The thing about rhetoric is it can’t afford to ask itself what it means by the words it uses. For example, in justifying Israel’s response to the attack on October 7, the most oft-chanted mantra is that Israel has a… Read More ›
Palestine
MORE MATH AND A MODEST PROPOSAL
After seven weeks of ‘precision’ bombing, the IDF, by its own reckoning, has managed to kill 1,000 Hamas soldiers. So only another 34,000 to go. So keeping the kill rate constant, it should only take another four and half years… Read More ›
SHAME
Of the 16 million Jews in the world, just under half live in Israel. Of the other 8.5 million, most support the State of Israel, in the sense that they regard it as a mustering point “come the next pogrom”…. Read More ›
DON’T ASK DON’T TELL
Right from the get-go last Saturday morning, it’s been dubbed Israel’s 9/11. Yes there are parallels. But among them is the assiduous avoidance, in the largely pro-Zionist media, of asking what have the Israelis been doing to the Palestinians in… Read More ›
THE WHO-STARTED-IT GAME
When two parties are having at each other, strictly speaking somebody has to have delivered the first blow. But how far back are we to reconstruct? Or, what amounts to the same thing, what’s the statute of limitations on retaliation?… Read More ›
CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD (Repost, November 2020)
Presented at the Seventh World Conference on Metaphysics at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, Spain, Oct 24-27, 2018 ABSTRACT: By a political theodicy is meant an attempt to harness our theological resources to ameliorate the evil we do and suffer… Read More ›
WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS WRONG WITH GENOCIDE?
— for presentation on October 7, 2009, and again on October 4, 2012, for the Liberal Education Capstone course on genocide —
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Israel could pretend to hold the moral high ground – not in the Muslim world of course, but certainly in the West – from 1948 until the Six Day War in ’67. But whatever might be said of the Palestinians… Read More ›
IMMIGRATION, INVASION, OCCUPATION, AND CONQUEST
Few and far between are polities that manage to keep the foreigner out for long. As we’ve seen from the druthers of Donald Trump and his followers, by immigration is not meant the immigrant is necessarily welcomed in her new… Read More ›
FATHERS AND SONS
Only those with a long memory will get the reference, but in the same way Haiti’s Baby Doc Duvalier was not his father Papa Doc, neither is Justin Trudeau his father Pierre Elliott. Papa Doc and Baby Doc were both… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 