Category Archives: Media

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/

UPDATE II (10/8): THE TRUTH: Israel Suffered A Complete Collapse Of The State; The IDF Being Its Face

Affirmative Action, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Israel, Media, Military, The State, War

Israeli intelligence assets could very likely have been compromised. Israel is a progressive society recruiting for representation, not merit. This Israel has learned from the best: America ~ilana

When Israel flattens Gaza, and it no doubt will, if only out of sheer impotence—the World, a wicked place, must remember the body of this young Jewish woman murdered, stripped, straddled, her leg likely broken, folded beside her thigh ~ilana

The IDF appears near-useless in defending its citizens, not unlike the US Army.

So much for flimsy fences, unmanned, AI-powered machine guns on the Gaza border and other clever high-tech resources. Post-graduate cleverness clearly is no match for fiercely savage, hands-on guerrilla warfare.

Hamas’s low-tech invasion across the Gaza border into southern Israel was also a clear demonstration of a complete failure of the State apparatus, the IDF being the face of the State. Bibi Netanyahu, the PM, is in hiding.

The most honest report, as I write, in the evening of October 7, comes from a relative, safe, thank G-d. Her words are the most truthful to date:

 

“Shock, betrayal, the crash of a dream; how could this happen? People are still without help or rescue. They turned to the media to call the army because there were terrorists in their homes and yards. It took hours, and the situation has still not changed much. Total chaos.”

To my question, “Has not a war room been set up and constant TV updates from the IDF and the PM’s office being broadcast?”
Reply: Nope. Nobody is talking to us. People are doing the work of the army. It’s like the Wild West.

News from channel N12 confirms (in Hebrew, or an Ebonics equivalent, the spoken language has so deteriorated) that images of children’s corpses are circulating the internet, but their parents know not where they are lying, in which Israeli morgue. “It’s 2023,” exclaims the TV panelist! “A nightmare!”

300 are dead; 1800 injured.

About living through the 1973 War I wrote in “Betraying Brave Boys”:

The Yom Kippur War Israel nearly lost. Israeli intelligence failed miserably. As is usually the case, the kids paid the price—a few hundred youngsters were stranded on the borders with no backup. They defended their posts heroically before being gruesomely slaughtered. Many were dismembered.

When that war ended, Remembrance Day swelled to include another 2,523 casualties—about one-tenth of one percent of the population was dead. Thousands more were wounded. The casualty estimates for Egypt and Syria were 16,000.

UPDATED (10/8): While the Hamas’s low-tech invasion was confined to southern Israel, the extent of the casualties is far greater than 9/11, as a proportion of a total population of nine-million souls.  The death count to date is 650; 2000 injured

UPDATE II: There are people who are incapable of seeing excellence such as in literature, for instance, because it originates in the wrong side of the political spectrum. This is an intellectual deformity.

Being wedded only to truth and immutable excellence, at least as I see them, helps me seek out the best sources without fear or favor. In this way I consolidate my idea of how, in the case of Israel, on October 7, 2023, the slaughter of over 700 of their citizens was enabled. 

To wit, Fox News is providing the worst rah-rah rubbish, proving itself unfit to my task. MSNBC, on the other hand, has some excellent sources. Richard Engel has always been one of my favorite foreign-policy correspondents. Former Bernie Sanders operative Simone, an obnoxious crumpet of a host, not ordinarily my cup-of-tea, asks probative questions. In an exchange with the awful John Brennan, these two lefties float a plausible theory:

Israeli intelligence assets could very likely have been compromised. Israel is a progressive society recruiting for representation, not merit. This Israel learned from the best: America.

 

 

Trump Nullifies Republican Debate, AGAIN; Wisely Courts Trump Democrats

Democrats, Donald Trump, Labor, Media, Republicans, The South

I won’t be watching this make-believe Republican Debate, led by intellectual pygmies like Dana Perino, Bret Baier and at least 4 of the wannabe candidates

I do LOVE how Trump, in meta style, has made the latter—as well as all panelists on the other Fake News channels—irrelevant, white noise.

For the second time. On August of 23, some major dummies–Karl Rove (an architect of the war on Iraq), Ms. Perino, and the scintillating Trey Gowdy convened to sell something, for a change. They were trying to engineer a parallel reality for Deplorables.

As they say in the hood: Talk to the hand; the face ain’t listening.

So speak up, Ms. war-forever-more Nimrata Nikki Haley (who was empowered by Trump during his presidency), I can’t hear you. You too, Tim-something-or-another. Did you say something, Mr. anon on the upper-left of the screen?

It is an excellent political move, by the way, for Trump to be supporting labor. (I’m obviously not saying here that I support the United Autoworkers’ case.)

In this, Trump acts like a Southern Democrat (the good kind, once-upon-a-time)—and like RFK, Jr. might. Or, Trump deploys something similar to the Sailer Strategy.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is, come to think of it, a Trump Democrat (my new coinage).  The term mirrors the positive elements of a Southern Democrat.

Dixiecrats was the derogatory name the Media Ministry gave to what was really the States Rights Democratic Party. Considering that the Constitution consigns law enforcement to state and local governments, the position the Dixiecrats took was hardly subversive.

The issue of segregation or racism, moreover, is intellectually independent of states’ rights. The reason for the mistaken conflation of states’ rights and segregation resides with the same propagandists who successfully equate, for the purposes of discrediting, the right of secession with an alleged support for slavery.

