Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, December 16, 2025. It’s the second day of Hanukkah, and there are only nine shopping days until Koynezaa. It’s also National Chocolate Covered Anything Day. Here are chocolate-covered scorpions from Thailand at five bucks apiece (dorsal and ventral views of the confections are shown):
It’s also Boston Tea Party Day, with the rebellion occurring on December 16, 1773, and The Day of Reconciliation in South Africa, first celebrated in 1995 after Nelson Mandela was elected President of the Country. Mandela spent 27 years in prison, 16 of them in this cell on Robben Island in the ocean south of Capetown. I photographed this cell last year. Notice the uncomfortable sleeping mat and waste bucket. That, along with the table, are the cell’s sole furnishings.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 16 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Director and actor Rob Reiner and his wife were found stabbed to death in their home, and the prime suspect is one of their children. (Apparently Nick Reiner slit their throats.)
A son of the celebrated Hollywood director Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner has been arrested after the couple were found dead in their Los Angeles home, according to online jail records viewed on Monday.
The couple were found stabbed to death on Sunday in an apparent homicide, according to the police, friends of the family and two people who were briefed on the case but not authorized to speak publicly.
The son, Nick Reiner, 32, was arrested on Sunday night and is being held in a jail in Los Angeles County on $4 million bail, according to county jail records. No information about criminal charges was immediately available.
Rob Reiner, 78, was a popular sitcom actor before directing a slate of beloved films, including “This Is Spinal Tap,” “When Harry Met Sally …” and “The Princess Bride.” He went on to become a force in California and national Democratic politics, championing gay marriage and other causes. Ms. Reiner, 70, was a photographer and later a producer.
Nick Reiner had spoken over the years about his struggles with drug abuse and bouts of homelessness beginning with his teenage years. He worked with his father on a movie, “Being Charlie,” that was loosely inspired by his early life.
Police officials said on Sunday that officers had responded to a death investigation at the Reiners’ home in the upscale Brentwood neighborhood at about 3:40 p.m. local time and found two bodies. They said then that investigators were trying to get a search warrant for the home.
Here’s what else to know:
Reiner’s work: Mr. Reiner’s Hollywood career as an actor and director spanned decades, including an eight-year run on “All in the Family,” a 1970s sitcom. More recently, Mr. Reiner had cameos in television shows like “New Girl” and “The Bear.” The actor Sean Astin, speaking on behalf of SAG-AFTRA, called Mr. Reiner “one of the most significant figures in the history of film and television.”
Michele Singer Reiner: A photographer and later a producer, Ms. Reiner inadvertently altered the course of movie history when Mr. Reiner spotted her on the New York set of the romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally …” The pair later married, and their real-life love story influenced him to change the ending of his most famous movie. They had four children: Jake, Nick, Romy and Tracy.
Rob Reiner was a great talent. He played “Meathead” on “All in the Family,” the best comedy in the history of television, directed “When Harry Met Sally,” the best modern rom-com, and also directed “A Few Good Men,” nominated for four Oscars, including best picture. A sad way to go: stabbed, along with your wife, by your own son. Here’s Reiner as Meathead:
One more: the famous ending scene of “When Harry Met Sally.” On the NBC News last night, Rob Reiner related that the movie originally had a sad ending, with Harry and Sally walked off in different directions. But during filming Reiner fell in love with his future wife and decided to give the movie a happy ending. Great decision, and this is the famous result. What a declaration of love!
And this is what our First Idiot issued:
*Brendan O’Neill is mad as hell and isn’t taking it any more: this refers to the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia. This short article in The Spectator called “The Bondi Beach shooting was a pogrom” is paywalled, but you can see it archived here), and it’s addressed to Australians, as well as a few other folks:
. . . . Australian officials have confirmed that rancid Jewphobia was the fuel of this crime against humanity. This ‘evil attack’ was ‘designed to target Sydney’s Jewish community’, says New South Wales premier Chris Minns. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it ‘an act of evil anti-Semitism’. It is almost beyond belief that a Nazi-style slaughter of Jews could occur at this famously chilled beach. Is nowhere safe from the pox of Jew hate?
