The pond does a Tootle, but eventually gets back on the tracks with Polonial prattle ...

 

Every so often the pond feels the urge to break free from its lizard Oz chains.

This weekend the desire was particularly compelling, the chafing at the bit even stronger.

For some reason the reptiles sent out a second eleven, a bit like the Australian cricket team, and provided less than compelling reads...

The pond looked across the meadows of bright writing elsewhere, and felt the need to do a Tootle ...

Oh look, the cute frog, the pretty flowers, the flapping butterflies creating climate change in the Amazon ...

Oh look, over there, a bloody good Hydeing, Ah, here’s Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine – or rather, a plan to leave it in pieces

In the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to instigate his Ukraine “peace plan”, it’s great to hear from US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, that “everything is on the table”. Also: would President Putin like to keep the table? I get the feeling that Hegseth would be very willing to throw in the table, which is likely to be hewn by Saudi craftsmen. That’s not a bone-saw euphemism: Trump says the putative peace talks could be hosted by the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. For now, the world had to settle for Hegseth popping into a Nato defence ministers meeting in Brussels to announce: “Make no mistake, President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.” So this week offered an opportunity to watch Eisenhower quotes get Disneyfied by a defence secretary with a Crusades tattoo. Good times!

Good times indeed, no need to dissect, analyse, refute ... just enjoy ...

And yet here's the pond stuck in herpetology school studying the reptiles.

Back off the tracks and into the meadows...

Look over here, Anne Applebaum's There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing escaped from The Atlantic paywall, so all could read ...

...Eventually, demonstrations of loyalty might need to become more direct. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out that a future IRS head, for example, might be pressured to audit some of the president’s perceived enemies. If inflation returns, government employees might feel they need to disguise this too. In the new system, they would hold their job solely at the pleasure of the president, not on behalf of the American people, so maybe it won’t be in their interest to give him any bad news.
Many older civil servants will remain in the system, of course, but the new regime will suspect them of disloyalty. Already, the Office of Personnel Management has instructed federal employees to report on colleagues who are trying to “disguise” DEI programs, and threatened “adverse consequences” for anyone who failed to do so. The Defense Health Agency sent out a similar memo. NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the FBI have also told employees who are aware of “coded or imprecise language” being used to “disguise” DEI to report these violations within 10 days.
Because these memos are themselves coded and imprecise, some federal employees will certainly be tempted to abuse them. Don’t like your old boss? Report him or her for “disguising DEI.” Want to win some brownie points with the new boss? Send in damning evidence about your colleagues’ private conversations. In some government departments, minority employees have set up affinity groups, purely voluntary forums for conversation or social events. A number of government agencies are shutting these down; others are being disbanded by organizers who fear that membership lists will be used to target people. Even private meetings, outside the office, might not be safe from spying or snooping colleagues.
That might sound implausible or incredible, but at the state level, legislation encouraging Americans to inform on other Americans has proliferated. A Texas law, known as the Heartbeat Act, allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe to have helped “aid or abet” an abortion. The Mississippi legislature recently debated a proposal to pay bounties to people who identify illegal aliens for deportation. These measures are precedents for what’s happening now to federal employees.

There's cartoons to go with that ...

And the fate of federal employees will, in turn, serve as a precedent for what will happen to other institutions, starting with universities. Random funding cuts have already shocked some of the biggest research universities across the country, damaging ongoing projects without regard to “efficiency” or any other criteria. Political pressure will follow. Already, zealous new employees at the National Science Foundation are combing through descriptions of existing research projects, looking to see if they violate executive orders banning DEI. Words such as advocacy, disability, trauma, socioeconomic, and yes, women will all trigger reviews.
There are still greater dangers down the road—the possible politicization of the Federal Election Commission, for example. Eventually, anyone who interacts with the federal government—private companies, philanthropies, churches, and above all, citizens—might find that the cultural revolution affects them too. If the federal government is no longer run by civil servants fulfilling laws passed by Congress, then its interests might seriously diverge from yours.
None of this is inevitable. Much of it will be unpopular. The old idea that public servants should serve all Americans, and not just a small elite, has been part of American culture for more than a century. Rule of law matters to many of our elected politicians, as well as to their voters, all across the political spectrum. There is still time to block this regime change, to preserve the old values. But first we need to be clear about what is happening, and why.

