Category: religion

The Beeb

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Brilliant satire. The ending puts a rapier point on the anti-Israel bias of the BBC.
You may prefer a less charitable term.

It’s hardly the first example of the Beeb’s mindset. They’re recently plentiful.
BBC accused of putting lives at risk after rushing to blame Israel for hospital blast that ‘killed 500’ as PM takes jab

That was BBC correspondent Jon Donnison’s on-air speculation a month ago; “Israel was behind an explosion at the Ahli hospital in Gaza, which Hamas claimed killed more than 500 people.”

“Hamas claims” should be a triple red flag to any person pretending to be a reporter. For Donnison, unfortunately, Hamas’ approval is a commendation.

It was a Hamas rocket. At most 50 people died. They died due to their presence in the hospital parking lot over which Hamas fired the rocket. A rocket Hamas intended to kill Jews. Those who died were in the hospital parking lot in the first place because of the Hamas murder of 1,400 Israeli civilians. And because they knew Hamas uses hospitals as shields: “It’s as safe as it gets when Hamas denies us entry to their bunker complex.”

These noncombatants died… did I mention this?… because the faulty Hamas rocket fell on them.

Happens a lot.

I pick on Jon Donnison only because a brief DDG search reveals his complicity in historical Beeb misreporting going back to at least 2012: Beeb war boob.

In that case he claimed a photo taken in Syria of Muslim-on-Muslim dead children violence was an Israeli depredation in Gaza.

He still works for BBC.

I see a pattern.

Flanders Fields

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In Flanders Fields
By John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Poppies grow in Flanders Fields. And beyond.

Golda Meir…

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We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us.

An admirably succinct summary of Israel’s dilemma.

More Golda Meir Quotes on Israel & Judaism

Einsatzgruppen ≡ Hamas?

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Started following MEMRI on Twitter today: @MEMRIReports
A Statement By The President And Founder Of MEMRI On The Hamas Einsatzgruppen Attack

Excerpt, but read the whole short thing.

Now to another matter. The Hamas attack cannot be compared to the ’73 war, which is a war that we now miss. Not even to the massacres of the Islamic State. The comparison to animals made by Israel Defense Minister Gallant is also not appropriate, since no animal commits murder out of sheer cruelty. The only appropriate comparison is to the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary death squads of the SS of the Nazi Germany, who were attached to the 4th Wehrmacht Army groups that invaded Poland and Russia in the outbreak of World War II. Their one and only mission was to murder Jews wherever they found them. That is the only relevant comparison, and I propose to anyone that has a heart to stick to this comparison.

I made that same point about animals yesterday in a Xeet.

Einsatzgruppen is almost exactly right. There are many differences, of course, Einsatzgruppen spoke German, had different uniforms, and… uh… … didn’t have paragliders.

That’s it. That’s the list.

The new heretics

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In G.K. Chesterton’s day, it was not necessary to qualify the word “Liberal” with “Classical.”

Culture and political designations have changed. Verities, by definition, have not.

Five score and seventeen years after it was published, this resonates. It requires a careful reading:

“Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

It is indeed strange that by 2022 courage is required contend that 2+2 is 4. The idea has been declared racist and patriarchal. We’re told simple arithmetic is an artifact of white privilege.

One may speculate that the hue of the impossible grass has been excluded from Progressive contempt only because that color is ‘green.’ And/or because neither white nor asian heterosexual males have mentioned it lately.

As to strange courage… How can it require courage to oppose those who declare men to be women?

Why is courage needed to suggest government profligacy tends toward inflation?

From whence could courage be summoned to contest those who think human life begins only after a full 9 months gestation?

In what reality does the idea that self-defense is a natural right become a courageous position?

What’s even stranger… these ideas have public support. In ‘safe’ districts hoary politicians run on these these ideas. Their wannabe successors echo the themes. Many of them are elected in spite of it. In fact, because of it.

What we can conclude is that our practice of democracy has proved Tocqueville right, and Benjamin Franklin’s fears accurate.

Speech is not violence

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Claiming speech is violence will result in violence.

Last week, Salman Rushdie was to address the Chautauqua Institution on the topic of freedom of speech. He has some experience with those who would stifle it. Thirty three years ago he wrote a book titled The Satanic Verses. He was in hiding for the next decade. And it turns out that wasn’t long enough.

For his title, he looked at a few words in the Quran, as interpreted by some Islamic historians. Islamic fundamentalists are triggered by the concept raised by those co-religionists as long ago as ~900AD. In any case, Rushdie was writing a novel. Fiction.

It’s no surprise, though, that Rushdie’s daring to discuss it was not well received in certain quarters. He upset the same Islamist fanatics who encouraged the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the threats to the Jyllands-Posten for publishing cartoons, the mass shooting at Bataclan and Pulse, and other murders, arsons and riots too common to detail.

Fundamentalist Islam insists religion and the State are one. Naturally, then, Rushdie’s temerity provoked a Muslim cleric and Head-of-State (Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini) to issue a bounty for Rushdie’s death in 1989.

AKA a ‘fatwa.’ In polities where church and state are separated, we don’t yet have a special term for state religion-sanctioned murder. We are working toward it via the Church of George Floyd, the Cathedral of Transexual Pronounism, the Pieties of the Green New Deal, and the rite of Skin Color Original Sin, but we aren’t there yet.

That does not mean progress is not being made here. This week a militant follower of Islam with ties to Iran stabbed Rushdie a dozen times. As yet, the police can’t find a motive. You have to wonder how the find their own butts.

Rushdie’s stabbing is merely a reminder that “don’t say anything we don’t like to hear” fanatics can be dangerous. We have some of our own.

Every day needs to be ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed day.’ Here’s a comprehensive “compendium of images that depict Mohammed (the 7th-century founder of Islam), spanning all historical periods, cultures, genres, styles, formats and themes.”

Here’s my own paltry contribution.

Every day needs to be ‘Everybody write The Satanic Verses day.’

Rushdie’s stabbing is ethically no different from the persecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, the firing of James Damore, the threats against J. D. Rowling, or the demonization of Nicholas Sandmann.

Temporal Cassandra

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From 1959. 26 minutes.

From the comments:
“Ayn Rand was a time traveler sent to the past to inform the future of its fate.”

The sad thing is that Mike Wallace was so much better than today’s talking heads. For example, Cathy Newman.

In hindsight, we know Mike was a Leftist. He may have lacked the imagination to understand what Rand was saying, but he was polite; adding a gloss of honesty to his work. Faint praise, since Walter Cronkite and Bill Moyers did, too.

I couldn’t think of a ‘journalist’ character in Atlas Shrugged. Had to look.* There was only Bertram Scudder.**

Rand was eerily accurate in many ways, but may have understated the degradation we’ve seen in ‘journalism.’ I didn’t remember a sufficient excoriation of the press, and she had Walter Duranty as a contemporary example. Then again, the book is already over a thousand pages, and a full treatment of the press would have doubled that.

Well done, Ayn.

*That led me to an example of the nihilists Jordan Peterson despises.

“The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn’t any… ”

“Reason, my dear, is the most naive of all superstitions… You suffer from the popular delusion of believing that things can be understood. You do not grasp the fact that the universe is a solid contradiction… The duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be explained… The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man.”
-Dr. Pritchett

**Scudder’s claim to fame is that he prompted D’Anconia’s “Money Speech.”

“Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, “Don’t let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil – and he’s the typical product of money.”

Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Aconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?…”

So, of course, I read the whole speech again.

H/T Ragnar ;)