Never Mind the Bollards...

Many of the same people who are so offended by the walls and checkpoints that Israel (and Egypt) have erected between themselves and the Islamists living next door are perfectly happy to discuss the recent ‘vehicle attacks’ in Magdeburg and New Orleans almost solely in terms of inadequate barriers — in effect the problem becomes one of policing and planning: stopping those darned vehicles from getting away with murder.

Israelis show little reticence when it comes to talking about the cultural and ideological issues that force them to live like zombie apocalypse survivors within a fortified compound, but many outside observers roll their eyes at this whilst appearing most deeply engaged with the sorrowful condition of the poor zombies. So what if they keep breaking into the compound and munching people? Israelis should just suck it up, for this zombie apocalypse was somehow all their fault.

Meanwhile, back in their own societies, these same armchair Middle Easterners conspicuously fail to apply the very same conclusions — that simply containing the Islamist problem with ever more formidable fortifications might not be the best long term solution (...rather like arming American High School P.E. teachers).

In other words, that they really ought — as they have long lectured Israel — to address the underlying issues a little more resolutely.

These underlying issues are deeply complex and have an air of intractability about them, but refusing to even talk about them for fear of causing a stonking row and setting off the wingnuts is surely the worst of all possible starts.

Whether the problem is mass murder or mass rape, every time we try to apply labels to it, one can almost hear the hiss of an airlock door as it seals. It’s not Islam, because that’s the religion of peace, it’s not Terrorism, because it has elements of noble resistance, it’s not Misogyny, it’s modesty, and so on.

And in as much that it’s Anti-Western it seemingly taps into a low lying squeamishness that has wider prevalence in the culture, specifically within academia.

Right now the US seems willing to simply absorb the Bourbon Street incident as just another mass killing of the ‘running amok’ variety, where the lasting political issue is ultimately the weapon used, in this case a truck rather than an assault rifle, smothering the need to address the mentality itself and both its foundation and likely trajectory. 

In this case, however, it really is people killing people, not pickups. And not because the bollards aren't big enough.

Weaponised?

 

It strikes me that there has been a modicum of both weaponisation and inverted-weaponisation, just as there has been with ‘racist’.

But here’s the thing. Defining antisemitism is essentially a task for Jews, just as defining anti-black racism has always been a task for non-whites. Why would anyone even care when a white person attempts to set the boundaries in a fashion that obviously suits their own political (or geo-political) biases?

Just because Israel says something is antisemitic does not mean that it is…or indeed, isn’t.

That’s why have the widely accepted IHRA ‘working’ definition of Antisemitism which anyone, Jewish or otherwise, can keep handy when reading relevant posts on social media…or the Guardian.

And frankly, online games of bigotry BINGO are all too easy to set up these days. 

 

For example...if the article or post makes “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews” or accuses them “as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews”, BINGO! the author has an obvious pathological problem.

If the intent of the piece is to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or if it applies “double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” BINGO! Antisemite.

The loudest and simplest shout of all comes when the author deploys “the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g. blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis” or openly draws “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

BIIIIIIINGO!!!

Israel claiming something or someone is antisemitic when they may not be, is ultimately less prejudicial to the fundamental meaning of the notion, than so-called progressives in denial about their own deep-seated bigotry attempting to distract the entire culture from its agreed, speaker-neutral formulation for this variety of hate speech.

Miracle upon Miracle

The Christian miracle — where the charismatic chap increases the quantity of food relative to the quantity of hungry people.

MEETS

The Socialist miracle — where the un-charismatic buffoon does pretty much exactly the opposite.

 

Venezuelan Painting, 2022

 

In the Shadow

 

"Remember that the gates of Paradise lie in the shadow of the sword"

> Saying of Muhammad, as recorded by Salih Muslim

Today seemed as good a day as any to tuck into Tom Holland's self-consciously 'swashbuckling' and revisionist examination of early-stage Islam, set within the context of late-stage Roman and Persian power at the rear-end of what we Europeans call 'antiquity'...depending where you were at the time.

A Guardian reviewer called this book 'cavalier', 'unreliable' and 'most irresponsible', and particularly lambasted Holland for a failure to follow French scholarship, all of which right now sounds like a firm recommendation.

