Fresh health warning over ultra-processed foods as 30-year study warns they marginally raise your risk of an early death
The academic source of the article below is:
https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj-2023-078476
Its conclusions are utter rubbish, reflecting the biases of the authors rather than what their data shows. It is an extreme quartile study -- meaning that they had to throw away half of their data before they could show any correlations. And even then only very weak associations were shown in only some cases.
And given the large number of possible correlations examined, an experiment-wise error-rate approach to significance testing should have been used, as in a Bonferroni correction, which would have reduced ALL relationships in this study to a nullity.
The study is good evidence therefore that ultra-processed foods are NOT harmful to you. Pathetic!
Conservatives are used to Leftists ignoring facts in favour of their theories and epidemiologists are much the same. Both groups show a common human tendency to adopt simple generalizations to explain their world. Sadly for us all, reality is complex and unforgiving so simple theories can lead to conclusions that are radically contrary to the truth -- e.g. Affirmative action has not removed black failure and simple foods are not safer than complex ones
Eating too many ultra-processed foods (UPFs) may send you to an early grave, a study suggests.
Ready meals, fizzy drinks and ice creams appear to pose the greatest danger to human health.
Harvard University researchers tracked 115,000 healthy US adults over the course of three decades.
Four per cent more deaths occurred among participants who ate around seven servings of junk a day, compared against a group who ate half as much.
While the risk was only small, the team argued their findings echoed calls to limit certain types of UPFs.
The umbrella term is used to cover anything edible made with colourings, sweeteners and preservatives that extend shelf life.
Ready meals, ice cream and tomato ketchup are some of the best-loved examples of products that fall under the umbrella UPF term, now synonymous with foods offering little nutritional value.
They are different to processed foods, which are tinkered to make them last longer or enhance their taste, such as cured meat, cheese and fresh bread.
Yet dietitians argue this sweeping judgement wrongly fingers 'healthy' options like fish fingers and baked beans.
Ultra-processed foods, such as sausages, cereals, biscuits and fizzy drinks, are formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods and additives.
They contain little or no unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as fruit, vegetables, seeds and eggs.
The foods are usually packed with sugars, oils, fats and salt, as well as additives, such as preservatives, antioxidants and stabilisers.
Ultra-processed foods are often presented as ready-to-consume, taste good and are cheap.
The new paper adds to growing evidence illustrating the health risks of UPFs, which have been vilified for decades over their observed links to cancer and dementia.
Over the 34-year follow-up period, the researchers recorded 48,193 deaths, including more than 13,000 due to cancer and just over 11,000 attributed to cardiovascular diseases.
However, no specific relationship between total UPF consumption and cancer or heart disease deaths was observed.
Instead, the elevated risk — amounting to an extra 64 deaths per every 100,000 person-years — was only seen for deaths from all causes.
They also found no link between premature death and condiments, sauces and savoury snacks.
Even with sugary drinks and ready meals, the risk was less pronounced after researchers factored in the overall diet quality of the participants, who were quizzed about their eating habits every four years.
The risk was up to 13 per cent for some UPFs.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, the scientists said: 'The findings provide support for limiting consumption of certain types of ultra-processed food for long term health.'
But experts today criticised the research.
Sir David Spiegelhalter, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge, said: 'This study shows weak associations of ultra-processed foods with overall mortality.'
Dietitian Dr Duane Mellor, spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, said: 'It is also noticeable that those who consumed most ultra-processed foods tended to eat few vegetables, fruit, legumes and wholegrain.
'It might not be as simple as that those who ate more ultra-processed foods are more likely to die earlier — it is quite possible that these foods might displace healthier foods from the diet.'
He added: 'Not all groups of UPFs are associated with the same health risks, with sugar and artificially sweetened drinks and processed meats being most clearly associated with risk of an early death.'
Professor Gunter Kuhnle, an expert in nutrition and food science at the University of Reading, said it was 'impossible to know how reliable the results are' because of how the study was carried out.
He said: 'Results, therefore, should be treated with a lot of caution. 'I don't think this study provides evidence suggesting limiting certain foods just because of their level of processing.
'Public health policy should be informed by evidence, and there is very good evidence about the health effects of foods based on their composition — which is largely confirmed by this study.
'In contrast, there is still virtually no robust evidence for an effect of 'ultra-processing' specifically on health.'
The UK is the worst in Europe for eating UPFs, which make up an estimated 57 per cent of the national diet.