The chilling thing is that this barbarous act feels both shocking but also not surprising. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Australia – like Britain, Europe, the US – has been beset by the delirium of anti-Semitism in the two years since Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. Synagogues have been set on fire. Jewish schools have been daubed with racist graffiti. ‘Murder your local Zionist’ has been scrawled on walls.
. . . This is the hard question we must ask ourselves today: who wrote the mood music for the barbarism in Bondi? Who laid the rotten soil in which such brutish hatred festers and fattens and eventually bursts forth? I’m tired of tiptoeing around this: if you had any part in defaming the Jewish nation as the most evil nation, and those who support it as ‘scum’, then I don’t want to hear a word from you about Bondi. For some of us believe, deeply, that you have aided and abetted this new fascism.
For more than two years, Jews have asked you not to chant ‘globalise the intifada’. They told you it feels like incitement to violence. They pleaded with you not to call Zionists ‘Nazis’. They asked you not to entwine the Star of David with the swastika, fearing that this marks out all Jews as wicked people. They said: ‘Talk about anti-Jewish racism, please.’
. . . . And you just looked the other way. The self-styled virtuous of polite society pulled their keffiyehs over their ears and drowned out the Jews’ noise. People chanted ‘Globalise the intifada!’ on the streets of London just hours after the Yom Kippur murders in Manchester. It is a testament to the crisis of our civilisation that I can imagine mobs somewhere in the West chanting it today with not a second thought for the souls slain in Sydney.It is undeniable now that the unhinged hatred for the world’s only Jewish state has reanimated a medieval-like loathing for the Jewish people. In Colorado six months ago an elderly Jewish lady was burnt to death by a man shouting ‘Free Palestine’. In Washington, DC in May, a young man and woman were killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum, also by a man shouting ‘Free Palestine’. In Manchester in October, two Jews were killed. And now this unspeakable atrocity. Under the Palestinian colours, the world’s oldest racial hatred has found a new and lethal lease of life.
Anyone who has ever been to Bondi will know what a gloriously free space it is. Surfers doing their thing, young lovers sunbathing, blokes breaking the rules by sipping beers. And Jews gathering for special occasions, grateful to live in what they thought of as a tolerant nation. That is all shattered now. It has never felt more pressing to take a stand against the forces of misanthropy and Jew hatred that have crept into our societies – and against the elites that let them in.
Although it was likely two Muslims who did the slaughtering, antisemitic views have, as O’Neill says, been ubiquitous in Australia for some time. It would be hard to turn Muslims around, as their religion largely promotes Jew hatred, but this article isn’t addressed at Muslims.
*Over at the Free Press, Ayaan Hirsi Ali pulls no punches in a piece called “The intifada comes to Australia.” One of the murdered was a rabbi, Eli Schlanger:
. . . . Weeks before he was murdered, Rabbi Eli Schlanger wrote directly to Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, urging him to take a firm stand. He warned the prime minister against abandoning Israel or the Jewish people. He wrote as a rabbi shaped by history, reminding the prime minister that Jews have been driven from their land again and again by leaders later remembered with contempt. Australia’s leader, he said, still had a choice—to stand on the side of integrity and justice: “As a rabbi in Sydney, I beg you not to betray the Jewish people and not to betray God Himself.” In September, Albanese announced Australia’s formal recognition of a Palestinian state. Read now, Rabbi Schlanger’s letter feels less like advocacy and more like a warning that went unheeded.
This attack was not random. It wasn’t an eruption of private madness. It was deliberate. Jews were targeted on a Jewish holiday, in broad daylight, in a public place. This matters. When we blur that fact, we betray the dead.
