Democrats have become the enemies of free speech

The New Neo Posted on by

We already know that, but here’s a discussion by Turley:

After years of being told that free speech is harmful and dangerous, many young people are virtual speech phobics — demanding that opposing views be silenced as “triggering” or even forms of violence. Now a Pew poll shows just how much ground we have lost, including the emergence of the Democratic Party as a virulent anti-free speech party. Pew found that “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support the U.S. government taking steps to restrict false information online (70% vs. 39%).”

I think the explanation is fairly simple, and it has to do with the extent of the left’s power to shape opinion. Back when the left was not in control of much of anything in the US, it was all for freedom of speech because it was guaranteeing its own freedom of speech. But once the Gramscian march was well advanced, and the left controlled (for the most part) the MSM, education, entertainment, law schools, librarians, some social media, and many government agencies such as the DOJ – the left was free to toss away free speech because now the left itself was in a position to do the censoring.

To what used to known as “liberals,” free speech was a principle worth defending. But to the left it never was; it was merely an instrument briefly championed when it helped the left and dropped when it no longer did. Censorship was fine and dandy as long as it was the left doing the censoring.

Turley writes:

The growing support for censorship may reflect the echo chambered media environment. Many people watch and read news that continues to downplay or entirely omit reports on biased censorship. President Biden even charged that companies who refused to censor opposing views on social media were “killing people.” Others have denounced free speech as “a white man’s obsession.” New York democrats called for limiting speech as a way of protecting democracy. Indeed, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has declared free speech is “tyranny.”

Many journalists have joined politicians and professors in decrying the dangers of free speech. Some falsely claim that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment. Others panicked at the notion of free speech protections being restored at Twitter. On CNN, speech limits were called a “harm-reduction model” for the media. …

The European crackdown on free speech has now reached our shores and there are a growing number of citizens calling on the government to limit their right to free expression. It is a form of constitutional immolation by citizens who have never known true authoritarian government.

I’ve already explained where I think this is coming from. But I agree with Turley that some of it is also influenced by similar trends in Europe. I write “similar trends,” but that’s not really the best way to put it because Europe has never had a robust defense of free speech such as that in the US. It’s reflected in Europe’s lower standard of proof for defamation, and its enactment of hate speech laws and Holocaust denial laws. To a large extent, Canada is similar to Europe in this regard.

Both in Europe and in Canada and the US, the left’s stance against free speech also represents two competing although linked visions. The first is that the left and its ideas are far superior and the leftists are smarter and better than the rest of us, and as such should have the right to dictate what we can think and say. The second is that leftist thought is fragile and threatened and can’t win if freedom of speech is allowed to puncture its balloon. Both ideas argue in favor of censorship by the left.

ADDENDUM: And speaking of Europe and free speech, please see this:

The new German government coalition, which is likely to be the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) is looking to ban “lies,” according to a working paper that emerged from the group “culture and media” between the two parties.

Solo no more

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been blogging so long that I remember the early heady days of the genre. Maybe you remember too – when most blogs were solo affairs, the product of one person? Then slowly, over time, more and more blogs became group efforts. Individual essayists migrated to substack, but there most people didn’t write every day, much less multiple posts every day. Substack isn’t blogging.

Ace was once a solo blogger, but for years now he’s had many co-bloggers although he still writes a lot of the material at his site. Legal Insurrection was always a group effort right from the start, as was RedState as far as I know. Likewise Powerline. Instapundit started as just Glenn Reynolds but many years ago he enlisted helpers Ed Driscoll, Sarah Hoyt, and occasional others.

And on it goes.

But there are still a few of us lone bloggers here and there. Ann Althouse comes to mind, for example. I’m wracking my brain to come up with more. I’m certain they must exist, but they’re few and far between. Gerard was one, of course, but he’s been gone for two years.

And then there’s moi. I’ve been blogging for twenty years, all by myself.

But the other day I received an email that got me thinking it’s time to end my solo act and take on a co-blogger. I think you’ll agree that the email demonstrates a rare combination of wisdom, insight, and gracefulness of expression. And so I reproduce it here to introduce you to the my new associate:

Hey The New Neo Team!

