Many or perhaps even most of you may know this already. But it’s certainly not common knowledge. It’s a good summary of how Islam is the problem. You might want to send the video to other people who are unaware of what’s going on regarding the education of young Muslim children in murderous hatred of Jews. I first read of the phenomenon back in the 1990s and became alarmed about it, and I was right to be alarmed:
Why does the left rip down the posters of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas?
It’s no puzzlement why Palestinians or other Arabs in this country might do it. But what about the non-Arab contingent ripping down these posters?
Jeff Jacoby has an explanation, and I think he’s spot on:
The posters went viral overnight. Within days they were appearing everywhere, a powerful symbol of Israel’s anguish and of the desperate yearning for the captives’ safe return. Then came the backlash. “Within minutes or hours of going up,” reported the New York Jewish Week, “many of them had been partially ripped off the subway station’s walls, tears obscuring the victims’ faces or details about their lives, while others were defaced with marker or surrounded by messages such as “Free Palestine.” On a poster of two of the youngest hostages, 3-year-old twins Emma and Yuli Cunio, Hitler mustaches were drawn on the girls’ faces. On other posters, the words “Lies” or “Actors” were scrawled. …
The “Kidnapped” fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.
The idea that Jews might be victims has caused many people the world round to rip off the masks of civilized pretense – the excuse that their hatred of Israel had nothing to do with hatred of Jews. Clearly, it has everything to do with hatred of Jews.
This also harks back to yesterday’s post of mine on oppressors versus the oppressed. Simply put, the left only cares about two categories of people, oppressed and oppressor. The Palestinians have long been defined as oppressed, which means that anything awful they do cannot be judged as bad; it is always the fault of the oppressor. The left defines Israel as the oppressor. Therefore, the crimes of Hamas and the jubilation of the Palestinians about those crimes cannot be acknowledged as such because that would upset the groups’ placement in the all-important hierarchy of victimhood.
Israelis cannot be oppressed; they are always oppressors. Therefore obvious victims such as those on the posters must be denied and canceled, and reminders of their victimhood cannot be allowed to be seen and/or must be denounced as lies.
Jews as victims creates cognitive dissonance with previously held notions by leftists of the way the world works, and the place of different groups in it. Cognitive dissonance is intolerable for most people, and they will do almost anything to resolve it, including denying incredibly strong evidence.
The Left cares nothing about Muslim-on-Muslim killings …
… just as it cares nothing about black-on-black killings in the inner cities.
The only killing of a Muslim that concerns the Left is if a Jew does the killing, or a Western nation does the killing.
The only killing of a black person that concerns the Left is if a white person (or an Asian, defined as “white adjacent,” or a “white Hispanic”) does the killing.
There is a pattern here, which is that the Left pretends to care about Muslims who are killed or black people who are killed. But it does not. It cares about who it can blame.
In Yemen, a civil war has been ongoing for nine years:
According to the UN, over 150,000 people have been killed in Yemen, as well as estimates of more than 227,000 dead as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war.
But I haven’t heard a peep about it from our Left. Have you? In Syria, likewise, although that one’s been going on since 2011:
The war has resulted in an estimated 470,000 – 610,000 violent deaths, making it the second deadliest conflict of the 21st century …
Look at those numbers. Whether they’re exact or not, clearly the number of dead is high. We do hear about Syria now and then, but mostly because the US backs some of the parties, as do Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Both of these conflicts, as well as others, dwarf the Iraeli-Palestinian one in terms of deaths. But because Israel can be demonized in the latter conflict, it gets the attention and the Palestinians are the favorite victimized group of the left and academics (redundant, I know) and of the Muslim world.
NOTE: I wrote the above last night as a draft. Today I saw this post by Stephen Green on the very same topic:
While the Israeli-Hamas war garners all the attention … “No Jews” [trending on “X”] shows that, even with a brutal war raging, Gaza doesn’t even top the list of how bad Arabs have it…
…at the hands of their fellow Arabs. For much of the Islamic world, Israel serves as both a convenient distraction and a convenient excuse from just how badly most of the so-called “house of peace” (Dar al-Islam) runs its affairs.
