Quotulatiousness

May 29, 2024

A visit to failure pier

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander has some advice for any US congresscritter with a spine (unfortunately, that probably means none of them):

This old operational planner has one bit of advice to Congress in their role of having oversight of the Executive Branch; subpoena the Decision Brief for the Gaza pier operation.

This was on the lowest of low scale of military operations, Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response. There is little to nothing classified about any of this rump of a capability. Call in member of the Joint Staff who were involved in this planning — and I would prefer if you could find a few terminal O5/6 to testify as well. You might actually enjoy some candor.

The Commander’s Intent, the Higher Direction and Guidance, the Planning Assumptions, the Constraints and Restraints, the Critical Vulnerability analysis, etc. It is all there. If not, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense should tell the American people to their face.

This is a larger issue than anything happening in that impossible corner of the globe. Over the weekend, we saw yet more indications of an empire in decline deteriorating from bad to pathetic.

From the time the first load came off the pier, the aid barely made it past 300 meters until it disappeared into Hamasistan.

I’ll go ahead and tap the sign;

[…]

Generally this latest act in this other-end-of-the-Med-from-the-Greeks tragedy that has unfolded in front of everyone. As we saw at the top at Ashkelon Beach, first some ancillary bits floated over to Israel as the Eastern Mediterranean reminded everyone it is at the eastern end of a big sea with weather and waves and stuff.

We then found out that three soldiers were injured in a forklift accident. Just to add insult to injury, as the locals laughed, it appears more of the business end decided to try to make it to Haifa on its own.

[…]

I’m not sure how you scatter Army property all over the Eastern Med without a boot getting dry, but maybe I’m wrong. Gaza is lava, and all.

Empires don’t often die in a blaze of glory, no. More often than not they end in simpering apologies and excuses from poor leaders putting the wrong people in positions they have no place being, and when they fail — there is no accountability.

May 18, 2024

The plight of Greek refugees after the Greco-Turkish War

Filed under: Greece, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As part of a larger look at population transfers in the Middle East, Ed West briefly explains the tragic situation after the Turkish defeat of the Greek invasion into the former Ottoman homeland in Anatolia:

“Greek dialects of Asia Minor prior to the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Evolution of Greek dialects from the late Byzantine Empire through to the early 20th century leading to Demotic in yellow, Pontic in orange, and Cappadocian in green. Green dots indicate Cappadocian Greek speaking villages in 1910.”
Map created by Ivanchay via Wikimedia Commons.

While I understand why people are upset by the Nakba, and by the conditions of Palestinians since 1948, or particular Israeli acts of violence, I find it harder to understand why people frame it as one of colonial settlement. The counter is not so much that Palestine was 2,000 years ago the historic Jewish homeland – which is, to put it mildly, a weak argument – but that the exodus of Arabs from the Holy Land was matched by a similar number of Jews from neighbouring Arab countries. This completely ignored aspect of the story complicates things in a way in which some westerners, well-trained in particular schools of thought, find almost incomprehensible.

The 20th century was a period of mass exodus, most of it non-voluntary. Across the former Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires the growth in national consciousness and the demands for self-determination resulted in enormous and traumatic population transfers, which in Europe reached its climax at the end of the Second World War.

Although the bulk of this was directed at Germans, the aggressors in the conflict, they were not the only victims – huge numbers of Poles were forcibly moved out of the east of the country to be resettled in what had previously been Germany. The entire Polish community in Lwów, as they called it, was moved to Wrocław, formerly Breslau.

Maps of central and eastern Europe in the 19th century would have shown a confusing array of villages speaking a variety of languages and following different religions, many of whom wouldn’t have been aware of themselves as Poles, Romanians, Serbs or whatever. These communities had uneasily co-existed under imperial rulers until the spread of newspapers and telegraph poles began to form a new national consciousness, usually driven by urban intellectuals LARPing in peasant fantasies.

This lack of national consciousness was especially true of the people who came to be known as Turks; the Balkans in the late 19th century had a huge Muslim population, most of whom were subsequently driven out by nationalists of various kinds. Many not only did not see themselves as Turks but didn’t even speak Turkish; their ancestors had simply been Greeks or Bulgarians who had adopted the religion of the ruling power, as many people do. Crete had been one-third Muslim before they were pushed out by Greek nationalists and came to settle in the Ottoman Empire, which is why there is still today a Greek-speaking Muslim town in Syria.

This population transfer went both ways, and when that long-simmering hatred reached its climax after the First World War, the Greeks came off much worse. Half a million “Turks” moved east, but one million Greek speakers were forced to settle in Greece, causing a huge humanitarian crisis at the time, with many dying of disease or hunger.

That population transfer was skewed simply because Atatürk’s army won the Greco-Turkish War, and Britain was too tired to help its traditional allies and have another crack at Johnny Turk, who – as it turned out at Gallipoli – were pretty good at fighting.

