Thursday, February 20, 2025
From Ian:
Their Time Is Up
Their Time Is Up
Enough with the sophistry about international laws and human rights. The crucibles in which these ideas were forged, raging with the fires of century-old conflicts, have now cooled down and crumbled. To pretend as if we must now take seriously a torrent of treaties long after the framework guaranteeing their efficacy—if such a framework ever existed in earnest—is sheer lunacy. We’ve seen the United Nations. We’ve seen the International Court of Justice. We’ve seen the Red Cross. To take any of these decrepit and callous concubines of evildoers seriously is not an option any morally or intellectually serious person should ever entertain.Seth Mandel: The Great Erasure Is Here
Enough also with the insufferable ululations about Jewish morality and its arc which somehow always bends towards having mercy on the monsters who devour our children. As my dear friend and teacher Rabbi Meir Soloveichik noted in a celebrated article more than two decades ago, hate, too, is a Jewish virtue. The very next holiday on the Jewish calendar, in fact, Purim, is a celebration of the time, long ago, when Jews arose and dispensed with 75,000 of their pursuers, realizing that justice meant not only reversing Haman’s evil decree but forcing all those who were only too eager to partake in the slaughter to face the consequences of their actions. Like them, we, too, are fighting millions of little Hamans, murderous marauders who will grow emboldened the more we offer them mercy.
Which brings us back to earth, to the realm of the real, the practical, and the political. President Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza of its inhabitants is, if we’re honest, more merciful than any Gazan deserves, offering the savages who heard Kfir Bibas sob without showing a shred of basic human decency the one thing that precious baby will never have—a chance of a good and peaceful life elsewhere. Nevertheless, we must embrace this proposal, because at its heart is the one true and inescapable sentiment: Israelis can no longer be expected to live in proximity to those who desire nothing more than their death.
Negotiating with some other Palestinian group won’t do: The PLO, the PFLP, et al are merely a different shade of murderous. Nor is there much value to the fantasy that the same patient reeducation that cleansed so many Germans of the Nazi inflammation might work in Gaza, too. Gazans aren’t, as some Pollyannish accounts would have us believe, long-suffering innocents who had the misfortune of living through decades of Hamas indoctrination; they’re faithful adherents of a stern interpretation of a still-young religion who believe there is glory in putting the enemies of God to the sword. We can, and should, respect their fierce heart. We can, and must, insist that their hands be nowhere near our necks.
Sadly, Israel is showing a growing lack of resolve which is no longer possible to ignore or explain away as some clever bit of tactical genius. Is it possible that Bibi Netanyahu is playing a very long game of five-dimensional chess with the world, holding out on the real prize, which is smiting the regime in Iran? Maybe! But meanwhile, closer to home, nothing is done. A few days ago, a very wise friend wrote to share this startling thought: for the past 18 months, we’ve all listened to Israel’s best and brightest, including Netanyahu himself, go on the sort of podcasts beloved by the self-appointed best and brightest of the American Jewish community, saying that if only they had the proper American support, they would’ve waged a very different war against Hamas.
Now, American support is manifest. Now, an American president possessing uncommon moral clarity and candor is advocating for the opening of the gates of hell. And rather than live up to a year of tough talk, Israel equivocates, looking weak, wounded, and confused. Those exploding beepers were a marvel. The killing of Nasrallah was a thing of beauty. But you don’t win wars and secure the peace with a sprinkling of daring commando acts or a dash of excellent air raids. You win wars and secure the peace by making your enemy realize that they had lost, and in the Middle East, as anyone who has ever consulted a history book could tell you, that means only one thing: seizing land.
Israel, then, must annex Judea and Samaria right now, if only to appear as certain of its right to its ancestral homeland as, say, Senator Tom Cotton. It must enthusiastically advocate for Trump’s plan, or some other arrangement that leaves Gaza empty of Gazans. It must take one long look at Kfir Bibas’ coffin and realize precisely what happens when evil is met with too many clever arguments and not enough swift deeds.
Hennigan notes that the word “Mossad,” which is in Sabra’s backstory, isn’t mentioned in the movie. He doubted she’d even be back in another film and observed that “Unless Trump also takes over Marvel Studios, Sabra is definitely not getting her own movie.”Stephen Pollard: ‘For Peter Beinart, focusing on the right of Jews to be secure from terrorists is immoral’
A couple points here. First, the comics industry was built by Jews. Everyone making movies about comic-book heroes, and raking in the dough from ticket prices and licensing agreements, is doing so on the backs of the Jews who made it possible. As has been noted, “Jews created the first comic book, the first graphic novel, the first comic book convention, the first comic book specialty store, and they helped create the underground comics (or ‘Comix’) movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Many of the creators of the most famous comic books, such as Superman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Batman, as well as the founders of MAD magazine, were Jewish.”