I’m Tom, and I’m on the hunt for exciting new platforms to share my writing. I came across your site, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be an excellent place to showcase my work.

Are you interested in featuring my articles?

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Tom

My reply:

Hey Tom – With a demonstration of stellar writing skills like that, why ever not? Climb aboard. After all, I’m one of a vanishing breed: individual bloggers. It’s so nice to have company.

Tom will be covering such important topics as how to take selfies without looking like a fool, why AOC is so popular, the uses and misuses of autotune in the modern world, missing Joe Biden, five thousand reasons not to own a cat, quotes misattributed to Winston Churchill and/or Mark Twain, playing pinochle, and why there are no good bagels in California. I’ll still be dealing with the more serious and important questions such as why everyone misses Joe and Jill Biden, the jello mold revival, the art of diagramming sentences, string theory, and everything Bee Gees.

Here’s a photo of co-blogger Tom as an introduction. I think you’ll see why I had such a strong sense that he ‘d fit right in here:

Open thread 4/1/2025

The New Neo Posted on by

Time, You Old Gypsy Man
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

The above video was displayed perfectly when I set this post up. But somehow it then went to “private” mode and is no longer viewable except by invitation. It was a pretty nifty demonstration of the passage of time, showing closeup photos of Prince Philip in backwards order, starting with age 99 and then with a photo every previous year all the way back to babyhood.

I’ve now put up this one, which I admit is a very poor substitute:

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Tomorrow’s election in Wisconsin is very high stakes. Control of the US House may depend on it. And I’m worried about these special elections; they seem to be going the Democrats’ way due to greater motivation. That’s hard for me to understand and very disturbing; I think everyone on the right should still be highly motivated to vote.

(2) At this point, is anyone surprised at this news?:

The reason SS recipients now have to personally come to an office to change their banking info if they wanted a bank deposit address changed was because of the rampant phone fraud the DOGE team had uncovered almost immediately. Forty percent of ALL CALLS were fraudulent efforts to change direct deposit info. …

… [And] the Biden administration in 2024 – one year – gave 2.1 MILLION NON-CITIZENS social security numbers.

But legal immigrants with jobs can often get Social Security numbers, so why should that be a problem? Well, apparently some of them have voted.

I’ve read a few articles about this so far, and it’s unclear whether they’re talking about legal or illegal arrivals. Plus, what were the figures during the first Trump administration? I saw a comment somewhere that said they were also high, but I haven’t been able to discover whether or not that’s true. So that’s why I’m focusing on the voting issue.

(3) Yarden Bibas was told by his sadistic and barbaric captors that he could get a new wife and new, better children.

(4) DOGE will be looking at why so many members of Congress amass such fortunes.

(5) The FBI under Kash Patel:

Arrest of the top MS-13 leader in the United States, Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos.

Arrest of three fugitives on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list – that’s almost a third of the list nailed at a stroke.

A successful raid and arrest of 22 members of a drug trafficking operation run by suspected violent drug cartel members in Lubbock, Texas.

Arrests of Tesla vandals and terrorist attackers.

Disruption of a major cryptocurrency scheme reportedly laundering money to support Hamas.

Lawfare, French style: Marine Le Pen sentenced and banned from running for five years

The New Neo Posted on by

They tried it on Trump – boy, did they ever try. But a couple of things stopped them, including the fact that in the US a convicted felon can run for office.

Now the French have had greater success – at least for the moment – against the populist front-runner Marine Le Pen. Today’s news came as a surprise to me; I hadn’t even read that there was a trial going on. Why so little attention paid? I don’t know for sure, but here’s the upshot:

“Incredible.” That was the single word uttered under her breath by Marine Le Pen as she stormed out of a Paris courtroom this morning.

She left the court early – just before hearing that she was barred from running for office for five years after being found guilty of embezzlement of EU funds – almost certainly ruling her out from standing in the 2027 French presidential election.

Without even waiting for the judge to pronounce the full details of the sentence, the head of the National Rally knew that her political goose was cooked.

There would be no reprieve pending appeal. The bar on running for office was real and immediate.

The charges were apparently a convoluted reading of a law that most French politicians routinely violate without negative consequences. Sound familiar? And as for why the trial hadn’t gotten much publicity here, there’s this:

Le Pen’s incredulity can be better excused, perhaps, in the context of the moment.

