|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Since 1998, David Remnick has held the office of editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, that most definitive of weekly guides to the left-wing narrative, and during his tenure he’s demonstrated amply just how much he deserves that position of solemn, even sacred, responsibility. Sacred? Well, yes. For while the ancient scriptures of their nominal faiths may not be regarded as particularly holy in the homes of many secular upscale Manhattanites, The New Yorker certainly is, because, week after week, it makes clear to its devout readers – in conjunction with the New York Times, of course – just what opinions should and shouldn’t be tolerated at fashionable cocktail receptions and dinner parties.
A few illustrative highlights from his tenure. In November 2008, just after Obama won his first term, Remnick filed a shamelessly flattering profile of Obama’s mentor, the former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Remnick not only depicted Ayers as a gentle soul – actually comparing him to the amiable, sweater-wearing paterfamilias portrayed by Fred MacMurray in the prelapsarian sitcom My Three Sons – but also allowed Ayers to rewrite his own personal history. Without any dissent from Remnick, Ayers insisted that his terrorism had been of a far more harmless variety than people imagined (although, he volunteered, he now felt a mature regret for the “juvenile and inflated” rhetoric of his youth) and claimed that, mischievous GOP propaganda to the contrary, he’d never been particularly close to the Obamas. That profile – carefully stripped of facts that would’ve blown to smithereens virtually every detail of Remnick’s pretty picture – was the very apotheosis of shady, shoddy journalism.
And it was hardly a one-off. Remnick’s The Bridge (2010), about Barack Obama, took the genre of duplicitous, brown-nosing hagiography to new lows. So determined was Remnick to glorify his subject that when a couple of serious historians suggested that perhaps Obama’s elegantly composed memoir Dreams from My Father had in fact been ghostwritten by Ayers – just as JFK’s Profiles in Courage was ghostwritten by Ted Sorensen – Remnick called them racists, even though Obama’s own previous writings had been decidedly unimpressive and the book’s style seemed to have Ayers’s fingerprints all over it.
If the totally unaccomplished Chicago community organizer was, for Remnick, a golden god who could do everything short of walk on water, Donald Trump, the self-made multibillionaire and legendary building magnate, was, as Remnick wrote after the 2016 election, “vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted.” A hundred days into Trump’s presidency, Remnick contrasted the “discipline” and “rigor” that Obama had purportedly brought to the Oval Office with Trump’s “impulsive” and “mendacious” manner. The reality of Obama’s failures and Trump’s successes as president have never had any impact whatsoever on Remnick’s unswerving determination to portray the former as a hero and the latter as a bum.
You might at least have thought that Remnick, a Jew, would appreciate such Trump achievements as the Abraham Accords and the recognition of the Golan Heights as part of Israel – especially given the stark contrast with Obama’s palpable hostility to Israel. But Remnick isn’t that kind of Jew.
Which brings us to the Middle East. Now 65, Remnick was born in Hackensack, the son of a dentist, and attended an Orthodox Jewish school in Paramus. (Could it be that he disdains Trump so profoundly because the latter’s outer-borough roots remind him a bit too much of his own bridge-and-tunnel background?) After attending a public high school, Remnick attended Princeton, then worked for the Washington Post before moving on to the New Yorker. His take on the Middle East will be familiar to anyone who’s spent any time in certain parts of Manhattan. In his view, Israelis, especially right-wing Israelis, are the principal cause of their frictions with their neighbors. And Islam? In 2013, Remnick wrote about the Boston Marathon bombings. Though capable of dismissing Trump as a crooked clown, he’s much too sophisticated to dismiss a pair of jihadist murderers as evil, or even as the misguided dupes of an evil theology; instead, he described the Tsarnaev brothers as “battered by history…by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration.”
To be sure, the events of October 7 represented terrorism on an almost unprecedented scale – and have thus posed for the American left, including the American Jewish left, an unprecedented ideological challenge. A veteran left-wing pro can easily tsk-tsk away most Palestinian misdeeds with references to the “cycle of violence” and to the perpetrators’ supposedly understandable anger over decades of “occupation” and “apartheid.” But the events of October 7 were too singularly horrible, too reminiscent of the pogroms in Czarist Russia and of Nazi genocide at its most systematically heartless, to be swept away with the usual glib formulations.
But don’t worry: Remnick was up to the job. In his October 9 piece “Israel’s Calamity – and After,” he was smart enough to devote the first several paragraphs to a sober acknowledgment of the attacks’ singular brutality, although instead of condemning them severely in his own voice, he chose to quote, without comment, other people’s condemnations. He cited, for example, Haaretz editor Aluf Benn’s comparison of Hamas’s depredations to “the massacre of Russian Jews in Kishinev, in 1903”; an Israeli journalist’s statement that the survivors’ accounts of October 7 “are stories from the ghetto”; and the admission by an Israeli lawyer (“who has represented Palestinians,” no less) that “[w]hen you see pure evil it is very hard to digest that humans are capable of it.”
