Masking Palestinian Shame

Compared with the rousing success that is Israel, Palestinian failure, in Gaza and on the West Bank, has rankled.

Shame befalls those who have wasted their resources building terror tunnels and rockets designed to kill Jews, that is, to make the Jewish state look weak and ineffectual.

And yet, the October 7 attack on Israeli civilians, especially on women and children, must count as a new low, a new disgrace for the people of Gaza.

By using rape as an instrument of war and massacring children, the cowards of Hamas pretended to be strong. It was designed to hide the Palestinian shame from the world. In truth, it redoubled the disgrace that now hangs over all Palestinians.

But, America’s schoolchildren and college students have been coming to the rescue. Not so much because they want to fly over to Gaza and fight the war. Their jejune protests resemble childish rants, unworthy of supposedly intelligent students. 

They are doing it to distract and to cover up the disgrace that Palestinians earned by their appalling actions on October 7.

It’s one thing to win and one thing to lose. To attack women and children because you cannot compete is a new low.

The children protesting on American campuses are making incoherent noises in order to attract more attention to their riotous behavior, and thus, to obscure the fact that they are really trying to mask Palestinian shame. They do not know that they are not saving anyone’s face, but obscuring the truth about Palestinian failure. The more people try to make sense of the din, the more they are distracted from thinking about October 7.

If you want to save face, you need to build something yourself. If you cannot do more than to destroy what others have built, you might feel that you have saved face, but in truth you have not.

In truth, the protesters and rioters have no coherent agenda. Perhaps it signals stupidity, but seriously, their beliefs are incoherent. If they had wanted Palestinians to save face they would have recommended joining the Abraham Accords and working to build a nation. Evidently, the cowardly attack on Israeli women and children masks shame, but does not enhance their reputation as an honorable group.

Walter Russell Mead sums up the incoherent agenda promoted by college students  in a Wall Street Journal column:

Many of Hamas’s most passionate campus supporters believe that the organization wants to establish a secular Palestinian state. They also believe that Israeli Jews are European immigrants displacing an indigenous population—white settlers who should go home to Poland.

They think that Israel survives only because America supports it and that an American president who “gets serious” with Israel can make it do almost anything he wants. They see Hamas as part of a global coalition of “progressive” movements advancing causes such as climate change, democracy and LGBTQ rights against global capitalism. People who share these perceptions can organize a march or build an encampment, but the wisest heads in the world all working together couldn’t craft a feasible diplomatic strategy based on such an incoherent and unrealistic view of the world.

As we and everyone with an ounce of sense has pointed out, the Hamas agenda rejects all things gay. Go to Gaza and proclaim your binariness and they will hang you from a lamp post. As for their concern for the climate, there is none. These students are being manipulated to form a distraction from the atrocities that Hamas committed and the shame that would rightly befall them.

You might know that one Sheryl Sandberg, of Facebook fame, was so horrified at what happened on October 7 and so appalled at the effort to cover it up that she produced a video about it.

It was not that difficult. The dimwitted Hamas terrorists filmed themselves committing atrocities. They were proud of the gang rapes and mutilating children. Only after the fact did they discover that they had miscalculated.

Of course, proponents of the so-called Palestinian cause pretend that the cowardly actions of October 7 did not happen. When they did admit to what they had done, they insisted that the Israelis had it coming to them.

As for what happened on that day, Elizabeth Stauffer reports on the Sandberg video for the Washington Examiner:

First responder Rami Davidian said, “I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here. … Their legs were spread. … Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. … I had to close their legs and cover their bodies so no one else would see what I saw.”

And also,

Amit Soussana, who was kidnapped on Oct. 7 and held hostage for 55 days, described her experience in captivity: “[The Hamas member] started touching me, and I resisted, and then he dragged me to the bedroom, and then he forced me to commit a sexual act on him. And I remember, the entire time, I was thinking: ‘Amit, OK, you knew it’s going to happen. It’s really happening.’ I said to myself: ‘OK, you can handle this. You just want to survive.’”

A male survivor of the Supernova Music Festival told Sandberg he witnessed a semicircle of terrorists surround a young woman and take turns raping her. He said the rapes continued even after she had been shot dead.

An unidentified volunteer for disaster victim identification organization ZAKA choked up as he described the aftermath of the Nova massacre to Sandberg. He said, “We’re on Route 232. The street is full of cars. Some are burnt and some aren’t. With dead people inside. Young people who were shot and murdered in cold blood. Everywhere we go, there are bodies on the road. 

“There are bodies everywhere, everywhere. It’s an indescribable catastrophe.”

His colleague told Sandberg, “I don’t have words to explain what we saw.”

On that note, it’s time to lift our eyes from adolescent rants and grant to Hamas the shame it has earned.

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Wednesday Potpourri

 First, A. J. Edelman, proud Yale graduate, received a request for a donation to his alma mater-- to commemorate his class reunion.

He responded:

Last year I faced suspension and a trespassing charge if I returned to campus without proof of a 5th COVID shot. Perhaps you can ask one of the fine Yalies bravely harassing their Jewish peers instead. They're easy to find; they're hosting a Jew hatred festival in the middle of campus and calling for violent intifada.

Second, Andrew Ross Sorkin offers one strategy for American corporations. It’s the Google solution. He highlights the fact that corporate America has mostly kept silence about the demonstrations in favor of gang rape and baby killing.

He wrote:

Controversial thought experiment: What would happen if companies told universities that they wouldn’t hire ANY of their students unless the schools take decisive action to end blatant antisemitism on campus. After all, no company would use an executive search firm with even one employee who openly engaged in antisemitism.

We expect that Congress will-- sooner rather than later-- pass legislation to punish schools who have allowed anti-Semitism to fester on their campuses.

As I have often mentioned, anyone who gets caught up in this madness will almost assuredly pay a price. Children who are demanding amnesty fail to recognize that it is a futile gesture. 

Companies might not say it. They probably will not say it. But they are more likely to reject job candidates who might have been part of the anti-Semitism madness. How will they know who was more likely to be storming the quad, I leave you to conclude.

Third, the polls are looking bad for Joe Biden. Aside from wanting to play both sides against the middle in the Gaza conflict, the administration has tended to criticize Israel and to soft-pedal its criticism of Hamas.

And yet, the American people have not been fooled. The New York Post reports the results of the latest polls:

Four out of five voters (80%) back the Jewish state in its nearly seven-month-old war against the Islamic terrorist group, with the highest levels of support concentrated among older age groups, according to a Harvard CAPS/Harris survey released Monday.

Meanwhile, 72% of voters say they back an Israel Defense Forces military operation in Rafah to “finish the war,” with 28% saying Israel should “back off now and allow Hamas to continue running Gaza.”

Fourth, most citizens understand that the Biden shuffle, the way that the president walks, signals cerebral decline. Administration flunkies have decided that the best way to cover up the boss’s deficiencies is to surround him with other people, not to let him walk alone.

Zero Hedge has the story:

With the presidential election still more than six months away, President Biden's handlers are under increasing pressure to divert Americans' eyes from his obvious and accelerating mental and physical decline. 

Where his deteriorating mental abilities are concerned, we've already seen them using tactics like drastically minimizing his spontaneous interactions with reporters and excessively stage-managing his rare press conferences -- down to furnishing him with answers to questions submitted in advance. 

Now comes news that Team Biden's latest stage-management innovation is focused on obscuring his frailty: Uncomfortable with the way Biden looks as he unsteadily shuffles across the White House lawn, one or more staffers now walk at his side, helping to prevent close scrutiny of his gait. 

The country is in the best of hands. I bet you feel better already.

Fifth, a sidelight, perhaps only telling for those of us who live in Manhattan, but one of the nicer quarters in the city, the Flatiron district, has been hollowed out and nearly destroyed by criminals.

The New York Post has the story:

Flatiron is in shambles.

The once-thriving Manhattan business district is now a virtual wasteland littered with empty storefronts — with locals blaming spiking crime and the Big Apple’s disastrous post-pandemic retail real estate market.

“Big Box” retailers — including Lowes, Bed Bath & Beyond and Staples — have fled in the last few years, leaving one of the city’s shopping meccas peppered with Businesses who are trying to hang on have been plagued by rampant shoplifting and thefts, according to workers and city crime statistics.

Sixth, on the transmania front the Biden administration has been trying to enshrine delusional beliefs into law. And a federal court declared yesterday that states could not refuse to pay for what is falsely called “gender affirming care.”

The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine brings us up to date on what is happening in Europe, where sanity is taking hold:

The European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) published a policy statement on child and adolescent gender dysphoria, calling on healthcare providers to "not to promote experimental and unnecessarily invasive treatments with unproven psycho-social effects and, therefore, to adhere to the "primum-nil-nocere" (first, do no harm) principle. " ESCAP pointed to the "poor reliability and instability of a gender dysphoria diagnosis in a specific child over time" and the "possible effects of the decisions to block puberty or preventing medical transitioning on a child's psychosocial development." 

ESCAP allowed for the possibility that some children may benefit from gender reassignment but acknowledged the current lack of quality research to determine the risk-benefit ratio. It provided several key recommendations that focus on generating quality research in the area of gender dysphoria management for youth, with a call to differentiate between experimental practices of established medical treatments. 

ESCAP also insisted that "research findings are published solely on the grounds of quality criteria and not based on their findings," suggesting it is aware of the significant current publication bias, whereby studies reporting favorable transition outcomes are routinely published even if they are deeply methodologically flawed. 

ESCAP reminded everyone of the core ethics principles, putting them in the context of gender dysphoria treatments in youth: 

1. The principle of non-maleficence: do not use outside the research environment any experimental interventions with potentially irreversible effects, or interventions with unknown long-term consequences; do not adopt new practices prematurely without sufficient evidence; do not continue with outdated practices that might not be in the best interest of the patient. 

2. The principle of beneficence: adopt medical interventions with favorable benefits-to-harms ratio; consider benefits- to-harms ratio of not providing medical interventions; ensure adequate diagnosis and treatment of co-existing psychiatric disorders; ensure comprehensive diagnostic assessment of gender dysphoria instead of only relying on the self-assessment of children and adolescents 

3. The principle of autonomy: involve minors in the decision-making processes around their care in an age- and development-appropriate manner, assessing their capacity to consent; adopt an adequate informed consent process for possibly lifelong and irreversible decisions, securing that children and adolescents fully understand the potential risks, benefits, and irreversible nature of the treatments; consider the rights of their parents and guardians to consent to any major intervention or for participation of their children in research on experimental treatments; consider the rights of their parents and guardians to be fully informed about the current care for their children; offer adequate support and resources to those who decide to de-transition to their assigned sex, and respect their decision to do so. 

4. The principle of justice: ensure access to reliable and up-to-date information, assessment, and treatment for gender dysphoria, and during transition or de-transition; adopt equal precautionary measures for all; and protect the rights of children and young people as a group in a particularly vulnerable developmental phase. 

Seventh, Great Britain, with its National Health Service, is leading the march against transmania. Steve Watson reports:

The UK government is updating the constitution of the National Health Service specifically to expunge the creeping effort to ‘transition’ medical language by radical gender ideologists.

The move is being taken to ensure hospitals use language that is medically accurate and based in biological science.

It means that terms such as ‘Chestfeeding’ as a replacement for breastfeeding will be effectively banned.

Referring to ‘people with ovaries’ instead of women will also no longer be considered acceptable.

Eighth, and then there is egg freezing. Anna North has written an interesting article about it, for Vox.

Naturally, it has to do with feminism. Women who follow feminist dicta and place career before family often end up failing to have children. In some cases, it’s the biological clock, which apparently does not conform to feminist ideology. In other cases, it’s the problem of reaching a certain age and discovering that all of the good men are taken.

Feminism promises women that after they prioritize career over family they will find themselves irresistibly attractive, because they will be economically self-sufficient and do not need a man for anything other than siring children. 

It is not true. It was always a lie, but more than a few women believed it.

Meantime, Anna North writes this:

Despite the eye-popping cost of the procedure, experts predicted it would usher in a new era of gender equality and career advancement for women. A now-famous 2014 Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story promised a new option for professional women: “Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career.”

And yet, egg freezing is a risky venture, one that more often than not does not work out as planned:

the chance of a live birth from frozen eggs was 39 percent. 

And that, of course, assumes that the refrigerator where the eggs are stored does not suffer a power outage.

But then, North continues, women choose to freeze their eggs, not because they want to advance their careers, but because they want to take the time and put in the effort to find a suitable mate.

Ten years ago, egg freezing was seen as a path to economic and social empowerment for women. But most people aren’t freezing their eggs so they can work; they’re freezing their eggs so they can date.

Eliza Brown, now a sociology professor at the University of California Berkeley, and her team interviewed 52 women who had frozen or were considering freezing their eggs in 2016 and 2017. None of them cited a desire to climb the corporate ladder. Instead, almost all were interested in egg freezing because they lacked a romantic partner. “Most of our participants understood egg freezing as a way to actually temporarily disentangle romantic and reproductive trajectories,” Brown tells Vox.

One does not know whether the problem lies in the fact that women are outcompeting men in worldly achievement and that men do not find such women to be very attractive. Men seem not to be enamored of the idea of marrying a woman who is going to ask them to do half the housework and half the diaper changing.

Egg freezing doesn’t change the fact that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, nor that social norms still fetishize the male-breadwinner family, pressuring women and men alike to look for something that may no longer fit them or the times they live in. It also doesn’t change the fact that many women find dating men to be a frustrating and demoralizing experience, as Anna Louie Sussman writes in the New York Times. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating, told the Times that many men were “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available” and that dating today “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack.”

Some feminists blame men for the results of their own choices:

“Maybe men are going to need to get more comfortable marrying women who are more educated than they are and make more money than they do,” Harwood said. “Maybe the change happens there, in our gender ideologies and how we think of family.”

Back in the day, a woman named Susan Patton, who had a son who was a Princeton student and another son who was a Princeton graduate, wrote to the university’s student newspaper to recommend that young women marry young, that they seek out prospective mates while in college.

Naturally, the feminist intelligentsia exploded with outrage. Patton had wanted to consign women to the kitchen and the laundry. How ignoble can you get?

But, if the alternative is to miss out on family and marriage, and to live for the moment when you can take your frozen eggs and attempt to turn them into a baby-- knowing that the moment is more likely than not never to come-- it seems not to be such a bad idea.

Ninth, the Biden administration is trying to shower Hamas with empathy. It keeps saying that the Israeli military operation cannot succeed. It knows this because it read Tommy Friedman’s columns in the New York Times.

And yet, the Financial Times reports a change of heart among Gazans. It has been largely ignored, so it is worth noting:

Palestini­ans in Gaza are increas­ingly will­ing to voice their anger against Hamas, accus­ing the mil­it­ant group of fail­ing to anti­cip­ate Israel’s fero­cious retali­ation for its Octo­ber 7 attack that sparked the dev­ast­at­ing six-month war.

Hamas rules Gaza with a tight grip, but as Israel’s offens­ive has reduced the enclave to rubble, killed tens of thou­sands and brought the pop­u­la­tion close to fam­ine, res­id­ents such as Nas­sim — a retired civil ser­vant — have begun speak­ing out against the Islam­ist group.

“They should have pre­dicted Israel’s response and thought of what would hap­pen to the 2.3mn Gazans who have nowhere safe to go,” Nas­sim said from the south­ern city of Rafah, which teems with intern­ally dis­placed fam­il­ies from across the shattered ter­rit­ory. “They [Hamas] should have restric­ted them­selves to mil­it­ary tar­gets.”

Mohammed, another Gazan, went fur­ther by dir­ectly blam­ing Yahya Sin­war — the leader of Hamas in Gaza and the mas­ter­mind of Octo­ber 7 — for the dev­ast­a­tion Israel’s offens­ive has wrought in the strip. “I pray every day for God to pun­ish the one who brought us to this situ­ation,” Mohammed said. “I pray every day for the death of Sin­war.”

The next time someone says that you cannot defeat an idea militarily, recall these testimonies.

Tenth, whereas yesterday I wrote a column about face, and especially about the virtue of interacting with other humans face to face, the Wall Street Journal affirms my theory today:

Prof. Jeffrey Hall reports:

Although all social interactions reduced loneliness and built connections compared with being alone, face-to-face interactions and phone calls were the best.

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Losing Face, Cosmetically

Barely a day goes by without someone whining about how we are not expressing our feelings. We even have government-produced ads on television advising us all to get in touch with our emotions.

It is a pathetic enterprise, reeking with pathos, and we must count it within the constant effort to feminize the culture. Women are far more in touch with their feelings than are men. They feel more empathy. When you ask a woman how she feels, she will easily tell you far more than you wished to know. When you ask a man how he feels, he will look at you blankly, as though you are speaking a foreign language.

When it comes to expressing emotion, we have numerous tools at our disposal. Among the most important-- facial expressions. In fact, when we meet someone face to face-- increasingly a rarity-- we read their emotions by unconsciously mimicking their facial expressions. Then we figure out whether they are mad, sad, glad or bad.

