Author's Foreword:

Dear Readers of Guerre and Shalom:

I am sharing the Introduction to my forthcoming book. Once again, I was compelled to write about this; I really did not want to do so. An author does not always freely “choose” her topics. Since I am one of the pioneers of Second-Wave feminism, I wanted to honor it and at the same time document that we were only human beings, imperfect, and that those who came after us were far more than imperfect—they betrayed the essence of women’s rights. I call them faux-feminists.

They are the ones who wear hijab or niqab on campuses even as women in Afghanistan and Iran are murdered for failing to do so. They are also the ones who view “Palestine” as the most important feminist issue in the world. This is also true for Women’s Studies, Reproductive Rights, in the LGBTQ movement, the Goddess movement, the Christian Feminist Theologians, and for Feminist activism. I also charted the existence and rise of Antisemitism/anti-Zionism among Second-Wave feminists, including among some of our “icons,” from the early 1970s on, as well as in the media, and in international organizations long before it was on anyone’s radar.

Pretty crazy, yes? And yet it is so.

Here, have at it.

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“The Complete Palestinianization of American Feminism: A Lived History” by Phyllis Chesler

Introduction

The Second-Wave feminism that I once pioneered has been completely Palestinianized.

Sixty years ago, I did not foresee that feminists would so eagerly join the rest of the West in embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless, and suicidal; that feminists would privilege barbarism over civilization; and that they would one day become such grim totalitarian thinkers, such cowardly herd animals, and so susceptible to pro-Islamist and anti-Zionist/antisemitic propaganda.

Contemporary American “feminism” is far more concerned with the alleged occupation of Palestine—a country that does not and has never existed—than it is with the occupation of women’s bodies, faces, and minds worldwide.

It is a postmodern, postcolonial, and intersectional “feminism” in which legitimate concerns about race and an anti-woman obsession with identity have replaced any focus on sex-based rights. It is a “feminism” that passionately condemns Christianity, Judaism, and only one nation-state—Israel—as dangerous to women’s rights but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason. This allegedly evolved version of “feminism” condemns only Western imperialism and colonialism and refuses to acknowledge the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, and both gender and religious apartheid.

Women’s Studies associations and national feminist organizations are not merely “politically correct”; they have become “Islamically correct.” They are currently more concerned with the religious sanctity of head and face veiling than they are with forced face veiling and honor-based violence in Muslim countries and in Muslim communities in the West. In the name of anti-racism, not only have such faux feminists betrayed the Jews, but they have also abandoned tribal and immigrant women of color to barbaric misogyny. Above all, they have abandoned the most heroic ex-Muslim, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, and Hindu male and female dissidents everywhere.

Too many Western feminists have become total conformists. They are no longer independent or creative thinkers. Faux feminists have also been persuaded that Islam is a “race,” not an ideology or a religion; that America’s historically grievous enslavement of Black Africans and South Africa’s horrifying apartheid regime are exactly the same as alleged Israeli discrimination against Arab Palestinians, including against Jihadists with blood on their hands. American feminists are no longer independently inspired activists but only take to the streets in large swarms of Jihad-like bullies and usually on behalf of non-feminist issues.

For more than a half-century, American academics and so-called feminists have condemned American foreign and corporate policies and are now ready to die for America’s sins; they are quite willing to sacrifice their own way of life, as well as the lives of others, for a presumably noble cause; they are ready to surrender the West to a cleansing, redeeming force—in the misguided belief that doing so will finally rid the entire world of its immense suffering.

They believe that only America has caused the world’s pain and only its destruction can cure it. They view themselves as barbarians who have forfeited the right to challenge any other group, culture, or religious ideology, no matter how dangerous or violent, lest they somehow “offend.”

Some of these American faux feminists actually believe that the humbling of America and the destruction of Israel will reduce the sorrows of all the world’s victims. They hope it will also free them from the burden of Empire—a guilt they so unhappily bear—even if this also means that the whole planet might be bombed back to the seventh century.

Some of my former Second-Wave feminist allies and their contemporary faux-feminist descendants view Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis—even al-Qaeda and ISIS—as forces that are trying to level the playing field.

Totalitarian thinking is flourishing today among educated American elites. Thought-control is flying high under the banners of “free speech” and “political correctness.” Dare to question this privileged lot’s right to silence or shame those who are trying to expose or challenge them, and you’ll quickly be attacked as representing a new and more dreadful form of McCarthyist “witch-hunting.”

Of course, movements are bound to evolve, and a diversity of ideas is always welcome. Blind and righteous conformity to rank propaganda is not a genuine intellectual development. Communist thinking is not an evolution; it is, rather, a devolution. It’s been tried and, in human hands, has failed; the human costs are beyond acceptable. An exaggerated concern for one’s own body and for one’s own sexual identity in no way addresses faux feminists’ presumably larger concerns about poverty, racism, climate change, and justice for the oppressed.

*****

Just as the Jewish pioneers once drained the malaria-infested swamps in the Holy Land, so too am I rooting out the swamps teeming with ancient Blood Libels and Big Lies that have penetrated and dominated every conceivable feminist space in America and, for that matter, in the entire Western world. Even I, who have been writing about this for decades, am overwhelmed by how much it is proving a Sisyphus-like task, or as my colleague Richard Landes has said, how much it’s like cleaning out the Augean Stables, a filth-ridden cattle enclosure that Hercules purged in a single day.^[i]

I am no Hercules. None of us is. But although the task is a mighty one, as Albert Camus understood, there is still valor and purpose in the perpetual attempt to do so.

Centuries of Christian and Islamic Jew-hatred as well as more than one hundred years of Soviet-era anti-Zionist/antisemitic propaganda, especially as propagated and even legalized by the United Nations, preceded all that was to follow. American organizations, left-wing philanthropists, and billions—perhaps even trillions—in Arab oil money solidified this new kind of “education.” Many Second-Wave feminist icons as well as their followers drank the proverbial Kool-Aid.

To my horror, most American faux feminists are among those who remained silent after 10/7. Unbelievably, they believe that wearing hijab and niqab (a face mask) is a statement of anti-racism or an act of heroic “resistance.”

It was not always like this.

Once, there was a moment in time, when a veritable multitude of American Sleeping Beauties awakened and saw themselves and each other in a totally new way. That moment has passed, but I still remember it with wonder and affection. Radical feminist ideas and activism were a bit like taking LSD. So many women became high at the same time. Suddenly, the world became psychedelically clear, and all the Lost Girls found themselves and each other.

The world had not seen anything like us—at least not since the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century suffragists, both in England and in America. We’d never seen anything like us. We—who only yesterday had been second- and third-class citizens—had, all at once, and all too briefly, become players in history.

I am writing this book as a Second-Wave pioneer, and I am doing so in order to remind both the anti-feminists and the faux feminists who we were and for what we once fought. I am writing this book for the coming generations and for the sake of the historical record.

Who were we?

Second-Wave pioneers emerged between 1963 and 1973, and we took ideas very seriously. Some of us were geniuses. Many of us were dangerously intelligent, and most of us were radical thinkers. We did not all think alike. We were champion hairsplitters and disagreed with each other with searing passion. In our midst was the usual assortment of scoundrels, bullies, con artists, liars, and incompetents—not to mention high-functioning psychopaths, manic depressives, and suicide artists.

However, I am not a “wokester.” I will not write any of them out of history or censor their works.

Without a feminist movement, I would have had a career but not necessarily a calling. I still would have written my books, but they would have had much smaller audiences and far less impact.

Despite everything, despite anything, I wouldn’t have missed this revolution—not for love or money. I remain forever grateful for that moment in time, that collective awakening that set me, at least partly, free from my former life as a “girl.”

Turning to women for the first time in my life to discuss my—and their—most important ideas was psychologically and intellectually revolutionary. For many of us rebellious and ambitious daughters, the wounds of maternal disapproval were temporarily healed.

However, we knew nothing—absolutely nothing—about our American and European feminist foremothers and forefathers, even less about non-Western feminists. Few of us knew that we had feminist ancestors who had battled for women’s rights and for minority rights in the Western world in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Before us, feminists had opposed sex slavery, wage slavery, marriage, automatic male custody of children, organized religion, and the absence of women’s legal, economic, educational, and political rights. Their writings were brilliant and fiery—but unknown to each successive generation.

In 1982, nearly twenty years after Betty Friedan’s enormously influential work, The Feminine Mystique,^[ii] had appeared, the divine Australian feminist scholar Dale Spender published Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, in which she documented how the most remarkable feminist work had always been systematically disappeared again and again.^[iii]

Every generation of feminists had to reinvent the wheel. Mine certainly did. We called ourselves “sisters” and “daughters,” and we had no mothers, no heroic female models or mentors. We were, if anything, matricidal. With some exceptions, we also rejected the lives our own mothers had led.

Within ten to fifteen years, with a few exceptions, books by the best minds of my feminist generation were already out of print. Within fifteen years, university professors and their students were largely unfamiliar with most of our work. They took for granted—or regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned—the grueling lawsuits we had brought, our brave activism, and our most radical analyses, if indeed they even knew what we had done at all.

In our own lifetimes, we became like our suffragist grandmothers and shared their dusty, forgotten fate.

But I remember us as we were, and how we will always be: politically, intellectually, and sexually vivid, vivacious, incredibly vibrant.

Here’s what we did.

First, we formed a civil rights organization for women: The National Organization for Women (NOW), co-founded by two Black women—Aileen Hernandez^[iv] and Pauli Murray, who was a quietly “out” lesbian^[v] —and by a Jewish woman: Betty Friedan. NOW launched and won incredible class-action lawsuits. It demanded women’s employment and banking rights, access to public accommodations, and, in general, demonstrated against women’s legal, reproductive, political, and economic inequality. This work led to women’s entrance into formerly male-only jobs.

We picketed, marched, protested, sat in, and famously took over offices and buildings; helped women obtain illegal abortions; joined consciousness-raising groups; learned about orgasms; condemned incest, rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence; organized speak-outs, crisis hotlines, and shelters for battered women; some feminists came out as lesbians.

Finally, we implemented feminist ideas within our professions and began a process of transformation that, in some areas, continues to this day.

These were the three mighty tributaries of the second wave. I swam in all three torrents.

And yet.

Only now, looking back, do I remember how much of the early years of second-wave feminism was also painful.

I had such an idealized view of feminism that when I began to encounter incomprehensibly vicious behavior among feminists, I was stunned, blindsided. I had expected so much of other feminists—far too much, perhaps we all did—that when we failed to meet our own high standards, many of us felt betrayed.

And then, when we were really betrayed—slandered, shunned by everyone we knew, our ideas stolen, our authorship denied, our history revised—we had no name for what was happening. Eventually, we called this “trashing,” and it drove away many good feminists.

Individual petty jealousies and leaderless group bullying were frightening and ugly. “Mean girls” envied and destroyed excellence and talent. Feminists who had presumably left the 1960s Left brought with them its tactics of intimidation and interrogation. Many lesbians were supremacists who demanded primacy in terms of victimhood.

Some feminists did sound the alarm about what came to be called “trashing.” In 1970, the actress, journalist, and future film director Anselma Dell’Olio addressed this in an unpublished and incandescent manuscript that she titled her “Swan Song to the Women’s Movement.” In 1972, I quoted Anselma and discussed this subject in Women and Madness.^[vi]

In 1972, and again in 1976, Jo Freeman (Joreen) discussed this phenomenon in two important articles in Ms. Magazine: “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.^[vii]”

Mere words didn’t lead to a feminist reevaluation of sisterhood. Few feminists wanted to look at how they treated other women. And fewer still wanted to consider the possibility that the movement was not both “breast and womb.”

However, Paradise is always followed by the Fall.

For example: My good friend and colleague, the late great psychologist Naomi Weisstein, told me that within three years of its formation, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band had turned on her in pretty much all the familiar feminist ways. Naomi had written many of their songs and was also a genius at stand-up comedy at their performances. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which she had helped found in 1969, had already trashed her as a “star” and demanded that she surrender her speaking engagements to less eloquent speakers. Band members followed suit, and, fraught with envy and untold hidden agendas, they brought about the end of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band in 1973.^[viii]

As has been said: First, our movement ate its leaders; then, they turned on each other.

None of this stopped me, but it took its toll. After twenty years of research, I finally published a book titled Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (2002). Nothing to see here. Feminists behaved just like women behaved towards each other: competitively, aggressively, and with cruelty—a female version of Man’s Inhumanity to Man.

My greatest comfort and strength came from doing the work itself—and from knowing that my work touched, changed, and even saved women’s lives.

But I also never stopped trying. Twenty years later, I convened a panel at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association at Spelman College. The panel’s title was “Horizontal Hostility among Women: Race, Class and Gender Issues,” and it nearly tore the roof off the place. Because my invitee and co-panelist, author bell hooks,^[ix] and I publicly agreed on so incendiary a subject, some audience members—many of whom were African American women—accused the much-younger hooks of being my “mammy.” But mainly the audience wanted to tell their own stories of woman-on-woman betrayal and heartbreak. When we were finally forced to leave the auditorium, I sat outside on the lawn for a very long time listening to them speak.

Once, I also presented my views on psychological matricide and sororicide at a national conference of feminist therapists. Therapists had difficulty acknowledging that women could also be sexists. One African American therapist insisted that this was a “white girl’s problem”; one lesbian therapist insisted that this was a “straight girl’s problem”; one heterosexual therapist said that she hadn’t known that “women even had ‘a’ mother goddess or that we had killed her.” She urgently wanted to know “the” goddess’s name.

This book will share my own encounters with anti-Zionism/antisemitism among other feminist “icons”—long before our descendants became Palestinianized. However, I do not stop with my own experiences.

Sighing mightily as I girded my loins for this book, I also researched the American Women’s Studies movement; the Reproductive Rights movement; the LGBT and Queer movement; the Wiccan/Mother Goddess movement; the Christian feminist liberation theology movements; and the Feminist Activism, Media, and Organization movements. This research includes many contemporary interviews as well as much reading; it was considerably painful and enraging but also enlightening.

Look: I’m not asking for much. (Just joking.) But as the demonstrators chant: “What do I want? And when do I want it?” For starters: I want feminist intellectuals, academics, activists, and organizational leaders to learn how to shun propaganda and peer pressure.

I want them to write only about subjects in which they are truly expert and to write clearly and think independently.

I want them to quit being Jew haters and anti-Zionists.

I want them to stop sacrificing the women and dissidents of Islam in order to bring about the destruction of the West.

As I was writing this introduction, a lesbian feminist who is in her late eighties posted a rant on social media. Her name does not matter. There are thousands more like her:

The US and Israel are bombing the hell out of Iran, killing Iranian people and destroying sacred historical heritage sites while caskets containing young American soldiers who died for the cause are carried across our TV screens without an honor guard and all we hear is the success of the mission while the price of gas goes up and the stock market goes down and the worn out tired Earth continues to die and whatever happens after is unknown; and yet, our country right or wrong is no longer the place where dark skinned immigrants could once flee to because we now have concentration camps and deportation of such much needed immigrants who do the dirty work; and all this while pregnant migrant teens are kept in a place in South Texas to keep them safe from abortions. Have I gotten these things right, or is it my fevered imagination run wild?

As of this writing, I’ve not yet seen a parade of Vietnam War-era-like young American soldiers in caskets being carried across our screens without an honor guard post-Iran, have you? I’m not saying that this cannot happen…

However, the only feminist issue she mentions—abortion—appears towards the end of her post, and the only pregnant women she is concerned about are the “migrant teens.” She seems to have no knowledge that Iran has been murdering and torture-murdering Americans for the last 47 years; she knows or cares nothing about Iran’s barbaric persecution and murder of its own people, including feminist and gay dissidents. Climate change and immigration now pass as burning feminist issues, not sexual violence towards women and children, woman-battering, or even female poverty.

This book was very hard for me to write. The amount and intensity of anti-Zionism and antisemitism among my former allies and friends, the Palestinianization among my so-called descendants, the faux feminists—made me feel tainted by choosing to handle so much toxic material.

However, real feminist work has continued on throughout the 21st century.

Contemporary real feminism differs from our Second-Wave grand illusions and historically lucky momentum, but, in a way, it has also built upon many of our ideas. Real twenty-first century feminism is a bit more balkanized in terms of a feminist focus on one ethnicity, one race, one issue only, but it is also more international in nature. It is not Palestinianized work; the focus is not on the overriding importance of Palestine.

This is a very personal book. I lived everything about which I write: it either happened to me, or I was an eyewitness to the incident, or I spoke to the woman immediately afterwards. I also lectured and published about it from the early 1970s on. In addition, I interviewed still-living Second-Wave feminists about their own experiences of antisemitism/anti-Zionism. As a “recovering academic,” I was able to read a great deal of academic (and pseudo-academic) work that appeared both back in the day and throughout the 21st century.

The personal voice—or my lived experience—is my contribution to the historical record. This is exceptionally important since so many accounts of Second-Wave feminism, especially on the subjects of Israel, Judaism, anti-Zionist/antisemitism, Islam, and Palestine, have been wiped clean on the internet or radically transformed into believable lies. Some important feminists and events have been “disappeared”; credit for something that someone else really did has been neatly claimed. Of course, this kind of revisionism is also true in general—more so with the advent of social media and AI.

I hope that my personal voice will make it easier to trust my political conclusions and analyses. As they said in my generation: “The personal is political,” and so it is.

If one lives long enough, one may also begin to hear the sound of a mighty pendulum beginning to swing.

For example: Early in 2026, a brave new group, Feminists Against Antisemitism, asked to interview me. They are primarily based in the UK, and even more significantly, most of the founders are Christians. Jews are among them. Their group arose in response to pro-Palestinian demonstrators and their attempted takeover of a feminist conference in Brighton, England.

I have waited for them for quite a long time. I am so glad they are now here. The late great poet Adrienne Rich, in her collection Snapshots of a Daughter in Law, speaks for me:

“Well,

she’s long about her coming, who must be

more merciless to herself than history.

her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge

breasted and glancing through the currents,

taking the light upon her

at least as beautiful as any boy

or helicopter,

poised, still coming,

her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:

delivered

palpable

ours.”

^[i] Richard Landes, “Augean Stables,” Augean Stables (Augean Stables), accessed June 18, 2026, https://theaugeanstables.com/; Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Harvard University Press, 1995); Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford University Press, 2011); Richard Landes, Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Academic Studies Press, 2022).

^[ii] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (W. W. Norton & Company, 1963); Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Random House, 1976).

^[iii] Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).

^[iv] Aileen Hernandez, National Women of Color Organizations: A Report to the Ford Foundation (Ford Foundation, 1991).

^[v] Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (Harper & Brothers, 1956); Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (Harper & Row, 1987).

^[vi] Anselma Dell’Olio, “Swan Song to the Women’s Movement” (unpublished manuscript, 1970); Fellini of the Spirits, directed by Anselma Dell’Olio (Mad Entertainment, 2020).

^[vii] Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” The Second Wave 2, no. 1 (1972); Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” Ms. magazine, April 1976.

^[viii] Naomi Weisstein, Psychology Constructs the Female (New England Free Press, 1968); Naomi Weisstein, “Will the Women’s Movement Survive?,” Ms. magazine, 1975; “Chicago Women’s Liberation Union Herstory Project,” Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (Chicago Women’s Liberation Union), accessed June 18, 2026, https://www.cwluherstory.org/

^[ix] bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1981); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (South End Press, 1984).

On a Similar Subject:

THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: Twenty Roots of a Modern Blood Libel

by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Introduction: The Genocide of Truth

Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority // Chapter 9: Declaration // Chapter 10: Confusion // Chapter 11: Conversation // Chapters 12 and 13 below.

Chapter 12: Democratisation

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Chapter 13: Sophistry

The Descent of Politics

The past is not a foreign country. We are living “the past” as we speak. For no work emerges in a vacuum and no inspiration is absent of context. We live in the era of The Great Genocide Blood Libel, the most pernicious abomination of our age. The claim that civilian war dead amounts to extermination. The claim that Israel, with its advanced weaponry and precision technology, is incapable of doing to civilians in two years what any competent military power could do in two days. It’s an affront to common sense; an offensive joke. But it’s an old joke, a tried and tested affront to obviousness that has been with us throughout recorded history. And speaking of history, let’s turn to its founding father: Thucydides.

To reference the famous Greek in his history of the Peloponnesian War, words change their meaning. In his case “reckless audacity” came to be “courage of a loyal ally”, “prudent hesitation” was rebranded as “specious cowardice” and the “ability to see all sides of a question” was deemed “inaptness to act on any”. Oh how little has changed! For it was as true then in the civil war at Corcyra as it is now in the non-existence genocide in Gaza.

We live in an unintellectual age whose edifice is built on a foundation of sand. When Thucydides wrote his magnum opus, he did so with a hubristic faith in rationality. Hippocrates had led the way with an inductive approach to medicine and Thucydides followed close behind.

Eschewing the Homeric penchant for explaining world events in terms of myth and godly power, he decided instead to frame the world on an ever expanding basis of evidence. It is this that led slowly but surely to the modern wave of social science.

We admire Thucydides. We follow Thucydides. At least in the public square, we reach for cause and effect. Explanation. Predictability in the face of dispassionate past evidence. This is to be praised, to a point. But just as words can be used to define and terms can be used to elucidate, elucidated definitions can be manipulated in the name of power. “Objectivity” can be used to befuddle with abandon.

