Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party

If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts.

Instead, it simply erased the border and dynamited federal immigration law. By fiat, nihilists ended the wall, and stopped detaining and deporting illegal aliens altogether.

Or was it worse than that when candidate Joe Biden in September 2019 urged would-be illegal aliens to “surge” the border?

As a result, through laxity and entitlement incentives, 8 million illegal entrants have swarmed the southern border under the Biden administration. They are swamping border towns, bankrupting big-city budgets, and infuriating even Democratic constituencies.

The same nihilism applies to crime.

In the old days liberals gave light sentences to criminals or reduced bail. But today leftist prosecutors do not even seek bail. They hardly prosecute theft or random assaults.

Criminals are arrested and released the same day. Is the nihilist plan to destroy the entire body of American jurisprudence, and to ensure “equity” in being victimized?

Is the woke idea that all Americans—inclusive of diverse Beverly Hills elites, Hollywood celebrities, or members of Congress alike—must share victim equity, and thus experience firsthand street robbery, car-jacking, smash-and-grab, and home invasion?

The United States can produce annually more natural gas and oil than any nation on earth. It once pioneered nuclear power. It has vast coal reserves and sophisticated hydroelectric plants.

The old idea was to use these unmatched resources to transition gradually to other cleaner fuels such as hydrogen, fusion power, solar, and wind. That way consumers would still enjoy affordable energy. And the United States could remain independent of coercion by the oil-producing Middle East.

But that was not the nihilist way.

Instead, the Left deliberately cut back on pipelines, new energy leases, and fracking. It bragged of an upcoming ban on fossil fuels. In drought-stricken, energy-short California, the state is blowing up, not building new dams.

Is the nihilist agenda to punish with bankruptcy the energy-using middle class?

Is the hope that Americans will have to beg the Saudis, Iranians, Venezuelans, and Russians to pump more of the hated goo for our benefit so we would not have to dirty ourselves helping ourselves?

When Biden entered office in January 2021 the U.S. was naturally rebounding from more than a year of COVID-19-enforced lockdowns.

Overtaxed supply chains were still fragile. Pent-up demand was soaring. Consumers were flush with government cash. Trillions of dollars had been printed and infused into the economy to ward off a feared recession.

All economists advised not to increase the deficit, spike further consumer demand, and expand entitlements.

Instead the Left did just the opposite. Four-trillion dollars were printed and distributed. In no time, Americans, recovering from COVID-19, next experienced the worst, but entirely preventable, inflation in 40 years.

Three years later prices on staples remain 30%-40% higher than when Biden took office. Mortgage rates tripled.

Abroad the nihilism is even more inexplicable and terrifying.

All nations suffer military setbacks. But none in memory have shamefully hightailed out of a theater as we did from Afghanistan.

Few countries could even imagine discarding billions of dollars of weapons and hardware into the hands of the terrorist Taliban, or abandoning a $1 billion new embassy, and a huge, remodeled air base.

Why did the administration simply allow a huge Chinese spy balloon to float and photograph leisurely over the continental U.S.?

Naive countries might endure two or three attacks on their overseas bases without serious retaliation. But how could the U.S. military permit 135 rocket barrages by Iranian-supplied terrorists on American soldiers without a major and sustained response?

Is the point to humiliate our own troops? To destroy what is left of U.S. deterrence?

Popular culture is especially captive to leftist nihilism. It is not enough to object to a statue or artwork. Instead, without deliberation or public input, they must be defaced or destroyed, all the better stealthily and by night.

After the massacres of Oct. 7—but well before Israel had even responded to the barbaric invasion—thousands of students swarmed their elite universities cheering on the violence.

And what so exhilarated them?

The nihilist, ghoulish beheading, torture, mutilation, mass rape, dismemberment, and necrophilia of unarmed, civilian Israeli elderly, women, children, and infants.

In sum, we are witnessing an epidemic of leftist nihilism similar to the 16th-century European mad wave of iconoclastic destruction of religious art.

Or is the better parallel the suicidal insanity that Mao Zedong unleashed during his cultural revolution of the 1960s?

The old politics of Right versus Left, and Republican opposed to Democrat have now given way to a new existential struggle: Americans must choose between civilization—or its destroyers

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/14/americans-must-choose-between-civilization-or-its-destroyers/

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Gaza could have been a Middle East Singapore. It dug tunnels instead

Singapore’s revolution from an impoverished Third World outpost with no natural resources, no industry, and that relied on its neighbours for energy, food and water was achieved in not much more than a generation. Gaza had the same opportunity, but chose to pass.

Much of Gaza is in smouldering ruin. And Gazans are to blame. They voted for Hamas and polls show they would do so again, not that they have had the chance lately. Hamas likes to present itself as a resistance movement, but its raison d’etre is the slaughter of Jews – and anyone else who would support Israel’s democracy. Most Gazans agree with that.

The Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development on November 14 published the results of a poll it had taken, one question of which was: How do you view the role of Hamas? A total of 48.2 per cent responded “very positively” while 27.8 per cent responded “somewhat positive”. That means 76 per cent of Palestinians support Hamas after its depraved foot-soldiers flooded into Israel in October incinerating families, killing babies, raping men and women they then shot dead, and decapitating with a shovel one woman who fought them off.

Gaza’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, 1800km away at the time, saw it all unfold on Al Jazeera, which he watched in his luxury office in Doha, the capital of Qatar. (The Qatari government funds Al Jazeera, which is best known for its anti-Semitic, anti-American broadcasts and its glorification of Islamic terror.)

The Hamas boss and his 13 children prefer Doha to the challenges of life in Gaza – which he is not-so-slowly destroying from a distance.

Haniyeh is so murderously vile that even Fatah leader and Palestinian National Authority boss Mahmoud Abbas can’t stand him – although they do meet irregularly, bonded by their mutual hatreds.

Abbas is often caught out telling lies about Jews and has done so all his life. He studied at a Russian university and his thesis was published as a book – The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism – thatbroke the news that the Jews were partners with the Nazis and as such were equally responsible for the Holocaust.

On September 6, Abbas helpfully explained that, in any case, Hitler killed the Jews because he believed them to be exploitative money-lenders. Abbas usually cynically apologises for such absurd comments but seems to have forgotten to do so this time.

Haniyeh reportedly is very wealthy. He is said to profit handsomely from the tunnel smuggling business, which can turn over $600m a year and circumvents the Egyptian and Israeli blockades of Gaza, so the status quo suits him fine. So far he has overseen five wars with Israel: 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and the one now under way. Every time, Haniyeh uses Gaza’s citizens as human shields – and thousands have died.

Martyrs, he calls these victims of his sinful barbarism.

Gaza has never been at this low an ebb. Rooting out Hamas – as Israel has pledged – will mean many unavoidable, non-combatant deaths, as Haniyeh fully understands, expects and for which he planned. It’s among the reasons he is hiding in Doha.

Things could have been so different for Gaza. There were proposals for its development that might have seen it on the trajectory that powered Singapore to economic prosperity after 1965.

And they have a few things in common. At independence in 1965, Singapore’s land mass (at low tide) was 578sq km – it has grown to 734sq km since reclaiming marshlands, mangrove swamps and mosquito-infested jungle. But it has many more inhabitants than Gaza with population density of 8330 people per square kilometre.

Gaza is 365sq km and had a population density of about 3600 people per square kilometre when Israel withdrew from the territory in August 2005. Despite constant claims of various genocides committed by Israel there since, Gaza’s population has rocketed and stands at 2,299,000 with a population density of 6507 per square kilometre.

Singapore’s gross domestic product per capita in 1965 was $US517. Last year it was $US87,884 and ahead of the US. The GDP for the West Bank and Gaza was about $US3100 last year – ahead of India but just below Sri Lanka.

Singapore’s revolution from an impoverished Third World outpost with no natural resources, no industry, and that relied on its neighbours for energy, food and water – does that sound familiar? – was achieved in not much more than a generation.

The future of the envied tiger economy was founded on racial and religious tolerance with a radical plan to invite foreign capital – which required political stability – and develop industrial land while investing deeply in education, basic at first but soon leaning towards the technical skills the new industries would need.

Last week the annual OECD Program for International Student Assessment results measuring the mathematical, reading and scientific literacy of 15-year-old students were announced. It rates the education performance of 81 countries: Singapore came out on top. Again.