For every leftie complaining about Israeli’s treatment of Gaza Palestinians, there is exactly zero taking public notice of how they’re being treated in Syria. …
If author and former Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters is correct, the violence would only grow worse if Hamas or Iran were to succeed in wiping Israel from the map. “The destruction of Israel,” he wrote in the afterword to “The War in 2020,” would be “less likely to trigger Islamic unity than to utterly dissolve it. Unable to direct their frustrations at the Zionist devil, the Islamic nations of the Eurasian landmass would quickly rediscover the holy and delectable mission of slaughtering each other over trivia.”
Excellent point.
Open thread 11/2/23
The bigger picture: the ascendance of the post-modern left and the glorification of the “oppressed”
When I first became very active online, the search engine Google was rather new. I noticed quite early that, when I would be doing a search for content on Israel or Jews, the first page or two of results were viciously anti-Semitic and contained content that was based on Protocols-type lies as well as misrepresentations of the history of Israel and Palestine, or about hateful things Jews allegedly believed.
It was quite eye-opening. Apparently, anti-Semitic internet warriors were adept at gaming the early Google algorithm in order to flood the results lists. Google actually managed to change its algorithm and some of that volume of anti-Semitic content was damped down. But it was one of many lessons I learned about the power of the internet to spread hatred and lies of all kinds, not just anti-Jewish ones.
The internet has always been a double-edged sword. But the internet combined with the left’s ascendance in academia has created a fertile ground in which lies of all kinds can grow, and belief in such lies can become most common among the most highly educated. Then those people go out into the world and are influential in all sorts of institutions.
One of the tenets of leftism is the idea that the world divides neatly into oppressed and oppressor. You are one or the other, and there’s no escaping it. What’s more, the oppressed are defined as good no matter what their behavior; there are no objective standards for judging them except their defined status as oppressed. That is why we see it said that black people cannot be racists, even when they obviously are expressing hatred towards other races. That is why the George Floyd riots were perfectly okay and the J6 defendants were evil. That is why Nick Sandmann had a face so many wanted to punch, and his harassers were protected by the press and the left.
And of course that is why murderous savagery by Hamas is justified by virtue-signaling college students. Hamas is oppressed and Israelis are oppressors – or “colonialists” or “settlers” or whatever the term of art. That means Hamas can literally do no wrong.
Hamas leaders are well aware of this and exploit it. For example, here’s a recent pitch-perfect statement by a Hamas leader (safe in Qatar) that caters to the refined sensibilities of the Western postmodern left (“We are victims – everything we do is justified):
Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad: We Will Repeat the October 7 Attack Time and Again Until Israel Is Annihilated; We Are Victims – Everything We Do Is Justified #Hamas #Gaza #Palestinians pic.twitter.com/kXu3U0BtAP
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 1, 2023
All of it is of a piece, and this message would fall on deaf ears without postmodern leftism and its oppressed/oppressor measure of morality. Once the “oppressed victim” mantle is bestowed, objective measures of humane behavior fly out the window. Hamas is well aware of that and is adept at exploiting it.
ADDENDUM: The White House proves it got the memo on the proper intersectionalist hierarchy of oppressed victims: see this on “Islamophobia.”
Why a student of Asian ethnicity might express virulent genocidal Jew-hatred
Cornell student Patrick Dai, who allegedly was the author of “messages threatening to ‘shoot up’ the campus’ kosher dining hall” and said that “jewish people need to be killed,” as well as threatening “to rape Jewish women and behead Jewish babies,” is under federal arrest. One of the main things that has puzzled a lot of people is that he is ethnically Asian, probably Chinese. There is no indication that he’s an immigrant; my guess is that he was born here, although I’m not sure. His understandably shocked parents claim that he’s been deeply depressed, and that may be the case. But depressed people don’t usually post the sort of depraved threats he seems to have issued.
So what’s his motivation? I am just guessing, but here’s my list. More than one of these can be operating at once:
(1) He is under the sway of the usual leftist anti-Israel anti-Jew campus rhetoric.
(2) As a male Asian, he is keenly aware of being a very low man on the intersectional victim totem pole. What better way to climb higher than to support one of the darlings of the Left, the Palestinians? And since on that same scale Asians are considered quasi-Jews (smart, achievement-oriented, “white-adjacent”), it’s also necessary to separate oneself from the Jews and even excoriate them.
(3) He is turning his depression outward into aggression and rage, and the convenient target these days is Jews.
(4) He felt emboldened by being online, where people often release aggression without fear of consequences. Online one can sound like a big bad m-f-er, even if in person one’s demeanor is quite mild.
