The Last Unicorn
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
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
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
Recently a Gaza poll got a lot of attention. Its results were as follows:
This is the first poll I’ve seen of Palestinians (Gaza & WB) since 10/7.
75% support the 10/7 massacre.
76% have a positive view of Hamas.
98.2% have a negative view of America
Interestingly, 64% have a negative view of Iran. https://t.co/rmMrMzVIiI pic.twitter.com/8pBaTL3XTX
— AG (@AGHamilton29) November 17, 2023
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.
Open thread 11/18/23
I love the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet score, and this is one of my favorite passages. In this production, the costumes are also fabulous:
Hamas took the kids on a field trip
The killing fields, that is.
This is so terrible as to be nearly unbelievable. And yet, from what we already know about how children in Gaza are educated, it is indeed believable.
Not all children would be part of this – going along to witness the torture and murder of October 7, and to participate in looting – even if programmed to hate Jews, but some would. That man who was recorded calling his parents on October 7 and bragging about having killed ten Jews with his own two hands wasn’t tremendously old either, probably in his late teens. Gazan children are being abused in a profound way, and I don’t know if it ever would be possible for them to become normal again. I think it depends on the child, the programming, and on the child’s age.
I would guess that the brainwashing only proceeds into outright violence in the percentage of the population which is naturally psychopathic. There are estimates of what that percentage is, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve, if the culture in which those psychopaths live teaches and nurtures hatred and violence.
Not every terrorist had a retinue of children with him. Or women – there were women, too.
Eran Smilansky, a 28-year-old potato farmer, watched Gazan children go from house to house in his kibbutz on Oct. 7. Hamas terrorists followed. The boys laughed as the gunmen shot or dragged away Israeli families.
“They were like young, young kids,” said Smilansky, who defended his home from terrorists for more than six hours that day. “They were going in front of the terrorists, laughing with their friends and looking very calm. I remember thinking, What the fuck?”
Smilansky was one of a dozen survivors of the Nir Oz massacre who told the Washington Free Beacon they witnessed boys or women from the Gaza Strip looting the kibbutz, helping the armed terrorists, and apparently enjoying themselves. The youngest children were around 10 years old, according to several of the survivors, one of whom provided photographs of some of the women and children he saw.
There is strong evidence that this happened, based on photographs as well as multiple eyewitnesses:
Like most of the Nir Oz survivors, Eyal Barad and his family hid in the safe room of their house from about 6:30 a.m. until the Israeli military evacuated them 12 or so hours later. But Barad, an engineer, had a rare view of the outside world thanks to a speed camera he had recently set up to bust his neighbors for driving on the sidewalk.
On the camera’s livestream, Barad watched three types of Gazans pass by his house: uniformed Hamas commandos carrying automatic weapons, RPGs, and grenades; casually dressed gunmen; and ordinary-looking men, women, and children. Barad said the ordinary Gazans vastly outnumbered the armed terrorists. He estimated that he saw at least a dozen children, who were between the ages of 10 and 15, and 30 women from Gaza.
The armed terrorists were in charge, Barad recalled. They gave orders to the ordinary Gazans, like sending the children to loot specific homes. At one point, Barad saw a woman run up to an armed terrorist and point him toward a house.
“I’m guessing she saw people she wanted him to go kill or kidnap or I don’t know what,” Barad said. “But I can say with 100 percent certainty that [the women and kids] were not just innocent bystanders or looters. They were part of the massacre. They were part of the horrors that we endured that day.”
The article contains other chilling stories. The very worst involves a single witness – but no photos – who said that he saw terrorists hand a gun to children as young as six and have them fire it themselves, killing Israelis. I think this event is possible – really, anything is possible – but that’s one isolated instance and perhaps it’s not true.
I hope it’s not true.
But of course it could be true. And of course, we also have all these people in the West thinking the terrorists are the victims. It’s a world gone mad.
