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Some Recent Events in the Context of the Past

Readers of this series will know that after Israel’s unilateral violation of the first phase of the cease-fire agreement in early March, the IDF has resumed its genocidal attacks on the civilian population of Gaza and the West Bank.  In another demonstration of the rank disparity between the treatment of Jews and Arabs in Israel’s model “democracy,” at the end of March the Palestinian co-director of an Academy Award winning documentary was brutally assaulted outside his home in the West Bank by both fanatical Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers, who held a gun to his head.  An arrest followed, not of the assailants, but of the victim of the attack.

On March 23, the IDF added to its already virtuosic repertoire of war crimes the mass execution of 15 paramedics and humanitarian relief workers attempting to rescue Palestinians from the rubble to which Gaza has been reduced by the 2,000-pound bombs dropped in Israeli air strikes on residential neighborhoods for the past eighteen months.  With Netanyahu’s total blockade having prevented humanitarian aid trucks from entering Gaza for the past 50 days, the deliberate starvation of the population has become another weapon in Israel’s genocidal arsenal. As UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X, “Hunger is spreading & deepening, deliberate & manmade.  Two million people:  a majority of women & children are undergoing collective punishment.”

Continue reading “The Jewish Prison, Part Four: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine from the U.N. Partition to the Founding of the State of Israel” →

(A note to readers.  For the historical summary that follows, my main sources, unless otherwise noted, are Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2021, and A History of Modern Palestine, 2006, as supplemented and ratified by Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the Arab-Israeli War, 2008, and Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 2020.)

Competing Narratives

Since 1948, the historicity of the canonical narrative of the Zionist movement, as its aspirations were reified in the founding of the modern state of Israel, has been uncritically accepted, to say the least, in both the United States (whose mainstream media, and political and cultural institutions have been ventriloquized by the propaganda of the Israel Lobby for at least sixty years), and in a post-war Europe perennially struggling to dispel the miasma of the Holocaust.  That narrative has largely reckoned without the indigenous Arab population of Palestine.  (As Golda Meir once put it, with self-blinding hauteur, “There was no such thing as Palestinians.”)

Continue reading “The Jewish Prison, Part Three: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, from Zionist Origins to the End of the British Mandate” →

Throughout history, every political movement, tribe, nation, and empire has invented its own foundational narrative, a confabulation of historical fact, archetypal mythic motives, and overt propaganda.  Near the beginning of the Augustan Age, Virgil’s Aeneid provided the nascent Roman Empire with its own (forgive the redundancy) august prehistory, identifying as its progenitor the Trojan prince and demigod Aeneas, who fled his fallen city and with his fellow exiles was guided by divine providence across land and sea to the Italian region of Latium–as anciently preordained, according to Virgil, by Jupiter’s promise to Dardanos, the forefather of Troy.  Notably, Virgil’s myth pushed Roman origins back another 400 years before the traditional date of the Rome’s founding in 753 B.C. by the twin sons of Mars, Romulus and Remus.

Modern political movements and the polities engendered by them are no less avid to authenticate themselves as divinely ordained, or at least the product of same esoteric historical dialectic.  Beginning at the end of the 16^th century, Zionists (both Jewish and Protestant Christian) were already predicating the legitimacy of a modern state of Israel on the promise made by Yahweh to Abraham (ca. 1800 B.C.) and reaffirmed to Joshua (ca. 1250) prior to the conquest of Canaan.  (Indeed, for centuries following the Reformation, a number of radical Protestant millennialist sects, interpreting Old Testament history literally and in contradiction to the Christian soteriology and eschatology of the preceding 1600 years, argued that the restoration of a Jewish state in the Holy Land, in belated obedience to God’s promise to Abraham, was a prerequisite for the Parousia.)

Continue reading “The Jewish Prison (Part Two):  Biblical Atavisms, Holocaust Guilt, and Christian Zionist Fallacies” →

 

I take my title from that of a brilliant monograph (The Jewish Prison:  A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism, 2005), by the renowned French journalist and intellectual, Jean Daniel, who was the editor of the weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur from 1964 until his death in 2020.  In that moving lament for his people, Daniel diagnoses the morbid psychological and intellectual self-subjugation of the Jewish people to an ethos of victimhood, separatism, and moral and racial supremacy—rooted, as I will argue, in the primitive Old Testament ancestral mythos of the ancient Hebrews — and within whose walls they continue to be shackled to the  atavistic notion of the Chosen People, an obsession with Holocaust remembrance, and a reflexive apologia for the modern state of Israel that has anaesthetized them to the sufferings of the Palestinians.  As Omar Bartov (Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University) has observed more recently, every threat, however minor, to Israel’s original determination to cleanse the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants in Greater Israel or its imperial ambitions in the region has been described by its government (and the U.S. Israel Lobby) as “existential”, and the prelude to another Holocaust — the apotropaic specter of which has been used to justify its military’s brutal retaliations, and rendered its population morally insensible to the miseries it has inflicted upon its Palestinian Arab subjects.