Good times ...

Francis Fukyama. The pond hadn't thought of him for yonks, what with history having ended long ago, but what a droll read ...

...In my book Political Order and Political Decay, I wrote about how difficult it is to create modern, impersonal, high-capacity states. There is always pressure for “re-patrimonialization,” that is, the regress of a modern impersonal bureaucracy into a patrimonial one run by friends and family of the ruler. The United States is experiencing re-patrimonialization as we speak: citizens freely debating laws are replaced by supplicants begging the king to favor their interests. MAGA world, for some reason, thinks that this constitutes a return to constitutional first principles.
It actually means the exact opposite. The second Trump administration is turning into one of the most lawless presidencies in American history.

Good times ...

As for Applebaum's talk of other institutions, the pond immediately thought of Charlotte Higgins in the Graudian, Trump chairing a major arts institution would be laughable if it weren’t so deeply troubling

Donald Trump’s announcement that he was installing himself as the chair of the John F Kennedy Center, Washington DC’s temple to the performing arts, might have been mistaken for something petty or trivial – another random, Pollock-esque splatter of the policy paintbrush against the canvas of the world. On his favoured social media site he posted an image, presumably AI-generated, of himself as a dinner-jacketed orchestral conductor – the macho maestro of the US. But this is more than personal: it is political, and points towards the president’s wider project.
To understand what is going on, it is necessary to consider Trump’s favourite European authoritarian, Viktor Orbán. Hungary’s prime minister has chipped away at his country’s constitution and judiciary. But a no less powerful tool has been his attention to parts of society often regarded as unimportant compared with a country’s constitution. Alongside crushing independent media, Orbán’s government has co-opted the arts, appointing right-leaning directors to theatres, and instigating nationalist art exhibitions. Orbán understands that culture creates the climate for emotion and memory, imprints national myths, and – often intangibly – acts on politics.

Good times ...

The maestro conducting a full program of the Village People and Kid Rock, with an encore by Lee Greenwood. Move over Beethoven, learn to shake, rattle and roll ...

Talk about comedy, talk about a laugh ...

Good times, great times ...

What about another cleansing, worthy of Adolf?

See Parker Molloy in her Substack, The Government Is Literally Erasing Trans People from American History, Trump's removal of trans references from the Stonewall Monument website isn't just another culture war battle; it's actual government censorship.

All the funnier when JD Vance roams Europe preaching freedumb for the AfD and free speech ...

The Nazis are coming, the Nazis are coming ...

Once an incipient hillbilly fascist, soon enough a hillbilly fascist in power ... 

Take it away Parker, showhow easily they can match Adolf at his game ...

There are moments when the mask slips and you can see exactly what's happening. Yesterday was one of those moments.
The National Park Service, following orders from the Trump administration, has begun removing references to transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument's website. They're quite literally trying to erase trans people from American history. And no, I'm not being hyperbolic here: they are systematically going through government websites and removing references to trans people's existence, including one of the most important sites in LGBTQ history.

As the New York Times reported, the agency stripped the "T" from "LGBTQ+" throughout the site, and later removed "Q+" as well. A page about pride flags associated with the movement, including the trans pride flag, has been virtually eliminated. They're doing this while claiming to be "restoring biological truth to the federal government," which is both Orwellian and historically illiterate.
This is just the latest and perhaps most symbolically potent step in the administration's methodical campaign to eliminate trans people from public life entirely. Since January 20th, we've witnessed an unprecedented assault on trans existence: The State Department has frozen all transgender passport applications. The Social Security Administration has banned gender marker updates. The military ban on trans service members has been reinstated. Schools have been ordered to out trans students to their parents. Federally-funded hospitals have been banned from providing gender-affirming care to trans youth.
The scale of this is staggering. Federal agencies across the board have been ordered to scrub their websites of any content related to gender diversity. The CDC's LGBTQ health resources? Gone. The Department of Education's guidance for supporting LGBTQ students? Vanished. Even Census.gov temporarily went dark as they purged references to gender identity from their systems.
Let's be crystal clear about what's happening: This is government censorship. This is the exact thing that conservatives have been falsely claiming happens when social media companies fact-check posts or when schools remove books with racial slurs from required reading lists. But this? This is actual, literal censorship — a government agency actively removing historical facts to align with a political agenda.
The most infuriating part of this is that you can't tell the story of Stonewall without trans people. As activist Randy Wicker told the Times, the idea that they would try to take transgender people out of the Stonewall National Monument is absurd because "you can't just erase history." He's right. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two trans women who were instrumental in the Stonewall uprising, are being effectively written out of the very history they helped create.

