“In light of what is happening now in Israel, I’ve decided to repost “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people” which I first ran on January 2, 2016.
I’m running it again because I’ve seen a number of comments here and elsewhere, that boil down to: “it’s not our problem.” I disagree. What happens in the Middle East, or Europe, or elsewhere with our close allies is our problem – what we do about it is a different matter. Something being our problem doesn’t mean we have to invade and occupy another country, we could decide to do nothing or something less than going to war. But pretending “it’s not our problem” is just pretending. The war against the Jews is also the war against the Christians – the U.S. is the “Great Satan” to the Islamists, and Israel is the Little Satan.
Anyway, here’s the post, again:”
I’m surprised I had not heard the phrase in the title of this post before today.
Though I’m certainly familiar with the concept, it’s one we’ve explored here many times when discussing (i) that the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the inability of Muslims to accept any non-Muslim entity in the Middle East, but particularly not a Jewish national entity; (b) the plight of Christians in the Middle East who are on the receiving end of what would happen to the Jews in Israel if Israel ever lost a war; and (c) the Islamist-Leftist anti-Israel coalition, in which useful Western leftists are oblivous (at best, giving them the benefit of the doubt) to the threat they would be under if forced to live under the rule of their coalition partners as they demand of Israeli Jews.
I got to the phrase in a round-about way. First, I saw Martin Kramer’s Tweet linking to his Facebook post:
Exactly 40 years ago, Commentary published Bernard Lewis’s landmark article, “The Return of Islam.” Remember, in January 1976, the Shah was still firmly on his throne, the Muslim Brothers were nowhere to be seen, and there was no Hamas, Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda. So how did Lewis discern the “return”? He saw that regimes, including secular ones, were beginning to invoke Islam. This, he surmised, must be a reaction to a more profound trend. Perhaps the most prescient article ever written about the Middle East.
Then I read through (skimmed parts) of Lewis’ Commentary article, The Return of Islam (Jan. 1, 1976), which is quite long.
The central thesis of the article is that the West completely misunderstands the nature of the conflict, seeking to put it in the types of “left” and “right” disputes that dominate Western politics:
“…. one finds special correspondents of the New York Times and of other lesser newspapers describing the current conflicts in Lebanon in terms of right-wing and left-wing factions. As medieval Christian man could only conceive of religion in terms of a trinity, so his modern descendant can only conceive of politics in terms of a theology or, as we now say, ideology, of left-wing and right-wing forces and factions.
This recurring unwillingness to recognize the nature of Islam or even the fact of Islam as an independent, different, and autonomous religious phenomenon persists and recurs from medieval to modern times….Modern Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to conceive that any other peoples in any other place could have done so, and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations of what seemed to him only superficially religious phenomena….
To the modern Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight and die in such numbers over mere differences of religion; there have to be some other “genuine” reasons underneath the religious veil….This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and the rest of the Western terminology…. “
I’m not going to try to summarize the rest of the article. Read it.
The article seems relevant to the ideological war on Israel by Western leftists who view “the occupation” as the sole and overarching reason for the conflict; they can’t admit what historian Benny Morris finally acknowledged about the Arab refusal to accept Israel’s independence — it was primarily a religious war against the Jews, not a territorial war (emphasis added):
“What I discovered in the documentation relating to the war, at least from the Arab side, was that the war had a religious character, that the central element in the war was an imperative to launch jihad. There were other imperatives of course, political and others—but the most important from the enemy’s perspective was the element of the infidels who had the nerve to take control over sacred Muslim lands and the need to uproot them from there. The decisive majority in the Arab world saw the war first and foremost as a holy war, but until today historians have not examined the documentation that proves this. In my view, they have also ignored Arab rhetoric of the day, which universally included religious hatred against the Jews, because they thought the Arabs adopted this as normal speech that did not emanate from deep mental resources. They thought this was something superficial, that everyone talked like this. But I am positive the Arab spokesmen in 1948 did go beyond this and clearly and explicitly talked about jihad.”
And it remains so today. David Collier has a brilliant take-down of the leftist Jewish “theoretical Zionist.” Read the whole thing, here is an excerpt:
It cannot be said often enough or strongly enough that Israel is at war. Not a theoretical ‘cold war’ but a real battle, a battle that they cannot afford to lose. Israel is only there today because the IDF is strong. Can you imagine if Israel was protected by extreme left wing ‘Zionists’? This is why Israel has lost campus, because its international diplomatic corp – the Zionists- have been duped into giving platforms and status to people who do not like the Zionist state. How do you defend something you don’t like very much? When someone from one of these left wing groups argues against BDS, how can they win? The position they put forward doesn’t even exist beyond a dreamlike theory of a Middle East that is disintegrating before Islamic radicalism as I write. Remember, almost every one of these people would have wanted Israel to give up the Golan in the 1990’s. Today, had they been given their wish, ISIS would be on the shores of the Kinneret.
