Compendium #3
This site is not the only place to find my writing; I have been published at numerous other outlets across the web. In this recurring series, I’ll post some choice passages from these outside pieces and show you where to find the rest. Think of this as a mere tasting of the full smorgasbord. Without further ado, here’s Compendium #3, covering October 2023 through early December 2023.
Accusing Israel of Genocide Is a Moral Outrage, National Review, October 26, 2023
In this piece for National Review, I discussed the bogus claim that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in its war with Hamas, as well as the idea that it was a state founded on that infamy. In reality, Israel is the target of a genocidal ideology, not the perpetrator.
After Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, dozens of Arab nations invaded in an explicitly genocidal campaign against the newborn Jewish state. Those aims are clear from the historical record, as recounted by Israeli scholars Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf in The War of Return (2020): Ahmed Shukeiry, the founding chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), stated that the war was intended for “the elimination of the Jewish state”; the secretary-general of the Arab League stated that “this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades”; the lead coordinator of the Arab forces, Ismail Safwat, claimed the war’s objective was “to eliminate the Jews of Palestine, and to completely cleanse the country of them”; al-Husseini, still the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, said the war would continue “until the Zionists are eliminated, and the whole of Palestine is a purely Arab state.”
The nature of the fighting in this existential war, Palestinian-Arab leadership’s calls to evacuate, and the Arab exaggeration of Jewish “atrocities” like that at Deir Yassin all played a role in the flood of refugees to Arab lands. Over the course of the war, about 750,000 Arabs previously living in British Mandate Palestine were displaced. This is the origin of the term nakba, or “catastrophe,” which pro-Palestinian activists use to refer to Israel’s founding and to cast it as a uniquely evil act. Today’s Palestinians have granted themselves a special status as permanent refugees, but this misrepresents the history.
Read the rest HERE.
Interview with Breaking Battlegrounds, Radio/Podcast, October 30, 2023
In late October, I had my first radio interview with the Breaking Battlegrounds podcast out of Phoenix, AZ. We discussed my takes on Israel’s war in Gaza, the geopolitics of the Ukraine war, and the broader anti-American coalition – Iran, China, and Russia – that is challenging us across the world.
Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, pulled out Israeli settlers at gunpoint and relocated them into the state of Israel. And yet you had the people of Gaza essentially electing Hamas as their government, who only has had one election. They’ve held power in Gaza the rest of the time and they’ve been using all the aid money we give them to impoverish their own people and build terrorist infrastructure to try to destroy Israel. So it’s very hard to make peace with a people who are led by terrorists who have no interest in actually having a state even when they have the chance.
Listen to the whole interview HERE. The segment starts around 23 minutes in.
The New Progressive-Islamist Alliance, Providence Magazine, November 23, 2023
In this essay for Providence, I break down one of the most pernicious elements of the Western reaction to the Israel-Gaza war: the burgeoning partnership between leftists and Islamists known as the Red-Green alliance. This is not a novel development, but one which has existed, on and off, for over a century. I break down the history and its manifestation in today’s urban centers.
Since Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, there has been a flood of vitriol launched against Israel, despite being the victim of an attack and engaging only in justifiable self-defense. Posters of Israeli hostages have been torn down, pro-Israel demonstrators have been assaulted, university professors have called the mass murder of Jews “exhilarating,” and antisemitic protests against Israel and the US have rocked cities across the West. The culprits in these profoundly immoral acts tend to come from one of two political ideologies: leftism and Islamism.
One may think that, on the surface, these movements have very little in common – besides antisemitism, of course. But this Red-Green alliance – so labeled for the colors of communism and Islam, respectively – shares enough to form a union of convenience around their joint goal: the undermining of Western institutions, culture, and geopolitical power. For the progressive-Islamist bloc, these all fall under the rubric of opposing so-called “Western imperialism.” No two nations symbolize this hated ideology more than the United States and Israel. The two halves of the Red-Green coalition also share tactics and strategies; they utilize agitation and propaganda to exploit emotion and delegitimize their foes, see the world in starkly Manichaean terms, strongly police and stifle internal dissent, and live by the motto “the ends justify the means.”
This unholy alliance is running rampant in nearly every major Western city, where their mass demonstrations are now a regular occurrence. Islamic radicals and left-wing activists join hands to call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” misrepresent Hamas propaganda as neutral fact, and downplay or entirely ignore the massacre of thousands of innocent Israeli citizens – they’re settler-colonialists, after all. This may seem like a startling new development in politics, but the Red-Green alliance has a long history; one oftentimes far more favorable for the Islamists than their progressive comrades.
Read the rest HERE.
Ridley Scott’s Latest Historical Epic Tells a Story, But It’s Not Napoleon’s, The Federalist, November 29, 2023
My review of the much-anticipated Ridley Scott historical epic Napoleon was published by The Federalist. I was truly looking forward to this film, but was sadly disappointed. It was an ahistorical, awkward mess that was only slightly redeemed by beautiful cinematography, a subtle conservative bent, and compelling (albeit factually wrong) battle scenes.