* “LANCING THE LOTT,” Ilana Mercer, December 25, 2002

UPDATES ONGOING (8/28/023): Trump’s Piss-Poor Personnel Choices: A Treacherous T & A Show

Affirmative Action, Conservatism, COVID-19, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Media, Neoconservatism, Republicans

There is no question that Donald Trump is a political martyr. The Permanent State, Democrat and Republican, want him gone—and worse. There! I said it. It’s the truth. But now that Trump has been martyred—we pray for the former president and admire him for his resolve and resilience in the face of pure evil. My admiration for Trump the Man notwithstanding—his failures as a president are irremediable ~ilana

Otherwise, Donald Trump is adorable. His mug shot is a piece of political art ~ilana

Head on over to CNN or ABC if you are interested in taking the measure of some typical celebutantes hired by Donald Trump during his presidency.

On the progressive Fake News networks one can observe the female flotsam and jetsam—former Trump personnel-–perform for the camera, hissing like cobras against the former president. They got gigs at CNN: Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troye, Sarah Matthews. On The View it’s Alyssa Farah Griffin. Toxic and stupid, all. I know they believe otherwise, but nothing these banal bimbos will say will ever matter or mean anything in the grand schemes of things.

Trump had promised Deplorables to hire the best. Instead, he gave us a T & A parade of subpar females, including his daughter.

For Ivanka, Trump bombed Syria. For her lapdog husband, he approved a boatload of H-1B visas. Both Jared and Ivanka, aka Jarvanka, were eager to make a splash at Davos (Davos before Deplorables). Thus, at Jarvanka’s behest—and spurred on by his own bad judgment—Trump began firing and feuding with the architects of MAGA, all of whom could not stand the Davos duo.

Ivanka had vaporized the excellent John Kelly, who had kept Jarvanka out of the Oval Office. As did Trump’s daughter get rid of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, a tough ice-princess, who effectively instituted and administered the zero-tolerance policy on the border and never caved over family separation.

Ivanka and her husband then inaugurated the Goldman-Sachs West-Wing matriarchy (Jared is androgynous). Dina Powel, former adviser to Ivanka, soon made it onto Trump’s National Security Council. She was a relic from Goldman Sachs and an Ivanka recruit. The affable Democrat Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic advisor, was former president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs.

These “Kushner-Cohn Democrats” ousted Stephen Bannon from the West Wing.

Ivanka and the bimbo parade proved to be “The Donald’s most intractable problem.” “What Ivanka wanted Ivanka got,” at the expense of the MAGA agenda.

Whether Deplorables admit it or not, the two New York liberals, a nepotistic appendage to the Trump Administration, had been a disaster for the plank President Trump had promised and for which Deplorables voted.

And I won’t even go into the press secretaries who bedecked Donald’s dais, starting with stumblebum Sarah Huckabee, obsequious, apologetic and useless.

From Day One, and in a book published June 29, 2016, I had cheered “The Trump Revolution” and in particular, “The Donald’s Creative Destruction.” In “The Trump Revolution, The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016), Trump was celebrated as a,

“Political Samson that threatened to bring the den of iniquity crashing down on its patrons, … an entrenched punditocracy, a self-anointed, meritless intelligentsia, oleaginous politicians, slick media, big money: You name it; Trump was tossing and goring it.”

In the same book, I had recommended that if Trump needed bling to front his administration—let him choose women like Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter, who could bring it intellectually, had fight in them, and are easy on the eye, too. But men with fragile egos don’t like women smarter than themselves.

The Republicans are execrable for their weak response to the martyrdom of Donald Trump.

Still, there is no question that Donald Trump is a political martyr.  I first uttered the M word on January 13, 2021, over 2 years ago, in a post titled, “Make No Mistake, It Is Trump Voters Who’re Being Impeached In The House, Set Up For Persecution“:

Martyred twice—take the president’s second impeachment, passed impromptu in the House (Senate still to fold) with no due process of law afforded him whatsoever—as a badge of honor, a decoration of sorts

Trump is a brother now, say individuals calling themselves Blacks For Trump  … They put you in the infamous Fulton County Jail in Atlanta; that means the system is messing with you. You are one of us. What the brothers are sensing here is injustice. It’s what I call the Law of Rule, as opposed to the rule of law.

The Permanent State, Democrat and Republican, want him gone for good—and worse. There! I said it. It’s the truth. Now that Trump has been martyred—we pray for the former president and admire him for his resolve and resilience in the face of pure evil.

My admiration for Trump the Man notwithstanding—his failures as a president are irremediable. He ushered in an intolerable and damaging T & A show of treacherous bitches. He normalized neoconservatism, emboldening its representative to make a comeback, by heeding his daughter and hiring so many of them. Nikki Haley and John Bolton are examples. He heeded their policy advice too:

“It’s often said that the Trump administration is ‘isolationist,’” wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. “In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without … any debate in Congress or the media.”

Trump squandered the mandate he was given. He failed to prevent the consolidation—and the crimes—of a Covid Cartel, the vaccine, the lockdowns, the decimation of American small business and the destruction brought by the summer of black-on-white rage, which went unpunished under his watch. The promised Wall gave way to “multilayered technology”; to the “deployment of additional personnel,” and to the tried-and-tested (not!) “vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors.”

And you know that Kimberly G-String (who makes Madonna look natural) will be waltzing straight into a role as Trump’s press secretary—if not Don Jr., paramour, then another such apparition like her.


More about Kimberly Guilfoyle in “Is Political Participation Predicated On Views About Holocaust?” (November 14, 2019)

(8/28/023): Then there is Alina Habba-Habba. She’s what Trump appoints, and will continue to appoint, because he lacks the wherewithal to assess serious intelligence and to think deeply. Otherwise, Donald Trump is adorable. His mug shot is a piece of political art.