Some excerpts:

The libel [Kristof] dutifully repeated in “The Paper of Record” was a hundred years old when he printed it. The Palestinian propaganda has not changed in a century. The Western press, which once exposed it, now promotes it.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man Palestinian historians call the father of their national movement, distributed the original handbills in the summer of 1929. The text called on Arab men to rise against the Jews, an enemy who had “violated the honor of Islam and raped the women and murdered widows and babies.” The leaflets had been printed in advance.

No Jewish man had raped any Arab woman. That didn’t matter.

He paired the rape libel with a second weapon. His crowds at the Nebi Musa riots of 1920 had chanted “Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs.” Dogs in Islamic law are najis, ritually impure, the same religious category as pigs and bodily fluids. Calling a Jew a dog made a religious statement about defilement. Twin demonizations, both concocted and distributed with the specific intent of inciting violence against the Jews.

The author goes on to describe the Hebron massacre that resulted, in which Palestinians (not called that back then, of course) committed barbaric crimes against Jews that have a great deal of resonance with what occurred on 10/7, nearly 100 years later. There are resonances with other historic events in the area, too.

I strongly suggest you read the whole thing; it can’t be summarized. It’s an extraordinary history.

The post 100 years of rape inversion appeared first on The New Neo.

But I find that simply won’t work. It’s too emblematic of so many things that are deeply and destructively wrong. Thus, this post.

First, some background:

In the months following the October 7 attack, antisemitism shed its inhibitions.

What distinguishes this moment is the collapse of stigma. Expressions that would have ended careers a decade ago now generate applause, clicks, and campaign donations. Language that would trigger immediate condemnation if directed at other minorities is routinely excused, contextualized, or ignored when directed at Jews. Hostility that once hid at the margins has migrated inward—into campuses, political platforms, cultural institutions, and digital ecosystems. The result is an old hatred on steroids—newly unmoored from consequence.

This normalization is not diffuse, but has taken shape through two distinct but mutually reinforcing channels. The progressive left frames Israel as fundamentally illegitimate, a country of inherent injustice. That creates an atmosphere in which hostility toward Israel is cast as an ethical obligation. And for many on the left—and their Muslim activist allies—the distinction between Jews and Israelis frequently collapses.

On parts of the populist right, antisemitism has reemerged through the architecture of conspiracy theory. Jews are cast not as oppressors, but as puppet masters—orchestrators of migration, finance, media narratives, and foreign entanglements. The vocabulary differs from that on the left, but the structural function is identical: Jews are assigned exceptional and malign agency.

What differentiates left and right is not just their emphases, but also the fact that leftist leaders join in and leaders on the right condemn the Jew-hatred. It remains a fringe thing on the right – and many of those involved in it are not even on the right anymore, if in fact they ever really were.

Also from the Posner article:

Holocaust inversion—labeling Israelis as Nazis or Gaza as Auschwitz—has appeared with increasing frequency at demonstrations and across digital platforms.

That inversion – the turning of something upside down or into its opposite – is the Hallmark of modern-day Jew-hatred masquerading at times as anti-Israel sentiment and at other times ripping off the mask. And this inversion is what we have in the Nicholas Kristof article alleging that Israelis systematically rape prisoners, including (and perhaps especially?) with dogs that are trained to rape humans.

Let’s start out by saying that the latter is not even possible (not that Kristof or the NY Times care; the goal is getting the story out there):

Kristof continues to cite medical journal articles he claims prove dogs raping humans is possible. There’s one problem. …

Those medical journal articles talk about the opposite issue … that is, humans practicing bestiality on dogs, not the other way around.

And here is an excerpt from the abstract of one of those articles:

This report delineates a case of anal injury in a 12-year-old boy who gave a detailed history of bestial behavior with a male bulldog. The child described how he had seen this behavior modeled on the internet and subsequently initiated contact with his own dog, causing the dog to penetrate him anally. This type of juvenile bestial behavior with injury has only been reported once previously in the medical literature. … Spontaneous sexual assault of a human by a canine has never been described in the human or veterinary medical literature, nor is such a thing likely.