They are thought to be a key driver of obesity, which costs the NHS around £6.5billion a year.
Often containing colours, emulsifiers, flavours, and other additives, they typically undergo multiple industrial processes which research has found degrades the physical structure of foods, making it rapid to absorb.
This in turn increases blood sugar, reduces satiety and damages the microbiome - the community of 'friendly' bacteria that live inside us and which we depend for good health.
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The People Setting America on Fire
Over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed what has seemed like a mass outpouring of support for terror on elite college campuses. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern, Texas, and elsewhere, masked mobs have occupied schools with tent encampments, established self-proclaimed “autonomous zones,” clashed with police, harassed and threatened visibly Jewish students, and issued demands for their universities to divest from Israeli “genocide.”
Politically, moreover, the protests have displayed an incoherent mix of campus progressivism, hardcore Islamism and Arab nationalism, and revolutionary anarchism and communism, including open praise for North Korea. The only unifying thread would appear to be opposition to Israel and its alleged imperial patron, the United States.
Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.
But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7.
This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.
The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago.
Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades.
At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.
These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall.
Recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.
“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”
The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag.
On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.
These groups, Shideler says, typically operate in a decentralized manner, using successful tactics drawn from decades of anarchist organizing and spread through left-wing activist networks via word-of-mouth, as well as through formal trainings by professionals such as Fithian or the nonprofit “movement incubator” Momentum Strategies. “If you look at Fithian,” he says, “she has consulted with hundreds of groups on how to do these things: how to organize, how to protest, how to make sure your people don’t go to jail, how to help them once they’re in jail.”
There is no one decision-maker; rather, decentralized “affinity” groups work together toward a shared goal, coordinating out in the open via social media and Google Docs. This can create an impression of centralized planning. Shideler cites the matching tents that have cropped up on a number of campuses, prompting speculation that some shadowy entity is buying them en masse. “People keep pointing out, They all have the same tent!,” he says. “Well, yeah, it’s because the organizers told them to buy a tent, and sent around a Google Doc with a link to that specific tent on Amazon. So they all went out and bought the same tent.”
In fact, it is a mistake both to view the campus protests as a “student” movement and to regard the outsiders as “infiltrators” or somehow separate from the movement. Rather, student activists have been working together with outsiders, with whom they are linked via overlapping activist networks and nationwide organizations. The “student” revolts, in turn, exist on a continuum with the broader anti-Israel protest movement. The campus encampments, for instance, began immediately after the nationwide “economic blockade” on April 15, which saw protesters block the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and “flood” Wall Street in New York City. Calls to participate in the “A15 Action” were disseminated widely in anarchist and far-left networks, while Palestinian and Islamist groups—SJP, AMP, CAIR, and Within Our Lifetime—simultaneously called for an April 15 “Strike 4 Gaza.”
Given reporting that nationwide campus “liberation zones” and “encampments” were planned as early as November 2023, it seems likely that the timing of the university protests was decided by “the movement” well in advance.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/people-setting-america-on-fire-soros-tides-wespac
*********************************************What is Happening with the Catholic Vote? Polling Shows Biden’s Numbers Plummeting Especially with Hispanics
A brand-new study on Catholic voters has alarming news for President Joe Biden when it comes to courting the Catholic vote in November. Catholics – particularly Hispanic Catholics – are expressing a significant decline in support for Biden compared to four years ago.
According to an April 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center, former President Donald Trump now leads Biden among Catholics as a whole by twelve points, 55 percent to 43 percent. This marks a significant shift compared to 2020 when Trump won Catholics by a single percentage-point, 50 percent to 49 percent.
Hidden among this striking shift is the real group Biden has to worry about – Hispanic Catholics. White Catholics voted for Trump by a comfortable fifteen-point margin in 2020 and show a moderate increase in support for Trump now. However, Hispanic Catholics supported Biden by 41 points in 2020 but plan to split there votes nearly evenly in November.
Pew’s survey shows that Hispanic Catholics, who make up close to 40 percent of the American Catholic population, say they plan to support Biden in November by just two percentage points after supporting Biden by 41 points in 2020. Hispanic Catholics are now planning to support Biden by a razor thin margin of 49 percent to 47 percent, after supporting Biden by a margin of 67 percent to 26 percent in 2020.
According to Chad Pecknold, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America, Hispanic Catholics are shifting away from the Democratic Party, despite the left’s best attempts to court them. “They [Hispanic Catholics] were once reliable votes for Democrats, but they are now splitting down the middle”, Pecknold told the National Catholic Register. “What this suggests is that, despite their best attempts at buying their votes through political favors, Democrats are losing one of the identity groups they’ve worked hardest at keeping.”
