Thursday, May 16, 2024

Gaza: The Left cares about dead black people, whether in America or in Africa, only when they are killed by whites


With The Genocide Libel Is the Blood Libel of Our Time, you can count on Dennis Prager to get to the bottom of the issue.

The author of the Rational Bible series even manages to explain why the original blood libel is necessarily false:

In medieval Europe, Christians who hated Jews spread the lie that Jews kidnap Christian children, slaughter them, and use their blood to bake matzos for Passover. This lie became known as "the Blood Libel," probably the greatest libel in history. Over the course of many centuries, Jews were tortured and murdered, often by being burned alive, because of the Blood Libel.

The Blood Libel was particularly odious in light of two facts: It was the Jews who, through their Bible, first outlawed human sacrifice; and one of the first laws in the Hebrew Bible is a ban on consuming blood.

Dennis Prager goes on to take on the current blood libel:

For centuries, Jews had to confront the fact that all around them, throughout Europe, a vast number of people believed an enormous lie about them. Jews have to confront the same thing today. We are now living through the Second Blood Libel: the claim that the Jewish state is committing genocide. But, unlike the Blood Libel, this libel is not the product of Christians; it is the product of Muslims and the Left. The very people against whom the greatest genocide in recorded history -- the Holocaust -- was directed are now accused of that crime.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, in 1948, there were 1,380,000 Palestinians in Israel and the greater Palestine area, and as of 2022, there were 7 million. In other words, there are now five times as many Palestinians in the Palestinian territories and in Israel as there were in 1948.

 … given these figures, even leftists would be forced to acknowledge that Israel has never had the slightest inclination to perpetrate genocide against the Palestinians. People targeted for genocide do not increase their numbers -- let alone by a factor of five.

What the Left and their Muslim allies claim is that since Oct. 7, Israel has presumably changed its mind and decided to commit genocide against Palestinians (though, apparently, only in Gaza, not in the West Bank).

Here are some facts that explain why the charge of "Israeli genocide" is as much a lie as was the Blood Libel:

First, as Israeli officials have repeatedly stated, if Hamas released the hostages and surrendered, Israel would cease its bombing of Gaza. That was precisely the condition that the United States and its allies offered Japan and Germany: Unconditionally surrender, and the bombing of Japanese and German cities will immediately cease.

Second, World War II brings us to more proof that the charge of Israeli genocide is a lie. No one ever accused America or Britain of committing genocide against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Even those who now maintain that the Allied bombing of Dresden and other German cities was morally wrong do not accuse the United States or Britain of having committed genocide. So why is Israel so charged?

Third, during World War II, it was almost universally understood that every German death by the Allies was caused by the Nazi regime, and every Japanese death was caused by the Japanese fascist regime. Had there been no Nazi invasions of European countries and no Japanese bombing of the United States and invasions of myriad Asian countries, there would have been no World War II and therefore no bombing of German and Japanese cities. Likewise, if there were no Hamas and no Oct. 7, there would be no Israeli bombing of Gaza. Every dead Palestinian in Gaza is the result of Hamas' actions.

Fourth, Hamas is responsible for every dead Gazan for another reason: Hamas uses Gazan civilians as human shields.

Fifth, despite far larger mass killings around the world, only Israel is widely charged with genocide.

Since the beginning of this century, the Islamic terror group Boko Haram has murdered more than 60,000 Christians in Nigeria. Not only have there been no left-wing protests, few people even know, let alone care, about it. The Left doesn't care because the perpetrators have been Islamists -- their allies in the fight against the West -- and blacks. The Left cares about dead black people, whether in America or in Africa, only when they are killed by whites.

Same thing with Arabs and/or Muslims: Arabs killed by other Arabs (often the citizens' own governments) or Muslims killed by other Muslims generates zero outrage (even among Arabs and Muslims) and, indeed, zero interest.

In that perspective, notice that Libs Want Dennis Prager's Townhall, along with PJ Media, among (numerous) other media outlets, Charged Under 'Genocide Convention' for daring to Report the Truth About Israel and Hamas.

Sixth, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has just revised its child fatality figure in the Gaza war sharply downward. On May 6, it reported more than 14,500 deaths; two days later, it reported 7,797. OCHA also revised downward its figure for women fatalities from more than 9,500 to 4,959. In other words, all the mainstream Western media have reported as truth the lies Hamas announced about the numbers of Gazan women and children killed by Israeli bombs. (However, even the original false figures don't come close to substantiating the genocide charge.)

 … Even if the media give these new numbers the attention it has given the alleged "genocide," it will not end a single anti-Israel demonstration or cause one Israel-hater to cease accusing Israel of genocide. Since the accusation was never based on truth, truth will not end it.

The only genocide in the Israel-Palestinian war is the one Hamas and Iran seek to perpetrate against the Jews of Israel.

Related • To Peacenik Protesters Everywhere (Pro-Palestinian or Other):
The People that Hamas Slaughtered Mercilessly at Israel's Rave — They Are YOU! 

• The Genocide Charge Against Israel: What is
the Difference Between War and Genocide in the First Place?

"You Have Wiped Israel Off the Map!" Clash on French TV As Pro-Palestine Speaker Tries to Gaslight the Fact that Her Palestine Logo Has Made Israel Vanish

This war is like few others because the crucial theater is underground; Hamas is often underground, the Israelis are often aboveground, with Hamas seeking to position civilians directly between them 

 • A Gary Varvel cartoon on the current Middle East crisis and the truth about its roots

You can also listen to Dennis on this topic at his fireside chat.

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

The Real Reason for Secularism: For the Left, the Golden Rule and the 10 Commandments turn out to be a major problem


Over at Instapundit, Sarah Hoyt links to a trifecta of posts on secularism — as well as to her own outstanding In Praise of Populism — to wit, they are Keith Lowery's The Myth of Secular Neutrality, Holly MathNerd's The Disappearance of Secularism, and Francis Turner's Faith and Ritual.

Before we get to the gist of this post (the point here is not to quote all of these remarkable posts, although I would love to), I will do a quick quote from Keith Lowery's article:

The point is to psychologically condition Americans until they believe that they cannot afford to exercise their civil rights. From Jack Phillips to Donald Trump, the law-fare being run by progressives is less about winning those cases than about publicizing the cases so that other non-progressives will think twice before exercising their own civil rights, or doing anything that has a practical political impact that is negative for progressives. 

 … So the cost of exercising any actual civil rights, those which run afoul of progressive goals, is being intentionally inflated beyond all affordability. Progressives know exactly what they are doing.

The radical partisanship of the government bureaucracy, brazenly on display in 2020, unmasked the ideal of secular neutrality to reveal only a delusion.

The point of the present post is one part of my January article on the 2020 Election, and below I have expanded upon that passage.

But first, Sarah Hoyt (and thanks for the Instalink): Nancy Pelosi's

opponent is an idiot — and not an American — by saying that Trump should have “Accepted” the election results. I’ll assume he doesn’t understand mathematics or didn’t watch the results come in. NO ONE should accept impossible results that almost guarantee an election was tampered with. That’s known as disenfranchising the people, and any American should be revolted at the idea. There’s nothing sacred against election results. If there’s sufficient reason to SUSPECT let alone prove tampering, they should be examined, investigated and dissected. Which always happened till 2020. In 2020 the results were untouchable because they couldn’t stand examination. In the same way her opponent seems to only know the “made for TV” bs about January 6th. Taking a guided tour of the capitol is no insurrection, and no one should feel they have to bow to little Nancy’s insanity on that.

• Expanded from American Thinker's Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election":

When describing the 2020 election, all the left is doing is repeat incessantly — they don't even bother using their usual weasel tactic of referring to (unnamed) experts, although that is implicit — that Trump's claim are "baseless" or "unfounded", if not an outright lie (or "the big lie"), all the while calling us skeptics "conspiracy theorists", without ever giving, at least once in a while, some evidence thereof.

Just presenting one in-depth single article or news story in which every one of Trump's claims is meticulously picked apart and debunked might be enough, and the New York Times and the Washington Post could refer to it by linking the word "baseless" or "lie" in every every other subsequent news story to it.  But that "ur-article" does not seem to exist in any editorial office. 

As Dennis Prager puts it, in today's America (and world),

all you have to say to people who went to college is "Experts say" … As I've said for years, for the secular college graduate, "Experts say" is what "Thus sayeth the Lord" has been to religious people for thousands of years.  They have just exchanged authority from the Lord to "the experts"…

In this case, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN don't even use "experts say", knowing that that would sound ridiculous (who on Earth — what individual — can be called an unassailable expert on the matter of election results if there have been shenanigans which by definition are stealthy and which the so-called expert cannot possibly know anything about) while betting — incredibly, with no lack of success — on nobody challenging their basic gaslighting about Trump's "baseless" claims and his desire to "overturn" an election and, indeed, democracy itself.

