I just got back from a visit to Ireland, somewhere my husband wanted to visit despite its reputation as one of the more antisemitic countries at the moment. We went on some historical tours, and while most were very nuanced and balanced, one of them, focusing on the Easter Rising, struck me as a glorification of violence and martyrdom. As the guide enthusiastically described suicidal charges against impossible odds and bombs set off in London as late as the 1990s, I was disturbed by how contagious the enthusiasm was for most of the members of the tour group. Needless to say it reminded me of the current enthusiasm in local Canadian "free Palestine" groups for the "martyrs" of the "resistance."
I think it doesn't take much to persuade people that martyrdom is glorious. If one tour guide prone to propaganda could accomplish that in a couple of hours, it's not surprising that an endless stream of tik Tok misinformation can do the same thing on a more permanent level.
Interesting. I'll be in Dublin and Belfast soon and am taking a dual narrative tour in Belfast and presumably in Dublin I'll hear about the Rising. We'll see what I discover.
If you can find yourself about 80 minutes to watch the talk given on Irish antisemitism recently by Aoibh Crimmins, a scholar associated with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, it's incredibly informative.
I’m curious what you uncover too as I feel drawn to Ireland for no reasons known. I was told I had a sheep farm there in a past life so maybe that’s why. 😂
If you can convince the intended audience that the martyrs are paid-up members of the "righteous oppressed" or noble savages, yeah, there are people who will readily see them as heroic glorious sacrifices to the cause. And I wouldn't leave academics out of the formulation there, a prime Canadian example being Osgoode Hall law professor Heidi Matthews who has been very active on X declaring that it's up to the Palestinians to "define their own resistance" and more recently of the latest Hamas flotilla stunt that the IDF intercepted before it got near the naval blockade.
Pat, another excellent article. You really do analyze the enemy exceptionally well. You get inside the minds of these people and explain what motivates them better than almost anyone I read.
And you're probably right that many of these young people are searching for purpose. But I'll do you one better: I think our media, universities and progressive governments are actually giving them that purpose.
We look at these kids and ask, where the hell did they all come from? But look at what they're being taught and what their political leaders are reinforcing. Professors tell them Israel is a colonial state. The media feeds them a daily narrative of Israeli genocide. Progressive governments constantly validate the idea that the Palestinians are helpless victims and Israel is the villain.
Look at Canada. During Toronto's Pride parade, someone called out to Mayor Olivia Chow to say “Free Palestine,” and she immediately did it. This is the mayor of a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in North America. So these young people aren't operating in a vacuum. Their professors, media and political leaders are telling them that vilifying Israel is a righteous cause.
When I was young, our cause was the Vietnam War. We believed we were standing against an unjust war. Today's young activists have been handed Israel and the IDF as their Vietnam. They've been told this is their great moral struggle.
And Pat, this is why I keep coming back to the same point with you. You analyze their side brilliantly. I wish you'd turn more of that analytical fire toward our side. Where are we failing? What can we change? What should Jewish organizations, Israel and Diaspora Jews actually be doing differently?
Because we spend an enormous amount of time explaining why the other side is winning the propaganda war. I want us to start figuring out how we win it.
Ponder? Listen, Pat, I’m not much of a negotiator, but I’ll accept “ponder” for now. Pondering is a good starting point. 😂
From your writing, I get the sense that you enjoy a challenge and aren’t afraid of confrontation. So let me warn you, my friend: if you ever decide to take on the large Jewish organizations and expose their lack of accessibility and accountability, be prepared for indifference—and possibly even blackballing.
That’s where the real battle begins, because they’re the ones with the money, and money is what makes things happen. Yet for the average Jew on the street, these organizations are a brick wall. No direct names. No email addresses. No clear person responsible for a particular project. Donations are requested constantly, but rarely earmarked clearly enough for donors to know exactly where their money is going.
To use Trump’s language, it’s a genuine Jewish swamp.
