A Critical Hour

Yesterday, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, issued a press release. Its heading is something to ponder: “Yad Vashem Opens the Building of the International School for Holocaust Studies So That Evacuated Children from Southern Israel Can Go Back to School.”

• John Kirby is a retired rear admiral who is serving as the National Security Council spokesman at the White House. He was asked a question about the alleged insensitivity of the Biden administration to casualties in Gaza. His response is worth noting:

• Here is a headline I would not have expected: “Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews volunteer for Israeli military.” (Article here.)

• Mike Murphy has made a very good point — one that is generally overlooked, I sense:

• Making a point about Hamas, Haviv Rettig Gur has reminded me of something in our own political culture, concerning Russia:

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many Americans talked about how manly the Russian military was: so virile, so masculine, in contrast with us weenies in the West. In Ukraine, Russian soldiers have, among other things, murdered women and children as they tried to evacuate. Not so manly, really.

• A vignette in America — disgusting and un-American:

• There is a word for this: “righteous,” I think.

• Over and over, I think of that lyric from Oscar Hammerstein: “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” No one is born an antisemite, a Jew-hater. You’ve got to be educated into it.

• About that lynch mob in Dagestan — those hundreds bent on a pogrom: There is scarcely anything in the world more terrifying than a mob. It is, frankly, at the root of the politics that many of us hold: this anti-mob feeling. Madisonian conservatism (or Madisonian liberalism, if you like) has struck me as right since I was very young. Popular passions can kill.

• Volodymyr Zelensky is an amazing development in Ukrainian history. Small wonder that Putin and his fellow brutes are so scared of such a Ukraine. Small wonder that they can’t abide such an example on Russia’s border.

• Are you acquainted with the chairman of the National Heritage and Cultural Committee in the Pakistani senate? I was not, until Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, made me so:

https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1718526951579623802

• Many people in the Free World like the Turkish strongman, Erdogan. “Hamas is not a terror organization,” he said last week. “It is an organization of liberation, of mujahedeen, who fight to protect their land and citizens.” Uh-huh.

• Here is an offering on X — click on the image, for the full, nauseating effect, if you can stand it:

The world is awash in this sort of thing. Long has been. The only remedy for it is eternal vigilance — and that’s not really a remedy, but a means of surviving, century after century.

• A report from Reuters is headed, “Biden’s Israel stance angers Arab, Muslim Americans; could jeopardize 2024 votes.” I will excerpt a single sentence:

“I do think it will cost him Michigan,” said Laila El-Haddad, a Maryland-based author and social activist from Gaza.

That would be a damn honorable way to lose.

• One of my favorite journalists is David Horovitz, the founder of the Times of Israel. He is an Anglo-Israeli. When he talks, or writes, I sit up and listen. “Hamas, unthinkably, remains potent, still hurting Israel practically, psychologically.” That is the heading over an article of his. The subheading reads, “Empathy and support for an Israel in its darkest hour are dissipating, in a war that we don’t want to define as existential but that is looking increasingly so.” Yes.