This is pretty grim stuff by the splendid Nancy Rommelmann. Read it anyway.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Bearing witness to the October 7th massacreNovember 8th, 2023 |
 26 comments to Bearing witness to the October 7th massacre |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Hollywood isn’t entirely bad.
Gal Gadot for example.
Go, Wonder Woman!
I have said several times, here, and elsewhere, that everyone needs to see this utter depravity.
Alas, some people don’t want the truth to be seen. It is against what they just know.
Here day fights with night.
The Muslims of the World need to know what was done for the glory of Allah. Everyone does. Yes, it is horrific and that is exactly why it needs to be seen.
Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.
– General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1945.
I’ve never been able to understand the whole “Kill the Jew” thing, at all. What’s the attraction, for these losers to be doing these things to Jews? Why do they default to these atrocities?
As well, what the hell is it about Jews that attracts the minds of these deviants like moths to a lamp in the darkness? Why are they fixated on killing Jews, seemingly from the womb?
And, the institutionalized anti-Semitism? Where does that come from? What’s the damn point of it all? Does it work, for anyone? Doesn’t even make sense, because if the lurid claims of all these varied and sundry assholes were true, about the Jews, then they’d already be dead and never have had a chance to spout their hatred, because if there was an international conspiracy of Jews, then why the hell would that conspiracy allow them to live, spouting hatred?
The illogic is so bad you wonder how they can’t see it for themselves.
She’s right about why this isn’t going to be just generally distributed as a learning tool.
Most of us will see that presentation and be horrified.
The subhumans will use it as a recruiting tool. Successfully.
Meanwhile, Roger Waters (the Pink Floyd chap whom I wrote about a while ago), has claimed that the Oct. 7 pogrom was a “false flag” operation.
The man is a horror. I am frankly astonished he gets any business as a performer at all, but maybe I should not be surprised, given the continued normalisation of Jew hatred in parts of the allegedly “civilised” world.
Kirk: I am trying to think about the answers to your questions. In one sense, Jew hatred is a sickness in people who fear those who are different, who strive for things, achieve and build. It is, in a way, a form of “hatred of the good for being the good”; a way of deflecting attention from your own faults, failings and transgressions.
What sickens and frightens me is the seeming normalisation of anti-semitism in parts of the West. It is becoming more brazen; there isn’t even the attempt by some to try and hide behind terms such as “Of course I have no problems with Jews, but…”
Someone close to me the other day said “the Jews never seem to ask themselves why they keep getting attacked”…with the unspoken line that they are causing the problem. This is from an educated person, not an idiot. This mind virus is everywhere.
I think Tom Lehrer’s National Brotherhood Week is appropriate again . . .
“Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews”
I don’t understand the anti-Semitism in the West. Maybe hating the out-group provides a rallying point for the majority, and the Jews have been convenient for centuries. That doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s the only thing I can think of.
One thing that sadistic mass murder of October 7th has done is destroy the “unintended consequences” line that was taken, taken in good faith, by F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and many others. The idea that the horrors that Collectivism brings are “unintended consequences” – and that explaining to the left what their policies will lead to, will lead them to change course.
Many of the “protestors” in the West supporting the sadistic mass murder of October 7th (the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust – and murder done in the most sadistic and depraved ways) are NOT Muslims – they are Western leftists, and they know (THEY KNOW) what was done – and that is what they support.
They also, with profound sadism, “project” (in Saul Alinsky, a person from a once Jewish family, fashion) their own crimes on their opponents (indeed they get a kick out of lying in this way) – as we recently witnessed with the evil (and they are evil) people who disrupted the Congressional hearings on Freedom of Speech in universities – ironically they complained of being censored as they were removed from the room for shouting down witnesses (they were trying to silence speech – but they pretended they were the victims), and OF COURSE these evil people shouted their support of “Gaza” – they know what happened on October 7th (they know) and that is what they support.
So no more of this “unintended consequences” line – the people who want Israel to withdraw from the “West Bank” (much of which is closer to the sea than to the river Jordan) know very well what happened with Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal of 2005 – and that is what they want for the “West Bank” as well (and anyone who comes out with the line that “the Palestinian Authority recognises Israel’s right to exist” speaks with forked tongue – as such things as their school textbooks show) – it is what they want, it is the intended, not unintended, consequence of their proposed policy.