The Greeks who settled in their new country were quite distinctive to those already living there. The Pontic Greeks of eastern Anatolia, who had inhabited the region since the early first millennium BC, had a distinct culture and dialect, as did the Cappadocian Greeks. Anthropologically, one might even have seen them as distinctive ethnic groups altogether, yet they had no choice but to resettle in their new homeland and lose their identity and traditions. The largest number settled in Macedonia, where they formed a slight majority of that region, with many also moving to Athens.

The loss of their ancient homelands was a bitter blow to the Greek psyche, perhaps none more so than the permanent loss of the Queen of Cities itself, Constantinople. This great metropolis, despite four and a half centuries of Ottoman rule, still had a Greek majority until the start of the 20th century but would become ethnically cleansed in the decades following, the last exodus occurring in the 1950s with the Istanbul pogroms. Once a mightily cosmopolitan city, Istanbul today is one of the least diverse major centres in Europe, part of a pattern of growing homogeneity that has been repeated across the Middle East.

But the Greek experience is not unique. Imperial Constantinople was also home to a large Jewish community, many of whom had arrived in the Ottoman Empire following persecution in Spain and other western countries. Many spoke Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, a Latinate language native to Iberia. Like the Greeks and Armenians, the Jews prospered under the Ottomans and became what Amy Chua called a “market-dominant minority”, the groups who often flourish within empires but who become most vulnerable with the rise of nationalism.

And with the growing Turkish national consciousness and the creation of a Turkish republic from 1923, things got worse for them. Turkish nationalists and their allies murdered vast numbers of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrian Christians in the 1910s, and the atmosphere for Jews became increasingly tense too, with more frequent outbursts of communal violence. After the First World War, many began emigrating to Palestine, now under British control and similarly spiralling towards violence caused by demographic instability.

Antisemitism is far from a new problem

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle on some of the historical relics of antisemitism in European history down to today’s revived fascism of the left:

In his memoir Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens considered “why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring”. Many of us in the west have grown complacent, assuming that the horrors of the Holocaust would prevent this ancient prejudice from re-emerging. But as the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalates, few of us can be in any doubt that antisemitism has once again goose-stepped into the spotlight.

Of course, criticism of the Israeli government and its military strategy is entirely legitimate. So too is our profound concern for the innocents of Gaza and the many thousands of non-combatants who are losing their lives. But there is no denying the explicit anti-Jewish hatred that has accompanied these discussions in certain quarters. Criticise Israel all you like, but don’t try to tell me that Monday night’s daubing of the Shoah memorial in Paris with handprints of red paint was anything other than antisemitic.

Social media has opened our eyes to the prevalence of such sentiments. The other day I posted a link to my Substack piece about the Eurovision Song Contest on that hellsite now known as X. My focus in the article was on the narcissism of the “non-binary” performers, but one feminist activist decided to make it all about Israel. Underneath my post, she added an image of Eden Golan, the Israeli entry to the competition, with bloodstains photoshopped onto her dress. She went on to dismiss the victims of the October 7 pogrom as “silly ravers” and to blame the massacre on the IDF. Whatever else one might say about such views, it is clearly evidence of a complete absence of basic humanity.

This is sadly not uncommon. Recently we have seen protesters openly supporting Hamas, or even praising its acts of barbarism. A new poll has found that 63% of students currently protesting at US universities have at least some sympathy for Hamas. There have been overtly antisemitic statements, and Jews have been harassed on campus. It has been reported that at Columbia University, one protester cried out “We are Hamas” while another shouted at a group of Jewish students: “The 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?” These are the very people who have spent the last few years calling anyone who dissents even slightly from their worldview a “fascist”, and yet they are blind to actual fascism when it emerges within their own ranks.

All of this has taken me by surprise, which perhaps reveals the extent of my naivety. Antisemitism is nothing new, and has assumed myriad and outlandish forms over the centuries. Our own country has not been immune; Jews were deported from England in 1290, only to be readmitted in 1656. Before then, only those who had converted to Christianity were allowed to remain; specially, they were able to reside at the Domus Conversorum in London, established by Henry III in 1232. Anti-Jewish sentiments were reignited by a plot to poison Elizabeth I in 1594, which was blamed on her physician Roderigo Lopes, a Portuguese man of Jewish ancestry who was executed for treason. This is the context in which the forced conversion of Shylock at the end of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice ought to be understood.

Unpleasant myths about Jews have abounded throughout history, some of which still linger in Islamic regimes and the darker crannies of the internet where neo-Nazis gather to wallow in their bile. The poisoning of wells by Jews was thought to have initiated the Black Death epidemic in 1348. This notion was still pervasive by the time Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Jew of Malta in 1589 (consider Barabas’s mass extermination of an entire convent of nuns by means of “a precious powder”, or his boastful claim: “Sometimes I go about and poison wells”).

