The damage inflicted by Hamas on innocents is not the least bit collateral

The New Neo Posted on by

It is the purposeful targeting of the most vulnerable and innocent, the purposeful subjection of those human beings to atrocities and humiliation, the purposeful recording of the actions, the purposeful dissemination of those videos on the internet, and the purposeful demonstration of the jubilation of the Palestinian crowds at the barbarism.

This sort of violence conjures up plenty of historical precedents, among them Mongol invasions, Iroquois raids – and more recently Isis beheadings that also featured videos watched around the world. What is Hamas’ aim? Here’s what Haviv Rettig Gur has to say:

Families were butchered in cold blood. In one home, a terrorist shot the parents dead, took a child’s cellphone and started broadcasting it all in a livestream on their Facebook account. Grandmothers were pulled in wheelchairs to waiting vehicles ready to carry them as hostages into Gaza. Then came the mothers carrying babies. Footage circulated on social media, put there by Hamas, of an Israeli child asking his mother if the gunmen that surrounded them were going to kill them. “They said they won’t,” the mother replied as they were taken outside to some unknown fate.

The stream of videos didn’t stop. An IDF soldier’s body was paraded in Gaza. A young woman, bleeding, was pulled by the hair from a car after being kidnapped and taken into the Strip. And all of it was broadcast by Hamas to the world in joyful pride, sparking celebrations in Tehran, Ramallah and no small part of the online pro-Palestinian activist world.

Until Saturday, Israelis believed they were strong and safe. On Saturday, they started to believe that they were neither.

In that simple shift, the Hamas attack was massively successful.

As Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Hamza put it while the attack was still underway: “This powerful enemy is an illusion made of dust and capable of being defeated and broken. Our heroes made the enemy small and humiliated, feeling death everywhere.”

So apparently that was the idea. And although I don’t think most people would call brutal kidnappers preying on women and children “heroes,” apparently the Palestinians feel that they are.

The consensus of opinion right now is that Hamas has miscalculated and that their obvious brutality has alienated even some of their previous friends, especially in the West, and that will justify whatever retaliation Israel chooses. The Palestinians have long relied on the fact that the Israelis are not barbaric – although Palestinian propaganda is based on getting the world to think they are – and to expect a moderate Israeli response, with the Western world pressuring the Israelis to hold back.

This time? According to Gur:

Where [prior to this attack] Hamas had always seemed an implacable but ultimately containable enemy, it had now proven it could bring the danger into Israeli homes, could slaughter children and kidnap grandmothers while all the vaunted power of the Israel Defense Forces was helpless to stop it. …

Israelis can handle humiliation; they are less moved by the politics of honor than are their enemies. But these heirs of a collective memory forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everything possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vulnerability.

And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.

A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.

Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.

Here’s another go-round about ideas for Gerard’s book cover

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow! What a lot of suggestions, much appreciated. However, I realize on reading them that I have more ‘splaining to do. Thus, this post.

(1) I originally thought of course I’d use a photo of the monument on the cover. But I ran into lots of problems, and blurriness was only one of them. I’ve been to the monument, and I’ve also seen many photos of it. The monument and the name can be photographed from a distance that allows you to see it’s a monument by the shape of it, but that distance leads to a problem and the problem is either blurriness or faintness of the letters of the name. These of which can be somewhat corrected, although years ago I visited there with a friend who had a very good camera and lens, and the photos still weren’t very good.

What can’t be corrected, and what is true of all the images I’ve seen of the actual name in the stone, is that visually it’s a rather dull photo with a dull color if the color is true (gray). Unless someone has already read Gerard’s essay “The Name in the Stone” and is already familiar with the story it tells, I don’t think a photo of the monument is all that arresting. It’s kind of bland and colorless, and the color is in a sort of middling range. What’s more, there’s the problem – and believe me, it’s a real problem – of putting letters on top of letters when designing a book cover. That is, when superimposing the text of the title and author on a bunch of other names on gray stone, a cover is created that can be visually confusing. And it’s surprisingly hard to make the letters “pop” against the gray unless you make them chartreuse or something equally Day-Glo, which I don’t find attractive.

