Censorship and University Life under threat

Censorship worries many of us but in a world of prejudice it would be easy to simply ban uncomfortable speech.  In a recent report it was revealed that there has been a 61% rise in antisemitism in the British capital city and that a majority of French Jews are now considering emigrating.  France is no longer a safe place to live if you are Jewish. According to that same report over 40 percent of EU citizens hold antisemitic views.  In the United States, 75% of Jewish students have experienced antisemitism in their college.

It would be so easy to flee from faith.  It is not nearly as easy to fight prejudice and the antisemites who in the interest of free speech celebrate their passionate engagement by renouncing their opponent’s freedoms.  Jewish Uncle Toms are particularly enthusiastic about proscribing their coreligionists constitutional rights.  Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association is being curtailed across the Western World so that fascism may impose its views on us all.

The Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and lies. Communist China had to adopt a market economy to forestall collapse and even then in order to catch up economically with the West it has had to impose hard labor on large numbers of its own people.  North Korea is an abomination that can only survive through infusions of Chinese cash and the liberal use of concentration camps to keep its terrorized citizenry from rebelling against its military tyranny.  Venezuela, once viewed as the model for South American leadership and enlightened rule could only survive under its radical left wing charismatic leadership through its suppression of the opposition.  Massive food bribes at election time were with-held from anyone suspected of wanting to vote the wrong way.  So the Progressive left (and the term is interchangeable with ‘radical’) understands that it has to control the narrative and suppress any opposition in order to have a realistic chance of maintaining power.

The radical left is bereft of honesty because its own survival always takes precedence over the truth. In its desperation for self-validation it resembles a religion, and like any faith in the early stages of its’ mythological creation it is bought at the expense of a blood sacrifice. In this new religion, the radical left continues to demand and is incapable of letting go of that blood sacrifice.  Its antisemitic origins have blinded it to its bigotry. The original sin of the ‘progressive’ left’s intellectual, antisemitic birth has been espoused by far too many guardians of its ideological purity. It is an easy narrative, familiar to the general population and therefore, an easy key to opening the minds of its more receptive potential converts. 

Its political theology makes its easier to understand just how little distance separates Islamic State and other fundamentalist fascist organizations from the so called progressive left.  Those who gravitate towards these racist demagogues are only comfortable with a non-nuanced approach to life. They need simplicity as validation of their own identity.  As a consequence of this approach they are able to renounce human rights to any, save a selective few, as a vehicle for defining who is a friend and who, an enemy.  In this way they can ignore the stench of their cohort’s often genocidal ideology. 

I read an interesting article in Ynet news about Hillel.  This is primarily, an American and Jewish university club.   Its aim is to “engage Jewish students in religious, cultural, artistic, and community-service activities” (Wikipedia). As the survey referred to in the first paragraph proves, clearly antisemitism on campus exists.  Hillel, crucially, exists to provide a safe-haven and a familiar home for people who need it.  But there is a new fascist conspiracy to undermine and ultimately, to obliterate free speech and it is called “Open Hillel.”

Open Hillel is an initiative that claims to allow for more open criticism of Israel and Zionism.  In reality it is one more fascist instrument of control through which any criticism of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist organizations is first rebuked and then by denying Jews the rights that their opponents demand, prohibited.  By undermining Jewish rights and creating a hostile environment for Jewish association the Muslim and anti-Semitic Left are trying to muzzle Jews on campus.  By working to censor the visual Jewish presence on campus, fascism defines truth and controls narrative.  

As Ben-Dror Yemini said in the following article:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4756577,00.html

“On many campuses in the US, there are many groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Islamic associations, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and many others. They have a lot of power. They act, sometimes with violence, against Israelis coming onto campuses. Sometimes it's just because they're Israeli, regardless of their opinions. This phenomenon is called a boycott. The members of these groups, most of whom support the BDS Movement, are the ones behind a campaign to silence other opinions. So an interesting thing is happening here - in order to strengthen "openness" and "inclusion," we seek to open the door to those who use violence against openness.

Facing all of these groups, on some of the campuses, there is one group - only one - Hillel, which is trying to give Jewish students one space - just one - that would be clean of anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli propaganda. The three are not always the same thing. In recent years, differences between them have eroded. And now, there are those who seek to take away even this small space, so the exact same anti-Israeli opinions are voiced again - those already voiced over and over again everywhere else.”

Yemini also points out that activists and lecturers refuse to sanction opposition opinions, they silence any pro-Jewish or pro-Israel voices that even try to attend their events and they intimidate anyone who attempts to stand up to them.

For ‘boycott’ we should understand that this means physical censorship, intimidation and denial of a (pro-Jewish) right to free speech and association.  Visualize wife-beaters and proponents of choice demanding as their familial, cultural or democratic right, the right to abuse women; as well as unfettered access to the Women’s refuge.  Picture the pedophile who asserts the right to be given a role in looking after children.  Imagine radical right wingers seeking control of Democrat facilities at election time (USA) or permanent control of Labor Party and Trade Union’s communications media (UK).  No amount of dissimulation can conceal the rhetoric and sophistry that is meant to shut down debate in a secure environment.  That right to a secure environment is the purpose our universities serve.  It is under threat if you are the wrong kind of Jew.