But it was the opening sentence of the final paragraph of Lewis’ article that caught my eye and gave rise to this post (emphasis added):
In the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, an ominous phrase was sometimes heard, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” The Saturday people have proved unexpectedly recalcitrant, and recent events in Lebanon indicate that the priorities may have been reversed. Fundamentally, the same issue arises in both Palestine and Lebanon, though the circumstances that complicate the two situations are very different. The basic question is this: Is a resurgent Islam prepared to tolerate a non-Islamic enclave, whether Jewish in Israel or Christian in Lebanon, in the heart of the Islamic world? The current fascination among Muslims with the history of the Crusades, the vast literature on the subject, both academic and popular, and the repeated inferences drawn from the final extinction of the Crusading principalities throw some light on attitudes in this matter. Islam from its inception is a religion of power, and in the Muslim world view it is right and proper that power should be wielded by Muslims and Muslims alone. Others may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy. That Muslims should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal.9 That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God and nature, and this is true whether in Kashmir, Palestine, Lebanon, or Cyprus. Here again, it must be recalled that Islam is not conceived as a religion in the limited Western sense but as a community, a loyalty, and a way of life—and that the Islamic community is still recovering from the traumatic era when Muslim governments and empires were overthrown and Muslim peoples forcibly subjected to alien, infidel rule. Both the Saturday people and the Sunday people are now suffering the consequences.
I’ve never expressed an opinion or view of Islam as a religion, for the same reason I’ve never expressed an opinion or view on Christianity or Hinduism or other religions as religions — I don’t claim any expertise and casual conceptions of any religion can be wrong.
But you don’t need to be an expert on Islam to understand how Islam is practiced as a political matter in many parts of the world, and particularly in the Middle East. You only need to be able to read the news and to listen to what the Islamists tell us they want and intend on doing.”
“As we watch the horrific images of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli citizens, there is no mistaking the face of evil.
This is brutality on a scale most of us here in America have never witnessed – the rapes of women who are dragged through the streets to cheers. Babies murdered in their cribs — beheaded — fathers shot while trying to help their families escape—charred remains of still-smoking corpses in gardens, doorways, and cars.
For the past three years, our government has lied to us about what happened on January 6th. The Vice President stood before us and compared a riot at the Capitol to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
Had I never crawled out of my own feedback loop, I’d never have known they were lying because I, too, would have been locked in my home, terrified of either COVID or Trump supporters. I would have been grateful our government brought the hammer down and told millions of Americans that they were no longer welcome in their own country because a small mob of them lost their minds chasing an irrational fantasy that they could stop the certification of the vote and save this country from an oligarchal monopoly that now controls it.
Whatever January 6th was, we know for sure what it wasn’t. It wasn’t 9/11. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t October 7th in Israel. And the whole world was watching us pretend that it was. We looked like a fragile nation suddenly, one MAGA flag away from our government being overthrown.
Why would they, our president and vice president, not to mention Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, General Mark Milley, and countless talking heads in media, want us to believe that January 6th was like 9/11 in the first place? Why would they think we would believe such an egregious lie?
Because they knew the power of fear, they knew that the first “war on terror” was still-standing architecture, and why not use it to intimidate, harass, monitor, and “investigate” Trump supporters, especially those who put on a red hat and protested in DC on January 6th.
The first “war on terror” boosted Bush’s poll numbers and handed our government unlimited power to police and surveil its citizens. What better way to help stamp out Trump and MAGA than a new “war on terror?”
After sabotaging Trump’s candidacy meant to hand Hillary Clinton the win in 2016, we watched for the first time the administrative state and the monopolies of power attempt to discredit, destroy, and remove a sitting president. Then, we watched them betray our faith and our trust by forming an alliance to ensure Trump lost in 2020.
They would need the media to gaslight the public about everything from masks to COVID to lockdowns to the violence in the Summer of 2020. They would need lawyers to change any law that made it harder to ballot harvest with the $1 billion in dark money they had to play with. As lockdowns suddenly vanished, they would need an army of activists to turn America into a war zone for a few months. Now, it was perfectly okay to party and protest, body to body, fluids flying all over the country and world.
Then they would need doctors to insist protesting was “more important” than COVID because “systemic racism” had afflicted our country since its founding. Then, they would need military professionals to shut down Trump’s attempts at bringing in the military.
The Democrats would hold their convention, look us directly in the eye, and lie about the protests without mentioning the police and what they just endured even once. It seemed to me then that Barack Obama lied, Kamala Harris lied, Hillary Clinton lied, Joe Biden lied. What threatens you, they said, is the radical, racist Trump supporter.
Trump was not a lawyer or a politician. It was easy for lawyers and politicians to trip him up, to “find things” he did wrong. Nearly every one of his alleged “crimes” has been verbal, things he said, flapping his gums, agitating, taunting, and teasing them. He was showing Americans that you could still exercise free speech in a country that had become oppressive in its demands of what all of us could say, think, and do.
So why would they then need to compare January 6th to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor after Joe Biden took power? Because they didn’t just want to remove Trump. They needed to stamp out the grassroots movement known as MAGA, too.
They wanted Americans to understand, in no uncertain terms, that only some people in this country are allowed to protest violently. If you’re on that side you will be funded, supported, defended, and encouraged. If you’re not, you will be called a “fascist,” a “racist,” an “insurrectionist” and a “violent extremist.”
But for Biden, his failures would overshadow his achievements, starting with the catastrophic exit from Afghanistan. 13 American soldiers dead, countless civilians in the region. America stumbled greatly before the eyes of the world. Russia was watching. China was watching. Iran was watching. Hamas was watching.
As Biden’s approval numbers began to crash, he had no choice but to pivot to fear, to sell out his own citizens as would-be terrorists. Draped in blood-red light, Biden warned Americans of their most serious threat — the “extreme MAGA Republicans,” the “ultra-MAGA,” the “Semi-fascists.”
