History Moves On

From Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch – Left Behind by History– probably firewalled and I highly recommend a subscriptiion.

The Palestinian people have legitimate grievances, and I myself have tried my very best to give a damn about them. But you only get to blow up so many pizza shops. You start beheading children and murdering young mothers and torturing people so viciously and inhumanely that parents pray that their children will be found dead rather than discovered to have been taken hostage into Gaza, then you and your legitimate grievances and any United Nations resolution you want to cite can all go rot. There aren’t two sides to this story. We ought not pretend that there are.

Before he became … whatever it is he has become … J. D. Vance wrote an interesting and useful book, which you may remember, called Hillbilly Elegy. He ended it with an exasperated but sympathetic plea to his hillbilly people: Come on, already. Get it together, people. You’ve been through hard times, I know, but now, you have to take care of yourselves and do it for yourselves. Stop making excuses. Take control of your lives. Not in those words, of course; this is my paraphrase.

You can go into any of 300 different bars in Boston and get an earful about how bad the Irish have had it. But people eventually move on—at least, the people who want to be happy, who want to thrive as individuals and as families and as nations do. That doesn’t mean that what happened to the Indians and the African Americans and the Irish wasn’t terrible, or that we should just forget about it and pretend like it never happened. It means that you can’t keep good people down. Not forever.

A former police officer in Texas who now provides security to churches tells me that his team is taking extra precautions in the coming days. And not because he is worried about resentful Irishmen or enraged Norwegians.

History moves on, and, if you get left behind—it may not be your fault, but it is still your problem. The Israeli forces should be the least of the mortal worries afflicting those Hamas killers—if the Palestinians had any self-respect, it would be them taking the lead in putting an end to the power of these monsters, who are homicidal maniacs when it comes to the Jews but who haven’t done the Palestinians a lick of good, either. But, unhappily, the one almost universally shared assumption of modern diplomatic discourse is that the Palestinian Arabs are something less than whole and complete human beings, that they are not advanced enough to be true moral actors because they do not have the strength of national character to bear the moral weight that falls exclusively upon the shoulders of the Israelis and the peoples of the other liberal democratic states. The Palestinians, according to this line of thought, just bounce around like windup toys, and only the Israelis, the Americans, and the Europeans can be expected to behave like responsible adults. Nobody ever puts it exactly that way, of course, but that’s the upshot. The Palestinians are treated by their so-called advocates and benefactors as though they were a nation of people who have no agency and, hence, no responsibility.

The mystery is why the Palestinians continue to put up with it, and have for so long. They don’t need “days of rage.” They need property rights, free enterprise, the rule of law, and decent government. And nobody would be better pleased to see them have these than the Israelis.

When Woke Broke

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”- Voltaire

When Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery found the death camps in Germany, they ordered crews to film the piles of bodies and emaciated survivors, fearing otherwise no one would believe the depths of depravity the enemy was capable of. Only two generations later Netanyahu faced the same task for the same reason. With less shame than their Nazi predecessors this generation of sadistic perpetrators posted their own savagery on Facebook.

As long as the illiberal woke crowd only engaged in their historical revisionism and preferred narratives they were tolerated, but when this led to support of wholesale slaughter of innocents it became a bridge too far. Alumni are pulling their funds and students are avoiding schools that are plagued with such rudderless leadership. Political lines are drawn.

Social justice grifters in all their forms were easy prey for the Jew haters. It was just the next logical step. Periods of revisionism and moral ambiguity are breeding grounds for antisemitism and other forms of social and moral rot. It is too soon to predict how long this recoil will last, but we are certainly clearer how far the absurdities of the left can go.

PS : Can a Donor Revolt Save American Universities

Marxian Anti-Semitism

From The Marxian Roots of Campus Anti-Semitism by Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal, 10/13/23:

That anti-Israel protests erupted on elite campuses this week—not after the accidental killing of a Palestinian demonstrator but after the systematic murder of at least 1,300 people in Israel—signifies an egregious failure at the heart of American higher education. That so many students and academics could think this was a proper response to an act of mass murder suggests something deeply amiss on our campuses. What we are witnessing is the fruition, many decades in the making, of a habit of mind that can accurately be called Marxian.

Notwithstanding many dauntless efforts over several generations to defend regulated market economies as just, the belief that profit is theft, that prosperity under capitalism is taken from the poor laborer by force, is so much a part of today’s left-progressive mindset as to be unquestioned and immovable. The entire “social justice” movement is premised on the belief that if one group does well and another doesn’t, the former must have taken advantage of the latter—a thousand explanatory circumstances be damned. (See Thomas Sowell’s latest book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” for a brilliant treatment of the subject.) You can hear Marx’s concept of exploitation in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s constant assertion that successful corporations and wealthy Americans have somehow gamed the system at the expense of the poor and middle class.

That’s why they particularly hate Israel—a wealthy nation among neighbors whose poverty is relieved only by oil revenue. Israel is the one country in the Middle East where ordinary people stand a good chance of creating prosperity for themselves and their families. For modern progressive academics, weaned on the Marxian concept that wealth is the result of exploitation, that is precisely the reason for Israel’s guilt. They can’t behold its prosperity without concluding that the Jews have stolen their wealth from their neighbors.

