Woke Democrats are not so elite. They support a crime family and run a protection racket

Wokes, as already known, can’t think straight. Though educated and intelligent, they occupy the intellectual low ground. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/289372 

And for morality? What ground is held by Wokes? High ground. It must be high if Wokes look down on the other half as ‘deplorables’ in their self-belief that no people more superior ever lived. Compared to America’s Founding Fathers, primitive slave owners, Woke Democrats are demigods. They care.

Hardly a cause or concern fails to ruffle Woke feathers: gender, climate, black lives, police, migrants, Palestinian rights, Israeli wrongs, racism, dog whistles, white supremacy and a feudal midget of a President. The evils of America, home to systemic racism, trouble moral elites by day and by night.

The evils troubled Wokes up to the week that was. Then at the pinnacle of the November 2020 campaign a corruption story became about Joe and not Hunter. https://www.wsj.com/articles/now-corruption-story-is-about-joe-not-hunter-11603392288?mod=djemalertNEWS 

For their survival Wokes made calculations, and it was then the naked eye beheld the state of their moral pantry. Their cupboard and Old Mother Hubbard’s were bare to the same degree.   

It came as a shock to Woke Democrats that their candidate for President was more unsavoury and irredeemable than (to their mind) the despicable Trump. Their candidate runs a Family.

The Biden five, pronounced Peter Schweitzer author of books on the political swamp, is the number one crime family in Washington. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyn6OJFjwvU ‘The Big Guy’ in Hunter Biden’s emails, raking his 10% on deals with foreign entities in China and Ukraine, works the biggest racket in DC. What is the office of the Vice President for but to leverage influence?

Biden though is not a Don Corleoni type of Godfather. Jelly-kneed Joe throws his boy Hunter under the bus until father can squeak through the November poll. And remember Joe bunkered in his basement while the family braved Covid above ground. Remember at the onset of Covid, how Biden berated Trump for stopping flights from China, where the business partners strut the commissariat. Did Trump locking out China cost the Family? 

The crux of Biden’s bind is that the facts about him are too factual for his handlers to deny authenticity. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/22/hunters_ex-business_partner_says_joe_biden_lied_about_business_deals_in_china_fbi_has_proof.html?

So the Big Tech Wokes had to step in with a protection racket, which even their Atlantic mouthpiece admits.

“Concerns about illiberal tendencies on the left are not made up out of thin air. Parts of the left now seek far-reaching censorship in social media, and are hostile to free speech. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/hate-wokeness-vote-biden/616845/

Without a protection racket the Family would be kaput. “How long can the blackout continue,” asked the WSJ, writing of the “Silicon Curtain” cutting off the public’s right to know.

Could any media establishment be more corrupt than America’s? No legitimate media would refuse to cover the biggest story of a Presidential campaign. The campaign itself was a sham, a travesty of a campaign. The Woke candidate refused interviews and hid out in a basement – the ‘Hidin Biden’ strategy. Handlers did not trust the Godfather to survive encounters even with a pliant media. It had to be an issue-free contest for the White House. It had to be no more than a referendum on a scripted personality named Trump and how badly it handled the pandemic.

At the release of the Hunter Biden emails, jelly-kneed Joe, rather than staying to rebut them, scuttled back to the bunker, leaving it to the Woke media to make lame excuses for not covering the news. weekly newsletter from the public editor. And when Trump began to speak of the Family his interviewer cried out, “This is ‘60 Minutes and we can’t put on things we can’t verify.” pic.twitter.com/oLJoXr5apo. 

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil portrays the Woke protection racket, which non-stop during four bitter years heard, saw and spoke continuous evil about a concocted straw figure named Trump.  

If the protection racket, aided and abetted by feudal lords of the social media, banked on burying or blocking the revelations about the Biden Family, the gambit failed. The story ended up being the most-discussed of the campaign. The next most talked-about story was the social networks trying to block it. The New York Post which broke the story called it an act of modern totalitarianism.

But the Wokes have never been put off by totalitarianism. In their DNA is the instinct to control and indoctrinate everyone from cradle to grave. From language to sport everything must conform to Woke doctrines. No one has reason to be shocked. The Biden Family after all is in business with a regime commanded by Chinese President Xi Jinping. This is a gulag operating regime that removes children while parents are put through re-education behind barbed wire. https://www.economist.com/china/2020/10/17/how-xinjiangs-gulag-tears-families-apart.

Biden in the White House would mean that the protection racket snatched the soul of America the free. It would mean that the Family will be protected. There’ll be no paying for its corruption, as Hilary Clinton did not have to pay.  

It’s the unprotected American people who will pay. They’ll have to live with lockdowns for ‘safety sake’ and another lockdown perhaps for the sake of saving the planet from climate extinction. To Wokes follow the science means doing what Big Brother and Sister tell you is good for you. They trust Godfather Joe to do what’s good for them. If he did what’s good for the Family why not?

Bank on Wokes pursuing such a line of thought. Remember, they have a fatal deficiency of critical reasoning. Wokes don’t think so good. It wouldn’t occur to them that policy makers don’t have to live with the consequences of utopian dreams. Havoc caused by open borders, Green Deals, national health, language police and defunded proper police is for the meek and mindless to bear.   

Orwell’s 1984 did not have a bleaker finale.  

One Industry that Will Never Boycott Israel

BDS may flounder or prosper. Call that a truism. Whether it prospers depends on one industry not joining the boycott. Call that a paradox. The more effectively this boycot-flouting industry keeps with Israel, the more profit it makes, the better it will go for BDS. Likely or not call that a proposition. Could it be a valid one?

Riddle: what business promotes and facilitates BDS on the one hand while breaking with BDS on the other?

Answer: the Human Rights business.

It being a business there can be no argument. Look at the sustainability factors in favor of the watchdog players: 1) mountains of cheap capital on demand. (2) Global reach. (3) Well-connected stakeholders. (4) Media beating a path to the door. (5) A traded commodity for which the world has a gluttonous hunger.

If those are not conditions in favour of big business what other conditions are there.

Atop the pyramid you find the Big 5 watchdog club. The names are household: Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; Christian Aid; Oxfam; Save the Children Fund. Nominally they, along with second-tier watchdogs are autonomous, not-for-profit and apolitical. In real life they are none of those things.

There are not hundreds but thousands of second-tier entities, medium to small, a bewildering number of them bunched together in little Israel and Ramallah. They compete like hungry dogs to produce a product that has come to be called ‘Human Rights.’ Their important customers are the big 5, the UN and its satellite Human Rights Council. But they also market Israeli ‘crimes’ direct to people and entities which can turn Israeli “crimes against humanity” to good account.

These ‘smallies’ compete fiercely for publicity and investor capital. The EU is the single largest donor to human rights businesses in the good feel industry, chucking millions of Euros at BDS supporting entities operating out of Israel. The free capital is meant to promote peace, cooperation, and human rights – buzz words the Wokes are addicted to. In reality the lucky recipients are purveyors of inflammatory rhetoric. Their every act and concern is to hasten the day when the flag of Palestine flutters over where Israel used to be.

To get to the base of the pyramid. The broad base is made up of moneybags that keep the industry oiled. They are billionaire private investors, Euro countries that practically fling money at watchdog bodies, ecumenical coffers, flush Arab potentates, and the proverbial Joe public.

