In which the pond does its Friday Henry duty ...

 

It was inevitable what would dominate the reptile headlines this day, though amazingly last night ABC News 24 in its 6pm bulletin managed to ignore the obvious symbolism of a Musk truck exploding outside a Trump tower - switching to SBS solved that problem, though that solution might disappear under the mutton Dutton.

Never mind, each day the ABC is the pond's despair, almost as much despair as the reptiles produce on a daily basis.

ISIS might exploit Palestine anger to fuel terror is somehow a reptile EXCLUSIVE? 

Only in the hive mind could a reptile imagine that the bleeding obvious deserves an EXCLUSIVE tag.

Cue recent Haaretz headlines ...

'We're Still Breathing, and We Don't Want to Die': Testimonies From the Inferno in Northern Gaza, The IDF is completing its expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza – an area that once housed a population the size of Tel Aviv's. Residents who fled describe an unprecedented, brutal operation

Israeli Army Pushing Gazans Southward, Prohibiting Them From Taking Belongings, IDF soldiers even force residents to leave their clothes behind, despite humanitarian organizations' warning of dangerously cold temperatures. 

And cue this from the Haaretz daily email:

• According to the IDF, Hamas' internal security apparatus, which Shahwan led, "carried out violent interrogations against Gazans, severely violated human rights and repressed the group's opposition."
• Medics in Gaza told Reuters that the Israeli strike in Al-Mawasi killed at least 10 Palestinians, including women and children, and wounded 15. The IDF has not yet commented.
• The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza said that at least 45,581 Palestinians have been killed and 108,438 wounded since the start of the war.
• "Just two weeks ago, another Haaretz investigation revealed the arbitrariness and banality with which Gazans are killed in the Netzarim corridor and how every dead Palestinian is counted as a terrorist. Quite a few incidents described in that report happened after Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach took control of the corridor. But other accounts from soldiers reveal that the brigade's lack of discipline and the way it operates under an alternative set of laws went beyond that, with additional consequences. In early December, Vach convened the division's top officers for a review of their four months of combat in the Netzarim corridor. 'We didn't achieve our goal,' he said at the start of his remarks, according to officers who attended. The goal, they said, was to forcibly displace some 250,000 Palestinian residents who are still living in northern Gaza. In fact, only a few hundred Palestinians crossed the Netzarim corridor into southern Gaza" – Yaniv Kubovich

And so on and on ...

There are all kinds of terrorism unfolding on a daily basis, some the reptiles care about, some the reptiles studiously ignore.

Down at the very bottom of this day's digital offerings, the reptiles tried to maintain their climate and religious rage with a flurry of meretricious EXCLUSIVES ...

The reptiles are very easily trolled, with this a classic troll ...

Really?

Is it so shocking to Jimbo and reptile sensibility to note that the liar from the Shire, allegedly an Xian, is hanging around with a sexual predator, a pussy-grabbing prevert, convicted of sexual assault?

On second thoughts, quite possibly Jimbo and the reptiles are on board with some kinds of sexual abuse ... provided they're done by their hero, King Donald I, the tangerine tyrant.

The reptile EXCLUSIVE rage about climate news did provide the pond with an excuse to note Garry Linnell in The Echnida. 

Though The Canberra Times' emails are currently on a limited holyday service (Mondays and Fridays), it's safe to say you won't read any of this sort of stuff in the lizard Oz ...

