I simply don’t have time for a long post here, but I must mention a couple of other groups that have shown their true colors since October, 7th.

You’ll find the Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

6. The UN and it’s worse-than-useless Human Rights committees and agencies and sub-agencies.

7. Human Rights Watch, an organization fully possessed by the anti-Western, anti-colonial cult spirit.

8. And perhaps worst of the entire bunch other than Hamas itself . . . the international news establishment. Please take a few minutes and read through this well-researched Twitter thread:

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this dissertation, “one positive aspect of the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas is that the atrocities, and Israel’s rational response to them, have caused many masks to drop to the ground. The true nature of many groups and individuals is suddenly on public display.”

In Part 1 we covered three of them: 1. Hamas; 2. Colleges and Universities; and 3. Unlimited Immigration Advocates. Let’s keep going.

4. Islamists

It’s hard to believe but the 9/11 attacks were more than 22 years ago. Which means we have roughly 44 million voting-age citizens who have no meaningful memory of the events that introduced us to the term “Islamo-Fascism.” That’s millions who haven’t read the research and histories that show the affinity many modern Islamic thinkers have for Nazi ideology and will therefore be puzzled by the term. That’s millions who don’t understand that in many quarters, Islam has metastasized into something very dark and malevolent.

What’s more, the more recent ISIS atrocities in Iraq and Syria are seemingly now forgotten. I can tell you who does remember them: The Yazidi women of Iraq and Syria. So do the Christian girls of northern Nigeria abducted by Boko Haram (a.k.a. the Nigerian Taliban).

What many of these should remember, but clearly don’t, is what ISIS and its Islamic imitators around the world think of them and their pet causes such as female empowerment and sexual libertinism. Ask the girls of Afghanistan who just lost the right to an education (again). Or these girls . . .

For us old guys, the “both sides” arguments sounds depressingly familiar. Only us gray-hairs remember the “moral-equivalence” arguments of the Cold War era. Apologists for the Soviet Union’s brutal repression of freedoms and human rights at home and around the world invariably tried to paint the West as equally cruel, even as millions behind “the Iron Curtain” risked their lives to escape.

The apologists for Communist oppression and Soviet expansion invariably found reasons to blame the West, especially the U.S., for Soviet atrocities. Their crimes were always somehow our fault. If we didn’t insist on maintaining a strong military deterrent, we were told, the Soviets wouldn’t be trying to replace democracies all over Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia with Marxist dictatorships loyal to Moscow.

For American and European Progressives, at best, the Soviet Bloc and Western democracies were moral equals. At worst, the West was the bad guy and the Communists held the moral high ground. Today’s corollary are those who shrug and apply “both sides” arguments to the current conflict. They see . . .

• Hamas: enters Israel and intentionally (and gleefully) targets civilians, including the elderly, children, and infants; then retreats to hide behind Palestinian civilians, including the elderly, children, and infants. They do this knowing that any Israeli reprisals, no matter how careful, will create civilian casualties; and confident that Western media outlets will do their propaganda work for them.
• Israel: Uses intelligence and technology to precisely target Hamas fighters and leaders and minimize collateral damage. It drops leaflets and broadcasts messages throughout Gaza directing civilians to safe zones.

Many view these contrasting approaches and, at best, see no moral high ground for either side. But most see Israel as the monster here. Why? Because Isarel is of one culture (Western). And Palestinians are largely of another (Islamic).

Note those wringing their hands about the causulty count in Gaza and see if you can find any of them ever uttering even a word of concern when Muslims kill other Muslims by the hundereds of thousands.

See if you can find a word of distress or dismay about Assad’s Sunni body count in Syria that is estimated at 700,000 deaths. (Assad was and is backed by Iran. We’ll deal with Iran in a moment.)

See if you can find any alarm from those claiming Israel is bent on “genocide” in Gaza about the 377,000+ deaths in Yemen over the last ten years or so. Search for expressions of outrage over the 85,000 children who have died in Yemen as Muslim religious factions fight there.

