Year: 2022

‘Propaganda of the Deed’ – Give Out Kugel!

Rabbi Yoel Shwartz once gave a troubling speech at a Kedushas Tzion convention, saying our camp must actually do worldly things for people, not just educate them.

(By “troubling” I mean the message haunts me, not that it spells trouble about the speaker!)

His example was the contrast between the superior Rosh Yeshiva whose crowd is what it is, in contrast to the average Chassidic Rebbe.

Why? Well, only one of the two is known to give out free, piping hot kugel…

I recently read a similar story (unsourced) of effective “propaganda of the deed”:

Communists are out to try to prove to people that they care about them as people…

It has not been simply on the basis of pouring out words. They have tried to think of various means of convincing the public that this is so. For example, in various parts of Asia recently, when Communist Party congresses have been called—the annual congresses at which all the topmost leaders and the local leaders meet—they have followed the technique of aiming to prove to the people that they care.

The congress is called, not at some big city which provides accommodations like this, but quite deliberately they call it to meet in some remote place. Those of you who work in mission areas or even those of you who know your history will know that roads break down isolation, link up communities with other communities, and pave the way to development. If any of you work in areas where there are no roads, you know how isolated you can be. And so some of the Asian Communist Parties have called their congresses to be held in some area which is quite cut off from all development because it has no road to link with the main highways. The Indonesian Communist Party did that. They called their congress (this is a powerful party with 2,000,000 members) to meet in a place where there was no road to link it up with civilization. They called their delegates together a week before the congress was due to begin. Then they spent the week—top leaders and all the other leaders—working together to build a road from that village to the nearest highway. So the people would never forget that the communists came there and opened up the way to development.

I’m impressed.

(By the way, I was once forced to visit a Chassidic Tisch. ערום ראה רעה ונסתר. I made sure not to eat the kugel…)

Intimate Harassment of Conscripted Women: Ombudsman Keeps Saying the Same Thing…

But nothing changes, of course.

As the song goes:

הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ זָרְחָה, הַשִּׁטָּה פָּרְחָה וְהַשּׁוֹחֵט שָׁחַט.

A “Times of Israel” headline from this month:

1 in 4 female conscripts in police, prisons sexually harassed or abused — ombudsman

I think the number in the last report a few years back was 1 in 6… Change the masses can believe in!

Some excerpts:

Stark figures released on Monday by the State Comptroller’s Office revealed the high percentage of women subjected to sexual harassment or abuse while performing their obligatory national service in the Israel Police, Border Police and Israel Prison Service.

The report found that harassment is for the most part committed by professional, non-conscripted members of those forces including commanders, and when reported is either insufficiently addressed or not dealt with at all.

The report was commissioned in the wake of the so-called pimping scandal at Gilboa Prison, in which senior prison officers were accused of “pimping” out female prison officials in 2018 to prisoners held for nationalistic crimes.

State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman said the report painted a “troubling institutional reality” in the three services under review.

“It appears that the Gilboa scandal was just the tip of the iceberg. Conscripted soldiers are subject to harassment from terror inmates and from professional personnel who take advantage of conscripts’ weakness,” said Englman.

Continue reading…

The government loves pretending there isn’t a pattern.

Let’s keep filing useless reports, people!

בעל החידושי הרי”ם: ‘יהודי’ ע”ש הודאה

ספר שיח שרפי קודש בסוף פרשת ויצא

ותאמר הפעם אודה את ה’ על כן קראה שמו יהודה. סיפר הרב”צ אוסטראווער ז”ל ששמע מפ”ק מו”ר הגה”ק החי’ הרי”מ זצוקללה”ה הענין שכ”א מישראל נקרא “יהודי” הוא ע”ש יהודה, דהוא ע”ש שבח והודאה, וכמ”ש הפעם אודה את ד’ וכו’, ופי’ רש”י ז”ל שנטלתי יותר מדאי על חלקי וכו’ משמע מזה דכ”א מחויב לידע דכל מה דהשי”ת עושה עמו הוא יותר מהמגיע לו ולזה נקרא “יהודי”. עכלה”ק.