These organizations represent the modern face of fascism.  They are against free speech; they are completely closed to any opinion that is at variance with their own opinion.  Intimidation and violence are what they use if the legal stuff fails.  They are truly, worthy successors to 1930’s, 1940’s (and 1950’s) bigotry and if they are not defeated outright they will return us to a similar age of darkness and despair.

Censorship and the Control of Ideas in Society

We live in a world that is divided as never before by competition for the supremacy of ideas, such as Islamism, Islam, Democracy and freedom of speech, socialism and capitalism, fundamentalism and individualism.

Many people in modern society are alienated from that world of ideas and even more of them, are alienated from politics.  Increasingly, the more educated we become, the more we become alienated from religion in favor of consumerism and its comforting convenience.  To be engaged with something takes effort.  In a world of ideas that are constantly clashing it is far easier to either ignore or suppress whatever creates unease.

At the turn of the Common Era, the competition for whichever god or group of deities we chose to worship, was fierce. Aspects of worship were the fashionably contested marketplace of ideas that engaged slaves and aristocrats, workers and bureaucrat alike.  But then life was simple, ideas uncomplicated and existence precarious so a bit of extra help from the divine was at the very least, a psychological tonic!

As a species we began as pure instinct – how else could we have survived in an unremittingly hostile environment where weather, the search for food and shelter, predators and disease hunted us remorselessly?  And then we discovered the usefulness of relationships.  We discovered the utility in trusting associates, first families and then tribes. We discovered that mutual interest was a powerful force for survival. Trust grew out of physical and psychological familiarity – even if we did not, as yet, understand this. As we moved away from being instinctual human beings we needed the community to back us up, to protect us from other competitor communities. As communities became settlements then tribes, city states, regions then nations, laws became a means by which we regulated and therefore controlled behavior.

It has taken us thousands of years to reach the point where the individual is once more at the center of society.  Primitive man (woman) lived at the caprice of the elements.  The modern individual no longer needs to labor to survive and he or she may choose to live a life with a minimum of human interaction. That also means that our responsibility towards each other is no longer a necessity for our mutual survival and the danger is that our species’ responsibility for each other is being reversed.  We are at a different stage of growth (or decay) - depending on how we interpret society and whether we look forward or backwards for our inspiration.

Technology has enabled us to have partial control over disease and our physical environment. Our laws force us to exercise restraint and Western society encourages its’ citizens to be tolerant of that with which it is unfamiliar, and uncomfortable. And yet, we still have this competition for ideas which brings us into conflict across the globe with people who owe no allegiance to those ideals that have made us so theoretically tolerant.  Those people are using our tolerance against us.

Individualists demand self-expression as the highest ideal within society but it is conditional. What conditions that self-expression is an absence of censorship.  That means, when we disagree on a fundamental level with our neighbor we must ignore those differences in the name of tolerance. The problem is that a community can be equally committed to an ideal that is the antithesis of the freedom that gives us our right to individuality.  Unless we are willing to fight for our own rights of self-expression we will be censored and our articles of freedom will be used against us to undermine those very freedoms we so passionately defend.

In the 1920’s and throughout the 1930’s the Nazis used our ideals of freedom to undermine and overthrow democracy.  They used censorship to shut down any valid criticism and they used discrimination to appeal to the ignorant middle classes whose ballot they needed to be legally voted into power. The individual was always the greatest threat to the Party’s power because they were less likely to accept whatever they were told as absolute truth, and they could infect others with their criticisms and their doubts. 

Al Qaeda and Islamic State (Daesh) have their model for their ideal community and it negates what enabled our society to achieve our individual-centric society with its laissez-faire morality, its hedonism and its idolization of consumerism.

This is where the current cult of the individual fails every one of us.

And a simple example exists of this breathtaking naivety with which we have embraced our enemies while they openly treat us with contempt.  The Huffington Post launched an Arabic language edition in July 2015 called Huffington Post Arabi.  It is in competition with al Jazeera which is owned by Qatar and therefore reflects its anti-Western, pro-Islamist agenda. Because it is in competition with a successful Arab model which is reactionary, biased and sectarian, in order to compete it is satisfied to mimic it in its illiberal prejudices.  In an article I read as recently as January 25, 2016 there were references to World War 3, the term used to describe the conflict between Islam and the rest of mankind.

So let us be clear on what is being offered to the Arab world. We have a popular, commercially successful, Western, liberal, internet newspaper applying Western values as justification for funding the production of a prejudiced Arab-Muslim tabloid that in turn provides a veil of respectability to Arab prejudice. It censors debate and encourages the idea that ethnic conflict is legitimate; it is contemptuous of free speech and despises the freedoms that encapsulate our Western Society.

Arianne Huffington appears to be motivated by contempt and self-loathing. Perhaps our captains of industry have always been self-serving and contemptuous of the society that nourished them. It is society’s embrace of individualism that has enabled us to make stunning advances in every field of science and technology while simultaneously it is helping our enemies to undermine our civilization.