Even so, the structure would topple but for an independent clearing house: the UN and its satellite agency, Human Rights Council. Like a farm co-operative they act as a buyer of last resort, but at the same time as another tier of sellers of Israeli human rights violations. And upon this clearing house, and upon the whole industry, jobs depend in the tens of thousands.

Turning to the stock in trade, like any commodity there are different grades of human rights that fetch different market prices. The premium grade is Israeli crimes, which are more a brand than a commodity. Investors cough up generously for this best brand. Watchdog operatives know it very well. They scour the West Bank and Gaza from end to end, sourcing stock of Israeli crimes, paying handsomely to get greedy hands on it.

When Israeli violations are difficult to come by, operatives are adept at creating their own. B’Tselem, the flush home-grown body, gives away cameras to help agents poke, prod and pry crimes out of the holy land. The New Israel Fund has another business model. Salesmen tout Israeli violations on the international circuit.

Few strings are attached to the free capital. EU money, ostensibly for specific projects, actually supports anything from writing more grant applications, or allowing staff to travel and promote ugly agendas around the world. In many cases EU funding makes up 50% to 75% of budgets – small wonder that you find the EU symbol on the publications and websites of Zionist-hating watchdogs.

Trade is brisk, the money big and the players earnest. The Ford Foundation is one of the big private investors, with an annual grant budget exceeding $500 million. Christian Aid, with branches in 50 countries, brings in €100 million a year, while Human Rights Watch received $100 million from George moneybags Soros, who then threw small change, $750,000, to the anti-Zionist pro-Israel firm, J-Street run by capitalist Wokes.

Exactly how popular is the Israeli brand? Human Rights Watch spends three times more resources on Israel than on Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority combined. Amnesty produced 255 reports per million Israeli people compared to 60 reports on Syria, 23 on Iraq and Iran, and 9 on Saudi Arabia. While the butcher of Syria slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his  own people, Oxfam released a handful of statements and petitions condemning Assad. At the same time Oxfam condemned freely elected Israeli leaders a dozen times.

And the king of human rights kings? The United Nations trades in hardly anything but the Israeli brand. 75% of that body’s condemnations and 60% of its emergency sittings relate to Israel. For human rights violations in the whole world the UN keeps just one permanent item on the agenda. It keeps another permanent item for Israel alone. 

What is it about Israeli violations that human rights traders like so much?

The answer to that is another question. What is it about violations in Muslim countries that watchdog bodies shun like Satan? Iran is the place where people are beheaded; where choosing the wrong religion can be a death sentence; where LGBTQs are strung up on street poles. Watchdog traders are not fools. They know to keep clear of the violation-rich countries and to head to Israel, for the best of reasons: self-preservation. The risk to life and limb is paramount. The last thing dictators want is to have foreigners, infidels, poking, prying and prodding for human rights abuse.

But Israel – naïve open-door Israel – tells the watchdog firms to poke, prod and pry to their heart’s content. Israel is a watchdog paradise, Arabia is a watchdog hell.

The old risk-reward trade-off: who’d put up money to dig up abuse in Gaza, or Iran, or Syria? Who’d cough up for a commodity in such over-supply? Israel on the other hand, the stand-alone democracy in the region, dangles a low risk for high reward carrot. .  

Watchdogs have a particular business model that gives them a motive to dig up Israeli crimes, real or fake. It makes perfect business sense to invest in Israeli misdeeds as the stock-in-trade, as current assets convertible to cash. The source is practically inexhaustible and cheap. Palestiniansn are lured by hand-outs for valuable “testimony.”

On top of profit plunk downright honest-to-goodness hatred to get enough motive to power a metropolis. Why the anguish for Palestinian wellbeing when there are atrocities over the border for the picking?

That’s correct. Palestinian human rights are violated wholesale throughout the Arab world. They were starved to death in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria; 400,000 Palestinians in lebanon have no human rights; when during “Black September” in 1970 Jordan’s King Hussein killed more Palestinians in one month than Israel killed in a quarter of a century there was not a peep. Indeed, the King of Jordan continued to be loved as a man of peace. (“The War against the Jews” by Efraim Karsh, Israel Affairs, July 2012, pp. 319–43.)

 The conclusion cannot be ducked. Palestinians act as a lightning rod against Israel, and Israel acts as a lightening rod against the Jews. In days of yore biblical hatred ruled the roost. Today a money racket protected by a halo stokes the fires of purgatory.

How valuable are your crimes, oh Israel, your welcome mat, oh liberal nation.

Woke Democrats have a fatal deficiency. They can’t think straight

When the mind is at loggerheads with identity it leaves people at sixes and sevens. Behaviour goes one way, thoughts another, and words head north-north-west. It takes a political campaign to bring out how completely scatterbrained the Woke, Harvard alumni and all, can be.

George Orwell, who lived before Woke was heard of, beheld the chasm between intellect and common sense. “Some ideas,” he said, “are so stupid that only intellectuals would believe them.” And there was the Oxford don who, the story goes, put down a colleague. “On the surface he’s profound, but deep down he’s superficial.” Add, ‘intellectually dishonest’ and the educated fools who identify as Woke are kitted out. Self deception, contradiction and idiocy are in their every policy, act and concern.  

Wokes don’t vote for their candidate’s policies. They vote against a rival’s character. Biden has no policies other than ones he plagiarised from the Trump card, or adopts on the trot according to the prevailing wind; or keeps for after being elected such as fracking or packing the Supreme Court, or policies at cross-purpose, such as pro-lockdown and pro-job creation.  The belief that all whites have systemic racism in their DNA contrasts with Wokes pinning their hopes on a white Biden and his Vice running mate with her white husband.

The Woke mind can’t think straight. 

Contrast the straight thinking of Conservatives. They vote for policies not for character. They don’t look for “Mr. nice guy” in their leaders. In politics there are hardly any, and in any case being Mr. Nice is a hindrance for a leader more than a help. It means nothing for the country if a candidate is rude, ill-mannered and caustic. He can be the biggest jackass but who cares provided he is pro-law and order, pro-constitution, pro-Israel, anti-Iran, pro-liberty, pro-freedom of speech, pro-religion. Those who think straight cast their lot with the covenant not the king.   

Woke people, were their veins opened, would bleed chaos and falsehood. Intellectual rot is inevitable when your identity as a Woke is a lie. Fact is, the word was appropriated from the black vernacular – a most unwoke thing to do. ‘Stay woke’ had been a watchword of the early black consciousness movement.  It meant ‘wake up to a new reality; be alert to the deceptions of white people.’

Then Ferguson happened. In 2014 Michael Brown was shot dead by a policeman in Ferguson Missouri. The incident proved to be the catalyst to fire up ‘stay woke’ from a watchword to a war cry. The BLM movement took the Brown incident and ran with it. BLM made the martyr into a flaming fountainhead to stand for police brutality and anti-black bias of criminal justice.

The problem was and is that Michael Brown’s as much a martyr of police brutality and targeting as the police killing a Latino drug lord would be. He was a violent 19-year-old black who left a policeman with no other course but to shoot him dead. Hands up in surrender and “Don’t shoot” never happened. https://www.prageru.com/video/the-ferguson-lie/ The lie turned into a creed which turned into a radical anthem.