A consensus had almost established itself across France’s political world that this ultimate sanction by the court could not, would not – in the end – take place.

It was not just Le Pen’s followers who said it. Her enemies agreed …

So it was thought to be a nothingburger. Instead, quelle surprise!

Le Pen’s National Rally party must now decide whether to throw weight behind another candidate or to keep Le Pen as leader. The article goes on to explain that there’s a chance the appeal could be expedited and decided prior to the 2027 election, and the ban dropped. The wheels of justice certainly grind slow in France, if they grind at all.

The article I’m quoting is from the BBC, and they use some interesting rhetoric here:

In the short term we can expect an outcry, and a boost to the [National Rally] party’s support. Why? Because what has happened fits so neatly into the RN narrative that the populist right is a victim of the “system”.

What an odd coincidence that it “fits so neatly” into the right’s “narrative” of victimhood. After all, it’s only a narrative, no more true or false than any other fairy tale. The fact that Le Pen actually has been persecuted and made a victim of the “system” – well, we needn’t pay much attention to that, because we know it was only done to save the stupid proles from themselves.

The BBC even admits, in the very next paragraph, that the charges against Le Pen were – if you’ll excuse the expression – trumped up [emphasis mine]:

No-one likely to vote for the RN seriously holds it against Marine Le Pen for illegally financing her party using EU parliament funds. They all know that practically every French political party has resorted to similar underhand methods in the past.

And yet here’s the next paragraph:

By the same token, her “draconian” punishment – being banned from standing for the presidency – will be interpreted as a badge of honour: proof that she alone is standing up to the powers-that-be.

Why is draconian in scare quotes? Is that just a “narrative” as well? Didn’t the article already make it clear that until today even Le Pen’s enemies thought such a ban would be draconian, too draconian to impose?

Make up your mind, BBC.

Will the same thing happen to Le Pen’s party as happened in the 2024 US election as a result of – among other things – backlash to the persecution/prosecution of Trump? Hard to say, because under a parliamentary system the party would need either over 50% of the seats or another party would have to ally itself with them, and that’s highly unlikely to happen. However, this verdict is nevertheless playing with fire, because it really does make the persecution “narrative” seem very very true. And Le Pen’s enemies need to understand that if her party ever does take power, with or without her, the same law can be used against those who persecuted her. We’ll see who’s screaming “Draconian!” then.

And there’s also this, because Le Pen’s prison sentence was put on hold pending appeal:

Marine Le Pen remains a member of the National Assembly, where she leads a bloc of 125 – the parliament’s biggest. Till now she had not used that sizeable bloc to attempt to bring down the government of the beleaguered prime minister Francois Bayrou, who struggles on despite having no majority.

Those days may be over.

If you’re going to sentence a political enemy and bar him or her from running for office, you better make certain that the person’s offense is serious and egregiously criminal, or you risk having that kangaroo-court prosecution come back to haunt you.

Why do I get a cold every time I see my grandkids?

The New Neo Posted on by

You might answer: “Well, duh, it’s because they have colds.”

But that’s not what I mean. Yes, they do get colds frequently. But why do I catch every single one, without exception? My ex-husband doesn’t always catch the colds. My son and daughter-in-law don’t always catch them.

I do.

And my colds tend to last quite a while. Also, I’m especially vulnerable to losing my voice or at least getting hoarse.

It doesn’t matter whether I take those zinc tablets or Vitamin C or force fluids or take it easy. I had lots of colds as a child, and then again when my son was little. Shouldn’t I have gained some immunity over the years?

And yes, I’m aware that viruses keep morphing and today’s cold isn’t the same as yesterday’s cold. Yet isn’t there at least a certain amount of cross-immunity?

I don’t buy this answer – for the simple reason that I got every single one of my son’s colds when I was a young parent, and I got just as sick back then as I do now:

… [G]randparents are likely to get sick — sometimes much more so than anyone else in the family.

“They’re usually not as micro-immunized as the parents,” says Dr. Judith Turow of Nemours duPont Pediatrics, Lankenau. “Kids are around their parents all the time, so they’re receiving little bits of the illness as it develops. But if grandparents come into the picture when the kid is already sick, they get a big bolus of the full-blown virus.”

