Champion 1

by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher
Art by "Kid" Powers McGuire

I woke up this morning (Sunday, December 14), eventually sat down at my computer, and, before doing anything else online, read an email:

Not having yet seen the news, I had no idea why Kid was asking.

If people want to know my opinions, they can just read this, my Sunday column. But even though Kid (a non-Jewish law professor who lives most of the year in the States, who I've published Kid's World: A Brooding, Troubled, Lugubrious Artist Reveals His Perky Side) does read my Sunday column he would have to ask to know what I think about antisemitism in Mexico because I don't often write about my politics. What's the use?

Babes
*

People believe that they are 90% rational and get carried away by their emotions only 10% of the time. But I think those numbers should be reversed. At best (or is it worst?), we rationalize our emotionally-driven decisions after the fact. Take dessert, for example.

A friend coming over to visit last week (stopped at the store down the hill, on the main street of San Luis Rey, that sells Costco products and) brought up two large slices of cheesecake (with a raspberry glaze). He ate his slice emotionally, swallowing it in large forkfuls, shoveling it down with most of it untasted, not even touching his tongue.

I used to tell patients, "The first three spoonfuls of ice cream taste great. The second three taste good. All the rest goes down in gobs. Put it back in the freezer for later when you will actually enjoy it."

Still in the process of consuming my breakfast, I put my slice aside for later, eating it rationally, slowly savoring tiny bites of it over the course of the next five nights.

Politics is also largely emotional. As you cannot reason someone out of opinions that they have adopted emotionally, why write about it? Then, while I may be rational about ice cream and cheesecake, what do I really know about world affairs?

Queen of Hearts
*

Selfie 3
*

But, since Kid asked, I will venture that world history seems an almost universal, uninterrupted, tale of conquest followed by genocide or slavery; slavery involving either exile or grinding oppression, and rape. This, it seems clear, has been true nearly always and everywhere: Polynesia, Africa, America (before and after Columbus), Europe, Asia...

Despite the bad rap "white culture" has been getting for the last two decades, I would further venture that the Judeo-Christian belief in the worth of the individual, that we are all created in God's image, has been the main bulwark, however imperfect, against the world's formerly universal savagery. Christianity spreading Judaism's Golden Rule, "What is hateful unto you, do not do to another," certainly reformed the barbarity of the Roman Empire. The idea of individual rights and its corollary, equality before the law, however imperfectly applied, are Western innovations.

X (formerly Twitter) recently started listing the country where posts originate. This simple move revealed overwhelming fraud; accounts, some of them quite influential, pretending to be someone and somewhere they were not. These accounts, it seems, were mostly foreign actors being paid to sow divisiveness in the United States.

A lot of the antisemitism exploding right now on social media and podcasts, if not actually paid for by Iran and Qatar, is not organic, not grassroots. So too, a lot of the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas protests in the US were not spontaneous. They were also funded by anti-American forces.

Returning to Kid's question about antisemitic in Mexico, I've wondered if the pro-Palestinian protesters who appeared regularly across the street from the TOSMA farmers market each Saturday also received funding from agents of Hamas? Why should they be any different?

Champion 2
*

Cantinflas
*

You have to be careful defending the US, especially here in Latin America. It's obvious that America's hegemony has been marred with horrible abuse. However, as much as John Lennon would have us Imagine it were, the alternative to Western supremacy has never been an egalitarian utopia: "Imagine there's no countries." Leftist domination in the last 100 years: Nazi (National Socialism), Soviet, Chinese and Cambodian communism... has killed over a hundred million people, many, many orders of magnitude more than the CIA ever has.

I know that I'm on thin ice, and, if you are getting emotional about this, please know that I'm almost done, but it could be argued that Europe and America have just been better at conquest than everyone else. And also, that Western conquest has, sometimes, somewhere and somewhat, been tempered by Judeo-Christian values and law.

Having written the first draft of this article and had breakfast, I looked further online and saw why Kid asked me about antisemitism this morning. I see in the news that just today Australian Jews have been rewarded for their country's recent recognition of a Palestinian State by being gunned down during their celebration of the first day of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah. A crowd of 1000, including families with children, just having a good time on the beach, were attacked, with 15 dead so far and 40 hospitalized. This comes during a months-long campaign of harassment and intimidation against the Jewish community waged by Palestinian activists there on that beach, after months of the Jewish community appealing to the authorities for protection from that harassment and being ignored. What did you think that "Globalize the intifada" means?

Further in the news I see that Paris just cancelled their New Years party, with someone on X commenting:

World affairs affect me personally: "All politics are local." - Tip O'Neill. As a Jew in Mexico, I am in favor of America's recent aggressive stance against Venezuela. So too are my non-Jewish Venezuelan acquaintances here in town. They believe that Venezuelan "President" Maduro is bad for Venezuela, that he stole the election and is standing in the way of the economic prosperity that is trending in South America.

Certainly, Maduro is allowing Venezuela to be used as a base for Iran and its terror proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, to foment their antisemitic, anti-American agenda here in the western hemisphere, probably here in San Miguel right across from the farmers' market.

And to my leftist friends (I have many), let me remind you that Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot particularly persecuted and murdered thoughtful intellectuals such as you. When, almost 50 years ago, an alliance of Islamists and leftists overthrew the Shah of Iran, the first thing that the Ayatollah Komeini did after that Islamic Revolution was to consolidate his grip on power by murdering 30,000 leftists.

You can imagine a better world, and even work for it. I do and I am. But, please, keep your guard up because there are a lot of people who are betting against us. Meanwhile, be kind and, this holiday season, enjoy those desserts... slowly.

A detail from the memorial at Bondi Beach

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

Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, public internet, building community, strengthening the local economy. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

Discover Lokkal:
Scroll down SMA's Community Wall below.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar