A useful collection of answers to the arguments we see. More details for each at the link.
[UriKurlianchik] Most people single out Israel as uniquely evil for reasons that are inconsistent with their own values, and I can prove it mathematically.
That is, every accusation they throw at Israel can be raised against other nations to an equal or greater degree, yet they ignore these and focus all their condemnation on Israel.
I like to call this the consistency test.
Now, before we delve deeper into this claim and its implications, I’d like to point out two things:
This is not an argument that Israel hasn’t done bad things. Rather, this is a test whether Israel is sufficiently different from other countries to justify treating it as uniquely evil. If a person doesn’t pass this test, it doesn’t mean that their claims about Israel are wrong, but rather that they’re arguing them in bad faith in a way that is inconsistent with their own values.
Pointing out logical inconsistency is not whataboutism. The latter tries to distract from a subject by drawing attention to an unrelated subject. "Israel did X. Someone else did X too. Let’s talk about that instead." The consistency test does something different. It shows that If Israel did X and someone else also did X, treating Israel as uniquely evil is logically inconsistent.
So, without further ado, let’s apply the consistency test to the most common claims raised against Israel and see what we come up with.
well.
ETHNIC CLEANSING, GENOCIDE AND ETHNONATIONALISM: TURKEY
Modern The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor... was born from the worst genocides and ethnic cleansings in Middle Eastern history. Yes, not genocide, but genocides.
Between 1915 and 1923, the Turks have massacred:
664,000-1,200,000 Armenians
350,000-500,000 Greeks
250,000—300,000 Assyrians
Beyond these specific groups, there was a broader policy aimed of removing Christians from Anatolia to create a Ottoman Turkish-Moslem ethnostate. Before the creation of the Ottoman Turkish Republic, roughly 1 in 4 people in Asia minor were non-Moslem. Today, 99% are Moslem.
Right now, the Turks are ethnically cleansing native Kurds from Syria (they have displaced 200,000 already) and native Greeks from Cyprus (they have displaced around 160,000 in the ’70s). They are currently replacing them with Ottoman Turkish and Arab settlers. Ironically, thousands of these settlers are Paleostinian Arabs.
Turkey is so bad, I had to make a list of their top ten worst atrocities which in the 20th century alone. Nevertheless, there are no major anti-Ottoman Turkish movements in the West, nor are Turks harassed online or on the streets, or boycotted for their atrocities.
INDEPENDENCE THROUGH TERRORISM: IRELAND
The scale of militancy leading to the independence of Ireland is similar to Zionist militancy in Mandatory Paleostine. Both groups practiced targeted urban warfare meant more to sow chaos than to kill. In both cases, decades of resistance resulted in hundreds of British fatalities and dozens of civilian deaths.
In fact, the two movements were deeply interlinked because they fought the same enemy: the British Empire.
Zionist gunnies who fought the British in Paleostine were inspired by the IRA. Meanwhile,
...back at the wrecked scow, a single surviver held tightly to the smashed prow... Irish leader Éamon de Valera described Zionism as a national movement seeking self-determination under conditions not unlike those of Ireland. The phrase "Paleostine is England’s second Ireland" was a staple of Irish nationalist press in the 30s and 20s.
Jewish nationalism and Irish nationalism are sister movements. Yet today it’s the same Irish who seek to discredit Israel for walking in the same path they did.
GENERATIONAL OCCUPATION: WESTERN SAHARA
The situation in the Paleostinian territories is similar to the situation in Western Sahara. Both involve a prolonged dispute over territory, competing claims to illusory sovereignty, and the unresolved claim of a population to self-determination.
Morocco has controlled most of Western Sahara for over 50 years while the Sahrawi people, represented by the Polisario Front, continue to claim the right to determine the territory's political future. Morocco is seeking to consolidate its presence and authority on the ground while the international status of the territory remains disputed.
And yet, very few of the people who drop "Free Paleostine!" under any post made by a Jewish person show a similar passion to free Western Sahara.
I’d also ask what happened to "Free Tibet" but I don’t need 300 replies from Chinese bots under this article...
APARTHEID: PALESTINIANS IN LEBANON
Paleostinians living in Leb ...The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. Only one of those statements is an exaggeration.... are subjected to a distinct legal and social regime that limits their rights compared with Lebanese citizens, even though most of these Paleostinians were born in Lebanon and many are the children of people who were born in Lebanon as well.