Bah, humbug.

Average college students cannot and will not read and write

The New Neo Posted on by

This is one of the more depressing articles I’ve read lately. And yet nothing in it is a real surprise. The trends have been going on for many decades, and although the piece emphasizes the pernicious influence of cellphones and AI, it started long before those things were commonly available.

For example, during the 1980s my then-husband was a college professor at a fairly decent state university. He would periodically assign short essays on exams, and noted to me how many of the students could not write at all coherently. It’s not just that they weren’t reading the material, although that was often the case as well. But they didn’t seem to know anything about sentence structure, punctuation, or even logical thought.

It was profoundly disturbing. At the time, my husband and I weren’t all that far removed from being students ourselves. And yet as students we’d not seen anything like what he was seeing just a few short years later. Granted, we hadn’t been teachers or engaged in grading papers while we were students (he was a teaching assistant as a grad student, but had only graded objective exams). But still, it was a shock to see work from university students that would have gotten a poor grade from my 5th grade teacher in a New York public school.

This is what it’s come down to these days:

I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top. …

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” …

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish.

Has reading an entire book ever even been asked of them? We read Dostoevsky and Melville in my high school, but then again I was in an honors class. I get the impression that, somewhere long the line, such classes were banned in many schools as elitist and discriminatory.

More:

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

Even I, once a voracious book reader, find that I no longer have the patience for an entire book except for a few exceptions. I am indeed more impatient than I used to be; much more. Is due to my age? Is it due to my getting used to the shorter offerings online? Then again, I preferred short stories to novels even in pre-internet days, although I made an exception for a few novels such as Crime and Punishment, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Moby Dick. But in high school I could barely slog through The Scarlet Letter for example, although it was useful for vocabulary expansion (Hawthorne used a lot of words I found obscure at the time, despite the fact that I already had a good vocabulary).

And if we couldn’t or wouldn’t write coherently about those books we weren’t going to pass those courses. And this was in a NYC high school that catered mainly to working-class students in a non-affluent area – although, as I said, I was in the honors classes. I very much doubt the “regular” English classes had a similar reading list.

But more about today’s students:

They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok. …

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

That last paragraph represents something with a long history – something I believe Holden Caulfield referred to as “slinging the old bull” (Kamala Harris was a master at the practice, too). But Holden never had access to AI:

I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.

When the author gets around to trying to explain some of this, he lists the following, among other things:

Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. …

Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. …

They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones.

I must admit something, which is that I have a fair amount of identification with those students. I was an excellent student with fabulous grades. However, I almost always experienced school as a hateful and intensely boring experience. The times I had an interesting teacher were few and far between, and I can count about only about six or seven teachers and/or professors in my entire career that I would describe that way. I also have little patience for auditory learning, and lectures were a big snooze and made me physically restless, although I had no cellphone or other distractions and did not suffer from ADD. What I remember of school, almost from the start, is the nearly-painful experience of intense boredom and restlessness.

In college, because we were allowed to smoke in class (!), I sat way in the back in large lecture halls and chain-smoked, trying to blow the perfect smoke ring in order to amuse myself (and no, I never inhaled; couldn’t stand it). I also created elaborate doodles, took desultory notes, and often cut classes and/or “disappeared” for most of the term, only to re-surface for the exam. Nevertheless, I was big reader – and certainly read the assigned novels, although not always the other texts except for skimming. Nevertheless, for the most part I did very well in school.

Am I proud of my relative non-participation? No, most definitely not. I wish I had been more engaged; I think I could have gotten a great deal more out of my education if I had been. But I was always interested in learning itself, and did quite a bit of it outside class. But my experience means that I can identify with what is being described in terms of the behavior of today’s students. I’m very glad there was no internet and no social media when I was growing up; both probably would have had a bad effect on me. I’m also glad that my son was in grad school before cellphones started to become ubiquitous.

I worry about my grandchildren, of course. They are very young now and don’t even have cellphones. But at some point those things will intrude, and I just have to hope that they will grow up with good values and strong abilities despite the temptations.

Religiosity and support for israel

The New Neo Posted on by

Support for Israel seems to be correlated with degree of religiosity, whether the religion is Christian or Jewish.