Having cited these forceful reactions, however, Remnick pivoted with the elegance of a Maria Tallchief, shifting attention from Israelis as victims of Palestinians to Palestinians as victims of Israelis. He treated us to a Human Rights Watch official’s characterization of Gaza as “an open-air prison,” Benn’s complaint that Netanyahu runs a “government of horrors,” and Palestinian leader Mustada Barghouti’s attribution of Hamas’s actions to “the longest occupation in modern history.” The violence would not end, added Barghouti, until Israel ceased its “illegal occupation” and accepted Palestinians “as equal human beings.” Remnick challenged none of it – not the “open-air prison” calumny, not the “occupation” nonsense, and not even the “equal human beings” line, apropos of which any responsible journalist would have pointed out that while Israel has Arabs in its army, in its Knesset, and on its Supreme Court, Islam unequivocally categorizes Jews as subhumans deserving only of extermination, and Palestinian schools notoriously teach toddlers to have no higher ambition than to kill a Jew.
No, instead of questioning the sob-sister approach to Gaza, Remnick joined in, dubbing Gaza “a welter of human misery…a poor, overcrowded, underemployed landscape of suffering,” etc., etc. – all the while making no effort to correct the widespread impression that this suffering is somehow the fault of Israel, rather than of a Hamas government that, having received, over the decades, a fortune in aid from around the world, has chosen to spend it not on development (Gaza, as many observers have pointed out, is perfectly positioned, with its perfect beaches and year-round sunshine, to be a Mediterranean tourist mecca) but on bombs, missiles, and terrorist tunnels. Remnick even faulted Netanyahu (whom he’s always hated) for failing to see the importance of “resolv[ing] the conflict with Palestinians in Gaza” – as if there were any realistic possibility of resolving anything with terrorists who are devoted not to the lives of Gazans but to the deaths of Jews.
Remnick’s October 9 article was only the beginning. He picked up the topic again on October 17, the day before President Biden’s scheduled trip to Israel. By this time, Remnick himself was on the scene. Again opening his piece in a calculated fashion – namely, with a first-person account of the funeral of a family murdered by Hamas –Remnick uttered the requisite words of sorrow and pity, but was quick to add that “[i]t is hardly an exercise in rhetorical ‘equivalence’ to observe that in Gaza, too, there are constant funerals, shattered families, civilians living in dread.” On the contrary, “rhetorical equivalence” is exactly the correct way to label what an author’s doing when he dares to liken the coldblooded jihadist butchery of innocent families (including the microwaving, burning, and decapitation of babies) to civilian deaths caused by acts of war – civilian deaths that, moreover, could probably have been averted if those very same bloodthirsty jihadists, whom those civilians elected as their leaders, hadn’t deliberately placed them in harm’s way.
“Israel, like any other country,” wrote Remnick, “has a right to safeguard its existence and its citizens.” Yet in the next breath he seemed to deny this right: “But what will come from answering cruelty with accelerating cruelty, from an endless bombing campaign, from reoccupying part or all of Gaza? One thing is certain: it will intensify the suffering and resentments of ordinary Palestinians.” Well, as far as I’m concerned, something else is certain: that Gazans have, over a very long period indeed, had every chance to exchange their suffering for lives of peace, promise, and prosperity, if only they chose to let go of their “resentment” – i.e., Jew-hatred. But, raised from infancy to make Jew-hatred the very heart of their identity, they opted to stick with that.
Remnick didn’t even bother to try to make an argument against Israel’s military response to October 7. He simply asserted, as if it were self-evident, that bombing and invading Gaza would be an act of pure vengeance, “born of rage,” the product not of a determination to protect Israeli citizens and territory but of a “primal” urge to “eradicate.” And there was only one man, apparently, who could save the Holy Land from the “catastrophe” that would inevitably result from Israeli vengeance: namely, Joe Biden, who, insisted Remnick, needed to use all the power of his “statecraft” to enjoin Netanyahu “to act with strategic foresight and restraint.” In Remnick’s bizarro world, you see, Biden is a wise and seasoned master of world affairs – a veritable Bismarck – and Netanyahu a foolish, impetuous hothead.[1]
So much for Remnick’s first two post-October 7 pieces. But they were nothing compared to the 10,000-word “Letter from Israel” that ran on October 28 and that consisted largely of accounts of Remnick’s recent encounters with various Israelis and Gazans. For example, he recounted an exchange of text messages with a young Gazan friend of his, the poet Mosab Abu Toha. I looked up Toha: he studied poetry at Syracuse, has been a “visiting poet” at Harvard, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his poems about – what else? – Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Jewish state. On October 14, the New York Times ran a predictably disgusting piece by Toha that came as close as humanly possible to defending Hamas’s butchery. “I wish,” he wrote, “the West…would think seriously about what led to such actions on the part of Palestinians led by Hamas.”