A second example is that of the recent case of an American university professor, Joy Karega, who spreads her antisemitic ideology and conspiracy theories on American campuses.  An academic institution permits Karega to spread her malignant views without consideration of any action being taken to contain the influence of this repulsive individual. If this person represents our free speech legacy then colleges must permit all intellectual rabble rousers a campus forum.  If hate is a permitted commodity then there should be no bars to who may preach it.

To extrapolate what such a toxic equilibrium promotes is not difficult: at best, assassination, at worst, civil war.  If society understands this fundamental threat to its survival then how can it justify the continued employment of such a venomous creature?

We have been here at many other times in history.  The most recent outbreak of this intellectual contagion was during the first half of the twentieth century when fascism was violently expressed by both left and right.  Their most enthusiastic proponents were ultimately responsible for the murders of tens of millions of human beings.  But it was only seriously acknowledged that the extreme right wing committed crimes against humanity.  It was our greatest error because it inoculated Left wing fascists against any criticism of their beliefs and tactics for as long as they did not wear an armband adorned with a swastika.

In our world of ideas, fascisms antisemitic cheer-leaders are ascendant.  Meanwhile, we show far more concern for their right to abuse us than we do, our right, to live without the concomitant negative consequences their abuse entails.

Censorship: BDS and Fascisms’ Flag Waivers

The problem with any discussion of censorship is that it is not only what offends or is harmful to society that defines the need but also political will, social currency and degree of cultural acceptability.  The Western world has made it even more difficult for itself by having no unambiguous vision of its own identity and therefore it possesses no clear guide to illuminate the preferred direction that that discussion should take. Additionally, censorship criteria changes with each generation; they can change each decade thus redefining the truths that make up our comfortable sense of self (based on our understanding of morality).  But there is another kind of censorship and the easiest way to describe it is by saying that it is the opposite of freedom of speech. We choose to censor that which is uncomfortable for us.

Fascism is quite simply the need for others to censor anything with which they disagree.

And following on from this characterization of fascism what makes for propaganda is repetition, reinforcement and denial.  Without propaganda the fascist will have difficulty gaining a significant audience and without a significant audience it is unlikely to gain mainstream acceptability.  A picture, a word in a certain setting, or an oft repeated phrase creates familiarity and familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.  To quote Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) “anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.”   Our entire understanding of ourselves and our surroundings is based on predictability and that predictability is based on associations. Inevitably, it is what drives our rejection of change.  That rejection of change creates the self-censorship society usually willingly imposes on itself.  The outlier creates a dissonant reality that is subjectively uncomfortable by rejecting the norm (Kahneman’s “associative coherence”).  Put another way, it is the outlier's rejection of the norm that creates the intellectual and emotional discord (disharmony) that is at the heart of conflict.

BDS (the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement) is the perfect example of a classic fascist conspiracy that in order to succeed must censor the truth, if only because its version of truth is unable to compete with the alternate reality advocated by its enemy.  Therefore, it must control the narrative and deny its opponents the possibility of intellectual exchange or debate.  Fascism must censor the truth to flourish.  Not all change is positive nor is it necessarily desirable, but it is this interplay between people and society that defines the limits of acceptability in everything we do and in everything we are permitted to believe.  It is what creates both growth and decay.

Incidents of hate speech and violent confrontation dismissed with contempt as being no more than examples of academic freedom are proof of the incremental take over of Western universities by the advocates of fascism.

The problem is that contemporary ethical thinking is framed in terms of carefully chosen absolutes.  In today’s inquisitorial society, consensus is defined by the exclusion of anyone who does not think exactly as set out by fashion.  How different does this make us, in reality, from yesteryear's bigots?

The clamor to ban that with which we disagree is selective and it is within this selectivity that we isolate the threats to a ‘consensus’ (whatever that may mean) that is no more than a preferential narrative. When we selectively proscribe debate the main question that we should be asking is: who decides? Is it a movement like BDS or a committee? Where we have government mandated committees defining the limits on anything, at least in theory, those they appoint represent society and therefore what they limit represents what society is happy for them to limit.  In practice it is the most passionate and therefore usually, not the most ethical of advocates that place themselves in the position of being able to exercise control over decisions that impact on us all.  And so it is with BDS and its easy delegitimization of anything that threatens its assault on Israel, on Zionism and on Jewish equality.

The issue becomes more critical when we realize that it is not possible to prevent a movement from escalating its demands once it begins to achieve any of its objectives because success creates an escalation of momentum which in turn facilitates violence as an enabler of that success.

People who appoint themselves arbiters of morality can change society but not necessarily in a good way.  Most people cannot draw a line under their activities once a goal has been reached.  It is probable that the only movement in history that was able to stop once it achieved its objectives were the suffragettes. But then they reluctantly responded to state sponsored intimidation and their few acts of terrorism were against property, not people.  The militancy of the Suffragette movement ceased with the start of World War 1.

