The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign
Showing posts with label Commentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commentary. Show all posts

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Moral Clarity

Suppose one morning you were to go to the bank to pay your bills, deposit a cheque, and take out some cash. While you are waiting in line for a teller a man in a ski mask with a gun comes in, orders you and everyone else onto the ground, and demands that the teller fill his backpack with money. With his cash-laden pack on his back he is about to make his escape when he sees that police cars have arrived on the street outside and he cannot escape the building without coming into their line of fire. The person who had been in line ahead of you is a visibly pregnant woman whom the robber grabs and holds in front of him, pointing his gun to her head as he demands that the police back off and let him escape.

Imagine that after that an officer steps forwards from behind the police lines, draws his revolver from his holster, aims it directly at the pregnant woman and shoots, killing her, her unborn child, and the robber with a single shot. Asked to explain his actions, the officer says that the robber was an evil man and needed to be stopped, that he had shown his callous disregard for innocent life by holding the pregnant woman hostage and if allowed to go free would undoubtedly do the same thing again to other people. Therefore the officer had decided, in the heat of the situation, to use lethal force to put the robber down. When asked about shooting the woman he says “it’s a tragedy, yes, but I’m not to blame. It was the robber who put her there so that I could not shoot him without shooting her too. He’s to blame not me”.

Would you expect his supervisors to accept that explanation? Would you expect the public and the courts to accept it? How about you, would you accept it yourself?

I didn’t think so. Yet the police officer’s explanation is identical to the justification that the state of Israel and her many supporters and defenders expect us to accept with regards to her bombings in Gaza which have resulted in the deaths of several hundred Palestinian Arabs, almost all of whom have been children, women, and the elderly. Hamas, which has been firing rockets at Israel for over a month, starting when Israel was conducting a crackdown in the West Bank under the guise of a search for three kidnapped Israeli teenagers that the Netanyahu government knew were dead, fires these rockets from sites where Israeli retaliation would maximize these kind of casualties. It hides its rocket launchers in schools, in hospitals, in densely populated residential neighbourhoods in urban centres, and basically everywhere it can find where a retaliatory bomb would take out huge numbers of non-combatants. Hamas is like the robber, holding the pregnant woman in front of him. Actually, Hamas is worse than the robber, because where the robber in the illustration was merely using the woman to try and escape from the scene of his crime alive, Hamas actively wills the deaths of the innocent people it hides behind because it uses the deaths, injuries, and massive damage to civil infrastructure that Israel inflicts, to obtain international sympathy and material assistance as well as to feed the anti-Israeli hatred of its own supporters.

Yet suppose for some strange reason, the robber in the story actually wanted the pregnant woman to be shot. He is committing a very odd form of murder/suicide let us say. Would this bolster the policeman’s case or be an additional argument against it? Would it not increase the policeman’s culpability by making him complicit in the crime that was actually intended? Similarly, does not the fact that Hamas wants the death of hundreds of Palestinian women and children from which it can generate the capital it thrives on, and the fact that Israel knows this, provide amount to yet another reason why Israel should not bomb schools, hospitals, and residential neighbourhoods?

If it came down to a matter of whether we should be cheering for the police or for bank robbers, then obviously the sane answer is that we should be cheering for the police. That Hollywood often sends the opposite message is no argument against that for Hollywood is not even close to being sane. Likewise, if it came down to matter of whether we should be cheering for Israel or Hamas, Israel the legitimate state is to be cheered rather than Hamas the terrorist organization. The hypothetical situation does not boil down to a question of whom to cheer for, however, and neither does the question of Israel’s recent activities in Gaza.

Israel’ most strident defenders like to accuse those who criticize or condemn her actions of “moral equivalence”. What moral equivalence basically amounts to is taking a conflict and trying to make the two sides morally equal when one side is clearly in the right. One does not have to claim moral equivalence between policemen and bankrobbers, however, to understand that the actions of a policeman who shoots a pregnant woman to take down the robber who is holding her hostage are inexcusable.

As an ethical error, moral equivalence is a bit like the theological error called antinomianism. Antinomianism is the heresy that teaches that because we are justified by grace we are therefore freed from the responsibility of trying to live righteously. It is a real, definable, error, but nine times out of ten when someone accuses someone else of antinomianism, it is because he himself is guilty of the opposite error of legalism. Similarly, moral equivalence is an actual ethical error, but in many cases those who accuse others of it are themselves guilty of something that might be called moral Manichaeism, of insisting upon seeing all conflicts in dualistic terms, as between light and darkness or good and evil. There is a strong tendency towards moral Manichaeism among Israel’s defenders, especially those who cry “moral equivalence” every time somebody suggests that killing Palestinian women and children, blowing up hospitals and schools, and sending missiles through residential neighbourhoods might not be something other than a perfectly justifiable action.

Hamas’ actions place Israel in a difficult situation to be sure. Israel has a right and even a duty to protect her citizens and society from those that would do them harm. Tom Wilson at Commentary, recently took exception to those who acknowledge this right in theory, but seem to deny it in practice, and he has a good point. Saying that Israel has a right to defend herself doesn’t mean much if in practice you condemn everything she does. It is not helpful or legitimate, however, to argue that because Israel is the “good guy”, therefore whatever she does is by definition just. Policemen are “good guys” and robbers are “bad guys”, but that does not mean that the cop who shoots the pregnant hostage in order to take down the robber is justified in doing so. We may agree that Israel is the “good guy” and Hamas the “bad guy”, and that Israel is as justified in protecting her citizens from Hamas as a policeman is in protecting people from bank robbers, but we cannot extrapolate from this that Israel is justified in killing women and children to get at Hamas because Hamas is hiding behind them, any more than a policeman would be justified in shooting a hostage to get at a robber because the robber is hiding behind the hostage.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Religious Zionism – Bad Theology, Bad Politics

As I have argued previously, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the sane choice, if we are forced to pick sides, is Israel, because Israel is a legitimate state, the political expression of an established, civilized, society, genuinely interested in the wellbeing of that society, whereas her enemies, organizations like Hamas, are terrorists who exploit the suffering of their own people, hiding behind them as human shields and hurling them against their foes like human projectiles. Out of this fundamental distinction two other differences arise. First, Israel is highly efficient in protecting her own people from harm and wreaking destruction upon her enemies. As a result her casualty and injury lists are insignificant compared to theirs. Her detractors have tried to use this against her but, as again I have argued previously, their reasoning does not stand up to scrutiny because the possession of strength cannot reasonably invalidate its use. The second difference is that while both sides have committed great crimes against the other in their struggle over the land they both claim as their own, Israel will on occasion take responsibility for crimes committed in her name, and punish the offenders. The only responsibility her enemies have ever been willing to take for their actions has been in the form of praise, credit, and glory amongst themselves.

Many of Israel’s defenders and supporters deny that great crimes have been committed by both sides. According to them Israel is a squeaky clean paragon of justice and virtue who never does anything wrong whatsoever. Max Boot, for example, in a very recent article for the website of Commentary Magazine, wrote:

Needless to say, the Israel Defense Forces do not deliberately target children–any more than do the armed forces of the United States or other civilized powers.

Boot does, of course, later have a point – a very good one, as a matter of fact – when he observes that it is difficult for Israel to avoid civilian casualties when striking Hamas because the terrorist organization deliberately places its rocket launchers in the middle of civilian neighbourhoods to maximize the harm to their own civilian population from Israeli strikes. True as this is, however, it is not the whole story.

The rest of the story is that over the last three and a half decades Israel has increasingly come under control of a radicalized, nationalist faction, with a vision of a “Greater Israel” in which Israel’s territory would be greatly expanded, perhaps to the Scriptural limits of the Promised Land (the Nile and the Euphrates). This faction, known as the Likud, was founded by the men who had led the Zionist terrorist organizations the Irgun and the Stern Gang in the 1940s which during the 1948 war attacked Palestinian Arab towns and villages, driving out those they didn’t massacre, with the end result being Israel’s annexation and absorption of 80% of the territory apportioned to the Palestinian Arabs by the United Nations. In power, the Likud has interfered with American attempts to establish a Palestinian Arab state, sabotaged peace negotiations with its settlement program in occupied Palestinian territory, and basically made clear by its actions its intentions to pursue the end of “Greater Israel” by the same means of violence and expulsion with which Israel seized most of the Palestinian territory in 1948. That this plays a significant part in the events currently unfolding can be seen in the Netanyahu government’s deceptive decision to withhold the information that they knew the kidnapped teenagers had been murdered and that the men who did it were not acting on official Hamas orders.