The method chosen by the murderers should also trouble us deeply. Families were gathered in joy when men with guns got out of a car and began firing. The violence arrived with speed and cruelty, and though the scale differs, the pattern is unmistakable; it mirrors October 7 in Israel. A holiday. A crowd. Daylight. Attackers who targeted the most vulnerable, and knew precisely what they were doing.
This way of killing has been studied, praised, and spread for years. It appears in pamphlets, videos, and online posts. It is celebrated in slogans shouted at marches and emblazoned on placards. It is excused as rage, sanitized as politics. When killing is justified in moral terms, it no longer horrifies. Instead, it multiplies.
. . . . Antisemitism in Australia didn’t appear suddenly. Over recent years, it has risen steadily, then sharply. Synagogues have been firebombed. Jewish schools and daycare centers have been vandalized. Cars have been torched. Homes marked. Children bullied. Threats normalized. Since October 7, reported antisemitic incidents have surged several times over, reaching levels not seen in living memory. Terror attacks on Jewish targets in Melbourne in October and December of last year have been linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Yet too often, leaders chose reassurance over honesty. Chants calling for violence were justified as protest. Language forged in violence was treated as politics. Direct threats were brushed aside. Each retreat gave hatred more room. When murder is given a moral excuse, it no longer shocks. It simply spreads.
The Bondi Beach atrocity was horrific, but it wasn’t unforeseen. It was the result of long indulgence. It was tolerated into being. Ideas matter because they shape what people come to accept, especially when they are repeated unchallenged. When crowds call for intifada, they are calling for the most brutal form of violence. When Jewish symbols are burned, and Jews singled out as symbols of evil, this is not dissent, and certainly not “resistance,” but preparation. It is a rehearsal for what follows. Every society that has failed its Jewish citizens has done so first by looking away, persuading itself that hatred was only speech, and that speech carried no consequences.
. . .One truth must be spoken without hesitation. Islamist extremism isn’t merely another grievance-driven movement. It is an existential threat to Western society and to the values that sustain it. It rejects pluralism, despises freedom of conscience, and targets Jews and Christians precisely because those traditions stand for limits on power and the dignity of the individual. History shows this pattern clearly. Where such extremism is tolerated, minorities suffer first, and the wider society follows.
I cannot write this without honoring the man who intervened as the attack unfolded. Ahmed al-Ahmed, a fruit store owner, saw a gunman and, instead of retreating into helplessness, moved toward danger. He tackled the attacker, fought for the weapon, and risked his life for people he did not know. Without that act, many more families would now be mourning.
That man embodies what free societies ultimately depend on when institutions falter: moral resolve, physical courage, and a refusal to accept violence as fate. He mustn’t be reduced to a footnote. He deserves recognition as a reminder of what real citizenship looks like when it matters most.
Australian leaders should take note of that man. He acted decisively, without delay. He understood the nature of the threat in front of him and responded accordingly. That instinct is precisely what leadership requires in moments like this.
I have to agree with Hirsi Ali that “Islamic extremism. . . is an existential threat to Western society and the values that sustain it.” Not all Muslims are extremists, of course, nor want to kill Jews. But Islamic extremism is a widespread and virulent form of the species. If the you read the Qur’an, which many Muslims regard as word-for-word true, you will understand why. You can interpret words like “jihad” and “intifada” as innocuous, but if you read the book you’ll see what they really mean. And it’s not “Islamophobia” to say so.
*Donald Trump is being sued by The National Trust, which is seeking to stop construction of that giant and stupid Trump Ballroom in the White House, which replaced the entire East Wing.
The lawsuit from the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, represents the first major legal challenge to Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot addition and is poised to test the limits of his power. The organization argues that the administration failed to undergo legally required reviews or receive congressional authorization for the project, which Trump has rushed to launch in hopes of completing it before his term ends in 2029.
“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever — not President Trump, not President Joe Biden, and not anyone else,” the complaint says.