Every person must wrestle with their own personal limits on what they view as permissible.  Society is defined by its limits. It is when individuals or a group within a society refuse to accept the rules by which society is governed that violence or terrorism becomes just another tactic in their war.   It does not explain why some people agitate for change through violence but clearly, some personalities are more open to violent expression than others and some ideologies and faiths are similarly disposed towards violence as a means of achieving an end.

In Islamic societies there are numerous restrictions demarcated by religion, by tribal tradition and by mythology.  Violence is not usually one of them.  Therefore, within a Western legal environment its use as a means of furthering an Islamic agenda is easily justified through its cultural familiarity.

War, the execution of criminals, boxing and hunting are our last legally mandated acts of violence in Western Civilization. However, the targeting of Jews and Zionism (Israel) is an example of the application of subversion and violence as a means of assault on Western values and Western society.

Social media is populist and therefore not necessarily rational. Populism is defined by its successfully feeding off of people’s fears and prejudices. As such it is a form of low value entertainment, the risque post-cards of the electronic age.  Social media’s greatest crime is that it is largely unaccountable for its sins.

If something poses a threat to our way of life how do we indulge it without providing it with privileges available to no-one else? Is there a difference between violent and non-violent extremism or is one simply a way station on the road to the other?  How to make the unacceptable, irrelevant?

Ideas that we oppose must be defeated in order to relegate them to history’s footnotes.   Peddlers of hate, conspiracy theorists and bigots of all stripes whether on the Internet, on campus or in other public arenas cannot be banned but they can be shamed, isolated and denied an easy public platform from which to preach and spread their poison.  If ideas are offensive, it is the society that defines them as such and the interplay between groups sharing the same interests and those that do not, defines whether we accept or ignore their ideas.  Banning (censorship) simply drives an idea underground and marginalizes its proponents who then are more likely to be radicalized and left feeling that the only way forward is through violence. But make them appear ridiculous and maybe, you force them to confront their ideology, or minimize their influence.

The question is not how to recognize the dividing line between creating offense and inciting violence but how do we indulge that which is offensive without it becoming a characteristic of our society which facilitates bullying as an acceptable tactic to achieve any ends?

Israeli Oligarchs and Zionism’s Failure of Vision

As part of our 25th wedding anniversary celebration we looked at Budapest, Venice and Barcelona.  We settled on Tel Aviv.  To be fair, twelve months before that we had spent two days in Tel Aviv and it wasn’t nearly long enough. Twenty-seven years earlier I had dragged my then girl-friend (now wife) all over Tel Aviv.  Then, it was dirty and dusty but parts were gentrified. Bauhaus hadn’t yet gained the international recognition that it enjoys today.

This time we spent a couple of days walking from Geula Street which runs perpendicular from the seaside to Rothschild Boulevard and beyond.  Rothschild and Chen are two of the streets whose middle has a walkway the entire length, planted with the most gorgeous trees.  Many of those trees have roots wrapped around their trunks providing an organic sculptural majesty - they are a variety of Ficus or rubber tree.   One of the smart things the cities founders did was to create those tree lined boulevards which helps to circulate air and provide shade.

The downside to Tel Aviv is its lack of ambition for itself and its’ shabby chic. It may look good on a teenager but not on a building. It  spells out what is wrong with a city that has only recently celebrated its centenary; more about that later.

For the first few decades of renewed independence the refugee camps (Ma’abarot) housing Jewish refugees from throughout the Arab world were a necessary eye-sore that challenged successive governments to clear them.  Necessities were basics, not luxuries.  The possession of a small foreign currency account in the USA while Yitzhak Rabin was ambassador there (which his wife failed to close after the ambassador returned to Israel) brought about both the resignation of the serving prime minister, that same Yitzhak Rabin, and the fall of his government.

Four decades ago a representative of the state of Israel would recommend that a new immigrant bring with them a decent kettle when they immigrated!  This occurred at around the same time that an investigative journalist wrote an expose demonstrating how 70 families owned most of the wealth of the state.  The book had no impact on the uneven distribution of wealth.

Today, one statistic states that 5% of Israeli families (a few more than the 70 that once controlled everything) have 80% of the nation’s wealth. The GINI co-efficient which measures the distance between rich and poor, places Israel alongside the USA as highest in the developed world in the disparity between rich and poor.  The price of basic foodstuffs is ridiculously expensive. It isn’t just imports that cost too much.  Taxes are only part of the issue.  It is greed, centralized wealth and import policies that protect the oligarchs.  A book in the English language at Steimatsky’s (Israel’s largest bookstore chain) costs almost three and a half times the price it would cost in the West.  Packaged foods are often double what the same or a similar product would cost in a European country.

 

Outside the country, Israelis are competitive and have great products; internally it is as if a mafia owns everything and has no loyalty to anyone, at least not within Israel.   From a country of farmers and pioneers to a modern nation fed up with austerity, but led by politicians that have no national agenda, no unifying national vision, it makes sense that every man  and woman  is for themselves, and only themselves.