These are ancient lessons. In the era of Athens, primitive science advanced in a faustian partnership, accompanied ingloriously by sophistry —the ability to engage rhetoric for effect, the ability to manipulate language for desired result. Efficiency, rather than truth, was the order of the day; so much so that Thucydides invented the supposedly verbatim speeches of generals. He wasn’t there and he couldn’t in any case have scribed an accurate transcription. Instead he wrote what they would and should have said if the generals had been effective speakers according to the science of rhetoric.

And so it was that science met sophistry to create a corrupted language. Objective terms muddied by manipulated “truth”. Democracy was the bastard child of this union. Though founded on a noble creed of rational debate, it descended into foolishness through sophistry. Making a point well trumped making the right point. Persuasion through words bested words well-defined.

And so it was that war was decided by ill-considered vote and massacres, avoided and committed, were decided by a show of hands. Rational argument - so-called rational argument - was the difference between life and death and thus by their lips, men became gods. Self-appointed gods who wreaked the havoc that Zeus, by his non-existence, was incapacitated from bringing about.

Induction through observation was never meant to lead on this blood-stained trail. Yet liberated from mythology, the Athenians came to worship power, not justice. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. And so it was that adult Melian men faced extermination and their women enslavement. That is the consequence, foreseeable and unfortunate, of democratic sophistry.

Yet not all politicians are capable of the dark arts, and so they must be removed; eliminated by their sweet-talking enemies. And it is here that we recall Keir Starmer, today resigned from his Holborn pew. Once upon a time, he was set for Downing Street and that he would be Prime Minister was scarcely in doubt. He was flying high in the opinion polls and his opponents - divided, disunited and running empty on ideas - were on the road to Opposition.

Yet even with such a headwind, Sir Keir felt vulnerable - and he had good reasons for anxiety. For though their efforts were largely unsuccessful, his red-green councillors wished him ill – to bring him down over Gaza. In the event he was to secure a massive majority, but there were casualties; brave lieutenants who were to fall to the pro-Gaza vanguard.

Starmer knew his history and he trembled. He remembered Blair, by far the most electorally successful leader in Labour history. The circumstances of his downfall were many and varied: Iraq’s long tail, cash-for-honours, the machinations of Brown. Yet the proximate cause was telling and it wasn’t a war that, however unpopular, failed to deny him victory in 2005. Rather it was Israel’s war: Lebanon.

During that now-forgetten conflict, Blair was to take a principled stand; a position at which Alcibiades would have winced. He stood by Israel. In defiance of his party, in solidarity with America, he isolated Britain within the international community. Labour MPs had held their breath over Iraq, voting dutifully as the casualties flowed in and results were “mixed”. But supporting Israel? That was a step too far. He was effectively forced to resign.

History has repeated itself; inexorably; inevitably. Sir Keir romped to victory; his political power at its zenith; his electoral position impregnable. He destroyed the Conservatives in true-blue rural heartlands and even Scotland was to fall to the crimson-red march. Yet two years later he was gone.

The reasons were manifold, charisma, slow change and tone-deaf story-telling playing their part. Yet Gaza always loomed large. His relative support for Israel, his solidarity against terror, his failure to fall to The Great Genocide Blood Libel: all these increased the anger of his base, voting percentages collapsing as they trooped towards the anti-Zionist, environmentally-silent Greens.

“Man of the People” Andy Burnham understood the message: not the message from those flying the St George‘s flags, but rather the marching anger of his “genocide”-parroting base. As a good politician - “the anti-Starmer” - he acted decisively. He apologised about Gaza in one of his first national acts. He spoke to Lineker and when asked about “genocide”, failed to push back. As a sophist, he knew what progressivism required: “words had to change their ordinary meaning” –and their redefinition went without challenge.

He is not alone. In Democratic Primary after Democratic Primary, Israel is on the ballot. “Genocide” is the calling card for progressive votes. And in this climate, where are the “moderates” to be found? From Harris to Schumer, no-one is prepared to call out untruth; they have a sophists instinct, policy perfected through the show of hands. Sir Keir saw it coming, and no amount of Palestinian State recognition could offset the “genocide” onslaught.

And so we are faced with the descent of Western politics, a corrupted system that is entirely performative; where it’s all about identity in a world still struggling with post-colonialism and “the death of God”. Indeed perhaps it is “Democracy” itself that is on the ballot as words become increasingly meaningless?

And it is that linguistic meaninglessness that currently overwhelms all (above all action). For to be frank, it doesn’t matter what Burnham opines about the Middle East. Still less what some random town councillor has to say. As the leader of second-tier power, nothing he says is going to affect what happens on the ground. If he calls for a “peace deal”, there won’t be a “peace deal”. If he calls for anything at all, that won’t cause it to happen. He knows that. His members know that. So why is he so insistent in his new position, nodding quietly along as an ex-footballer disseminates the genocide lie?

Because, and I repeat, modern politics is performative. It is about signaling your “values”. It isn’t about actually changing anything. Hopefully, Sir Keir took a pro-Israel-ish position because he believed in it. Perhaps Burnham is overwhelmed with the opposite sentiment. But one thing is certain: What neither are influenced by in any way are their ability to influence the situation on the ground. Their words are hot air. Appreciated or despised hot air. But hot air nonetheless. And anti-Israel Labour members, due to their own ideological considerations, are wasting their own hot air to obtain other hot air more to their liking.

They were even prepared to prevent Sir Keir becoming a Labour Prime Minister where, one hoped, he would put in place policies that he did have control over. How extraordinary! That the Labour Party were more concerned about meaningless statements than actually getting into power. For them, virtue-signaling, or vice-signaling according to your point of view, is of greater importance than actually doing anything.

Look around the Free World. No matter the issue. No matter the country. All that motivates activists, voters, the media and, by extension, politicians are words; meaningless words; vessels void of denotation through Babelesque confusion. Words have morphed into mere symbols; that which signifies ideologically purity, political positioning and tribal validation. Sophistry in other words.

Here we describe just one example of an old-new phenomenon: a Babel of antiquity that has maturated in modernity. It has been solidified in our modern world of Thucydides, where words are twisted in the cause of power and Western democracy has justified terror. We rationalise horrific Arab crimes through demagogic diversion to Israel. We ignore Pax Arabica, yet speak of Israeli “genocide”. We do what we must in a world of power. We — well represented by our politicians.

So to be clear, the problem isn't that “politicians are bad"; indeed, like Starmer and Blair, they may be punished for insufficient sophistry. They (relatively) held firm to principle while their constituents demanded the vacuous.

The issue, as ever, is one of incentives; the call of the fates to which Burnham dutifully answers. Here is the formula: Democracy asks politicians to persuade.
Persuasion rewards simplification. Simplification rewards emotionally legible language. Emotionally legible language becomes tribal signalling. Tribal signalling rewards semantic inflation. Semantic inflation favours sophistry. Sophistry becomes political advantage.

In short, democracy rewards the sophist; the politician who understands his audience’s language; that which they wish to hear repeated ad nauseum.

Thus politicians aren't “bad” or “good”. Less liar; more listener who wishes to survive. Sophistry is demanded of them: a species of political natural selection; the outcome of the dialectic between the politician and their electorate.

This is how a falsehood becomes accepted without first passing the test of truth. Not through myth, but through persuasive “reason”; that which is used to destroy language in the name of a (soon-to-be explored) progressive doctrine. It is the destruction wreaked by Athens at the genesis of “history”.

The Genocide of Truth was conceived to confront this West of perverted “reason”; for it besieges Melos not with spears, but slogans. Those of us who refuse the ‘genocide’ dispensation are cast out, our arguments unheard, exactly as the Melians’ pleas for justice went unheard by Athens –she that decided that power, not Truth, would settle every political question.

We say otherwise and our thesis is simple: Truth exists. Words have meaning. Democracy, easily abused, should be for the good (But can it be?). So let us finally speak with candor. It is Middle Eastern lies - backed up by Western word-abusing sophists - that have destroyed the foundations of our discourse. May we respond today with the re-meaningfication of our words so that the people of Melos may be besieged no more.

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Michael’s perspective impacts directly on the question of stability, anti-revolution and social cohesion which is why it forms part of Guerre and Shalom’s SOCIAL COHESION FORTNIGHT. Don’t forget to read the other articles here:

Finally, on the matter of paid subscriptions, the price of Guerre and Shalom will be going up within 2 weeks. I’ve kept the subscription price at £45 (€61) for a while, but from FRIDAY 11th SEPTEMBER, it will increase to £50 (€68). If you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, subscribe before then and you’ll lock in the current price. If you’re already a paid subscriber like Michael, nothing changes for you, so enjoy the permanently reduced rate: your price is fixed.

200+ of you are already supporting The World’s Intelligent Journal and are able to read every serialised book chapter along with the full archive. Thank you. But for everyone else, now is the time to sign up! - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

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“Politics of the horseshoe” by Michael Constan

Every change in government is a revolution, no matter how peaceful the transition; it can present as a shift in one single policy to a complete overthrow of the political establishment. We witness this now in the West at the hands of the educated classes, primarily centered on college campuses, left-wing political parties, and the “woke” far-right; these groups portray inimical political systems as superior to our own democratic institutions.

They seek to overthrow our country under the guise of protecting these same institutions.

They divide our society into oppressors and oppressed, the same technique rooted in most revolutions throughout history.

While this ideology predates the industrial revolution, the major sources for this modern intrusion include Socialist theory, postmodernist thought, postcolonial theory and Islamism. University faculty refuse to examine their roots; instead, they have allowed the major proponents of these ideas, Russia, China, Qatar and Iran, to fund them, leaving them beholden to their munificence and providing their benefactors with unquestioned support. In this way, university faculty have pursued an unrelenting assault on our history, culture, and philosophies which they seek to topple.

The horseshoe theory mirrors this disintegration of social cohesion. Since its introduction in 1990s political discourse, commentators portrayed it as a measure of societal satisfaction with the political climate.

They argue that the bar starts straight, with little distinction between the political right and the political left; as political factions assume power, their underlying principles drive policy decisions that lead to ideological fractures in the body politic. As disagreements with federal policy rises, the extremes look for alternative measures to ameliorate social problems. Eventually, as the right and left become more extreme, they break off from the mainstream, bending into a bar in opposition. This model is simplistic; it measures extreme attitudes as a linear extension of those in the mainstream, merely noting that far-left and far-right have violence and unfreedom in common.

Instead of a single bar, I would propose a three-bar chart, with each bar lying horizontally. The top bar is a straight line reflecting the foundational philosophies, principles and institutions of the reigning constitutional regime, which lies parallel to the lowest bar which represents all ideologies, documents and institutions that stand in opposition to the system. The horseshoe should the middle bar; it is flexible and can deviate from total support for the current government to support for the opposition and the potential for overthrow of the government.

This model reflects the historical reality. Many new governments arose from violent, oppositional revolution, including the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and many kingdoms and empires; ironically, the Nazi party was elected by the people. As in all revolutions, there are at least two diametrically-opposed ideologies, only one of which can win.

For the West, the upper bar represents governments elected by the people, while the lowest bar represents autocratic systems including communism, socialism, dictatorships and theocracies.

The upper bar reflects the philosophies, founding documents, institutions, and societal values of the original founders of the state. For the United States, the upper bar represents the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist documents, all amendments to the constitution, including all institutions created through the establishment of our country and governmental agencies as approved by the House and Senate. The values set forth by our constitution include a freedom of speech, neither establishment of an official religion nor denial of right of practice, freedom to pursue your goals, including ownership of property, creating a business, and the right for citizens to participate in government through a republican form that allows representatives and senators to act as proxies to vote for their districts and states.

The Constitution is a man-made document and is in continual need for improvement; our founding fathers realized this, defining the mechanisms for change in the Constitution through the common will of the people. While our Constitution mandates a separation of church and state, our culture is rooted in the Christian tradition and Western civilization that influenced our founding fathers who drafted it.

Our founding fathers united against Great Britain because of colonial economic policy; among the issues was taxation without representation and mandatory transportation of raw materials for industry in England. Many residents in the colonies opposed separation and supported the King.

The chart was already in play at this time; the Revolution was not only against a colonial power, but a civil war. The combatants had opposing philosophies; one side supported the monarchy, while the other side met, debated and discussed their ideas for the future country. The arguments were intense, and the (small r) republicans almost lost.1

When the war was over, the people who sided with the King moved throughout other parts of the British Empire; as the opposition, they reflected the lowest bar in their support for the regime out of power. Those who stayed supported the current constitutional reality. As those who remained supported the new government, the center bar hung mostly parallel to the upper bar of the Government of the United States.2

The central bar reflects the will of the people. As we have seen, those who initially remain in the country nominally support the government. With time, however, issues arise that affect societal happiness, including acts of weather, monetary policy and wars. This is where the lowest bar comes into play.

The lowest bar reflects opposition to the established government. Any divisive issue that arises can lead to the development of an opposition movement; this is especially true if the most educated class feels oppressed. Thus most of the leaders of opposition movements were children of the upper-classes; this includes Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, the Castro Brothers, Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chih Minh, and Pol Pot.

While Hitler was self-educated and did not come from the upper class, many of his early followers had PhDs, including Goebbels, Mengele, and Werner Von Braun. Stalin, by contrast, was from a peasant family, but he was a student in a seminary before becoming a communist.

Western civilization (the top bar) is marked by belief in civil rights for all, freedom of speech and religion, generally separation of church and state, except for those where religion is officially recognized in foundational documents, and social and economic opportunity.

The Western-residing opposition to the West (the lowest bar) is marked by various levels of autocracy, including absolute monarchies, dictatorships, theocracies, and ideologically-based systems requiring allegiance to the ruling party and the alternative governmental structure. This requirement alone demonstrates the validity of the revised model of the horseshoe.

To demonstrate this issue, we should recall the American and French Revolutions which stand as diametric opposites. What distinguished the American from the French was that whilst the founding documents were flawed, the nation's fathers wrote them with the understanding that man is flawed and that society evolves. The result is that we have unparalleled freedom in comparison to most of the world.

As mentioned, the opponents of the creation of the United States left the country, while the remainder accepted the basic underpinnings of our constitution. The purpose of the revolution was explicit; the leadership wanted freedom to create a governmental and legal system that would grow to benefit all of society.3

While the United States succeeded in creating a working country after their revolution, the French Revolution self-destructed on the guillotine of ideological purity. First, they arrested and exterminated the aristocracy and the clergy; then they went for the Girondists, the “conservative” revolutionaries. The revolution started as a tax revolt, but the winning leadership established the Terror, beheading all those deemed opponents of their regime, including rival leaders of their own party who disagreed with Robespierre. Of course, many of the opponents were peasants and people who were devout Catholics. He attempted to recreate society in his own image, establishing a new religion that the people opposed. His death ended the Terror. Within a decade, Napoleon was emperor.

There are two kinds of revolutions: those with ideas that are rooted in true societal needs, and those rooted in power control and subordination of society. As a society, we need to question in which direction the revolutionary winds are blowing and adapt. In this endeavour, we have a constitution that serves us well.

Yet we need to be honest. There are those that seek to overturn our way of life. They oppose our constitution and wish to replace it. They are not from our political spectrum, but a threat from the lower bar. So the question is this: Can we attract the middle bar- the people - to our constitutional order? Or will we wither at the first sign of the tempest? On this answer alone does freedom depend.

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Dear Prime Minister of Pakistan,

FAO: the real military rulers of the State

Six months ago, fourteen former international cricket captains wrote to you and the Pakistani government appealing for humane treatment and proper medical care for Imran Khan. We wrote then not as politicians, but as former colleagues and rivals who share a bond forged on the cricket field - one that transcends the borders and disputes that too often divide countries.

But you didn’t reply, so we decided to engage Daniel of Guerre and Shalom Substack to up the ante. It’s difficult for us as sporting captains to speak with candour because we are beholden to fashions such as The Great Genocide Blood Libel. We have to whisper about Pakistani human rights abuses all the while condemning Gaza in a loud voice. We ignore the treatment of Afghan refugees because Gary Lineker tells us to.

Cricket was born of the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth is said to hold certain values, among them democracy, human rights and the rule of law. (We shan’t speak of good governance.) Yet by imprisoning a former Prime Minister, removed from office under undemocratic circumstances, you breach every ideal the organisation is meant to hold dear.

Mr Khan is being held in abysmal conditions, a political prisoner of a soft military dictatorship. Pakistan has lost any veneer of democracy. We detest Khan’s pragmatic, Islamist populism as much as you do - intolerance without principle! - yet we accept the inability of Muslim countries to choose humanitarian leaders as par for the course.

Our greater concern is Pakistan’s original sin. She was created by a Western Empire in an act of “European” settler-colonialism, displacing the original Hindu, Sikh and Christian inhabitants in the process. 15 million were displaced and up to 2 million were killed because of Jinnah’s “ethno-nationalism”. He argued that India’s Muslims were a distinct nation and would only survive politically in a non-Hindu majority state. Perhaps he was right, perhaps he was wrong. We don’t care. We are Western youngsters at heart and this racist borderism offends every principle of our progressive perspective.

We would have been prepared to overlook this travesty if you had behaved perfectly as a democratic nation. But you failed! You engaged in war after war with your neighbours. You prioritised the rights of Muslims, committed apartheid on your minorities, were nasty to asylum seekers and developed nuclear weapons, which was unfair on those countries that didn’t have them.

And now you have scraped the bottom of the barrel. You imprison sportsmen who moonlight as politicians and your MBS-Erdogan lovefest makes you a danger to world peace. Pakistan has failed the scapegoat test and must be wiped off the map as an act of justice!

Boycott Pakistan! Divest from Pakistan! Sanctions on Pakistan! Marches in the street and global intifada. And send their cricketers home in disgrace.

In our first draft we wrote, “We do not presume to adjudicate Pakistan’s domestic legal processes. That is not our place”. We were being diplomatic. Everything that happened in the years 1947 to 48 is of course our business. It’s a matter of shame for us spoilt, entitled, guilty Westerners and as a former London playboy, I’m sure Imran would agree.

So we ask again, this time with entitlement:

• That the medical board directed by the Supreme Court — including Mr Khan’s own doctors — be permitted to complete a full and independent assessment of his health, particularly the reported loss of vision in his right eye.

• That the weekly family visits reinstated by the Court be honoured without interruption or administrative delay.

• That whatever the outcome of that medical assessment, the treatment recommended by it be provided without delay.

But even if you submit to our requests, we won’t stop there. We will accuse you of ongoing “genocide” and 100 years of war on Punjab. We won’t stop until you are completely dismantled as a state.

We’re not experts of course, but we know human rights abuses when we see them. Most of all, we recognise historical hypocrisy —and when it comes to that charge, Pakistan has the world’s best-performing cricket team.

We hope this matter can be resolved expeditiously and with the dignity that the “free nation” of Pakistan deserves.

Yours in cricket,

The West

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Recently from Guerre and Shalom:

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The latest chapter of THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH. Help us end The Great Genocide Blood Libel:

In the 1960s and 1970s, Denmark engaged in a policy of forced contraception of indigenous Greenlandic women, a former colony over which Denmark still ruled. Doctors inserted IUDs into women without their consent or knowledge, in some cases causing a permanent inability to bear children. Even in the 90s and 2000’s, gynecologists were still finding IUDs Greenland women didn’t know they had.

Greenland’s population in 1970 was less than 50,000, as compared to Denmark’s close to 5 million. This means Greenland had only about 9000 women of prime reproductive age. But Denmark was interested in bringing the indigenous Greenlanders into the modern world, which was expensive, and believed less population would make it easier to bring the local standard of living closer to Europe’s. Greenland women were also having many of their children out of wedlock, which the Danish government disapproved of. In 1969, only around 1500 babies were born in Greenland, but authorities in Copenhagen decided that even that relatively small number was simply too much.

So Denmark embarked on a campaign of having IUDs inserted without women’s knowledge or consent. IUDs were inserted into about half of all eligible women, and births correspondingly fell by more than half, falling to a low of 638 in 1974.

In recent decades there has been a realization that this conduct was wrong. Greenland appointed a group of four experts to investigate legal responsibility, and on August 28^th they submitted their report.

The four of them had no trouble agreeing that forced sterilization is contrary to human rights. For that, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had already gone to Nuuk and issued a formal apology. But there was another, more delicate issue for them to address.

Article II of the Genocide Convention, which Denmark ratified in 1951, states: ‘Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. . . Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.’ Could Denmark therefore be guilty of genocide?

Despite Israel’s stated military aim to defeat Hamas and release the hostages, international law indicates that a state can act with genocidal intent while at the same time pursuing additional goals.- 2024 Report from Amnesty International concluding the Gaza war was genocide.

Different underlying motives do not displace genocidal intent. . .genocidal intent may exist simultaneously with other, ulterior motives.- Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, Oct. 1 2024.

The four person group divided so strongly on the issue of genocide that they divided in half, submitting two separate reports. One of the reports stated unequivocally that Denmark is not guilty of genocide, the reason being that for the government of Denmark, the primary motive for the IUD campaign was to reduce the population size in order to raise the standard of living. Even though the campaign was likely also motivated by racist views of Greenland’s indigenous culture and a desire to transform indigenous Greenlanders into becoming like Europeans, the fact that one purpose of the policy was economic means that other motives need not be considered and therefore there was no genocidal intent.

