Friday, December 30, 2022
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The religious culture war comes to Israel
Melanie Phillips: The religious culture war comes to Israel
Far from creating a liberal, tolerant society, progressive ideologies are profoundly illiberal and coercive. Far from producing the brotherhood of mankind, left-wing universalism sets group against group in a battle for power over each other.David Collier: How the Twittersphere spreads antisemitism
A constitutional monarchy, such as exists in Britain, promotes unity because it exists above politics and therefore above division. This was the great insight of King David, who unified the tribes of ancient Israel to form a coherent nation and whose limited monarchy was the inspiration and template for the British Crown.
King Charles’s patent desire to bring the British people together has transformed him from a figure widely disparaged and distrusted as cold and remote into a person viewed affectionately as the benign and genial grandfather of the nation.
The State of Israel, of course, doesn’t have a monarchy. Nor does America, which is being pulled apart over these cultural issues.
For all the unifying strength of the monarchy he represents, however, King Charles is actually in a lonely and perilous position. For the prevailing culture in Britain is actively undermining the religious continuity he realizes is essential.
No political party in Britain is prepared to face down and defeat the culture warriors writing women and conservatives out of the public sphere. No party is prepared to stop children being taught the lie that Britain and the West were born in the original sins of colonialism and oppression. No party is prepared to conserve and defend the classical liberal settlement underpinning freedom, tolerance and democracy. And no party is prepared to challenge radical, pagan environmentalism—to which the King, with his belief in the spiritual unity of all creation, is unfortunately also deeply attached.
In America, the parallel collapse of conservatives’ understanding of what was at risk and needed to be defended led to the implosion of the Republican Party and the rise to power in 2016 of Donald Trump as the only way to defeat the cultural predations of the left.
In Israel, the collapse of the moderate, religious Yamina Party meant that those who believe the combination of Jewish religious integrity with a modern economy, scientific advancement and the duties of citizenship is crucial to Israel’s identity and survival were left with no political representation.
They have been presented instead with a stark choice between religious zealots in one camp and left-wingers in the other screaming about the end of democracy while urging insurrection against an elected democratic government—and with Netanyahu holding the line against the extremism on either side.
Considering the way Netanyahu has been characterized as beyond the pale, this is indeed an irony. He and King Charles, it turns out, have something rather crucial in common.
We all know that Jew-hate spreads in the Twittersphere, but nobody touches on how much of it is there. Nor do people draw comparisons between the level of ‘anti’ activity, and the level of ‘pro’ that seeks to answer it.Facts most Arabs and a hostile world would rather not admit
As a quintessential minority group, Jews are drowned out on social media, and because these platforms operate on algorithms that reward ‘popularity’, Jewish people are on a loser from the start. Networks of hate even gang up to have Jews removed from the platform.
‘Zioporn’ addicts. Thousands of accounts in the Twittersphere that indulge their ‘kink’ by watching, liking, or sharing, either fake or butchered images that demonise Israel or Israelis. The more gruesome the image, the better the high. Authenticity is irrelevant. The ‘happy ending’ normally involves a tweeted utterance of disgust or outrage directed towards the state of Israel, or those that support it.
In a world which contains brutal regimes that slaughter millions, this tweet (posted 28/12 at 2:28am) suggests Israel is the ‘most despicable’ nation on earth:
A Twittersphere snapshot
I wanted a snapshot. Analysing a period on Twitter and then quantifying the output that was found. Such an exercise would also allow me to draw a comparison with the way other nations are treated on social media – showing just how exceptional (and therefore antisemitic) the anti-Israel rhetoric is.
I took a 36-hour period, from midnight on the 28 Dec, to noon on the 29th. Only two search terms were used. As nobody has any interest in a troll spamming his way to 100 dormant anti-Israel tweets a day, I set a bar for a minimum number of retweets. This ensured that only the hate that travelled was tallied.
I was complimented some time ago by a reader of one of my earlier published articles, titled, Lies, Myths and Obama, which dealt – as many of them do – with the history of Israel and its enemies: Biblical and post-Biblical.
I had included in the article the following sentence: “Only one people has ever made Jerusalem its capital and only one people ever established their ancestral and Biblical homeland between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea: the Jews.”
I had also added that: “the Jews were the indigenous inhabitants of the Land for millennia long before the Muslim religion was created.”
The reader, nevertheless, had correctly pointed out that most people, because they have been exposed for so long to anti-Israel Arab propaganda, believe that there has not been a continuous Jewish presence in the Land during the last 2,000 years. They are thus unaware that the territory was never Judenrein (that is empty of a Jewish presence). And most Arabs and a hate filled world would rather you forget also that Jews lived for millennia in Mesopotamia or what became later known as British created Iraq.
Indeed, Jews had resided for nearly 3,000 years in that territory from the Babylonian Captivity in 586 BCE onwards. It was when Israel was reborn in 1948 that the Iraqi Arabs drove the Jews from their ancient homes, turning them into penniless refugees who found sanctuary in Israel; an impoverished country barely able to support them at the time.
More Jewish refugees were created than Arab refugees as one Arab state after another in the Middle East and North Africa drove out their Jewish populations. A monumental crime, which hardly is ever recognized.
Arabs and their anti-Israel supporters try to convince the world that the Jews just appeared in the early 20th century after being dispersed for two thousand years from their Biblical homeland. That is a flat out lie and flies in the face of recorded history. Indeed the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians do not even acknowledge ancient Biblical Jewish history ever existed. But facts never seem to matter to Arabs and pro-Arabs. So this brief history lesson will be for them an inconvenient truth.
Let me start by quoting from an article written in The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998 by Charles Krauthammer:
"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,500 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one today advertising ice cream at an Israeli corner candy store."
