What time is it?

Well, tonight will be the night most of us turn our clocks back, if we still have any clocks that don't turn back automatically. What do you think of the man inside the clock adjusting the time above? Here is another guy in action in a similar clock outside Paddington Station.

There have been some development in the past few weeks that have made me wonder what time it is in a different sense. Steven Hayward has put up his American Kristallnacht edition of the Powerline Week in Pictures.

I think he missed this:

Why did the Hamas attack catch Israel by surprise?

A different concept of death

An interview with author and intellectual Paul Berman about Hamas's ideology and Western blindness.

Editor's note: The following interview was originally published in German translation by Swiss daily newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung on October 24th. . .

The interview was conducted by Andreas Scheiner.

Some excerpts:

PB: The Israelis thought they had introduced a kind of language to communicate with Hamas. Hamas commits a terrible act and the Israelis retaliate. They know they can bomb this or that, but not more because that would break the implicit deal. For some years, the Israelis thought that Hamas had entered into this comparatively uncomplicated form of war.

AS: The Israelis became careless?

PB: Yes, even Netanyahu, who always presented himself as the sophisticated realist who, unlike the naive liberals, understands the fundamentalism of the movements that attack Israel. But he turned out to be the same kind of naive fool that he used to rail against.

AS: He forgot that Hamas has a different concept of death?

PB: You see, Hitler also had a different concept of death. Hitler didn't want to force his enemies, who were the Jews, into an agreement; he wanted to exterminate his enemies. In the end, he and the top leaders of the Nazi party committed suicide. So, he wanted his enemies to die, and if they didn't die, he wanted himself and his entourage to die. Which is not so far from the Hamas idea. Hamas has learned quite a bit from the Nazi idea.

AS: You need to explain that.

PB: Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood emerged in the 1930s as an Islamic fundamentalist renewal movement, but it became a mass movement by absorbing a number of European ideas. Mussolini and Hitler wanted to "cleanse" society by resurrecting the Roman Empire in some kind of modern version. Hassan al-Banna was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and he entertained a similar cleansing fantasy, only, in his case, he wanted to revive the Islamic empire of the Prophet Mohammed.

Well, to me, this makes the behavior of students on some of our campuses more worrisome. Do any of them have a "cleansing fantasy"? "By Any Means Necessary"? Why is there a worldwide antisemitism surge?

The two Hamas Charters

Helen Dale regularly challenges institutional preconceptions. Here is a book review which describes some ways she has done this in the past, in reference to grievance studies. Anyway, she decided to look into differences between the two editions of the Hamas Charter in a Twitter thread, and some other folks joined in. Also refer to the interview above concerning how the Muslim Brotherhood has absorbed some European ideas.

The 2017 Hamas Charter is the wildest mashup of Islam and decolonisation/postcolonial theory, worth reading if nothing else to show the extent to which people can get high on their own supply.

In this context, be aware that (unlike Christianity), Islam has no doctrine of original sin, which means the sort of whiny "poor me + pity the victims/oppressed" arguments that fly in Christianity and Christian-derived intellectual movements (Wokery is one) don't really work in combination with it.

The Koran places the onus on individuals for their actions, regardless of their group affiliation or whether they are oppressed or not. Q74:38: "Every soul is a pledge for what it has earned"; Q53:38: "No burdened person shall bear the burden of another".

That's the revised (2017) charter, designed to be more palatable to potential 'progressive' allies.

The original 1988 version is a nasty piece of work.

The 1988 version is framed and argued using conventional Islamic doctrines, yes. Those doctrines are at least relatively stable. Islam is 1400 years old; its internal cleavages and disputes are readily available to anyone who's curious.

In my view, the 2017 version is dangerous precisely because it's designed to drag in Western support, even if theological absurdity is a byproduct.

Related: Everything the social justice crowd told us was a lie

The American Front

An American friend asked me yesterday where I thought our greatest dangers lie. Getting bogged down in Gaza? The northern front, facing Hezbollah and the Iranian militias in Syria? The soon-to-be nuclear Iran? Another intifada in Judea and Samaria? Violent riots by Arab citizens of Israel?

None of those, I said. The greatest danger facing Israel today is from the Americans.