The same is true of American cities – the terrible consequences of leftist policy are not “unintended” which is why the policies are not changed when the consequences become obvious. Even back in the 1960s such people as “Cloward and Piven” (the husband and wife team who helped design many of the Progressive policies) knew what the consequences of the policies would be – the collapse of society (“capitalist society” would be what they would call it) was what-they-wanted.
You could show this film to leftist activists (again NOT Muslims) and their only response would be to giggle (yes giggle) at the mutilated bodies, and to chant “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea”.
There is no “knowledge problem”, this is not about “unintended consequences” – the people who dominate the universities and then go off into the government, and corporate, bureaucracy – know-what-they-do.
What sickens and frightens me is the seeming normalisation of anti-semitism in parts of the West. It is becoming more brazen
Growing up in the 1960s believe me it’s been pretty brazen for a while. At the age of either 6 or 7 I recall my father being told that I could no longer attend the local Cub Scout pack as it had been found out after several weeks that I was Jewish and the pack was Christian’s only.
The pack leader who gave my father this unwelcome message was the local Baptist minister.
This anti-semitism is mainly found in Christian cultures. Indians aren’t anti-Jewish, nor are Chinese. And Christians are astonished that Jews can’t see the truth that Jesus IS the one true Messiah! And Arabs can’t see why Jews don’t accept Mohammed as a prophet. Nor do they want to accept that the re-emergence of Israel means that the Koran is wrong.
Tonight (9-10 November) is the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
The pack leader who gave my father this unwelcome message was the local Baptist minister.
My respect for many so-called Christians continues to fall. Unless I am missing something, the Pope, Archbishop of Canterbury here in the UK, and leaders of churches in other countries haven’t exactly shaken the ground with their denunciations of the October 7 pogrom.
Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray said:
As examples, those kinda suck; there are no significant populations of Jews in either India or China. If there were a “mind virus” causing anti-Semitism, carried by Jews, then there’s not a lot of chance for it to have spread in either country.
Of course, they have their own parallel issues. Across a broad swathe of Asia, Chinese emigres are seen as the “Jews of Asia”, and hated in similar ways for similar surface reasons.
To a degree, I think the root of a lot of anti-Semitism comes down to “Smart Kid Syndrome”, where the kids who’re only somewhat smart manage to piss all their peers off by making themselves the “teacher’s pet”. There’s a lot of things that the Jews do as a cultural group that might tend to generate this response, such as setting themselves apart and actually being smarter than average due to their cultural mandates for literacy and scholarship. The Ashkenazi Jews of Europe experienced a “passage through the needle” in all those ghettoes they were forced into, in that only the really smart survived and thrived in those environments.
Being the annoying smart kid in a classroom can really piss a lot of people off. If you don’t figure that out and modify your behavior, I can see how that could escalate into a lot of what you see with anti-Semitism.
In the Arab frame, you have a lot of issues pushing into this, I suspect: For one, they feel a sense of “imperial loss”, in that where they were once top of the heap in Islam, the Turks came along and toppled them off into the scrapheap. Then, after centuries of that, along come these Westernized Jews that turn the desert around them into a veritable garden, living better than the Arabs through their own hard work and effort. This has the effect of showing the Arabs up, demonstrating their inherent inferiority as a culture, and on and on and on. The military defeats inflicted on them by the Jews only made it worse, because the Arabs could, before that, always fall back on what badasses they were as fighters. The Jews showing up with soldierly discipline and organization, then beating the crap out of them? Yeah; that had to hurt.
I suspect that much of the issue for the Arabs is hurt pride and envy of the Jews doing so much better than they are. Look at the Gaza Strip, then look at Israel. Consider those greenhouses the Israelis left behind, all the help they’ve offered with things like irrigation; that’s got to rankle the Arab soul, which is already pretty damn delusional and envious of the “other”.
So… Maybe that’s a part of it? Dunno; been trying to work out all the roots of anti-Semitism for most of my life, and I still don’t “get it”. I grew up in a fairly anti-Semitic environment from my Eastern European step-dad and all his friends, and that just didn’t “take” with me because the other half of my inputs were entirely indifferent to the idea, and I could never see any logic in their belief system. You asked him or most of his friends where the hell they’d encountered actual real-live Jewish persecution in any aspect of their lives, and the very best you could get was some severely fourth-degree stuff, like the moneylender four generations back two or three villages over, who wasn’t even a Jew, for sure… All based on rumor, folklore, and propaganda. You’d hear stories from them that were obviously cribbed from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but run through a couple of games of “Telephone” to distort it just enough that they could make it their own… None of it was based on anything first-hand experienced or “real”; all just what you’d have to term folklore.
