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Lord Balfour, Villain
It’s just a painting! There’s a genocide going on and you’re worried about a painting!
Yes, because this is the rationale that permits driving a truck bomb into St. Peter’s for, oh, fill-in-the-blank. This is the rationale that permits taking a sledgehammer to the Pieta because it reinforced the gender binary. This is the rationale for shooting an artist who drew a blasphemous picture. This is the rationale of the mad and impatient, the lunatics who attend a bedside with a skeleton on the sheets and tell themselves they are midwifing the future. -James Lileks, The Bleat, Wednesday Review of Modern Thought
Lileks was even better than usual today–and that is saying a lot. Do not miss the article linked above.
I am surprised that Lord Balfour was not targeted earlier. More than four decades before Yassir Arafat and/or some Syrian ideologues invented the concept of a
“Palestinian” national identity, the British rulers of former Ottoman territories politely and innocuously suggested that that spot would be a suitable place for a Jewish national homeland. This was formally stated in the famous Balfour Declaration. You can just feel the meanness and racism dripping in every line.
The same people who think that America’s borders should be wide open to waves of uninvited foreigners tell us that it was unconscionable that the British allowed and for a while encouraged Jewish immigration into the ancestral Jewish homeland to join the Jewish population already there.
In the century since Lord Balfour wrote that, the Christian and Jewish minority populations in the Islamic world have been steadily exterminated. Actual genocide. Focused, intentional persecution. Islamist intolerance is epidemic. But for some reason, we are not allowed to notice that particular phenomenon.
The useless, narcissistic poser who defaced the painting is no different from other cognitively and morally impaired dhimmis who want to persuade us normals that Hamas is an official victim class. Posing as human rights champions, they nevertheless remain militantly silent about overt genocide by China against Uighurs and Tibetans, about ethnic cleansing, and the enslavement of Christians and others in Africa, persecution of Yassidis, the Baha’i and even disfavored Muslim sects in Iran, Iraq, and Yemen.
Our pompous princess, the anti-art jihadi, and her entire retarded tribe attack only Western culture, Western law, and Western society oblivious to the fact that Western culture is the ONLY force on Earth that has ever effectively opposed injustice, persecution, oppression, and bigotry. But let’s destroy Daddy’s portrait because even though he may have been a very good man he was not perfect and left me a world that is imperfect and filled with icky things and his failure makes me ever so cross. Not cross enough to oppose actual bad people who might hurt me, of course, but angry enough to demonstrate against Western people and their surrogates who, like Daddy, should somehow make all the badness go away. And I am such a good person for feeling this way.
Published in History
I read it earlier this morning and concur. I was going to do a post about it, but @oldbathos and James did an outstanding job.
Modern day Britain–“where everything is policed, except crime”–Mark Steyn
The story of the man who was thrown to the ground and arrested at one of the regular weekend “Kill the Jews” riots in London, because he was carrying a sign reading “Hamas is Terrorist” is a perfect example. Police insist he was arrested only to ensure his own safety, and that he was “de-arrested” (not a joke, George Orwell, call your office) shortly thereafter.
It seems that–in the face of the screaming mob–the Bobbies simply couldn’t figure out a way to let the one guy who was carrying a sign stating what is actually official UK government policy, have his right to do so assured and–as usual–they denied him that right in order to let the howling barbarians have their moment. I should think Robert Peel is rolling over in his grave.
If I were going to arrest the guy, it might have been for mangling the language, but I think his heart was in the right place, and that he deserved to be seen and heard.
The regular reports in which the police post photos of “persons of interest” they are seeking for breaking the law at such demonstrations is another indicator. Crimenutely. The police are there. They see these people breaking the law in real time. The posts, after the fact, of their images say nothing other than “We didn’t have the guts to wade in and arrest these people at the time, and so now we are showing their pictures (which we took) asking the public to help us find them (again). Please
claphelp.”Cowards.
Thanks, OB. To all those people who have put their reputations on the line (like Lord Balfour) for the good of others, thank you, many times over.
Spot on!
Thanks!
I think that this is completely incorrect, historically.
Here are two pieces of historic evidence. The British Peel Commission report in 1937 recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The UN resolution on the issue in 1947 approved the same thing.
The proposed Arab state was, obviously, the state of the Palestinian Arabs. They were the Arabs living in Palestine. They had an obvious national identity and national aspirations, recognized at the time.
There wasn’t a proposed state called “Palestine.” There was a proposed Arab state in Palestine. There wasn’t a proposed state called “Israel” either. There was a proposed Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish state came to be known as Israel, and the nascent Arab state came to be known as Palestine.
My account above is arguably misleading, in one way. I refer to the “proposed Arab state.” The UN resolution partitioning Palestine could be interpreted as the legal basis of a Palestinian state, just as the Zionist argument in favor of the legitimacy of Israel generally cites the very same resolution as providing the legal basis of the state of Israel.
I find there to be far, far more evidence of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and persecution of the Palestinians by the Israelis, than I find evidence of any of your other claims.
As just one example, how many Uighurs and Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese? What percentage of the the homes of the Uighurs and Tibetans have been blasted to rubble by the Chinese?
Just in the past five-odd months, the Israelis have killed vastly more Palestinians. The latest reported official figure is about 31,000, though this is generally acknowledged as incomplete. The latest reported official figure of women and children killed is about 22,000. About 2 weeks ago, our Secretary of Defense testified that the figure for women and children was over 25,000, at that time.
Nope. The figures from the Palestinian agency are a farce. It’s remarkable that when you look at the growth of numbers, they conveniently go up in a straight line. The numbers are somewhere between 12,000 and 18,000.
The point is that there was never a pre-existing “Palestinian” national identity. Arabs living under the British mandate thought of themselves as Arabs, not differentiated “Palestinians”. The Arab invasion of the brand-new UN Jewish partition was not to restore a “Palestinian” nation but to assert the generic Muslim claim that what was once theirs can never go back to non-Muslim rule, particularly the symbolically important conquest of the sites of Jewish and Christian origin stories.
Utter garbage comparison. Tibetan women are forced to marry Han Chinese husbands. Suppression is granular and total. The overt attempt to destroy non-Chinese identity has no parallel in Israel. No one is compelled to renounce Islam or an Arab identity. Also, Tibetans and Uighurs don’t launch terrorist attacks on the Han. Yassidis don’t rape Muslims. there is no excuse other than imperialist racism.
Your casualty figures are silly. If you were tracking the “official” numbers, you would notice they increase linearly and are almost exclusively women and children. Oddly enough, the IDF is not killing males according to your sources.
I have zero sympathy for Gaza. If an entire people give themselves over to a culture of total war and glorify terrorist violence, they don’t get to complain when their completely inexcusable, intolerable actions cause that war to actually happen. Even Hitler at his most insane was consistent enough to believe that if would-be conquerers lose, they deserve what they get and ordered bombers to destroy German targets.
If the IDF makes even token efforts to minimize civilian casualties (and they have clearly gone to some lengths) , they are already morally superior to your Palestinian Arab buddies who accept no corresponding moral obligation.
I get that you really, really hate Israel but maybe that should cause a pause and rethink in some of what you post on this topic area which is invariably over the top.
DNFTT, people.
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