Monday, October 7, 2024

Part I

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A Day of Infamy for Israel and the Civilized World: Today’s Anniversary of the Deadly Attack on Israel by Hamas

Well, there are certain dates that are simply etched as if in stone. December 7, 1941, that would be the Japanese attack upon US forces at Pearl Harbor. September 11, 2001, that would be the attack of Al-Qaeda upon the United States, primarily in New York City and in Washington DC. And of course, October 7, 2023. And that is the deadly attack by Hamas upon Israel, the first major and deadly invasion of Israel as a nation-state since the 1948 War of Independence and one of the deadliest in terms of all of Israel’s history. And every one of these events, every one of these dates etched into memory, brings up an entire system of worldview issues, an entire historical context and a moment of decision.

December 7, 1941 was as President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “A day that will live in infamy.” That is to say it will be remembered in human history, particularly the history of the United States of America as a day of infamy, a surprise attack upon US forces there at Pearl Harbor. But it invokes an entire memory of the most significant war thus far in all of human history. What we know as World War II. All you have to say is Pearl Harbor Day or December 7, 1941, and that entire system and network of memory is invoked. Similarly, all you have to say now is September 11. You don’t even have to say 2001. It’s because September 11, or as it became even more widely known, 9/11 in the United States and beyond, was a wake-up call, the fact that we do live in a war, in this case, a war against terrorism, a war against anarchy, a war against forces of evil. And in this case, it was President George W. Bush who spoke most eloquently at that moment of the peril faced by the United States.

And now we’re looking at October 7, 2023. You’ll recall that this was that horrible attack upon Israel. And just a year later, we need to step back for a moment and recognize once again exactly what happened. And then we need to take an account and understand what we know about the world now that we frankly didn’t know a year ago. There are harsh truths, but essential truths we need to know and think about because we may not have known them before October the 7, 2023, but we certainly have learned them. We know these truths now. And so let’s just look back at what happened at October the 7th. On that date, Hamas a terrorist group, an Islamic terrorist group that has been primarily located in the Gaza Strip in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, it launched a deadly attack upon Israel, and this means inside of Israel. And with hundreds of combatants, the Hamas forces went into Israel and killed approximately 1200 people.

Not only did they kill approximately 1200 people, but this also included at least 787 civilians and no less than 56 children. So this was a deadly attack. It was a premeditated attack. In its own way, it was an ingenious attack using even such things as kites in order to carry out the attack. But it was particularly evil in the form that the attack took. For instance, going into a concert of young adults and just killing as many as possible, chasing people into houses and then mowing them down inside their homes. It was an attack intended to make a statement in blood, and it did. And it was intended by Hamas to be an attack upon Israel that we now know, we didn’t know at the time, but we now know Hamas hoped then would be joined by others. And as it turns out, a group like Hezbollah in Lebanon did a day later state their solidarity with Hamas, but it would be almost a year after that before Israel and Hezbollah would actually be in an exchange of warfare.

So Hamas overestimated the power of its patron, that would be Iran. And as others have noted, it underestimated the strength of Israel. And so even as Hamas carried out this deadly attack, and even as quite frankly, it exposed weaknesses, intelligence weaknesses, military weaknesses, even in one sense, a weakness of imagination on the part of Israel. Israel, as Israel does, rebounded from this and eventually pushed back against Hamas there in Gaza. And as we now know, we have seen month after month of very intense warfare, but we’ve also learned some deep moral lessons in the midst of this. First of all, let’s go back to October the 7th, and in the days that immediately followed. It was clear that Israel had not anticipated this. And of course, as in anyone of these attacks such as Pearl Harbor, perhaps even closer to us, of course, thinking of the 9/11 attacks, we can look backwards and say, “Well, there were dots people should have connected.”

But that’s exactly the way fallen humanity works. Sometimes we just have to connect the dots backward. But of course that meant we didn’t connect them in time to prevent them. And in the case of Israel, this was a particular humiliation because Israel has prided itself on its strength of self-defense going all the way back to its hard-fought revolution just at the point of the 20th century. But in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, the first response was just absolute moral horror. And that absolute moral horror was not just on the part of Israel, but all of Israel’s allies and friends. And of course at the top of that list, you have to put the United States of America. And so Americans very quickly looked at what had happened there in Israel and recognized this is Israel’s 9/11. That’s exactly what this is.

But at the same time, proportionately given the size of the population and the death toll, Israel’s experience was even deadlier in that proportionate sense than what the US had experienced on 9/11. So in any country, you can say there’s certain dates in which there is a before, and there’s an after. Again, December 7, 1941, there was a before and there was an after. We can’t forget that date. And then 9/11, and now for Israel, October the 7th. But one of the points I want to make, and I’ll get back to this in a moment, is that October the 7th is not just a date for Israel in its memory. It is a date for our memory as well. It was the death of certain illusions and it was the awakening of a certain knowledge that we can now not forget. We cannot afford to forget. Even as the United States could not afford to forget the lessons of December 7, 1941, Israel will never be able to forget the lessons learned in October the 7th and in the subsequent days.