I hope you do take this on, but I also think you shouldn’t do it alone. There’s another man I think you should know: Matthew Taub, who writes Unapologetically Jewish on Substack. He’s a man of action, just as you are, and he’s currently involved in a lawsuit against Olivia Chow and the City of Toronto. I think the two of you would make a formidable team.
So consider this an old Brooklyn boy doing a little behind-the-scenes matchmaking. Reach out to him. Look at what he’s doing. I’ll encourage him to look at your work as well.
Now that I’ve warned you how difficult and frustrating the challenge will be, I suspect you may be even more interested.
After all, Pat, you said you were pondering. I’m willing to accept that—for now. 😂
It starts by looking at the large Jewish organizations and tearing down that Jewish swamp, so that there's accountability and accessibility. They are in control of the big money, and that's what you need to fight back.
Mary, I'm talking about virtually every large, established Jewish organization that operates like a closed bureaucracy instead of an accountable public institution.
Organizations like CIJA, UJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Jewish Federations and many others all have different missions, but they share the same problem in my view. Try finding a complete list of the people responsible for specific projects, along with their direct email addresses, so ordinary Jews can contact them with ideas, concerns or criticism. You generally can't.
Try finding exactly where your donation is going. Not just "support our mission," but, "This money is earmarked for Project A, Project B or Project C." I think donors deserve that level of transparency and accountability.
So my criticism isn't aimed at one particular organization. It's aimed at a culture. Too many of our large organizations have become closed bureaucracies that ask for money but make it difficult for the very community they represent to communicate with the people making decisions.
If they want our trust, they should be far more transparent, accessible and accountable than they are today.
In the words of Sly Stone which could be directed at the young "progressives" who embrace Palestinianism, "You've been sleeping far too long. There's a permanent crease in your right and wrong."
I forwarded your excellent previous post about 3 truths to my beloved (Jewish) god-daughter, who is solidly pro-Palestine. It was probably a mistake, but she sent a kind reply expressing her abhorrence of the ‘genocide’ and her sadness that I believe the ‘lies’ about what happened on Oct. 7. I am not washing my hands of people I love because they have ‘drunk the kool-aid’, but her response certainly proved most of your points.
You have to admit there's a certain diabolical genius in the Palestinian strategy of human sacrifice and their commitment to mass-martyring their own people till victory is achieved, with the Zionist entity destroyed.
The idea is so foreign, ugly and incomprehensible to Western brains, it's almost like our entire post-Enlightenment worldview and belief system works as an immunity to even considering it. Even back in the 70s and 80s, when there were many more adults with life and military experience and not the eternal adolescents raised in a terrarium that are moderns, no one could quite grasp it. Arafat would say things like "Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations." And this would be written off as just posturing that mature realists needed to ignore, it was a negotiating position or a way for Arafat to hold off his hardliners—he couldnt't really mean it! (All Westerners agreed.)
But fast-forward 54 years from Munich 1972, when the Palestinians officially became the new revolutionary proletariat and the latest oppressed Cinderella to wear the Western Left's glass slipper, and this weird belief system has hardened into a sacred faith, the last great cause, as much of a cult as any early religion. And if parents and grandparents with some memory of the struggle for survival couldn't grasp the basic reality here, then today's digital veal calves raised inside the protective crate of the safety state and its digital panopticon have no hope and no way to marshal any skepticism when their screens are flooded with dead babies and all the media outlets that are the churches of their faith (NYT PBS NPR CNN etc) publish nonstop war porn, half dedicated to Palestinian victimhood and the other half to the litany of brutal IDF crimes.
Antizionism is more or less the Big Lie of our time, part Nazi Big Lie (Jews are the source of all global evil) and part Soviet Big Lie (Israel is a racist imperialist colonizer akin to the Belgian Congo), and as history teaches, very few people, no matter how supposedly "well-educated", are able to see through Big Lies and fight them. The rage-addled children of the modern West, conformists with a manufactured cause, want Jewish blood and won't take NO for an answer.