As Hispanic Catholics have made a pivotal turn away from Biden in the last four years, white Catholics have further consolidated behind Trump. According to Pew’s survey on how Catholics plan to vote in November, Trump secures around 61 percent of white Catholics to Biden’s 38 percent.
While recent polls shows that economic issues in particular are pushing Hispanics and blue-collar voters away from Biden, social issues also play a significant role when it comes to the Catholic vote.
Catholics are less likely to support the left-wing cultural agenda, opposing both transgender ideology, abortion, and same-sex marriage at high rates according to survey data. A 2022 poll from RealClear Opinion Research found that Catholics hold distinctly traditional views on a wide range of social issues including abortion, transgender ideology, and parents’ rights in education.
The survey found a full 82 percent of likely Catholic voters support some form or abortion restrictions, and 58 percent reject the idea of forcing doctors to perform procedures which violate their moral convictions, including abortion.
On transgender issues, American Catholics are significantly opposed to forcing biological males into female environments. Sixty-seven percent of Catholic voters reject the idea of biological males competing against biological females in school sports, and 67 percent reject allowing transgender males to use girls’ bathrooms and showers.
The Catholic population as a whole firmly believes that parents’ rights should be respected regarding the curriculum their children are taught as well. The Real Clear survey shows that 90 percent of Catholic voters say parents deserve more information on what their children are learning in school, and 65 percent believe parents deserve to play a role in deciding what is taught in public schools.
It is important to note that regular church attendance among Catholics is highly predictive of holding more conservative social views, and the opposite is true as well. Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey of American Catholics finds that those who attend church at least weekly are significantly less likely to favor the church recognizing LGBTQ marriages or encouraging women to become priests.
Practicing Catholics who attend church at least weekly say by a 32-point margin, 65 percent to 33 percent, that the church should not recognize gay marriage. Less-practicing Catholics who attend church less than weekly say the exact opposite. By a 24-point margin, 61 percent to 37 percent, those who attend church less than weekly say the church should recognize gay marriage.
The Biden Administration’s corrosive social agenda, driven by the most radical elements of the cultural left, is turning off a variety of voters, including independents, swing voters, parents, and Hispanics. Hispanic Catholics are further distancing themselves from the left after favoring Biden by double-digits in 2020. The radical left’s transgender ideology, infiltration of the school system against the will of parents, and violent abortion agenda is only further isolating Catholics from the Democratic Party.
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How did our anti-racist left become so openly anti-Jew?
I have never before felt shame in my country. Frustration, irritation and incomprehension, occasionally, but never shame.
Now I am ashamed of our opportunist anti-Semitism, cynically tolerating Hamas murders by weaponising the appalling plight of ordinary Palestinians in Gaza. I am ashamed of fellow citizens, openly or snidely anti-Jew; of universities too frightened to let Jews speak; and Pontius Pilate governments, washing their hands of dead Jews out of political convenience or fear.
What really bemuses me is that modern anti-Semitism in Australia comes from the left when it traditionally has been a product of the populist right. After all, Adolf Hitler was no social liberal.
But our own Jew-baiters now cluster visibly on the left. Bits of the Labor Party, various trade unions and innumerable faux-Trotskyist committees peddle propaganda, supposedly just anti-Israel but founded in a deeper racial and religious loathing. Most visibly the correct thought that offspring of privilege demonstrate enjoyably on university campuses, routinely eliding the old convenient distinction between Israel and Jewry.
This progressive anti-Semitism is easy to observe but much harder to explain. Why are people who endlessly propound human rights, revile racism and foster gender diversity so negatively obsessed – at best – with one of the smallest, historically most persecuted minorities in the world?
Part of understanding is to accept that, while Australia and its British tradition have inflicted less persecution on Jews than almost any other Western society, our record is not perfect. Way back, the Plantagenet kings milked, murdered and banished Jews. The Victorians who produced our liberal Constitution also manufactured that Semitic monster Fagin.
But in the new colonies of Australia anti-Semitism was beside the point. The troops were much more worried about Indigenous guerrillas, convicts and the feckless Irish. They may not positively have liked Jews but had little interest or energy to persecute them.
