RUTHFULLY YOURS

The U.S. Army recently announced that it has horrifying video footage of Islamic State fighters herding Iraqi civilians into buildings in Mosul. The plan was not to use them as human shields–that is, to announce their presence in the hope of deterring American airstrikes. Rather, ISIS was deliberately trying to ensure that American troops killed them, by “smuggling civilians into buildings, so we won’t see them and trying to bait the coalition to attack,” an army spokesman saidat a briefing for Pentagon reporters. The motive, he explained, was hope that massive civilian casualties would produce such an outcry that the U.S. would halt airstrikes altogether.

There’s an important point to this story which the spokesman neglected to mention: This tactic is borrowed directly from Hamas. And it was borrowed because the world’s response to successive Hamas-Israel wars convinced ISIS that creating massive civilian casualties among residents of its own territory is an effective strategy. Admittedly, Hamas hasn’t yet been caught on video actually herding civilians into buildings before launching attacks from them. But there’s plenty of evidence that Hamas prevented civilians from leaving areas whence it was launching rockets or other attacks at Israel, thereby deliberately exposing them to retaliatory strikes.

During the 2014 Gaza war, for instance, the Israel Defense Forces warned civilians to evacuate the town of Beit Lahiya before launching air strikes at Hamas positions. But according to Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid, who based himself on interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas gunmen showed up and warned that anyone who left the town would be treated as a collaborator. Since Hamas executes collaborators, that was equivalent to saying that anyone who tried to leave would be killed on the spot. Thus, faced with the alternative of certain death at Hamas’s hands, most Beit Lahiya residents understandably opted to stay and take their chances with the IDF.

There’s also plenty of evidence that Hamas deliberately launched attacks from buildings where it knew civilians were present. Just last month, for instance, I wrote about a case during the 2009 Gaza war in which Hamas directed sniper fire at Israeli troops from the third floor of a well-known doctor’s home, thereby forcing the soldiers to choose between becoming sitting ducks or shooting back and risking civilian casualties. Unbeknownst to the soldiers, Hamas was also storing explosives in the house (using civilian buildings as arms caches or wiring them with explosives is standard practice for Hamas). Consequently, when the soldiers fired at the Hamas position, an unexpectedly large explosion ensued, killing three of the doctor’s daughters and one of his nieces.

Australian Imam: “Palestine is Jewish Land”  http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2017/04/australian-imam-palestine-is-jewish-land.html No wonder Ayaan Hirsi Ali admires this Australian Shi’ite imam, Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi.  He is speaking to the Rotary Club of Adelaide. Hear him out. Memri.org video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUe4SbpN5-E)

Like other criticisms of Hirsi Ali, the effort was to portray her as the problem itself rather than as the response to a problem.

That this type of campaign can succeed — that speakers can be stopped from speaking in Western democracies because of the implicit or explicit threat of violence — is a problem our societies need to face.

There is a whole pile of reasons why Islamists want to stop her explanations from being aired. But why — when the attacks keep on happening — do our own societies collude with such sinister people to keep ourselves the dark?

Only a fortnight after a vehicular terrorist attack in Westminster, London, another similar attack took place in Stockholm, Sweden. On one of the city’s main shopping streets, a vehicle was once again used as a battering-ram against the bodies of members of the public. As in Nice, France. As in Berlin. As so many times in Israel.

Amid this regular news there is an air of defeatism — a terrible lack of policy and lack of solutions. How can governments stop people driving trucks into pedestrians? Is it something we must simply get used to, as France’s former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan have both suggested? Must we come to recognise acts of terror as something like the weather? Or is there anything we can do to limit, if not stop, them? If so, where would we start? One place would be to have a frank public discussion about these matters. Yet, even that is easier said than done.

There is a terrible symmetry to this past week in the West. The week began with the news that the Somali-born author and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali had been forced to cancel a speaking tour in Australia. “Security concerns” were among the given reasons. A notable aspect of this issue, which has been made public, is that one of the venues at which Hirsi Ali was due to speak was contacted last month by something calling itself “‘The Council for the Prevention of Islamophobia Incorporated”. Nobody appears to know where this “incorporated” organisation comes from, but its purported founder — Syed Murtaza Hussain — claimed that the group would bring 5000 protestors to the hall at which Hirsi Ali was scheduled to talk. This threat is reminiscent of the occasion in 2009 when the British peer, Lord Ahmed, threatened to mobilise 10,000 British Muslims to protest at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster if the Dutch politician Geert Wilders were allowed to speak. On that occasion — as on this one — the event was cancelled. Promises to mobilise thousands of angry Muslims can have such an effect. But the long-term implications often get lost in the short-term outrage.

By the end of July last year, I noted that from the time of the Pulse dance club attack in Orlando that killed 49, Western countries were seeing ISIS-inspired terror attacks at the rate of one every 84 hours.The pace slackened slightly over the next two months, but last summer I termed it the “Summer of Terror”:

And now, just hours before the beginning of the Christian Holy Week and a few days before Jewish Passover, the events of this past week may indicate that we’re seeing the beginnings of yet another “Summer of Terror” comparable to last year’s or perhaps surpassing it.