Dogs cannot be trained to do this – and yet the charges against Israel have a lengthy history:

Grok: Dog handling and canine behavior experts (along with military K9 analysts) have explicitly stated that training dogs to perform sexual assault/rape on human command is not possible in any operational or standardized way.
The Palestinian allegations you’re referring…

— Aaron Poris (@a_poris) May 11, 2026

Grok: Dog handling and canine behavior experts (along with military K9 analysts) have explicitly stated that training dogs to perform sexual assault/rape on human command is not possible in any operational or standardized way.

… [C]laims of IDF or prison guards in facilities like Sde Teiman or Ofer using trained police/military dogs to rape or sodomize detainees—originated primarily from anonymous testimonies collected by groups such as Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (often described by critics as Hamas-linked), the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and amplified by CAIR, Middle East Eye, and some UN summaries.01823 These accounts describe dogs being “let loose” or commanded to mount and penetrate restrained prisoners, sometimes with details like a handler saying a name like “Messi.”

However, these specific “dog rape on command” claims have been widely labeled as baseless propaganda or recycled antisemitic blood libels by fact-checkers and Israeli advocates. They rely on hearsay with zero corroborating evidence: no names, dates, videos, forensic records, or named witnesses—unlike documented cases of muzzled dogs being used for intimidation, biting, or general attacks on detainees (which appear in BBC reporting and human rights monitors).

Multiple sources directly addressing canine training confirm the core point you raise: there is no known training framework anywhere in the world for conditioning dogs to perform directed sexual acts (mounting and penetration) on command in a controllable, repeatable, operational setting. This is not how K9 programs work—IDF’s Oketz unit or any police/military dog units train for detection, tracking, apprehension, or attack bites, not sexual behavior. Sexual mounting in dogs is driven by instinct (arousal, dominance), not precise obedience like “attack” or “sit.” It cannot be standardized, deployed reliably, or switched on/off without massive ethical, legal, and practical barriers.

This impossibility aligns with basic canine biology and professional dog handling: you can train dogs to aggress or intimidate, but engineering them into tools for targeted rape defies how animal behavior is conditioned. Claims of this nature echo historical fabrications and lack any precedent in real military or law-enforcement dog programs.

Neither Kristof nor the Times cares to do the most basic fact-checking of the claim, which of course is “too good to fact-check.”

The Kristof article is Orwellian. The Times should be deeply deeply ashamed of publishing it. But in the current climate, it could get a Pulitzer to go with Kristof’s two previous ones.

The article is an excellent example of the Islamic terrorist’s propaganda modus operandi, and in particular the favorite Palestinian ploy of accusing your enemy of what you yourselves do – not rape with dogs, of course, but rape, humiliation, degradation, and torture of enemies. Kristof’s article is a bunch of propagandist rumor dressed up as news (but placed, interestingly enough, on the “Opinion” page, probably for legal reasons), but it came out one day before a report on Hamas’ 10/7 atrocities – which were exhaustively documented by Hamas’ selfie videos and the testimony of survivors. The evidence is night and day, although the allegations in both pieces are horrific and disgusting, because torture and rape are horrific and disgusting. But the content of the Hamas report is one of the most horrific and disgusting things ever (and I don’t say that lightly), and has the extra-horrific element of being true.

But “horrific and disgusting” really doesn’t even begin to cover it. I don’t think any words do. You can read the report here, or you can read summaries here and here – if you can stomach it.

How can people champion those who perpetrated these vile offenses and videoed themselves in the act? By denying the atrocities or by excusing them or by reveling in them. Those three responses are quite different from each other, but they have the same effect in the end.

I have read a great deal of Holocaust literature in my lifetime. Some of the descriptions of what happened back then are so awful I wish I’d never read them. The same is true of this, about which I have only read summaries but those are bad enough. The deeds are demonic, depraved, sadistic, limited only by the human imagination (which at times seems unlimited).

Many Holocaust survivors have reported that their tormentors often told them two things while they were in the camps. The first was that the victims would never get to tell their tales, because they would all be killed and the Nazis would successfully destroy the evidence. That didn’t happen, although the Nazi perpetrators tried to make it happen. But the Gazans of 10/7 weren’t interested in hiding the evidence; they broadcast it. They knew from previous experience that the some would deny despite this evidence, and some would goulishly delight in it and be inspired. This makes them arguably worse than Nazis.

This is a fascinating report based on intelligence captured from Hamas. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a relevant excerpt:

To light that internal powder keg, Sinwar needed a spark. This necessity explains one of October 7’s most gruesome aspects. Sinwar was convinced that capturing and broadcasting “explosive images” right at the start of the offensive would “trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum” among Palestinians and Arab Israelis. The goal was to spur a violent mass uprising while simultaneously paralyzing the Israeli public with terror. That is why Hamas terrorists wore body cameras and gleefully livestreamed their own atrocities.

I think they also must have believed that the West would not object – that either terror or excuses and justification (or denial) would be the West’s reaction. They almost certainly knew that the West had been primed, saturated for decades with Pallywood propaganda and taught by pro-Palestinian professors, with the cooperation of “journalists” – such as Kristof.

The other thing the Nazis told their victims was that, even if any of them did somehow manage to survive, the world would never believe them. When Eisenhower made and then released films of what the Allies found when they liberated the camps, and when he made some of the locals come and see the dead, he was aware of the risk of non-belief and he wanted to document at least some of the atrocities for future generations. And yet there are plenty of Holocaust deniers today, as well as Holocaust celebrators.

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It was the casual manner that got me. Neither knew my political leanings, but it was assumed that I agreed with them – didn’t everyone who didn’t sport a tail, horns, and a swastika tattoo? With the first person I was so stunned I said nothing. But later, with the second person, I challenged him – to no avail.

You’ve probably seen similar public statements from Trump-haters over the years – on TV and on social media, for example. It’s become standard. In the last year I’ve heard it again from two different friends, each of them people I’ve known for many years and who’ve never spoken this way before. Neither have any history of being leftist firebrands and in fact each have long been political moderates.

But not on the topic of Trump, apparently. The first was over the phone, and my long-time friend said that if she ever was given a terminal diagnosis she would try to kill Trump. This seemed only slightly tongue-in-cheek and deeply unfunny. She went on to vent quite a bit on how much she hated him. My response was that I hope she never receives a terminal diagnosis.

The most recent person to express this was even more disturbing. This was from an old friend who’s one of the most mild-mannered people I know – ordinarily. We were having lunch and catching up, since I hadn’t seen him in a long while, and towards the end of the meal he said that if he had a rifle (which he doesn’t) and if Trump came anywhere on his property (which Trump won’t) he would kill him. With the previous people saying this, they’d only given very general reasons why; I guess they thought his evil was so very obvious it needed no explanation. But this time I asked him why, and his answer stunned me: it was that Trump wasn’t even human. This was said with vehemence and a kind of fervor and certainty that indicated a very deeply held belief.

Again, I asked why he said that. I wish I could remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that it was obvious just by looking at him – that he cared about no one and nothing but himself, and that he didn’t love America but hated it. He offered no particular evidence and I didn’t press it; to pursue the conversation was going to be counterproductive. This was a person who already knew my general politics, but I think he assumed that despite being on the right that I, as a moral and upright person, would be a Trump-hater too.

There are a great many people like this, and their sentiments are considered perfectly okay and even moral by other people just like them, people I would never have described as political activists or leftists, but who want Trump dead and probably are surrounded by others who want him dead too. The sentiment has been mainstreamed, and it happened quite early in Trump’s first term although it’s only gotten worse..

A couple of days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Jimmy Kimmel did a sketch about the coming festivities. It was supposedly funny, and there certainly were plenty of people or bots in the comments to this video who seem to think it was indeed funny. Here are a few seconds that got a lot of attention in retrospect, for obvious reasons:

Today Melania Trump issued a reaction:

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” …

“People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him,” she said. “Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”

Good luck with that; I don’t think it’s going to happen. There’s an audience for it and an appetite for it, and although Kimmel doesn’t have high ratings I don’t see them pulling him.

Last night I came across the following video and clicked on it because of the title. I kept watching it because it periodically featured people – I believe mostly from TikTok? – expressing the most outrageous death wishes on Trump, with a venom that is extraordinary and no sense of needing to hide their sentiments. For example, two very short segments:

Those aren’t even the worst ones. Here’s the whole thing, in case you’re interested:

There’s plenty more where that came from. What’s happened is not just a norming of such behavior – although there’s that – but a message that it’s not only okay but that’s it’s cool and virtuous, something of which to be proud.