NYT’s Pacific COVID Unselfawareness…

New York Times Decides Lockdowns are Actually Draconian and Economically Destructive when China Does Them

“Many were fed up with Mr. Xi … and his ‘Zero-Covid’ policy, which continues to disrupt everyday life, hurt livelihoods and isolate the country,” writes the Times in pacific unselfawareness.

eugyppius
Nov 28

Three years ago, Zero Covid was the aspiration of public health bureaucrats and politicians across the West. Charlatan techbros like Tomas Pueyo appeared on national television to demand nationwide house arrest; leaders like Angela Merkel surrounded themselves with virus-eradicationist modellers and imposed unprecedented months-long closures upon their countries. When protests inevitably broke out, they were violently suppressed; the protesters were slandered as conspiracy theorists and fascists.

The New York Times played a leading role in this long and excruciating charade. In April 2020, they reported that “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the [Trump] White House” was responsible for “quietly working to nurture protests and apply … pressure to overturn state and local orders intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus.” In March 2021, they ran an obnoxious opinion piece about What Happened When Germany’s Far-Right Party Railed Against Lockdowns, which called German protesters “an amorphous mix of conspiracy theorists, shady organizations and outraged citizens” and appeared to accuse the right-populist party Alternativ für Deutschland of opportunism for joining their ranks.

What a difference a few years have made.

China Protests Break Out as Covid Cases Surge and Lockdowns Persist is a lead headline in today’s New York Times: “Strict Covid restrictions are hurting the country’s economy and angering members of the public, who are taking to the streets,” we read in the article that follows. Western anti-lockdown protesters are fascists and conspiracy theorists; Chinese anti-lockdown protesters, on the other hand, are ordinary people who are just fighting the power:

“Lift the lockdown,” the protesters screamed in a city in China’s far west. On the other side of the country, in Shanghai, demonstrators held up sheets of blank white paper, turning them into an implicit but powerful sign of defiance. One protester, who was later detained by the police, was carrying only flowers.

Over the weekend, protests against China’s strict Covid restrictions ricocheted across the country in a rare case of nationwide civil unrest. There had been signs of dissent, but the new wave of anger may pose a bigger challenge for the government.

Some demonstrators went so far as to call for the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. Many were fed up with Mr. Xi, who in October secured a precedent-defying third term as the party’s general secretary, and his “zero-Covid” policy, which continues to disrupt everyday life, hurt livelihoods and isolate the country.

Western lockdowns were necessary to save lives. Chinese lockdowns are the repressive tactic of an undemocratic regime.

The Chinese government on Monday blamed “forces with ulterior motives” for linking a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region to strict Covid measures, a key driver as the protests spread across the country.

In much the same way, the New York Times blamed shadowy political actors with ties to Trump for anti-lockdown protests in 2020.

Outside China, the rest of the world has adapted to the virus and is near normalcy. Take soccer’s premier event, the World Cup. Thousands of people from across the globe have assembled in Qatar and are cheering on their teams, shoulder-to-shoulder, without masks, in packed stadiums.

China’s approach won praise during the beginning of the pandemic, and there is no doubt it has saved lives. But now that approach looks increasingly outdated. Almost three years after the coronavirus emerged, the contrast between China and the rest of the world couldn’t be starker.

Emphasis mine, because it’s probably the most amazing line in the whole piece. Here we have America’s foremost propaganda outlet, trying desperately to accuse China of unjust dictatorial repression, for the crime of implementing in a more organised and coherent way the very same Zero Covid policies that Times journalists spent nearly two years supporting. What’s actually wrong with the harsh Chinese lockdowns? Well, say the Times, who can’t say anything else – they’ve become unfashionable.

Continue reading here…

From Eugyppius, here.