“Genocide” is a word that has lost its meaning …

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… in the hands of the left. Then again, that happened a long time ago.

Apparently, any attack by Israel is a genocide, according to the anti-Israel anti-Jew crowd on the left and in the Arab world. Those on the right who aren’t keen on Jews don’t usually utter the “genocide” accusation; they are more into “Protocols” type stuff.

The accusations of genocide are especially painful to Israelis and other Jews, for obvious reasons. Here you have John Kirby trying to explain the word to those who refuse to use it properly:

This word genocide is getting thrown around in a pretty inappropriate way by lots of different folks. What Hamas wants, make no mistake about it, is genocide. they want to wipe Israel off the map, they’ve said so, publicly, on more than one occasion, in fact just recently. And they’ve said that they’re not going to stop. What happened on the 7th of October is going to happen again, and again, and again. And what happened on the 7th of October? Murder, slaughter, of innocent people in their homes, or at a music festival. That’s genocidal intentions.

Hamas would like to finish what Hitler began. Israel is determined that the phrase “Never again!” is made a reality.

Over 20% of Israel’s own citizens are Arabs. No one is killing any of them – except, of course, Hamas, who on October 7 managed to murder quite a few – whether through accident, haste, excess of murderous zeal, or on purpose because any Arab who lives in Israel becomes an honorary Jew. Don’t think the Arabs of Israel haven’t noticed.

NOTE: I have my own memory of how long ago the left was using the word “genocide” inappropriately for the activities of the Big Satan (the US). When I was in college, I had a roommate with whom I was quite friendly. The Vietnam War was ongoing, and we both were against it at the time. But one day she said the US was committing genocide there. I thought I’d let her know why that was an incorrect use of the word – maybe she simply didn’t understand, although she was a pretty smart girl. But an argument ensued, and I couldn’t help but notice how weak her reasoning was.

It perplexed me at the time. It no longer does. She later went on to become a successful lawyer, and I have no idea what her politics are now. But back then she was just doing the best she could to parrot the leftist party line on the Vietnam War. Many years later I recalled the disagreement and my puzzlement, and realized it was one of the first signs of the characteristics that were what led me to my political change.

Milei of Argentina

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The results of Argentina’s recent election are interesting, to say the least:

[Argentina] has just elected a radical free-market economics professor named Javier Milei as its new president …

… Milei’s landslide win over an entrenched left-wing political machine Juan and Evita Peron founded in the 1940s (immortalized in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Evita”) is significant on many levels.

… Milei has called China an “assassin” regime, and while still allowing [Argentinian] trade with it, he will strictly limit official ties.

Argentina will also drop out of attempts by nations such as Russia and Brazil to create a new unit of account as an alternative to the US dollar.

Indeed, Milei wants to put a brake on Argentina’s 143% annual inflation rate by adopting the dollar as its de facto currency.

The local peso has lost about 90% of its value against the dollar on the black market in the last four years.

Other US allies will benefit from Milei taking office.

He recently waved an Israeli flag in solidarity with the Jewish state and has pledged to move the Argentine embassy to Jerusalem.

Not only that, he has a lot of supporters among young voters.

Piece of trivia: he used to be a singer in a Rolling Stones tribute band.

More:

After recent left-wing victories in Brazil and Colombia, Argentina now joins Chile, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay in successfully countering the left-wing tide.

Hope it spreads here in 2024.

Hostage deal?

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For weeks I’ve been seeing rumors of a hostage deal, but this news sounds a bit more solid. On the other hand, it would be a good idea for the Israeli government to pretend to be negotiating a deal, in order to have Hamas keep the hostages alive until (hopefully) rescue can be achieved.

There are several problems with a deal, of course. One is that any prisoner exchange can endanger Israel further by letting go some dangerous people and by making future hostages more valuable to take. Another is that any ceasefire is counterproductive to the offensive. Still another is the fact that Hamas apparently does not hold all the hostages – other groups and even individuals may have some.

But anyway, here’s the report:

A senior Israeli official on Tuesday outlined further details of a tentative hostage deal with Hamas, which Israeli cabinet members are reportedly voting on late Tuesday, according to NBC.

