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One of the defining features, possibly the crucial, most existential characteristic, of intelligence, is the ability to distinguish one thing from another. This is true in every aspect of our lives. A car is not a horse. The sky is not a mountain. Taylor Swift is not Led Zeppelin – and Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. That this needs to be said is not an indictment of our education system, or society, or contemporary politics, or social media, or not being breast fed as a child. It’s simply a statement of fact, because people who score between 25 per cent and 75 per cent on the bell curve of intelligence, the average Joe or Josephine Soap in other words, do not generally have an inclination to understand and distinguish why W. H. Auden’s poetry is superior to the comic verse of Pam Ayres, or why the value of something, as Oscar Wilde said, is different to its price, or why perennial worth is better than this month’s hyped fashion, or why there is a difference between being ‘merely clever’, as Wittgenstein said, and being intelligent.
Moreover, and this is an age-old problem articulated by philosophers as diverse as Plato and Heidegger – average minds are easily swayed by the cultural zeitgeist, by arguments from authority (whether from priests, politicians, ‘experts’ or celebrities), and especially by public opinion. They fall, regularly, for every contemporary trend. Look, for example, at the uncritical attitude and acceptance, from the majority, to the Covid-19 measures.
People with average intelligence are decent, kind, trustworthy, extraordinarily capable in ways that leave more intelligent people scratching their heads in admiration, not the least bit lacking in street smarts, and know implicitly what is good for themselves and their families, (especially when government policy negatively affects their wallets). What they are not, though, is particularly interested in abstract thought.
The impact of intelligence on politics and culture has become clear in recent months. People who six months ago couldn’t spell anti-Semitism are now parroting the most harebrained anti-Semitic delusions, without knowing much about Jews, Israel, Arabs, Islam or the modern history of the Middle East. In the words of Heidegger, people ‘fall’ into the ‘they’.
Antisemitism, though, is a hydra-headed beast, which, like a chameleon, changes its colours in different environments. A millennia-old antisemitic trope is the blood libel, the claim that Jews kill Christian children touse their blood in Passover matzohs. The blood libel has become secularised in recent decades, with accusations that Israelis, read that as ‘Jews’, are sadists murdering Palestinians in pursuit of a policy of genocide. The source of these lies are Islamic extremists, or their ‘anti-Zionist’ allies in the West, who spread propaganda that is a mixture of traditional Islamic antisemitism and Nazi ideology. The latter, it should be noted, greatly influenced the Muslim Brotherhood, the organisation that spawned Hamas.
The ease, though, with which a majority of people’s perceptions can change is instructive. The moral and intellectual poison of the most recent iteration of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, (the modern blood libel), was disseminated by the far left after the Soviet Union withdrew its support from Israel following the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars, became pervasive on the internet, and has culminated in South Africa, that paradigm of good governance and equality before the law, accusing Israel in the International Criminal Court (ICC) of genocide.
A depressing indictment of contemporary culture, and a window into the zeitgeist, is that something which was taught to generations of children on the long-running American children’s show Sesame Street is now a lost skill: ‘One of these things is not like the other, and one of these things is kinda the same’. The thing that’s not like genocide is Israel’s war against Hamas, and the things that are similar to genocide, although they should more accurately be described as war crimes, were Hamas’s brutal, stomach-churning murder, gang rape and mutilation of innocent Israeli civilians on October 7.
Propaganda, to be clear, works its magic using narrative and spin to explain complicated events. Simple stories or, for many people, songs and chants which depict the world in black and white and people as purely good and irredeemably evil, are easily understood. It is the uninformed, though, who are most likely to fall for unsophisticated dichotomies. People with average intelligence comprise 50% of the population. It’s not that this demographic is incapable of understanding complex ideas, although that is usually the case, it’s that they find anything other than sex, music, drugs, movies, alcohol, and sport boring. Panem et circense (bread and circuses, as per Roman poet Juvena) is the totality of their lives.
The dominant cultural trope about the Gaza War, which was created by a corrupt, at worst, and a naïve, at best, media, is the relentless perfidy of Israel.
Who, though, other than someone completely uninformed about the decades-long conflict in the Middle East, for example, would believe anything that Hamas says, especially their statistics about the dead and injured in Gaza? It took the Israelis months to determine how many people went missing or were killed on October the Seventh, yet Hamas knows the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza as soon as they switch on a computer. And extraordinarily enough, remember the blood libel, there are always large numbers of children cited as victims. Germans, to put the situation in context, don’t blame the Allies for their dead in World War Two; the Palestinians are hypocrites blaming Israel for casualties in a war that Hamas started.
