RUTHFULLY YOURS

~I commented recently on Tucker that I preferred the Internet of a decade ago to the increasingly totalitarian social-media cartel of today: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, feels the same way:

I think that the old blogosphere was superior to “social media” like Twitter and Facebook for a number of reasons. First, as a loosely-coupled system, instead of the tightly-coupled systems built by retweets and shares, it was less prone to cascading failure in the form of waves of hysteria. Second, because there was no central point of control, there was no way to ban people. And you didn’t need one, since bloggers had only the audience that deliberately chose to visit their blogs.

The Internet of the post-9/11 years already seems like a lost Golden Age. Twitter in particular seems to have no purpose other than cascading “waves of hysteria”. I mentioned on air both Facebook’s viral snuff videos, and the suicide of a Canadian porn actress after a Tweetstorm of homophobia accusations from LGBTQWERTY types who subsequently gloated over her passing. “Social media” plays a role in more deaths than, say, America’s supposedly all-powerful “white supremacist” movement. But, unlike the latter, nobody seems bothered about the former.

~This week’s Spectator contains a piece with the following headline:

Do the Americans know who they’re fighting in Afghanistan — or why?

What follows doesn’t really ask that question – in part because we all know what the answer is. One of President Trump’s great contributions to the public discourse is that he sees people as winners (him) or losers (Crooked Hillary. Sad!), and that he would prefer America to be in the former category. That’s why his decision to string along with existing Afghan policy is so unTrumpian: If there is any US strategy left in the Hindu Kush, it’s to lose so slowly no one back home notices.

Jason Burke’s Speccie piece is a review of a new book by Steve Coll called Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret War in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016. As old Islamabad hands will know, “Directorate S” is the secret unit dealing with Afghan affairs in Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), which itself celebrates its seventieth birthday this year. The ISI was set up by Sir Robert Cawthorne, then Deputy Chief of Staff of the fledgling Pakistani Army, and like so many bright ideas of well-intentioned men in that part of the world it jumped the tracks fairly spectacularly. But the very fact that a book about “America’s longest war” is named after a malign Pakistani black-ops racket tells you something about the tenuous grasp Washington has of the situation. In his review, Mr Burke writes of Afghanistan before the US intervention:

Bagram had been captured by the Taliban, who then exercised nominal control over 80 per cent of Afghanistan.

The world’s most lethal evil-doers are the NGOs that fly under a false flag, claiming to be champions of human rights. Their potency comes from the fact that unlike other of the world’s worst actors—think Kim Jung Un—they are not feared and despised but admired and treated as moral arbiters. A billion dollar a year industry, these NGOs reinforce their moral with financial muscle. Gerald Steinberg, founder and director of NGO Monitor, has been alone in following these outfits for the last fifteen years. He observes that human rights NGOs show “that soft power can sometimes be more dangerous than hard power.”

And while Israel is their most obvious target, they have bigger game in their sights—the transformation of Western societies and culture through mass immigration.

Human rights NGOs bear a major responsibility for the demonizing of Israel in the West. In Catch the Jew Tuvia Tenenbom, masquerading as Tobi the German, focuses on the hundreds of so-called human rights NGOs that infest Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories in search of Israeli misdeeds—and fabricate them (sometimes stage them) as they come up short. Many of these NGOs are basically front groups for terrorists and assorted destroy-Israel groups. In 1917 Steinberg finally was able to persuade the Danish government to stop funding the Human Rights International Humanitarian Law Secretariat, an NGO framework established in 2013 at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah with an annual budget of millions of euros paid for by the governments of Sweden, Holland, Denmark and Switzerland. In an interview with journalist Ruthie Blum, Steinberg says that his research has shown that of the 24 core NGOs funded by the Secretariat, six had ties to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (on the EU’s official list of terrorist organizations) and 15 were involved in world-wide campaigns to destroy Israel by economic means.

We live in an age of ideological self-awareness, a world of identity politics and human rights activism, where those among us with any common characteristic or condition, or particular cause or opinion, can coalesce into active pressure groups each demanding recognition of its perceived “cotton wool” rights.

It is often claimed that the law is now soft on crime and weak on social and civil wrongdoing. By comparison with what it was like during the life and times of nineteenth-century Australia, our present-day laws are indeed very soft.

Stealing a sheep in the 1820s invited the death penalty.[1] Convicts were flogged for being rude to an official;[2] and when George Howe was given permission to publish Australia’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette in 1803, the country was not ready for a free press—it had to be “passed by the governor’s inspector”.[3]

All of that changed with the moving times and the development of an enlightened democratic system of government. Steal sheep now and you might get away with a community service order;[4] be rude to whoever you like and so what; while the media can report and criticise anyone or anything it believes to be deserving of it.[5]

Well, that is unless you offend, insult or humiliate someone who claims their sensibilities and feelings have been hurt. I’m referring, of course, to the long-running debate over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975[6] in respect of which several trivial complaints with a racial connotation, as dealt with by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), have given rise to public controversy and concern.

From the historical archives, a reminder of the thin line between barbarity and civilisation, and that civilisation cannot be taken for granted. (The image at left is of still-breathing victims of the Kiev pogrom of 1919; the pogrom described below seemingly occurred in 1885, and the author briefly mentions one that took place in 1905.)

This article was printed in The Australian Worker, 16 August 1933; it was entitled ‘What a Jewish Pogrom Means’.

For centuries the Jews have been persecuted. But have you ever realised the terror of a pogrom? This description of anti-Jewish riots by David Katharas refers to pre-war Russia, but it might easily be Germany to-day.

This story may help Christians to realise the. horror with which world Jewry has heard of the outbreak of anti-Semitism in Germany, and the depth of feeling behind the protests of our people against the Nazi attacks on the Jews.

I am a trader in the City of London, but Russia is the country of my birth.

I am one of many thousands of Jews in this country and America who have lived through the terror of persecution in Eastern Europe, and who know what anti-Semitism can mean at the hands of the more brutal of the European peoples.

My mind goes back to a spring evening in the town of Kiev in South Russia [Ukraine].

There are five of us huddled in a corner of a back room — my parents, my two young sisters and myself. We children are clutching my father’s arms, too terrified to speak or even to weep.