Israel

A Stop On a Journey – The Lesson To Be Learned

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(A reprise post from the early days of the original mil-blog, Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, which was posted so long ago that the only place I had it preserved was in a collection of posts about matters historical.)

In the month of September, 1985, my daughter and I spent a couple of weeks in Italy, before I took the Autostrada north, over the Brenner Pass. I had decided to drive across Europe, when I got orders transferring me from Greece, to Spain. The Air Force generously provided passage on the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, and Blondie and I were off on a six-week long ramble.

In the space of a day, we went from flat northern Italian landscapes of cypress trees and square campanile towers to green terraced fields clinging to a steep mountainside, and chalets and the onion-domed church towers of Bavaria. Just north of the Austrian border, I got tired of driving. In a little town just off the highway somewhat short of Munich (now, since we were in Germany, it was an autobahn) I spotted a sign for a “Zimmer frei”, and for a night rented a guest bedroom from a nice elderly German woman whose guest bathroom provided hot water only in the sink tap. Complaint in rusty college German only roused mutual incomprehension. The bedroom seemed to be that of her long-grown and departed children, with twin beds and a wardrobe upon which someone had painted a view of the nearby village, as seen from the bedroom windows.

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Edward Said

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Many professors at Columbia University are dismayed that a campus culture with a long history of demonizing Israel as a barbaric imperialist state, and little to no history of criticizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in the past, now actively embraces such attacks against Israelis today. “We are horrified that anyone would celebrate these monstrous attacks or, as some members of the Columbia faculty have done in a recent letter, try to ‘recontextualize’ them as a ‘salvo,’ as the ‘exercise of a right to resist’ occupation, or as ‘military action.’”

This attitude toward Israel is an outgrowth of the modern leftist doctrine that the West is history’s greatest aggressor. The sum of the West’s interventions in non-Western lands is automatically regarded with cynicism, including the post-WWI nation-building in the former Ottoman provinces – and especially the formation of Israel. Anti-Zionist leftists blindly trust the Arab side of the story, that the Israelis and not the Arabs instigated the 1948 war. Many if not most of this group – certainly the loudest – reject the notion that Jews have rightful claims to any of the territory west of the Jordan River; it was Arab-ruled before the Turkish occupation (albeit under governments headquartered outside of the region), it should be Arab-ruled again.


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Consequences

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So, looking at the actions of pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses and in the streets of major blue-tinged cities over the last few weeks, we really don’t have to ask as Dorothy Thompson did, in mid-1941 who goes Nazi? College students suckled on the sour teat of DIE-addled academicians with delusions of intellectual grandeur, for a certainty, and recent immigrants who have brought their unfortunate old habits of hate with them. Still, when it comes to that first group, it has been amazing and disheartening to observe that sheltered twentysomethings driven to hair-trigger meltdown by the alleged presence of misogyny, the faintest hint of racism, and microaggressions so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye have enthusiastically aligned themselves with genocidal Jew haters from Gaza. Students and academics didn’t even pause for a split second, before cheering on indiscriminate random slaughter, torture, repeated rape so violent that it left pelvic bones broken, burning families alive in their own homes, looting and hostage-taking.

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Quote of the Day

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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.