I have been thinking about your granddaughter and wondered if you have tried sharing any Ask Haviv anything episodes? The very first one where he explains what his podcast will be is worth watching. A serious attempt to understand ! Perhaps today's youth have had curiosity and the pursuit of truth kicked out of them. Time to restore it one person at a time. Havivs latest , Here's to the next 250 years , is worth watching today too.
Israel, for all its flaws, sends its young people into battle hoping they return home.
Hamas celebrates those who do not.
One culture builds bomb shelters to save civilian lives.
The other builds terror tunnels to hold civilian hostages, save the lives of terrorists, and leave civilians above ground to die in the onslaught the elites brought down upon them. Because that is the strategy. Dead Palestinians are a cost of doing business in Hamas’ global PR war. They are not a sad byproduct of war. They are a cost calculation as much as missiles, magazines, and throat-slitting daggers.
[...]
One culture develops advanced defense systems like Iron Dome to limit the necessity to send its armed forces into battle during "ceasefires" that are inevitably broken by the celebrators of martyrdom. And just to remind the folks here about just how credulous some people have become, there are people who complain that Israel having the Iron Dome is an unfair advantage that allows Israel to operate with greater impunity and that out of fairness, Israel should supply Palestine with Iron Dome. There was even one Democratic senate primary hopeful, Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who proposed such a piece of idiocy, but has now dropped out, leaving the Democratic Party incumbent Haley Stevens to battle it out with a DSA backed candidate Dr. Abdul Al-Sayed.
The forced withdrawal of Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham "my Totenkopf" Platner, because raping a woman who is a Democrat and who finally went public about the incident was a bridge too far has brought forth the lunatic fringe, including a JVP "influencer" Sim Kern, who said that, having been raped herself, if her rapist was running against a "genocide supporter", Kern would campaign for the rapist because "genocide is worse than rape".
The assumption of guilt by so many non-experts, politicians who are themselves lawyers in particular, who have no idea what sort of evidence the International Court of Justice has been weighing over the last 30 months without issuing a final opinion is truly something (revolting) to behold. For anyone who is interested, an open letter by a group of experts has just been published that focuses on the flawed "findings" of Amnesty International and the UN Commission of Inquiry and which can be found here:
The regressive glorification of death that you describe is complemented by the crass "pay to slay" component of anti-Israel/Jewish violence, which seems to be leaking into the West now, as hired thugs – often adolescent males – shoot up Canadian synagogues for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver (CAD $1000-ish).
Beautiful article! So, so true. So many young people who have not been asked to do anything in their lives, not to work , not to support themselves - only to live in their parents' homes and take, take, take. The parents are also responsible. Check out the birds' nests in your neighborhood - you will see Mom and Dad pushing their little ones out to become adult birds. Good lesson for the hapless youths who can do nothing and get paid the protest lies and slander.
Best of all I love this statement: If you are still not sure which side you are on in this goddamned conflict, you need a morality transplant.
Indeed a death cult Pat... everybuddy who sez "oh, they're jus' like us--they share our same hopes & dreams & then bloody Israel murders 'em" are under the most gob-smackin' illusion / delusion/ mind control known ta human kind...
I see folks sendin' love ta jew-hatin'/USA-hatin' Fallastinians daily along with bile fer Israel so it must be their brains got eaten by Movie Monsters!.... Yep, Mindless Zombies promotin' Mindless Zombies with explosives... as anybuddy in thrall with death has no mind an' is totally zombified.
T'day I read a great stack piece from Francisco Gil White who shared the "poifect" photo--a lil' boy no more than FIVE all decked out for gee-hawd, Dyno-Mite strapped to his chest... Not fiction...sadly
Great article, Pat.
I just got back from a visit to Ireland, somewhere my husband wanted to visit despite its reputation as one of the more antisemitic countries at the moment. We went on some historical tours, and while most were very nuanced and balanced, one of them, focusing on the Easter Rising, struck me as a glorification of violence and martyrdom. As the guide enthusiastically described suicidal charges against impossible odds and bombs set off in London as late as the 1990s, I was disturbed by how contagious the enthusiasm was for most of the members of the tour group. Needless to say it reminded me of the current enthusiasm in local Canadian "free Palestine" groups for the "martyrs" of the "resistance."
