"Nothing is true; everything is permitted."
- Hasan-i Sabbah, 12th-century founder of the Hashashin, the Order of the Assassins

"Where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing."
- Rieff

by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

Some years ago, when people kept asking me if I was happy, wiseguy that I was, I would answer, honestly enough, "I'm happy that no one is bothering me."

TS Eliot called it an "objective correlative," something concrete that represented something more subtle. My emotion here, unmolested, is represented concretely by my residence at the end of a short dead-end alley, where there are no passers-by. The privacy of my situation is further enhanced by a metal barrier preventing the intrusion of cars parking or trucks turning around.

The New Atheists, straw-manned religion, cheaply ridiculing its miraculous stories, the Koran's flying horse, the Torah's speaking ass. But when you steel-man our faith, it has a lot to offer. The prayers we chant for protection from enemies, refer first to those most formidable and prevalent, the enemies within, our own destructive tendencies. No one else is bothering me, true enough. But more importantly, and very recently, I've stopped bothering myself. But, still, I am bothered.

Personally, I am happy to pull my chair outside on a chilly morning, like today, and sit typing in my sunny doorway. Personally, I have (gracias a dios): financial equilibrium, creative activity (some people paint, I publish), good friends and I just added a delicious, fry-less Pad Thai to my already formidable culinary repertoire. I'm ok; it's the rest of the world that I'm worried about.

As a doctor, as a counsellor, my eye is drawn in each case by that which does not make sense. I am like Hamlet, who sighed, he in his indecision, "Aye, there's the rub." Today's most striking friction, society's most glaring incongruity, is the bizarre alliance between two extremes, the radical "left" and radical Islam. Queers, gays, feminists, political dissenters of every variety would literally not last a day in Hamas' Gaza. How, then, has progressive politics bedded down with savage, theocratic, misogynous authoritarianism?

In last week's article I fretted about ignorance. This week I'll worry about lies.

The academic who did the most to popularize systemic racism, the idea of a "legacy of lynching," for example, that American white jurors want longer sentences for Blacks and Latinos accused of crimes than for Caucasians, or that conservatives are on average more racist than liberals, was lying. Eric Stewart was fired from Florida State University, and his fraudulent, often-cited research papers are being retracted by major journals because much of what they report is simply not true. He fabricated his research results.

Claims by Black Lives Matter (BLM) that US police are perpetrating a "genocide" of African Americans are false. The number of unarmed Black men killed by police each year is 20-something or less.

The three top examples of cop racism are shaky at best:
1) There is considerable, recently-emerged evidence (from Minnesota's Hennepin County medical examiner) which indicates that the widely accepted account of Floyd's death is false.
2) President Barack Obama stated that he had "full confidence" in the decision of his Justice Department clearing the officer who shot Michael Brown.
3) Alleged rapist, Jacob Blake was shot outside his victim's house holding a knife while resisting arrest.

Jussie Smollett faked his own beating. The Covington Catholic kids were the victims. None of the white "Karens" did much of anything wrong; one of them turned out to be a pregnant nurse absurdly accused of jacking a bicycle from five fighting-age Black men.

The Politics of Tribal Nonsense, by Wilfred Reilly

 

Pallywood is a long Palestinian cinematic tradition, in which a wide variety of political parties and terrorist groups create fake dramatic videos and peddle them to sympathetic Western media outlets who pay for these comically obvious fabrications and then cynically or cluelessly present them as indictments of the Jewish state’s cruelty.

Pallywood media fakers during the Second Intifada, turned the invented story of the death of a Palestinian boy (the al-Durrah footage aired on French television, image above) at the hands of cruel Israeli soldiers into the 21st century’s first global blood-libel.

A Palestinian resident in war-torn Gaza assures his viewers that there’s no one more oppressed than he is; a woman yelling about smashing the patriarchy; a person identifying as BIPOC shouting about the omnipresence of white supremacy; someone who's watched a couple of videos and now identifies as genderqueer demanding that their they/them pronouns be parroted by all; it all falls apart upon first contact with reality.

#MrFAFO Is Real, by Liel Leibovitz

 

Israel is not committing genocide against the Palestinians. At least, they're not very good at it; the Palestinian population having quintupled since the 1960s.

If you classify everything that Hamas does as a legitimate response to Israeli oppression, and anything that Israel does as a war crime, then you've been influenced by antisemitism.

An intifada involves murderous attacks against Israeli civilians. If you are calling for both an intifada and a ceasefire, you are demanding that Israel not defend its citizens from murderous attacks.

A ceasefire now, when humanitarian aid is flooding Gaza, when hospitals are receiving Israeli incubators and assistance, when a humanitarian corridor is open to the south, when the overwhelming majority of Gazans being killed are Hamas terrorists, would only serve to save Hamas.

Regarding pro-Palestinian lawlessness and mobs, we should heed the words of the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirate spoken in 2017: "There will come a day that we will see far more radical extremists and terrorists coming out of [the West] because of lack of decision making, trying to be politically correct, assuming that they know the Middle East, Islam and the others far better than we do."

The recent congress of the Arab League, while not affirming that Israel's actions are defensive, voted down sanctions against Israel and the US. Pundits said that an Israel invasion of Gaza would ruin its ties with the Arab world, but not a single friendly Arab country has reacted so. In fact, Saudi Arabia said it intends to continue its pursuit of relations with Israel, the disruption of which was Iran's chief purpose in ordering Hamas's October 7th raid.

Again, down to the next photo, borrowed very heavily from Liel Leibovitz:

Today, decades of blasting away at faith, family, and nation—our bulwarks against unreason—have left their mark. Grim theories forged in war-torn Europe by post-modernist French intellectuals do not translate well to Santa Barbara, California.

For the Woke, the business of separating argumentation and propaganda from reality is a tedious and bothersome constraint. For them there are no hard facts, only hard feelings and soothing fictions. Here again, Shakespear's confused Danish prince anticipates the sentiment, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

But reality has an uncomfortable way of intruding on even the most delirious imaginations. Sooner or later, the delirious stumble onto the consequences of living out their bloody fantasies and the party is over. Sooner or later, perhaps in the not-so-distant future, reality will have its revenge.

Our most dangerous enemies are within, our persons and our society, if only because they are the closest. Hamas and the foolish Woke have revealed themselves, undeniably so. Neither wants peace nor justice nor equity. They want power to enact their vengeful strategies.

Here, far away from it all, I sit typing in my doorway. Just finishing this week's article, the sun has gotten strong enough for me to strip down to shorts and do my yoga. But first I'm going to go eat some watermelon. Personally, here on my dead-end, life is very good. ¡Viva México!

**************

Dr. David presents Lokkal, the social network, the prettiest, most-efficient way to see San Miguel online. Our Wall shows it all. Join and add your point of view.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar