In which the pond tries to avoid Gaza and our Henry by cheerfully contemplating the destruction of the planet ...

 

The pond woke with a heavier heart than usual - herpetology studies are always a burden, a duty and a chore - but today was traditionally the hole in the bucket man day, and the pond knew what would be coming, and yet the pond has never run Hamas propaganda, only partly because the reptiles would never dream of it, and the pond also tries its best not to run Benji propaganda, though the reptiles do it all the time ...

The question of balance, frequently confused with 'whataboutism', is everywhere to be found. 

In the latest Haaretz newsletter update to arrive in the pond's in box, this was the opening line: Israel’s war against Hamas has entered its twenty-seventh day, three weeks after Hamas killed at least 1,300 Israelis and wounded more than 3,300 in a merciless assault. In the Gaza Strip, the Hamas-controlled health ministry reports that more than 9,000 Palestinians have been killed. 

Okay, there's an insinuation that they don't trust the figures, so how about: Israel’s war against Hamas has entered its twenty-seventh day, three weeks after Hamas killed at least 1,300 Israelis and wounded more than 3,300 in a merciless assault. In the Gaza Strip, the Hamas-controlled health ministry reports that many, many thousands of Palestinians have been killed, many more Palestinians than Israelis if you want a meaningless head count and done... in a merciless assault.

There, fixed, and then with a deep sigh, the pond turned to the lizard Oz digital edition ...

 

Yep, there was our Henry, but displaced, because in the top far right favoured position, the reptiles had decided to give garrulous Gemma a go ...

What was missing? If you looked elsewhere, news of what was happening outside the hive mind reptile bubble was easy enough to find ...

Here's the thing. They could find time to lead the digital edition with talk of mushroom murders and Australia's most wanted, but news of bushfires had been banished, banned, shunned, dismissed out of hand?

It was the same in the treekiller edition (when are they going to end the tree slaughter?)

Down below the fold in the comments section there was more Benji propaganda ...

The pond was in a quandary. It thought of giving garrulous Gemma a run, but knew that the pursuit of happyness was one of the most futile and useless tasks anyone could undertake. 

Almost any pop psych guru will tell you so, as in David Robson furiously scribbling for the Graudian Why it's time to stop pursuing happiness ...

The pond doesn't read the reptiles in a quest to attain happiness. It's a duty and a chore ... and then the pond realised that Gemma was parroting news from London ...

“The rejection of traditional sexual norms and the idea that we can just throw them out the window,” explained Louise Perry at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London this week, has led to unintended consequences that have not been beneficial for women and society more broadly.
The author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and the host of the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast, Perry describes herself as a feminist, and yet her message is a 180-degree departure from the conventional feminist narrative. 

Uh huh, but we'd had other news from London this week, and that was only useful for cartoon fodder ...

Meanwhile, the pond dutifully read GG's parroting of the news from London and got to the end, only to come to this ...

Perry might sometimes simplify complex topics, but her points are valuable and she presents them clearly. She believes that while we can’t undo the invention of the pill (and we wouldn’t want to), women should understand that their nature differs from men’s. Recognising this distinction is crucial for mental wellbeing. Perhaps the problem is not the sexual revolution, but rather the refusal to acknowledge our inherent differences.

Amazingly the reptiles had managed to slip in a link over that talk of simplifying complex topics, and what do you know, it led to a piece by the Angelic one simplifying complex topics ...

Did GG realise that her blather would see the reptiles slip in a link to the Angelic one?

Who knows, who cares, and at that point, the pond simply gave up on that strand, and instead decided to celebrate the heroic worker bee reptiles who diligently toil away representing lobbyists and industry groups in the lizard Oz. It's rarely celebrated or appreciated, but some worker bee reptile has to do it.

Step forward Perry Williams for your first appearance on the pond, fittingly helping with the need to nuke the country ...

Peak bodies? Aren't they usually called dangerous 'leets and cliques?

At this point the pond should note the links sent in by esteemed correspondents. They aren't ignored or overlooked, but sometimes the pond is overwhelmed by a sense of futility. Take that Graudian story about discovering sunlight can be a form of energy ...

And so on, but what use is that, when put up against worker bee Perry, diligently parroting industry cliques and 'leets?

On the upside, worker bee Perry's offering was short, so the pond could turn to snappy Tom, also making a rare appearance ... and the cats of Australia might love what he's offering because there's obviously something amiss if you suffer from "clean-energy fervour". What are ya, some kind of greenie apocalyptic the bushfires are burning religious fanatic? 

The pond could revert to more gobbets from that story of solar panels in SA, but why bother, because snappy Tom was also over pretty quickly ...

As fine an assembly of clichés as any reptile might muster, and thankfully we're no longer in the turbulent tens or the 'orrible oughts, or the nauseating nineties, or even the enervating eighties, but the pond was now on a roll, and rolled straight on to the ever-reliable Oz editorialist ... and what do you know, this time there was blather about creative destruction, and recycled nattering "Ned" ...

That's the trouble with navel-gazing reptiles intent on fluff gathering, and the lizard Oz editorialist's ability to repeat the most tedious nonsense trotted out by by the likes of "Ned". It's known in the trade as operant conditioning, aided and abetted by incessant repetition, and the reptiles are expert at it, because how else can you achieve the hive mind inside the perfect bubble?

Joel? They had that old dinosaur Joel at the conference ... blathering about "climate change and all those things"?

Forget it Jake, and so on to a brief disinfected survey of our Henry ... the pond only does so reluctantly, and with full awareness that it distracts from a war being fought in Europe and in the United States, for which Luckovich found biblical connotations so the Speaker could understand ...

Meanwhile, the point of Henry's rant was to justify the current merciless slaughter, and naturally it involved a portentous, pretentious humbug survey of history, which somehow managed to foist all the blame on Islam and Islamics, as if somehow the Islamic religion had produced the Holocaust ...

The pond will allow just enough to show how he does it ...

...Initially, that anti-Semitism reflected an element of scriptural ambivalence. The Koran both proclaimed Islam as the only true faith and – notably in relating Muhammed’s war with the Jewish tribes in Medina – seemed to endorse the Jews’ outright elimination. But it also mandated respect for “the people of the book”, a category which, along with Christians and Zoroastrians, included Jews.

The tension between those prescriptions was addressed through the Pact of Umar, which is usually attributed to caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, who ruled from 634 until his assassination in 644.

Building on aspects of the Byzantine Empire’s legal code, the pact allowed the “people of the book” to practice their faith so long as they remained strictly subordinate to Muslims. The pact’s implementation differed greatly from region to ­region; but almost everywhere, the harshest restrictions on “dhimmis” – that is, non-Muslims – applied to Jews.

Particularly in the Arab lands, to be a Jew was to experience a lifetime of humiliation. Umar said the pact “gave dhimmis a place consistent with the abject lowliness God has imposed on them”; travelling through North Africa in 1876, the French writer Joseph Halevi described it as “reminding Jews that their Arab masters could do whatever they wanted” – including killing them, with Jews being four times more likely to be murdered in 19th century Morocco than Muslims.

Yet precisely because the presence of Jews allowed even the poorest Muslim to enjoy a sense of social superiority, dhimmitude was never inherently exterminationist. However, new pressures, which came into play in the second half of the 19th century, dramatically altered that picture. 

To begin with, although their implementation was extremely patchy, the Ottoman Empire’s sweeping reforms in 1839 and 1856 abolished dhimmitude. Every bit as importantly, Ottoman property law was overhauled in 1858, creating a functioning market in land; along with a series of free trade agreements, that change reshaped the Ottoman economy.

The consequences were two-fold. An expansion in the size and efficiency of agricultural holdings forced many small farmers off the land, inducing an exodus that caused clashes between impoverished Muslims flooding into urban areas and the largely urbanised Jewish population.

At the same time, the Jews, who had always had relatively high levels of literacy, proved well placed to take advantage of the opportunities created by the ­reforms, provoking a wave of ­hostility from traditional and emerging Muslim elites.

As those processes were under way, Islam itself experienced a fundamental transformation. Formed after the failure of the 1857 Indian Mutiny had signalled Islam’s political defeat in the subcontinent, the Deobandi movement in northern India heralded the rise of a drastically purified, more rigorous form of Islam, which, like 17th century Christian Puritanism, was congenitally intolerant of other faiths.

Adamantly rejecting religious freedom, including the limited tolerance mandated by the Koran, rehabilitating the notion of holy war and glorifying martyrdom, that movement’s myriad successors – along with Shia Islam’s equally virulent equivalents – elevated hatred into a ­virtue, preventing more liberally minded Muslim reformers from making durable inroads.

Combined, those changes had a profound effect on Arab nationalism, as it took shape over the period from 1890 to 1940. Even in its most secular versions, it was almost always infected by anti-Semitism, attempting to cement a largely artificial ethnic or national identity by opposition to (among others) the “arrogance” of the supposedly all-mighty Jews; its more widely prevalent religious versions added an apocalyptic imaginary to their fury, foreshadowing a jihad that would lead to Islam’s global ­triumph and the Jews’ complete extirpation.

The result was a transition from dhimmitude’s anti-Semitism of subordination to an anti-Semitism of extermination.

Almost immediately, that led to a steep increase in the frequency and geographical spread of massacres. Attacks on Jews swept Morocco from 1894 and Algeria from 1897, long before Zionism had any presence in Palestine; they spread rapidly across the Middle East, and then morphed into the even more violent riots – marked by cries of “Itbah al Yahud!” (“Butcher the Jews!”) – that became a common occurrence in the Arab lands throughout the inter-war years.

It was in the midst of that gathering storm that the propaganda of European anti-Semitism, which theorised and legitimated extermination, gained enormous resonance in the Muslim world during the 1920s and 1930s; and while the crushing of Nazi Germany marginalised exterminationist anti-Semitism in Europe, it not only survived but prospered in the Arab countries, surfacing with great vehemence even when World War II had just ended. 

Firstly anti-Semitism in Europe has survived, and anti-Semitism is frequently conflated and confused with opposition to barking mad far right policies of the Benji kind. So fanatical are some fundamentalist Jews that they even took to assassinating one Israeli prime minister when he looked like he might have given the Palestinians some kind of deal ...

Secondly, you don't erase centuries of violent Xian antipathy to Jews by lumping it all on the Islamics ...

And thirdly you don't end with this extraordinarily one-sided and myopic summary ...

Today’s battle in the Middle East is therefore not a clash of ­civilisations; it is a war that has been developing for more than a century between civilisation and exterminationist barbarism. Unless and until that barbarism is comprehensively defeated, this world of ours will know no peace.

What's going on in Gaza right now isn't civilisation at work, it's barbarism ... and that's why you can read stories like Biden and Netanyahu Look Headed for a Breakup on Unqualified U.S. Support for the Gaza War ...

For those who can't get past the paywall, a sample ...

...It is the profound flaws of judgment and instincts of Bibi & Co. that will require Biden and his team to demand a significant change of course by Israel. Should that change not come, it will then be the deep-seated values of Biden and his team and their clear sense of U.S. national interests that will require what will be a major adjustment in U.S. policy.

Events of the past several days suggest that rift is not far off.

As Israel’s offensive in Gaza has begun, the carnage it has produced has been awful and the weeks ahead promise worse to come. The language of Netanyahu—the total war framing of the conflict by him and his team—has been confirmed by the high civilian toll of their military operations to date.

Israel’s ferocity is of course, in large part explained by the sickening memories of what the Hamas terrorists did during their Oct. 7 rampage. But however justified even the harshest of language and actions may feel, Netanyahu and his supporters have signaled with their words and their actions that they have not taken on board the admonitions of Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and others to respect international law and the rules of war, to prioritize humanitarian needs, and to act in a way that is consistent with the ultimate goal of an enduring political solution to this decades-old conflict.