That explains the greed but not the lack of civic community.  An example is Tel Aviv which is called “the White City,” a designation based on its 4,000 Bauhaus/ International Style buildings, many of which are in need of serious renovation.   (It used to also be called the Big Orange as a nod to the Big Apple).  Enormous infrastructure projects are being proposed (such as the TA Light rail project and redevelopment of former military lands for large-scale commercial and residential construction.)  But almost everything in Tel Aviv appears tired and even decrepit.   The cosmetic face of Tel Aviv is usually ignored.  Newly constructed hotels and beach-side apartments are soon in need of maintenance and even the 5 star hotels along the sea-side appear externally dilapidated.  1970’s entertainment structures are ugly and clearly no longer maintained.  Some-one is making lots of money but it is not from any attempt at creating civic pride. 

Operation Protective Edge and other previous military conflicts affected Jerusalem – generating fear and damaging tourism.  But TA has rarely been touched (excepting during the First Iraq War when Iraq fired 39 missiles at it).  An enormous quantity of cash (mostly foreign donations) has contributed to the ongoing beautification of Jerusalem and to its maintenance. But TA is overwhelmingly ignored.  So the question is, why do its citizens ignore aesthetics? To show its contempt for modern town planning, the Midrachov, the seaside walkway that stretches the length of Tel Aviv from the   fashionable area of shops in the North to Jaffa in the south was still under reconstruction in the summer time during the peak period of the tourist season.

Maybe the main problem is that that 5% who own most of the wealth are funding both the political left and the political right.  So there are few (if any) national politicians with significant influence who are willing to take on any national issues that impact their own narrow interests.   A simple example occurred with the 2015 budget.  Yair Lapid planned three modest agricultural reforms for sheep’s milk, egg quotas and fish. These plans would have lowered prices, but Agriculture Minister Yair Shamir blocked them.  He did so because his party has activists from farming communities and agri-production organizations who we must assume, opposed the reforms. (Ha’aretz January 2nd, 2015) The Israeli market is not competitive.  It is controlled by vertical monopolies that prevent competition in local and national markets.  Israel is too small not to be regulated but control can also be abusive.  The danger in any relationship is that those that seek control rarely know when to stop and the difference between control and dictatorship is in the degree by which control is exercised.

Japan had a similar problem in the period that ended with General MacArthur’s rule.  The Zaibatsu were enormous conglomerates with control over every aspect of Japanese life. Breaking up the Zaibatsu helped to facilitate Japanese competition with the West.  For almost five decades the Japanese economy not only flourished but was viewed as the model of a centralized economy that other states could emulate, if they wanted to develop a healthy economy.

The need for action against oligarchies and monopolistic practices is obvious. Israel needs effective legislation targeting the control that the super-rich have over the Israeli economy. But the only way that will happen is if collusion is permitted by those same people and organizations in the furtherance of international competition because Israel is too small a market to sustain the ambitious entrepreneur.

There needs to be tax incentives to increase domestic productivity without jobs being lost.  Competition has meant the transfer of jobs overseas.  There has to be tax incentives to ensure jobs remain in Israel. Unemployment damages the social fabric.

People do not invest in property maintenance or in the creation of legacy structures if they are not committed to the local community.  A beautiful building, donations to art galleries and parks endowed in their names and the names of their loved ones are demonstrative of public statements of permanence.

Instead, in Israel we have foreign donors who endow universities, museums and public spaces while super-rich Israelis offer 50 shekels to their fellow Israelis and then demand a rename of the building in their name.  Worse, when their inflated egos are insufficiently stroked they emigrate and take their money and their physical assets with them.

Civic pride and economic maturity entails investment in aesthetic as well as commercial infrastructure. It includes long term Israel focused business and social investment; not selling off every technological innovation that emerges from Israel’s creative genius and not ignoring the cultural needs of the people.

The first stage of Zionism, building the nation so that it would be sustainable, is completed.  The second stage, a renewed Zionism that builds and beautifies the land has not yet begun but it is urgently required.  We do not discuss Zionism because we are intellectually and morally fatigued through the constant attacks of bigots who have no interest in understanding its noble birth or its ongoing mission but who have every interest in demonizing Zionism and thereby rewriting the history books; thus preventing any meaningful understanding of it.   A vigorous debate around a renewed Zionist vision will not only raise the quality of debate but also provide critical focus for Israel’s notoriously partisan political parties and perhaps even a means for reuniting some of them.

A Call for Moderation and Reflection

“The highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”  (Ludwig Feuerbach)

In Cologne, Germany on New Years Eve, some 1,000 men of ‘Arab - North African’ appearance attacked female revelers and to date well over 500 criminal complaints concerning sexual assault and in some cases, rape, have been reported.  Similar incidences may not have been as quantitatively ‘significant’ elsewhere but are known to have occurred throughout Europe.  We are losing the battle for our human rights because the assumption of universally applied responsibilities does not exist and therefore the application of equal rights is similarly trivialized.