Yet the Wokes purloined it. And they parked some beloved concepts on a Ferguson crime that never happened. Six years later to be Woke is to be a staunch advocate of ‘social justice’ and ‘systemic racism’– or to preen the ego to feel you are woke. The latter concept is not evidence-based. The former concept is a contradiction in terms. Justice cannot be qualified or it is not justice for all but someone’s idea of it for a group. As Thomas Sowell asked, “If your concern is fairness and social justice, what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

The fact that woke Democrats can’t think straight is that simple. You cannot build truth and rational thought on a foundational lie. Being deficient in skills of critical thought was always on the cards after Wokes appropriated a black omelette and made a scrambled egg from it.

The scatterbrained Woke Democrat who votes Biden is the real threat to America. The Clinton-Obama axis that controls the Biden puppet is the wannabe dictator.

A rude and crass President Trump believes America is great and wants to preserve it that way. The right Presidential material boils down to nothing more complicated than this.  

The pandemic reveals what has become of humanity

As Don Quixote thought windmills were giants to be jousted with, so we regard Covid-19: a   plotting, stalking goliath.  The analogy could not be closer – the Middle Ages were a time for plagues. The Black Death of the 1340s killed more than 40% of Europe’s population. Still, amid the terror and superstition common sense was not discarded. Those who could afford it fled city death traps to quarantine in the countryside. 

In 1529 the ‘sweating sickness” dropped Londoners like flies. In Hilary Mantel’s novel, Wolf Hall I read: “The rule is for the household to hang a bunch of straw outside the door as sign of infection, then restrict entry for forty days, and go out as little as possible.” Had our architects of lockdown taken a leaf from medieval common sense, the lives and livelihoods of billions of victims would have been spared.   

Worse than jelly-brained, we have been poltroons kidding ourselves that ‘better to be safe than sorry’ is a noble guide to life. To believe Lancet, we lack the stoicism of a generation ago. “Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics” speaks of the “stoicism” of both the common people and policy-makers.   https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31201-0/fulltext

Befitting a medical journal, Lancet compares in measured tones the craven behaviour of today with the level-headed behaviour of those who went through worse pandemics in the 1900s.

Where we lack common sense, they had it. Where we panic, they kept sane; where our media sensationalizes, theirs informed. Where our modellers of disease are out to make a name with pronouncements designed to propagate dread, their medics wanted to learn and understand. Where our parents put coddling before relatively safe schooling, their parents knew kids were at risk going to school, yet made them go. Where our politicians play god, theirs let the medical fraternity handle crises of public health. And where our politicians close down business and cut off cross border trade, theirs understood that economic suicide could make no impression on a virus. All in all 20^th century humanity did not go berserk, and believers prayed to their Gods in the time honoured manner.    

Consider the no-nonsense Prime Minister of Britain, Harold Macmillan. It was July 1957. There he stood telling a Tory Party rally that the British “had never had it so good”. The world was in the grip of a pandemic worse than our Covid-19. Influenza A, virus subtype H2N2, known as the Asian Flu, had surfaced in China in the winter of ‘56. By April Hong Kong had a quarter of a million cases. By June India crossed the one million mark. The British and the Americans were basking in a boom when the pandemic made landfall. By the time it was contained in ‘58 more than a million had departed this mortal coil, of which 30,000 were British and 100,000 Americans. For a crude comparison with our Flu, double the fatalities to allow for the smaller populations than today.

But then people were redoubtable. They learned to live with a pandemic. They did not put their lives on hold. Neither did they succumb to a new normal. Owners of businesses were not prohibited from earning a living. No one cowered at home waiting for some invalid curve to flatten. They did not become hypochondriacs.   

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What of our political, cultural and moral leaders? Did they keep their heads while all around were losing theirs? They can’t have done. Not when they put their money on the likes of ‘Professor Lockdown’ Neil Ferguson whose doomsday prediction of 1 million British deaths spurred on the lock-downers of the world. Would his science have been respected had it been known he would break his own rules by smuggling a married woman into his home during London’s lockdown?

The lockdown – if you want to call it that rather than a bazooka to kill a cockroach – zapped just about everything except the pest, which repaid the favour with a second wave of prolific spite. It’s no mystery why the losers from lockdown learnt before the experts who lost nothing, that it was a weapon of indiscriminate devastation.  

European governments were next to be taught the lesson. They won’t be locking down again in a hurry, no matter how bad the second wave. Taking example from Sweden, Europeans have come to terms with living with the virus. Not so Britain, Israel and Australia which imposed draconian second lockdowns. Many Israelis, so I’ve been told, would flee the country if airlines were airborne.

Naturally enough lockdown proponents were under pressure to scapegoat the blame. And the handy scapegoat was the villain of the peace, the voiceless coronavirus. Loathe it but be sorry for it, taking the consequence of closing down society on its blameless back.

Rabbinic authorities and their observant flock are blame-shifters in chief. The cultural devastation they wrought by forbidding Jewish gatherings drove rabbis to distraction. The law making the sanctity of human life paramount drove them over the edge of reason.

The social cost and the economic cost from isolating Jews were horrendous. Saving one life involved sacrificing maybe 100 others. And so language, to scapegoat, had to bend to the task. “The Covid pandemic forced people apart.” Or, a rabbi who himself banned communal gatherings, blamed a secretive force. “We could never imagine that our synagogues would be closed”. What closed them is left to the imagination. Or this deliberately obtuse statement in a periodical: “The whole world is reeling from the virus and the economic crisis that inevitably followed.” As if politically imposed lockdowns were blameless.  

Not to forget the other scapegoat: ‘Follow the science,’ is the refrain of those who made the rules. Mute science is a handy blame-taker for all too human scientists. The rule-makers, cutting corners, mean, “follow my scientific advisors who agree with me that lockdown is the remedy.”  

G L Gomme in The handbook of folklore defines myth as “the science of a pre-scientific age.” Folklore, says Gomme, offered our ancestors a comforting sense of control over nature. Dry spells were addressed by rain dances and by offerings to Helios. The pre-science folk just had to sit back and wait. The rains came. The sun reappeared. Wisdom and the illusion of control were verified. 

Proponents of using a bazooka to kill a cockroach have not had their myth verified. After lockdowns laid the world to waste, corona came back to bite.

There are Jews who can be hated – and who should be

A consolation to the Jewish people is being reminded that hatred of the Jew is not their fault. No one expects the victim to cure the anti-Semite villain.

But wisdom deep and wide can debunk this reminder for not being true, all the time. It took Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks to debunk it.

Writing on hatred in the Torah, the Rabbi delves into Pharaoh putting the Israelites into bondage, with infanticide and all.

“When hate is rational, based on some fear or disapproval that – justified or not – has some logic to it, then it can be reasoned with and brought to an end.”

The fear and hatred of Pharaoh had some logic. By reproduction alone the Israelite settlers could overwhelm Egypt. (‘Two Types of Hate.’ Covenant and Conversation, 29 August 2017)

On the other hand, Rabbi Sacks identifies hatred of the irrational brand – the hatred we believe, wrongly, to be the only type. Without logic hatred of this type has neither beginning nor end. To illustrate, Rabbi Sacks points to the Amalekites attacking the vanguard of Israelite columns en route to the Promised Land. They attacked without cause or strategic purpose. It was hatred pure and simple.

