It is impressed upon me that those with close personal ties to the region, or with family present in the warzone, particularly but by no means exclusively Jews or Israelis, may find my necessary afterword too much to read as they mourn or wait in dreadful suspense for news of their families, friends, and neighbors. I comprehend that. I bitterly and furiously regret the necessity of the concluding part, and I encourage them to pass it in silence, unread, and to limit their reading only to Part I of this essay. The very last thing I wish to do is to add to their pain. Part II exists only because it is essential to preempt the usual false claims from the usual suspects which are directed against any supporter of Israel who is not Jewish. And I am incandescent with rage that I have been compelled to write it; rightly and righteously angry that I have been driven to the necessity of refuting these usual canards with facts which, at a time when the Jewish people, inwith and outwith Israel, are mourning their dead without yet knowing who has been murdered and who, taken hostage by barbarians, it is obscene to have been forced to adduce. And yet, even now, in order to preempt the non-argument derailments of little lapsed Unitarian pricks at Harvard in keffiyeh scarves, right-on Congresscritters, hereditary isolationist Kluxers and Bundists, Trumpshirts, Islamists, supercilious diplomats, second-rate academics, swivel-eyed Labour councillors, incarnate EU pomposities, and other offscourings of nominal humanity ‘dipping their poisonous tongues into pools of blood’, I am driven in Part II to making clear—even as doing so must give unspeakable pain to them that mourn—that this is everyone’s, every decent person’s, fight; and that I cannot be debarred from speaking by their maliciously false assertions that I must be Jewish to support Israel, that I must be a Prot religious nutter to do so if I’m not Jewish, that I am ‘too white’ and somehow—or thereby—too ignorant to have a say in any case, and/or that I must be being paid to do so. May Almighty God everlastingly damn these people to the lowest circle of Hell.
Part I: Ceterum censeo… Smite the Amalekites.
The whole point and purpose of the Geneva Conventions is to limit their protections to those who observe the laws of war, regulars and irregulars alike. The entire reason for this is to incentivize that observance and to visit consequences upon those who do not observe the laws of war. The State of Israel observes and is observing these, both as to ius ad bellum and ius in bello. The terrorists (and their patrons and supporters)—axiomatically—do not.
Immediately upon Israel’s having been attacked, civilized nations’ governments and many of their citizens, including those with elevated public profiles, asserted sympathy and solidarity with Israel and Israelis as victims. Well within the succeeding week, the tone has changed, to deprecate almost any response by Israel to the crimes of which it has been victim. We saw this in September of 2001: on 12 September, it was ‘we’re all Americans now’, swiftly followed by ‘those vulgar, violent Americans mustn’t hit back’; we saw this in January of 2015, when attitudes turned on a dime from ‘Je suis Charlie’ to ‘there must be no disproportionate response’, and again in November 2015, and again, and again, including towards the criminal invasion of Ukraine by Russia: this swift oscillation of sentimental ‘support’ followed by outright hostility to countermeasures and counterstrikes. And it invariably happens when it’s Israel under attack.
Part of this, when the State of Israel is attacked, is simple Jew-hatred, however sublimated and clothed in the similitude of respectability. Much of this, no matter who is attacked, is mere human nature: the relief that one’s country and oneself is not the victim; the thrill of posing as sympathetic; the joy of patronizing those suffering even whilst pretending that patronizing them is help; the malign pleasure of seeing someone else in difficulties, as La Rochefoucauld knew; the wish that the victim continue helplessly a victim to be condescended to—and the resentment when he does not. And of course the mainspring is mere sentimentality, an exaggerated care for the guilty as much as for the guilty party’s innocent victim, with the fillip of a sense of superiority in wishing a plague on the houses of both These Little People in their ‘petty quarrel’ which is beneath us because we’ve avoided being a part of it. That’s where isolationism comes from, after all: a remote, aloof, pro forma tut-tutting of far-off disasters in ‘less happier lands’ and of ‘quarrels in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing’. It is also the source of actually defending, in the guise of disinterested and magisterial judgment, with much babble of ‘root causes’ and ‘we are all guilty’, actual crimes against humanity.
It is no kindness to anyone, it is indeed a special sort of evil, to let evildoers off the consequences of their evil acts. The State of Israel, having been attacked unlawfully by quasi-state and non-state terrorists and their paymasters and accomplices, has an inalienable and absolute right, by war and otherwise, to destroy these enemies and their power to work evil: to abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices. And the United States—remember the Second Barbary War, and the Perdicaris Affair as well, and the Tampico Affair, too—and the United Kingdom—recall the Don Pacifico affair, amongst many, many others—have similar rights, as their citizens have been murdered by these same savages. (If you are wondering, No, I’m not a ‘Progressive’: never mind Reagan, I’m a Goldwater Democrat, and rather to the rightwards of Margaret Thatcher. Suck it up and deal with it.)
