In which the pond does its best to distract from an ongoing genocide and our Henry's bigotry ...

 

The pond wanted to start light today, because in due course things will get genocidally heavy. 

So it was pleasing to see this lob into view at WaPo (sorry, paywall)...

The pond didn't have the foggiest why poor old Vonnegut had got himself into trouble with Floridian puritans. 

The pond immediately ruled out the fire bombing of Dresden. Republicans love war and killing and a bit of frying on the side. 

It had to be something to do with sex.

Perhaps it was Vonnegut's weird suggestion of fluid gender identities, what with there being five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual. 

Perhaps Ron DeSanctus's mind was blown by the way they all looked identical because their differences were all in the fourth dimension. 

Even worse, the perfidious Tralfamadorians had suggested they'd identified no fewer than seven sexes on earth, each essential to reproduction, but apparently with five of them active in the fourth dimension. Perhaps it was the Tralfamadorian proposal that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals, and other similar gibberish. Or perhaps it was this:

Speaking of people from Poland: Billy Pilgrim accidentally saw a Pole hanged in public, about three days after Billy got to Dresden. Billy just happened to be walking to work with some others shortly after sunrise, and they came to a gallows and a small crowd in front of a soccer stadium. The Pole was a farm laborer who was being hanged for having had sexual intercourse with a German woman. So it goes. (The pond found a pdf of the entire book here, which saved copying from the pond's print version)

So it goes. Sex and violence, all in one Burroughs moment, without needing to firebomb a city. 

Or perhaps it was the reference to a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony? You know:

...Billy was again directed to the back of the store and he went this time. A jaded sailor stepped away from a movie machine while the film was still running. Billy looked in, and there was Montana Wildhack alone on a bed, peeling a banana. The picture clicked off. Billy did not want to see what happened next, and a clerk importuned him to come over and see some really hot stuff they kept under the counter for connoisseurs.
Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls.

The pond realises that now it will be banned in Florida, or withdrawn from school library computers, but must insist that around Tamworth sheep were preferred. 

On the other hand ponies and horses weren't that uncommon.  After all, if into a classical education, there was a parallel in Apulieus's The Golden Ass:

...what worried me a great deal as I thought about it was this – how was I, with my four clumsy legs, to mount this exquisite lady? How could I embrace her soft white body, all milk and honey, with my horny hooves? How could I kiss those delicate red lips, fragrant as ambrosia, with my great ugly mouth and its teeth like a row of rocks? And how – and this was what really troubled me – though I was on fire to get started, every inch of me – how was she going to cope with my immense organ? I was already mourning for myself: thrown to the beasts as an item in my master’s games for splitting a patrician lady in two! Meanwhile she went on murmuring endearments and kissing me repeatedly and moaning tenderly and fluttering her eyelids seductively, and then finally, ‘I have you,’ she cried, ‘I have you, my dove, my sparrow’, and with that she showed how empty and foolish my worries and fears had been. For holding me tightly embraced she welcomed me in – all of me, and I mean all. Every time I pulled myself back in an effort to go easy on her, she would thrust violently forward in her frenzy, and grasping my back would cling to me even more closely. I really believed that I might prove inadequate to satisfy her desires; and I could quite see how the mother of the Minotaur had found so much pleasure with a lowing lover. After a sleepless and laborious night she left me while it was. still dark to avoid detection, having first agreed to pay the same price for another night. (More at the Internet Archive, a full pdf, slow to load).

Of course the pond only slipped in that classical reference because today is learned hole in the bucket man day. 

To show off its learning of all the best classical literature, the pond could have referenced the discussion in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel regarding the virtues of using a well downed neck of a goose, as opposed to a gentlewoman's velvet mask or neckerchief. (Short cut blog here)

The pond apologises, the pond's mind has gone a tad smutty ever since it saw the mango Mussolini perform a blow job on a microphone stand, a feat broadcast around the land. 

The long absent lord alone knows what Floridians made of it, and how they managed to banish the image from the tender minds of young Floridians.

Please allow the pond to turn to our Henry, currently in search of straw to fix the bucket, or perhaps to garnish a Thucydides reference or some other learned meme. It turns out that classical references are all the go at the moment ...

On the other hand, for low comedy, let the invisible germs in the rose run wild and free...

And that's the end of the lightness for the moment, as the pond turned to the reptiles to see what was happening in the hive mind known as the lizard Oz ...

Uh huh, a lead opinion story dressed as news about Palestine, it wasn't a good omen, and then over on the far right there was a second eleven team to handle chores. 

That expendable crew man number six of the Kelly gang, a certain Joe, had been assigned to deal with the carnival of clowns (dressed up as a serious attempt to purge the deep state of oligarchs and billionaires and never mind the scent of Musk).

The reptiles had dragged in a doctor to suggest getting a Covid jab was fine if you could use a booster, while down below him, anti-mask, anti-vax Killer Creighton was ignoring the doctor and rabbiting on about China ...

A little later in the day, simplistic Simon - here no conflict of interest, no Bid here - turned up to blather about the Middle East:

But there was no sign of the hole in the bucket man in his preferred place on the extreme far right. 

No doubt the reptiles will exhume later in the day, but the pond was consternated to say the least.

It took a little bit of digging to ferret him out, and discover that he was in fine full Zionist form ... Jew hatred festers amid multicultural malaise, The anti-Semitic riots in Amsterdam reflect decades of policy failure. It’s time out own government learned that failures’ lessons.

It was a five minute read, the reptiles suggested, but it felt much longer, but at least he was right about decades of policy failure, which is how we get a genocidal government ruling Israel ... and the confusion and conflation of being a Jew with being part of a state which should be a pariah nation as a a result of its routine indulgence in war crimes.

The reptiles started by helping with an image of a protest ... A protestor waves a Palestinian flag during an unauthorised pro-Palestinian demonstration on Dam Square in Amsterdam.

Then the hole in the bucket repair man cranked into full rabid gear ...

“Barbarians on scooters are riding through our capital city hunting Israelis and Jews,” David van Weel, the Dutch Minister of Justice and Security, wrote on X late last week as a violent, largely Muslim, mob rampaged through Amsterdam’s streets.

The attacks, which followed a soccer game between a Dutch and an Israeli team, appear to have been premeditated and well-organised. Nor were they an isolated incident.

Rather, they reflect a longer-term build-up in violent anti-Semitism. Immediately before October 7, a report by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights found that an unprecedented 25 per cent of Dutch Jews feared for their safety. And since then the number of anti-Semitic incidents has trebled.

But the latest outbreak is more than just another horrifying indicator of growing anti-Semitism. It also signals a deep, now almost certainly fatal, crisis in Dutch multiculturalism.

At least originally, the decision to provide the country’s Muslim immigrants with their own schools, housing and community services was taken on purely pragmatic grounds. The assumption was that the Turks and Moroccans who, as of the late 1950s, had been brought to the Netherlands to fill gaping labour shortages would only be required for a short while. It therefore seemed sensible to ensure they retained their culture of origin, as that, it was thought, made it more likely they would be happy to leave.

Just to help the hole in bucket man further, the reptiles followed up with an audio visual supplement, titled Dutch police moved in on the University of Amsterdam (UvA) after anti-Israel protests broke out at one of the campuses. On Monday, UvA announced that the school will remain closed on Tuesday and Wednesday due to safety concerns. The pro-Palestine protesters demand UvA cut all ties with Israeli institutions and end their support of “the ongoing genocide” in Gaza. Monday’s protest was meant to be peaceful, with students and staff from universities across Amsterdam organising a walkout. The University of Amsterdam released a statement, maintaining it started peacefully but quickly turned violent. “The National Walkout protest that started peacefully has unfortunately turned into an occupation,” they wrote.

At this point the pond felt inclined to do a little counter-programming ... there is, after all, some fair evidence of that ongoing genocide, and really, is it right to stay silent in the presence of a genocide? 

UN special committee likens Israeli policy in Gaza to genocide, Report also refers to Israel ‘using starvation as a weapon of war’ and running ‘apartheid system’ in West Bank

An opening sample:

Over at Haaretz, you could read B. Michal running through the five signs of a genocide taking place. 

You can find them in full at Maybe Israel Is Committing Genocide After All? The pond will settle for the last couple and his conclusion:

The pond supposes that at this point the old bigot should be allowed a little space to preen and parade his book learning, really just an excuse for some random bashing of Islamics, without regard for the way that the genocidal activities of the Israeli government now far exceed the original crime and are generating protests:

However, by the early 1970s it had become clear the “guest workers” had no intention of going home. At the same time, elite attitudes had changed dramatically. Accommodating Islamic separatism was no longer seen as a pragmatic necessity; it was considered the morally right thing to do. Widely publicised revelations of Dutch complicity in the Holocaust underscored the point: to oppose Islamic separatism was worse than wrong – it demonstrated a lack of humanity.

Any possible costs or risks were consequently dismissed out of hand, all the more so as Dutch academia had embraced the “contact hypothesis” formulated by social psychologist Gordon Allport in his classic The Nature of Prejudice (1954). Giving that hypothesis an optimistic (and entirely unwarranted) interpretation, advisers assured the government that ongoing contact between Muslim immigrants and their Dutch hosts would ultimately erase any ethnic tensions.

