The “Islamophobia” shooting in Vermont

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin.”]

Remember this?:

When three Arab Muslim students were shot and wounded in Burlington, Vermont, politicians and the media immediately hyped it as the ‘Islamophobic Crime of the Century’.

President Biden issued a statement declaring that “there is absolutely no place for violence or hate in America.” …

The three Muslim men [shot in Burlington, Vermont] identified as ‘Palestinian’, two of them were wearing keffiyehs and Kamala [Harris], like many other leftists, was implying that the shooter was ‘anti-Palestinian’.

“The idea that three young men walking down the street get shot, perhaps because of no other reason than they are Palestinian, is unspeakable,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said. ”But I gotta tell you, this is not just a local phenomenon, this is happening all over the country.”

Then he blasted Israel.

Of course.

More:

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee falsely claimed that “a man shouted and harassed the victims, then proceeded to shoot them. We have reason to believe this shooting occurred because the victims are Arab.”

In reality, they had been shot by a local resident outside his house who did not say a word.

The three Muslim men were returning home from a party on Saturday night when James J. Eaton, a local resident with a history of mental instability, stumbled out of a white clapboard house on the residential street and without a word fired four shots at the three men.

Eaton had been described as “that hippie guy” and “progressive”, an organic farmer who had posted a meme with a definition of “Amerika” that called it “the worst sense of the United States, ie imperialism, corruption and the global exportation of American culture.”

He appeared to be a Biden supporter …

In reality, Eaton supported Hamas.

On December 6, Seven Days, a local news outlet known for breaking stories about local politics, revealed that Eaton had tweeted, “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.” …

Local politicians were aware of this …

But the original narrative was so much more useful. The article goes on to detail a host of other “Islamophobia” crimes that were falsely labeled that way. But don’t sit on a hot stove till any of this becomes common knowledge.

NOTE: The propaganda use made of this incident reminds me somewhat of the murder of Matthew Shepard, which most likely was not motivated by homophobia, although it was consistently reported on with the homophobia motive angle.

Israel’s turn to defend itself in the kangaroo ICJ

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday was Orwellian accuser South Africa’s turn, standing in for so many of the tyrannies and failed states around the world in using the ICJ (International Court of Justice) to accuse Israel.

Or, as this group succinctly put it yesterday: “Today South Africa took a short break from being a failed state that allows – basically – people to be killed in its own country because of their race, in order to lecture Jews on why trying to prevent a second Holocaust is genocide.”

Here’s what happened today:

Israel’s six legal representatives asserted that the ICJ has no jurisdiction over the complaints brought by South Africa since they relate to the laws of armed conflict, not genocide; argued that “random” inflammatory comments of Israeli politicians did not reflect policy determined in the state bodies making war policy; and insisted that the widespread harm to Palestinian civilians during the war was a result of Hamas’s massive use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes, and not genocidal acts.

They also underlined in depth the steps Israel has taken to warn civilians to evacuate from Israel Defense Forces operational areas and to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians, including facilitating the establishment of field hospitals in Gaza to aid Gazans and mitigate harm to them.

In a court of actual justice, this case would have been thrown out at the outset – or, if the case were allowed to proceed, the verdict of “not guilty” would be obvious and inevitable. But this is not a court of actual justice, and I would not be the least bit surprised if it rendered a verdict of “guilty.” In fact, it would surprise me greatly if it issued any other verdict.

Here is the text of Israel’s opening remarks. Some excerpts:

The State of Israel is singularly aware of why the Genocide Convention, which has been invoked in these proceedings, was adopted. Seared in our collective memory is the systematic murder of 6 million Jews as part of a premeditated and heinous program for their total annihilation. …

… [T]he Genocide Convention was not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population, even when the use of force raises “very serious issues of international law and involves enormous suffering and continuing loss of life.” The convention was set apart to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity. …

The applicant [South Africa] has regrettably put before the court a profoundly distorted factual and legal picture. The entirety of its case hinges on a deliberately curated, decontextualized, and manipulative description of the reality of current hostilities.

