Note
I originally posted here an article about the motivations of the Nashville shooter. Google has censored that article so it now no longer appears. It is however still available on my backup site: http://jonjayray.com/pcnov23.html
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‘Progressives’ have no idea what would be done to them in Gaza
By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
When I was a student at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands between 1995 and 2000, my professors introduced me and my fellow students to a sensitive and difficult discussion: the betrayal of the Jews to the Nazis by Dutch collaborators during World War II. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered.
Inspired by Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which argued that ordinary Germans were complicit in the Holocaust, my professor had us reckoning with a dark chapter in the Dutch past. To what extent were ordinary Dutch people responsible for the deportation and murder of their Jewish neighbours? Would we have joined the brave men and women who protested against the persecution of Jews or would we have been among the silent, if not complicit, majority?
Most of us at Leiden thought we would be in the former camp, which is very easy to say in hindsight. There were few students who thought it inappropriate of the professor to make us go through that exercise of moral reckoning, though perhaps these days more would say they felt “unsafe”.
Now we are facing another reckoning, and all of us in the West must ask and answer that same question when it will really make a difference. In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s response in Gaza, the poison of anti-Semitism is coursing through the veins of the West once more. This time it manifests itself as a well-orchestrated campaign against Israel, the state founded as the nation of the Jewish people, a place Jews can call home without fear of discrimination, pogroms and the threat of genocide.
In major cities all over the Western world, from London to Sydney, as well as on the campuses of elite universities from Harvard to Stanford, pro-Palestinian protesters chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – that is, Israel will be wiped off the map. Anti-Semitic hate crimes are up 1350 per cent in London. A Jewish prayer walk in London was cancelled after police informed the organisers that attendees would not be safe (a pro-Palestinian march was taking place 11km away on the same day). Petrol bombs were hurled at synagogues in Berlin. Posters of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas have been torn down systematically in London and New York, and Jews are being told to make themselves inconspicuous for their own safety.
‘Even when jihadist terror groups are militarily defeated, as ISIS was and Hamas may be, the dogma lives on in mosques and online.’
In short, Jew-hatred is again on the march in the heart of Europe less than a century after the Holocaust.
Why are moral, well-educated people on the left so keen to excuse the Hamas butchers and march alongside people calling for Israel’s annihilation?
Many of these people say they are anti-Zionists, not anti-Semites. They insist they are affected by the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and do not endorse the terrorist tactics of Hamas.
But what exactly is anti-Zionism? At best, it is a lazy attitude that makes pristine moral demands of the state of Israel. It is an attitude that never questions Palestinians or for that matter Arab leaders on why they find it acceptable for Hamas terrorists to hide behind women and children and launch rockets from schools, mosques, hospitals and other civilian sites.
Take the example of the rocket misfired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that hit a hospital in Gaza. After the fog of the initial confusion lifted and it became clear that PIJ was responsible, did any “anti-Zionists” marching for the Palestinian cause pause to digest what had happened? PIJ had clumsily killed – byHamas’s own account – more than 400 civilians. It did this while Hamas urged the residents of Gaza to stay put, knowing full well Israel was preparing a surge to clear Hamas out of Gaza. Hamas is dishonest in so many ways but at least it is honest about the fact it does not value human life – least of all the lives of those unfortunate enough to reside in Gaza.
My question for Western supporters of Palestinian activism is simple: Where was your outrage on October 8, the day after 1400 Israelis were slaughtered? Whatever your rationalisation, there must be a reason you feel less empathy for them than for the Palestinians who have been put in harm’s way by the actions of Hamas. Are you quite sure your anti-Zionism is not an old hatred clad in new clothes?
In some cases it is clear we are dealing here with privileged woke types indulging in revolutionary cosplay who just as readily might attend a Black Lives Matter demo or a Just Stop Oil action.
The odd thing is that such people – who are invariably passionate believers in the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender minorities – are so willing to align themselves with the Islamists who are now the principal proponents of anti-Semitism in the world.