And with the acknowledgement that is not just a matter of a death toll of about 1200, it is also the fact that Hamas intentionally and with evil intent took more than 250 prisoners as well, and these are hostages. Many of them are still being held, but adding to the horror, we now know that a good number of them are dead. And some of them, even just in recent weeks, were clearly executed by Hamas just before they might’ve been liberated by the Israelis. So we’re really looking at a web of evil upon evil. And of course, Israel has had to respond to this politically, by the way, going back a year ago, it looked like this might be a fatal blow to the government of the longest serving Prime Minister in Israeli history. That would be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But at this point, Netanyahu is credited with what has to be counted as one of the most courageous military comebacks in all of recent military history. We’re talking about Israel reeling from this attack on October the 7th, just a year ago.

And now we are looking at the fact that Israel has shown enormous fortitude, and incredible courage, not to mention national determination and taking on Hamas there in Gaza. And then furthermore, now having to confront Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon brilliantly so as we’ll remember in recent weeks. And then having to deal with no less than two direct attacks from Iran, and the acknowledgement that the world has changed in such a way that we now talk about an axis of resistance. We didn’t come up with that term. It was George W. Bush who as President came up with the term the axis of evil. But it is Iran that has put together this axis of resistance, and it includes proxies such as Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, also in Syria, Hamas there in the Gaza Strip. And then you look at groups such as the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and you are looking at a deadly constellation of groups that intend evil and who have carried out evil acts and intentions.

All three of those groups. Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels, and Hamas. And we’ve also come to know the evil intent of some of these organizations in a way that quite honestly had not been well documented before. When it comes to the leadership of Hamas, not only does Hamas want to bring about the non-existence of Israel, and frankly the non-existence of Jews in the Middle East, but it also has a leadership that has embedded itself intentionally among civilians in order to increase civilian casualties. And in one of the most evil statements imaginable, the leadership of Hamas has said that that’s one of the ways that Hamas is going to bring the war against its own people in order that they would understand what’s at stake and necessarily join the effort to exterminate Israel. And then Hezbollah, once again, you’re looking at, in that case, a Shiite militia basically subservient to Iran and by some accounts representing the largest non-state military on planet earth.

But just consider what’s happened in recent days. I will just bring to your attention exploding pagers, and we also had exploding radios, and then we had direct attacks, which basically took out the senior leadership of Hezbollah. And so all of a sudden, Iran that had appeared to be virtually invincible, not to mention ingenious with this axis of resistance, is now basically facing the fact that Hamas, it hasn’t been eradicated, but its lethality has been greatly reduced. And Hezbollah, perhaps even more powerful, but now it’s reduction even more radical. And so we’re about to find out what this world looks like, but the big lesson is this, freedom has enemies.

And just remember that Israel, which is by no means faultless in terms of its history, nor is the United States of America, but both are constitutional governments in which eventually the people have their say. And both of them are established upon an understanding of human dignity that quite frankly stands out in direct contrast with the view, well let’s just think about this for a moment, you have Israel’s understanding of how and why it must fight, and then you have Hamas intentionally bringing about civilian casualties of its own people to make a point and to raise the stakes. So when you’re looking at human dignity, and again, no nation is flawless. There is no nation without sin, without error, and quite frankly, without making mistakes.

But when you look at Israel, we are looking at one of the most crucial allies the United States has, and we are looking at the only elected government based on this kind of a democratic process anywhere in the Middle East. And we are looking at a nation, that even though you don’t hear the Biden administration saying this out loud, we’re looking at a nation that is absolutely essential for our defense and for the defense of American interests around the world. So this is not just American friendship with Israel. It’s not just Israel’s friendship with the United States and our allies. It is a recognition that in a fallen world, the nations that stand together in terms of worldview commitments, had better stand together in terms of military and intelligence sharing as well.

Part II

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Anti-Semitism in Elite Sectors and a Reawakening of Jewish Identity in the U.S.: The Ripple Effects in U.S. of Hamas’s Attack on Israel

But as we’re thinking about the lessons learned since October 7, 2023, I want to come back to the United States for a moment because we have learned some big lessons here. One of the interesting things that many have remarked upon is how the October 7 attacks led to something of a reawakening of Jewish identity in the United States. That is to say the large Jewish population in the United States, proportionate to the distribution of Jewish populations elsewhere in the world. There have been successive waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, and even as you look at Judaism in the US, it has been trending in a very liberal and a very secular direction.