The administration in October rapidly demolished the East Wing to make way for the ballroom over the objections of the National Trust and other historical preservationists who urged the White House to pause its demolition, submit its plans to the National Capital Planning Commission and seek public comment.
. . .Officials responded by saying they would work with the commission, a board that oversees federal building projects and is now led by Trump allies, “at the appropriate time.” NCPC chair Will Scharf, Trump’s former personal lawyer who is now White House staff secretary, said his administration colleagues have told him they will submit the project plans to the commission this month. It has yet to do so, even as work continues on the former East Wing site.
“The lawsuit is our last resort,” Carol Quillen, National Trust’s CEO, said in an interview. “We serve the people, and the people are not being served in this process.”
The administration did not respond to questions Friday about the National Trust’s specific claims or when it would submit ballroom plans to the commission. Officials have maintained that Trump has authority over White House grounds and is working to improve them at no cost to taxpayers, dismissing critics as “unhinged leftists” who seized on the imagery of bulldozers tearing down what has been called “the People’s House” as a metaphor for the opening year of his term.
“President Trump has full legal authority to modernize, renovate, and beautify the White House — just like all of his predecessors did,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, wrote in a statement.
. . . .The president has also maintained that he is not bound by typical building restrictions or the need to seek construction approvals, citing conversations with advisers and experts.
“They said, ‘Sir, this is the White House. You’re the president of the United States, you can do anything you want,’” Trump said at an October dinner to celebrate the ballroom’s donors.
Several polls have shown that the ballroom project is broadly unpopular, and Democrats have consistently attacked it, eager to contrast the president’s focus on a luxurious ballroom against many Americans’ concerns about affordability.
It’s clear that this was rushed through without even trying to get approval, and with the possibly unwarranted assumption that the President could do anything he wanted to the White House. And even if he could, it isn’t his house, it the American People’s house. It’sridiculous that they already destroyed the East Wing without even submitting project plans. I guess we’re getting used to this mishigass.
*In Luxor, Egypt has restored and revealed two giant statues of a pharoah, and they are impressive! The AP reports, and I’ve put a video below:
Egypt on Sunday revealed the revamp of two colossal statues of a prominent pharaoh in the southern city of Luxor, the latest in the government’s archaeological events that aim at drawing more tourists to the country.
The giant alabaster statues, known as the Colossi of Memnon, were reassembled in a renovation project that lasted about two decades. They represent Amenhotep III, who ruled ancient Egypt about 3,400 years ago.
“Today we are celebrating, actually, the finishing and the erecting of these two colossal statues,” Mohamed Ismail, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told The Associated Press ahead of the ceremony.
smail said the colossi are of great significance to Luxor, a city known for its ancient temples and other antiquities. They’re also an attempt to “revive how this funerary temple of king Amenhotep III looked like a long time ago,” Ismail said.
Amenhotep III, one of the most prominent pharaohs, ruled during the 500 years of the New Kingdom, which was the most prosperous time for ancient Egypt. The pharaoh, whose mummy is showcased at a Cairo museum, ruled between 1390–1353 BC, a peaceful period known for its prosperity and great construction, including his mortuary temple, where the Colossi of Memnon are located, and another temple, Soleb, in Nubia.
. . .The statues show Amenhotep III seated with hands resting on his thighs, with their faces looking eastward toward the Nile and the rising sun. They wear the nemes headdress surmounted by the double crowns and the pleated royal kilt, which symbolizes the pharaoh’s divine rule.
Two other small statues on the pharaoh’s feet depict his wife, Tiye.
The colossi — 14.5 meters (48 feet) and 13.6 meters (45 feet) respectively — preside over the entrance of the king’s temple on the western bank of the Nile. The 35-hectare (86-acre) complex is believed to be the largest and richest temple in Egypt and is usually compared to the temple of Karnak, also in Luxor.
Here’s a short video showing the reconstructed statues. I really must get to Egypt some day, and the time is running out.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej get balled up in conversation:
Hili: What is “today”?