Extending unwarranted protections to terrorists merely encourages them to behave unlawfully without consequences. Hamas, Hezbollah, & Co. deserve no quarter not absolutely required by law and are owed no such protections. Their Charters—the demonic inverse of that asserted in ‘Rule, Britannia!’, for theirs condemn common Palestinians ever to be slaves to terror-masters—call for genocide and terror. They oppress, terrorize, and torture their own people. They take women and infants hostage. They behead children. That is their Charter, and not theirs alone; and their Charter—for which they claim religious sanction—is their Mein fucking Kampf: only fools—or sympathizers with terror—ignore, defend, or diminish it, or attempt to explain it away. They told and tell us their intentions; their actions declare them; they have shown who and what they are, and only fools—or sympathizers with terror—do not believe them to be what they are. Like the Serbian Black Hand in 1914, or Wagner, they are effectively akin to hostes humani generis, and frankly, as is true also of pirates, ought once more to be so regarded under international law. Diluting consequences is a grievously misplaced, and a murderous, sentimentalism. Rewarding bad behavior merely encourages more of it. Those who dilute the distinctions between lawful and unlawful combat, who extend the former’s protections to the latter, who consequently wink at hostage-taking, rape, the targeting of children, genocide, mass murder, torture, attacks upon discrete civilian gatherings, the siting of military targets amidst civilian populations, the emergence of fighters without distinguishing apparel and a chain of command from a noncombatant populace and their melting back into it and hiding in its midst, bear moral responsibility, guilt, of an order equal to the terrorists’, for the casualties thus befalling the noncombatants and protected sites amongst whom and which these abject cowards hide.
Supporters of evil and of evil deeds, their paymasters, their accomplices, their defenders, and anyone whose name crops up when one asks, Cui bono?, must suffer the utmost and most stringent consequences. They are guilty under the law of parties.
The PA and its dictator for life, currently in the second decade of a five-year elected term, must also be so treated and regarded. (They are not a legitimate government by the measure defined by Thomas Jefferson; and the idea that Abbas ‘was elected’—as if that excuses his actions since—merits the riposte that so were Cæsar, the younger Bonaparte, Mugabe, Marcos, Erdoğan, Putin, and that Austrian corporal … prior to their self-coups.) He and they and the unlawful combatants are solely responsible for civilian casualties by their having unlawfully placed legitimate military targets in civilian areas. The moral responsibility for civilian casualties is entirely on the terrorists who have emplaced legitimate military targets amongst the civilian population, and is upon them only. A foggy-minded sentimental shudder at the consequences is precisely what they are aiming for in order to paralyze resistance to their war crimes. And to escape the consequences of them. This is how indulgent parents, in spoiling their children, raise psychopaths and sociopaths.
Macaulay, Sherman, and Jackie Fisher were right. So was Vegetius. Ignoring their maxims as the West has done, and international diplomats have done, leaves these Western sentimentalists and the pinstriped brigade with blood on their hands—and upon their souls, presuming they have any such organs.
I’d like to think that at last the FCO and Foggy Bottom Camel Corps, and Jew-haters in all political parties (o Jeremy Corbyn, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, the Squad and the Trumpshirts and all isolationists, the ‘Palestinian’s Pals’ Battalions, Iran-normalizers, ’Murica-Firsters, and Little Englanders), and UNRWA and the WHO and the EU’s aid agencies—for the common or garden Palestinian is given these opiates of the masses and remains complicit in or compliant with their terrorist leaders in consequence, carefully kept ready for radicalization and dependent upon the terror-state complex for distribution of aid—, thumb-sucking pundits, professional distributors of aid whose jobs rely on the continuation of misery, every weasel in the West, et al., shall have ceased to look at the Palestinians and think, What lovely people: let’s give them a state. They’d have done much better over the past seven decades to have echoed what King Harold said at Stamford Bridge. The invading Harald III Sigurdson Hardråde, Harald III ‘Hardrada’ of Norway, sought land in England—and, frankly, the Crown—for himself, and land for his puppet-ally, Harold’s exiled brother Tostig. King Harold’s counteroffer? ‘Six feet of ground or as much more as he needs, as he is taller than most men.’ The last time the Palestinians, so-called, had a state of their own was before the arrival of Nebuchadnezzar. They were and are not autochthonous to the region, even in the common usage of that term. They are a mix of Minoans, Cretans, other Sea Peoples and pirates, Nabatæans, Macedonians, Bedouins, Syrians, Roman auxiliaries, apostate Byzantines who converted for the tax breaks, invading Arabs, Crusaders’ by-blows, Bosniaks on the run, Turks, and the bastards of Allenby’s Anzac cavalry troopers circa 1917, all topping up a prior meager population of lost Jews and Canaanites and Edomites and Early Inhabitants hanging about since the Chalcolithic.
No criticism there: such is the common history of man. (Innumerable groups complaining of ‘settlers’, ‘occupiers’, ‘colonizers’, or any group they can label as such with whatever degree of truth they can manage, always resort to telling those whom they resent to Go Back to Where They Came From (and not, alas, to a Beatles tune), just as certain repugnant people do to perfectly legal immigrants. What they do not realize is that they are exposing themselves to a valid tu quoque: we can all go back to where we came from, the complainers included; but Olduvai Gorge and the Great Rift Valley generally are going to be damned crowded.)
The Western idolization of the Palestinians is rooted in Jew-hatred; sentimentalism and the pleasure of playing almoner and patronizing the poor and the distressed; and Orientalist exoticizing—and eroticizing in some cases (Thesiger and Lawrence both come to mind, though the idea that anyone ever saw the chinless Arafat as Rudolf Valentino is bizarre. There is I think no fetishizing of the women—having seen them, I understand why not—because the terrorists are visually presented as young men, and they are the group swooned and eroticized by fools of either sex, after their habit with that little shit ‘Che’ Guevara).