… [I]n its sweeping counterfactual description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [South Africa] seemed to erase both Jewish history and any Palestinian agency or responsibility. Indeed, the delegitimization of Israel since its very establishment in 1948 in the applicant’s submissions sounded barely distinguishable from Hamas’s own rejectionist rhetoric.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that in the applicant’s telling, both Hamas’s responsibility for the situation in Gaza and the very humanity of its Israeli victims are removed from view.

The attempt to weaponize the term “genocide” against Israel in the present context does more than tell the court a grossly distorted story, and it does more than empty the word of its unique force and special meaning. It subverts the object and purpose of the convention itself, with ramifications for all states seeking to defend themselves against those who demonstrate total disdain for life and for the law….

We know of the brutality of October 7 not only from the harrowing testimonies of the survivors, the unmistakable proof of carnage and sadism left behind, and the forensic evidence taken at the scene. We know it because the assailants proudly filmed and broadcast their barbarism.

The events of that day are all but ignored in the applicant’s submissions, but we are compelled to share with the court some fraction of its horror, the largest calculated mass murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

We do so not because these acts, however sadistic and systematic, release Israel of its obligations to uphold the law as it defends its citizens and territory. That is unquestionable. We do so because it is impossible to understand the armed conflict in Gaza without appreciating the nature of the threat that Israel is facing and the brutality and lawlessness of the armed force confronting it.

Much more at the link.

Hunter Biden agrees …

The New Neo Posted on by

… to testify in a closed session of the House if they issue a new subpoena.

I guess the threat of charging him with contempt actually had some effect.

Should be … interesting.

It’s also interesting to recall the history of the laptop and the way the press, social media, and the “intelligence community” covered it – that is, covered it up (with the exception of the NY Post) prior to the election of 2020.

What would you pay for Pablo Picasso’s palette?

The New Neo Posted on by

Seventy thousand dollars or so? Someone shelled that out back in 2020.

I looked that fact up because of this comment by “Oligonicella”:

I have a long running joke of a habit as I paint. I clean my palette board off at the end of each session because I use a mix that dries fairly rapidly. I do this by scraping with a palette knife and then smearing it on a smaller canvas.

After repeated sessions at the real painting it starts looking like post modern art, which is exactly the mockery I’m looking for.

I’ve sold two – “Old Man’s Lament” and “The Detritus of Life”.

Coming summer I’ve another portrait lined up. Maybe scrape off “Clinging to Existence”. Heh.

No offense to Oligonicella, but I doubt the going rate was $70K. The person who did pay that for the used Picasso palette was buying, not a work of art, but a sort of talisman, a relic of the Great Artist. I recall reading somewhere that Picasso used to say any time he signed his name to anything, even a napkin, people could sell it for big bucks. It must be very odd to have that degree of fame in one’s own lifetime.

Picasso’s star has somewhat fallen compared to in his heyday. He’s unwoke, of course, and unusually prolific and so his works aren’t rare. But don’t try to buy a painting of his for bargain prices. Don’t even try to buy a signature of his for a pittance. It’ll set you back about two thousand dollars.

More on the Soviet-generated spread of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda

The New Neo Posted on by

In line with my recent post on the Soviet influence on pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel – as well as anti-Semitic – propaganda, here are two more articles I recommend. The first was brought to my attention by commenter “Gringo,” and it’s quite comprehensive in featuring examples of Soviet political propaganda that set the tropes, and current examples in the West that follow the same templates.

Some excerpts – but I highly recommend the article itself:

The claim that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians is among the longest-running lies told about Israel. “Genocide Israeli style”; “Zionist-engineered genocide”; “the ‘final solution’ of the Palestinian question”—these may look like snippets from some recent campus proclamation, but they are not. They appeared in a Soviet pamphlet titled “Zionists Count on Terror.” Published in 1984 by Novosti, a Soviet foreign propaganda arm masquerading as a news agency, this pocket-sized brochure was meant to promote the Soviet view of Israel and Zionism to English-language audiences.

