Glenn Reynolds:
It’s as if these people are a bunch of degenerate animals, which is because that’s what they are. Hamas and the — majority — of Palestinians who support them. And their western supporters — including the Western feminists who went crazy about a fictional frat-house rape that left its “victim” alive and unscarred — are utterly complicit as well.
And we’re supposed to pretend somehow that these degenerate animals aren’t degenerate animals because of a bullshit Cultural Marxist theory created by people whose goal was always to undermine Western civilization and replace it with something that looks a lot like a cross between Hamas and Stalin. Garbage ideas from garbage people who deserve to be treated like the garbage that they are, but that are instead amplified and legitimized by our academic/media/political complex, which is itself no better. It is important to make that truth utterly clear and to repeat it and throw it in their faces.
And, from
John Hinderaker:
Upon re-reading this post, I realize that I may have inadvertently maligned the animal kingdom. To be clear, there is no animal species, no predator, anywhere near as cruel, as heartless, as vicious, as ignorant, as the Muslims who carried out the atrocities of October 7—and the much larger number of Muslims and Western liberals in the press, at Harvard, Penn, MIT, etc., who cheered those atrocities. No animal species has sunk that low.
John Hinderaker:
What accounts for this savagery? The sick culture that prevails among the so-called Palestinians, and that especially dominates Gaza. The Gazans are lost in hate and have been trained to do evil from childhood. It is that culture that must be destroyed, not the political organization of Hamas, which is a symptom not a cause.
A number of commentators have written that the Israelis must not seek revenge for the atrocities of October 7. I don’t understand that. They absolutely should wreak vengeance on the Gazans. (“Everyone over there is a terrorist,” as one retrieved hostage says.) In my opinion, Israelis have a moral duty to avenge the Gazans’ atrocities. Happily, they seem to be well on their way to doing so.
Ed Morrissey:
However, this is utter nonsense, not least because ‘Palestine’ did not exist at that time. At all. One would think that a Catholic priest would know the history of the region better than that. That name didn’t even come into being until about a century after the death of Christ, when the Romans put down the last of the Judean rebellions and drove many of the Hebrews from the region. That took place in 132 AD (or Common Era, if you prefer), 99 years after the Crucifixion. At that time, the Romans renamed Judea as Syria Palestina after combining it with Galilee, a name retained until the empire began its long collapse and withdrew from the region in 390 AD.
But even after the Romans renamed the region Syria Palestina, Jews maintained a significant population within it, although many more dispersed to other parts of the region. Christians emerged as a dominant population initially, first after the acceptance and endorsement of the Romans under Constantine, and later after the Roman retreat in 390. The area became more Christianized over the next couple of centuries through evangelization and other cultural phenomena rather than conquest, but Jews remained in the former Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. The Arabs, fueled by Islam, didn’t come in significant numbers for another couple of centuries after that — and even then, they didn’t identify themselves as “Palestinians” under the Roman rubric, which would have been unthinkable to them at the time.
Furthermore, while Bethlehem is today in the West Bank where ‘Palestinians’ want a state, that’s not where Mary or Joseph originated or lived before Jesus’ birth. They came from Nazareth, which not only wasn’t part of a mythical Palestine at that time, it’s not even part of the proposed Palestine today. Nazareth is within Israel proper and will remain so, regardless of any “two-state” settlement. Therefore, even if one accepts a backward projection of a modern claim to a period where the claimants’ ancestors wouldn’t control for another six or seven centuries, it’s very clear that Jesus would not have been a “Palestinian” at all, especially as the term is defined now. He was a Nazarene, a Judean, a Hebrew, and an Israeli in modern terms, and so were Mary and Joseph. And while Jesus and the Holy Family did flee Bethlehem as refugees into Egypt, they returned to Nazareth rather than Bethlehem after the death of Herod … which is again part of Israel, not part of a proposed “Palestine.”
None of this “parallels” our current world situation. Jesus was born under an occupation, but that’s because the Romans had occupied the land of the Jews. Today, the Jews have control of their own historic lands, having literally bought it from the peoples that had colonized it in the succeeding centuries, especially the Arabs, and then defended it in several wars in which Arabs invaded Israel in attempts to conquer and destroy it. Mizrahi Jews — natives of the region — comprise a majority of its population, thanks in large part to the ethnic cleansing of Arab and Persian nations in the first half of the 20th century and immediate post-independence period in the second half.
