Category Archives: Cultural

The Israeli election

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There were two sets of comments I found most clarifying. That Obama is an enemy of everything that is good I now take it as given. John Hinderaker at Powerline has written a post on Will Obama punish Israel for re-electing Netanyahu? in which we find the following:

The administration’s critique goes on and on, as you will see if you follow the link. The bottom line is that we now have, in the United States, an administration that is friendly to the Islamic extremists in Iran who consider us to be the “Great Satan,” who hang homosexuals from cranes, who torture and kill those who want democracy, who have ICBMs and eagerly seek nuclear weapons with which to attack us and our allies. All of that is fine with the Obama administration, apparently. But the administration is bitterly hostile to the only actual democracy in the Middle East–the one place in the region where women in burkas can vote.

There are no values on the left, only tactics. Not even hypocritical, they just want the pleasures and personal wealth that come from running things. To the extent they care about anything, they care about other people succeeding by the application of bourgeois values in their own lives. There is such hatred infused in everything they do that it must be the most miserable experience to be who they are. They never achieve a single positive thing they say they are trying to do. But their promises are taken up time and again by others many of whom prefer to vote to ratify their inner misery. They have no genuine expectation that things will get better. We must protect ourselves from these people, but pay no attention to their high-minded words. They are filled with hatreds and envy. Nothing will satisfy their nihilism because there is nothing they seek other than the harm of others.

The other comment I found very insightful was written by someone who seems to have wished the socialists to have won. It is more a strategic overview from the left side of the Israeli political spectrum, but seems to make clear what someone such as myself, living on the other side of the world, cannot so easily see. The article is After electoral trouncing, what future for the Israeli left?. Read it through, but this added quite a bit to my understanding of how Israelis look at the world and why Netanyahu won.

Why did turnout rise so dramatically? Simple: the majority of the Israeli electorate continues to distrust the left’s judgment. It is a trust deficit rooted in a more general distrust of Palestinian intentions, of the Obama White House and other touchstones of left-wing policy. In hindsight, it may be one of the bitter ironies of this campaign that Labor’s own slogan, “It’s us or him,” may have done as much to guarantee Netanyahu victory as anything Netanyahu may have done. . . .

It is true that Netanyahu explicitly “fear-mongered,” and that this won him his steep lead on Tuesday. But Netanyahu’s international critics fundamentally misunderstand his audience, his electorate, and so deeply misconstrue what exactly he was “fear-mongering” about.

Netanyahu’s critics insist that he fear-mongered about Iran and the Palestinians. He did not – because he doesn’t have to. The Israeli electorate has long ago written off Palestinian politicians as untrustworthy and unable to deliver peace. And it is Iran, not Netanyahu, that has convinced nearly all Israelis from all parts of the political spectrum that Iran is a very real danger to Israel.

All Netanyahu had to do was to warn, at times in blatantly racist terms, that the left and Arab voters were “turning out in droves.” His fear-mongering was not on the substance of the disagreement with the left – the electorate already mistrusts the left’s judgment on these issues – but simply to warn that the left might win. That alone spiked the Likud vote, even in the cold late-evening hours of Election Day.

The assumption behind the “fear-mongering” accusation is that Netanyahu is the reason Israelis are distrustful of peace initiatives or Iran deals. It is a convenient conceit, suggesting that if one could get rid of Netanyahu the problem would be solved, but it is entirely wrong. The White House’s or European Union’s policy feuds with Netanyahu are not actually with Netanyahu himself, but with the mainstream Israeli electorate that responded so forcefully on Tuesday when they were finally convinced that their country might soon be forced into dangerous new concessions or compromises in a precarious Middle East.

Obama hates Israel. Well so do others. The election was a judgement by Israelis on how to deal with the world they live in, that includes the vicious hostility of the American President. Who knows what the future will bring, but this was, in my view anyway, the least worst answer where there are no really good ones.