Andrzej: A point of life in brackets between yesterday and tomorrow. Its value varies depending on different variables.
Hili: Make my today better.
Hili: Co to jest „dziś”.
Ja: Punkt życia w nawiasach między wczoraj i jutro. Przybiera różne wartości w zależności od różnych zmiennych.
Hili: Zrób moje dziś lepsze.
*******************
From: CinEmma:
Fr0m The Language Nerds; These are all valid English sentences:
From Things With Faces; a happy remote:
From Masih. Click on screenshot to see the video, for they won’t allow embedding. AND DO NOT WATCH IT IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THE VICTIMS OF THE BONDI BEACH MASSACRE.
From Emma, who’s tired of dumb arguments:
“But I’ve had a hysterectomy, am I not a woman?”
Your gotchas don’t work. Not only are you (deliberately) failing to distinguish between sufficient and necessary, you are also, remarkably, failing to understand that why you don’t have a womb is kinda key information here.
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) December 14, 2025
From Simon. I had no idea ducks could get a driver’s license:
GWAS pic.twitter.com/OuDcNbeTdy
— Oded Rechavi (@OdedRechavi) December 12, 2025
From Luana; this person wouldn’t last five minutes in Gaza:
Eurovision singer ‘Nemo’ says he’s very inspired by the ‘brave people’ of Gaza and would like to visit it one day. How do you think he would be treated there? pic.twitter.com/EusEup8scy
— Dr. Maalouf (@realMaalouf) December 12, 2025
A Morse Code alphabet. I wonder if this is how the dots and dashes were made:
Morse code alphabet
[📹 knowledgebytes]pic.twitter.com/0CbGHnrPuP
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was nine years old. Note the yellow star. https://t.co/Sg6qAGW0el
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 16, 2025
Two from Dr. Cobb. First, his new book is nominated for a prestigious prize:
Very excited to see that CRICK has been shortlisted for the Hatchards First Biography Prize. Here are all five books!
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-12-15T13:21:19.253Z
. . . and a beautiful pod of dolphins:
A pod of dolphins chasing mullet in shallow water in Tampa Bay, Florida yesterday. I took the video on the St Pete side of Tampa Bay. #nature #animals #dolphin #florida #fish #wildlife #naturephotography #mullet
— See Through Canoe (@seethroughcanoe.bsky.social) 2025-12-15T13:21:46.471Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. -George Santayana, philosopher (16 Dec 1863-1952)
Trump’s post about the Reiners is beyond belief. How can any human being, let alone the president of the US write something like that? Not so long ago it would have seemed inconceivable. But Trump has normalized so many aberrant things… And it has nothing to do with politics, just essential human decency.
Yes, Trump’s post about the Reiner’s was discreditable, especially after the reactions to negative posts after Charlie Kirk’s death. I guess he has a little Reiner Delusion Syndrome.
Joe put males in female sports on his first day in office. He issued EO 13988. Trump issued EO 14168 on his first day in office. EO 14168 says that sex is determined at conception.
That word… I think it does not mean what you think it means…
“Discreditable” means “tending to bring harm to a reputation.” Whose reputation was harmed here, Trump’s or Reiner’s?
Just as one can damn with faint praise, one can deflect with faint criticism.
The National Trust is not a regulatory body. Their approval is not needed. As is often the case with law suits against the Trump admin, no one wants to admit that the Executive actually has the authority to do things under the Constitution.
I thought the Trump tweet was remarkably eloquent.
A remarkably eloquent demonstration of his cruel narcissistic psychopathology. A remarkably eloquent demonstration of stupefying irony. A remarkably eloquent demonstration of the need to implement the 25th Amendment.
🎯
Eloquent bulls eye
Illicit drug users should go to prison, not rehab…which rarely works. Nick Reiner reportedly was in rehab 17 times and now he is suspect #1in the murder parents are dead and he’s suspect #1.
Drug rehab isn’t compassion, it’s insanity.
