Invaders be invaders...

History works on the basis of chosen identity not DNA, inevitably, because for most of history nobody knew about DNA. 

It’s why the Battle of Hastings in 1066 was between Anglo-Saxons and an invading army of Frenchmen, even if it wasn’t, not really. 

It’s why Obama is an African American and not any other variety of American. 

It’s why so called Palestinians are Arabs, because they tell us they are. (And, if they then also claim to be indigenous to their current location, we need to call them out for trying to have their cake and eat it.)

And thus, even if the fanciful notion that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were Palestinians appeals to you, in spite of the fact that the timelines make it impossible that they might have self-identified as such, the one thing they absolutely could not have been was Arabs. 

Indeed, if you are the sort of person inclined to regard people of European descent in places like the Americas and Australasia as inhabitants of stolen land, then so too are the Palestinian Arabs in the so called West Bank. This is not something you should be permitted to play both ways for reasons of political convenience. 

Invaders be invaders. And we are all of us invaders, one way or another. You possibly need to drop your sanctimonious and frankly moronic historical polarities and start trying to think about how people in general could be convinced to live harmoniously without them.

Nothing good or bad that happened in the past becomes less good or bad over time. There is no virtue (or indeed vice) in temporal proximity. Every one of our deceased historical ancestors is equally dead. It's a level playing field.

An idea containing unthinkables...

Earlier this week BBC Mundo published an article about the brave resistance of the people of Gaza in the face of invasion by an army led by Alexander the Great. Fascinating as it was, rather like the recent Metro piece on the 'cultural appropriation' of Hummus, one could sense the underlying determination to distract us from the one historical narrative that the hyper-liberals seem hyper-determined to suppress at all costs, that of Arab theocratic colonialism. 

For those of us who long for peace in the Near East (not least for the peace and quiet that this might engender) it seems evident that the realisation of Palestinian Arab national aspirations will be a prerequisite for longer-term concord. 

Yet these national aspirations, such as they are, have become bound up with the idea of Palestine, itself a composite of the aforementioned unmentionable historical narrative, indeed a version of it in modern, radicalised format, and thus so infused with both Jihadist extremism, anti-westernism and antisemitism, it is truly hard to see right now how they might be realised any time soon without feeding the fascist beast, so to speak. 

And the worst part is of course that this rather toxic supremacist idea has fostered a mirror image of itself within Israel, such that a nation which was essentially tolerant and socialist for much of its early history has adopted a virulently defensive posture comprising its own undeniably supremacist gestures. 

This has of course only enhanced the fundamental incompatibility at the heart of the conflict, and even if some territorial solution could be found along the lines that the majority of European bien pensants have long hoped for, there is an unwillingness on their part to acknowledge that the idea of Palestine contains additional incompatibilities with the formalised collective fictions which currently prevail in the Arab and wider Islamic world, and that the Jews and their doggedly-defended civic rights are really not the sole problem here. 

Many of those who currently self-bamboozle with the idea of Palestine are out there calling out the worst effects of Israel's 'self-defence', often mis-appropriating historically-specific and highly-loaded terms like Apartheid and Holocaust, and one is inclined to surmise that they do so to a large extent in order not to have to pause to consider that their own central idea promises all these supremacist side-effects in a radically purer form: genocide, ethnic cleansing, discrimination, gangsterism and state-sponsored evils of the more obvious varieties.

To appreciate what a sovereign Palestinian state might portend, one only has to consider the already marginalised and oppressed state of several highly vulnerable minority communities in Gaza: LGBTQ+, facing intimidation and worse, Christians, facing forced conversion and a pressure to leave, and black Palestinians, descendants of the African slaves that the Ottomans kept in to the 20th century (another stream of history that the mists have enveloped) who face all kinds of systemic racism and exclusion and are predominantly concentrated in a Gaza City neighbourhood sometimes referred to as al-Abeed, “the slaves.” 

Indeed anyone who rushes to denigrate Israel as an 'Apartheid state' should pause to ponder the fuller implications of From the river to the sea, Palestine will be 'FREE'. 

Today the 'Nakba' is primarily used to refer to the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Arabs by Israel after the 1948 war, or so says Wikipedia, at best an over-simplification of what actually happened, but at the time the tragedy referred to was not the loss of land, but the cosmic shame of failing to wipe out the 'zionist entity'. 

And the fact that a greater number of Jews were simultaneously ethnically-cleansed from locations around the nearby Islamic world is yet another unmentionable in progressive circles today. 