The propaganda was designed and intended to spread the world around the world.

English-speaking readers around the world were meant to understand that Zionists were genocidal and racist settler-colonialists who deployed Nazi methods in the service of global imperialism, while suppressing the anti-colonial national-liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. In the pamphlet’s 76 pages, variations on the words genocide, terror, and racist appear some 300 times. Novosti made clear that Zionists were perfidious double-dealers by associating them with the CIA, MI6, and of course, the Mossad in 100 instances. Readers were told to dismiss Jewish claims of antisemitism as Zionist tricks meant to deflect attention from Israel’s crimes.

The terms of the argument are the same ones so very popular among our young people now. I think the propaganda campaign (which of course was not limited to that pamphlet) can be counted a great success, if one measures success in terms of the scope of the indoctrination. Again, please read the article; it’s quite informative and illuminating if you’re puzzled by what’s going on these days.

Here’s another recommended article that’s related. It details some of the Soviet support through the KGB, starting in the late 1960s, for the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The idea that the USSR was behind a great deal of this sounds like a conspiracy theory. But some conspiracies exist and some conspiracy theories are based on solid fact. I don’t think there’s much doubt about the truth of this one. Does it matter anymore, now that the propaganda has been spread around the globe and is accepted by so many people, even in our country? I think it’s not just of purely academic interest to understand how these things occur, in order to help counter them now and prevent them in the future. Of course, much more is needed than understanding. A plan of action would be nice, and the hour is late and getting later.

Another October 7 survivor interview worth watching

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve watched a great many of these October 7 survivor videos, and they’re nearly all extraordinary. I view them because I’ve long been interested in the psychological reactions of people in extreme situations – how they respond in the moment, and then how they integrate the experience into their lives afterwards.

The people in the October 7 interviews I’ve seen are often extremely strong and very insightful and reflective. Some are more traumatized then others by the events they experienced and witnessed, which reflects not only the different conditions they endured but the differences in their personalities and life experiences before then. In short, people vary. But all seem to agree that October 7 and its aftermath have been profoundly life-changing for them, a watershed.

The young man – he’s twenty-four – impresses me as being exceptional in his ability to describe both the events that transpired that day and his own reactions to them. He is very strong. Towards the end of the interview, the person asking him questions (who most of the time just lets him tell his tale) attempts to suggest he needs more psychological help in dealing with it, and he tells her why he’s not pursuing that right now. I think he knows what’s best for him:

Anti-Israel farce in the International Court of Justice

The New Neo Posted on by

Orwell could have given this court its name. “Justice” indeed:

Earlier the international tribunal heard South African accusations that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The South African delegation was the first to present their case to the 17-judge panel aiming for an injunction to be issued by the court to stop Israel’s fighting in Gaza.

“The world should be ashamed,” South Africa claimed after accusing Israel of purposeful genocide of Palestinians and much more. Among accusations Israel was said to conduct an annihilation of Gaza, targeting population growth there, turning it into the largest concentration camp in the world.

It is indeed the world that should be ashamed – for entertaining this biased show trial. Then again, all trials in the International Court of Justice are show trials because it has no way to enforce its rulings except if countries decide to abide by them. “How many divisions does the ICJ have?”

The point of the charade is propaganda, and the “international community” has been very good at anti-Israel propaganda for many decades. There’s strength in numbers, and unfortunately way too many countries in the world are run by corrupt despots, and anti-Israeli sentiment is ripe among them. South Africa is certainly one of those countries.

More:

The [Israeli] Foreign Ministry on Thursday said the South African accusations against Israel in its war in Gaza were baseless lies and the most hypocritical in history. In a statement released soon after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing was adjourned the ministry said South Africa was being used as a judicial arm of the Hamas terror group and had presented a perverted account of the October 7 massacre while completely ignoring Hamas atrocities and the kidnapping of hostages.