DESTRUCTION AND DISPLACEMENT: THE ANTI-ISIS COALITION
During the 3-year-long war to defeat ISIS in Iraq, 5 million people were displaced. As the below image from djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... shows, the results are not dissimilar to Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... One wonders why no one called this wae genocidal...
FOREIGN FUNDING: THE PALESTINIANS
A 2004 World Bank assessment found that in 2003, donor disbursements to the West Bank and Gaza were about $258 per person, the highest sustained rate of per capita disbursements to an aid recipient in the world since the Second World War.
In 2024, official donors provided about $4.38 billion to the Paleostinian Authority/West Bank and Gaza, including about $1.70 billion from DAC donors and $1.48 billion from multilateral organizations.
This is more than the aid Israel receives even in absolute numbers.
SETTLER-COLONIAL PROJECT: CANADA
Israel was never a settler-colony because it never had a metropole. However,
denial ain't just a river in Egypt... Canada was. In fact, the word Canada literally means "settlement." Mind you, it was not just native Americans that got displaced by this settlement.
Between 1755 and 1764, the British authorities expelled the French-speaking Acadian population from Nova Scotia to other colonies. 20—25% died from disease, exposure, or shipwrecks. Hmm... sounds like something kids today would call a genocide.
OPPRESSION: AFGHANISTAN
Just Google "women in Afghanistan."
LAW OF RETURN: ARMENIA
This is called ius sanguinis (right of blood) and is incredibly common. The reason you’ve probably never heard about it is because it’s ignored in all cases except Israel.
NO RIGHT OF RETURN: LITERALLY THE ENTIRE WORLD
Following WWII, approximately 14.6 million ethnic Germans who’ve lived in east-central Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... for generations have fled or were expelled from their homes by the Allies. This happened roughly at the same time as the Nakba.
Amazingly, none of these Germans, or their descendants have a right of return to the places they were expelled from and where now mostly Slavic settlers live in their former homes. None of them are hereditary refugees either.
SEPARATION BARRIERS: BRITAIN
Due to the Irish propensity to blow up people, the British erected dozens of "peace walls" in Belfast, physically separating Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. These "peace walls" stretch about 34 kilometers long and restrict movement between the communities.
The above examples showed us, objectively speaking, there is nothing about Israel that is uniquely evil unless you tailor the uniqueness exactly to Israel’s size. That is, "Israel is the only country that does X while also being Y and Z." At that point, any country can be made "uniquely evil" simply by adding enough qualifications. This is clearly bad faith behavior based on irrational hatred towards Israel rather than following consistent moral values.
And once again: the point of these comparisons is not that "someone else did it, therefore Israel is innocent." That would be whataboutism. The point is that the same conduct is treated as evidence of unique evil when Israel does it but not when other nations do the same or worse.
This means that a Communist who hates all states including Israel or a Nazi who hates all Jews including Israelis would pass the consistency test. Their hatred of Israel is consistent with their values. However,
denial ain't just a river in Egypt... they don’t view it as a unique evil, just one of their many enemies.
However,
denial ain't just a river in Egypt... a liberal who made hating Israel his entire identity and spends his day harassing Jews online because of Israel would fail the test because singling out Israel is inconsistent with his own otherwise moderate values.
An abiding mystery of this lunatic Fourth Turning is how it came to be that the supposed intellectual elite of America was the class that so shamelessly lost its collective mind, got behind ideas that ranged from absurd to disgraceful — “Defund the Police,” “boys in the girl’s locker room,” “voter ID is unfair,” “dismantle capitalism,” “no one is illegal,” “mostly peaceful riots,” “Covid vaccine mandates” “CIA-run censorship,” — and finally decided to march under the banner of communism, history’s most floridly ruinous political program.
The answer is that intellectuals are in the employ of the racketeering operation that is Washington’s permanent bureaucracy married to the Democratic Party’s laundering of taxpayer dollars into all the parasitical enterprises that this combine feeds. And the more the money-flows get cut, the more the intellectuals fear losing their fat salaries and their status. In desperation, they are now trying to just burn the USA house down.
From a post from an old friend from work.
The news media spent months claiming tariffs would trigger hyperinflation and crash the economy. But now that the real data is out, we can see that the "sky is falling" hype simply didn't match reality.
What the establishment didn't want you to see is how resilient the American economy actually is:
The 85% Domestic Buffer: Roughly 85% of our GDP is driven by interstate commerce (local services, housing, utilities, and labor). Tariffs only apply to the 15% international bucket, giving us a massive natural shield against runaway inflation. 🛡
Foreign Exporters Swallowing the Cost: The media said Americans would pay 100% of the tax. In reality, access to the U.S. market is too valuable to lose. Foreign dealers have been forced to slice their own wholesale prices and margins just to keep their goods competitive here.