AND ANOTHER TAKE ON THE ELECTION: Here is a different view by Meyrav Wurmser who seems more closely tied to the Likud and even the religious side of the Israeli constituency. First this, which I had not known:

The majority of the religious Zionist camp, however, spoke of continuing the partnership with the state but under different terms. They believed that it was time for the religious Zionists, who until then had treated the authorities of the secular Zionist state with great reverence and admiration, to begin demanding leadership positions in government. As one of the leaders of the religious Zionist camp described it to me during an interview shortly after the disengagement, they no longer wanted to be the guy who checks if the kosher rules are kept in the restaurant cabin of the Zionist train. They now wanted to be the driver of the train. They would no longer play a humble second fiddle in the secular state’s orchestra but would choose the music and conduct. That was the only sure way for them to prevent further disengagements.

The decade that has passed since the disengagement has seen the settler movement working relentlessly toward this goal. Within a few years, they have become the primary foundation of the IDF’s officer corps. Their children volunteered in disproportionate numbers in all the elite units and became top pilots, paratroopers, and commandos serving on the front line. As a result, they also suffered a disproportionate number of casualties in the military. Gradually, the religious Zionist community and its skullcap-wearing youth replaced the secular youth of the kibbutzim as the core of Israel’s defense forces. The religious Zionist camp won much admiration and sympathy among large segments of the Israeli public, which now regarded it as the unwavering embodiment of Zionist principles.

But this really worries me. The left seems to be the same everywhere, but in most places it is not quite as suicidal as it would be in Israel. Here is how the article ends:

Ironically, as the settler movement engaged in soul-searching and spent the last decade reinventing itself in ways that Israel’s mainstream center would tolerate and perhaps even admire, the Left is moving in the opposite direction. Instead of asking what went wrong and looking to find a strategy for winning back the Israeli people, most of the commentators on the left in the past 24 hours have retreated into bitterness and elitist condescension toward the Israeli people. The most popular Facebook page today in Israel is a leftist attempt to punish Israel’s south, which voted heavily for Likud. Referring to Israelis, Alona Kimhi, a popular author on the left, wrote: “Every people has the leadership it deserves. Long live stupidity, evil and false consciousness. Drink some cyanide, . . . Neanderthals.” And Gideon Levi of Haaretz wrote that Israel should hold another election, to elect not a new leader but a different people. Instead of asking why they lost touch with the Israeli people, the Left is washing its hands of them, which is hardly an effective strategy for winning future elections.

I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Do they think they live in New York? What can they possibly be thinking that I can’t see myself? I just don’t get it at all.

It’s more than just a matter of words

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I wrote this the other day but didn’t push the “publish” button. But with Andrew Bolt having put up a post today on The West attacked: killers to the right, ferals to the left, which begins with the sentence, “Islamists on the Right, anti-capitalists on the Left”, I will just have to buy in. The rest of this was written on Tuesday.

There are no two people in politics I agree with more consistently than Andrew Bolt and Peter Costello, so if I bring up one of Andrew Bolt’s posts in which both feature, it must be understood that I don’t disagree with a single point they make, only with the terms they use. Andrew’s post is titled, The Left now sounds just like the Islamist Right, in which Peter is quoted as saying:

Australia is one of the most successful, open, prosperous, accepting societies that the world has ever known. Being born here is one of the best things that could ever happen in a person’s life. That is worth explaining as part of immunising the young against the false political claims of extremists.

Andrew began the post with this where I will begin myself:

One of the most disturbing developments in public debates has been the Left giving cover to Islamists of the far Right.

There is, I must insist, no such thing as “Islamists of the far Right”. The right-left divide in politics is between those who value individual rights above collective rights and those who do not. The only person who ever correctly thought of Hitler as to his right politically was Joseph Stalin who introduced this notion into our political direction finder. To think of racists and extreme nationalists as part of the right is merely to defame those of us who see ourselves on the right, far or otherwise. It is we members of the right properly understood who almost alone have been willing to take the fight up to Nazis, fascists, communists and Islamists and have been able to do so without missing an ideological beat. To describe Islamists as “far right” wrongly aligns people such as ourselves with people such as themselves, and introduces a confusion of terms since the right-left divide then becomes less clear cut than it ought to be. No one on the right is ever described by those on the left as anything other than “far” right. To be on the right should be seen as a badge of honour.