This assumes that they have facial expressions. Increasingly, women, especially, have chosen to numb their faces, to reduce or eliminate their ability to communicate via facial expressions. Thus, they adopt a wrinkle-free, line-free ageless countenance. And they wonder why they are having trouble communicating. They even complain about the lack of emotion in their interlocutors.

Of course, these women want to look younger than they are. They are often competing for men against younger women, so why not a little subterfuge.

Of course, facial lines and wrinkles often bespeak good character, maturity and experience. Strangely, many older women do not want to show off their good character, maturity and experience. Exception given for today’s Queen of England.

A more important point concerns deception. Does a Botoxed face bespeak deception, or is merely a cosmetic enhancement?

A Botoxed face makes manifest the pretense that the person is much younger than she is in reality. I use the female pronoun here because precious few males undergo such treatment. 

And yes, I am fully aware that our current president has had a great deal of work done on his face. If that was the worst thing we could say about him, the world would be a better place.

But then again, a Botoxed face might attain a different extreme, and become unrecognizable. One aspect of human communication involves knowing with whom you are talking. In principle, this occurs when you are talking to someone face to face. If you are not recognizable, or if there is doubt about who you are, communication will become more difficult.

Looking your best is not the same as looking like someone else. Social beings are recognizable by their face, more than by the expression of emotion. Expressing emotion does not identify you. Being mad, sad, glad or bad does not say who you are. Your face does.

The risk with cosmetic treatment is that you become unrecognizable and therefore, as the expression goes, you will have lost face. That means that you become a pariah, someone who does not belong in polite society.

Anyway, it gets worse. It’s one thing for women of a certain age, good feminists that they are, to want to shave a few years off their appearance, especially if they are unattached. They might not recognize that they can no longer connect with other people. They will find solace in the fact that Botox does wear off in a matter of months.

But now, a new phenomenon has reared its head. Cosmetic surgery for younger women, presumably to give them features that are notably considered to be sexually desirable. 

Olivia Petter has the story in the British newspaper, the Independent:

Take a look at the faces around you. Notice anything? The shapes of people’s eyes all tilting up in the same way towards their hairline? Pouts that pucker up with perfect uniformity? Cheekbones that protrude almost violently through the skin? Perhaps you don’t notice any of these things, in which case you’re already too far gone. But if you do? Well, it’s only a matter of time until you become indoctrinated. Because in 2024 beauty is a homogenous ideal, one that none of us can escape from.

I do not accept the clunky phrase, “homogenous ideal” but the trend suggests that young women are very insecure, to the point where they do not believe that they can attract men without looking like some vulgar simulacrum of a celebrity. One feels some considerable sympathy for women who have learned to think this way.

Of course, the larger issue is whether this absurd habit is more erotic or more aesthetic. Is it about sex or is it about beauty? Assuming that you can distinguish the two? 

Surely, it is about deception, though I hasten to remark that if a young woman is erotically unappealing with one face she is just as likely to be erotically unappealing when she puts on a mask. Unless of course, she is up for sale.

More importantly, as Petter points out, young women end up looking the same. They lose the characteristics that allow them to be identified, to have face in the world. Her article bears the title: “Are we all going to have the same face.”

One suspects that the gremlins who edit the newspaper decided that they needed to make the phrase gender neutral. In truth, the problem most involves women, not men.

If we do, none of us will have face. We will all have lost face. We might be exquisitely and irresistibly attractive but we will have more than a few problems making our way in the world. A false face will not do you very much good in the marketplace.

Looking like you are wearing a mask will not serve the same purpose. Masking your features makes you look like you are hiding something.

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An Israeli Profile in Courage

Tis a puzzlement. How did America’s great institutions of higher learning become infested with leftist agitators who hate higher learning?

Writing in the Atlantic George Packer traces the origin of today’s student protest movements to the Vietnam Era. Then, students occupied the office of Columbia University’s president, making non-negotiable demands and insisting on the overthrow of academic authority.

Packer does not mention that the student radicals of the 1960s had a very specific reason for wanting to end the Vietnam War. They did not want to fight. They did not see anything worth fighting for. They thought that Communism was the future-- it was preordained-- and that it was futile to stand in the way of history.

Students rebels considered themselves to be idealistic peace lovers. People in other parts of the country believed that they were cowards. The moral taint that hung over the Vietnam protesters suggested that they were less idealistic and more chickenshit.

One recalls that Winston Churchill once opined that the only thing that was worse than losing a war was refusing to fight.

