Wednesday, March 27, 2024

MODERN GLOBAL ANTI SEMITISM POST OCTOBER 7






Modern day world wide anti semitism, paradoxically following the Hamas attack of Israeli community settlements and a Peace Festival on October 7 2023, has been largely based on new rationales These add to the older tropes justifying the millennia old hatred. All the justifications for Jew loathing can be defined by artificially creating 4 categories -  The New Left, The Old Left, The New Right and The Old Right. Jay H. Ell will attempt to outline the philosophies of these entities. 


Before expanding on modern global antisemitism its adherents and their theories, Jay H. Ell believes that the context of this phenomenon is germane to the discourse.


THE MIDDLE EAST STATE OF PLAY OF ACTORS CIRCA MARCH 2024


HAMAS is a self declared “freedom fighter” organization whose stated aim is genocide of the Jews and a Palestine “From River to the Sea”. Sinwar is at its head. There is appropriate world wide empathy for the Palestinians caught in the middle in Gaza, 


ISRAEL is a democracy that currently has a right wing extremist government with two messianic figures who believe in “From the Sea to the River”. Netanyahu is at its head. There is scant empathy for the Israelis.


GAZA is a humanitarian disaster area for which there is joint culpability. History will decide who shoulders the overwhelming blame. The potential for starvation of the Palestinians has led the United Sates to acquiesce to a Security UNO Council resolution for an immediate cease fire for humanitarian aid and hostage release. Both of the latter have  to be the priorities of the Israeli government. However the Netanyahu response is to to invade Rafah!. The invasion of Rafah is a war cry rather than an immediate necessity. 


ISRAEL’S Netanyahu and his government have an 80 percent disapproval rating. They will be removed peacefully in a democratic election or by the Israeli Knesset. While there are determined moves to axe the Israeli Prime Minister, the reasons he has been accepted thus far are outlined in the blog  CIVILIAN CASUALTIES - HAMAS, NETANYAHU, BIDEN, UNO ,AND THE SUNNIS, March 3 2024.


HAMAS came into power by force. Sinwar and Hamas won’t subject themselves to democratic change. Only force can remove them.


THE IRANIAN LED RESISTANCE, unlike Israel is not asked what their “day after” plan will be. Will it be the return of 8 million Jewish “colonialists”  to countries of “origin” including Islamic states, gas ovens or slaughter Hamas style?


OCTOBER 7 2023 saw an attack unbridled in savagery and sadism on innocent Israeli citizens with the taking of over 200 hostages, The Israeli response was to eradicate the perpetrators, Hamas. The world response was to attack not only Israel but diaspora Jews regardless of what they believed. 


The Middle East war has spilled over into internal politics, with, first and foremost Netanyahu running against Biden, Schumer running against Netanyahu and Trump running against Biden.


GLOBAL ANTI SEMITISM


For the first time in history Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora, (for practical purposes America and to a lesser extent Europe), have been the subject of widespread  antisemitism  Ironically the protagonists of this mantra for this modern day prejudice have differing rationales since anti semites themselves never admit they are anti semites. They always piously behold that “Some of their best friends are jews, even grandchildren”. Jews have been hated since time immemorial because of, what they believe, for all the myriad of evils they are allegedly responsible for and for being born.


Ironically too, the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the Diaspora, that support Israel, are in different worlds in their analysis of the status quo. As the podcasters in “For Heaven’s Sake” explained, the Diaspora’s understanding of the Israeli conflict is more like the Afghanistan and Iraq strifes while for Israel this is existential, for survival more akin to World War11. What both these Jewish constituencies are acutely aware of is that the Jews themselves don’t define who a Jew is, rather it is the anti semites that decide.


SELECTIVE MORALITY


While the invective started immediately after October 7 it has been fueled by the devastation of Gaza and the inevitable collateral damage that urban warfare brings. The situation is not helped by an obscene right wing government in power in Israel. However no one is calling for the end of Russia, Hungary or China because of their regimes. Russian immigrants in London are not being warned to go to the center of London because of the plunder of Ukraine. No Hungarian immigrant captain of a sport’s team is being axed in Australia because he is Hungarian. No children of ex patriots of China are being harassed in school or College in France on account of what the Chinese government is doing to the Uyghurs. 


