The dead in Israel are closing in on a thousand now, or the equivalent, proportionately, of ten 9/11s. John Podhoretz sums up Saturday October 7th this way:
The single day on which more Jews died and were wounded than any other since the Nazi death camps eight decades ago.
In contrast to eight decades ago, as the death toll climbs, jubilations in western cities grow ever more delirious.
New York:
At a Hamas celebration rally outside the @IsraelinNewYork consulate, a speaker recounts the deadly Islamist attacks on the music festival in southern Israel that killed hundreds of civilians. The crowd cheers. pic.twitter.com/Qlzkd9ugvh
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) October 9, 2023
London:
In Golders Green, synagogues are being smashed and the police are doing nothing. https://t.co/8TtyrNI0wF
— Petronella Wyatt (@PetronellaWyatt) October 9, 2023
Montreal:
downtown Montreal right now pic.twitter.com/dlmnATOhVQ
— Sam Forster (@ForsterSam) October 8, 2023
That picture at top right shows one of my "fellow Canadians" passing out sweets in celebration of the ever increasing mountain of civilian dead and wounded and raped and kidnapped.
In Australia, on the other hand, HM Constabulary will arrest you if you wave an Israeli flag:
Explain yourselves @nswpolice, arresting two Aussies who were waving the #Israel flag (the same flag to be projected on the #SydneyOperaHouse), while you stood by and allowed #Hamas supporters to hold a rally in support of a proscribed terrorist group in #Sydney @ChrisMinnsMP pic.twitter.com/cIjuMwHmEF
— Matty Orzlowski (@MattyOrzlowski) October 9, 2023
As Andy Ngô notes above, the slaughter at a music gig was particularly pleasing to the Manhattan crowd. The all-night rave was a so-called peace festival. How'd that work out? Headline from The Times of Israel:
ZAKA says more than 250 bodies collected from site of music festival attacked by Hamas
ZAKA has had to cease its recovery of the bodies of music lovers because their volunteers have come under fire.
That number of on-site corpses does not include the likes of Shani Louk, the young German citizen abducted from the festival, gang-raped, killed, and then driven around the streets of Gaza so that the delighted citizenry could take selfies with her defiled body.
So they throw a big rave for peace, and the Palestinians ride in and kill everybody.
Indeed, they may have killed them with US weaponry from Afghanistan - oh, and possibly Ukraine, too.
"All we are saying is give peace a..." Ka-boom!
All the young life snuffed out will have been either apolitical or soft-left. It was in that sense yet another party at the end of the world:
As for who's continuing to fire on the volunteers attempting to recover the bodies, at least half-a-dozen Israeli communities remain in the hands of Hamas - whose men, remarkably upgraded in their general competence, managed to take another one last night.
None of this is normal, and we have not as yet had any credible explanation for it. Danny Yatom, former Mossad boss, says Israel's security "collapsed totally" on Saturday. Yes, we know that. Abbas Kamel, Egypt's intelligence chief, says Israel ignored repeated warnings of "something big". Okay. But why?
Meanwhile, Israel's "allies" among the prime ministers and presidents of the west increasingly resemble its discreetly cooperative friends in the police and security departments of the aforementioned Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc: They can be helpful in certain areas, but they do not speak for their peoples.
Why is that?
Well, the natives of western nations don't have a lot in common with the surging Muslim populations they foolishly imported - with the enthusiastic support of what my old comrade Ezra Levant calls "the official Jews". For example, the native Europeans are hot for the gays; the Muzzies are hot for throwing them off roofs or burning them alive. Which is why all the gay bars in, say, the East End of London and Amsterdam's once famous HomoHotel seem to have mysteriously closed...
But the one core belief that effete Continentals and firebreathing Mohammedans do share is that everything is Israel's fault. As I wrote a decade-and-a-half ago:
The Islamicization of Europe entails certain consequences, and it might be worth exploring what these might be. There are already many points of cultural friction—from British banks' abolition of children's "piggy banks" to the enjoining of public doughnut consumption by Brussels police during Ramadan. And yet on one issue there is remarkable comity between the aging ethnic Europeans and their young surging Muslim populations: A famous poll a couple of years back found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.
Fifty-nine percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of you? Hey, relax: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. For purposes of comparison, in a recent poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—i.e., the "moderate" Arab world—79 percent of respondents regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. As far as I know, in the last year or two, they haven't re-tested that question in Europe, possibly in case Israel now scores as a higher threat level in the Netherlands than in Yemen.
Twenty years ago, post-9/11, the western left were already anti-Israel. All that's changed is that a big chunk of the western right has joined them. This turned up in my Twitter feed:
How do you address the fact that Jews are the leading propagandists for immigration and Diversity in the West, as well as the suppression of free speech that is the necessary accompaniment to such an undemocratic agenda?