Accusing Israel of genocide is the intellectual equivalent of believing that charity cures poverty, the ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ fallacy. The majority of people, the average 50 per cent, who donated money to Live Aid, or those who state that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians don’t read books about economics, or sophisticated histories about a century-long conflict in the Middle East that is culturally distant from their own lives. They are fed information about Israel on the nightly news and from propaganda videos on the net, and they have no idea whether what they are watching is true, partly true or disreputable nonsense. Contemporary antisemitism, the latest iteration of the world’s oldest hatred, then, is a social contagion of the uninformed.
Believing that charity can cure famine, is good-hearted naivety. Falsely claiming that Israel is committing genocide is the epitome of evil. And evil, as Socrates said, is an absence, often of intelligence. A cat is not a helicopter. The truth is not subjective. And war, especially one imposed on Israel by a fundamentalist cult of radical Islam, is not genocide. Learn, for all our sakes, to tell the difference.
Bit ocontroversial to link intelligence (lack of) with antisemitism. David Isaac writes many comments which are well researched and would normally reflect an above average intelligence. Sindri is quite impressive with his contributions. However one is antisemitic, the other is not.
Unfortunately, antisemitism is introduced to many newborns with their mother’s milk
.Your comments on COVID makes your IQ score a bit suspect, however. Sorry buddy.
Dr Bron
Your ad hominen followed by your “Sorry buddy” schadenfreude is arrogant.
‘Your comments on COVID makes your IQ score a bit suspect, however. Sorry buddy.’
Oh dear there appears to be another sheep on the loose- Baaa! Sorry that should read ‘Quack’
What an edifying article- basically anyone who asserts that Israels actions fall within the meaning of genocide as described by Raphael Lemkin, or as defined by the UN Genocide Convention, must either be of average or below average intelligence, or an anti-semite. The bar for being published on Quadrant Online sure has dropped.
Sadly your ahistorical, ignorant and emotive insistence that the 21st century political entity known as the ‘Palestinian People’ (otherwise known as Arab Muslims) are the ‘indigenous natives’ of the lands that constitute Ancient Israel and Judea only goes to endorse the authors view.
I am facinated by the extensive tunnelling undertaken by Hamas and how it was concealed by a supposedly ever vigilant Israel. A huge engineering undertaking with a massive excavation involved, where was the excavated material disposed of and who did the manual digging. Surely non combatants were used, especially those with underground mining experience. Dare I say that some of those miners could have come from outside of Gaza. Over all it looks like the whole community may have been involved.
Israel departed Gaza nearly twenty years ago. At the time it was known that the Gazans were tunnelling both into Epyptian and Israeli territory. And since it has been known that tunnelling has continued. Israel knew that it was extensive but had no mandate to interfere.
Surveyors, geologists, engineers, people skilled with underground machinery such as roadheaders, ventilation and rock bolting … and the ever present need for constant disposal of large volumes of waste.
None of that was hidden from the Israelis or any of their allies, nor could it have been. Preventing it was not in their jurisdiction, though.
Intelligence? How is it measured? How accurate is the measure? How relevant is it to behavior?
Antisemitism is a moral failing. Its prevalence in a society reflects the lack of moral awareness, nothing else.
Agreed. The vice of envy at play, in my view.
This may appear to be off topic, but it remains a good indication of just how easily perceptions can influence our very humanity. Nicolaus Copernicus passed away in 1543, and we can read that he was presented with his epic book: On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, quite literally on his death bed. Some historians carry the view that the printing of the book was deliberately delayed because of the fears Copernicus entertained of the Holy Inquisition. His work is the source of the historic shift in human affairs and gives us the label: Copernican Revolution. It was another 300 years before his book was removed from the Holy Roman Church’s list of banned publications. To my point: All this happened 481 years ago, when he challenged the holy word of God and shifted the Earth into its proper place in the Solar System, thus changing the understanding of how everything moved in that system. Perhaps you would think that people would now understand that the Sun does not move around the Earth, thus dismissing the popular comment that the Sun rises in the East, but no, we religiously stick to the mistaken perception that the Sun does indeed rise in the East. It does not and this proof has existed for nearly 500 years. The point of my blathering in regard to current discussion, is that if we so readily accept as truth, a completely erroneous perception, then what other perceptions do we hold so closely for which we will never accept the truth even if the truth holds so much truth that it becomes a universal truth which does not require evidence. Therein lies the stupidity of the great unwashed.
April 16, 2024
Just which part of the Bible was opposed to what Coppernicus discovered? Catholocism, if that is what you mean, is full of teachings that are against the Bible (perpetual virginity of Mary, praying to saints, doing good works to earn salvation, etc.). Just because a person or organisation claims to be Christian and follow the Bible does not mean that it does.
Highly intelligent folks can also be abysmally foolish, ignorant and slavishly persistent in following the fashionable and evil ideology. People with low IQ can also recognise the truth. It all depends on whether the heart is oriented towards the good, the beautiful and the true.
Agreed. I’m uncomfortable with this idea that antisemitism is down to a lack of intelligence. There are plenty of highly intelligent people who fall for the most awful claptrap. And people who aren’t very smart whose good principles incline them towards discernment and good judgment.
An example is the Foreign Minister Wong, often referred to as anti-Semite, reasonably in my opinion.
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There can be little reasonable doubt about her being very intelligence:
Wong gained a scholarship to Scotch College, Adelaide, where she studied chemistry, physics and mathematics.
She was accepted into the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery at the University of Adelaide, but instead chose law and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Jurisprudence and a Bachelor of Laws with Honours at the University of Adelaide
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I neglected to give Wong her full title – Minister for Foreign Affairs.
H L Mencken:
It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
Good piece Declan. Certainly rings true in my ears anyway.
Keeping score isn’t the point. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see the physical destruction in Gaza would involve mass casualties. Luckily there is a difference between ‘intelligence’ and common sense.
it’s interesting and accurate what you say Maryse regarding the attitude of the heart.
i recall Jesus was rejected by the ‘educated intelligentsia of the day, yet the ordinary folk ‘heard Him gladly’
Very good point.
Actually most people rejected Jesus in favour of the elite’s position. That was in spite of John’s message and prophecies, and despite Jesus’ miracles and wisdom – things that they actually experienced for themselves, but still were still unwilling to fulminate at an intellectual level, as occurs even now. How difficult was it for the elites to turn a crowd against him in Pilate’s courtyard?
As for hearts seeking good, isn’t that what the wokists play on? Repeatedly view images of crying Palestinian children, and hence assume that it is good to admonish Israel for its evil. In such a position there is no intellectual clarity, but merely a shallow piety.
John (the other one) bashes it into the early church that they must seek truth above all else. Only in truth can there be genuine faith and love.
What Maryse intended, surely, by her reference to good hearts was not to engage in nursery moralising (or to use your excellent description “shallow piety”), but rather to point out that having one’s heart, for want of a better term, aimed at “the good, the beautiful and the true” is some preventative against falling into error. I’d be surprised if anyone here disagreed with that proposition.
The intelligence point is a furphy. It is true that many people don’t read and rely without thinking on the information grabs of the media and social sites in particular. However, Antisemitism in the time of the Nazis was pushed by ignorant but clever opinion manipulators; and that is still true today of many modern academic neo-Marxist promoters of antisemitism. People who don’t read or think enough then believe these apparent experts. They are, most of them, capable of reading and thinking, but just don’t (busy? lazy? Prejudiced? Distracted?… but not necessarily unintelligent). This begs questions about our schools and some teaching standards.
Some Quadrant writers using sarcasm should be more careful to be accurate and less worried about being clever. Tony’s point about making distinctions is excellent, but he the point down with his furphy.
My apologies Tony, I had read your piece first – but was this was a comment on Declan’s article. Generally my only complaint about Quadrant articles is the use by some writers of sarcasm or ridicule to make points. Fairness and accuracy is most important. Readers don’t need to agree with the arguments because the debate/discussion is healthy. I just think that sarcasm and ridicule don’t help the process.
The sweeping assumptions linked to a non-sequitur on ‘intelligence’ reveal almost desperate lack of logical follow-through. I do sympathise – once Israel has shown its true colours, it is pretty hard to justify -resorting to claims of ‘antisemitism’ reveals just how little factual and rational justification there is.
First, to address dwgilmour 80’s point – yes, ‘antisemitism’ at the time of the Nazis was manipulated in the context of a very sophisticated propaganda exercise. However, the issue of the Jews as the focus of German animus was a result of a perception throughout Europe, and particularly in Germany, that the Jews were behind the Russian revolution (which had just occurred and which had shocked the civilised world by the brutal executions of the Tzar and his family). This was followed by the revolutions in Munich which were no joke – and in which there were families executed in the furtherance of the spread of communism. Of the 44 involved in the Munich revolution as heads , 40 were Jews. So, the antisemitism was not based upon an irrational hatred that welled up inside a populace who simply existed to persecute a race solely on their existence-it was the result of a perceived threat at a time when communism was aggressively on the march and extremely violent. Whether this perception was the result of manipulation and propaganda is another exercise and is worth examining, but to negate any true inquiry by the cancelling claim that it was simply the outcome of ‘antisemitism’ and to claim (as is always done) that the spoliation of the Jews in World War II was the simplistic result of a mad blood lust (or, in this author’s appropriation- a blood libel) is simply more propaganda.