But, although the Palestinians have Arabized, and weaponize their Arabization, I for one am at a loss to understand the absurd hold they possess over the Pan-Arab mind, if that is not an oxymoron. I equally stand astonished that a people who have in their time been governed by Rome, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Persians, the Umayyads, Outremer, and the British can, even allowing for a period of Ottoman government—or misgovernment—, have remained in or reverted to the state of savagery and barbarism in which they appear to rejoice and upon which they seem determined to pride themselves. There is a reason why one reaches to the Balkans for analogies when dealing with these people, the rabid Karens of the Levant. They are as vicious and as bent on provoking a world war as were the Serbian irredentists and irreconcilables of 1914, whom they seem bent on emulating. They are as irresponsibly murderous and as willing to ignore the laws of nations and of war as the Villistas of that period, or Raisuni. All the same, they were offered a state, as part of a two-state solution—that mirage, that chimæra—in 1947, and not only rejected it—and are pledged to reject it yet—, but participated in and cheered on the attempted invasion of Israel by all her neighbors. And lost. Well … vae victis. They are complicit in their own oppression—which is at the hands of their own people only—and have not the backbone to rise against it. Unable or unwilling to come out from under the porch and take on the big dogs, the snarling little feists bite only the hands that feed them.
A people who have supinely acquiesced in their immiseration are pathetic—and not in any commendatory sense. The Jews of old resisted and revolted against Rome as against the Seleukídai and their predecessors; against the overwhelming material might of the Nazis, the Jews formed the Bielski partisans, the Parczew partisans, l’Armée Juive—including Scriabin’s daughter, mind you—in the French Resistance and the Comité de Défense des Juifs in the Belgian, the Rab Battalion of Tito’s ‘National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia’, and the ŻZW and ŻOB in occupied Poland; they rose against their oppressors in the Battle of Muranów Square, in the Slonim Ghetto, the Łachwa Ghetto, the Mizocz Ghetto, the Mińsk Mazowiecki Ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in conjunction with the Battle of Muranów Square, the Częstochowa Ghetto, the Będzin-Sosnowiec Ghetto, the Białystok Ghetto… They rose even in the death-camps, at Treblinka, at Sobibór, even at Auschwitz itself. Where not under the Nazi grip, they joined SOE’s Jewish Parachutists of Mandate Palestine, the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group, Eighth Army, in HM Forces, and the Special Interrogation Group.
The Palestinians? Their leaders (if that’s the word)—to an extent their chosen leaders, bitterly though they repent them of that choice after—, from Hitler’s pet Großmufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini to Fatah and Hamas, have carefully inculcated in them resentment, privation, a sense of ill-usage; and have directed their calculatedly cultivated hatreds towards those not responsible for their privations, for the leaders’ own purposes and power. It’s legitimately Orwellian. When they have risen, it has been in the ranks and at the behest of their own oppressors and not against their actual enemies: that is the infantilism of the intifadas.
Oh, they haven’t a state, poor dears? They have been living as refugees (cue the Tom Petty track) for seven decades in a camp writ large? Well: whose fault is that?
They have made no attempt to better their situation or gentle their condition. Imagine what Gaza and the West Bank should be in the hands of Singaporeans, Hong Kongers, the Dutch, the Swiss, or the Americans. Nor have they directed any attempt at their liberation of themselves against their actual, home-grown oppressors: contemplate what twelve Highlanders with a piper, ten families from rural Virginia, a handful of Texans, or any five Poles or Ukrainians had done in such circumstances. Israel should then not need to deal with Hamas: if Palestinians were like other peoples, they’d have strung the bastards up themselves.
They were offered a two-state solution in 1947; they screamed and held their breath until they turned blue—or green. These people have the political instincts of King John, VV Putin in Ukraine, 1914-vintage (and current) Serbs, Hillary Clinton, the late Merovingian rois fainéants, and the Provos, combined. Which is to say, all the cunning of Wile E. Coyote. Their neighbors won’t take them in: the Jordanians tried, and the Palestinians attempted a back-stab, a coup, and a civil war. Lebanon tried: same result. No one trusts them, and with cause: their sworn word is meaningless, always. They are like the Great Heathen Army in the 870s and before, never keeping their word, always coming back for more plunder and rapine. Well: the Vikings got their Danelaw and eventual assimilation into England, all right: after Alfred curb-stomped them at Ethandun and extracted the Treaty of Wedmore from Guðrum, and made him and his successors keep its terms. Israel is having to do the same—and with much more moderation than Texans, say, or Scipio, should have shown.
Peace is the child only of victory. Grant and Lee between them ensured military peace—which the politicians then screwed up civilly—with the imposition of unconditional surrender on the one side and a renunciation of guerilla warfare and ‘continuing the struggle in the hills and mountains’ on the other. The Germans’ halting progress in their application for readmission to the human race has been made possible only by the Allies’ having won the War and NATO’s having won the (first) Cold War. France was able to rejoin the community of civilized nations only because Wellington won at Waterloo.
If—if—any good thing comes out of this latest irruption of the irrational, of barbarism and savagery, I should like to think that it is, or shall be, the far overdue realization that the Palestinians—and their state and non-state supporters—must take the consequences of their actions and of their past choices, and that the West needs to stop waffling in an access of sentimentalism. (Yes: looking at you, Varadkar, and you, Darroch, and you, Egeland, and all your needy, seedy crew.)
I don’t ‘pray for peace’. I pray for victory.
‘If—if—any good thing comes out of this latest irruption of the irrational, of barbarism and savagery…’ Yes: if. It’d be nice. However, my weary cynicism suggests otherwise. That leaves but one option: that of removing their capacity—and that of their state and non-state supporters, accomplices, and co-conspirators—to effect their malicious designs ever again; the removal of their having the strength to do so. (Iran, as presently constituted, is, for example, a prime candidate for … deletion.) So… Delenda est.