So why the Jews? The Jews who constitute 00.02 percent of the world’s population. Besides the hatred of the Old Right including Iran and its Resistance movement as well as the growing numbers of Neo Nazis, and extreme right wingers, what is the rationale of these people who come out in droves?  While the anti semitic entities overlap in rationales it is useful to examine them as “purists”. The most disconcerting and ubiquitous of these is the New Left.


THE NEW LEFT


The New Left, including many Jews, no longer equate liberalism with Zionism, which in this instance  is the right of the Jews, outside of the diaspora, to have their own state as voted by UNO in 1947. They equate the current Israeli extremist government with Zionism. They like the Israeli right wing believe that the two state solution is dead -  they only see a Palestinian one and assume the Palestinians will allow the Israelis to live side by side with them in a happy democracy.   


 The New Left accepts implicitly that October 7 was a legitimate “freedom fight” with wildly inaccurate comparisons to the African National Congress struggle against apartheid. They exculpate Hamas, which is the dominant political and military Palestinian organization for the resulting carnage and starvation in Gaza when that was their objective to achieve victory, which indeed they have, in the propaganda war that followed.


Many of the liberal entities, that Jews disproportionately were involved in, have morphed into New Left entities. These include The Women Movement, Black Lives Matter and the ANC in South Africa.  Jews stood side by side with Martin Luther King. They formed the first organization for the advancement of “colored people” in America. Ruth Bader - Ginsberg and Bella Abzug pioneered equality for women. For a lengthy essay on the subject see Frank Foer, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending: The Atlantic March 4, 2024).


The apartheid struggle in South Africa was awash with Jews on every level as the architect of true apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd warned, “That it hadn’t passed unnoticed how many Jews were in the opposition”. 


As far as the New Left are concerned it is isn’t the Liberal Organizations that have changed it is The Jews, The Zionists. They are the ones that are out of step and not with the program. So the “Liberal Organizations” say nothing to the rape and plunder by Hamas. They ignore Hamas's  sacrifice of the Palestinians much as the fellow travelers accepted Stalin’s genocide as part of the price to pay for a world wide Dictatorship by the Proletariat.. The LGBT groups in spite of the fact that they have marches in Jerusalem, proclaim “LGBT support ‘From The River To The Sea”.This regardless of the current draconian policies of The Resistance. Women, in Palestine are, to put it kindly, second class citizens while Israeli women are raped in the tunnels yet the silence of the world wide women movements is deafening. In the "day after" the moral police will be in control of women as they are today in Iran. 


The New left argue with the arrogance and with certitude they have the power of history going forward much like the Fascists and the Communists did in the twentieth century.  At their least radical they argue for a cease fire without mentioning the hostages…..  They mock protagonists, even Holocaust survivors,  who are supporters of the two state solution, as being out of date. They then lampoon liberals saying look who are on your side - the MAGA Republicans. The false equivalency if accurate would mean America and ISIS K are on the same page because they both are against Putin’s Russia.


They are wrong, liberalism like true democracy is a messy business. Once again there is a simplistic social engineering answer to a complex problem. For example they have no idea who will govern their one state where the Palestinians will be in a majority. Like Bibi Netanyahu they have no idea of the day after. It will just magically happen,.


However there is a philosophy behind all of this 


INTERSECTIONALISM - THE BASIS OF THE NEW LEFT


There is no longer much love for liberalism, even if it has evolved to its present day form to the modern welfare state with the influence of the Enlightenment philosophers from Milton to Marx. Liberalism, it is argued is one dimensional while the new philosophy of “Intersectionanlsm” brings together multiple  social factors. These factors such as feminism and race inherently combine to produce an identity that is subject to oppression that cannot be ameliorated. Attempting to fight racism alone, for example, is doomed to failure as it is interconnected with other factors. 


The oppressed are marginalized. Societies are thus divided into the weak, oppressed, and the strong, oppressors, period. It follows that nothing can undo colonialism. It lives on as ineo colonialism. You have to side with the weak in their fight against the strong. Rationale and facts are irrelevant. 