The displaced Palestinians, most of whom were complicit in a failed attempt at radical ethnic cleansing in 1948, were 'rewarded' with permanent, heritable refugee status. The displaced Jews' equivalent reward was, in effect, Israel. Neither have had anywhere else to go since the Arabs' ill-advised attempt to bypass the UN compromise. 

Even if the competing supremacisms are now somehow suppressed and the Palestinians accept a territorial compromise, simultaneously surrendering that seriously problematic 'right of return' (as once did those many millions of Germans shunted lastingly westwards at the end of WWII), there would remain the matter of how they would treat the Jews of Judea, a continual presence in that particular geographic space since both it and they acquired the name. 

One is inclined to think that this population would end up being lumped in legally with the so-called settlers, and their eventual fate marked by the merest of shrugs by the 'international community'. Though the zombie-progressives would surely cheer on a successful 'de-colonisation' event with guttural enthusiasm. 

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(With regard to Elica's last point in the text with the white background, I'll add that the most gobsmackingly racist society I have ever encountered on my travels is socialist Cuba, where people of predominantly African descent have long been formally excluded from certain sections of the economy and where one constantly hears racist tropes being openly shared in 'polite' conversation.)   

Together (2025)

Starring an actual married couple (rather like Eyes Wide Shut) Together is definitely memorable, and 'ooooh' on many levels, but also frustrating, because the ways it might have been improved are obvious.

Some of this might be chalked up to budget constraints, but there are weaknesses in the written treatment of connections between the body horror and the underlying thematic elements: relationships, gender, life goals and so on.

It also needs one or two extra cast members. Never was a movie more in need of one of those talky French dinner party scenes.

A fork in the road...

 

This infographic, currently doing the rounds, is rather succinctly emblematic of the sheer exuberance of the ignorance, bigotry and overall ethical confusion that has taken hold of the 'Free Palestine' cult...to its obvious detriment.

RFK, most documented genocide, I know, I know, but of all ‘the issues which matter’ here, the one that sticks out is smack in the middle: HAS INDIGENOUS CUISINE.

I’m a big fan of Iranian food and it does indeed belong to one of the most distinctive culinary traditions in the region. But Persia, just like the part of the Levant we nowadays refer to as Israel, was conquered and colonised by Arabs, and so the food in modern Iran bears witness to an exchange. Dolma (stuffed veg) for example, originated as the Arabian dish Mahshi yet, on the other hand, the Arabs themselves had not previously been consuming much rice or saffron before they invaded this ancient land.

Over on the western side of this expansion, given the complex history of the peoples and the rise and fall of several imperial systems before the arrival of Islam, eating habits were always a blend of influences.

Today’s Israel is inhabited by a veritable mix of peoples. 25% of citizens are non-Jewish: Palestinian Arabs, Druze, Bedouin and Christians in the main. The majority of the other 75% are non-Azkenazy, in other words they belong to the Middle Eastern or Mediterranean heritage groups. If the food they are eating is not ‘indigenous’, where did it come from? (Are they all just eating pizza like the citizens of Antigua?)

Is a taco ‘indigenous cuisine’?

It is an interesting question because the most famous variant — al pastor — was effectively introduced to Mexico by Levantine Orthodox Christians fleeing Islamic persecution in what we know today as Lebanon.

Across Mesoamerica, as today in Israel and the wider Levant, key ingredients and techniques remain from ancient times, yet Castilian colonisers, themselves carrying a fairly recent history of Islamic subjugation, brought a range of items with them which are absolutely essential to Mexican cuisine today: beef, chicken, cheese, rice, wheat, garlic, onions, plus various fruits like citrus.

30% of Israelis are of Azkenazi heritage, which means they bring some Eastern European delights to the party, like bagels. These are clearly no more ‘indigenous’ to Israel than any kind of wheat-based bread is here in Guatemala, but so what, and how thick do you have to be to make some sort of basically racist political point out of it?

It’s possibly also worth mentioning Beta Israel, the roughly 160,000 Israeli Jews of Ethiopian origin. I’m going to take a punt here and assume that the food they eat at home is in some significant ways different to that of other Israelis, reflecting their distinct geographical history. It’s probably ‘indigenous’ to their unique ethnic sub-culture, if not to Israel itself.

Should the Pro Pals hold this against them I wonder?

(Google to the rescue — Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) cuisine is characterized by its use of spices, stews (wot), and injera, a sourdough flatbread. While sharing many similarities with Ethiopian cuisine overall, certain dishes and practices are distinct. For example, Beta Israel do not eat raw meat dishes like kitfo and gored gored. They also observe kashrut (Jewish dietary laws), which influences their food preparation and consumption.)

Blame Game

The vast majority of positions people are taking regarding the conflict in the Middle East are basically silly and unhelpful.

One way I could illustrate this is to take each of them as they come and rework them into interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror.

So, Bono, for example, would be carefully trying to split blame between the bad boys of the Old Regime and the over-enthusiastic and over-committed newcomers.

This might seem like a more moderate and reasonable position than the one typically adopted by those who will instinctively suggest that the toffs had it coming or even ‘what actual evidence is there of guillotine usage?’ 

But historians are unlikely to be much impressed with either approach.

One thing you learn about bloody revolution is that the blame game essentially makes you an armchair participant and hobbles any attempt at serious analysis.

The October 7 pogrom started this new phase of the war just as the stormings of the Bastile and Winter Palace respectively started the two most famous European revolutions. Neither event is a self-contained explanation, but too often today ‘context’ is used more as a tool for suppressing sophisticated understanding rather than furthering it.

Deep-seated conflicts and radical upheavals in state power come about as a consequence of complex interactions between individuals, groups and the ideas which flow between and around them, plus a range of often peculiar, contingent circumstances, political, economic and social, which transcend — and ought to transcend — our ability to simplistically moralise about them.

Sanctimonious Hysteria

I have yet to come across the self-styled Anti-Zionist capable of succinctly explaining to me why their chosen creed is not just another, particularly noxious form of Antisemitism without immediately proceeding to do precisely the opposite.

The reasons for this ought to be obvious. For a start their typically urgent beliefs involve taking a stance on both Jewish civil rights and Islamist totalitarian fascism (and sometimes also on women's rights, minority rights and so on) which is wholly at odds with large sections of their otherwise cherished worldview.

For those for whom all this is little more than a form of socially-charged tribalistic cosplay, this may not matter all that much, but for those who care — genuinely care — the end result is typically a kind of sanctimonious hysteria...for they usually are aware on some levels at least of the cognitive dissonance and its unmistakable inference of bigotry, and this is simultaneously fed and partially disguised by an historical narrative spanning the spectrum from half-truths to outright lies: contortions, distortions, distractions, inversions; all present, along with an unwillingness to engage with alternative perspectives or any process of verification, such that in the end the final incompatibility they find themselves living with is that between the progressive ideal of free expression and their determination to bully all dissent into silence.

How the fire was stoked...

Since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 — in a free and fair election according to the UN’s Special Rapporteur (piss taker) Francesca Albanese — vast sums of money have been spaffed by the ‘international community’ on aid and development in Gaza, much of which has either ended up back in Qatari or Iranian bank accounts or has been more domestically invested in the infrastructure of terror and repression…

Qatar ($2.5B), US ($1.5B), Germany ($1.2B), Saudi Arabia ($1B), UK ($800M), Sweden ($600M), Norway ($600M), Japan ($500M), Canada ($400M), Netherlands ($400M), France ($300M), Italy ($200M), Belgium ($200M), Switzerland ($200M), Denmark ($200M), Australia ($200M), Kuwait ($600M), UAE ($500M), Turkey ($400M), Algeria ($300M), and Iran ($1.4B to Hamas). Others: Ireland, Spain, Finland.

And if one were looking to find one specific group to blame for the horrors of this present conflict — conspicuously missing from Bono’s recent, equable dishing out of censure between both Israel and the Palestinians — are all these UN-filtered outsiders who, collectively, for a long period of 16 years, were simultaneously ignoring and stoking this fundamentally unstable, combustible situation.

Holocausts

This word, whole/holos, burnt/kaustos was first coined by the 12th century English chronicler Richard of Devizes to specifically refer to the practice of the deliberate mass slaughter of Jews, in London.

Some 800 years later, should you be strongly inclined to widen its usage to encompass what may appear to be similar phenomena, I would suggest that you are going to need to be 100% sure that your motivation is free of any anti-Israelite bigotry.

Some of the same concerns surround the use of the term genocide in reasoned debate right now, specifically the manner with which it is presently being deployed, libellously, by members of the 'Free Palestine' cult.

Before permitting this extra charge to the discourse, ask yourself why it is seemingly so important in the first place to this cause and its prevailing obsessions.

Three key reasons absolutely stand out for me.

1) It's their calling card for carefree detachment from all forms of strictly fact-based debate.

2) It distracts everyone from the rather blatantly fascistic and genocidal aspects of the Hamas — and wider Islamist — project, as well as from the import of those chants of 'from the river to the sea'.