What evidence is there that ‘rehab rarely works?’ The % of relapse is high (40-60% according to this: https://action-rehab.com/rehab-faqs/how-many-people-relapse-after-rehab/ ) , but then it does work 60-40% of the time.
These days it is viewed as a mental illness and not a crime.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll accept your stats. Here’s the point. In most cases, possession and use of illicit drugs is a criminal act. Don’t ignore that. Also take into account that a high percentage of drug addicts commit crime to support their habits. And their addiction fuels criminal cartels.
I’m not advocating throwing away the key. Drug addicts should get rehab, including mental health therapy, but it should be behind bars where they will pay a price for the harm they’ve caused to family and society.
I appreciate your thoughtful response.
Yes, rehab is a too-frequent failure. Coercive prison rehab is a worse failure. Prohibition is a repeatedly-proven massive failure (the Volstead Act, the endless War on Drugs, etc.). Most illicit-drug-related crime is due basic economics: inelastic demand and restricted supply, thus high prices and high-risk activities in response to those prices (by both the buyers and sellers).
IMO a moralistic they-deserve-to-suffer approach is about the worst possible strategy, for both the users and society in general. But organised criminal enterprises do very well out of it.
Maybe it would be better to regard addicts as suffering from a mental illness they are powerless (under determinism) to control. Under this medical model — call it Harm Reduction v.2.0 — they could be committed involuntarily to a secure mental health facility not to rehab them, which fails, nor to treat them against their consent but just keep them from committing the crimes they can’t help committing to fund their drug needs. The focus would be on incapacitating the incorrigible, not on retribution or deterrence. This is the enlightened approach to antisocial behaviour that doesn’t require subscribing to imaginary free will.
A further advantage is that committal under state and provincial mental health legislation is an administrative procedure. It doesn’t require a criminal conviction of guilt, since there is no guilt. All that’s required is for a psychiatrist to certify that the person is suffering from a mental illness — drug addition is right there in the DSM — that makes him unable to care for himself or makes him a danger to others. (There are legally specified safeguards of review and appeal.)
If the addicts were taken off the street, the dealers would go out of business and disappear. This would have the opposite, salutary effect from arresting dealers, which only raises the price and thus the incentive for the addicts to steal if left to their own devices, as now.
Putting our money where our mouth is, and treating socially dysfunctional drug addiction as the dangerous mental illness it is, is long past due. Just because we get all progressive and regard everything as a mental illness and not a crime doesn’t mean we can’t protect ourselves from dangerous people suffering from those diseases.
Sr. Duterte had a related solution, but cheaper.
Well, yes, many objections. Sometimes the most practical failure mode is the status quo. (It’s often the status quo for good reasons.) As long as the addicts can’t get to my neighbourhood to steal from me — no free busses! –, they can freeze and die on the streets downtown in Zombieland for all I care. The activists who dictate to City Hall seem to like it that way, so who am I to argue?
But we do need to scale back safe supply and safe injection sites as dangerous public nuisances that increase opioid deaths.
+1 Mark.
D.A.
NYC
At one time I was closely associated with AA. The AA failure rate is above zero, but far below 100.0% Rehab works at least some of the time (perhaps most).
To put this in perspective, I was not a member of AA. My job was to fix their computers. I was locked in room and not allowed to attend AA meetings. This is not a complaint. I supported AA then and still do.
AIUI, they do not publish statistics on their success rates (and what constitutes success). If they don’t, I’d like to know why.
I was associated with the AA chapter that had the worst ‘success’ rate in town. It was around 50%. Apparently, other chapters did better. Do I have any national statistics? No. Did I even have any exact local statistics? No. Do I know how AA defined ‘success’. No.
Anonymous participants in a self-help program are hard to do follow-up and collect statistics on. Known only to God, and all that.
I presume AA chapters keep some relevant records, otherwise how could they meaningfully award 6-month / 1-year / 5-year sobriety tokens? If they do then these statistics could be aggregated anonymously. That would at least be something.