Same with the word “conservative” who are people, again like ourselves, who find the open and tolerant society in which we live one we would like to see preserved, and therefore are very careful about the nature of change, and are never in any great hurry to see things radically altered. I am at one with Edmund Burke in believing in “the general bank and capital of nations and of ages”* as the great repository of common sense and social morality. It is being worn away as the left has continued its march through the institutions, but it has a powerful hold even still.

And then there is the quote from Peter, where he wrote, “the false political claims of extremists”. The word “extremists” is commonly used about Islamists. But calling Islamists “extremists” makes it seem that these views are well beyond some kind of norm, a thousand miles from the political centre. And so they are, if we restrict the frame of reference for other people’s political morality to our own view of things as found in our own culture, whose traditions travel back in time through to the British Isles and the values that have developed as part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. These are the great bequest we have inherited and we must do everything we can to defend this history from the ignorance of the fanatics in our midst. To call our enemies “extreme” is to misread how they think of themselves. They are perhaps on the more aggressive side of their own value set, but they seem to be far from “extreme” within the communities in which they live. The extremists in such communities are more likely to be the people who agree with us, the ones who would like to share in our own cultural tradition and make common cause with us. Even living here in a Western nation, it is still not easy for them, as the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown. The proper word to describe Islamists is “barbarians”. If the left chooses to side with them, that is what they are as well.

____________

*”You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” From Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p 145.

Islamists are not on the “far right” and they are not “extremists”

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There are no two people in politics I agree with more consistently than Andrew Bolt and Peter Costello, so if I bring up one of Andrew Bolt’s posts in which both feature, it must be understood that I don’t disagree with a single point they make, only with the terms they use. Andrew’s post is titled, The Left now sounds just like the Islamist Right, in which Peter is quoted as saying:

Australia is one of the most successful, open, prosperous, accepting societies that the world has ever known. Being born here is one of the best things that could ever happen in a person’s life. That is worth explaining as part of immunising the young against the false political claims of extremists.

Andrew began the post with this where I will begin myself:

One of the most disturbing developments in public debates has been the Left giving cover to Islamists of the far Right.

There is, I must insist, no such thing as “Islamists of the far Right”. The right-left divide in politics is between those who value individual rights above collective rights and those who do not. The only person who ever correctly thought of Hitler as to his right politically was Joseph Stalin who introduced this notion into our political direction finder. To think of racists and extreme nationalists as part of the right is merely to defame those of us who see ourselves on the right, far or otherwise. It is we members of the right properly understood who almost alone have been willing to take the fight up to Nazis, fascists, communists and Islamists and have been able to do so without missing an ideological beat. To describe Islamists as “far right” wrongly aligns people such as ourselves with people such as themselves, and introduces a confusion of terms since the right-left divide then becomes less clear cut than it ought to be. No one on the right is ever described by those on the left as anything other than “far” right. To be on the right should be seen as a badge of honour.

Same with the word “conservative” who are people, again like ourselves, who find the open and tolerant society in which we live one we would like to see preserved, and therefore are very careful about the nature of change, and are never in any great hurry to see things radically altered. I am at one with Edmund Burke in believing in “the general bank and capital of nations and of ages”* as the great repository of common sense and social morality. It is being worn away as the left has continued its march through the institutions, but it has a powerful hold even still.