May 14, 2024

The Eurovision non-binary song contest

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Unless you’re very tuned in to all things Euro, you might not have known that the gala Eurovision Song Contest has again come and gone (I only noticed after the fact myself). It wouldn’t be a televised pan-European event if there wasn’t at least a tiddly bit of controversy, so that role appears to have been eagerly filled by the Irish contestant, in whom Brendan O’Neill is unimpressed:

What a thing of beauty that Israel beat Ireland in Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. That Israel’s serene songstress, Eden Golan, got more points than Ireland’s warbling, gurning, pseudo-Satanic they / them, Bambie Thug. That an actually decent song trumped the caterwauling of a fake punk who mistakes having tattoos, identifying as “nonbinary” and saying “I’m queer!” for a personality. More importantly, that a singer who was harangued by baying mobs of Hamas fanboys did better than the “singer” who helped to whip up this orgy of cruelty by saying she cried when she heard Israel had made it to the final. Boo-fucking-hoo. I bet you’re crying even more now, Ms Thug.

This is the news – the beautiful news – that Israel came fifth and Ireland sixth in the Eurovision Song Contest. Of course – because they are racist and mentally unstable – Israel haters on social media are saying the Zionist octopus helped to bump up Israel’s points. One pictures Mossad agents taking a break from hunting down the anti-Semites who slaughtered a thousand of their compatriots to post memes on Facebook saying “Screw Bambie, Vote Eden!”. In truth, the reason Israel did so well in the public vote – getting the maximum “douze points” from no fewer than 14 of the 37 nations eligible to vote in Eurovision – is because normal people don’t share the Euro-bourgeoisie’s feverish loathing for the Jewish State. It wasn’t only the emotionally incontinent Israelophobe Bambie Thug who took a beating last night – so did the entire anti-Israel middle class whose cries for a boycott of Eurovision clearly fell on deaf ears.

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, of course, given it’s only Eurovision, and given that some people (me, for example) were highly motivated to vote for Israel in order to wind up the wankers of Europe. But it is undeniably delicious that, despite the pompous pleas of drag queens and other paragons of morality for everyone to switch off Eurovision this year, millions watched. Around 7.6million Brits tuned in. Yes, that’s lower than last year – when we were the hosts – but it’s higher than every year between 2015 and 2021. It will be a source of mirth for me for some time that while the LGBTQ lobby was self-importantly putting away the glitter, locking the drinks cabinet and doing their very best not to check X for Eurovision updates, the general public were watching and enjoying the daftness of it all. Rarely has the moral gulf between us and our preening cultural overlords been so starkly exposed.

Then there were the votes for Israel. It felt like a tiny rebellion against the hysteria of the elites. Brits gave Israel 12 points. So did France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and others. This was people saying “We don’t agree with your bullying of a young woman and your obsessive hatred for her homeland”. Even the good people of Ireland gave Israel 10 points. As someone who knows and loves Ireland, it would not surprise me one iota to discover that people there are as yawningly vexed by Bambie Thug as everyone else in Europe who enjoys the sense of hearing. The land that gifted Eurovision Dana, Johnny Logan and Riverdance now finds itself represented by a self-styled “goth gremlin goblin witch” who does “primordial screaming” (shorter version: she can’t sing). What a mess. I’ve been listening to Logan’s “Hold Me Now” (winner in 1987) to try to liberate my brain from Thug’s narcissistic howling.

Andrew Doyle also commented on the “non binary” emphasis of many participants:

This year the trophy went to Switzerland’s Nemo, a man in a skirt who identifies as “non-binary”. The UK entry, Olly Alexander, calls himself “gay and queer and non-binary” but magnanimously accepts the pronouns “he” and “him”. And then there is the “queer” and “non-binary” Irish entry Bambie Thug, a woman who came sixth in the competition but first in the award for the sorest of losers. Having being beaten by Israel, whose very presence in the competition was a source of outrage for Thug, she had the following to say:

    I’m so proud of Nemo winning. I’m so proud that all of us are in the top ten that have been fighting for this shit behind the scenes because it has been so hard and it’s been so horrible for us. And I’m so proud of us. And I just want to say, we are what the Eurovision is. The EBU [European Broadcasting Union] is not what the Eurovision is. Fuck the EBU. I don’t even care anymore. Fuck them. The thing that makes this is the contestants, the community behind it, the love and the power and the support of all of us is what is making change. And the world has spoken. The queers are coming. Non-binaries for the fucking win.

One might argue that all of this is simply an extension of the high-campery of old. Thug certainly looks pantomimic, with her Christmas-cracker devil horns, and the layers of makeup piled on to what used to be a face. But what were once the glittery fripperies of gay culture have been hijacked by the acolytes of gender identity ideology, a movement that has appropriated this whimsical sheen to advance its authoritarian and sinister goals. It is this same movement that has successfully lobbied governments to introduce draconian speech laws, has hounded people out of their jobs for wrongthink, and has normalised bullying and threats of violence in the name of “social justice”.

The very notion of “non-binary” is a reactionary concept dressed up in the guise of progressivism. Most of those who identify as non-binary are embracing, rather than rejecting, sex stereotypes. They claim to feel neither sufficiently masculine nor feminine, which is simply another way of reinforcing what it means to be male or female.