And yet nothing will eradicate from Uncle Leon's world the reality that his family has a trans member, out and proud and defiant.

Then there was the whole Adams affair, and the Democrats' singular failure to act when confronted by corruption.

There were any number of people who resigned in acts of bravery, but the pond was drawn to Eric Lach in The New Yorker and Danielle Sassoon’s American Bravery, A conservative prosecutor in New York makes the first bold move against Donald Trump’s rampaging (archive access)

You wouldn’t think it possible that a Federalist Society member and former clerk for the archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would show more grit in the face of Trumpism than the entire leadership of the national Democratic Party, but here we are. Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has provided the first dramatic check against the Trump Administration’s rampage through the federal government. On Wednesday, she refused her bosses’ orders to drop the criminal corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. She offered her resignation, and put her career on the line, rather than do the dirty work Washington directed her to do...

..On Thursday, Bove accepted Sassoon’s resignation, and wrote her an eight-page reply, which was leaked to the press. In every way that Sassoon’s letter is clear-eyed and measured, Bove’s reply is weak and hysterical. “The Justice Department will not tolerate the insubordination,” he wrote, clearly restraining himself from exclamation points. “You lost sight of the oath that you took.” The tone was unmistakable: middle-manager embarrassment. Bove threatened Sassoon and the lead prosecutors on the case with an investigation. He wrote that the Adams case was being transferred to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. But that, too, backfired. Within hours, several senior leaders in the Public Integrity Section had resigned as well, according to the Times. No one would rid Bove of this troublesome indictment.

Good times, brave times.

You can take King Donald out of New York and send him to Florida, but you can't take him out of the Mafia shakedown culture ...

7 down at time of writing ...

They found their coward, or perhaps it was their fool ...King Donald, Mayor of New York, the Judge Dredd of justice, he is the law ...

Good times, great times ...

How about Susan B. Glasser in the same magazine, It Took Trump Only Twenty-four Days to Sell Out Ukraine, Amid the chaos in Washington, the President’s phone call with Putin has Moscow filled with glee. (archive access)

The selling out of Ukraine was an inevitable consequence, no doubt, of America’s decision to reëlect Trump—the car crash that we’ve been watching unfold in slow motion since the evening of November 5th. For those who have been warning about Trump’s plans for Ukraine, Wednesday’s revelations felt like the crash had finally happened. John Bolton, the hawkish Republican who served as Trump’s national-security adviser and who has since publicly turned on him, said that his former boss had already “effectively surrendered to Putin” and appears prepared to force Ukraine to accede to “a settlement that could have been written in the Kremlin.”
The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, quite possibly a lame duck given upcoming elections in which his party’s share in the polls has collapsed to around fifteen per cent, blustered about Europe refusing to accept a “dictated peace.” But, in reality, who’s going to stop Trump? On the campaign trail last year, he used to brag that he would solve the Ukraine war in twenty-four hours. He broke that promise, but in the twenty-four days since he’s returned to power he’s given a brazen indication of how he plans to do so. Christmas came early for Putin this year.

It wasn't just Ukraine, Susan, there were all sorts of deals to be done ...

Back at The Atlantic, there was Yair Rosenberg's howl of pain, The Trump World Order, If the president gets his way, the strong, not international lawyers, will write the rules.

Memo to Yair, the strong have always written the rules, but do go on ...

