By Melanie Phillips
International pressure on Israel not to extend its sovereignty over parts of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria is increasing. More than 1,000 European parliamentarians have signed a letter asserting that this proposal, which they term “annexation,” would “encourage other states with territorial claims to disregard basic principles of international law.”
Following the brutal death in police custody of George Floyd, racial anarchy in America is increasing. In Seattle and Washington, D.C., there have been attempts to set up “autonomous zones” that exclude the police. Statues and other artworks that have been targeted for toppling as representing “white privilege” include those of Abraham Lincoln, the 19th-century anti-slavery activist Hans Christian Heg and now even Jesus.
These events are connected. In this period of civilizational turmoil, supposed progressives campaigning against the sovereignty proposal falsely project onto Israel crimes of which not only is it innocent, but of which the progressive class itself is guilty.
Take the claim that Israel’s “annexation” is unlawful. Under international law, annexation has a precise meaning: the forcible incorporation by one state of the territory of another state. This does not apply to the disputed territories, which never belonged in law to any other state.
Israel has the only legally grounded claim to this land, including the never-abrogated duty given to the British in the 1920s to settle the Jews throughout what is now Israel, the disputed territories and the Gaza Strip.
Far from being an illegal annexation, extending Israeli law to these areas actually implements international law after some nine decades during which it was flouted and then ignored by Britain and the world community. It is those who oppose the sovereignty proposal who show contempt for the law.
Now look at how “progressives” in America are practicing occupation and junking the rule of law. The “autonomous zones” promptly descended into lawlessness, chaos and violence. In Seattle, there have been arson attacks, reports of rape and shooting incidents in which at least one person has died.
Andy Ngo of the Canadian website Post Millennial spent five days undercover in this area. He has said it quickly descended into anarchy with armed vigilantes roaming the streets.
In addition, he observed extremist literature being distributed. Some of this provided “instructions for criminality, such as how to create bombs with light bulbs, how to lock up a building to prevent entry from police, how to injure police and kill them.”
The “progressive” class routinely accuses Israel of racist behavior towards the Palestinians. Yet Israel’s Arabs have equal civil rights, as can be seen every day in its parks and shopping malls, and in its hospitals, courts or armed forces.
Arabs in the disputed territories don’t have the same rights for the simple reason that they are not Israeli citizens. Even so, they receive Israeli aid or hospital treatment alongside Israelis. Any discriminatory treatment they receive, such as queuing at checkpoints, is purely to protect Israelis from the ever-present threat of being wounded or murdered by them.
Now look at the anti-white racism that openly parades itself in America and Britain.
The very idea of “white privilege,” damning an entire ethnic group for its alleged evil behavior and attitudes, is racist.
At the University of Virginia in February, a black student was filmed stating: “This is a space for people of color, so just be really cognizant of the space you’re taking up because it does make some of us [people of color] uncomfortable when we see too many white people in here.”
In Lincoln County, Ore., wearing anti-virus face masks has become compulsory for white people alone since black people are exempt if they have “heightened concerns about racial profiling and harassment due to wearing face coverings in public.”
So the color of someone’s skin — once the key marker of racial prejudice — has now become the determinant factor in western culture when used against white people.
The reason why the war of extermination against Israel continues to this day is only because its Arab attackers are empowered by the tacit or overt support they receive from the West. Similarly, America has descended into anarchy only because civic, educational and political authorities have fallen into line with the diktats of the mob.
Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkan initially backed the “autonomous zone” as “a peaceful expression of your community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world.”
At Northwestern University, professor Steven Thrasher declared: “The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response.”
Meanwhile, people who question this insurrection in any way are being harassed or losing their jobs. Princeton University professor Omar Wasow showed that, while peaceful civil-rights protests gained public support, violent protests lost it. A data analyst who tweeted this, David Shor, was promptly fired.
It’s not by chance that attitudes to Israel illuminate the west’s internal anarchy. For repudiating the tenets of Judaism lies at the very core of the current turmoil.
Black Lives Matter is a far-left, anti-white, anti-capitalist, anti-family revolutionary movement with openly expressed aims of destroying western culture and society. Yet thousands of people are supporting it, including many Jews.
Some of this support is based on ignorance of its agenda. But the recent demonstrations have brought out onto the streets the same kind of people who came out for Extinction Rebellion, and before that the Occupy movement against capitalism, and who have marched against Israel behind the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah.
This is because there’s a large mass of people, mostly young, who are constantly seeking a focus for their idealism. They have accordingly alighted upon one cause after another which claims to be about the betterment of the world — women, race, gender, the Palestinians, saving the planet.