The atrocities which are the entire reason for the Israeli action against Gaza, and the hiding by Hamas in civilian areas in order to use Gazan civilians as human shields – these apparently are mere irrelevant details to the South African lawyers.

Also:

Diaspora Minister Amichai Shikli said the proceedings in the Hague were a new low for the UN institutions which have become a bastion for world antisemitism. “It is doubtful whether the UN still has any moral standing as an organization that was established to promote human rights but appoints the representatives of the Iranian dictatorship to be at the helm of its human rights council,” he said.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid also criticized the proceedings in the ICJ. “It is not Israel that is on trial today,” Lapid said, “it is the international community. If a country defends itself against a barbaric attack by murderous terrorists, and can then find itself facing charges of genocide in court, then the Genocide convention has become a means to reward terror and advance antisemitism,” he said.

That’s what the UN and the international community have become. Actually it’s even worse – the UN is actively involved in directly teaching the Palestinians their murderous hatred of Jews through the educational system.

Fetterman part of a bipartisan bill to help students combat anti-Semitism on campus

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes.”]

I guess it’s no longer a surprise that Senator Fetterman is deeply committed to this issue, but it’s still newsworthy:

Senators Bill Cassidy, R-La., and John Fetterman, D-Pa., are introducing a bipartisan bill Thursday aimed at protecting students on college campuses from antisemitism and other discriminatory acts.

The Protecting Students on Campus Act of 2024 seeks to “empower students” to file civil rights complaints if they experience discrimination on college campuses, according to a statement exclusively shared with Fox News Digital. …

The bill would require colleges to post information and links on their websites and in high-traffic public areas, like student centers, detailing how to file a Title VI discrimination complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

It would also require the OCR’s assistant secretary to give monthly briefings to Congress explaining the number of complaints the office had received, how they were addressed and how long the complaints had been pending with the OCR.

Additionally, each college receiving federal funds would have to submit an annual report to the Education Department’s inspector general detailing the number of complaints it had received regarding discrimination, an analysis of the number of such complaints, and the action the institution took to address them.

Even without the bill, though, students can file lawsuits – and have done so. For example:

Harvard University was sued by Jewish students who claim the school has failed to punish campus antisemitism that soared after the Hamas attack on Israel and helped lead to the ouster of President Claudine Gay.

Harvard administrators failed to enforce policies that should protect Jewish students from antisemitic speech and conduct, according to the lawsuit filed late Wednesday in Boston federal court. Students cited a US civil rights law that’s been used to sue New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and University of California, Berkeley.

The only way to improve university conditions in this regard is to make sure there are negative consequences for failing to protect students from threats and discrimination. One problem that could arise is deciding how to protect free speech while giving redress for the more extreme cases.

The left and the Palestinians: Part I – The Soviets

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is the first of a two-part or perhaps three-part series.]

A great many people seem surprised that the left is so strongly allied with the Palestinians, and are their main champions in the West. After all, the two groups would seem antithetical on a host of important values. The left claims to support the rights of LGBTQ people and yet the Palestinians are downright hostile to them – as well as to sexual freedom in general and women’s rights, which are other purported leftist causes. Many leftists are anti-religion as well, whereas a very restrictive form of Islam prevails among most Palestinians.

And yet the alliance between the left and the Palestinians is not only there, but it goes way back. Take a look at this, written in 2003 by a Romanian named Ion Mihai Pacepa, head of intelligence there who had defected to the West. He describes a very direct connection between the Soviets and the Palestinians [emphasis mine]:

I was given the KGB’s “personal file” on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB’s disinformation department then went to work on Arafat’s four-page tract called “Falastinuna” (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students….

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, “imperial-Zionism” was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism….

In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. “You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over,” Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time….

You can find similar assertions about Abbas here.