3) It represents an attempt to downplay and ultimately delegitimise two millennia of Jewish historical experience, quite unique in terms of repetitive 'Holocaust' events. 

Fun at the Fringes

You won't ever catch the Guardian describing the Temple Mount as the ancient synagogue-turned-mosque, will you?

Cordoba's wondrous Mezquita, medieval not ancient*, has an even more convoluted history, as construction began during the Emirate in the late 780s, making use of the site and partial ruins of the christian Basilica de San Vicente.

From what I can gather from today's more informative news stories (not including the Grauniad) is that the fire and subsequent roof collapse took place in an area which reveals how the building was not simply repurposed like Hagia Sofia over in Constantinople — though there was a lapse of around 300 years before the new owners went full Trump on the old mosque, adding a cross-shaped baroque chapel of comparative gaudiness and vulgarity, smack in the middle of the combo-structure, which quite shocked us when we came across it during our visit in the early noughties.

Yesterday's incident has of course set off all the usual suspects in Spain. Like the 'How dare you refer to this building as a Mezquita and not La Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción' types. (Some may be suspecting that the see-saw cycle at this location is as yet incomplete.)

There is an abiding myth that Islamic Andalucía was an unlikely paradise of tolerance, diversity and cultural exchange. The reality was somewhat different.

Christians who did not immediately convert became dhimmis, sub-citizens who paid a special tax called the jizya. Those who switched to Islam were referred to within the hegemonic culture as muwalladun (or muladi in Spanish), a word derived from the language of cattle breeders, meaning “cross breed”.

Though some dhimmis, Christians and Jews, rose to prominence in the bureaucracy (largely because they were naturally detached from the existing pattern of loyalties in the regime) the majority were treated as inferiors and subjected to periodic oppression, executions and so on.

Yet what is really fascinating here is that while neither of the two competing blocks could in any way be described as broad-minded melting pots, some seriously interesting and important cross-cultural transfers were taking place as a result of MIGRATION.

For the people doing all the fleeing across the civilisational borders — such as the dhimmis who ended up as 'Mozarabs' in Spain or the Muslims who had lived under Christian rule and then made a beeline back to the Emirate — were escaping the constraints of forced social inequality and opened up new opportunities, not just for themselves, but also for their host societies.

* It's tempting to believe that this little slip was very deliberate on the part of the newspaper.

Immoral Asymmetries

One of the greater mysteries of Arab Palestinian grievance is what its adherents hope to achieve by continuously peddling their almost absurdly asymmetrical narrative. 

Do they imagine, for example, that their relentless demonisation of the Jewish state will reach some sort of tipping point that it will suddenly go 'poof' and vanish forever with no further unpleasant consequences for the region?

All the fundamental problems with the standard Arab Palestinian tale for global consumption were on display in Columbia agitator and former-detainee Mahmoud Khalil's recent interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein.

Khalil talks about the lack of legal rights enjoyed by Palestinians Arabs in Syria today and how his grandma's family were forced to depart a township called Tiveria, now situated within Israel. 

But he does not expand at all on the underlying circumstances. Indeed, he very specifically fails to mention the bloodthirsty pogrom carried out against the Jewish population of that same town in 1938, which you'd think might have played some role in his family's ultimate departure from it. 

Like a lot of those who identify as Palestinian Arabs, he focuses exclusively on his own sense of loss, but at no point recognises any of the following: 

1. That the original UN partition plan envisaged no major displacement of populations in situ.
2. That many of the Arabs who were eventually forced to move because of the war they had started were shifted out of the way not by Israelis, but in reality by other Arabs.
3. That many of those who ended up as hereditary refugees after the '48 war were not even long-term Palestinians proper, but trapped migrants that the other Arab states wished to use as political pawns. 

And most crucially, when we consider the strange yet relevant symmetries of grievance, that more Jews were displaced from around the Middle East as a result of this conflict they did not choose, than Arabs after the so called 'Nakba'. 

Khalil describes the October 7 atrocity to Klein as a 'desperate attempt to break the cycle', when what it surely more obviously represented was a desperate attempt by Hamas and its Iranian sponsors to head off the imminent threat of diplomatic normalisation: in other words, to continue the cycle at all costs. 

For peace to now have a chance, everyone in the region needs to able to anticipate an existence with a significant measure of security from ethno-religious aggression, having put away the various custom-made historical axes that they have been attempting to grind for over a century.  

And the various other big players, inside and outside the region, really need to stop making use of this conflict as a tool for the expression and even management of their own domestic social and political issues. (This is by no means limited to Arab nations any more.) 