It spreads like a contagion. Some people are more vulnerable to it than others, but I couldn’t have predicted in advance who among my friends would be most vulnerable to it. I also have plenty of friends and relatives who are Democrats and who detest Trump, but at least I’ve never heard them wish him dead.

The post It’s become the norm to talk about wanting to kill Trump or at the very least wanting him to die – and to be proud of it appeared first on The New Neo.

I then came across this – which takes it a bit further, shall we say:

But seriously – the first clip was taken from a discussion of Bonhoeffer’s life, by Glenn Beck. Now, Beck is not my favorite pundit, but in this case I think he does a good job of explaining how Bonhoeffer wrestled with the dilemma of what a Christian decides to do in the face of manifest evil. Here’s the entire clip, which is about fifteen minutes long:

The post Bonhoeffer on evil, according to Carlson and Beck appeared first on The New Neo.

I haven’t watched it, but huxley’s comments give a summary of what is said. I’m not surprised by the content; it conforms with my previous statements that nihilism explains a lot of the impulse behind Antifa. In fact, I wrote a post about that just about a month ago, here.

I’ll add a few thoughts. I believe that there’s always a certain percentage of the population that trends toward sociopathy, but a society can nudge them along in that path or discourage them. Our current society seems to breed a lot of aimlessness and anger, and young men are especially prone to that although women are hardly exempt.

There’s a lot of mockery going around right now about the “No Kings” demonstrations. The crowds seem to be skewed to the elderly, otherwise known as “smelly old hippies/Boomers” But I know a lot of you are, like me, Boomers, and as such you remember the 60s and early 70s. It was a frightening time as far as I was concerned. Riots, assassinations (including of police), enormous societal changes, wars, and even terrorism.

Some of that terrorism was international in nature, as well, and some of it had Israel as its target. To refresh your memory, the 1972 Olympics massacre happened in Munich. And the 1972 Lod Airport massacre (now Ben Gurion Airport) featured an international cast of terrorist characters [my emphasis]:

The Lod Airport massacre was a terrorist attack that occurred on 30 May 1972. Three members of the Japanese Red Army recruited by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine attacked Lod Airport … near Tel Aviv, killing 26 people and injuring 80 others. Two of the attackers were killed, while a third, K?z? Okamoto, was captured after being wounded.

The dead comprised 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, a Canadian citizen, and eight Israelis …

Because airport security was focused on the possibility of a Palestinian attack, the use of Japanese attackers took the guards by surprise. The attack has often been described as a suicide mission, but it has also been asserted that it was the outcome of an unpublicized larger operation that went awry. The three perpetrators — Kozo Okamoto, Tsuyoshi Okudaira, and Yasuyuki Yasuda — had been trained in Baalbek, Lebanon; the actual planning was handled by Wadie Haddad (a.k.a. Abu Hani), head of PFLP External Operations, with some input from Okamoto. In the immediate aftermath, Der Spiegel speculated that funding had been provided by some of the $5 million ransom paid by the West German government in exchange for the hostages of hijacked Lufthansa Flight 649 in February 1972.

There was no internet back then, of course. But although that didn’t stop them from coordinating things, it helped make it more difficult. Nowadays it’s much easier to organize and to use propaganda and social media to stir up the requisite anger and stoke both the nihilistic impulses and the sympathy for supposed “causes” that the perps know little to nothing about. It’s not as though those Japanese terrorists had any special beef with the Israelis. Their actual motives? I bet you can guess [emphasis mine]:

The Japanese public initially reacted with disbelief to initial reports that the perpetrators of the massacre were Japanese until a Japanese embassy official sent to the hospital confirmed that Okamoto was a Japanese national. Okamoto told the diplomat that he had nothing personal against the Israeli people, but that he had to do what he did because “It was my duty as a soldier of the revolution.”

The other two were dead, so they weren’t talking. But I strongly suspect their motives were the same.

