Turning Dragonese

Empress Trudy


My view of it is this. What I personally, emotionally hope for is irrelevant. This is why we in the civilized world have courts of law. This is what ayin tachat ayin really means - making the punishment exactly fit the crime and no more. This is why we don't pitch the punishment of murderers and rapists over to the families of the victims. Because vengeance is cathartic but it's not justice. So how I personally feel about it isn't entirely germane.

Now having said that, I am willing to admit, paraphrasing Churchill, that in times of dire need good men are called upon to do very dark things. Because the reality of our eternal confrontation with the Arabs is just that - dire and eternal. I will never concede even a millimeter of the benefit of the doubt that they themselves never believe exists. They are certain and I am willing to take them at their word. To believe otherwise is projecting more upon their desires and goals than even they do.

We here, generally, in the well fed west make some fundamental assumptions about the world that, while they are true, they are true here and not everywhere. And not concerning everyone.

We believe 'people' whoever they are, are nice and good and are more or less merely misunderstood or agitated by forces they don't understand. This is patronizing and infantile. This flies in the face of 5,000 years of recorded history. Individuals can be nice, mass movements are bloody awful things.

We believe in the White Man's Burden, that if the swarthies and wogs were shown what's what they'd all eventually fall over themselves to be just like us. This is patently ignorant. Not even middle class Mexico is 'just like' middle class Shangai.

We, I think if you really pried it open, are dismissive of faith to the point that we don't believe that it's a significant social force or driver for movements either for good or for violence. We here in the secular left have jettisoned most of society's connection to faith and assume everyone else has too or, if, for example the Salafists or the Ayatollahs talk about divine justification they're lying to everyone because they're nihilists who believe as little as we do. This is, on its face, a dangerous and silly thing to believe. Faith matters; what we're arguing about is the difference between fanaticism and piety and both of those things are very real.

So burdened down with all this terribly arrogant and erroneous baggage we scold and browbeat the Jews exhorting them to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Without really believing in any of it or that the threats to the Jews are real or that if they were - and here's the rub, that even if they WERE, they wouldn't matter. The Jews would happily go on being 'secular' bagel and a schmear high holy day Jews more or less - maybe with a few less civil rights but all they'd have to do is abandon their entire identity to skirt that problem. Just like the German Jews of the 1890's I suppose??

We here, even among ourselves in the Zionist camp, are constantly saying "well when the Arabs learn to stop teaching their kids to want to exterminate us it will work out." The shorter form of that is "When they change their entire society, culture and narrative there will be peace." A good working definition of what a society IS, is what it inculcates and fosters in its own children.

Well that's never going to happen. To anyone, ever. In any society in the world. No one is ever going to abandon what they hold dear for someone else's benefit. Only the lunatic anti Zionists be they Jewish or not say this. The Arabs don't. The Muslims don't. The French courts mandating women can't wear the niqab don't. The ayatollahs in Iran aren't telling the Jews to change. They're telling them to die.  No - only the Liberal left "Jews" say this and that's because there's nothing they hold dear in the first place. When you believe in nothing, losing it is part of the plan.

This is why I maintain a hard line. Not because of what I happen to hope for personally but because after 90 years, Jabotinsky is still right about it. "The Iron Wall" is still true. Not because we're evil, but because it simply is accurate and there is no reason to delude ourselves that wanting it not to be true is a sure course forward. In the Renaissance, mapmakers would fill in the areas they knew nothing about with "There Be Dragons". Who knew, maybe there were? Odds are no one was ever coming back to tell us whatever they discovered. And half of them lied about it.

Politically we're somewhere southwest of the end of the world - in a region where the Jews are told "There Be Dragons - go ahead tell us what you find and report back." If we refuse or hesitate we're called Reptiliphobes if we're eager we're called illegal occupiers of Dragistan. The Dragistanians are telling us to die or move, while our better moral angels on the left are scolding us to adopt the ways of the Sea Serpent. Meanwhile we hold out this absurd notion that as soon as the Dragons stop breathing fire and eating people, join a union, legalize gay marriage and all those other things - in short - stop being so...Dragon-y, it will be glorious.

But it's not.