Now of course, the alternative to that is Orthodox Judaism, but the mainstream of Judaism, most of the branches of Judaism in the United States have moved into a less theological posture. I think that’s absolutely undeniable. It’s acknowledged by those who are the leaders of those movements. But the attack upon Israel has brought about a new consciousness on the part of many American Jewish people of why they love and support Israel. And remember, that was crucial to Israel’s Declaration of Independence and its defense back at the midpoint of the 20th century. It turns out that it’s crucial again, but that raises huge worldview questions. If it’s not a theological commitment, then how long will this commitment last? But Israel and the United States have had to come to another conclusion, and the Jewish population in the United States has come to a very sad conclusion, and that is the acknowledgment that anti-Semitism is a very deep virus throughout much of the elite sectors of American society and in particular on elite American college and university campuses.

Now the tragic realization is that many of these young students are so influenced by progressivist ideologies, that they side with the terrorists rather than with Israel. And they often are buying into the kind of woke and leftist theories such as settler colonialism, charging Israel with being an illegitimate state. Now by the way, it doesn’t take much logical extension to figure out that if that ideology is true, it’s not just Israel that is an illegitimate state, but the United States of America. And some of course are saying that in elite colleges and universities in this country, and quite frankly, you’ve got parents trying spend their life savings to send their kids to these colleges and universities. And you have rich people in the United States who are not liberal in that sense, who give this money for social prestige in order to have an endowed chair in which the professor teaches this kind of leftism and well settler colonialism or another form of critical theory or a just unvarnished version of Marxism.

But it has been a wake-up call particularly to see how many young people on America’s college and university campuses are activists. They seem to be true believers in these leftist ideologies and this wave of anti-Semitism is, if anything, absolutely undeniable. And honestly, it’s hardly abated on these campuses. You also have faculty members who will aid and encourage this kind of anti-Semitism, but again, mostly under the guise of these kinds of ideologies such as settler colonialism. What they argue is that Israel is an illegitimate state, but that’s one of those ideologies that gets you absolutely nowhere except perhaps tenure at a major American university. I’m going to bring this section to a close for today, but we do need to watch what takes place today. On the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, it’s going to be very interesting to watch the major press coverage, and here’s what I want you to watch for.

I want you to watch for that on the one hand, on the other hand, that is often the game played by those in the media who want to suggest they’re just being balanced and objective. But when you’re looking at this, you realize we have a grave and deadly conflict of worldviews here. And honestly, one of them is respectable and one of them is terrorist. And it is absolute hypocrisy for the United States and the citizens of this country to say, “Well, that was certainly true on 9/11/2001,” without recognizing that it is just as true on October the 7th of 2023.

Part III

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The Economist: Are We Past Peak Woke? Well, ‘Wokeness’ is Getting a Rebrand, But the Ideology Isn’t Going Away

But this is the perfect time to look at a major report that comes in the British newspaper, the Economist. It looks like a magazine, but they call it a newspaper. And this is a major research analysis that comes also with editorial comment, and the headline in the editorial comment is this, “After Peak Woke,” the subhead, “The Influence of a Set of Illiberal Ideas is Waning. That Creates an Opportunity.”

Well, that’s a dual statement. Number one, they say that these illiberal ideas, these liberal ideologies, they are waning and then they go on to say, this creates an opportunity. Well, the first is a claim as is the second. Is peak woke really something in our rearview mirror? Have we really seen some kind of turning point in this culture away from the woke ideologies? I have to tell you right up front, I am suspicious that we have past peak woke, but I always think that what happens is that when you have people who buy into those worldviews, they learn how to express those same ideas differently, and thus you see them show up just in a different guise. But let’s let the economist make its case. What the editors write is this, “In the past decade, a form of wokeness has arisen on the illiberal left, which is characterized by extreme pessimism about America and its capacity to make progress, especially on race. According to this view, all the country’s problems are systemic or structural, and the solutions to them are illiberal.”

Now, let me just stop here for a moment and say that what illiberal means in this context is leftist, as in leftist ideology. This is to the left of liberal. They go on to say, “Including censorship and positive discrimination by race, this wokeness defines people as members of groups in a rigid hierarchy of victims and oppressors like the Puritans of old,” I’ll just insert here, that irritates me, but that’s what they wrote. “Like the Puritans of old, adherents focus less on workable ideas for reducing discrimination than on publicly rooting out sinful attitudes in themselves and others.” And then in parentheses, especially others. Here’s what follows. The Economist has analyzed how influential these ideas are today by looking at public opinion, the media, publishing higher education, and the corporate world.