On Oct. 16, Netanyahu posted a tweet, later removed, in which he described the struggle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” Days later, in televised remarks announcing the beginning of expanded military action in Gaza, Netanyahu referred to a Biblical passage about the Amalekites, a group wiped out by divine intervention. As Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times, “Netanyahu wasn’t advocating that literal policy, but Amalek is a code word that regularly crops up in Israeli politics for a ruthless enemy that must be crushed without mercy.”

In both instances, Netanyahu blurred the distinction between Hamas and Palestinians more generally, implicitly justifying attacks not just on the terrorist organization, but on all the residents of Gaza. While defenders of the Prime Minister may deny this, the consequences of Israeli actions in Gaza belie those denials.

The message of no mercy has been repeated by other Israeli politicians throughout the last three weeks. One, a member of Netanyahu’s parliamentary coalition, Galit Distel Atbaryan, said, “Erase all Gaza from the face of the earth. That the Gazan monsters will fly to the southern fence and try to enter Egyptian territory or they will die and their death will be evil. Gaza should be erased.”

Meanwhile, efforts to put even more pressure on Palestinians in the West Bank have escalated—which is saying something given the ultra-aggressive policies of the Netanyahu government regarding expanding Israeli settlements and even arming settlers for conflict with their Palestinian neighbors. And Israeli spokespeople have asserted that they will have to steel themselves against international criticism to carry out what they have in mind for Gaza–a sure sign they are tuning out calls for mercy and restraint.

While Israel defended its attacks in Gaza that have produced significant civilian casualties, like multiple assaults on the Jabalia refugee camp, as being the fault of Hamas for locating in or underneath the camp, UN Human rights officials said, “We have serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”

Serious concerns? As for that link to Nicholas Kristof, in the NY Times, a reminder of how juxtaposing barbarism and civilisation just pours petrol on the fire ...

...when I got to my destination, I interviewed a sweet 57-year-old Gazan woman who was talking to me about the war and told me that she approved of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians.

I pressed her, and she insisted it was fine even to kill a 5-year-old Israeli child, because “they are all Jews and Zionists.”

That conversation pretty much broke my heart. Such bigotry is nurtured by Hamas propaganda but also by Israeli bombing of Gaza: The woman said she had lost two cousins to Israeli fire, including a young woman married only a year ago, and she weeps daily at the bombardment of family and friends in Gaza.

Meanwhile, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the escalation of the ground operation on Saturday, he cited biblical references to the Amalekites, who were the target of a divine genocide. In the story, God’s order was: “put to death men and women, children and infants.” Netanyahu wasn’t advocating that literal policy, but Amalek is a code word that regularly crops up in Israeli politics for a ruthless enemy that must be crushed without mercy.

Some have been more explicit in their biblical exegesis.

“You may think you’re being merciful” by sparing a child, counsels a far-right rabbi in a chilling video posted online, but actually “you’re being vicious to the ultimate victim that this child will grow up and kill.” And this, too, breaks my heart.

There are of course many other voices that are merciful and sensible, and I’ve highlighted them previously. But when children on both sides are slaughtered and people are fearful, it is extremists who invariably are ascendant.

That is the longtime pattern in the Middle East: It was Palestinian suicide bombers who propelled Benjamin Netanyahu into the prime minister’s office, and it has been Israeli hard-liners who fuel extremist Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

“Extremists need each other, support each other,” Eyad al-Sarraj, a Gaza psychiatrist who died in 2013, once lamented to me. He complained that Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007 had turned Hamas fanatics into popular heroes.

Now I fear we face a prolonged war that will make the dehumanization on both sides much worse.

Well yes, and our Henry shows the face of dehumanization and hatred, and why things will get much worse ...

And the pond is over it, and so on to end with the immortal Rowe of the day ...