Is this the “cultural genocide” I’ve heard so much about from smug college kids? It must be.
Indeed, the founder of Marvel Studios itself is Israeli, though Avi Arad left the company two decades ago, before it was bought by Disney. The current president of Marvel Studios is Kevin Feige, and it is safe to say he knows exactly what he’s doing. Nothing in a Marvel Studios production is an accident; every detail is intentional.
A second facet to this, one buried in the details but interesting to ponder nonetheless, was discussed by a writer for Gizmodo. The piece regurgitates long-debunked Hamas propaganda about the conflict, though the flip side of that coin is that the writer is therefore fairly straightforward in justifying the Sabra hate.
The writer notes that at one point the comics made sure to show Sabra expressing guilt over harming innocent Palestinians. “But in the years since that issue, as Sabra was moved even more specifically in the direction of being a supportive agent of the Israeli state, her reconciling with her duty and her nation’s ongoing persecution of the Palestinian people all but vanished, even as international criticism of Israel’s government has grown.”
That is, Sabra was problematic because she wasn’t entirely a symbol of Jewish guilt. “While many of Marvel’s national heroes have worked with their governments at times in their careers, Sabra was introduced as not just Israel’s national hero, but an agent of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. That gave her an explicit connection to the actions of the Israeli government that, if anything, Sabra… has been pushed further and further into embracing after she was first introduced.”
Sabra, then, is a patriotic Israeli. She’s a hero, but only to those who believe the Jews deserve same rights to self-determination and security as everyone else. Which is, apparently, not many people in Marvel Studios’ target audience.
That has been given full rein in his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. This is a book that not only need never have been written but that does not need to be read.
Its most obvious pointlessness is that it is simply boring, a predictable regurgitation of every slander against Israel. We get ethnic cleansing, apartheid, massacres and all the usual stuff. Why bother with Beinart when this is the everyday diet of the media? Beinart jazzes it up with a rant against anyone even vaguely associated with speaking up for Israel in the wake of the October 7 massacre. If that sounds repulsive, it is because it is. Beinart goes through the motions of condemning what happened on October 7 but spends far longer attacking those who have stood up for Israel since then. As he writes at the start, in his “note to my former friend”: “I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating.” Think about that for a second (because that is all it is worth). For Beinart, focusing on the right of Jews to be secure from terrorists is “immoral”.
If you’re worried about the impact on Jews of having to live alongside Palestinians in a single state – if you’re worried, that is, that they would be slaughtered – then don’t be, because Beinart says it worked in South Africa so it will work in the new not-Israel state. And that’s it. That is the entire basis on which he thinks the world should take the leap into deciding that the Jews no longer need a state.
Actually, that’s not quite it because we are all wrong to have noticed an increase in antisemitism since October 7. It hasn’t happened. We know this because Beinart asserts it, and he is so much wiser than the rest of us. Chants of ‘from the river to the sea’ are “ironic” because “there already is a country that extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan”. Oh, clever point! It’s not about Jew hate at all but rather is used by those crafty Zionists: “Labelling the slogan antisemitic — even genocidally antisemitic — turns public attention away from how Israel is treating Palestinians now, especially in Gaza, and redirects attention toward how Palestinians might treat Jews were they in charge. It replaces the actual subjugation that Palestinians experience as an oppressed people with the theoretical subjugation that Jews might experience were the shoe on the other foot.”
Beinart uses the same logic to defend usage of the phrase “intifada” and other slogans such as, “when people are occupied, resistance is justified”. Indeed for Beinart the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” is actually worse and more threatening than “intifada” or “resistance is justified.”
Perhaps one should feel sorry for Beinart, who is so consumed in his loathing of Israel that he appears to have lost all sense. He writes that spraying anti-Zionist graffiti on the walls of an Israeli embassy and a synagogue are equally fine because “they are both, in their essence, Zionist institutions.” Despite him insisting that Zionism is entirely separate to Judaism, a synagogue is nonetheless a “Zionist institution”. Go figure.
But in any case, none of this is antisemitic, he maintains, just as nothing we have seen on campus since October 7 is about Jews: “The data is clear: the vast majority of campus progressives distinguish between Jews and Israel.”
But how can one feel sorry for someone who now devotes his life to spreading such calumnies about Israel, about Jews, and about those who speak up for Israel and Jews. As for whether to shake Beinart’s hand: would you?
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