It worked, at least in part, to sway independents leading up to the 2022 midterms, thanks to a last-minute attack on Paul Pelosi by a mentally ill, homeless, illegal immigrant named David DePape that our government could apply to all of MAGA.
They were gearing up to do it again for 2024, with the FBI at the ready, already investigating Trump supporters. What other options do they have with a deeply unpopular president, a Vice President who is even less popular and Trump making them sweat the polls?
But then Hamas attacked Israel, forcing all of us to stare deep into the face of evil. Now, we could see what that looked like. Now, we remember 9/11. Now we remembered the wake-up call. Now, we can easily see that our government has been lying to us about who our enemies are.
The attack on Jews in Israel was telling. It exposed the House the Left built these past 20 years —the identity-first Democrats who shamed Trump for his “Muslim ban” because it was racist, who shamed Trump for his “build the wall” strategy at the border, who shamed Trump for wanting to block China as the pandemic hit. That, too, was racist. And now, they can’t even bring themselves to utterly condemn the attacks by Hamas. That was a world that existed outside the first War on Terror. Don’t fear them, an entire generation was raised to believe because that is racist.
Fear those other people over there with the MAGA flags because they’re all angry white men mad about women and people of color having a voice for the first time.
It’s all splashing back in their faces like toilet water now because it seems we’ve raised an entire generation that has a hard time seeing evil, much less naming it, if they deem the attackers as “oppressed” and the victims as “oppressors,” based on what they’ve all been chattering about online for years now, evil is harder to see.
#freepalestine builds clout. #standwithisrael does not. Kylie Jenner voiced her support for Israel and lost one million Instagram followers, and, like the coward and narcissist she is, she deleted the post.
Standing with Ukraine is easy because they view Putin and Trump as fighting on the same side. Standing with Israel is complicated because of the history of Israel and Gaza, which, for so many of them, is on par with how America “colonized” the tribes already here.
Much of the Left still sees it as a binary – they aren’t white, which makes them good. The Europeans were white, which makes them bad. All points must lead to “white supremacy.”
But now, we all can see where that has led. It has led to the banality of evil, people who can’t see it, or refuse to see it to serve their own interests. That, too, has now woken people up to the reality of the American left.”
This should disqualify Haley, at least with thinking voters…..
Nikki Haley demands we bring in more potential terrorists, because apparently 2.3 million from Islamist countries since 9/11 just isn’t enough. She’s willing to go to war to protect Ukraine’s borders, but isn’t willing to protest our own. Shameful and immoral. pic.twitter.com/anoERfw6f1
Ron DeSantis said no Gaza refugees. Nikki Haley didn’t agree.
“She's trying to be politically correct. She's trying to please the media and people on the left, I don't care about that. I'm gonna speak the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”
One, we don’t want that hot mess over here. Two, how do you intend to sort the Hamas Gaza Palestenians from the Not-Hamas Gaza Palestenians? There is no way to vette them so as to not allow cells into this country. Let the Arab states handle them.
The response to Ryan Carson’s murder shows the worst of the right
It used to be that a man could get stabbed to death on the street, and nobody would know about it except family or friends. But in the age of social media, those days feel like a distant dream.
In early October, one man’s grim murder became viral clickbait fodder as X (formerly known as twitter) users replayed the last surveillance-captured minute of his life over and over. At the beginning of the clip, New York City political activist Ryan Carson is sitting on a bench with his girlfriend when a young black man in a hoodie walks past them. As they get up and walk in his direction, he suddenly begins shouting incoherently, then turns around and makes an aggressive approach. Within seconds, Carson is collapsed on the pavement with a fatal chest wound. (Suspect Brian Dowling has been arrested and is currently being held without bail.)
Numerous cruel comments mocked Carson’s naivete and weakness in confronting the attacker. Instead of either fleeing or disarming the young man, Carson repeatedly tells him to “chill.” As it emerged that he and his girlfriend were left-wing Antifa activists who pushed for softer crime policies, the comments from alt-right quarters became even more savage. A bleeding-heart white liberal, viciously stabbed to death in front of his equally liberal girlfriend by a violent young black criminal? What could be more deliciously ironic?
Not everyone joined in the mob. Conservative writer Nate Hochman suggested that so far from being mocked, Carson should be praised for at least trying to place himself between the attacker and his girlfriend, however tragically unable he was to neutralize the threat. Foolish mistakes were certainly made, but the whole bloody incident is over in the blink of an eye. It’s one thing to “chirp from behind your keyboard” about what you would do if you had to confront a violent maniac on a dark street. It’s quite another thing to actually do it, with seconds between you and death at knifepoint.
But sympathy and nuance were thin on the ground in alt-right spaces because, to them, Carson was the “right” sort of victim. Of course, this sort of callous delight in the death of the “right” people isn’t limited to the alt-right. Just this year, we saw left-wing social media mocking the death of the “rich white men” on the Titan submarine. No death is too cruel to be converted into celebratory meme fodder. In fact, the crueler the death, the more memes it seems to generate.
While human cruelty is nothing new, our ability to consume evil and tragedy as “content” is. How many clips of people dying will float through our feeds in an average month? An average week? To those gleefully replaying Carson’s death, he might as well have been a videogame character, a non-person. Even those of us who still want to be compassionate may struggle to have a strong emotional reaction, because we’ve been so desensitized.