In his messages to Remnick, Toha raged about the number of Gazas reportedly killed in the alleged Israeli bombing of a Gaza hospital. What was psychologically revealing was that although Hamas’s story of the bombing was already being debunked, Toha refused to stop believing in it. The idea that hundreds of Gazans, including children, hadn’t actually been killed in a hospital was of no comfort to him. On the contrary, he wanted, on some level at least, for all those Gazans to have been killed, because the very idea fueled the anti-Jewish hate that is his very lifeblood. Not that Remnick read it that way. No, for Remnick Toha’s refusal to accept that hospital story was a lie provided the perfect occasion to make this remarkable pronouncement: “There were, of course, facts—many of them unknown—but the narratives came first, all infused with histories and counter-histories, grievances and fifty varieties of fury, all rushing in at the speed of social media. People were going to believe what they needed to believe.”
It’s a fascinating passage – especially given that Remnick himself is one of the leading shapers of today’s progressive narrative. To be sure, Remnick doesn’t ever say that that’s what he’s up to. He professes to be an objective journalist, a presenter of facts. But when you’re writing about October 7 and its aftermath, there’s no way to pretend that the facts – the almost inconceivably terrible facts – are anything other than what they are. And so, in order to give leftist New Yorker subscribers an excuse to turn their heads away from those facts, at least a little bit, you’ve got to focus not on trying to establish those facts to the best of your ability but, rather, on pretending to ponder, at some profound level, the Rashomon-like reality of competing perspectives, the inescapability of the subjective, the inevitability of the “fog of war,” the ultimate unknowability of, well, pretty much everything.
Putting the facts on the back burner, then, Remnick devoted his October 28 piece mainly to interviews in which Israelis and Palestinians offer their own, highly subjective takes. How, given this approach, to deal with the IDF’s now-famous video of Hamas atrocities, which provided a solid ninety minutes or so of evidence of Hamas’s barbarism? Here’s what Remnick did. He described in detail the room to which he and other journalists were summoned to view the IDF’s video: “There were three bowls of snacks—peanuts, walnuts, and sugar cookies—and complimentary I.D.F. notebooks,” and so on. He took us right up to the moment before the video started (“Shefler excused himself and left the room. Harel-Fisch turned out the lights”). And then he cut discreetly away. Yes, that’s right. In his entire 10,000-word piece, Remnick told us absolutely nothing about what he saw in that video.
Instead we got his interlocutors – a curious group indeed. Avichai Brodutch, a farmer whose family was kidnapped by Hamas, said of the terrorists, “The world should know how cruel these people are.” But he also, bizarrely, made excuses for them: “It was overkill by Hamas. I don’t think they thought things would go that far. At least, I want to believe that. Their religion is peaceful. No religion can be successful for long if it is not peaceful.” I won’t criticize Brodutch, whose grief and fear may well have rendered him incapable of lucid thought on this subject. He may well also have been reluctant to badmouth Hamas in the New Yorker, lest the kidnappers retaliate against his loved ones. Besides, Brodutch may be uninformed about the brutal wars of aggression that transformed Islam, over three centuries, from an obscure local power on the Arabian peninsula into an empire reaching from the Bay of Biscay to the Bay of Bengal. But Remnick is surely aware of Islam’s savage history, and for him to pass on without comment Brodutch’s ludicrous claim that Islam is “peaceful” is unforgivable.[2]
Another Remnick interviewee was retired IDF general and leftist icon Yair Golan, who drew a moral equivalence between Nazis and Israelis. Based on what? A single incident “in which an I.D.F. sergeant was filmed shooting a Palestinian who had stabbed an Israeli soldier but had already been subdued and was prostrate.” Then there was Roni Stahl Lupo, who was born in the Hamas-devastated Kfar Aza kibbutz and whose sister, Ziv Stahl, Remnick identified as “the executive director of Yesh Din (There Is Law), a human-rights group.” In fact Yesh Din is one of those self-identified “human-rights groups” based in Israel – B’tselem and Jewish Voice for Peace are others – whose actual focus is on churning out preposterous pro-Palestinian PR. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Lupo, while saying that she was “enraged at Hamas,” also confessed to being “deeply anxious about the bombing of Gaza,” because she couldn’t bear the notion that someone in Gaza “will be killed because of me.”
Remnick also spoke to Islamic scholar Sari Nusseibeh, whom he described as having served as “an informal adviser to Yasir Arafat” and as having “always been a distinctly moderate voice in Palestinian public life.” Neat trick. This conversation took up much of an October 30 New Yorker podcast in which Nusseibeh replied to a question about October 7 by saying that “human nature is not all good” and that there are “radicals in every society,” claimed that Muslims’ “problems with Jews have nothing to do with them being Jews,” and proffered a stunningly feeble excuse for a condemnation of Hamas’s atrocities: “This was definitely a crime, to go around killing people like that.”
