A year ago today, like millions of others, I saw Palestinians celebrate the murder of Shani Louk:
Hours later that day, a video emerged showing Louk’s body,[28][29][b][c] partially clothed, with a significant head injury and blood-matted hair, being paraded in the streets of Gaza City by Hamas militants in the back of a pickup truck; they were exclaiming “Allahu Akbar”, and were joined in the cheers by the people in the crowd surrounding the vehicle, some of whom spat on the body.[33][23][34][35] The video went viral,[36][37][2] becoming one of the first viral videos of the Israel–Hamas war.[36] It was released in a wave of videos of Hamas members parading hostages and bodies.
The link with the text “Palestinians celebrate” takes you to my post of that title. The quoted text takes you to the Wikipedia article with the title “Killing of Shani Louk”, which describes how her half-naked corpse was paraded in triumph to the mob, and how members of that mob happily filmed it and shared the videos with their friends. A detail it does not mention but which is burned into my memory is that the Hamas men sat on her dead body, as if it were a hunting trophy.
Usually when I post a Wikipedia extract, I strip out the numbers in square brackets that show where the Wikipedia article links to a source. In this case I have left them in. If anyone reading this has the slightest doubt about whether these events really were as depraved as they sound, prepare yourself mentally then follow those links to confirm it for yourself. Remember as you look that Shani Louk was but one of 364 festival-goers murdered by Hamas. Nor was she the only victim paraded before a Palestinian crowd most of whose members were not members of Hamas. What struck me about that mob was that there was no pretence that Shani Louk was guilty of anything, even by their standards. There was no claim that she was a blasphemer against Islam or an Israeli soldier – the fact that her body was displayed in her underwear flaunted that she was just a random Jewish woman they had caught and killed.
Kemi Badenoch MP, one of the contenders to be the next leader of the Conservative party, recently and astonishly caused controversy by saying ‘Not all cultures are equally valid’. I agree with this statement. Some cultures are worse than others. Now that ISIS is gone, Hamas-ruled Gaza is probably the most horrible culture currently present on Earth. Please note that this makes absolutely no difference to the obligation of Israel to adhere to the laws of war, even against an enemy that does not. It just lets the Israelis know what to expect from Gaza if they do not defeat Hamas.
Should we conclude that the Palestinians, or the Gazans, are an accursed people by nature? No. There is a dark mirror to the past in the fact that Shami Louk was half German. In living memory Germany fell as low as any nation in human history. Let us not delude ourselves that the attempted extermination of the Jews was carried out by the Nazi party alone. A brave but tiny minority of Germans who were not Nazis sheltered Jews, a larger minority at least did not report their suspicions that their neighbours were doing so, and the majority obeyed the Nazis so long as they remained in power.
Who would have dreamed eighty years ago that one day the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin would be illuminated with an image of the Star of David to remember Jews murdered in a pogrom? Yes, a mere symbol, but a true symbol – Germany re-joined the family of nations decades ago. What brought about this change? The complete military defeat of the Nazi regime. Cynics observe that the change did not happen until after the defeat. Optimists observe that it did happen after the defeat.
I have never seen anything quite as depraved as 7/10 and the aftermath (especially using the victims’ own phones to post images and video of their raped, mutilated and desecrated corpses to their families via social media).
The only thing more sickenening is the equivocation (and indeed support) from much of “The West” in terms of these atrocities.
Israel has been remarkably restrained. And perhaps needlessly so because it is hard to imagine them more getting more blame if they had reacted “disproportionately”. In Bibi’s position I would have probably done something “unwise”.
I have had very dark thoughts. I will not share them. They are that bad.
I do not hate Islam as much as I hate those who accomodate and excuse it.
I wrote my first comment before I finished your post Natalie. It’s excellent.
I know that what i am going to write will seem extreme; in fact, it seems extreme even to myself. But i am just trying to follow logic to its uncomfortable conclusions.
If culture A thinks that culture B is equal, while culture B thinks that culture A is inferior, that is prima facie evidence that culture A is in fact inferior to culture B. (I am speaking loosely here: cultures don’t think; but i believe that am making my point.)
Where i want to go from there is obvious: there is prima facie evidence that the culture that produced Queers for Palestine is inferior to the culture of Gaza.