But some will argue that compassion is wasted on our political enemies anyway. Self-styled conservative pundit Gina Bontempo makes this case explicit. After all, Carson and his girlfriend were among those who demand abortion on demand, side with violent criminals against cops, mocked the vaccine-hesitant as they died, and want to hound conservatives out of the public square. They wouldn’t show us mercy. So why should we show them mercy? Perhaps “on a personal level, in private, we can pray for them and their souls.” But whenever we see an “enemy” like Carson suffering the consequences of his activist choices, Bontempo proposes we shouldn’t “act surprised or upset.” Such calls for “peace and unity” are “one of the reasons we keep losing,” after all.
Of course, Bontempo’s whole post is a strawman argument, since nobody is demanding we “back down” or “give ground” to people advancing evil or foolish policies. We’re simply suggesting that, yes, it’s actually normal to feel “upset” when we see a man, any man, get murdered in real time. Even if there’s some indirect sense in which Carson’s activism helped create the conditions for crimes like his own murder, that doesn’t make the crime just.
All of this should go without saying, but apparently, it still needs to be said. And in an increasingly secular age—on left and right alike—it will fall to Christians to say it. Not because we’re seeking to “virtue-signal” or gain approval from our political opponents, but because we are human. And so are they. ~
_______________
*The key for those of us who are believers: all people are made in God’s image
To go along with “Never glory in the death of your enemy” there is 1 Corinthians 13:6, that love “does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth”. A thought on this that I have read in a couple places says (according to Got Questions?):
“Further, to “not delight in evil” carries the idea of not gloating over someone else’s guilt. It is common for people to rejoice when an enemy is found guilty of a crime or caught in a sin. This is not love. Love rejoices in the virtue of others, not in their vices. Sin is an occasion for sorrow, not for joy.”
Which reminds me of these verses from Proverbs 24:
“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,
And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles;
Lest the Lord see it, and it displease Him,
And He turn away His wrath from him.”
Rejoicing over the stumbling of our enemies, or gloating over their guilt, particularly of our political enemies, is rampant among folks on both political sides on social media, even – sadly – among some believers. It can be a strong temptation to react that way, but we ought not to be that way. 😦
“Following a blast at a hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday, Hamas immediately claimed that an Israel Defense Forces strike was to blame — but the evidence does not support such claims from Hamas officials pretending to be impartial government ministers inside the Gaza Strip. In fact, the evidence disproves what Hamas — and many of its sympathizers in the media and politics — have said.
Instead of what Hamas rushed to claim, it appears the attempt to blame Israeli forces and further demonize Israel and its people is nothing more than scrambling to draw attention away from the mass-casualty event that was, in fact, the result of a misfired Hamas or another Iran-backed terrorist’s rocket and, potentially simultaneously, an attempt to cover up the fact that Hamas was again using a hospital to house terrorist infrastructure and weapons stockpiles.
Here’s some of the video circulating that shows the cause of the explosion:”
“In addition, Al Jazeera unwittingly broadcast live video of the terrorist rocket misfiring and blowing up the hospital in Gaza City.”
An Al Jazeera broadcast documented the moment that the Islamic Jihad launched a rocket which misfired and hit a hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds. pic.twitter.com/O5Lx1BtOtJ
“The blast occurred just minutes after a large barrage of Hamas rockets were fired toward Tel Aviv and Hamas reportedly announced that they were in the process of launching their “most robust weapons” at Haifa just before the hospital explosion — but no such weapon reached Haifa.”
Ooooo… that’ll show ’em, the old “strongly worded letter” is sure to scare Hamas.
Clowns.
SEC. BLINKEN: “The U.S. and Israel have agreed to develop a plan that will enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza, and them alone.”
“If Hamas — in any way — blocks humanitarian assistance from reaching civilians,… pic.twitter.com/QokGZnHIQP
“SEC. BLINKEN: “The U.S. and Israel have agreed to develop a plan that will enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza, and them alone.”
“If Hamas — in any way — blocks humanitarian assistance from reaching civilians, including by seizing the aid itself, we’ll be the first to condemn it.””
This stern warning about possible future condemnation will probably do the trick. https://t.co/oWnkaQl89p
Here’s what’s happening. Reports indicating Hamas attempted to fire a rocket, and it didn’t detonate properly. Landed on the hospital, tragically killing hundreds (40% of Hamas rockets land inside Gaza). The Gaza Health Ministry, controlled by Hamas, now issues report saying it… https://t.co/3ewGjsn5tF
This tracks because the reports of the hospital explosion happened around the same time I saw, from the outskirts of Sderot, multiple rockets being fired at Israel. Hopefully we’ll get a clearer answer soon. https://t.co/knMUzmKax5
After you notice that the Israel didn't bomb the hospital, but instead it was hit by a Hamas rocket that hit the munitions they stored in the hospital, maybe you'll apologize to Israel. Or maybe your hatred of Jews is just too strong.
Yet we are to mourn with those who mourn so when wartime innocents are killed we are to take Scripture as our instruction.
As for the hospital strike, I believe the blast origins remain under some dispute. Either way, it is tragic for those whose lives were lost in that setting, intentionally or unintentionally, in the chaos and violence of war. -dj
Wandering Views 
A repost from 2016, as relevant then as now.
““First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people””
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/first-the-saturday-people-then-the-sunday-people-2/
“In light of what is happening now in Israel, I’ve decided to repost “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people” which I first ran on January 2, 2016.
