American Jews and “Christophobia”

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Cornflour.”]

Arnold Kling has written a fairly short piece entitled “Jewish Christophobia.” In it, he says:

One reason that most Jews are reluctant to move right is that they have what I call Christophobia. This is not a fear of Christ. It is a fear of Christians. Many Jews fear that Christians are either out to convert Jews or otherwise make American Jews feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.

I was surprised, though, when I read the piece, that it leaves out quite a bit. What is left out is what I’d roughly call “history,” although there are other things left out, too. So I’ll try to fill them in a bit.

(1) Many of the Jews that Kling mentions are ethnic Jews only, and as atheists or agnostics some of them fear traditional religion and the religious in general. They believe – in some cases correctly – that some people who are extremely religious are out to impose their beliefs on others. Not all Jews of the atheist variety support Israel, either, for similar reasons, nor do they identify with it. The rise of anti-Semitism post-10/7 may have given them cause to re-evaluate these points of view, because it’s not the religious Christians who are visibly anti-Semitic these days, it’s their fellow atheists and leftists. But that realization is new.

(2) And then there’s history. The history of anti-Semitism has a long long Christian phase. One doesn’t have to go all the way back to the Crusades to find it, either. Although the Holocaust and the Nazis were NOT a Christian undertaking – the Nazi leaders themselves were anti-Christian for the most part and many members of the German resistance and in particular the plot to kill Hitler were devout Christians – the truth is that the Holocaust happened in Christian nations. Most of those who participated and/or cooperated in a lesser way would probably have described themselves as Christians.

It wasn’t just the Holocaust, either. Pogroms happened in Christian countries, in particular in Eastern Europe and Russia, in times so recent that many American Jews heard grandparents or even parents talk about them, depending on the age of the listener. It’s not at all unusual for American Jews to have had grandparents or great-grandparents murdered in a pogrom, and although pogroms had many motivators one of the things that was often present was the anger of Christians at the alleged Christ-killers, the Jews. This was especially the case the further back in time you go, and it’s mostly absent today. But that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. You can read about the history here, and note that there were Jew-blaming portions of Christian liturgy until quite recently. And apparently some Christian branches still contain such things as this:

The Holy Friday liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as the Byzantine Rite Catholic churches, uses the expression “impious and transgressing people”, but the strongest expressions are in the Holy Thursday liturgy, which includes the same chant, after the eleventh Gospel reading, but also speaks of “the murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews”, and, referring to “the assembly of the Jews”, prays: “But give them, Lord, their reward, because they devised vain things against Thee.”

(3) Kling writes, “many Jews will say that ‘the only reason Evangelicals support Israel is because they believe in a prophecy that when all the Jews move to Israel they will be converted to Christianity.’” I think that’s a correct statement of the beliefs of at least some Jews, and for the most part I think it’s a false belief. But note that I say “for the most part.” It is certainly the case – I see it over and over – that at least some Evangelicals support Israel for exactly that reason. Christianity, unlike Judaism, is after all a proselytizing religion, and the goal and hope of some – not all, but a significant number of – devout Christians is that the Jews will indeed convert to Christianity some day. In the very olden days, that was sometimes accomplished by violent and/or coercive means, and these days it’s peaceful. But the idea that some Jews might still see the goal of conversion as a potential threat is neither crazy nor completely unjustified, and it is up to Christians to show otherwise.

I believe that more and more Jews are realizing as time goes on that Christians are their best friends and allies. But there are very strong reasons why this understanding has been somewhat slow in coming.

NOTE: In 2015 I wrote this long post on a related theme, entitled “On Jews disliking evangelicals.”

What do you get when you cross Alice’s trial with Kafka’s The Trial? Judge Merchan charging the NY jury in the Trump case, that’s what

The New Neo Posted on by

This afternoon I was trying to explain to a friend what’s been going on today in the NY “hush money” trial and why I’m so perturbed about it.