I implore my Jewish friends, and all who have lost innocent kin to these barbarians, to end their reading here. The next bit is going to be incandescently profane and very angry.
Part II: This is the cause of all who love liberty, and all free men have a stake in the consequences—and no, caring for and supporting Israel is not and must not be limited to Jews. So stuff your attempted ad hominem, your genetic fallacy, your Bulverism, your conspiracy theories, and your demand that I ‘declare my interest’.
It is difficult even when doing or attempting to do the right thing always to avoid possibly being unintentionally insensitive. Particularly in a moment of peril and disaster at the blood-boltered hands of barbarous tyrants. That is why I have recommended that those with ties—close ties; personal ties—to Israel skip this part, which exists only to spike the guns of those who would seek to dismiss my remarks for the usual horseshit reasons. For all the Ellis Island mythos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, many of us do not have the close familial ties and emotional connections to the countries from which our ancestors immigrated which are had by some; and the same is I think true for most Britons who are not Black Britons—or of course who are not British Jews, or members of parts of the Subcontinental diaspora. More recent immigrants in any Western country may well feel those ties to an extent, but those who have been in one or another Western country for 400 years or more tend not to—with one exception. There are of course, for example, some rather sad Anglophiles and Royal-watchers, and, even now, Diana-manes, in the United States, just as there are Plastic Paddys wondering where the NORAID boxes went at their favorite fake Irish pub; but they are a distinct minority. One of my old university friends and contemporaries, for example, is a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, with immediate family in both; but not even he, to my knowledge, reacted to the London Tube bombings in quite the same visceral fashion in which we all reacted to September 11th. And I don’t think there is a very great deal of Italian-American interest in day-to-day events in Italy any longer, after so many generations; nor so very much attention regularly paid to affairs in los Estados Unidos Mexicanos even by Chicano families in the Rio Grande Valley. Quotidian Finnish affairs are, I think, of little moment even to most Finnish-Americans, even in Minnesota or in Delaware. But Israel is not merely a small embattled beacon of hope and liberty in a very dark part of the world: for many Jews in the West, it is something rather more, to an extent the rest of us cannot grasp. I may be exasperated by the continuing echoes of The Troubles, materially annoyed by the SNP, contemptuous of Plaid, driven to despair by the C of E and much of the rest of the Anglican Communion, or naturally outraged by Russian FSB thugs spreading poison in Wiltshire, but these things cannot strike me with the gravity with which terror and war in Israel must necessarily strike any Jew of the Diaspora, some of whose families have been in the United States for at least three centuries or longer. The only justification for these concluding remarks, then, is preemptively to dismiss the usual ad hominem attacks directed towards anyone, not himself Jewish, who defends, as we ought all to defend, Israel.
Let’s get this out of the way at once: as the usual braying jackasses shall raise it. I have no recorded Jewish ancestry. The one candidate in my recorded genealogy for that honor is the unknown mother of Ebles, Ebalus, II Manzer, Duke of Aquitaine, a 29th great-grandfather of mine. I do not support Israel on the ground that I am Jewish: because I am not.
‘He’s insisting he’s not Jewish. That means he’s secretly Jewish.’ No, it means you’ve misspelled genealogist, you jackass.
Like JRR Tolkien, I can only regret that I appear to have no ancestors among that gifted people. If I did, and I thought Israel to be in the wrong, I’d say so. I don’t, they’re not, and I shan’t. I’m an Ó Cearbhaill of Éile on both sides of the family, I’m a 31st great-grandson of Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig, Rí na h’Éireann and a 33d great-grandson of Cellach of the Hard Conflicts, Cellach mac Cerbaill, King of Osraige; and I’m ashamed to share an ethnicity with most of Ireland, North and South, on a far too regular basis—and especially when I see the latest rot from the contemptible Leo Varadkar. When I look at the Republic, and remember that, on the English side, our Ludlow cousins and connections were Cromwellians when we were Cavaliers, I suddenly feel that perhaps more of the Irish ought to have been sent to Hell and fewer to Connacht. I’m descended of every King of Scots who left descendants, from Cináed mac Ailpin to James V, inclusive; and I’m embarrassed to share that ethnicity with a plurality of modern Scots a majority of the time—especially the Nats, and especially under their current vile leader. And so it goes: the English regularly disappoint me; even the Welsh sometimes embarrass me; once in a while, a few Cornishmen manage to make me resent our kinship. As to the Continent, let alone those lasting humiliations My Fellow Americans… Well, as a 25th great-grandson of Giacomo Tiepolo and a 22d of Pietro Gradenigo, as a 19th great-grandson of Bernabò Visconti, as a 24th great-grandson of Friedrich Barbarossa, a 28th great-grandson of Robert Guiscard, a 26th great-grandson of Bjørn Haraldsen Ironside, a 27th great-grandson of King Inge Stenkilsson the Elder, a 29th great-grandson of Vladimir II Monomakh Vsevolodovich, as a 21st great-grandson of Philippe IV ‘le Bel’, Roi de France (is that Gentile enough for y’all?) … all I can say is, vaffanculo, va te faire enculer, and the various local equivalents.