Famously, by the 1930s Australia had enjoyed a Jewish army commander in John Monash, a Jewish chief justice of the High Court in Isaac Isaacs, and a Jewish governor-general, also the irrepressible Isaacs. What was left was a limited, legacy anti-Semitism. Some people thought the Jews were too clever, too grasping, too sharp. But as the nation developed, it became reprehensible to talk like this. Good, ordinary people were not even passive anti-Semites.
A critical factor here was the Holocaust. The two Great Generations saw its consequences live on horrific newsreels. They were revolted beyond revulsion. They passed their horror to their children, and they to theirs. Anti-Semitism was a brand name for mass murder. But, incredibly, even the Holocaust has faded. A 66-year-old Australian (like me) was born only a decade and a bit after Auschwitz, and was minutely instructed in its meaning. Younger millennials were born 50 years after the Holocaust. It is remote history, not part of ethical family upbringing.
The consequence is that younger people do not understand the Jews as a nation reared in utter horror. They are just another minority, to be liked or deprecated as circumstances demand. Which contributes to our current confronting circumstances.
A pro-Israel protest at Sydney University to address the safety of Jewish students. Picture: NCA NewsWire/David Swift
A pro-Israel protest at Sydney University to address the safety of Jewish students. Picture: NCA NewsWire/David Swift
First, anti-Semitism is entrenched in the left as an instinctive, sometimes unwitting default position. Second, with the horrific chaos in Gaza, anti-Semitism suddenly is chic. People now routinely utter race libels that until recently would have had them ejected from any decent cocktail party. Correspondingly, anyone contradicting them will be abused or frozen into silence. Third, and chillingly, anti-Semitism is strongest among those who are young, trendy and left.
The same university students who ostentatiously agonise over climate change and social housing protest about the Jews. They do this through a self-confirming lens on the horrors of Gaza. If questioned, they smile pityingly, wave their banners and move on to the couscous. As the mayor of Gomorrah doubtless remarked on that fatal night, what on earth is going on? When did being left mean being an anti-Semite?
One obvious point is that if the state of Israel is conflated with the Jews, both are natural targets of the left as proxies for the US. Rent-a-Trots wanting to condemn the evils of modern liberal capitalism can take Israel and its difficulties as a bitter case in point.
Interestingly, the old nostrum that “I’m not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel” seems to be waning. In the current Gazan atmosphere of fear and loathing, the claim is not only implausible but unnecessary. Casual anti-Semitism is the new black.
The other odd thing about targeting Israel as the servant of the Great Satan is that other running dogs receive far less attention. Washington has numerous client states around the world. What, other than the obvious, automatically selects Israel?
For many years Israel could counter this type of argument with an entirely different narrative. What we saw was a band of plucky Jews in army uniforms, repeatedly invaded by bully larger nations, yet invariably victorious in improbable circumstances. But as Israel has succeeded, not only militarily but economically, its status as a David against Goliath has dissipated. As demonstrated in Gaza, right or wrong, Israel is a superpower in the Middle East. Yes, it is beset by intractable enemies such as Iran, and yes, groups such as Hamas are vicious murderers who hold the whole Palestinian people as hostages. But Israel as the underdog is a slogan that no longer flies.
The reality of Israel’s success is that it has augmented the armoury of the left. If Israel is no longer the 97-pound weakling, it can be portrayed as a bully. The international terms for a nation-state bully are invader, oppressor and aggressor.
Jews must wonder at these terms, all of which are highly personal. Not only states but people can be aggressors and oppressors. If Israel has these qualities, it follows that its people have the same, and most of those people are Jews.
Everyone loves to hate a stereotype. In the Middle Ages, Jews were thieves, cheaters, carriers of disease and killers of Christian babies. Today they are rightist brutes, genocidal murderers and ethnic cleansers. The current language of the left is a recognisable translation of medieval charge sheets. Where are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion when you need them?
Funnily enough, the idea of Israel as rogue state primarily composed of recently arrived Jews feeds directly into the grand obsession of the Australian crazy left. This is the devalidation of the Australian nation-state.
You know the trope. The first Europeans in Australia were mere invaders who warped into settlers. They had no right to inhabit the continent. Crucially, their collective posterity was no better, as they were tainted settlers by blood. The result was a perpetual settler state.
It follows that nothing done by our own settler state – such as making a constitution, let alone uncongenial laws – can be valid. Where this deconstruction of Australia leads is hard to guess but it certainly means that European Australians collectively are perpetually nasty, brutal, exploitative invaders. We are racially invalid occupants of the continent. Sound familiar?
