Tucker Carlson Firing: ‘When You Tell the Truth, Have One Foot in the Stirrup’

Great article on Mises.org…

Excerpt:

Why would BlackRock, headed by CEO Larry Fink, pressure Fox News to axe Tucker? For one, Tucker was known for his scathing criticism of Ukraine’s corruption, which put him at odds with the investment giant. In January, Carlson reacted derisively to a video of Ukrainian President Zelensky thanking BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs for “rebuilding” the country. Tucker referred to Zelensky, not as a hero, as the establishment would have it, but as a dictator. Carlson has also been critical of BlackRock’s push for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, claiming, rightly, that ESG is a means of circumventing legislation and thus subverting democratic processes. ESG thwarts the will of the people and installs a “climate change” dictatorship in its place.

“The media,” Tucker recently said, “are part of the control apparatus…not only are they part of the problem, but I spent most of my life being part of the problem, defending the Iraq War, like I actually did that.” That is, Tucker came to recognize that the media are ideological state apparatuses whose functions are to indoctrinate, mislead, and support the reigning regime and their narratives, whether past, present, or future. Tucker attempted to subvert those media functions and became a danger to the regime. It is no wonder that he no longer works for Fox News. The question is how he lasted so long.

Read the rest here…

Paul Johnson: Providential Timing of the Balfour Declaration and the Miracles of the Six-Day War

Quoting the great historian (bolding added):

World War I had a double effect on Zionism, transforming its program from a theoretical into a real possibility but also ensuring that the creation of the Jewish state would be bloody. Until 1914, the men who ran the British empire, though sympathetic to Zionism, were inclined to fob off Jewish leaders with schemes for developing a slice of Africa. Turkey was a traditional British ally, and keeping its ramshackle possessions together was a prime object of British policy. What put an end to all that was the fateful decision of the Turks to join the side of Germany in the war. In a dramatic speech in November 1914, the British Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, announced: “The Turkish empire has committed suicide.”

Immediately, a Palestinian Zion became conceivable, and what would be known as the Balfour Declaration was in train. But the British decision to end the Turkish empire in the Middle East also presupposed the existence of new Arab states as well, and inevitably brought into being Arab nationalism. It is here that Herzl’s initiative and dynamism proved to be so crucial. Timing is all-important in history. No doubt a Zionist political movement would in due course have come into existence without Herzl. By launching it in the 1890’s, Herzl gave the Jews, in effect, a twenty-year headstart over the Arabs. Even before the war began, Zionist leaders had been in touch with leading British policy-makers, and they exploited the possibilities produced by the war with great energy and sophistication.

It is amazing, in retrospect, that the Zionists were able to secure the Balfour Declaration—ensuring the “best endeavors” of the British government to achieve “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”—in 1917, while the war was still undecided, thus preempting the postwar negotiations and settlements of national claims. By the time the Arabs got themselves organized as an international pressure group, at the Versailles Peace Conference, it was too late. They did win their Arab states, but the Jews had already gained their national home and were settling it with all deliberate speed.

But World War I also introduced unprecedented degrees of violence and extremism into the world, and these too held consequences for the future of Israel. Gone was any possibility that the Jewish national home might integrate itself peacefully with its Arab neighbors, paying for its presence in their midst by teaching them the modern arts of agriculture and commerce. The so-called Arab Revolt that began in 1936 and that was encouraged and rewarded by the British mandatory power confirmed local Arab leaders in the view that their most promising option against the Zionists was force. What had driven out the Turks and created the new Arab states could also be employed, in due course, to extirpate the Jews. This became a fixed Arab notion, so that in time, both within Palestine and across the Middle East as a whole, Arab leaders, faced with the choice of negotiation or war would invariably choose war—and invariably lose.

The violence bred by the searing years 1914-18 also decisively changed the moral climate of Europe, again with fateful results for the future Jewish state. In the wake of the war, extremist regimes seized power and ruled by force and terror—first in Russia, then in Italy, and finally in Germany. The transformation of Germany from the best-educated society in Europe into a totalitarian race-state was, of course, determinative. Although the anti-Semites of Central Europe had always treated Jews with varying degrees of cruelty and injustice, up to and including murderous pogroms and expulsion, it was only with Hitler that actual extermination became a possible program. The outbreak of World War II provided the covering darkness to make it not just possible but practical.