Do the EPs of the 1st Hamas Demolition Brigade (Derailment Company) have even a tenuous grasp of what they’re doing—and the consequences? I’d be right surprised if they did. Jews—noncombatant, civilian Jews, including women and children, protected by the laws of nations and of war—have been murdered, kidnapped, tortured, massacred—and you demand no one speak up for them if the speaker could possibly be Jewish? A crime against humanity is in progress at your filthy hands, and you decline to hear the victims’ and their families’ testimony? Fuck you.
Cowards want to hit and not be hit back, and if they are hit back, want to tattle, and enlist Mommy or Teacher. Hamas, whatever that Day-Glo orange toad Trump says, are cowards, not (‘very stable’) geniuses, or smart. They are counting on waffling weasels in the West—who are already emerging like cockroaches—to ‘support-Israel-but’ and to ‘counsel restraint’ and all that happy horseshit. Not happening; not here. Not from me. My mood is near to being that of my 24th great-grandfather by one line Simon V de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, his son Amaury VI, Comte de Montfort, a 24th great-grandfather of mine by a slightly different path, Philip II Augustus, King of France, yet another of my 24th great-grandfathers, and his son King Louis VIII le Lion of France, a 23d great-grandfather of mine (blame the Stuarts, the Leslies, and the Erskines of Mar for these pedigrees), at the siege of the Cathar stronghold of Béziers. (Sufficiently Gentile for y’all?)
The State of Israel is being a right smart nicer and more restrained than I’d be.
Jew-hatred—Islamist, nominally Christian, Marxist, secularist—always has at its shriveled, evil heart some foul, false notion of collective guilt and collective punishment. If that’s the sauce you want for the goose, Abu Gander… No one is responsible for any sins or any soul save his own.Æðelred Unrǣd is, lamentably, a 28th great-grandfather of mine. I’ve had my share of clusterfucks in this life; but I never ruined a kingdom, and I’m not responsible for his having done so. The despicable Noll Cromwell is a fifth cousin of mine—something even I find it difficult to be cavalier about—; but it’s on him, not me, that he went from a devout, psalm-singing tax protester and religious fanatic to a proto-fascist, tyrannical Sullan dictator. (Low Churchmen … sigh. They’re hopeless.) Richard de Malbiche, a first cousin of mine, my Percy and Darell cousins, and my 24th great-grandsire Sir Peter de Fauconberg were the main players in the massacre of the Jews of York in 1190. They shall have exchanged this life for all the sad variety of Hell, where I trust they are burning screaming; I bear no responsibility. Benedict Arnold is an 11th cousin of mine, and Alger Hiss a 15th; I never sold my country. That rabid racist Theodore G. Bilbo is one of my 12th cousins; I am not he, and the Baldwins of Aston Clinton and Dundridge who are our common ancestors, MPs and a Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and All That, aren’t responsible for the son of a bitch either. Senator Bilbo is merely a minatory example of the downward social mobility and moral degeneration which so often attends the colonial and frontier experience in the British and Irish. So is Nathan Bedford Forrest, an 11th cousin of mine: I cannot claim his brilliance as a cavalry commander and am not guilty of his sins, and no more are any other common descendants of the Savages of Rocksavage and Clinton. I have seen it suggested that that smarmy, smirking sociopath Matt Gaetz is, like me, a descendant of Bjørn Haraldsen Jærnside and Princess Katarina Ingesdotter; if so, that’d make the pedo-looking bastard a 28th or so cousin to me. I don’t know the whoreson, don’t care to, and bear no responsibility for him. (Though I do say that had either Bjørn Ironside—the Ragnarsson of that name being ostensibly a 31st great-uncle to me—encountered said Congresscritter on some witless Witan, they’d have marked him down for the blood-eagle as soon as his usefulness had ended. Vikings were always happy to use the treacherous … and then reward them as they deserved.)
Gentile enough for you?
I have saints in the family: Ælfred Micela, Alfred the Great, a 33d great-grandsire of mine; Ēadgār the Peacemaker, one of my 31st great-grandfathers; Eberhard of Friuli, one of my 32d; Louis IX of France, one of my 23d; Ferdinand III, King of Castile & León, also a 23d great-grandfather of mine; Margaret of Wessex, Queen Consort of Scots, a 25th great-grandmother of mine: but I take no credit or sanctity by them. Nor should anyone in such case; any more than any of us answers for sins and crimes in which we did not participate.
There is no collective sin; no collective guilt; no collective punishment. The complicit and the collaborators, on the other hand, are liable to consequences: something Hamas and its pals—including the both-siders, the restraint-counselors, the both-houses-‘humanitarians’, the support-but set, the whatabouters, and Winken, Blinken, and Nod—really ought to contemplate quietly and with dread. Because if that argument, and consequent weaponry, is turned on them… Fortunately, Israel is infinitely more moral than they.
And the Let’s Not Be Beastly to Hamas crowd can drop this derailing horseshit right sharpish.
Hamas’ hellhound, Hell-bound whores want a Judenrein defense of Israel? Challenge. Fucking. Accepted. Game. Fucking. On.
‘He supports Israel? Oh, he must be Jewish if he does that, whatever he claims.’ No, Dr. Bulver; merely attuned to elementary morality. And monumentally Gentile.