Israel is constantly derided as a settler state. The Jews who came to their historic homeland during the past two centuries are dismissed as invaders. As articulated by Hamas, Israel should be destroyed and “the Jews”, not the Israelis, driven into the sea. This narrative is deeply attractive to the loopier Australian left because it validates their own national narrative.
This type of analysis is greatly assisted by the collapse of substantive education in our schools and our universities. Into the 1970s, kids would come out of school with at least a smattering of history and geography. They would know which river and which sea, and the reality of a historic Israel. Today, most students have never heard of King David, let alone Philistines or Moabites. They could not point out Jerusalem on a map. In this puddle of ignorance, prejudice and shallow leftism can wallow together.
In Mosman and Paddington, we can discuss the Jews and Israel quite free of content. It helps that the Carlton set’s dislike of the Jewish state is exactly the type of cause that delights the cultural left. They have no actual skin in the game. There is lots of flag-waving, lots of chanting. Naturally, there is no risk you will ever have to do anything.
But there are satisfyingly identifiable enemies. As Jewish students and speakers are harassed at universities, and Jewish schools have armed guards at their gates, the argument that this is all anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic is as implausible as the Loch Ness monster.
All of these intellectual failures are standard components of the leftist rejection of Jews, Jewishness and a Jewish state. But there are at least three concepts grounding the structure of Australian progressive anti-Semitism that are rarely identified. The first has been mentioned: the direct identification of European Australians and European Australia with Jews living in Israel and a Jewish state.
This is not playing for peanuts. In Australia, there are people who routinely deny our nation and nationality. Lidia Thorpe is merely a technicolour example. But these sorts of views are expressed routinely in most universities and sympathetic parts of the media.
This type of rhetoric has the potential to undermine national confidence when we need to confront a new and dangerous world. When we hear there is no valid state of Israel, that Jews in Israel are merely settlers, and Jews generally are problematic, we should understand that the bell tolls for us, too.
The second confronting reality is that there are some fundamental characteristics of Jews and Jewishness that are abhorrent to the left – including the Australian left – and will never be accepted by “progressives”. The point of being a progressive is a desire for constant, sweeping change. Everything is wrong and I know how to fix it. From climate change to home ownership, our country is detestable, but I am here to help you.
Psychologically and practically, however, Judaism is adamantly opposed to a culture of constant goyim transformation. Despite the best efforts of Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Richard the Lionheart, Jews have remained Jews. If the laws of the Medes altereth not, the law of Moses is unkillable. This is an enormous ideological difficulty for progressives. The concept of values and teachings that are immutable is an assault on their existence. Jews are a problem for progressives in much the same way as the Catholic Church: each exists outside time and temporary relevance. Little wonder that when the Australian Catholic Church was deservedly flattened by its child abuse scandal, ordinary Catholics who patently had no role in the horror were astonished by the personal vilification they received. Now, with Israel in Gaza, our local Jews can receive just punishment.
The third crucial element in the disdain of the Australian left for all things Jewish has been the development of a soft anti-Semitism. Particularly mastered around the conflict in Gaza, this is the practice of constantly professing sympathy for Jews, in the Middle East or domestically, but consistently refusing to recognise their rights, interests, realities and sensibilities.
This technique is important for governments as it allows them to avoid charges of anti-Semitism while holding and occasionally expressing views fundamentally hostile to Jews. It is particularly important in practical politics, where some electorates are dominated by large numbers of people hostile to Israel, and realistically to Jews. But you cannot simply come out and yell “Three cheers for Hamas!” The Albanese government, occasional wriggling aside, has been a master of this sort of calculated nuance. Nervously condemning the Hamas murders, it seems almost relieved whenever some semi-plausible account of Israeli atrocities emerges.
With the horrifying deaths through an Israeli drone strike on aid workers delivering desperately needed food in Gaza, genuine horror seemed faintly tinged with relief that Israel finally had attracted a degree of opprobrium. That Foreign Minister Penny Wong almost simultaneously was ventilating the possibility of a two-state solution, without current practicality or principle, was entirely fitting. It certainly was a thoughtful Easter gift for Hamas.
Perhaps it is unfair to call these behaviours even soft anti-Semitism. Probably we need a new term, such as “Asemitism”. This describes a dead-eyed refusal even to see Jews in any dire situation such as Gaza. Just as agnostics and atheists disbelieve in God, Asemites cannot accommodate the actual possibility of a Jew. If I were an Australian Jew, I would be musing along this same dirty track.
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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