The use of the claim of ‘antisemitism’ to shut down any statement or fact that might be inconvenient is one that simply does not work any more. We are in a culture that has gone through the 90’s censorship of political correctness, then morphed into LGBT bullying and followed immediately by a society that demanded that women agree that men are women. We are now faced with a political and humanitarian situation where we are told that we cannot believe our lying eyes because to state a fact that does not suit the interests of Israel is ‘antisemitic’. Nobody cares anymore. If it is antisemitic to sympathise with a dispossessed people who are subjected to outrageous bullying, and outright unjustifiable killing, then the term possesses no meaning whatsoever.
6 million Jewish people were killed all across Europe for being Jewish. Apparently that is not mad blood lust.
April 16, 2024
Quite so; if an existential threat justifies mass murder, we can be thankful that such an idea did not occur to the covid enforcers. I also fail to see how humiliating, torturing, and exploiting the Jews fits in with simply trying to remove a danger to the state. Come on, that’s the sort of the thing the Communists, themselves, did!
But it’s easily explained by referring to 40 Jews among communists. That’s how it’s done without a skerrick of antisemitism, we’re told. Others explain by referring to a street in Vienna where most houses were owned by wealthy Jews.
The same drivel as “David Isaac” emits, but at least this poster doesn’t have a faux-jewish screen name. The idea that Hitler’s mad, murderous jew-hatred can somehow be justified or at least rationally explained by the involvement of jews in revolutionary movements is bunkum, and it’s belied in any event by what Hitler actually said and wrote.
This feeble and lying revisionism is intended to make the Third Reich respectable. Having it aired here at Quadrant is a bit like getting a piece of chewing gum from the gutter stuck to your shoe.
You mean the same ‘lying eyes, that missed the slaughter of 1200 innocent civilians on October 7, the same ‘lying eyes’ that excuse Hamas own dictatorial oppression of Gazans, the same ‘lying eyes’ which overlook the Origins of Hamas from within the Muslim Brotherhood, the same ‘lying eyes’ which are blind to Hamas as a proxy for Iran, the same ‘lying eyes’ which have ignored indiscriminate rocket fire over the border into Israel for decades without blinking, the same ‘lying eyes’ which ignores the public statements from Hamas and its allies imploring the removal of Israel off the map of the world, The same ‘lying eyes’ that have been fooled into believing Palestinians are ancient culture (strange how they have no unique language, culture or religion) when in reality Palestine is a historical region not a people and lastly the same ‘lying eyes’ that somehow manage to instill the Arab Muslims- whose culture could only ever extend to the 7th century as somehow more indigenous to the Levant than the peoples who follow a religion whose genesis and language and culture in the region dates back at least 5000 years. You are exhibit A in the authors evidence supporting his case.
This bloke’s a whacker. All he wants to say is that most people are stupid. It will never throughout the whole of his life occur to him that perhaps he is the stupid one. He’s not smart enough for that. As his off-cuff rant demonstrates by its lack of any kind of rigour at all.
You said, “This bloke is a whacker”. I disagree. Intelligence does play a very big part in all of our lives. Of course, there are many other factors that affect our behaviours e.g. cultures, beliefs, propaganda, drug use, upbringing and life events etc. but intelligence is a very important factor. Read the following to understand some generally accepted facts.
https://www.iqmindware.com/blog/the-bell-curve-cognitive-
elites/#:~:text=It%20is%20called%20a%20bell,somewhere%20between%2070%20and%20130.
“The Bell Curve And Cognitive Elites.”
This curve tells us that the average IQ score is 100, and about 95% of the population have an IQ score (measured by a valid IQ test) somewhere between 70 and 130. About 2.1% have higher than 130. 68% have an IQ level between 85 and 115.
Interesting article Declan, nice one. I think your point about the average person being uninterested in intellectual abstract thought is particularly astute. I would guess that the majority are confused about Israel but are swayed by what they see and hear every day, which is that Israel is essentially illegitimate.
The average person is putty for the intellectual class most of whom, as Paul Gottfried has recently noted, are fully paid up to a radical wokism. I would call it socialism, with crony wokism being our particular western flavour.
There seems to be a devious link between socialism and anti-Semitism. With socialism being the philosophy of death and nihilism, and Judeo-Christianity being the philosophy of life and essentialism, the antagonism is horribly logical. Anti-Semitism is the ancient hatred, but I’m guessing if you were to switch Jewish Israel with Christian Israel, the contemporary hatred would be the same.