The Palestinian cause was once the cause of Marxist-Leninists and secular nationalists. No longer; today, the toxic ideology of Islamism is the principal driver of the war against Israel, and a core element of that ideology, genocidal anti-Semitism, has been spread to the Muslims of the West by Islamist propagandists.
The Western left tends to look away from the theological underpinnings of the likes of Hamas, al-Qa’ida and Islamic State, blaming their atrocities on Western foreign policy or the alienation of young Muslim men. Western governments, meanwhile, have seen the problem narrowly as a military or security issue to be solved with the tools of intelligence and counterterrorism. Both groups fail to recognise that Islamism is a collection of deeply held sacred beliefs. They ignore the cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and “Jihad!” and the use of faith-based symbols such as the tawhid (the raised index finger of the right hand) by terrorists.
Even when jihadist terror groups are militarily defeated, as ISIS was and Hamas may be, the dogma lives on in mosques and online, spread by Islamist networks, including charities, under the protection of the Western norm of free speech. The Islamists use the freedoms of the West – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association – against the West.
All one has to do is look at the original Hamas charter – which invokes Islamic scripture to justify its hatred of Israel and the Jews and calls for the destruction of Israel – to see the religious foundations of its ideology.
The same goes for groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Brotherhood (from which Hamas is descended). These and many other Islamist groups have infiltrated the West and indoctrinated a whole new generation of Muslims with their vile beliefs. But what is truly astonishing is that “progressives” on the left join forces with the Islamists, apparently oblivious to the fate that awaits any member of the LBGTQ+ community who makes the mistake of coming out in Gaza.
The answer to this problem is not as British Home Secretary Suella Braverman has suggested – for the police to arrest those who call for jihad in the streets of London. Braverman’s call for police intervention was rightly rejected by Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police.
As a free speech fundamentalist, I disagree vehemently with the criminalisation of any sentiment, however vile. For too long we have looked to the police to make the problem of Islamism go away. But it is not their job to erase religious dogma. The real challenge is to reform our institutions of education and culture, which have abjectly failed through negligence or going woke.
The real battlefield is not for control of the streets but for hearts and minds. Only by countering Islamist ideology through working with groups such as the anti-Islamist CLARITy Coalition (of which I am a founding member) can the new anti-Semitism be defeated and the naive leftists who support it persuaded to change their minds.
Everyone in the West is now being asked the same question that the people of Europe were asked during World War II. For, if historian Bernard Lewis’s prediction that Europe will become majority Muslim at some point this century is fulfilled, and if the Islamists – already so popular and influential in our democracies – gain real political power in the West, I do not think it alarmist to worry that another Holocaust will be the result.
Right now, the Islamists are, however dangerous, nowhere near as powerful as the Nazi invaders were, but too many of us are hesitant to stand up to them. We must reckon with Islamist anti-Semitism now, while we still can. Alas, on the basis of what we are seeing in our cities right now, I fear we will fail our Jewish friends and neighbours yet again.
Thank God the proposal to rename a German daycare centre named after Anne Frank in deference to “parents with a migrant background” appears to have been defeated. But the fact anyone could suggest such a change takes me back to The Netherlands. On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank and her family were arrested. She died, probably of typhus, in Bergen-Belsen about six months later.
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"USA Today" Reveals True Colors With Front-Page Hit Piece on Libs of TikTok
They still call their national newspaper USA Today, but on some days, the front page looks more like “LGBTQIA Today.”
The bold top headline for Oct. 6 was “When Libs of TikTok posts, threats increasingly follow.” The author of the story is Will Carless, whose beat is “extremism.”
Beware, that beat is almost always just “right-wing extremism.” That’s how they define the wildly successful Twitter account of Libs of TikTok, operated by Chaya Raichik.
In a front-page text box, USA Today warned that Libs of TikTok is a “creator of, and a force multiplier for, right-wing outrage.” It’s a “hive of conservative politicians, media personalities and far-right online influencers.”
With badly disguised propaganda such as this story, that can be reversed: USA Today is a creator of, and a force multiplier for, left-wing outrage. The reporter, Carless, came to the “hive” of McPaper from the far-left Center for Investigative Reporting.
