Category Archives: culture

Indicative, but also Misleading

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A Wall Street Poll found strong support for Israel in the war Hamas has inflicted on it, but the question the paper chose to illustrate the matter also is misleading.

Overall support for Israelis is solid, although there is considerable support for both Palestinians and Israelis “equally” in the Hamas war.

Unsurprisingly, given the strong antisemitic streak running through the Progressive-Democratic Party, those worthies especially strongly sympathize with both Palestinians and Israelis rather than with Israelis alone.

What’s misleading about the question, though, is the tacit inclusion of the terrorist Hamas gang under the rubric “Palestinian people.” The question needs to be asked concerning sympathizing with Israelis, whose civilians are explicitly targeted by Hamas, vs sympathizing with Gazans, whose civilians are equally targeted by Hamas in the form of shields and Gazan residences and facilities used by the terrorists for weapons storage and launch sites and command centers.

Sympathizing with both Israelis and Gazans (not generic Palestinians) would have more legitimacy given Hamas’ assaults on both sets of civilians more or less equally, albeit one with deliberate targeting and the other with deliberate abandon.

Stupidity

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A construction warehouse in Los Angeles owned by Ryan Baggaley and his brothers was broken into and looted. Now Baggaley is upset.

I voted for Karen Bass. I voted for Biden. I voted for Gavin Newsom. I’m sick of it[.]

Why? He could see their attitude toward police and toward law and order for years including from Bass’ time in Congress before she became the latest LA Mayor and continued the city’s soft-on-crime tradition. He could see the rampant and exploding crime all around him during those years. Why would he keep voting, repeatedly, for more of the same?

The brothers waited until it happened to them directly before they decided the situation was wrong.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results each time may or may not be an indication of insanity. It is, though, a clear demonstration of stupidity. They still kept voting Progressive-Democrat, apparently expecting different results each time they voted. If they do decide to leave California, they’re not welcome here in Texas. Or even if they decide to stay in California, they’re still not welcome in Texas.

And just to saucer and blow this Los Angeles situation, there’s this bit of sad irony:

The suspect vehicle used in Baggaley’s break-in was stolen from the LAPD’s impound yard[.]

Too many cops. Take some of them out.

Oh, wait. They already did. Need to reduce the force even more to work this problem.

“Invisible Americans”

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Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) thinks she has the support of “invisible” Americans, her constituents. It’s…unfortunate…that she does, but it’s especially saddening given what she thinks her constituents believe, which they seem to demonstrate by repeatedly electing her. Her antisemitic bigotry is blatant.

Here’s her claim regarding her openly supported slogan From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. It’s

an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.

This is a lie. The region encompassed by the slogan she so enthusiastically supports includes the region in which is situated the nation of Israel. Even were Tlaib’s associated claim that her one-nation solution wherein Jews and Arabs live “side-by-side” with “equal rights” were true, it would only be a supposedly peaceful driving out of Jews from their homeland since they would be dramatically outnumbered in population and in voting. Her own interpretation calls for the removal of Jews from the Middle East.

The more accurate interpretation of her slogan is the one that’s been the case since the First Intifada, a four-year period of overt terrorism against Israel perpetrated by Hamas. It’s a slogan of hatred of Jews and a call for their extermination, as noted by Congressman Max Miller (R, OH) on the House floor during the debate regarding House censure of Tlaib:

To be clear, “from the river to the sea,” as someone who’s Jewish, means to exterminate my people. I understand she thinks it’s some kind of aspirational message. I do think it’s aspirational—an aspiration to the genocide of Jews.

In response to the censure debate, Tlaib was careful to carry through her antisemitic bigotry: when she spoke during her part of the debate, she wore a Hamas keffiyeh over her blazer.

UN Secretary-General

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António Guterres is missing a good opportunity to keep quiet. He wrote a letter to the UN Security Council President, distributed to all of the Security Council members, a letter that is not really responsible behavior.

The worst part of his letter is his demand for a ceasefire at all cost. He knows full will the meaning of that phrase in the present context—all cost includes the destruction of Israel as a polity, as a society, as a people. Guterres doesn’t care.

Underneath that, he bleats about “reportedly” 15,000 Gazans have been killed in this war, and adds his “reportedly” claim of 40% of those 15,000 being children. Undoubtedly, several thousand Gazans, including children, have been killed. But he chooses not to cite credible sources for those figures, he ignores who has the responsibility for those deaths, and he ignores the inalienable right of the Israelis to defend themselves, to defend their very existence.

Guterres also bleated about hospitals become battle zones and the decreasing supplies of hospital and Gazan necessities.

Guterres has chosen to ignore where the responsibility for this disaster lies. Hamas has repeatedly stated that its goal is the extermination of Israel, and at least one of its leaders has promised repeated October 7s until the goal is achieved—no matter how many Gazans die in the effort.

Guterres has chosen to ignore the basic fact that the vast majority of Gazan casualties—of whatever number—are the direct result of Hamas’ use of Gazans as human shields and Hamas’ use of Gazan residential apartment buildings, schools, those hospitals about which Guterres pretends to worry as rocket launch sites, weapons and ammunition storage sites, and command centers.

Guterres has chosen to ignore that it was Hamas that chose to ignite this war, and that it is Hamas that is creating the humanitarian disaster about which he pretends to care so much with its refusal to let Gazans evacuate combat zones—zones which the Israeli government and the IDF are constantly at pains to announce before hand, at great risk to their own soldiers and at great risk of letting terrorists leave the combat zone along with Gazans.

Guterres’ performance is not well brought-up behavior.

“Silence is Violence”

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That’s been the mantra of the Left for some years. It’s an extreme rendition of the obligation of folks—especially those with public influence—to speak and act against bad behavior, especially atrocities. It’s a mantra that was born in objections to the rise of, and increasing publicity surrounding, violence against women and children, increases (in publicity, at least) roughly coinciding with the time of the Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein exposures.

That brings me to 7 October 2023 and the terrorist Hamas attacks, of which rape of Israeli women and children, torture during and by rape of Israeli women and children, butchering of Israeli children were not byproducts of the heat of the moment but were deliberately used and specific tactics of the Hamas terrorists. There has been some outcry against those atrocities by major “women’s groups” that concern themselves with protecting women and children.

There also has been an ear-shattering silence from other organizations that make the same claims of concern for women and children. The Silent Ones include these:

  • Planned Parenthood
  • Women’s March
  • EMILY’s List
  • Democrat Women’s Caucus
  • National Organization for Women
  • Equality Now
  • Time’s Up
  • SOS Children’s Villages
  • World Health Organization
  • United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women Empowerment
  • N. Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women
  • International MeToo

The list goes on and is disgustingly long.

On 30 November, NOW did, badly belatedly, say that NOW condemns the use of rape as a weapon of war, but even with that, its statement was insultingly generic, with no mention of Hamas or Israel specifically. Coming as it does nearly two months after the atrocities, and only after mounting opprobrium, it’s not possible (for me, anyway) to believe NOW is uttering anything other than empty rhetoric in an attempt to cover its collective political behind.

Silence is violence is, by itself, an unprovable accusation. Silence, though, is a powerful indication of the antisemitic bigotry of these allegedly supportive but carefully silent organizations, and it is illustrative of the hypocrisy of these organizations that speak so loudly and zealously against crimes against women—or what they perceive as crimes against women—but are just as loudly and zealously silent when it comes to crimes against Jewish women and children.