More disturbingly, in recent years even more extreme voices have arisen within the Likud faction, equating the Palestinian Arabs with the original inhabitants of Canaan (many Palestinian Arabs have, very foolishly, claimed to be the descendants of such in order to establish a claim to the land that predates that of the Jews) and calling for Israel to treat them the way the Israelites were commanded to treat the original Canaanites.

This horrendous suggestion, which thankfully, Netanyahu and the governing Likud of Israel are almost certainly far too pragmatic to seriously attempt to put into practice, is bad theology as well as bad politics. God’s instructions to mercilessly exterminate the seven tribes of Canaan was a special, one-time divine authorization of what was otherwise contrary to God’s commandment to live at peace with whoever was willing to accept a treaty with them (Deuteronomy 20), for which God, Who ordinarily does not give account of His decisions to man, gives a specific justification in the exceeding wickedness of the tribes as described in Leviticus 18. When the Israelites failed to follow through on these instructions in the initial conquest of Canaan, they were forbidden to renege on the treaties which they, contrary to their instructions, had made with the inhabitants of the land.

We find just as bad theology, although not always with such horrible implications, among religious Zionists, some Jewish but mostly Christian, in Western countries like Canada and the United States. Religious Zionists base their support for Israel, not upon the reasons I outlined in my first paragraph, but upon the belief that the modern Zionist movement and the establishment of the modern state of Israel fulfil the Old Testament prophecies of the Restoration of Israel. Religious Zionists offer Israel far greater, and much less-qualified support than she otherwise finds among her defenders. Some of them have been known to rank the well-being of Israel over that of their own country, an attitude that is sometimes called “Israel First”. Most of them take an attitude towards criticism of the actions of the government of modern Israel that would ironically, condemn the very prophets whose writings they look to for support of their position as those prophets were blistering in their condemnation of injustices and idolatry of the Israeli leaders of the time. Many of them are in strong sympathy with the positions of the Likud.

Yet the basic premise of religious Zionism is heresy by the standards of the traditional orthodoxy of both Judaism and Christianity. The Jewish Tanakh which is the Christian Old Testament does indeed prophesy a restoration of Israel. In Genesis, God promises Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that He will make a great nation out of their descendants and give them the land of Canaan forever, in Exodus He delivers the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and makes a Covenant with them, the terms of which are spelled out in Exodus and Leviticus and reiterated in Deuteronomy when they finally arrive at the border of the Promised Land. They enter and conquer the Promised Land in Joshua then in Judges, the cycle of idolatry and rebellion, followed by judgement and dispersion, followed by repentance and restoration, begins which continues through the history of the united kingdom of Israel, and the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, until the latter two are swept away in the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities the first two of three events that brought about the Diaspora, the scattering of the Jews through the nations. It is the prophets who warned of and saw these Captivities that prophesied a final restoration of Israel in connection with the coming of the Messiah and the New Covenant in which God would write His laws upon their hearts rather than on tablets of stone. In the final Restoration, like the mini-restorations throughout the entire aforementioned cycle, spiritual restoration would precede physical restoration.

This is why Zionism is heresy. The orthodox doctrines of both Judaism and Christianity require a spiritual restoration to precede the physical restoration. This was not the case with the establishment of modern Israel, ergo modern Israel cannot be the fulfilment of the prophecies. Judaism rejects the truth that Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah and that He established the New Covenant in His blood two thousand years ago. Therefore, by orthodox Jewish doctrine, Israel cannot be the fulfilment of the Restoration.

Christianity is built upon faith that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Christ, the promised Saviour. Yet although Christianity recognizes that Messiah has come, Israel still cannot be the fulfilment of the prophecy because apart from those who founded the Church, the nation rejected Christ which led to the third of the events that brought about the Diaspora, when the armies of Rome put down the Jewish rebels and sacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D. In orthodox Christian theology, the spiritual restoration of Israel which must precede her physical restoration, is her recognition of Him Whom they rejected, as their Lord and Messiah. Obviously, that has not happened.

