The moral problem is not the cycle of violence; it is Palestinian violence
Moral equivalence has two purposes. One is to enable the morally confused to hide their confusion. The other is to enable the immoral to hide their immorality.
Here are two examples as applied to the Israeli-Arab conflict:
One is the assertion we hear regarding the latest Israel-Hamas war by members of the Western Left, by Muslim supporters of the Palestinians and even by a few individuals on the Right: “Palestinian babies are as precious as Israeli babies.”
Professor Cornel West, a lifelong progressive running for president as a Democrat: “As I have said for the past 50 years, a precious Palestinian child has the same value as a precious Israeli child.”
David Cronin, an editor at Electronic Intifada, a large pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel website: “Palestinian babies are just as precious as my new daughter.”
A second example is to avoid condemning Hamas for the wars they start by instead condemning the “cycle of violence.”
Let’s analyze the two statements.
That the lives of Palestinian children are as precious as those of Israeli children is a given. But it is meaningless given that virtually no Israeli or Israel-supporter has ever claimed otherwise. Indeed, it is usually worse than meaningless. It is usually a nice-sounding way to attack Israel and its supporters.
Would those who make this assertion have made it during World War II?
After all, it is certainly true that Japanese and German children are as precious as American children. But what purpose would such an assertion have served? Would it have meant that Americans should drop no bombs on Japan or Germany? Presumably not.
And if it would have, the statement would have been nothing more than a pro-German or pro-Japanese sentiment.
Or would it have meant that America should avoid gratuitously killing Japanese and German civilians? If so, it would have served little purpose, since even if American pilots bombed only military and industrial targets inside Japan and Germany, many Japanese and German civilians, including children, would still have been killed.
And, to cite the best-known example, the killing of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war in the Pacific, thereby saving an exponentially greater number of Japanese and American lives.
The reason America, Britain, and Canada dropped bombs on Germany, and the reason America dropped bombs on Japan, was solely because Germany and Japan started World War II and because they committed horrific evils.
Defeating those two countries was as clear a moral imperative as there could ever be. The Germans unleashed the unique slaughter known as the Holocaust and committed a massive number of atrocities against civilians in every country they conquered. The Japanese committed mass murder and Nazi-like atrocities on Chinese, Korean and Filipino civilians (such as grotesque medical experiments on non-anesthetized Chinese and the use of conquered women to be gang-raped on a daily basis by Japanese soldiers).
Therefore, why would someone have noted during World War II that Japanese and German babies are as precious as American or British babies? If it were to encourage the Allies to avoid gratuitous civilian deaths, and the maker of the statement were clear about the necessity and morality of bombing those terrible countries, no one would have disputed the statement. But if it were to draw some moral equivalence between the Allies and Japan and Germany, between their bombings and the Allied bombings, the person would be abettor of evil.
The same holds true for all those who now assert that Israeli and Palestinian children are equally precious. Given that the Palestinian regime in Gaza (i.e., Hamas) is dedicated to murdering every Jew in Israel—great-grandmothers down to infants; given that Hamas and all their Muslim and non-Muslim left-wing supporters around the world seek to annihilate the nation of Israel; given that Israel has, almost uniquely among the nations of the world, regularly warned Gaza civilians to evacuate buildings that Israel planned to bomb (thereby losing the advantage of a surprise attack on Hamas operatives); and given that Hamas places its leaders and weapons in schools, hospitals and apartment buildings for the express purpose of bringing death down on women and children, what exactly do those who assert that Israeli and Palestinian babies are equally precious seek to accomplish?
Unless accompanied by a completely unambiguous condemnation of the Hamas attacks on Israel via thousands of rockets and directly on Jewish parents and children, including babies, as war crimes and utter evil; and unless accompanied by a clear moral distinction between Israel and Hamas, the only reason for announcing that Israeli and Palestinian babies are equally precious is to engage in anti-Israel moral relativism.