It has been flagged up lately as exactly the kind of serious, generally non-polemical historical work by a leading British author which might soon fall foul of the UK Labour government's approach to 'free speech' and Islamophobia.

If it's content that supports "the religion of peace" message (or indeed, the colonial victimhood narrative) that one is seeking, I'm supposing that this may not be the best title with which to start.

 

Cast into the Cosmos

 

 

The rather sweet little note that President Carter appended to the Voyager spacecraft in '77 reads a bit like something a High School kid who’d been binge-watching Star Trek might have scribbled. (Ironically of course, given the role that the Voyager was to play not long afterward as the franchise broke out onto the big screen.)

 

Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy record was principled and of mixed success, shall we say.

And perhaps here we can extract some clues as to why this might have been. He betrays some peculiarly American prejudices about the way the lines on our political maps come about. These include the notion that all of us human beings are on an evolutionary path to a state of government that looks a lot like the USA writ large.

Nation states, particularly those based on identifiable nations, are thus a more primitive form. Carter assumes that his extraterrestrial audience will inherently understand this. In this worldview, blocks or federations are great, empires however, always decrepit, and don’t say ‘world government’ or half your audience will disappear off into a homemade bunker.

I suggested in a post the other day that one of the reasons that we misunderstand the Middle East, often deliberately so, is that we apply some combination of the American and the Marxist way of looking at human organisation to the region, both containing an inherent sense of a direction of travel.

In fact there is always an innate tension in our individual and collective relationship to the available scales of organisation and control which, unlike time or natural selection, possesses a very definite reverse gear.

Context and Scale

One doesn’t have to look very hard at all to find examples of archetypally-oppressed people acting in a manner that looks rather startlingly oppressive.

Such incidents sit, rather like that tree in the forest, in a historical space where they continue to exist as facts no whether or not we see or comment on them. Yet how we as historians, or even just citizens of tolerant societies, talk about these incidents is often very revealing. Context and scale are always extremely important.

Take Liberia, a small country in West Africa which often turns up on lists (or maps such as this) of the uncolonised, which was in fact first established in 1822 by an organisation called The American Colonization Society (ACS) , good folk we’d probably refer to as ‘progressives’ today, who came up with the plan of sending freed or freeborn African Americans back to Africa in order to establish a new model society based on their admirably liberal ideals, hence the name. The capital Monrovia is named after POTUS Monroe, he of the famous, completely non-colonial Doctrine.

 

Let’s just say that the Liberian experiment did not go 100% according to plan. The emigrants did not adapt so well at first to their ‘homeland’, with only 39% surviving the first couple of decades. The country achieved independence from the ACS in 1847, but by this time the newcomers had set themselves up as a notoriously abusive elite who were not treating the natives particularly well at all.

 

Anyway, for the purposes of what I am about to say, that’s all that really needs to be shared. If I were to now say that the behaviour of this one small group of African Americans somehow offsets one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed, the Atlantic Slave Trade, I’m sure you’d start questioning my underlying motives. I'd certainly hope so.

 

Yet this in essence is what many of the Pro-Pals have been doing, often knowingly, when they compare Israel to the Third Reich or even Apartheid South Africa. 

 

One does not have to be a towering genius to spot the intent to wash away centuries of Jewish historical experience of slaughter and oppression, pogroms, Spanish Inquisitions and so on — and perhaps even more specifically, somehow offset one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed, the Holocaust.

 

They use terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ not in the first instance because they represent appropriately accurate descriptions of circumstances, nor because they would equitably apply them to similar situations elsewhere in our complex world, but instead precisely because they are attempting to pin these offences on Jews, as the latest twist in the double millennia-old demonisation game.

Not even the most disingenuous of useful idiot could hope to pretend otherwise. For while most would immediately understand both the probable malignancy and stupidity of any attempt to downplay the evil of slavery using one of history’s bizarre spin-off sideshows, they are often unquestioningly on board with text and imagery which juxtaposes the Star of David with Hitler and/or Nazi swastikas.

 

These manoeuvres belong to the part of contemporary hate speech known as Holocaust Inversion. (Maybe the reason we don’t have an equivalent term for slavery is that it is far less common.)

Cod-casuistry of this sort should be actively discouraged and punished, where appropriate, yet we now appear to live in societies where otherwise decent people — though mostly the self-declared kind — increasingly seem to understand that they can get away with it.