Monday, May 05, 2025
From Ian:
A Comma in the Blood
A Comma in the Blood
How Natalia Ginzburg’s doctrine of ‘universal compassion’ empowered the exhausted morality of our times, in which it is both easier and more righteous to side with the losersGadi Taub: Benjamin Netanyahu vs. Edward Said: The global war against woke ideas
This was Ginzburg’s mindset when she sat down to write “The Jews,” and it helps explain why she refers to the members of Black September, who carried out the massacre, as “guerrillas” rather than terrorists. (In this, she foretells the practice of news agencies such as the BBC and CBC to label Hamas terrorists, “militants.”)
Ginzburg begins her piece with a truism: When a tragedy happens in the world, we find ourselves considering how we would have acted if we had the power to do so. “If I were Golda Meir, I would have acquiesced to the guerrillas’ demands. … If I were the head of the German police, I would have let the guerrillas escape.” As for the guerrillas, Ginzburg describes their state of mind as “inhuman desperation.” They exist in a “stone desert,” where the “usual sentiments disappear” and where “the guilty and the innocent no longer exist.” These desperate ones, devoid of “hatred, scorn, or pity,” are “imbued with a power impossible to reach with our voices.”
The second part of her essay is far more interesting and revealing. She begins with the affirmation “I am Jewish” and continues, “When I heard about the Munich massacre, I thought: Once again they’ve killed people of my blood … but when I thought it, I felt contempt for myself. … I don’t believe in the least that Jews have blood different from that of others. I don’t believe there are blood divisions.”
Realignment of thought becomes her overwhelming project: “As a child, I inhaled the idea that the Jews were superior to others.” Such thoughts, she states, “are flaws of our education,” and so she asks us, as adults, “to remove these tattoos from our souls.” As for the Jews of Israel: “I thought they were superior to the Arabs. … Then, at a certain point, I found this idea monstrous. I tried to rip it from my mind and stamp it out.”
Ginzburg’s reeducation leads to the following: “After the war, we loved and pitied the Jews who went to Israel. … They’d survived an extermination and had nowhere to go. … We loved them for their fragility, their weary gait, and their shoulders weighed down by fear. … We had hoped that they would be a small, cozy, powerless country.”
This is shockingly naive and only to be matched by her romanticizing of Arabs as “poor peasants and shepherds.” Her conclusion is to be expected if one has followed her train of thought from “Universal Compassion”: “The only choice available to us is to be on the side of those who die or suffer unjustly. … I don’t want to be on the side of those who use weapons, money, and culture to oppress peasants and shepherds.”
Netanyahu’s mission is not, of course, to argue the fine points of queer theory or to point out the contradictions in the late Palestinian-American activist professor Edward Said’s teachings. But his instinct for calling out cultural and moral relativism goes right to the heart of the problem.Bassam Tawil: What Are Palestinians Really Interested In?
“This is not a clash of civilizations,” he told Congress, alluding to Samuel Huntington’s popular book. “It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”
Framing the war in this way and calling barbarism by name, Netanyahu set out to overthrow a worldview, not just an opinion. His call was for the restoration of our immune systems, so that we may regain moral clarity and be able to tell right from wrong. His speech was the virtual opposite of the worldview expounded in Cairo on June 4, 2009 by Said’s most influential disciple—Barack Hussein Obama.
Obama’s own disciples were still at the helm when Netanyahu spoke to Congress. He could not say this explicitly, but he must have been fully aware that he was asking the world’s greatest superpowers to jettison Obama’s woke moral compass and reverse course. It thus fell to the leader of a small country to call America, and the West as a whole, to its senses.
“For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together,” he said, adding Ronald Reagan’s famous Cold War quip: “Because when we stand together, something very simple happens—we win, they lose.”
Despite the standing ovation he received from senators and House representatives, Netanyahu was facing an administration that refused to rise to the challenge, or even to call evil by name. It was not only trying to appease the barbarians; it was even refusing to call them that.
It is high time we bring back truth to our language. The word “barbarism” must be returned to our lexicon if we are to understand the meaning of the war in the Middle East as well as almost every central aspect of politics—domestic and foreign—in every Western democracy.
The question isn’t whether the term does or does not give us a clue as to the alleged residual racism of those who use it. It is not a misnomer designed to excuse Western domination over innocent victims. It is an accurate, truthful description of powerful enemies who mean it when they say they are out to destroy Western civilization.
It fell to Israel not only to fight these barbarians for its own survival, but also to wake the West up from its woke dreams, and exhort it to return to itself. We Israelis are not the unpleasant remnant of your guilty past. We are the key to your future survival. That was the deeper meaning of Netanyahu’s speech.
Not all values are created equal. We will not be able to defend ours if we continue to use Obama-era sanitized language and talk of “radical extremism,” instead of calling the terrorists of Hamas, the Pakistani grooming gangs in Britain, the Muslim murderers of Charlie Hebdo journalists in France or the assassin of gay director Theo Van Gogh in Holland by the name that describes them truthfully: jihadi barbarians. Foes of humanism. Enemies of liberalism and democracy.
This is not all theory. Israel is now fighting not only against a military enemy. It is also waging a simultaneous culture war against a constellation of lopsided “human rights” organizations, think tanks and NGOs, biased international tribunals, woke newspapers, “progressive” media outlets and social-media platforms, corrupt universities and peace processors who are trying to tie our hands.
We need to openly defy them. We need to go on the offensive and destroy their moral credibility. Above all, we need to win on the battlefield despite their best efforts to stop us, because it is crucial not only for Israel’s exitance. It is also essential to demonstrate that democracies can defend themselves. That they will not let their moralizing elites turn their own values against them, demanding in effect surrender to the barbarians.
We cannot desert our values by pretending to adhere to them more scrupulously. Israel must now prove that the West can be diverted from the path of cultural suicide.
We are now the West’s boots on the ground, in the cultural war as well.
"These fires put both Israelis and Palestinians at risk and are causing severe damage to the land these terrorists claim to be fighting for. These people are not pro-Palestinian, they are pro-terrorism against Jews." — Bassem Eid, Palestinian human rights activist, X, April 30, 2025
Decades of anti-Israel propaganda by Palestinian leaders and media outlets are directly responsible for this hatred. For that reason, any talk about a peace process with the Palestinians has unfortunately become nothing but a sick joke.
Palestinians are far more interested in murdering Jews and setting Israel on fire than they are in "coexisting." They do not want Israel "coexisting" on even one millimeter of the Jews' own historical homeland.
The world needs to realize that the Palestinians have raised a whole generation that worships destruction and death for the Jews -- and even for themselves -- far more than a better and prosperous life.
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