...Oscar Wilde once snarled that conversation about the weather was the last resort of the unimaginative. These days it's the preferred subject for the curious and those needing a sense of control over chaos. A recent study found one in two smartphone users regularly consult weather apps, while the industry built around this growing obsession will reap revenues of close to $2 billion this year.
Last month Google announced that its DeepMind artificial intelligence program had made an astonishing leap forward in the business of predicting the future. Its algorithms can now churn through data in a microsecond, interpreting cloud patterns and listening to the whispering of the wind to achieve unmatched and highly accurate 15-day forecasts.
Fifteen days. It's a bold promise, almost godlike in its scope; a development that combines the two most pressing issues destined to radically alter human life for generations to come - climate change and the rapidly evolving industry of AI.
Fifteen days. How remarkable. Farmers once gave the Bureau of Meteorology a standing ovation when it got it right over the weekend. Weather app addicts like me are rejoicing. But it's not enough. While we celebrate the micro we choose to ignore the macro. Fifteen days tells us whether we'll need an umbrella in a fortnight. It doesn't predict the storm gathering on the horizon that will lay siege to our place in the world in the coming decades.
The year 2023 was the planet's hottest in more than 170 years of forensic bookkeeping. It was also, just as disturbingly, 0.15 of a degree warmer than 2016 - the previous title holder for the hottest year. Once the data is finalised, it is expected 2024 will eclipse all records, a pattern expected to worsen in the coming decade. "The last two years have been kind of supercharged," noted the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, recently.
We've all sensed the longer summers, shorter winters and the increasing violence of storms. The 10 hottest years on record all occurred in the past decade. Recent data suggests climate change caused 41 additional days of dangerous heat in the world last year, while intensifying 26 out of 29 major weather events that caused thousands of deaths and displaced millions of people.

Say what? The pond is only informed by the reptile hive mind. What is this bizarre talk of a climate crisis? Please, do go on ...

Australia, parched and dehydrated for hundreds of thousands of years, is now 1.5 degrees warmer on average than a century ago. This sort of catastrophic shift should chill the warmest marrow in our bones. But we continue sleepwalking into the future. I ask if it will rain in 15 days. I don't want to ask if my granddaughter will be able to breathe the air in 50 years.
Like so many others I've become so impressed by our audacity at predicting the unpredictable that I forget those forecasts on my touchscreen are little more than a short-term gimmick. The future won't present itself to us with cute little icons representing recent precipitation levels and wind speeds. The only accurate forecast is that it will be much wilder and messier, wracked by longer droughts and apocalyptic blazes as the ice caps melt and sea levels rise.
But even now, decades after the first alarm bells sounded, we don't want to talk about it. I experienced a month in the Arctic last year, hiking across shrinking glaciers and increasingly exposed tundra. When I returned I passionately preached to friends and colleagues about the dangers ahead. And each time their eyes glazed over a little more.
So now I immerse myself in weather apps and pathetically celebrate 15-day forecasts. A marvel, perhaps. But they will never be enough. The future isn't something we can predict or control. The future is something we shape with every choice we make. And it's clear we've decided we're not brave enough to make those hard choices required to save it.

Well yes, "sleepwalking" is just the right somnambulistic condition required for reading the lizard Oz. Eyes wide shut and fully glazed is what happens when you read the reptiles ...

But setting genuine terror aside, the pond knew its Friday duty.

A quick survey of the far right extremities of the digital rag confirmed what had to be done...

Forget Charles  "each way" Wooley, woolly by name and by nature, and Rodger sounding the alarums. 

No need to wander off with them, at least not when we have our Henry and one of his spectacular history lessons, usually sublimely irrelevant, but always sublime in their own bizarre, deeply weird way ...

There are all kinds of terrorism unfolding on a daily basis, some our Henry cares about, some our Henry studiously ignores.

Return of Islamist terror a test for our lax laws, With the tenth anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo approaching – and the US now reeling from the New Orleans terror attack – there can be no complacency in the face of Islamist rhetoric.

Why go back to Hebdo? Partly for a snap...

Protesters hold copies of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo during an anti-terrorism vigil at Place de La Republique for the murdered school teacher Samuel Paty.

Perhaps it might have been better for the reptiles to go full on, rather than discretely show that image being held up ...

Okay, that gives the pond its fundamentalist-deploring credentials, essential before proceeding and absorbing our Henry's history lesson ...

A few days before Christmas, a French court condemned Brahim Chnina and Abdelhakim Sefrioui to 13 and 15 years’ imprisonment respectively for their role in the murder five years ago of Samuel Paty.
Coming on the tenth anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and with the US reeling after the terrorist attack in New Orleans, the court’s decision highlights the dangers of complacency in the face of Islamist rhetoric.
Paty, a secondary school teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northeast of Paris, had, as required by the national curriculum, taught a session on freedom of expression using the attack on Charlie Hebdo to highlight what was at stake.

Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the prophet Mohammed were on the Ministry of Education’s website for teachers to use in their presentations. But before projecting the cartoons, Paty warned his class that some students might find them shocking. He therefore invited any students who feared being offended to leave the class while they were being shown and then return for the general discussion.

At this point the reptiles tried to remind our Henry that there's been a lot of terrorism under the Gaza bridge since then with an AV offering designed to spread FUD and alarums about Australia missing out on its fair share of attacks by terrorists ...

Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister Patrick Gorman discusses the domestic implications of the New Orleans truck attack which claimed the lives of at least 15 people and injured dozens of others. This comes after the FBI is treating the incident as a possible terrorist attack. “Our terrorism alert level is probable that is not where you would ever want it to be,” Mr Gorman said. “We’ll continue to do everything we can, as an Australian government, to keep Australians safe at home … but we all have a role to play.”

Our Henry managed to ignore that attempt to spread FUD about Australia and pressed on with his history lesson ...

The discussion itself proceeded uneventfully. However, that evening, Chnina’s daughter told her father that Paty had asked Muslim students to identify themselves and leave the room, giving him free rein to launch into a tirade against Islam. Paty had, of course, done no such thing. Moreover, it emerged that the girl, who had a long record of truancy, had not even attended class. But that didn’t stop Chnina from decrying on social media what he described as an Islamophobic attack on his daughter.
Chnina’s posts were soon drawn to the attention of Sefrioui, who has run a series of “anti-Islamophobia” organisations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing on some of France’s leading mosques to publicise Chnina’s concocted claims, Sefrioui mounted a vitriolic campaign denouncing Paty, in posts downloaded more than 100,000 times, as an Islamophobe who had ridiculed the prophet Mohammed.
One of the people viewing Sefrioui’s videos was Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim refugee. Having purchased butcher’s knives, Anzorov repeatedly stabbed Paty as he was leaving school, before decapitating him with a meat cleaver.
Anzorov, who immediately posted a video of the beheading, died in a confrontation with police. What matters here, and deserves more attention than it has received, is the court’s careful reasoning in its verdict against Sefrioui.
While Sefrioui’s attacks on Paty were venomous, he was consistently cautious in what he posted. Having been involved in previous controversies, he appears to have sought legal advice about exactly how far he could go before being accused of incitement to violence.
As a result, Sefrioui never called for Paty to be assaulted, much less murdered; exemplifying Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum that the “bad man walks the line”, he clearly tried to benefit from the constitutional protection of freedom of expression by stopping short of explicitly urging violence.

It's easy, and fair game, even if sublimely irrelevant to the current events that set our Henry in motion.

At this point, it's a ritual to note that the pond has no truck with fundamentalists of any kind or stripe, and frequently wonders why it pays such attention to fundamentalist reptiles, either fanatically religious (the bromancer), fanatically climate science denying (the bromancer), or both (the bromancer).

Never mind, have a snap, Emmanuel Macron pays his respects at the coffin of Samuel Paty inside the Sorbonne courtyard in October 2020.

Back to our Henry doing his Michel Houellebecq impression ...

It is, however, equally clear that his posts, which urged Muslims to fulfil their duty to punish blasphemers, were addressed to an audience that included violent extremists, who would interpret them as a call to arms. As the court argued, the question, in these situations, is not what a reasonable person would make of the posts’ literal content; it is whether there was a material and reasonably foreseeable probability that they would result in violence.
The issue that raises is not a new one. On the contrary, it featured prominently, as “the Mark Antony question”, in the debates that framed the classic American jurisprudence on the limits of freedom of expression. The reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is scarcely accidental: no work in the English language is more squarely focused on “the power of speech/To stir men’s blood”.

Normally the pond wouldn't interrupt our Henry in full flight, but that mention of Shakspere sent our Henry into a kind of post-Thucydides, ecstatic trance ...

Some might wonder what this has to do with wretched mass murder in the streets of New Orleans, or a Musk truck exploding, but they must be newbies to the company of the hole in bucket man ...