What intrigued me then, and now, was how damn pervasive and seemingly universal it all was. How’d some crap like that get going in rural Balkan-land, and then keep going, with the paucity of actual, y’know… Jews? I mean, if there were any people who should have gotten the tick-mark for exploiters of the common folk, it should have been all those damn Austrians and Turks, right? But, the Jew is the universal go-to scapegoat for most of the people from that region that I’ve met, over the years… And, where, pray tell, are all the damn Jews around there? Especially after WWII…
It’s a bizarrely pervasive and “sticky” set of prejudices that just don’t make a hell of a lot of sense, when you actually examine it. In a way, I think it’s sort of the same thing with my black friend’s dogs: They did not like whites, or any other ethnic group, and I think that they picked up on unconscious cues from their owners and acted on the instinct-level distrust they had for outsiders. My own dogs did the same with anyone who didn’t “match” with what they were used to; I was appalled to find my German Shepherd, when I was a kid, behaving as though he were a police dog belonging to a Southern Sheriff’s department: He hated blacks and Mexicans, from the first time he met one.
Which left me wondering what the hell he was picking up on, from me, let me tell you. I still feel more than slightly horrified, thinking about that.
Jonathan Pearce said:
I’d submit that many of these people you’re terming “so-called Christians” are really the same sort of human sludge that clogs up all the other institutions, men and women who got themselves sweet gigs in the hierarchy and who see their primary job as protecting said hierarchy, lest their sweet jobs go away. As such, they’re mostly going to be moral cowards, jobsworthies that don’t want to rock the boat. Few of them are actually “believers” in that which their institution is putatively meant to be serving, either. It’s all about the hierarchy and the structure; the belief system it’s meant to support is just for the rubes. The Anglican church is particularly bad about this, as are a lot of Catholic dioceses I’ve encountered. About the only Catholic priest I can think of, that I’ve actually known, who truly believed in God and not the Church bureaucracy, was a Polish military chaplain we had who had been badly abused under the Communists. He was a devout “fire-and-brimstone” Catholic, and I have no doubt his faith was sincere.
I still wouldn’t have left him in charge of any Communist POWs, though. In that regard, the man was a walking probable war crime…
Kirk, the cultural constrast that you are describing subsumes one that is frequently advanced as characterizing the North/South divide in the run-up to the US Civil War. I remark on this because I had been struck by the parallel between the way in which demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians sprang into life on October 7th before any Israeli response and the way in which demonstrations in the Upper South in solidarity with the shelling of Fort Sumter sprang into life before Lincoln had issued his call for volunteers.
Alan Peakall said:
I see some similarities in the irrational response of both groups in both historical cases. Some.
The whole thing is wrapped up in human irrationality. If the South hadn’t had the (to the North’s view…) lunatic assumption that Lincoln was going to free the slaves to rape and pillage all across the South, then they wouldn’t have done what they did. And, even if Lincoln had been planning on that, the upshot was that the slaves weren’t in any position to do so. It was a crazy set of assumptions that led to the Civil War, mostly on the part of the South. Lincoln might have been able to thread the needle and defuse the situation, but with all the crazed drum-beating in the South, that wasn’t happening. The rest of the country electing Lincoln was a declaration of war on them, or so they chose to take it.
The similarity with today’s Gaza/Hamas issue is the lengthy period of propaganda and agitation that’s been wrapped around the issue in the academy. The various Hamas supporters are not in any way rational, no more than the Southerners were, regarding Lincoln. End of the day, they’d all be better off negotiating in good faith about how to solve the problems, but… They’re not going to, because the people who elected Hamas don’t have realistic or rational goals. They want every Israeli dead, and off “their” land, which they never owned. The Israelis aren’t likely to go anywhere peacefully, and the fact that they’re a nuclear power…? WTF? What expectations do the Gazan Arabs have? Even if they had the support of Iran, and Iran nuked Israel off the map, what does that leave them with? An irradiated hellscape next door? One whose creation would destroy them, as well? How’s that work, again?
