The Greatest Scam on Earth

As you are all most likely aware, the Israel-Palestinian conflict has flared up again.   Like clockwork, the apologists for both sides have come crawling out of the woodworks insisting that we all take sides.   Interestingly, this time around the apologists on each side are taking rather the same position with regards to the apologists of the other side that they insist the side they are cheering for in the Middle East take towards the other side, i.e., one of eradication and elimination.   The pro-Israel side is calling for the pro-Palestinian side to be silenced, their protests shut down, and their views criminalized.   Some on the pro-Israel side are capable of distinguishing between being pro-Palestinian, that is to say, someone who seeks to promote the basic human rights of the Palestinian Arab population, and being a supporter of the murderous terrorist organization Hamas, but it seems to me that they are outnumbered by those lacking this capacity.   To be fair, this same incapacity characterizes the other side as well.   On either side, it is most ugly in its manifestation.   The pro-Israelis who fail to make the distinction have come close to calling for all expressions of humanitarian concern for the Palestinians to be outlawed as hate.   They clearly have come dangerously unhinged because all rational, sensible, and decent people are categorically opposed to laws criminalizing hate qua hate.   The other side, however, has made it difficult not to sympathize with them to some degree in that they have been openly cheering on the most vile and despicable sorts of behaviour on the part of Hamas.

 

Two and a half years ago, in an essay entitled “The Holy Land Returns to the Old Normal” I gave an overview of the Israel-Palestine conflict, rebutted a few common fallacies concerning it, offered an explanation of where the insistence that we all take sides comes from, and answered that demand.   I do not intend to go over all of that material again, but I hope you will excuse my quoting myself here.  At the end of the essay I pointed out the obvious real nature of the relationship between the Israeli government and Hamas:

 

The most ill-kept secret of the Middle East is that Likud Israeli governments and Hamas each rely upon the other to maintain their popular support among their own people.   The Palestinians expect Hamas to keep on harassing Israel.   The Israelis expect their government to brutally punish the Palestinians.  Each, therefore, provides the other with the excuse to do what they need to do to play to their own crowds.   So we come to May of this year.   On the sixth the Palestinians hold a protest in East Jerusalem, on the seventh the Israelis crack down and storm the al-Aqsa mosque, on the tenth Hamas issues an ultimatum which Israel naturally ignores and the rockets start flying, on the eleventh the Israeli Air Force begin several days of bombing the hell out of Gaza.   On the twentieth, having given their fans the show they were looking for, Netanyahu and Hamas agree to a ceasefire.   Bada bing, bada boom, it is all over in a fortnight, mission accomplished, everyone is happy, high fives all around.   Too bad about all the people who had to die, but didn’t someone somewhere at sometime say something about an omelet and eggs?

 

There is no good reason to think that any of this has changed in the present situation.   Indeed, the current conflagration could be said to exemplify the point.   The actions of the Israeli government and Hamas both clearly serve the interests of the other.   Consider Hamas’ attack on 7 October.   On top of the usual barrage of rockets, Hamas breached Israel’s supposedly impenetrable barrier and almost 3000 of their agents entered Israel, attacked towns, kibbutzim (collective farms), and even a weekend music festival.  They murdered some 1500 people, and took about 150 hostages.   The murder victims and hostages were mostly Israeli citizens, although there were a few soldiers and a number of people from other countries who were in Israel in various capacities – workers, students, attendees of the music festival – among both the dead and hostages.    This was far better organized and co-ordinated than any previous Hamas attack and consequently far more lethal but it is difficult to see how it accomplished anything for Hamas other than the bloodshed itself.   It did, however, clearly serve a purpose of Benjamin Netanyahu.  Netanyahu, who had been ousted as Prime Minister of Israel in June of 2021, was re-elected in December of last year on a hard-line platform and needed to at least appear to be making good on his promises.  Cracking down on Hamas is the easiest way of doing that and by carrying out an attack of this nature Hamas handed him an iron clad justification for doing so.   On a side note, whatever else you might say about Benjamin Netanyahu, his political longevity is something to be marvelled at.   I fully expect that sometime down the road we will be reading, a week or two after his funeral, that he has just won re-election as Prime Minister of Israel in a landslide.

 

Now some of you might be thinking “Aha, gotcha, there is a flaw in your argument.   Hamas’s actions might serve Netanyahu’s ends, but in retaliating the Israeli government will wipe them out so there is no reciprocal benefit, it is a one-way street this time around”.   This, however, very much remains to be seen.   So far, apart from the rhetoric, Israel’s retaliatory actions have consisted of the same sort of aerial bombardment with which they have responded to past Hamas attacks, albeit on a larger scale.   There has been talk of an imminent and massive ground incursion into Gaza for a week and a half now but if it ever materializes the IDF’s overwhelming military superiority does not guarantee Israel a quick and easy victory.   Ask the Americans.   Israel would be walking into the same sort of situation in which the United States found herself entangled in Vietnam and later Afghanistan.   This is a long term operation and the longer it drags on the more it is to Hamas’ favour, because the longer such a conflict stretches out, the less international public sympathy will be with Israel, and it is in the arena of international public opinion that Hamas fights all its true battles.

 

It sounds crazy but it is nevertheless true that every time Hamas attacks Israel it is with the intention of provoking a retaliatory attack.   The reason this seems crazy is because Israel is so much stronger than Hamas in terms of military might.   It conjures up the picture of a chihuahua getting in the face of a big bruiser of a bull dog and yipping away annoyingly until the larger dog barks or bites its head off.   One moral of the Old Testament account of David and Goliath, however, is that size isn’t everything.   In this case, Hamas wants Israel to attack back because every time Israel does far more Palestinian civilians are killed than Hamas agents, enabling Hamas to run to the international news media, the General Assembly of the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, humanitarian organizations, university professors and student activists, and basically every group of self-important jackasses with a lot of money and power and not enough brain cells to fill a thimble, and whine and cry about how mean old Israel has been beating on them again, after which these groups wag their fingers in Israel’s face saying shame on you, shame on you, and dump tons of money in humanitarian relief into Hamas controlled Palestinian territory, keeping Hamas solvent, and freeing up other resources with which to buy more rockets.

 

A great illustration of the Hamas strategy can be found in the 1959 film The Mouse That Roared.   In the movie, a small European country, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has built its entire economy on a single export product, the wine Pinot Grand Fenwick.  When a California wine company produces a cheap knockoff, and the country is threatened with insolvency, Duchess Gloriana (Peter Sellers) and her Prime Minister, Count Mountjoy (Peter Sellers) hatch a scheme to attack the United States, lose, and then reap the rewards of losing to the United States, which pours plenty of money into rebuilding the countries it has defeated in war.   So they send the United States a declaration of war and then put their game warden, Tully (guess who), in charge of their small army of soldiers, mail-clad and armed with bows and arrows, and send him over.   The scheme goes awry when Tully accidentally wins the war – watch the movie to find out how.   The point of course, is that Hamas’ strategy is essentially that of Grand Fenwick.   It is a darker version that involves much more bloodshed including the sacrifice of large numbers of their own and the payoff is expected more from third parties than from the victorious attackee, but it is the same basic scam.

 

Israel is running a big scam too, of course.   In her case it is not the gullible “international community” that is the mark so much as the equally gullible United States of America.   Israel, which paid for the creation of Hamas – see my previous essay alluded to earlier – has long been the single largest recipient of American foreign aid, in part because the various pro-Israel lobby groups in the United States make the National Rifle Association look like rank amateurs in comparison, but also because Israel knows how to play on the United States’ national mythology by presenting herself as the only liberal democracy in her region, surrounded and besieged by anti-Semitic autocrats, just like those that the United States likes to imagine herself as having single-handedly defeated in the Second World War.   Of course there is some truth in that depiction.   When did you ever hear of a successful scam that consisted completely of falsehoods?

 

This is why it is best for the rest of the world to stay out of this conflict and refuse to give in to this demand that we pick sides.   Our involvement, whichever side we end up supporting, however well-intentioned, ends up facilitating the worst sort of behaviour of both sides.

 

We need to stop looking at the conflict in the Middle East through the lens of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” dichotomy, rooted in the heresy of Mani that has permeated Western popular culture through the pernicious influence of Hollywood movies and the comic book industry.   There are no “good guys” in this conflict although there are a lot of innocent victims, both Israeli and Palestinian Arab.

 

If someone were to point a gun to my head and demand that I choose sides I would chose Israel, although I would be sure to hold my nose while doing so.   Israel is a legitimate state, or at least the closest thing to a legitimate state that a modern democratic government without a king can be, which isn’t very close.   Hamas is a criminal organization of lawless thugs and murderers.   Israel has spent the last three quarters of a century trying to build up a civilized society for herself and her people.   Hamas are destroyers not builders.   I am a life-long Tory by instinct and as the late Sir Roger Scruton wisely put it “Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”   I will never side with those who only ever walk the easy path of destroying what others have labouriously built.   Not Year Zero, Cultural Maoist, groups like Black Lives Matter and Every Child Matters in North America. Not Hamas in the Middle East.   Finally, while both sides value the lives of civilians on the other side extremely cheap, there is a huge difference in that Hamas places no higher a value on the lives of their own civilians.   Indeed, Hamas arguably values the lives of civilian Palestinian Arabs less than Israel.   Hamas, when it attacks Israel, targets the civilian population, but prior to 7 October, its attacks have been largely ineffective.   It fires tons of rockets at Israel, almost all of which are taken down by the Iron Dome, and the few that make it past are not guaranteed to hit anything or anyone.   Its rocket launchers, however, Hamas deliberately places in residential neighbourhoods, mosques, hospitals, schools, and other similar locations where a retaliatory strike to take out the rocket launcher will have maximum civilian casualties.   The same is true of anything else Hamas has that would be considered a legitimate military target by the rules that most countries, nominally at least, support for the conduct of warfare.   Therefore, Israel must either stand there and allow herself to be attacked, the sort of thing someone whose soul has been killed and brain rotted from training in public relations and/or human resources might recommend, (1) or take out Hamas’ attack bases and in the process destroy the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure within which those bases are hid and kill the countless numbers of Palestinians that Hamas uses as human shields, handing Hamas plenty of ammunition in the form of bad press to use against her..

 

That having been said, the reasons for refusing the choice, for not taking sides are solid.   It is in the mutual interests of Israel and Hamas to keep this conflict going forever, but this is not in the interests of the civilians on both sides, nor is it in the interests of the rest of the world which both sides expect to pay for their lethal and destructive activities.   It is in the best interests of everybody, that the rest of the world refuse to be dragged into this any longer, and tell the two sides they both need to grow up.

 

I shall, Lord willing, follow up this essay with two others.   The first will demonstrate that the Christian Zionist position that we are required by the Scriptures to take Israel’s side in Middle-East conflicts is rank heresy.   The second will look at the neoconservative claim that the pro-Palestinian Left’s unhinged support of Hamas comes from anti-Semitism and demonstrate that it comes from a different source.

 

(1)   Contrary to what the Anabaptist heresy teaches, Jesus said nothing of this sort in Matthew 5:39.   This verse is best understood as forbidding revenge rather than self-defence but even if taken as forbidding self-defence it says nothing about how governments, responsible for the security of those they govern, are to act, as evident from the fact that before this section of the Sermon, Jesus gave a disclaimer that it is not to be taken as abrogating the Law.

Canada's Cultural Marxism was "Made in the USA"

In reporting on the Trudeau Liberals’ draconian new “transgender rights” bill the editors at Taki Theodoracopolus’ e-magazine made the remark that “[a]t any given moment, Canada is also about 15 years ahead of the USA down the murderous path of instituting Cultural Marxism as a state religion that must not be transgressed under penalty of death.” This is not, alas, an entirely erroneous statement, at least if we have the last few decades in view, but the most interesting thing about it is that it is essentially saying that Canadian progressives are attempting to be more American than the Americans. In Canada, Cultural Marxism is and always has been, a product imported from the United States.

Cultural Marxism is the use of culture to subvert and undermine the traditions of a society and civilization. It is usually thought of in terms of the attacks on people of white European ancestry, the Christian religion, the patriarchal family and the male sex in general, and heterosexual normality, that now permeate popular and academic culture. Political correctness is the popular appellation for Cultural Marxism in its coercive aspect.

American conservatives think of all of this as having been imported from Europe and they are correct in one sense in that Cultural Marxism as an actual strategy of infiltrating and subverting the institutions that generate and transmit culture such as schools, media, and churches was developed by European neo-Marxists such as Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci during the interwar period of the last century and brought to America by thinkers such as those of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse – who temporarily relocated to Columbia University in the 1930s and 1940s and had a surprisingly large amount of influence in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s for men whose theories were primarily a synthesis of the ideas of the two most boring and uninspired thinkers in all of history, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. If Europe was the birthplace of Cultural Marxism at the level of theory, however, Los Angeles, California has been the central base of operations from which it has conducted its highly successful campaign against the peoples, religion, and traditions of Western Civilization. Can there be any doubt that the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the Cultural Marxists has been the “pop culture” produced in music and motion picture recording studios of the City of Angels?