I think it doesn't take much to persuade people that martyrdom is glorious. If one tour guide prone to propaganda could accomplish that in a couple of hours, it's not surprising that an endless stream of tik Tok misinformation can do the same thing on a more permanent level.
Interesting. I'll be in Dublin and Belfast soon and am taking a dual narrative tour in Belfast and presumably in Dublin I'll hear about the Rising. We'll see what I discover.
If you can find yourself about 80 minutes to watch the talk given on Irish antisemitism recently by Aoibh Crimmins, a scholar associated with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, it's incredibly informative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceeCwX4eItY&t=366s
I watched it. She was quite interesting and far from simplistic. Thanks for the recommendation.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
I’m curious what you uncover too as I feel drawn to Ireland for no reasons known. I was told I had a sheep farm there in a past life so maybe that’s why. 😂
If you can convince the intended audience that the martyrs are paid-up members of the "righteous oppressed" or noble savages, yeah, there are people who will readily see them as heroic glorious sacrifices to the cause. And I wouldn't leave academics out of the formulation there, a prime Canadian example being Osgoode Hall law professor Heidi Matthews who has been very active on X declaring that it's up to the Palestinians to "define their own resistance" and more recently of the latest Hamas flotilla stunt that the IDF intercepted before it got near the naval blockade.
Pat, another excellent article. You really do analyze the enemy exceptionally well. You get inside the minds of these people and explain what motivates them better than almost anyone I read.
And you're probably right that many of these young people are searching for purpose. But I'll do you one better: I think our media, universities and progressive governments are actually giving them that purpose.
We look at these kids and ask, where the hell did they all come from? But look at what they're being taught and what their political leaders are reinforcing. Professors tell them Israel is a colonial state. The media feeds them a daily narrative of Israeli genocide. Progressive governments constantly validate the idea that the Palestinians are helpless victims and Israel is the villain.
Look at Canada. During Toronto's Pride parade, someone called out to Mayor Olivia Chow to say “Free Palestine,” and she immediately did it. This is the mayor of a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in North America. So these young people aren't operating in a vacuum. Their professors, media and political leaders are telling them that vilifying Israel is a righteous cause.
When I was young, our cause was the Vietnam War. We believed we were standing against an unjust war. Today's young activists have been handed Israel and the IDF as their Vietnam. They've been told this is their great moral struggle.
And Pat, this is why I keep coming back to the same point with you. You analyze their side brilliantly. I wish you'd turn more of that analytical fire toward our side. Where are we failing? What can we change? What should Jewish organizations, Israel and Diaspora Jews actually be doing differently?
Because we spend an enormous amount of time explaining why the other side is winning the propaganda war. I want us to start figuring out how we win it.
Another terrific article, my friend.
Thanks Frederick! Hmmm ... Let me ponder.
Ponder? Listen, Pat, I’m not much of a negotiator, but I’ll accept “ponder” for now. Pondering is a good starting point. 😂
From your writing, I get the sense that you enjoy a challenge and aren’t afraid of confrontation. So let me warn you, my friend: if you ever decide to take on the large Jewish organizations and expose their lack of accessibility and accountability, be prepared for indifference—and possibly even blackballing.
That’s where the real battle begins, because they’re the ones with the money, and money is what makes things happen. Yet for the average Jew on the street, these organizations are a brick wall. No direct names. No email addresses. No clear person responsible for a particular project. Donations are requested constantly, but rarely earmarked clearly enough for donors to know exactly where their money is going.
To use Trump’s language, it’s a genuine Jewish swamp.
I hope you do take this on, but I also think you shouldn’t do it alone. There’s another man I think you should know: Matthew Taub, who writes Unapologetically Jewish on Substack. He’s a man of action, just as you are, and he’s currently involved in a lawsuit against Olivia Chow and the City of Toronto. I think the two of you would make a formidable team.
