Friday: Hili dialogue

May 15, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, May 15, 2026, and Malcolm X Day, celebrated on the third Friday in May. Here’s a near-final scene from Spike Lee’s great movie “Malcolm X” (1992, my favorite of his). Malcolm drives to the auditorium where he’ll be assassinated, passing his killers in another car, and then walks–or rather rolls–to the venue.  The music is the greatest of all soul songs: “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke.

It’s also Endangered Species Day, International Conscientious Objectors Day (I was one), National Chocolate Chiop Day, Jerusalem Day, and NASCAR Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*At the summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi in Beijing, the priority for Trump is economic agreement, while for Xi it appears to be getting the U.S. to soften its support for Taiwan, which Xi wants to take over. The WaPo reports on the difference in emphasis.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned President Donald Trump on Thursday that “conflicts” could emerge if the two powers mishandle Taiwan, declaring that Beijing’s top priority in talks with the United States is the fate of the contested island long supported militarily by Washington.

Xi’s message — delivered behind closed doors in an hours-long meeting in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People — was all the more striking given Trump’s effort to warm up relations and deliver trade deals to boost the U.S. economy. It came after Xi welcomed Trump at an elaborate ceremony overlooking Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese military crushed pro-democracy protesters in 1989.

Trump brought dozens of top U.S. business leaders with him on the trip and has made deepened trade ties a focus, downplaying the military rivalry between the two nations. Although Trump said later that the meeting was “great,” Xi’s remarks, as reported bythe Chinese Foreign Ministry, made clear that the Chinese leader intended to focus on security at a moment when Trump has shown greater willingness to flex U.S. military might.

“The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U. S. relations,” Xi said, according to the Foreign Ministry readout. “If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”

. . .China has long claimed sovereignty over Taiwan, a democratic island territory that is a powerhouse manufacturer of semiconductors and other technology. The United States, while not officially recognizing Taiwan as an independent country, is the territory’s major military backer. U.S. war planning for east Asia envisions how to defend the island against a Chinese invasion aimed at reasserting Beijing’s authority.

“China’s military threats are the sole cause of instability for the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific region,” Taiwanese government spokeswoman Michelle Lee told reporters Thursday. “Our government views positively any actions that contribute to regional stability and help manage the risks posed by the expansion of authoritarian influence.”

The U.S,. has no formal defense treaty with Taiwan (we once did, but it was ditched in order to establish relations with China), but we do have nonbinding agreements to provide Taiwan with arms and other defense aid if it’s attacked. But we have no obligation to give military help. What this means to me is that it would be easy for Trump, if he wants better economic relations with China, to tell Xi that we’re not going all out to defend Taiwan against Chinese military action. The PRC has implied that “reunification” should occur fairly soon, but not necessarily by military means. But the Taiwanese will never assent to joining with China, so any “unification” would have to be done by force.

*In Amit Segal’s latest column at “It’s Noon in Israel,” the author speculates about how the Israeli elections, which have been moved earlier, might turn out, and reports on Netanyahu’s recent interview on 60 Minutes, where the PM “squirmed” when asked about Chinese involvement in the war in Iran. Segal then discusses that involvement:

China, unlike Qatar, does not support Iran out of love for the Ayatollahs, nor out of hatred for Israel. It does so because it needs chaos in the Middle East that will drain US resources and attention away from Taiwan and the South China Sea. For Xi Jinping, every dollar the US invests in interceptors for Israel is a dollar not invested in submarines in the Strait of Malacca. This quiet war is China’s way of buying time in the clash of titans against the United States. The Iran war is where the Chinese are testing American boundaries and their willingness to go all the way.

The event is only getting more complicated. Take the Strait of Hormuz, for example. The Iranians are trying to create a new equation and control the world through violent control over the straits. This might be good for the Iranians, but for the Chinese, it is terrible. Why? Because while transit through Hormuz is important to the Chinese, transit through the Strait of Malacca is much more important. This is a narrow strait between Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, practically controlled by the US. Eighty percent of China’s oil imports pass through it. If the method of blocking shipping lanes becomes a legitimate means, it means the US will acquire almost absolute control over the Chinese. And that is just one example.