I’m running it again because I’ve seen a number of comments here and elsewhere, that boil down to: “it’s not our problem.” I disagree. What happens in the Middle East, or Europe, or elsewhere with our close allies is our problem – what we do about it is a different matter. Something being our problem doesn’t mean we have to invade and occupy another country, we could decide to do nothing or something less than going to war. But pretending “it’s not our problem” is just pretending. The war against the Jews is also the war against the Christians – the U.S. is the “Great Satan” to the Islamists, and Israel is the Little Satan.
Anyway, here’s the post, again:”
I’m surprised I had not heard the phrase in the title of this post before today.
Though I’m certainly familiar with the concept, it’s one we’ve explored here many times when discussing (i) that the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the inability of Muslims to accept any non-Muslim entity in the Middle East, but particularly not a Jewish national entity; (b) the plight of Christians in the Middle East who are on the receiving end of what would happen to the Jews in Israel if Israel ever lost a war; and (c) the Islamist-Leftist anti-Israel coalition, in which useful Western leftists are oblivous (at best, giving them the benefit of the doubt) to the threat they would be under if forced to live under the rule of their coalition partners as they demand of Israeli Jews.
I got to the phrase in a round-about way. First, I saw Martin Kramer’s Tweet linking to his Facebook post:
Exactly 40 years ago, Commentary published Bernard Lewis’s landmark article, “The Return of Islam.” Remember, in January 1976, the Shah was still firmly on his throne, the Muslim Brothers were nowhere to be seen, and there was no Hamas, Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda. So how did Lewis discern the “return”? He saw that regimes, including secular ones, were beginning to invoke Islam. This, he surmised, must be a reaction to a more profound trend. Perhaps the most prescient article ever written about the Middle East.
Then I read through (skimmed parts) of Lewis’ Commentary article, The Return of Islam (Jan. 1, 1976), which is quite long.
The central thesis of the article is that the West completely misunderstands the nature of the conflict, seeking to put it in the types of “left” and “right” disputes that dominate Western politics:
“…. one finds special correspondents of the New York Times and of other lesser newspapers describing the current conflicts in Lebanon in terms of right-wing and left-wing factions. As medieval Christian man could only conceive of religion in terms of a trinity, so his modern descendant can only conceive of politics in terms of a theology or, as we now say, ideology, of left-wing and right-wing forces and factions.
This recurring unwillingness to recognize the nature of Islam or even the fact of Islam as an independent, different, and autonomous religious phenomenon persists and recurs from medieval to modern times….Modern Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to conceive that any other peoples in any other place could have done so, and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations of what seemed to him only superficially religious phenomena….
To the modern Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight and die in such numbers over mere differences of religion; there have to be some other “genuine” reasons underneath the religious veil….This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and the rest of the Western terminology…. “
I’m not going to try to summarize the rest of the article. Read it.
The article seems relevant to the ideological war on Israel by Western leftists who view “the occupation” as the sole and overarching reason for the conflict; they can’t admit what historian Benny Morris finally acknowledged about the Arab refusal to accept Israel’s independence — it was primarily a religious war against the Jews, not a territorial war (emphasis added):
“What I discovered in the documentation relating to the war, at least from the Arab side, was that the war had a religious character, that the central element in the war was an imperative to launch jihad. There were other imperatives of course, political and others—but the most important from the enemy’s perspective was the element of the infidels who had the nerve to take control over sacred Muslim lands and the need to uproot them from there. The decisive majority in the Arab world saw the war first and foremost as a holy war, but until today historians have not examined the documentation that proves this. In my view, they have also ignored Arab rhetoric of the day, which universally included religious hatred against the Jews, because they thought the Arabs adopted this as normal speech that did not emanate from deep mental resources. They thought this was something superficial, that everyone talked like this. But I am positive the Arab spokesmen in 1948 did go beyond this and clearly and explicitly talked about jihad.”
And it remains so today. David Collier has a brilliant take-down of the leftist Jewish “theoretical Zionist.” Read the whole thing, here is an excerpt:
It cannot be said often enough or strongly enough that Israel is at war. Not a theoretical ‘cold war’ but a real battle, a battle that they cannot afford to lose. Israel is only there today because the IDF is strong. Can you imagine if Israel was protected by extreme left wing ‘Zionists’? This is why Israel has lost campus, because its international diplomatic corp – the Zionists- have been duped into giving platforms and status to people who do not like the Zionist state. How do you defend something you don’t like very much? When someone from one of these left wing groups argues against BDS, how can they win? The position they put forward doesn’t even exist beyond a dreamlike theory of a Middle East that is disintegrating before Islamic radicalism as I write. Remember, almost every one of these people would have wanted Israel to give up the Golan in the 1990’s. Today, had they been given their wish, ISIS would be on the shores of the Kinneret.
But it was the opening sentence of the final paragraph of Lewis’ article that caught my eye and gave rise to this post (emphasis added):
In the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, an ominous phrase was sometimes heard, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” The Saturday people have proved unexpectedly recalcitrant, and recent events in Lebanon indicate that the priorities may have been reversed. Fundamentally, the same issue arises in both Palestine and Lebanon, though the circumstances that complicate the two situations are very different. The basic question is this: Is a resurgent Islam prepared to tolerate a non-Islamic enclave, whether Jewish in Israel or Christian in Lebanon, in the heart of the Islamic world? The current fascination among Muslims with the history of the Crusades, the vast literature on the subject, both academic and popular, and the repeated inferences drawn from the final extinction of the Crusading principalities throw some light on attitudes in this matter. Islam from its inception is a religion of power, and in the Muslim world view it is right and proper that power should be wielded by Muslims and Muslims alone. Others may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy. That Muslims should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal.9 That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God and nature, and this is true whether in Kashmir, Palestine, Lebanon, or Cyprus. Here again, it must be recalled that Islam is not conceived as a religion in the limited Western sense but as a community, a loyalty, and a way of life—and that the Islamic community is still recovering from the traumatic era when Muslim governments and empires were overthrown and Muslim peoples forcibly subjected to alien, infidel rule. Both the Saturday people and the Sunday people are now suffering the consequences.