I mean, even if they get their little “…from the river to the sea…” deal going, where’s that going to leave them, afterwards? Do they realistically think that they’re going to kill seven million Israelis, and not pay a price in terms of casualties? Their idea of “exchange ratios” has to be dramatically delusional to even posit this BS.
Yet, here we are. The South at least had an ever-so-slight chance of winning something. The Gazans just have a pointless and entirely nihilistic desire to kill Jews, which isn’t a recipe for victory or even much in the way of a life.
I mean, let’s say the Iranians get nukes and come “riding to the rescue” of Hamas, by nuking all of Israel. Where’s that leave Gaza and the West Bank? Do they think that they’re going to somehow “win” something, other than a really big prize for “Stupid”?
The whole thing amounts to a really big, real-world version of that South Park episode with the Underwear Gnomes and their business plan: 1. Collect Underwear 2. ????? 3. Profit!!!
For those not paying attention, we’re currently at the “Collect Underwear” phase of the Hamas business plan. The intermediary phases have yet to manifest…
Part of the issue is people want a certain political outcome without wanting to know how the sausage is made. They want Israel gone, but they don’t want to acknowledge these attacks or to minimize them or deflect them. They don’t want to confront the idea that the people they are supporting are the same people cutting the heads off of toddlers and gangraping the mothers to death before sitting gown to breakfast and putting the whole affair on video. So they march in support of the Hamas killers because they want Israel gone.
It’s really not different than your Victorian man in the street happy to be a part of the British Empire without knowing what the Redcoat in Africa or India is really doing when it comes enforcing London’s will. Or the fervent advocate of Manifest Destiny who likes Grant’s decision to bring the Indians to heel without actually understanding what it means to have US cavalry ride into a village and ride out after killing women and children. Or the Socialist thrilled that the Soviet Union is bringing socialism to the world without actually looking at why people are risking their lives to escape Cuba or East Germany or Russia.
@Stephen R. Don’t think the redcoat in India was doing much that was bad. Rough justice perhaps, but generally much better than the alternative.
Clovis Sangrail said:
I guess it depends on the perspective; the destruction of Indian culture embodied in the suppression of suttee and the Thugs is a terrible, terrible thing from the views of some Indians.
Just as the end of the Aztec traditions of ritual human sacrifice were horrendous cultural losses, and on and on.
You can’t please most people, and the ones who want to go digging up events from a hundred or two hundred years ago to justify what they’re doing now are generally bad people who deserve bad things to happen to them.
I’m on the side of the general arc of “improvement in human life”, and I happen to feel that is best served by the current “least bad” solution to same, which has been the Western canon and its basically Judeo-Christian underpinnings.
Yes, ending slavery in Africa and ending human sacrifices in Central America, and dragging the noble savages of the Great Plains into the modern world kicking and screaming ultimately were good things, but they weren’t done gently. My point isn’t that the actions of the Redcoat, Spaniard, or US cavalry trooper were brutal but could have been a lot worse. My point is the intelligentsia of those various centuries don’t really want to know how those edicts of theirs are carried out. They simply didn’t care what it took to make the world British, or turn the Americas Catholic, or remove the Indians so the railroads and white settlers could do something with the land.
The situation with the pro-Palestinian crowd is much the same. They want the Palestinian state (which ultimately means no Israel) and don’t care how it happens. There is a mental disconnect because they revel in their willful ignorance and much like the parlor-room types of old will come up with some type of an excuse why it had to be done or why it is for the best. And why wouldn’t they? Their hands aren’t bloody at the end of the day. They gleefully send other men to die for their political ideals. They are no different than the universal civilian disarmament types that demand laws taking my guns. They won’t be the ones stacking up outside and facing rounds coming at them because they will never put themselves in harm’s way. That’s someone else’s job, and if mistakes are made, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, now can you?
That is why I said instead of sanitizing the Hamas attack, Israel should be showing clips and photos and forcing the students and professors to look at what Hamas has done and make them publicly defend them.
@ Steven R,
I fully concur and support what you’re saying, here.
I do have to say that I doubt that merely rubbing their faces in it would do the least bit of good. The Hamas fellow-travelers aren’t going to change their minds based on rationally presented evidence, because they never arrived at their belief system by any process of actual rational thought in the first place.