Another example comes specifically from Israel: the amount of military knowledge and capabilities built and tested here over the past three years is historically unprecedented. Israel is considered today around the world as a formidable power with field-tested experience. The war is the world’s largest testing lab for artificial intelligence on the battlefield. When Israel disrupts UAV swarms or eliminates 20 scientists in Iran in a few seconds, it makes its superiority practical. Trump brings receipts showing that Chinese technology is inferior to the Israeli-American mind, clarifying to them that he holds the tap to the knowledge and the blockade against everything they are trying to achieve. In this battle, Israel is the US’s combat R&D department, and for Trump, this is a tremendous bargaining chip.

Trump knows that the one keeping Iran alive today, even if quietly, is the empire from the East. They are the ones still trading with the Iranians while bypassing sanctions; they are the ones providing them with intelligence and even certain types of weaponry. For the Chinese, for example, air defense batteries are considered offensive weapons, but ballistic missiles are somehow defined as defensive weapons. Go figure.

Just as Israel set a goal for itself to break the Middle Eastern axis of evil, Trump set a goal for himself to break the Chinese-Russian-Iranian-North Korean axis of evil. If he disconnects the Chinese from the axis—he will weaken it significantly and bring it closer to the goal he desires so much: an absolute and indisputable victory, in a short time, and with a relatively low number of casualties.

The talks in Beijing are ongoing, and so far not much has been leaked.

In response to the release of the Civil Commission Report on sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, and Nicholas Kristof’s ill-sourced column on Israeli sexual violence against and dg rape of prisoners, the WSJ has issued two editorials. The first is about the Report itself, “The truth about Hamas,”  You can read about these examples in the Report (you can find it here).

Reading “Silenced No More,” the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, we were transported back to Oct. 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.

The new report is a catalogue, for memory’s sake, of Hamas depravity. Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.

Yoni Saadon recounts another horror: “She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. . . . I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologize to her, saying ‘I’m sorry.’” Later he saw “a beautiful woman with the face of an angel and 8 or 10 fighters beating and raping her.” The last one shot her in the head. Each example here is of a civilian non-combatant.

Why is this being published when the details are out in the open? Because many people don’t believe them or choose to ignore them. As the article says:

We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied by an antisemitic global left that wants us to forget. Everywhere denial serves the same purpose: to distort Israel’s defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.

The other op-ed, “Kristof’s unbelievable tale” (subtitle: “The columnist publishes a poorly sourced, fantastical tale of torture and dog rape in Israel”), goes after the columnist’s (and the NYT’s) hamhanded piece:

A little‑known Geneva‑based NGO called Euro‑Med Human Rights Monitor published a report in June 2024 alleging that the Israeli military was using dogs to attack Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including to “sexually assault prisoners and detainees in Israeli detention facilities.” Quoting testimony attributed to Palestinian detainees, Euro‑Med claimed that the dogs, equipped with “surveillance cameras” strapped to their backs, were “let loose” on prisoners, torturing them “systematically and sometimes collectively.”

Euro‑Med’s report received no attention from mainstream outlets when it was released, and for good reason. Israel has linked the group’s leadership to Hamas. Euro-Med has a documented record of promoting wild allegations against Israel, including claims of organ harvesting of Palestinian detainees, mass executions in hospitals, and denials of well‑established Hamas activity at Gaza’s Al‑Shifa hospital. This week, Euro-Med’s far‑fetched allegations found their way into a New York Times opinion piece penned by Nicholas Kristof.

Mr. Kristof cites allegations by “Palestinian prisoners” and “human rights monitors” that Israeli police dogs have been “coached to rape prisoners.” He offers no evidence for this in the column, but later defended the claim on X, citing “three different medical journal articles” about rectal injuries from anal penetration by dogs. Yet the scientific literature describes human‑initiated bestiality, not dogs assaulting humans, which may not even be anatomically possible.