Oh, and speaking of “the same”:

Okamoto was tried by an Israeli military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1972. Okamoto served only 13 years of his prison sentence. He was released in 1985 with more than 1,000 other prisoners in an exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. He settled in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. He was arrested in 1997 for passport forgery and visa violations, but in 2000 was granted political refugee status in Lebanon. He is still wanted by the Japanese government as of 2021. Four other JRA members arrested at the same time were extradited to Japan.

It is thought that Okamoto is still alive and living in Lebanon; if so, he’d be 77 years old, which makes him the quintessential Boomer. His older brother was a terrorist, too. A few more details about Okamoto:

The name in Okamoto’s forged passport was Daisuke Namba, Crown Prince Hirohito’s would be assassin. …

In his final statement [at his trial] Okamoto told the court: “When I was a child, I was told that when people died they became stars…We three Red Army soldiers wanted to become Orion when we died”.

During the incarceration, he requested to convert to Judaism and tried to circumcise himself with nail clippers. He stated that he was tortured during his imprisonment, being “forced to eat like a dog” and emerged from imprisonment emaciated.

And what of the Japanese Red Army? According to this Wiki entry, it disbanded in 2001, but its stated goal was as follows: “to overthrow the Japanese government and the monarchy, as well as to start a world revolution.”

This particular group was hardly the only instance of international terrorism. I’m just mentioning them because they are good examples of how long ago this international nihilist impulse was wreaking havoc.

The Trump administration has recently designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization:

Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals. This campaign involves coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists. Antifa recruits, trains, and radicalizes young Americans to engage in this violence and suppression of political activity, then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members. Individuals associated with and acting on behalf of Antifa further coordinate with other organizations and entities for the purpose of spreading, fomenting, and advancing political violence and suppressing lawful political speech. This organized effort designed to achieve policy objectives by coercion and intimidation is domestic terrorism.

What is meant by “organization” has been disputed, but although Antifa doesn’t have a webpage with a president, VP, secretary, and treasurer, there is some emerging evidence to support Antifa’s organizational nature, particular in its funding; you can find some details at the link.

Mark Twain is said to have uttered the phrase “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Whether or not Twain actually said it, it seem quite true, and there’s a lot of rhyming going on these days. We Boomers are well-positioned to notice that.

NOTE: The Manson family were another good example of nihilism from that era. You may recall that, through the horrific murders they committed in 1969, they wanted to ignite a race war they called “Helter Skelter.” Basically, extremely violent nihilists, helped along by drugs.

The post The present-day nihilists of Antifa and the nihilists of a half-century ago appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s not for young people. I didn’t know anything about it or about Bergman, but it seemed interesting and I started to watch it. It seemed to be about a medieval family in Sweden and its beautiful blond teenage daughter, who set out on an errand and – well, what happened to her profoundly shocked me. I didn’t see it coming, and it terrified me and affected me deeply enough that I remember it still, all these years later, although certainly not every detail. The images and plot, which featured beauty and innocence defiled, and retribution and revenge (sometimes literally overkill, I might add), were incredibly powerful. I didn’t really understand the movie and yet I partly did, at least on a visceral level.

You may or may not have ever seen the movie. If you haven’t, spoiler alert for the discussion in this clip. But I put the video up here because it features a number of scenes from the movie, and a summary of the film’s themes:

Yesterday, in pondering the murder of Iryna Zarutska, the video images of it that have been circulating, and the reaction to those images, I kept thinking about The Virgin Spring. There is noting racial in the movie, by the way; everyone is white because after all this is Sweden in the 13th century (or 14th, depending on your source). But the theme of evildoers defiling and ending the life of a young blond girl is there, and the “evil versus good” images are extraordinarily powerful. Thus it is with the video and images on the train. The still image of the killer, standing up, hand raised to strike, poised above the diminutive Zarutska who looks younger than her years, is blood-curdling and bone-chilling.

One wants to yell “stop!”, to go back in time and stay his hand. But no one can.

So there is blame, and suggestions for retribution. In this case, there are many many people to blame. The first is, of course, the perpetrator Decarlos Brown. He is a violent career criminal, and this was an utterly unprovoked crime against the most innocent – and unaware – of victims.

But wait – there’s also the judge who set him free for his last offense, which was a 911 call that he made and then hung up. A forensic psychiatric evaluation was ordered in that case at his lawyer’s request, but it never happened. Why? “The system” was broken, or set up to fail.