Heresy always bears bad fruit. If we equate present day Israel with the renewed and righteous restored Israel of Scriptural prophecy we are unable to provide the present state with precisely what she needs the most – qualified support, tempered by strong criticism and indeed condemnation of her actions when such condemnation is called for.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Apartheid in Perspective

There are many evils that can be charged to the account of the late twentieth- century phenomenon that is commonly called political correctness. One of these is the growing inability to perceive certain historical figures, events, and institutions with anything worthy of being called perspective. In the last century alone, movements and organizations committed to the political philosophy of Marxist-Leninism murdered the bodies of over one hundred million people and the spirits of millions more whom they forced into the dreary, hopeless, slave like existence that passed for life in the police states that flew the red flag. Yet to this day it is far safer for someone in academic or media circles to praise a Communist government, to dismiss the fear of Communism as irrational paranoia, and to say that the Americans were the aggressors in the Cold War, than it is for someone in those same circles to say anything that could be construed as a defense of General Franco of Spain or General Pinochet of Chile even though there was far more freedom and prosperity for the average citizen under either of their regimes than in any Communist country and the number of people tortured and killed by their regimes was far lower than that of any Communist country. Any attempt to put both Communism and the anti-Communist regimes of Franco and Pinochet in perspective is likely to be met with widespread denunciation and accusations that one is engaging in apologetics for “human rights” abuses.

Virtually anything having to do with Africa is similarly protected from perspective by political correctness.

Take the slave trade for example. We know all about it, don’t we? The bad guys, the white Europeans, in the age of exploration came to Africa, where they began to capture and enslave black people, who they shipped overseas to Europe and the European settlements in the Americas, where they were oppressed as drudge labourers.

Suppose, however, we were to broaden our perspective on African slavery by including within our picture of it the fact that slavery existed on the African continent long before European ships arrived on her west coast, that African slavery had begun with African tribes going to war with one another and enslaving each other, that the Arabs had conducted a trade in African slaves centuries prior to Europe’s getting involved, and that one of the consequences of modern European expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism was that the imperial powers ended and outlawed the slave trade in the nineteenth century, and abolished slavery in the territory under their control? Suppose we were to broaden our perspective even further by pointing out that since the end of World War II, which had accomplished a geopolitical realignment around the two new superpowers of the USA and USSR, who forced the old imperial powers to withdraw, slavery has begun anew in parts of Africa where it had been abolished by Britain, France, and the Dutch.? Suppose we were to point out, as Professor Bruce Charlton recently did (1), that due to liberal immigration and multiculturalism slavery has been reintroduced into the birthplace of abolitionism and is largely being ignored by the leftists who promote multiculturalism in contradiction to their professed opposition to slavery in all forms?

From that broader perspective it no longer appears to be a simple Manichean morality tale of evil whites and pure, innocent, oppressed blacks does it?

There is probably no element of African history that is more lacking in perspective than that of apartheid. Apartheid is the word in the Afrikaans language that refers, as its sound would suggest to English speakers, the state of being apart or separate. In 1948, when the Nationalist Party came to power in South Africa, it adopted this term to designate its policy of racial segregation.

The government of South Africa picked a particularly poor time to institute this policy. World War II was over, the revelations of the atrocities of Nazi Germany had given racialism a bad name, the anti-colonial, anti-imperial era was beginning under the supervision of the new progressive superpowers, the Communists were at work trying to fan the flames of anti-racist sentiment into the fire of revolution, and in the United States, now the leading power of the liberal, democratic, West, the Civil Rights movement would soon be underway, which would lead to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the model for subsequent anti-discrimination legislation such as the 1968 Race Relations Bill in the UK and the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. The way the tides of opinion were moving, it was inevitable that apartheid would receive widespread condemnation. Interestingly, the one country that understood perfectly well where the Afrikaners were coming from, itself achieved its independence as a country that same year. After the Six Days War in 1967, Israel and South Africa forged a close alliance, signing the Israel-South Africa Agreement in 1975. Today, enemies of the Jewish state liken the measures she has taken to preserve her existence in the face of the constant threat of Arab and Muslim terrorism to apartheid. Her defenders reject the comparison as a calumny, perhaps because they, unlike the country they are defending, lack perspective on apartheid.

It is fitting, therefore, that of those essays with which I am familiar, the one which in my opinion best put apartheid into perspective, appeared in an extremely pro-Israeli publication. The author of the essay was British writer and historian Paul Johnson. In an article that appeared in the September 1985 issue of the American neoconservative monthly journal Commentary, (2) Johnson took the United States to task for the economic boycott of South Africa then underway. It was a “cruel absurdity”, he declared, for the richest country in the world to “deliberately set about destroying the economy of what is in some respects still a developing nation.” (3) The United States had nothing to gain from doing so and much to lose. The only explanation for this absurdity, Johnson argued, was that “assumption that the South African regime is a unique moral evil, whose wickedness is so great that the necessity for its destruction transcends all the rules governing relations between states and, indeed, the dictates of elementary common sense.”

He then proceeded to demolish that assumption by pointing out that South Africa, far from being unique, is “in many fundamental respects…a typical African country.” He gave six examples, the first four of which are 1) that like other African states it was undergoing a population explosion, 2) like other large African states its racial problems were particularly complex and not just a matter of black and white, 3) “population pressure on the land is driving people into the towns, and especially into the big cities”, and 4) like in other African states this creates problems for the government to which the response is typical:

So governments respond with what has become the curse of Africa—social engineering. People are treated not as individual human beings but as atomized units and shoveled around like concrete or gravel. Movement control is imposed. Every African has to have a grubby little pass-book or some other begrimed document which tells him where he is allowed to work or live. South Africa has had pass-laws of a kind since the 18th century. They have now spread all over the African continent, and where the pass-book comes the bulldozer is never far behind. Virtually all African governments use them to demolish unauthorized settlements. Hundreds of thousands of wretched people are made homeless without warning by governments terrified of being overwhelmed by lawless multitudes. In the black African countries bordering on the Sahara, the authorities fight desperately to repel nomadic desert dwellers driven south by drought. When the police fail, punitive columns of troops are sent in. (4)

The fifth example Johnson gave was that South Africa, like all African states, conducts its social engineering on a racial basis. He wrote:

All African states are racist. Almost without exception, and with varying degrees of animosity, they discriminate against someone: Jews, or whites, or Asians, or non-Muslim religious groups, or disfavored tribes. There is no such thing as a genuinely multiracial society in the whole of Africa…African countries vary in the extent to which their practice of discrimination is formalized or entrenched in law codes and official philosophies. Most have political theories of a sort, cooked up in the political-science or sociology departments of local universities. Tanzania has a sinister totalitarian doctrine called Ujaama. Ghana has Consciencism. There is Zambian Humanism, Négritude in Senegal, and, in Zaire, a social creed called Mobutuism, after the reigning dictator. All these government theories reflect the appetites of the ruling racial groups… Apartheid is not a concept which divides the Republic from the rest of Africa: on the contrary, it is the local expression of the African ideological personality. (5)

This, it should be noted, has changed since the change in power from the Afrikaner National Party to the African National Congress in 1994. Not only does the ANC, despite the false image of the “rainbow nation” generated by a deceitful media, practice discrimination against the white South Africans who are currently being eliminated in a Zimbabwesque manner, the ANC is not even representative of all South Africa blacks, being historically a primarily Xhosa organization, (6) although its current leader, Jacob Zuma, comes from the rival Zulu people.

The sixth way, in which Johnson said that South Africa was typical of Africa was in the way it had suffered “at the hands of its politically minded intellectuals”.

Having demonstrated that in all of these negative things Nationalist South Africa was a typical, rather than unique, African state, Johnson then identified four ways in which it stood out by differing from other African states. The first two of these were its wealth, “South Africa has by far the richest and most varied range of natural resources of any African country”, and the fact that it had used that wealth to build a modern economy, the only one of its kind in Africa. The third was that blacks were better off in white-governed South Africa than any other country in Africa. Here another extended quote from Johnson is in order:

Except for the Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Malawi, all the black African states have experienced falls in real incomes per capita since independence. But only in South Africa have the real incomes of blacks risen very substantially in the last quarter-century. In mining, black wages have tripled in real terms in the last decade and are still rising…This helps to account for the fact that there are more black-owned cars in South Africa than there are private cars in the whole of the Soviet Union. The Republic is the first and so far the only African country to produce a large black middle class. In South Africa the education available to blacks is poor compared to what the whites get, and that is one of the biggest grievances the black communities harbor; but it is good compared to what is available elsewhere on the continent…Thanks to mining, again, this modest but rising prosperity is not confined to blacks born in South Africa. About half of South Africa’s black miners come from abroad, chiefly from Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana…The security fences South Africa is now rather anxiously erecting are designed to keep intended immigrants out, not—like the Berlin Wall—to keep people in. (7)