Between 1581 and 1602, London had been rocked by 35 outbreaks of widespread disorder, more often than not induced by firebrands. However, Shakespeare’s concern was not just with fiery calls to mayhem: it was also with the ability of orators to induce violence, despite pretending not to.
Never has that ability been as starkly displayed as it is in Mark Antony’s speech over Caesar’s dead body. In a text of dazzling brilliance – the speech, which is barely 1100 words long, deploys fully 52 of the 90 major elements of classical rhetoric, including those associated with “oratio obliqua” – Mark Antony “lets slip the dogs of war”, while repeatedly proclaiming Brutus an “honourable man”.
Stirred by the speech to cry “Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!”, the mob runs riot in the streets, murdering a harmless poet because he has the same name as one of Caesar’s assassins. Meanwhile, Mark Antony, admiring his handiwork, says coldly to himself, “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot”.
It was with Mark Antony’s oration in mind that the US Supreme Court rejected Judge Learned Hand’s finding, in Masses Publishing Co. v Patten (1917), that speech only breached the prohibition on incitement if it involved “direct advocacy” of illegal action. However, the Supreme Court’s own “clear and present danger” test raised more questions than it answered.
In Dennis (1950), Learned Hand, by then chief judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, therefore tried to give the test some precision, writing that the courts “must ask whether the gravity of the ‘evil’ ” that could be caused by the speech, “discounted by its improbability (of occurrence)”, justifies its condemnation.

Dammit, he's a veritable book of quotations, interrupted only by a snap People gather on Place de la Republique in homage to history teacher Samuel Paty.

How many gather to pay homage to the many thousands dead in Gaza and the West Bank?

Never mind, that image seemed to send Henry into a freedom of expression frenzy...

What the French court has done is to adapt and apply that test to the age of online Islamic extremism. It accepted that Chnina and Sefrioui neither specifically advocated violence nor conspired with Anzorov in carrying it out. But given how predictable it was that their campaign would induce violence, it concluded that they were, legally and materially, Anzorov’s associates in his terrorist act.
Unfortunately, the Australian laws on incitement fall well short of that level of intellectual sophistication. We seem to struggle with the idea that the law must erect, and effectively enforce, a wall of separation between advocacy, which it protects, and inciting, overtly or covertly, the violence that makes societies unlivable.
Far from preserving the freedom of expression, ignoring that requirement only empowers freedom’s worst enemies, while every act of terrorism weakens its friends. A free society cannot survive if its citizens come to believe that the price of freedom is perpetual fear.

Hang on, hang on, surely the entire point of the reptile business model is perpetual fear?

Would that it were not so, but each day hate mongers fill the digital edition pages.

Each day women must still live in fear of Catholic-inspired terrorism, the latest examples emanating from Queensland and South Australia.

It is no trivial matter that Australian papists can, together with Islamic fundamentalists - and with complete impunity - propose legislation to strip women of the control of their bodies.

Oh sorry, the pond always gets its history lessons wrong, and so must attend to our Henry's final words in his history lecture for the day.

It is therefore no trivial matter that Australian imams can, with complete impunity, refer to Jews as “pigs, rats and termites”. Nor is it a trivial matter that the government, having stoked a climate in which unreason festers, disowns, like Mark Antony, any responsibility for the foreseeable consequences.
“Poetry,” said WH Auden, “makes nothing happen.” But rhetoric, history shows, makes things happen, on a frightening scale. And as Michel de Montaigne put it, in his essay “Of the Vanitie of Words” that scholars believe influenced Shakespeare, the harm it wreaks is at its greatest “when the commonwealths affaires are in worst estate, and the devouring Tempest of civill broyles most agitates and turmoiles them”.
As 2025 opens with our own commonwealth’s affairs “in worst estate”, that is a warning we can no longer afford to ignore.

But what of the terrorism on view in Gaza and the West Bank? 

What of former PMs hanging around with convicted sexual predators?

What, for that matter, of the sources of domestic terrorism at home?

Sorry, you can't expect the reptiles to pay attention to Catholic fundamentalists; they are, after all, the home of Catholic fundamentalism.

And with that, it's time to return to the US for a few Luckovichs, as a way of wrapping up the day with a few insights into a deeply troubled country discovering what that talk of chickens coming home to roost means ...