A Resilient Strong Dollar: The U.S. dollar’s global strength means our currency has massive purchasing power, naturally lowering baseline import costs and fighting off inflation.
Billions in New Revenue: Even after court-ordered corporate refunds, the Treasury has successfully retained over $132 billion in net revenue from these trade policies—bringing in billions funded by international trade rather than domestic income taxes.
So why the massive backlash from the talking heads? The intense aversion from Congressional Democrats, globalist institutions, and multinational Wall Street banks isn't just about economics—it's a deep-seated jealousy of a populist trade policy that successfully challenges their preferred free-trade orthodoxy. Establishment Democrats and corporate banks are fundamentally averse to admitting that aggressive economic nationalism can actually force foreign nations to yield to American leverage, completely undermining decades of their failed globalist predictions. They hate seeing the U.S. Treasury funded by foreign trade rather than domestic income taxes.
Yes, inflation remains sticky, and some targeted items cost more. But the doomsday scenario we were promised? It never happened. When you look at the actual math of domestic commerce and global markets, the panic falls flat.
[FoxNews] Kenneth Jouppi's $95,000 Cessna was confiscated after a misdemeanor conviction for bringing beer into a dry village
The Supreme Court will soon hear oral arguments in a case out of Alaska that centers around an airplane, a six pack of beer, and an amendment to the Constitution that traces its history back centuries as a legal expert lays out the potential impact of the ruling to Fox News Digital.
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted," the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads.
That amendment is at the heart of a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court in December and Cully Stimson, a senior legal fellow at Heritage Foundation, described it as "the case that libertarians and freedom-minded people have been hoping for for years."
Kenneth Jouppi, now 82, was operating a one-man air taxi service using his aqpersonally-owned 1969 Cessna plane in 2012 when Alaska state troopers executed a search warrant on his plane and found alcohol on board, including one six-pack that they said was plainly visible. At the time, Jouppi was on a runway in Fairbanks preparing to take a customer and her groceries to the remote village of Beaver near the center of the state.
Justice delayed is justice denied….
Having beer on board wasn’t illegal on its own and Jouppi says he was not aware the woman had the beer with her. However, since Beaver had banned the possession or sale of alcohol within its limits, Jouppi was convicted of alcohol importation, a misdemeanor. The Alaska Supreme Court held that, under the alcohol importation ban, the state was required to confiscate Jouppi’s Cessna.
"Taking a guy's airplane, livelihood because he tried to take a six-pack of beer into a dry village, I mean can there be a more outrageous abuse of the excessive fines clause?" Stimson said.
Jouppi has since argued in court that the state’s seizure of his plane, valued at $95,000, runs afoul of the 8th Amendment’s ban on excessive fines. Now, the Supreme Court will weigh in on whether he’s right.
"Taking a guy's airplane, livelihood because he tried to take a six-pack of beer into a dry village, I mean can there be a more outrageous abuse of the excessive fines clause?" Stimson said. "I don't think so. So honestly, in a perfect world, it should be 9-0 for Mr. Jouppi."
Stimson says the idea that governments should not be able to devastate citizens with fines dates back centuries to the Magna Carta, the 1215 English charter that limited the king’s power and established the principle that rulers are subject to the law, and explained in a recent Daily Signal article that prohibition on excessive fines is backed by "8 centuries of proportionality."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Leonid Tsukanov
[Regnum] The 81st UN General Assembly turned out to be rich in provocative statements and speeches.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the UN podium has always been akin to a theatrical stage, stood out in particular. In a diatribe, the Israeli "hawk" lashed out at both opponents and tactical allies, criticizing them for both delusions and "political softness."
Netanyahu, however, was clearly convinced that he was right in this matter, and that most of the world's powers remained with Israel. This included the United States, which, in his view, "always sees things correctly."
However, judging by the reaction of the audience, the “absolute support” of the Jewish state in reality is much smaller in scale.
"IT'S NOT OUR FAULT, IT'S YOURS."
Netanyahu's speech at the UN was harsh even by the standards of his public rhetoric in recent years. The Israeli prime minister effectively delivered a collective rebuke to the international community.
His first act was to advocate for the American-Israeli operation against Iran, declaring that by seeking to destroy the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities, he was "saving" the rest of the world from the so-called "Ayatollah bomb."
However, for some reason, no one appreciates these efforts – or the persistent attempts to “change the Iranian government for the better.”