Then there was the famously left-wing (and ardently anti-Netanyahu) Israeli novelist David Grossman, who in the past has called for dialogue with Hamas and accused Israel of conducting itself like “a band of pirates.” Noting in 2012 Grossman’s fatuous contention that “[i]t is Israel’s fears, not a nuclear Iran, that we must tame,” Giulio Meotti pondered whether “the international success of Grossman and other self-lacerating Israeli writers has more to do with their talent for Israel bashing than their literary gifts.” Bingo. But when he spoke to Remnick the other day, Grossman – obviously shaken by the events of October 7 – wasn’t in the mood for the usual Israel-bashing. He called those events “evil, pure evil,” and even admitted that if, after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza,
the Palestinians had started to build in Gaza using the financial support they were promised, if they had made Gaza a kind of test case on how to build a life again, if Gaza had become, if not the “Singapore of the Middle East,” then at least a place where life could be developed, the next withdrawal would have come quickly. Instead, they chose another path. There were thousands of missiles aimed at us from Gaza in the next two years. And now, after they have done this, you start to think, Well, if you have such a neighbor, you had better be well equipped and suspicious all the time.
I suppose Remnick deserves at least a modicum of credit for including Grossman’s comments in his article. But the article was still a vile piece of work. Remnick flew to Israel knowing full well what his job was. He knew that The New Yorker’s subscription list is full of the names of bien pensant secular leftists, many of them Jews, who, although shaken to the core of their being by the diabolic crimes of Hamas, are possessed of a worldview according to which Israel is an extension of the West, a tool of America, an imperialist power, and hence a force for evil in the world, while the Palestinians are ever-suffering victims with whose cause any decent, civilized soul is compelled to stand. Consequently, although they experienced Hamas’s actions as a profound challenge to their worldview, these readers were deeply uneasy with the idea of actually changing that worldview; no, this time they couldn’t see Palestinians as victims, but they could, perhaps, be persuaded to intellectualize the whole terrible thing, to see it in shades of gray, to be able to speak convincingly, at the next dinner party, of the fog of war and moral ambiguities and the complexities of history and the messy muddle of Israeli domestic politics and Netanyahu’s strategic failures. And, heaven bless him, that’s what David Remnick gave them.
In his October 30 podcast, Remnick stated that he didn’t want Israel to imitate America’s big mistake after 9/11. And what, in his view, was that mistake? Answer: lashing out militarily at Iraq – an act that Remnick attributed to irrational rage. Yes, Iraq was a major misstep. But the American government’s other big post-9/11 error, I would submit, was refusing to face up to the dark reality of Islam. As a result, even today, tens of millions of Americans still don’t grasp the real lessons of Islamic terrorism – and therefore responded to the atrocities of October 7 by marching in support of Hamas. And about that, David Remnick has absolutely nothing to say.
Notes:
[1] To use the word “statecraft” in the same sentence as the name of our staggeringly mediocre and at least semi-senile commander-in-chief was hilarious enough, but Remnick also took the opportunity to praise the Biden Administration for carrying off, in the case of Ukraine, “an enormously complex feat of high-stakes diplomacy and political skill.” Just imagine what the Ukraine situation would look like now if Biden hadn’t done such a magnificent job!
[2] Incidentally, a Google search turned up a 2019 article in which Brodutch was quoted as being “optimistic” amid tensions between Gaza and Israel: “I wanted to live in the community of the kibbutz, and I knew that the tensions would cease one day, so I was not afraid….I have hope that one day I will be able to go to Gaza and have hummus there with some locals.”
Great Article, The Hypocrisy of the Left is staggering, always willing to give Credence to Lies.
>>The Hypocrisy of the Left is staggering
“Jews are just like everyone else, only more so”. You’ve heard that one, right? Well, when it comes to the Jewish left, focus on the “more so” part.
In case you were wondering how the left, including Jews on the left, would deal with the savagery without losing their leftist bona fides by ending their fascination with the Palestinians…this is it.
Ditto on article.
It’s amazing how the lefties like DR are assumed educated with their precious credentials yet year after year generate, publish, and profit from such obvious stupidity.
Something does not fit with our institutions of “higher” learning. They are not.
Groupthink. One has to go along with the group to get promoted. Currently leftism is the dominant worldview in Academia.
Are conditions for Jews now worse than they were in the 1930s? Then it was a matter of leaving Germany. Today, it looks more and more a matter of leaving the world.
Remnick has been a major proponent of wokeism in all its facets. But for a Jew to be so willfully blind to his eternal enemies is incomprehensible
It’s as if they lack the gene for self preservation.
Excellent point and seems to be very close to the issue.
First, their precious degrees, actually, false flags for thinking exercises; fail them bigly in training for rational thinking. Rather they (Ivy League Degrees) serve more as an unqualified qualifier.
Second, the failure seems rooted in an inability to foresee consequence. Possibly, your “gene”.
No wonder many of these types then go into social sciences, vague since they sprouted. No doubt though that it paid him well.
Jews on Mars. That would be good.
Hamas has said their goal is to wipe Israel off the map.