And then there is the quote from Peter, where he wrote, “the false political claims of extremists”. The word “extremists” is commonly used about Islamists. But calling Islamists “extremists” makes it seem that these views are well beyond some kind of norm, a thousand miles from the political centre. And so they are, if we restrict the moral compass we use to judge other people’s political morality to our own view of things as found in our own culture, whose traditions travel back in time through to the British Isles and the values that have developed as part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. These are the great bequest of our cultural traditions and we must do everything we can to defend this history from the ignorance of the fanatics in our midst. To call our enemies “extreme” is to misread how they think of themselves. They are perhaps on the more aggressive side of their own value set, but they seem to be far from “extreme” within the communities in which they live. The extremists in such communities are more likely to be the people who agree with us, the ones who would like to share in our own cultural tradition and make common cause with us. Even living here in a Western nation, it is still not easy for them, as the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown. The proper word to describe Islamists is “barbarians”. If the left chooses to side with them, that is what they are as well.

____________

*”You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” From Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p 145.

A Lynch Mob at Sydney University

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What a disturbing story we find at the University of Sydney the other day. I am even more than normally conscious of how disgusting it was, having this afternoon gone along to the Jewish street festival in which a couple of roads were blocked off and where we wandered around in the afternoon sun. But, as always, I was conscious of the Jewish primary school which sits just around the corner from the Holocaust Centre, both of which I pass every day on the way to the station. I had never been in the Holocaust Centre but went in to have a look. Let me just leave it at this. The children in the school are no different in any way from the murdered children whose pictures can be seen on the walls of the Holocaust Centre. We are playing with fire in allowing any of this to continue.

At the centre of the disturbance at the University of Sydney was the presentation by Colonel Richard Kemp, who had been in charge of security operations in Afghanistan and Northern Ireland, who looked down with utter disdain at these pathetic nonentities. As he wrote in his letter to the President of the University of Sydney which was released today, “although the students attempted to intimidate me as well as the audience members, I did not feel personally threatened, as I have faced considerably greater dangers and threats than could possibly be presented or contemplated by such people”. The protestors knew, of course, there was absolutely no danger to themselves in anything they did, total cowards that they are. Here’s what I think of as the central point of the letter written by Colonel Kemp:

Peaceful and reasonable demonstration, such as handing out leaflets, chanting dissenting views or holding placards with messages of opposition to the views of a speaker, is of course acceptable. Indeed, such a peaceful demonstration was under way outside when I entered the room for my lecture. I was offered and accepted a leaflet, which I read and I briefly engaged in discussion with a protester. However the type of racially‐motivated aggression, intimidation and abuse that occurred at this event is wholly unacceptable. Also unacceptable in any respectable university is the curtailment of an invited and approved speaker’s freedom to speak and engage in legitimate academic discourse such as I experienced at your university.

I urge you to investigate this incident and to take action against the students and staff members who were responsible for the behavior that I have described. If you fail to do so then you will be failing to discourage such action in your university in the future. You will thus be failing in your duty to ensure that your students, visitors and guest speakers may take part in debate within the precincts of the University of Sydney without fear or concern for their own safety.

I would add that you have a particular responsibility in respect of the racist, anti‐Semitic nature of this protest. As you know anti‐Semitism is a rising phenomenon in the world. Jews in many places live in increasing fear and concern that they will be singled out and discriminated against. Only by taking firm action against anti‐Semitic abuse and hatred whenever and wherever it occurs can this situation be reversed. Sydney University has the opportunity here to set an example to other academic institutions that lack the moral courage to face up to the modern scourge of anti‐Semitism.

The most beautiful song ever written

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It is O mio babbino caro, of course, which comes in the middle of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, around the twenty-one minute and thirty-second minute mark in the full production above. You will know the song without any doubt, but if you haven’t seen the opera you have no idea what it’s about. This is, as it happens, also the greatest one-act opera ever written. We saw it last night with another one-act opera, but when paired, it is alway the one to come last. Anything else is guaranteed to seem flat if it comes after. Treat yourself to one of the most exquisite moments anywhere in the arts and watch the whole thing (in Italian but with English subtitles), but if you haven’t the time, just go to minute twenty-one.

But I have to say that while the Glynebourne cast is better, the singing is not as good and the production not as electric. This one from the Paris Opera is also in Italian but comes with French subtitles. The song itself comes at around the twenty-second minute mark.