The film is not a biopic of Napoleon, nor is it a film about the Napoleonic Wars or the French Revolution. Instead, it is an intense character study of a toxic marriage between Bonaparte and his first wife, Josephine. This could be interesting, but the importance of this relationship is wildly exaggerated, and the details are pure invention. The most unforgivable failure of Scott’s epic, however, is its complete warping of Napoleon himself.
There is a lot of good in the film, but it is all superficial. The cinematography of Dariusz Wolski, a frequent Scott collaborator, is visually compelling and elevates the often-vapid writing. The scene setting is excellent, with great lighting and grand scope, something especially obvious during the battle scenes. These sections of the film are real edge-of-your-seat moments and partially make up for the dialogue. Martin Phipps’ score is wonderful and feels in sync with the on-screen action. Some of the performances stand out, specifically Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine, which is a tour-de-force. The costumes and set design are outstanding.
One minor bit of character development for Napoleon himself is also cleverly done: Over the course of the film, Napoleon’s increasing comfort with warfare is depicted by his reaction to artillery fire. At first, he covers his ears and darts around madly, but by Austerlitz and Waterloo, he is shown with ears uncovered, calmly managing his troops. This is a skillful way of building a character by showing instead of telling.
And… that’s pretty much it.
Read the rest HERE.
Netflix’s Ahistorical Ibram X. Kendi ‘Documentary’ Is More Racist and Radical Than You Can Imagine, The Federalist, November 30, 2023
In my second movie review for The Federalist, I covered the antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘documentary’ Stamped From the Beginning on Netflix. As is the case with all of Kendi’s work, this is a masterclass in lies, misrepresentation, and abject nonsense. Its entire purpose is unfairly demonizing the West for the sins of the human past; we mustn’t let this attack go unanswered.
All of this absurdity and fabrication is in service of one goal: making Kendi’s radical ideology of antiracism into the only legitimate path forward. Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge the “truth” that modern Western society is as racist as it was in 1619 is a denialist. As such, they must either get on board the Antiracist Express or be cast as an inveterate bigot.
The best part of this disastrously bad documentary is its continuous attacks on liberals. The film presents them as part of the white power structure dedicated to preserving its own racist primacy. President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton, and the musical “Hamilton” are examples of this. So are, hilariously, CNN host Don Lemon and former President Barack Obama.
For the Kendis of the world, there are two sides: racist and antiracist. If you are not consciously antiracist, you are racist. There is no compromise with this ideology. We must take these radicals up on their challenge and defeat this noxious worldview if we are to preserve the blessings of America for our progeny. If “Stamped from the Beginning” is the best they can do, then it should be a fairly simple task.
Read the rest HERE.
History Has an Ideology Problem, National Review, December 3, 2023
In this piece for National Review, I break down a major controversy in academic history that goes right to the heart of the biggest problem of that profession: the focus on ideology over fact. The fracas revolves around a highly-publicized paper that accuses a key Industrial Revolution inventor of stealing his major success from enslaved black metalworkers. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Still, the profession has doubled down on this progressive ideology over the truth of history.
History has always been a contentious field, reflecting the biases of both the historian and society. It is a window into the present as much as into the past. Still, the writer of history must do his best to check and overcome his innate biases. In the words of the 19th-century historian J. A. Froude, “the first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape their influence.” The influence of one’s “own sympathies” cannot be eliminated, but the focus must be on factual evidence. Unfortunately, the modern history profession has all but abandoned this pursuit of objectivity in exchange for progressive ideology. This is most obvious in its embrace of critical race theory and the fatally flawed 1619 Project. A recent controversy in the field exemplifies this focus on ideology over history.
It involves an extensively covered article by Jenny Bulstrode in the journal History and Technology. In her paper, “Black Metallurgists and the Making of the Industrial Revolution,” she argues that a crucial 18th-century innovation in the manufacture of wrought iron credited to Henry Cort was stolen from its real developers: 76 enslaved Africans at a Jamaican foundry. It immediately made a big splash in the media, with laudatory coverage from the Guardian, NPR, the New Scientist, and other publications. Bulstrode’s claims that a foundation of British prosperity was purloined from oppressed black slaves fit perfectly into the progressive vision of Western history as built on white supremacy and slavery. Not only that, the paper was written by a prize-winning university lecturer and passed peer review, and the author marshaled a great deal of evidence to support her contentions.
The problem is that she misinterprets sources, reaches insupportable conclusions, and fails to back up her key assertions.
Read the rest HERE.
That’s it for this edition of the Compendium, rounding up my other writing over the past few months. I’ll be back soon with more snippets from my work around the web. If you just can’t sate your curiosity for that long, check out my Twitter, where I post all of my work (and a veritable hodgepodge of other nonsense) as soon as it comes out.
Cheers!