, but anything less certainly won’t.
Stalins comments about "useful idiots" applied to the liberal left of half a century ago still applies but now it is fused with the Nazi beliefs. It is the same strange true-believing mentality that supported starving the successful farmers that is now supporting Hamas.
Quislings to the left of me, quislings to the right of me. Into the valley of death…