The author touched a few nerves. I don’t agree that it is a matter of intelligence. It is a matter of sense and morality. But it is also a matter of naivety and innocence. Our society has a short memory. The Middle East does not. Our society practices multiculturalism, the Middle East is ruthless in regards to culture. Our society has no ability to understand that it is being manipulated in a process lasting decades to support the Arabs; it can’t accept that October 7 was not a one-off catastrophe or that proportionality is not relevant. It is flabbergasted that Israel does not yet withdraw. It doesn’t understand – how could it?
I don’t know if he touched any nerves, but I can read “below the line”, for readers “off the cuff” opinions. Presumably the writer is of the view that some or many, are accusing Israel of genocide, and rather than attempting to resort to definition and accepted facts to refute the accusation, merely asserts that anyone who holds or entertains such a view is either morally repugnant or a simpleton. Is that really what the Quadrant online space is about? In essence the article is mere invective.
Nobody was ‘justifying ‘ Hitler. It is pretty much in keeping with my point that you use what I said to extend to a completely disingenuous conclusion.
My comments are based upon a contemporaneous book, published in 1924, by a Jewish author Marcus Samuels, called ‘You the gentile’. He was examining what, at that time, was called ‘the Jewish problem.’
Hitler was a dictator and it does you no service to attribute any push-back to justifying a dictator who persecuted many millions of people and against whose doctrines my father went to war.
Despite what you say, your post unequivocally attempted to proffer a rational explanation for the German attitude to Jews, namely the involvement of Jews in revolutionary movements. In fact, as eventually whipped up by the Nazis, it was indeed no more than blood-lust.
However, I acknowledge what you say about Hitler. My forbears and relatives also fought against Hitler, and suffered horribly for it, so I apologise for attributing to you views that you don’t hold.
It’s clear that Jews were at the forefront of communist revolutions from Russia to Hungary and Germany, and in communist parties in America and France. In those more clear-eyed times many statesmen were aware of this and drew the reasonable conclusion that it was not safe to have Jews in your country if you wished to avoid revolution, which many people did. Hitler’s policy, far from being bloody, aimed to remove Jews from positions of cultural power and encourage emigration. There were not many takers because every country knew the risk it was taking accepting these peculiar and unassimilable migrants. Palestine took some 60,000 by 1939 to the chagrin of the local Arabs, and how right they were proven by subsequent events.
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Apart from the infamous events in November 1938 following the assassination at the German Embassy in Paris of Ernst vom Rath by the the Polish Jew Grynszpan, which followed the slaying of Swiss NS leader Wilhelm Gustloff in 1936 by another Jew Frankfurter, there was very little violence perpetrated against Jews prior to the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany. This despite the open hostility, to the point of declaring war on Germany on 24th March 1933 by Jewish groups in America and Britain, manifested by boycotting and constant agitation for the Western powers themselves to fight Germany.
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In short Sindri your libellous assertions are based on a cartoon version of history in which there are goodies and baddies rather than nations (including the widely dispersed nation of Israel) with interests and rivals. But then I believe you already know this.
But nowhere near as comic as your blinded antisemitic view of history that conveniently overlooks the pact betweenArab Palestinian Nationalist Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler established over multiple face to face meetings between 1939 -1941 which sought to 1) pledge not to occupy Arab land, 2) recognize Arab striving for independence, and 3) support the “removal” of the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Führer confirmed that the “struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine” would be part of the struggle against the Jews. Hitler stated that: he would “continue the struggle until the complete destruction of Jewish-Communist European empire”; and when the German army was in proximity to the Arab world, Germany would issue “an assurance to the Arab world” that “the hour of liberation was at hand.” It would then be al-Husayni’s “responsibility to unleash the Arab action that he has secretly prepared.” The Führer stated that Germany would not intervene in internal Arab matters and that the only German “goal at that time would be the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space under the protection of British power.”
The image of the two embracing no doubt fuels your antisemitic wet dreams.
I don’t understand your objection to Hitler’s rather obvious policy. Madagascar was the preferred final destination for Jews at this point, an option which receded further and further from possibility as Germany’s initial successes were wound back. As I stated above World Jewry had declared war on Germany in 1933 and was her avowed and implacable enemy with extensive influence in all four of the great powers arrayed against it. Hardly surprising then that an alliance with the enemies of political Zionism in the Near East would be sought especially after all attempts to broker a peace with Britain which did not entail Germany’s relegation to vassaldom had been rebuffed. From the German point of view Zionism had only ever been a convenient and humane mechanism to deport Jews rather than a policy plank.
