And then there’s Bukele of El Salvador

The New Neo Posted on by

Until now, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador hasn’t appeared on my radar screen. Seeing that photo at the link, my first thought was how very young he looks.

It sounds as though, on the whole, his presidency has been good for El Salvador; at least, the Salvadorans appear to think so because he’s wildly popular and will probably be re-elected. The Biden administration doesn’t like him:

In his four years in office, President Nayib Bukele has turned El Salvador from a dangerous place filled with corruption, crime, and MS-13 gang members to a tropical paradise. Now, with his signing up for a historic re-election bid, he’s transforming El Salvador’s election system so he can do more.

This last week, Bukele officially registered to run for a second term, which hasn’t happened in El Salvador’s history due to a law that prevented any president who served from applying for office again. El Salvador’s Supreme Court changed the law in 2021, ruling that Bukele would be eligible to run for re-election. With almost every other democratic nation allowing for a president to serve a second term, the law seemed absurd, and with Bukele posting a 90% approval rating among Salvadorans, he faced little opposition to the constitutional change. However, it hasn’t stopped the foreign media, particularly in the United States, from criticizing Bukele and comparing him to authoritarian dictators in Central America’s past.

In addition to his youth (he’s 42), another thing that caught my eye is his name. It’s not Hispanic. I wondered whether he was an Arab, or even Palestinian, and although that seemed unlikely it turns out to be true:

Bukele’s paternal grandparents were Palestinian Christians from Jerusalem and Bethlehem while his maternal grandmother was Catholic and his maternal grandfather was Greek Orthodox. …

Bukele studied law at the Central American University, but later ended his studies and founded his first company at age 18.

… Bukele was born [in El Salvador] into a Christian household, although his father converted to Islam later in life. As the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, Bukele’s religious beliefs were a controversial subject in the 2019 election, with an image surfacing showing Bukele praying at the mosque in Mexico City. In February 2018, The Times of Israel published an image of Bukele “in deep reflection at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City.” …

Bukele has publicly stated he considers himself a believer in God first rather than religion. In a 2015 interview he said that “I am not a person who believes much in the liturgy of religions. However, I believe in God, in Jesus Christ. I believe in his word, I believe in his word revealed in the Holy Bible. And I know that God does not reject anyone because of their origins.”

His wife is apparently part Sephardic-Jewish.

Interesting guy. In that Wiki link, you can read of the many differing opinions and controversies his tenure has raised. He even sounds in some ways like a Trumpish figure.

Sam Bankman-Fried has been convicted on all counts

The New Neo Posted on by

And the jury didn’t deliberate very long to return the verdicts:

Bankman-Fried was charged with seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in what federal prosecutors have described as “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.”

He was accused of using customer deposits on the crypto trading platform FTX to cover losses at his hedge fund, pay off loans and buy lavish real estate, among other personal expenses. …

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said the verdict sends a message “to every single fraudster out there who thinks that they’re untouchable.”

He could be sentenced to up to 110 years, and he faces additional charges in another trial. His defense in this one amounted to claiming he didn’t know the significance of what he was doing. However, others testified against him in order to get plea deals:

Caroline Ellison, the former co-chief executive of Alameda and Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, previously pleaded guilty to criminal charges and testified under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. She has testified that she committed fraud with Bankman-Fried and at his direction.

Ellison additionally testified that Bankman-Fried believed in utilitarianism and thought rules against lying or stealing inhibited his ability to maximize the greatest benefit for the most people.

I have to say first that although I followed Bankman-Fried’s original arrest, I haven’t followed his trial. But I’ll add that in general I don’t like it when the entirety of the evidence against a defendant is the result of confederates trading testimony for plea deals. I know it’s done all the time as a very basic prosecutorial tool – and I think it’s highly likely that in this case the ex is telling the truth, because Bankman-Fried’s claim of ignorance just doesn’t seem plausible. And perhaps there’s plenty of other evidence to corroborate what the ex and the other plea-dealers are saying.

Assuming Ellison’s story is the truth, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the way Bankman-Fried reasoned and rationalized his behavior: utilitarianism. That’s a topic I’ve discussed in before, this post (first in a series of three) from 2015.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go again – so much news!

(1) The UN is a travesty, and not a funny one:

In the worst decision by an international body since the League of Nations looked at the rise of Adolf Hitler and said, “I’m sure everything will turn out fine,” the United Nations has handed the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum to Iran.

(2) An editor of the Harvard Law Review, Ibraham Bharmal, is apparently one of several people who recently assaulted a Jewish man on campus. Bharmal is an activist and a member of CAIR, which is an organization that has been linked with Hamas, although the group denies it.

Another Harvard student associated with the assault is Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a divinity school student who lives with university undergraduates as a sort of advisor.

Divinity school.

(3) Biden wants a ceasefire. I hope Israel doesn’t listen to him; it depends how hard he and/or his aides push and threaten. Perhaps he wants to level the playing field between Israel and what he has called “the other team.” Quite a sports metaphor. Or perhaps he’s not serious and is merely trying to appease the Democrats’ very large anti-Israel Left flank.

(4) The American Ornithological Society is eliminating misogynist and racist names from birds. WTF? For example, Audubon was a slave holder, so out with him!

(5) Trump says his children are being persecuted in the NY fraud trial. I think that is obviously the case; his entire family is in the Left’s crosshairs and has been since the beginning. To the Left, persecution of the family is a feature and not a bug.

This video explains a lot about the high incidence of Muslim Jew-hatred

The New Neo Posted on by

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?

The New Neo Posted on by

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 …

The New Neo Posted on by

… 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.

The bigger picture: the ascendance of the post-modern left and the glorification of the “oppressed”

The New Neo Posted on by

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):

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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.