I’ve never expressed an opinion or view of Islam as a religion, for the same reason I’ve never expressed an opinion or view on Christianity or Hinduism or other religions as religions — I don’t claim any expertise and casual conceptions of any religion can be wrong.
But you don’t need to be an expert on Islam to understand how Islam is practiced as a political matter in many parts of the world, and particularly in the Middle East. You only need to be able to read the news and to listen to what the Islamists tell us they want and intend on doing.”
—-
The Return of Islam
https://www.commentary.org/articles/bernard-lewis/the-return-of-islam/
LikeLiked by 1 person
“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Press Coverage of Terror in Israel”
LikeLike
“The Attack by Hamas Shatters The Lies About January 6th
Nothing like a genuine act of terror to shake us back to reality.”
https://sashastone.substack.com/p/the-attack-by-hamas-shatters-the#details
“As we watch the horrific images of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli citizens, there is no mistaking the face of evil.
This is brutality on a scale most of us here in America have never witnessed – the rapes of women who are dragged through the streets to cheers. Babies murdered in their cribs — beheaded — fathers shot while trying to help their families escape—charred remains of still-smoking corpses in gardens, doorways, and cars.
For the past three years, our government has lied to us about what happened on January 6th. The Vice President stood before us and compared a riot at the Capitol to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
Had I never crawled out of my own feedback loop, I’d never have known they were lying because I, too, would have been locked in my home, terrified of either COVID or Trump supporters. I would have been grateful our government brought the hammer down and told millions of Americans that they were no longer welcome in their own country because a small mob of them lost their minds chasing an irrational fantasy that they could stop the certification of the vote and save this country from an oligarchal monopoly that now controls it.
Whatever January 6th was, we know for sure what it wasn’t. It wasn’t 9/11. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t October 7th in Israel. And the whole world was watching us pretend that it was. We looked like a fragile nation suddenly, one MAGA flag away from our government being overthrown.
Why would they, our president and vice president, not to mention Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, General Mark Milley, and countless talking heads in media, want us to believe that January 6th was like 9/11 in the first place? Why would they think we would believe such an egregious lie?
Because they knew the power of fear, they knew that the first “war on terror” was still-standing architecture, and why not use it to intimidate, harass, monitor, and “investigate” Trump supporters, especially those who put on a red hat and protested in DC on January 6th.
The first “war on terror” boosted Bush’s poll numbers and handed our government unlimited power to police and surveil its citizens. What better way to help stamp out Trump and MAGA than a new “war on terror?”
After sabotaging Trump’s candidacy meant to hand Hillary Clinton the win in 2016, we watched for the first time the administrative state and the monopolies of power attempt to discredit, destroy, and remove a sitting president. Then, we watched them betray our faith and our trust by forming an alliance to ensure Trump lost in 2020.
They would need the media to gaslight the public about everything from masks to COVID to lockdowns to the violence in the Summer of 2020. They would need lawyers to change any law that made it harder to ballot harvest with the $1 billion in dark money they had to play with. As lockdowns suddenly vanished, they would need an army of activists to turn America into a war zone for a few months. Now, it was perfectly okay to party and protest, body to body, fluids flying all over the country and world.
Then they would need doctors to insist protesting was “more important” than COVID because “systemic racism” had afflicted our country since its founding. Then, they would need military professionals to shut down Trump’s attempts at bringing in the military.
The Democrats would hold their convention, look us directly in the eye, and lie about the protests without mentioning the police and what they just endured even once. It seemed to me then that Barack Obama lied, Kamala Harris lied, Hillary Clinton lied, Joe Biden lied. What threatens you, they said, is the radical, racist Trump supporter.
Trump was not a lawyer or a politician. It was easy for lawyers and politicians to trip him up, to “find things” he did wrong. Nearly every one of his alleged “crimes” has been verbal, things he said, flapping his gums, agitating, taunting, and teasing them. He was showing Americans that you could still exercise free speech in a country that had become oppressive in its demands of what all of us could say, think, and do.
So why would they then need to compare January 6th to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor after Joe Biden took power? Because they didn’t just want to remove Trump. They needed to stamp out the grassroots movement known as MAGA, too.
They wanted Americans to understand, in no uncertain terms, that only some people in this country are allowed to protest violently. If you’re on that side you will be funded, supported, defended, and encouraged. If you’re not, you will be called a “fascist,” a “racist,” an “insurrectionist” and a “violent extremist.”
But for Biden, his failures would overshadow his achievements, starting with the catastrophic exit from Afghanistan. 13 American soldiers dead, countless civilians in the region. America stumbled greatly before the eyes of the world. Russia was watching. China was watching. Iran was watching. Hamas was watching.
As Biden’s approval numbers began to crash, he had no choice but to pivot to fear, to sell out his own citizens as would-be terrorists. Draped in blood-red light, Biden warned Americans of their most serious threat — the “extreme MAGA Republicans,” the “ultra-MAGA,” the “Semi-fascists.”
