by Clarice Feldman, American Thinker:
I wish you all a happy and healthy New Year even though, as 2023 draws to a close, it seems that “the whole world is festering in unhappy souls,” to quote the brilliant Tom Lehrer. I know at times it seems unlikely that 2024 will be better than this one has been, but there are some reasons for optimism. I credit independent journalism, Elon Musk with his fight for free speech on the internet, and the truism that eventually reality bites for my belief that the West may be wising up to the toxic mix of Islamism, traditional anti-Semitism, and Communism. Domestically, I credit the brilliant U.S. Constitution and the good sense of our citizens for my optimism.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Israel
Without much coverage, there are awful things going on in the world outside of Israel and Gaza. In Sudan, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Libya, Arabs are enslaving, raping, and murdering Africans. In Pakistan, 1.7 million Afghanis, many who have sheltered there for decades, were forced back to their homeland in winter, with few possessions and even fewer prospects for survival. The Ukraine-Russia war is taking an enormous toll on the lives and fortunes of civilians in both countries. This toll of atrocities against civilians is nothing new, as Matti Friedman reports, so it’s worth your time to read in its entirety. The article was written in 2014 but remains relevant today.
The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives — that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.
News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.
Despite the oversize coverage of the fighting in Gaza, the psychopath Yahya Sinwar’s days seem numbered. The Hamas infrastructure is in rubble, including most of the many miles of tunnels constructed with billions of dollars of foreign aid which was meant to improve civilian life, but was commandeered to aid death-cult forays into Israel. Along with Sinwar’s demise must come the death of UNWRA, which has been fully exposed as a leading force behind Islamist terrorism in Gaza. The UN and the international press, along with our own major media, have black eyes for their role in the invasion of Israel, the butchery there, the hostage-taking — all of it. (To take one example of many, it took 83 days after October 7 for the New York Times to finally report on the rapes and mutilations of Israeli women by Hamas.) A number of aid organizations have also exposed themselves as anti-Semites and will in time be as fully discredited. How the western press gets such reporting wrong is detailed in former AP reporter Matti Friedman’s account.
In European countries, the huge wave of Islamists and recent immigrants from Islamic countries have joined the stew of right-wing anti-Semites and communists to demand their countries force a cease-fire on Israel (that is, when they are not demanding those countries scrap their own laws and customs and replace them with Sharia law). Germany has banned such demonstrations and deported numbers of the demonstrators, France has threatened to do so, while the UK seems paralyzed to act as the streets of London are swamped with pro-Hamas and pro-Sharia thugs who beset British patriots and deface treasured national symbols. Still, there are leaders in the West whose popularity rose in defiance of these mobs: Italy, the Netherlands, and Argentina seem to prefer rational leaders to cowards and appeasers. In any event, the demonstrators demand for a cease-fire seems futile. The latest offer of one in return for the hostages was rejected by Sinwar.
Read More @ AmericanThinker.com