Just this week we’ve seen terror attacks in:

St. Petersburg, Russia
Vaucouleurs, France
Queanbeyan, Australia
Ofra, West Bank
Stockholm, Sweden

St. Petersburg, Russia

On Monday, a nail bomb carried by a suicide bomber ripped through a metro train in St. Petersburg; the attack, at last count, killed 14 people.During the course of the investigation more devices were discovered:The suspected bomber, Akbarzhon Jalilov from Osh, Kyrgyzstan, became radicalized and traveled to Turkey in November 2015, at which point a large gap emerges in his biography.It’s unclear whether Jalilov entered Syria and possibly trained with terrorists. So far, eight others have been arrested in connection with the bombing.

Vaucouleurs, France

Monday night, Sarah Lucy Halimi, a 66-year-old doctor and Orthodox Jew, was stabbed while in her bed and then thrown over her third-floor balcony by a 27-year-old Muslim neighbor while he shouted, “Allah Akhbar”: CONTINUE AT SITE

When the United States defeated and occuppied Japan after World War 2, lowering the country’s birthrate was a major priority. The conventional wisdom of the day was that overpopulation was a root cause of Japan’s military aggression, so measures to reduce the birth rate were a major priority. Abortion was legalized, and a comprehensive propaganda campaign was launched, with media (fully under control of the occupation) depicting large families as unahappy and two children as ideal. Over the course of a few years, the birthrate sharply declined and then continued to decline more slowly. Meanwhile, as the average age rose, so did the death rate, so deaths began to outnumber births, as this chart shows:

(The decline in 1966 was due to that year being particularly “unlucky” according to the Japanese zodiac.)

Japan’s population peaked at just over 128 million and now is declining at an accelerating pace, as fewer young people are having fewer babies. A demographic time bomb is now detonating, with the population projected to decline by one third to 87 million in 2060, with half the population between 15 and 65.

The birth dearth is already visible on the streets of Tokyo, where I am currently visiting with AT co-founder Richard Baehr. Very few babies are visible on the streets. Yesterday, we saw only two baby carriages all day, and both of them were like this:

Pets, meanwhile, have become big business. This is in upscale pet store very near where we are staying:

“Pets always come first.” Hmmm.

The dogs and cats are adorable. A quick look at the pets section of a bookstore as well as the pet store itself suggests that low-maintenance cats are far more popular than dogs.

Meanwhile, it is cherry blossom (sakura in Japanese) season in Japan. Here are the cherry trees in front of a junior high school in Tokyo:

And here are the blossoms in Ueno Park, one the prime spots for viewing them.

But of course, as with every aspect of human behavior in Japan, there is an etiquette, a set of rules for people to follow. Due to the large number of foreign tourists (esspecially from Asia) visitng Japan lately, the rules are spelled out in Ueno Park:

Aside from the sheer beauty of cherry blossoms, the cultural appeal for the Japanese is related to their evanescence: after blossoming for a few days, they fall to the earth – a powerful metaphor for the transience of human life. Owing to the acelerating decline in Japan’s population, the cherry blossom may prove an unfortunately appropriate symbol of Japan’s flowering as an economic and cultural force in the world.

Reality is a formidable opponent. It never loses. Sometimes the victory is immediate; in the political, cultural, and economic domains, it may take a while longer. In any human confrontation with the intractable facts of life, physical or historical, the outcome is never in doubt. Ignorance is a serious liability in any transaction with the real world. Denial is ultimately lethal.

The most succinct definition of reality I know of is the deceptively simple dictum of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides in his fragmentary poem “On the Order of Nature”: “Whatever is is!” Human error and ensuing catastrophe consist in the unfortunate propensity for believing that “things that are not are.” The modern update of the formulation is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” where we read, “The world is the totality of facts” (Proposition 1.1). A lie is also in itself a fact, but it is not a part of the structure of reality – that is, in the philosopher’s words, it does not satisfy the criterion of its “unalterable form.” A lie is a “negative fact,” pointing to the “non-existence of certain states of affairs.”

Lies, like imaginary objects, are protean; they can shift, change, recompose. Reality is what is “unalterable”: 2+2=4, the Archimedes Principle, the gravitational law of inverse squares, the Coriolis Effect, Ohms Law, the force of entropy, and so on. One cannot violate or deny these facts with impunity. They simply are. The same is true of historical facts, for example: over-taxation depletes a country’s resources by impoverishing its productive classes; a falling reproductive ratio leads in time to national decline; military adventurism creates domestic turmoil, but “peace in our time” is the harbinger of war; magical ceremonies do not cure serious diseases; hyperinflation can “Weimar” a loaf of bread; public entitlements cause personal dependency; and so on. Pretending otherwise, and acting on the pretence, is a recipe for an empty larder and a house in disarray.

It is much easier, of course, to reject or dismiss facts or truths where the damage is not immediate, to conflate “things which are not” with things that “are,” if the harm is deferred to a later date. One can deny sexual dimorphism, for example, and posit 32 different genders or gender identities along with a welter of ludicrous pronouns before the result of such folly becomes evident in cultural degeneration and social collapse. One can refute the fecund marriage of a man and a woman – that is, the family, as the historically validated foundation of a robust, viable, and productive society before social and cultural disintegration inevitably set in. One can suppress the provable fact of differential climate change over the eons and replace it with fashionable and scientifically untenable theories such as man-made global warming before the inevitable economic effects reduce a nation to increasing financial hardship.