I'm not very religious myself, but if you read the books in Dennis Prager's Rational Bible series ("The title of [these five commentaries] is “The Rational Bible” because its approach is entirely reason-based … The reader is never asked to accept anything on faith alone"), you will get an idea of the real reason why religion has such a bad reputation. What does it mean to be religious? Does it mean believing in (alleged) fairy tales or going to Church/Synagogue with foolish believers with silly smiles on their faces?

It means nothing but this, says Dennis Prager: live and work (and… govern) while trying to integrate the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments into your life. Now, before you protest that you don't want, or need, a religious lesson: think of "do not steal" and "do not kill" (do not murder in the original Hebrew); isn't that pretty good governance for a society that even an atheist can, without renouncing his atheism or agnosticism and without joining any religion, subscribe to?!

Ah, but there's the rub: to the leftist, actually, the 10 Commandments turn out to be one heck of a major problem.

Leftists at the head of a nanny government obviously don't think you are their equals, socialists do not believe in "do not covet" (taxes), communists do not believe in "do not kill", nanny governments do not believe in "honoring your father and mother" (your family) — certainly not above Big Brother — and above all, all of the above do not believe in "Do not bear false witness."

(If you protest, "Let's not get carried away, Erik, surely you cannot deny that some amount of taxes are necessary in life?!", Harry Jaffa provides the answer: "Those who live under the law have an equal right in the making of the law, [while] those who make the law have a corresponding duty to live under the law." Incidentally, this also pertains to the January 6 kerfuffle…)

Bearing false witness: leftists allow themselves to lie to others, and they allow themselves to lie to themselves — all to bask in their own valor and glory, as these knights in shining armor turn everything upside down.

Because they are Drama Queens, leftists allow themselves to wield double standards and to lie about global warming, about the rise of the oceans, about Republicans being Hitler, about leftist riots versus right-wing protests, about illegal immigrants and how they have no papers, about racism, about COVID, about 1776 replaced with 1619, about American culture (structural racism), about sexism, about rape culture, about men identifying as girls participating in women's sports, about suicide being a benevolent thing ("Do not kill" applies also to yourself), about the horrendous (Bible-based) Western civilization, about the ghastly sins of despicable Republicans like Donald Trump, George W Bush, and Ronald Reagan vs the "ho-hum" at-best-insignificant lapses of valorous Democrats like Joe Biden, Barack Obama and the Clintons, about how the MAGA movement is traitorous, about how the January 6 protesters deserve up to two dozen years in prison while releasing true criminals onto the streets, about how the communists were honorable ("sure they killed millions of people, but, hey, they had good intentions"), and about wokeness uncovering a true picture of society.

In short, they can lie about how despicable their neighbors are and how valorous they themselves are to attack said neighbors, aka their (non-threatening) adversaries.

Speaking of the Bible, incidentally, does it not mention false pride as the cardinal sin? Wouldn't that cover yourself self-describing as valorous for "saving the planet" and "saving democracy"?

No wonder leftists praise l'état laïc and want the Judeo-Christian religion to have nothing to do with politics…

It also explains the antisemitism and anti-Americanism through the centuries and the millennia, Israel and the United States being the two nations that have most followed the precepts of the Judeo-Christian Bible, not least the Golden Rule (and have prospered as a consequence) — and thus at least tried to prevent politicians and citizens alike from lying to others as well as to themselves. This brings us, full circle, back to Dennis Prager, writing (in Whites Aren't Hated for Slavery but for Making America and the West),

the left … hates America, which it regards as the paragon of capitalism. By becoming the most successful country in history, America, the quintessential capitalist country, remains a living rebuke to everything the left stands for. If America can be brought down, every left-wing egalitarian dream can be realized. … What the left does very much seek is to destroy America as we have known it -- the capitalist and Judeo-Christian enclave of personal freedom.

Mark Levin's latest book is called The Democrat Party Hates America.  The truth, as we have seen with the Woke movement, is that leftist scholars and activists hate American institutions, the Left hates American values, leftists hate American history, leftists hate American liberty, leftists abhor the Judeo-Christian religion (because of its Golden Rule and its Ten Commandments), and Democrats have hated Republicans since the movement was born in 1854.