A State may be responsible for the commission of genocide through an organ whose conduct is attributable to that State. . . As agents of the State of Israel, their acts were attributable to the State of Israel. The Commission thus concluded that the State of Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide- United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry Report, Aug. 2025

The two-person report also concedes that individual doctors may well have wanted to limit Greenlanders ability to have children for racist rather than economic reasons. But it argues this would simply have been the private motivation of these particular doctors. Even though they were working on behalf of the government, their individual, private motivations can in no way be attributed to the state.

There is no need to wait for the ICJ to declare it a genocide - Navi Pillay, Chair of the three person UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory

The other report, issued by the remaining two people, who broke off from the original working group, did not rule out the possibility that the campaign of forced sterilization constituted genocide. However, they decided that making that determination is beyond their competence as they are only a group of experts. “A final decision on the question of genocide remains complex and can only be made by a court with the jurisdiction, authority and resources to convene and review all available evidence,” they wrote.

‘It is our duty to bear witness to the ongoing carnage and to name it for what it is: genocide’- Amnesty International Israel/ Palestine researcher Budour Hassan, December 2024.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has been silent on the question of genocide. In her official statement about the recent report, she acknowledges that the forced sterilization represents a ‘dark chapter from the past’ and apologized for, ‘the injustice of being subjected to systematic discrimination because they are Greenlanders.’ But she says absolutely nothing about genocide. It therefore seems that in her view, it is not important whether the term genocide accurately describes the conduct in question or not.

“It is time Palestine took its place among the free nations of the world, that it could pursue self-determination, self-governance, fulfil its obligations and avail of its rights under the UN Charter”- Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris, May 2024.

“The State of Palestine hereby declares that it accepts with immediate effect the competence of the International Court of Justice for the settlement of all disputes”- Palestinian submission to the ICJ

Opposition parties in Greenland want to bring Denmark before the International Court of Justice for a formal finding of whether the forced sterilizations do constitute genocide. However, there is a problem: Greenland lacks the standing to do this.

Up until 1953, Greenland was a Danish colony. At that time, it was incorporated into Denmark, giving Greenland residents full citizenship and voting rights. In 1979 Greenland received home rule, which gave it control over most internal affairs. Finally, in 2009, Greenland became self-governing, which included recognition that Greenlanders are a people entitled to self-determination under international law. Greenland has its own parliament, and the self-governing arrangement refers to Greenland and Denmark as equal partners.

But even though it is entitled to self-determination, Greenland is still not a state. That means it cannot be admitted to the United Nations, and it cannot initiate proceedings at the International Court of Justice. This conveniently allows Denmark to decide whether its forced sterilization program can be judged by the ICJ, regardless of Greenland’s wishes.

So was Denmark guilty of genocide according to international law? Under the standards applied to Israel, quite possibly. But why would anyone expect those same standards to be applied to a nice, European country like Denmark as well?

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THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: Twenty Roots of a Modern Blood Libel

by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Introduction: The Genocide of Truth

Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority // Chapter 9: Declaration // Chapter 10: Confusion

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CHAPTER 11: Conversation

Death of the Overton Window

We all believe in free speech – or so we tell ourselves. In reality we believe in a range of acceptable opinions out which speech is politically verboten. Since the 1990s, this space of free expression has been known as the Overton Window.

During the 21st century, and particularly within the last 10 years, the Overton Window has changed dramatically —in terms of what is deemed acceptable, the definitions of Right and Left, and the range of ideas that can be socially aired. Most noticeably of all, we have shifted from a national Overton Window to a factional one.

Where the mainstream Right and Left in the past differed in their views, they shared an Overton Window. Whether you were Labour or Conservative - or the equivalent in your own countries - you had an identical sense of where Extreme Right and Left lay. Thus you could debate openly with your political opponents, come to regular consensus and stonewall the extremes.

An excellent example of this is in the Israeli context is Likud’s attitude to the Extreme Right. In the halcyon days of Yitzhak Shamir, it was Likud policy to boycott Meir Kahane and his political ideas, yet his political son Itamar Ben Gvir is a full member of the current Netanyahu Administration. So whereas the Likud and the Centre-Left once shared an Overton Window, now they live in different political universes.

The effects can be seen beyond Parliamentary politics —in the heart of the mainstream media. When the British largely shared one Overton window, the BBC could genuinely claim to be impartial, if by that one means airing all manner of acceptable political views. Regardless of the staffing of the Corporation, It would be duty bound to showcase voices from both the Left and Right —and it did. Allegations of bias would have had less traction because everyone in political life agreed on the extremes and most accepted that one’s opponent’s views were legitimate.

In the internet age, however, where each man is an Overton Window Island, it is impossible for the BBC (and equivalents) to maintain impartiality. Even if it were genuinely so minded, and even where acting in completely good faith, impartiality is a foreign concept in a world without bounds of acceptability.

So, in the context of the Gaza War, for example, the BBC may claim impartiality through showcasing both Israeli and Hamas voices; but given that Hamas is so far outside the author’s Overton window, it is hard for him to consider the result non-prejudicial. Impartiality doesn’t mean in the middle; it means showcasing the full range of acceptable voices. Where John says Hamas is a terrorist organization and Jane says Israel is committing “genocide”, there are no parameters of acceptable debate — the two cannot share a platform with integrity.

Progressive activists would point to the positive effects of a shifting Overton Window. It was only through the mainstreaming of previously outlandish views that homosexuality became legalized and National Health provision became a reality.

Free Speech enthusiasts would warn of the dangers of defining extremity on high. If a radical views cannot be heard, how can we cast away the shibboleths of the past? How can we move beyond dogma and religious superstition? How can we advance science in the face of clerical opposition? How can we create a better world in the face of “reactionary politics” —or a radicalism that has gone too far?

Surely people need a space to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable?

The above listed arguments have much merit. A world of stifling conformity is a world without change or progress. A world of taboos is a world when neither society nor the individual can grow. But the flaw with unbound progressivism and free speech is that we’re not working together as a unity — as a united nation. There will always be leaders and followers, trendsetters and laggards, but the successful society moves in the manner of an earthworm: the forward section moves on ahead, stretching the animal until the rest follows of its own accord. There is change; there are new ideas; but we move together as a body —a communal spring.

And so it was the British national health provision was not a radical advance by a radical government, but the cumulation of a slowly growing consensus. The Labour party may have dragged the earthworm along, but the Conservative tail followed willingly. Only the “extremist” doctors of the British Medical Association held out against change —ironic one might think.

Similar results were evident in social policy. Wilson’s government may have legislated the previously unthinkable - on homosexuality and much besides - yet they were supported in their efforts by much of the Conservative Parliamentary corpus.

Thus the Earthworm Effect brought about change and progression, all the while maintaining the cohesion of a national Overton Window.

Today, however, we live in a very different world where ne’er the twain shall meet. There is no national, even generational, conversation because we have such different views of what’s acceptable. Badenoch and Corbyn have both been leaders of mainstream political parties in recent times, but their views on Israel, the Middle East and much besides are not just different, but mutually illegitimate. Political debate, of the sort that we saw during the mid-20th Century Consensus, is therefore impossible. Parliamentary contributions have been reduced to mere sloganizing for a Tik-Tok, 1 minute world.

Where there is no common Overton Window - no common conversation - there is no real nation. This is a problem in Britain, Israel and throughout the Western World. Cohesion doesn’t imply agreement, but a recognition of mutual legitimacy. And what brings mutual legitimacy? Living in a shared moral universe buttressed by common terminology.

Incomprehensibility leads to certain contempt and where we hold each other in contempt, there seems no way out of the impasse.

This chapter was first drafted in the milieu of my Substack publication Guerre and Shalom. There, amongst the fluff and foolishness of the internet, free speech is a living and breathing organism. A wide range of views are both encouraged and showcased. It is fair to say that right-wing Benjamin Kerstein and famed liberal feminist Prof Susan Bordo have little in common on a practical policy level. They undoubtedly voted for different candidates in the recent American election — and are both very vocal as regards their political views. Yet they co-exist quite happily in “The World’s Intelligent Journal”. Why? Because each views the other as promoting incorrect, yet legitimate, viewpoints. Neither live in the la-la-land of The Great Genocide Blood Libel. Both - let’s be blunt - are proud Jews.

It is indeed the common rejection of The Great Genocide Blood Libel that makes so many Jews of so very different perspectives live in the same political universe. You don’t need to be an aficionado of Benjamin Netanyahu - I certainly am not - to utterly reject the inversion of language that the human rights establishment characterises as scholarship.

From Dr Khaled Salih to Professor Steven Pinker, we all believe passionately in the truth of words and we mutually rail against the disgraceful linguistic deception of hate-marching New Left. Indeed, it’s remarkable that the always mild-mannered Pinker himself used the expression “blood libel” in terms of the hijacking of genocide memory. But the question, of course, is why reasoned debate is no longer possible within a shared Overton Window. Why is it that Mill’s free speech can no longer swoop in on horseback to save the day? For that we must turn to a theory of knowledge in an act of Cartesian meditation…

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From the perspective of the broader intellectual project of Guerre and Shalom in PAX ARABICA and elsewhere, this chapter raises all the familiar questions: a) Are Middle Eastern minorities safe when they are promised federal self-rule short of independence? b) Can Western and regional powers be trusted to enforce legally agreed promises of protection? c) Can minorities rely on the goodwill of others who prioritise stability above all or should they protect themselves? d) What constitutional structures can guarantee the self-determination of non-Arab Middle Easterners? e) Can Arabization be reversed in such a way that represents collective justice for the indigenous peoples all the while respecting the individual rights of Arabs and other newly-settled groups? f) Can newly-empowered minority groups use the opportunities afforded to them to establish truly democratic institutions that respect the individual rights of all inhabitants of all ethnicities? Or will they descend into civil war and infighting?

We are honoured that Khaled and Ann-Catrin are able to pose and respond to these questions in such a way that respects the justice of history, the imperfection of human beings and the rights of those of all ethnicities who are innocent pawns in the process of politics. If Khaled continues to be involved in Kurdish politics and advises its leaders in line with his manifestly liberal democratic philosophy, Kurdistan will surely continue to be a beacon in a very troubled region. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

What’s the context of the chapter?

This chapter follows the Kurdish passage from protected self-rule into constitutional federalism after 2003. The fall of Saddam Hussein removed the regime that had carried out Anfal, Helebje, Arabization, and village destruction, and it allowed Kurds to enter the making of the new Iraq as constitutional actors rather than rebels outside the state. The Kurdistan Region gained legal standing inside Iraq’s federal order. This was a major historical achievement. But recognition did not resolve the hardest questions: Article 140, Kirkuk, disputed territories, oil, revenue, Pêşmerge status, federal courts, and Baghdad-Erbil trust. The constitution became both shield and battlefield.

The following questions were soon to emerge:

Would Kurds become constitutional partners rather than conditional minorities, rebels, security problems, disputed populations, budget dependents or bargaining chips?

Would federalism become a mechanism to protect Kurdish self-rule through enforceable institutions, namely territory procedures, revenue rules, trusted courts, security arrangements and disputed-territory settlement?

And would there be a shared recognition that Kurdish self-rule is a founding fact, not a temporary concession?

What does the chapter ask?

It asks whether federalism can become a genuine correction mechanism, or whether it becomes another language of postponement. The test is not whether Kurdish self-rule is recognized on paper, but whether constitutional language can protect Kurdish rights when territory, oil, revenue, courts, armed forces, and Baghdad-Erbil power become contested. It also tests the opposite danger: whether the correction of Arabization and disputed-territory policies can be pursued without displacing, subordinating or politically marginalizing Arabs, Turkmens, Assyrians, Yazidis, Shabaks, and other communities living in the same contested spaces.

Chapter Summary:

A Federal Opening shows that 2003 changed the Kurdish question in Iraq without solving it. The fall of Saddam allowed Kurds to help write the rules of the state that had tried to destroy them. The Kurdistan Region entered Iraq’s constitutional architecture with recognized institutions and legal standing. That was an extraordinary achievement. Yet the deepest conflicts remained unresolved: Article 140, Kirkuk, oil, revenue, Pêşmerge command, disputed territories, federal courts, and the limits of Baghdad’s acceptance. Federalism gave Kurdish self-rule its strongest legal form inside Iraq, but law without trusted enforcement left the settlement fragile. The dream had become government; now government had to survive law, oil, territory, ambition, and the return of history.

The federal opening made Kurds constitutional actors; its unfinished danger was that rights without enforcement could still leave Kurdish life vulnerable to postponement, bargaining and recentralization.

How do I read the chapter?

By becoming a paid subscriber of Guerre and Shalom. There you can access an ever-expanding list of books and articles on the Middle East, philosophy and the foundations of our shared civilization. On Friday September 11th, the price of a paid subscription will rise, so sign up today to lock in the current reduced rate. The price paid by existing subscribers will remain as before.

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Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

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Parts I to III of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part IV — The Dream Becomes Government

The dream becomes government only when the people remain larger than the institutions built in their name.

Introduction & Chapter 11: The Safe Haven

Chapter 12: The Kurdish Civil War

Chapter 13: A Federal Opening

2003, the fall of Saddam, the Iraqi constitution, Article 140, oil, security and disputed territories

The fall of Saddam Hussein changed the Kurdish position more dramatically than any event since 1991.

For the first time, the regime that had carried out Anfal, gassed Kurdish civilians in Helebje, destroyed villages, Arabized Kurdish lands, and treated Kurdish self-rule as a temporary problem to be crushed was gone. The Iraqi state did not simply weaken, as it had in 1991. Its central dictatorship collapsed. Its army dissolved. Its ruling party was banned. Its fear system broke open. The Ba‘thist state that had haunted Kurdish life for decades was suddenly removed from power.

For Kurds, this was not merely regime change. It was historical reversal.

In this chapter we present a limited claim: after 2003, Kurdish self-rule in Iraq moved from protected fact to constitutional form, but federal recognition remained fragile because the mechanisms needed to enforce it — territory, oil, security, revenue, courts, and trust — were never fully secured.

This is constitutional anti-fungibility. The Kurdish people were no longer to appear only as rebels, victims, mountain fighters, minority petitioners, security problems, or regional exceptions. They entered the new Iraq as constitutional actors. But that achievement could survive only if federalism made Kurdish self-rule a founding fact rather than a temporary concession. A constitution worthy of correction must not make Kurds replaceable by Baghdad’s convenience, American strategy, regional stability, oil disputes, court interpretation or postponed implementation.

But even this reversal took place inside occupation, Iraqi fragmentation, regional suspicion and a state-building process Kurds did not control alone.

From Hunted People to Constitutional Actors

The people once hunted by Baghdad now entered Baghdad as indispensable actors in the making of the new Iraq. Kurdish parties were no longer mountain movements negotiating from weakness. They became central participants in the reconstruction of Iraq. The KDP and PUK, despite the wounds of civil war, understood the strategic opportunity. They moved together enough to secure Kurdish interests in the new Iraqi order. That cooperation should not be minimized; after the civil war, even partial Kurdish coordination was itself a political achievement.

Here lay the great difference between the British-made Iraq of the 1920s and the Iraq remade after 2003. In the first Iraq, Kurds were incorporated into a state whose foundations had not treated them as co-equal partners. In the second, Kurds entered the constitutional process as essential actors. They were not simply pleading for recognition from the mountains. They were helping write the rules of the state itself.

This did not erase Kurdish vulnerability, but it changed the location of the struggle: the Kurdish question had entered the constitutional text.

After 2003, the Kurdish question entered law in a new way. The demand that had so often been treated as rebellion, foreign manipulation, or disorder could now appear as federalism, constitutional recognition, regional government and negotiated authority.

That legal translation mattered because it changed the category through which Kurdish life could be heard. The same demand that had once been punished as disorder could now be spoken as partnership. The same region once treated as rebellious terrain could now appear as a constituent federal region. The same Pêşmerge once treated as an insurgent force could now require constitutional settlement. The same Kurdish language, memory, and administration once treated as sources of danger could now claim institutional standing. Federalism, at its best, is the refusal to make a people fungible with rebellion merely because they demand room to govern themselves.

Federalism as Structural Protection

Federalism opened a real possibility. Iraq might have become something different from the state that had produced Arabization, Anfal, chemical attacks and mass displacement: a federal partnership in which Kurdish self-rule was not tolerated reluctantly, but accepted as one of the foundations of the country. The Kurdish leadership entered the post-2003 process with a clear memory: never again should Kurdish survival depend on Baghdad’s goodwill alone. This was the central lesson of Anfal translated into constitutional politics.

The Kurds did not seek merely cultural rights. They sought structural protection. They wanted recognition of the Kurdistan Region, federalism, Kurdish participation in federal institutions, protection for the Pêşmerge, reversal of Arabization, a process for disputed territories, and authority over internal security. They understood that words without institutions were dangerous. They had lived through too many promises that became traps.

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ARTICLE 1 (On architecture and cohesion, by Chris Hall):

ARTICLE 2 (On minority rights and cohesion, by Daniel Clarke-Serret):

ARTICLE 3 (On the vulnerable and cohesion, by Maish Yarmush)

ARTICLE 4 (On festivals, immigration and cohesion by Cymposium):

ARTICLE 5 (On common language and cohesion by Daniel Clarke-Serret - Chapter 10 of THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH):

ARTICLE 6 (On citizenship and cohesion by Nachum Kaplan):

ARTICLE 7 (On same-sex unions and cohesion by Ruth Vanita):

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“Same-Sex Unions in India” by Ruth Vanita

There is an often-overlooked but crucial difference between legal and social discrimination. When the laws endow one with equal rights, social oppression may and often does deprive one of those rights. In such a situation, those who are able to obtain legal support can go to court to demand redress. Many people cannot reach the courts and the question becomes how to empower them.

But if the law denies one the basic rights that all other citizens have, one has no recourse except to try to change the law. It was this second kind of struggle that LGBT people waged for years in order to decriminalize sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex, a struggle that was finally successful in India in 2018. Before we turn to that groundbreaking case, let us first briefly survey the wider situation on the continent.

In many West Asian and African countries, one can be legally imprisoned or even executed if one is discovered to have engaged in same-sex relations. The first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage was Taiwan in 2017. In 2024, Thailand became the largest Asian country to recognize same-sex marriage. Its House of Representatives voted 400 to 10 to ratify same-sex marriage and the Senate agreed, with a vote of 130 to 4. In 2023, Nepal began temporarily registering same-sex marriages after a Supreme Court interim order, but married same-sex couples do not have all the same rights as cross-sex married couples.

Thailand is a Buddhist majority country, Taiwan is one-third Buddhist and one-third Taoist, and Nepal is 81.9 percent Hindu, making it the largest Hindu-majority country in the world. Hinduism and Buddhism have never treated homosexuality as a serious crime the way the Abrahamic religions have, and, as I demonstrated in my co-edited book, Same-Sex Love in India (2000), many Hindu texts, such as the fourth-century Kamasutra depict homosexuality as part of human nature or even celebrate same-sex love.

Hindu scriptures’ and literature’s understanding of unusual actions or relationships is that they are based on attachment from a former lifetime. As the eleventh-century Sanskrit Kathasaritsagara puts it, “Heartfelt affection without a cause speaks of love from a former birth.” Rebirth is still a common explanation in India for inexplicable attachments and aversions.

But India, unlike Thailand and Nepal, was colonized by European Christians who had long considered homosexuality an unspeakable crime and punished it with torture and execution. As far as we know, no one in India had been executed for same-sex relations until the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa, western India, burned a 16-year-old boy to death on this charge. In 1861, British rulers passed an anti-sodomy law that criminalized sexual acts ‘against the order of nature,’ which was interpreted to criminalize homosexuality. The law remained on the books after India became independent in 1947. By that time, most English-educated Indians believed that homosexuality had been unknown in ancient India and that it was against Indian culture.

After a two-decade long battle, the Supreme Court of India finally overturned the law in 2018 (Navtej Singh Johar vs. Union of India). This and the internet have enabled gay people to live more openly and find each other more easily. But many rights are still legally denied to those who are in same-sex partnerships. In 1987, Leela Namdeo and Urmila Srivastava, two police constables in Madhya Pradesh, married each other and were suspended from their jobs. The case was widely reported in the Indian press. This type of discrimination continues today in many job sectors, and forces people into hiding and pretending.

From 1980 onwards, the press has been reporting cases from all over the country of non-English-speaking, low-income couples, mostly women, who have married each other by Hindu rituals or have committed joint suicide. Perhaps the most interesting thing about these unions is that in the 1980s there was no LGBT rights movement in India nor was same-sex marriage legally recognized anywhere in the world; the first country to validate it was the Netherlands in 2001. None of the Indian couples who got married were in touch with any activist or campaign nor did they use any identity terms for themselves. They simply said they could not live without each other and they wanted to marry each other.

Some did try to register their marriages. In 1993, Vinoda Adkewar, 18, and Rekha Chaudhary, 21, from neighbouring villages in Maharashtra, western India, went to the Registrar of Marriages declared their intention to marry. The Hindu Marriage Act requires the groom to be 21 and the bride 18. Rekha was in shirt and trousers, and declared herself the groom, and Vinoda, in a sari, was the bride. Their families and the police spent three hours dissuading them, and Vinoda finally gave in.

In some cases, families accepted the relationships and even helped arrange the weddings but in other cases, the families, the local community, and the police forced the women to separate and to marry men. Many such couples end up committing joint suicide, often leaving behind suicide notes saying that they will be married in the next life. Even those couples whose families accepted their unions faced social discrimination, for example, when Jaya Verma and Tanuja Chouhan, two nurses, married in 2001 in a ceremony witnessed by 200 guests, and hosted by their families in Patna, eastern India, their landlord asked them to vacate their room the next day1.