A couple of footnotes:
Paul Marks please note: ‘uncomfortable’, not ‘absurd’.
It seems to me that Kemi cannot say that, since she wants to be PM for all British people. So i am saying it for her.
Is it possible to identify criteria with which to rank cultures, has it been done or is the concept beyond the pale?
But then you need to define the level of culture (which produced Queers for Palestine) to which you refer.
Humanity? Western culture? Western woke culture? Western woke queer culture? Or the 200 people who truly believe that they could be queer in Palestine?
I’m part of two of these subdivisions, but not of three of them. Which is “my” culture? Do I end up on the inferior side?
David Roberts writes, “Is it possible to identify criteria with which to rank cultures, has it been done or is the concept beyond the pale?”
It is obviously impossible to rank something so unfathomably complex as a culture in the sense of giving Culture A a score of 56% good and Culture B a score of 43% good. As bobby b pointed out, it is hard to say where – and when – one culture stops and another starts. But there are pairs of cultures for which I have no difficulty saying which one is better.
I am not an Islamic legal scholar, of any of the schools of Sunni or Shia jurisprudence, but I suspect that these warriors acted wrongly even-according-to-their-own-moral-system.
As I understand it, and I am open to correction, taking an infidel woman as a sex slave is allowed – but why the killing?
How is the killing of an unarmed woman correct under any of the interpretations of Islamic law?
Is this not forbidden?
There is also the matter of the crowds cheering on the abused corpse of the woman.
Is not the behaviour of the crowd also not forbidden?
The German National Socialists hid their crimes – they did not parade the corpses to cheering crowds.
A very important question.
The way i would answer is:
(a) “the West” is not a culture but a ‘civilization’, i.e. it encompasses many cultures, dead or alive, not all of which are equally valid;
(b) Western cultures whose members believe that the culture of Gaza is equally valid as their own, are prima facie inferior to the culture of Gaza.
But there is room for debate.
— BTW in my brief sojourn at the Ivy League in the 1980s, i found strong opposition to Reagan, but still everybody seemed to be patriotic. Not like today.
I was at the Jerusalem Post site the other day, getting an update on the Israeli perspective of the conflict, when I caught a brief item on how “new materials developed by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa are expected to lead to significant improvements in the quality of MRI scans and expand their usage“.
It occurred to me that it’s almost impossible to imagine a single Muslim state in the Middle East coming up with anything like that.
Islam is cuturally inferior because it makes no distinction between morality and law. Islam is a total system with rules for everything from food, dress and sexuality to governance, politics and international relations. It has an undeniable internal logical consistency but not all logically consistent systems are either good or right. I abhore it because of it’s victim blaming. The idea that rapes occur because women don’t wear bin-bags is the opposite to true morality. True morality is seeing an attractive woman being attractive and not treating her as “uncovered meat”. True morality is harder because resisting temptation is harder than temptation being banned. This is a major strand in Christianity and something I admire about that religion even though I am not a Christian. Real morality is about being able to stay one’s baser impulses not about a law or society or whatever eradicating the temptation. A tactic which rarely works anyway. Consider US alcohol prohibition on that score. A truely heroic soul is the alcholic who walks past a pub during happy hour. It is not a soul who bans pubs.
Excellent point Paul. The minutes of the Wannsee conference make this desire very clear.
I don’t know if this needs to be added but…
As I see it the problem was as much the cheeering crowds as the perps themselves. Indeed the culture that meant the rapists and murderers knew they’d be cheered. I think you are probably correct about Islamic jurisprudence and the whole, “Whatever your right hand holds is your tilth so plough as you shall”. So, yes the killings of the raped are probably against Islamic law but the taking of sex slaves is, in my opinion, morally horrendous anyway. I believe that without recourse to a power higher than it being self-evidential within any culture that can claim any moral high ground whatsoever.
Is it possible to identify criteria with which to rank cultures
Any ranking of cultures would be biased by the culture of the person doing the ranking.
Snorri – yes there has been a real change in academia, and elsewhere, in the West.