It might seem 'fair' to compensate for the seemingly monstrous asymmetry in military might with a fabricated and also quite monstrous asymmetry in how the past is chronicled, pro-actively remembered and then disseminated, but this attempt at rebalancing has only served to add spin to the cycle and undermines the cause of peace overall. 

This means that right now, Palestinian Arabs in particular, ought to let go of their own exclusive, 'cosmic' sense of loss in how this has all played out. 

The long history of Islamic colonialism and oppression in this area cannot be made to simply vanish from the record by convincing a load of unlettered, radicalised-lite Americans that everybody else is the coloniser, the occupier, the would be genocidal maniac...never the poor, misunderstood Islamist. 

On some level every single Palestinian Arab in the Levant is descended from a conqueror — rather like white South Africans — and whatever their inferred rights may now be, they surely also have a certain obligation to play a tempered role in discovering a post-colonial solution which ultimately works for all the regional communities, especially those who were there before the Mohammedans came charging in. 

And beyond a subset of gullible nitwits, nobody is really buying their inverted narrative of occupation and loss, which is rather plainly geared towards a form of exclusively Jihadist RE-colonisation. 

Right now what is happening is terrible. It will end, as the last World War ended, when the bad guys are defeated and their system fully dismantled. Their bomb-blasted territory will almost certainly then be occupied by the victors, while a plan for the post-fascist, de-militarised future is then mooted, and, one supposes, funded. 

This is how these things nearly always go, certainly that's how it went for the Germans and the Japanese.

All discourse which aims to delay, distract, even deny this outcome, no matter how well it apes the language of humanitarian concern or righteous anger, strikes me as fundamentally immoral, because it will only function to extend the evolving calamity, and then 'the cycle'. 

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

You might say that Gareth Edwards was born to direct a Jurassic reboot (...or rebirth). 

His contributions, mainly in the extraordinary action sequences, are what makes this addition to the franchise so much fun, perhaps papering over the problems with plot and character, both in the main underdeveloped and under-utilised, even in the case of chuchitosaurus ('Dolores').

It's absurdly simple to predict precisely the munching order for the 'expendable' members of the ensemble.

A couple of smallish complaints that I'd level at Edwards are that he seems a bit better at composing mobile CGI beasties than static landscapes, and that in key moments his dinos seem rather sluggish and hesitant, as if they too have been handed the munch list and know who's on it and in which order they are to be snarfled.

Provocative Incitements

To the historically and culturally illiterate nitwits at this rag, praying at the most important site in Judaism is the equivalent of punctuating 'my heart goes out to you' with a straight-armed salute at a celebratory rally.

Unmentioned in this article, yesterday saw Jews worldwide marking Tisha B'Av, a solemn festival of mourning which commemorates the destruction of both the first and second Temples...and the ruins of the latter would be where, exactly?

There's a bit more to this 'provocative incitement' than a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Mohammed. Maybe now would be the time for one of those periodic reminders of how the Al-Aqsa mosque got there in the first place...

For it was plonked on top of Judaism’s most holy site, deliberately, not because the location was somehow especially sacred for Muslims, but as an act of calculated colonialist trespass and affront, a 'provocative incitement' no less, along the lines of what the Spanish elected to do to the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán/Mexico City and elsewhere. (Sure enough today one often sees individuals dressed as 'Aztecs' conducting rituals around the Catholic Cathedral which could best be described as non-canonical.)

Whilst besieging Jerusalem, Caliph Omar conceived the plan of demolishing the christian holiest of holies, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and building his triumphal mosque at that sacred location.

But the church survived, for the time being being at least — one of the Caliph's successors was less given to the path of compromise — as the Patriarch of now conquered Jerusalem, a wily Greek, 'persuaded' Omar that what he really wanted to do was humiliate the Jews, not the Christians.

All this is recorded historical fact.

I know that the Guardian doesn't seem to be much interested in facts any more, but anything else you might have picked up about this 'controversial' site and the origins and sacred significance of the structure on top are part of a mythological morass of self-serving fantasies that the Arabs and their all-encompassing political-religious ideology have woven around their presence in Jerusalem.

Should Jews be wont to cause offence by praying at this spot, good on them. It's what Guardian lefties often refer to as 'resistance'.

And, in theory at least, a variety of such in which no real hurt is done, except to feelings — it's just religious idiots doing what religious idiots do, and if some of these idiots choose to adopt a posture of intemperate, vindictive umbrage, that would be revealing, wouldn't it?