 An example in our times? Firebrand anti-Zionists would be the Amelekite crazies. 

And the Pharaoh type of today? Anti-Semites who hate with logic, and even with justification?  

Witness the American case, a philanthropist and trouble maker supremo. Mr George Soros (ne Schwartz György) might be the Jew who can be hated by anti-Semites – and who should be.  

“The revengeful and well-funded coalition of Trump-hating insurrectionists is preparing the battlefield for a post-election civil war; threatening to extend the 2020 election into 2021 and to weaponize every tool to make sure Joe Biden assumes the presidency even if President Trump legitimately wins. The same sore losers who still refuse to accept the results of the 2016 presidential contest are preparing to do whatever it takes—including promote the secession of western states—to force the removal of Donald Trump next January.”

Could it be written off as the fantasies of people still mad about 2016. Far from it.  

To believe  American Greatness the plot is backed by some of the wealthiest people who walk the earth. The insurgent masterminds rely on the storm troopers, the BLM and Antifa rioters to do the softening up. The money of Mr Soros and Master Zuckerberg, Jews among the gentile plotters, could make it happen. https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/10/the-resistance-war-games-a-post-election-civil-war/

If they draw anti-Semites out of the woodwork, can we blame the anti-Semites?    

Not long ago Mr Soros drew the Hungarian strain out of the woodwork. A meddling Jew flinging billions at bringing on his godless vision of utopia for a country he’d no business to meddle in, was guaranteed to draw ‘Kike’ haters d like sugar draws wasps.

Bank breaker Soros is no symbol. More than the House of Rothschild could do in bygone times, Hungary-born Soros can summon the capital, buy the alliances, educate disciples, and trouble every corner of Europe with mad visions of a borderless world.

Backwater Hungary is nothing to the financier and his Open Society Foundations, with mountains of capital and a bottomless cause. Love or hate Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, only the dishonest could deny the bind he was in consequent of a Jew gambling with countries, and even a whole bloc of them.     

The crux of Orban’s bind involves the sanctity of borders. Whither are they going? Not in Hungary alone but the whole of Europe?

Some forty years ago a president of America seemed to anticipate the question. To quote Ronald Reagan: “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.” Today anti-Semite and Jew face off on either side of the border issue. Hungary’s freely elected leader versus Mr Soros. For his part the latter is perfectly candid. He wants to reshape a country across the Atlantic. He’d be a meddler even if Hungary were a failed state. But what is he doing with a fully functional democracy, a paid up member of Europe and the United Nations! Soros calls it a Mafia state. Viktor Orban might be closer to the mark if he called his antagonist a Mafiosi.      

But Mr Soros is not secretive. He tells the world what’s in his mind. Talking of the resister Viktor Orban, he said: “Orban treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”

Could it be the definitive meaning of Jewish chutzpah? No question, it’s the perfect example of, ‘Who pays the piper calls the tune.’

From when the philanthropist set up the Open Society Foundations in 1993 he’s flung in excess of $11 billion at feel-good groups, staffed or loved by the Left. It could be with tongue in cheek that Soros named the foundation after the 1945 book by Karl Popper, ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies.’ The meddler operates as the enemies do in Popper’s title, and not just in the open society of Hungary. In the bastions of freedom, in America, Israel and Europe, Soros busy as a bee is undermining the will of the people spoken through the ballot box. And the disciples he bought do their utmost to push back on behalf of the great Paymaster.   

Rights groups and watchdogs lambast Hungary’s elected government for cracking down on Soros and the civil society NGO’s proliferating on his money. Balint Bardi, a Budapest journo says, “We have pushed for greater acceptance of refugees and migrants, putting us at odds with right-wing governments and far-right political parties,” Bardi believes that Hungary’s government is waging a campaign against Soros as part of a broader strategy to exploit xenophobic feelings. His opponents, according to Bardi, want to deflect attention from a government crackdown on civil society in order “to gain popularity for the government”.

Notice:

[i] A watchdog decrying the xenophobia its master orchestrated by pushing Orban to open borders to untold migrants who, learning from Britain, France, Spain, will not assimilate into a Judaeo-Christian culture, let alone the risk of security, PC for outbreaks of terror using bombs, knives, trucks for murder and mayhem. [ii]“Right-wing governments and far right political parties.” When did Bardi the journo qualify a government as ‘Left-wing’ or a political party as “far-left?” Only left-wing is good? Democracy is only acceptable when voters return governments the left-wing like?  [iii] “To gain popularity for the government.”  Is it not precisely what a political party in a democracy is supposed to do: get elected by popular vote? What does Bardi want of the successful party: to make itself unpopular, to please foreign meddlers?

For an astute reader of markets who broke the Bank of England, Soros’ investment in disciples has returned products of asinine quality with faulty brains like Bardi.

Another Soros product of sub-quality is a human rights expert named Nora Koves. It’s not playing fair, she complains, to require transparency of NGOs receiving $26,000 or more from outsiders. What business is it of government and citizenry to know that her NGO is controlled by a foreigner out to make Hungarians, like God made man, in his own image“.”Basically,” says Nora Kovos, “we are the last critics standing in Hungary. We are the professional criticism of the government.”

Notice:

[i] Who or what is a ‘human rights expert’? Could it be Nora Koves describing herself?  [ii}Is there even a talent known as human rights expertise? [iii] Nora Koves works for Budapest-based Eotvos Karoly Policy Institute, another outfit surviving on the bottomless pocket of the meddler. [iv] “We are the professional criticism of the government.” Yes they are. Professionals live on what they get paid to do.

Meanwhile Hungary’s government styles itself as the defender of “Christian Europe” against a surge of  migrants incentivized by Soros and his EU cronies to pick Hungary as a likely place to settle down, all the while educating Europeans to regard borders and sovereignty as unwonted vestiges of bygone days.  

Hungary is not alone. All over Europe leaders and parties blame Soros for the mess. A former Prime Minister of Poland, Jarosław Kaczynski, blames the entities he funds for advocating “societies without identity”. Anti-Soros laws and rhetoric are part of the landscape in Serbia, Bulgaria and Slovakia. Who shall cast the first stone at Viktor Orban for plastering billboards with the face of the instigator all over Hungary: “Don’t let George Soros have the last laugh,” it pleads.

Of course Jewish watchdogs are aligned with the pro-Soros circus. Aren’t they aligned with every circus going. Jewish activists get good money from Mr Soros, so why not? “There’s no doubt,” an activist Jew declared. “The vast majority of American Jews live with what we would call white privilege.”

If being privileged is sinful, if the more privileged you are the greater your sin, well then. Zionists and the tiny country they support are culpable. Then hating Zionists is more than the right thing to do. It is the moral thing to do, and those of good conscience are duty bound to hate Zionists.

A moot point: are we dealing with Amelikite crazies or Pharaoh rational types?

The myths and madness of hate are indiscriminate. Watchdogs seem to be a susceptible group. Meddling Jews are the fox guarding the henhouse. And the empire of the greatest meddler of them all is camouflaged by a veneer of nonsense.

SA Inc can’t be rescued without knowing the problem

CEO’s can’t rescue SA Inc.