By 1975 Singapore had achieved full employment. Industry was at first simple manufacturing including matches, fishing hooks and mosquito repellents. The transition to high-value manufacture, especially computer products, was swift. And it never scrimped on defence; like Israel, it introduced compulsory conscription and has a standing force of more than 50,000 personnel but can call on more than 250,000 reservists.

By the turn of the century Singapore was an affluent global city, having coasted through the Asian financial meltdown of 1998.

Israel’s disengagement with Gaza was announced in 2003 and by 2005 its remaining citizens were removed, many forcibly by Israeli soldiers, some dragged from their synagogues, which soon were desecrated. The departure had been on the cards for years, back to the day when a two-state solution still seemed possible, even if, as late as 2000, the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Yasser Arafat, when offered a historic and generous deal brokered by US president Bill Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, sabotaged the negotiations. Peace was the last thing on his mind.

Not long before Arafat’s death the Palestinians created laws to pay salaries for Palestinians jailed in Israel for terrorist offences and murder – cementing in a permanent incentive for young Palestinians to kill Jews. For Palestinians, crime does indeed pay and it reportedly costs 8 per cent of the Palestinian budget.

Nonetheless, much of the world saw promise in Gaza at this time and, with investors from Japan, Spain, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Morocco, what became the Yasser Arafat International Airport – a good half the size of Sydney airport – was opened by Clinton in November 1998.

International airlines started arriving and 90,000 passengers, including would-be business investors, flew in the following year. But the runways were bombed by Israel in response to the Second Intifada that started in 2000, during which 1137 Israelis were murdered and more than 8000 injured by explosions at public places and suicide bombers while others were stabbed and shot.

Killed in this hate wave was 15-year-old Melbourne student Malki Roth who was at a pizza restaurant with her best friend, who also was murdered. (The Arab woman who arranged the bombing, Ahlam Tamimi, smiled when she heard 15 had died in the attack and said recently: “Allah granted me success … I would do it again today, and in the same manner.”)

Despite the unending, unprovoked violence from Israel’s enemies, particularly those in Gaza, plans to develop the strip sprouted as business thinkers saw the strategic advantages and possibilities of the land and the extraordinary number of locals of working age. The average age in Gaza is 18.

Nineteen days after Roth was murdered, the International Monetary Fund released a report on the economic prospects of the West Bank and Gaza, which it described as “favourable”. It spoke of the need for GDP growth of 8 per cent – a challenge, but it had been achieved before. In any case, the territories’ GDP had grown an average 6 per cent annually for three decades.

The IMF reported that were there political stability “the economy should be able to enjoy an extended period of high growth”. It also stated that “there is considerable scope for expansion of Palestinian trade with the rest of the world, in particular with the European Union and the United States”.

A more detailed plan for Gaza was drawn up by Rhode Island’s Roger Williams University (ironically, Williams was a 17th-century campaigner for religious freedom and the separation of church and state), the goals of which were job creation, sustainable economic development and environmental security. It saw opportunities in Gaza’s 41km of beautiful Mediterranean coast – in contrast, Monaco can claim only 3.8km of the Mediterranean. It proposed the establishment of a free trade industrial zone that would employ 30,000 and generate jobs for perhaps another 120,000.

Initially, the plan was to build near the Egyptian border. “Later the zone would be expanded inland and offshore in Palestinian waters on to a large artificial island with a connecting causeway, which will also serve as a jet aircraft runway and with a deep water port.”

The report’s authors believed start-up costs would be $300m to $450m. It is worth noting that today’s war reportedly is costing Israel an estimated $900m a week. (The Gaza conflict is a proxy war on Jews masterminded and funded by Iran whose plan it is to undermine the Israeli economy.)

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/gaza-could-have-been-a-middle-east-singapore-but-chose-martyrdom/news-story/65e50e3ca5d728c303764dfd7db9e1b6

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Can there ever be peace between Israel and the Palestinians?

If history is a guide, the answer is no. But we are right to believe in miracles.

The Israeli government has only weeks to finish, or at least change fundamentally, its operation to destroy the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza. International pressure on Israel is mounting drastically. The humanitarian cost in Gaza, though entirely the moral responsibility of Hamas, is unsustainably high.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be moved by the Albanese government signing a defective, one-sided UN resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire but not even mentioning Hamas by name, nor its October 7 atrocities.

It’s demoralising, of course, the defection, and confusion, of Australia, which was once at the centre of the Western alliance.