But for the song on its own, there is nothing quite like the moment when this nine year old wins Holland’s Got Talent in 2013. It was an astonishing moment and went round the world in a day.

The single worst example of bad teaching I have ever come across

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A fascinating post by Scott Johnson at Powerline which he titles, Notes on Middlemarch and in which he discusses what a trial it had been for him to read the book which he has just finished. I therefore wrote him the following:

Dear Scott

I enjoyed your reflections on Middlemarch which is one of my favourite novels of all time, but I think I had a particular reason for the pleasure it gave me, since I identified, sadly, with Dorothea’s first husband, William Casaubon. I think of myself almost perfectly portrayed as that ponderous pedant, writing some weighty but unreadable exegesis into various historical episodes of interest to no one else. I wasn’t actually depressed by his fate, but I did find it instructive. We are what we are, and the book did help me embrace my own nature.

As it happens, I was reading the book at the same time as I was driving our year-seven son to school of a morning, and each day I would tell him where I was up to and what was going on in the plot. You can thus see how like Casaubon I must be, if that is the nature of my conversation with a twelve year old. But the reason I mention it is because he told his English teacher that he had read Middlemarch to which she replied, to this twelve year old, that she could not understand why he had read it, and that she had been forced to read it at university and she had hated it, the most awful book she had ever read. I have always thought of that as the single worst example of bad teaching I have ever come across.

Kind regards

BTW it is ranked as the seventh greatest novel written in English and I completely agree. Unlike Scott, I was just driven along by the plot, but then again, I find John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy more intrinsically interesting than any economics book I come across today.

Who are these people to criticise us?

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Stacy McCain brings up something that has also been known to get under my skin. Who are these moral giants who feel free they can criticise the rest of us for our moral failings? I never see anything particularly exceptional about them, but they feel they can set standards for everyone else, based on their own standards of perfection which they never seem to live up to themselves. (See Bill and Hillary for the kind of people who should under no circumstances ever say a word about anything anyone else ever does.) They are more like moral cretins. This is part of how it’s described:

American society, means that we can never have a moment’s peace.

Constantly, we find the Left dividing us, demanding that we choose sides and accusing us of hateful selfishness if we do not join their crusades to destroy American society.

They yell “Civil rights!” And you are a RACIST if you don’t support whatever agenda the Left is pushing. They yell “Economic equality!” And you are a CAPITALIST OPPRESSOR who hates working people if you don’t support the Left’s agenda. “Gay rights!” You’re an ignorant prejudiced HOMOPHOBE. “Women’s rights!” You’re a MISOGYNIST who hates women.

The Left’s agenda is always about accusing us — ordinary Americans just going about our daily lives — of hateful selfishness. Accuse! Accuse! Accuse!

Once you start noticing this pattern, eventually you feel the need to ask these “progressive” activists a simple question: “Who are YOU to accuse ME?”

What gives these people the moral authority to accuse honest law-abiding citizens of “oppressing” others? What acts of unselfish generosity have these “progressives” ever done, that would qualify them as such exemplary characters as to judge us?

Who elected them the Official Arbiters of Social Justice?

Who indeed? They have been calling the moral shots since from around the mid-1960s and while there are some things that have become better, the US is now a lot lot less a good place to live today than it was then. It may be richer, but it is not better.

Dr Who began as a spin off from the Canadian Howdy Doody Show

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Who knew any of this, from the Wikipedia entry for The Howdy Doody Show where it deals with the Canadian programme:

Early in the run, there was a short-lived puppet character called Mr. X (no relation to a puppet of the same name who appeared on the American show) who traveled through time and space in his “Whatsis Box” teaching children about history. However, Mr. X was removed from the show due to parental complaints that he was too scary. It has been suggested that the Mr. X sequence may have inspired the creation of the long-running British science fiction series Doctor Who. In its earliest days, the series was likewise designed to teach children about history and, throughout the series, it has featured an alien known only as the Doctor who travels through time and space in his TARDIS, which is permanently in the shape of a police box. The series’ creator, Sydney Newman, oversaw the production of the Canadian version of Howdy Doody while working as head of programming for the CBC.