Find, if you can, condemnations of China’s authentically genocidal oppresion of the Muslim Uyghurs. You’ll likely search in vain.

It is a related phenomenon to the complecency about the weekly body count in Chicago. Those deaths seemingly don’t matter because the killers aren’t the right group to fit the narrative.

In honor of all the concern and indignation about the Israeli “occupation” we’ve seen from the Hamas apologists, I posted the following on Facebook recently.

• Me: While I’m doing “History Jeopardy” here, I’ll take “Conquests and Occupations for 1000, Alex.”
• Alex: “The Jeopardy answer is: It stands as the most massive conquest, occupation, and colonization since Alexander the Great.”
• Me: “Alex, what is the Arab-Muslim conquest of AD622 to AD750, wherein Arab armies overran and subjegated hundreds of ethnicities, forced their converstion to Islam, and settled the areas with ethnic Arabs as a ruling class. With the exception of Spain and Portugal, these colonizations and occupations remain until this day. Compared to this, the British Empire and Ghengis Khan’s Khaganate were mere flashes in the pan in terms of longevity.”
• Alex: “Correct! The board is yours.”

North Africa was for several centuries one of the most Christian places on earth. Today Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are dotted with the crumbling, forgotten remnants of once-flourishing churches.

Ironically, for many in the Middle East, the root offense of Israel’s existance is that it represents a tiny piece of “de-colonization.” A sliver of 1300-year-old Islamic occupation and colonization has been rolled back.

5. Iran

Speaking of illumination and clarity . . . If it wasn’t already clear, the nature of game Iran is playing is now on full display. With the backing and encouragement of Russia, Iran funded, supplied, and trained the October 7 attackers. They have smuggled an astonishing quantity of rockets and arms into Gaza, which, by the way, is supposed to be some sort of impenetrable Escape from New York-style prison according to the Israel critics.

For several decades, Iran has been at the center of a larger drama playing out in the Middle East. Islam’s version of Catholics vs. Protestants is Sunnis vs. Shiites. It’s an ancient, bitter rift in Islam that goes back to the earliest years of the religion–immiedately after the death of Mohammed (if he really existed.) Catholics and Protestants stopped killing each other 500 years ago (except in Northern Ireland).

Today, Saudi Arabia leads the Sunni faction in the Middle East. And Iran is the champion of the region’s Shiites. The Saudis and other Sunni kingdoms have decided to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and play nice (see Abraham Accords). The Iranians remain vocally and unapologetically committed to seeing Israel wiped from the map.

Iran’s proxies in the Middle East are some of the worst groups on the planet. Death and misery are all they produce.

All of this has been evident to anyone with a functioning set of eyes. The real mystery is why the regimes of both Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden clearly favor “Death-to-America” Iran and the Shiites in this ancient conflict–even as the Sunni kingdoms have taking huge risks in normalizing relations with Israel. And why both left-leaning administrations repeatedly undermined the sanctions regime by releasing billions of dollars to an Iranian regime that hates us and is training and arming some of the worst terrorist factions on the planet. Oh, and has relentnlessly pursued access to nuclear weapons. I have a theory about that but I’ll save it for another blog post.

Let it suffice to say, the actions of Hamas (in Gaza) and Hezbollah (in Lebanon) reveal, again, the true nature of Iran. October 7 has also made clear why Israel, or the U.S. for that matter, cannot allow Iran to achieve its nuclear weapons goal.

Summary:

As I pointed out in a previous post, much of this makes no sense . . . UNLESS . . . unless you the understand the invisible, 2000-year-old spiritual conflict between the Kingdom of Jesus the Christ and the retreating, increasingly desperate “anti-Christ” forces.

Understand that, and you’ll understand why the same groups, institutions, and individuals that hate the United States, hate Israel, and hate everything associated with Western Civilization. It’s why eco-terrorist target our great works of art. It’s why 36 years ago Jesse Jackson led 500 marchers down the main square of Stanford chanting “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

Leviathan is a “fleeing serpent.” (Isaiah 27:1) But a fleeing serpert is the most frantic, angry, violent kind.

