RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

CAIRO—A bomb has struck a church north of Cairo, killing at least 13 people and wounding 25 others, Egypt’s Health Ministry said.

The attack took place on the Coptic Christian Palm Sunday, when the church in the Nile Delta town of Tanta was packed with worshipers. Ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed confirmed the toll from the attack in an interview with CBC TV. The state-run MENA news agency provided the same death toll and said 35 were wounded.

CBC showed footage from inside the church, where a large number of people gathered around what appeared to be lifeless, bloody bodies covered with papers.

Christians make up around 10% of Egypt’s population and have repeatedly been targeted by Islamic extremists.

Note from Janet Levy

As you probably know, the European press has been compromised for a very long time and typically refers to Muslims as “southerners” or “Asians” or nothing. Muslim-sounding names are purposely kept out of reports, wherever possible.

Also, with Islamic blasphemy laws in place in many countries, great care is exercised to avoid possible prosecution for “defaming” Muslims or Islam in any way. The many visible prosecutions of truth tellers has had a profound censoring effect on formerly free Europe. J.L.

The Islington assault has left a man, a woman and their two-year-old son with burns. Scotland Yard said “strong acid” was thrown at the group by an assailant.

Firefighters, who were among the first at the scene, used their hose to cool the victims’ burns. A Met Police spokesman said the man, aged 40, has suffered serious injuries.

They said: “The man’s injuries, whilst not believed to be life threatening, are being treated as life-changing.” Both adults suffered 15 per cent burns, while the child suffered burns to the face.

The mother and boys injuries are not as serious as those suffered by the father. All three are being kept in hospital. The incident occurred at around 1pm at the junction of Copenhagen Street with Caledonian Road.

“We have to accept that we are in a long war. That this has no easy answers.”

Georgetown University professor and terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman made this grim diagnosis while recently speaking at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The institute’s presentation “Post Caliphate: The Future of the Salafi-Jihadi Movement” gave a distressingly sober examination of why victory over the world’s militant groups will not come any time soon.

Referencing the 2011 American SEAL killing of Osama bin Laden and the demise of other Al-Qaeda leaders, Hoffman pointed out that five years ago, that militant group was widely believed to be on the downward slope toward collapse. But last February, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spoke to the United State Committee on Armed Services and “painted a remarkably bleak and melancholy picture of a newly resurgent Al-Qaeda.” In a now-famous 1998 interview, bin Laden said that he welcomed “the opportunity of martyrdom, because I am completely confident that my death will produce thousands of more Osamas.” According a slide showing the number of Al-Qaeda affiliates currently operating across the globe from Nigeria to Indonesia, bin Laden’s dream may well have been realized.

According to Hoffman, the “conventional wisdom in recent years was also that [the Islamic State] would remain an entirely local phenomenon” in the Middle East. But ISIS attacks like the November 2015 event in Paris have disproved this thesis. Such miscalculations “should make us very sober about any conception that we have a good pulse on ISIS even today – much less that we truly understand the dynamics and the evolution of the broader jihadi movements.”

Hoffman warned against unfounded optimism, pointing out that the Islamic State’s expulsion from Iraq would not end the group’s widespread threat. According to his presentation, at a minimum, ISIS will go underground like Al-Qaeda did, using international terrorist strikes in particular to keep the organization vibrant. But many analysts “don’t consider one of the worst case scenarios,” he said, “and that is the potential for some sort of reconciliation between Al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

Militant groups like the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda don’t just disappear. They are continuously attempting to rejuvenate themselves. “These groups – for more than a decade and a half – have been able to withstand the greatest onslaught directed against terrorists in history, often by the most technologically advanced military in the history of mankind,” Hoffman said, pointing out that this phenomenon seems to confirm the jihadist belief in “their divinely-ordained struggle: that there will be travails; there will be setbacks. But that victory is still possible.”