It is only correct that we constantly debate the balance between the Big Brother state and civil rights but protection of the individual as a cultural principle has not kept up with human rights.  Thanks to the Internet, pornography, crime and terror can now be efficiently manufactured by anyone. In an age of narcissistic fulfillment personal choice and our duty to protect are no longer interdependent.  I am more concerned with peoples’ freedom to conceal and thus facilitate their personal – group vendettas, misdemeanors and indiscretions through the electronic media than I am worried about the potential for government to abuse our personal electronic information.  If you have something to be ashamed of don’t put it on record.   The communications age has been a blessing to the narcissist whether they identify as mass killers or terrorists.  Society is acclimatizing to a decremental loss in our security.  But people who are isolated from electronic communication are less likely to succeed in hurting others.  On the other side of the information paradigm the proper controls must be maintained to secure the protection of personal, benign information.

The social media have become a wickedly efficient resource for abusing and inciting violence across the globe in millions of postings and comments that are created every day.   It is as effortless to lie as it is to tell the truth and because reality and fiction are easily manipulated the electronic media are no longer, if they were ever, a vehicle for educating us towards achieving a just society.

Basic human rights can never be geographically variable, historically justified or culturally insignificant; not in the name of multiculturalism nor in the name of political correctness. According to Wikipedia, the latest human rights fad (called ‘Intersectionality’) involves “the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination or discrimination”.   If words such as ‘integrity’ and ‘ethics’ are to have any meaning at all they have to be applied in equal measure. In an open ethical system intersectionality is therefore nonsense because each part of our identity is separate and as such, it cannot be interpreted hierarchically nor can it become conditioned on someone else’s interpretation of how we should interact with the different layers of our identity.  When human rights become politicized they are no more than a battle of wills for a newer form of discrimination, domination and oppression.  Communication becomes essentially unilateral and fetishistic.

China is the global sweatshop for the Western worlds’ cheap consumer products (as well as the source of most of our counterfeit products).  Instead of crying crocodile tears for the poor foreign worker the Western World could solve its unemployment problems but it would cost each of us thousands of pounds, dollars or Euros extra, every year, by returning more expensive production to western nations from China (and elsewhere).  It would be the ethical and equitable thing to do so.  We keep quiet about Chinese human rights. We negotiate them away for our material comfort.

We should be questioning the Arab world about its treatment of women and children, minorities; its oppression of its workers; its colonial history and its slave-owning present.  We should boycott all goods made in Pakistan and not just for its sweatshops but also for its inter-generational support for terrorism.  Saudi Arabia should be an international pariah. It has provided some 100,000 million dollars in aid to Islamist institutions over the last quarter of a century and yet without its oil we would need to find a cleaner, more efficient means of meeting our energy requirements. But we keep quiet about Arab human rights violations. Left and Right negotiate away their protection for our material comfort.

Warm feelings of self-righteous anger have to be universal to be principled unless they are the product of selectively chosen, ethically fascist targeting.

We are living in an age of fear and irrationality where those who create that fear hold sway over us – see how easy it is to do nothing about North Korea even as it enslaves its own citizens and threatens nuclear annihilation against its American rival.

According to the United Nations, between March 2011 and August 2015 250,000 people were killed in the Syrian Civil War.  Other estimates place the number of dead men, women and children at 350,000.   How many deaths were there in the Arab-Israeli conflict between 1920 and 2015? Some 115,000 people died.  In 2015 Switzerland called a meeting of the Geneva Convention for only the third time in its history.  The UK, France, Germany and another 123 signatory states to the Fourth Geneva Convention assembled in order to condemn Israel.  The Fourth Geneva Convention concerns itself with the protection of civilian persons in time of war.  Israel stood alone in the dock on all three occasions.  Make sense? Of course it doesn’t.  Sudan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Brazil are just four of the dozens of conflict nations that have produced acts of genocide since the end of World War 2. Syria is almost a side-show to what has become a tragic litany of intentionally ignored blood letting. So if Israel is not there to be periodically pilloried the UN stands for nothing other than its own corpulent, self-congratulatory but essentially meaningless existence. Under those conditions, the United Nations Organisation exists only to serve its delegates with an endless merry go-round of pork barrel political extravaganzas.  The UN is nothing save political theatre as tragic farce.  UN activities cost a few Western nations some 40,000 million dollars annually.  How else to justify doing nothing most of the time against the most heinous crimes committed in plain view unless there is an Israel to obsess about to the exclusion of everything else?

Human Rights are a geographically variable commodity because we live in a political world.  Our politicians and academics, our journalists and our charity workers, our bureaucrats and our social activists are human beings.  They are prejudiced, racist, and guided by ego.  We give them credit for altruism when their endeavors are inevitably driven by power and greed.  What frightens them most are controls that limit their freedom and if limiting ours helps them to keep theirs, they will embrace populism, incitement and selective censorship to do so.

The only thing protecting us from them is that we do not keep quiet when we feel threatened by their excesses. But we are losing that fight too because it is easy to be selective about what is important to us while ignoring the ever spreading injustice that results from equalities unequal application.

Cologne was not a New Years Eve aberration. It was a symptom of our accelerating decline.