Then there is the soft-on-crime policy of the city, courtesy of Democratic politicians. And the idiocy of allowing people to ride the light rails without paying.

One thing I think is clear, however: no one on the train that night could have prevented the crime. Even if the equivalent of Daniel Penny had been there, Brown wasn’t verbally threatening anyone, and he acted so quickly I don’t think anyone could have stopped him. What they should have done afterward – and didn’t do – is another question, one I have dealt with previously in yesterday’s post and my comments on the thread there (see this as well as this).

Now, finally – and too late – Brown is in custody without bail. A great many people are calling for his execution. But although I understand the call, I’m not one of them – for the simple fact that I think Brown is almost certainly a schizophrenic. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think he’s not guilty. But mental illness of that nature, with active psychotic delusions – and his were documented prior to the crime and not just as an ex post facto excuse (which also happens sometimes) – can be a mitigating factor in the sentencing phrase. I am not in favor of executing people who commit crimes, even heinous ones, while under the influence of active hallucinations.

I would have to know more, however, because I could change my mind about Brown. But at the moment, life imprisonment would seem more appropriate. Brown is a very difficult case because he combines two things: a violent history that may or may not predate his schizophrenia, plus the schizophrenia itself. But the schizophrenia was documented prior to the murder – in fact, his original 911 call was about one of his delusions. To refresh your memory:

The alleged killer, however, currently has pending charges for misuse of the 911 system in January following a police welfare check — which revealed his troubling thoughts, the outlet [Charlotte Observer] reported.

Brown told authorities during the visit he believed someone had given him a “man-made” material that controlled when he ate, walked, and talked, an affidavit obtained by the newspaper said.

“Brown wanted officers to investigate this ‘man-made’ material that was inside of his body,” the affidavit said.

Officers then advised Brown that he was suffering a medical issue, and there was nothing more they could do to help him.

He became upset over their response and called 911. He was arrested after he hung up the phone, the outlet reported.

He called 911 and it sounds as though paramedics should have come, and/or he should have been taken to the hospital for an evaluation. Did the cops or paramedics try to do that, and he refused? I’d really like to know, because a hospital evaluation would have been highly appropriate. I’ve known people that has happened to, but it doesn’t even seem like he got a psychiatric consult. And yet, with evidence that he was actively psychotic and paranoid, plus his violent record about which the police had to have known if they checked, some sort of dramatic intervention was called for.

I’m not making excuses for him. I believe he needs to be locked up, probably for life this time. But he should have been locked up (and gotten treatment) earlier, and many people are at fault.

One more thing – you may think this interview (if real) is just Brown blowing smoke and making up excuses. But note that it’s very consistent with what he told the police many months ago when he made that 911 call and at the time of the original call he wasn’t facing charges for anything:

In a phone interview circulating online, Brown blames “The material. Put it like that. The material using my body. It’s that. You know, that’s not me.

“I’m talking about just for no reason. But since they did that, since they did that, now they got to investigate the material my body exposed to. Since they want to do all that, now they got to investigate.” …

“They lashed out on her. Well I was working out … Whoever was working the material, they lashed out on her.”

That is essentially what he told police long before the murder. It is consistent with a schizophrenic delusion, and also with the utterly unmotivated and unprovoked nature of the crime. You may call it BS, and perhaps it is, but the time frame indicates otherwise. Again, that does not absolve him of criminal responsibility, but to me it indicates that the death penalty should not be imposed. I expect a lot of disagreement on that.

NOTE: Here’s what happens at the end of The Virgin Spring (spoiler alert once again). You’ll have to click on the link to watch the scene, because embedding has been disabled.

Also, here’s Ang Lee on what the movie meant to him when he saw it at the age of eighteen.

The post <i>The Virgin Spring</i> and the murder of Iryna Zarutska: on innocence, evil, images, and retribution appeared first on The New Neo.

…Maxim Gorky [said] that Lenin’s favorite piece of music was Beethoven’s Appassionata. Gorky recounted a discussion with Lenin:

“And screwing up his eyes and chuckling, [Lenin] added without mirth:

“‘But I can’t listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn’t pat anyone on the head or we’ll get our hand bitten off; we’ve got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-hm—it’s a hellishly difficult office!'”