To think Palestinians worked side by side with Jews and went back to Gaza and drew maps to where the nurseries were. How demented is that!
Ever Palestinian mother knew their sons were going to massacre JEWISH BABIES.
They martyred their Terrorist children.
Christian brothers and sisters WAKE UP! Jews and then us Christians.
As Americans you are not capable of understanding the evil that is inbred in Palestinians.
We are called treacherous Christians..
I stand with Israel and every thing they must do to defend OUR futures
Listen to Son of Hamas, If Israel does not succeed in riding the world of Hamas Palestinians will continue to be voluntary human shields,
David Resnick is dangerous.
Don’t let the media and videos fool you Hamas rules Gaza.
Israel sends out flyers where they will bomb Hamas sets up blockades and will not let civilians leave.
Hamas shoots their own women children mother and fathers in the back when they try and flee as the young Hamas men file deep in safety bunkers built with money that was meant to aid Palestinians.
ISRAEL DID NOT ASK FOR THIS WAR!!!
Those who condemn Israels right to defend their survival are just as evil as Hamas!
I have been in pro Israel rallies in Chicago. Palestinian s with their blow horns destroyed the calm of a peaceful gathering by Jews! I with my sign Christian for Israel was being shouted profanities by Palestinian antagonists young and old!
In MY USA I AM SPIT ON BY PALESTINIANS.
As a Christian women, a mother sister, Aunt. l am not going to be manipulated by the lies from the left.
Israel must destroy Hamas as we live free we have NO right to judge..
l hope they level Gaza it is evil ground.with evil inhabitants..
Go Old Testament on barbarians in Gaza, West Bank, Hebron and the head if the snake IRAN.
Blessing to all IDF soldiers.
Israeli civilians did not wake up and ask to be massacred. Israel did not ask for this war. But they must end it with the only way possible destroy Hamas.
Hamas is Gaza and Gaza is Hamas no difference. Gazans stand with Hamas!
Hamas is responsible for every dead Jewish and Muslim child killed from October 7 till this ends..
Support life, freedom of religion freedom to love life!
Support Israels right to live in peace.
I agree. Gaza should be razed to the ground. There are no innocents there except babies and toddlers. It’s a festering menace that needs to be expunged. Those Paleosimians like to murder Jewish babies. Driving them into the Sinai would be merciful. Any who would choose to stay would be responsible for the deaths of their babies and toddlers.
Paleosimians are sub-human.
If he lived 80 years ago in Europe, he’d be Chaim Rumkowski in the Lodz Ghetto making his “Fathers and mother, give me your children!” speech when the Nazis demanded children under 10 be deported to Chelmno death camp.
Remnick’s turgid prose is what happens when you are a self hating Jewish journalist ala Thomas Friedman
Boy, you said it.
I miss Tom Wolf he could have entertained us. A middle class Jewish kid from New Jersey, hobnobbes with upper east side WASPs. Maybe it could be a musical comedy like Westside Story.
My take on West Side Story (the west side of Gaza City)
I have often walked
Down this street before
But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before
All at once am I
Several stories high
IDF found the street where you live
ROTFL!!!! That was from “My Fair Lady” but what the hell, Maybe they could do version of “Maria” entitled “Rashida”
That’s a good idea. Was west side story a comedy? I never saw it.
Not intentionally. A Puerto Rican guy pointed out that if someone started shouting “MARIA!!” in the barrio, ever window would open.
A reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Not intended as comedy but watched to day it sometimes resembles comedy.
But the music by Leonard Bernstein is superb. The lyrics to the songs by Stephen Sondheim are catchy and witty. The dancing is a little over the top.
The woke version:
Maria . . .
I just met a boy named Maria
Fakestinian projection.
Thank you, a great article with the kind of truth that one will never find in a New Yorker “profile” piece.
The Fakestinians are nothing but Arabs – at least they were until 1967 and Israel’s lightning victory. Some KGB agitprop genius at Lumumba University in Moscow realized that for years the world saw tiny Israel facing 300 million Arabs. The genius was to create a big bully Israel and a ‘tiny helpless victim – ‘the Palestinians”. The Arab world worked strenuously to KEEP these people in misery, isolation and angry.
You’re welcome to go into Gaza and interview every individual Muslim if they really believe in killing the Jews or not, if they really believe in killing the Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists, or not.
When you’re 100% certain which individual Muslims are innocent of Jew-Hatred and Infidel-Hatred, and which ones are not, please report your findings to the Israelis.
Ultimately, it’s either the Israeli innocents and children or the few, adult, Palestinian Muslim innocents and children. Which side do you pick to keep alive and safe?