But, in fact, these causes are all about hating other people: men, Zionists, white people and humanity in general.
Worse still, since they are utopian they all fail to deliver the perfection of the world that they have promised. Their adherents consequently seek scapegoats upon whom they turn with ferocity in an attempt to bring about by coercion the state of purity the designated culprits have purportedly thwarted.
All of these ideologies have sought to displace the basis of western Christian culture: the moral codes of the Hebrew Bible.
So-called progressives believed that casting all that aside would make people free, decent and rational. But these virtues come from that very same Hebrew Bible.
Its belief that humanity had been fashioned in the divine image gave rise to the revolutionary idea of the dignity of every individual. Its moral codes putting chains on human appetites in the interests of others were the basis of community, conscience and the rule of law. And its proposition that the world was created by a purposeful intelligence gave the west its powers of scientific reason.
Destroying the basis of those virtues turned them into the very things progressives purport to stand against: bigotry, illiberalism and unreason.
Having abandoned the values that give life meaning, progressive idealism has now mutated into a vicious culture of grievance and resentment, and ushered in the Hobbesian nightmare of a war of all against all.
No surprise that it has also unleashed fresh waves of antisemitism across the world. For by denying the book that gave the west its values of love, truth and conscience, it has now embraced instead hatred, self-absorption and lies.
@ Reader:
@ Reader:
Thank you for the intent. My problem was that I had become used to the long absence of Captcha and had dropped into (for me) my normal habit of writing my post, then pressing “post comment”. So I was constantly writing my post and pressing the “post”, and, of course getting the ORDER to back arrow. I even was rejected because my decision that 25+28 = 53 was WRONG by the almighty Captcha.
Anyway I just saw a post that Ted sent to Bear, that he was removing Captcha. Odd, in a way, that so many posts of so many others were continuously “trashed” and not one of mine. Like the Rocky Graziano bio…”Somebody Up There Likes Me”..
@ Edgar G.:
I was just trying to be helpful. I put your words “time expired” in quotation marks so you’d know which of you comments I was replying to.
If you know all this stuff – great.
@ Reader:
Yes of course I know all that, don’t I have posts printed here, so I MUST do all you just pointed out. It’s obvious. But, you mentioned that your time expired, and you had to …etc. So your point caught my eye , and I also mentioned that I was surprised that it happened to me..ONCE. because I hadn’t been aware that Captcha was timed. I was likely adding a more lengthy piece…..That’s all. ?
But I do that all the time and this was the first time it happened. I’d have not mentioned it, TH thinking it an anomaly, except that your comment caught my eye.The fact that I get vaught so much by Captcha shows that I post first.
@ Edgar G.:
“ran out of time” You don’t have to do captcha before typing your comment.
You can:
– type the comment
– do the captcha (until it works – wait to make sure the refresh arrow is round again)
– click on “post comment”
– pray that it shows up
@ Reader:
You’ve actually had a very rough time with the monster. A few hours ago my major mathematical opus, where I decided-after all due deliberation and cogitation- that 25+28 totaled 53…….was rejected by the damned thing. However, I ran out of time only once, and it surprised me, as I hadn’t known that this internal faculty existed..
We had it too good for a while. Captcha laid low….under some rock, and watched us forget all about him, and gambol around……then slithered out again….and POUNCED. Only a heartless computer could be so cruel…
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Ha Ha Ha,…….. as El Brendel used to say..”Det’s a gud vun…” ….
This is the 3rd time in the last 3 posts that I didn’t bow to the Captcha genie…
The FOURTH time……..!!!!!
@ Reader:
Same here.
@ Edgar G.:
I’ve noticed that sometimes Captcha gives me an error even when everything is correct.
In this case, I go back and refresh the page (click on the round arrow on the top left of the screen), and do another Captcha (the 1st one will no longer work if you repeat it).
You have to wait until the page is fully refreshed before CAPTCHAing again.
Edgar G. Said:
The New York Times?
Edgar G. Said:
The New York Times?
@ Reader:
Maybe my joke a while back about Ted installing a “garbage gobbler” was not such a joke after all. It may be so fine-tuned that a phrase or a single word might activate it.
For instance I’ve posted comments on a boxing site for many years. A very poor site closed down, and suddenly we were flooded; illiterate obscene, and filthy in their language beyond all belief. I hardly understand their lingo.. After protests from some ;staunch members, the publishers installed a kind of algorithm which bounced almost everything …For instance, not long ago in comments about an old time boxer, whom I knew slightly. I mentioned that he had a Cockney accent. It was printed with the first 4 letters just asterisks.