The Dickensian BBC

It began with a preview of the new BBC television blockbuster drama series starting just after Christmas. 'Dickensian' is a mashup of Dickens most popular works.  In the preview, Fagin is a stereotypically sinister, snarling Jew with a prominently worn Mizrachi Jewish skull cap.  Fagin is shown in profile to cinematically disturbing effect.

At a time of heightened fear of terrorism the press does its best to ignore antisemitism even though in every country that statistics are kept, antisemitism is of considerably greater prevalence than Islamaphobia. 

Christmas is a time that is supposed to represent good-will to all men (and I assume women as well).  Until recently most orthodox Jews ignored Christmas, even as a secular festival, because of its negative history.  That history was one where Jews experienced fear due to incitement by the Christian clergy and persecution based upon the accusation of deicide.   Modern Israel not surprisingly, ignores this period of the year except in the distribution of free pine trees to any Christian families wishing to celebrate the festival.  It makes the deception and incitement by Western news outlets (our modern priesthood) all the more telling.

If we set aside the egos and prejudices of journalism's finest sons and daughters then that is our first issue.  It is a naive belief that journalism is meant to inform rather than what it really is; a platform for the expression of biases; a vehicle for conveying editorial prejudice.  And Jews have a particular interest in the chimera of honesty that is the practice of journalism because it is the Jews who are always the first to suffer its deceptions.

Our problem is that Jews are not meant to be normal people with normal fears, desires and anxieties. We are constantly being enjoined to learn from our history as if only we are expected to respect those who disrespect us, and exercise restraint at every provocation. But we have always been told to turn the other cheek (so that we would make an easier target). The definition that UK society refuses to acknowledge is this: Antisemitism is the expectation that Jews will respond to every action against them in a way that demonstrates a unique tolerance, a tolerance that is expected of no one else. It is the reaction to that failure of expectation that self justifies the bigot’s antisemitism.

So my complaint is that Jews in the Jewish Diaspora and in Israel are held to a standard expected of no one else and no other nation.  The hallmark of the modern antisemite is not his or her naked aggression or the intimidation that is part of their natural demeanor towards us.  It is the displeasure, the rarely concealed contempt that is displayed whenever we and only we do not listen to the “instructions” or “advice” given to us, most often unsolicited, by journalists, lecturers, professors and politicians alike.

It is truly an act of deception or naivete to believe that the visual media either informs or educates to a neutral agenda. Repetition is the essence of the propagandists’ art and visual stimulation, the most effective means of imprinting an idea, good or bad into our sub-conscious.

For example, on December 26^th a popular BBC soap opera “Eastenders” had a story line around a Nativity play. In the play a boy states “Yes we can stay in this inn because Islam welcomes all faiths.”  Islam emerged a distance of 1,300 kilometers (as the crow flies) from Israel and did not begin until 600 years after the biblical story. The remark, aside from its fundamental inaccuracy implies that Mary and Joseph were excluded from the inn on religious grounds.  This is also not part of the biblical story. Just to round off this antisemitic fantasy defilement, at this time of the year apologists for Palestinian terror often endow Jesus, Mary and Joseph with a faux Palestinian identity. The reality is that Palestinians, as Arabs, would have assaulted and perhaps murdered any Jews not traveling in convoy, for that lawlessness and thuggery is also the history of Arab (Palestinian) conduct towards non-Muslims over the centuries of their habitation in the Holy Land.

When I was growing up I had never seen a person who was not white except for those people I watched on TV and they were mostly gangsters.  I did not know how I would react to my first encounter with someone who was “different”.  But I was thankfully brought up to believe in the essential equality of everyone so I passed the test.  I do not believe that film makers are unaware of the impact their film making has on people.  When dealing with reality based fiction they cater to our need for the reassurance of familiarity and not to jar us from the sense of comforting complacency that most of us prefer to inhabit in our everyday lives.

There are some reinforcing memes best abandoned to the antechambers of history, for the study of relics of past abomination by scholars and antiquarians.  The Merchant of Venice and the various Passion Plays are two of these negatively reinforcing and culturally ugly literary events. So is Oliver Twist. No matter how the literary crowd try to sugar coat them, with their antiquity or by their authors’ pedigree the characters portrayed also deliver a message, of reinforcing and repulsive stereotype.  The damage prejudiced portrayal causes can not be justified, not in an era when even associating Islam with terrorism is regarded as secular blasphemy; not when politicians, social commentators and national media outlets make every effort to disassociate us from fearing the Muslims in our midst, to protect Muslims from any negative association that the expression of Muslim extremism may generate.

The BBC more than most international media behemoths understands this.  Its’ sensitivity ensures that even Muslim mass murderers are never portrayed as villains. It does its best to inoculate Islamists from being forced to confront their inhumanity. The BBC’s discomfort with terms such as “Islamic State” and any other term that ties the Muslim faith to crimes of violence or hate crimes proves that the BBC has internalised at least some historical lessons.

To rationalise a narrowly focused bigotry in a world that is experiencing ethnic and religious conflict on a global scale and to dismiss the criticism of that bigotry because it is done in homage to art is an unacceptable rationalisation for continued prejudice and hate.