The more I read about Kristof’s defense the angrier I get. How dare he use evidence from bestiality to buttress claims of Israelis dog-torture? Anyway, the article goes on to debunk two of Kristof’s named sources as shill for Hamas propaganda, and ends this way:

Sexual assault in prisons is an unfortunate reality worldwide, and sexual violence in war is well‑documented. Hamas used systematic rape and sexual violence during its attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 as detailed in a comprehensive report released this week by the Israeli Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes. Such allegations are grave and demand proper investigations and rigorous reporting.

Mr. Kristof’s column doesn’t meet that standard. Instead, it relies on a patchwork of omissions, dubious sources and ever‑more lurid allegations, serving more to demonize Israel than to clarify what actually happened. Worse is that this kind of reporting erodes trust in journalism and makes it harder for genuine victims of sexual violence to be believed. They deserve better.

You don’t often see one MSM outlet go after another like this, but both Kristof and the NYT deserve it. I don’t often quote WSJ op-ed pieces as I find them too far on the right for my liking, but both of these editorials are sensible and, what’s more important, moral.  The NYT’s actions here are both stupid and immoral, spreading undocumented assertions that will hurt Israel, as the paper and Kristof surely know.

*Over at The Freethinker, Nick Cohen takes issue with the familiar argument that Western values derive from Christianity. His question: “What has Christianity to do with Western values?”

The notion that liberal democracy is only for Westerners and is the product of specifically Western religious traditions has always been asinine, however plausible it may have seemed in the early twenty-first century. Japan and South Korea are part of ‘the West’, after all. Far from being a sign of democratic solidarity, Christian identity politics has become the friend of every enemy of Western democracy.

Before I go further and explain why, I need to introduce a plethora of caveats. I am not talking about, let alone criticising, the majority of European Christians, who are as likely to support liberal ideals as anyone else. I am not finding fault with this aspect of Lutheran doctrine or that Vatican pronouncement. Cultural determinism is as wrong when it is used to maintain that religion poisons everything (as the late Christopher Hitchens used to say) as it is when it is used to announce that Christianity blesses everything and has given us democracy, feminism, human rights, and all that is good and lovely in the world. Totalising explanations always fail. They cannot handle complexity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently made my point for me. Last November, the former atheist announced her conversion to Christianity and unintentionally revealed the fatuity of Christian identity politics as she did so.  Any genuine Christian reading the articles and interviews that accompanied her conversion would notice there was no embracing of the Nicene creed; no declaration that Hirsi Ali now believed in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father.

. . . . Citing Tom Holland’s claim in his 2019 book Dominion that Western morality, values, and social norms are ultimately products of Christianity, the former atheist said that she had realised that Christianity was the source of Western safeguards for freedom and dignity. ‘All sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity,’ she continued. To believe in freedom and to defend it one ought to be Christian.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown extraordinary courage in standing up to the threats of radical Islamists. Tom Holland is the nicest and most intellectually generous historian I have met.

But this is hopeless stuff. In much of Europe the struggle for human rights, which Hirsi Ali presumably admires, was in part a struggle over state religion. The Enlightenment was a reaction against the bigotry and slaughter of the European wars of religion. To this day French liberals insist on defending secularism because they remember the arbitrary power of the Catholic church and fear the arbitrary power of Islam. The drafters of the US constitution wisely prevented the state from passing any law affecting religious worship and belief because they wisely feared the power of the religious persecution.  It is not just that so many Western freedoms originated in the anti-clerical struggles of the Enlightenment – and it is ridiculous to say that they are nevertheless still somehow ‘Christian’ freedoms – but that the argument is circular. If everything comes from Christianity, even freedoms that were achieved in opposition to the constraints of state religions, then there can never be real change in the world. If everything comes from Christianity, then religion is stretched so thinly that it all but vanishes, as it clearly has in Hirsi Ali’s strangely faithless conversion. If everything is Christian, then nothing is Christian.

. . . Few people can go along with Hirsi Ali’s argument today. Those that do will be on the right or the extreme right. Liberal Christians or those who identify with the Christian tradition, such as Tom Holland, see democracy and human rights as flowing from Christian beliefs. But Christians with actual power are making a nonsense of their argument.