The editors say again, “Using a host of measures, we found that woke peaked in 2021, 2022 and has since receded.” Okay, now that’s quite a claim. They’re saying that peak woke was about three years ago, 2021 to 2022, and it has been receding since. Now let me tell you the good news. It has been at least visibly or audibly receding in some ways because you hear some of the arguments at a much lower volume than you did back then. And you at least in terms of say, public comment and the conversation on American college campuses. Now, again, I want to make the argument that being on those campuses convinces me that the ideas and ideologies are gone. They’re just being repackaged. But nonetheless, I think if there is a reduction in peak woke, it’s not so much among those who were the, say the producers of wokeness, but among those who were just in the larger culture and kind of driven along by this ideological and political movement.

I do think that where you see a significant step back, for instance, is when you look at American corporations. A lot of American companies have decided they cannot afford to look like they are turning their companies into marching armies for wokeness. And so you see company after company, whether it’s Fortune 500 companies or just say even something as local in rural Kentucky, for example, as Tractor Supply. You see these companies just backing off of DEI and ESG ideologies. Now again, I think we’re going to have to watch to see if they come back in a different form, but it does at least tell us something about the fact that some of these companies, even just to guard their own bottom lines and accountability to their own shareholders and out of fear of losing their customers, by the way, little footnote here, just think of something like Bud Light, and here’s where you understand that those fears are leading to some distinctive differences in boardroom conversation and in the policies that we learn of later.

But when it comes to American higher education, I just have to tell you, I am not very optimistic. I am not even really hopeful to any extent that the ideologies have been reduced. I think what happens in every one of these cases is that they are rebranded and they come out with a new ideological label. The Economist makes an interesting point when it defines its terms, “The term woke was originally used on the left to describe people who are alert to racism. Later, it came to encompass those eager to fight any form of prejudice. By that definition, it is obviously a good thing.” So that’s what the Economist is writing. But then, “But Democrats seldom use the word anymore because it has become associated with the most strident activists who tend to divide the world and intp victims and oppressors.”

Now, let me just state they don’t just tend to do that. That’s the center of their ideology. That’s not some kind of fringe belief. That’s how they look at the world. The Economist continues, “This outlook elevates group identity over the individual sort, and sees unequal outcomes for different groups as proof of systemic discrimination. That logic is then used to justify illiberal means.” Again, that means from leftist ideologies. “Such as reverse discrimination and the policing of speech. It is this sort of woke warrior that Republicans love to lambast.” Well, it is simply the fact that they represent a clear and present danger to American society. You send your kids to any kind of say, elite college of university or more dangerously an institution that isn’t elite but wants to look elite. You see these woke warriors everywhere, and it is now woven into entire sectors of the curriculum. So for instance, there was a recent study just looking at conservatives and liberals in higher education, and I made reference to the study on The Briefing.

And it points out that there are entire subject areas, there are entire degree programs in which there basically are no conservatives because the ideology behind the program is itself so leftist. Now speaking of the change, if it’s a real change, and again, I am doubting that it’s a real change, there is a change in language. My suggestion is they just relabel things. But listen to this, “To corroborate the trend revealed by opinion polls, we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like intersectionality, microaggression, oppression, white privilege, and transphobia.” Listen to this. “At our request, David Rosado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Washington Times between 1970 and 1923.” Now listen to this. “In all, but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of those terms peaked between 2019 and 2021 and has fallen since.”

So one of the reasons why I mentioned days ago citing an LA Times’ article that the LA Times is, if this is conceivable to you, even more predictably liberal than a newspaper like the New York Times. Yeah, there’s still a difference between the east and the west coast. But as we draw this to a conclusion, thinking about the consequences of wokeism, I want to say that just relabeling these ideologies really isn’t going to help. If anything, it hurts and it makes it even more difficult for American citizens and American parents and the students and children of those parents to understand what in the world they’re really being taught. But we do know this, and this is where the Christian worldview comes with a strength of analysis that frankly the secular Economist doesn’t have. And that is this. There is going to be a dominant worldview. And if that dominant worldview is not tethered to theological truth, to theistic truth claims, then it is just going to march progressively always to the left.

And that’s not just an accidental pattern. If you reject theism, if you reject belief in God and an anchoring belief in objective reality that is grounded in a creator God, then you are going to eventually and progressively and inexorably inevitably, you’re going to be pushing further and further left because your analysis turns out to have problems. And there’s only one way to go if you hold to that worldview, and that’s further left. And that explains the history of American higher education over the last 100 years. And if the Lord tarries and nothing changes, it’s just going to get worse as we look ahead. Then again, this is where Biblically-minded Christians, remember that we are called to a battle of ideas and we need to be involved in that battle. This is not the call for retreat. It is instead a call that we all must answer in terms of this kind of ideological warfare, this kind of intellectual conflict.

And if you think you can escape it, I just want to say you need to understand your children will not escape it, nor certainly will your grandchildren. And if that doesn’t have your attention, frankly, I don’t know what will.