It’s not easy to capture in its full surreal horror, although Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka have given similar trials a go. But what I told my friend was something like this: The judge has told the jury they don’t have to agree on the elements of the supposed crime that elevated at most a misdemeanor barred by the statute of limitations into a felony that could be tried. They don’t even have to agree on what that crime might be. They just have to figure there was some sort of crime and Trump was some sort of guilty. And oh, by the way, in their summation Trump’s defense attorneys can’t criticize this monstrous ruling by the bench.

Ghastly. Outrageous. But hey, Merchan has the power and he’s going to use it. The left isn’t even pretending to play by the rules. They know there is no check on them from the MSM or leftist lawyers, who will say anything to get Trump.

So in the end it rests on the wisdom of the American public to see through all of this. Or perhaps on the shoulders of one juror with integrity, if there is such a thing in this case.

As Ace writes:

The prosecution wants a Choose Your Own Adventure style verdict — jurors can pick from three offered predicate crimes. And they don’t even have to agree on which of the three possibilities they’re convicting Trump under; five jurors can pick Possible Predicate #1, four can pick Possible Predicate #2, two can pick Possible Predicate #3, and one can even make up his own predicate. As long as they all say that some predicate is present, they can convict.

This is against the law. The Supreme Court has ruled that juries must be unanimous about all elements of a crime to convict.

Now we know why the crime that supposedly occurred was never specified: it didn’t have to be, as long as a compliant judge was willing to prostitute himself and twist the law into something unrecognizable, and a New York jury would take his word for it that they could pretty much wing it and give vent to their imaginings about the evil crimes Trump must have committed or intended to commit.

For what it’s worth, here’s information about the defense’s closing arguments, which have been completed. This is an unusual order of things; ordinarily the prosecution goes first with its closing arguments and the defense gets to go last, although the prosecution gets to rebut briefly at the end.

Newsweek writes that “It is common practice in criminal trials for prosecutors to summarize their closing arguments last … .” Actually, it’s not common at all for the prosecution to give its closing arguments last. What does Newsweek mean by “summarize”? Do they mean the rebuttal? This is deliberately vague. The rest of the article is filled with quotes from attorneys saying that Trump is so incredibly stupid and ignorant to expect to have the last word. But this is, once again, deliberately confusing the closing argument order with the final rebuttal.

This is rather obviously what Trump was referring to – the reversal in this trial of the usual order for closing arguments themselves. Here’s the usual order:

Under the Sixth Amendment, defendants have a right to present a defense. They are also entitled to give a closing argument. Usually, the prosecution first makes a closing argument, then the defense attorney. The prosecutor, who has the burden of proof, frequently gets the chance to respond to the defense’s final argument.

So yes, the prosecution ordinarily gets a chance to be last, but not for its main closing argument – it’s just an opportunity to rebut what the defense has said. In the Trump trial, with the defense going first for their main closing arguments and then the prosecution last for their main closing arguments, will Trump’s lawyers get a chance to rebut? Apparently not.

I’m curious if there are any trial lawyers out there who can say how often it is that the prosecution goes first for the main closing argument, and how it is handled and why it would happen.

ADDENDUM:

You can read more on the subject here (from Scott Johnson) and here (from Byron York).

And here’s Jonathan Turley. His whole Twitter (“X”) page is of interest, but here’s one tweet from it:

I guess the anti-Trump lawyers quoted in that Newsweek piece would say Turley is stupid and ignorant, too.

Now the EU says it wants to sanction Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

Has the EU ever done a single thing that’s good? I’m drawing a blank on that. Here’s the latest action it’s considering that’s not good:

The European Union is considering sanctions against Israel as member states Spain, Ireland and Norway officially recognize “Palestinian state.”

The threat of sanctions is aimed at forcing Israel to stop the ongoing military operation against Hamas terrorists in the Rafah terrorist stronghold, European media reports suggest. The EU “foreign affairs ministers raised the prospect of placing sanctions on Israel in a “real way” for the first time over its continued military campaign in the besieged city of Rafah in Gaza,” the Irish Times reported Monday evening citing the country’s foreign minister.

I find it darkly ironic that people criticized the Jews in WWII for not fighting back sufficiently against the Nazis (although one of these days I plan to write a post showing that they fought back much more than people know), and now the Jews are criticized for fighting back against an enemy that is at least equally murderous.