As I said in the opening of Part 1 . . . “It’s a good thing to know the truth.”

Above. An Israeli mother’s final message to the world.

Recommended reading:

Warning: Some difficult things to read ahead. But it’s important to face the truth, even when . . . especially when . . . the truth is awful.

As the folks who attend the Cup & Table Co. gatherings will attest, a consistent prayer of mine over the last several years has been that hidden things would be revealed. And that people, institutions, organizations, and nations that are not what they purport to be would be exposed as what they truly are.

One positive (although appalling) aspect of the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas is that the atrocities, and Israel’s utterly rational response to them, have caused many masks to drop to the ground. The true nature of many groups and individuals is suddenly on public display.

And that’s a good thing. It’s good to know the truth.

Of course at the top of that list is Hamas itself, although only the clueless and the self-deluded were surprised by the barbarity of their attack. (Digital evidence is abundant. Proud Hamas militants uploaded GoPro video of their heroic exploits to the social media site Telegram.) Israeli first responders report finding families in which childrens fingers and feet were amputed in front of their parents, whose eyes are gouged out, and then all shot. They report little girls with broken pelvises, suggesting atrocities that I will not spell out here. The list of unspeakables gleefully and proudly perpretrated by Hamas in a few short hours would fill a book.

Those of us who have bothered to acquaint ourselves with Hamas’ tactics over the last 20 years–and those of other militant Islamist groups–were not remotely surprised by the barbarity. But for many political liberals here in the West, it’s been a shocking revelation. The reality of Hamas doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.

No, Hamas coming out as ISIS 2.0 wasn’t that much of a surprise. Far more revealing has been the response of many groups and individuals here in the U.S. and the U.K. who, at minimum, made excuses for the butchers of 10/7, and often cheered and celebrated their work.

Here are a few of the folks that have just put their true selves on public display.

1. Antifa / BLM / DEI Zealots / Identitarians / Decolonizers . . .

. . . 1619 Project-ers / Critical Race Theorists / Human Extinction Environmentalists / Throwers of Paint on Priceless Works of Art / Occupiers of Wall Street / Users of the Term “Whiteness / Etc., Etc., Etc.

I lump these groups together becuase there is so much overlap in their ranks, assumptions, and objectives. For some time I’ve been pointing out that at the root of all of these cult-like groups is a white-hot hatred for Western Civilization (which they incorrectly view as being “white” but correctly view as having Christian underpinnings.) (At the root of the roots is what the Bible calls an anti-Christ spirit.) See this recent post for example.

It explains why these groups uniformly despise the arts, science, capitalism, the traditional family, traditional marriage, child-bearing, sex roles, and pretty much everything that has contributed to human flourishing and freedom over the last 2000 years.

The vocabulary and branding changes but the agenda never does. It’s the same toxic hybrid of Marxism and Paganism we’ve seen since the sixties. It’s just that the sixties campus radicals are now running all of our nation’s core institutions. One of the most recent buzzwords they’ve rolled out is “decolonize.”

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen calls to “decolonize the curriculum” in schools; “decolonize the arts”; and to decolonize everything from physics to farming. Just hours after the horrors of the October 7th attack became known, Najima Sharif, a contributing writer to several U.S. publications, including Teen Vogue magazine, posted these words on X:

What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.

Najima Sharif

I, for one, knew precisely what decolonization meant, and therefore wasn’t remotely surprised when America’s “decolonizers” celebrated and cheered the gleeful slaughter of Oct. 7. It means rolling back, “by any means necessary,” the progress, modernity, liberty, prosperity, and social mobility that Western Civilization has made possible as it has spread.

Maybe learn to spell Israel before speaking truth to power about Israel. (Someone “decolonized” the spelling curriculum.) Which brings me to another group illuminated by recent events.