The latest BBC drama series about Charles Dickens was previewed on Breakfast BBC’s news program and from the start it was clear that it was not meant for us to feel sympathy for anyone of Jewish background.  The BBC is at war with Israel, both individual and nation. Its methods are subtle but that does not detract from its purpose. If you are Jewish but do not heed the “advice” of Britain’s elite you are the enemy.  The Jews have always been Britain’s enemies.  The BBC is at war with most of us, Jews and Israeli’s.  It is always happy to implant seeds of hate via a new program or via its latest headline. Isn’t it time the Board of Deputies of British Jews or the Jewish Leadership Council (for the British, Jewish community) and the government of the State of Israel took this threat with all seriousness?

Yossi Sarid, Israel and the Death of Civility

There are many people within the settlement enterprise, on the right of Israeli politics and within the religious community who have celebrated the death of Yossi Sarid.

This is in spite of an inconvenient truth, expressed by people of an allegedly religious disposition that the Second Temple was overthrown because of "sinat chinum" (hatred between people).   And yet, this is what they are guilty of.  Did not God say of the Egyptians when they were drowning in the Red Sea, that the angels should not sing because they, the Egyptians were also, his (her) children?  They respond with Psalms 139:21: "Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee? And do not I strive with those that rise up against Thee?” (JPS Tanach 1917) It is used by the settler movement and those people opposed to the Left to justify their own particular hatred, particularly of people like Yossi Sarid.

The problem is that we can all pick and choose texts from holy script.  One of the most negatively impacting issues that Jews have faced throughout the last 1,800 years of history is that our religious competitors interpreted their own religious texts to justify every atrocity they committed in the name of their faith.  They have used it to justify slavery and in the Muslim world still do, to this day. Do we really want to be like them?

The reason the Jewish people have survived for 4,000 years is that we do change, nothing is sacrosanct. We have always wrestled with angels, we have always argued with God. The Golden Mean is a principle concept in Judaism. By choosing the nastier bits of ancient texts we embellish that which is hateful and disfigure that which is beautiful.  

I know that Sarid could be a total ass - the left wing equivalent of the extreme right is the same unbridled hatred of the person with whom they disagree.  Sarid’s eloquence was far too often vile in its expression of passionate disregard for his enemy’s feelings and the target was inevitably those communities of Jews who did not believe as he did it.

That was unforgivable arrogance - the kind of single-minded disregard for feelings that seems to be the salient affliction of modern western society’s most passionate believers.  And here is the issue that afflicts Israel, Europe and the English speaking world.  People whose beliefs are most passionate, often, have very limited if any knowledge outside of the narrow discourse to which they offer their undiluted support, body and soul. Once they sign up to a particular stream of consciousness, all else is discarded.  It helps to explain why it is nearly impossible to engage in debate or even discussion with pro-Palestinian supporters, radical leftists and religious bigots.  Facts that are not consonant with their belief system are brushed aside, often with a violent urgency that intimidates their interlocutor, and they think they are being moral.  It is meant to be thus. Intimidation and violence are key tools in the suppression of debate.  When a particular belief system is so exclusive that it cannot possibly win an argument on its own merits, debate must be occluded at all costs.   And an essential element of this way of thinking is violent speech.

Yossi Sarid is dead, may he rest in peace. I could not agree with his politics because his beliefs excluded a display of compassion for any Israeli’s with whom he disagreed. He understood the anger and frustration Arabs felt but like far too many of his colleagues on the Left, he ignored the base prejudice and antisemitism that was rooted in Arab society.  His secular mindset viewed the Arabs as victims of history and Jews (with whom he was incapable of identifying) as oppressors.  History is rarely that simple and in the Near-East absolutely, it is not.  The most charitable view of that same history is that both Arab and non-Arab are victims of history.  But there are so many historical narratives that to choose only one is to be blind to the past and to dismiss a holistic approach to history is to celebrate ignorance over knowledge.  And that is unforgivably crass.  

The history of the Land of Israel is the history of the Near-East itself. It encompasses an Arab, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Ottoman as well as secular narrative that has impacted every corner of the Globe.   To define oneself by only focusing on a narrow point in history or a single narrative is to reject the enlightenment.

Just as our enemies attempt to exclude us from any legitimate rendering of history, the Left has almost completely lost the attention of Israeli Jewish society.  It has failed to capture our allegiance because it ignores our own legitimate story and refuses to challenge either the bigotry of our enemies or the lies of our ‘friends’.  There is a desperate need for social activism and compassionate engagement in Israeli society but the left cannot re-engage the attention, the trust or the sympathies of the Israeli public in any significant numbers while it is seen to be understanding towards those ideologies and those people whose most heartfelt desire is not to live in peace with us but to destroy our society and to kill us all.

In a world of total moral collapse, Primo Levi said there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values (Michael Curtis on “If this is a man”).

The problem is that we speak in terms of carefully chosen absolutes that exclude anyone who fails to think exactly as we do.   Our world is descending into another Dark Ages because of our selective intolerance.  Celebrating the death of an Israeli patriot is part of that disease that infects our Western society.