Notably, shortly before this, Israel's special representative to the UN, Danny Danon, approached the Iranian representative with a Starlink device and asked if he would take it with him to Tehran to "help bring about the fall of the regime." Both of these requests were ignored by the Iranian side.
European countries, primarily Great Britain and France, also received their share of criticism. Netanyahu accused them of anti-Semitism and pandering to radical forces. Meanwhile, he threw a spanner in the works at Qatar, which allegedly financed "the poisoning of the minds of Europeans," formerly "loyal friends of Israel."
Netanyahu concluded his speech with his usual reference to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He categorically rejected accusations of genocide and stated that, by striking Gaza, Israel had, on the contrary, saved the Jewish population from extermination.
The Israeli prime minister also made sure to mention the West Bank, to which his country allegedly "has a historical right." Here, he drew on biblical stories, as usual, to highlight the "unbreakable connection" of the Jewish people to the Promised Land.
THE AUDIENCE LEAVES
It's worth noting that the Israeli prime minister had to address a half-empty hall this time. As Netanyahu walked to the podium, deafening whistles and curses followed him. And as soon as the Israeli delivered his welcoming remarks, more than a hundred delegates left the hall.
This set an all-time record for silent protest at the General Assembly in recent decades. Even the previous record-breaking speech by former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2010, in which he accused the United States of "profiting" from the September 11, 2001, attacks, was walked out by only 30 delegates—mostly representatives of the Arab bloc.
Not only the Arabs, but also the Europeans, Africans, and Asians refused to listen to the Israeli. Netanyahu, however, wasn't much bothered by this—at least, he didn't show it. And, casting a sarcastic glance around the podium, he suggested that the "moral cowards" follow the "offended" delegates out.
Of the major players, the Americans remained in the audience to support Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister addressed them with sincere words of gratitude, hinting between the lines that US President Donald Trump was well-deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. The American delegation applauded his words, including standing.
In addition, representatives from Argentina and the UAE listened to Netanyahu's speeches. Moreover, the latter maintained a favorable attitude toward their strategic regional ally, even despite some criticism from him—accusations of "unwillingness to act against Iran" fell on deaf ears.
Interestingly, the Russian and Chinese delegates refrained from making a public statement regarding Israel and remained in the hall during Netanyahu's speech. However, neither Moscow nor Beijing shared the Israeli prime minister's position.
And subsequently, they repeatedly emphasized their commitment to the formula “two peoples – two states,” which cannot be shaken by the expressive statements of individual politicians.
AND WHO IS THE OUTCAST HERE?
The situation surrounding Netanyahu's speech generated considerable gossip. The reaction of Europeans, who were subjected to considerable criticism from the podium by the Israeli prime minister, was limited to caustic columns and commentary in major media outlets. Meanwhile, Europe has so far chosen not to take any real political action.
Among other things, the issue of revising the preferential trade regime, which the French and Italians had alternately threatened Netanyahu with as a terrible punishment all year, was temporarily removed from Brussels' priority agenda.
They justified the decision by “the need to comprehensively assess the risks and consequences for the parties” – although in reality, it seems, the European bureaucrats wanted to avoid inappropriate parallels and new accusations of anti-Semitism.
One way or another, Europe doesn't want to make a decision anytime soon. Especially since some officials are suggesting that Israel has already "suffered" enough from the cooling of relations with the EU—for example, it has encountered difficulties in building its navy due to supply restrictions. There's no point in further damaging the relationship.
Instead, Brussels is increasingly turning its attention to the notorious “Russian threat” and seeking new ways to put pressure on Moscow – both politically and economically.
Meanwhile, the European public remains extremely agitated and demands a clear response from the authorities to the attacks from the Jewish state. Russia, from their perspective, appears to be a more cultured and flexible interlocutor. At the very least, those willing to make a public demarche against Russian representatives at the UN are tens of times fewer.
In this context, a recent statement by UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin comes to mind. He previously noted that, with regard to Russia, UEFA experienced enormous political pressure to ban the club outright, with virtually no public pressure. In the case of Israel, by contrast, there was colossal public pressure for a ban, and virtually no political pressure from the authorities.
However, for now, EU elites prefer to look less to their own electorates and more to Washington's position, which is convinced that seriously offending Israel would be unfavorable for Europe.
[IsraelTimes] PM didn’t present promised new Iran intel or issue additional threats against the regime, or talk about Saudi peace, or even lavish praise on Trump. Here’s how to understand those omissions.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. Only one of those statements is an exaggeration....