It’s not easy being a dictator. Apparently, one always has to make sure nothing soft enters the psyche.

And speaking of evil, the German police and SS men and soldiers who massacred unarmed civilians – including women and children – in Eastern Europe as part of the Einsatzgruppen had to be steeled to do their dirty dirty work. They didn’t start by murdering Jews; first on the agenda were the Polish leaders and intelligentsia. And in terms of “steeling,” this is how Hitler himself put it at that point:

As stated by Hitler: “… there must be no Polish leaders; where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh that sounds”.

“However harsh that sounds.”

They were given liberal supplies of alcohol. Later, after much brutal and barbarous killing of Jews including women and children, it was this way for the killers:

After a time, Himmler found that the killing methods used by the Einsatzgruppen were inefficient: they were costly, demoralising for the troops, and sometimes did not kill the victims quickly enough. Many of the troops found the massacres to be difficult if not impossible to perform. Some of the perpetrators suffered physical and mental health problems, and many turned to drink.As much as possible, the Einsatzgruppen leaders militarized the genocide. The historian Christian Ingrao notes an attempt was made to make the shootings a collective act without individual responsibility. Framing the shootings in this way was not psychologically sufficient for every perpetrator to feel absolved of guilt. Browning notes three categories of potential perpetrators: those who were eager to participate right from the start, those who participated in spite of moral qualms because they were ordered to do so, and a significant minority who refused to take part. A few men spontaneously became excessively brutal in their killing methods and their zeal for the task. Commander of Einsatzgruppe D, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, particularly noted this propensity towards excess, and ordered that any man who was too eager to participate or too brutal should not perform any further executions.

During a visit to Minsk in August 1941, Himmler witnessed an Einsatzgruppen mass execution first-hand and concluded that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men. By November he made arrangements for any SS men suffering ill health from having participated in executions to be provided with rest and mental health care. He also decided a transition should be made to gassing the victims, especially the women and children, and ordered the recruitment of expendable native auxiliaries who could assist with the murders. Gas vans, which had been used previously to kill mental patients, began to see service by all four main Einsatzgruppen from 1942. However, the gas vans were not popular with the Einsatzkommandos, because removing the dead bodies from the van and burying them was a horrible ordeal. Prisoners or auxiliaries were often assigned to do this task so as to spare the SS men the trauma.

The Severity Order was issued to the army in October of 1941:

In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations. For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry.

In other words, harden yourselves to the killing of innocent civilians, often women and children, not as unintended collateral damage but in cold blood. For some, this appears to have been rather easy:

British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that although Himmler had forbidden photographs of the killings, it was common for both the men of the Einsatzgruppen and for bystanders to take pictures to send to their loved ones, which he felt suggested widespread approval of the massacres.

Few objected, very few.

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At first it seemed as though the main reason might have been Mangione’s supposed good looks, and certainly that had something to do with it. But the phenomenon has much deeper roots, and those are the reason another murder of an executive is now being celebrated online by the same people (or bots?) who lauded Mangione and cruelly mocked Thompson:

Wesley LePatner was a senior managing director at Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager. She was CEO of the firm’s Real Estate Income Trust—a $53 billion portfolio. She was also a mother of two, a philanthropist, and an engaged member of New York’s Jewish community. On Monday, she was shot and killed in the lobby of her midtown Manhattan workplace, one of four victims of Shane Tamura’s murder spree.

There’s some evidence that her killer was targeting the National Football League, which shares an office building with Blackstone. But within hours, it was clear that his motive was irrelevant to the hordes now celebrating LePatner’s execution online. Across Reddit, Facebook, X, and other social media platforms, users—many anonymous, and some displaying transgender or Palestinian flag emojis—seized on the executive’s death as symbolic retribution. Her position at the investment firm became a license for cruelty. Commenters mocked her success, dismissed her philanthropy as sinister, and portrayed her employer as an unmitigated force for evil. The message was unmistakable: her death was something to relish.

Most of these people (and again, I’m not at all sure they are all actual people) appear to be capitalist-hating leftists angry that they’re not getting a big enough cut of the pie. And, in the case of LePatner’s murder, that perennial favorite of so many vicious people worldwide – Jew-hating – is thrown into the mix. So no doubt some are also old-fashioned anti-Semites on the right, although I believe the vast majority are on the left.

From the link:

This grotesque display is part of a broader trend of class rage and Internet nihilism that justifies violence by turning innocent victims into scapegoats for moral fury. The permission structure for such ghoulishness is now fully operational. What were once the disturbing mutterings of the fringe are now public, performative, and proudly cruel.

A political movement is testing its power. Call it Luigism.

I’ve written several posts on the “Luigism” phenomenon, although I didn’t call it that. Here’s one, and here’s another that’s not about Luigism but is about what’s behind it. Praise of this latest murder doesn’t depend on anything about the shooter, unlike Luigism. It seems to have morphed into pure victim-hatred, a vile and ominous sign.

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Israel came to a standstill on Thursday morning as a two-minute siren sounded nationwide at 10 a.m., marking Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah). …

“We bow our heads in memory of the victims,” Netanyahu said during the ceremony. “Their legacy obligates us to defend our existence and ensure never again means never again.”

The words have taken on even more meaning since 10/7/2023.

I’ve written many many previous posts on the subject of the Holocaust, but for now I’ll direct you to this one as well as this one.

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(1) The left alters or ignores the usual rules, which destroys trust in an institution in order to “get” their opposition.
(2) The institution can be almost anything: the FBI, presidential elections, or the legal system, to take a few recent examples.
(3) The right responds by criticizing the compromised institution and the left.
(4) The left acts shocked, SHOCKED that the right has stopped respecting the hallowed institution that is a pillar of our government and society.

Case in point, Joe Biden trolling us yesterday about Trump’s remarks:

President Joe Biden on Friday called former President Donald Trump’s reaction to his conviction in New York on criminal hush money charges “reckless” and “dangerous.”

“It’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged, just because they don’t like the verdict,” Biden said at the White House, hours after Trump held a press conference condemning the criminal case. …

This jury was chosen the same way every jury in America has chosen,” the president said. “Five weeks after careful deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous verdict.” …

“Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years,” Biden said. “And it literally is a cornerstone of America, our justice system … justice should be respected.”

“And we should never allow anyone to tear it down. As simple as that. That’s America. That’s who we are. That’s who will always be God willing.”

Joe Biden, gaslighter-in-chief. And these are the talking points parroted by Democrats right on down the line (or maybe it’s Biden who is the parrot – no matter).

It’s almost a thing of beauty, really. Destroy the institution – in an obvious way – and then gaslight the public by saying it’s the other side’s objections that are “tearing down” the institution that you have already trashed.

Another way to put it: the fox says that he guarded that henhouse most assiduously, and anyone who says otherwise is questioning the integrity of foxes – a sacred principle on which our republic rests.

The left, which long ago (or not so long ago) questioned the methods of the FBI, the DOJ, the police, and the government in general, now finds these things beyond criticism. The MSM is, of course, in agreement with the left. For example, see this AP story headlined, “Republicans join Trump’s attacks on justice system and campaign of vengeance after guilty verdict.” Note also the Orwellian reversal, because it is the left that has attacked and perverted the justice system to get vengeance on Trump and also to run election interference against him.

From the article:

Embracing Donald Trump’s strategy of blaming the U.S. justice system after his historic guilty verdict, Republicans in Congress are fervently enlisting themselves in his campaign of vengeance and political retribution as the GOP runs to reclaim the White House.

Almost no Republican official has stood up to suggest Trump should not be the party’s presidential candidate for the November election — in fact, some have sought to hasten his nomination. Few others dared to defend the legitimacy of the New York state court that heard the hush money case or the 12 jurors who unanimously rendered their verdict.

And those Republicans who expressed doubts about Trump’s innocence or political viability, including his former hawkish national security adviser John Bolton or top-tier Senate candidate Larry Hogan of Maryland, were instantly bullied by the former president’s enforcers and told to “leave the party.”

Republicans POUNCE!

This is probably as good a place as any to link to this article by law professor Steven Calabresi, entitled “President Donald Trump’s Manhattan Convictions are Unconstitutional.”

And here’s Alan Dershowitz from yesterday:

The left thinks it will be able to stand upright in the wind that would blow:

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