The same ambiguity goes for “queer”. Many gay people see this as a anti-gay slur, associating the term with the practice of “queer-bashing”. But now, many young heterosexuals are identifying themselves into this category as a means to claim the high status that now accompanies victimhood. Dannii Minogue, a lifelong heterosexual, recently “came out” as “queer”. To those who have been the victims of homophobic abuse and violence, it’s galling to see straights embracing the term as a fashion accessory. Minogue may as well have come out as a “faggot” or a “dyke”.

May 8, 2024

The nonsensical “right of return” debate

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

George Monastiriakos explains why he should have the right of return to his ancestral homeland:

Greek colonization in the Archaic period.
Map by Dipa1965 via Wikimedia Commons.

My family hails from a small Greek village in Anatolia, in modern day Turkey, but I have unfortunately never been to my ancestral homeland because I was born a “refugee” in Montreal. Living in the “liberated zone” of Chomedey, Que., one of the biggest Greek communities in Canada, is the closest I’ve ever felt to my beloved Anatolia.

The Republic of Turkey does not have a legal right to exist. It is an illegitimate and temporary colonial project built by and for Turkish settlers from Central Asia. My ancestors resided on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor for thousands of years before the first Turks arrived on horseback from the barren plains of Mongolia. I will never relinquish my right to return to my ancestral homeland.

If you think these assertions are ridiculous, it’s because they are. I copied them from the shallow, even childish, anti-Israel discourse that’s prevalent on campuses in the United States and Canada, including the University of Ottawa, where I studied and now teach. I am a proud Canadian citizen, with no legal or personal connection to Anatolia. I have no intention, or right, to return to my so-called ancestral homeland. Except, perhaps, for a much-needed vacation. Even then, my stay would be limited to the extent permitted by Turkish law.

The Second Greco-Turkish War concluded with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Among other things, this agreement finalized the forced displacement of nearly one-million Ottoman Greeks to the Kingdom of Greece, and roughly 500,000 Greek Muslims to the newly formed Republic of Turkey. This ended the over 3,000 years of Greek history in Anatolia, and served as a model for the partition of British India, which saw the emergence of a Hindu majority state and a Muslim majority state some two decades later.

With their keys and property deeds in hand, my paternal grandmother’s family fled to the Greek island of Samos, on the opposite side of the Mycale Strait at a nearly swimmable distance from the Turkish coast. While they practised the Greek Orthodox religion and spoke a dialect of the Greek language, they were strangers in a foreign land with no legal or personal connection to the Kingdom of Greece.

The Great War channel produced an overview of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1923 that resulted in the vast human tragedy of the expulsion of ethnic Greek civilians from Anatolia and ethnic Turkish civilians from mainland Greece here.

April 5, 2024

Ero: The Croatian Uzi (With Israeli Help?)

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Jan 3, 2024

The best of the submachine guns made in Croatia during the Homeland War was the Ero, made by a company called Arma. The Ero is a basically perfect, parts-interchangeable copy of the Israeli Uzi that was developed in 1992 and adopted into Croatian Army service in 1993. The only really distinguishable difference between the Ero and Uzi is the Ero’s use of Croatian-language selector markings (and receiver markings). Between 15,000 and 20,000 were produced, and they remained in service long after Croatian independence was secured. They were issued to vehicle crews, military police, special forces, and reconnaissance units.

Arma was a subsidiary of a major Croatian engineering firm, and after the Ero production it developed the APS-95 Croatian AK (which is a story for another video). They were a very competent company, but the details and quality of the Ero are so good that I believe it must have been made with tacit or explicit assistance from Israel. Croatia does have a strong Jewish community, and there were rumors during the war that the technical data package for the Uzi did find its way into Croatia. There is no official acknowledgement of this happening, but it would certainly not be hard to believe. But however the development happened, the result was a very high quality submachine gun.

A big thanks to the Croatian Police Museum (Muzej Policije) in Zagreb for giving me access to film this cool piece for you! Check them out at: https://muzej-policije.gov.hr
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March 28, 2024

Justin Trudeau never misses an opportunity to make a performative announcement, even if it harms Canadian interests

Filed under: Cancon, Middle East, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an announcement last week that the Canadian government was cutting off military exports to Israel … except that Canada buys more military equipment from Israel than vice-versa:

Israeli Spike LR2 antitank missile launchers, similar to the ones delivered to the Canadian Army detachment in Latvia in February.
Wikimedia Commons.

When the Trudeau government publicly cut off military exports to Israel last week, the immediate reaction of the Israeli media was to point out that Canada’s military was far more dependent on Israeli tech than was ever the case in reverse.

“For some reason, (Foreign Minister Melanie Joly) forgot that in the last decade, the Canadian Defense Ministry purchased Israeli weapon systems worth more than a billion dollars,” read an analysis by the Jerusalem Post, which noted that Israeli military technology is “protecting Canadian pilots, fighters, and naval combatants around the world.”

According to Canada’s own records, meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces were only ever purchasing a fraction of that amount from Canadian military manufacturers.

In 2022 — the last year for which data is publicly available — Canada exported $21,329,783.93 in “military goods” to Israel.