This new Carless front-pager spread to an entire inside page. It began with a list of alleged bomb threats and public ridicule of drag-queen events and hospitals performing mutilations, which they call “gender-affirming care.” Then USA Today blamed Libs of TikTok.
“In almost every case, the perpetrator of the threat is unknown, and Chaya Raichik, the far-right influencer who runs Libs of TikTok, says she opposes violence, and that because there have been almost no arrests, there’s no proof the threats come from her followers,” Carless admitted in his story.
But he warned of a “clear pattern,” writing: “USA Today has confirmed dozens of bomb threats, death threats and other harassment after Libs of TikTok’s posts since February 2022.”
Based on what? “Exclusive new research from the progressive analysis group Media Matters for America.”
So USA Today is partnering with the passionate LGBT advocacy group Media Matters, not unlike the media’s public alliance with the censorship group GLAAD. The method is the same: Suggest that anyone and everyone who spreads information resisting their revolution is an extremist that spurs violence. It’s meant to ruin reputations and intimidate people into silence.
Anyone who calls in a bomb threat, even if they have no intention of acting on it, is committing a crime. That’s why they’re usually anonymous. But sometimes bomb threats are faked by “victims,” just like actor Jussie Smollett faked a late-night beating in Chicago by Trump fans.
“Extremism” reporters like Carless are hot to find the “far-right” threats and ignore the behavior of their side.
Speaking of extremism, Carless used experts such as Media Matters’ Ari Drennen, who recently tweeted that “homeschooling should be illegal. Too many parents use it to abuse their children, keeping them ignorant and easy to control.”
Wow. That’s just like The Washington Post, which once described conservative Christians in a 1993 front-page article as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.”
Carless also quoted Alejandra Caraballo as “a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic.” He noted Caraballo was “openly critical” of Raichik, but not that Caraballo is a radical “trans woman.” Last month, Caraballo attacked owner Elon Musk after headlines vanished in posts on his social media company X, formerly Twitter.
“Elon Musk was arrested after being found in the street in a ketamine induced fugue state,” Caraballo messaged. That was a lie. Then came a much worse lie: a retweet of another account claiming “evidence showing Elon Musk is a pedophile mounting quickly.”
Chaya Raichik tweeted: “This is the person that the media cites as an ‘online safety expert’.” Musk tweeted emojis that Caraballo was “bat [guano] crazy.”
That context might have balanced the USA Today story a tad.
Carless let Raichik defend herself, but nothing about this USA Today article was balanced or fair. It was designed to shame and degrade any resistance to the “LGBTQIA Today” agenda.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/09/usa-todays-unbalanced-front-page-lashing-of-libs-of-tiktok
***************************************************Australia: New wave of anti-Semitism rolls in from the left
Nazism resurgent. The original Nazis were socialist so not much has changed
On Friday night a pro-Palestinian mob descended on Caulfield, in the heart of Melbourne’s Jewish community, and incited anti-Semitic violence on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
In response to this grotesquerie, Foreign Minister Penny Wong released a social media post condemning “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” in reference to the “violence in Caulfield”.
While it is reasonable to warn against both forms of prejudice in the context of community tensions, only one of them was on display in Caulfield on Friday night.
Wong’s tendency to draw moral equivalences seems to be increasingly habitual. This was again evident on Sunday morning when she revealed the government is pushing for a ceasefire in the Hamas-Israel war, noting Israel needed to be held to higher standards.
In a recent photo posted to her official social media account, Wong stands next to Nasser Mashni, the president of the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network. Last week it was revealed Mashni has a history of demonising Jewish people and as recently as last year he called for the destruction of Israel.
“The power structures that exist in the world all focus upon Zionism,” Mashni said on his radio show. “Israel is the domino. Israel falls over, not just the Middle East – South America, the Africans, the world is a far better place once we destroy Western imperialist control of the world.”
While there is no suggestion Wong knew of such rhetoric when she posed for a photograph with Mashni, the incident highlights a major blind spot when it comes to anti-Semitism on the left.
