Barton Hinkle offers a new modest proposal:
The latest issue of Time purports to explain “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.” (Hint: Blame the money-grubbing Jews!) There will be earnest efforts to point out why this is nonsense, but they will fall on deaf ears. These days a defense of Israel requires stronger measures. And perhaps nothing could do Israel more good than for the United States to declare war on it.
After all, if you want to win the support of American academics, journalists, and movie stars — if you pine for the approbation of the U.N. Security Council and NGOs the world over — then you should get on the wrong side of U.S. foreign policy.
This has been true at least since 1933, when The New York Times’ chief Stalinist, Walter Duranty, called reports of famine in Russia “malignant propaganda.” Throughout the Cold War, Americans were instructed that communism was “fundamentally a more uplifting idea than capitalism” (Andy Rooney). That “most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy” (Dan Rather). That Fidel Castro was a “dashing,” “larger-than-life personality” who not only “delivered the most to those who had the least” but who turned his nation into “paradise,” a “peaceable society that treasures its children” (Diane Sawyer, Peter Jennings, Rather again, CBS’ Giselle Fernandez, and Newsweek).
When the Iron Curtain began to fall, Americans were told that “the transition from communism to capitalism is making more people more miserable every day” (CBS News). That “in the old Soviet Union, you never saw faces like these: the poor, the homeless. . . . [I]s this what democracy does? . . . [T]he price of freedom can be painfully high” (Barbara Walters). And so on, ad nauseam.
[…]
A single whackjob in Florida decides to burn the Quran, and everybody from the president to the pope to Gen. David Petraeus to Sarah Palin to the nearest blogger in Starbucks lines up to denounce the deed. And rightly so. Yet from all the furor you would scarcely know that for every bias crime against a Muslim in the U.S., there are 10 bias crimes against Jews. (E.g., in 2008 the FBI logged 7,783 hate crimes; 105 of them targeted Muslims, and 1,013 targeted Jews.)
Likewise in academia, one simply cannot be considered right-thinking if one does not deem Israel — America’s staunchest Mideast ally — an imperialist, racist, illegitimate state that terrorizes innocent Palestinians. Hence, inter much alia, the move at Harvard to divest from Israeli companies. As for the thousands of Qassam rockets lobbed at Israeli civilians by Hamas “activists,” or the fact that the Palestinian Authority’s “moderate” Fatah government recently named a square in Ramallah after an infamous terrorist — well, best not to speak of those things. Not if you want tenure, anyway.
So you can easily see what Israel would gain from a formal American declaration of war. Ideally, the declaration should come from a Republican Congress — preferably introduced by a Tea Party insurgent, at the behest of Glenn Beck — but that’s icing on the cake. The main thing is to put the Jewish state in the same position vis-à-vis the United States as Fidel Castro or the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
Overnight, violent pro-Israel demonstrations would break out in San Francisco and New York. The press would term them “mostly peaceful.” Counter-demonstrations would be described as angry mobs. Sean Penn and Michael Moore would collaborate on a movie glorifying the Israeli Defense Forces’ raid of the “Freedom Flotilla’s” Mavi Marmara. Campus centers of Middle Eastern studies would discover the virulent anti-Semitism of the official Arabic press, catalogued with depressing thoroughness at Memri.org. In English departments across the land, Zionist literary criticism would become the hot new thing. Posters of Che Guevara would come off college dorm walls, to be replaced by images of David Ben-Gurion.
Who knows? If the war dragged on for a few years, maybe Time might even come to its senses.
Maybe. Unfortunately, we’d still have to deal with a strong propaganda counter-offensive from educated liberal Jews who are so in touch with their “own” self-loathing that they’d do everything they could to make sure the world still saw them for the dirty, filthy would-be murderers they are — if only so they could then distance themselves from “themselves” to prove, yet again, that they are some of the good ones.
It’s a complicated dynamic, I realize. But it does explain why educated Jews vote in frightening proportion for the left, who quite clearly despises “them” (if not, they believe, them).
Check out this argument:
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2161
Peter Sellers knew more than he knew.
I can’t quite make out if this is funny because it’s true or sad because it’s true.
Both.
Ya’ll saw this right? The onion parody of Time. Must click for those who missed it.
I am sick of people saying everyone from the president to the pope are denouncing that FLorida guy “rightly so.” It isn’t rightly so. It is authoritarian, hysterical, and creepy. The international reaction (outside Muslims, who are always angry anyway) should be a massive “meh.” If it were a Torah, a prayer shawl, a cross, or a Bible, no one would bat an eye. Or an American, Israeli, or UK flag, a picture or effigy of a world leader, or a Dixie Chicks CD.
It is not “rightly so” that these people are condemning it. It is pussified fear and arrogant, superficial elitism.
I think it’s more that Team R isn’t a very inclusive party and Jews are a lot sensitive to uninclusiveness.
It is fine and good to point out double standards or say that the government shouldn’t be involved.
But… it’s also fine and good to point out that book burning is stupid. Take Mein Kampf, for instance. I’d like to see it in every library in the country. And right next to it I’d like to see a few volumes titled Hitler: Man Without a Penis? or Irrational Bigotry and National Socialism.
“Arghh” is the word I’m looking for, I think.
The fact that they sent the FBI to talk to wacky Florida guy was chilling. We have the right to be dumbasses as long as we aren’t conspiring against the government. I don’t support the guy in the slightest, mostly because I abhor book burnings on the face of it, and because it’s impolite to the Muslims (as opposed to the Moslems, who can suck it).
To the larger issue, the Jews have been the canary in the coal mine for thousands of years now. When anti-Jew rhetoric is on the upswing, one can expect oppression to increase and wars to break out. Be prepared.
bh and I are on the same page on this one I think.
it would be silly for people not to take the opportunity to point at the Florida swamptrash and say hey we’re not like that…
It’s sort of a gimme I think and it’s been a slow news week anyway.
There is something to be questioned in destruction for destruction’s sake of many sorts I think. I’ve seen people fly into a rage, for instance, and lash out at all manner of innocent objects willy-nilly, breaking everything they can get their hands on.
Bystanders not directly participating in the emotional outburst are puzzled: what did that lamp do to him (or her), what did that ceramic flower vase?
“Self loathing Jew” is apparently any Jew who has an opinion that you don’t agree with.
I mean, so much for conservative belief in “individualism” over “identity politics” or whatever. You’ll bash lefties for supposedly calling black conservatives “Uncle Toms” and then turn around and label Jews “Kapos” for the most mild criticism imaginable.
Why the scare quotes AJB? Scared are you?
I think it’s more that Team R isn’t a very inclusive party and Jews are a lot sensitive to uninclusiveness.
What complete nonsense. An assertion with nothing to back it up.
How are they not inclusive? I want current examples. And James Baker doesn’t count.
It would be nice for people to point at the rioting lunatics and say “Hey, we’re not like that. Y’all cut that shit out. You’re making us look bad.”
Mr. Callahan Team R is obsessed with gays and fetuses and Christ.
Jews are not obsessed with these things.
Yeah, you sort of lost it after “I think,” I think.
Oh, there are Jews who I disagree with all the time who aren’t self loathing. So that can’t be the criterion.
No, I’ll stick with their tell for being self-loathing the self-loathing.
I’m certain that many Jews vote their consciences; but when the numbers are what they are — just as it is with blacks voting so remarkably uniformly — then we have a statistical anomaly, and one worth exploring.
Personally, I know a number of Jews who vote left by rote. But the kind I’m talking about here are those who do so to appear worldly and to be accepted as intellectualized.
Nothing quite puts the polish on the unearned halo than a vigorous self-denunciation of your sins. Even if you got to embellish or make some up. The cheers from the crowd are also pretty sweet.
That’s what I’ve heard anyway.
Mostly, if cheers from the crowd are what’s desired, tell the crowd they’re great and wise.
You do cartoons almost as well as Barack.
Why not just call them all “bitter clingers” and be done with it? At least that designation has the ring of cultural familiarity about it.
AJB and happyfeet make assertions based on facts not in evidence. What’s new?
No, AJB. Its one who apologizes – and looks for new people to apologize to – for the perceived crime of being alive and being successful.
There are a lot of self-loathing people out there and from all backgrounds. It’s just that the world’s Jew-Hate is so strong that Jewish self-loathing really sticks out as not being just silly or strange, but suicidal.
Now go away, mental midget.
Give him a break, Mikey. Maybe he’s taught as many P. Roth novels as I have.
Incidentally, it was Portnoy’s dismissal of a kind of rote secularized Judaism that I argued made him an individual and not part of a pre-determined tribal affiliation used for identity constraints.
So I find AJB’s comments ironic and perfectly in keeping with the kind of criticism that likes to talk about, eg., Toni Morrison writing about and from the “black aesthetic,” as if the thing itself existed outside of individual blacks.
It is that move, by the way, that gives identity politics its power: the thing exists beyond individuals, and so you have to accept the thing lest you lose “your” identity.
You seem to have an Ike and Tina relationship with various groups, happyfeet. If the group doesn’t do things 100% your way, well then ‘The b^!ch had it coming’.
It’s quite off-putting, really.
The idea that Jews are gonna cozy up to the Sarah Palin party is a frankly ridiculous proposition, and it’s not cause they hate themselves I don’t think.
American politics has broken down into dynamics of tribal identification. It doesn’t behoove anybody to pretend that’s not where we are.
I’ll burn whatever I want to burn whenever I want to burn it and everyone else can just fuck off.
Except for Jews, I mean. Can’t burn them…anymore… or yet, depending on whom you ask.
Office workers are fair game though, regardless of religious affiliation and as long as the building they work in is really big. No complaining about burning those guys. I mean, what’s the big deal really. They aren’t books.
The Left thanks you for surrendering so quickly to their definitions and their claims of inevitable victory, happyfeet.
Besides, people who work for a living aren’t on TV. So they’re just asking for it.
The problem with your thesis is neatly shown with Rev. Wright, ‘feets.
Rev. Wright was that guy Meghan’s daddy was too cowardly to mention, yes?
Forget it, bh. He’s rolling.
And yet Sarah Palin wasn’t too cowardly to mention him. Nor was I.
Oops!
I can’t even get annoyed at this moron anymore.
Of course, but the story still got out there. People knew about him. Yet, open anti-semitism somehow didn’t fracture the voting bloc.
It’s not because liberal Jews feared being seen as anti-black or anti-intellectual, bh. It’s because they were just terrified of the prospect of manger scenes on the laws of their neighbors in West Chester.
When my house is being burglarized weekly by the local gang. When I go to the police I find that they are getting a piece of the action. I then start taking actions to defend my home, actions which I would not take in a normal situation.
Then I can be called obsessed with the defense of my shit, bitterly clinging to it even. But why aren’t the ones who wish to steal it called obsessed too?
The idea that Jews are gonna cozy up to the Sarah Palin party
OK, that explains it. I should have known.
Comment by I Callahan on 9/10 @ 12:06 pm #
The idea that Jews are gonna cozy up to the Sarah Palin party
OK, that explains it. I should have known.
Sometimes it actually is that obvious.
I feel no particular need to denounce the idiot pastor in Florida. I have already issued multiple blanket denunciations of Phelpsianism, to which I am given to understand he subscribes. Thus to issue a new specific denunciation of him would be redundant. And therefore silly.
Notice also that I don’t include an obligatory “Obama sucks” in every comment I post. Same principle.
I think what’s important is that Israel is an ally and we’re going to treat them like one because it’s important that America be seen as a steadfast and trustworthy ally. Israel is not a tool for to win Jewish votes at home.
And that’s pretty much that I think.
But if you want to talk about why Jews largely don’t identify with Team R I think the answer isn’t going to have much at all to do with Israel.
Anyone stupid enough to assume I support a Phelpsie in any way, is also stupid enough to vote for the same party Fred Phelps does.
Or with reality.
Right. That’s reserved for scare-mongering about how Sarah Palin is going to force a wafer down your Jew gullet.
She’s aesthetically jarring quite apart from any intentions she might have with the wafers I think Mr. Jeff.
She’s aesthetically jarring? Truthfully I find her to be kind of stupid – like you – but she’s only jarring to weak, easily-manipulated people who lack the sophistication or desire to see the game the left has played on her for what it is.
Right. She’s too churchy looking. And Jews are quite shallow creatures, as a whole.
The whole history of Jews being singled out for persecution and stereotyping, and the subsequent desire to assimilate at whatever costs?
Ignore all that. This is really all about the displeasing aesthetics of Wal-Mart.
poor Sarah
I love Wal-Mart by the way it’s where America shops for Value
People who lack the desire needn’t be easily-manipulated though, need they Abe? Seems to me they only have to be ordinary folks who’ve devoted a lifetime to voting mono-directionally, even if for reasons they deem sophisticated but which may turn out, under close analysis, to be only pseudo-sophisticated. We are all, more or less, creatures of habit.
– If I could characterize one thing that is evident in how the members of my tribe act when they “escape” the Israel clutch it’s that they seem to revert to a sort of “contained” aloof snobbery, which Ric touched on the other day when he talked about the German psyche.
– They seem to want to determinedly put the past behind them, to want to disassociate with all that history, even at times the whole holocaust tragedy, and apparently they feel most comfortable with the elitist posture of the Left, or the more moderate elitistism of the Democrats in general.
– That’s the only appeal I’ve been able to isolate in their preferences. I don’t think it’s at all political, but more classist based. I can’t prove it, it’s just something I’ve observed over many years in many setting’s, including my own extended family, from the ashes of Auschwitz to the Kibbutz’s of Tel Aviv, to current times.
– Make of it what you will.
– As far as the victory Mosque/Koran burning, we need to step up the pressure in any way we can to make the Muslims take the responsibility for their own problems. The hijacking of Islam is not our problem, it’s theirs to clean up. The Left does everything it can to “pin it to us”, as evidenced by the extensive examples you gave concerning the Liberal press.
– Islam is totally intolerant at every turn. We should not accept that any more. Now that Imam is making open threats that if he doesn’t get his way it could cause bloodshed and make greater problems for our security at home. Having done that I think he’s lost his option for that reason alone.
HAVANA – “Fidel Castro says his comments about Cuba’s communist economic model were misinterpreted by a visiting American journalist.
Appearing at the University of Havana on Friday, the 84-year-old ex-president says he meant “exactly the opposite” of the quote contained in a blog by Atlantic magazine reporter Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goldberg wrote Wednesday that he asked Castro if Cuba’s economic system was still worth exporting to other countries. He said that Castro replied: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”
– Obviously his statement was taken out of context by the god bothering clingers. The status of the average Cuban citizen, and their living standard, as they collect an astounding $20 dollars a month for luxury beyond anything the people of Capitalist countries can claim, comes directly from the Communist state workers paradise. Clearly a remarkably efficient system we could only wish we could match.
I still think they’re easily-manipulated in the sense that that, for instance, the universe of self-identified liberals is largely composed of people who have no idea who Saul Alinsky is, but they’ll nevertheless quickly embrace the mantra du jour from the left’s sausage factories. When your entire worldview is predicated on self-flattery and moral vanity, you’re liable to fall for anything which reinforces it. Some of this is human nature, and, thus, the right isn’t immune to some measure of internal manipulation as well, but our side is infinitely more self-correcting I think.
Sigmund Freud to Fidel Castro:
“Your slip is showing, and all that indignant huffing and puffing won’t change it.”
I’m didn’t convey what I meant so well I think Abe. I intended to expand your use of easily-manipulated, confined roughly to the realm of political ideology etc, to the wider sense of being easily-manipulated when it comes to making decisions for which one pays a more immediate price, such as buying a car say, or playing a three card monte as a cruder example.
Jewish schoolgirls are also easier than their Catholic counterparts, so there’s the need to keep abortion accessible to think about. Sarah Palin wants your slutty JAP’s to stay knocked up. Bitch.
– Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin……………..
(Trying to distract feets away from those brownies)
“Jewish schoolgirls are also easier than their Catholic counterparts…”
Sociologists are going to be in want of a request for proposal aiming at an experimental design to test this thesis empirically I’d betcha.
PALIN-TEBOW 2012!!!!!
“aesthetically jarring”
Considering the source, I weight accordingly.
Might as well be trollhammered. Never happened.
Um, what about before Sarah Palin? Were the Jewish voters voting for republicans, screw that, conservatives in droves and I missed it? And it still amazes me in regards to Palin, that feets just loved him some GW Bush, but hates, hates, hates on Palin every available moment. And as for governance, the only fucking thing that really matters when discussing people who govern, she is to the right of GW Bush. Something doesn’t reconcile.
Comment by ak4mc on 9/10 @ 12:11 pm #
Denouncing this guy gives him an importance totally undeserved and runs the risk that D-list celebrities will now routinely do something outrageous in order to acquire the honor badge of presidential disapproval.
My sources tell me that Levi Johnston is now considering his options.
– She’s against same sex “marriage”. That’s all it take to flip feets.
There’s no easier group of people to market to than urban liberals, sdferr. The difference, if I understand what you’re getting at, is that rather than being generically malleable, manipulating lefties requires that one operates within their narrow band of existing preferences.
– The Lefty talking heads and Journolists are starting the “he ain’t one of us” snowball rolling. The coming wall to wall repudiation will boil down to “he was a poser, how were we to know”.
I’m not sure I have a point Abe, outside the idea that people do not typically understand (for what I think are intelligible reasons, i.e., that the shortfall is largely in consequence of the complexity of the issues generally, that is for whatever political ideology may attempt to tackle them) what the actual costs of their political stances are, whereas they know damn well what the costs to their wallets and dignity are when they fall for stupid purchases or into the scams of obvious scammers. The true penalties for dumb political purchases are often very remote and the apparent rewards, very proximate.
George Bush is very America and he was an awesome governor and an awesomer president and I love him more than beans.
I think what you’re driving at sdferr, is the desire on the part of some to buy grace on the cheap…
…with other people’s money…
…the consequences of cheaply bought grace to be born by yet different people…
In part, quite so Ernst, though often enough to be borne by themselves in ways they never imagined. And too, it needn’t be measured in grace alone, since graft, political handouts and all manner of apparent goods or pleasures are offered and taken.
This thread has been a monument to why I keep ‘feets Trollhammered most of the time — all the time in future.
other things what are monuments are include a big honking statue of former president Mr. Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair, the world’s largest pecan, a goodly sized hammer, and this statue of >Mr. Saint Bernard somewhere in the Alps what had the puppy dog named after him
feets, your #70 only speaks to your tribalism. GW Bush governed to the left of Sarah Palin. You are allegedly the “staunchiest”. Again, it does not reconcile.
HF wants Republicans to be conservative, but not icky-conservative with all the judgey Christianism.
feets. You should seek perfection in other things, cause politics just isn’t going to ever go the way you want it to. Trust me in this.
Hence my never ending odyssey in search of the perfect pizza.
Sams Club, by the way, has a nice three meat pizza that turns out really well if you have a convection oven.probably the best store bought pizza out there.
Speaking of store bought Chicago and the White house are acting like Rahm E. is of course going to the new mayor of Chicago.Madsive,massive voter fraud.
pizza story
i bought a pizza one time at lunch for a co-worker and as he was eating it he said
he; damn, this is the best pizza i ever had1
me; yeah it’s alright
he; no, it’s the best i’ve ever had
me, incredulous; you mean to tell me, you’ve never had better pizza anywhere? at anytime?
he; nope, this is the best!
me, agitated; you don’t have a favorite pizza place in your town, or nearby town that has better pizza than this?
he; nope, this is the best i’ve ever had
me, confused; why..why is this the best?
he; because i didn’t buy it
he seen me coming a mile away and reeled me in