This didn’t even place Israel among the top 10 buyers of Canadian military goods for that year. Saudi Arabia, notably, ranked as 2022’s biggest non-U.S. buyer of Canadian military goods at $1.15 billion — more than 50 times the Israeli figure.

What’s more — despite Joly adopting activist claims that Canada was selling “arms” to Israel — the Canadian exports were almost entirely non-lethal.

“Global Affairs Canada can confirm that Canada has not received any requests, and therefore not issued any permits, for full weapon systems for major conventional arms or light weapons to Israel for over 30 years,” Global Affairs said in a February statement to the Qatari-owned news outlet Al Jazeera.

The department added, “the permits which have been granted since October 7, 2023, are for the export of non-lethal equipment.”

Even Project Ploughshares — an Ontario non-profit that has been among the loudest advocates for Canada to shut off Israeli exports — acknowledged in a December report that recent Canadian exports mostly consisted of parts for the F-35 fighter jet.

“According to industry representatives and Canadian officials, all F-35s produced include Canadian-made parts and components,” wrote the group.

March 26, 2024

Montreal’s La Presse issues apology for antisemitic editorial cartoon

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Caroline Glick discusses the blood libel cartoon published by Montreal’s La Presse on 20 March, 2024:

According to Canada’s La Presse, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a vampire, and he is poised to suck the life out of the Palestinians in Rafah, Hamas’s final outpost in southern Gaza. The publication that was once a paper of record in Canada ran a political cartoon on March 20 portraying Netanyahu as a vampire, with a huge hooked nose, pointy ears and claws for fingers, dressed in Dracula’s overcoat while standing on the deck of a pirate ship.

The caption, written in blood-dripping red letters, read: “Nosfenyahou: En Route Vers Rafah.” Nosferatu, the Romanian word for vampire, was the title of a proto-Nazi German silent horror film from 1922 chock-full of anti-Semitic poison. The film, which became something of a cult flick, featured a vampire with a long Jewish nose. He arrived at an idyllic German town with a box full of plague-carrying rats that he released on the innocent villagers as he plotted to suck his realtor’s blood.

La Presse‘s cartoon didn’t leave any room for imagination. It wasn’t making a political or military argument against Israel’s planned ground operation in Rafah. Its goal wasn’t to persuade anyone of anything.

The Netanyahu-the-vampire cartoon asserted simply that Netanyahu is a Jewish bloodsucker and, more broadly, the Jewish state — and Jews worldwide — must be vigorously opposed by all right-thinking people who don’t want Jewish vampires to kill them.

As the paper no doubt anticipated, the cartoon provoked an outcry from Canadian Jews and some politicians. And after a few hours, the newspaper took it off its website and apologized. Anyone who thinks that means that the good guys won misses the point of the move. The Jewish outcry and pile-on by politicians and media coverage proved the point. Jews are evil and control everything, even what a private paper can publish. Like Nosferatu in its day, the cartoon will become a piece of folklore, additional proof that the Jews are the enemy of humanity.

In other words, the cartoon was a blood libel.

We’re seeing lots and lots of it these days. And so, it is worth recalling what a blood libel is.

In its original form, of course, the libel was specifically about blood. About 1,000 years ago, Christians in England began accusing Jews of performing ritual murders of Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzahs.

The accusation was inherently insane. Jewish law prohibits murder. It prohibits cannibalism. It prohibits child sacrifice. It prohibits eating food with blood. But none of that mattered. Like the cartoon in La Presse, the blood libel didn’t seek to persuade anyone. It presumed that its target audiences already hated Jews or had a latent tendency to hate Jews, which the blood libel aimed to unleash. The purpose of the blood libel was to scapegoat the Jews and to incite target audiences from London to Damascus to act on that hatred. Over the millennium, hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred in Europe and the Islamic world in response to blood libels.

March 9, 2024

The Jewish Avengers Who Hunted Nazi Murderers

Filed under: Britain, History, Italy, Middle East, Military, Religion, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published Mar 8, 2024

In March 1945, the first Jewish unit in the Allied forces reaches the frontline. Before fighting the Nazis, the men spent years battling against the policies of the British government. After the war, they will take vengeance on the perpetrators of the Holocaust and join the Zionist movement in building and fighting for Israel.
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February 15, 2024

Israel as an “Eschatological Garrison State”

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Big Serge outlines why Israel was compelled by its geostrategic position to react as strongly as possible to the October 7th atrocities along the southern border with Gaza:

“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It is almost impossible to find a dispassionate analysis of the Israeli-Arab conflict, simply because it sits directly upon a concatenation of ethno-religious fault lines. Palestinians are the object of concern for many of the world’s nearly two billion Muslims, particularly in the Arab world, who tend to view Gaza’s suffering and humiliation as their own. Israel, on the other hand, is a subject of rare agreement between American evangelicals (who believe that the nation state of Israel has relevance to Armageddon and the fate of Christianity) and the more secular American governing blob, which treats Israel as an American outpost in the Levant. To this, we can add the emerging religion of anti-colonialism, which views Palestine as something like the next great liberation project, akin to ending apartheid in South Africa or Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence.

My goal is not to convince any of the aforementioned people that their views are wrong, per se. Instead, I would like to argue that, despite these many powerful emotional-religious currents, much of the Israeli-Arab conflict can be understood in fairly mundane geopolitical terms. Despite the enormous psychological stakes that billions of people have in the subject matter, it still unfolds itself to a relatively dispassionate analysis.

The root of the problems lay in the peculiar nature of the Israeli state. Israel is not a normal country. By this, I mean neither that it is a special, providential country (as an American evangelical might say), nor that it is a uniquely wicked root of all evil. Rather, it is extraordinary in two important ways that relate to its function and geopolitical calculus, rather than its moral content.

First, Israel is an Eschatological Garrison State. This is a particular form of state which perceives itself as a sort of redoubt against the end of all things, and accordingly becomes highly militarized and highly willing to dispense military force. Israel is not the only such state to have existed in history, but it is the only obvious one extant today.

A historical comparison may help explain. In 1453, when the Ottoman Empire at last overran Constantinople and brought an end to the millennia-old Roman imperium, early medieval Russia found itself in a unique position. With the fall of the Byzantines (and the previous schism with western papal Christianity), Russia was now the only Orthodox Christian power remaining in the world. This fact created a sense of world-historic religious siege. Surrounded on all sides by Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Turko-Mongol Khanates, Russia became a prototypical Eschatological Garrison State, with a high degree of cooperation between Church and State and an extraordinary level of military mobilization. The character of the Russian state was indelibly formed by this sense of being besieged, of being the last redoubt of authentic Christianity, and the consequent need to extract a high volume of manpower and taxes to defend the garrison state.

Israel is much the same, though its sense of eschatological terror is of a more ethno-religious sort. Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, founded in the shadow of Auschwitz, besieged on all sides by states with which it has fought several wars. Whether this justifies the kinetic aspects of Israeli foreign policy is not the point. The simple fact is that this is Israel’s innate self conception. It is an eschatological redoubt for a Jewish population that sees itself as having nowhere else to go. If one refuses to acknowledge the central Israeli geopolitical premise — that they would do anything to avoid a return to Auschwitz — one will never make sense of their actions.

January 30, 2024

York University’s CUPE local apparently cribs their homework from the Völkischer Beobachter

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

York University’s contract and part-time instructors are represented by CUPE local 3903, who’ve distributed an eye-openingly anti-semitic document with the (implied) order to interrupt normal tutorials and replace the content with Palestinian propaganda:

Detail from an official “toolkit” distributed to York University contract and part-time faculty which claims that their employer is complicit in “genocide” by the mere tolerance of Jewish groups on campus.
Photo by A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine

A new toolkit circulated to York University teaching assistants instructs them to denounce Israel at every available opportunity, even when it has no apparent relevance to the subject being studied.

“Let us collectively divert this week’s tutorials to teaching on Palestinian liberation,” reads the 15-page document circulated by CUPE 3903, the union representing York’s contract and part-time faculty.

The document adds that tutorials should be diverted to condemnations of the “Zionist Israeli state” regardless of the course that the TA is supposed to be discussing.

“It is a medical issue. An arts issue. A feminist issue. A society issue. A political issue. A cultural issue. A geography issue. An engineering issue. An architecture issue,” it reads.

The document is filled with claims denouncing Israel as a genocidal “colonial project”. Canada is treated much the same, and is referred to alternately as the “Canadian settler state” or “Turtle Island”.

The mere presence of Jewish groups on campus is also referred to as evidence of York University’s “complicity” in genocide.

The document denounces the existence of sanctioned “Zionist cultural institutions”, making explicit reference to Hillel, the world’s go-to Jewish campus organization. York is also called an accessory to genocide because of its research links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The pamphlet even provides a script for TAs to read as they inform students that the tutorial will be cancelled in favour of becoming a “teach-in … for liberation.”

“Today, I open up our classroom to bring our attention on Gaza, to speak up and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement, and contribute in ending Canada’s and York’s complicity with genocide and the settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian land and life,” reads one introductory line.

January 1, 2024

“On numerous occasions in 2023 I’ve been tempted to go places with a placard saying ‘Ultimi barbarorum‘”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

Portrait of Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677)
Unknown artist, from the Herzog August Library via Wikimedia Commons.

My favourite story about Spinoza concerns the time he lost his cool. A philosopher, a Jew and history’s finest defender of Enlightenment, Spinoza was normally a picture of quiet reason. But when he heard about the lynching of Johan and Cornelis de Witt he became gripped by an uncommon fury. The de Witt brothers were key political figures in the Dutch Republic, the enlightened new nation in which Spinoza enjoyed such great liberty to think and write. On 20 August 1672, at The Hague, they were set upon by a ferocious mob that held them responsible for the invasion of the republic by a French-English alliance. They were murdered, mutilated and clumps of their flesh were eaten.

Spinoza was enraged. He made a plan to visit the site of the mob’s savagery to hold a one-man protest. Think Greta Thunberg, but enlightened. He prepared a placard to hold up. But his landlord restrained him, fearing he too would be slain by the mob. And so history was denied the image of one of our great philosophers staging a lonely, angry protest. What did his makeshift placard say? It had two words on it. “Ultimi barbarorum“. Rough translation: “You are the greatest of barbarians”.

This year more than any other I’ve understood how Spinoza felt. On numerous occasions in 2023 I’ve been tempted to go places with a placard saying “Ultimi barbarorum“. To the kibbutzim of southern Israel following Hamas’s fascistic savagery against the Jews there on 7 October. To George Washington University after students projected the words “Glory to our martyrs” on the side of the library building: young Americans of unimaginable privilege taking pleasure in the butchery of Jews. To the lovely, leafy campus of Columbia in New York City where students planned to hold a meeting on Hamas’s stirring “counter-offensive”. To those “pro-Palestine” marches in London at which the morally treacherous middle classes marched alongside individuals dressed as Hamas terrorists and extremists chanting for yet more slaughter in Israel: “Jihad, jihad, jihad!”

To New York University where students shouted, “We don’t want no Jew state / We want all of it”: a cry by the comfortable for Hamas to finish the genocidal job of eliminating Jews in the Middle East. To the streets of Manhattan where protesters shouted “Shame on you!” at an Israeli woman whose daughter was kidnapped and brutalised by Hamas. Shaming the victims of racist terror – a low even for the unhinged woke. To any gathering of politically minded Gen Zers, to be frank, after polls found that huge numbers of them view Jews as an “oppressor class” and believe Hamas’s pogrom was “justified”. And to the Sydney Opera House, where radical Islamists chanted “Gas the Jews” and “Fuck the Jews” mere days after Hamas murdered the Jews. Nazi-style parades, uncontained glee at genocidal violence, on the streets of a Western city.

At every place I’ve wanted to say “Ultimi barbarorum“. To call out both barbarism and its intellectual apologists. To express Spinoza-style disgust for these new enemies of Western civilisation. For make no mistake, that’s what they are. From Hamas to the radical Islamists in Europe who feel inspired by Hamas to the West’s own sons and daughters of privilege who make excuses for Hamas – all have proven themselves in 2023 to be the adversaries of truth, culture and reason. Surely no one will now deny that Western civilisation is under assault on two fronts: from without and within?

The West’s bourgeois left loves to larp as Marxists, often quoting the great Rosa Luxemburg: “Socialism or barbarism!” This year we discovered which side of that clash they take – it isn’t Luxemburg’s. The apologism for Hamas in privileged circles has been mind-blowing. Hamas’s bestial violence against the Jews has been denied, downplayed or outright justified. A “day of celebration” is how one privately educated pretend radical in Britain described the racist butchery of 7 October. This sympathy with barbarism, this receptiveness to acts of staggering dehumanisation, goes beyond Israelophobia. It speaks to more than the witless hate for Israel that’s been rampant in right-thinking circles for years.

December 18, 2023

“I hashtag these foolish dupes ‘Useful Yidiots'”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay isn’t fond of the Jewish groups that provide media cover for antisemites:

Have you heard the expression, “Two Jews, three opinions”? Truly, we have always been a contentious people.

In judging the worthiness of any particular internal debate, our sages applied the criterion of motivation. Constructive debate, they decreed, was noble; debate intended to wound was ignoble. I consider “ignoble” any public rhetoric by Jews that provides both comfort and ammunition to our enemies.

These Jews can be found in academia and the media, as well as in anti-Zionist groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and the If not Now movement. All preface their public statements with “Speaking as a Jew” or similar tropes. They’re willingly trotted out by Israel-loathing activists to deflect charges of demonstrable antisemitism in their ranks. On X, I hashtag these foolish dupes “Useful Yidiots”.

For candour and ignobility, it is hard to beat a 2008 Facebook post by Useful Yidiot Michael Neumann, Trent professor of philosophy, and, not incidentally, the son of German Jewish refugees:

    (My aim is to) help the Palestinians (and) I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose … If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don’t care.

Neumann’s savage tone is typical of a certain sub-genre of Useful Yidiots. These are psychologically warped intellectuals who interpret their own or their family links to the Holocaust as a de facto moral credential endowing them with authority to promote the odious libel against Israel of Holocaust inversion: that is, the pernicious false allegation that Israel is to the Palestinians what the Nazis were to the Jews.

In their febrile imaginations, Israel is pure evil, while the Palestinians are blameless victims with no agency in the creation of their alleged Holocaust-level circumstances, and no power to effect change in their destiny. All expressions of Palestinians’ hatred for Jews (at Israel and abroad) and any form of violence against them qualify as justified “resistance”.

There is no better example of the type than Norman Finkelstein, in progressive circles a much admired historian, who has devoted his entire professional life to Holocaust inversion. His parents — alone of their entire families — survived Auschwitz and Maidanek. How their tragedy inspired Finkelstein’s rabid loathing for mainstream Jewry and Israel, always presented under cover of a near-ecstatic empathy with Palestinian suffering, is a question for psychoanalysts to solve if they can, but rabid is certainly the word for it (conservative intellectual and journalist Douglas Murray termed Finkelstein a “psychopath”).