The extraordinary evolution of American leadership over the past decade can be grasped from just two moments. In 2016, Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lectured Donald Trump, then an upstart presidential candidate, on the Middle East. “The Palestinians are not a real-estate deal, Donald,” Rubio quipped during a primary debate on CNN. “With your thinking,” Trump retorted, “you will never bring peace.” Turning to the audience, Rubio got in a last word: “Donald might be able to build condos in the Palestinian areas, but this is not a real-estate deal.”
On Wednesday, President Trump sat alongside the king of Jordan and reiterated his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza from its inhabitants and rebuild the area. “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it,” he said. “It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic-development job.” Sitting on Trump’s left was Rubio, the secretary of state tasked with carrying out the plan he’d once publicly derided. In the span of 10 years, U.S. foreign policy had transformed from the domain of expert-brokered consensus to the province of personality-driven populism.

Good times, little Marco and tiny hands now a team ...

Whether one considered the rules-based order a faulty but essential engine of collective prosperity or a sclerotic hypocritical holdover from another era, it now appears to be in decline. Trump is transitioning the old order to a new regime remade in his image—one where statecraft is entirely transactional and the strong, not international lawyers, write the rules. After all, how many divisions does the United Nations command?
Yesterday, during Trump’s meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, he was asked “under what authority” he was permitted to take the “sovereign territory” of Gaza. The president responded: “U.S. authority.” In the Trump World Order, no more explanation was required.

Good times ...

Over at The New York Review of Books, you could read stuff on arcane matters, or David Cole's The Unhinged Presidency, Many of the legal challenges to Donald Trump’s executive overreach will come down to the Supreme Court. Will it rein him in? (archive access)

Mere speculation of course but speculation you could find in the archive if you weren't a subscriber like the pond ...

...The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has enabled the consolidation of presidential power. It has, for example, advanced an unjustifiably expansive notion of the president’s “removal power”—his authority to fire his underlings. The Constitution says nothing about the president’s authority in this regard, but the Court has treated removal power as an implied aspect of executive authority and grown increasingly hostile toward any efforts to limit it. 

The courts, the ultimate salvation ...

Good times ...

In the interest of keeping certain agencies, such as the Federal Reserve Board, protected from politicization, Congress has occasionally passed laws providing that the president may remove certain officials only for abuse or neglect—not simply because he disagrees with their policy decisions. The Supreme Court upheld such a limit in 1935 with respect to the Federal Trade Commission, and again in 1988 in a challenge to the statute that created an “independent counsel” to investigate and prosecute cases against high-level executive officials, where the president has an inherent conflict of interest. The 1935 decision was unanimous; in 1988, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the majority, with only Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting. The Roberts Court has not formally reversed those earlier decisions, but it has repeatedly struck limits on removing federal officials, including the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Board; members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, an entity designed to oversee the accounting industry; and hundreds of administrative patent judges.  
In other cases, however, the Roberts Court has sought to restrain executive power. Its “major questions doctrine” has barred presidents from undertaking significant new initiatives without explicit authorization from Congress, and last term the justices overturned a longstanding rule that required courts to defer to executive agencies’ “reasonable” interpretations of ambiguous statutes the agencies enforce. 
So far these latter decisions have constrained only Democratic presidents. Soon we will see not only whether the Court is willing to apply them to Trump but also whether Trump’s current abuses will shake its confidence in largely unchecked presidential authority. In his first term Trump had the worst won-lost ratio in the Supreme Court since FDR. His even more blatantly lawless conduct this time around should be grounds for him to eclipse that record. No one in this nation’s history since George III has provided a better object lesson in the risks of unlimited executive power. We can both demand and hope that the Court agrees.

King Donald, in direct line of succession from mad King George!

Why do they mock him so?

Good times ...

And there's so much more, but the pond is a good Tootle. It knows it should never leave the reptile tracks ...

And so for its Sunday meditation the pond was lumbered with prattling Polonius yet again ... and all the little locomotives gathered to listen to Polonius let off steam ...

Anti-Semitism on the rise long before Gaza war, It is a sad reality that Australia, which until recently was regarded by many as the embodiment of a successful multicultural, tolerant and accepting society, is now making international news for acts of Jew hatred.

Not that again.

A correspondent did wonder if Polonius might mention the Cairo Takeaway Enmore affair, but there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening.

Being a reptile is all about cultivating selective blindness, and so not being able to see what the other hand is doing ..

We're in 'litany of rage' territory, so cue the first indignant snap, The anti-Semitic acts that took place at the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023 occurred when Israel was still retrieving the burnt and butchered bodies of its citizens. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Jeremy Piper

No mention of the subsequent butchery and ethnic cleansing of Gaza?