It’s like that damn kid of my friend, who denied, denied, denied that touching a hot burner would hurt. He kept trying to do it, apparently because “Pretty red ring”, or something. His parents went nuts trying to prevent him from doing that, and there was nothing rational they could convey to that little nutter that could convince him not to do it.
Until, one day, he did. Got his hand very badly burned, and there was suddenly a very permanent aversion to touching red-hot glowy things in that child… Who has, throughout the rest of his life, demonstrated very little ability to learn from anything other than the most painful of personal experiences.
It would be my speculation that a lot of these Hamas-loving twits would have to be gang-raped to death before they accepted that their world-view was erroneous.
Paul,
A few peole have kinda got in before me on this. But here’s my penny’s worth…
I don’t think “THEY DO KNOW”. I fear you are guilty of projecting your own clarity of thought onto others. A lot of people quite simply cannot comprehend things which fall outside of their World View. Yes, it’s double-think. It’s in the Hamas Charter which blames Jews for basically everything including WWII (“from which they greatly profitted”). You get it with a certain strain of Holocaust deniers who seem to simultaneously believe it was a good thing and it never happened. Although the Jewish people seem to attract this a lot for some reason (perhaps because they are from a white European perspective an “other” that doesn’t look too “other”) it is a a very common phenomena in every field of human thinking.
In this case it is simply “Palestinians are oppressed”. “Oppressed people can’t be evil”. Therefore, at some level, October 7th didn’t really happen.
In 1054 a supernova exploded in our galaxy. Now that is a sight to behold. A star visible in daylight. The Japaness, Koreans and Chinese recorded it. Perhaps others but there is no record in Europe depite it being visible here. Why? It was a change in the sphere of fixed stars and that couldn’t happen according to the Ptolomaic/Aristotelian physics of Europe at the time. Scroll forward to 1604 and we have another supernova just as visible. Astronomy was in a state of flux by then. We had Gallileo and Copernicus, Tyche and Kepler. This one was recorded in Europe – it has been named for Johannes Kepler.
Johnathan Peace – do not confuse “leaders of Churches” with Christians.
Whether it is called the “Social Gospel” or “Liberation Theology” what many (not all – but many) these “leaders of Churches” believe in is Collectivism – they do not believe that they, as individuals, will be held to account before God after they are dead (they believe “once you are dead you dead” – Christians do not believe that).
However, I accept your point – many atheists are good and honourable people, and often “leaders of Churches” are not.
NickM.
I think the left know the consequences of what they advocate – and some other people, including yourself, disagree – and hold that the leftist activists do not know what their policies would result in.
It would be a much nicer world if you were correct – but the evidence, for example their failure to change course when the results become obvious (as they are in American cities) indicates that you are mistaken.
That and the fact that the leading leftists (such as Cloward and Piven) said that their aim was to destroy society (they would call it “capitalist society”).
When people say they are, for example, followers of Saul Alinsky they tell me a lot about their aims – not just their tactics.
As for the present dispute – the left know perfectly well what happened on October 7th 2023, and they SUPPORT what happened.
Why is this strange? After all the Jews were better off, inequality, so they “deserved” to be raped, mutilated and murdered. You are also forgetting basic human sadism – leftist doctrine (like the doctrines of a certain religion) gives people the excuse to indulge in human blood lust and other evil human desires.
I understand the left well – I am no saint, evil instincts are something I well understand.
We humans have a lot of evil in us (I certainly do) – all a leftist (someone who chooses the left hand path) really is, is someone who says “Yes!” to the evil within themselves, rather than resisting it. The person who screams out the slogan “Social Justice” knows, deep down, that they are a destroyer – a thief and a murderer, but the doctrine gives them an excuse to indulge the dark part of human nature.
Are they all like this? NO they are not – but far more are than Hayek, Friedman or yourself believe to be the case. At it is becoming horribly obvious that many (very many) of them are like this.
They know what happened – and they enjoy what happened.
Paul,
No, it wouldn’t be a better World. The almost deliberate ignorance of evil is arguably more damaging than the simple embracing of it.
I’m not being a bleeding heart here but cognitive dissonance is a real thing. If reality challenges your own entrenched World-View then that can be a very difficult barricade for truth to broach.
It would be a much nicer world if you were correct – but the evidence, for example their failure to change course when the results become obvious (as they are in American cities) indicates that you are mistaken.