But much more important is the attitude of US President Joe Biden, who warns that Israel is losing international support. Biden himself is under immense pressure for solidly backing Israel.

The biggest operational problem for Israel remains the 500km of Hamas tunnels. Israel must destroy or disable these if it is to capture or kill top Hamas leaders and permanently disable Hamas militarily. The international pressure is immense. Israel will finish its operation by January or change its methods such that large-scale humanitarian aid can enter Gaza.

But it’s what happens the day after the operation ends that is where the biggest disagreement between Jerusalem and Washington (and Canberra, though Australia now has no influence at all with Jerusalem) comes in.

The Biden administration, like most international opinion, wants negotiations to resume towards a two-state solution, a Palestinian state living next door to Israel. Given that’s agonisingly distant, in the short term it wants the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank, to administer Gaza.

Netanyahu says no on both scores. He doesn’t want the PA in charge of Gaza and he now rejects the two-state solution. My guess is he’d compromise on having the PA back in Gaza. The two-state solution, however, extraordinarily complex and difficult, seems impossible operationally.

Nothing generates more ignorant cliches than the Israel-Palestine dispute. Much discussion of it just involves endless recycling of familiar cliches that mostly float clear of reality. The difficulty with the two-state solution is that Palestinians, and in the past their Arab neighbours, and now their Iranian sponsors, have rejected every single genuine offer of a Palestinian state.

Until recently, most Israelis wanted a two-state solution. As anyone who has visited Israel knows, it’s a successful modern democracy, with a vibrant society, ethnic diversity and great economic achievement. It yearns to live normally, in peace. But decades of relentless attack by regional enemies who don’t accept its right to exist has changed its attitude to the utility, and dangers, of peace negotiations.

Notwithstanding three regional wars aimed at Israel’s annihilation, and almost constant lesser attacks from a collection of enemies that would fill a fat phone book, Israel has on at least four separate occasions offered a full state to the Palestinians, who each time rejected it.

It starts in 1947. The last uncontested sovereign power over the land of Israel, before modern Israel was created, was the Ottoman Empire. Ditto for the West Bank and Gaza. After the Ottomans, Britain ruled under a mandate first from the League of Nations, then the UN.

In 1947 the UN decided to split the land between Jews and Palestinians, with Jerusalem belonging to neither state but administered internationally. The Palestinians could have had their independent state right then. Israel would have been much smaller. Instead the Palestinians, plus all their Arab neighbours, rejected the deal. In 1948, when Israel declared independence and was formally recognised by a vote at the UN, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan all attacked, planning to wipe the Jews out of existence.

There was terrible fighting. Several Jewish towns were massacred. Some 750,000 Palestinians left Israel. This had several causes. One is they expected Jewish soldiers to be as savage with them as Arab soldiers had been with Jewish residents. Another is they expected Arab nations to quickly overwhelm Israel. Then they would return. Some Arab leaders advised Arab residents to flee temporarily. Some Palestinians were certainly driven out by Jewish soldiers. Large numbers of Palestinians remained, and today 20 per cent of Israel’s population is Arab. About the same time, 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and North African countries where Jews had lived for millennia, although often as a persecuted minority.

Israel’s Arab neighbours were determined never to accept a Jewish state. In 1967 they were making troop movements preparatory to attacking Israel, and declaring they were about to attack. So Israel launched a pre-emptive strike and in the process took control of the West Bank, which had been in Jordan’s possession, and the Gaza Strip, which Egypt had controlled, and the Sinai Desert, which also belonged to Egypt. Neither Jordan nor Egypt had ever tried to set up an independent Palestinian state in these territories.

Following this war the Arab states declared their policy of “three noes”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.

In 1973 Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, and Syria, with a degree of help from some other Arab nations, launched a surprise military attack on Israel that became the Yom Kippur war. At terrible cost, Israel won that war.

Despite his anti-Semitic past, Sadat made a historic peace with Israel in 1979. Critically, Israel returned the vast Sinai desert to Egypt, giving up all the strategic depth it had afforded Israel, and all its mineral resources, in exchange for a durable peace treaty. Israel evicted Jewish settlers who had moved to Sinai. But in terms of the politics of a subsequent Palestinian state, here is the most powerful lesson of all. Egyptian Islamic Jihad, enraged at Sadat making peace with Israel, assassinated him in 1981.