Do you know one CEO who knows the problem? CEOs having to run businesses profitably can never be part of the solution. They can only be part of the problem. Business wise is not wise period. For exaample:

Jeff Bezos of Amazon turned his toy the Washington Post into a handout of the Democrat Party. The CEO of American Airlines turned flights into a BLM promotion. The CEOs of Twitter, Face Book, YouTube block medical opinion on Covid treatment as ‘disinformation’ because it is not the opinion of the politicized CDC. Nike appointed a brand ambassador on the strength of his labelling policemen “Pigs.”

One who pins faith in business leaders to rescue SA Inc. is the opposite of wise.

To know the problem takes Wisdom  

To rescue SA Inc, if it can be rescued at such a late point, is to know the problem, is to have wisdom.

Wisdom takes understanding. Understanding takes knowing exactly what dropped SA Inc. into the league of muck; therefore what will keep SA Inc. there.

Therefore:

Wisdom                                   =          Understanding

Understanding                              ≠          Acceptable PC opinion

Understanding                              =          Identifying the problem

Identifying the problem          =          Identifying the solution

Understanding 1

The President as part of the problem cannot be the solution. The P will do what he always did. He will oversee and enable the rot.

After the P acted this way under Zuma; after he has acted this way in power; after he allowed Mugabe to run riot; after he allows the new tyrant of Zim to run riot –

The P like the Leopard can never change his spots.

“Ramaphosa on Tuesday said that he would implement an employment stimulus plan within the next month.”

What’s wrong here?

In two decades has any P seen one plan through to completion? Inept and dishonest leaders are always going to do something, which never gets done. 

Ramaphosa said that, “Countries across the world are facing significant economic disruption as a result of the pandemic, leading to the worst global downturn in decades. South Africa has not been spared these realities. ”

What’s wrong here?

The P is evading responsibility. Did it come down from Heaven that he must impose a state of emergency with 5 levels of lockdown? And who told him to keep lockdown at level 2? Science?  

The P, not some inanimate pandemic, damaged the economy.

Ramaphosa said that “there were two important processes before he could implement his employment stimulus.”

What’s wrong here?

According to his modus operandi the P plays for time. When you see that word “process” it’s the ANC way of saying, ‘forget it.’

One who pins faith in R is the opposite of wise. 

Understanding 2

A prominent judge understands.

“Corruption is not our only problem. John Kane-Berman has identified what we need to do to save our beloved people from disaster. We are on the point of becoming another Cuba or Venezuela or, God forbid, Zimbabwe.”

Long before Kane-Berman, I identified the same nub of the problem: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24775   “The bed rock of the rot is tossing merit out the window. Economic signals headed to hell in a basket when merit became the last consideration for filling jobs. A merit-free economy and a doomed society are wedded closer than a horse and carriage.”

Understanding 3

Kane-Berman has understood in detail what I understood in essence. Click here

“If appointments are made not on the basis of professional competence, but on the basis of political loyalty or to fill racial quotas, you end up with the public service we have got, pervaded by both corruption and incompetence.

So even if Mr Ramaphosa seriously intends even to begin to start trying to stamp out corruption over Covid-19 – a big if – he faces the challenge of finding enough officials who are both honest and competent. It is impossible to disentangle corruption from the other two factors, cadre deployment and racial demographics. Eskom. SAA. Prasa. The SABC. State schooling. Government health care. National departments? Provinces? You name it.

With the exception of the Western Cape, South Africa’s municipalities are packed with people, many of them deployed cadres, who are sometimes crooked, sometimes incompetent, sometimes both. If all the crooks were weeded out, millions of people would still have no clean or reliable supplies of water, because they would still be at the mercy of incompetent cadres.

Yet even though the Constitutional Court warned that beneficiaries of affirmative action had to be “suitably qualified in order not to sacrifice efficiency at the altar of remedial employment”, its decision in the Barnard case gave more weight to racial requirements than to “effective” public administration. The court thus lent its imprimatur to racial policies which have undermined the public sector and also the constitutional rights which depend on an efficient public sector, among them the rights to life and dignity, the right to security of the person, the rights of access to housing and health care, and the right to a healthy environment.

Apart from being criminal, the theft of public funds undermines all these rights. But so do the ANC’s cadre deployment and racial policies, which also handicap efforts to combat such theft and other types of crime. It’s about time (to connect the dots). And for the Constitutional Court not to be complacent about the consequences of racial “transformation”.

Understanding 4         The one and only solution

A colour blind society and economy.   

How can lockdowns be kosher

To make one pray, in synagogue or privately, for something, morning noon and night, life without it must be intolerable. Thrice daily a Jew prays for פַּרנָסָה – for sustenance, a livelihood. Bereft of פַּרנָסָה life is burdensome. Can the heart or head get used to being a charity case? Can a breadwinner make peace with depending on those who kept their livelihood?

Lockdowns rob people willy nilly of פַּרנָסָה. How can a practice that tells a man he may not earn a living be kosher? That he may not support a family. That he may not keep his head above water as long as others are contracting a virus. Take away a livelihood and you take away a life. Often not a figurative life – I heard that an Israeli committed suicide when the lockdown put paid to his food stall.

Lockdown imposers forget the law of unintended consequence. It is not difficult to forget  when you lose nothing. The comfy in the Knesset and the health department keep their livelihoods. It took an Erel Margalit to remind members of the Corona Cabinet that, “Another general lockdown will lead to mass layoffs, and the collapse of businesses across the country.” Families and businesses on the skid, never mind the unemployed, are at the mercy of tax-supported technocrats who live very nicely, thank you.

Those who run lives, or ruin them, are not paid to think that by helping Group x to stay safe they rob Group y of livelihoods and lives. And the next meal.  “COVID-19 is about to force a food insecurity reckoning in Israel,” warned a headline on Arutz Sheva. “The strain on Israel’s piecemeal network of food banks and charities is growing daily. At the same time the closures of hospitality and other supportive businesses have robbed (food banks) of reliable sources of surplus foodstuffs.”

It would be bad enough if the technocrats had Science behind them. They do not. Doctors, journalists and ordinary Israelis are suing the Health Ministry over a number of unmentionables.

1. “Disagreements about the severity and extent of morbidity and mortality caused by the virus.
2. The link between measures taken and prevention of infection and morbidity
3. The degree of health burden.

The litigants had to remind bureaucrats that “every decision, step, and policy affects the lives, health, and future of millions of Israelis. Therefore reliable information and true data are critical.”

Lockdowns are kosher?

It cannot be that Jews full of heart and soul, love and understanding have grown hard-skinned and thoughtless. It does seem very uncharacteristic. Besides which, it goes directly against the obligation to set up a fellow Jew to earn a livelihood which is better than to live on handouts. 

There can be two explanations: the scary news feed, and one-eyed vision. The technocrats  are culpable on both counts. Everyone and the rabbinate are prone to fall into line, and afterwards do the mopping up from treating the health crisis and the scare-mongering as a call to lockdown. The Corona fear cycle I coined is a perpetual wheel. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/284960

News feed to scare people stiff numbs the brain. New infections, hospitalized cases, ventilator cases, mortality counts: the parameters of a virus, the excitable though lesser part of the story; the part given over to healthcare professionals and the media; the part where scientific terms get bandied about.