“A proper war in self-defense is one fought without self-crippling restrictions placed on our commanders in the field. It must be fought with the most effective weapons we possess (a few weeks ago, Rumsfeld refused, correctly, to rule out nuclear weapons). And it must be fought in a manner that secures victory as quickly as possible and with the fewest U.S. casualties, regardless of the countless innocents caught in the line of fire. These innocents suffer and die because of the action of their own government in sponsoring the initiation of force against America. Their fate, therefore, is their government’s moral responsibility. There is no way for our bullets to be aimed only at evil men.” – Leonard Peikoff, “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism”
“How To Think About the Death of Innocents in War”
Another moronic lecture/homework assignment from a guy who never mattered, replete with a lecture telling us how to think about the death of innocents.
You are certainly on top of what matters from guys who don’t matter.
If I spent my time watching these stupid videos and reading your endless B.S. about altruism I wouldn’t have time for my laundry
And that is what matters to me….my time.
It wasn’t a bad post. Actually, it was pretty good.
“Intrepid” is an irrational, knuckle-dragging, Christian Neanderthal. He doesn’t actually read, listen, analyze, or think about the actual content of any of my comments. He simply reacts emotionally like a male, knuckle-dragging, Karen.
He is also a stalker who has followed me to other websites to try and get me canceled and banned. He has also threatened me with physical violence and even insulted my mother for having given birth to me, it takes a real rabid Christian to do that, doesn’t it.
That crazy lunatic, rabid Jew-hater, Martin Luther would be proud of him. Intrepid is a German Lutheran. The Nazis considered Luther one of their major heros.
Actually, it’s a pretty good piece.
Actually, it’s a pretty good piece.
Wow, an irrational, knuckle-dragging, Christian Neanderthal. Very original. Guess what, there were no Neanderthals who were Christian. In the main I think the Neanderthals were way smarter than you. They could start a fire with two sticks. Can you? Neanderthals existed for about 360,000 years. Do you think Objectivism will exist for that long?
Why would anyone read, listen, analyze, or think about the actual content of any of your moronic comments. There’s nothing to analyze or think about. . Judging from your epic downvote count most people don’t bother with them either.
You had a mother? I thought you were assembled from spare parts from Ayn Rand’s old car.
If you actually think I am a stalker you obviously don’t know the meaning of being stalked. What a little girly man you are.
And by the way, I’m not a German Lutheran. my grand parents came from Russia. So nice try again with the guilt by association re: Nazi Germany. If you simply google the phrase “Lutherans and Nazi” Germany, you would find out absolutely wrong you are about Lutherans. But truth never really matters to you. So you won’t be googling anything right? You have your revisionist fake narrative. The only thing that matters to you is your anti-Christian Objectivist narrative culled from Lenny Peikoff.
You are truly a hoot and a half.
“Ayn Rand on the Death of Innocents in War”
And yet another waste of time video from a long dead women who basically handed out her homework like Muslims who dispense candy after every successful terrorist attack.
You seem to have no limits on how you abuse your privileges on this comment board.
It is no wonder why nobody gives a crap about what you post…..over, and over and over again.
And she is suddenly an expert on war? And therefor you are an expert on war? How effing presumptuous and full of yourself you are.
It would actually be easy to test muslims for their belief systems. Just have a large database of relevant questions correlated with various Islamic beliefs. Have the person to be tested sit down at a computer and answer questions selected randomly until sufficiently strong correlations are established. It doesn’t matter if the person tested tries to cheat, that is one of the correlations that can be established.
The scary thing, to me, is that this method can be adopted by governments to enslave their citizens. And that is even before all the latest AI stuff was developed.
Do you really think that the average feral jihadist has the intelligence to take a test?
Yes, you can always outsmart dummies, and even intelligent people can be easily manipulated. Geniuses, not so much, but how many geniuses exist in the Islamic world? One or two?
Little Aynie yet again mis-underestimated. She made yet another misjudgment. What she did possess, however, was a blinding ego like no other.
There are plenty of incidents throughout modern human history in which certain peoples deliberately installed a psychotic behavior into their children. It is hedious even monstrous. China has done this. The Nazis attempted it. Dear America even has experimented with the idea. Heck, even Hollywood got into the game with three Bourne series in which a rogue unit of the cia took orphans and trained them from very young boys and girls to be killers. My husband’s good friend md in China treated medically a professional assassin there. Just because they are so young does not necessarily mean they are innocent – monsters remove innocence and replace it with traits foreign to normal society. Rand misses the point completely. She unwisely assumes young always means innocent. She probably never walked alone at night in NY, SF, or Seattle.
You obviously did not listen to Rand’s argument or are intentionally misrepresenting what she said.
It’s your Jesus Christ who preaches “love your enemy”, “turn the other cheek”, “judge not that you shall not be judged”, not Ayn Rand.
I guess that’s why you just had to insult Jesus Christ and every other Christian by misrepresenting what he said in another post in the Goska article where you wrote “love your Muslim enemy”. “love your Muslim neighbor as you love yourself” in the comment board.
You are as low rent as they come. You have no class. You are an objectivist boil on the butt of humanity. But this what happens you fail at everything you try….like trying to convert the world to that religion of yours, with you, of course, as the “High Priest of Nothing”
I would bet that Rodriguez didn’t waste her time watching the Rand drivel. Life’s too precious and too short to waste time on Objectivist garbage.