There’s no way for me to prove that these things are true, but they certainly seem to be in line with Soviet propaganda of the era. For example:

Soviet anti-Zionism is an anti-Zionist and pro-Arab doctrine promulgated in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While the Soviet Union initially pursued a pro-Zionist policy after World War II due to its perception that the Jewish state would be socialist and pro-Soviet, its outlook on the Arab–Israeli conflict changed as Israel began to develop a close relationship with the United States and aligned itself with the Western Bloc. Anti-Israel Soviet propaganda intensified after Israel’s sweeping victory in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, and it was officially sponsored by the agitation and propaganda media of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as well as by the KGB. Among other charges, it alleged that Zionism was a form of racism. The Soviets framed their anti-Zionist propaganda in the guise of a study of modern Zionism, dubbed Zionology. …

In his 1969 book Beware! Zionism, Yuri Ivanov, the Soviet Union’s leading Zionologist, defined modern Zionism as follows:

“Modern Zionism is the ideology, a ramified system of organisations and the practical politics of the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie which has closely allied itself with monopoly circles in the USA and other imperialist countries. The main content of Zionism is bellicose chauvinism and anti-communism.”

Soviet leaders said Soviet anti-Zionism was not antisemitic. As proof, they pointed to the fact that several prominent Zionologists were ethnic Jews representing an expert opinion.

Sound familiar?

More:

The meaning of the term Zionism was defined by the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “the main posits of modern Zionism are militant chauvinism, racism, anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism… overt and covert fight against freedom movements and the USSR.” …

The Israeli government was also referred to as a “terrorist regime” which “has raised terror to the level of state politics.”

Adopting the “chauvinism” and “racism” and “terrorist” accusations was an important move for the PLO in appealing to the Western left. And the Protocols accusations appealed to some disparate groups on the far right, as well. And who was it who helped invent – or at least laid the groundwork for – “anti-colonialism” and “postcolonial” theory? Why, those champions of freedom and national autonomy, the Soviets:

In accounts of the precursors of postcolonial theory a number of thinkers usually appear, such as Marx, Lenin, perhaps Mao Zedong, but definitely Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James. Missing from this line-up is Stalin. It is convenient to ignore Stalin, since his name functions as a cipher for radical polarization, oscillating between veneration and demonization. Yet, a sober reassessment of Stalin will find that he is crucial not only for the prehistory of postcolonial theory, but also the theoretical and practical groundwork that postcolonial theory needed to repress in order to enable its own emergence.

The following study has three steps. First, it draws on the insightful work of Christina Petterson, which shows that postcolonial theory could arise only after the triumphalist ‘defeat’ of the Soviet Union and indeed the Eastern Bloc after 1989, or what she calls the dissolution of the so-called ‘Second World’. Second, it analyses the theory and practice of affirmative action in the Soviet Union, which was explicitly fostered by Stalin. Third, and crucially, it identifies the breakthrough from affirmative action to an anti-colonial position, which provided the justification for Soviet policies in assisting anti-colonial struggles throughout the world. These two features – affirmative action and anti-colonialism – enabled the historical conditions for post-colonialism, as well as the theoretical and practical realities that have been simultaneously repressed and appropriated by postcolonial theory.

Here you will find a densely jargon-filled more recent description of postcolonial theory. Note the prominence that academic Middle Eastern Studies took on as a path to promulgating this way of looking at the world:

However, for the theory to take shape as an analytic it needed something more than a binary exposition or a simple historical genealogy; it required an understanding of those power structures that governed the representation of colonized peoples. The text that gave a language and a methodology for the latter was Edward W. Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism. Although Said did not use the term “postcolonial theory” in the first edition of his work, his argument (after Foucault) of the links between discourse and power provided a framework within which a postcolonial theory could be given shape.

I already have a draft for a post about Said’s role in all of this; maybe it will form the basis for a Part III. However, a planned Part II will deal with how the Soviet propaganda line on Palestine was spread by Western leftists in the aftermath of the 1967 war and during the 70s.