In my 2005 book, Love’s Rite (updated edition Penguin India, 2023), I documented scores of such unions, which continue unabated today. For every one reported case, there are dozens reported only in local papers, and dozens more not reported at all. This book also demonstrated that same-sex unions are attested in ancient Indian literature, for example, two co-widows who miraculously produce a child together in fourteenth-century Bengali devotional texts, and many female-female weddings in eighteenth-century Urdu poetry written by Muslim poets, who recorded a number of terms used for female-female sex and a woman’s female lover or partner.

After 2005, I found a few more cases of male couples. In 2007, two men in their mid-twenties, Jayanta Ghosh and Swapan Manna, a hairdresser and a farmer, took poison together in a village in Bengal, and were found dead in each other’s embrace. Both men were married to women. The entire village, including local leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), known as CPI(M), then in power in Bengal, had pressured them to separate, and villagers had threatened them with violence2.

These rural and small-town couples included Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, tribals, factory and farm workers, fisherwomen and students. Whenever such couples were brought to the courts, judges ruled that consenting adults were free to live together. In 2002, in Durg, central India, Anjali, 22, a nurse, began living with Dr. Neera Rajak, 39, whom she planned to marry. Anjali’s father lodged a police complaint, accusing Dr. Rajak of kidnapping Anjali. Both women appeared before the police, and a judge ruled that they could live together, as they were adults (Zee News, September 21, 2002)

While queer theorists and activists continue to debate whether or not gay people should enter the patriarchal institution of marriage (even while all of us continue to participate in every other patriarchal institution, from universities to banks), and while many homophobic people tell us that same-sex marriage is a Western idea alien to Indian culture, young Indians have for decades been choosing to die because they are denied the right to marry.

After decriminalization of same-sex relations in 2018, a gay male couple and a lesbian couple filed petitions asking for the right to marry (Supriyo Chakraborty & Abhay Dang v. Union of India). They were joined by several other petitioners from across the political spectrum (extreme right to extreme left and centrists). India is the only country I know of where this battle was fought by people with such a wide range of political views.

The government opposed the petition, and a number of groups, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian, intervened to argue that same-sex relations are abnormal and unnatural, and would destroy culture and society. These arguments have been made in virtually every legal battle around the issue in the U.S, the U.K., and European countries, but the words “abnormal” and “unnatural” have no equivalents in Indian languages because these concepts are foreign to Hindu thought.

In 2023, the Supreme Court refused to grant the right to marry or even the right to domestic partnership, saying that this was the business of the legislature. However, the Court wrote a 366-page long judgement, citing many works, including my two books mentioned above, to declare that same-sex couples faced unfair discrimination, and the government should examine what rights they could give to couples.

Transgender people have already been entering into cross-sex marriages. In 2014, the Supreme Court, in the case of NALSA vs. Union of India, directed the government to allow transgender people to self-identify their gender, to give them a number of other rights and to institute quotas for them in education and employment.

In India, as in several other countries in the region, including Pakistan and Iran, transgender is better understood and accepted than same-sex relationships. In Pakistan, the Transgender Protection of Rights Act, 2018, grants transgender people the right to self-identify their gender and prohibits discrimination in areas like education, employment, and healthcare. However, homosexuality remains criminalized in Pakistan under Section 377 of the Penal Code, with penalties ranging from fines and imprisonment for two years up to life.

In Iran, all forms of consensual same-sex activity are illegal under the Islamic Penal Code, with penalties ranging from flogging and imprisonment to execution. However, adult transgender individuals can legally change their gender after undergoing sex reassignment surgery, which is partially funded by the state (Country Reports, 2015). In 2008, the BBC reported that Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except Thailand.3

India does not give as many rights to married couples as the U.S. does. For instance, in India, income tax returns must be filed by each individual, not by couples. But married people in India do have rights from which same-sex couples are excluded. Some of these problems can be partially obviated. One can make a will leaving property to one’s partner. However, the partner’s family can contest it, which they could not do as easily if the partner was a legal spouse. Two people (whether or not they are a couple) can purchase or rent property jointly but many landlords refuse to rent to two single people or to an unmarried couple.

Other problems are intractable. The spouse of a government employee inherits his or her pension and is covered by his or her medical insurance. Medical and funeral decisions are made by next of kin, and some hospitals will not allow a legally unrelated person to discuss medical matters with the physician. A partner of many years remains a legal stranger and can be side-lined by an individual’s biological family.

Transnational couples face special problems. India recognizes all heterosexual marriages that are legally contracted in other countries. A foreigner who marries an Indian of the other sex is immediately able to obtain an Overseas Citizenship of India, which confers on him or her a lifelong visa to stay in India for any length of time, and the right to work, invest, and own property in India. But a foreigner who marries an Indian of the same sex can only get a tourist visa, which is valid for six months, and cannot even open a bank account in India, let alone take up employment. When a same-sex couple legally marries outside India, each of them is treated as single and as a legal alien to the other while they are in India.

Even though same-sex married couples do not have any of the legal rights that the government bestows on cross-sex married couples, the number of Hindu wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples continues to grow. In the last 15 years or so, many more gay people live openly with their partners, and many same-sex weddings in the middle class as well as amongst the wealthy and celebrities have been positively reported in the media. Many of these couples upload photographs and videos of their weddings to social media and to YouTube.

Among the poor too, couples do live together but couple suicides also continue. In 2018, Bhavna Thakor and Asha Thakor, both factory workers married to men, committed suicide by jumping into a river, with Asha’s three-year-old daughter, in Ahmedabad, western India. Their suicide note, written with lipstick in the Gujarati language, on a paper plate, stated, “We have left this world to live with each other. The world did not allow us to stay together. Perhaps in the next birth we will meet again”.4

In 2006, the residents of a tribal village in Assam, asked candidates in the legislative assembly elections to work to legalize the marriage of two women, Thingring Basumatary, a daily-wage labourer, and Roinathi Basumatary, a domestic help. These two Bodo women were in love since they were young girls, and got married in a Goddess temple in 1999. They were publicly whipped in their own village and had to flee. They moved from one village to another but no one would employ them or allow them to settle down. Finally, in Simlaguri village, they found acceptance and have been happily living there for years. With their neighbours wanting them to have legal rights, candidates of both parties have promised to consider the demand.

“We are also part of society … elected representatives also have responsibilities towards us,” Thingring told a journalist.

“Hope is the only thing we poor people have,” she added5.

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For more on Hinduism and India:

by Eli Kavon

About the book:

Introduction: Birth of a Nation

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PART 1] Foundations: The Claim of Continuity

This section moves in four steps: a close reading of Jacob's own transformation from scholar to statesman, an account of Zionism's inheritance of Jewish exceptionalism, a test of that exceptionalism against Jews who lived fully inside a foreign culture without losing themselves to it and, finally, a reckoning with what history and memory owe each other.

Chapter 1: Jacob’s Journey: Evolution of a Patriarch

When we first encounter the young Jacob in the Torah, he is “a mild man who stayed in camp.” In contrast, his older twin brother Esau whose heel he grasped as they emerged from Rebekah’s womb was “a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors.” Yet, only chapters later in Genesis, Jacob is wrestling and overcoming a mystery man, and demands that he be blessed by this manifestation of God on Earth. God gives him the name Israel—”for you have striven with beings divine and human and have prevailed.” This transformation of Jacob from bookworm to wrestler can only be understood if we examine the patriarch’s life in more detail. It certainly is a remarkable metamorphosis.

Jacob’s education in the ways of the world begins with Rebekah, his mother. Rebekah is the sister of Laban, a man immersed in the politics of duplicity and tricks. While the passive Isaac preferred Esau to Jacob—Esau was the man of action that his father never could be—Rebekah realized her younger son had to get out of the tent, muddy himself in the real world and seize the birthright from his older brother. If that meant deceiving his father, so be it. It was time to leave the yeshiva of Shem and Ever, as it was millennia later, when scholars left the Volozhin yeshiva to fight for survival and sovereignty.

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ARTICLE 1 (On architecture and cohesion, by Chris Hall):

ARTICLE 2 (On minority rights and cohesion, by Daniel Clarke-Serret):

ARTICLE 3 (On the vulnerable and cohesion, by Maish Yarmush)

ARTICLE 4 (On festivals, immigration and cohesion by Cymposium):

ARTICLE 5 (On common language and cohesion by Daniel Clarke-Serret - Chapter 10 of THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH):

ARTICLE 6 (Below. On citizenship and cohesion by Nachum Kaplan.)

“The Great Replacement of Citizenship” by Nachum Kaplan

Citizenship is disappearing. Not legally, of course. The passports remain, the ceremonies continue, flags are raised, anthems are played and politicians deliver moist little speeches about diversity being our strength. New citizens still pledge loyalty to Australia or swear allegiance to Canada or wherever their new home may be. Yet the substance of citizenship is being steadily eroded.

The citizen was once understood as a participant in a national enterprise. He possessed rights, certainly, but also duties. He belonged to a polity larger than himself. He was expected to obey its laws, contribute to its prosperity, defend its institutions, tolerate his neighbours and exercise some restraint over his appetites. The citizen did not just ask what the country would give him. He was expected to ask what he owed it, too.

That question has become almost indecent.

In its place, the modern state has installed a new political character: the claimant. The claimant does not join the national community. He submits an invoice to it and arrives carrying an identity, a grievance and a list of demands longer than my neverending to-do list. The country is not an inheritance to maintain but an institution to prosecute. Its history is an indictment. Its customs are suspicious. Its majority population is permanently in the dock. Nothing is owed to the nation. Everything is owed by it.

This is the great replacement occurring across much of the West. Not the lurid demographic conspiracy endlessly invoked by internet quacks, but the replacement of citizenship by grievance. The client, complainant and self-appointed victim are replacing the citizen whose political authority grows in direct proportion to his declared injury.

Australia and Canada are particularly advanced laboratories of this new arrangement. Both consider themselves successful immigrant democracies. Both are stable, prosperous, tolerant and have welcomed millions of people from almost every country. Both have built societies in which newcomers can become citizens, prosper, vote, criticise the government and raise their children without adopting the historic majority’s ancestry, religion or cuisine.

This is a civilisational achievement. Naturally, it is now described as oppression.

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks of citizens, whether Australian by birth or choice, pledging loyalty to the country’s people, values and democracy. Canada likewise surrounds citizenship with the language of shared rights and responsibilities. Yet the political culture beneath those formalities increasingly discourages the very idea of a common national identity.

We are told to celebrate every identity except the national one. Ethnic pride is enriching. Religious pride is empowering. Indigenous identity is sacred. Sexual identity is liberating. Diasporic identity is authentic. Yet national pride must be handled with tongs by a diversity consultant while a university committee checks it for traces of fascism.

The result is a marketplace of competing resentments.

Citizenship once flattened inherited differences in the most morally important sense. It said that, before the law and within the public square, we met as equals. One citizen did not possess greater political authority because his ancestors suffered more, or because his feelings were more delicate or his communal lobby employed a better communications team.

That principle is now being dismantled. The state increasingly classifies people into moral castes. Some groups possess historic guilt. Others possess historic credit. Some are instructed to listen, while others are invited to speak with unmatched verbosity. Some must apologise for events that occurred before their grandparents were born. Others may invoke ancestral injuries as though suffering were a hereditary bank account earning compound interest.

Think of it as feudalism with pronouns.

The political class encourages it because grievance is governable. A confident citizen may tell the government to leave him alone. A claimant requires an administrator, a programme, a grant, an advisory panel, a commissioner, a strategy, an office and an annual conference in a very agreeable hotel. A citizen stands upright. A client queues.

The modern state therefore has a powerful incentive to convert independent citizens into supplicants. Every human difficulty becomes a policy failure, every disappointment a form of structural discrimination. Every unequal outcome becomes evidence of oppression and every unpleasant encounter becomes harm.

Every offence also requires intervention. Governments once built roads, maintained public order and defended their borders from foreign threats. Now they validate.

Their ministers speak as though they were in a group therapy session, except therapy at least aims to restore a person’s agency. Political therapeutic culture does the opposite. It rewards permanent fragility and teaches people that their discomfort confers authority and that resilience is a form of surrender. The ideal political subject is no longer the responsible adult. It is the toddler, a brat in the terrible twos.

Canada has made this moral infantilism an international brand. Its public identity is saturated with therapeutic euphemism: inclusion, safety, belonging, affirmation and lived experience—is there any other kind of experience? These can describe worthwhile objectives but are often little more than linguistic chloroform. A government may invoke belonging while presiding over social fragmentation. It may preach inclusion while dividing citizens into officially recognised tribes. It may advertise compassion while making ordinary people feel that their country belongs morally to everyone except them.

Australia is following the same path, though with less polished diction and more compulsory acknowledgements before morning tea. Every institution now performs a ritual declaration about whose land it occupies. It is intolerable. Yet fewer institutions appear capable of explaining what obligations accompany living on that land today.

Do we owe one another loyalty? Must newcomers accept the country’s liberal norms? May Australians expect foreign hatreds to be left behind? Should every citizen defend the freedom and safety of every other citizen, even when overseas conflicts make that unfashionable?

These are not theoretical questions.

Australia is holding a Royal Commission, its highest form of judicial inquiry, into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. The commission has heard evidence about threats, abuse, extremist activity and institutional failures serious enough to force a fundamental examination of whether Jewish Australians can participate safely in national life. The federal government has also strengthened criminal and migration laws addressing hate groups and hate-motivated conduct.

This is what happens when citizenship becomes weaker than imported grievance.

The essential civic principle should be brutally simple: whatever quarrels existed in Beirut, Tehran, Gaza, Lahore, Moscow, Beijing or Belfast, they do not authorise anyone to terrorise his neighbour in Melbourne, Toronto, Sydney or Montreal. Your ancestral feud is not a diplomatic passport, your theology is not a search warrant and your petulant grievance does not outrank another citizen’s right to live in peace.

Yet Western governments are curiously reluctant to speak this plainly. They prefer the soft mulch of “community tensions,” as though antisemitic intimidation were a neighbourly disagreement over the height of a garden fence. They convene listening exercises, consult stakeholders, condemn all forms of hatred in statements designed so meticulously to avoid naming the present danger that the danger may reasonably conclude it has been invited to help draft them.

This is the disease of post-citizenship politics. The state no longer sees individuals who must obey common rules. Rather, it sees communities whose sensitivities must be negotiated. So the most aggressive groups gain the greatest leverage. They learn that outrage works, that threats produce meetings, that disruption produces concessions and that accusations of prejudice send officials scrambling for the ceremonial knee pads.

Moderation gets nothing. Menace gets a memorandum of understanding.

A healthy country does not ask every group to negotiate its own relationship with national values. It states those values and expects everyone to live by them. The law applies equally. Women are equal. Religious belief does not trump civil authority. Violence is not protest. Citizens are not proxies for foreign governments. No minority receives a veto over criticism. No majority inherits collective guilt. The nation’s institutions belong to all citizens and may not be captured by activists claiming to speak for their entire race, faith or sex.

None of this requires ethnic nationalism, only civic seriousness.

Indeed, a strong common citizenship is the best protection against ethnic nationalism. When the national identity is capacious, confident and available to everyone, people can belong without retreating into tribes. When elites destroy that common identity, tribalism does not disappear. It becomes the only identity left.

Then everyone begins counting. Who receives funding? Whose history is taught? Whose offence matters? Whose dead are mourned? Whose flags may be displayed? Whose fear is believed?

The progressive fantasy is that a country can dissolve its common culture and remain peacefully diverse through the magic of administrative goodwill. This is as wrong as a doughnut with no hole in it. A society without a shared identity does not become beautifully borderless. It becomes a collection of pressure groups fighting over the treasury, the curriculum and the moral hierarchy.

Someone must say this without trembling like a frightened cat: immigration is not merely an economic transaction.

A country is not a hotel. It is not enough to pay taxes, obey most laws and get furious whenever the minibar is restocked incorrectly. Citizenship requires an emotional and moral investment in the national community. It requires gratitude—not grovelling gratitude, but the ordinary recognition that entry into a free and prosperous democracy is not an act of colonial aggression committed against the entrant.

This expectation should not be controversial. It should be printed on the form.

Australia and Canada do not need less diversity. They need more citizenship. They need schools that teach national history as an inheritance to understand, not a crime scene to inspect. They need governments willing to say that rights are inseparable from responsibilities, and institutions that address citizens as adults rather than sorting them into oppressors, victims and grant recipients.

Above all, they need the confidence to demand reciprocity. The nation will protect your freedom, and you must protect the freedom of others. The nation will recognise your dignity, and you must recognise that of your neighbours. The nation will permit you to preserve your culture, but you must not use it as a weapon against the nation’s laws. The nation will give you belonging, and you must be willing to belong.

This must be the minimal price of inclusion.

The alternative is the slow liquidation of the national community: a country in which everyone possesses rights, nobody accepts duties and government exists to referee an endless tournament of grievance politics. That arrangement will not produce justice, only stoke resentment, fragmentation and eventually backlash.

Ordinary citizens will tire of being told they are strangers in their own country, morally inferior to people who openly despise it. They will conclude that if citizenship means nothing, ancestry must mean everything.

That road ends badly.

The answer is not to reverse the hierarchy of grievance, but to abolish it. No hereditary guilt, no hereditary virtue, no imported vendettas, and no state-sponsored ranking of citizens by fashionable suffering. One law. One civic standard. One national community broad enough to contain difference and strong enough to impose limits upon it.

The citizen must return. Not as a taxpayer with a passport, a demographic category or a customer demanding cultural room service, but as a participant in a common endeavour.

A free country cannot survive indefinitely as an apology attached to a welfare system. It must believe that it has something worth preserving, something worth joining and something worth serving.

Citizenship must once again mean more than standing in a decorated hall, repeating a pledge and collecting a certificate. It must mean that the country owes you justice—and that you owe the country something in return.

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Still to come on social cohesion fortnight:

• Ruth Vanita talks about same sex and transgender equality in India and surrounding Asian countries.

• Michael Constan on his theory of the political spectrum and its implications for stability.

• Daniel Clarke-Serret talks about the essence of a democratic nation.

Coming very soon is FEMINISM WEEK. It’s sure to be explosive :). Subscribe to support our work!

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THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: Twenty Roots of a Modern Blood Libel

by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Introduction: The Genocide of Truth

Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority // Chapter 9: Declaration

CHAPTER 10: Confusion

The 21st Century Tower of Babel

DIRECT TRANSLATION OF BABEL: Hebrew for Babylon

ETYMOLOGY OF BABEL: From the Hebrew root B-B-L meaning “confusion”

You are literally going to glow with pure joy once you’ve finished reading this chapter. Or not. Because, as you know, literally really means really. It's giving a precise description of what is actually going to happen in the realm of reality. If you mean to say metaphorically then why don’t you use the word?

There are two schools of thought. The first is that words have a self-contained, hidden essence - an “ostensible definition” - that isn't susceptible to a posteriori tinkering. Literally means really; in real life; not metaphorically. This is set and unchanging. You understand meaning by following granite-set, pre-existing rules of interpretation.

The second school holds that meaning is determined by usage. According to this theory, words and phrases have no inherent meaning. They are hollow shells: vessels to be filled with usage in the everyday reality of a given community. Village x may use the word differently to village y and its meaning will change accordingly. Although the original usage of “literally” was the inverse of “figuratively”, in modern “street America” it means the inverse of the inverse. Literally means figuratively.

Proponents of this “forms of life” theory, notably Wittginstein1, see this as a description of the real rather than a norm to be supported or criticized. When you are immersed in the life of a particular community or country, you implicitly understand the precise meaning of terms. If modern Americans want to invert the previous meaning of certain words, then that is a natural consequence of the dynamism of language.

The natural, laissez-faire, “free market” development of English is one of its most endearing features. No government institute tells us the parameters of “real English”. There is no French, top down, elitist approach and though some may mourn the death of certain forms of speech, it is more than made up for by the creative fruits of freedom. In my writings, I enjoy creating new words and resurrecting antique phraseology and the liberty afforded to me by my mother tongue means that I do so shorn of the criticism of the reader.

But though English linguistic-libertarianism is both exciting and impossible to contain from on high, it has its limits. Feeling that certain words and phrases should have a reserved meaning, philosopher/university professor Simon Cushing2 takes issue with the full implications of the Wittgensteinian view. He gives the example of “literally”, above articulated, as well the phrase “beg the question”3.

While in philosophical circles, this expression has traditionally had a precise, clearly-bounded meaning, in common parlance it has come to mean “raises the question” or “makes you think of a further question”. The common man, hoping to convey that meaning, could simply say “Your point raises the question”, but instead they chose to raid the locked safe of clearly defined terms and pollute the sea of precise understanding. Philosophers, hoping to use that phrase in its originally intended form, may, through its contemporaneous usage, beg more questions in the mind of the listener.

Indeed it is here that we see the full collateral damage of laissez-faire linguistics. Though literal freedom of expression is life-affirming, all ideologies are susceptible to extreme implementation. “Literally” and “beg the question” may be Simon Cushing’s “pet peeves”, subverting, as they do, clarity of expression and precision of meaning. But mine is “genocide”, a word that has gone from describing the worst human crime imaginable, the Nazi slaughter of the 6 million in extermination camps, to mere evidence of civilian deaths in war. Although all innocent deaths in conflict are to be mourned, evidence of those deaths alone clearly and obviously fails to amount to genocide, both as defined in the official international definition, or more pertinantly, according to the original meaning of that term.