(5) If the opinion of China means anything to him, he is not alone in his Jew-hatred:
Antisemitism has always been an issue in pockets of the Chinese social media ecosystem, but the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza has brought a fresh outpouring of hate.
Since Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, and Israel’s ensuing bombardment of the Gaza Strip, the Chinese internet has been awash with antisemitism, including many comments that are too extreme to repeat in this article. …
Hateful online content is a global scourge. The Chinese information space, however, is unique in that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightly controls the messages circulating on social media platforms through both automated and manual tools, meaning the hate speech that remains uncensored reflects the regime’s decisions. …
Hateful online content is a global scourge. The Chinese information space, however, is unique in that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightly controls the messages circulating on social media platforms through both automated and manual tools, meaning the hate speech that remains uncensored reflects the regime’s decisions.
Very very disturbing, and perhaps an influence on Bai. And in videos of pro-Hamas student demonstrators, I have noticed a sprinkling of Asian students. At first it puzzled me, but it puzzles me no more. I don’t know how common this sort of virulent Jew-hatred is among Asians in this country – I’m inclined to think not very. But the existence of violent anti-Semitism in Asians in the US is another indication of how the poison of such hate has spread via the internet and academia.
Euthanasia in Canada
Our humane and friendly neighbor to the north:
[In 2015] Canada’s highest court determined that assisted suicide would be ethical only “with respect to voluntary adults who are competent, informed, grievously and irremediably ill,” and only when it would be “clearly consistent with the patient’s wishes and best interests, and [provided] in order to relieve suffering.” …
When critics argued that the ruling would result in euthanasia being offered to the mentally ill, the depressed, those with disabilities, or other vulnerable persons, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dismissed such concerns, saying, “this simply isn’t something that ends up happening.” He was wrong. In 2021, Parliament removed the law’s previous requirement that a person’s natural death must be imminently foreseeable for him to elect suicide. …
The expanded MAID [Medical Assistance in Dying] policy did not distinguish between medical infirmities and avoidable suffering caused by neglect or poverty. Bioethicists Kayla Wiebe and Amy Mullin contended that Canada should not deny people assisted suicide if living conditions make their lives intolerable. Physicians have offered MAID to people who cannot afford housing or find proper medical care. A rogue bureaucrat within Canada’s department of veterans affairs offered MAID to an elderly veteran struggling to make ends meet; the matter was turned over to the police.
Canada’s euthanasia regime has grown rapidly since 2021. According to the Fourth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2022, “the most commonly cited sources of suffering by individuals requesting MAID were the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities (86.3%), followed by loss of ability to perform activities of daily living (81.9%) and inadequate control of pain, or concern about controlling pain (59.2%).”
Back in the late 1990s, when I was having chronic pain from several nerve injuries, I was in an internet discussion and support group for people with similar problems. At the time, I knew nothing about health care in Canada or Britain. But within that group it did not escape my notice that participants from those countries with chronic pain were suffering more, and longer, than people in the US, for the simple reason that their strained government health care systems gave such problems an extremely low priority. They were underdiagnosed and undertreated, and although that was sometimes the case in the US it was quite clear that it was far worse in Canada and Britain
I guess this “solves” the problem:
More than 13,000 people in Canada were euthanized in 2022, an annual rise of 31.2 percent since 2021. In 2022, 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country were the result of euthanasia; MAID could now be listed as the nation’s fifth-leading cause of death. Nearly 45,000 people have been euthanized since 2016, when Parliament first introduced MAID legislation. This number will keep rising as stigma disappears and MAID advocates continue to push for relaxed standards. The Canadian government seems to be on board with that agenda, as it reportedly plans to make MAID available to anorexics and drug users.
The slippery-slope argument that Trudeau scoffed at has proved true. Simons, a Canadian fashion company, released a disturbing advertisement presenting 37-year-old Jennyfer Hatch’s decision to die as a posh lifestyle choice. A funeral home in Montreal notably offers a $700 “turnkey” package of MAID and funeral.
It’s a bargain, both for the person and for the state.
Many people criticize slippery-slope arguments, but it seems clear to me that they are often valid. We’ve seen time and again that in the case of euthanasia the policy nearly always (perhaps even always?) follows that downward trajectory. There’s really very little to stop it.
Open thread 11/1/23
November already? November already.