In what follows, I cannot hope to improve upon the reflections of Daniel, Bartov, Norman Finklestein, and the many other authorities on the conflict on whom I have gratefully depended, beyond dilating upon them from my own, reductively personal perspective, and my own lifelong study of ancient religious ideas.  My method may strike readers as backwards:  that is, to begin with present events, before seeking what can only be a tentative and provisional aetiology in the more recent and ancient past.

 

Part One.  A “Lunatic State”: The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza

Continue reading “The Jewish Prison (Part One)” →

Test.

The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.

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We will not forget … our Constitution, and we will not forget our God.

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With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate…

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I will end the practice of catch and release.  And I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.

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After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.

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Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.

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Under my leadership, we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.

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And we are going to bring law and order back to our cities.

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This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.  We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.

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As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.

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This week, I will reinstate any service members who were unjustly expelled from our military for objecting to the COVID vaccine mandate with full back pay.

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When, since the turn of the millennium, has anyone heard such a sustained and frontal repudiation of the sacred articles of progressive orthodoxy from a world leader (with the exception, perhaps, of Giorgia Meloni, Victor Orban, or the “authoritarian” Vladimir Putin)?

For social conservatives, believers in freedom of opinion and speech, and adherents of equal and impartial justice—all of whom have been diabolized, legally harassed, and politically banished to the wilderness for the past two decades—the 47^th President’s inaugural address should have uplifted the spirit like the ethereal descants of Allegri’s Miserere.

Continue reading “An Inaugural Address Like Never Before (Really), and a “Sermon” That Is More of the Same” →

With Trump’s virtual landslide victory, we may finally be “unburdened by what has been,” as the long, progressive totalitarian nightmare that began with Obama’s “transformational” presidency may, at last, be coming to an end.  It is probably too much to hope that Kamala Harris will de-transition from a “black female” (her dual intersectional qualifications for office) to just one more of the millions of Americans of mixed race; from her chameleonic southern preacher revival meetin’ drawl, Detroit jive-talk, and Jamaican patois, to her normal college-educated mid-Atlantic accent; or from a “working class” victim of systemic American sexism and white supremacism to the wealthy child of privilege that she has always been.

Continue reading “Trump’s Garbage Cleans House” →

What follows is a revised and updated version of an essay first posted on Priceton nearly two decades ago.  I justify this act of self-plagiarism by the fact that the progressive juggernaut has not changed, except in its fanaticism and exponential acceleration towards the totalitarian abyss.

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I have often been asked by my most admiring students, in the most perplexed and plaintive tones, why I am a conservative—a position that evidently makes me an intellectual leper. I have tried to explain to them that modern-day conservatism is really the heir to classical liberalism, modern-day liberalism having shifted inexorably leftward toward supine statism since the 1960s, and, after the turn of the millennium, embarking on its long march toward the fanatical post-modernist progressive theocracy under which we now groan.  (As Robert Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly observed, it was not he who left the Democrat Party, but the Party that left him—a Party that his father and uncle would scarcely recognize today.)

Continue reading ““McCarthyism,” Then and Now” →

After lecturing on Plato’s Symposium at my august university in the early 2000s (that is, when student safe zones, trigger warnings, and cancel culture were still in their infancy; though they persist in maintaining students in a state of infantilism), I received an email from the English Department’s interim Chairman who hired me to answer an accusation from a student that I was “homophobic.”  My first reply, intentionally sarcastic, was that I suffered from no irrational fear of homosexuals or homosexuality.  I say “intentionally” because at the beginning of the year, the incumbent Chair—I use the gender-neutral language here only because as a lecturer he was regularly described by his students as “wooden”—had the patronizing temerity to warn us new hires that students (and we’re talking about English majors here!) “wouldn’t get irony.”  Thus I felt impelled to see if one of their professors could himself detect it. He didn’t.  My second, non-ironic response was that I ventured no moral judgment on the subject except to read the passages in Plato in which he condemned it, thereby, apparently, “triggering” my accuser.

Continue reading “The Olympic “Last Supper”: A “New Gay Testament”” →

What follows was recently published in The Wanderer, a traditional Catholic newspaper that comes out (in print!) every week–the oldest continuously published Catholic journal in the United States, in fact, to which I contribute a column once a month.  Readers will, I hope, forgive me if they recognize this as a severely abridged, slightly amended, (and possibly even improved) version of an essay posted on Priceton some time ago.

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In the last few decades, it seems, everyone has discovered a recipe for happiness, from Hugh Hefner to Madonna to Deepak Chopra, to the cannabis retailers one now sees on every street corner; from the self-righteous torchers of cities to the anatomical male rapists who self-identify as females in order to get sent to women’s prisons.  Oh the joys of the examined life!  But it doesn’t take much thought to recognize that it is only ideological snake oil that they are trying to sell.  Given the popularity of these and other ethical and religious quacks and charlatans, it is almost impossible to persuade people, especially today’s enrollees in Self-Esteem University, that the ancients, the deadest of the dead white males, had something rather valuable to say on the question of how to live rewarding and meaningful lives. Continue reading “Happiness Among the Ruins (II)” →