The fourth way in which Nationalist South Africa differed from other African countries is that was “in many respects a free country.” Johnson explained that:

Every other African country has become, or is in the process of becoming, a one-party state. None of them subscribes in practice, or in most cases even in theory, to the separation of powers. Both the rule of law and democracy are subject in South Africa to important qualifications. But it is the only African country where they exist at all. The emergency and security powers enjoyed by the South African government are so wide and draconian that they almost make us forget that the judiciary is independent—very much so—and that even non-whites can get justice against the state, something they are most unlikely to secure anywhere else on the continent. The courts are cluttered with black litigants suing the police, the prison authorities, or other government agencies, or appealing against sentences. (8)

To summarize, the things which the anti-apartheid movement most objected to in Nationalist South Africa – its official racial discrimination, its heavy handed government policing, etc., were all features that the South African government shared with all other African governments, that were not uniquely South African, per se, but rather were typically African. It made no sense, therefore, to single South Africa out for condemnation. The only difference was that in South Africa the governing group was white whereas in all other African countries – now that Ian Smith’s government had fallen and Rhodesia was being turned into Zimbabwe – it was black. Since the conditions for blacks were improving in Nationalist South Africa, to the point that they had an immigration problem from the rest of the continent, whereas they were rapidly declining in the rest of Africa, it made even less sense to condemn South Africa.

Since the ANCs rise to power in 1994, conditions in South Africa have deteriorated for blacks and whites alike. What was a first world country when governed by the Afrikaners is becoming a third world country, in which the white South Africans face genocide and the black South Africans face the deterioration of the rule and protection of law, a failing economy, and a decline into the conditions present everywhere else in Africa. Those South Africans who can, black and white alike, are now fleeing the country, while under Afrikaner rule they were struggling to get in.

What is apparent out of all of this is that South Africa was a better place to live, for blacks and whites alike, from 1948 to 1994, than either any other country in Africa was at the time or than South Africa itself has been ever since.

This does not mean, of course, either that the policy of apartheid made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now, or that apartheid is somehow justified by all of this. What made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now is that South Africa then, the prosperous, Western, country, was largely an expression of the Afrikaner people who built the country, established its institutions, and wrote its laws. As such an expression, the country of South Africa was a country that Afrikaners, other African whites, and African blacks all wished to participate in. Apartheid, of course, prevented the other people living in South Africa, other than non-Afrikaner whites, from full participation, and that is wherein its injustice lies. The difficulty is that apart from apartheid, that South Africa would probably have been impossible to create.

All of which must be taken into consideration if we are to even approach perspective, when it comes to apartheid and the whole South African situation.

(1) http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca/2013/10/why-do-modern-leftists-pretend-to-be.html


(2) Commentary has been published since 1945 when it was founded by the American Jewish Committee as a replacement for the Contemporary Jewish Record. Its first editor was Eliot Cohen, who was succeeded by Norman Podhoretz in 1960. It was during Podhoretz’s editorship that the journal ostensibly moved to the right, when Podhoretz, initially a Cold War liberal Democrat, grew disgusted with the pro-Soviet, pro-Palestinian, New Left in the 1970s and realigned himself and his publication with the American conservative movement. Hence the label “neoconservative”, which in an American context generally refers to a member of the “New York Intellectuals” who moved from the left to the right in the 1970s and who is usually belligerently militaristic. Commentary gradually became independent of the American Jewish Committee. Its current editor is John Podhoretz, son of Norman Podhoretz, and it remains extremely, to the point of being obnoxiously so, pro-Israel.

(3) Paul Johnson, “The Race for South Africa”, Commentary, September, 1985. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-race-for-south-africa/ (if you wish to view this, you will have to part with some shekels, I am afraid, either a subscription price or the purchase price of the article)

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid.

(6) See Ilana Mercer’s Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011) for more information about this.

(7) Johnson, op cit.

(8) Ibid.