Perhaps only a rampant Antisemite such as yourself could use Hitlers’ Germany and ‘Humane’ in the same sentence. Says it all really. And notable by admission is any recognition that the Palestinian political movement (because they are not a people, a culture, a language or a religion) as represented by the Grand Mufti had already sought to give voice to their desire for Genocide of Jewish people well before the annexation of modern Israel and the supposed evil of occupation and colonialism (the terms Iran’s useful idiots such as yourself like to advance) putting a lie to all such claims that this is the root cause of your antisemitism.
Mad, bad, but contemptible rather than dangerous.
I’ve never replied to comments about any of my articles, but I would like to briefly respond to some of the criticisms of this article, which probably assumed too much of the reader to fill in the blanks of my argument, and hence has caused people to believe things which I never intended and don’t believe.
The hint about the core argument of the article is in the word ‘new’, as in ‘since October the Seventh’, and the extraordinary growth of antisemitism among ordinary people.
Also, I didn’t argue that intelligent people aren’t antisemitic or can’t be antisemitic. A majority of the SD, the Nazi secret service, had PhDs. Plenty of intelligent people through the years have been antisemitic. To give two examples: Voltaire and Kant. In the article, I tried to explain the reasons why ordinary people, since October the Seventh, were parroting age-old antisemitic tropes, and why this has happened so quickly. Also, common sense is intelligence, and so are spirituality and religiosity. All are forms of intelligence. Furthermore, libraries, from the ancient Greeks onwards, have groaned under the weight of books whose arguments were about the malleability of the masses – it’s a central topic in political theory. And whether people like to admit it or not, average people have average intelligence. The clue is in the word average. And in reply to an ad hominen argument about my intelligence. I have one skill – I read books. Other than that, I’m squarely in the average camp and often below average.
With all respect prose is not poetry, so there should be no need to “fill in the gaps”, if the article is written with sufficient clarity. Your (now) expressed core thesis, that most individuals who have not turned their cognitive powers to a given subject, are prone to parrot or accept a zeitgeist is hardly novel.
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But your chosen example, the charge or accusation of genocide against Israel is a poor one. The accusations of genocide leveled against Israel are hardly new. A google search limited to the 13 years before October 7 2023, literally turns up thousands of web pages where these very accusations were being made. That search will turn up opinions from Harvard Law School, the European Parliament, various UN bodies, to name a few, and all of this before recent events. The reason for this is squarely due to the wording of Article II of the UN convention.
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Clearly you have firm views about the meaning of the word “genocide”. But the aforementioned convention has its own definition. Most people who wish to accuse Israel of that act, will find something to hang their hat on, in Article II. So in summary whilst a car is not a horse, some words can have many meanings, and genocide is one of those words. Finally if I might add to the discussion on semantics, the compound words anti Zionist and anti semitic use a different object, presumably for a reason.
Nobody, at least where I’ve read, has ever equated the retaliation of the Israelis to their atrocity to the 9/11 attack in America, which,,to my mind at least, is almost exactly the same. The western world applauded the USA mobilising everything against Afghanistan in their retaliation and nobody made any issue about civilian deaths then….
Ignoring for the moment the issue of Israeli complicity in 9/11, the response to it in Afghanistan had international support and did not involve systematic clearance by bombardment of an entire urban area. Even so it is doubtful whether a similar operation by the USA would be possible today in a much more skeptical propaganda environment. Certainly the subsequent and far more controversial 2003 demolition of Iraq was so poorly justified and massively counter-protested that one would hope it could not be repeated. Then again, decades earlier, the carpet bombing of Vietnam or for that matter of Japan and Germany and the effective murder by exposure of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers after their surrender also flew far enough under the radar with a tame media.
“Ignoring for the moment the issue of Israeli complicity in 9/11”
Oh, sod off, Horst. You don’t belong here.
“Ignoring for the moment the issue of Israeli complicity in 9/11”
We can always rely on someone supplying an example, and often on who it will be.
How do you like being described as “peculiar and unassimilable”, Katz?
Scaled to 9/11 for the national population, the approx 3,000 in the towers equates to approx 40,000 Israelis on October 7th.
By such meretricious calculations the destruction of ‘Amalek’ in Gaza is equivalent to 1500 9/11s or four and a half million odd people. Of course all such comparisons are absurd, The Gaza clearance operation is straightforward ethnic-cleansing and mass murder. Genocide is an intentionally emotive term which really ought to be retired.