Ummm, that photo is of Archie Bunker,not Meathead.
It’s the beginning of a video. Follow the link.
Doesn’t sentence 3 require a comma between ‘moved’ and ‘the’? And doesn’t sentence 5 require the word “that” between ‘horse’ and ‘raced’?
Speaking of English comprehension, have you taken the NYT quiz consisting of questions lifted from the college entrance exam for Korean kids? I’m a native English speaker who got an 800 on the reading portions of both the SAT and the GRE, but I only got half (2) of these questions right.
the barn fell
I think fell=hill here (think fell runner)
it’s the barn fell as opposed to the high fell or the green fell, the particular hill with the barn on it
I think the horse, who was raced down the barn, fell down.
yes, that’s better
Can anyone find an example of a Jewish private citizen who has engaged in a religiously-motivated killing of members of another religion?
It always seems to be:
Christian nutjobs killing Jews…
Muslim nutjobs killing Jews…
It’s never in the reverse. Now, clearly there are people with severe mental illnesses and violent tendencies in any population of people, including the Jewish community, yet this never seems to result in individual Jews gaining firearms and deciding to massacre people in public spaces.
It’s almost like, I don’t know, the different beliefs and institutions of the different religions result in different behavior.
These days?
Yes, I am sure you can find examples. Even if this has recently abated, we don’t need to go into the massive history of anti-Semitism by Christians against Jews over the centuries.
My question is why there are almost no examples of a lone Jew, perhaps mentally ill or perhaps not, who is aggrieved about antisemitism and just decides to go and shoot up a mosque BECAUSE he believes this is what his religion tells him to do. I think the answer lies in the fact that there seems to be almost no leverage within Judaism to do that.
In contrast, the challenge of a devout Muslim would seem to be how to AVOID hating Jews, as anti-Semitism is all over the “sacred texts”. Ditto for Christianity, which has a strong tradition of blaming Jews for the death of Christ, or at the very least hating Jews for stubbornly refusing to believe in the “good news” of Jesus.
I fully support Israel and oppose the rising tide of Jew-hatred around the globe. But, Jeff Vader, with respect, there have been some Jewish acts of terror. The one with which I am most intimately familiar was in 1994, when Baruch Goldstein attacked a mosque in Hebron. Sadly, a small number of Jews still think of him as a hero but, happily, most Jews do not.
“Ditto for Christianity, which has a strong tradition of blaming Jews for the death of Christ, or at the very least hating Jews for stubbornly refusing to believe in the “good news” of Jesus.’
Would pious Christians condemn the Jews if that rag-tag mob advocating for Barabbas had declined to demand Jesus’s crucifixion? After all, one way or another the Lamb of God had to be sacrificed to take away the sins of the world. If not the Jews, who would these Christians of the ensuing centuries up to now, who allegedly had a vested interest in this being accomplished, require to undertake the task? Would that these Christians could be transported back in time to show the courage of their theological convictions and undertake the task. (“This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You.”)
Jeff I think the absence of this is why the media so treasure, expand and often even invent stories of “West Bank settler violence” – it provides an equilibrium against Islamic violence.
So as not to be seen as …(sigh)… “Islamophobic”.
Thing is those WB settler stories are usually blown WAY out of proportion. A “hat” Jew even farts in Samaria and it is the end of the world. ZIONIST WAR CRIME!
vs. a stabbing/shooting / exploding bus event against Jews, or bigger, is “resistance”.
The asymmetry is amazing. They/we in the west can’t process it.
best,
D.A.
NYC
There was a massacre of Muslims at prayer in a mosque that occurred back in the 90’s. I remember reading about it in the newspapers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacre
“Globalize the intifada” always meant exactly what it said. There is no ambiguity. Yet why do leaders such as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese do so little? Most likely it’s because they, too, are afraid of the radicals. They offer little beyond platitudes because they hope that by sacrificing the Jews they will spare themselves. They will not. The intifada starts with the Jews but it does not end with the Jews.