December 14, 2023

The West – “Ukraine? Ukraine? Do we know a ‘Ukraine’?”

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter notes just how quickly cross-partisan support has eroded since the summer, and especially since the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7th:

Well, you can’t say Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t try. With a new U.S. aid package for his country frozen by a Republican filibuster, the president of Ukraine made a last-ditch visit to Washington to plea, as he has done so often, for help against the Russian invasion. But unlike previous visits, he was treated more as yesterday’s annoyance than a global statesman fighting for the cause of freedom.

The wheels came off the bus of Western support for Ukraine gradually, then suddenly. The slow distancing from Ukraine has been underway since last summer, but it was finally pushed off the cliff in the wake of the barbarism of Hamas on October 7. Since then, the world’s attention, effort, and in important cases, arms, have been focused on the Middle East. But also, the intensely polarizing character of the Israel-Hamas war has hardened political divisions in almost every country, in a way that has largely destroyed what had been, in many countries, a cross-partisan consensus on Ukraine.

But for all its slow-motion inevitability, it is still shocking to see just how quickly support for Ukraine evaporated, how hollow the promises have been revealed to have been, how ugly the finger pointing has got, and how unprepared NATO, the EU, and the West as a whole are for the danger that is staring them in the face.

Let’s start with a basic fact: the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which began in early summer with so much dramatic hope, has failed. The goal was to drive to the Black Sea, split the Russian forces in half, and begin the work of retaking the sovereign Ukrainian territory that had been seized by Russia since 2014.

It didn’t happen, and it didn’t even come close. Why that is the case has been, and will be, the subject of intense scrutiny and analysis, but what seems clear is that the Russians were given too much time to dig in and lay minefields tens of kilometres deep across the front lines. In the absence of sufficient airpower to achieve air superiority over the battlefield, the attacking Ukrainian forces became sitting ducks to Russian artillery, helicopters, and drones.

So the fight is at a stalemate. The commander of the Ukrainian army, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said as much in an article he wrote for The Economist at the beginning of November. President Zelenskyy has admitted it as well, as has the head of the Ukraine war cabinet.

This failure need not have been a disaster. Success in battle is never guaranteed, the enemy always gets a vote, and there is nothing stopping the Ukrainians from tending their wounds, burying their dead, and trying again.

Nothing, that is, except the fecklessness, the division, and the bad faith of Ukraine’s partners in the West. Instead of sitting down to figure out what went wrong, adjusting and increasing their aid accordingly, and recommitting to the fight, the whole so-called alliance has degenerated into infighting, blame shifting, and ass-covering. The Washington Post recently had a whole series devoted to giving anonymous American “senior officials” plenty of acreage to underbus the Ukrainians, who were, allegedly, too slow to start the counteroffensive, too cowardly when it finally began, too incompetent in their execution, and too stubborn to listen to the Americans advising them.

This all may be true. But something else is also true: The West, for all its promises to back Ukraine to the hilt, to stand by it through thick and thin, to do whatever it takes as long as it takes, has not done any of this. Support, in the form of arms deliveries, training, aid, ammunition, what have you, has been slow, grudging, performative, and inadequate to the task.

December 12, 2023

Canadian politics – if you don’t like something, call it some kind of “genocide”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper on the political mis-use of the technical term “genocide”, to the point that it’s almost become routine to describe something you oppose as a “genocide”:

Victims of genocide
Photo by Cantetik2 via Wikimedia Commons.

In recent weeks, it’s become popular among Canada’s activist groups and even mainstream politicians to accuse Israel of “genocide”. In a since-deleted Thursday evening social media post, for one, NDP MP Don Davies accused Israel of “cultural genocide” against Palestinians. The United Church of Canada has also begun using the g-word in its official literature.

The charge doesn’t hold up on any material grounds. Unlike most genocided people, the Palestinian population has been soaring dramatically ever since the 1960s — all while retaining their traditional language and religion. Israel’s prosecution of its current conflict against Hamas, meanwhile, has featured any number of factors that are markedly out-of-step with an attempted genocide, including detailed evacuation orders and a rate of civilian casualties markedly lower than the global average.

But the charge doesn’t need to make sense, because it turns out Canada has been abusing the term “genocide” for quite some time. Coined amidst the Second World War by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, “genocide” refers to the intentional destruction of an entire demographic of people.

While the most notable genocides involve systematized mass-murder, it’s not a requirement. As per the official definition struck in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, genocide can also include attempts to erase a people via birth control or indirect methods such as famine. It’s on these grounds that Canada has officially accused China of genocide regarding its Uyghur minority. Although Beijing is not mass-murdering the Uyghurs, they are rounding them up into “re-education” camps and mandating forced sterilization with the explicit intention of destroying the Uyghur way of life.

But among Western academic and activist circles, “genocide” has now been stretched to apply to almost anything, from emissions policy to the ethnic ratios in prisons. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of just how much of Canadian life has been accused of being genocidal.

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