I remember a night my girlfriend and I walked through a park in Seattle. She was frightened but I told her I could kick any possible assailants ass and protect her, but I realized I couldn’t kick the asses of multiple assailants or a punk with a gun.
Rand lived in a safety bubble, that’s for sure.
What are you talking about Jeff? Please provide a quote where Rand in any way councils any kind of pacifism? Any kind of appeasement of violence or evil?
Provide a quote or shut up.
An act born of rage, ( you want to define that in fair terms,). Defending your country from militant Islam is a duty. Does he not think that cutting off people’s heads, baby’s heads, murdering families in their beds, and raping and kidnapping women and children isn’t an act of rage????? Most people have actually seen the beheading and the bodies after the event happened. The media aren’t the only ones who have the pictures. The woke have no sense of rationality or truth! The thinking is so rediculous. Who in their right mind, wants to teach your children how to become murderers, especially at 4 years old on to adulthood?
Poor Remnick. It must be difficult for the poor guy to prove his moral and intellectual superiority in a situation that calls for annihilating people who are the embodiment of evil.
Another tour de force, Dr. Bawer. Your reporting and analysis are unmatched and exceptionally enlightening. TY.
An excellent sketch of the Left’s useful idiots.
Actually, the number of deaths in Dresden was “only” 25,000. The Nazis added a decimal place to show the barbarity as alleged of the Allies and the Soviets embraced that to show the cruelty of the west. Dresden was, by the way, a legitimate military target and as to the Soviets, they kept quiet about how they’d requested the place be hit because it was a transportation center for reinforcements to the eastern front.
Misdirected emotion is foolish in a game of survival.
The little dears you try to pull heart strings for carry automatic weapons and are brainwashed from their first day of speech. Their empathy has been removed starting at their birth into that killer environment. They carry an ingrained, trained trait to seek out and remove a certain life. Even were they to be dropped into a normal western family environment, like the psychotic children of Romania a few years ago, the cold, killer trait cannot be uninstalled.
All too true. Only fools think all children are innocent. Toddlers, yes, but children? Not hardly.
The New Yorker, for many decades after its first issue in the 1920s, set the gold standard for sophistication and elegant writing, clever, witty cartoons (e.g. Chas. Addams’s famously evil ones) and thoughtful reflection and commentary in The Talk of the Town on the first page of every issue
My own father was a lifelong reader and subscriber at least as early as a 20-year-old boy when he came home from the Navy at the end of WW II in 1945, and, I heard, many times, used to leave his copy of the magazine on the counter at the local drugstore, where the 18-year-old girl there was what was then called a “soda jerk,” to impress her with his “sophistication.”
It worked; he proposed, and she accepted, the next year; I was born in 1952 (so it wasn’t a “shotgun wedding”).
Both of them continued to enjoy The New Yorker; and I did, too–first chuckling at the cartoons and admiring the ads for high-end luxuries, and then, in first grade and for decades after that, reading and loving the essays and articles on the whole range of subjects that the magazine published in those decades.
But that eloquence, elegance, and style didn’t last forever: The New Yorker took a bitter, hard-left swerve into political rants, even in The Talk of the Town, which became an anti-Reagan rant written by, I think, the Editor at the time, identified (unless I’m mistaken) as “the former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter,” and then worse and more fanatical in its partisan, Left-wing hate.
I dropped my own subscription to The New Yorker because of it around that time, as I also dropped mine to the once-fabulous Atlantic Monthly (now dba just as “The Atlantic”) for exactly the same reason.
Both of those famous, historically wonderfully elegant, eloquent, intelligent, thoughtful periodicals have lost their minds and their Founding Mission; and under their present owners and editors have gone on a kamikaze mission against their own longtime, loyal audience of subscribers and buyers.
And if their boards of directors and shareholders (or is it the controlling sole proprietor, in either case?) don’t deal with this self-destruction, then the only thing left to plead in bankruptcy court will be retaining the trademark rights to their names.
Which won’t be worth much at all.
Yeah, I remember that. It used to be good. It was always out in the living room of my neighbors (Berkeley Profs) from the 1950s on, so I used to read it there (I was best friends with their kids) But at some point it went bad.
Leftists infiltrate everything. They’re like butt worms that way. Once they worm their way in, they corrupt their host and the next thing you know, decent organizations have become shit mills.
Mid 1980’s I bought a few different issues of the New Yorker, yes you buy a current issue in Oklahoma, the only part I remember enjoying was the Talk of the Town articles. I stopped buying it.