Democratic political leaders, who have credibility on elite campuses their Republican colleagues lack, have a duty to denounce these spineless university presidents and fomenters of anti-Israel bigotry. Jew-hatred among the cognoscenti has a history of spreading faster than anybody expected.

Thoughts on October 7

First, I was shocked at the surprise, the scale, intelligence lapse, and the ingenuity of the invaders.

Soon I was enraged at the savagery. Attacks on civilians is nothing new to Israelis, but the brutal murders of the most vulnerable children and elderly changes our view of what the Israelis are up against. No cause justifies this depravity.

When support for Hamas emerged from our most exalted universities shock and rage turned to depression. Students in America are supporting a level of Jew hatred that would have made the Hitler youth blush.

The microscopically thin line between Anti-Zionism and Anti- Semitism, if it ever existed, was just erased. The left which values gay and transgender rights and women’s rights openly supports the Islamic world which tolerates none of these values and opposes the only country in the Middle East where these values exist. There is only one value they share: the hatred of Jews. Let any Anti-Zionist rant long enough and ‘Jew’ will replace ‘Zionist’.

Academic and media sources which have championed climate change and varieties of ‘social justice’ with absolute moral supremacy that tolerates no dissent suddenly calls for ‘context’, restraint, and moral relativism when 1300 Jews are sadistically slaughtered.

We could revisit the history that brought us to this point but as the Soviet joke goes. “The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable.” We face a cultural and religious conflict that undermines modern liberal values.

The Palestinian minds and most of the Arab street in the Middle East have been poisoned by generations of vicious Anti-Semitic indoctrination. Wiping out Hamas will not change this, though that is the next logical step, and it should not stop with just neutralizing their leadership and destroying their supplies. There is a next level of poisoned minds ready to replace them and they should also be fearing for their lives. It is worth noting that half of Gaza is under 18 years old.

Financially supporting Gaza or the Palestinians without forceful oversight of how that money is spent is just another level of support for these terrorists. Money is fungible.

There are a lot of lines to be drawn from past actions to October 7. Thinking as Americans do that rational self-interest and incentives will yield rational results is our Achille’s heel. Hatred of this nature does not need a reason; it only needs an excuse. Yes, Iran needs to be addressed, but carefully and methodically to contain the coming war as much as possible, but even eliminating Iran will not change the hatred that drives this conflict.

From the WSJ: “…hardened authoritarian ideologues understand each other better than pragmatic Americans, with their eyes on balance sheets and cost-benefit analysis.”

We have learned that the victor in these conflicts is not always the superior force, but the one who controls the timeline. Americans want their victories fast and cheap and this enemy will not be accommodating. Israel has no choice. Their enemies can lose a 100 wars; Israel can not afford to lose one.

If Israel and the Jews disappeared tomorrow, do you seriously think this hatred will dissipate and they will peacefully attend to the grinding work of building a civil society? Who will they then blame for their dysfunction and misery and how will they react? Do you think their animosities will be contained in their region?

The Saturation Point

from The Jerusalem Post, HOW A PRO-PALESTINIAN AMERICAN REPORTER CHANGED HIS VIEWS ON ISRAEL AND THE CONFLICT by Hunter Stuart:

For example, after the November 2015 ISIS shootings in Paris that killed 150 people, a colleague of mine ‒ an educated 27-year-old Lebanese-Palestinian journalist ‒ casually remarked that those massacres were “probably” perpetrated by the Mossad. Though she was a journalist like me and ought to have been committed to searching out the truth no matter how unpleasant, this woman was unwilling to admit that Muslims would commit such a horrific attack, and all too willing ‒ in defiance of all the facts ‒ to blame it on Israeli spies.

USUALLY WHEN I travel, I try to listen to people without imposing my own opinion. To me that’s what traveling is all about ‒ keeping your mouth shut and learning other perspectives. But after 3-4 weeks of traveling in Palestine, I grew tired of these conspiracy theories.

“Arabs need to take responsibility for certain things,” I finally shouted at a friend I’d made in Nablus the third or fourth time he tried to deflect blame from Muslims for Islamic terrorism. “Not everything is America’s fault.” My friend seemed surprised by my vehemence and let the subject drop ‒ obviously I’d reached my saturation point with this nonsense.

The Slavery of the System

from Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish, From Freedom to Slavery

The slavery of the present is a more subtle thing. It grips the mind more tightly than the body. It still remembers that men enslave themselves best. It knows also that true power comes from making all complicit in its crimes so that they are also complicit in their own degradation. The system only asks that each man enslave himself and kill his own children. And once he has done that, he will only feel it right to demand that everyone else do likewise.

Do it for the environment, for social justice, for the Pharaoh of every age and his ideology. Enslave your mind. Kill your children.

This is the slavery of the system. It requires few whips and many words. It nudges men to be their own taskmasters and to reach out their hands to the new Pharaoh in the hope that he will save them. It is this slavery which is so pervasive, which Passover wakes us from, if it has not already been perverted into the Passover of the system, into civil rights seders and eco-matzas with donations to Planned Parenthood which will do what the midwives did not, if has not become yet another tribute to the Pharaoh of Hope and Change.