It is also darkly ironic that most European countries that were occupied by the Nazis had a great many citizens who voluntarily cooperated with rounding up their own Jews for the slaughter. Now the European Union would like to give Israel Hobson’s choice: let yourself be murdered by barbarous neighbors, or we will squeeze you to death financially.

Fortunately, I don’t think the Eastern European countries will go along with this – although I could be wrong – and Germany would have an “interesting” dilemma in deciding what to do. Also, I don’t think that Europe is the biggest source of Israel’s trade (see this). Then again, I wouldn’t put it past Biden to join in the anti-Israel sanction festivities.

Anti-Israel sanctions are exactly the sort of thing the language of “apartheid state” and “genocide,” the recent international court decisions against Israel, and the MSM propaganda are all meant to engender. The aim is to isolate and cripple the Israeli state.

The Rafah attack: another day, another lie by the anti-Israel crowd

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no mystery why they lie: lies work, especially with the full weight of the MSM behind them. In fact, the Palestinian cause is mostly lies, but on the strength of those lies they gain more and more supporters. The lies have managed to unite the Jew-hating left and Jew-hating right, which is a neat trick. And the lies pull in people like my friends who are not Jew-hating at all but merely read the MSM and mostly believe it.

And so we have this (and please note the subtitle of the Melanie Phillips piece, which is, “Another murderous lie travels round the world before the truth gets its boots on”) [emphasis mine]:

On Sunday, Israel’s air force carried out a strike in Rafah targeting two senior Hamas commanders whom it had tracked by aerial surveillance to a compound in the Tal as Sultan area.

Following this strike, a terrible fire broke out in a number of refugee tents where Gazans displaced by the war were burned alive. The Hamas-run health ministry says 45 civilians were killed here and many more injured. …

The western media, politicians and “humanitarian” groups parroted the Hamas claim that the Israelis had willfully targeted a refugee camp that Israel itself had designated as a protected humanitarian area. …

The fact that Israel had done what the world had demanded but said was impossible, by moving almost one million Gazans for their safety out of the area of Rafah where the IDF was about to conduct its military operations, counted for nothing. The strike on this humanitarian area, said the world — from the UN to the EU to the French president Emmanuel Macron — showed that there was “no safe space anywhere”. This apparently proved that the IDF assault on Rafah, in the teeth of the global requirement to desist, demonstrated the Israelis’ callous disregard for human life and the rules of war and therefore that they were truly monstrous.

Except that this was totally untrue. The Israeli strike had taken place one and half kilometres away from the designated humanitarian area. The IDF’s target location was inside the Rafah combat zone. You can see this clearly on the IDF map above. …

Israeli jets had used two small bombs to minimise civilian casualties. The IDF said it had taken steps ahead of the attack to ensure that no women or children were in the Hamas compound. The strike took place more than 100 metres away from the shelters that caught fire. …

Earlier, Israeli officials told the Biden administration that shrapnel from the strike may have ignited a nearby fuel tank. Further information that has come to light, however, suggests that the tents were actually ignited by Hamas munitions.

This video footage, reportedly filmed by a Gaza resident in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli strike and obtained by the website Abu Ali Express, features an onlooker saying that what was hit was a Hamas Jeep “filled with ammo and weapons,” and he expressed a worry that “any moment a [Hamas] rocket can fly at us…”

The IDF says it now suspects that ammunition, weapons, or some other inflammatory material was stored in the area of the strike, causing a secondary blast and the fire that spread to the civilian tents.

The IDF has released an intercepted conversation between two Gazans suggesting that an ammunition store in the area had ignited.

If you recall the false Hamas story of the hospital strike by Israel early in the war, widely reported to have killed 500 people and destroyed much of the hospital (fake news which traveled swiftly around the world), you will find this familiar. In both cases there are civilians taking refuge, an unfortunate incident that kills many of them which is blamed on Israel, and a reality that the cause was Hamas rather than Israel. With the hospital incident there was the additional claim of 500 deaths reduced to a few dozen (we never have learned the true number; at least I’ve never seen it), as well as a bomb Hamas had fired at Israel that fell short and landed in the hospital parking lot only and not on the hospital itself. In the current incident it may be that the number of casualties was properly reported, but once again this does not appear to be Israel’s fault and is a direct result of Hamas’ own methods of warfare.