As interesting is that Charles Schultz was always annoyed that the name of his comic strip was changed against his wishes from “L’il Folks” to “Peanuts”, a change he always lamented.

Might also mention that I was looking at this at all was because I was looking up the Canadian words to the “Howdy Doody Show” song which I cannot find.

MORE RANDOM FACTS: Here is a bit of history on the Peanut Gallery which did not start with Howdy Doody, which itself began as a radio show.

By the mid-20th century, the “peanut gallery” expression was commonly in use, but became even more popular when Buffalo Bob Smith of the Howdy Doody Show began referring to his (radio) studio audience of rambunctious youngsters in 1943 as the “Peanut Gallery”.

Barbarism and the modern world

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Where are all those who were oh so concerned about the museum in Baghdad when George Bush took the war to the Taliban in 2003. As it happened, every one of the museum’s historic treasurers had been preserved. Now where are these same leftist scum when mankind’s dwindling stock of historic sites is set upon by Islamist vandals. See the real thing in action. From Reuters: With sledgehammer, Islamic State smashes Iraqi our history. And do please note that as they wrote the headline, it is merely Iraqi history, once again covering up both for the Islamists and for the American President who does the least possible he can get away with:

Ultra-radical Islamist militants in northern Iraq have destroyed a priceless collection of statues and sculptures from the ancient Assyrian era, inflicting what an archaeologist described as incalculable damage to a piece of shared human history.

A video published by Islamic State on Thursday showed men attacking the artifacts, some of them identified as antiquities from the 7th century BC, with sledgehammers and drills, saying they were symbols of idolatry.

“The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him,” an unidentified man said in the video.

The smashed articles appeared to come from an antiquities museum in Mosul, the northern city which was overrun by Islamic State last June, a former employee at the museum told Reuters.

And now there is this to add to the above: Islamic State jihadis bulldoze ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.

THE Islamic State group began bulldozing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in Iraq on Thursday in the jihadists’ latest attack on the country’s historical heritage.

IS “assaulted the historic city of Nimrud and bulldozed it with heavy vehicles,” the tourism and antiquities ministry said on an official Facebook page.

An Iraqi antiquities official confirmed the news, saying the destruction began after noon prayers on Thursday and that trucks that may have been used to haul away artefacts had also been spotted at the site.

It’s from an AFP story, and again the telltale diminishing the story to merely one of local Iraqi interest, nothing to do with the historic stock of our common human heritage. It is we too who are amongst the barbarians if we cannot find it within ourselves to fight these people until they are defeated and ground into the dust.

Barbarism Update: I suppose we should be grateful that these things even get a mention:

IS destroying another ancient archaeological site in Iraq

It’s a brief seven para story from an unknown news source. If you are looking for some kind of context not just for the barbarities themselves, but for the lack of any serious reaction across the entire spectrum of our media-political elites, let me draw your attention to Roger Scruton’s Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged which I have just read. Like everything of his, I have come away with a sense of conservative reality I seldom find in the world in which I am personally surrounded by.

Know thine enemy – as vile as it is humanly possible to be

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Where are all those who fought to take on this fight who worried about the museum in Baghdad. See the real thing in action. From Reuters: With sledgehammer, Islamic State smashes Iraqi our history:

Ultra-radical Islamist militants in northern Iraq have destroyed a priceless collection of statues and sculptures from the ancient Assyrian era, inflicting what an archaeologist described as incalculable damage to a piece of shared human history.

A video published by Islamic State on Thursday showed men attacking the artifacts, some of them identified as antiquities from the 7th century BC, with sledgehammers and drills, saying they were symbols of idolatry.

“The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him,” an unidentified man said in the video.

The smashed articles appeared to come from an antiquities museum in Mosul, the northern city which was overrun by Islamic State last June, a former employee at the museum told Reuters.

They are barbarians, and they are already inside the gate.

[Via Andrew Bolt]