Similar to this line of thinking is Herbert Marcuse’s revisionist Marxism. He believed that where Marx got it wrong was that it was not a class struggle it was a subjugated identity struggle. Consequently he was heavily into rights for women.


Marcuse like the intersectionalists in their identity philosophies have been criticized for not taking individuals into account. That is the least of their problems. The upshot is the day after 10/7 there was no condemnation of the savagery rather the support of it.The underdogs had sought to regain their land. What followed was, inter alia, THE UNSURPRISING SILENCE AS ISRAELI WOMEN ARE RAPED IN TUNNELS. (See blog 

January 27, 2024). 


THE NEW RATIONALE OF ANTI SEMITISM - THE OLD LEFT


The Old Left are not so old. They have a new hypothesis as why  the State of Israel is illegitimate. Their new mantra was articulated in 2001, 7 years before Israel’s last offer to the Palestinians for a Two State Solution and 4 years before Israel unilaterally ceded Gaza. Using the present day principles of what constitutes evil, The United Nations Conference on Racism declared that Israel was guilty of apartheid, racism, attempted genocide, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Although this finding was subsequently reversed by the General Assembly it stuck. In another historical irony, the morally, politically and financially bankrupt South African Government seized on the Israeli defensive response a few weeks into the war to charge Israel at The International Court of Justice with the aforementioned crimes. (See blog January 15,2024 “IRAN’S NEWEST PROXY, SOUTH AFRICA, LIBELS ISRAEL AS GENOCIDAL”.


The late Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Jonathan Sacks interpreted that the basis for anti semitism morphed through the ages from Jews being different, for killing Christ, because they threw poison into wells,  killed children to use their blood to make unleavened bread, were racially inferior, (still there today with the Old Right), were capitalists, were communists and now because they have a fascist state exhibiting the modern day evils on land stolen from the Palestinians.


THE NEW RIGHT


The basis of this philosophy is that truth is perception.The granddaddy of all this was the French philosopher Albert Foucalt. 


Foucalt was into knowledge and its relationship to power. The elites controlled the masses by claiming they had the monopoly on facts and science, both of which they opined were subject to objective analysis. What these power mongers were claiming, Foucalt argued, was that the masses were ignorant. However, he continued, the masses’ perceptions were just as valid as the facts and science of the elites. (Look around - you may recognize the phenomenon). 


The upshot of all this baloney is that Hamas’s attack was justified and what followed in Gaza is all Israel’s fault. (See blog: THE RATIONALE FOR REFRAMING THE ISRAEL/HAMAS CONFLICT,December 30, 2023). 


AT THE END OF THE DAY


Once again the world is perpetrating a pogrom on Jewry which is novel in its rationales. Once again it is impossible for Jews to counter it, How do you prove that you are not poisoning the wells or that you aren’t in a secret plot to take over the world? 


Joe Biden, the leader of America and the free world, needs every bit of support in this existential struggle between reality and madness in America, Ukraine and the Middle East. Now is not the time to be uninvolved. He is correct in making the 2024 Presidential  election about “Who we are”. (See blog:  "OLD"JOE IS JUST BID-EN HIS TIME, March 19, 2024.


The action of the United States in no longer shielding Israel politically on the world scene has yet to play out. The latter outcome coming after repeated warnings that Israel needed to have a valid “day after” plan and just could not continue hostilities with famine raging in Gaza and Israeli hostages languishing in the labyrinthine underground Hamas tunnel complex. Netanyahu better watch his false braggadocio because Biden can take his battleships and go home. 


In the words of the composer, Irving Berlin, another American Jew, who wrote the biggest hit song in history,“White Christmas”, - “God Bless America”. He penned that too.


Tuesday, March 19, 2024

"OLD"JOE IS JUST BID-EN HIS TIME





For almost light relief Jay H. Ell will write this blog about President "Old Joe" Biden. We all need a break from the dark Trump and the global horrors. Besides no one else is featuring him, which incidentally is to his advantage. The media scream at him to get his message out while implying that he is too moribund to do it. Yet all they do is run stories on Trump. 


The 2024 election is going to be a referendum between two elderly "old" gentlemen and it is a well known electoral fact that whoever the contest is about is far more likely to lose. But that ignores the reality that Biden smashed the negative narratives doing the rounds in all the media, starting with his State of the Union, (SOTU), address, followed by a string of rallies, largely ignored by the media. Not that "Old Joe" doesn't face problems but more of that at the end. 