All that induced a pioneering shift to what was becoming known as multiculturalism. Thanks to generous public support, it did not take long for the Netherlands to boast the highest number of mosques and Muslim schools per capita in Western Europe, along with taxpayer-funded imam training, Muslim chaplains in the army, hospitals and prisons, and free airtime for Islamic programs on public TV channels. Moreover, provisions were introduced ensuring Muslim community leaders participated in a wide range of public policy decisions.

By 2000 an Institutional Accommodation Index, which measures 15 Western European countries’ response to seven key Islamic claims, placed the Netherlands at the top of its rankings. And the Netherlands’ “accommodation” score rose even further between 2000 and 2010, as additional measures were adopted to empower Muslim communities.

But if the policies empowered anyone, it was the best organised and most determined Muslim groups, ranging from the Erdogan-aligned Millî Görü, which is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood that operates in Australia as a registered charity, to the Moroccan offshoots of the Salafis.

As well as seeking to segregate Muslims from Western “corruption”, including by strictly enforcing rules that limit opportunities for women and girls, those groups have a long history of vicious anti-Semitism. Through their government-sanctioned control over community institutions, they made Islamic schools and mosques into breeding grounds for Judeophobia: in the Netherlands, Muslims are five times more likely than Christians to believe Jews can never be trusted.

At this point the reptiles slipped in another snap to show Police officers on horses secure during an unauthorised pro-Palestinian demonstration on Dam Square in Amsterdam.

Unauthorised? Then who authorised this?

Cue Amir Tibor in Haaretz, brooding under the lengthy header, 'MBS Was Willing to Go a Long Way Toward Israel, but Netanyahu and His Coalition Have Become Unhinged', There's a split-screen between Riyadh, where the Saudi Crown Prince accused Israel of genocide and called for the full recognition of Palestine, and Jerusalem, where far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich is prepping for annexation. Can the Trump administration still push normalization under these conditions?

A sample of the brooding ...

...To understand the source of the Saudi frustration, one should look no further than another public statement made on Monday, this time in Jerusalem, by Israel's Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich. Standing in front of the cameras in the halls of the Israeli Knesset, Smotrich announced that, due to Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election, the year 2025 will be "Israel's year of annexation."

His plan is to officially annex the occupied West Bank, turning the disputed territory into an official part of Israel – but, of course, without giving citizenship or equal rights to the millions of Palestinians living there.

And it's not just the West Bank. Smotrich is also pushing for Israel to build new settlements in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, in areas from which the Israeli military has displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

His far-right party, which has been collapsing in the polls but still enjoys a strong position inside Netanyahu's current coalition, isn't trying to disguise this plan, which is not supported by any of Israel's allies abroad. To the contrary: the Smotrich camp is openly celebrating the possibility of a depopulated northern Gaza ripe for Jewish settlement.

Netanyahu is silent in the face of their extremism, too weak and afraid to confront Smotrich, who could bring down the government if the prime minister dared to speak out against him.

The split-screen between Riyadh, where a disappointed MBS described Israel's extremism, flanked by Arab and Muslim leaders, and Jerusalem, where the extremist Smotrich prepared his next steps to prolong the Gaza war and expand the conflict, tells a sad story about the Biden administration's failure in the Middle East. Israeli-Saudi normalization, building on the 2020 Abraham Accords, was Biden's top policy goal in the region and, for a brief moment in 2023, it even seemed possible. But today, it is more distant than ever.

Trump also wants the Saudi deal, and sees it as a direct continuation of his previous administration's policies. His close adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is already working on it. But in order to succeed, they will have to first of all solve the expanding gulf between Israel and the Arab world – even with the friendlier parts of it, like Saudi Arabia.

Without a clear break from the extremism of the current Netanyahu coalition, and without burying annexation, there won't be normalization with Saudi Arabia, no matter the aspirational plans of the incoming Trump administration.

Meanwhile, our Henry was still rabbiting on in his full Pauline Hansonite way ...

And they also transformed heavily Muslim neighbourhoods into incubators of violence, brutally exemplified by the death threats against Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the assassination (and ritual beheading) of her collaborator, Theo van Gogh.

The results are apparent in EU surveys of serious anti-Semitic incidents. Perhaps because of its sensitivity, the relevant series has been discontinued. But in 2018 it found that in the Netherlands, a clear majority of the identifiable perpetrators were Muslim, with almost all the others being their allies on the left. In none of those series, or their counterparts on the Muslim experience, were there any reports of assaults on Muslims by Jews.

In short, the policy put in place to achieve conciliation had created and entrenched catastrophic social divisions, endangering vulnerable Dutch citizens.