You assume these people are rational, Paul. I admire your optimism about the essence of human nature on that*. They are not. They have their theories and they are sticking to them. They know The Truth and reality be damned! I have seen interviews with non-Muslim protestors who stated that, “Hamas wouldn’t do this” (because they’re the white hats, right?). They just don’t see because it simply doesn’t compute in their Universe.
It is philosophical idealism (very much a German thing going back at least to Kant and probably Liebniz – and have not German “philosphers brought us Hell on Earth?) taken plus-uber. Read this by Borges…
This isn’t a bad translation and it is online. A better one is to be found in the collection Labyrinths.
Everyone should.
I’m RG colour-blind. Circumstance, perversity and desire made me a graphic and web designer… I know what it is like to see the World as it isn’t. For years I thought Corsodyl toothpaste was green. It is salmon pink. I see that now because my wife told me. That switcheroo was weird – it took seconds**. We see reality through our own lenses. I can work because I know colours through RGB or CYMK codes. Through the objectivity of numbers.
I am reminded everyday how difficult seeing things as they are rather than as I immediately perceive them. Not everyone bothers to choose their colours using hexadecimal coding.
If I only see a lime as green only because I know they are green then is it not possible that people can see an utterly depraved act of rape and pillage as an heroic act of resistance? We all see reality through our beliefs the same way I look at toothpaste or fruit. We all use our theoretical structures to interpret reality.
I like to think I am more self-aware of that because of toothpaste. And hex codes in Corel Photopaint. And limes, obviously.
*Bet ya rarely get accused of being an optimist!
**Now here’s a question. I’ve known my wife for more than 24 years. What if someone else had told me? Well, I’d be wondering WTF they were doing in our bathroom at 7:30am but that would be another issue 😉
@NickM,
Well-reasoned and cogent post.
Only quibble I really have with it is this line:
I don’t think that phrasing quite works, for me. Maybe others, as well…
The root issue isn’t so much being ignorant of what is good vs. what is evil, but the flat refusal to recognize evil at all. Were the Israeli soldiers to be doing what the Hamasniks did on the seventh of October as they fought their way into Gaza, then those same acts would be seen as the utter depth of depravity by all and sundry. After all, that is what the Arabs have been accusing them of for decades, no?
Yet, when confronted with actual video evidence recorded by the Hamasniks, the average Hamas supporter here in the West refuses to term what they show as evil. At. All.
This isn’t ignorance. This is a flat refusal to acknowledge actual evidence of evil conduct displayed for the world to see. You and I see those videos, and we see depravity and terror; average member of the Hamas supporters see those same videos of their guys committing heinous war crimes, they see glory and commendable acts…
It’s not a form of ignorance. It’s willful denial of reality, an inability to acknowledge depravity when it is displayed. You see it in the way a lot of the BLM protestors lionized George Floyd, a habitual criminal who essentially committed suicide with a controlled substance. They’ve turned him into some sort of martyr-saint, unable to see the reality that he was largely a vicious criminal that threatened a pregnant woman with a gun, by suggesting that he’d shoot the fetus.
This ain’t ignorance. It’s something else, entirely. Or, so I would say…
Kirk,
I do believe there is a cognitive dissonance. The Hamas supporters see Hamas as the wronged party and that therefore everything they do is provoked by Israel because they see (they just know) Israel is the oppressor. They have built into their whole World view the idea that the poor and weak are always the good guys regardless. They see all “oppressed” groups as equal (similar for the bizarre concatanation of LGBTQABCXYZ+++ – how many lesbians want to date “chicks with dicks”?) and engaged in the same struggle. This is of course not the case. For three reasons:
1. Being weak does not equal being good. Having F-16s when the enemy has bottle rockets doesn’t doesn’t dictate the morality of the situation. People do think that, though. Genuinely think that. Related to this is the idea of “proportionate response”.
2. A lot of people think “Everyone is all the same” and that if they only discussed things nicely we’d get solutions. Often this does work but not with the likes of Hamas. Israel has tried. I guess it worked with Egypt at Camp David but quite frankly Hamas are the type of folk who will win at chess every time not because they learn an effective Sicilian Defence but because they pitch-up with a shotgun.
3. Not all causes are the same. Not all methods are the same. Things are much more complicated than that. Sorry, folks but life is not simple. I suspect there is a strong element of intellectual laziness here.
