U-Haul is raking it in these days renting moving vans and trailers to folks eager to flee such Dementocratic crapholes as San Francisco for rather more habitable places far from the Left Coast. Why then no Jew-Haul? Because the Jews ain't goin' nowhere, to allude to a song written by a Jew. Bill Maher makes the point, displaying along the way considerable historical savvy.
He also says something that supports the point I make in my Pollyanna post:
History is brutal, and humans are not good people. History's sad and full of wrongs but you can't make them unhappen because a paraglider isn't a time machine. People get moved, and yes, colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century. And they didn't do it by asking.
Maher is dead wrong on much, like the late Christopher Hitchens (d. 15 Dec 2011), but both are/were brilliant, articulate, courageous, and right about much.
I stand with them for free speech, open inquiry, the life of the mind and against the anti-civilizational forces of wokery and Islamism. And that is why I stand with the Jews.
Maher underestimates the religious bigotry and non-stop Jew hatred brainwashing among Palestinian Arabs and in many parts of the Islamic world starting with Iran. He also underestimates US own clueless young generation. They don't read Maher or history, don't care about arguments and facts. They believe Jews everywhere are colonizing oppressors "because Critical Theory" or "because TikTok" and they are helped by pro-Islamistic money to attend pro-Hamas rallies and attack the Jews in the West.
https://nypost.com/2023/12/16/news/majority-of-americans-18-24-think-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas/
This alarming trend won't peacefully.
Posted by: Dmitri | Monday, December 18, 2023 at 07:12 AM
An article over at American Thinker addresses this: "Who is teaching Jew-hate to the young?"
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/who_is_teaching_jewhate_to_the_young.html
The comment string is worth reading, and contains this comment, which is not the whole story, but it is insightful:
"No one is teaching "Jew Hate" to the young. Everyone is teaching them "White Hate". And since Jews are white (and rather successful Whites), Jew Hate is a very predictable and inevitable result."
I agree with Dmitri, this won't end peacefully. We are probably heading into WW III, and this is the exact worst time to have an evil, demon-possessed president.
Posted by: Joe Odegaard | Monday, December 18, 2023 at 08:03 AM
Check out Lev Haolam. Every month they help small businesses in Israel succeed by selling a box of surprises shipped to their subscribers. Their standing orders were a god-send to some of their producers after October 7th when so many went into the active service of the IDF.
Ingvar
Posted by: Ingvar | Monday, December 18, 2023 at 09:35 AM
Totally off-topic in this thread, but on topic of our civilization decline broadly speaking. When I see news like this one today -- Pope Francis authorizes blessings for same-sex couples -- my already dark pessimism about where the West is heading turns pitch black.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/18/europe/pope-francis-same-sex-couples-blessing-intl/index.html
I can only guess what traditional Catholics think and feel about this.
Posted by: Dmitri | Monday, December 18, 2023 at 11:04 AM
Dmitri asks what a traditional Catholic thinks?
I am a cradle Catholic.
When I say the Credo, I say "I believe in One, HOLY, Catholic and Apostolic Church."
Those words exclude the current RCC.
I feel like I am on my own, and that the strong support that should be mine from the church, support which would make very clear to others the contours and boundaries of the morality that I believe in, and try to practice, and which keeps the world from total evil chaos — that support IS NOT THERE.
There is no help. We are abandoned. The church must, and will, answer before God for this betrayal.
Posted by: Joe Odegaard | Monday, December 18, 2023 at 12:27 PM
There seem to be two stories here: one about what Bill Maher says about Israel and the fact that Bill Maher is saying it.
What Maher’s saying is that Israel’s not going any where. It’s an historical reality and the Palestinians, and Islam more generally, should come to terms with it.
But Maher’s a liberal whose views were shaped in and by the generation of the New Left. From that perspective, what he says about Israel fits into a world view that is understandable to most of Maher’s viewers. It is not understandable among the Woke Left, which is stridently anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and pro-any-oppressed-group.
In the Nate Silver piece below, Silver wrote about the widening gap and growing disaffection between American liberals and the Woke Left. Maher’s at ground zero in that battle.
Posted by: James Soriano | Tuesday, December 19, 2023 at 04:24 AM
James,
Good comment. One question is this: If a group is party to its own 'oppression,' then to what extent is it truly oppressed and worthy of the sympathy of others? Bombs are raining down on the Gaza Strip. But whose fault is that? It is the fault of Hamas and their supporters who, my sources tell me, are the majority of Palestinian Arabs.
Compare blacks in the USA. They screw up mightily as a group. They are on the bottom because of their own illegal and imprudent behavior. (If every black was like Larry Elder or Candace Owens, my statement would be false; but those two and plenty of others I could mention are outliers.) So when the cops enforce the law, leftist knuckleheads scream 'racism!' when the truth is that blacks bring about their own 'oppression.' There are of course cases of police brutality and I condemn them; but George Floyd brought about his own death, and there are plenty of other examples like his.
Posted by: BV | Tuesday, December 19, 2023 at 04:55 AM
An argument can certainly be made that the Palestinians are party to their own oppression and failures. The Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” an Israeli foreign minister once said. I don't think Hamas is interested in seizing opportunities. It has opted for the sword.
Right now the “oppressed-oppressor” narrative is in the driver’s seat. It’s the result of years of disastrously successful “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” agitation by anti-Israeli groups on college campuses an elsewhere. They have made great headway in delegitimizing Israel and in dehumanizing Jews. It has happened in our lifetimes.
Posted by: James Soriano | Tuesday, December 19, 2023 at 05:40 AM