It worked, at least in part, to sway independents leading up to the 2022 midterms, thanks to a last-minute attack on Paul Pelosi by a mentally ill, homeless, illegal immigrant named David DePape that our government could apply to all of MAGA.
They were gearing up to do it again for 2024, with the FBI at the ready, already investigating Trump supporters. What other options do they have with a deeply unpopular president, a Vice President who is even less popular and Trump making them sweat the polls?
But then Hamas attacked Israel, forcing all of us to stare deep into the face of evil. Now, we could see what that looked like. Now, we remember 9/11. Now we remembered the wake-up call. Now, we can easily see that our government has been lying to us about who our enemies are.
The attack on Jews in Israel was telling. It exposed the House the Left built these past 20 years —the identity-first Democrats who shamed Trump for his “Muslim ban” because it was racist, who shamed Trump for his “build the wall” strategy at the border, who shamed Trump for wanting to block China as the pandemic hit. That, too, was racist. And now, they can’t even bring themselves to utterly condemn the attacks by Hamas. That was a world that existed outside the first War on Terror. Don’t fear them, an entire generation was raised to believe because that is racist.
Fear those other people over there with the MAGA flags because they’re all angry white men mad about women and people of color having a voice for the first time.
It’s all splashing back in their faces like toilet water now because it seems we’ve raised an entire generation that has a hard time seeing evil, much less naming it, if they deem the attackers as “oppressed” and the victims as “oppressors,” based on what they’ve all been chattering about online for years now, evil is harder to see.
#freepalestine builds clout. #standwithisrael does not. Kylie Jenner voiced her support for Israel and lost one million Instagram followers, and, like the coward and narcissist she is, she deleted the post.
Standing with Ukraine is easy because they view Putin and Trump as fighting on the same side. Standing with Israel is complicated because of the history of Israel and Gaza, which, for so many of them, is on par with how America “colonized” the tribes already here.
Much of the Left still sees it as a binary – they aren’t white, which makes them good. The Europeans were white, which makes them bad. All points must lead to “white supremacy.”
But now, we all can see where that has led. It has led to the banality of evil, people who can’t see it, or refuse to see it to serve their own interests. That, too, has now woken people up to the reality of the American left.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
This should disqualify Haley, at least with thinking voters…..
LikeLiked by 2 people
The media landscape is riddled with clowns.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good piece in World:
~ Never glory in the death of your enemy
The response to Ryan Carson’s murder shows the worst of the right
It used to be that a man could get stabbed to death on the street, and nobody would know about it except family or friends. But in the age of social media, those days feel like a distant dream.
In early October, one man’s grim murder became viral clickbait fodder as X (formerly known as twitter) users replayed the last surveillance-captured minute of his life over and over. At the beginning of the clip, New York City political activist Ryan Carson is sitting on a bench with his girlfriend when a young black man in a hoodie walks past them. As they get up and walk in his direction, he suddenly begins shouting incoherently, then turns around and makes an aggressive approach. Within seconds, Carson is collapsed on the pavement with a fatal chest wound. (Suspect Brian Dowling has been arrested and is currently being held without bail.)
Numerous cruel comments mocked Carson’s naivete and weakness in confronting the attacker. Instead of either fleeing or disarming the young man, Carson repeatedly tells him to “chill.” As it emerged that he and his girlfriend were left-wing Antifa activists who pushed for softer crime policies, the comments from alt-right quarters became even more savage. A bleeding-heart white liberal, viciously stabbed to death in front of his equally liberal girlfriend by a violent young black criminal? What could be more deliciously ironic?
Not everyone joined in the mob. Conservative writer Nate Hochman suggested that so far from being mocked, Carson should be praised for at least trying to place himself between the attacker and his girlfriend, however tragically unable he was to neutralize the threat. Foolish mistakes were certainly made, but the whole bloody incident is over in the blink of an eye. It’s one thing to “chirp from behind your keyboard” about what you would do if you had to confront a violent maniac on a dark street. It’s quite another thing to actually do it, with seconds between you and death at knifepoint.
But sympathy and nuance were thin on the ground in alt-right spaces because, to them, Carson was the “right” sort of victim. Of course, this sort of callous delight in the death of the “right” people isn’t limited to the alt-right. Just this year, we saw left-wing social media mocking the death of the “rich white men” on the Titan submarine. No death is too cruel to be converted into celebratory meme fodder. In fact, the crueler the death, the more memes it seems to generate.
While human cruelty is nothing new, our ability to consume evil and tragedy as “content” is. How many clips of people dying will float through our feeds in an average month? An average week? To those gleefully replaying Carson’s death, he might as well have been a videogame character, a non-person. Even those of us who still want to be compassionate may struggle to have a strong emotional reaction, because we’ve been so desensitized.
But some will argue that compassion is wasted on our political enemies anyway. Self-styled conservative pundit Gina Bontempo makes this case explicit. After all, Carson and his girlfriend were among those who demand abortion on demand, side with violent criminals against cops, mocked the vaccine-hesitant as they died, and want to hound conservatives out of the public square. They wouldn’t show us mercy. So why should we show them mercy? Perhaps “on a personal level, in private, we can pray for them and their souls.” But whenever we see an “enemy” like Carson suffering the consequences of his activist choices, Bontempo proposes we shouldn’t “act surprised or upset.” Such calls for “peace and unity” are “one of the reasons we keep losing,” after all.