I know of no bulletin broadcasting, side by side, the vital stats of the virus and the lockdown. In Column 1 virus metrics, in Column 2 lockdown tolls, the bigger cut of the pie – the cut you can verify. There can be no doctoring the businesses gone broke; hotel staff laid off; street vendors that failed to re-open, travel agents given up waiting for aircraft to get airborne and cruise liners to go to sea; papered-up windows in mute malls, turnover at food banks; the  unemployment number. So to the bottom line: lives taken by the lockdown.

The last metric gives practitioners of lockdown itchy backs. In the parlance of medical science there are ‘excess deaths’. The term, you’d think, means too many deaths from Covid-19. No. It involves too few. No expert quite knows why, but the government toll falls short of the number of deaths that exceed an historical norm. The experts can’t explain the shortfall. They only know that people died in vast numbers while locked down.

Take South Africa. Excess deaths from May to August stood at 33 478. The death toll from Covid-19, the toll driving people to distraction, stood at 10,000 or just one-third of ‘lockdown deaths.’ But it did more than kill people. The lockdown cut 3 to 4 million people adrift from their jobs until those who did not earn a living were as many as those who did – a 50% unemployment.  

Yes, people die obeying warnings to stay home. Scared stiff people neglect their cancer or diabetes or blood pressure or their physical and mental fitness. Survivors of neglect often have nothing to celebrate either, being invalids or amputees. Face facts. Lockdowns can be three times more lethal than Covid-19. Worse. Covid-19 kills the sick while lockdowns kill the healthy.

Yet lockdowns are kosher certified?

They are because of lives they may save – the sanctity of life principle or pikuach nephesh. Has anyone tracked down an elusive scientist, one who calculated how many lives a certain lockdown saved? We never hear an expert swear by the Hippocratic Oath that a lockdown saved (x) number of lives in a given period. We do know that residents of care homes have died even when held in solitary confinement. Yet our faith in the lockdown is not shaken. We stick to our scientific ‘betters’ like burr.

What they did do, exceptionally well, was to oversell the pandemic. Polls confirm the impact of the sales campaign. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/never-has-a-virus-been-so-oversold. Respondents in the UK thought that Covid-19 had killed 7% of the population. That would be 4^1/2 million fatalities. North of the border Scots were more bamboozled. They were under the impression that 10% of the UK had died, which equals 7 million. Americans were little better. They believed the virus had killed 9% of America, or 30 million. The reality, bad enough, is a toll around the 0.2 million mark.

Oversell a toothpaste and no one gets hurt. Oversell a pandemic and people die. The fear cycle kills. But alarming the public is held to be the right thing to do. Lockdowns are kosher because consideration for others is derech eretz.  

How the twin pandemic got born. The supreme sanctity of human life created a death trap. It predictably collapsed the parameters of the world we knew.

Everyone knows the health risk. Few know the risk of bondage. To certify a lockdown kosher is to certify a political coup. Angelo Codevilla, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University, calls it the “Great Covid coup of 2020, achieved by lies and fear.”

“In March, the WHO and the CDC presented coronavirus to the world as a danger equivalent to the plague. But China’s experience had already shown that it was much less like the plague and more like the flu. All that happened afterwards followed from falsifying this basic truth. Rulers took the opportunity to extort public compliance with their agendas. The claim to speak on behalf of “science” is an attempt to avoid being held accountable for the enormous harm done. Rulers will continue doing harm because they want to hold on to the power the panic brought them.” https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/13/the_attempted_covid_coup_of_2020_143952.html. A hair-raising but obvious scenario. When lockdowns were novel I warned repeatedly of power grabbing. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/beware_of_tyranny_more_than_covid19_.html. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25585

How could we go there when economic collapse and tokens of bondage were all around? Fright is a blinding tool. The panic stokers in power did their work well.

To believe that lockdowns can stop a pandemic is to believe in a myth. G L Gomme in ‘The handbook of folklore’ defines myth as “the science of a pre-scientific age.” Folklore, Gomme says, offered our ancestors a comforting sense of control over nature. Dry spells were addressed by rain dances and by offerings to Helios. The pre-science folk just had to sit back and wait. The rains came. The sun reappeared. Wisdom and the illusion of control were verified. 

The lockdown folk are not so lucky. They’ve not had their myth verified. After their device laid the world to waste the virus came back to bite.

South Africa’s dreamy emperors

A satiric masterpiece

Long after the ‘dark continent’ salvaged independence and respect from the horrors of colonialism, now and then African rulers seek to emulate the ways of the European. The desire is deep and suicidal. The former colonized will do whatever it takes to copy the former colonizing powers.   

A 1932 satiric novel by Evelyn Waugh proved to be starkly prescient. In “Black Mischief” the Emperor of Azania, identified with Zanzibar, may be an overdone caricature, but the way it portrays a syndrome has to be marveled at.   

“Another thing,” said the Emperor, “I have been reading in my papers about something very modern called Birth Control. What is it?” 

Basil explained. 

“I must have a lot of that. You will see to it.”

What does it all have to do with South Africa today, expiring and on life support?

ANC party bigwigs have been allured by modern ideas. European ideas. They have bought into round pegs for square holes. They read about “something very modern” called National Health, and they “must have a lot of that.”

Scandinavia is the model for the ANC. Party bigwigs want its flawless health system and not the tumble down hospitals it made – death traps run by comrades and cadres who’d make a mess of managing a spaza shop. Only the best of Europe is good enough for African pride, for a country where a third of the people live below the poverty line. The Swede’s proficiency is to be transplanted into the heart of corroded Africa. 

Reality is not even a consideration.  South Africa is well on the road to a Venezuela or a Zimbabwe– total wrecks.

• A contracting economy
• Mass unemployment  
• Unserviceable debt
• Treasury bare as a Mother Hubbard’s cupboard
• Corruption rot from the head down
• Utilities and departments run by clueless cadres
• Government workers who don’t work but who the President thinks can’t be dispensed with.
• Resources that could uplift every desperately poor person, are diverted to luxury living for the politically connected
• Exodus of  capital, both assets and human
• Not one cogent plan to completion in twenty five years
• Law and policing more conceptual than real
• An ethos that dirty money buys a ticket to heavenly living, not a quick ticket to the jailhouse. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/cartoon/call-for-action/

A plan to install the best health system in Europe just has to be thought up and it will happen.  Ripe and ready for picking. No thought is given to the contract for submarines that idle in Simonstown dock because no one knows how they work.   

Can Evelyn Waugh’s Emperor of Azania be alive in South Africa? If life imitates art he can be. When a character in a novel is so life like, it means that each part of the character coincides with a bit of real life. We can certainly tear an Emperor out of the pages of a book and paste him in a rundown country besotted with modern ideas. There are Waugh’s Emperor’s galore at every level of the ANC, comrades deranged by the prospect of wealth acquired at a wink and a nod.

“The Lord Chamberlain came to consult the Emperor about the banquet. He had forbidden raw beef. What was he to give the guests?”

 “Raw beef, said Basil. Call it steak tartare.” 

“That is in accordance with modern thought?” 

“Perfectly.” 

