CONK!
“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” the scriptures say, and that is what I have been doing. The news cycle has been rightly inundated with the horrors wrought by Hamas, Israel’s response, and with great sadness, the horrors that continue to unfold.
I have no words, which is why you haven’t seen any in these pages. Foreign policy is not something I’ve ever considered my wheelhouse, so I rarely write about it, good or bad. But this is just horrific. A new level (who would have thought) of man’s inhumanity to man.
Bari Weiss’ has some powerful pieces over at her Free Press Substack. I would recommend going over there and checking out the coverage and the commentary. A good many of her writers are Jewish or Israeli, and there’s something about seeing your own people targeted and slaughtered that clarifies and focuses you. It shows in the writing.
Here’s an excerpt from Weiss’ piece, “When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them”
It’s as if the Cossacks had TikTok.
On the one hand I think: surely this will be sufficient. Surely this amount of blood will be enough to shake the world awake. Surely no one can equivocate or justify this. As my friend Sarah Haider wrote, “How easy is it to simply condemn targeted violence against civilians? Can there be a lower bar?”
And yet, across the world, people have sunk below it.
Here you can watch people gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews” and “death to the Jews.” People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York. (Scroll down to read our Free Press dispatch on the celebrations in Manhattan.)
At our most prestigious universities there is silence from administrations that leapt to speak out on George Floyd’s killing and on the war in Ukraine. Indeed, Meantime, the social justice crowd offers explanations for the massacre—a massacre that, in part, targeted a group of progressive Israelis at a music festival. Terrorists came to that festival on paragliders carrying machine guns to start their slaughter. They raped women there next to the dead bodies of their friends.
In that way, as Free Press editor and writer Peter Savodnik explains in our second piece in today’s digest, the last few days have been extremely clarifying.
Because now we know.
And then, there’s the usual stuff from me, on RedState, 1819 News and here.
Despite the horrors occurring across the seas, the world continues to spin, battles are being fought on small and large scale in our own personal lives and worlds, and as Samwise Gamgee said in The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, “[T]here’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”
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