Quote of the Day

David Harsanyi:

Though Jews are by far the most targeted religious minority in the United States, we have yet to have a big national conversation about the problem. No one in major media dares even bring it up.

There are lots of “conversations” we’re supposed to have, meaning mob actions where leftist cadres will abuse isolated non-leftists who are dumb enough to take the bait. Media and top Democrats are all-in. Maybe it’s time to go Alinsky on the Left and hold struggle sessions about antisemitism? It’s a nice thought.

The New Pogrom

I think the reason that last Saturday’s massacre in Israel hits so close to the nerve of Americans like my daughter and I, is because we can look at the pictures and video of the victims and the aftermath and see ourselves. My daughter and I look at pictures of the blood-spattered crib and the baby carrier and see Wee Jamie. Hear him crying in pain and bewilderment. We see pictures of the pleasant little houses, the tree-planted neighborhoods targeted by the Hamas savages, and see our own neighborhood, as a bullet-riddled, blood-spattered smoking ruin. I look at pictures of the audience at the all-night music rave, and see my daughter among them, dancing with her friends and having fun, the next minute dragged away dead, or for treatment that used to be described as worse than death. My daughter can look at me or consider her memories of her bed-ridden invalid grandmother, and readily imagine either or both of us cut down mercilessly … and the murderers recording the whole bloody cruelty for posting to social media for the approval and cheers of their friends.

This is an organized and sponsored pogrom the cruelty and viciousness of which hasn’t been seen since medieval times, although the Nazis and Imperial Japanese certainly did their best in Europe and China within the memory of elderly people still alive today.

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Foreign and Domestic

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… (From the Oath of Enlistment)

It honestly kind of slipped my mind at first, that Monday morning was the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the United States. It’s been 22 years since that horrible day. I had other stuff – purely personal concerns on my mind.

For one, every single thing that I had to say about 9-11, I said, wrote and posted ages ago … and why re-run, one more time? There’s just nothing more to say, any more than there would be anything more to say about the shock of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 – one more tedious rerun of a recollection of where I was, what I was doing. It’s been a lifetime, in a way – and for high-school and college graduates this year, it’s been all their lifetimes.

The other thing – a more recent tragic anniversary which looms closer in time is the disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan, and the Abbey Gate suicide bombing there which killed more than a hundred civilians and thirteen American service personnel. Those deaths meant so little to President Biden that he kept looking at his watch during the ceremony at Andrews AFB when their coffins were unloaded. Those thirteen were the merely last American military lives frittered away in almost two decades of seemingly endless and pointless deployments to Afghanistan, culminated in a departure so botched that I’m still shocked that only a single commissioned officer resigned in protest. Sec Def Austin and General “Thoroughly Modern” Milley apparently feel no shame over bungling their responsibility to the Nation so horribly.

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9/11 and the Attrition Mill

A few years after 9/11, I visited an old industrial facility which had been restored to operating condition. One of the machines there was an attrition mill. It consists of two steel discs, rotating at high speed in opposite direction and crushing the substance to be milled between them.

I immediately saw this machine as a political metaphor. Western civilization is caught in a gigantic attrition mill, with one disc being the Islamofascist enemy and the other being certain tendencies within our own societies. The combination of these factors is much more dangerous than either by itself would be.

For example,already  in 2015 the student government at the University of Minnesota has rejected a resolution calling for annual commemorations of the 9/11 atrocity.  Why?  It was argued that such a resolution would make Muslim students feel “unsafe.” The “Students for Justice for Palestine” said that being reminded of 9/11 on its anniversary would lead to increased “Islamaphobia.”

It seems pretty clear that this sort of ridiculously deferential “sensitivity” does not make immigrants, or children and grandchildren of immigrants, more likely to assimilate.  Contrarily, it reinforces group identifies and intergroup hostilities.  And in doing so, it creates a social environment in which it is much more likely that actual terrorists–representing the upper disk of the Attrition Mill–will go unreported or even be actively supported in their ethnic/religious communities. And that, in turn, greatly increases the risks inherent in large-scale migration.

Hillary Clinton reacted to the Benghazi murders by blaming a video, going so far as to tell a grieving father that  he would have his revenge–not on the killers, oh, no, but rather we are going to have that filmmaker arrestedHere, we see the threat and actuality of Islamist violence being used as an excuse for interfering with the free-speech rights of Americans…and you can bet that if that precedent is successfully established, it will be applied with plenty of other justifications, too.

And, of course, Islamist murder threats–such as the fatwa against Salman Rushdie–have helped accustom people to keeping their mouths shut, for the sake of safety.

Related post in The American Mind:  The Woke-Islamist Axis Against Free Speech.

The Hill to Die On

I swear, I have never been able to understand how the loud and proud Capital-F official feminists made the ready availability of abortion the hill (for the pre-born fetal humans, mostly) to die on. Yes, I’ve pondered this in blogposts many a time. The 19th century suffragettes certainly were what we would now cast as pro-life, and so was a modern iteration, IIRC. (I used to get their newsletter.) Why that one single aspect, out of all the others which would have a bearing on the lives of females; extended maternal leave and benefits, quality childcare … practically any other concern other than that of abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy could be a rallying ground for those affecting an intense interest in matters of a particularly female orientation. This, when birth control in so many forms (and for male and female alike) is readily and economically available. This is not the 19th century anymore, not even the first half of the 20th,. Truly, it is a mystery why this particular cause and no other animates the radical fem-fringe. I can only surmise that many of the radical and early feminists had abortions, felt horrifically guilty about it all and wished to drag other women into that particular hell with them as a matter of solidarity.

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