The source told NBC that the prospective agreement would release around 50 women and children hostages over the course of four days, during which time Israel would temporarily pause attacks to ensure the safe passage of the hostages. Israel would also agree to halt drone flights for a certain amount of time each day, though the source said Israel believes it can maintain oversight of Gaza without them.

Under the current work-in-progress deal, the official confirmed that Israel would also release 150 Palestinian women and child prisoners who assisted in terror attacks but did not directly kill Israelis themselves. Families of the victims of the convicted prisoners would have a 24-hour opportunity to appeal their release to the Israeli Supreme Court. …

At this stage, Israel is only negotiating for Israeli hostages, according to the source. Other countries will have to conduct their own talks with Hamas to release their respective hostages. The official noted that many of the American hostages have dual-citizenship and therefore qualify as Israeli hostages.

Time will tell.

ADDENDUM: (Hat tip: commenter “Miguel cervantes”) Netanyahu made a statement:

The return of hostages is a top, “sacred priority and I am committed to it,” Netanyahu says.

“Before us is a difficult decision but the right one,” he adds. “We will not rest until everyone is returned. The war has stages and the return of the hostages will have stages.”

More at the link.

The propaganda war: no matter how strong the evidence the IDF offers, much of the world rejects it

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You can see some of the new Israeli findings about Hamas terrorist activity in Shifa hostpital here. But no matter how strong the evidence, you can also see – especially if you follow the reaction on social media – denial is strong. So many people merely say it’s all fake; that Israel lies, and that’s that.

Actually, as far as lies go, they don’t get much bigger than this Big Lie issued by the Palestinian Authority:

The Palestinian Authority falsely claimed Sunday that a preliminary investigation by the Israel Police has revealed that the Israel Defense Forces was responsible for the death of all 364 partygoers near Kibbutz Re’im during Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, drawing fierce denunciation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Opposition Leader Yair Lapid.

In a statement by its foreign ministry which has since been deleted from its social media accounts — but which Hebrew media said was sent as a document to diplomats and to the United Nations — Ramallah asserted that Israeli helicopters bombed Israeli civilians on October 7 during the Supernova music festival as part of the so-called “Hannibal Protocol, which allowed the occupation police and army to kill everyone.” …

However, the claim disseminated by the PA has no basis in reality, originating in a Haaretz story Saturday that quoted an unnamed police source saying one of the options being looked into is that a small number of partygoers had been harmed on October 7 by fire from a military chopper that had been directed at the Hamas terrorists. The police denied the Haaretz report.

A bit like the 9/11 Truthers: Bush did it!

Yesterday I read an article that described the scope of the Palestinian propaganda program and how it worked on youth and the left. Please take a look. I really suggest you read the whole thing, because it cannot possibly be summarized. But here’s an excerpt:

As the years went on, I began to see what Ameer Makhoul had laid out to me taking shape. The PR coverage was first …

Then the campuses: The creation of Apartheid Week worldwide. The growth of BDS. The student volunteers who began by the thousands to work in the Palestinian territories and its refugee camps. The shocking creation of anti-Zionist Jewish student groups.

As an award-winning copywriter and creative director in ad agencies and a professor of Communication at USC, I have developed an intuitive antenna to detect similarities between writing styles, idea styles and conceptual creation. In the early years of this pro-Palestinian campaign, I could see the commonalities of excellence, style and manipulation across all their platforms. Teaching on a university campus gave me a front-row seat at this theater of darkening skies.

People of color, particularly antisemitic Black groups like BLM, were organizing to identify with the Palestinians. Many organizations representing people seen as oppressed were moved to identify with the Palestinians. Students of every variety were swayed. I could see the commonalities of language creation and transfer — my field — being applied to the Jews. Many of them were old antisemitic tropes into which new life was being breathed:

Israel and Jews are colonialists just like other white oppressors around the world. Israel is an apartheid society, the same as South Africa was.

Jews have white privilege, even though more than 50% of Jews are dark-skinned people from the Arab world, Iran and Africa.

Jews hold power in media and banking, making them the enemy.

Jews center themselves as capitalists and donors.

Jews don’t hold space for anyone but themselves.