Extreme religious belief makes assaults on the Constitution easier. The faithful are obeying the Lord’s commands and they do not admit the right of any earthly constitution or ballot to restrain them. Hirsi Ali and many others fail to draw the parallels with the woke movement they deplore. To the worst type of progressive the West is the sole source of global oppression. Whiteness and Eurocentric beliefs are sins. And yet in the US Christian conservatives, who are spurred on by their opposition to progressive authoritarians, are no more willing to defend the West than their left-wing enemies.

This year will be a decisive year for the West. One way to get through it would be to end our self-serving and flattering cultural exceptionalism. The enemies of democracy are not only to be found in foreign tyrannies, they are among us. And the more devoutly they claim to uphold Western Christian values, the more likely it is that they are willing to subvert Western civilisation.

I suppose the thesis could be defended by arguing that “well, Christianity formed the good values, and they’ve being subverted historically by religion.” But that ignores the historical Enlightenment development of humanism as a reaction against Christianity and other religions.

*Finally, satire from The Babylon Bee: “The NYTimes reveals: Seven more shocking things Israel has trained animals to do” (h/t Luana).

As you may have heard, The New York Times revealed this week that Israel has a secret animal training program that literally teaches dogs how to waterboard prisoners. Scarily, that’s not all they’re teaching animals. Here are seven more shocking things that The New York Times has reported that Israel has coached animals to do:

  1. Trained goldfish to only live for three weeks and make kids sad when they die: Horrifying.
  2. Taught cats to be emotionally detached and self-centered: The evil is sickening.
  3. Trained a chicken to make that mocking chicken noise, but only when it sees New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof: So mean.
  4. Trained pigeons to fly around pooping on people: Unbelievably twisted.
  5. Taught a guinea pig how to pilot an Apache attack helicopter: Okay, that is a scary image.
  6. Trained a parrot to repeat whatever is said, slowly driving people insane: What kind of sick people are these?
  7. Taught a golden retriever how to play basketball and ultimately lead a Midwest high school team to the championship: We could not be more appalled.

We hope this list wakes people up to the disturbing reality of what Israel is doing with these poor, innocent animals.

And here’s one from Facebook:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is smelling the flowers

Hili: The scent of wisteria reaches all the way here.
Andrzej: It’s a nice smell.
Hili: I prefer the smell of catnip.

In Polish:

Hili: Aż tu dociera zapach wisterii.
Ja: To miły zapach.
Hili: Wolę zapach kocimiętki.

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

From The Dodo Pet:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Masih: More protestors hanged in Iran this week:

From “Captain” Ella, with the English translation below:

Standing before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem… And upon the Holy Quran… An Arab Muslim fighter in the Paratroopers Brigade—swearing allegiance in the Israel Defense Forces Long live the State of Israel. 

This Arab IDF member wouldn’t dare go near the Al-Aqsa mosque on top of the Western Wall, as he’d be killed. He’s thus forced to swear fealty before the remains of the Second (Jewish) Temple.

From Luana; NYU students are trying to get Jonathan Haidt, who wrote about the hypersensitivity of students, banned as a commencement speaker because he wrote about the hypersensitivity of college students. In fact, I can’t think of a better commencement speaker.  The link to the article is here.

From Simon; the Number Ten Cat is institutionally neutral:

One from my feed. I’d love a salticid as a pet but they don’t live very long:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was nine years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-15T10:11:59.767Z

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, the world’s most beautiful duck. Be sure to watch the video; that is some sexual dimorphism!

The Extraordinary male Mandarin Duck, the lighter one is the female is soft colours brown-grey with white and hint of blue at wing. They live in Eurasia. Life span is 3-6 years in the wild, and 10-20 in protected areas.

— 🇨🇦JOY 🇨🇦 (@joycomes.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T14:49:32.308Z

And an invasive species:

“Could you fucking NOT?!”

— 𝔸𝕞𝕓𝕖𝕣 𝔻𝕒𝕨𝕟 (@amberdawn1116.bsky.social) 2026-05-12T13:09:26.390Z

2 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Dogs are haram in Islam, so being raped by a dog is probably something viscerally disgusting to a Muslim. An antisemite would believe that of course the Jews would do it. It is like urban legends. Even if not true they are the things we imagine would happen.

    Reply

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