(Would you believe, they even got around this by leaving a space between a couple of letters, also by using a different letter with a similar sound).
That damned Captcha, I get caught by it all the time, and have to back-arrow. So many times that by now I’m not sure that I’m NOT a robot…
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I replied to your latest comment. My reply got trashed again.
Try looking for it tomorrow morning.
I guess it is controversial to say anything bad about Nazism other than it killed Jews (that’s why my reply got trashed).
@ Sebastien Zorn:
No, the genocide of the Jews was NOT Nazism’s only unique feature. The Nazis differed from other Jew haters in how systematically they accomplished the genocide with, BTW, almost decisive help from the populations of the occupied countries which were not nazified before the war.
Jews weren’t the only victims of the Nazis.
I’ve been trying to explain, apparently in vain, that I am NOT for using these terms to mean other things.
I am FOR using these terms when they are appropriate to identify the Nazi concepts and behavior which ARE NOT limited to Jew hatred and killing Jews.
For some reason you refuse to understand what I am saying.
You seem convinced that Nazism was a unique German phenomenon solely motivated and distinguished by the genocide of the Jews.
Nazism is a murderous, racist, eugenicist oligarchic rule supported by big capital (in spite of the word “socialism”), intent on subjugating and enslaving the whole world and culling its population based on its immoral principles which may or may not include killing Jews.
Do not accuse the NYT of hiding the truth about the Shoah.
The US government knew about it (American Jewish citizens were treated differently in Europe by the Germans) and American Jews knew about it (and did NOTHING except for a very small number of people who tried to help).
@ Reader:
The NY Times hid news of the Shoah in plain sight as it was happening by surrounding the stories with other atrocity stories in the back pages. That’s what using terms like Nazi, HItlerian, or Antisemite to mean other things does. That’s why the Jihadist/left coalition (red/green axis or GW Bush’s apt “axis of evil”) is trying to claim them.
@ Reader:
On the contrary, I am saying the the genocide of the Jews was its only unique feature, and using it to mean other things is of the same order as saying antisemitism isn’t only directed at Jews, effectively taking it out of the dictionary. You can’t fight a thing you can’t name and these are names that have emotional baggage that no new term anyone could conjure right now would carry, eg, Judeophobia or jew hatred.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I am not saying that it is OK to use these terms indiscriminately.
I am saying that they should be used when it is necessary to call a spade a spade and evil – evil (to call real Nazism (which is not a unique phenomenon) by its proper name when you see it practiced instead of using some other misleading term) without narrowing it down to just one of its many features, namely, the genocide of the Jews).
Nazism can exist with all its other characteristics without killing Jews.
If it’s forbidden to identify it, then we will be defenseless when it resurfaces.
@ Reader:
Telling me I’m not funny is racist.
@ Reader:
The intention to spark outrage at lesser known atrocities by using words that already spark horror only works for a short time, as we have seen. What happens in the end, is that terms like Hitlerian and Nazi become whitewashed as people are gradually desensitized to them. Remember Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi?” Now, every bully is labeled a Nazi. And then the real Nazis came out of the woodwork, as we have seen, and with bloody consequences, unimaginable even 10 years ago.
Why not just say, “totalitarian” when you mean “totalitarian?”
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Not funny. Anyway, the comment trashing problem has been solved, allegedly. If it’s true, then my comments are being censored for content.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Part 2.
As soon as the WWII ended, the US saved the Nazis and both the US and England started the Cold War against the Soviet Union while making an “economic miracle” out of West Germany.
England continued its anti-Jewish policies in Palestine until getting kicked out of it in 1948 (if they had Netanyahu there, we would still have no state). Glubb Pasha (the British General Glubb) commanded the Jordanian Legion in 1948.
The US and its population certainly seem to prefer Nazism to socialism/communism.
See (on Amazon) The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture by Ronald Smelser, Edward J. Davies ll.
It’s enough to read the excerpts available on Amazon to be rather unpleasantly surprised.
BTW, neither socialism nor communism have ever existed yet anywhere in the world except as corrupted terms for certain types of backward feudal societies where all the means of production were nationalized as a result of a revolution in order “to build socialism for the working class”, and whose rulers (like Stalin in the 30s) decided to announce that they already succeded in doing just that in 10 years or so (which sounds like a bad joke).
Hitlerism and Nazism, however, existed in their true form and not only as the means of killing Jews but also as the means of racist, eugenicist (killing the lower races and the unfit), totalitarian enslavement of the whole world by the higher race(s).
Killing Jews is a special (albeit an extreme) case of their overall racist eugenicist policy.
WHAT IS GOOD FOR THE JEWS?
In my opinion, at this point, it is leaving the Diaspora ASAP. I mean, yesterday.
Without wasting time on building more synagogues, outreach, enhancing the Jewish identity, fighting anti-Semitism, cancelling Farrakhan shows, running for office, completing university education, etc.
Just unplug from it and move out.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Part 1.
My point is that being a purist about using the term “Hitlerian”, etc. to only pertain to Jewish genocide (which I am NOT trying to minimize) inadvertently whitewashes the rest of the evil that such regimes perpetrated by not using these terms as examples of totalitarianism (worldwide, racist, eugenicist and murderous as in the case of Nazi Germany – which is NOT repeated in all the other totalitarian regimes).
The US and England only “allied” themselves with the Soviet Union for the duration of the war (some US companies were working for and inside Germany throughout the war) and did an absolute minimum possible to help it fight the Germans.
The idea was to exhaust both countries (check out what Truman said about it).
This was AFTER both England and the US (FDR and Churchill both of whom Jews adore) made sure to lock the European Jews in Europe knowing what was about to happen to them.
@ Reader:
Maybe it was racist. (joke)
@ Sebastien Zorn:
My point is that being a purist about using the term “Hitlerian”, etc. to only pertain to Jewish genocide (which I am NOT trying to minimize) inadvertently whitewashes the rest of the evil that such regimes perpetrated by not using these terms as examples of totalitarianism (worldwide, racist, eugenicist and murderous as in the case of Nazi Germany – which is NOT repeated in all the other totalitarian regimes).
The US and England only “allied” themselves with the Soviet Union for the duration of the war (some US companies were working for and inside Germany throughout the war) and did an absolute minimum possible to help it fight the Germans.
The idea was to exhaust both countries (check out what Truman said about it).
This was AFTER both England and the US (FDR and Churchill both of whom Jews adore) made sure to lock the European Jews in Europe knowing what was about to happen to them.
As soon as the WWII ended, the US saved the Nazis and both the US and England started the Cold War against the Soviet Union while making an “economic miracle” out of West Germany.
England continued its anti-Jewish policies in Palestine until getting kicked out of it in 1948 (if they had Netanyahu there, we would still have no state). Glubb Pasha (the British General Glubb) commanded the Jordanian Legion in 1948.
The US and its population certainly seem to prefer Nazism to socialism/communism.
See (on Amazon) The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture by Ronald Smelser, Edward J. Davies ll.
It’s enough to read the excerpts available on Amazon to be rather unpleasantly surprised.
BTW, neither socialism nor communism have ever existed yet anywhere in the world except as corrupted terms for certain types of backward feudal societies where all the means of production were nationalized as a result of a revolution in order “to build socialism for the working class”, and whose rulers (like Stalin in the 30s) decided to announce that they already succeded in doing just that in 10 years or so (which sounds like a bad joke).
Hitlerism and Nazism, however, existed in their true form and not only as the means of killing Jews but also as the means of racist, eugenicist (killing the lower races and the unfit), totalitarian enslavement of the whole world by the higher race(s).
Killing Jews is a special (albeit an extreme) case of their overall racist eugenicist policy.
WHAT IS GOOD FOR THE JEWS?
In my opinion, at this point, it is leaving the Diaspora ASAP. I mean, yesterday.
Without wasting time on building more synagogues, outreach, enhancing the Jewish identity, fighting anti-Semitism, cancelling Farrakhan shows, running for office, completing university education, etc.
Just unplug from it and move out.
PLEASE DETRASH MY COMMENT.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH IT.
@ Sebastien Zorn:Fox, which is owned by Disney, was going to air a July 4th Farakhan speech until Dov Hikind led a protest against it and they have cancelled it. They have a new channel, Fox Soul Network. https://thejewishvoice.com/2020/06/fox-soul-cancels-louis-farrakhan-july-4th-speech/
@ Reader:
Farakhan is a Jihadist and his influence is the main one on Black Americans, including the so-called Black Hebrews. Communists are knee-jerk third-worldists and will coddle up to any movement among them that seems radical. That goes for Marx, as well. Despite his personal distaste for Jews and Judaism, in practice, he defended Jewish Civil Rights in the old empires in which he lived because he thought it was the progressive thing to do. What he wanted was total assimilation but he did not advocate mass expulsion or murder. If that seems like the same thing to some people, I am reminded of the hilarious exchange between Bill Maher and Brigitte Gabriel in which she said the difference in cultures is that western men don’t brag about murdering their wives, and Maher quipped, “Well, I doubt it would make much difference to the wife.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcFoPkzYXog
@ Reader:
Communist Laos is the least antisemitic country in the world according to a 2014 Anti-Defamation League survey.
I used to be a leftist with universalist values. Now, while not ruling out compassion for others, secondarily, my main rule of thumb is “Is it good for the Jews.” How about you?
https://www.jta.org/2014/05/16/archive/from-the-archive-laos-laos-and-anti-semitism
@ Reader:
Any man, woman, child or baby with Jewish grandparents is to be killed and many subjected to vivisection. Period. No exceptions. That’s the only thing that distinguishes Hitlerism or Nazism from other totalitarian systems. I think Fascism and Communism are preferable to Nazism, don’t you? Not that I would want to have to choose. But, I think the distinction needs to be made. Individual Communists out of power won’t shoot you as easily as looking at you the way a neo-Nazi will. Many are Jewish, themselves, and don’t regard themselves as self-hating Jews. Same goes for Fascists. Mussolini’s regime was not antisemitic until the late 30s. Neither was Imperial Japan, at first. Communist regimes have gone back and forth. For Nazis, murdering us is their first priority. They have that in common with JIhadists.
Were the US and England wrong to ally themselves with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany?
Why is my comment repeatedly trashed?
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I think it’s a mistake to avoid using the word Hitlerian for a totalitarian regime just because Hitler was the only one to systematically murder Jews.
The unintended consequence of using the words “socialist”, ”communist”, “stalinist”, “maoist”, “leftist”, etc. and avoiding the words “fascist”, ”Nazi”, “Hitlerian” is whitewashing these latter regimes and training people’s subconscious that fascism is somehow preferable to communism.
In fact, this was the attitude of the United States after WWII and this remains the attitude of many (if not most) Americans today.
If we ignore for a moment Hitler’s special (explicit) fixation on destroying Jews, the rest of his regime was absolutely murderous to the whole world and to his own people which is a lot more than we can say, for example, about the USSR or China.
Also, a lot of people don’t realize that the whole “civilized” world was quietly and actively complicit in the crimes of Nazi Germany, they just preferred that not they but the Germans do the dirty work.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
My reply to you keeps getting trashed.
I’ll try again later.
@ Reader:True, but Mussolini, Pinochet, Louis Napoleon, Robespierre and too many others to name did the same thing under similar conditions without the genocide and there have been many other genocides throughout history but this was one was the only one this extreme and this international and it was mainly directed at the Jews so calling every totalitarian, fascist, or whatever- you-want-to-name it regime Hitlerian essentially does the work of antisemites who have tried and are trying to take the word, “antisemite” out of the dictionary by giving it such a broad scope it robs it of its special meaning or sting. They know that the first step to combatting or curing a phenomenon is naming it. This is not just semantics. It’s basic Orwell. The left’s first conquest and most pivotal conquest has been the dictionary which is why we need to once again purge them from every part of the educational system.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
In order to accomplish the genocide, Hitler needed those “Hobbesian” conditions implemented and propagandized first.
And don’t you think “authoritarian” is too mild of a term to describe “Hitlerian”?
BTW, the ideas of the state of nature as a constant war and the survival of the fittest seem to be typically British, as well as the constant preoccupation with those ideas.
@ Reader: Well, Hobbes is certainly authoritarian – I would reserve “Hitlerian” for genocide against the Jews, it’s really the only unique thing about it – but yes, the implication is that out of mob rule and chaos arises dictatorship, something the American Founding Fathers understood all too well, hence all the checks and balances intended to prevent sudden radical change such as the two party system, the three branches of government, winner take all elections, and the electoral college.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
You know, just by briefly looking at this Hobbesian stuff – it is perfectly Hitlerian:
1) the state of nature is a state of war;
2) the subjects must obey their sovereign without question;
3) if the subjects commit crimes that were ordered by the sovereign, the subjects cannot be blamed because they just followed his orders.
Like, WOW!
@ Michael S:
” …ushered in the Hobbesian nightmare of a war of all against all.” – last line of 2nd to last paragraph.
“…In this situation where there is no common authority to resolve these many and serious disputes, we can easily imagine with Hobbes that the state of nature would become a “state of war”, even worse, a war of “all against all”…”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/#StaNatStaWar
The title doesn’t seem to fit the article at all.