2. Colleges and Universities

In our “elite” universities, we’ve seen Jewish students holed up in a library in fear while angry mobs shouted for the extermination of all Jews. A “clean” world is the euphemism.

Sane voices have been sounding the alarms about higher education in America for decades now. Among scores of books and essays I could cite, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Robert Bork’s Slouching Toward Gomorrah (1997) stand out for me. But until recent weeks many Americans remained largely unaware of what cesspools of Marxism-Paganism college faculties and administrations have become; or the degree to which the public education system that is feeding students into those universities has been transformed into a machine designed to indoctrinate students into the new state religion. It’s a faith that holds up the State as the Messiah and Western Civilization as the devil.

A three-year-old survey of American adults 18-39 both explains some of what we’ve observed on college campuses and serves as Exhibit Z in an indictment of the education system. In a 2020 survey, nearly two-thirds of US younger adults said they were unaware that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Anad another 23 percent said said they believed the Holocaust was a myth. That leaves about 10 or 12 percent of people under 40 who actually know the historical truth.

Not good, but it explains a lot.

I’m generally a hopeful, optimistic person. But it’s difficult to imagine how the American educational complex can be salvaged or reformed at this point, even if the necessary public will to do so could be summoned, which it can’t. The only course of action may be to wait for the inevitable collapse, dismantle the entire thing, and salt the earth it formerly occupied. Then build something new from scratch.

3. Unlimited Immigration Advocates

For decades now, both Europe and the U.S. have largely pursued a policy of allowing (and frequently encouraging) large-scale third-world immigration. During his 2020 campaign for president, Mr. Biden signaled that, if elected, he’d reverse most Trump-era restrictions and effectivelly throw the floodgates open. Almost immediately, millions began preprarations to head to Mexico.

Many Progressives favor mass third-world immigration for the same reasons they want to “decolonize” the math cirriuculm and purge Palestine of Jews “From the River to the Sea.” Namely a visceral hatred for Western Civilization and it’s values. This, and slavery to a related narrative about Oppressors (always white) and The Oppressed (always non-white).

To be fair, other powerful interests have favored wide-open immigration spigots as well. (2 million new illegals last year alone.) Particularly Wall Street interests who covet ultra-cheap labor at the low end of the economy and cheaper software developers and systems designers for the tech sector via abundant H1B visas.

By the way, anyone who wants (as I do) to see higher wages for the working poor and preservation of a social safety net of welfare programs will oppose mass immigration . . . but only IF they can do basic math and understand anything about economics. (I know that’s a lot to expect.)

And they will oppose it IF (as I do) they understand that Western values and assumptions undergird the prosperity, freedom, progress, and order that makes this a place everyone wants to live.

There are more groups showing us who they really are right now. We’ll take a look in Part 2 of this diatribe.

War is a terrible thing. It’s also an old thing. Unimaginably old.

There is evidence in the Bible that there was a war in the heavnelies before there was even an earth. And that that conflict spilled over onto this planet at some point, with horrific, far-reaching consequences.

But every once in a while a war, with all the horror one entails, resolves things. Leaves things more stable and more conducive to human flourishing than if low-level, simmering, festering, attritional, “peace” had continued.

These are my thoughts today as I have a strong sense that war is coming. A war on a broader scale that what we’re witnessing in southern Israel and Gaza. A war that actively involves U.S. forces.

Again, war is ugly. It should not be romanticized, glamorized, or clamored for. But my sense is also that the aftermath of what’s coming, whatever it looks like, will leave things better for a lot of people who have suffered under oppression for far too long.

It’s just a sense . . . a feeling. Perhaps I’m wrong. I hope so.

Here’s what I know with great certainty . . .

God doesn’t cause all things. But He does cause all things to work together for the good of His people. (Romans 8:28) That, I know.

I also know that nothing catches our Heavenly Father by surprise. And that King Jesus is presently ruling in the midst of His enemies. (Psalm 110:1-2) And of the increase of His kingdom, and of peace, there shall be no end. (Isaiah 9:7)