It’s Halloween, and you know what that means
Candy corn.
I’ve already had my annual fix of the stuff. When I went to the market to buy it, I noticed it’s far more expensive than it used to be. A fairly large bag of candy corn always seemed to cost between 99 cents and $1.99, and that was for the primo brand, Brachs. Now it’s between $3.99 and $4.99. Not exactly going to break the bank, but it makes one stop and think.
For a moment, anyway.
Happy Halloween.
From Daniel Pearl to October 7 and beyond
Remember Daniel Pearl? Why do I start this post with him? He was the first terrorist victim – at least the first I can remember – whose death contained that special element of horrific sadism and psychopathic brutality crossed with modern technology, in that his beheading was videoed and purposely broadcast by the perpetrators. This was way before ISIS, but it foreshadowed the behavior of that group. It was something out of a psychological horror movie, and yet it was real.
Pearl was held hostage first, too. And then before the terrorists killed him he was forced to say things such as, “I am a Jew.” That was very very important to the terrorists, although the US seemed to be their main target for the moment.
Here’s an interesting fact that I never knew before, about Daniel Pearl’s mother, which is that she was an Iraqi Jew who fled that country in the 1940s because of persecution and violence:
Pearl was born Eveline Rejwan on November 11, 1935, in Baghdad, Iraq. Her father, Joseph, was a tailor who ran an import business, and her mother, Victoria (Abada) Rejwan, was a homemaker. … When Pearl was 5, she lived through the Farhud, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Iraq following a failed nationalist coup. She and her family hid in their home for days, protected by their Arab neighbors who told rioters that no Jews lived there.
Her family then moved to a suburb of Baghdad but anti-Jewish attacks persisted and she herself witnessed the bodies of Iraqi Jews hanging from gallows in a square. Her father lost vision in one eye after an assault and he had to bribe a police officer to free his two sons after they were arrested on false charges.
In the late 1940s, Pearl worked with an underground Zionist movement that facilitated the emigration of Jews, then illegal, to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. At this time, Pearl began using the Hebrew name Ruth. Around 1948, her two older brothers were smuggled into Palestine from Iraq. In 1949, Ruth’s oldest brother was killed fighting for the Israeli army, which she did not learn about until years later as her father had withheld the information from his family. In 1951, Pearl arrived with her family in Israel as part of the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews.
So the horror of Arab anti-Semitism was one of her earliest experiences, long before the nightmare returned in a very personal way.
Pearl’s mother met her husband Judah Pearl in Israel, and they moved to the US in 1950 for graduate studies. Both were scientists. Ruth Pearl died in 2021, but her husband is still alive at 87, and he was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to Polish-Jewish immigrants who had had the prescience and good fortune to be able to emigrate to Israel.
Daniel Pearl was abducted, held hostage, and murdered by various jihadi groups in 2002, when he was 38 years old. That was over 20 years ago, so you may have forgotten some of the details that perhaps didn’t seem so important at the time. But here are a few:
On February 21, 2002, a video was released titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. The video shows Pearl’s mutilated body …
The Jew Daniel Pearl. And of course there was the broadcasting, with great pride, of not just the killing but the mutilation. What seemed so unusual back then stopped being unusual a long time ago, because we’ve seen many such videos over the years. And now, with social media, we have refinements such as this: filming the murder of a young man on his cellphone, and sending the video to his mother.
But back to Pearl and the video of his killing. During the video, Pearl was made to say at the outset:
My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.
Jewish, Jewish, Jewish; Israel, Israel, Israel. That was no mere detail to Pearl’s killers. It’s not that they won’t kill non-Jews; they certainly will, and with relish. But it is Jews they wish to eliminate from the earth first. One can argue about what the Koran says about Jews; it says a lot of contradictory things, many of them not good. But you can’t argue about what hadith Hamas chose to put in its charter as inspiration:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him
So do not be surprised when Palestinians and Palestinian sympathizers in Western countries stand in public squares and celebrate the killing of Jews and scream that they want to kill more. As courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:
In short, anti-Semites the world over have been emboldened by this crisis, and Jews are once again being blamed for their own massacre. And I am not remotely surprised. In my childhood, I was steeped in the Islamist movement’s noxious anti-Semitism — which has been on such ugly display this week.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, I spent my early years escaping political strife after my father was imprisoned for being an anti-government activist. We moved between countries before settling in Kenya.