Not sure, Norm. Nowadays, I think they genuinely don’t see there is an actual danger.
They (lefty PMs from Norway to France to Australia) indulge in all sorts of biases, work arounds, etc to convince themselves any legitimate criticism of Islam, and a small but very dangerous minority of Muslims…. is “racism”.
Moral gymnastics of Olympic proportions.
best,
D.A.
NYC
Motivated reasoning. Electoral demographics. Woke Left.
The Labor government here has come to depend on imported Muslim votes for political power. Muslims tend to concentrate in certain districts and vote as a bloc for the party that so generously imported them and their families, and Labor depends on winning those districts to take and hold government. That is why the current Labor government broke with Labor’s traditional support for Israel and turned against it. That is why the Labor governments (state and federal) tolerate “kill the Jews” demonstrations by angry Muslims, rants by Imams instructing their followers of the evil nature of Jews, and thousands marching on the Sydney Harbor Bridge carrying pictures of the Ayatollah and waving flags of Hamas and ISIS, all in violation of the country’s hate speech laws. It is an outrage.
Seems to me all those sentences need commas.
They do. Yes.
Back when people used to send telegrams those sentences would have been included in samples of actual (supposedly) telegrams that would be hard to interpret, sent by customers trying to minimize word charges. The only punctuation in a telegram was “STOP” for a period. Charged as a word, it was used only when absolutely necessary.
An example I recall was,
followed shortly by a correction:
(Ernest Hemingway supposedly honed his terse style as a foreign correspondent with The Toronto Star from having to cable his dispatches from faraway places at five dollars a word. He would send five or six well-chosen words and the re-write desk in home office, fore-runner of AI, would use educated guesses about Franco’s Spain to turn it into a couple of paragraphs of “eye-witness” prose.)
A famous telegram to Variety from the hinterland went:
reporting that people who lived in remote rural districts resented Hollywood movies that depicted them as unsophisticated rubes.
Interesting tidbits, thanks.
Many critical articles about the so-called non-binary person Nemo have appeared in the German-language press. Quite a few call it a PR stunt, because winning the ESC 2024 did not give his career a boost, despite the media and social media coverage. His album, released in October this year, was an international flop. It only spent three weeks at number 3 in the Swiss charts.
“Musically, Nemo was already a well-known (and highly competent) figure in Switzerland before the ESC, and remains so as an event in Swiss cultural history. Even without such standing, many find it easy to succumb to the pressure. But his career after the ESC stalled. Nemo fell – and continues to fall – prey to the classic mistake made by all singers, bands, and performance groups who become famous through a single night at the ESC: namely, that a great performance at the ESC – even for winners – guarantees an international career.
Yet the history of the ESC teaches us that winning the world’s most important pop competition of the day does not guarantee a great success story. Only then, according to the recently deceased Munich music manager Hans R. Beierlein, does the hard work of building a long-term career begin.
Abba took this to heart after their victory in Brighton in 1974, as did others. Nemo, however, ranks far behind after “The Code” and is not in demand internationally, despite the sometimes toxic anti-Israel solidarity on social media.”
https://taz.de/Nemo-gibt-ESC-Siegestrophaee-zurueck/!6135804/
East Wing: Sometime in the later 1780’s Gustav III of Sweden set out to build a palace to rival Versailles, just N of Stockholm at Haga Park. By early 1792 they had gotten as far as building the foundation – huge stone piers that still exist and can be freely roamed – when all came to a halt after a certain event at a masked ball.
At some future time it would be nice to find a testimonial piece of rebar extending out of the WH lawn, commemorating a palatial ballroom that never happened.
Thanks for the introduction to Gustav III’s Julius Caesar style ending. His “The ball seems to be merry and bright” does lack the drama of WS’s “Et tu, Brute?”, but that’s non-fiction for ya.