And then there’s the whole idea of having a cover with a photo that literally illustrates the meaning of the title. I found, when I actually designed cover after cover of this type, that it started to feel limiting. There are almost 50 essays in the book. Only one – the title essay – is about the name in the stone. But it’s not really about the monument itself, although it most definitely touches on that. It’s more about Gerard’s attitude towards seeing his own name in the stone, his relationship with his family and their memories of his late uncle who died in the war, and his growth as a person from college student to the man writing the essay. And that’s just one essay of so many. Therefore, putting the photo of the monument or other parts of the park such as the eagle sculpture on the book cover started to seem to me as though it would be misleading about the nature of the book’s contents.

As for my going down to New York again and taking photos, it’s not happening. That’s a big trip for me, and as I said, I’ve actually been there before and tried to get good photos, unsuccessfully. Also, such photos probably would have the drawbacks I mentioned. But if any of you want to go there in the next week or two and try to take photos and then send them to me – please, by all means, do so. But I’ll caution you by quoting no less an authority than Gerard’s essay itself, 2007 version. Gerard was a good photographer with excellent cameras. He published the essay many times after that and never indicated that the situation had changed [emphasis mine]:

[The name is] on the far left column on the third stone in on the right side of the monument looking towards the sea. The name is usually in shadow and almost impossible to photograph. …

Note: Since this essay was first written in May, 2003, several thoughtful people have supplied me with photographs. As you can see, the name still remains difficult to photograph.

The photo someone sent him is the one I used in that first book cover in Saturday’s post.

It’s also harder than you might think to get something that would work on a book cover in terms of size, shape, sharpness, contrast, and visual attractiveness. I actually already have access to some clearer photos that are neither mine nor Gerard’s, and I didn’t think they’re very successful when I tried designing covers with them just as an experiment. For example, here’s one with a photo from Google Street View. I can put it in this blog post and attribute it (which I just did), but it is not allowed on book covers at all, even with attribution. However, I’m offering it as an illustration of what’s possible if someone went down there and took such a photo (by the way, these cover photos are screenshots of prototype covers but the real covers would have text that looks sharper than this, and the diagonal lines and the words “Book Brush” wouldn’t be there on a real cover, of course):

Here are some book cover examples that use a closeup photo from another site. I would also probably need permission if I used this photo on a book cover, and I may or may not be able to obtain that permission. The photo is very clear, but I think it doesn’t integrate all that well into a cover. I’ve tried many composition ideas, as well as fonts and colors, and it just seems dull to me. I think this might be the best of the lot:

A similar effort of mine; whether better or worse I’m not sure:

This next one uses the same photo but blows it up to be the background for the entire cover, and then superimposes the title, etc., on it. I think it’s visually confusing. Plus, only part of the name is on the front (right) and part on the back (left). I didn’t bother to finish the back cover on this one, but it would be similar to the others where I’ve put some words and a photo on the back. The letters here are red and somewhat 3-D in an effort to make them more visible. I’m not sure I like red, but I discovered that other colors are really hard to see (except the aforementioned Day-Glo ones):

(2) I can find copyrighted photos of the eagle statue at the monument site. But in that case I’d have to pay major bucks to use a photo like that on a cover. The eagle is visually dramatic, and using the eagle would be okay if the book were about war heroes or something like that, but it’s really not for the most part. And, unlike the covers with a photo of the actual name in the stone, the eagle statue doesn’t explain the title unless the reader happens to already know that the sculpture is in the same park as the monument. So using the eagle doesn’t make sense to me. The essays are very varied in nature, as I’ve said and as Gerard’s regular readers are aware – philosophical, humorous, sarcastic, personal stories, spiritual, and expressing awe at nature and the universe. I hope the book appeals to his readers, but I hope to reach a wider audience, too, if possible.