Indeed, the only context in which this assertion would be useful is if it were directed at Hamas and its Muslim and left-wing supporters. It is they who do not believe that Israeli and Palestinian children are equally precious. As Al-Monitor, a nonpartisan Mideast news website founded by an Arab-American, reported:
“The Israeli medical staff of Tel Hashomer Hospital is fighting for the life of a 6-month-old Palestinian infant abandoned by her parents. … Cancer-stricken children from the West Bank and Gaza have always been treated there alongside children from Israel.”
As regards the “cycle of violence,” it is hard to imagine a more anodyne description of the Israel-Hamas war.
Again, did anyone ever use this as a description of World War II? Why not? There certainly was a cycle of violence. But no one ever used the term, because it would have been an immoral description of what was happening. The “cycle of violence” was not the problem; Japanese and German violence was the problem.
And that is the case now. The moral problem is not the cycle of violence; it is Palestinian violence.
Without violence from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, there would be no “cycle of violence.”
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UK: Tories in name only
By SIR JACOB REES-MOGG
Nothing is being done to inspire voters to turn out, and to assume that they will do so next year to stop Sir Keir Starmer is wishful thinking.
Sir Keir has been busy putting on Tory clothes, learning from the electorally-successful Sir Tony Blair.
In such a way, he appears much less threatening than either Corbyn or Miliband.
In recent weeks, some of the Government's rhetoric has improved a little.
However, as yet, the actions do not follow the words.
Rishi Sunak's speech on reducing the impact of net zero regulation was a start.
But the penal Energy Bill is just days from Royal Assent.
Among other terrors, it makes provision for sending people to prison who make mistakes on their home insulation
It is simply no good to oppose more regulation in the spoken word while introducing it in the black letter of legislation.
Words and actions must meet and as the words are popular, they need to be followed up with action.
We also need to stop attacking Tory voters.
On Monday, we'll see the landlord-bashing Renters Reform Bill in the Commons.
It is unpopular with Tory MPs and the Whips' Office apparently advised against it.
But Downing Street insists on ploughing ahead with a Bill that will hurt renters as well as landlords in a socialist belief in regulating free contracts to stop landlords and tenants agreeing mutually beneficial arrangements.
It should be dropped.
Moreover, whichever clever clogs in Number 10 thought announcing a ban on conversion therapy on the morning of a by-election needs to be found a comfortable place in a rest home.
It is a policy that accepts the most extreme version of the gender change fanatics, bans abuse that is already illegal and is at the apex of woke ideology.
It is in no way conservative and I expect any Conservative who read about it on Thursday morning in Tamworth or Mid-Bedfordshire left their umbrellas firmly furled and their front door firmly closed.
Taxation is another area where there is no incentive for Conservatives to go out to vote.
Even Sir Keir Starmer says that the burden is too high, while the Government is in thrall to the OBR and the Bank of England, whose error-strewn record is only too apparent.
The State spends and taxes too much, and both need to be reduced.
The recently-announced decision to trim the Civil Service is simply not ambitious enough.
It is only two-thirds of the plan that was ready to be put into action a year ago.
More decisions to cut back on folly, as with the welcome cancellation of HS2, need to be made, and Tory Ministers need to stop defining their success by how much they spend.
When a Minister says we have increased government spending on this or that worthy cause, what he really means is: I have placed an extra burden on taxpayers.
Instead, the money needs to be found to help families and businesses.
The Corporation Tax rise should be reversed, death duties scrapped and fiscal drag - that is putting millions of people's income tax rate up from 20 per cent to 40 per cent on the same real income, needs to be tackled.
To boost the economy further, the Government must use the Brexit freedoms that it has been so timid about thus far.
Instead of scrapping EU regulations, the Government decided to keep them, worried that it might accidentally abolish unnecessary red tape.
However, this has meant it has kept hundreds of unnecessary regulations that British governments opposed when they were introduced, and has so far only repealed fairly unimportant items.
It needs to act swiftly to remove any regulations that damage the consumer interest, such as the ban on parallel imports, or the REACH regulations, which simply act as a barrier to innovation and competition in the chemical industry.
Deregulation lowers costs, helps reduce inflation and makes everyone better off.
The Government also needs to be clear on immigration.
Small boats are a problem which needs to be tackled.
But it is by no means not the whole problem.
Net migration of 606,000 in 2022 is simply too much.
Post-Brexit, it is under the control of the Government to reduce this scale of net migration as the rules are made by secondary legislation.
Yet once again, the malign hand of the Treasury and the OBR is behind the excessive influx as they focus on GDP, not GDP per capita.
But it is not just an economic issue.
It is also about integration and infrastructure.
How can society cope?
In a way, the focus on small boats has been a distraction from the real problem.
But it has not distracted the communities affected by this scale of inward migration.
Above all, the Prime Minister needs to concentrate on the big issues and forget the trivial.
No-one is excited about maths to 18 or changes to A levels in 20 years' time, or indeed a smoking ban set for an arbitrary date that means Peter and Mary can buy cigarettes for Thomas, Anselm, Alfred and Sixtus for the rest of their lives.
A ban that encourages a domestic black market for the Rees-Mogg family is nugatory.
It is high time to stop hitting our own voters with policies that make them worse off or with woke nonsense that offends them.
Instead, we need to start cutting the size of the State, tax cuts that give people back their own money and a solution to the migration issue.
Perhaps like Henry the Sixth, the Conservative Party and government will suddenly wake up.
If we don't, last week's by-election results will be simply an early taste of the bitter outcome of next year's General Election.
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Why aren’t ‘anti-fascists’ condemning the tide of anti-Semitism?
I have a question about the events of the past few days: where is Antifa? Where are those self-styled anti-fascists who love to rage against anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of the 1930s?
Jews in Israel have been rounded up and murdered. Disgusting anti-Semites are on the streets of Sydney screaming, ‘Gas the Jews! Fuck the Jews!’ Mobs in London have taunted Israel, essentially laughing over its dead Jews. Britain’s Jewish schoolkids are taking off their blazers lest anyone recognise them as Jews and attack them. Across Europe security is being beefed up at Jewish establishments — schools, synagogues, museums — out of fear that Hamas-supporting mobs will invade and desecrate them.
And yet Antifa is nowhere to be seen. The thing these lefties fearmonger about all the time — the creeping return of the boiling hatreds of the 1930s — feels more real than ever and they’re saying nothing. It’s a strange anti-fascism that takes a break when something very much like fascism rears its repulsive head.
Following the slaughter in Israel the Western left stands exposed like never before
To the modern left, everything is fascism except actual fascism. Everything is ‘like the 1930s’ except the slaughter of Jewish youths, the kidnapping of Jewish grandmothers, the rise of mobs demanding a second Holocaust.
‘Fascist!’, they cry at everyone they disagree with, like real-life versions of Rick from The Young Ones. Yet when real Nazi scum show up, like that mob in Sydney crying ‘Gas the Jews!’, they turn coy.
Back Brexit and they’ll call you far right. Say a man can never become a woman and they’ll brand you a fellow traveller of fascism. Wonder out loud if we should try to do something about illegal immigration and they’ll say, ‘This is starting to feel a bit 1930s’.
But wipe out entire Jewish families? Gun down Jewish festivalgoers? Kidnap an elderly woman who survived the Holocaust? Mock Jews on the streets of our cities? Then they’ll erm and ahh. That’s ‘resistance’ apparently, not racism. It’s a rebellion, not fascism. It’s a ‘day of celebration’, as Novara Media’s commissioning editor said of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Saturday, not a return of the bigotries of the 1930s.
Surely nothing better captures the moral disorientation of the radical left than the fact that they are more likely to use the word ‘fascist’ about their own fellow citizens who voted Leave or who defend women-only spaces than they are about a radical Islamist in Gaza who spits on the dead body of a woman who was murdered on the presumption that she was Jewish.
The surrealism of the ‘fascism’ issue is best summed up by events in Australia. Something genuinely horrific happened outside the Sydney Opera House yesterday, as mobs of Hamas backers hollered for the mass murder of Jews.
The opera house was lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag but Australia’s Jews could not go there to mourn or to connect with one another because a baying mob was there calling for them to be shoved back in the ovens. This requires serious self-reflection on Australia’s part. Any nation in which such a sick thing can happen has a duty to reckon with itself.
And yet I remember there being far more online fury, especially from Antifa, when Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, was in Australia earlier this year. Her Let Women Speak events Down Under, at which women agitate against the idea that blokes can become women, were furiously counterprotested by the masked anti-fascists of the modern left.
Where were these people yesterday? Why were they not counterprotesting the radical Islamists who were calling for another genocide of the Jews?
It is a curious anti-fascism that gets more riled up by a diminutive British lady whose only crime is to understand biology than it does by a baying mob that wants to eliminate the Jewish people.
Following the slaughter in Israel the Western left stands exposed like never before. I don’t think they realise how hard it will be for them to come back from this. Jews murdered by a virulently anti-Semitic movement, Jews taunted on our streets, Jews living in fear across our continent, and they said: ‘Well…you know…what did Israel expect?’
They’ve been fighting fantasy fascism for years, yet when real fascism came, they hid, they looked the other way, they made excuses. If they think this isn’t being clocked by people around the country, by the decent majority who abhor radical Islamist bigotry against Jews, women and others, then they’re even dimmer than I thought.
Here’s the thing: today’s Jew haters are even targeting the same people that yesterday’s Jew haters did. It is reported that the wheelchair-bound grandmother snatched by Hamas and spirited into Gaza is a survivor of the Holocaust. If you want to know how you would have reacted the first time this lady’s life was turned upside down by a movement of violent anti-Semites, just look at how you’ve responded the second time it happened.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/why-arent-anti-fascists-condemning-the-tide-of-anti-semitism
************************************************Australians the most promiscuous?
There would seem to be a number of problems with the figures below. For a start, men and women are not separated out A lot of women do have few partners and a lot of men have many. I stopped counting when I had been with 50 women.
And the age of the people could matter too. I came of age in the 60s when "free love" was all the rage. I did participate in that culture to a degree. I have happy memories of it in fact. I gather that young people these days tend to be less promiscuous than their parents were at the same age.
But it is possible that the figures below have some accuracy. Australians do tend to be laid back and religion is not influential for the great majority of Australians
Despite the country’s Puritan past, the average US citizen has slept with more than 10 people, according to raunchy research into the world’s most promiscuous countries.
NapLab compiled data from various sources to come up with their list, looking at national sexually transmitted infection rates, a country’s attitudes toward premarital sex and the average number of sex partners, among other criteria.
America was declared the 15th most promiscuous country on the planet by NapLab, with the average resident sleeping with 10.7 people over the course of their lifetime.
That’s on par with Canada, as our naughty northern neighbors also notch up an average of 10.7 bedroom buddies.
However, Mexicans are less promiscuous than those in the US, with their average citizen sleeping with nine people.
Brits were also less likely to have as many sex partners (9.8 on average), as were the Spanish (6.1), the Polish (6) and the Chinese (3.1).
Meanwhile, Australia was named the most promiscuous country in the world, with the average citizen sleeping with 13.3 people and 81% of residents approving of sex before marriage.
Prostitution is also legalized Down Under, while the average Aussie loses their virginity at a younger age than the average American (17.8 years versus 18 years).
Despite their citizens seeming to sleep around more on average, Australia had lower rates of sexually transmitted diseases, also known as STDs, than the US.
The STD rate is 14,454 per 100,000 citizens in Australia, while it’s a far higher 19,900 per 100,000 people in the US.
India was named by NapLab as the least promiscuous of the 45 countries they examined. Just 19% of Indians thought premarital sex was acceptable, while the average citizen had had just three sex partners. India also had relatively low STD rates when compared to other countries on the list
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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