How many people realize even now that the hospital story was false? I doubt it’s even anywhere near half of those who heard the initial story. How many will ever get the facts on this one? Vanishingly few.

What’s more, after so many lies of this sort, the newspeople as well as heads of state should know enough to keep their mouths shut for a while until the facts emerge. But they cannot and will not do this. They are not interested in telling the truth. They are interested in pushing the anti-Israel narrative.

Many people criticize Israel’s messaging. But how on earth is Israel supposed to counter the enormous number of sources spreading the lies? I really don’t see how that can be done. Richard Landes, who specializes in these issues and coined the term “Pallywood” (and who is a friend of mine), wrote Can the Whole World Be Wrong, a book that was published in 2022. The subtitle is “Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad.” As far as I know, Landes also coined the phrase “lethal journalism,” and it is apt. Things have only gotten worse since 2022, and yes – the “whole world” can indeed be wrong.

And if the exploded Hamas ammunition story turns out to be incorrect, and Israel is responsible for these deaths, I will point out that mistakes are made in war all the time that lead to the unintended deaths of civilians. There is no army on earth – none – that takes more steps to avoid this than the IDF, as “Cynical Publius” (great name) points out in Tablet. And although he is talking about a particular person here, the MSM obviously is to be included in the group of “people like” that person:

But it’s people like my fellow soldier on X who trouble me more. When you know that Israel is the freest, most liberal state in the region; when you know that war is hell and civilians die in all wars; when you know that the IDF engages in state-of-the-art mitigation measures to protect innocent civilians; when you know all of these things and still engage in the blood libelish lies of “Israel is committing genocide,” No. 2 is the only logical conclusion. The only stain is the one on that person’s soul—a black stain of Jew hatred that goes back millennia.

Open thread 5/28/24

The New Neo Posted on by

I was going to add the earlier (1971) studio version. But then I saw this and couldn’t resist, because of the spoken intro and how it connects to the added verse in the above video. The circle coming round, indeed:

For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Both are more threatened in this country now than ever before in my lifetime, due to a frontal assault from the left which controls the media and educational system as well as the federal government. The following is a repeat of a previous post, slightly edited and updated.]

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I was assigned in school.

It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.

I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things are looking dim for both liberty and courage these days, it is not over.

When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:

I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion–of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

We certainly feel the threat now, don’t we?

The Palestinians and the jihadi motive: being clear

The New Neo Posted on by

In a post from last Friday, I wrote on the attitude of many people about the Palestine/Israel conflict and the prospects for peace. The people I’m describing are not the rabid, vicious demonstrators who chant “from the river to the sea.” Nor am I talking about people who live in Israel; the vast majority there have disabused themselves of the notion that there can be a negotiated 2-state solution without a significant war, destruction of the jihadi elements in Palestinian society, and re-education of the Palestinian citizenry. When I wrote the following, I was thinking of the majority of the people I know, who believe in the “cycle of violence” which labels both sides as equally culpable and equally unwilling to give up anything. Such people believe that with goodwill it could and can all be settled peacefully:

Much better to believe that we all want peace and that there is some sort of negotiated solution possible without so much violence. But it is crystal clear that it is a fantasy, even if it wasn’t quite as clear many decades ago.

So, why am I writing about this topic again? I realize that I need to explain what is now so clear and why it wasn’t so easy to see it before.

In my perception of the situation there were several turning points. One was the 1972 Munich massacre. It’s hard to convey to those who are younger and don’t remember those times how shocking that event was. The Olympics were off-limits, athletes were immune from politics and violence – and if this seems hopelessly naive well, it was. The massacre was an eye-opener. And one of the most horrific things about it was that much of the world seemed to shrug, and another was that afterwards Arafat’s stock and that of the Palestinians seemed to rise in the world.