So consider this an old Brooklyn boy doing a little behind-the-scenes matchmaking. Reach out to him. Look at what he’s doing. I’ll encourage him to look at your work as well.
Now that I’ve warned you how difficult and frustrating the challenge will be, I suspect you may be even more interested.
After all, Pat, you said you were pondering. I’m willing to accept that—for now. 😂
And you have raised some good questions. What can we do to counter this?
It starts by looking at the large Jewish organizations and tearing down that Jewish swamp, so that there's accountability and accessibility. They are in control of the big money, and that's what you need to fight back.
Who are you talking about precisely
Mary, I'm talking about virtually every large, established Jewish organization that operates like a closed bureaucracy instead of an accountable public institution.
Organizations like CIJA, UJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Jewish Federations and many others all have different missions, but they share the same problem in my view. Try finding a complete list of the people responsible for specific projects, along with their direct email addresses, so ordinary Jews can contact them with ideas, concerns or criticism. You generally can't.
Try finding exactly where your donation is going. Not just "support our mission," but, "This money is earmarked for Project A, Project B or Project C." I think donors deserve that level of transparency and accountability.
So my criticism isn't aimed at one particular organization. It's aimed at a culture. Too many of our large organizations have become closed bureaucracies that ask for money but make it difficult for the very community they represent to communicate with the people making decisions.
If they want our trust, they should be far more transparent, accessible and accountable than they are today.
There is a great moral rot in the west. You have spelled it out well.
In the words of Sly Stone which could be directed at the young "progressives" who embrace Palestinianism, "You've been sleeping far too long. There's a permanent crease in your right and wrong."
Love it!
I forwarded your excellent previous post about 3 truths to my beloved (Jewish) god-daughter, who is solidly pro-Palestine. It was probably a mistake, but she sent a kind reply expressing her abhorrence of the ‘genocide’ and her sadness that I believe the ‘lies’ about what happened on Oct. 7. I am not washing my hands of people I love because they have ‘drunk the kool-aid’, but her response certainly proved most of your points.
Thank you. I'm sorry you're dealing with that. Even people we love can be idiots sometimes. Hahaha.
"The Mark of the Immature Man Is That He Wants To Die Nobly for a Cause, While the Mark of the Mature Man Is That He Wants To Live Humbly for One."
- Otto Ludwig
- Popularized in “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger
Excellent column!
You have to admit there's a certain diabolical genius in the Palestinian strategy of human sacrifice and their commitment to mass-martyring their own people till victory is achieved, with the Zionist entity destroyed.
The idea is so foreign, ugly and incomprehensible to Western brains, it's almost like our entire post-Enlightenment worldview and belief system works as an immunity to even considering it. Even back in the 70s and 80s, when there were many more adults with life and military experience and not the eternal adolescents raised in a terrarium that are moderns, no one could quite grasp it. Arafat would say things like "Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations." And this would be written off as just posturing that mature realists needed to ignore, it was a negotiating position or a way for Arafat to hold off his hardliners—he couldnt't really mean it! (All Westerners agreed.)
But fast-forward 54 years from Munich 1972, when the Palestinians officially became the new revolutionary proletariat and the latest oppressed Cinderella to wear the Western Left's glass slipper, and this weird belief system has hardened into a sacred faith, the last great cause, as much of a cult as any early religion. And if parents and grandparents with some memory of the struggle for survival couldn't grasp the basic reality here, then today's digital veal calves raised inside the protective crate of the safety state and its digital panopticon have no hope and no way to marshal any skepticism when their screens are flooded with dead babies and all the media outlets that are the churches of their faith (NYT PBS NPR CNN etc) publish nonstop war porn, half dedicated to Palestinian victimhood and the other half to the litany of brutal IDF crimes.
Antizionism is more or less the Big Lie of our time, part Nazi Big Lie (Jews are the source of all global evil) and part Soviet Big Lie (Israel is a racist imperialist colonizer akin to the Belgian Congo), and as history teaches, very few people, no matter how supposedly "well-educated", are able to see through Big Lies and fight them. The rage-addled children of the modern West, conformists with a manufactured cause, want Jewish blood and won't take NO for an answer.