Nah, conure up instead Sharri, full disrespect...

Appearing on Sky News’ Sharri program on Thursday night, Melbourne-based businessman Michael Kroger made a quite shocking revelation.
Kroger reported that he had heard from a Jewish Australian about the prevalence of anti-Semitism at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney during 2018.
The man (who provided a name and mobile phone number) texted Kroger that he was booked to have an operation at Bankstown Hospital.
But he cancelled the procedure after being advised by one of his friends, who was working there, about how some Jews were treated – including quite unpleasant acts of commission and omission.
That was seven years ago – well before Hamas broke a ceasefire and invaded southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
As we know, this led to the murder of the most Jews since the end of the Nazi Germany Holocaust in mid-1945. And there were the acts of barbarous brutality – including the rape of women and the murder of children – along with the kidnapping of civilians, some of whom have died in captivity.

Cue a snap of philistines daring to get agitated about ethnic cleansing, The Free Palestine rally outside Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023. Picture: AAP

That sent Polonius off again ...

Writing in these pages on September 23, 2023, I referred to the decision by Federal Court of Australia Chief Justice Debra Sue Mortimer in the case of Kaplan v the State of Victoria.
The judgment was handed down on September 14 that year.
Five Jewish Australian applicants, including Joel Kaplan, initiated proceedings alleging that they had experienced acts of anti-Semitism from other students while studying at Brighton Secondary College in suburban Melbourne. The BSC is a government school run by the Victorian Department of Education.
The students maintained that the BSC staff had done nothing to protect them and that they were treated differently from non-Jewish students.
The evidence was overwhelming and the Chief Justice found for the applicants under the Racial Discrimination Act on most matters.
What was surprising was that the Victorian Department of Education used taxpayers’ funds to contest the case rather than settling. Then, as now, Victoria had a Labor government.
Not long after the Federal Court decision, the Minns Labor government in NSW decided to light up the Sydney Opera House with an Israeli flag on the evening of October 9, 2023.

Still no mention of the Enmore saga, though there's footage to be found and shared?

That's why the pond cheerfully ignored the dog botherer this weekend when he finally showed up carrying this tag:

Australia, we have a problem with migration
We shut our borders to China very quickly to help protect us from Covid-19. The virus of Islamist extremism is much more dangerous for our society

Nah, we have a problem with News Corp bigotry, we have a problem with the virus of News Corp extremism, a foreign invader lodged in the system worse than a brain worm in RFK Jr.'s noggin... and there's no way to shut the border on it, as it wreaks havoc in the streets.

Back to Polonius, and the reptiles flung in an image designed to reinforce the bigotry, dressed as a show of solidarity ...

People wrapped in Israeli flags watch the Opera House illuminated in blue to show solidarity with Israel on October 9, 2023. Picture: AFP

... and of course Polonius stayed stoic and solid ... as you'd expect of a one-eyed Murdochian ...

In the event, Jewish Australians were advised by NSW authorities to stay away from the Opera House, which became the site of an anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstration.
This was an unauthorised demonstration in which thousands of anti-Israel protesters carried Palestinian flags and chanted “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” – a call for Israelis to be forced from the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
At the Opera House, a combination of Islamists and green-left agitators chanted “Where’s the Jews?” – which many heard as “Gas the Jews”.
No matter the words, the message was much the same. Jews in Australia, whether Australian citizens or not, were the target. And the Israeli flag was burned.
The Opera House anti-Semitic acts took place before Israel retaliated by attacking Gaza, leading to the Israel-Hamas war.
In other words, there is no causal connection between the Israel-Hamas war and the acts of anti-Semitism in Australia – since the latter were prevalent even before Israel began its defensive war against Hamas.
The current scandal at Bankstown Hospital in which two nurses, one male and the other female, boasted on social media about wanting to kill Israeli patients is but the latest instance of a domestic war in operation against Jewish Australians.

There was a snap to go with that,  NSW government officials are investigating after nurses at Bankstown Hospital, Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, were filmed declaring they refuse to treat Israeli people and would "kill them" if they present to their ward. Picture: NewsWire

Then Polonius went on with his litany, with the dog botherer featured ...

