the definite article 24
some longer pieces - some of transcendent light, some of darkness
An excerpt from a Lowell High School textbook:
In North and South America, the Caribbean islands, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel colonial invasion decimated Indigenous populations through foreign disease and military domination to the
point where: Indigenous population→ the minority + the settler population → the majority = settler colonialism
Abigail Shrier takes a look at how curricula and materials are indoctrinating American high school and elementary school children to hate Israel.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jewpilled-alana-newhouse
The chief editor of Tablet takes a not-unsympathetic look at the new Jews of America. Here’s a quote from one of her informants:
“Israel means something different, and America does too. We are neither begging for salvation nor hysterical nor blissfully ignorant. We love Israel and also love America. Not in lieu of loving Israel or being Jewish! People are choosing America because it makes their lives meaningfully better for reasons that are important to them. But it’s not because it’s just easier, and we aren’t choosing the assimilation of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Maybe—I know this sounds woo woo—this embrace and recategorization is just Jews stepping into a higher order of how we see ourselves, and others.”
“For the North Africans living in Holland, the dominant Jewish story of the twentieth century is not Auschwitz, it is Israel, which in their distorted conception is an illegitimate, one-directional criminal enterprise directed at an innocent population. Nor—and this is crucial—is this merely an attitude about a conflict. They believe it is the crime of the twentieth century, conferring ultimate guilt on the Jewish people. “Palestine” is a phrase felt to carry the gravity of “Holocaust,” grotesquely inverting the perception of the Jewish experience.”
In different forums and in different modes, I have mourned the victory of Hamas over, not just Israel, but the West. I’m sure I don’t have to explain.
What has bothered me the most is that the West has not been able to counter the triumph of evil with a clear values-based moral message. The best place for that to have been expressed, of course, would have been on college campuses, the battlefield of the past year, or in the realm of politics and policies. Both have disappointed. i seem to keep reading very moving and articulate pieces by (the remain few) morally astute scholars who have decided to take this year off from teaching. Are they afraid or disgusted or have simply despaired of the effectiveness of higher education? I don’t know. But every time i read or listen to one of these intellectuals, I think - this is not the time to retreat into research. This is when our society needs you the most!
Below are essays from two intellectuals who have not put down the gage and have continued to hold high the light of thought and morality. The first, of course, is Douglas Murray, who has fearlessly engaged the dark evil of these times. You are familiar with his work, I’m sure, but this piece is such an articulate epression of his mission that I wanted to share it with you.
The second piece is by Martin Gurri. In this absolute intellectual tour de force, Gurri analyzes how forces set free by the Enlightenment have spun out of control. His language is plain, easily understood, but his analysis peels back centuries of thought and locates the threads that have brought us to these times. He speaks not with the moral authority of Murray, but with the depth of thought and understanding that left me with an appreciation for the use of history to see the present more clearly.
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-profundity-of-evil/
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-endarkenment
Peter Berkowitz wrote a follow-up to Gurri’s article in RCP:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/11/10/diminishing_the_endarkenment_151920.html