The Holocaust destroyed by far the greater proportion of European Jews, the pool from which Zionism had drawn both recruits and moral fervor. But it also united much of the rest of world Jewry behind the Zionist project, and brought into existence the American Jewish lobby, the prototype of all the great lobbies of the later 20th century. In the perspective of the Holocaust, moreover, it became clear that Zion had to be not merely a “national home” but a refuge, and a fortress. Finally, the Holocaust spurred the Palestinian Jews (and the refugees who joined them) to create the military means to defend the citadel. If World War I created the new Zion, it was World War II that made possible the Israeli army.

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In the last half-century, over 100 completely new independent states have come into existence. Israel is the only one whose creation can fairly be called a miracle.

I observed the drama of 1948-49 from the security of an ancient Oxford college, where I was an undergraduate. Academic opinion was then, on balance, favorable to the new Zion: many dons had been brought up in the philo-Semitic tradition of Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot’s novel about a young man who discovers his identity as a Jew and dedicates himself to the Zionist cause, and they welcomed Israel as an intellectual and moral artifact. But opinion was also virtually unanimous that the state would be crushed. That was assuredly the view of most governments and military staffs: the notion of the Jew as a soldier had not yet captured the Western imagination.

In 1948, the Haganah, Israel’s defense force, had 21,000 men, as against a professional Arab invading army of 10,000 Egyptians, 4,500 in Jordan’s Arab Legion, 7,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, and 3,000 Lebanese—plus the “Arab Liberation Army” of Palestinians. In equipment, including armor and air power, the odds were similarly heavy against Israel. Revisionist historians (including Israeli ones) now portray the War of Independence as a deliberate Zionist land grab, involving the use of terrorism to panic Arabs into quitting their farms and homes. They ignore the central fact that the Zionist leaders did not want war but rather feared it as a risk to be taken only if there was absolutely no alternative. That is why in 1947 the Zionist leadership had accepted the United Nations partition scheme, which would have given the nascent state only 5,500 square miles, chiefly in the Negev desert, and would have created an impossible entity of 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs. Arab rejection of this scheme was an act of supreme folly.

Of course the Jews fought heroically, and performed prodigies of improvisation: they had to—it was either that or extermination. No doubt they fought savagely, too, on occasion, and committed acts that might appear to lend some coloring to the revisionist case. But as a whole that case is historically false. It was the Arab leadership, by its obduracy and its ready resort to force, that was responsible for the somewhat enlarged Israel that emerged after the 1949 armistice, and the same mind-set would create the more greatly enlarged Israel that emerged after the Six-Day War of 1967. In another of the paradoxes of history, the frontiers of the state, as they exist today, were as much the doing of the Arabs as of the Jews. If it had been left to the UN, tiny Zion probably could not have survived.

Hear, hear!

Mr. Johnson also points out the miracles that led to the founding of the State, but I see that as nothing but a humanly-mishandled Divine opportunity for blessed anarchy (or monarchy).

Continue reading this here…

‘U’vnei Yerushalayim’ – How Do You Build a City Without Road Construction Projects?!

is this not what we’ve been praying for?

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

The picture below (obviously I am not a great photographer), showing 4 cranes on the horizon,  was taken from a window in our hotel room (if I remember correctly) a few weeks ago when we visited my daughter in Eretz Yisrael.  We switched to a different hotel during our trip, and at that second one there was a crane practically parked outside the window.  So much for the view!  Of course, all this construction makes for a huge traffic mess.  One evening we were taking a bus back from somewhere and there was a backup for at least a few blocks trying to get to tachanah merkazit.  People were begging the driver to let them off so they could walk instead of wasting time sitting in traffic.

When you end up sitting in traffic in Yerushalayim, stuck on a bus, and have a hotel room with nothing but views of construction cranes as far as the eye can see, and you turn Heavenward and ask, “What did I do to deserve this?” I can’t help but feel that Hashem’s answer is, “Isn’t this what you’ve been asking me for for 2000 years?!”

“Don’t you plead with me three times a day every day, ‘U’vnei Yerushalayim Ir haKodesh b’m’heira b’yamaeinu’?  So what are you complaining about?  How do you build a city if not with cranes, without construction sites, and traffic detours?”

Somehow we fail to put 2 and 2 together.  Somehow we see right in front of our eyes all the evidence of our prayers being answered, and instead of thanking Hashem, we complain about the traffic.  What did we expect?  Buildings to fall in place from the sky?  Should we also expect to return after 2000 years of exile with no practice running a country and not have fights over things like judicial reform, not have arguments in the Knesset, not have political, social, religious turmoil?

Maybe miracles that would happen if we would be zocheh, but for now we have to live with the next best thing — miracles that happen b’toch ha’teva, with all the bumps in the road, but which are miracles nonetheless.

Continue reading…

From Divrei Chaim, here.