Adass Israel Synagogue in the Melbourne suburb of Ripponlea, not far from Brighton, was firebombed.
Regular intimidatory marches have been made in areas of Sydney and Melbourne that have a relatively high Jewish population – cars have been torched and anti-Semitic graffiti painted on walls. Note that the Jewish population of Australia is relatively small at a bit over 100,000.
It is a sad reality that Australia, which until recently was regarded by many as the embodiment of a successful multicultural, tolerant and accepting society, is now making international news for acts of anti-Semitism.
What is to be done? – to ask the question made famous by Vladimir Lenin. Of the various governments, the Minns Labor government in NSW has performed best. But more can be done by non-government organisations. Especially at the ABC, which prides itself as the national broadcaster.
Melbourne-based businessman Joe Gersh, who until recently was a member of the ABC board, appeared on Sky News’ The Kenny Report on Thursday.
Gersh (who is a board member of The Sydney Institute) acknowledged that the ABC had done some objective coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, citing the example of some interviews by 7.30’s Sarah Ferguson.
But Gersh maintained that, at the moment, the ABC was part of the problem rather than the solution. He referred, for example, to John Lyons, the ABC’s global affairs editor.

Ah he would, wouldn't he, what with Lyons being one of the few to mention the ethnic cleansing being performed in the West Bank and Gaza, and so a fit subject for demonisation ... ABC global affairs editor John Lyons. Picture: ABC

The pond is always pleased to catch Lyons offering insights, though the pond's watching of the ABC is beyond intermittent ...

The Zionist lobby is a potent one, and any criticism is routinely berated ...

You simply can't do criticism, even if its criticism of Benji inventing his own ghetto and doing what fascists have done to ghettos ...

Gersh described Lyons as “an experienced journalist”, but said in his view Lyons had been critical of the state of Israel in his book Balcony Over Jerusalem and critical of the “Jewish organisational structure in this country and many of the Jewish leaders and individuals” in his monograph Dateline Jerusalem.
Gersh also asked why the ABC did not send one of its reporters from London to cover “the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz” – which the Seven and Nine networks and Sky News attended.
He asked: “Where was the ABC?” There has been no answer.
Then there is the weakness of many Australian tertiary campuses – with the obvious exception of Western Sydney University where Jennifer Westacott is chancellor.
Last Tuesday, The Australian Financial Review reported University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott had been interviewed on the 15 Minutes with the Boss podcast.
Scott said he had “failed” the Jewish students, as had “the university”. But he is intent on keeping his $1m a year job while the university has promised to construct a safe room for Jewish students. Really.
Greg Craven, the Australian Catholic University’s former vice-chancellor, has called for a judicial commission into the “monstrous failure of truth (with respect to anti-Semitism) in our institutions designed most to expound it”.
A good call. But don’t hold your breath.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute. He appears every Friday on Sky News’ The Media Report.

The pond isn't holding its breath in relation to any Polonial mention of Islamophobia, the Enmore Cairo affair, or various other examples of bigotry and prejudice by Zionists ... lack of oxygen quickly leads to the end times.

But the pond can only cop so much from alleged Xians, especially when humbugs of the craven Craven kind are trotted out ...

The monstrous truth is that antisemitism was let out of the bible long ago, as noted in the wiki Antisemitism in Christianity ...

It was Xians, Catholics in particular, that set all sorts of blood libels loose on the world, the killing of Christ perhaps foremost, and you can still find barking Mad Mel Max types spouting them ...

If you did any history, you couldn't avoid them ...

Cum Nimis Absurdum
On 14 July 1555, Pope Paul IV issued papal bull Cum nimis absurdum which revoked all the rights of the Jewish community and placed religious and economic restrictions on Jews in the Papal States, renewed anti-Jewish legislation and subjected Jews to various degradations and restrictions on their freedom.
The bull established the Roman Ghetto and required Jews of Rome, which had existed as a community since before Christian times and which numbered about 2,000 at the time, to live in it. The Ghetto was a walled quarter with three gates that were locked at night. Jews were also restricted to one synagogue per city.
Paul IV's successor, Pope Pius IV, enforced the creation of other ghettos in most Italian towns, and his successor, Pope Pius V, recommended them to other bordering states.