Like not a few figures in Western European history in the late 9th and in the 10th and 11th Centuries, Ebles Manzer managed to succeed his father despite his being illegitimate. William the Bastard of Normandy, one of my 25th great grandsires (Gentile enough for you?), who after 1066 rejoiced in the slightly superior sobriquet of William the Conqueror, did the same. Particularly in polities such as Normandy which were founded by Vikings who decided to settle, marriages more Danico and uncanonical marriage generally, as well as the usual royal or noble bastardies, were not infrequent: how the hell else did you think I descend of my 29th great-grandparents Harold II Godwinson and Ealdgȳð Swann hnesce, through their daughter Gytha of Wessex and her husband Vladimir II Monomakh? (Gentile enough for you?) Ebles was unique only in being known for his illegitimacy as ‘the Manzer’ or ‘Mamzer’—the Hebrew term—rather than ‘the Bastard’, ‘le Bâtard’. None of the other ruling bastards swanning about at the time were thus designated. Some people find that distinction in epithets suggestive, and posit that the unknown mistress of his father, Ranulf II of Aquitaine, was Jewish. No one knows, and I could not care less if I put my mind to it. Is that sufficiently Gentile for the critics? If the House of Poitiers picked up a certain genetic introgression of Jewish descent in the Year of Our Lord 870 or thereabouts, it clearly did not slow Ebles down or affect his career and that of his descendants—or make him less of a prick, as one should otherwise have expected. (I know effectively no bad Jews. I become a complete misanthrope when I survey the mass of my fellow Gentiles.) Ebles’ direct descendant Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of my 22d great-grandmothers, hardly comes across in the historical sources as a stereotypical Jewish mother, either. I am approximately as ‘Jewish’ as Harald Hardrada, supra, a 30th great-grandfather of mine, and a ghastly sod with it, or Thomas Jefferson, supra, a 9th cousin of mine, as it happens—all of which is important only to this Part II. And it is obscene that I must go into all this to preempt the usual deflections of the usual Jew-haters; and more obscene yet that I must do so even as Jews worldwide and the citizens of the State of Israel are once again wondering, as too often in history, what has become of their relations, and who are to be prayed for as dead, and who, as captive, their names not yet being verified and released.
‘Oh, another American who says he’s not Jewish but supports and defends Israel. He must be some subliterate snake-handler, some trailer-trash tethered to some tin tabernacle, some guns-an’-Jesus backwoods Bible-thumper, some redneck enraptured of eschatological fantasy.’ Well, son, that’s a hell of a way to describe a learnèd Anglican of good family.
I am, much to my displeasure, compelled to clear the air and show my cards in this fashion because the softer sort of modern Jew-hater—the sort who do not march about with tattoos and armbands—quite as much as the usual pitiable Kluxers, European neo-pagans, Rodnovers, Putin’s putaines, Said-ists, Saddam-ites, Camel Corps diplomats, catchpenny academics, and other sweepings and scourings of mudsill, white-trash, trailer-park Karens in togs above their station, tend to say two things about anyone who supports Jews, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel. The first is to award us the undeserved honor, which I must decline, of being one of that admirable people. The second is to charge them, us, with being the sort of eeeee-vangelical ’Murrican nominally Protestant redneck who says nice things about Israel as a country in between telling ‘Jew jokes’ and taking huge chomping bites of a three-pound bacon cheeseburger. I have no objection to a Whataburger, though my cardiologist does on my behalf, and if I get one, it will be sans bun, owing to my Type 2 diabetes. But I am a High, Trad, Continuing Anglican, an Anglo-Catholic—not surprising in a man one of whose 15th great-uncles was Henry VIII and one of whose first cousins fifteen times removed was Good Queen Bess. (Fat Harry’s sister Margaret married James IV, King of Scots, and they are 14th great-grandparents of mine. Their son, James V, my 13th great-grandfather, had, he being a Stuart, a right smart of bastards (ahem), though only one surviving legitimate child). Europeans, particularly on the Continent, have this vision of redneck, burger-chomping, Nonconformist Protestant cowboys as being the only supporters of the State of Israel, or of Americans as being, at the least, too unsophisticated to grasp the balanced, remote, aloof disapproval of both sides, the nuances so clear to the ever-so-sophisticated European mind: which does not exist. There’s a reason the English-speaking nations have spent several centuries rescuing the nuanced, ever-so-sophisticated, supremely wise, frightfully enlightened Europeans from their own dictators and those of their neighbors. (Armada Year comes to mind.) In comparing the histories of the nations of continental Europe—which are in their present forms in many cases younger than the United States—and the histories of the United States of America and of the United Kingdom, I for one fail to see how the English-speaking nations have anything to learn from, or are in want of the tutelage of, the heirs of John Lackland (my 21st great-grandfather, alas), Ivan IV Vasilyevich Grozny (my 8th cousin, sadly), Louis XIV (my 7th cousin, regrettably), Bonaparte (a 17th cousin, and I despise the fact), Petain (no relation, blessedly), Wilhelm II (another 17th cousin I prefer not to contemplate), Nicholas II (same again, barkeep), Mehmed Talaat,Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler (all of them, laus Deo, no kin of mine).
‘Typical pro-Israel American: doesn’t know anything about the matter, or the nuances, and is a racist against the poor oppressed Palestinians.’ Oh, horseshit. Your ‘nuances’ are running lower than the Nueces in a drought.
Those who believe that one must be partly Jewish—or must be, to use the vile Spanish canard of old, a ‘crypto-Jew’—to support the State of Israel, presumably also believe in the sort of ethnic or racial essentialism, some one-drop rule, whereby one’s sympathies must be enlisted on the side of the enemies of the State of Israel if one shares any of their DNA. I mention post-Reconquista Spain for a reason: of all the puerile obsessions which have taken hold of the human mind, that period’s Iberian insistence upon ‘purity of blood’ is perhaps the most ludicrous, given the genetic history of the Iberian Peninsula. Peasants—my ancestral Pastons, initially, for example—may marry within their kin-groups. Monarchs and peers do not; and the extra, and the illegitimate, children and grandchildren of monarchs and peers soon become commoners, squires, the County gentry. And further accidents, including economic and religious, can reduce those families and their circumstances further still, or put them on the first boat to the colonies.