So, a generation of presumptive cowards was faced with a daunting task. How to erase the presumption of cowardice. The group decided to take over the American mind, to undermine the value system that defined martial culture, and to teach students that those who rebelled against authority were courageous while those who defended American values were involved in a criminal enterprise that had succeeded in exploiting of non-white peoples. 

Rather than embrace the moral taint of cowardice, the opponents of the Vietnam War declared that they would be willing to fight, but only not for America. They would fight injustice. They would fight oppression. Remember the song: Street Fighting Man. They draw a line at America. They would not defend a criminal enterprise.

If you believe that this is recent history, recall the words of Susan Sontag, uttered during the Vietnam Era:

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

Or else, this:

The white race is the cancer of human history.

There is nothing new under the sun. People do not quote Sontag any more, but they believe that the meaning of America lies in slavery. They believe that the white race is a cancer and that America was founded in a genocide.

Again, these hysterical minions are creating a new world, where they are courageous and where those who fought to defend America or who worked to build America are criminal conspirators.

So, children go off to college and learn the lessons of twentieth century anti-Americanism. They learn lessons that glorify their anti-war parents and disparage those who fought and died for America. That is, they learn how to think like totalitarian leftists.

They might, Ross Douthat remarks, study some of the classics, but once they arrive at the twentieth century, it’s all leftist propaganda:

But then comes the 20th century, and suddenly the ambit narrows to progressive preoccupations and only those preoccupations: anticolonialism, sex and gender, antiracism, climate. Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault. Barbara Fields and the Combahee River Collective. Meditations on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how climate change is “colonial déjà vu.”

To understand the world before 1900, Columbia students read a range of texts and authors that are important to understanding America and the West in their entirety — Greek and Roman, religious and secular, capitalist and Marxist.

To engage with the contemporary world, the world they are being prepared to influence and lead, they read texts that are only really important to understanding the perspective of the contemporary left.

These students are being recruited into the vanguard of the revolution. They are going to fight the good fight against capitalism and patriarchy. 

A minimal understanding of history would have told them that the central conflict in the twentieth century, between capitalism and communism, has been resolved. It would have taught them that communism lost, but not before killing tens of millions of people, most often by starvation.

No one with a brain still believes in the hopes peddled by communism. And yet, American students are told that they ought to be engaged in permanent protest against a criminal enterprise like America. They are not allowed to feel any patriotic stirrings over America’s victories in wars, in world wars and in the cold war.

Given the world that the left is trying to produce, Israel is now a reproach. A pro-American nation, where people are proud of what they built, where citizens are willing to fight to defend their land-- this refutes all of the most sacred beliefs of the American academy.

Israelis are showing what it means to have courage. They have not bowed down to Biden and Blinken. They know that they did not deserve October 7.

If they had simply accepted the atrocities of October 7 they would have been showing that they believed the horrors to be just punishment for their white supremacist conspiracy. They would have accepted that they had accomplished nothing during the past decades, and that whatever successes they garnered were built on oppression and exploitation.

Israel did not think this way. And yet, if theirs is a profile in courage what does that make those who have rallied to Hamas, imagining that committing atrocities should be rewarded and that the cowards who raped and mutilated women and children were heroes fighting oppression.

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What Was Courtly Love?

It used to be called courtly love. Now it’s a felony.

Courtly love was a medieval practice. It grew up in Southern Europe, and eventually morphed into what we call courtship. That is, courtship leading to marriage. 

Keep in mind, for most of human history and certainly for people in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, marriages were arranged. 

When marriage was arranged, adultery was more easily tolerated. Having mistresses, concubines and courtesans was the norm. But then, with the advent of courtly love women entered the adultery game.

When men rode off to fight the crusades, they left their homes and properties to their wives. Said wives, being fully empowered, used their newfound freedom to seduce the young males who remained behind. They were too young to fight the crusades but were not too young to fall in love.

These newly empowered women invented courtly love, an erotic seduction ritual whereby a young male, generally teenaged, would perform a series of ordeals in order to win the favors of his beloved, a woman that he often called his Lord. 

These young men kept chronicles of their exploits in a genre of romantic poetry. They were called troubadours. Today we call them guitar heroes.

Courtly love was frankly adulterous. Yet, by the terms of the contract the two lovers never consummated their passion. They showed the truth of their love by sleeping in the same bed and not touching each other.

Assuming that you believe what they said. Some scholars have pointed out that the courtly lovers, especially the male troubadours, had a serious incentive to deny any carnal knowledge. If they had admitted to consummation they would have been risking their lives.