I am not excusing the support for “Palestine” or Hamas or whatever. Those are not excuses. There is no excuse for intellectual laziness if you are going to support a cause – any cause. There is no excuse for supporting evil because you have intellectually moved your mind-set into a twisted perspective (or let others do it to you – note the support for Hamas at universities). I’m just trying to grapple with the “why?” here.
Having said all that I am also perfectly prepared to accept that some of the support for Hamas is just Good Old Fashioned Anti-Semitism wearing more fashionable clothes (those jackboots are just so 1940s…) and some of it is pure evil. And cowardly evil at that. Chanting, “From the River to the Sea” in Manchester is a much lower risk than taking on the IDF. And finally I think that some people also just like torture porn. A lot of very good looking young Israeli women were raped, tortured, mutilated and killed on October 7th. It’s like the SAW movies for real. There are people who really get their rocks off on that.
NickM – yes I do believe in a certain basic rationality.
The people on the marches around the Western world, both the Muslims and the NON Muslim “Woke” Marxists (atheists – now there is a bizarre alliance) know what was done on October 7th – they know about the rapes, mutilations and mass murder – they support it and want to do these things in all Western countries. I am wary of “banging on” about this – as I feel I am becoming a bore, but it is important that the obvious is stated – if the obvious is denied by the establishment (which it is – see how Suella Braverman was attacked for saying these are “Hate Marches” which they are, they are marches in support of evil – showing the desire to commit the same evil deeds).
When Romans flung babies on rubbish heaps to be eaten by rates they did NOT believe that the babies had committed crimes worthy of such a fate, and when Romans went to watch people being killed in the Games they did not care if these people had committed no crimes at all.
These Romans wanted to see suffering and death – human sadism is not usual, it (like all the dark impulses) is present in every human soul (in the Aristotelian sense – if people reject the religious sense), we all have evil within us – the marchers, in London and other Western cities, are not space aliens or demons, they are just free will human beings who have said “Yes!” rather than “no” to the evil we all have within ourselves.
Certainly their world view (whether it be Islam or the “Woke” version of Marxism) makes it easier for them to do this – but it is still a choice.
And there are vast numbers of them.
Some people may think that I was too harsh in suggesting, to Johnathan Pearce, that many of the leaders of the churches are not, in reality, Christians.
I would point to the news today – Bishop Strickland of Tylor Texas being dismissed by Pope Francis.
Did Bishop Strickland commit some terrible immoral act – like Pope Francis’s favourite painter (and fellow Jesuit) Father Rupnik (who sexually abused nuns for years – and is still a priest in good standing) – err no, Bishop Strickland did not do anything wicked (it might have been better for him if he had).
Was there some theological problem – does Bishop Strickland not believe in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church? To think in this way is to totally misunderstand the situation in the Western world, most certainly NOT just in the Catholic Church) – it was precisely because Bishop Strickland believed in traditional Christian doctrines that he was dismissed.
To be fair – Bishop Strickland might have been tolerated, in spite of his Christian beliefs, if he had only kept quite about them – but he kept banging on about Christianity (as opposed to the new religion of “Social Justice” – the “Social Gospel”, “Liberation Theology” and the Climate Cult), teaching the old Christian religion, and thus he had to be removed. And it is much the same in the “mainstream” Protestant Churches.
Father Calvin Robinson, and so many others, have found the same in the Anglican Church – and the other “mainline” or “mainstream” Churches, these institutions (bureaucracies) will tolerate many things, but they will not tolerate Christianity. The “New Atheists” and so on, do less harm to Christianity in their entire lives than someone like Archbishop Welby does in the average week – enemies of something often do vastly more harm if they are the “leaders” of that thing, than if they are open opponents. For the faithful will still respect such leaders – because of centuries (indeed thousands of years) of custom and practice – not grasping that the people in the special robes and sitting on the carved chairs, no longer believe (and do not like people who do believe – indeed will not tolerate such people if they do not keep quiet).
The Churches are not alone – by and large every institution in the Western world, from the universities to the intelligence and security services, now hates and despises the civilisation they were created to defend.
The Progressive Judges hate justice (traditional justice), the FBI hates both the Common Law and the Constitution, and hates the society the law is there to defend.
The universities hate learning – they hate traditional knowledge and honest enquiry and discussion.
It is NOT a problem confined to the churches – almost all institutions in the Western world are corrupted. Controlled by people who hate everything these institutions are supposed to stand for.