My family too has its history with the region: Raymond III of Tripoli is one of my second cousins; Guy I of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem and Cyprus jure uxoris, a 25th great-uncle; his wife Sibylla of Anjou, Queen of Jerusalem, a first cousin of mine; Conrad I de Montferrat, King of Jerusalem, a 25th great-uncle; Baldwin III, King of Jerusalem, a 24th; Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem, a 29th great-uncle; Baldwin IV the Leper, King of Jerusalem, a first cousin; Fulk V, King of Jerusalem, one of my 24th great-grandfathers; and Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, one of my 28th great-grandfathers. They were, on religious rather than racialist grounds, not precisely known as friends to Jews, Arabs (the yet-Christian ones included), or—explaining the preceding—Orthodox rather than Roman Christians, equally. Such was the temper of the times. And my family, like the Palestinians, were but transient late-comers to Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people for long ages to which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Tell me I don’t understand the history and background of the region…
‘Listen, we’re not going to accept this sort of lecturing from some white-bread American.’ Well, it’s nearer to cornbread. Or naan. Or shelpek. Or pit(t)a.
The Eastern Roman Emperor Nikephoros I Logothetes is one of my 42d great-grandfathers … because descendants of his married into Italian and French ducal and comital houses (and the House of Árpád): including eventually that of Burgundy, and thence that of Savoy, thence into the House of Saluzzo, and thus into the Fitzalans of Arundel. Modern Palestine was a territory of the Eastern Roman Empire. And Nikephoros I, an Orthodox Christian, naturally, was nearly certainly a Levantine Arab of the Banu Ghassān, which tribe originated in Arabia Felix as Sabæans and removed to the Roman Levant consule Zeno.
People do not grasp what having a thoroughly British and Irish descent actually means. It means being related to ancestors, cousins, and connections half a world to the East of East Anglia and Easter Ross and the East Neuk of Fife. My 16th great-grandfather Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, the father of Henry VII, was descended, through Naples, Anjou, Aragon, Bavaria, and Valois, from steppe people of Western and Central Asia, and South Siberia. Cue the Borodin.* This is because my 25th great-grandfather, Stephen V of Hungary and Croatia, married my 25th great-grandmother, Elizabeth of the Cumans. István was of course anÁrpád, a Magyar, they being originally a tribe from the steppes of Central Asia; Erzsébet, the daughter of the Khan of the Qipchak-Kumans, a Turkic steppe tribe. (Tonight’s encore by Borodin: the Polovtsian Dances.) Like an astonishing number of persons of English descent, I am descended of the Skleroi, a Rhangabe or two, various Phocids, the Komnenoi, Laskares (Stephen V’s mother was a Laskarina), Palaiologoi, Angelids, Doukai, Dalassenoi, Byzantine-Armenians of the Kourkouas family, the Bulgarian royal family of the Kometopuli (the Bulgars also being formerly a semi-nomadic steppe people), and so on—and of the Bagratids as well, marching through Georgia: with the result that my cousins and connections, and those of unknowing millions of persons of British descent, include, ultimately, the Hamdanid emirs of Mosul and Aleppo; Alā ad-Dīn Kayqubād I ibn Kaykhusraw, Sultan of Rûm; Batu Khan of the Golden Horde; Saladin; and Timur the Lame: Tamerlane. Not terribly Wonder Bread, is it. So let’s drop the race-baiting and the whole nonsense of ‘I can speak because I am browner than you’, shall we, Karen al-Husayni?
Similarly, in the fragments of what later became Spain, in the 9th Century there was Musa ibn Musa al-Qasawi, a Muwallad wali in Tudela, Arnedo, Huesca, Zaragoza, and parts adjoining, always rebellious and often victorious. He was the uterine half-brother of the Basque hero Eneko Aritza, Íñigo Arista de Pamplona, the first King of Pamplona; and their descendants intermarried thoroughly within a century’s time. Íñigo Arista is one of my 35th great-grandfathers; Musa ibn Musa is one of my 36th … through the marriage of the Infanta Isabella of Castile to Edmund of Langley, the first Duke of York, they being among my 19th great-grandparents. (Always assuming that my 18th great-grandsire Richard of Conisburgh, 3d Earl of Cambridge, was Edmund’s son and not a product of Isabella’s rumored affair with John Holland, 1st Duke of Exeter, who is in any case one of my 19th great-grandfathers through his daughter Constance, Countess of Norfolk.) And Edward I of England married Eleanor of Castile and León, my 21st great-grandparents through three of their great-grandsons: Edmund of Langley aforementioned, John of Gaunt, John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, 1st Earl of Richmond, one of my 18th great-grandfathers, and Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, one of my 21st great-grandfathers. Pretty damned Gentile, if you ask me… It is also through the numerous Plantagenet-Iberian marriages that I am a first cousin to Abd al-Rahman III, the 1st Caliph of Córdoba, a descendant of Musa ibn Musa in five generations. His great-aunt Toda Aznárez—in euskara, Tota Aznar—of Pamplona was Queen Consort of Pamplona married her children into the Houses of León, Castile, and Galicia, and is an ancestress of mine—and the Plantagenets at issue—many times over, most nearly in my case one of 32d great-grandmothers. Gentile enough for you?