Israel has continuously attempted to get Gazan citizens to move away from the battle areas but the UN and Arab League states insist they must remain there.
See main thread for my reply to this.
Thank you Sindri
I get it, Israel wants more land and Israelis want fewer unfriendly neighbours. Why can’t those pesky goyim just forsake the last vestige of their homeland without a struggle? Why won’t Arab countries and the UN aid Israel’s war aims?
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Of course this is just another stage of the invasion which began stealthily over a hundred years ago. There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with an invasion as long as we’re allowed to call it what it is and make a clear-eyed decision as to whether it’s in OUR national interest to support or resist such a brutal undertaking, one which stands to alienate many of our recently imposed diverse foreign elements.
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One hopeful outcome from this event may be the death of the illusion of universal human rights. Rights are always conditional on the morality of the powerful. The idea of universal human rights is itself being used by the powerful to coerce gullible White people into accepting their own dispossession.
You don’t ‘get’ anything. That much is patently clear from all of your contributions. What the rest of us get from you on the other hand, is your rampant unbridled antisemitism. A frothing at the mouth hatred of all things Jewish and Israeli. We get a corrupted moral relativism which amongst other things states ‘I don’t understand your objection to Hitler’s rather obvious policy’. We get your status as an intellectual pygmy unable to understand that there is no such thing as the indigenous ‘Palestinian People’ who have occupied the river to the sea for time immemorial. They are just Muslim Arabs who have sought to adopt the lands of Ancient Israel and Judea after the Assyrians had displaced the original Israelites. We get your faux moral grandiosity on ‘human rights’ while you simultaneously punch down on the victims of October 7.
Frankly, if I were ASIO I would be very interested in your potential connections to the Iranian regime given your endless attempts to push their pro Hamas propaganda and allied antisemitism here at every opportunity.
Quote: “What the rest of us get from you on the other hand, is your rampant unbridled antisemitism.”
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This part of the rest gets nothing from him as I long ago stopped reading his posts.
https://quillette.com/2024/01/16/the-iranian-connection/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter
What a lot of hot air signifying nothing. I take a patrotic British Australian perspective as part of a multi-continent Christian European civilization. I don’t see the Zionist project as a necessary part of this whole, which is not to say that it doesn’t have its merits. I just don’t value it as much as most here seem to.
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An anti-Semite used to be someone who hates Jews. Nowadays he’s someone whom some Jews and their proxies hate, usually for trying to get at certain truths. So be it. Your hilarious efforts to turn Iran into a bogeyman and your insinuation that I must be a foreign agent are pure projection.
‘I take a patr[i]otic [freudian slip perhaps?] British Australian perspective as part of a multi-continent Christian European civilization’ Except of course when just a handful of comments ago you stated; ‘Hardly surprising then that an alliance with the enemies of political Zionism in the Near East would be sought especially after all attempts to broker a peace with Britain which did not entail Germany’s relegation to vassaldom had been rebuffed.’
Then of course there is this classic extension of an age-old Jewish trope that you offered just above; ‘Ignoring for the moment the issue of Israeli complicity in 9/11’.
I’ll find you a mirror David and what you will see in it is a vile Jew-hating antisemite. You can’t even be honest with yourself, let alone anyone else.
My link above on Hamas as Iran’s proxy is a well known fact and has been written by two respected academics and authors in the field of Middle Eastern Politics – something you are most certainly not. Again, I think it worthy that ASIO look into your potential links to your beloved Iranian regime.
Come off it mate. You’re obsessed with Jews. You describe them on this thread alone as “peculiar and unassimilable”. A few stories above, the climate crackpot Naomi Oreskes is “nominally American, Dr Oreske is a New York Jewess”. You think that Jews are a sort of fifth column undermining any country where they live. Then there’s your mad revisionist line that Hitler policies towards the Jews were “humane”, your theory that Jews were a mortal peril to the countries of Europe, and that Britain was played like a violin by the Jews in WW2 when she should have been making nice with Hitler. And, though you deny it, you think that Jews control the world. I don’t have time to dig up all the evidence of your peculiar pathology, but when confronted with it, as here, you retreat into a sort of confected mildness, just like your friend Dr Töben, who, I note, actually spoke at a holocaust denial conference in Iran as a guest of the ayatollahs. Perhaps CK has hit a nerve.
I don’t know who “controls the world” but it’s going to be well-organised, very wealthy groups of people with superior knowledge of the entire world and ability to project well-aimed propaganda which is ultimately how politics is controlled, particularly under universal suffrage. As Quadrant is at pains to point out , much of what passes for knowledge in the mainstream of Western liberalism is erroneous, leaving the bulk of people who “trust the science” in a fantasy land from which they are quite unable to help themselves or their ethnic cousins. Groups of people, particularly with shared lineage, who can think clearly and identify their own group interest in such a setting are at a significant advantage.