To mix politics with religion may be wrong but justified

A look at America, Britain and South Africa

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, emphatic that rabbis were wrong to bless Biden or Trump, says that mixing politics with religion is “an absolute and total outrage. It’s one of the greatest things Judaism ever taught the world. You mix religion and politics, you get terrible politics and even worse religion.”  https://www.jta.org/2020/08/27/opinion/rabbi-jonathan-sacks

With a clarity that makes him distinct from the herd, Lord Sacks tells American Jewry it is    “making a big, big mistake. This is not a small thing. It’s a very, very big thing.” Or is it shadow boxing with his own British rabbi? Mirvis the Chief Rabbi had broken the golden rule and dipped into politics. In November 2019 before the ballot he ordered British Jewry to not vote Labour because the party leader Corbyn was unfit to be a Prime Minister.

“Allowing that convention dictates that a Chief Rabbi stays well away from party politics – and rightly so – the forthcoming elections constitute an exception since the very soul of our nation is at stake”. At stake because anti-Semites packed the Labour party.

Lord Sacks agreed that Corbyn the leader was a threat to the community of Britain. But he never told it how to vote. Rabbi Mervis went right in and did the great sin that Judaism taught the nation not to do. He mixed religion with politics. Did the Almighty let him get away with doing that? Looking at the backlash on social media, no. The Chief Rabbi got terrible politics and even worse Judaism for his trouble.

The anti-Semites had a field day. They said Mirvis didn’t like the platform of the Labour party because it condemned Israel for emasculating the Gaza strip. They scoffed that Labour’s support for a Palestinian state bothered him. They hinted at the rabbi being an arms dealer for Israel. He wanted, they said, to cover up violations of human rights in the occupied territories, where Mervis trained in a yeshiva. The anti-Semites got a kick out of airing their anti-Zionism as much as they got a lift from tossing a rabbi into a mound of manure.  It would be better had Rabbi Mirvis heeded the Lord Sacks. Had he kept out of politics Jews would probably have deserted Labour at the polls anyway.   

American Jewry is not so threatened as to need a rabbi to tell them which way to vote. The Trump ticket that the “Election will decide whether we save the American Dream and the American way of life” is every minority’s concern. If you’re a rabbi you don’t bless the Trump campaign. A gala dinner would be the kosher way to show appreciation; or a private donation to the Trump campaign.  

No doubt Trump in the White House will be better for Israel than Biden in it. That’s for communal bodies to help make happen. Campaign and lobby. AIPAC and the Israeli government can lend a hand, just as Obama lent an interfering hand to get Israeli parties on the Left elected.  Unless Rabbi Lord Sacks is wrong, an American rabbi would need a hotline to God to mix politics and religion and emerge with a tallis laundered for Yom Kippur. If Britain’s Rabbi, facing the worst case scenario for a community couldn’t do it, let the rabbinate of America beware. You mix religion and politics, you get terrible politics and more terrible religion.

No rabbis more than the rabbis of America’s temples demonstrate what you get by diluting Judaism with the dregs of politics. Temple Beth El in Salinas California is one of many. Cantor Margaret Bruner declared her temple a ‘Sanctuary Congregation’. The Sanctuary City idea in the bible drove her to follow suit. Let all who hop the border fence into America – drug dealer or child trafficker don’t matter – find safe haven in Temple Beth El. Cantor Bruner pledged financial and legal support into the bargain. “The Jewish people strongly believe that since we were once slaves and strangers in a strange land it is incumbent upon us to offer a safe haven for those fleeing persecution.” Quite how the cantor identified a persecuted fence-hopper from one looking for a lifestyle supported by the taxpayers of California, she kept private.    

Her type of chessed, if you call it that rather than infantile make-believe, gives a warm and fuzzy feeling. Mores the pity that cantors and clerics may get the feeling without contorting Judaism into another human rights enterprise. Hence the temple recipe they live by:

Religion + Leftism = Tanach + Tikkun Olam

South Africa could be a case on its own. It was never a fair country. A rabbi in South Africa can scarcely avoid mixing politics with religion. There was Apartheid and after it a hybrid system of elected comrades to gulp down wealth as fast as capitalists could produce it. 

A year ago when the country knelt on the cusp of no return I warned it was up to President Trump. Should Trump not slap sanctions on the comrades in crime, the country was a goner. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24682  Yes, the innocent could be fallout. But the alternative, to be kind to the guilty, would make it worse for the innocent. A beggar country in the making is no time to think of fallout. Sixty five million victims of crime  want not a cruel future but a kind one. 

President Trump did not slap sanctions. Arguably South Africa is a goner. Comrades and cadres took a promising country that began with Mandela and made a meal of it. Today they banquet off the dying scraps of meat.

The despoiling got going when a President named Zuma took the rule of law and hollowed it out so that comrades could feast till they burst. A President named Ramaphosa took up where the deposed Zuma left off. His style is different but the results are the same. Where the greed of the former was personal and shameless, the enabling of the latter is cloaked with good intentions. There are times when words stop trying to make a point and let a cartoon do it graphically.  https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/cartoon/dear-comrades/

When a regime tears up the implicit agreement between government and the governed as to the rights and duties of each (the Social Contract) what is a Jewish community to do? Petition God to bless the government? Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein suspended that part of the synagogue service when Zuma was the head Comrade in Crime, then reinstated the prayer  when Ramaphosa deposed Zuma. Either way it won’t make a jot of difference. The free for all will hasten a messy end and probably replace the president with a tyrant like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. 

Civil activism is the one hope, though faint. Smart activism could break the feasting and birth a  beginning from which to rebuild. To be smart it has to be kosher and smarter than marching arm in arm to the Union Buildings.   

I see a four-pronged activism.

1. Stop asking God to bless a government that exists for criminals. What if our prayers are answered and they become better at crime? The President is no more than an overseer and enabler of crimes against humanity – unsurprising after he did the same under the former President and allowed Mugabe to brutalize Zimbabweans. Our President is more than a wimp; he hardens his heart and allows the rich to steal from the poor. .http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24775
2. Close ways for comrades to splash out. Target car dealerships that cash in by selling  Bentleys and Rolls Royces, Ferraris and Masseratis. File criminal charges against  dealerships that fail to verify the source of money. The same for real estate transactions. Make agents and auctioneers duty-bound to distinguish clean money from dirty. Picket swish country clubs that accept looters as members.    
3. As the ANC made the Apartheid state a polecat, make their gangster state a polecat. Lobby for trade boycotts. Lobby the UN Human Rights Commission. The WHO already declared ANC looting of PPE tenders equivalent to murder. Lobby the US Administration to slap financial and travel bans on leaders of the ANC.
4. Promote a tax revolt. Withholding tax is the way to say to the criminal state, “You have broken your part of the social contract and made it null and void.
5. Campaign on social media. Here is a tweet for a community rabbi. “President Ramaphosa. Explain how your seizure of land is consistent with the willingness of investors to invest.” Or this Tweet: “Give an example or two of countries where land seizure has not damaged agriculture.” Or how about this for a Tweet? “President Ramaphosa, lead by example. First expropriate land that you own.”

You mix religion and politics when conditions look existential. You may get terrible politics though better to try than be left with nothing

The great peace blocker

President Trump cannot help being willful and impulsive. He likes to call the shots; whatever advised to do he does the opposite. Critics think because he is not obedient he’s a brute. Despite or because of prickly traits, there’s been no incumbent of the White House more likely to bring down the curtain on a conflict that defies a deal. Could the smirking face under the yellow coiffure make Israel and the Palestinians smoke the peace pipe?