(3) The back of the book as I’ve done it on these book cover ideas is incomplete. The big space between the quote from the book (on the top of the page) and Gerard’s photo and bio (on the page bottom) is for blurbs from other authors, which I plan to try to get. That’s another one of the tasks involved.

(4) The reason the book is subtitled “and other essays,” rather than something like “and other works” or “collected works” is because it is composed only of essays. That’s how Gerard had planned it. As for his poetry, I’m planning to edit a second book containing just his poetry.

(5) There are plenty of fonts and colors available; these are just some ideas. I probably will have a book cover designer help with that. But yes, to answer a question some people had: these days, book covers often mix fonts, including using block print in one part and script in another. Go to any site that has templates and you’ll see (for example, this). I own quite a few older books that do it, too; it’s not just a new fad.

(6) Here’s the other style book cover that quite a few people preferred from the previous post. I really don’t know whether I’ll end up using a monument names photo or something else like this. I go back and forth with it. But I think this one has the advantage of being bold and simple, as well as conceptually open-ended. The photo is also free for use. By “open-ended” I mean that this photo could conjure up almost anything in the mind of the reader: strength, endurance, nature, rock of ages, and probably other things. It’s not THE name in THE stone, of course. But Gerard’s name is on the stone on this cover, if only as an artistic device. So it is at least slightly illustrative of the title without being a literal demonstration of it. Inside the book there will be a photo of the monument with the name, the blurry one, but it won’t be as blurry in the book because it will be considerably smaller. So it’s not as though a photo of the monument won’t be somewhere connected with the book.

(7) All of the photos of covers I’ve posted so far have been for the traditional book version. But here’s a cover idea for an ebook version. What do you think?:

ADDENDUM: For anyone who likes the covers with the “name” photos of the monuments – as I said, there are copyright issues with the first one that are insurmountable; it cannot be used on a cover, period. And there are possible issues with the second, the closeup one. I included them here as examples of what might be done with the right photos, but I have neither the time nor the equipment nor the skill to take any. I hope to get the book out within the next couple of weeks, before the holidays. So really, if anyone is in or near NYC and is a good photographer and wants to give it a try and send me the photo, please do!

The ebook cover, however, has no copyright problems.

On Hamas’ barbarity and the desire for Israeli retaliation

The New Neo Posted on by

There are horrific videos of what Hamas has done in Israel today; please see this. A description:

At least 150 Israelis have been murdered and over 1,000 wounded by terrorist intruders from Gaza. Dozens of Israelis, including women and children, have been captured by Hamas taken into Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed.

Bodies of murdered Israelis have been “paraded” to cheering civilians. Not only does this satisfy the hatred of Palestinians toward Israel, but it is designed to provoke retaliation by Israel and place Israelis in the position of arousing the further ire of the many segments of the world that already hate Israel. Hamas is well aware of the propaganda value of the entire action/reaction.

Israel has no choice. Hamas and Iran are well aware of that, and have factored it into their calculations, and are more than willing to pay the price because they feel in the end it will help them. I hope their calculations are wrong.

Christopher Rufo looks at Nixon

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting. Of course, America – and the world – has changed a lot since then:

Hamas attack; Israel at war

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, and the Palestinians are celebrating their favorite way: attacking Israel and Israelis in a huge terror operation. You can find news here, here, here, here, here, and here.

From the latter:

Who is behind the Palestinians’ attack on Israel? Iran, for one. The London Times minces no words:

“The British government believes that Iran is linked to the Hamas attack on Israel and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is likely to have played a role in training and the supply of weapons (Dipesh Gadher writes).

“A Whitehall source said: ‘The Revolutionary Guards have their fingerprints all over this multifaceted attack. Hamas is just another tool in Iran’s campaign against the West.’”

Where would Iran get the money to finance the Palestinians’ war? Oh, that’s right. We just gave them $6 billion.