All of Cultural Marxism’s victories in its endless war against all things good, decent, and normal can be traced to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was itself to a large degree a Hollywood fabrication. The conventional narrative of this history tells us that black Americans, having undergone a century of continued cruel oppression under segregation after they had been freed from slavery in the American Civil War, rose up against their oppressors under the leadership of a modern-day Spartacus, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and finally obtained their rights in the Civil Rights Act passed by the United States Congress in 1964. In reality, the US Supreme Court had dealt the deathblow to segregation in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a year before the media elevated King to celebrity status in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Civil Rights Act did not terminate the “separate but equal” state laws that had already been struck down by the Supreme Court ten years earlier but rather made it a civilly liable offence for private citizens to discriminate on the grounds of race or sex, in certain situations. By telling people what they were or were not allowed to be thinking while selling or renting a house, hiring, promoting and firing an employee, or serving or withholding service from customers, thus extending the rule of law into the realm of private conscience, and by placing an impossible burden of proof upon the accused, this bill was in itself a major assault on principles of justice that had been long established in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, so effective was the falsified, media-generated, version of these events that the Civil Rights Movement has served as the template ever since for the “Social Justice Warriors” who, howling with outrage on behalf of one supposedly mistreated group or another, have demanded radical changes to society and the strict curtailing of how we are allowed to think or speak.

The American Civil Rights Act was obviously the model upon which the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 was based. Like its American equivalent, the CHRA forbade private acts of discrimination, but it went the American bill one further by including the notorious Section 13, which defined as an act of discrimination, the communication via electronic media of words and ideas that were “likely” to expose people to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of their race, sex, national origin, or any other prohibited grounds of discrimination. It was the Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that brought in the CHRA with Section 13 in 1977, and we can see a parallel with what the present Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is seeking to do by introducing Bill C-16, which proposes to make “hate speech” against transsexuals a criminal offence, punishable with up to two years of prison time. Both generations of Trudeaus looked to the United States for their inspiration, in Justin’s case to the President Barack Obama’s attempt to shove all this transgender rights nonsense down all the states’ throats by executive order. In both cases the Trudeaus have taken a rotten American idea and made it even worse.

In this we see how it is true for the editors of Takimag to say that Canada, with the Trudeau Liberals in power, is ahead of the United States in the game of instituting Cultural Marxism as a state religion, but that this is by imitating the United States and trying to outdo the Americans in their own game. The reorientation of Canada away from her British roots and connections and towards greater continental integration with the United States has been the goal of the Liberal Party since the nineteenth century. This remained the case when the Liberals came under the leadership of the Trudeaus, themselves a cheap, Canadian, knockoff of the trashy, American Kennedy family. To this day the Liberals look to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as their greatest achievement during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. The Charter is clearly a second-rate imitation of the American Bill of Rights. It is built on the same false premise as the American document – that rights and freedoms are better secured by being written down on paper than being enshrined in long-established custom and tradition – while making no mention of the basic right to one’s own property, and making the most important rights and freedoms mentioned, less secure than the multicultural, egalitarian, and feminist agenda that Pierre Trudeau had borrowed from Hollywood. The biggest effect of its having been added to our constitution was to make the Canadian Supreme Court more like the American, that is to say, a panel of activists carrying out a social, moral, and cultural “revolution from above” against the Christian religion and the customs, traditions, and way of life that had been identifiable as Canadian since Confederation. Six years after the Charter was introduced, the Canadian Supreme Court struck down all of Canada’s laws against abortion, a decision the American Supreme Court had anticipated by fifteen years. Last year it struck down all of our laws against doctor assisted suicide. In between were a string of liberalizing and secularizing decisions striking down long-established laws and traditions of the type the Americans have had to endure from their Supreme Court since at least the 1950s. Progressive activist judges in the United States had had the Fourteenth Amendment at their disposal since 1868. Their Canadian equivalents had to wait until 1982 to get the Charter.

It is deeply ironic, therefore, that virtually everything which progressives, including supporters of the NDP and Green Parties, both of which basically want all the same things as the Liberals only faster, think of as being “the Canadian way” as opposed to “the American way” is merely one American innovation or another taken to an absurd extreme. The original Canadian Tories, from Sir John A. MacDonald through to John G. Diefenbaker, knew that what set the Canadian way apart from the American was our loyalism, monarchism, and our remaining true to our British traditions and institutions within the larger British family of nations and it is pathetic, that the party that bears the Conservative name, has abandoned its opposition to same-sex marriage and endorsed the transgender rights bill thus essentially conceding the culture war to the Cultural Marxism that has infiltrated our country with “MADE IN THE USA” stamped all over it.