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virus Coronavirus Global conflict Israel 

Israel still suffers virus of hate even as it saves Arab lives

Melanie

While countries around the world struggle to get on top of the Covid-19 crisis, Israel’s achievement so far has been remarkable. Its mortality rate from the virus has been vastly smaller, in proportion to its population, than the rate in countries such as Britain, Sweden or the United States. That’s largely because it tackled the virus with the kind of bold, strategic approach with which it defends itself against its physical foes. This week, with new cases reduced to a few dozen, it started to lift a wide range of…

Coronavirus Britain Coronavirus 

“How has it come to this” indeed. But now Boris must keep his nerve

Melanie, , ,

This week, when Boris Johnson made his first appearance at prime minister’s questions since he nearly died from Covid-19, the new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, got the better of him. It wasn’t just that the absence of the usual braying mobs of backbenchers played to Starmer’s strengths as a calm, relentless and well-briefed advocate. It was that the questions he asked with such deadly and polite quietness were unanswerable. With the UK’s virus death toll then standing at more than 29,000, Starmer asked: “How has it come to this?”…

HRH Israel 

From San Remo to 72nd birthday, Israel displays rare and robust resilience

Melanie, , ,

One hundred years ago this Sunday, the four principal allied powers involved in World War I signed a resolution at San Remo. Next week, Israel celebrates Yom Ha’atzmaut, the 72nd anniversary of the state’s declaration of independence. Typically, the world thinks that the key step towards the establishment of the State of Israel was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the statement in which the British government committed itself to work for the establishment of a Jewish home in what was then called Palestine. Relatively little attention has been paid to the…

Pope Culture wars 

Is the Pope a pagan?

Melanie, , ,

The observations by Pope Francis on the coronavirus pandemic published in The Tablet are startling. They reveal with unusual sharpness just what kind of person currently heads the Catholic church. Asked whether the economic devastation wrought by the virus was a chance for an ecological conversion by reassessing priorities and lifestyles, the Pope replied: “There is an expression in Spanish: ‘God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives.’ We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18…

Britain Culture wars 

Why so many “experts” make such disastrous errors

Melanie, , ,

If you want to discover why so many of our experts are getting things so terribly wrong, Giles Fraser’s interview on Unherd’s “Confessions” with the former Bank of England governor, Lord King, is essential listening. King asks what it means to be rational in an age of deep uncertainty. Many experts, he says, have come to believe that mathematical calculations and computer modelling provide us with an authoritative representation of reality. This is hopelessly wrong because such calculations can never encompass the uncertainties that help form human behaviour. Yet these…

Culture wars Global conflict Israel 

How the virus exposes magical thinking and short-term greed

Melanie, ,

The coronavirus emergency has affected virtually the entire world. In the west, it has brutally exposed the effects of a cultural characteristic that is as amoral as it is self-destructive. There is a refusal to face reality and the difficult choices it often requires, taking refuge instead in magical thinking and short-term greed. It’s a characteristic that has made victims of Israel and the Jews, along with many other people. In the current crisis, the west is paying the price of pretending that China’s communist regime does not represent a…

mining Jewish people USA 

Mining for hate in “The Plot Against America”

Melanie, , ,

The coronavirus pandemic has produced an intensification of anti-Jewish paranoia. One guest on Turkish television said “Jews, Zionists have organized and engineered the novel coronavirus as a biological weapon just like bird flu” to “design the world, seize countries and neuter the world’s population.” Similar vile theories are circulating in the West. False claims are being spread that Israel hasn’t helped the Palestinians in this crisis. In fact, Israel, has distributed testing kits to the Arabs in Gaza and the disputed territories, while its health ministry has provided Arab Israelis…

Iran Britain Global conflict Israel USA 

Will a microbe seal the fate of Iran’s virulent regime?

Melanie, ,

The point about events that catch us unawares is that we are never prepared for the unexpected to happen. Who would have thought that the entire world would suddenly be destabilized by one microbe? It will take some time before people grasp the likely social, political and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. But it is already altering the landscape and knocking previous assumptions off-course. Until a few days ago, attention in the United States was focused on whether the Democrats could find a plausible candidate to beat President Donald…

fathers Britain 

We need to talk about absent fathers and crime

Melanie, , ,

At the weekend, a 16-year-old boy died in Coventry from stab wounds and a man in his twenties was fatally stabbed in north London. Last week, a police officer put her helmet above the parapet on this issue. Jackie Sebire, assistant chief constable for Bedfordshire who leads on serious violence for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said some young people who lacked the “protective factor” of a father figure looked up to drug dealers and gangsters instead. Of course, many factors contribute to crime; its causes are complex, and it…

Culture wars 

The real western civilisation emergency

Melanie, , ,

A few commentators have begun to stumble towards the fact that the policy of becoming “carbon neutral” by 2050, as adopted by the UK and the EU, would undo modernity itself. On Unherd, Peter Franklin observes that, if carried through, the policy will have a far greater effect than Brexit or anything else; it will transform society altogether. “It will continue to transform the power industry, and much else besides: every mode of transport; how we build, warm and cool our homes; food, agriculture and land use; trade, industry, every…