Category Archives: History

Douglas Damien Murray For IDF Beefcake & Other Such Creepy Curiosities

BAB's A List, Communism, Critique, History, Iraq, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Media, Propaganda

BY R. J. STOVE

Herewith, a few disordered (and shamelessly impressionistic) thoughts on the current Australian political scene, as it is impinged on by the Middle East horrors. Before specifying these thoughts, I should stress the fact that I consume far less mass-media news reportage than most of my compatriots do. Besides, I don’t own a television set at all.

On the other hand, what I lose in terms of the ability to acquire up-to-date data, I perhaps gain in terms of detached observation. This is what I’ve observed here over the last few months.

Australia’s Likudniks – many of whom of course are either helots of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire, or Pentecostal fundamentalists, both groups being seldom more ethnically Jewish than I am – are furiously trying to dial up the volume to eleven, SPINAL TAP style. So shameless is the truckling to Bibi, that entire issues of THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN and SPECTATOR AUSTRALIA, entire talk-shows on Sky News, appear to consist of press releases from Mossad.

In such milieux, the term “antisemite” is promiscuously applied not only to brain-dead mullahs who now and then chant nasty things about Jews at a public protest outside the Sydney Opera House, but to the coolest and most reasoned criticisms of Israel’s official policy since October 7,  of whom some are even Jewish. And yet …

It isn’t working. Even I can tell that it isn’t working.

In the 21st century’s first few years, when most of these same people furiously defended the buccaneering expedition to Iraq, the policy of shouting down all disagreement with Israel’s regime did still work. As recently as a decade ago, it did still work.

Not now, though. The opposition to the Gaza ethnic cleansing is now too widespread among intelligent Australians, and, I suspect, too confidently maintained, for the toothpaste to be reinserted into the tube. It appears that the time when even the mildest criticism of Netanyahu was equated with mass-murdering Einsatzgruppen has now – for better or for worse – ended.

I’ve also noticed a marked demographic split, on the issue of who is currently supporting Netanyahu and who isn’t. As a general rule (there exist, needless to say, exceptions), the demography is as follows:

* PEOPLE UNDER 40: Pro-Palestinian, except for a handful of neocon dittoheads in the above-named, mostly Murdoch-controlled, outlets.

* BOOMERS, APPROACHING PENSION AGE, FROM THE VIETNAM-DRAFT-DODGING GENERATION: Overwhelmingly pro-Netanyahu.

* RETIREES IN THEIR 70S, 80S, AND 90s: Surprisingly inclined to give Palestinians the benefit of the doubt. I wonder if bitter memories of America’s Anglophobic behavior over Suez in 1956 are figuring in this age group’s memories.

In a way, I could almost feel sorry for the Murdoch-controlled dittoheads. With them, as with Comrade Zhdanov chewing out dissident writers and composers in Stalin’s Russia after World War II, there’s clearly a sense of bewilderment that anyone should show such base ingratitude as to exhibit opposition. To quote Orwell’s comments on the Stalinist cultural purges of 1947-1948:

The thing that politicians are seemingly unable to understand is that you cannot produce a vigorous literature by terrorizing everyone into conformity. A writer’s inventive faculties will not work unless he is allowed to say approximately what he feels. You can destroy spontaneity and produce a literature which is orthodox but feeble, or you can let people say what they choose and take the risk that some of them will utter heresies. … They [the Soviet politicians] don’t know what literature is, but they know that it is important, that it has prestige value, and that it is necessary for propaganda purposes, and they would like to encourage it, if only they knew how. So they continue with their purges and directives, like a fish bashing its nose against the wall of an aquarium again and again, too dim-witted to realize that glass and water are not the same thing.

Strangest of all, to me, is the fact that even the cleverest of Bibi’s apologists (and that’s not saying much) – to wit, Deviant Douglas Murray, neoconservative armchair Clausewitz, and accordingly a tireless apologist for every dirty deed now being carried out by uniformed IDF beefcake – is no longer, as hipsters would put it, “cutting through.” Not on this topic.

Goodness only knows what all of the above portends. What I can say with a measure of certitude about the Australian scene is a variant of the ancient aphorism about New York. Namely, that if the Likudniks can no longer make it here, they can no longer make it anywhere, other than in the United States of America.