My friend was surprised. How is that possible? President Biden expressed his full support for Israel, and is supplying us with weapons and ammunition, and has sent significant naval forces to our region. He threatened Iran against intervening. Congress just overwhelmingly passed a resolution of support for Israel. What more do I want?

So I explained that the problem with America is the same problem that we had here in Israel until October 7. It is the conseptzia, the stubborn resistance to the reality that is behind the conflict that has been going on for at least a century, and of which the butchery on Simchat Torah was just the most recent flareup.

You can read the particulars of the resistance to reality and some interesting history at the link. Here are some of the author's conclusions:

. . . To be Palestinian is to suffer from the nakba, and to dream of reversing and avenging it.

During the 1960s, the Soviets encouraged Palestinian nationalism, adding to it some spices of Marxism-Leninism, and presenting the Palestinians to the world as an oppressed third-world people fighting a war of national liberation against European colonialism. Later we had the "Zionism is racism" resolution in the execrable UN, followed by the 2001 anti-racism summit in Durban, South Africa, which emphasized this theme (despite its complete inapplicability to the conflict), leading to today's accusations of "apartheid." Despite all this, which is mostly intended to make Western liberals comfortable with idea of wiping Israel off the map, the Palestinian consciousness still centers on the shame of the nakba.

The honor lost in 1948, and which has continued throughout "the occupation" (to Palestinians this means the period of Jewish sovereignty that began in 1948 ) , can only be recovered by reversing the nakba, bringing back all those who fled in 1948 and their descendants, and establishing Palestinian sovereignty over the land. It is also a religious imperative to restore rule by Muslims. Finally, the shame of what has occurred is so great, that the reversal must be accomplished with great violence. Only if the land runs with blood can the accumulated insults of the last 75 years finally be avenged.

This is Palestinian culture. This is what separates Palestinians from other Arabs and Muslims, many of whom can accept the existence of a Jewish state. With various modifications and different emphasis, this is what every Palestinian child learns in school, whether in a Hamas or UNRWA school in Gaza, or a PA school in Judea/Samaria. It is even to a great degree taught to Arab citizens of Israel in the Israeli Arab educational system. It is what Palestinians hear from their leaders, in their mosques, on the TV and radio, and in their newspapers and social media. It's what Palestinians say in Arabic, and often in English too.

Certainly there are Palestinians for whom economic goals are important; there are secular ones and Christians; and there are those who hate violence and believe in democracy. There is opposition to Hamas in Gaza and to the PA in Judea/Samaria. But the basic ideas are unchallenged - they are pervasive in the culture itself. They are the conventional wisdom, the motherhood and apple pie of Palestinians, and some form of them is accepted by the great majority. Polls consistently show that most Palestinians favor armed resistance against Israel, and elections are almost always won by the most radical candidate. If that isn't enough, Palestinian values are often enforced by men with guns.

So that is why the ultra-violent massacre in the south was cheered by Palestinians everywhere. And that is why the propositions of the conseptzia are false. Honor/shame and religion are at the top of the list of motivators for the Palestinians. Palestinians have consistently chosen violence over statehood, and weapons over economic development. They are not frustrated because they don't have an independent state - they are infuriated because we have one on what they believe is their property. If we give them money for development, they will take it (and skim off plenty from the top for the benefit of their leadership). But the PA will always pay terrorists and their families, and Hamas will not stop building tunnels and rockets.

The Palestinians can't be bought off and they can't be persuaded that it is in their interest to live at peace alongside a Jewish state. The various factions have different strategies and tactics, but their ultimate objective is the same: Israel must disappear.

The Americans are dangerous, because they don't or won't accept this. . .

Gaza was an open-air prison before October 7

Remember that "refugee camp" where Israeli bunker busters collapsed tunnels and caused some dramatic damage and deaths? It was established when the Egyptians controlled Gaza. When the Israelis occupied Gaza, they tried to modernize some of those squalid neighborhoods and were rebuffed.

Gaza is not an "open-air prison" for everyone. Roll the video.

@CBSNews @CBS ever heard of research or background checks of your interviewees? Seriously, what a joke. This Gazan girl lives more of a luxury lifestyle than half of the world’s population. 😳#therealgaza https://t.co/GXUOHEGBBZ

— Maureen (@moweezle) October 17, 2023

Music

Hungarian Dances played by youths in Poland

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, October 28, Just TEN wishes?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:11 AM

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