So am I supposed to be upset?
please israel , do not listen to america or the west who are apologists for barbarity . level gaza !! do not stop until all of hamas are eradicated and all the tunnels are flushed out of the vermin who inhabit them . take whatever steps are necessary . keep doing it until you run out of bullets and bombs . if the cartels in mexico came across the border and did to americans what hamas did to israelis would americans be squawking about a measured response ? would there be a ceasefire ? yet biden and his miscreants want israel to do what it wouldn’t . america is morally bankrupt due in great part to obama and his cronies and now under feckless joe and his ineffectual POC . ignore america and get on with it . make stupid choices [ hamas ] get stupid prizes . there are no innocents in gaza , their collective guilt is what condemns them .
Remnick wrote a highly acclaimed book about the disintegration of the Soviet Union called “Lenin’s Tomb”.
For that book, Remnick realized that he needed to go to the source of the ideological OPPOSITION to Soviet Communism.
That person was the late, great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn who was forcibly exiled out of the USSR was living in rural Vermont in the 1990s.
Remnick gained a great deal of access to Solzhenitsyn for a series of interviews(not an easy thing to do).
Remnick visited Solzhenitsyn’s gated home several times and even got to know the Solzhenitsyn family.
It’s an amazing thing that Remnick could spend that much time with the greatest ANTI-COMMUNIST who ever lived and NOT learn a single molecule about the real implications of the fall of Communism.
Furthermore…… Remnick’s fellow travellers in the US are the vanguard of the Communist revolution in America that Solzhenitsyn would have detested.
While AIS would have been revolted by the Communist takeover of America………..he would not have bee surprised.
Twenty years before Obama he issued a warning to the West and America in particular.
“To us Russians, Communism is a dead dog. But to you Westerners it is still a living lion.”
Too bad the Remnicks of the world never had ears to hear it.
Israel ceded the Gaza Strip the Palestinians in 2005 and removed all their military and settlements and look what their capitulation has wrought. The Palestinians had the opportunity to create their home but in 2006 elected Hamas to be in control of the Gaza Strip. Just in case anybody still believes in the lie of a “two state solution” for Jews and Palestinians or like Biden, wants a ceasefire in Gaza; the leader of Hamas just announced the real goal.
In a newly released video interview, Ghazi Hamad, who lives a life of luxury in Qatar by spending millions of dollars in embezzled aid money, said his terrorist government has no intention of formulating any kind of peace. Instead, in his own words, they’ll just keep slaughtering Jews until Israel no longer exists.
And, oh yeah, his life of luxury has been financed by Biden who has sent the Palestinians a half a billion dollars in “humanitarian aid”. And now he wants to send more aid to the Palestinians in the form of your tax dollars. Remember that the Palestinians elected Hamas to be in charge of the Gaza Strip in 2006 and so all of that aid is controlled by Hamas, it’s mostly fungible and so can be converted to buy weapons to kill Israelis or converted to cash and embezzled to their leaders like Hamad. Qatar, like Iran and a half dozen other Muslims states, openly call for the destruction of Israel and support the Hamas butchers.
Unfortunately you have to PAY to read these screeds in Pravda Media leftist rags NYT, WaPo and New Yorker.
President Herzog of Israel is a deluded individual who has stated that the Oct. 7 murderers do not follow true, peaceful Islam, or words to that effect, and continues to vainly seek peace with those who never hid their intention to destroy Israel. I don’t know or care what sources you use for information, but you clearly go out of your way to find and swallow lunatic fringe garbage. To paraphrase Barnum, there’s a gullible nutjob born every minute. You’re one of them.
Well Bawer, you’ve proved beyond a doubt that Remnick is an utter scumbag, and in my opinion, irredeemable. And you did it with so many examples it isn’t even funny.
Yeah, great article!
My own tangent is that the behavior of Hamas is characteristic of not only muslims, but primitive wild tribes in Africa and elsewhere as well. Hamas and such are driving humanity back to that primitive level, but the leftists are in denial, and blame it on civilized people such as the Israeli conservatives.
I keep finding, when I go back in history, that it was much rougher than people nowadays realize.
Yes, modern luxuries like law and order, plumbing, refrigeration, air conditioning, electric lighting and microwave ovens are taken for granted by us but Previous generations would’ve killed or died for them. Not to mention basic medicine and healthcare.
Good observation. It was so much rougher for previous generations. Imagine living without a toilet! FUCK that shit. Pun intended. 😛
To paraphrase the Declaration of Independence: everyone is born with rights and privileges.
These rights and privileges are conditional and are lost when they are abused.
Remnick has lost all rights and privileges to be called a Jew.
Remnick is a bad man. That is what he is. No other label.
He didn’t ask to be born into the peoplehood he rejects.
He only represents his glib, egotistical, pathetic self.
Even a baby venomous snake can kill you. How can Israel rid itself of terrorists in it’s midst without collateral damage? It’s the Paleosimians who deliberately put children in harm’s way. THEY are responsible, not Israel.
Raze Gaza to the ground, I say.
FUCK the Geneva Convention. None of the rogue states signed off on it and Gaza isn’t even a real nation.
US Citizens should give heed that the former US Congressman lost two family members during the bombing of the Orthodox Church in Gaza. May they R.I.P.