But I bought – as did most people – the idea that the Palestinians really did want a state and that under some set of circumstances they would be willing to live alongside Israel in peace or relative peace. Should I have believed that back then? Probably not. But coverage of Arafat’s rhetoric when speaking in Arabic was in its infancy, and the way the MSM and the government were talking about the situation it was easy to believe that a settlement was possible. Oslo and Camp David and their disappointments and failures were in the future, and it was more possible to see that some sort of negotiated 2-state solution could be achieved and that this was the goal of the Palestinians.

I distinctly recall when I started to think this was not the case. It was some time during the 1990s, and I was reading a lengthy article about the education of Palestinian children. I’ve never been able to find this article again, so I can’t quote it. I don’t even remember where it appeared, although I have a vague recollection that it might have been The New Yorker, to which I had a subscription. But I remember the content. It described in detail how the Palestinians were being taught to hate Israelis and Jews and consider it the highest honor to kill them. And I realized, with a sinking heart, that the situation was far worse than I had ever thought. Simply put, if the article was true – and it turned out that it was – peace through negotiation was unrealistic.

Later developments in my thinking stemmed from the failure of Camp David, discovering how much lying the Palestinians did (see my pieces on the al Durah incident, for example), and watching the Second Intifada develop. So it was that by the early years of the twenty-first century I had largely given up the notion that mere negotiations would ever work.

With 9/11 we also had become aware of the seriousness of the worldwide jihadi threat. But still – at least in my mind – the Palestinian terrorists were somewhat different. Although they were connected to the jihadis it seemed their goals were more localized and focused on eliminating Israel and that it was primarily the land they wanted. It wasn’t just a land dispute about borders, but that seemed to be the strongest motive.

However, what 10/7 finally made clear was that the Palestinians have been merely playing to the western left in using the rhetoric of national liberation and/or nationalism. What they want is for Israel to be obliterated and for the Jews to be wiped off the face of the earth – and then the Christians – and/or converted to Islam. In other words, they are jihadis first, Palestinians second. And this is one of the reasons they have wreaked havoc in the Arab countries that made the error of giving them refuge – an error those countries are not likely to repeat. Why are they trying to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy? Because Jordan, although a Muslim country, is not jihadi enough. Why the same in Egypt? Because Egypt, although a Muslim country, is not jihadi enough.

What percentage of the Palestinian people are onboard with this? Unfortunately, it seems to be the vast majority.

Leftists in the west have chosen to ally with this group. They have bought the nationalistic rhetoric and deny the jihadi motive, which is why they scream that it’s the Israelis who are committing genocide against the poor victimized Palestinians. It fits the leftist worldview quite neatly, and the Palestinians and other jihadi propagandists are well aware of that and exploit it. If the jihadis ever win, modern-day leftists will be just as surprised as the Iranian leftists were when Khomeini took power and massacred them. I wonder how many of today’s young leftists are aware of that history.

Khomeini also said this after taking power:

Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world. . . . Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them [the non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]. Does this mean sitting back until [non-Muslims] overcome us?…Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.

That’s the jihadi creed.

Growing up in a big family

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently read this essay by Jay Neugeboren about growing up in a very large family with 35 first cousins. Neugeboren is somewhat older than I am, and so the era he describes was earlier but not all that much earlier. But the type of family he describes is nothing like my family was.

My family was very very small. I had parents and an older brother. But I had only one aunt and uncle and one first cousin, and my aunt and cousin both died when I was six years old, within a few weeks of each other of completely different causes. Two of my grandparents died before I was born, and my other grandfather was very very ill until he died when I was eight. My remaining grandmother played a huge part in my life and lived nearby, but she died when I was nineteen.

And so there was none of the sort of casual family get-together stuff with all the cousins playing together, the thing described in Neugeboren’s article. My uncle did remarry, and he had two stepchildren, but one was considerably older and the other was very difficult.

However, I also lived in the kind of community where it was common to call the friends of one’s parents by the honorifics “aunt” and “uncle” even though we weren’t related. So there was that.

But it was nevertheless a very different universe from the one that Neugeboren inhabited, and very different from the one in which my own grandmother was raised. She was an only child, it’s true, but she had 36 first cousins and they all lived in New York City. Interestingly enough, I married a man who had (I write in the past tense because many are now deceased) something like 26 first cousins, so many he really lost count.