Speaker Johnson will be releasing the bulk of the J6 video
Some video is already available to the public as of Friday, with the bulk of it to be released gradually over time, Johnson said.
“When I ran for Speaker, I promised to make accessible to the American people the 44,000 hours of video from Capitol Hill security taken on January 6, 2021. Truth and transparency are critical,” Johnson said in a statement.
“Today, we will begin immediately posting video on a public website and move as quickly as possible to add to the website nearly all of the footage, more than 40,000 hours. In the meantime, a public viewing room will ensure that every citizen can view every minute of the videos uncensored.”
He continued, “This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations, and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”
Most members of “the American public” will probably find things in the video that confirms the beliefs they already have; I’m not at all sure it will change minds. But I think there will be plenty on there which, if viewed objectively, would challenge the left’s interpretation and the official government message. But perhaps the most important part is that criminal defendents whose lawyers have been blocked from seeing possible exculpatory evidence on the videos will get a chance to look and see for themselves if it’s there.
Good for Johnson. Here’s a link. Some highlights here.
ADDENDUM: See also this (hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes.”)
Some miscellaneous things I want to highlight
(1) Commenter “IrishOtter49” has a health crisis; see this. Please pray for his recovery if you’re the praying kind, or if not, please send good wishes and hopes for his recovery.
(2) I thought I’d reiterate the following, most of which I’ve discussed previously in my own comments here:
In Israel, for the most part the “safe rooms” were reinforced rooms within the house itself and didn’t have locks. People held them shut, sometimes for 12 hours or so. But even if the terrorists couldn’t get in, they often just set the whole house on fire.
And regarding the failure of the Israeli military and police to get there in time: from what I’ve read, the failure to respond had to do with several factors. The first was that it was a holiday and a lot of people in the military weren’t on duty. The second was that the jihadis disabled some of the communications – I’m not sure of those details and I don’t think the details have been reported, for security reasons. Another is that on a nearby base that had close to 300 soldiers on duty, the terrorists attacked while they were still asleep and murdered them all. I also think that some soldiers and police did come to the area (and many were killed), but not in enough quantity because it took quite a while to realize the huge scope of the invasion – about 3,000, spread out – because an invasion it was, of an unprecedented kind.
Also, 1,000 to 1,500 terrorists were killed that day in Israel. I don’t know what percentage of those terrorists were killed by members of the communities they were attacking, but I think it’s very likely that, as the Israeli military and the police were trying to get to all the areas where Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists were engaged in killing people, a significant number of those terrorists were killed by the Israeli authorities. The area was relatively small – Israel itself is relatively small – but the terrorists were not centralized and they were spread out all over that area. Coordinating the response must have been very challenging. It was obviously poorly done, but I think many factors were involved and we’ll get more information as time goes on.
(3) You might say that this Israeli peace activist who was murdered by Hamas (hat tip: commenter “huxley”), was wrong. But I think she was, if anything, naive. The alternative to believing that peace is possible, and that good deeds will help, is to fall back on a solution that seems terrible. The sad truth appears to be that sometimes it takes violence to combat evil. But still, I can understand the deep desire for it to be otherwise. RIP:
She co-founded the Women Wage Peace group, which lobbied for a diplomatic resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and helped found Ajeec-Nisped – the Arab-Jewish Center for Empowerment, Equality, and Cooperation.
Kher Albaz, an Israeli Bedouin who worked alongside her, tells BBC World Service she “lived in equality” and used to drive injured Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals.
“She was a real human being, her view on life was very positive, she was always smiling and looking for ways to make people feel better, always looking for ways to make sure people felt accepted and felt good,” he says.
(4) I got a late start today and need to do some other tasks for the next hour or two. So posting will be delayed till late afternoon or early evening.
Open thread 11/17/23
Shifa hospital and the hostages
The Israelis have explored the tunnels under Shifa hospital and have reported on what they found:
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have complete control of Gaza City’s massive Shifa Hospital, believed to be home to Hamas’s headquarters.
