The Conservative Cave

The prevailing narrative from entertainment, academia, and other creative spheres is that Israel is the villain of all villains. And one of the words we see most often is “genocide.”

A massive contingent of creative and political figures has lent their names to an open letter calling out the “narrative. The letter is the brainchild of the Creative Community for Peace, and it begins, “We the undersigned are outraged and sickened by the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people: the lie that Israel committed ‘genocide’ in Gaza. We reject this accusation with contempt.”

"Central to the letter is the meaning of the word 'genocide' itself. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide requires 'specific intent' to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group," the press release explains. "This is an exceptionally demanding legal standard that goes beyond knowledge that civilian deaths, widespread destruction or even the destruction of part of a group may result. It requires an intent to bring about the group’s destruction as such. The signatories argue that applying the term to Israel without regard for that standard has turned one of international law’s gravest concepts into a political accusation."

The letter has over 5,000 signatories, and they come from all political persuasions, religious traditions, and nationalities. The press release gives a sampling:

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Among the political and public-policy figures signing the letter are former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson; former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Irwin Cotler; former UK Cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi; former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie; former senior U.S. diplomat Elliott Abrams; and former White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman. They are joined by prominent scholars, historians and intellectuals, including Harvard professor Steven Pinker; historian Benny Morris; historian Sir Niall Ferguson; Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, University Distinguished Professor at Emory University and former U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism; former Yad Vashem Chief Historian Dina Porat; Yossi Klein Halevi, Author and Senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute; Brandeis University Professor Emeritus Jonathan D. Sarna; historian Simon Sebag Montefiore; historians Jeffrey Herf and Norman Goda; UCLA professor Judea Pearl; author Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Binghamton University Jonathan Karp; and urban-warfare expert John Spencer.
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The letter also includes leading figures from film, television, music and media, among them Haim Saban; former Paramount Global Chair Shari Redstone; former Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing; Spyglass Media Group Chairman and CEO Gary Barber; Tribeca Enterprises co-founder Jane Rosenthal; producers Lawrence Bender and Susan Rovner; Fernando Szew, Head of Studio, Fox Entertainment Studios; Propagate Content executives Ben Silverman and Howard Owens; entertainment attorney and investor Kevin Yorn; Sharon Osbourne; actors Debra Messing, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anthony Edwards, Mayim Bialik, Dame Maureen Lipman, Patricia Heaton and Jerry O’Connell; Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino; House creator David Shore; authors Dara Horn and Howard Jacobson; and music industry heavyweights Julie Greenwald, Bob Ezrin, John Ondrasik, David Draiman, Boy George, Paul Kemsely, and Billy Mann.

“Those who accuse Israel of genocide, a very specific crime with a legally specific definition, are fulfilling the dictum attributed to the Nazi propagandist, Josef Goebbels. ‘If you tell a lie and keep repeating it enough, people will eventually come to believe it,’” said retired Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt. “By October 10 [2023], accusations of genocide were common, even before Israel set foot in Gaza. Then it was extremist voices who made this charge. Now, people have come to believe the lie and to mindlessly repeat it.”

California families pay nearly $1.70 more per gallon of gas than the national average, according to data from AAA.

The average price for a gallon of regular gas in California reached $5.88 on Wednesday, compared with $4.22 nationwide. Diesel prices in the state have climbed even higher, reaching a record average of $7.87 per gallon.

That makes gas more expensive in California than in any other U.S. state, and the gap has fueled a political fight over why California drivers are paying considerably more than motorists elsewhere in the country.

Gov. Gavin Newsom took to X on Monday to sarcastically thank President Donald Trump for rising gas prices, as his administration has pointed to the conflict with Iran and disruptions to global oil markets as major drivers of the recent nationwide increase.

But while those pressures have pushed prices higher across the country, California drivers are still paying significantly more than the national average.

Rep. Vince Fong, R-Calif., told the Daily Signal that California’s own energy policies have contributed to that disparity.

“California’s gas crisis is the result of poor policy and incompetent leadership. Gavin Newsom has shuttered refineries, blocked domestic production, driven the highest gas taxes in the country, and made California dependent on foreign oil from Iraq and Brazil,” he said.

Aztecs: An Interpretation, Inga Clendinnen (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

When Hernán Cortés landed in the New World, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was one of the greatest cities anywhere on earth. It had more than twice the population of Seville, and was (as my grade school history textbooks always nervously assured me) cleaner, more orderly, and more magnificent than any contemporaneous European city. Its ochre towers and pyramids rose like a dream from the shimmering waters of Lake Texcoco. Unlike the organic maze of alleyways that characterized most Spanish cities, Tenochtitlan’s public gardens and temple districts and grand processional ways were a product of the sort of high modernist urban planning that Europe wouldn’t really see until Haussmann’s Paris in the 19th century. The walls of the city shone with lime and were decorated with paintings, so it glimmered like a bauble in the Mexican sun. The soldiers who followed Cortés on the one hand described it as so ethereal it seemed the three causeways joining it to the mainland were anchors without which it might float away, but on the other hand were overawed by the towering height and hallucinatory bulk of the Great Pyramid topped with its twin temples to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc.

... The questions people usually ask given all of this are, “How did the Spaniards win? And how did they win so quickly and decisively?” I understand the allure of these questions, and why they have captured the imaginations of generations of historians and anthropologists. They are reasonable questions. But after reading Inga Clendinnen’s book I find I no longer have any interest in these questions, because all of my thought is bent towards another one: “Why didn’t God destroy the Aztecs sooner?”

In fairness, He did destroy them pretty quickly. The ancestors of the Mexica wandered into the fertile basin that was to become their empire sometime in the late 1200s or early 1300s. They found it already settled with a mosaic of mostly Nahuatl-speaking city-states, and spent a few decades as mercenaries or tributaries for various stronger powers. One of those petty wars went badly, and they finally settled down as bedraggled refugees on the muck-covered islands that were to be the site of their future glory. Within a hundred years they were the most powerful city in the valley. Fifty years after that they were the unquestioned hegemon and begin to launch wars of imperial expansion towards the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Another fifty years of imperial glory, and then they were destroyed utterly. ...
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That empire was not gentle. Few empires are, but even by the sad standards of human history, the Mexica were extreme. I’m not speaking here about their legendarily creative and inventive ways of humiliating subject peoples,2 I’m speaking about the human sacrifices. No, these were not exaggerated by the colonizers, as some revisionist historians would have you believe.3 If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it. The reality, as Clendinnen brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica, like an extra-spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings. And everybody had their role to play:

1. The trillions of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ of social programs bennies over the past 60 years were not a "bribe"?    

2. Why do I know that if I bothered to find a transcript of last night's speech that Trump said and meant something very different from Chasstev365's pretzellation?

Chasstev365 (9,236 posts)

And so it's come to this:

Trump is so desperate he literally just offered to bribe the entire American electorate on camera.

If anyone is tempted to vote Republican to accept the bribe, I would just say;

* He would never actually give every American $ 5000

* Even if he did he did, IT'S YOUR ****ING MONEY!!!!!

https://democraticunderground.com/100221496306