If the increasingly disturbing modern usage of “genocide” is to be believed, namely that all civilian deaths in war amount to (rhetorical) genocide, then all war is genocide in the public imagination. If that be so, then the Nazis and their protegees in Rwanda are no more guilty of genocide than Winston Churchill or Barack Obama, a proposition which is as absurd as it is offensive.

This is the problem with Wittgenstein. It is descriptively so that words change meaning and that at the same time, within different communities, the same words can have distinct usages. To complain about this can be likened to complaining about the British weather. But, as Cushing says, there are some words that must be “reserved” else we do great, irreparable damage to our discourse.

To say that genocide is equal to war is problematic not only because it is legally and descriptively imprecise (what term do we now use to describe real 1940s genocides and bring those responsible to justice?), but more importantly because genocide is a term which brings with it extreme moral turpitude. To commit genocide is to condemn the author as being the worst of humanity. War, though tragic, doesn’t suggest that connotation. Wars can be just. Wars can be in self-defence, notwithstanding that they inevitably bring the death of innocents.

Although it is generally true that words must be interpreted in their used context, not all meanings change naturally and innocently. Just as a court witness may fake empathy or a pained Seneca may be stoic, so meanings can be intentionally changed with maleficent intent. Contrary to the general Wittgensteinian description, such meanings can be devised in one’s internal, mental world then disseminated vexatiously (or at least with gross negligence).

Today’s modern blood libel is a perfect illustration of this. Genocide’s sudden, intolerable, anti-legal change of definition in common discourse came about as an act of deliberate strategy, done with the nefarious intent of blacklisting one particular nation. It is one thing for language to evolve as a matter of natural genealogy or authored creativity, but quite another for meanings and their related emotional states to be intentionally hijacked for ill. Through malicious misinterpretation, the meanings of words become not only imprecise, but unusable. Meaningful communication becomes extinct.

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Read more

ARTICLE 1 (On architecture and cohesion, by Chris Hall):

ARTICLE 2 (On minority rights and cohesion, by Daniel Clarke-Serret):

ARTICLE 3 (On the vulnerable and cohesion, by Maish Yarmush)

ARTICLE 4 (Below. On festivals, immigration and cohesion).

“The Curious Case of Acceptable Festivities” by Cymposium

It was one of those peculiarly London afternoons; grey, undecided, and faintly theatrical, when a friend and I found ourselves ambling past Marble Arch with no particular destination in mind. The city, in that mood, has a way of presenting itself as both stage and audience, and on this occasion, it had arranged a procession.

They came in black.

Not the fashionable black of Mayfair window displays, nor the self-conscious austerity of the metropolitan intellectual, but something altogether more solemn. Lines of men, some young, some weathered, moving in deliberate rhythm, carrying banners inscribed in a script that was beautiful if entirely opaque to the untrained eye. There was no music, at least none that could be called festive. Instead, there was a cadence, measured, mournful, almost liturgical. It was not a parade so much as a collective act of remembrance.

We paused, as one does when confronted with something that feels both public and private at once. There is, after all, an unspoken rule in cities like London: everything is permitted, but not everything is understood.

Later that evening, I mentioned it to another friend. “Those people in black near Marble Arch,” I asked. “What was that all about?” He smiled with the faint amusement reserved for questions whose answers seem obvious in retrospect. “Ashura,” he said. “They’re commemorating the death of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.” Suddenly the pieces fell into place. What had struck me as mysterious was, for thousands of Londoners, simply an annual act of mourning, a ritual as familiar to them as Remembrance Sunday or a Good Friday procession might be to someone else.

Yet I could not shake the feeling that, despite unfolding in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, the procession somehow existed alongside London rather than within it. Not unwelcome, exactly, but not entirely of the city either. It occupied the streets with every legal right to do so, yet carried with it an air of being a guest rather than a host.

This, I later realised, was the curious asymmetry. London is no stranger to imported traditions. Paint the town green for Saint Patrick’s Day, and it will oblige with enthusiasm bordering on delirium. Install the paraphernalia of Oktoberfest, beer steins, brass bands, and the occasional public collapse, and one finds not resistance but sponsorship. Across the Atlantic, the Feast of San Gennaro has become so woven into the mythology of New York that few stop to consider it an imported tradition at all.

Societies, of course, are not especially rational creatures. They develop tastes, habits and prejudices for reasons that often defy neat explanation. This essay is not an accusation so much as an attempt to understand one of those peculiar inconsistencies. Why do some immigrant traditions, over time, become part of the civic calendar, while others remain perpetually described as “foreign”? Why, for instance, does the prospect of joining friends for an Eid celebration, an afternoon of good food, conversation and hospitality, fail to attract the same easy enthusiasm as an Oktoberfest beer tent or a St Patrick’s Day parade? One need not have observed Ramadan to enjoy the feast that follows it, just as one need not be Irish to wear green in March or German to raise a stein in September.

Perhaps there are good reasons. Perhaps there are irrational ones. More likely, as is often the case with societies, there is a tangled mixture of history, familiarity, politics and simple human habit. Whatever the explanation, the distinction itself is worth examining.

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The Hierarchy of Festivity

If one were to judge a culture purely by what it permits onto its streets, one might conclude that London, and, by extension, its transatlantic cousin in New York City, possesses a remarkably refined taxonomy of celebration. Not all festivities are created equal. Some are embraced, amplified, and monetised; others are tolerated with a certain polite distance; and a few linger in that ambiguous space between curiosity and quiet suspicion.

Consider the annual eruption of green that accompanies Saint Patrick’s Day. For a brief, delirious interval, the city becomes an honorary outpost of Dublin. Rivers are dyed, hats are donned, and a great civic permission slip is issued for behaviour that would, on any other day, invite swift disapproval. It is loud, it is messy, and it is, above all, welcome. No one pauses to ask whether this Irish import sits comfortably within the historical or cultural lineage of London or New York. Its credentials are assumed; its place, unquestioned.

The same indulgence is extended to Oktoberfest, that monument to Teutonic excess which has somehow found fertile ground far from Munich. Here too, the streets, or at least the designated enclosures, fill with song, intoxication, and the occasional horizontal citizen. It is difficult to imagine a more conspicuous violation of public order being so cheerfully sanctioned, yet sanctioned it is, with corporate sponsorship and municipal blessing to boot.

Across the Atlantic, the Feast of San Gennaro offers a similar spectacle: a transplanted Neapolitan devotion now indistinguishable from the mythology of New York itself. What began as an immigrant observance has, through repetition and familiarity, been naturalised into something approaching civic heritage.

And yet, place alongside these scenes the quieter, more solemn procession of Ashura, and the contrast is instructive. There are no corporate sponsors, no cheerful headlines, no sense that the city has momentarily reinvented itself in festive solidarity. Instead, there is a subtle distancing, as though the event, while permitted, has not yet been granted the full rights of cultural citizenship.

One is left to wonder whether the difference lies not in the fact of foreignness, but in its flavour. For the West, it appears, has developed a particular appetite: it consumes the exotic most readily when it is sweetened with spectacle, softened by familiarity, and, perhaps most importantly, accompanied by a drink.

A Culture Built on Borrowing

To speak of “foreign” traditions in countries like the United States or the United Kingdom is, on closer inspection, to indulge in a rather charming fiction. These are not ancient, hermetically sealed civilisations that have cautiously admitted outside influences at the margins. They are, instead, cultural mosaics, assembled over centuries by successive waves of people who arrived carrying not only labour and ambition, but languages, beliefs, cuisines, customs and ways of seeing the world.

One need not even begin with immigration in the modern sense. Consider Christianity itself. Today it is often regarded as inseparable from the historical identity of Britain, Europe and, by extension, much of the English-speaking world. Yet Christianity was not born on the cliffs of Dover nor among the forests of Germany. It emerged in the eastern Mediterranean, in Roman Judea, before spreading westward over centuries to become so deeply woven into European civilisation that its foreign origins are scarcely noticed. What was once an imported faith eventually became the cultural baseline against which other imported traditions would later be judged.

The same story repeats itself in more ordinary ways. The evidence is not tucked away in obscure archives; it is sitting quite plainly on the dinner table. The Hamburger, that supposed emblem of American identity, announces in its very name its German parentage. New York-style pizza, now elevated to near-sacred status, began life as an Italian import, its lineage traceable to the ovens of Naples rather than Manhattan. Even the humble bagel, now as native to New York as impatience, arrived with Eastern European Jewish immigrants, carrying with it the memory of another continent.

Britain, for its part, is hardly exempt from this process of accumulation. Fish and chips, that most canonical of British fare, owes as much to immigrant (Sephardic Jewish) influence as it does to local ingenuity. Chicken tikka masala, often jokingly described as Britain’s national dish, is itself a product of migration and adaptation. The national palate, much like the national identity, has been shaped less by cultural purity than by centuries of borrowing, modification and reinvention.

Nor were these imports immediately embraced. There was a time when Irish Catholics in Britain and America were viewed with suspicion, their loyalties questioned and their customs regarded as stubbornly foreign. Italian immigrants in New York were once caricatured as outsiders whose neighbourhood festivals belonged to the Old World rather than the New. Even many Jewish communities experienced generations in which their traditions were regarded as something to be accommodated rather than celebrated. Familiarity, it turns out, is rarely immediate. It is earned slowly, often over generations.

Which is to say that the transformation of the foreign into the familiar is not an exception to the Anglo-American story. It is the story. The cultures that today appear settled and self-evident are, on closer inspection, little more than layer upon layer of successful cultural imports whose passports have long since expired.

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The Selective Embrace of the Exotic

And yet, having spent centuries perfecting this alchemy of cultural absorption, the modern West appears to have become surprisingly selective about which imports it welcomes into the national story.

Not all traditions travel equally well. Some arrive to applause; others to scrutiny.

Part of the explanation may simply be that some celebrations are easier for outsiders to join. One does not have to be Irish to enjoy Saint Patrick’s Day. Few participants pause to reflect on the life of St Patrick himself. The festival has become a broadly accessible civic event: dress in green, share a drink, enjoy the parade, and one is, for a day at least, part of the celebration. The same is true of Oktoberfest, whose appeal requires little explanation beyond good company and generous quantities of beer. Even celebrations with far deeper religious or cultural roots, such as Holi, have found surprising popularity in places like Oxford and other British university towns, where throwing coloured powder has become, for many, an irresistible communal experience divorced from its theological origins.

The pattern repeats elsewhere. Chinese New Year invites dragon dances, lanterns and fireworks. Diwali fills public spaces with lights, sweets and colourful dress. These are celebrations that, whether intentionally or not, present obvious points of entry. An outsider does not need to understand every layer of symbolism to feel welcomed into the festivities.

Celebrations such as Eid al-Fitr occupy a more complicated space. The feast itself is, in principle, no less universal. Food is shared, families gather, generosity is encouraged and neighbours are often invited. Yet to many outside the Muslim community, Eid remains something observed from a distance rather than participated in. Whether this is the product of unfamiliarity, media portrayals, or simply the fact that many celebrations naturally revolve around family and existing communities, the result is much the same: the event often feels less publicly legible than its counterparts.

The same is even more true of Ashura. Mourning does not translate as readily as merriment. A solemn procession commemorating events from the seventh century demands context in a way that a parade centred on music, food or drinking simply does not. It asks the observer to understand before participating, whereas many successful public festivals allow participation long before understanding.

There is another factor that deserves acknowledgement, uncomfortable though it may be. Cultural acceptance is not solely determined by the openness of the host society. It also depends, at least in part, on how accessible immigrant communities make their traditions appear to outsiders. Some celebrations naturally invite spectators to become participants. Others remain, understandably, more intimate expressions of communal identity. There is nothing inherently wrong with either approach, but they do produce different outcomes. A festival that offers food, music and conversation to strangers will almost always diffuse more quickly into the broader culture than one whose meanings remain largely internal to the community celebrating it.

None of this entirely explains the asymmetry, but it begins to illuminate it. Cultural acceptance is not merely a function of history or politics. It is also shaped by psychology. People gravitate towards joy more readily than grief; participation more readily than observation; familiarity more readily than ambiguity. The traditions that become woven into a nation’s fabric are often those that ask the least of newcomers while giving them the most immediate reason to join.

Perhaps, then, the question is not simply why some traditions remain foreign. It is also what allows other traditions to cease being foreign at all.

A Question of Principles

All of which raises an awkward, if unavoidable, question: what, precisely, do these societies imagine themselves to be?

For nations that speak with practised fluency about pluralism, tolerance, and the gentle virtues of liberal democracy, there is something faintly contradictory in the selective policing of culture. The official story, repeated with commendable confidence, is that diversity is not merely tolerated but celebrated; that difference is not a threat but a strength. And yet, when certain kinds of difference make themselves visible, audible, and impossible to ignore, the tone shifts ever so slightly.

One begins to hear objections that are, on the surface, entirely reasonable. The streets, we are told, must remain orderly. Public spaces cannot be monopolised. There are concerns about noise, about cleanliness, about the general inconvenience of it all. These are, of course, the sorts of objections that might be raised against any large gathering.

Except, curiously, they are not raised with equal enthusiasm against all gatherings.

When Saint Patrick’s Day rolls around, the temporary collapse of public decorum is not merely tolerated but anticipated with something approaching civic pride. When Oktoberfest takes hold, the spectacle of public intoxication, complete with its inevitable debris, is reframed as festive exuberance. The aftermath, one suspects, is no less fragrant, no less inconvenient, and no less visible.

Even the Feast of San Gennaro, with its crowded streets and unapologetic excess, is embraced as part of the urban tapestry, a living testament to the city’s immigrant past.

Set against this, the quieter objections to processions like Ashura begin to look less like principled concerns and more like selective sensitivities. The issue, it seems, is not disruption per se, but the identity of those doing the disrupting, and perhaps the unfamiliarity of the meaning behind it.

One is left, then, with a rather uncomfortable proposition: that the boundary between “acceptable” and “foreign” culture is drawn not by the magnitude of its impact on public life, but by how easily it can be assimilated into an existing narrative, and by whom.

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Of Immigration and Advantage

It is worth recalling, if only to steady the argument, that the extraordinary success of places like the United States has never been built on cultural restraint. Quite the opposite. Its greatest competitive advantage has been an almost unrivalled ability to attract people from elsewhere: scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists and dreamers, each arriving with skills that have transformed the country in ways too numerous to catalogue.

The familiar story is usually told in the language of economics. The brightest minds arrive, the most ambitious remain, and together they drive advances in technology, medicine, finance and the sciences. It is one of the defining features of modern America that so much of its success has been built not despite immigration, but because of it.

Yet people do not cross oceans as disembodied intellects. They arrive with families, memories and traditions. They bring languages spoken around the dinner table, recipes inherited from grandparents, holidays marked on different calendars and rituals that give shape to ordinary life. To welcome the engineer while expecting him to quietly retire his culture at the office door is to misunderstand what immigration has always been. Human beings are not modular creatures. Their contributions cannot be separated quite so neatly from the lives they live.

The United States has long wrestled with this tension. It has often asked newcomers to become unmistakably American in public life, to adopt a shared civic identity, a common language and a common national story. There is much to admire in that aspiration. A society needs common ground if it is to function as more than a collection of parallel communities. Yet the expectation can also carry an implicit bargain: bring your talents, certainly; bring your work ethic; but allow the more unfamiliar parts of your identity to remain largely private.

The result is a curious duality. Many immigrant communities become adept at navigating two worlds. In the workplace, the classroom and public life, they perform a shared American identity with ease. At home, in places of worship and within their own neighbourhoods, older customs continue to flourish. The hyphen in “Indian-American,” “Chinese-American” or “Arab-American” is not merely grammatical; it represents a continual negotiation between assimilation and inheritance.

Britain has historically approached this balance somewhat differently. Rather than insisting upon a singular national identity, it has often tolerated a greater degree of cultural distinctiveness in public life. Yet this accommodation has carried its own paradox. If America has sometimes encouraged assimilation at the expense of visibility, Britain has at times seemed willing to recognise cultural difference without fully incorporating it into the national imagination. Communities are acknowledged, their festivals permitted, but they are not always understood as belonging equally to the shared story of what it means to be British.

I have occasionally encountered this distinction in surprisingly ordinary conversations. More than once, after expressing an opinion entirely unrelated to my background, someone has felt compelled to remind me, “Yes, but you’re (insert ‘foreign’ ethnicity here).” The remark is rarely intended as hostility. If anything, it is offered as a statement of fact. Yet it quietly reveals an assumption that some identities remain qualified, that one may be accepted within the nation while never quite escaping the adjective that precedes it.

Perhaps this is inevitable. Every immigrant society must decide which differences enrich the common culture and which remain, however politely, on its margins. But if the prosperity of countries like America and Britain has depended upon importing human capital from every corner of the globe, it is worth asking whether the accompanying cultures should forever be treated as excess baggage. The ideas, after all, rarely travel alone.

The Slow Work of Becoming Familiar

History, if it teaches anything at all, teaches patience, though it rarely advertises the lesson in advance.

The Irish who now lend their patron saint to a global bacchanal were not always greeted with green-tinted affection in the United Kingdom or the United States. They arrived to caricature and suspicion, their loyalties questioned, their customs regarded as insular at best and subversive at worst. The same might be said of Italian immigrants, whose neighbourhood festivals, now folded neatly into the civic calendar, were once dismissed as parochial displays of Old World provincialism.

Time, however, has a way of domesticating the unfamiliar. Repetition dulls the edge of strangeness; participation replaces observation; what was once “theirs” becomes, almost imperceptibly, “ours.” The process is neither swift nor especially graceful, but it is remarkably consistent.

Which is why it may be premature to treat the current unease surrounding observances like Ashura or celebrations such as Eid al-Fitr as fixed or final. They may, in fact, be passing through the same slow and uneven rite of passage that earlier immigrant traditions endured, caught in that awkward intermediate stage between visibility and acceptance.

This is not to suggest inevitability. Acceptance is not guaranteed, nor is it evenly distributed. But the pattern is difficult to ignore: today’s curiosity, or even discomfort, has a habit of becoming tomorrow’s tradition, provided it is allowed the space, and the time, to take root.

And therein lies the tension. For patience is a historical virtue, but a political inconvenience.

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A Future Tense of Belonging

It requires no great leap of imagination to suppose that, a century hence, the spectacle of a procession marking Ashura winding its way through London or New York City will provoke no more comment than the annual greening of rivers for Saint Patrick’s Day. What is now observed with curiosity, or, in less generous quarters, unease, may yet be absorbed into the easy, unexamined rhythm of civic life.

After all, this is how the story has tended to unfold. The unfamiliar is first noticed, then tolerated, then tentatively embraced, and finally, once its origins have been softened by time, claimed as part of the local inheritance. Somewhere along the way, the edges are rounded. Meanings are simplified. A festival once rooted in grief or devotion may acquire, for the wider public, a more convivial face. There will be food, almost certainly; perhaps even a sponsor or two.

One might even venture that this process could be hastened, however modestly, by the oldest instruments of cultural diplomacy: explanation and exchange. An invitation to share in a meal marking Eid al-Fitr; a willingness to understand the history that animates a day like Ashura; the simple, civilising act of curiosity. These are not especially radical propositions, but they are, at present, unevenly practised.

For now, however, there remains a quieter, more discomfiting reality. There are citizens, native-born, no less than newly arrived, who move through these societies with the full rights of belonging in law, yet with a cultural presence that is still treated as provisional. Their festivals are marked, but not quite shared; visible, but not entirely accepted.

They are, in a sense, insiders with an asterisk.

And so the paradox persists. Nations that pride themselves on being forged from elsewhere continue, in subtle ways, to distinguish between what has been sufficiently domesticated to count as “ours” and what must, for the time being, remain politely, persistently “theirs.”

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Yet I would add some follow up questions to history’s cross-examination: Why is it that when faced with an aggressive Türkiye that occupies and ethnically cleanses Kurdish Afrin in Northern Syria does the West inevitably support the Sultan and his forces over the Kurdish oppressed? And why is it that this truly neo-imperial State get a free pass while Israel is inevitably blamed for its proactive defence? And how is it that this clear and undisputed war criminal in Erdogan the Terrible gets to escape ICC censure while today’s author inexplicably faces an legal indictment and restrictions on his travel?

I’ll answer: Because Kurdish lives don’t matter, imperialism is OK if it’s Islamist, and Israel is held to standard 1000 times stricter than a so-called NATO ally “because that’s the way of the world”. We sit and watch as Kurdish Afrin is no more and the pathetic Western protesters sit by and do nothing. They just wait for an Israeli-Turkish conflagration so they can support the tribe on the anti-Jewish side.

General Gallant is highly diplomatic in this article as befits his former office, yet, we, as observers, can be blunt. An ICC that fails to indict Erdogan is a sham and a world that accepts Kurdish ethnic cleansing is morally lost. The General is understandably concerned with Israel’s security above all, but I also fear for the West — for we support Türkiye. We support immorality, imperialism and evil and call it justice.

If Ergodan comes to London, it’s time for a citizen’s arrest. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

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For more on the Turkish destruction of Kurdish life, read this article from Dr Khaled Salih —and spread it:

“Türkiye’s Foothold” by General Yoav Gallant

The agreement signed in Mecca is part of a larger Turkish play that Israel needs to address.

