Will Zionism self destruct?

Alistair Crooke, formerly of MI6, in a talk he intends to give at the HSE University, Moscow, this month will say that Saudi Prince Bandar persuaded Donald Rumsfeld in 2006 to reduce Iranian power, increased by overthrowing their enemies the Taliban and Saddam, by overthrowing Assad. This is very interesting.

Putin put a stop to that game.

Now Israel is increasingly ruled by Middle Eastern Jews and is on the road to becoming another country in the region ruled by religious fanatics. The American evangelicals won't mind but liberal Democrat Jews will.

I wonder whether Israel will exist in 2100 but think it will not disappear without a world war. Seriously. I do not want it to cease to exist for several strong reasons, including wanting to avoid America launching a world war, but what a world of pain that languid dilettante Arthur James Balfour has caused.

Are these the end times, like the rustic American Evangelicals thought all along? And it's all England's fault.

"Sunak unveils biggest military spending increase in a generation"

Why is Rishi Sunak increasing defence spending massively when Great Britain is not threatened by any state actors? Why should we care what China does or what happens in the Middle East? Does no British politician understand anything about foreign affairs?

Will there always be an England? No.

For Saint George's Day a tweely expressed but devastating thought by Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, former Telegraph and Spectator editor (and former boss of Boris Johnson), Charles Moore. "Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years."

Quotations

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Only press on : no feeling is final.”
Rainer Maria Rilke


"In a general way it's very difficult to become remarkable. People won't take sufficient notice of one, don't you know." Joseph Conrad, quoted by Anthony Powell as the epigraph to his memoirs.

Patrick Cockburn is always interesting

Patrick Cockburn on February 24 in the i newspaper, tweeted that day by Peter Hitchens.

"As an unforced political error, Biden’s mistake over Gaza vies with President George W Bush in invading Iraq in 2003 and President Vladimir Putin ordering Russian troops into Ukraine in 2022. As a military conflict, Gaza might be small, but it has an infinite capacity to destabilise the region and the US itself.

"Israel, helped by the US, has wrecked a status quo in the Middle East that favoured them both and whose destruction they may already rue."

Patrick Cockburn today.

My country right or wrong

Patriotism is always a good thing. The problem nowadays is that so many people are very patriotic for foreign countries. I am one of them in the sense of loving Romania passionately. But with one's own country the rule should be "my country right or wrong". With other countries this rule should never apply, but it does. Especially when the other country in question is Israel. 

Americans' patriotism and lack of irony are two of their strengths but American patriotards are very annoying.

Equally annoying, and perhaps equally dangerous, are the people who think patriotism is all right in small doses, like an infection. Western Europe and England are full of them. These people are often globalists.

Patriotism is required by the Fourth Commandment. (Protestants call it the fifth.) Thou shalt honour thy father and mother. 

Of course it applies to immigrants whose mother and father are from another country but it is connected to ancestor worship.

'The least eventful war ever'

This is how wars generally begin, rather than because of plots by evil men. 

The Portuguese banknotes scandal of 1925 and the end of the first Portuguese Republic

This is the fascinating story of Alves Reis that could have been written by William Le Queux, Edgar Wallace or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, never dreamt of BUYING the Bank of Portugal with forged notes.

I am staying in the Hotel Metropole in Lisbon where Reis stayed until he had enough "money" for the Hotel Alvenida Palace.

In the story of Aladdin the Chinese empire is gripped by massive inflation because Aladdin was turning so many things into gold. Reis's forgeries created a boom and bust in Portugal which led to a coup against the First Republic and the benign despotism of Dr Salazar. 

Reiss became converted to Protestantism in gaol and converted many other prisoners.

The pursuit of happiness

Five suggestions for how to be happy, based on replies to questionnaires by people who had completed the Bristol University 'science of happiness' course:

Talk to strangers

Spend more of your money on others

Spend time in nature

Count your blessings

Be kind to others.

Quotations

"Real love simply means being able to say to someone else, 'What are you going through right now?'" Simone Weil

“Everything about this [English] society is disagreeable to me – from its limited way of thinking to its indecent manner of cooking vegetables”. Portugal’s greatest novelist, José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900), was a Consul in Newcastle and Bristol. He was one of the fairly few famous men to have lived and died in Queen Victoria's 63 year reign: Oscar Wilde and Charles Stewart Parnell are two others that spring to mind.

Franklin Foer says the Golden Age of American Jews began in 1967 and is drawing to a close

Subscribing to centre-left Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz provides me with a critique of IDF actions and the Israeli government that is absent in the UK and Romanian press and leads me to all sorts of interesting things.

Like this very interesting audio discussion with Franklin Foer about how liberalism benefited American Jews after 1967, as set out in his recent Atlantic article The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending. The Ha'aretz interviewer and he agree that American Jews believe in liberalism as a creed but also as a means to protect Jews.

This sense of security ended when Donald Trump became President. This was despite Mr Trump being the most philo-Semitic and Zionist of American president ever, President Biden possibly excepted.

From the Atlantic article:

10 Commandments of Propaganda

A summary by Belgian historian Anne Morelli of Lord Ponsonby's 'Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War' (1928).

1. We don't want war, we are only defending ourselves!

2. Our adversary is solely responsible for this war!

3. Our adversary's leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil

4. We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!

5. The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention

6. The enemy makes use of illegal weapons

7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable

8. Recognized intellectuals and artists support our cause

9. Our cause is sacred

10. Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor

Quotations

"I do not believe a word that comes out of your mouth. Your entire policy consists of provoking the Palestinians." Jacques Chirac, 'red with anger', talking to Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant." Sir Roger Scruton

"Love and do what you like." St Augustine

Before progressives were progressive about race

The Progressive movement in the USA in the first quarter of the last century were not like modern progressives. Carrie Chapman Catt was an American Emily Pankhurst - a leading suffragette who founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904. She argued that "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage" because more white women than black ones would vote.