Obviously, the same would not be the case if the religion is Islam.

Here’s more:

The political arm of Reform Judaism is publicly opposing Huckabee [for the post of ambassador to Israel]. So too are the left-wing lobby J Street and the Jewish Democratic Council of America. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group of Jewish community relations councils around the country, didn’t condemn the nomination outright but made clear its disdain for him with comments deprecating him as a “Christian nationalist.”

These views were summed up in an op-ed published in The Hill by Lily Greenberg Call, a veteran Democratic operative who had worked for the campaigns of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris and resigned from a post at the Department of the Interior because she felt the Biden-Harris administration was too supportive of Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. “Unconditionally supporting Israel actually makes Jews unsafe” and the Jewish state is “antithetical” to “Jewish values,” Call asserted.

On the other side of the issue, more mainstream, liberal Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee said that they looked forward to working with Huckabee. More ardently pro-Israel groups like the Zionist Organization of America and the Orthodox Union endorsed him enthusiastically.

The opposition to Huckabee – and to Israel itself – is from leftist people of Jewish background, who are leftists first. Leftists do not, for the most part, like religion. In fact, leftism has often been described (not by leftists, however) as a replacement for religion and a type of godless quasi-religion. The reason leftists seem to have a soft spot in their hearts for Moslems is the exception, but that is based on Moslems supposed status as oppressed peoples, not their religiosity.

The leftists I know, some of whom are Jewish but not the majority, detest religion and look down on those who practice it or believe in it as irrational troglodytes. But I’d never heard the phrase “Christian nationalism” prior to reading the linked article. Here’s how it is explained by the author:

Przybyla condemned political conservatives and Trump backers as “Christian nationalists,” because they believe that the rights of all Americans “don’t come from any earthly authority,” she said “They don’t come from Congress or the Supreme Court. They come from God.”

That is something that Huckabee believes. But that belief was shared by all of America’s Founding Fathers, not least a non-denominational Deist like Thomas Jefferson. It was, after all, the man who would eventually become the third president of the United States who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that it was “self-evident” that all Americans were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

It’s either abysmal ignorance on the part of Przybyla, or refusal to accept the stance of the Founders. It hardly matters which; it’s a common notion, that of the negation of what’s known as “natural rights” and their religious basis in the beliefs of the Founders. It’s something I discussed previously in this post about Allan Bloom and his book The Closing of the American Mind, written in 1987. The following is a quote from the book:

But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist…

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

I repeat: that was published in 1987. In the nearly forty years since then, it has only gotten worse.

But back to the issue of support for Israel:

As a Gallup poll published last June suggested, support for Israel in the United States is primarily a function of religious faith. And declining religiosity is directly linked to growing hostility to Israel.

The survey, which tracked opinions about the Jewish state and the Palestinians over the last quarter-century, demonstrated that support for Israel was far more prevalent among those who attended religious services regularly, and it declined among those who did not attend a church or a synagogue.

The poll notes that Protestants have generally been most supportive of Israel and remain so, but the percentage of Protestants in the population has declined. Meanwhile, those with no religious identity have increased, and they are the group most likely to be sympathetic to the Palestinians – an embrace which is rather ironic, considering that fundamentalist Islam is a huge part of what motivates the Palestinians. But it’s not about logic.

More:

The percentage of Catholics in the U.S. population has remained about the same over time, but Catholics have shown a somewhat more significant increase in sympathy for the Palestinians in the past five years than is the case for Protestants.

I’m not sure what that’s about; perhaps the current Pope? Despite this increase in pro-Palestinian sentiment among Catholics, the majority are nevertheless supportive of Israel.

In general:

If younger Americans are less supportive of Israel than older ones, it is to some extent the result of their being less religious than their elders. The fact that people 29 or younger are also more likely to have been indoctrinated in the toxic neo-Marxist ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and colonial-setter ideology that brands Israel and the Jews as “white” oppressors—and which is antithetical to traditional faith—is also part of this depressing trend.

As for Jews, the poll doesn’t tell us much for two reasons: the first is that the number of Jews was so small as to be susceptible to large margins of error, and the second is that religiosity among Jewish respondents wasn’t measured in any way. But we already know from other polls that, among Jews, the more religious the greater the support for Israel. The definition of “Jew” is, of course, different than definitions for other religious groups, because being Jewish also represents an ethnicity and does not require any religions belief at all. And yet nevertheless, according to recent polls, support among American Jews for Israel remains extremely high:

Strong earthquake in Burma causes many deaths and much destruction

The New Neo Posted on by

An 8.2 earthquake in Burma is estimated to have caused thousands of deaths, although the figures are unknown as yet. But it sounds very very bad:

An air traffic control tower collapsed at Naypyidaw International Airport, killing all staff who were on duty, Burmese media said. …

Mandalay’s Ava Bridge collapsed into the Irrawaddy River after the quake, and buildings and temples lie in ruins.

Many homes have collapsed, and even some buildings in Thailand have been destroyed.

RIP.

Blaming Bibi: documentary about the family of a hostage

The New Neo Posted on by

The harrowing plight of the remaining hostages, and their loved ones and friends, should not be forgotten. Their are still about 59 and perhaps half of them are still alive.

And so I read this piece with interest. It describes a documentary that focuses on one such family, with relatives both in Israel and in the US.

The hostage families are not a unitary group, and even within this family there apparently are considerable political differences of opinion. And I consider that the families of hostages have undergone such stress, turmoil, fear, and sorrow that they are almost beyond criticism for anything they might do or say. However, quite a few of them are on the Israeli left and have long hated Netanyahu, and it should come as no surprise that they consider him blameworthy.

But two things in the article surprised me enough that I’m going to discuss them. First, a little background:

The film, which won the best documentary feature award at the Berlinale film festival, shows the first months after teacher Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband, artist and mechanic Aviv Atzili, were taken hostage in the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, part of the wider Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas assault on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

Much of the film focuses on Beinin Atzili’s older parents, American-born couple Yehuda and Chaya Beinin, who have lived in Israel since the early 1970s. They worked with the couple’s siblings and three children to get their daughter and son-in-law released.

As it turned out, Liat was released in that first wave, but Aviv had been murdered on October 7 and Hamas still holds his body.

Liat’s father Yehuda had this puzzling thing to say about the family’s initial attitude:

“We thought another couple of weeks and this would all be over,” said Beinin. “Nobody thought we’d be in this for the long haul.”

Why would anyone think that? I understand that it might have been wishful thinking, but it makes zero sense to me based on history. Beinin must be aware that the negotiations for a single hostage, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, took five years to accomplish. Also, 1027 prisoners were exchanged for that one man, 280 of them lifers.

So how could anyone think this would “be over” in a couple of weeks, and why would that person not realize this would not just be a prisoners-for-hostages deal but would have to involve a war to destroy Hamas?

Yehuda Beinin is described in the article as a “peacenik” and “committed liberal who has long been opposed to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” So obviously he is going to see Netanyahu as the problem; perhaps that allows him to have a fantasy that this matter could have been resolved quickly and easily without Bibi. In fact, that leads to the second puzzling statement of Beinin’s:

It’s clear to Beinin that if Israel wants the remaining 59 hostages released, then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has to go,” he said. “The hostage families found themselves in a very difficult situation. There won’t be any resolution if he’s still prime minister.”

Well, I suppose he would be correct if Netanyahu was replaced by a leftist government willing to give Hamas everything it wants, keep Hamas in power, end all military operations and control of Gaza, and throw in a Palestinian state as well. But short of that, I can’t imagine what sort of magical thinking is required to think someone else would do better than Netanyahu – whose government, after all, made the deal that returned Liat Beinin Atzili to her family.

More:

And as [Yehuda] Beinin pointed out, both in the film and in interviews, he sometimes angers people, including his own grandchildren, when he brings in politics, and has tried to rein himself in.

So the family members are not united with him politically. And yet they have managed to work together. In addition, neither Liat nor Aviv’s relatives seem to want compromises in order to bring Aviv’s body home:

“Liat has said she doesn’t want a single hair on any Israeli soldier’s head harmed to bring Aviv home,” said Beinin. “And Aviv’s brother says if it will take twenty years to bring his body home, then it will take 20 years.”

I would be interested in seeing this movie if and when it becomes readily available.