In the past the left might mock anti leftist opinions, or be angry, but they did not seek to PUNISH anti leftist opinions – now they do. That is why it is no longer possible to live with them – because they themselves will not allow peaceful coexistence. They will not allow us to be ourselves – to peacefully express our beliefs, indeed (under the doctrine that “silence is violence”) they, increasingly, will not even allow us to be silent – we must (under threat of punishment and persecution) actively agree with and work to achieve their doctrines – such as “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” which turns out to mean Uniformity, Injustice, and Exclusion.
NickM.
In Christianity there is, allegedly, a view associated with some extreme Calvinists (perhaps unfairly), that moral good and moral evil are DEFINED by what God commands and what God forbids.
That moral reason does NOT define what is morally right and morally wrong – that moral right and moral wrong is defined by, essentially arbitrary, commands of God.
This theological ethical view is sometimes called “voluntarism” – the idea that God is totally “unfettered” by moral reason and is not subject to moral judgement, that things are good because God says they are good, and bad because God says they are bad (full stop).
Does this view, allegedly held by a few small sects of Christianity, remind you of anything?
Is it possible to identify criteria with which to rank cultures … ?
One possible way would be Darwin’s: which culture succeeds, which declines and dies out?
What we call “western civilisation” has been dramatically successful for the last couple of centuries or so but is now, by most measures of success (economics, number of people that share it, etc.) declining. Arguably it has already died out; the attitudes that formed the culture of the Victorians are largely antithetical to those of the west today.
Are not religion, philosophy and science, the human species attempts to comprehend the universe and our existence? Perhaps Natalie a greater challenge than to rank cultures. It occurs to me that the linguistic approach, which was used to identify human personality traits for ” big five” and hexaco, could be applied to identifying culture criteria. This approach was applied across multiple languages, which, jgh, goes some way to overcome your bias point. Barbarus has another approach.
David R: Is it possible to identify criteria with which to rank cultures … ?
Barbarus: One possible way would be Darwin’s: which culture succeeds, which declines and dies out?
That should certainly be a prime consideration: what good can a culture do, if it does not survive?
But of course the question ‘which culture succeeds’ can be interpreted more broadly, i.e. which culture succeeds in making people healthy and happy.
PS: I seem to remember reading a review of a book that made pretty much the same claims as i made above. But i did not read the book.
@jgh
Any ranking of cultures would be biased by the culture of the person doing the ranking.
But that is true of all rankings. For example, as a general rule I don’t watch movies that are lauded by movie critics because how they rank movies is dramatically different than how I rank movies. Or a more obtuse one, how the California retirement system CALPERS, ranks the value of stocks in the stock market is quite different than the way I do, since I don’t care about their wokeness, I care only about $$.
The question — what is the ranking of cultures has an implicit assumption: how do WE rank cultures, since nearly everything in the human sphere is subjective. Or to put it another way, to give a ranking of anything you first have to define the units of measure.
You see this a lot of rankings with an agenda. For example, who were the best and worst US Presidents? I think it depends a lot on what you consider great about a President. Which country is the free-est? It depends a lot on if you include “the right to free healthcare” or “the right to keep and bear arms” under your definition of “free”.
If Joe is a devout fundamentalist Christian and Sal is an atheist libertarian and Alex is a Wahhabi Muslim and Deb is a reclusive autist, they are going to come up with very different “best” ranking orders of countries around the world.
It’s like ranking deserts. If I like chocolate and you like strawberry, our rankings will differ.
(ETA: just like Fraser Orr already said.)
Obviously. But the Darwinist ranking is correct and all different rankings are wrong.
Within the Darwinist ranking, there might be ties. In such cases, my opinion is correct and all differing opinions are wrong. Until my opinion changes.
Kalahari? Namib?
(It’s sticky toffee pudding, obviously.)
“Any ranking of cultures would be biased by the culture of the person doing the ranking.”
Well, duh.
Barbarus,
I was going to make a similar comment. The west will be lucky to survive the 21st century, while it is difficult to imagine what could stop Islam. In a sense we are in WWIII right now, Islam vs. the world, and only Israel is putting up a fight.
The complete failure of western governments, not people, governments, to defend western civilization is unforgivable.
I made this point a month after the pogrom, Einsatzgruppen with GoPros, which included a x-video interview with a Hamas terrorist weeks after the event, saying quite calmly that he’ll have no regrets even if he kills a nursery full of Jewish kids.
The Palestinians culture, to the extent it exists, extending back to the 1930’s is Nazism at it’s extreme.