Of course, Bontempo’s whole post is a strawman argument, since nobody is demanding we “back down” or “give ground” to people advancing evil or foolish policies. We’re simply suggesting that, yes, it’s actually normal to feel “upset” when we see a man, any man, get murdered in real time. Even if there’s some indirect sense in which Carson’s activism helped create the conditions for crimes like his own murder, that doesn’t make the crime just.
All of this should go without saying, but apparently, it still needs to be said. And in an increasingly secular age—on left and right alike—it will fall to Christians to say it. Not because we’re seeking to “virtue-signal” or gain approval from our political opponents, but because we are human. And so are they. ~
_______________
*The key for those of us who are believers: all people are made in God’s image
-dj
LikeLiked by 2 people
” Even those of us who still want to be compassionate may struggle to have a strong emotional reaction, because we’ve been so desensitized.”
Yes. The strongest emotional reaction I have any more to most any distant tragedy is a weak sigh.
LikeLiked by 1 person
To go along with “Never glory in the death of your enemy” there is 1 Corinthians 13:6, that love “does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth”. A thought on this that I have read in a couple places says (according to Got Questions?):
“Further, to “not delight in evil” carries the idea of not gloating over someone else’s guilt. It is common for people to rejoice when an enemy is found guilty of a crime or caught in a sin. This is not love. Love rejoices in the virtue of others, not in their vices. Sin is an occasion for sorrow, not for joy.”
Which reminds me of these verses from Proverbs 24:
“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,
And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles;
Lest the Lord see it, and it displease Him,
And He turn away His wrath from him.”
Rejoicing over the stumbling of our enemies, or gloating over their guilt, particularly of our political enemies, is rampant among folks on both political sides on social media, even – sadly – among some believers. It can be a strong temptation to react that way, but we ought not to be that way. 😦
LikeLike
https://twitter.com/taaltree/status/1714044804831797370?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1714044804831797370%7Ctwgr%5E56c8a464342238e0720ae34048b1c6cf68581e42%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Famy-curtis%2F2023%2F10%2F17%2Fexcuse-me-cornell-university-professor-calls-hamas-terror-attack-exhilarating-n2388626
LikeLike
While I don’t revel in it, I refuse to feel bad about it.
“Hundreds Killed by Islamic Jihad After Misfire Causes Explosion at Gaza City Hospital”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2023/10/17/did-hamas-rocket-misfire-just-take-out-a-hospital-in-gaza-city-n2629969
“Following a blast at a hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday, Hamas immediately claimed that an Israel Defense Forces strike was to blame — but the evidence does not support such claims from Hamas officials pretending to be impartial government ministers inside the Gaza Strip. In fact, the evidence disproves what Hamas — and many of its sympathizers in the media and politics — have said.
Instead of what Hamas rushed to claim, it appears the attempt to blame Israeli forces and further demonize Israel and its people is nothing more than scrambling to draw attention away from the mass-casualty event that was, in fact, the result of a misfired Hamas or another Iran-backed terrorist’s rocket and, potentially simultaneously, an attempt to cover up the fact that Hamas was again using a hospital to house terrorist infrastructure and weapons stockpiles.
Here’s some of the video circulating that shows the cause of the explosion:”
“In addition, Al Jazeera unwittingly broadcast live video of the terrorist rocket misfiring and blowing up the hospital in Gaza City.”
“The blast occurred just minutes after a large barrage of Hamas rockets were fired toward Tel Aviv and Hamas reportedly announced that they were in the process of launching their “most robust weapons” at Haifa just before the hospital explosion — but no such weapon reached Haifa.”
LikeLike
Of course. Another traitor to America.
“Rep. Don Bacon caught serving as advisor to nonprofit with ties to CCP-linked think tank
Humpty Dumpty Institute touts partnership with Beijing think tank that employs 12+ members of CCP & People’s Liberation Army
Bacon is an advisor to HDI
When HDI’s ties to CCP were exposed, GOP Reps Andy Harris and Gus Bilirakis resigned from Advisory board
Don Bacon did *not* resign saying he was “satisfied” with HDI’s explanation
Wait until you see how much $$ Don Bacon gets indirectly from Sequoia Capital via McCarthy’s PACs, the biggest US investor in CCP military tech
Now we know why Don refuses to vote America First
He’s protecting his friends in Communist China!”
—
LikeLike
Ouch.
https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1714283417981075718?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1714283417981075718%7Ctwgr%5E32ec763957e530d7da56ad2ac1c0e0ad4f87edf9%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fsamj%2F2023%2F10%2F17%2Fdon-bacon-n2388639
LikeLike
Ooooo… that’ll show ’em, the old “strongly worded letter” is sure to scare Hamas.
Clowns.
“SEC. BLINKEN: “The U.S. and Israel have agreed to develop a plan that will enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza, and them alone.”
“If Hamas — in any way — blocks humanitarian assistance from reaching civilians, including by seizing the aid itself, we’ll be the first to condemn it.””
LikeLike
Once again, the useful idiots spread lies and Hamas propaganda.
This is the same “bombing in the video above which was clearly a Hamas rocket misfiring.
LikeLike
LikeLike
Yet we are to mourn with those who mourn so when wartime innocents are killed we are to take Scripture as our instruction.
As for the hospital strike, I believe the blast origins remain under some dispute. Either way, it is tragic for those whose lives were lost in that setting, intentionally or unintentionally, in the chaos and violence of war. -dj
LikeLiked by 1 person