Quotations

Amnesic 

@_amnesic

It may be slightly inconvenient to remember Extraordinary Renditions, or US ambassador to Tashkent John Herbst being "livid" at the rogue UK ambassador, Craig Murray, for publicising the "not uncommon" practice there of boiling people to death

"Modern man is painfully confused.
He spends his vacation visiting the wonders of what the old world built, yet hates the beliefs that inspired them to build it."
I,Hypocrite (Twitter/X)

Christ is risen!

 

I wish all my Catholic and Protestant readers Happy Easter!

The Jesus Seminar, a group of liberal, publicity hungry New Testament scholars who were very fashionable in the USA around the turn of the century, disbelieved most of the Gospels, thought Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God and his corpse was probably thrown into a shallow dirt grave, where it rotted away or was eaten by wild dogs.

In fact few non-Christian historians doubt the crucifixion happened (the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus records it) and that something happened very shortly afterwards to create a movement which swept the civilised world.

The non-Christian New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann said ‘It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.’

These experiences were also enough to lead Peter and Paul to suffer death rather than renounce their faith that Jesus had risen from the tomb and was the Son of God. Their martyrdom under Nero is not questioned by any historian, as far as I ever heard. Peter is said to have been crucified upside down at his request because he did not believe himself worthy of the same death as Jesus, but this seems to be a legend.

The resurrection is the most significant event in the history of not only the West but the world, whether or not you believe it happened.

Talleyrand met a young man at a party who asked him for his advice about how to start a new religion. The renegade bishop turned pagan replied, 'First die and on the third day come again'.

This is a slightly adapted version of what I posted at other Easters.

Western media do not invent the facts but they invent the news. They are the great threat to peace.

Why is the big story on the BBC and world newspapers the collapse of a bridge in America, a day after it happened? 

If it happened in Pakistan or Chad it would be forgotten at once.

Why did people care about the death in custody of a petty criminal in America three years ago? 

Why was September 11 such a huge story, come to that? 3,000 people died the previous weekend in a natural disaster in Central America.

I allow myself only to skim the news each morning in a few minutes but I was very sad when a friend told me that the Princess of Wales (it is not polite to call Her Royal Highness Kate) has cancer. I wish her a swift recovery. 

Lots of stories, jokes and conspiracy theories had been circulating about her disappearance but I was angered that an Observer writer complained that 'On X, the influence of its “free speech absolutist” owner Elon Musk has been palpable. Among the more publishable conspiracies are the insistence that the footage of the princess was a body double, or that she was in a coma, or recovering from plastic surgery or was, in fact, dead.' 

I was angry because why shouldn't any silly theory be published, if not defamatory or obscene?

I don't remember believing in any conspiracy theory, though after everyone else I realised that Epstein was obviously in some way a blackmailer, working for some nefarious organisation. I don't know for whom. I have no idea if he worked for the Israelis (whom I recently learnt sought to use Monica Lewinsky to blackmail Bill Clinton). 

But what is wrong with people believing in conspiracies? 

I am more worried about people who believe the media.

Such innocent people believed the Ukrainians had a chance of driving the Russian army out of the Crimea and that anyone who suggested a negotiated peace was a Putin apologist and an appeaser. 

They think, unless stopped in Ukraine, Russia will invade NATO countries. 

They think the Houthis were impeding world trade before the Anglo-Americans intervened in the Red Sea. They were only impeding Israeli vessels (with possibly one exception) but thanks to the intervention the Red Sea is closed to traffic.

They think Iran and China endanger the West. They don't, but America does, by exporting Woke and seeking to overturn regimes (including the governments of Nato allies like Hungary and possibly Turkey). 

They imagine Israel was a democratic country going about her business blamelessly on 7 October when, for no reason, evil terrorists suddenly struck, beheading babies and raping women. Evil they may well be but this story starts in 1917. What AJP Taylor said of Hitler applies to Hamas too. "Hitler was a rational, though no doubt a wicked, statesman." 

They think people demonstrating against Israel or shouting 'From the river to the sea' (which is a crime in England) are antisemites. 

They think the Pope is trying to reform the financial and sexual corruption in the Catholic Church. 

Stories of what has been and is happening in the Vatican sound like the insanest conspiracy theories but most have been proven!

But can a cardinal, in order to cover up his financial crimes have tipped off the Australians to arrest Cardinal Pell who was conducting an audit? Cardinal Pell then went to gaol because of untrue allegations of interfering with a boy. I want to say no, of course not, but....

Yet the media do not talk much about this and nor about very many other Vatican scandals, because the liberal Pope is their hero. During Pope Benedict XVI's reign it was very much otherwise. 

And so it goes.

The Western media are controlled by Washington DC and the British secret service and make the world very much more dangerous than it would be without them. 

Rather like NATO.

Quotations

Interviewer: If you lived in the West Bank or Gaza, what would you do?

Ami Ayalon, former director of Israeli Security Agency Shin Bet: I would fight back, I would do everything in my power to secure my liberation. They know they’re the oppressors, they just don’t care.

An outside caterer preparing the nave ⁦of St Edmundsbury Cathedral ⁩ for a Masonic fund-raising dinner tonight

 

This is normal now in Protestant cathedrals in England. A silent discotheque took place in Canterbury Cathedral recently, which was the shrine in Catholic times of St Thomas a Becket, and the nave of the ancient Rochester Cathedral was used for crazy golf in 2019.