***************

Melbourne-based historian and organist R.J. Stove is the author of César Franck: His Life and Times and of a forthcoming book (Kings, Queens and Fallen Monarchies, scheduled for 2024) about Europe’s monarchist movements between the two world wars. Dr. Stove’s  innumerable disastrous career decisions include a total refusal to regard Rod Dreher* as the greatest Christian theologian who ever lived.

*Screen Pictures of Douglas Damien Murray For IDF Beefcake is courtesy of this site:

https://www.fanpop.com/clubs/damien-thorn/images/30060000/title/damien-photo?card

& here:

https://nypost.com/2023/11/15/opinion/on-the-ground-inside-gaza-where-israel-is-trying-to-save-civilians-from-hamas/

UPDATED (1/12): NEW ESSAY: Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In

Anti-Semitism, Argument, Christian Right, Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Hebrew Testament, History, Ilana Mercer, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Military, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, War

The Israel of my formative years was no Eden before the Fall, but it was not a terrorist state. Jewish supremacism, like the American exceptionalism driving the United States’ foreign policy, breeds barbarism ~ilana

NEW: “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In” was a feature on The New AmericanThe Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity (January 6), and The Mises Institute, Power & Market (January 8).

I am honored that the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel McAdams at the helm—from the get-go doing the work of the Lord—has featured the essay, Jewish Supremacism, Like American Exceptionalism, Breeds Barbarism.”

First, I ask you to consider: Are First Principles opinion? Are the rules of logic opinion? Is the Sixth Commandment opinion? Is it optional? Is Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Just War Theory opinion? Of course not. Immutable natural law is truth, not opinion.

The truths tackled

*The “Hamas Made Me Mass Murder ‘Argument'”.
*
The fact of “Murder And Ethnic Cleansing having been Mainstreamed, in Israel.
*The media tool that is “Fox News, providing War Porn Militarytainment to Americans and Israelis.
*
And some tools that front Fox, who promote “The Antisemitism Libel (Set Theory is in there. Oh, yeah; my mind takes me to math, sometimes).
*The ILLOGIC Of The Justification is dismantled.
*
All this against the backdrop of an account of the “Israel In Which I Grew Up.”
It’s Gone.

The piece, Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In,” passed muster with my book editor’s gimlet eye. Robert James Stove, PhD, has written most kindly:

Wow. I think that this article might be your best literary production yet.
It taught me so much about Israel’s early decades which I didn’t know otherwise.
If you’d written nothing else in your life, you would still deserve salutes for this cri de coeur alone.

This wide-ranging essay, an intellectual and spiritual purge of sorts, spans, by necessity, past and present, the personal and the political, the philosophical and the factual.

As remarked,

One of the advantages of age … is historic perspective, harking back to the past. There is value in looking back, even if it is only to lament what is no longer. Doesn’t the Left preach the merits of processing grief?

And while this column generally avoids excess use of the singular, 1st person pronoun; there comes a time when the personal cannot be avoided in galvanizing on behalf of the victims in Gaza. VDARE’s Peter Brimelow, ever-so kindly and under personal duress, had written the Foreword to Broadsides: One’s Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture (2002), my first book. This most observant of men observed the following:

Somewhat to my surprise, it is actually quite rare for this most emotionally intense of columnists to draw on … personal experiences. What seems to motivate Ilana, ultimately, is ideas

As painfully revealing as writing “Today’s Jewish Taliban is not the Israel I grew up in” was, it nevertheless accomplishes what it sought to achieve: To near-hermetically refute, I hope, almost every possible “argument” in support of Israel’s orgiastic murder spree in Gaza.

I aimed to seal the case against the prosecutors and defenders of a war, “70 percent of whose casualties are women and children.” Nobody can say, after reading this, that the war even remotely qualifies as a just war. Gazans are owed reparations for the irreparable.

Even explained is the difference between murder and “righteous killing,” with allusion to The Sixth Commandment’s “Thou shall not murder”. In Hebrew and in English.

There is nothing righteous about Israel’s murder spree in Gaza.

Conservatism Inc has currently banished such thinking, just as first-principles criticism of Genghis Bush was silenced during the United States’ war on Iraqis—only way worse: There is a monk-like devotion to Israel Über Alles among America’s Israel First media, left and right. Personally, I know very few fellow Jews—Stanton Peele, Esq., PhD, longtime colleague, is one—who are in agreement with “Today’s Jewish Taliban is not the Israel I grew up in“.

So, help me understand: I ask readers to please explain to me and to my readers why have Israel’s supporters not denounced the manifestly diabolical deeds being committed in Gaza?