— Diversity Makes Free (@WillemD19118035) October 8, 2023
How do I "address" it? Actually, I've already "addressed" it. Fifteen years ago, I fought a tough campaign for free speech in Canada, culminating in the repeal of the law and the exit of the Canadian state from the censorship business. By the end of that struggle, the only institutions opposed to my campaign were what Ezra calls those "official Jews" - B'nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish Congress and the like. When Ez and I were invited to give evidence to Parliament as to why the Canadian state should not be in the business of "the suppression of free speech", the B'nai Brith tosspots turned up to object. We ran into them in the Central Lobby, and it degenerated quickly: Ezra wound up sneering at them as "Jewish book-burners".
As for the Canadian Jewish Congress, they were led by Bernie Farber, capo di tutti wankers of northern Jewry. My late friend Kathy Shaidle used to say: He must be adopted; he's too stupid to be Jewish. (He is certainly very dull-witted: an episode in The Prisoner of Windsor was inspired by him.) So he supported the Canadian Islamic Congress's campaign against me and Maclean's magazine, and even went so far as to backslap the Islamic litigants at cozy social events.
Another memory of that day in Parliament: After our testimony, we bumped into the CBC's Evan Solomon who asked us if we'd like to come on his show, broadcast live from the lobby. While we were waiting to go on, Ezra's telephone rang. It was the then prime minister, Stephen Harper, wondering if we had a moment to pop across Wellington Street to the then Langevin Block and have a word. I said I was really hoping to get out of Ottawa before the start of rush-hour. Evan Solomon was aghast: "I've been trying to get to the PM for months, and you say you're more concerned about the traffic?"
So I agreed to the meeting. But I was right - it wasn't worth getting stuck in traffic for. Mr Harper, an admirable fellow in many respects, was affable, but concerned about joining our free-speech cause, because, as he told us, he couldn't be seen to be going up against the CJC and B'nai Brith.
So how's that working out for Canadian Jewry? Here's Anthony Koch, bigshot Quebec Jew (and former sidekick of another Tory leader, Erin O'Toole):
Downtown Montréal right now. My city. Our city.
What has become of us?
— Anthony Koch (@Anthony__Koch) October 8, 2023
pic.twitter.com/zwYtlNj8PZ
"What has become of us?" Bernie Farber is what became of you - the arse who thought me and Ezra were a bigger threat than the importation of legions of people famous around the world for their antipathy to Jews. You could try Googling it. It's a numbers game now:
"What has become of us?" Since 9/11 the Muslim population of Canada has increased from two per cent to 4.9 per cent, while the Jewish population has shrunk - just a little, but it's now down below one per cent.
You were an advisor to a putative PM, and you're entirely unaware of that?
Do the math: a five-per-cent Muslim population is more than enough to cost you the election. That Jewish point-nine per cent? Who cares? Certainly not enough for any Quebec politician mindful of his electoral viability to do any serious pushback on Montrealers partying over dead and raped Israelis.
"My city. Our city"? No. Their city. Your soon to be untended cemeteries. Same old story as the rubble-strewn Jewish graveyards from Tangiers to Baghdad and beyond. But this time it's because of policies enthusiastically supported by bodies supposed to represent the interests of the Jewish people.
I don't want to single out Bernie Farber, although he's a total prat. South of the border, there are few men in America I despise more than Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. See my column from a decade back: "Hath Not a Jew Eyes?" Because of fools like Farber and Foxman, there will be no Jews in Montreal - and very soon.
As for those on the western left and right making common cause with the rapists and child-killers of Hamas, I get that they don't dig the Jews and that therefore it has a certain logic. Except:
It's one thing to be "anti-Semitic" or "anti-Zionist", as millions of westerners now are. But that's not where your comrades in the fight against Israel are inclined to leave it: They're anti-Jew mainly as a subset of being anti-infidel - anti-the other. Just to keep it music-festival-wise, see that Orlando nightclub, and Ariana Grande, and the Bataclan concert.
So one day you may get your wish, and Israel will be gone. And then they'll turn, as they always do, from the Saturday people to the Sunday people...
~Notwithstanding Mark's one-step-forward-three-steps-back health, we had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, including his columns on Day One and Day Two of this new war. Ahead of that, he was back in the anchor seat for a Clubland Q&A. whose elegaic quality prefigured the days to come: The Last Farewell. But not even World War III can prevent Rick McGinnis's weekend movie pick - a "sexy western" - and Mark's happy hundredth birthday wishes to the wonderful Glynis Johns.
Even as fall descends, don't forget our summer Tale for Our Time, Steyn's variation on H G Wells's theme of time travel. If you've yet to hear it, you can start with Part One here.
If you were too busy spending the weekend passing out the Quality Street at the Hamas demo, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
