Maniacal hatred of Jews festers in cocoon of denial, says GEMMA TOGNINI
She sees that there are NOT "two sides" to the events in Gaza. I thought I might mention that, as her name suggests, Gemma is of Italian descent. Her father was Italian. And Italians have long been unusually sympathetic to Israel. I grew up among Italians and admire their emotional warmth
The New York Times, well known as a predominantly left-leaning paper (that’s important, stay with me) published a devastating feature about the weaponisation of sexual violence by Hamas.
This long-form feature is the result of interviews with more than 150 people, including survivors and witnesses to the slaughter of October 7. It cites first-hand accounts and multiple primary sources, and meticulously explains how facts were verified. I don’t know how they managed. I could barely get through it. Their words dripped with grief, measured yet urgent with the weight of responsibility. The cadence of every line whispered: the world must know, the world must know.
Reading the responses to this article were an exercise in despair. Almost all expressed horror at the savagery of what had been documented, and thanked the reporters and the paper for bearing witness. Many more concurrently dived into the filthy waters of moral equivalence; this was savage and barbaric, they said. But, also, Israel sort of deserved it.
I realised in that moment there is a bloodstained thread that bound Ryvchin’s book to the article and the comments that followed. Denial. Denial of truth. Denial of facts. Denial that a moral centre has been violated.
I see no difference in the societal elites who centuries ago concocted the most ridiculous blood libel tales to violently enact pogroms on Jews across Europe and those who today are responding to the unthinkable sexual violence of Hamas with, well, Israel really is the oppressor.
Surely this thinking is a kind of sickness?
The NYT report details verified images of women’s corpses with nails driven into their thighs and groins. It verified a video showing two dead female IDF soldiers who had been shot directly into their vaginas. They interviewed a survivor who, hidden and feigning death, watched Hamas fighters mutilate a woman’s breasts while she was being raped.
I don’t want to go on, to keep recounting these horrors, but we must, as long as there are still people whose response is conditional. Who respond with, yes … but.
Let’s bring this closer to home and tease it out further, because we must. Nobody wants to have their world tipped upside down. Denial is a form of weakness. It is the ultimate form of self-preservation. It’s the person who stays with a cheating partner, ignoring the signs because the pain of dealing with it seems greater than the humiliation of the status quo. It’s the parent that refuses to accept their child is on drugs.
Vision has been released of 21 year old Mia Schem running towards her mother, after she was released from… Hamas. Ms Schem was abducted from the Supernova music festival in early October and appeared in a video released by Hamas 10 days later, pleading for her release. Mia was More
In corporate life, where I spend 99 per cent of my days, it’s the dysfunctional board that denies the existence of red flags, hiding behind the notion of stability, unable to acknowledge that this stability is a Band-Aid by another name.
It’s in myriad situations in everyday life where denial has consequences at only a personal level.
But, as a friend of mine said earlier in the week, what we’re seeing here is so different. It is uniquely directed at Jews, and at Israel and its right to exist. I can’t recall any other manifestation of hatred and denial on this scale.
French-Israeli hostage Mia Schem has given details of her ordeal during her 54 days held in Gaza. She was held captive by a Palestinian family. She talks of being confused – why is there a woman here? Why is there a family here? Then the penny dropped.
The same media that have been so swift, say, to believe all women, believe any woman who says anything about sexual violence, published an insulting disclaimer to Schem’s words, saying her account was yet to be verified. By all means, pop over to Gaza and ask the family that held her. I’m sure they will be honest and transparent.
Ah, but to believe Mia Schem means a brick in the protective wall of ideology comes down. Perhaps the wall itself. To deny her story is to stay in the same cocoon that refuses to accept a ceasefire, without Hamas surrender and the safe return of the still living hostages, is a fool’s errand.