Jews need to be held accountable for the pain they are causing.

If you challenged any of this you were a racist, the worst thing you could possibly be accused of.

(Except if you are racist against Jews. Then you prove you are a true ally of the oppressed.)

Our enemies have had a real success. They have formed a winning international communication army with trained troops everywhere.

When Israeli writer, producer and former antisemitism envoy Noa Tishby recently said that students, particularly Jewish ones who are protesting against Israel, have been “played,” I don’t know if even she understands the background and extent of it. They haven’t just been played, they’ve been turned. Many of them are alumni of Jewish day schools and camps. Those students believe they have joined the other side because they were the victims of a propagandized Zionist education and have now seen the light. No, they are the victims of a propagandized, slow, well-crafted plan, laid out to me by Ameer Makhoul.

This has been going on for decades, and social media has become one of the main conduits for such propaganda. You can see for yourself how incredibly effective it’s been. Those enormous crowds – especially of young people passionately screaming not just Israel-hatred but Jew-hatred – are no accident, nor are they some organic natural development. They are the fruits of long labor by master propagandists on the Palestinian side.

RIP Rosalynn Carter, 96

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Ninety-six is a formidable age, and Rosalynn Carter made the most of her long life:

Mrs. Carter was married for 77 years to Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who is now 99 years old.

“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” President Carter said. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

She is survived by her children — Jack, Chip, Jeff, and Amy — and 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. A grandson died in 2015.

“Besides being a loving mother and extraordinary First Lady, my mother was a great humanitarian in her own right,” said Chip Carter. “Her life of service and compassion was an example for all Americans.

I can’t say that I followed her life very closely. But my impression was always of a steel magnolia type, soft-spoken but very very strong. RIP.

Most women’s rights organizations are worse than worthless

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Women’s rights organization are basically wholly-leftist boilerplate operations at this point. Maybe they always were, but whether or not that’s the case, it’s become abundantly clear as time has gone on that their principles are utterly changeable, and depend almost completely on politics.

Therefore, post-10/7 it’s been easy to see that they have been silent or taken the wrong side about a massacre and rape festival that should have been a no-brainer for them to vigorously and unequivocally condemn.

Instead we have this sort of travesty:

UN Women, the United Nations’s leading organization for the protection of women’s rights internationally, issued its first statement on the Hamas attacks on October 13. There is no mention of Hamas in the statement. There is no mention of sexual violence. It does call for the “immediate release of the hostages,” but the majority of the text is devoted to the “dire” situation in Gaza.

“Within a month following the Russian invasion to Ukraine, UN Women expressed grave concern over evidence of rapes and other conflict related sexual violence and called for an investigation into these allegations. Likewise, they reacted immediately to the reports of rapes of Yazidi women by ISIS, which was referred to as a terrorist group,” a professor and academic director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women at Bar-Ilan University, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, tells the Sun. “Their failure to acknowledge what actually took place on October 7 adds fuel to the propaganda, to the campaign of denial, in which we find ourselves now.”

The UN group is hardly alone. For example:

Where are the self-righteous sisters of The Squad? Where is AOC, Rashida, and Ilhan? I guess their duplicitous feminist stance takes a pause when the victims are Jewish. Where is the Me-Too movement? They shamed and helped prosecute sexual predators in show business and the workplace. Why are they giving Hamas a pass? Where are the female journalists on the BBC and MSNBC? …

Where is the outrage from Save the Children or UNICEF? In 2014, after Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria, movie stars and politicians spearheaded the global outcry. Michelle Obama launched a social media campaign to “Bring Back Our Girls.” But the former first lady has been nowhere to be seen since October 7. Her silence has been deafening. …

In the aftermath of wars in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Ukraine, the crimes against women were central to the international criminal indictments and prosecutions of men responsible for orchestrating the campaign of rapes. It is unlikely that such a special prosecutor will be called to protect Israeli and Jewish women. I have fought the destructive virus of anti-Israel bias of the International Criminal Court for years. The court in The Hague has historically used its jurisprudence as a platform for attacking Israel and not defending it.

See also this, and this.

