It isn't just 2023 that's ending.
A conversation, with friends, about the war, the enemy, and the state of things.
The Year of the Zombies.
I’m shifting out of neutral this week. After a bit of a hiatus I’m back in the saddle with the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen. The main attraction in today’s newsletter is an unscripted, unedited and mostly impromptu conversation with a couple of chums, Fred Litwin and David Roytenberg.
Fred will be familiar to readers of the Real Story (see this guest post, particularly). He’s is a “gay dissident,” a proud Zionist, a polymathic, prolific author and a dear old friend. David is the top guy at the Canadian Zionist Forum, a regular contributor to the Times of Israel, and one of the nicest people I know.
Our conversation is bookended by the Gaza War and the eruption of unambiguous antisemitic vulgarity in street protests and across a wide swathe of what used to be the Anglo-American intelligentsia since October 7. But it’s really about the wider, civilizational war we’re all caught up in.
Every Jew I know is reeling, disoriented, and more or less disconsolate. One of the subjects that came up in conversation: Are Israelis becoming brutalized by having been subjected to war and terror for seven decades? Have Israelis finally become inured to the suffering of the Palestinians?
It’s an unavoidable question and David and Fred handled it thoughtfully and sincerely.
That suffering is very real, even if the widely-cited death toll of 21,000 deaths in Gaza since the October 7 pogrom occludes a Palestinian civilian-to-combatant morality ratio of perhaps 1:1. But here’s something I do not get.
No sensible, humane person would disagree that Gazans are enduring obscene agonies at the moment. The rarely-credible United Nations agencies credibly reckon that 90 percent of Gazans are desperate for food, with perhaps a fifth of the population enduring extreme hunger.
The lead UN agency on this file is the World Food Program. I get that UNRWA is wholly discredited. I get that Israel shouldn’t be expected to allow Hamas to handle food distribution in Gaza. But as Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib keeps asking, why the hell can’t the WFP do what it’s supposed to do (and routinely does) in these circumstances?
Emergency airdrops could be organized in coordination with the Israeli Defence Forces and the Israeli Air Force. “A UN/WFP ground controller can set up GPS waypoints for each drop,” Alkhatib suggests. “Dubai has a huge humanitarian hub with enormous UN resources, supplies, assets and tools that can be rapidly marshaled for this task.”
Operations like that could effectively distribute food, allowing Gazans to collect aid directly, cutting out the Hamas middleman in a way that also gets around the incapacity of on-the-ground NGOs. What’s the hold-up?
That’s a close-up question. Here’s some bird’s-eye views:
The indispensable Jeffrey Herf: From the River to the Sea When Hamas revised its charter in 2017, it tapped into the narratives of the global Left–with stunning effectiveness.
Our old pal Matti Friedman: The Wisdom of Hamas: They understand the war they’re fighting. Many in the West still don’t.
And Geoff Shullenberger’s magisterial cartography of zombieland. It’s about the exhaustion of the entire Euro-American “progressive” project (and the inadequacy of its conservative antidotes) in the form of a review of five books on the subject: The Poverty of Anti-Wokeness.
Meanwhile, of all the stuff I’m working on, here’s just one story that requires a great deal more attention than it’s been getting:
Could this have something to do with “housing unaffordability”?
Gee. I wonder. From the summer of 2022 to the summer of 2023, nearly 700,000 “non-permanent residents” arrived in Canada, quite apart from the 400,000-plus “permanent resident” arrivals.
This brings the total number of NPRs currently in the country to 2.5 million. More than a million people in this nominally-but-not-really-transitory population hold work permits, and another million or so are “students” who also hold various kinds of work permits.
Oh dear:
Why Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives and Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats are so quiet about this is a question I keep asking that always goes unanswered or avoided altogether.
Enough for today. As always, so many stories, so little time. Do put your feet up and sit in on that conversation with Fred and David. It’s free, but taking up a paid sub would be nice of you and it would do you a world of good.
Speaking of paid subscribers (they get to comment on posts and whatnot), I wish I had the time to respond to each of their kind and encouraging responses to my Christmas newsletter. I read them all. Thank you, all of you, from the very ventricles of my heart.
Happy New Year.
Hi Terry:
A friend just forwarded this website address to me. It is extremely graphic, but probably necessary as a response to deniers and celebrants of October 7th. Imagine the pain and outrage Israelis justifiably feel when observing the sudden overflow of hate. I hope that this link goes viral and that normal humans will excoriate publicly, and to their faces, all the deniers and the celebrants of the atrocities committed. Israelis have learned to be strong and determined as a result of their aloneness, historical aloneness. Of course, we have many supporters, and are grateful, more than you will ever know, but the wave of hatred that has swept through N. American universities and cities has shocked even us. European lip service has been no surprise, but the perfidy of the Biden administration was disappointing, to say the least. The US State Department has been unable to do its worst, most likely because the majority of Americans, have been raised with the admirable notion that good must triumph over evil. Americans also understand the lone hero, or group, that saves itself from catastrophe by joining together and courageously resisting tyranny. Please continue the good and noble fight. Your principled efforts set an example and are appreciated. <https://www.hamas.com/>
One cannot watch everything on the Hamas website, which another of your commenters provided a link to. Pure evil was unleashed on October 7 and these sadists are proud of what they did/intend to do. The goal of Hamas is to erase Israel and all Jews living there by torture and murder, pure and simple. On the final two screens of the website, all Hamas goals are clearly listed together with how they are to be achieved; basically this is a short step-by-step manual on the principals and methodology of taking over a country and establishing an Islamic government. I have heard from someone who tried to read an English translation that the Koran is full of atrocities that believers are commanded to commit on all "infidels" and therefore the Koran becomes unreadable long before the end. The day after the nation of Israel was created in 1948, it was attacked by its Islamic neighbor countries and has been under a state of tension or outright Islamic attack with resultant war ever since.
Our federal government is encouraging millions of newcomers annually into our country. No precise number of arrivals (temporary, permanent, legal and illegal) who want to stay seems to be available. Our PM recently issued a special invitation to all Gazans to come here too. There are exceedingly high numbers of immigrants of Islamic extraction already here and arriving daily, and their presence together with their sympathizers is destabilizing because of their threats to our Jewish population at their now constant "demonstrations" being held in our cities. At these demonstrations, the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews is being loudly called for. Certainly sounds like "hate speech" with a threatening undertone to the average listener. They have come here to partake of our benefits and generosity, but have brought all the old grievances from their homelands with them. They support the sadistic atrocities which were perpetrated on innocent people on October 7 in Israel. They are calling for more of this to continue.
The behavior and words of our federal government as recorded by the media regarding the war in Israel, and our government's cultivation of "demonstrations" supporting the October 7 atrocities constitute a betrayal of its responsibility to the country and to its citizens. If a government does not condemn unconscionable behavior from its residents, then by default it cultivates that behavior. As a modern democracy, a G7 country and a member of NATO, Canada is expected to know right from wrong and to lead the country, rather than wobble along according to the agendas of its regional voters.