One can speculate that the timing of this war is not unrelated to the fact that we have a senile buffoon for a president. A senile buffoon who doesn’t much like Israel …

Of all the things the Obama/Biden faction has done, its enabling of Iran is up there as one of the worst. I’m going to assume this action by Hamas was planned some time before the money transfer, but that Iran knew the money was almost certainly coming and was able to plan accordingly.

The details of this attack are horrendous, with civilian targets and civilian kidnappings. In addition, there’s this:

Hamas and Hezbollah want to derail the much-rumored normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which will marginalize Hamas and Hezbollah to some extent.

No doubt Hamas expects — and likely hopes for — a strong Israeli response against them in Gaza …

Why does Hamas hope for a strong response against them in Gaza? Propaganda purposes. Propaganda is biggest export of the Palestinians, having disseminated it all over the world with no small success.

In recent years, when I’ve written about Israel it’s been almost entirely about internal Israeli politics. But when I first began blogging, most of the news about Israel was about terrorist attacks and the reaction of the Western left, which was to champion the Palestinians. Sadly, we seem to be entering that territory again.

NOTE: You can find updates on the news from Israel by checking here periodically.

Blocking children’s access to online hardcore porn

The New Neo Posted on by

The Federalist has an article about a Louisiana’s Republican state representative Laurie Schlegel’s successful fight to block online porn from children in the state. The article makes several important points:

(1) Online porn today is mostly brutal and violent, far far different from the old Playboy centerfold type.

(2) Children have widespread access to it.

(3) It has an addictive quality for many people, but for young children and teens it has the added effect of helping to form their ideas about sex when they are young and vulnerable.

There’s one important thing the article doesn’t discuss, however, which is the role that child access to online porn plays in the escalation of the transgender phenomenon among young girls. I have been struck at how often this factor is mentioned among detransitioners, who are often consumers of online porn in their youth and are so troubled by it that they decide to retreat from womanhood, since being a woman and sexual contact in general is associated with being the recipient of violent abuse.

Online porn is not so great for young boys, either, as this article in Psychology Today (not a bastion of right-wing thought) describes:

When an adolescent boy compulsively views pornography, his brain chemistry can become shaped around the attitudes and situations that he is watching. Sadly, pornography paints an unrealistic picture of sexuality and relationships that can create an expectation for real-life experiences that will never be fulfilled. …

Pornography shows us a world where relationships mean nothing and immediate sexual gratification means everything. Therefore, the adolescent viewer’s brain is being wired to expect that sex and relationships are separate from one another, and that men and women’s bodies should be sexually exaggerated as they are in porn–which can lead to shame about one’s own body as well as failure to be aroused by the bodies of others.

Pornography on the Internet can be inexpensive, easy to access, and easy to hide. Many adolescents look at pornography when their parents think they are doing homework. While masturbating to porn, the adolescent brain is being shaped around a sexual experience that is isolating, visceral, and completely void of any love or compassion.

That was written in 2011, and since then the role of violence in these images has become dominant and even more destructive to normal functioning. For example, this was written in 2021 by the parent of a teen girl who suddenly announced a desire to become a boy. When she gave her parent (I’m assuming a mother, but it’s not clear) access to her devices, this is what the parent found:

The history on every device was filled with pornography, and the porn was mostly guy-on-guy. It was violent porn. It was anime porn with rape scenes, pregnant cartoon men being sodomized, gang bangs with cartoon children. There were internet sites that contained written porn, with beatings, followed by forgiveness and sex.

My daughter had been sucked into the dark web.

She was only 13.

There were searches for ball gags, hand-cuffs, whips and leather outfits. There were surveys to determine what deviant sex acts she would partake in. There were Discord and Instagram chatrooms where girls discussed whether they are bottoms or tops, givers or receivers, abusers or abused. There were discussions of turn-ons with weaponry. There were images of cartoon dogs giving oral sex. My daughter started drawing penises on her walls in her room, her shoes and her pants.

More at the link. It is very very disturbing and I suggest you read the whole thing.