In a story that seems related, there is also the news that young US women are converting to Islam in record numbers. I haven’t read the article – paywall – but it doesn’t surprise me. Young women are adrift at sea these days, and Islam offers a very strict direction. That it is a misogynist direction may not matter to those women seeking whatever it is they think they find there.

I will close with an excerpt from this poem by Sylvia Plath. Although the poem says “every woman,” I disagree about that. But I think it expresses something of the truth for at least some women who are attracted to violence and subjugation. I hate to say it – and I’m not one of the women thus described – but there is a masochistic strain in some females that does fit what Plath wrote here:

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

The Last Unicorn

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Kids these days love unicorns. Unicorns are almost their emblems, their mascots. I’m not sure why, but I’ll go with it. Unicorns are a beautiful escape from reality, and a benign one. Even adults can use that now and then.

Unicorns got me to thinking about an animated movie I remembered from 1982, The Last Unicorn. I thought I’d seen it before, but when I watched it a few weeks ago I realized I hadn’t.

I also realized it’s a pretty dull movie. But one sequence seemed magical to me, and that was the introduction. Here it is (it ends a bit prematurely, but it’s basically all there):

You may have noticed that much of the animation is patterned after the famous unicorn tapestries in New York’s Cloisters. I was taken to see them on a school trip as a child. I wasn’t interested in the Cloisters themselves at the time, but the tapestries were memorable. Here’s a site that shows them all, and explains what they’re about. They’re older than I thought; from around 1500, and mostly in good shape, which I think is remarkable. If you haven’t been there and seen them in person, you might not realize that they are quite large, each at least twelve feet high and eight feet wide.

This is the tapestry on which the film’s introduction is modeled:

The story of the tapestry series, however, might be likely to offend the modern-day sensibilities of many of our unicorn-loving kids, because it depicts a unicorn hunt in which the unicorn appears to be killed by the hunters. More here:

The tapestries themselves tell a story, which is likewise mysterious. “The unicorn was a symbol of many things in the Middle Ages,” as Richard Preston writes, including Christianity, immortality, wisdom, love, and marriage. Add to this that every least element in the tapestries — from flora and fauna to clothes and gestures — had a particular medieval meaning, and it’s little wonder that their significance is unclear to us. Certainly, the unicorn is a proxy for Christ. But he is also an image of the lover brought down like a stag in the allegorical hunts evoked in medieval works like Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess and Gottfried von Straussburg’s Tristan and Isolde. He is both a creature of flesh and spirit, earthly longing and eternal life.

Despite the fact that the unicorn seems to be killed in the hunt, there’s a seventh tapesty that shows the creature alive and fenced in. Is this part of the series, or a standalone? Who knows?:

The Cloisters’ current curator posits this last tapestry “may have been created as a single image rather than part of the series.” But a former curator, Margaret B. Freeman thought like many others that it may have been the mystical conclusion of the series, in which the “unicorn, miraculously come to life again,” stands for both the risen Christ and the “lover-bridegroom, at last secured by his adored lady.”

In the animated film – SPOILER ALERT – the last unicorn lives and the other unicorns return from a sort of suspended animation in the sea.

The body of a third Hamas hostage has been found

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The source of the story is the Tanzanian government:

Eynat Shlein, deputy director general of MASHAV, Israel’s international development cooperation agency, confirmed the death of 22-year-old Clemence Felix Mtenga, one of two of [Tanzania’s] citizens abducted by the terrorists during their invasion of Israel and slaughter of 1,200 others.

More than 240 people, citizens of Israel and at least 25 other nations, were taken hostage by Hamas.

The second Tanzanian citizen — a fellow student — taken hostage that day was Joshua Mollel, whose current whereabout and condition remain unknown.

Both Mtenga and Mollel were in Israel to study agriculture, and were participating in an 11-month agricultural internship program, according to Israel’s foreign ministry.

That is extraordinary: 25 countries plus Israel. Also, some of the hostages are Israeli Arabs, as are some of the dead.

Israel isn’t giving details about the death of Mtenga, and perhaps we will never learn them. But it seems pretty clear that his body was found in Gaza, perhaps – as with the two other dead hostages – near Shifa hospital.