Of course, the roots of anti-Semitism stretch deep into history, and Jew hatred has attached itself to many different ideologies. Early leaders of Christianity wrote polemics against the Jews, and derogatory references can be found within Islamic texts. But, while it’s important to acknowledge these historical forms of prejudice, contemporary variants have also become relevant today.
One of the most influential pieces of modern anti-Semitism is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document that emerged from Imperial Russia in 1903. This document popularised the conspiracy theory that Jews were engaged in worldwide control. Hitler referred to the Protocols in Mein Kampf and this conspiracy theory became part of the broader Nazi propaganda campaign.
Yet while the Nazis were defeated in 1945, the Protocols did not die with them. The Soviets repurposed the Protocol’s conspiracy theories in their own propaganda during the Cold War, which ramped up after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. In order to signal support to Egypt and Syria (who had lost the war) anti-Zionist propaganda became part of the Soviet’s broader Cold War strategy. This strategy aimed to push back against the US and strengthen Soviet influence in the Middle East.
Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet Jewry, writes that the Soviets took Nazi propaganda and simply substituted the word “Zionist” in place of “Jew”. She explains: “Soviet ideologues relied for inspiration on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, on the ideas of classic religious anti-Semitism, and even Mein Kampf, but adapted them to the Marxist framework by substituting the idea of a global anti-Soviet Zionist conspiracy for a specifically Jewish one.”
Such propaganda spread through multiple channels. In the ’60s and ’70s, newspapers such as Pravda published cartoons that were then reprinted by communist-aligned media in the West.
Tabarovsky points out that the Soviets were well aware Europeans were particularly sensitive to accusations of racism, and of anything associated with Nazi Germany – so they cynically used this against Israel by equating Zionism with Nazism. Soviet cartoons of the ’70s depict Jews looking into mirrors only to be greeted with reflections of Hitler, and Stars of David superimposed over swastikas.
In 1975, a UN General Assembly resolution was passed that declared “Zionism is Racism”. The controversial resolution was passed only with support of the Soviet bloc, Arab states and various African nations (it was overturned in 1991). Michael Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, historians of the Soviet Union, argue this resolution was one of the Soviets’ “greatest victories”.
It was a victory because it successfully decoupled the demonisation of the Jewish people from associations with the far right. As Quillette editor Jamie Palmer wrote in 2016: “The claims that Zionism is racism, the instrument or puppeteer of Jewish and American imperialists, a project of Western colonialism, or a template for Jewish world domination; that Zionists were co-conspirators and ideological ancestors of Nazi Germany who control markets, industry, and media, and; that Israel is a ‘terrorist regime’ – all such claims originated in Soviet propaganda and are widespread on today’s activist left.”
The Soviets targeted Israel with their propaganda because they saw the only parliamentary democracy in the Middle East as a proxy for the West. In a recent address, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his “fists clench and eyes tear up” over Israeli military actions in Gaza drawing parallels between the Russian military and Hamas.
The scenes in Caulfield, where pro-Palestinian groups tried to intimidate local Jews, are echoed worldwide, from Ivy League campuses in the US to the streets of London during Remembrance Day.
I asked Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, about rising anti-Semitism in Australia. He told me by email: “There is a lag in reporting and chronic underreporting due to shame and embarrassment, but the incidents we have received show an increase of at least 600 per cent from the previous month.”
But aside from the explosion in incidents, what alarms Ryvchin the most is the “mindset of the contemporary anti-Semite”. Explaining that “the expulsion or destruction of Jews was always framed as a necessary, righteous act”, he sees the attitude appearing on Australian streets today. The mindset of today’s anti-Semites, according to Ryvchin, “is what is most concerning because it means there is no shame in their deeds and instead a sense of mission and purpose that can turn an aggressive fringe movement into something truly terrifying”.
Ryvchin’s observations reveal a disturbing normalisation of anti-Semitism. And at least some of it stems from the fact that the left has never grappled with its own history of anti-Semitism. And is ill-equipped to deal with it when it arises.
If a Coalition minister posed in a photograph with a neo-Nazi who had called for Jews to be murdered on a radio show, the Australian media and public would rightly be apoplectic. But Australia’s Foreign Minister can pose with the left-wing equivalent, and it barely raises a yawn.
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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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