What is happening in Syria these days is taking place far from the focus of the public and the media, but close enough to Israel that we should be alert. Türkiye is establishing itself in what is still considered Syrian territory, and it has been doing so in a slow, gradual and strategic fashion. It is proceeding in stages, in a manner designed not to provoke a response, and to divert attention from other major events in our region.

The activity is combined, military and civilian together. Religious and social outreach, nonprofit organizations doing work no one objects to. In parallel, senior Turkish officers have begun arriving and moving through these areas, and activity is forming around them. Turks on the ground are working with Sunni communities, with Druze, and with others, including close to our border. Türkiye has taken on the rebuilding of Syria’s armed forces, and it is doing so based on its own defense industry. Arrangements concerning weapons, equipment and training between the two armies are being discussed and, in part, signed. A Syrian army rebuilt with Turkish systems, by Turkish trainers, is a Syrian army that answers in some measure to Ankara.

Each one of these steps taken by Türkiye is small enough to be dismissed on its own, which is exactly how a foothold is built. By the time the presence is undeniable, the question of whether to permit it has already been settled.

We Have Seen This Method Before

There is no need to speculate about where gradual entrenchment leads, because we have watched it run to its conclusion twice, with opposite results. In Lebanon, Israel permitted Iranian penetration and allowed a gradual buildup to proceed on our border. What grew there over the years became a monster of terror. On the Syrian border, we chose differently, and for a decade we fought a persistent Iranian and Syrian effort to build a combined military presence against us and managed to block it. It required constant attention and a willingness to act while the effort was still small, and it worked.

For us, Israelis, it is clear that we cannot allow a military establishment so close that it degrades our ability to defend ourselves against Iran, against Lebanon and against Syria itself. That condition has not changed, whatever else in Syria has.

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Filling Regional Power Vacuums

In February, a day before the current campaign in Iran began, I argued that the weakening of Iran would not leave an empty space, and that Türkiye was the actor best positioned to fill it. Power vacuums in this region are never empty for long. What was then a strategic direction has since become a physical presence, and it has moved faster than I expected.

I should say plainly that I do not write this as someone who has always regarded Türkiye as an adversary. In 2005, as military secretary to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, I sat in meetings with Türkiye’s leadership when Ankara was considered one of our closest partners, a rising power inside NATO with ambitions to join the European Union, and it understood that a relationship with Israel served those ambitions. We were a route to Washington, a partner in intelligence and defense technology, and a signal to Europe about the kind of state Türkiye intended to be.

As heirs to an imperial tradition, the Turks have always seen themselves as leaders of the region and of the Muslim world. Unlike Iran, which pursued the same standing through proxies and violence, Türkiye projects influence through state power. Its geographic location naturally positions Türkiye for that. The country sits on the bridge between Asia and Europe, and it controls Russia’s principal shipping route westward, military and civilian alike, to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic beyond. It fields NATO’s second-largest army, larger than any European force, and it has become a manufacturing anchor for the European economy.

The activity in Syria is part of a larger play. Türkiye holds ground and influence in a divided Libya, and a presence in East Africa built primarily through Somalia. It has cultivated real standing across the Turkic states of Central Asia, in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan above all. Its occupation of Northern Cyprus is now more than fifty years old, and its dispute with Greece has lately taken the form of maritime zone claims that neighboring states and the European Union have rejected. Syria is the latest move of many taken over years, and the closest to our borders.

What Was Signed in Mecca

On August 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed an agreement declaring that an armed attack on any one of them is an attack on all three. Turkish officials compared the clause to NATO’s Article 5. It is worth remembering that Article 5 has been invoked once in the history of the alliance, after September 11. Mutual defense clauses are rarely tested, and this one may never be.

What this agreement gives Türkiye is access to Saudi capital, the largest pool of defense money in the region, at precisely the moment its industry needs financing to scale. It gains association with a nuclear-armed state, which changes how others calculate the cost of confronting it. And it gains a customer that wants what Ankara is uniquely willing to sell.

Saudi Arabia buys most of its weapons from the United States, but Riyadh now wants engineers, production lines and an industry of its own, and Washington has never been eager to transfer that kind of knowledge to anyone. Türkiye has shown itself far more willing to transfer knowledge alongside product. Its defense industry exported more than ten billion dollars last year and has spent a decade learning to build and sell at speed. Saudi money will accelerate it further.

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Taking Them at Their Word

Our history and experience as Jews teach us a valuable lesson. When those who hate us tell us what they intend, we take those intentions seriously.

In 2018, the president of Türkiye told his party’s parliamentarians that “the spirit of Hitler, which led the world to a great catastrophe, has reemerged among some of Israel’s leaders.” At the prayers ending Ramadan in March 2025, he asked publicly that “Allah destroy and devastate Zionist Israel.” And in 2024 he said of Israel that “just as we entered Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we will do the same to them. There is nothing to prevent us from doing it.” He repeated that threat this past April, after Assad had fallen and Turkish forces were already in Syria.

We have heard this kind of language before, and we learned what it costs to treat it as rhetoric. That is why we are paying close attention to the foundations being laid by the Turks, and especially to those being set so close to our homes. Mount Hermon sits less than 300 kilometers from the Turkish-Syrian border. Israelis are used to thinking of Türkiye as a faraway country. It is not.

Since I met him in 2005, Erdogan has changed course. Where he once saw Israel as an opportunity, he now sees us as a problem, a blocker to his strategy rather than an enabler of it.

Israel does not need additional security challenges. For years the objective I set was to improve our bilateral relationship with Türkiye, and I would still prefer that outcome. But the Turkish leader has spent years fanning the flames, and he is now backing those statements with practical steps. If it comes down to it, he will learn the hard way that Israel does not behave as some of his neighbors do. We will defend ourselves and our interests.

Partnering with Israel, not against it, has already been proven as a far more productive route. I have written before about what that partnership actually returns to the United States, in industry, in capability and in combat-proven technology. Israel and the United States have just come through a war that tested all of it under real conditions. That shared record is the foundation to build on. We are the region’s only functioning democracy, a technology power whose products the world buys, an economy that has grown through a war on seven fronts, and a military whose capabilities have been proven in combat rather than in exercises.

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The Fourth Circle

Regional balance is achievable, and I am confident it runs through partnerships with Israel. Ben-Gurion built his periphery doctrine on partners beyond the ring of hostile neighbors who shared our interests without sharing our borders. Those partners were Ethiopia, Iran and Türkiye then. All three have been irrelevant to that purpose for many years, and the doctrine went with them.

What has changed since is that distance no longer costs what it once did. Communications, security cooperation and transport now make it practical to build real strategic depth with states that are nowhere near us. The fourth circle is available in a way it simply was not in Ben-Gurion’s time.

That is where we should concentrate our diplomatic efforts. India, with which our defense and technology relationship has become one of our closest. The United Arab Emirates, whose influence now reaches around the world, built on the courageous and far-sighted leadership of its ruler. Azerbaijan, a relationship of long standing and real substance. Greece and Cyprus, our partners in the eastern Mediterranean in energy, maritime security and joint exercises.

These are not a coalition against anyone. They are states whose interests genuinely align with ours, and together they form strategic depth that no single adversary can erase.

A capable and ambitious state is establishing itself to our north, patiently and in stages, and it is deepening its ties across the region while it does so. Our answer has to work on both fronts. Address the foothold while it is still being built and build the fourth circle while there is time to build it.

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We need to end the madness. End the legal harassment of General Gallant. And end The Great Genocide Libel. In my newly released book (THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH), I explore the deep philosophical and cultural roots of the lie of the century. Support the cause by reading the serialisation in full (open to paid subscribers of Guerre and Shalom). Two recent chapters are below:

The introduction to the book is here:

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“It’s important not to conflate Judaism with Zionism.”
‘cause Judaism’s a noble religion.

But...
You’re stiff-necked,
You’re stubborn,
Just get with the times.
Your creed is as dead
as a poem that rhymes.

And
Kosher’s barbaric.
So let it be banned.

And ‘cision is too
So let it be damned.

And 
No to the Sabbath
"How lazy", they jibe.
And marry a Jew?
You’re racist. You're vile.

Yeshivah?
Old-fashioned.
Faith?
What a joke!
Service in Hebrew?
You ghettoized folk.

And as for your book?
We hate it.
It’s rank!
‘Cause you don’t show the love
of the one that we thank.

Your god is a devil,
He’s jealous,
what’s more,
you look for salvation
in words of the law.

So let me here finish,
Honest at last,
Jud-Zio-daism
Equal and past.

And if you are lucky 
inferior caste.

****
But we love the Jews!

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In today’s commentary, Maish tells us about how the section of Deuteronomy known by Jews as Ki Teitzei should be seen as one synthesised narrative, teaching us to protect the most vulnerable in our society, and the commandment to “blot out” Amalek is an integral part of this. Maish—thank-you for your work and your contribution to the defence of our civilisational story - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

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Previously from Maish:

Introduction

Parshat Ki Teitzei contains more mitzvot than any other parshah in the Torah, seventy-four by the traditional count, and at first reading it can feel almost deliberately disorderly. We move from the beautiful captive woman to inheritance, the rebellious son, returning lost property, the fallen animal, the mother bird, rooftop parapets, forbidden mixtures, marriage and divorce, sexual offenses, escaped slaves, prostitution, interest, vows, workers eating from a field, divorce, military exemptions, collateral, kidnapping, leprosy, wages, individual criminal responsibility, justice for the stranger and orphan, gleanings for the poor, lashes, the unmuzzled ox, levirate marriage, dishonest weights, and then, suddenly, Amalek.

Or perhaps not suddenly at all. Perhaps Amalek is exactly where Amalek belongs. The final three verses of Ki Teitzei are among the most famous and disturbing in the Torah:זָכוֹר אֵת אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה לְךָ עֲמָלֵק בַּדֶּרֶךְ בְּצֵאתְכֶם מִמִּצְרָיִם. אֲשֶׁר קָרְךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ וַיְזַנֵּב בְּךָ כָּל הַנֶּחֱשָׁלִים אַחֲרֶיךָ וְאַתָּה עָיֵף וְיָגֵעַ וְלֹא יָרֵא אֱלֹהִים, “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you left Egypt: how he encountered you on the way and struck at all the stragglers behind you, while you were exhausted and weary, and he did not fear God.”

We usually race toward the command in the following verse: תִּמְחֶה אֶת זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek. But before asking what it means to destroy Amalek, we should ask the question the Torah itself forces upon us: What, exactly, made Amalek so terrible?

Israel had enemies before Amalek and would have enemies afterward. Pharaoh enslaved an entire people and murdered its infants. Sichon and Og fought Israel. Midian would become an enemy. The Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans would eventually follow. Warfare itself cannot explain Amalek’s unique theological status.

The Torah therefore gives us details. Amalek did not simply attack Israel.וַיְזַנֵּב בְּךָ כָּל הַנֶּחֱשָׁלִים אַחֲרֶיךָ, Amalek went after the people at the back. And that may be the key to the entire parshah.

The People at the Back

Every moving society develops a front and a rear. At the front are the strong, the fast, the organized, the well-connected, the people with resources, status, family, health, confidence, and power. At the rear are those who cannot quite keep up. The Torah calls them הַנֶּחֱשָׁלִים אַחֲרֶיךָ.

Rashi, drawing on Midrash Tanchuma, Ki Teitzei 10, makes the description considerably more uncomfortable. These were not necessarily innocent saints who happened to walk slowly. He describes them as חסרי כח מחמת חטאם, people weakened because of their sins, whom the protective cloud had expelled.

That changes everything. If the stragglers had been flawless victims, protecting them would be morally easy. Rashi’s reading makes the Torah’s demand harder. Some people end up at the back partly because of their own failures.

And they are still your people. They may have sinned. They may have made terrible decisions. They may have wandered beyond the protective cloud. They may even bear some responsibility for their vulnerability.

Amalek sees that vulnerability and says: Good. Now they are easy to kill. The Torah says: They are still part of Israel.

This is one of Judaism’s most demanding moral propositions. The test of a community is not merely how it treats its finest members. It is how it treats the people who have fallen behind, including some who helped put themselves there.

Read Ki Teitzei Backwards

Now go backward through the parshah. Suddenly its apparent miscellany begins to acquire a remarkable coherence. There is a captive woman, taken in war and completely at the mercy of the victorious soldier. The Torah intervenes. There is the son of the less-loved wife, vulnerable to manipulation by a father who prefers another child. Again the Torah intervenes. There is a lost animal whose owner is absent and therefore unable to protect his property. The Torah intervenes. There is a mother bird sitting defenselessly upon her young. The Torah intervenes. There is a person walking on your roof who could fall because you failed to construct a parapet. The Torah intervenes before he falls. There is an escaped slave, perhaps the most powerless human being imaginable in the ancient world. The Torah astonishingly commands:לֹא תַסְגִּיר עֶבֶד אֶל אֲדֹנָיו, Do not return an escaped slave to his master. He is permitted to live “in your midst, in the place that he chooses.” Do not oppress him. There is a poor laborer who possesses so little economic leverage that his employer might casually postpone his wages. Torah says no. בְּיוֹמוֹ תִתֵּן שְׂכָרוֹ, pay him that day, because “he is poor and his life depends upon it.” There is a debtor whose poverty has placed him under the power of a creditor. Even then, the creditor may not barge into his home and seize whatever he wishes. There is a widow whose garment might be taken as collateral. The Torah says no. There is the גֵּר, the stranger, without the family networks and inherited social capital enjoyed by everyone around him. Do not distort his justice. There is the יָתוֹם, the orphan, without a father to advocate for him. Do not distort his justice. There is the poor person who owns no field and waits behind the landowner during harvest. Torah tells the owner not to squeeze every final unit of value from his property. If you forget a sheaf, leave it. When harvesting olives, do not go over the tree again. When harvesting grapes, do not strip the vineyard a second time. What remains belongs to the stranger, the orphan, and the widow.

Again and again, Ki Teitzei asks the same question in different legal forms: What do you do when another human being is temporarily or permanently at your mercy? And again and again the Torah answers: You restrain yourself. You remember that weakness does not extinguish human dignity. You leave something behind. You pay on time. You return what was lost. You build the railing before someone falls. You do not enter the debtor’s house. You do not exploit the stranger. You do not manipulate the inheritance of the unwanted child. You do not return the fugitive to the person from whom he fled. And then, after constructing this extraordinary moral architecture, the Torah says: Now let me tell you about Amalek.

Amalek Has the Opposite Moral Instinct

Amalek sees exactly the same human being Torah sees. The difference is in what happens next. The Torah sees the weak and identifies an obligation. Amalek sees the weak and identifies an opportunity. That may be the deepest distinction.

Amalek does not merely practice violence. Amalek practices predatory violence. He does not confront Israel at its strongest point. He searches for its weakest.

The Or HaChaim emphasizes the deliberateness of the attack. Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar (1696–1743), the great Moroccan-born Sephardic commentator who eventually settled in Jerusalem is universally known by the title of his Torah commentary, the Or HaChaim. He says Amalek did not merely stumble across Israel. He went looking for them, traversing the wilderness in pursuit of his prey. This was not an unfortunate border skirmish. It was a hunt. And the prey Amalek selected consisted of the people least capable of defending themselves.

The Torah even piles vulnerability upon vulnerability: וְאַתָּה עָיֵף וְיָגֵעַ you were exhausted and weary. Rashi connects עָיֵף to Israel’s thirst immediately before Amalek’s attack in Exodus 17. They were physically depleted. Amalek waits for exhaustion. That is not incidental information. It is the indictment.

There is a species of evil that does not merely desire victory. It calculates weakness. It asks where resistance will be lowest. It finds the exhausted, the isolated, the unprotected, the straggler, and strikes there. That is Amalek.

“He Did Not Fear God”

The verse then adds three apparently simple words: וְלֹא יָרֵא אֱלֹהִים, “and he did not fear God.” Rashi, following Sifrei Devarim 296 understands the subject as Amalek: Amalek did not fear God enough to refrain from harming Israel. But why is fear of God the decisive description?

Because throughout Tanach, yirat Elokim is not merely an emotion felt during prayer. It frequently appears precisely where one person possesses power over another person who cannot protect himself. The Egyptian midwives refuse Pharaoh’s command to murder Hebrew infants because וַתִּירֶאןָ הַמְיַלְּדֹת אֶת הָאֱלֹהִים, the midwives feared God. Yoseph, holding his brothers completely within his power as ruler of Egypt, says אֶת הָאֱלֹהִים אֲנִי יָרֵא, I fear God.

Why invoke God at precisely those moments? Because when the vulnerable person cannot stop you, something else must. That something is yirat Elokim. The fear of God means that there is no such thing as an unwitnessed exercise of power. There is no human being so insignificant that what you do to him becomes morally invisible. There is no field so completely yours, no employee so economically dependent upon you, no debtor so powerless, no stranger so disconnected, no captive so defeated, no straggler so far behind the camp that God ceases to care what happens there.

Amalek’s defining characteristic is therefore not atheism in the modern philosophical sense. It is something much more dangerous: the conviction that when nobody powerful is watching, you may do whatever you want, וְלֹא יָרֵא אֱלֹהִים.

Rashi’s Boiling Bath

Rashi famously offers several interpretations for אֲשֶׁר קָרְךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ. One derives קרך from chance or happenstance. Another associates it with impurity. But his most famous explanation connects it with קור, cold.

The nations had heard what happened in Egypt and at the sea. Israel seemed untouchable. Rashi, citing the Midrash Tanchuma, compares the situation to a boiling bath that everyone is afraid to enter. One reckless man jumps in. He is badly burned but in doing so he cools the bath for everyone else. Amalek was that man.

This adds another dimension to Amalek. Amalek does not merely injure his immediate victims. He changes the moral temperature. Someone must be first to demonstrate that the previously unthinkable can be done. Someone must be first to cross the line. Once he does, everyone else’s inhibition decreases.

That is how barbarism often spreads. The first humiliation shocks us. The tenth becomes familiar. The hundredth becomes background noise. Someone must first teach society that the forbidden is possible. Amalek cooled the bath.

And that metaphor extends far beyond warfare. Every civilized taboo depends partly upon the expectation that decent people simply do not do certain things. Once someone publicly violates the taboo and succeeds, the psychological barrier is lowered for everyone else. Cruelty is contagious. So is contempt. Amalek’s crime was therefore not only killing the stragglers. It was introducing a new possibility into the world: perhaps the weak are fair game.

The Astonishing Juxtaposition of Amalek and Dishonest Weights

There is another clue hiding immediately before the Amalek passage. What are the verses preceding זכור את אשר עשה לך עמלק? They concern weights and measures. You may not keep a large weight and a small weight, manipulating the measurement depending upon whether you are buying or selling. You must possess אֶבֶן שְׁלֵמָה וָצֶדֶק, a complete and honest weight. Then, without transition the Torah states: זָכוֹר אֵת אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה לְךָ עֲמָלֵק.

Rashi refuses to treat the juxtaposition as accidental. Citing Tanchuma, he writes that if Israel falsifies weights and measures, it should fear the provocation of the enemy. At first this seems strange. What does cheating someone at the marketplace have to do with Amalek? Everything.

The merchant with the dishonest weight and Amalek share a moral operating system. Both search for an asymmetry they can exploit. The customer does not know the true weight. The merchant does. The straggler cannot defend himself. Amalek can attack him. In each case, one human being discovers that another is vulnerable and asks not, What do I owe him? but What can I get away with?

The magnitude is obviously different. Fraud is not murder. But the moral vector points in the same direction. This may explain why the Torah places Amalek immediately after dishonest weights. Before commanding us to identify Amalek outside ourselves, Torah forces us to examine the miniature Amalek that can appear in ordinary economic life.

Do not manipulate the scale merely because the customer cannot detect it. Do not exploit the worker because he needs the job. Do not squeeze the debtor because he needs the loan. Do not mistreat the stranger because he lacks connections. Do not attack the straggler because he cannot fight back. These are not unrelated commandments. They are variations on one question: What kind of person are you when you possess an advantage?

The Torah Does Something Even More Radical

There is an additional feature of Ki Teitzei that deserves attention. The Torah does not merely command us to protect the vulnerable. It repeatedly instructs the powerful person to remember having once been vulnerable himself.

After commanding justice for the stranger and orphan and protecting the widow’s garment, the Torah says: וְזָכַרְתָּ כִּי עֶבֶד הָיִיתָ בְּמִצְרַיִם, “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt.” Then, only a few verses later: זָכוֹר אֵת אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה לְךָ עֲמָלֵק. Remember Egypt. Remember Amalek. These are not merely historical exercises. They are technologies of moral memory.

Remember what it felt like to possess no power. Remember what it felt like when someone stronger could determine whether you ate, worked, rested, lived, or died. Remember what happened when you were exhausted and somebody saw your exhaustion as an opportunity.

The Torah’s theory of memory is therefore profoundly practical. We remember suffering not in order to cultivate permanent victimhood but in order to prevent suffering from reproducing itself when the former victim finally acquires power. Yesterday you were the slave. Tomorrow you will own a field. Yesterday you possessed nothing. Tomorrow someone will owe you money. Yesterday Pharaoh controlled your labor. Tomorrow you will employ laborers. Yesterday you were the stranger. Tomorrow strangers will live in your country. Yesterday Amalek attacked you when you were weak. Tomorrow you will be strong. And then comes the real test. What will you do with your strength?