One of the things that has also become clear is that Hamas doesn’t have all the hostages. Some of the kidnappers are members of other groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said to hold about 30. Some of the kidnappers seem to be what you might call free-lancers, number unknown.

That article I just linked gives a breakdown of the countries from which the hostages come. I knew there were many Thais, but the number is extraordinary, about 22%:

According to the Israeli government, 138 of the hostages have foreign passports, including 54 Thais, 15 Argentinians, 12 Germans, 12 Americans, six French, and six Russians. There is also one Chinese hostage, one Sri Lankan, two from Tanzania, and two from the Philippines.

It goes without saying that we simply don’t know how many hostages are still alive, or where they are being held, or whether they will ever be freed. It is heartbreaking and outrageous, as well as evil.

On the leftist takeover of American universities: looking back at John Silber

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This new book – The Canceling of the American Mind, about leftism and cancel culture at universities in the US – looks interesting. It obviously harks back to Allan’s Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, and about which I’ve written many posts over the years.

Bloom wrote about the beginning and middle of the story; now the whole thing is solidified and entrenched. But although Bloom’s descriptions of Cornell in the 1960s make one realize how long ago most university administrators were abject cowards bowing to the mob (Bloom called those administrators and professors “dancing bears”), I sometimes think of one university president who never caved. Once he was gone, his school – Boston University – was taken over like all the others. But John Silber fought quite a fight.

The word “controversial” was made for the feisty Silber. He famously did battle with Howard Zinn, a tenured professor at BU, many times over many years. You can read about it here:

Reflecting on the incident – which culminated with Silber invoking Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea that those engaging in civil disobedience should welcome arrest and Zinn comparing him to Bull Connor – Silber held firm. “When there were students setting fire to buildings on the campus of Boston University, and when there were riots, and students preventing students from going into buildings, then I think being resolute was absolutely required,” he explained in an interview on the matter in 2006.

That it is almost unimaginable for a university president to be similarly resolute today reflects the hegemony of Zinn’s approach in the contemporary academy and highlights how courageous Silber was in his time. In addition to weathering criticism from Zinn, Silber stood up against a student “referendum,” in which 16,000 voted against allowing the Marines on campus. Silber responded simply, “I would be much more impressed by a thoughtful document that was brought in by one single student than I would by a mindless referendum of 16,000.” Like his counterpart, Silber’s strong perspective on campus issues was informed by a deeper philosophical approach, perhaps best summed up by Harold Willis Dodds – Princeton’s president from 1933 to 1957 – who famously said, “[i]deas should not be made safe for students, but students should be made safe for ideas.”…

… [also] BU was sponsoring a program to provide scholarships to black South African students, and Silber saw calls for divestiture as a form of virtue signaling. In a private meeting with protestors who demanded BU divest from General Motors and IBM, he asked, “[w]hy should we do that? Is it immoral to own that stock?” When the students responded that it was, he said, “[s]o then, we’re supposed to sell it to somebody? We can’t divest unless we sell it to somebody….If we sell it to somebody, we have just gotten rid of our guilt in order to impose guilt on somebody else.”

There’s much more, of course – including the fact that Silber ran for the Massachusetts governorship in 1990 as a Democrat. Those days are certainly gone.

NOTE: More here on Silber.

Voices from Gaza: public opinion on Hamas

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Recently a Gaza poll got a lot of attention. Its results were as follows:

So, are those numbers valid? Obviously, I don’t know. What I do know is that, were I a Gazan, I would perceive voicing an anti-Hamas position to be very dangerous to my well-being. So although the poll may indeed be valid, if it is invalid it would probably be invalid in the direction of false positives, and the amount of Hamas-approval would not really be that high.

That said – although we don’t know for sure, I think the amount of Hamas-approval in Gaza is very high, probably more than 50% of the population. That’s bad enough. But I just don’t think we know.

Another thing I don’t know is whether the following is for real. Also, if it is for real, I don’t know how many people in Gaza share these beliefs. Perhaps very very very few. Perhaps more than that. But it’s certainly interesting:

Another:

Another:

There is another group that also interviews people in Gaza but uses animation to illustrate their stories:

There are quite a few more. Make of it what you will.