How many would need to completely reframe their political thinking, perhaps even parts of their identity? Mia Schem’s testimony says what history taught us. Just as not every German was a Nazi, there were many enthusiastic Nazis in German society. Not every Gazan is Hamas, but only the greatest fool would deny that a proportion of everyday Gazans are complicit. That they know where the hostages are, and are happily complicit.
Denial feels safe, but it never is. It simply postpones the inevitable pain of realising what was there all along. To the many who continue to say, oh but sexual violence has always been a weapon of war, you are in denial. You are minimising the most atrocious acts of femicide in our times.
The blood of every innocent civilian life lost in Gaza is on Hamas. Not only has it rejected every ceasefire offered, refusing to release the living hostages, it has promised it will repeat October 7 until Israel, Jews and Christians are wiped from the map. Hamas is not denying this and neither must democracies in the West.
*************************************************
The furious Leftist hostility to Trump is what threatens American democracy
Unlike in 2020, when then-candidate Joe Biden was leading almost all of the polls — out of 293 national polls taken during that cycle compiled by RealClearPolitics.com, Biden led 285 of them, or 97 percent of them — this time around, former President Donald Trump has an observable advantage in the polls, leading President Biden in 103 out of 214 polls taken, or 48 percent of them. Biden has only led 81, or just 38 percent, and 30 are tied, or 14 percent.
Since, given Democrats’ historical advantage in the popular vote — Republicans have not won the popular vote since 2004 but still managed to eke out Electoral College wins in 2000 and 2016 without it — any potential tie in the popular vote would still bode well for Trump and Republicans in 2024. So, really, about 62 percent of the polls (and rising) showing that at this point in the race, with less than a year to go until November, Trump definitely has an advantage.
This has tended to be true even in the four-way, five-way race polls and seven-way race polls as the political parties attempt to stack the deck in every way imaginable to find a configuration of candidates that might show Biden prevailing.
Since the polls are real and show Biden is quite vulnerable regardless of which race is considered rather early in the process — the primaries haven’t even begun yet — this is leading to widespread panic in the Washington, D.C. establishment and attempts to remove Trump from the ballot first from Colorado and now Maine as GOP appeals rush to the Supreme Court so that Republicans in the primary and general election voters will be the ones to determine who the next president is.
This panic and push to remove Trump in turn is threatening to continue the constitutional crisis that began in 2016 with the attempt to subvert his candidacy and then administration on false charges he was a foreign agent. Even after Trump won, official Washington, D.C. could not accept the outcome and sought to overturn if not the election’s outcome, then to delegitimize it and effectively run out the clock.
By 2020, with the help of Covid and the ensuing economic lockdowns plus mail-in balloting, Democrats managed to boost turnout in the election to narrowly defeat Trump, winning by a scant 43,000 votes in Georgia (10,000), Arizona (10,000) and Wisconsin (23,000), which if they had gone the other way, the Electoral College would have been tied 269 to 269, sending the election to the House of Representatives.
Given the closeness, Trump returned the favor visited upon him after 2016 and challenged the outcome of the election, and its legitimacy as well. This unfortunately led to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, numerous prosecutions of rioters whether they were peaceful or not, and now prosecutions of Trump himself in a bid to imprison him and add legitimacy to the attempt to keep him off the ballot.
This is all insane. Every bit of it. Because it’s dangerous. The U.S. Civil War began in 1860 because the defeated political party, the Democrats, could not accept the outcome of the election. And in 2016, they began that process again as now both parties have joined in what appears to be mortal combat over who gets to sit in the White House even though whether it is Trump or Biden, both would be constitutionally term-limited and second terms are usually very difficult to move legislation or get much accomplished anyway.
As things proceed, the election does not even appear to be turning on issues so far, but when those are considered, on issues like the war in Ukraine, Trump's opponents appear to rather the world burn in nuclear hellfire than admit he was right about the powder keg there as in 2016 the counterintelligence investigation was predicated on Trump’s electoral opposition to U.S. intervention in that region.
And now, Trump’s opponents would apparently rather see the republic fall in civil war (just like almost every other republic that fell in civil war) than see him in office again. They are hoping supporters — it doesn’t matter which side — do something stupid, thus creating a predicate for the federal government to seize even more police powers for itself atop the mass surveillance and censorship regimes that have already been exposed.
That is, everything appears to be on the table except for backing off or admitting a mistake. Historians might look back and ascribe the inevitable outcome as a product of hubris, and surely that is present, but to merely note the pridefulness on display would be to ignore the deliberate catalyzing that has occurred as constitutional norms have been destroyed as the nation appears on the brink of catastrophe.
In short, Washington, D.C. perceives an existential threat to their power, real or imagined, and thus have created one, but now to all of our liberty. 2024 will test the civil society's longevity but I fear we lack knowledge of its institutions to truly preserve them. We understand the consent of the governed but that's not enough to want to preserve it.
https://dailytorch.com/2024/01/2024-will-test-the-longevity-of-the-civil-society/
*************************************************Is Wikipedia struggling to maintain neutrality in times of political unrest?
In the realm of social media, Wikipedia isn’t a platform that comes to mind. It isn’t thought to possess hate speech, misinformation, let alone antisemitism. Rather, Wikipedia presents itself as a well-sourced, crowd-generated, free encyclopaedia, relying on consensus building and the neutrality of editors. The aim is ‘to inform, not influence’. Yet, Wikipedia’s collective consensus building to achieve neutrality is an assumption that is naïve at best, revealing what I believe to be unsettling editor bias on the platform. Essentially, while Wikipedia has systems in place designed to correct mistakes, these systems appear to be struggling to cope with political narratives.
As I have demonstrated in the past, during periods of geopolitical conflicts and when contentious topics dominate the news, there is a noticeable uptick in Wikipedia page views. Consequently, editors flock to these pages striving, in my view, to influence the narrative. A closer examination of editor user pages and article talk pages unveils a disconcerting parallel with major social media platforms.
Wikipedia has not been left untouched by the disturbing surge in antisemitic speech and conspiracy theories about the Jewish people seen online. Wikipedia’s access and editing for all (crowd sourcing) shows the platform’s vulnerability to bias and political influence.
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, one editor’s portrayal of a Palestinian flag branding ‘Judaism as a religion of life and Zionism as a cult of death’ led to reprimands from administrators. However, the editor denied that the statement qualified as hate speech and went so far as to lobby other like-minded senior editors to defend it. Another case is of an experienced editor quoting antisemitism denialists and going on to draw parallels between the current Israeli government and the Nazis. The same editor argued that an attempt to label said editor as antisemitic is a mere tactic to enforce silence.
Wikipedia editors hide behind anonymity and a user interface of talk pages that are not so obvious to the public allowing for hate speech and misinformation to go unchecked. Here, editor discussions take place in a pseudo-academic format on what an article should and shouldn’t include. All positions need to be well-sourced, yet sources are also voted on via consensus in order to make the reliable sources list. It seems like an alternate reality when media outlets with questionable neutrality are used as reliable sources. Moreover, the dominance of left-leaning sources means that information is limited and skewed. Academic articles take precedence but with the current state of academia – when calling for genocide is defended by some university presidents – Wikipedia is found wanting.
Moreover, cherry-picking information from sources is common in order to bolster an editor’s or a group of editors’ narrative. Take this article and talk page on Palestinians. There is a group of pro-Israel editors arguing with a group of pro-Palestinian editors about the misuse of a source on the genetic link between the ancient Canaanites and modern Jews and Arabs. The pro-Palestinian editors omit mentioning the genetic link between Jews and Canaanites in order to bolster the Palestinian genetic link. The pro-Israel editors are dismissed, the senior administrator involved doesn’t care to comment on the misuse of the source, and if a reader were to only read this page, they would be getting half the information. An encyclopaedia should be unbiased but there is no shortage of opinions within it.
The many editors most prolific on political articles use sources to their advantage, omitting and adding the information that suits their narrative. It is an unsettling thought that this free encyclopedia has nearly seven million articles in English with active editors equating to less than one per cent of the total 46 million editors on the site. It means that the most active editors are a very small group with their own interests and biases. It also means that editing Wikipedia becomes a numbers game reminiscent of the quote, ‘Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.’ In other words, if you are outnumbered by a group of like-minded editors, you become the dinner.
This consensus policy with no checks and balances means the potential for biased narratives permeates the articles. A very recent and crucial example of this taking place was investigated in March of this year, where a group of Polish editors distorted Holocaust articles over a period spanning 15 years. The editors were familiar with Wikipedia’s mechanisms and created the appearance of adhering to the rules. They were also willing to invest a vast amount of time in debating other editors in order to build consensus and worked together to discredit established historians, often propping up fringe voices. The editors created the semblance of a real-world academic debate over what should be considered a non-controversial genocidal event, yet it was rendered a discussion on semantics and interpretation. The 15-year delay by Wikipedia in banning these distortionists prompted suggestions for external experts to address controversial political issues on the site, yet the experts are still nowhere to be found.
Take a discussion on 22 November 2023 about changing the blue Star of David in an article about Jews. Editors can be found disputing its connection to Jewish identity citing that it isn’t representative of all Jews. One editor is quoted as saying, ‘I think it would be accurate to say that Zionism invented the Jewish people, and therefore is as much a part of Jewishness as Judaism.’ The discussion is painted as academic, quoting sources, pitching argument against argument, all whilst the only Jewish nation is fighting a war after the most heinous attacks on Israeli civilians.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that these discussions are not happening in a vacuum. Editors that start these types of debates have a narrative they want to push and these very same editors know that millions of people will read it and believe it. Wikipedia fails to effectively manage the dominance of editor group think and the platform’s consensus-building model is consistently manipulated. For this reason, Wikipedia is no more than a social media platform with citations.
***********************************************
Sen. John Fetterman slams ‘pinko’ Harvard, calls Israel beacon of ‘progressive ideals’
I haven't aways approved of Fetterman but he's got his feet on the ground in this matter
In an interview this week, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman slammed the BDS movement and said that although Harvard University has always been a little “pinko” he doesn’t “recognize” it 25 years after he attended the school following Claudine Gay’s resignation as president.
“As an alum of Harvard — look, I graduated 25 years ago, and of course it was always a little pinko,” Fetterman told Semafor this week “But now, I don’t recognize it.”
Fetterman’s comment comes shortly after Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned from her position after struggling to answer a question condemning antisemitism in front of Congress and being accused of plagiarism almost 50 times.
Fetterman also told Semafor that “Israel is really a beacon of the kind of values, the American values and progressive ideals, that you want to see.”
“In that region, it’s our strongest ally, and we have a very special kind of relationship. I don’t understand how anybody could vote against the Iron Dome, or want to harm Israeli businesses or the nation or anything. I’ll never understand that. Calling them ‘colonizers’— like, where does this come from? It must be TikTok or some kind of obscure classroom talk.”
Fetterman also addressed calls for a “cease fire” in Israel from within his own party.
“More and more of my colleagues are calling for it,” Fetterman said. “It’s so strange. Why aren’t you calling for Hamas to surrender? If Hamas surrendered, and turned over their guns, all the killing and all the misery would.”
Fetterman has drawn criticism from fellow Democrats on some of his positions including Israel and immigration and he recently told NBC News that he is “not a progressive.”
“I just think I’m a Democrat that is very committed to choice and other things. But with Israel, I’m going to be on the right side of that. And immigration is something near and dear to me, and I think we do have to effectively address it as well,” Fetterman said.
****************************************
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
*****************************************
/>
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
No comments:
Post a Comment