Allport would not have been surprised. In setting out the contact hypothesis, he had warned that intergroup contact only induced greater toleration under “optimal” conditions. Those included the absence of institutionalised separation between the groups, as separation “tends to increase mutual suspicion, distrust and hostility”. Additionally, contact needed to “give rise to a sense of common identity, shared by members of both groups” – and crucially, that sense of common identity had to be “supported by laws, institutions and norms”.

The intellectual forefathers of liberalism would have heartily endorsed Allport’s warnings. From Michel de Montaigne and John Locke to David Hume and Adam Smith, they never considered toleration a universal human attribute, much less claimed it would be self-enforcing.

Acutely aware of the havoc extremist sects wreaked in the lead-up to the wars of religion, they assumed the “civil magistrate” would suppress whoever threatened what the Renaissance humanists had called “il vivere civile” – a life in peace and security. They fully understood that when the authorities refuse to intervene, toleration can rapidly degenerate into the policy Martin Hollis, a leading British political philosopher, caustically described as “liberalism for the liberals, cannibalism for the cannibals”: which is all well and good, until the cannibals start throwing the liberals into the pot.

At this point, to back up our Henry, the reptiles threw in the notoriously racist Bolter, with an interminable tag:

Sky News host Andrew Bolt has discussed the “huge” revolt in Europe as voters become sick of mass immigration and illegal immigration. “In the Dutch election, in the European election, and yesterday in the first round of the French election for its national assembly. The anti-immigration national rally party of Marine le pen and Jordan Bardella got 33 per cent,” Mr Bolt said. “The new popular front alliance of socialists and communists and other leftists 28 per cent. “And the centrist together for the republic party of President Emmanuel Macron down to just 22 per cent.”

Really? The Bolter in a cross promotional Sky News (AU) fever dream slagging off the different and the other in a way too familiar if you scratch the surface in the Nederlands?

Meanwhile, Ben Reiff in The Graudian, Israel’s true objective in northern Gaza? Removing Palestinians – and annexing the territory. 

The opening as a sample:

And then there was Owen Jones in the Graudian, Is there any red line that Israel will be held to? Biden has just confirmed the answer is no. 

Another sample:

That deserves a cartoon:

At last the pond had reached the end of the old bigot's ranting.There's only so long the pond cares to keep company with the Bolter, not to mention Pauline Hanson dressed up as a pedantic bore:

But Dutch multiculturalism took none of those dangers into account. Far from suppressing Islamic separatists, it showered them with power, funding and authority, hoping that would transform them into “moderates”. Unlike France, which rigorously monitors Islamic schools and closes them if they are inculcating anti-Semitism (as several leading schools surreptitiously were), the Netherlands allowed generations of young Muslims to be taught hatred at the public expense.

And instead of impartially enforcing the law, the police and public prosecutors, who were petrified of being accused of Islamophobia, acted more vigorously against alleged insults to Islam than against actual attacks on Jews. That the Dutch police, who seemed reluctant to protect the victims of the football riot, legitimated anti-Semitism by excusing police officers from guarding Jewish sites if they found doing so “offensive”, only made things worse.

Now, after decades of policy failure, the Netherlands is reaping the whirlwind. Faced with a fierce public reaction that poses grave risks of its own, the new Dutch government is drawing that failure’s bitter lessons. It is up to our government to show it has the intelligence and, even more importantly, the moral courage to do so too.

Indeed, there have been many failures and bitter lessons. 

What a pity that the bigotry of the hole in the bucket man doesn't have the intelligence or the moral courage to note the mass starvation, the collective displacement and the genocide currently going on, producing demonstrations by those who can see what it's like to witness hatred in action ...

Usually the pond would end there, but when confronted by genocide, why not a few more light moments to take away the stench of the displaced, the starving and the dying. 

There was this wonderful irony, at AP here and at the Beast as ‘The Onion’ Buys Alex Jones’ Bankrupt Infowars With Help of Sandy Hook Parents in Wild Twist, NOT SATIRE The satirical news website plans to turn the right-wing conspiracy haven into “a parody of itself.” (paywall(

Inter alia:

Then there was the infallible Pope of the day, for which the pond had no segue:

Above all, the pond bitterly regrets that it was Joe, that second eleven member of the Kelly gang, who had been assigned to cover the cavalcade of clowns, while the likes of the bromancer went MIA.

Why bother with him when the immortal Rowe was to hand?

As always it's the details ...

Ah Tulsi, beloved agent of Vlad the sociopath, or so Russian media sociopath Vladimir Solovyov says on YouTube ...

Speaking of YouTube, a few samples, though the pond guesses some will have already seen them ... but that carnival of clowns keeps on giving to late night US comedians ... 

We're a long way from Vonnegut now ...