Memory Is Not Enough

The Ramban makes an important observation about זכור and לא תשכח. Why both? The rabbinic tradition distinguishes them: לא תשכח addresses forgetting in the heart; זכור requires active verbal remembrance. The Ramban explains that Israel must transmit what Amalek did across the generations, telling its children what occurred and why the command concerning Amalek exists. That means Amalek cannot be reduced to a vague symbol of generic evil. The story must be told. Something happened. A people had just escaped slavery. They were traveling through a desert. They were thirsty, exhausted, disorganized, and vulnerable. Some fell behind. Another nation deliberately attacked those people. Remember that. Because civilization has a remarkable capacity to remember victories and forget victims. The Torah insists upon the opposite. Remember the rear of the column.

Who Is at the Back of Our Column?

And this, finally, is where Ki Teitzei stops being ancient history. Every society has נחשלים אחריך. Every community has a rear. There are elderly people who cannot keep pace with technological and social change. There are poor families quietly drowning while living beside affluent neighbors. There are children who do not fit the educational machinery constructed for everyone else. There are people with disabilities for whom ordinary architecture becomes an obstacle course. There are immigrants who do not understand the language or bureaucracy. There are workers who cannot afford to antagonize their employers. There are widows and widowers suddenly navigating institutions their spouses once managed. There are people whose marriages collapse, whose businesses fail, whose children struggle, whose reputations are damaged, whose judgment was poor, whose luck was worse.

And, crucially, some of them have made mistakes. Rashi will not allow us the luxury of imagining that everyone at the rear of the column arrived there through no fault of his own. That may be precisely why the Torah’s ethic is so demanding. A civilization committed to protecting only the blameless vulnerable will eventually discover reasons why almost nobody qualifies.

The poor should have saved more. The addict should have exercised greater self-control. The prisoner should not have committed the crime. The debtor should not have borrowed. The struggling student should have worked harder. The socially isolated person should have behaved differently. Perhaps. But the Torah asks another question first: What are you going to do now that he is behind you? Amalek has an answer. The Torah has another.

The Opposite of Amalek

We often imagine the command to destroy Amalek exclusively as a command about Amalek. Ki Teitzei suggests something more demanding. Before we can speak seriously about eradicating Amalek, we must make certain that we are not reproducing Amalek’s governing principle ourselves. The Torah has just spent an entire parshah teaching Israel how not to become the thing it is commanded to oppose. Do not exploit the captive. Do not dispossess the unwanted son. Do not ignore what your neighbor has lost. Do not create preventable danger. Do not return the fugitive slave. Do not exploit the poor worker. Do not invade the debtor’s dignity. Do not pervert justice for the stranger or orphan. Do not strip the field bare. Do not cheat with the scale. And finally: remember Amalek.

Now the ending of Ki Teitzei no longer seems strange. It seems inevitable. The parshah begins with Israel possessing power over a captive woman and ends with Amalek possessing power over exhausted stragglers. Between those poles lies an entire Torah of what human beings are supposed to do with power.

That is the architecture. Ki Teitzei asks us to construct a society in which vulnerability generates responsibility rather than opportunity. Amalek constructs the opposite society. To Amalek, the rear of the column is where one goes hunting. To Torah, the rear of the column is where responsibility begins. Perhaps that is why the Torah does not merely say תמחה את זכר עמלק, erase the memory of Amalek. It first says זכור. Remember. Remember what he did. Remember whom he chose. Remember when he attacked. Remember that you were עיף ויגע, exhausted and weary. Remember the people who could not keep up. And then look behind you.

Because the ultimate question raised by Parshat Ki Teitzei may not be whether we can identify Amalek among our enemies. That is usually easy. The harder question is whether, after acquiring strength, security, wealth, sovereignty, institutions, and power, we can still recognize the people walking at the back of our own column.

The Torah’s answer to Amalek is therefore not weakness. Judaism has never demanded helplessness in the face of evil. Amalek must be confronted precisely because predation upon the defenseless cannot be tolerated. But military strength alone does not constitute the defeat of Amalek. You defeat Amalek when your strength becomes the shield behind which the weak can walk.

You defeat Amalek when the worker knows he will be paid, the debtor knows his home will not be invaded, the stranger knows the law will protect him, the fugitive knows he will not automatically be returned to his oppressor, the widow and orphan know they will receive justice, and the person who has fallen behind discovers that the community has noticed his absence. Amalek looks backward and sees prey. The Torah commands Israel to look backward and see a brother. That may be the most important difference of all.

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by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

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Parts I to III of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part IV — The Dream Becomes Government

The dream becomes government only when the people remain larger than the institutions built in their name.

Introduction & Chapter 11: The Safe Haven

Chapter 12: The Kurdish Civil War

KDP-PUK conflict, internal fracture, external manipulation and the Washington Agreement

The safe haven gave the Kurds space.

The Kurdish civil war showed that space alone was not enough.

This chapter argues a limited claim: the Kurdish civil war did not prove that Kurds were incapable of self-rule; it proved that self-rule born from armed struggle requires institutions stronger than the parties that delivered it.

This is party-war fungibility. The people who had survived Baghdad, Anfal, Helebje, flight, and abandonment were now at risk of becoming interchangeable with armed-party claims. The citizen could become KDP or PUK before becoming public. The region could become party territory before becoming common home. The Pêşmerge could become party inheritance before becoming public defense. The checkpoint could become the border of loyalty. The dream could be divided between those who claimed to have carried it. Civil war is the moment when the people begin to disappear into rival carriers of the people.

After 1991, Kurdistan Region in Iraq had something unprecedented in modern Kurdish history: protection from Baghdad, returning refugees, open political life, Kurdish administration, election, parliament, and the beginnings of government. For a people emerging from Anfal and Helebje, this was extraordinary. The dream had descended from the mountain into institutions. Kurdistan was no longer only a rebellion, a memory, or a forbidden word. It had ministries, parties, flags, checkpoints, media, and elections.

But the same conditions that made self-rule possible also exposed the wounds inside Kurdish politics. The external oppressor had not disappeared, but its immediate reach had been weakened. That meant Kurdish parties now had to confront one another not only as allies against Baghdad, but as competitors for power, territory, revenue, legitimacy, and the right to define the future.

The Kurds had escaped one burning house, but the new house had to be built with hands still shaking from smoke, loss, suspicion, and grief. Protection from Baghdad created space, but it did not create trust. The safe haven offered a foundation. It did not decide who would hold the blueprint, who would control the doors, or whether the rooms would belong to the people or to the parties.

That question — whether public authority would belong to citizens or to armed parties — is the chapter’s central correction test.

The result was one of the most painful episodes in modern Kurdish history: the war between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan that broke out in 1994.

This war was not simply a quarrel between two leaders. It was the eruption of accumulated structural tensions: geography, ideology, party history, conflicting networks, foreign alliances, economic control, border revenue, personal rivalry, and the difficulty of transforming guerrilla movements into democratic institutions. The KDP and PUK had both sacrificed for Kurdistan. Both had martyrs. Both had prisons in their memory. Both had fought Baghdad. Both had legitimacy. That was precisely what made the conflict so dangerous. It was not a war between Kurdistan and an obvious enemy. It was a war between two Kurdish claims to Kurdistan.

The danger lay in the word claim. Each party could point to sacrifice, memory, territory, leadership, loyalty, martyrs, prisons, and war against Baghdad. Each could say it had carried Kurdistan when others failed. But no carrier of Kurdistan is identical with Kurdistan. The KDP was not Kurdistan. The PUK was not Kurdistan. Their martyrs were not the whole future. Their regions were not private inheritance. Their armed histories did not give either party ownership over the people. The civil war became possible when gratitude for sacrifice failed to become limits on power.

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When Parties Are Stronger Than the Government

The roots went back before 1991. The KDP, associated with the Barzani family and rooted strongly in the Erbil-Duhok-Bahdinan regions, carried the prestige of Mustafa Barzani, the 1961 September Revolution, and the older nationalist struggle against Baghdad. It had tribal, rural, conservative, and nationalist dimensions, though it also contained modern political currents. The PUK, founded in 1975 by Jalal Talabani and others, a breakaway from KDP, after the collapse of the Kurdish revolt, drew more heavily from Suleimani, intellectuals, leftist currents, urban activists, and those who criticized KDP dominance and traditional leadership patterns.

This difference was not absolute. The KDP was not merely tribal. The PUK was not merely ideological. But each party developed its own social world. Each had its own geography, emotional memory, leadership culture, patronage networks, military structures, and foreign contacts. After 1991, these worlds were forced to share one fragile government.

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Please enjoy the short and rousing conclusion to Uri’s serialised book and feel free to submit reviews. Today’s epilogue is free as a temptation to purchase the complete work. Subscribe as paid to read each chapter in its entirety (links below). - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor)

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Rooted Truth: Israel’s Case Against the Deniers

by Uri Zehavi

Preface & Introduction: The Return of the Lie // Chapter 1: Setting the Record Straight // Chapter 2: From Balfour to Independence // Chapter 3: By Right, Not Permission // Chapter 4: Apartheid as Propaganda // Chapter 5: Colonialism and the Great Erasure // Chapter 6: The Genocide Libel // Chapter 7: The UN Assembly Line // Chapter 8: Campus Catechism // Chapter 9: NGO Lawfare // Chapter 10: The Jewish Right to Return // Chapter 11: Sovereignty is Not Theft // Chapter 12: Israel is the Non-Negotiable Nation

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Epilogue: Home

This book opened with the obvious that somehow became controversial: Israel is the homeland of the Jewish People, and our return is both just and lawful. We walked the reader through the libels and the factories that produce them. We named the lies and the liars. Now the last word is the first truth: Israel is not on trial and Jewish sovereignty is not a loan. We do not apply for it each season. We do not apologize for it between wars.

Those who deny that sovereignty are the ones under judgment. History keeps the docket. Pharaoh failed. Haman failed. Hadrian tried to erase Judea and ended up advertising it for two thousand years in every prayer book.

The Mufti who saluted Hitler did not win. The murderers of Munich did not win. Hamas will not win. They all misread the same opponent: a people that outlives its undertakers.

In 1948 the answer to a very old question became final: can the Jews live free on their soil? The answer is yes. It remains yes. It will remain yes. The charter that matters is not in New York; it is written in Hebrew on stone, on coins, on deeds, on graves.

We revived our language. We reopened our towns. We built a scrappy democracy that argues at breakfast and mobilizes by lunch. We grow oranges, and write code, and send our kids to the army, and then to university, and then to weddings where grandparents whisper Kiddush in accents from Baghdad to Vilna and Addis Ababa. Our enemies watch this and call it an anomaly. It is normal life, earned the hard way.

So let us be plain. Israel is here to stay. Its title does not depend on courtesy from Brussels or threats from Tehran. It rests on the unbroken bond between a people and a land and on the ordinary right every nation claims: to decide its fate without asking “May we?”.

Sovereignty is not theft. It is responsibility. It is the weight each generation accepts so the next can study, plant, create, pray, argue, love and sleep.

We want peace. Our prophets wrote the aspiration into the nation’s operating system. But they never confused the end of days with today. In the real world, the quiet in a nursery depends on a fence that works and a soldier who does not blink. The paradox is not complicated. An iron dome above is what makes a violin lesson possible below. We do not worship the sword. We keep it sharp and hope to be able to keep it sheathed.

The choir of deniers would prefer a different script. They reduce every Jewish right to a slogan and every Jewish town to a crime scene. They call Judea “occupied,” a Jew in Hebron a “colonizer,” the Western Wall an “issue.” Their vocabulary is a pry bar.

Our answer is shorter. No.

No to the erasure. No to the renaming. No to any map that treats Jewish presence as a sin to be expiated.

We owe no apology for locking our doors. We owe no deference to courts that confuse self-defense with aggression. We will not outsource survival to blue helmets or paper guarantees that melt in the first warm rain.

We place our trust in the pilot who intercepts the missile, in the infantry sergeant who checks the gate at 3 a.m., in the engineer who builds the next layer of protection, in the teacher who explains why Zion means home, in the parents who pass on a language and a story that does not end with the latest headline.

Peace will come when our neighbors value life more than our death.

Until then, we will do what free peoples do. We will guard what is ours, make more of it, and invite any neighbor who accepts reality to build with us.

We will keep our hand extended and our eyes open. We will remember the hard days and double the good days. That is the Israeli way. It is also the Jewish way.

Picture one last scene. A kibbutz in the south, days after the October massacre. Bullet holes in stucco. Windows boarded. The smell of smoke still in the laundry. An elderly woman, a survivor from Europe, stands at the edge of the yard she planted decades ago. Her voice is quiet. “I will not lose my home again.” That sentence is both policy and prayer. It sums up thousands of years and the next morning’s to-do list.

The world can pollute the air with slogans. It can hold conferences that rename our stones. It can shout “from the river to the sea” into microphones and think that abhorrent racket rewrites geology.

We will keep doing the work that makes a country: argue budgets, study Torah, write patents, bury our dead with tears and honor, celebrate births with laughter loud enough to reach the neighbors.

Israel is not a question mark. It is the living answer to Jewish history. Those who still deny it are not brave rebels. They are bit players in a very old rerun.

The last word belongs to reality. The people of Israel live. The State of Israel stands. We are home. No permission required. No apology offered.

Am Yisrael chai.

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[Image: Charles de Gaulle on the BBC, 18 June 1940]

THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: Twenty Roots of a Modern Blood Libel

by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Introduction: The Genocide of Truth

Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority

CHAPTER 9: Declaration

Gaullist chutzpah: Creating reality through the power of language

In the face of the confusion of French souls, in the face of the disintegration (?) of a government fallen under enemy servitude, in the face of the impossibility of bringing our institutions into play, I, General de Gaulle, French soldier and leader, am aware that I speak in the name of France.

Charles de Gaulle on the BBC, 19 June 1940

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There are leaders and there is Charles de Gaulle. There is audaciousness and there is Charles de Gaulle. He may not have been Jewish, but his life was the very embodiment of chutzpah. Here was a barely known military man who, upon fleeing to London from the Nazi terror, simply declared himself the leader of the free French people!

He represented nobody. Absolutely nobody. To be sure he had shown extraordinary military bravery in both World Wars, spying on the German trenches in the former and valiantly leading an armoured regiment in the latter. To be sure he had just been selected undersecretary of defence by then-ousted French premier Paul Reynaud. Yet at just 49 years of age, and hardly a household name in metropolitan France, he announced himself on the BBC as the true leader of the “free French”. Although Marshal Pétain, installed at the head of a Nazi puppet government in Vichy, was by far his senior in military ranking and despite being a Pétain mentee in better times, he spoke of his senior officer as accepting “an act of debasement” in agreeing to servile armistice terms with the German government.

What is extraordinary here is less de Gaulle’s statements, but more the acceptance of the new Gaullist reality by others who were unforced by either power or logic to accept them. “You are alone”, Churchill said to de Gaulle. “Well I will recognise you alone”.

Many have been the men in American prisons who have claimed to be Jesus Christ resurrected. Few have been the listeners that have accepted these claims. Yet on this occasion, we see a typically Churchill-esque break from the norm. For though France had its own government on its own territory with citizens of multiple and unknown opinions upon the concept of France, and though there were other former governmental figures such as Édouard Deladier and Georges Mandel with greater seniority and experience to run a shadow government in exile, de Gaulle had the unprecedented brass neck to claim that he alone had the embodied authority to represent the “real France”. [And Churchill had the brass neck to support such pretentious positions against Roosevelt’s unsurprising scepticism.]

De Gaulle’s extraordinary approach to leadership, which amounted to changing established reality through sheer force of will, continued unabated throughout the war years:

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Preliminary Reading:

The social contract is predicated on conservative consent, but to admit as much doesn't make one a conservative. It is a mere acknowledgment of reality. Only when we understand things as they really are can we intuit a path forward.

This work is written from the perspective of a nomad; a man who has no home; whose ancestors have roamed the Earth since time immemorial. We have citizenship, yet doubt its solidity. Our suitcases are always packed, ready to move on when the Cloud of Glory beckons us.

We would prefer to stay put; to contribute to our community and to build our State. We seek nothing but the betterment of the co-citizens around us. But history has shown us that the future is cruel; that there is no solution to the nomadic dilemma. Should we remain apart, they will suspect us. Should we integrate, they will envy us. Should we become more German than the Germans, they will exterminate us. There seems no path forward; only the anxiety of despair.

Yet although the powers of a clairvoyant elude us, we doubt not of the following maxim: that the stability of society is not only in their interest, but ours also. We would like to agree with Ayn Rand that rights inherently rest with the individual; that all should be compelled to follow the example of the United States and submit government to moral law. We would like to agree, but we may not; for she describes what ought but not what generally is.

She explains that the freedom-removing government is “criminal”, but not how we may prevent its criminality. Although we may wish to live in a utopia - or failing that in the freedom of America - we may not force it, for we have no power, only vulnerability. Our imperative is to guard that which we already have and to affirm all positive change that has garnered conservative consent.

Rand’s thesis, memorably stated in her essay Man's Rights, has an intuitive moral appeal. Where the individual is sacrificed to the will of the state, there our “natural rights” are offended; rights, according to her, that are neither gifted by neither God nor Society, but rather are inherent in our rational nature. A tyrannical dictator, ruling only in his own interest, clearly sacrifices the individual for a collective interest only he defines, but such, affirms Rand, is also the case in a majoritarian system. Here the majority decides what is in the interest of the State and the minority individual is left with no choice but compliance.

Should they see the majority decision as injurious to their individual moral purpose, they may protest, but to no avail; for in our modern societies it is the State that has the unique monopoly on violence. This being so, government is only legitimate insofar as it protects an individual’s freedom of action. That is the Randian concept of rights.

Rand’s case is compelling, but it ignores the ingredient which can bring about such a state of affairs: power. Power can be used to sacrifice the individual or be employed to bring about the common good. Furthermore, it can be deployed in the defence of different conceptions of the common good. Many have been the historical instances, Catholicism, communism and Islamism among them, of the powerful instituting what they consider to be the common good to the disapproval and actual harm of minority subjects.

The American Experience, which marries the common good with the individual right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, is an exceptional retort to the general rule. Here, the powerful consented to individual political rights and saw that as the basis of their Constitution. Such is to be lauded in most congratulatory of terms, not least of all by the powerless, wandering nomad.

Yet, in defiance of Rand's thesis, this was not “nature”, but declaration. The American Declaration of Independence, as its name suggests, brought into being a political reality that didn't previously exist. It was explicitly founded on the basis of Biblical Freedom, which in and of itself was a political reality that didn't previously exist. American society gifted those rights that we always ought to have had, but never did.

Its powerful thereby created a city on a hill; a prototype of a New Jerusalem. To maintain that Jerusalem both respects the conservative foundations of the original contractors and the individual rights of the current citizenry. Yet had the American State never arrived at that state of political development, those rights would never have existed.

It is here that we must marry the Randian conception of political organization with the conservative attitude of Roger Scruton. On the surface they could not be more different or opposed. Indeed Scruton describes the “bigoted” liberal as even more of an adversary than the power-seeking socialist. Yet it is in understanding the Scrutonian analysis that we resolve the dilemma: how Anglo-conservatives wound up supporting individual rights.

Roger Scruton is emphatic: natural rights do not exist and freedom is a secondary, if not tertiary, goal. The English philosopher sees the nation as an evolutionary organism with its own purpose and will. Through involving themselves in the life of the nation, the conservative identifies the national will with this own. The national posture is defined by its laws and the institutions created by those laws. Freedom, thus understood, is not an abstract principle granted to each person individually, but the space of action permitted by the statutes and customs of their land. That which is not specifically proscribed is permitted and that which will harm the nation, will be proscribed indefinitely.

Thus the British “freedom” of speech is defined by the boundaries of its prohibition. Sedition, incitement of violence and so on - harmful, as they are deemed to be to the nation - are forbidden, but that which is not forbidden is necessarily permitted.

In this way, Scruton firmly contradicts the analysis of Rand. It is not the nation that is subject to individual liberty, but individual liberty that is subject to the higher authority of government. Yet the apparent incompatibility of these doctrines only manifests itself outside Anglo shores, for the natural organism of the Anglo-State was the creature that birthed liberty. Scruton is correct to argue, as I do within my work, that it is the law - not nature - that grants liberty, yet the Anglo powerful have consented to such liberty, both in the United Kingdom and even more dramatically in the American context.

The compromise between Scruton and Rand, which is to say the living reality, comes in accepting the meeting of is and ought. The individual ought be granted a right to life, a right to liberty and a right to pursue (though not the entitlement to be given) happiness. Rand is correct about property too; that it is the individual means to live out an genuinely independent life. Yet those rights only exist because they were in fact granted; because they were birth organically by the liberty-striving Anglo State.

Seeing individual freedom as the expression of its purpose and inscribing that development in the text of constitutionally agreed law, the powerful of Anglo-lands gifted us our rights. Only by remaining without the bounds of their constitutionally framework do we maintain those rights so as protect the freedom of the powerless.

Yet there is a postscript and it challenges the conservative conception that Scruton is so wont to promote. It is understood that it is for the law to grant rights, but it is argued that there is a moral duty to advance towards rights over time. The reason for this is simple: not everyone has a home. The social conservative may automatically identify his own will with that of the nation and seek to live in “friendship” with his nation through affirming conservative principles, but what would his response be to those without a land?

We too live in friendship with our adopted homeland, but do so knowing that we don't have a stake in political decision making. Our voice is meaningless; a drop in the ocean. We try to stay silent, minding our own business and accepting the majority will, but sometimes that isn't enough to save us. If no nation in the world were prepared to go on a journey towards rights, then what future would we have? How could we live with individual dignity?