The Egyptian peace treaty demonstrated conclusively Israel would trade territory for peace, so long as it got real peace. The US underwrote the peace and it stands today. The Egypt-Israel treaty showed everyone peace was possible. Sadat’s assassination showed everyone it would always carry a high price.

The Oslo peace accords kicked off a process in the 1990s that led to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, under the sponsorship of Bill Clinton, offering a full Palestinian state to Yasser Arafat.

Barak offered 96 per cent of the West Bank, some compensating territory from Israel proper, all of Gaza and the Palestinian neighbourhoods of east Jerusalem. Israel would keep only the large Jewish settlement blocs near Jerusalem, a couple of per cent of West Bank territory, and give territory from Israel proper in compensation. Barak wanted a full guarantee of peace and an end to all other Palestinian claims on Israel.

Arafat refused the deal. He tried to tell Clinton that Jews really had no historic connection to Jerusalem. He couldn’t meet the requirement to end all claims. And he demanded that all four million of the descendants of the 750,000 Palestinians who left in 1948 be allowed to return and live permanently in Israel, not in the new Palestinian state but in Israel itself. This is the so-called “right of return” and it’s an absurdity.

Every other refugee population that goes to live elsewhere is permanently resettled. But, of the neighbouring Arab countries, only Jordan offered Palestinians citizenship. Generally, Palestinian refugees and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were kept as notional refugees so the UN would pay for them in perpetuity, and as a bargaining chip against Israel.

The Palestinians could have had an independent state from Clinton and Barak, flooded with international aid, sponsored by the US, the EU and the Arab world. But had Arafat taken this deal he would surely have been killed by his own extremists eventually, just like Sadat. It’s likely Arafat never remotely wanted a deal. Former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid once told me that Arafat had told him privately that it was his ambition “to throw all the Jews into the sea”.

Barak’s remarkably generous deal, which would have involved uprooting many Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, was improved and offered to Arafat again. But again the Palestinians rejected it, making the third clear time they refused to accept a state.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/can-there-be-peace-between-israel-and-palestine-history-says-probably-not/news-story/8cee6a7f2de5e0033f8e0447decc0988

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Will Javier Milei’s ‘shock therapy’ work?

The Argentinian peso has been devalued by 50 per cent overnight. Controls on exports have been scrapped, and the country’s ministry of culture is to be closed down. The health, labour, social development and education departments are also facing the chop. Argentina’s president Javier Milei – who vowed to deliver economic ‘shock treatment’ in his first speech on Sunday after formally taking office – has started a radical overhaul of the economy and begun what is by far the most interesting experiment in economics in the world right now.

True, Milei may not have gone as far as some people might have expected. The plan to replace the peso completely with the American dollar has been shelved for now. So far, at least, the central bank has not been abolished, although given that it is currently presiding over an inflation rate of 140 per cent it could hardly complain if it was. By any normal standards, Milei is taking an axe – if not a chainsaw – to Argentina’s bloated state apparatus.

Milei is right to be bold. The currency markets, which will be by far his greatest point of vulnerability, can’t attack him. He has already trashed the currency, with a huge devaluation, and it was significant that the impeccably centrist International Monetary Fund quickly put out a statement supporting the move. Milei knows that the only time he can make deep cuts in public spending is right at the start of his term, when momentum is with him. Indeed, by abolishing ministries wholesale instead of trying to reform them, Milei may well have provided a template for other governments that win power on a free market platform.

He is right to be bold

The plan is high risk, and may well combust within weeks. It is Argentina, after all, a country that has specialised in economic chaos for more than a century. But if president Milei can control inflation, and unleash exports of agricultural products, and bring energy on stream, it could just work. Additionally, if wheat and maize prices rise, the country will soon have plenty of dollar earnings. Meanwhile Argentina holds 21 per cent of the world’s lithium supplies, crucial for batteries, and production is just starting to be stepped up. Its huge reserves of shale oil and gas are beginning to come on stream too, and could soon turn the country into a major energy exporter. With a little luck, Milei’s boldness could well pay off. And if it does, it will change the economic debate globally – by demonstrating there is an alternative to an ever expanding, activist state.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/will-javier-mileis-shock-therapy-work/

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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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