It is the main influence. Starting with Haji Amin Al-Husseini, friend of Hitler and founder of the SS Handschar Brigades, to the Egyptian Yaser Arafat trained by Nazi officers who fled to Egypt to destabilize Israel and who manufactured a familial link to Al-Husseini. Until now nothing has changed in those accursed lands where the local population is taught from the time they can walk to hate, to kill, to destroy. You can find the children’s cartoons which shown on Al-Aksa TV quite easily on the internet, some of them I believe even on YouTube.
Keep the memories of those celebrations in your mind.
In a few years, it will be a sign of “far-right extremism” to spread the “disinformation” that anyone celebrated killings on that day.
A few years after that, it will be “racist misinformation spread by far-right extremists” that there even were any killings on that day, much less that anyone celebrated them.
Not long after that, if you post any mention of said celebrations online, the police will come for you – you disinforming, misinforming, rightwing Nazi racist.
Charles Darwin was not a “Darwinist” in ethics – he did not define what was morally good by what survives. If one takes that road then the murderer is morally superior to the innocent murder victim – because the murderer survives and the innocent victim does not survive.
As for what is freedom – people who confuse freedom with free stuff (goods or services taken, by force, from others – by government or private criminals) rule themselves out of further moral discussion. After all what they are really saying is that they are going to take your stuff, or going to get the government to take your stuff and give it to them, and kill you if you resist.
The left used to say that they opposed private property rights, but supported Civil Liberties such as Freedom of Speech – but now they openly hate Civil Liberties.
The left now openly support punishing people for peacefully expressing their beliefs – and, indeed, under the “silence is violence” doctrine are starting to demand that people express support for leftist doctrine and actively work to put leftist doctrine into practice (keeping silent no longer being an option).
But that is not the argument that is made here.
The argument is that you cannot be morally good if you are dead. 🙂
(Not in this world, anyway.)
Survival is a necessary but not sufficient condition for goodness.
Now i think that i remember a bit better the 3 conditions of a healthy society discussed in the book that i mentioned (Sick Societies, by Robert B. Edgerton).
They are: survival (and wealth) of the society, survival (and health, and wealth) of the individuals, and happiness of the individuals. IIRC.
BlindIo,
The very strong foundational links between the Nazis and things Like the Muslim Brotherhood ought to be more widely known. Dare I say the unsayable? Post WWII espousing Nazism is just wrong in “polite society” but if it is re-framed in the context of the Palestinians (who as “people of colour” are obviously incapable of wrong) then it’s OK.
Paul,
The Calvinists always confuse me. And interest me. If you consider one of the truly fundamental philosophical issues: evil and free will (which are essentially interlinked) they can be seen as an extreme. My science/maths background makes me interested in extremes because you can really get to know equations by letting things tend to either zero or infinity. I don’t believe in God but the religion that most impresses me is Catholicism. Why do I suspect that? Tolkien. I’m reasonably active on Quora. I use Quora for technical stuff and I answer questions on maths and aircraft and computers but the most upvotes I get are on moral issues with respect to Tolkien’s works. Yes, it surprises me! I must have been nine when I read “The Hobbit” and I’ve been a fan ever since. I guess, like Bilbo, I didn’t realise where that road would take me. So, not to Rome exactly, but Tolkien’s emphasis on free will and the moral choices that engender have shaped me perhaps more than I realised until I answered a question on Quora about a fantasy novel…
Ferox,
Look at this.
It would appear the road of history has gotten shorter.
The problem with “judging cultures” is the many historical occasions when the purported inferiority of a culture was the rationale for oppressing the people of that culture.
American slavery advocates claimed that blacks should taken from Africa as slaves because of “backward” African culture.
German colonialists declared the “backward” Hereros to be a useless obstruction to the development of South West Africa, who should be “removed”.
In general, colonial “settlers” had few qualms about displacing, killing, or subjugating “natives”, in substantial part because they viewed the natives as culturally inferior. This not to say they were always wrong about that – but what they did was sometimes very wrong.
“Cultural” superiority was also an important element of Nazism and Japanese imperialism.
One might also note that Communism viewed itself as a superior culture to be imposed by force on the whole world.
With all that baggage, cultural “judgement” has some very bad connotations.