So, nowadays we are seeing a rash of incidents where older married female teachers have seduced boys of high school age and have been caught in the act. Some of them have been imprisoned.

One remarks that the other side of the equation, male teachers seducing female high school students seems less prevalent, perhaps because it is more obviously criminal.

The tabloid press happily reports all of the cases, for the obvious reason, that the women in question are good looking. If you were a seventeen year old male who was the object of the affections of a comely twenty-seven year old, tell me that you would have turned her down.

Obviously, age does matter here. If the boy in question is closer to twelve, evidently the calculus changes considerably.

As it happens, psycho therapist Stacy Kaiser specializes in the field. She calls these women sexual predators, which is less gracious than calling them courtly lovers. Said women are now considered to be rapists. They are occasionally spending their days in prison. 

Kaiser is appalled that we do not understand how deranged these women are and how much they are damaging the teenage males in their charge. 

True enough, some of the boys in question suffer emotionally from their encounters. One does not, from Kaiser’s account, know why this is the case. It might be that they feel responsible when their teachers get caught and get convicted and get imprisoned. It could be that they are told that they must be feeling very badly for having had sex with an attractive teacher. 

At the least, we must recognize that adolescent boys are far more likely to take such actions in their stride than are teenage girls. Obviously, Kaiser, good feminist that she must be, considers that such seductions are always bad and even criminal.

You do not have to have lived too long to understand that men and women do not react the same way to sexual encounters. Evidently, this disparity counters feminist ideology which states that men and women are precisely the same, but no one with a brain really believes it.

One might read Donald Symons’ book The Evolution of Human Sexuality to gain a minimal understanding of the differences between male and female sexuality.

Anyway, Kaiser goes all moralistic on these women, whom she, purportedly a professional, holds in contempt:

Crippled by their insecurities, these perpetrators seek relationships that enable them to manipulate others – giving them a sensation of control that they otherwise are incapable of achieving in their everyday lives.

The two women I counseled were utterly remorseless over their actions. Their only regret was not being able to continue their relationships.

Dare I point out, consulting with two patients does not offer anything more than anecdotal evidence. And, dare I mention, the concept that Kaiser introduces, “control” is positively meaningless. Psycho therapists overuse the word and have reduced it to so much blather.

Understand this. When courtly love began in medieval Europe marriages were arranged. They began their seductions because they had been abandoned by their husbands, often for years on end.

We ought to notice that the older, more experienced women involved in courtly love were functioning as teachers for younger less experienced boys. As though that is a crime. 

Arranged marriage continued until the Protestant Reformation and Puritanism. Then, for Martin Luther and his followers, marriages were considered to be expressions of love. Once that was the case, as you see with the scarlet letter, people were far less tolerant of adultery. 

The change took place, I will posit, because Luther and his followers had been excommunicated. Thus, they were no longer required to remain celebate, but they lacked social standing, wealth or prestige. Thus, the bases for most marriages were precluded and they fell back on a default position-- romantic love. Previously, romantic love was relegated to adulterous relationships.

As for teacher-student relationships, one should not ignore the simple possibility that the women in question find it exciting to teach boys how to have sex. And they might find it exciting to transgress, to do something that is somewhat forbidden.

Besides, didn’t feminism teach them that they should never compromise their sexuality and that they should express it openly and fully.

Dare we mention that we do not have enough material from enough cases to know how these women’s husbands were treating them. Surely, that has some importance here.

In her Daily Mail article psycho therapist Stacy Kaiser continues to express her contempt for these women:

The women I counseled told me that they felt 'real connections' with the boys they targeted.

Some offenders claim to 'fall in love' with their victims and even purport to be 'dating' them.

That's nothing more than delusional thinking - a way to justify breaking the law and traumatizing a vulnerable person.

An adult cannot have a meaningful or mature relationship with a minor, as children and teens do not have fully developed brains - and victims are influenced by fear, coercion and deceit.

Obviously, this is not delusional thinking, though Kaiser does not seem to know what the word means. Any serious study of female sexuality will explain that when a woman has carnal relations she feels connected and she feels that there is an emotional component. Such is not always the case for the males in question.

One is impressed by Kaiser’s ability to attribute the most sordid and pathetic motives to the boys in question. I will not share the head shots of the women in question, but if you find the Daily Mail article and examine them, you might not think that this is all about fear, coercion and deceit.

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