The difference between the atmosphere in which children are raised today, and their possible exposure to hardcore porn, and the atmospher in which older adults were raised is enormous. I included the above excerpt as an illustration of the sort of thing we’re talking about. And even if a parent manages to block such things on a home computer or on a child’s phone, there are other friends with other phones and other computers.

A very serious problem.

Pack your bags: it’s off to the re-education camps with you!

The New Neo Posted on by

Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016 – and even during the campaign – I noticed that anyone who wore a MAGA hat was being demonized as a racist and a violent extremist. This seemed like a very ominous turn to me. After all, “Make America Great Again” is a perfectly okay slogan, and nothing Trump had done or said seemed all that terrible to me, although at the time I was wary and had opposed Trump during the primaries, preferring a different GOP nominee.

During Trump’s presidency, it got worse and worse. There were even incidents such as Jussie Smollet’s faked hate crime that supposedly was perpetrated by men in MAGA hats. Biden escalated matters with rhetoric such as his “Red Wedding” speech, and of course the persecution of the J6 defendants and the characterization of that demonstration as a “deadly insurrection.”

Therefore it’s not a new thing that the FBI has been pursuing people on the right, claiming they are dangerous terrorists. So this news is really only a slight escalation of an ongoing action:

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.

When last I checked, that’s half the country.

More:

The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.

So to summarize: they’re going after one side, but they want somehow to convey the idea that they’re being even-handed. Good luck with that. Actually, people on the right already know they’re being targeted as the dangerous enemy, and people on the left think that’s what the right deserves.

More:

“Especially at a time when the White House is facing Congressional Republican opposition claiming that the Biden administration has ‘weaponized’ the Bureau against the right wing, it has to tread very carefully,” says the [unnamed FBI] official.

Earth to unnamed FBI official: it’s not just the Republican opposition “claiming” it; it’s acknowledged far more widely than that, because it’s obviously true.

And right on schedule, Hillary Clinton chimes in with an oh-so-helpful suggestion:

“I mean, we had very strong partisans in both parties in the past, and we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things: gun control, and climate change, and the economy, and taxes,” Clinton said. “But there wasn’t this little tail of extremism wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today, and sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure.”

“He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions, and when do they break with him? You know, because, at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen,” she added.

I especially like that word “formal.” Will the deprogrammers wear tuxedos, or will they belong to a special unit, or what?

Ah, but she didn’t mean anything so very pernicious by it. She just meant they should lose the election:

When asked how this “deprogramming” could be done, Clinton said the defeat of Trump and candidates aligned with him was the solution. Clinton, who had alleged her election loss in 2016 was illegitimate, also blasted “election deniers.”

Losing an election is always known as “formal deprogramming.” Sure thing.

And of course, there are plenty of videos of Hillary herself denying the results of the 2016 election.

All the presidents’ dogs

The New Neo Posted on by

Presidents often own pets, in particular dogs. It humanizes them, makes them seem like regular guys. And of course, many of them just like dogs and have always had them.

And then there’s President Biden. What gives? The reports are that Biden’s dogs have been biters, and that Biden may have been mistreating them by hitting and kicking them. A Freedom of Information Act has been filed by Judicial Watch in order to find out. If it’s true, it’s certainly not a good sign about Biden – but only one of so very many.

You can see a history of presidential pets here. I think that, so far, the most famous one was FDR’s Fala, a Scottie he mentioned in this well-known speech, and is featured in a DC statue. It’s worth having a listen to FDR talking about Fala:

(An aside – whenever I see FDR during his days as president, it startles me that he looked so much like my grandmother.)

Trump was one of the rare presidents who didn’t have any pets, and was quite frank about the fact that, although it might be politically expedient to own one, he just didn’t want one.

Remember when Romney was the GOP nominee in 2012, and was accused of having mistreated a dog years earlier by putting it in a crate on the roof of his car? And LBJ made headlines by hoisting his beagle by the ears. You can read about it here, including LBJ’s tone-deaf comment, “”It does them good to let them yelp.” Yikes!