In any event, the Infanta Isabella of Castile—like Eleanor of Castile and León and like John Holland, 1st Duke of Exeter—is a descendant of Musa ibn Musa: he being in turn a direct descendant in five generations of the Caliph Marwân I ibn al-Hakam al-Qurayshi, the fourth Umayyad caliph, who, for the benefit of Muslim readers, was in his youth one of the sahaba, the Companions.
In this inane game of ticking boxes by the Hamas apologists’ own metrics, I get to speak, being, by their litmus tests, of recognized Indigenous descent (Basque), as much a POC as Rashida Tlaib (I being of Arab—of the Quraysh, at that—and Central Asian descent), and, hell, let’s throw in Hispanic (being descended of every post-Roman and mediæval Christian ruling house in the Iberian Peninsula, before and after the Reconquista) whilst we’re at it.
As for my not knowing the territory or its history, allow me further to point out the irony that Sir Mark Sykes is an 11th cousin of mine (and François Marie Denis Georges-Picot one of my 10th cousins), and T. E. Lawrence, a 12th … and that the most recent common ancestor I share with Lawrence of Arabia was herself a descendant of the Caliph Marwân. (My and Georges-Picot’s MRCA was likewise a descendant of Marwân I’s, as it happens.) Oh—and Allenby was one of my 13th cousins once removed (and himself a distant Marwanid). (Hell, from the days of Marwân I, Nikephoros I, Michael I Rhangabe, Basil I ‘the Macedonian’, and Leo VI the Wise, through the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, to the Arab Revolt and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, my family has been fucking the region up for fifteen centuries. Tell me I don’t know the territory…)
Ethics and morality are not tribal.
Those who think that this disposes me to think highly of or to support the Palestinians; or who think that it ought to do; or who consider me some sort of—to use a term associated with the sort of scum who think in these terms—‘Rassenverräter’ not to do; or who think that I am somehow a bigot or even a ‘racist’ towards the Palestinians because I do not … ought to go home, because they’re drunk, or too Goddamned stupid to be let out without a keeper.
I’m an historian. I’m well aware of How We Got Here. And I know who bears the war guilt here. It isn’t Israel.
I should love to see the Palestinians freed of oppression. That’s why I support Israel: they’re the only ones trying to liberate those poor bastards.I regret that the civilian Palestinians are in the position they’re in … those of them who have any claim to innocence; but it’s the consequence of their own choices and their own actions—or inactions. They have been supine at best, collaborationists at worst, not resisting—or actively participating in—their own degradation at the hands of their own home-grown lunatics. As Cousin Tom Jefferson wrote to William Stephens Smith—Smith was married to Abigail Adams the younger, daughter of my 13th cousin John Adams; his sister Sally Smith married one of Adams’ sons, Charles Francis Adams (is this Gentile enough for you?)—‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’ The Palestinians have chosen not to tend their garden. As John Stuart Mill—a distant connection of mine by marriage and no kinsman to me—noted, ‘A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.’ Call that a Western, Christian-informed, Gentile view if you like; that does not refute it. My sympathy for the oppressed attenuates to the vanishing point when they who claim oppression are the instruments of their own oppression and have not the testicular fortitude to rise against their oppressors, or even to bug out for a freer land—and who are abject cowards who, worse still, at their oppressors’ bidding, assail the enemies of their oppressors—: which precisely describes the inert mass of Palestinians.
I shall always side with the civilized man rather than with the barbarian and the terrorist. In Israel as in Ukraine, all free men have a stake in this battle against terror, aggression, oppression, and the spread of tyranny, be their fathers who they may. The blood of those slain by terrorists cries out for vengeance.
‘Well, if he supports Israel and he’s not Jewish and he’s not some religious nut-case, that must mean the Jews are paying him to do so.’ … Seriously? To paraphrase a 13th cousin of mine, Willie the Shake, ‘stand not upon the order of your pissing, but piss off at once,’ you pathetic, abject morons.
Oh—and to round out the trifecta of idiocy, No, I’m not being paid by whatever non-existent Jewish ‘controllers’ and ‘paymasters’ the phantom presences of whom inhabit your pitiable delusions, you pathetic little halfwits. Nor am I in the pay of the See of Rome, the Freemasons, any alleged Illuminati (who must be pretty geriatric by now), Hubbard’s cupboard of crooks and crackpots, the Mor(m)ons, or David Icke’s pet lizard—as my bank could glumly attest. (Banks are professionally amoral.) Hell, I’m as poor as a Grub Street hack of old, nowadays, and the embodiment of, If you’re s’ damn smart, why the hell ain’t you rich? So shove your idiot pamphlets and forged Protocols up your asses. Alongside a 12-gauge shotgun, and go out with a bang, exchanging this life for all the sad variety of Hell.
It is utterly absurd, intolerable, and appalling that I have needed to declare my non-interest and establish my bona fides in this fashion; but this is the moronic, intellectually dishonest world in which we live. That being got out of the way … read Part I again.
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* Aleksandr Porfiryevich Borodin, Александр Порфирьевич Бородин, a 20th cousin of mine. Gentile enough for you?
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.
Exsurgat Deus:
Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered : let them also that hate him flee before him.
Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away : and like as wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God.But let the righteous be glad and rejoice before God : let them also be merry and joyful.
❦
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 