This argument is even more foolish than the “Jesus was an illegal immigrant” argument, and only slightly less silly than a claim by CNN’s Christopher Lamb (also flagged by Twitchy) that Jesus would have been born “in Gaza under rubble” today. Bethlehem was the city of David, the place where the prophets foretold that the Messiah would be born — and Bethlehem is nearly a hundred miles from the Gaza border. (Lamb had the good sense to delete his tweet after getting roundly criticized for it.)
The real message of Christmas has nothing do with any of these political questions. It has nothing to do with national or international relations. The real message of Christmas has to do with Christ bridging the gulf between the Lord and fallen humanity, and the forgiveness of sins and extension of the grace necessary for each of us to live in God’s eternal love. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something … and these days, that’s usually a progressive media narrative meant to distract from reality.
John Hinderaker:
So good luck with “net zero” by 2050, or any other date. Environmentalists in the U.S. and Western Europe have succeeded in prematurely shuttering a number of coal plants, but that is virtually irrelevant. It is China and India, along with countries like Indonesia, that are driving the coal explosion.
And,
The challenges are unprecedented because until now, no one has done anything as stupid as shutting down vast quantities of reliable electric power while having no plan [to] replace that capacity, on any timetable or at any cost. But that is where we are now. Given that U.S. emissions are essentially immaterial to global CO2 emissions, in view of what China, India, Indonesia and other countries have in progress, one can only question the motives of those who want to cripple our economy and our children’s futures with pointless “green” mandates.
John Hinderaker:
The Biden administration is demanding that Israel take even more extraordinary measures to avoid harming “innocent civilians” as it tries to eradicate Hamas. Around the world, politicians and others express dismay at the alleged number of innocent civilians who have been killed by Israeli bombardments, even while admitting that Hamas’s casualty numbers include its own terrorists, people killed by terrorists’ awol missiles, and so on.
But my complaint is more fundamental. Watching videos of Israeli captives being paraded through Gaza, and seeing “civilians” spitting on them, hitting them, joyously celebrating their capture, I have asked: where are these innocent civilians we keep hearing about?
John Hinderaker:
What is the connection between these two seemingly unrelated topics, global warming and the conflict between Israel and Hamas? One might say that a person who is wrong about one thing (global warming) is likely to be wrong about another (Gaza). But Thunberg isn’t just wrong, she is a passionate advocate against fossil fuels and against Israel—and, more broadly, “settler colonialism.”
That is not a coincidence. Rather, it reflects the fact that the climate change movement in which Thunberg is so prominent actually has little or nothing to do with climate change. Rather, it is an attack on the West. Fossil fuels are the foundation of modern civilization. They are the sole reason why we are not riding around in donkey carts and reading by candle light. Destroying fossil fuels means, at best, impoverishing the West.
That this is the activists’ real goal is evident from the fact that they train their fire not on China or India, but on the United States and Europe. If they were really concerned about the climate, this would make no sense, because China is by far the largest emitter of CO2.
And,
If you aren’t talking about Chinese emissions, everything you are saying about global warming is a joke. And neither Greta Thunberg nor Al Gore, Joe Biden or John Kerry is saying anything about Chinese emissions. If they really believed their own hype about global warming as an existential threat, they would be talking about invading China or bombing the hundreds of new coal plants that it has under development. But they don’t do that; instead, they stick up for the Chinese Communists and say they are doing a pretty good job. So their real goal isn’t affecting the climate, it is destroying Western economies and, thus, Western power.
Likewise with Israel. Neither Greta Thunberg nor any of her left-wing allies has shown any interest in Middle Eastern conflicts that do not involve Israel. From the Iran-Iraq war to the Syrian civil war to the homicidal conflict between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, they are uninvolved, no matter how many thousands of Arabs are killed. Only when Israel is a party—even when it is a party because of one of the most vicious acts of war carried out in the modern era—do they swing into action. Why do they care? Because Israel is Western in its orientation, and thus denounced as a “settler colonialist” country despite the fact that Jews were living in the Holy Land more than two thousand years before the first Arabs appeared.
That Greta Thunberg and many other leftists are engaged in both climate change and pro-Hamas activism is no coincidence. Rather, the two positions are of a piece: both are fraudulent and have little to do with their expressed purposes. Rather, both are born of hatred of Western civilization.