Joe Biden who was written off as a walking corpse, delivered the world a master class as he kicked off his presidential campaign in the State of the Union address, by illustrating his uncanny skills as a politician. The MAGA narrative of “Sleepy Old Joe”, backed by the political hit job the special counsel, Robert Hur, who pontificated in his paternalistic gratuitous assessment of the mental apparatus of the President of The United States. The argument that Biden had degenerated to “A well meaning elderly man with a poor memory” was shattered in front of the nation. Hur, a Trump nominee, had been appointed by Biden’s Attorney General Garland, indicative of the latter's obsession to fall over backwards to project impartiality, to investigate "Old Joe's" inadvertent retention of classified documents. Hur was humiliated by the Democrats at a hearing the MAGA GOP held at Congress and proved biased by the panoramic display of Biden’s mental fitness at the SOTU address.


“ELDERLY,”  OLD JOE 


So a very low bar was set for the 46th President as the critics settled down for what they prognosticated would be a boring bipartisan insipid SOTU speech, praying that “the mumbler  in chief” would at least not fall asleep at the podium. They all scrambled to rewrite their assessments changing their tunes in record time. One seriously wonders on what these overpaid pundits based their pompous observations on. If they had just reflected on what has happened before their own eyes over the past three years and even in the past three months or weeks they would not have been surprised at what they witnessed on March 7 2024 in the Capitol, which he reminded them was the self same venue as January 7, 2021.


This was the same "Old" Joe Biden who made a surprise trip half way across the world to resuscitate the shell shocked Israelis and can hold two thoughts at once - the right of the Israelis to defend themselves and see to the needs of the Palestinians caught in the middle. The same geriatric who organized the Covid response with troops in the cities and then in spite of protestations from the learned economists flooded the country with relief money. Following that he oversaw an economic recovery which was the most profound throughout the world even besting gangbusters China. This led Larry Kudlow, Trump’s former director of the National Economic Council, to exclaim that, numbers on the economy were outstanding,“We cannot view this through a political lens”.


None of this had any impact on the perception that the demented "Old" Joe was stumbling along the corridors of the WhiteHouse talking to the paintings of the former Presidents.  instead the pundits took their cue from Biden’s low approval ratings. The latter is a reflection of the public looking for a “performer” rather than a leader in addition to their general disenchantment with politics. Well he displayed that that he could "perform" with the best of them. He can sound like a populist when the need arises. It is not his preferred shtik but it is what it is. He can ad lib and even feeds off hecklers. As any seasoned stand up can tell you,  "...if you have the mike you have the room". Incidentally he has a wry sense of humor which he displayed with aplomb.


Then there was the question of his being “elderly”. "Old Joe" took that bogeyman on with more subtlety that Ronald Reagan famously did. Incidentally he threw Ronald Reagan’s mantra in the sneering “Republicans” faces. Reagan characterized America’s role in the world as that “Shiny City On the Hill”. He has also gently reminded during his campaign, that the “Other fella” is no spring chicken himself. The near record viewership, including nearly 6 million on FOX NEWS, were treated to a passionate interpretation as to “Who we are”.


THE ISSUES AND BIDEN’S POLITICAL SKILL SET


Jay H. Ell just cannot let go of the, even now, liberal media’s obsession with Biden’s age, while accepting the “elderly” slurring mumbling Trump’s invective incoherence as,"Just Trump being Trump". They had to have been aware that even if "Old Joe" wanted to there was no off ramp for him. Sadly in America the Presidential campaign is 2 years long. He would have had to back off and become a lame duck when Merrick Garland was half asleep in the Justice Department on appointing an Investigation into January 6 leaving the country not having a definitive judicial ruling on Trump’s sedition. Who better than he, the victim of Trump’s attempted coup, to place the issue foursquare in front of the electorate? 


Then it was Biden who was prosecuting the war against Putin. It was Biden with his fifty year experience in foreign affairs, who knows every world leader by name, who put together that incredible NATO and EU coalition to fight for democracy in Ukraine. 


The central theme of his campaign has been “Freedom” in all its aspects. He opened his SOTU speech by referring to the threat that hung over the world in 1941 when fascist dictatorships threatened Europe and very soon thereafter America. This has to hit a high note with what is still left of the old GOP. Trump has announced to his Nuremberg style rallies that America was going to become isolationist, a circumstance that even at this point in time when at least a third of the “GOP” in Congress don’t support his abandonment of the Reagan mantra. 


However the crucial freedom, that has cost the MAGA GOP countless interim elections as well as referenda some even in the darkest red states, that of a woman’s right to control her own body, was front and center in the oration. The ramifications of the Trump engineered reversal of Roe v Wade have resulted in disaster as horror story after horror story is regaled in the media. Supreme Court Justice Thomas’s interpretation of the axing of Roe is the banning of contraception and already in vitro fertilization is on the block. One can hardly see the crucial Republican suburban woman vote that helped tip the balance in 2020 switching back to Trump. In addition not much has happened or is about to follow will clear up his image as to how he regards and treats women.


The blue collar workers that swung back to Biden from Trump in the MidWest, in 2020, have no reason to ditch him now as the Biden economy have increased job opportunities and most significantly the influential Autoworkers Union's demands have been met. His appeal isn’t that he is the billionaire backer of the workers he was on the picket line with them - the first President to do so.


His tax policy is where the mainland is at where there will be no increase in taxes for anyone with a net income of $400,000 - an income he claims he only reached when he became President!


He has deftly, thus far, prevented the Israeli/Hamas conflict mushrooming into an all out war in the Middle East. He has brought in aircraft carriers, created a coalition to keep the shipping lanes open and taken out Iran backed terrorists in Sudan, Iraq and Syria. 


He has wholeheartedly supported America’s ally Israel affirming that they could fight the just war that Hamas had savagely started but they needed to do so “justly”. Throughout he has insisted that the civilian casualties were too high and finally stated that Netanyahu was not waging the conflict in Israel’s best interests. He knew Netanyahu’s game, that inspite of all the USA’s unlimited aid, the Israeli Premier would argue that America could not dictate policy and run on that in the next election. So Biden got in first when the green light was given to Senator Schumer to attack him telling him to call an election.


Biden’s weakest position is on immigration where again he outmaneuvered the “GOP” by being prepared to accept all their recommendations to bolster up border security in what would have been a bipartisan resolution. Trump, who has visceral skills, immediately kiboshed the deal as this was one of his trump cards for 2024. Jay H. Ell can see the TV ads playing at election time zeroing in the most conservative "GOP” Senator James Langford of Oklahoma, the "Republican" negotiator on. the deal, mouthing the words that what Biden claimed, “was true”, while the rest of his colleagues tried to howl Biden down. 


IT IS THE ECONOMY  - “OLD" JOE IS NOT STUPID


The polls, on this crucial issue, remind Jay H. Ell of those conducted on health care providers where the majority of respondents claimed that all doctors were uncaring, However to the question as to how they viewed their own doctor the majority stated that their doctor was empathetic and listened to them. So it has been in some exit polls on the economy where the overall assessment is that it sucks but as to how they were doing only a minority claimed that they were faring “worse” 


However one needs to examine the facts and figures and see whether there is the basis for individual perceptions to change. To date there is record unemployment under 4 percent and inflation is down from 9 percent to 3 percent. Also at the current rate America’s deficit is projected to be cut by 3 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. But groceries are still up and mortgage rates make it prohibitive to purchase a home.....


Besides the Covid relief money which saw the country through the epidemic, Biden through his bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and Inflation Reduction Bill has poured $442 billion into the economy. There are 50,000 discrete projects ranging from roads, bridges, rail, broadband, clean energy, public transportation, airports, ports, freight rail, water and the mind boggles. Most of the money is directed to rural and underdeveloped areas which translates to mainly the “Red” States which are 12 of the 18 largest recipients,


There are 8 more months for this to kick in. So the economy just has to remain on track without inflation flaring up so that the independent Federal Reserve can lower interest rates. 