The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called a ‘Jew’, not that any of us actually knew one. To be called a ‘Jew’ was so abhorrent, some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonoured them with this ‘slur’.
As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends.
I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful ‘two-state solution’: we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map.
When I was 16, my school’s teacher of religion was Sister Aziza. She read to us the Koran’s lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin — the place reserved for Jews.
Sister Aziza described Jews as physically monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them.
It was a lot to take in for a teenager who read Western romance novels in secret, but I believed every word. …
[Much later] I abandoned my religion, but I have never lost my clear-sighted understanding, forged in my childhood, of Islamism’s pathological hatred of Jews, as well as Muslims considered as heretics and non-Muslims in general.
The former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi — a one-time leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — declared that Muslims should ‘nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred’ of Jews.
One of the most chilling things about the 10/7 terrorist attacks was that for several previous years Hamas pretended to be backing away from violence, and fooled Israel into thinking that actually was true. Now they are bragging about the success of their deception, which caused the Israelis to give them travel permits and also to let down their guard somewhat. According to a Hamas official:
“We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”
And they want this to be a worldwide effort. They’ve been preparing the ground for decades: emigrating to Western nations, using propaganda in the MSM, and enlisting many allies in academia (see this). Perhaps they have overestimated their support and overplayed their hand, causing at least some of their erstwhile allies in the Western Left to recoil in horror. Perhaps. But perhaps not. There is no mistaking their intent anymore, nor the lengths to which they are willing to go to achieve it.
9/11 was a wakeup call for a lot of people. And so is this. The question is whether it will be heeded.
Roundup
I find myself doing more of these roundups these days because there’s just so much news.
(1) I’m surprised to learn that there actually were some writers at The NY Times who are reported to have urged caution on the headline and placement of that blame-Israel hospital bombing story, and that they were lower down on the hierarchy rather than higher up. Lower down tends to mean younger, but I would have imagined that it would be the older editors rather than younger people who were urging caution.
(2) Funny stuff on new Speaker Mike Johnson [hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”].
(3) Another change story, this time in Israel.
(4) The ACLU surprisingly defended Trump’s free speech rights in the Jack Smith trial:
“The obvious and unprecedented public interest in this prosecution, as well as the widespread political speech that it has generated and will continue to generate, only underscores the need to apply the most stringent First Amendment standard to a restraint on Defendant’s speech rights,” ACLU attorneys wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief.
The group urged Chutkan to reevaluate her order, calling it both vague and overbroad, with aspects of its meaning “unknown and perhaps unknowable.” One particular uncertainty the ACLU seized on was the meaning of Chutkan’s prohibition on statements that “target” Smith, his prosecutors, court personnel, defense attorneys or witnesses.
“Reading the order, Defendant cannot possibly know what he is permitted to say, and what he is not,” the group wrote.
Chutkan nevertheless reinstated the order. No surprise there.
(5) One of the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas has been freed by the IDF:
The Times of Israel reported that Megidish, a private who had served as an “observation soldier,” was captured during Hamas’ raid of Israel’s Nahal Oz base. She had likely been held alone by Hamas and a mission to bring her home had been planned for “several” days, the outlet reported. Israeli forces were reportedly met with resistance from Hamas, but no troops were injured or killed.
We’ll probably never know the details, but it’s good news.
(6) Shani Louk, the woman whose seemingly lifeless and broken body was barbarically paraded in front of joyous Gazan crowds, has been confirmed dead by the finding of a piece of skull matching her DNA. Of all the terrible horror stories connected with October 7, hers was one of the earliest to be known, and that was because the terrorists were so very proud of it. RIP.
It seems that a lot of people would like the Jews to just let themselves be killed
Jews are criticized for contradictory things. They are excoriated for supposedly not realizing they were targets during WWII and not escaping or fighting back. Although the truth is quite different, this is a persistent accusation. But they are also criticized when they fight back in normal (or even relatively restrained) fashion, as Israel does.
Many people seem to think that now they should just absorb being massacred on an enormous scale:
This has a historical precedent about which most people are unaware: Gandhi agreed that the Jews should allow themselves to be massacred, although his reasoning for the recommendation was completely different. Gandhi, you ask? Surely not Gandhi! So let me refresh your memory by suggesting you read this post of mine from 2005.