I have been thinking about your granddaughter and wondered if you have tried sharing any Ask Haviv anything episodes? The very first one where he explains what his podcast will be is worth watching. A serious attempt to understand ! Perhaps today's youth have had curiosity and the pursuit of truth kicked out of them. Time to restore it one person at a time. Havivs latest , Here's to the next 250 years , is worth watching today too.
[...]
Israel, for all its flaws, sends its young people into battle hoping they return home.
Hamas celebrates those who do not.
One culture builds bomb shelters to save civilian lives.
The other builds terror tunnels to hold civilian hostages, save the lives of terrorists, and leave civilians above ground to die in the onslaught the elites brought down upon them. Because that is the strategy. Dead Palestinians are a cost of doing business in Hamas’ global PR war. They are not a sad byproduct of war. They are a cost calculation as much as missiles, magazines, and throat-slitting daggers.
[...]
One culture develops advanced defense systems like Iron Dome to limit the necessity to send its armed forces into battle during "ceasefires" that are inevitably broken by the celebrators of martyrdom. And just to remind the folks here about just how credulous some people have become, there are people who complain that Israel having the Iron Dome is an unfair advantage that allows Israel to operate with greater impunity and that out of fairness, Israel should supply Palestine with Iron Dome. There was even one Democratic senate primary hopeful, Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who proposed such a piece of idiocy, but has now dropped out, leaving the Democratic Party incumbent Haley Stevens to battle it out with a DSA backed candidate Dr. Abdul Al-Sayed.
The forced withdrawal of Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham "my Totenkopf" Platner, because raping a woman who is a Democrat and who finally went public about the incident was a bridge too far has brought forth the lunatic fringe, including a JVP "influencer" Sim Kern, who said that, having been raped herself, if her rapist was running against a "genocide supporter", Kern would campaign for the rapist because "genocide is worse than rape".
The assumption of guilt by so many non-experts, politicians who are themselves lawyers in particular, who have no idea what sort of evidence the International Court of Justice has been weighing over the last 30 months without issuing a final opinion is truly something (revolting) to behold. For anyone who is interested, an open letter by a group of experts has just been published that focuses on the flawed "findings" of Amnesty International and the UN Commission of Inquiry and which can be found here:
https://genocideexperts.com/open-letter-on-genocide
The regressive glorification of death that you describe is complemented by the crass "pay to slay" component of anti-Israel/Jewish violence, which seems to be leaking into the West now, as hired thugs – often adolescent males – shoot up Canadian synagogues for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver (CAD $1000-ish).
Beautiful article! So, so true. So many young people who have not been asked to do anything in their lives, not to work , not to support themselves - only to live in their parents' homes and take, take, take. The parents are also responsible. Check out the birds' nests in your neighborhood - you will see Mom and Dad pushing their little ones out to become adult birds. Good lesson for the hapless youths who can do nothing and get paid the protest lies and slander.
Best of all I love this statement: If you are still not sure which side you are on in this goddamned conflict, you need a morality transplant.
Pat, you are a treasure!!!
Indeed a death cult Pat... everybuddy who sez "oh, they're jus' like us--they share our same hopes & dreams & then bloody Israel murders 'em" are under the most gob-smackin' illusion / delusion/ mind control known ta human kind...
I see folks sendin' love ta jew-hatin'/USA-hatin' Fallastinians daily along with bile fer Israel so it must be their brains got eaten by Movie Monsters!.... Yep, Mindless Zombies promotin' Mindless Zombies with explosives... as anybuddy in thrall with death has no mind an' is totally zombified.
T'day I read a great stack piece from Francisco Gil White who shared the "poifect" photo--a lil' boy no more than FIVE all decked out for gee-hawd, Dyno-Mite strapped to his chest... Not fiction...sadly
https://substack.com/@franciscogilwhite/p-205259281