It all depends. If ‘Mr Not Nice Guy’ is not blind to the elephant in the room he could be the one. He mustn’t be as myopic as, in his Trumpian brag, “All prior administrations from President Lyndon Johnson on, who tried and bitterly failed.”

Trump could do the impossible. But to do it he would have to spot that lurking mammoth. It alone knows what caused decades of peace proposals to be archived.

The peace camps haven’t a clue. They like to blame four problems of little bearing.

(1) Antipathy of Palestinians to the idea of a Jewish flag in the neighborhood;

(2) Israeli settlement building in the West Bank;

(3) Israeli occupation; and

(4) Palestinian insistence on the time bomb labeled ‘Right of Return.’

Peace-seeking diplomats are so consumed by these blockers that the elephant in the room, signalling they’re wasting their time, goes unheeded. More’s the pity. The great blocker is nothing more complicated than money.

Money has institutionalized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Money has made it more an economic than a diplomatic problem. How so?

No deal, miracle and all, would stop a money mechanism like no other on earth..The elephant in the room would hum and ha long after the diplomatic file had gone to the archives.

You don’t stem billions of dollars, make a million jobs redundant and condemn thousands of activists to obscurity by brokering an agreement between two peoples. Yes, big fat beneficiaries sup at the table of the world’s favorite conflict.

At the head of the table sit kleptomaniac terror– crazies. Taps gushing dollars do not predispose the suits lording it over Ramallah and Gaza to make peace. Why would it? Why disturb a state of limbo if it meant no more filthy lucre. Billions of dollars, with no strings attached, have gushed into the coffers of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. That’s only from Western donors. How much Arab countries and Iran have sent is anyone’s guess.

Largesse never incentivized leaders to get off their butts. Ask the World Bank. Its report in July 2012 complained that “the Palestinian economy cannot sustain statehood as long as it continues to rely heavily on foreign donations.” So on what did Palestinian leaders splash billions?

Some of it went to pay some 140,000 workers that swell its payroll.’ They are the breadwinners for a third and more of the Palestinian population. Nearly half work in security, which has a sufficiently broad meaning to allow militants of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Islamic Jihad and other groups to draw a salary. If they happen to be behind bars, still they get their monthly transfer. Mahmoud Abbas uses around 6% of the budget to keep ‘political prisoners’ and convicted murderers in clover. In this upside down world prisoners never go short, while teachers and health workers are left waiting for their money.  More billions go into ‘development aid’, though what this means depends on what cronies ensconced in Ramallah and Gaza City like it to mean. Other billions go down a few deep pockets.

“Chronic Kleptocracy – Corruption within the Palestinian Political Establishment” was the title given to a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs held in July 2012. Analysts testified before Congress on crony capitalism, endemic corruption, distortions of the market and other malpractices.

For Gaza, aid from abroad is the economy. Under the PLO much of it came from the US and Europe, but after Hamas came to power the Arab League was forced to step in. Iran on its own has become an important donor, funding Hamas to the tune of hundreds of billions. Since there can hardly be tax revenue from an economy with practically no taxpayers, reliance on donations must be total. On what, and on whom, the money is spent no one knows, and cares even less.

Until the money tap is turned off no power on earth would impel super-rich, unaccountable leaders to smoke the peace pipe with Israel.

And how, unless by the hand of God, will Team Trump decommission a planetary system? If two states do get born from the ‘Deal of the Century,’ what happens to the orbiting bodies? So many livelihoods; all the reputations and careers; such behemoth planets and moons, so much wild spending, orbit the conflict.

Take UNWRA. When the UN agency began in 1950 it had three quarter million Palestinian refugees to care for. Today it looks after some five million. There are 700 UNWRA schools teaching half a million children; 122 clinics and more welfare centres provide better care than Arab host countries offer their citizens. But it doesn’t come cheap. UNWRA’s budget is around $2 billion.

What if the miracle happens? What if the Trump formula gets accepted by the side that has said, “No – a thousand times no?’ How would UNWRA workers react – some 30,000 Palestinians who believe in entitlement as they believe in Allah? Just talk of cutbacks led to riots in the territories.

And no one in their right mind expects Arab leaders to surrender their potent weapon against Israel: refugees. Lebanon, Syria and Jordan putting up their hands to absorb five million? It won’t happen. For seven decades Palestinian refugees haven’t known what human rights mean. No deal made in Jerusalem and Ramallah can change that.

Who the will continue to look after the millions in permanent limbo? No force known to man could make the United Nations disband UNWRA.

Other bodies, playing for bigger money, orbit the conflict. Who’d bet on the human rights industry supporting the peace plan and packing up. This is an industry in every sense of the word. Look at the sustainability factors driving the civil society businesses (NGO’s): mountains of cheap capital; global reach, well-connected stakeholders, media channels beating a path to the door, and last but not least: a traded commodity called Israeli misdeeds, for which the world has a gluttonous hunger. If those are not conditions for big business what are they?

Nominally NGOs are autonomous, not-for-profit and apolitical. In real life they are none of those things. There are not hundreds but thousands of entities, a bewildering number of them operating in the tiny areas of Israel and the West Bank, all competing to supply human rights product. And on the industry people depend for jobs, in their tens of thousands.

Trade is brisk, the money big and the players earnest. There are billionaire private investors, Euro zone countries that practically fling money at NGOs, ecumenical coffers, flush Arab potentates and proverbial Joe public. The Ford Foundation is one of the bigger investors, with an annual grant budget exceeding $500 million. Christian Aid, with branches in 50 countries, brings in €100 million and more a year, while Human Rights Watch received $100 million for 10 years from George Soros. Oxfam is bigger than them all. With affiliates it attracts €900 million annually, a third of that from Euro Zone tax money.

These and lesser NGOs operate a particular business model which gives them a vested interest in human right abuses. Real or not is not important. Israeli misdeeds are levered as stock-in-trade; they are assets convertible into cash.

Exactly how popular is the Israeli brand? One of the big-five, Human Rights Watch, devotes three times more resources to policing and reporting Israel than to Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority combined, and six times more resources than to Syria and Libya. Amnesty produces 255 reports per million Israeli people compared to 60 reports on Syria, 23 on Iraq and Iran, and a mere 9 on Saudi Arabia. When the Syrian regime slaughters 70,000 of its own people, Oxfam pays lip service by issuing three statements. At the same time Oxfam condemns Israel, stable and free and going about its business, nine times.

And the king of human rights kings? The United Nations trades in hardly anything but the Israeli brand. Seventy five percent of that body’s condemnations and sixty percent of its emergency sittings relate to Israel. For human rights violations in the whole world the UN keeps just one permanent item on the agenda. It keeps one other permanent item for Israel alone.

Not to leave out the foot soldiers. How will boycotters take a deal that absolves the country they love to hate? Would they accept an Israel that comes up smelling of roses? Limelight, book sales, career opportunities and, for the lucky few celebrity status, would evaporate like the dew after dawn. Take away the unresolved conflict and you break the magic money machine. ‘Israel-bashing is the contemporary key to acceptance,’ said Professor Robert Wistrich. Even a humble saxophone player may aspire to overnight celebrity status. ‘It is Gilad Atzmon’s blunt anti-Zionism rather than his music that has given him an international profile,’ the Guardian explains.

Good luck and all to a President half the world loves to hate. Were Trump to smash the   blocker of peace a Nobel Prize would be a miserly reward.