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My mildness annoys you? That’s too bad. I am at heart a mild person. Maybe you should focus on rebutting me rather than attempting to defame me with accusations of mildness. You have interesting ideas, many of which you ascribe to me, and perhaps some of them are true but we’ll never find out if we can’t discuss them freely. I am glad that for the moment we can. Perhaps you’d like to explain why everything you said I said is wrong?
Debating your paranoid theories about Jews, let alone Hitler’s “humane” polices towards them, would be only slightly more useful than debating the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden.
As I’ve said before, there are convivial websites for anti-semitic crackpots to exchange their ideas. Quadrant, whose founding principles were intellectual rigour and implacable hostility to dictatorships of the left and right, is not one of them.
I’ll take that as a ‘no’. As I said recently, I’m grateful that QoL is not an echo chamber. But I can understan – you prefer to play in the sandpit with your friends.
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Given all that guff about intellectual rigour it’s instructive that you so often choose to rehash old ground with liberal use of ad hominems and ridicule – when you’re not elaborating your own version of my supposed arguments, not so you can argue against them, but so you can ridicule them and attack me. The intellectual rigour is stupendous….
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But I can understand-…
At the core of all this, in my self-assessed learned opinion, is the human species; a social animal possessed with too much intelligence for its own good, which is now at plague proportions, to the detriment of the planet.
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We see manifested here at Quadrant Online the human behaviours of tribal identification and territorial conflict (intellectual and geographical), with words being thrown like lethal weapons between one tribe and the other.
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Words like “anti-Semitism”, “race”, “indigenous”, “aboriginal” and “native” mean different things to different people. Myself, I don’t think the word “anti-Semitism” has any useful relevance in the service of the “greater good”, because it refers to Semitic people, of whom the Arabs form the overwhelming majority. Originally the word was used in relation to Ashkenazi Jews, but whether they are actually Semites is a moot point (see Arthur Koestler’s “The Thirteenth Tribe” and/or Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People”). Similarly, the words “indigenous” and “aboriginal” are not helpful, because they have become politicised and/or weaponised
so it would be best to refer to people as “native”, because that word simply refers to having been born on a particular area of land. There is the process of “naturalisation”, whereby a person can become a “native”, and in the Australian context that would mean attaining citizenship, thereby we are all equally Australian.
I don’t agree about the process of becoming Australian.
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In the same way that Americans descended from the 17th C. settlers are more American than descendants of post-revolutionary let alone post WW2 arrivals there is a gradation.
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Australia was a bifurcated society of English and Scottish Protestants and largely Irish Catholics (with a few Germans in SA and the odd other) up until the post-war period when this distinction began gradually to weaken, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of so many migrants who were much more different from the incumbents than the incumbents were from each other. Up until the 1970s there was a fairly tough regime of socialisation to which any new arrivals, whether British or more exotic, were subjected which ensured their compliance with Australian values: “don’t stick out, especially intellectually”, “no dobbing”.No-one was interested in your culture; you’re an Australian now. Hardly anyone travelled overseas. We had our own sports, our own poetry which celebrated our past, our own music scene and our own radio. Television and film were a mix of local, English and American. That was the last period of authentic ethnogenesis when continental and British Europeans were forced to become Australian into the 1970s. There were a few Malay Chinese and Vietnamese who were somewhat incorporated into the nation at this time as well, although the process was necessarily less complete for them.
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No-one who has arrived here since the racial discrimination act and the Fabian-imposed multiculturalism regime can really be Australian, whatever his citizenship status. They are all world citizens, maybe with strong attachment to a homeland and with special access to the Australian zone. It’s Australia’s fault. We allowed ourselves to be swindled and we gave up on making people become like us.
Of course there was overwhelming international cultural pressure from academe and popular media driving us to make the “right” (wrong) decisions. I hate to say it @Sindri but Jews were intimately involved in the catastrophic switch to multiculturalism, whether or not they were the ultimate instigators. Understandably, given the a
German experience, many felt that a dominant racially conscious White Anglo-Celtic population, which had existed up until the 1960s, was always at risk of becoming hostile to an increasing Jewish presence. This risk was mitigated by a multicultural policy which more or less denied race that was in force until fifteen or so years ago, when it became race critical. Even conservative Jews rarely have a bad word to say about multiculturalism maybe because they intuitively know that Jewish culture is extremely well-adapted to flourish in that millieu.