Obviously, though, complete avoidance of judgement is no longer supportable. The great and very difficult task now is to create a consensus “metaculture” under which clearly toxic cultural elements can be recognized and removed, without enabling abuses.
Rich Rostrum: Rather than trying to suppress people making judgments about others – which mostly just makes government less believable – shouldn’t we simply discourage the making of such judgments into viable rationales for bad behavior?
Sort of channeling Steve Sailer here, but if our “leaders” are always denying what most people can notice for themselves, it makes the issue being noticed much more important and divisive, and makes our “experts” look like fools.
Rich Rostrom, the justification whites gave for enslaving blacks was not that the blacks were culturally inferior, it was that they were racially inferior.
I’m sure we all agree that enslaving or oppressing anyone for any reason is wrong, but oppression justified on cultural grounds is slightly less evil, because even the oppressors admit the possibility of cultural change – even if they continually come up with new reasons why that day is far off.
I am sure that “their culture is inferior and we are helping them by forcibly improving it” has been given as a justification for slavery and oppression on many occasions in history, and cultural inferiority (I shall take religion to be a subset of culture in this context) has often been thrown in as a makeweight where the main justification was racial inferiority – but, for obvious reasons, cultural inferiority is more likely to be used to justify enslaving people than murdering them. The Nazis made very clear to their functionaries tasked with killing Jews that there was nothing any Jew could do – no change in religion or behaviour – that would allow them to be spared.
No Snorri – sometimes the only way to do what is right, indeed to honour the best part of yourself is to take the road that will lead to your own death. To take that road – even though you know where it leads.
Desperately avoiding death by dishonourable means (betraying those one should stand with – and betraying the best part of one’s self) is the road to a much worse death than the death of the body – and many atheists also understand that. This does not depend on the hope of the survival of the soul after physical death.
NickM – the hard core Calvinists remind me of something that Hayek said about Carl Schmitt. That Schmitt understood what the key questions were, and laid out the arguments very clearly – and then choose the wrong side.
I am not writing about theology (certainly I hold no brief for Rome) – other than how it relates to these philosophical and ethical matters, and their position (also shared by Dr Martin Luther and by at least Sunni Islam) that choice is predetermined (in which case it is not really choice) and that what is morally good and morally bad is just a matter of what God commands and what God forbids, is wrong – horribly wrong.
Natalie – I know that academia (and wikipedia) are pushing the language of “enslaved” and “enslaved persons” on us – but this language is very misleading.
In the vast majority of cases, whites (Europeans) did NOT “enslave” people – they bought people who already were slaves, and would either have been kept as slaves in Africa (where slavery had been endemic for thousands of years) or sacrificed (as thousands of people were – in various West African Kingdoms), or sold to Islamic slave markets in North Africa and the Middle East – where the normal, although NOT universal, practice was to castrate the males – due to a massive slave revolt, which took years to exterminate, in what is now southern Iraq in the early days of the Islamic Empire. In the Ottoman Empire the normal, although again not universal, practice was to kill babies had with slave women – to prevent a mixed race population emerging, otherwise Constantinople, Damascus and so on would have ended up with a population mix similar to a modern American city – which was NOT the case.
There was no need, at first, for biological arguments for Europeans arguing that this or that race of people were inferior – because the people already were slaves when they were sold to Europeans. Although YES false arguments of inferiority did start to be used over time (when the institution started to come under attack by Abolitionists – attacks that started in the 1700s).
As you know the word “slave” comes from “slav” – people who were captured for slave markets (mostly Islamic slave markets – but sometimes Christian slave markets as well, although some Christian lands forbad slavery – for example France after the judgement of King Louis the Tenth) for very many centuries, and who tend to be rather pale.
Western Europeans were often taken as slaves themselves – taken by Islamic raiders on land or sea.
Paul do you, or anyone, know if Pascal’s “Wager for the existence of God”, has been applied to the concept of free will? It seems to me to make it a slam dunk, to assume free will.
Paul Marks, you are, of course, correct about the history of slavery. I learned a lot about slavery in Africa from conversations with Niall Kilmartin, quoting Thomas Sowell and other historians.
Natalie – yes indeed, and I certainly did not mean to imply I was saying anything that you were not already aware of. I was thinking of third party readers.