But it wasn't just the tykes. The proddies were just as bad. 

See Luther and anti-Semitism:

Martin Luther at first made overtures towards the Jews, believing that the "evils" of Catholicism had prevented their conversion to Christianity. When his call to convert to his version of Christianity was unsuccessful, he became hostile to them.
In his book On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther excoriates them as "venomous beasts, vipers, disgusting scum, canders,[clarification needed] devils incarnate." He provided detailed recommendations for a pogrom against them, calling for their permanent oppression and expulsion, writing "Their private houses must be destroyed and devastated, they could be lodged in stables. Let the magistrates burn their synagogues and let whatever escapes be covered with sand and mud. Let them be forced to work, and if this avails nothing, we will be compelled to expel them like dogs in order not to expose ourselves to incurring divine wrath and eternal damnation from the Jews and their lies." At one point he wrote: "...we are at fault in not slaying them..." a passage that "may be termed the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust."
Luther's harsh comments about the Jews are seen by many as a continuation of medieval Christian anti-Semitism. In his final sermon shortly before his death, however, Luther preached: "We want to treat them with Christian love and to pray for them so that they might become converted and would receive the Lord," but also in the same sermon stated that Jews were "our public enemy" and if they refused conversion were "malicious," guilty of blasphemy and would work to kill gentile believers in Christ.
Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, the Roman Catholic Church still incorporated strong anti-Semitic elements, despite increasing attempts to separate anti-Judaism (opposition to the Jewish religion on religious grounds) and racial anti-Semitism. 

Brown University historian David Kertzer, working from the Vatican archive, has argued in his book The Popes Against the Jews that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the Roman Catholic Church adhered to a distinction between "good anti-Semitism" and "bad anti-Semitism". The "bad" kind promoted hatred of Jews because of their descent. This was considered un-Christian because the Christian message was intended for all of humanity regardless of ethnicity; anyone could become a Christian. The "good" kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about the accumulation of wealth, etc. Many Catholic bishops wrote articles criticizing Jews on such grounds, and, when they were accused of promoting hatred of Jews, they would remind people that they condemned the "bad" kind of anti-Semitism.

And then there were the ratbags let loose in the twentieth century, allowed to roam, brought to heel far too late, with Charles Coughlin a prime example ...

The television producer Norman Lear recounts in his autobiography how Coughlin's radio broadcasts disturbed him deeply at age nine. As a Jew, they made him aware of the widespread antisemitism in American society.
Coughlin believed Jewish bankers were behind the 1917 October Revolution in Russia that brought the Bolsheviks into power, backing the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory. During the last half of 1938, Social Justice printed weekly installments from the 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent antisemitic text.
Coughlin denied being antisemitic on several occasions. However, he received indirect funding from the German Government.

Ah yes, we know that sort ...

How we know that sort ...

The one thing that can be said with certainty, is that while Islamic and Xian fundamentalists enjoyed a good stoush in the Crusades, they shared for a very long time a  certain streak of vigorous anti-Semitism, waxing and waning according to the mood ...

The other thing is that being an atheist has its advantages, because you can call down a pox on all their houses (and given the number of gods doing the rounds, that's a lot of houses).

These days the 'angels on the head of a pin' types have a devilish duty explaining away the infallible teaching ...“extra ecclesiam nulla salus,” or, “outside the Church there is no salvation.”

They do their best, they realise it's a limitation on recruiting and on the way people respond to a deeply bigoted church intent on sending everybody to hell, save the kiddie fiddlers within...

That's why they like to lump all anti-Semitism on Islamics ... it's a convenient way of ignoring the mote in the eye of the craven Craven, prattling Polonius and the Catholic church at large ...

In short, how the pond regrets wasting time with Polonius this day, how it would like to have headed back to the meadow and the butterflies creating a tornado in the Amazon ...

So much else to note, so many good times, like alleged Xians starving the starving ...

.... or Dr. Frankensteins creating a beauty few can see ...

... but that's the Xian way. Blame it on the Islamics, while endeavouring to kill them all ...

Genocide and ethnic cleansing and hearty redeeming prayers are the good times on offer from their long absent Lord ...

She's really going out with him ...

As always, the devil is in the detail ...