“ANY DEMOCRAT COULD BEAT TRUMP MORE EASILY”


It was the consensus that any generic Democrat could beat Trump more easily. Really?. When running on his own Trump has been a tough nut to crack. In 2015 he demolished a star studded field across the Republican spectrum from Jed Bush to Ted Cruz and another half a dozen between. He sleepwalked into his third “GOP”nomination So the only opponent who has beaten him when he is actually on the ballot is Biden. The latter also cruised past him in the Presidential debates. 


Trump has cruelly and effectively lampooned his rivals one by one - Biden not so much. Trump and Hur have tried to stick “The Sleepy Old Joe” label on him but it just won’t stick. As Ron Klain his former Chief of Staff answered in a sickening NY Times 45 minute podcast where the interviewer never, but never, stopped hammering him about Biden’s age and whether he had admitted to anyone that he was only going to be in office for one term. Klain argued with conviction that Biden’s faculties were spot on and that he was the best candidate to defeat the red monster. 


Even after the Republicans last hope Special Counsel Robert Hur to trumpet the lie that Biden was demented failed miserably, The NY Times headline screamed, “Special Counsel In Biden Documents Inquiry fiercely Defends Report”. This after a hearing where the Democrats exposed Special Counsel Hur as a political hack who refused to deny that he would accept a post in Trump”s Justice Department should Trump win the election Who needs Fox News when the liberal media do the work for Trump? Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and the rest all initially had joined in the crusade all but arguing that Biden had lost his marbles.


Biden is the genuine article, Lindsey Graham, that Trump poodle, confided after the January 6 insurrection. '…..he, (Biden) maybe the best person to have, (In answer to the question who was the best person to bring the country together). I mean how mad can you get at Joe Biden?“.


THE PROBLEM


There is little doubt that Biden's support for Israel with the resulting high casualties in Gaza has angered sections of the youth vote, (certainly not the large movements that include David Hogg’s March for Lives and The Run For Something Movements), as well as the Muslim community mainly in Michigan. No doubt he is aware and sensitive to their position and during the Primary elections the narrative was that these Democratic voters have every right to register their disapproval. He argued that he was not ignoring that aspect of the existential threat to Israel. 


There is a big debate as to where the Latinos are polarizing to. Most polls show they are switching to the right but the picture is mixed. Where this will matter is in Texas, Florida and Arizona. The latter swing state being a target of the MAGA GOP. Kari Lake, the MAGA GOP nominee, an election denier both of the 2020 Presidential election and her own gubernatorial election is a toxic personality. At the moment the Democrat Ruben Gallego, who as his name implies is Latino, is way ahead in the polls and women in the swing state have moved increasingly into the Democratic column. It is difficult to see Trump and his fellow traveller Kari reversing the status quo.  


Overall approximately 1 in 10 Democrats registered a vote either for another candidate or "uncommitted". This is about the same for any incumbent President. At the end of the day if these people vote for Trump and he somehow wins it will be the last time all of us have the opportunity to participate in an election. If they were motivated enough to vote in a Primary they have to have the insight to be aware of that reality. 


Moreover, the Trump "negative" vote was more than double that of Biden's and he too was running as an incumbent -  if you don't believe Jay H. Ell ask Trump himself and his MAGA  crowd. Notably Trump's "negative" votes are more likely to abstain or vote for Biden as the ever increasing number of former employees and even Republican Primary contestants have indicated. 


AT THE END OF THE DAY


Jay H. Ell hopes that everyone has enjoyed this break from Trump and the Middle East. 


As matters stand it is hard to see how The Donald can regain the WhiteHouse. He and his MAGA GOP are strapped for cash which is another colossal advantage Biden has over him. In addition with is daughter in law in the driver seat the Republican National Committee have made his election a top priority, which leaves the other candidates on their own, minimizing their chances to mobilize the votes for all of them.


Harold MacMillan, a former British Prime Minister when asked what was the most challenging situation that leadership of a country posed, replied “Events dear boy events”. There are plenty more events on the Trump horizon. One wonders what the impact will be, now that the Emperor has been exposed to have no money,  on his following let alone the “undecided” who he has made no attempt to win over anyway. Then there is the documentary on the porn star “Stormy” Daniels and the salacious trial to follow and who knows maybe the January seditious conspiracy litigation….


Meanwhile "Old" Joe is just biding his time.