What about you? Are you still in touch with your cousins? As it turns out, as an adult, I reconnected with one of my cousins-by-marriage (the older one) and we are very good friends now. I also found out, through DNA testing and by chance, that we are actually very distantly related. I’m also very distantly related to my ex-husband.

Go figure.

The Trump “Unified Reich” hoax

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday one of my Democrat friends told me she was worried that Trump had now openly praised Hitler and the Nazis. Initially I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it didn’t take more than a moment to find this:

Here’s a piece on it.

When I – or you – hear someone claim that Trump is praising Nazis and plans to start a Reich, I know from previous experience that this is some sort of distortion (otherwise known as a lie). All I have to do is check it out and that will become clear.

But I also know that many many people are already convinced that Trump is a Hitlerian white-supremacist megalomaniac, and it therefore doesn’t occur to them to check it out. Why would they want to waste their time, when they already know it’s the case? The fact that their perception of Trump as Hitler is based on a series of such lies is unknown to them, and toppling that edifice would require going through the lies one by one and proving each one to be a lie.

At a certain point, it might or might not dawn on the person that the entire perception is incorrect and needs radical revision. But at what point? Who is going to undertake the task of refuting the lies one by one, and how many people would be patient enough to listen? How much proof does it take? And of course some people will never change, no matter what facts are brought to bear.

Time and again it has been brought home to me that this is the situation with most of my friends. No, they are not evil, nor are they stupid. They simply are steeped in lies that are fed them in order to influence them politically, and they are surrounded by like-minded people so the lies are rarely if ever challenged. They are busy with their lives. They would have to actively seek out and read the press on the right to ever hear counter-arguments, and there is little motivation for that because (a) they’ve been told over and over again that the press on the right lies constantly (and it does lie sometimes, although with nothing like the frequency of the left); and (b) it is difficult and rather frightening to change one’s political viewpoint, and risks alienating friends and family.

When I have written in the past about my own experience of political change, I’ve emphasized that it was under some special circumstances: I was reading online and unaware of the right vs. left sources of my information, so I was judging it only on how logical it was and what sense it made to me. It was only about a year later that I discovered that the sources I found most reliable were on the right. This was a shock at the time, but I could not deny it and anyway it had already happened. I also had no idea that moving to the right on my part would cause much of a rift or even discomfort socially. At the time, I wasn’t in the habit of having political discussions with friends or family and was naive about the social polarization that could occur.

Both of these things facilited my change, but very few people are naive about either thing these days.

International law redux

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I wrote this post on international law back in 2006. I think it’s time for a re-post (slightly edited). And please note the 2006 event that sparked the post. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.]

The International Red Cross has said that Israel’s response in Lebanon violates the “proportionality” principle of the Geneva Conventions (see this for my views on proportionality). The group has also issued the following statement about the terrorist group Hezbollah:

Hezbollah fighters too are bound by the rules of international humanitarian law, and they must not target civilian areas.

I’m sorry, but what’s the International Red Cross been smoking?

Earth to International Red Cross: Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. They exist to target civilians.

Furthermore, there’s a general principle involved, one that should be readily apparent to anyone with a modicum of sense:

To be “bound” by a certain law, one (or both) of two things need to be true: (1) the “bound” entity has to agree to the authority of those administering the law; (2) the authority has to have the power of enforcement over that entity.

The International Red Cross has neither over Hezbollah at this point. The only way it would get that power–and it could never obtain #1, only #2–is by a military defeat of Hezbollah, a capture of its leaders, and the act of subsequently bringing them before an international tribunal.

And, of course, to defeat Hezbollah would require a response the International Red Cross already has already condemned as violating the principles of proportionality, since Hezbollah is well aware of the value of hiding behind civilians, and does so purposely and frequently. So, how in heaven’s name would any international court ever get authority over Hezbollah, except to try them in absentia? And a fat lot of good that would do, except as meaningless theater.

The remark by the International Red Cross about Hezbollah being “bound” by the Conventions made me think of a popular comeback when I was a kid. When someone would say, I’m gonna make you do it, the usual retort was Oh yeah? You and what army?

Somehow I think that’s exactly what Hezbollah would say.