Unfortunately, the IDF did not find any [living] hostages, but they claim they found evidence Hamas once held them at the hospital.
The IDF discovered “a significant stash of Hamas weaponry.”
Also, they found Hamas uniforms that seem to have been discarded hastily, probably when the jihadis donned civilian clothing in order to flee.
As far as violence goes:
… [N]one of the soldiers shot their guns. Instead, they entered the hospital calmly and controlled, not engaging any medical personnel or patients.
The IDF claimed it “was ‘not overrunning’ the hospital, asserting troops were conducting a ‘focused’ operation ‘in a defined area’ of the hospital.”
The IDF brought everything Hamas denied the Palestinian people in the hospital: medical supplies, incubators for babies, and humanitarian aid.
It won’t change all the Jew-haters’ minds, nor the MSM coverage. I wonder, however, if a few of the Palestinians have noted the contrast.
This guy apparently noted something else, though, when interviewed by Al Jazeera in another Gaza hospital:
The Qatari-owned broadcaster interviewed an injured Palestinian man at Al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza on Sunday 5 November.
However, the Al Jazeera reporter cut the conversation short as soon as the man criticised the terror group for hiding among civilians.
“As for the resistance, they come and hide among the people. Why are they hiding among the people? They can go to hell and hide there,” the man said, according to a translation by the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) from Arabic to English.
The reporter then abruptly turned away from the man even as he continued to speak, addressing the camera and changing the subject.
The Israelis warned the Shifa hospital that they were coming and when it would happen, giving the terrorists plenty of time to leave and live to fight another day. But if the IDF didn’t give warnings, the entire world would condemn them; plus it would offend their own sense of integrity and human decency.
The warnings also give Hamas a chance to move the hostages elsewhere, of course. At some point they may run out of hiding places, but that could take a long long time, if ever. In the meantime, if any hostages die or are even killed by Hamas, the terrorists can claim it was the IDF that killed them.
But so far the hostages are still worth more to the terrorists alive than dead – at least, I think so. Therefore it stands to reason they will try to keep most of them alive in order to get more bang for their hostage buck, as it were. What the hostages are going through, and have been going through, is unconscionable and horrific to imagine on any level, both psychological and physical. The suffering of their families is intense. Even we who are onlookers find the hostage situation enraging and heartbreaking, but multiply that feeling exponentially for the families.
The ultimate fate of one hostage was revealed as a result of the IDF’s Shifa takeover, however:
Yehudit Weiss, 64, was sick with cancer when Hamas death squads murdered her husband in Be’eri and abducted her to Gaza on October 7.
The IDF found her body in a building containing Kalashnikovs and RPGs adjacent to the Shifa Hospital. ? pic.twitter.com/Ik7UuP18Ok
— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) November 16, 2023
No further information on her death has been released so far. RIP.
How many other hostages are dead? When did they die, and how? How are the living ones being treated? And where are they? The public has no idea; I hope that Israeli intelligence does.
Why does Fetterman support Israel so strongly?
Senator John Fetterman’s support for Israel is a surprise to many people, because he’s a “progressive” Democrat. These days that seems to go with being anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and in some cases even pro-Hamas. But Fetterman has been something of an Israel booster.
I don’t have any special knowledge that answers the question as to why. But I do have a few observations on the subject. The first is that he has a history of strong Israel support, although of course things like that can change when someone enters Congress and is pressured by the Democratic leadership. In this case the Democratic leadership, Schumer, is at least relatively pro-Israel as well. More significantly, Schumer no doubt realizes that the Democratic Party has a lot of Jewish donors (the Jewish voters constitute a rather small number; it’s the donors that really matter), and he might think that having a visibly pro-Israel Fetterman is a nice foil against people like Tlaib in the House.
Fetterman himself, despite being a leftist Democrat, is also somewhat of an individualist. My sense of him is that he’s not afraid to be different; he is different. His clothing, for example, is very different. His illness makes him different, too, but he was an atypical guy even before that.