Leave your comment here,  so others may understand to what you attribute this deformity. Anon is fine. Email me personally, if you simply cannot share your insights publicly. I want to hear and understand.

 The New American: “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban.

https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/memory-indictment-todays-jewish-taliban-not-the-israel-i-grew-up-in/

&

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity: Jewish Supremacism, Like American Exceptionalism, Breeds Barbarism.”

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/jewish-supremacism-like-american-exceptionalism-breeds-barbarism/

&

The Mises Institute, Power & Market, January 8

https://mises.org/power-market/israels-hamas-made-me-do-it-claim-doesnt-excuse-tel-avivs-barbarism

UPDATED (8/21/023): Mercer Uninterrupted Physical Continuum In Response to Libel

Aesthetics, History, Ilana Mercer, Israel, Morality

This is the new woke reality: You apologize for not being stupid and immoral; you justify and defend not being physically decrepit in your later years

My authentic physical continuum, against the background of life in all its tumult

This post is a function of sad necessity—in response to wicked libel here: https://www.unz.com/imercer/first-they-came-for-tucker-carlson-next-is-robert-f-kennedy-jr/#comments
&
https://www.unz.com/imercer/first-they-came-for-tucker-carlson-next-is-robert-f-kennedy-jr/#comment-5952798

Me in my early 40s.

Turned 50, in Santa Barbara. Identical to the above.

Me as a young girl, 13-14, growing up in Israel:

Childhood in Israel, ilana mercer on right, aged 13/14

The same face if a little plumper, aged 13-14. MEMORIES. Childhood in Israel. I’m on the right; my little sister is on the left. My bestie behind us. A lifetime ago.

The beach would have been our childhood hangout, the gorgeous, undeveloped, historic Caesarea, with Herod’s ancient city close by.

Sad that one has to address what is the sin of lashon haraa; the evil, wagging tongue of libel and lies, promulgated by some female foe.

Will update this post with the rest of this necessary, if repulsive, frivolity.

As a lifetime dissident, my words and ideas have been plagiarized. Read “The Moral Writer’s First Commandment: Cite Your Sources!” https://www.ilanamercer.com/2021/05/moral-writers-first-commandment-cite-sources/ I’ll fight that. Good or bad, or both—my words and ideas are MINE. Nobody takes credit for those. They are all I have.

Ditto when the integrity and authenticity of my physicality is maligned, libeled as fake, as is the case here.

https://www.unz.com/imercer/first-they-came-for-tucker-carlson-next-is-robert-f-kennedy-jr/#comment-5945562

https://www.unz.com/imercer/first-they-came-for-tucker-carlson-next-is-robert-f-kennedy-jr/#comment-5952798

The gallery at IlanaMercer.com now spans an image culled from the early teens, from me in my early writing career when already “mature,” until today, 2023.  No serious change. A physical continuum pictorially depicted cannot but be authentic, against the background of life in all its tumult.

A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson, Author of The Declaration, And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

Classical Liberalism, English, Founding Fathers, Government, History, Political Philosophy

‘Let us … toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him’ILANA MERCER, July 4, 2019

The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson‘s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of the collective mentality of the D.C. establishment “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By “all men are created equal,” Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a “Natural Aristocracy,” did not imply that all men were similarly endowed. Or that they were entitled to healthcare, education, amnesty, and a decent wage, à la Obama.

Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.”

This is the very philosophy Hillary Clinton explicitly disavowed during one of the mindless presidential debates of 2007. Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary revealed she knew full-well that the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But she then settled on “progressive” as the appropriate label for her Fabian socialist plank.

Contra Clinton, as David N. Mayer explains in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, colonial Americans were steeped in the writings of English Whigs—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others. The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

Jefferson, in particular, was adamant about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power,” a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”

“As Jefferson saw it,” expounds Mayer, “the Whig, zealously guarding liberty, was suspicious of the use of government power,” and assumed “not only that government power was inherently dangerous to individual liberty but also that, as Jefferson put it, ‘the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’”

For this reason, the philosophy of government that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.

But Jefferson‘s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England‘s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.

Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism. “To the Whig historian,” writes Mayer, “the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.”

If Jefferson begrudged the malign influence of the Normans on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

And, notwithstanding the claims of the multicultural noise machine, the Declaration was as mono-cultural as its author.

Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
Originally
: “A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Declaration,” by Ilana Mercer, July 4, 2019