If no State deigns to go on a journey towards Randian America, then the nomad - a human, rational individual - is thereby treated as a means towards an end. A thing, a chattel, a slave. Rights must be won - consented to - but their achievement is the moral objective of any society with decency. Patience is the antidote to destabilising revolution, but it is challenged by permanent injustice.

The nomad is a person.

The nomad deserves rights.

We call on the social conservatives to agree.

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“In every case, the anti-American or anti-Western actor is excused until responsibility vanishes; the democratic society is judged as if it enjoyed unlimited freedom of action. It’s the old campist structure in chemically pure form: Power is objectionable when exercised by the United States or its allies, but violence exercised against them is an intelligible reaction to structures they created.”

Many thanks Claire - Daniel CS (editor)

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For more on The Democrats:

“The Most Dangerous Woman in the World” by Claire Berlinski

This insignificant, preposterous woman is going to rescue Donald Trump:

That is the co-chair of the DSA. If you don’t know who she is, you’re about to learn, because Republican strategists will spend every day between now and the midterm elections introducing her to you. They won’t need to distort her views, invent a quotation, or selectively edit the video. They’ll just have to show you the interview.

You will see her stupid, beaming, self-satisfied face on ad after ad. Romer, smiling brightly: “I do, yeah, yeah,” when asked whether she believes in collective ownership of the means of production. Then: open borders, abolish prisons, abolish the Senate, defund the police. Then Remnick asking whether she would have attended the exultant rally held the day after Hamas had slaughtered 1,200 people and taken more than 200 hostages. “That’s a good question, I probably would have, yeah, yeah.” Then Ukraine: “We shouldn’t send weapons to the Ukrainians.”

What should America send Ukraine instead of weapons? “Huge teams of diplomats.” Cut to a Russian missile striking an apartment building. The ad writes itself. And by the time it has aired ten thousand times, something extraordinary will have happened: Donald Trump’s own record on Ukraine will have disappeared. The GOP will use Romer to prosecute Democrats for the policy Trump himself has pursued.

Now bring up photographs of every Democrat running in a competitive district. Place beside them the DSA rose, footage of Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and whichever Democratic candidate can be found within six degrees of anyone the DSA has ever endorsed. The narrator will ask: “Is this your Democratic Party?” Or: “They want to abolish the police, open the borders, abandon Ukraine, and put socialists in charge of the American economy. And my opponent refuses to stop them.” If the candidate has ever used the word “equity,” attended a rally with a progressive, supported criminal-justice reform, or failed to denounce Romer by name, the chain of association will be complete.

Then there will be the ad that begins with Romer praising Cuba for having “the most queer-friendly constitution that exists.” We will see grainy footage of Cuban dissidents being arrested, families crossing the Florida Straits, perhaps a political prisoner describing his cell. Cut back to Romer explaining that Cuba’s “serious problems” exist because American pressure made the regime “over-correct.” Then photographs of Democratic candidates: “She calls communist Cuba a model. Does your Democrat agree?” It will be political plutonium in Florida.

The Hamas ad will be even worse. Images of the Nova festival, burned homes at Kibbutz Be’eri, children’s bedrooms, hostage posters. Romer, smiling: “I probably would have, yeah, yeah.” The narrator will say: “When Hamas murdered parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, they didn’t mourn. They celebrated. They called the massacre “inevitable.” Now the Democratic Socialists are taking over the Democratic Party.” In fact, the ad doesn’t even need to put “celebrated” in the narrator’s voice. It can show the rally, let Romer supply her answers, and finish with: “Whose side are they on?”

Then the closing montage: “open borders,” “prison abolition,” “defund the police,” “abolish the Senate,” “owning the means of production”—intercut with every DSA-endorsed politician and every vulnerable Democrat who has ever appeared beside one. The refrain: “This isn’t the old Democratic Party. It’s the Democratic Socialists’ party now.” Followed by the fatal question: “Will [embattled Democrat] stand up to them—or stand with them?”

Fox News will replay those clips until they become ambient noise. Elon Musk will repost them with “Wow,” the argument from first principles having apparently concluded, or “This is insane!” which, for once, will be both the full extent of his analysis and substantially correct. TikTok accounts will set her chirpy “yeah, yeah” to music. Republican candidates will show the interview at rallies and ask crowds whether they want this woman deciding what happens to their homes, their savings, their police departments, and their children. Conservative influencers won’t have to persuade voters that she is ridiculous; her voice will accomplish that before they’ve finished explaining who she is.

But the DSA is a separate organization! It’s only a small fraction of the Democratic Party’s membership! Doesn’t matter. Voters won’t study its endorsement procedures or adjudicate the factional differences between Romer, Mamdani, and AOC. They’ll absorb a much simpler proposition: This is what the Democratic Party becomes when no one restrains it. Every Democratic evasion—“She doesn’t speak for all of us,” “We’re a broad coalition,” “Republicans are trying to distract you”—will sound like confirmation that no one is prepared to say the obvious thing: This woman is an ignorant fanatic, her views are not ours, and she must not be allowed within a thousand miles of American power.

The purpose of this campaign won’t be to make anyone like Trump. It will be to remind voters who have soured on him why they once found voting for him gratifying. Romer restores, in a few exquisitely ruinous minutes, the entire emotional world of wokeism: the childish language, the moral exhibitionism, the serenely selective compassion, the contempt for practical consequences, and the self-righteous certainty that anyone who objects is wicked. Republicans will present themselves, once again, as the only available instrument with which voters can smash that world. And they will use it.

What’s so galling is that Trump’s Republicans—after the pardons, the apologetics for political violence, the indulgence toward Putin, the cruelty toward refugees, the sheer contempt for constitutional government, the ruinous foreign policy—will successfully run as the party appalled by terrorism, dictatorship, and foreign aggression. They’ll wash the stain off their record with a rag made of the public’s disgust at Megan Romer.

The disgust won’t be manufactured, either. This woman is perfectly engineered to produce political catastrophe. Maximum symbolic visibility, minimum formal accountability, and an unlimited supply of thirty-second clips that the GOP needn’t even distort.

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Again and again, Remnick asks the most elementary follow-up question: What would that mean? How would it work? What follows from it? And again and again, you discover that the slogan is the terminus of thought rather than its beginning.

She wants the working class to own the means of production, but can’t explain the institutional arrangements she has in mind. She wants to “tax the hell out of millionaires,” but has apparently never considered a rate, a base, the interaction with investment or revenue, or even what the taxation is meant to finance. She supports open borders, prison abolition, abolition of the Senate, defunding the police and wholesale socialization, but each exists primarily as an advertisement of moral character. As she says, taking principled positions “tells people that you’re principled.” That may be the most revealing sentence in the interview. The position isn’t an instrument for governing. It’s an instrument for exhibiting oneself as the sort of person who holds the position.

The Ukraine exchange is where it ceases to be merely ridiculous. Romer acknowledges that Putin is a murderous dictator and that Russia is an aggressor. (This is because Russia is “hypercapitalist,” she says, and Putin is “this crazy right-wing oligarch.” She betrays no awareness that Russian imperialism came in a left-wing version, too.) Asked whether this is precisely why Eastern Europeans wanted NATO membership, she says yes—then proposes withholding weapons from Ukraine and sending “huge teams of diplomats” instead.

Remnick’s incredulous reply—“So Russia would get off Ukraine’s back by us sending diplomats?”—is almost painfully restrained. She is, clearly, genuinely unaware that diplomacy has been conducted continuously; it has never occurred to her that diplomacy derives much of its effect from the material balance of power; nor has it occurred to her that without arms, Ukraine’s bargaining position is just the interval between resistance and conquest. She is so deeply unserious that she makes Vivek Ramaswamy look like George Kennan.

Violence happens because Americans haven’t sent enough nice people to talk; hostile powers have no autonomous purposes; and, once American military power is removed, history naturally bends toward justice. Ukrainians possess no political agency, no right to defend themselves, no knowledge worth consulting. They’re scenery in a morality play about the Pentagon. One might call it magical thinking produced by radical American innocence, except there’s nothing innocent about it. From a four-year-old, these ideas would be innocent. But this is the confident imbecility of a full-grown woman who has never in her life been told, “That’s insane.” Her cosseted environment has produced a monster.

What follows is even more sinister. Cuba’s repression is an “over-correction” caused by the United States. Hamas’s massacre was “largely inevitable,” because Israel had “put them in a concentration camp” and “deprived them of food.” In every case, the anti-American or anti-Western actor is excused until responsibility vanishes; the democratic society is judged as if it enjoyed unlimited freedom of action. It’s the old campist structure in chemically pure form: Power is objectionable when exercised by the United States or its allies, but violence exercised against them is an intelligible reaction to structures they created.

The interview reveals something important about the word democracy in DSA rhetoric. Romer invokes it almost liturgically. The organization decides things democratically; workplaces will be democratic; housing will be democratic; the economy will be democratic. But democracy does no conceptual work. It’s a sacramental word that purifies whatever follows it. Who allocates capital? Who bears losses? What happens to dissenters? Which rights may a majority not abolish? She hasn’t thought through a word of this. You could call it democracy without liberalism, institutions, or consequences—which is exactly what Trump has been advocating and putting into practice for more than a decade.

The very worst aspect is her cheerfulness. She doesn’t appear troubled by her ignorance. When she can’t answer, she says “That’s a good question,” laughs, and returns to the catechism. Remnick isn’t ambushing her; in fact, he’s extraordinarily patient. He gives her repeated opportunities to supply mechanisms, qualifications, evidence—anything. But beneath every slogan lies another slogan. Each time Remnick asks her to connect principle to consequence, the intellectual floor gives way. She continues chirping in midair.

This is the alternative now being manufactured on the left while the American right becomes openly authoritarian. One political movement has abandoned reality for the sovereign will of the Leader. A growing portion of the opposing movement has abandoned it for the sovereign imbecility of the slogan. In both cases, knowledge is oppressive, institutions are obstacles, moral certainty substitutes for causal reasoning, and the world beyond America exists only as material for a domestic psychodrama.

Trumpism with more giggling is not an adequate answer to Trumpism. History is especially unkind to people who believe their intentions will excuse them from understanding how anything works.

That giggling levity is intolerable. She discusses allowing Russia to conquer Ukraine with roughly the gravitas one might assign to changing a manicure reservation. It has never occurred to her that she’s making enormous demands upon everyone else while accepting no burden of specification herself. Abolish the police, prisons, borders, Senate and private ownership of essential industries; produce a one-state Palestine; withhold Ukraine’s weapons. How would any of this work? “That’s a good question.” Who decides? “Democracy.” What happens to the vulnerable during the transition? More trees, social services and diplomats. She claims the moral prestige of every utopian end while leaving other people to absorb every foreseeable consequence.

Nor does she have the decency to be embarrassed. Remnick keeps giving her opportunities to notice the abyss between her confidence and her knowledge. She peers into it cheerfully, giggles, and changes the subject. Usually, ignorance is corrigible because discovering it causes discomfort. Here, ignorance has been incorporated into her identity: Detailed knowledge belongs to the compromised managerial class; radical sincerity is its own qualification.

This is the DSA’s elected national co-chair. She says explicitly that she speaks for it, and she describes its positions as products of its convention. This performance can’t be waved away as one unfortunate spokesperson. Here is the DSA platform. Read it, and don’t allow anyone to euphemize it. This is not a “Swedish-style social democracy party.”

American politics contains an inexhaustible supply of idiots. But Megan Romer is dangerously repellent. It isn’t just the appalling and idiotic positions she holds. It’s the spectacle of her complete intellectual unpreparedness serenely coexisting with her absolute moral confidence. It’s that everything about her affect is calculated to remind the voters who have soured on Trump—the swing voters whose whims will determine the fate of the planet—why they hated wokeism so much that they were willing to burn down the country just for the pleasure of seeing “liberal tears.”

Her voice alone is enough to do the job. The bright, singsong register. The chirpy “yeah, yeah.” “Do you believe in owning the means of production?”—“I do, yeah, yeah.” It’s the uptalk, the ditzy informality she uses to advocate the coercive and the catastrophic, suggesting a seminar-room ingénue has merged with a commissar: I’m just wondering whether, like, the kulaks really need all that grain?

A reflective person confronted with “Should Ukrainians simply be overrun?” might pause, lower her voice and acknowledge the horror of the alternatives. Romer fills the space with chirpy verbal motion—“yeah,” “you know,” “right,” giggles—and hurries back toward the slogan. Voters will recognize the sound before they’ve parsed the words. It activates an entire archive of resentment. She doesn’t just revive the issues associated with peak wokeism; she reproduces the entire emotional transaction: the serene presumption of moral superiority; the nursery-school vocabulary applied to questions of war and state power; the refusal to acknowledge trade-offs; the suggestion that ordinary intuitions about crime, borders, property or national defense are morally contaminated; the conspicuous compassion for designated groups combined with startling indifference toward inconvenient victims; and, above all, the galactic self-satisfaction that is entirely unmerited and which simply makes you want to slap her.

Trump’s great psychological offer was never a coherent policy program. It was retribution for humiliation. He told people who believed themselves despised by the credentialed classes, “You may despise them back. Better still, I will humiliate them for you.” “Liberal tears” were not incidental sadism; they were precisely the bargain. Romer walks directly back into that structure. She’s almost a laboratory specimen of the antagonist Trump requires: culturally self-satisfied, politically radical, historically ignorant, blithe about disorder, incapable of speaking outside activist argot, and visibly amused by objections that most voters regard as obvious. This doesn’t say, to swing voters, “The danger has passed; competent, constitutional government is safe with us.” It says, “Everything you hated is coming back, and it has learned nothing.” Romer is reopening the emotional wound upon which Trumpism depends. Trump says, “They’re crazy and they hate you.” Romer appears on screen and supplies the corroborating evidence.

The danger is magnified because voters need not agree with Trump to respond to the stimulus. A voter can view him as corrupt, deranged and dangerous, yet also conclude that the people opposing him intend to abolish the police, open the borders, and confiscate private property while laughing at anyone who objects. Romer allows voters who have come to despise Trump to vote Republican again while telling themselves that no, they are not endorsing him; they’re defending themselves against her. Others will simply stay home, having decided that the country offers them a choice between two varieties of repulsive and dangerous fanaticism.

Nor will a recital of Democratic policy proposals answer this. Democrats must understand: The injury is affective before it is programmatic. People don’t just fear that Romer’s policies will be enacted; they fear being governed by lunatics who regard them with contempt. The repair therefore also has to be affective. Democratic leaders must demonstrate—not just assert—that they understand why her performance is offensive. They must be able to say, “Yes, of course you’re right to want borders, police, prisons for violent criminals, private property, and a foreign policy that recognizes the reality of evil in the world. Those are normal positions in a free society. Megan Romer’s views are not ours, and her contempt for the consequences of those views is not ours either.”

But far too many Democrats still think the central error of wokeism was bad messaging. It wasn’t. It was the conversion of politics from persuasion among equal citizens into deranged moral classification by a self-appointed clerisy. Euphemisms became loyalty tests, empirical objections became evidence of a moral defect, and ordinary people were expected to submit not only to ludicrous policies but to an entire etiquette of deference.

Romer has preserved that sensibility intact. Even “democracy,” in her usage, doesn’t actually mean the accommodation of competing interests and convictions. It means a process by which the morally enlightened collectively ratify conclusions already embedded in their ideology. She exhibits no curiosity about people who disagree, no recognition that they may possess legitimate interests or knowledge, and no anxiety about coercing them. “Democracy” becomes the word that absolves the project of having to be liberal.

The most dangerous misconception Democrats could have is that voters will carefully distinguish among the DSA, DSA-endorsed candidates, progressive Democrats, and the national party. They will not. Electoral politics operates through associative branding. Republicans will make Romer the face of each and every Democrat unless each and every one of them makes the separation unmistakable. “She does not speak for us” is utterly insufficient. Candidates must—beginning today—identify all of those particular propositions as ignorant, cruel, and disqualifying.

Nor can Democrats solve this by saying that the Republican Party is infinitely worse. It is infinitely worse—and that’s precisely why Romer is dangerous, and precisely why I am white hot with rage with the Democratic Party’s irresponsibility in indulging this. Romer is handing the GOP a way to transform an election about authoritarianism, corruption, and monumental governmental failure into a referendum on open borders, Hamas, police abolition, and socialism. When one party threatens constitutional government, the opposition acquires an obligation to be exceptionally reassuring. It must persuade low-information, ideologically moderate and politically exhausted voters that voting Democratic doesn’t mean consenting to every radical fantasy circulating on the left. Winning this election is a moral obligation.

How is it possible that the Democrats haven’t figured out that Republicans will turn relatively obscure extremists into the face of their party? They did it for years with “defund the police.” Over and over, Democrats have proven incapable of breaking the association. They learned nothing from the devastating ad that simply repeated what Kamala Harris herself said about the imperative of providing sex change surgeries for illegal aliens.

The essential Democratic response would be swift and brutally clear:

Megan Romer does not speak for the Democratic Party. We support Ukraine’s right to defend itself, reject the glorification or rationalization of terrorism, believe public safety requires competent police, and oppose both authoritarian capitalism and authoritarian socialism. Our argument is for affordable health care, housing, good wages, and constitutional democracy—not the abolition of borders, prisons or private enterprise.

Every candidate asked about her should say some version of that—without equivocation, jargon or anguished throat-clearing.

But the party will instead perform its customary ritual: pretend no one has heard of her; accuse anyone who mentions her of amplifying the right; issue an exquisitely lawyered statement condemning “harm in all its forms”; and allow Republicans to define the relationship. Progressive figures will refuse to criticize her because criticism “from the right” must never be validated. Moderates will denounce socialism in general while failing to isolate the actual obscenities. Everyone will congratulate himself on not falling into a trap while standing at its bottom.

Watching this interview, I felt hope leave my body in exactly the way it did during Joe Biden’s final debate with Donald Trump. And I am furious—white hot with rage—at the Democrats, who can’t stop gravely repeating, “Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy,” but simply refuse to behave as if they mean it. They refuse to take seriously their responsibility as the only institution capable of stopping him. They claim the moral authority of being the last line of defense while refusing the discipline that being the last line of defense entails.

The horror of that debate was the overwhelming confirmation of what had been, until that point, a suspicion: Everyone around Biden had permitted an obviously impaired man to become the indispensable instrument for defeating an authoritarian, and had concealed or rationalized the risk until it appeared on live television, when nothing could be done about it. It revealed an entire party apparatus incapable of distinguishing loyalty to its internal arrangements from responsibility to the republic.

Romer represents exactly the same phenomenon. Around her, pretending not to see her, is the same surrounding institutional passivity. Everyone can see the weapon she is handing the Republicans; everyone knows how readily she and the other Romers of the DSA will be made to represent the whole Democratic coalition; and yet we can be sure we’ll see evasion, euphemism and paralyzing fear of offending an activist faction. Democrats will say she does not formally speak for the party while declining to say that what she said was ignorant, morally grotesque, and contrary to Democratic principles. That distinction will mean everything inside Democratic institutions and absolutely nothing on television.

“Donald Trump is a threat to democracy” can’t merely be campaign language. If Democrats don’t believe that by now, they’re too stupid to hold office. If they do believe it—and they damned well should—the proposition imposes obligations. It means winning is not one good among others. It means that no, it’s not okay to lose so long as you’ve done “the goodest job as you know you can do.” Winning is the precondition for preserving the arena in which all the other arguments can continue. It requires candidate selection, message discipline, coalition management, strategic compromise, intellectual seriousness, and the ruthless containment of liabilities. It means occasionally disappointing activists, donors, incumbents, interest groups, and your own vanity. Above all, it means treating preventable electoral defeat not as an unfortunate verdict delivered by a benighted public but as a catastrophic failure of duty.

Democrats repeat that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy so often that the sentence has become punctuation. But parties that believe democracy is in danger do not behave this way. They do not conceal fatal weaknesses until they are exposed on live television. They do not allow a preposterous sect to supply the opposition with its most potent cultural weapon. They do not treat electoral self-sabotage as evidence of moral purity. And they don’t demand that voters overlook every provocation because the alternative is worse. A party that presents itself as the last defence of constitutional government assumes a corresponding duty to be electable.

Instead, the party behaves as if recognizing Trump’s danger discharges its responsibility. It confuses correct diagnosis with adequate action. Having said the words, it expects the electorate to assume the burden of rescuing democracy regardless of whom the Democrats nominate, what they tolerate, or how much cultural contempt becomes attached to their brand. .

Unlike Donald Trump, Romer lacks the power to launch 4,000 nuclear weapons on a whim. But she stands at the weakest point in the only coalition capable of constraining Trump, and seems almost purpose-built to hand the midterms to the GOP. One look at her is enough to reactivate all of the cultural antagonisms upon which Trump depends, make the midterms a referendum on the most repellent features of woke politics, and persuade wavering voters that defeating the Republicans would restore the very people they had voted for Trump to punish.

The Democrats have neither learned why wokeism produced such ferocious revulsion nor forgotten the habits of delusional moral hauteur that produced it. Arriving like a Bourbon restoration in a nose ring, Romer will become nationally important not because Americans want what she proposes, but because they detest it. She’s a political weapon that the Republican Party found lying unattended in the Democratic coalition, and she’s delighted to pull her own trigger.

If the Democrats can’t say, clearly, that this woman doesn’t belong in their party and neither does anyone like her, we are, without exaggeration, doomed.

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