Month: January 2025

The anti-semitism envoy Jillian Segal now wants a national cabinet meeting “after summer attacks on Jewish Australians”. The attacks were as far as I know acts of vandalism, and not attacks on the persons of Jewish Australians, as implied by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) news article. No one has been arrested for these acts of vandalism and so who is responsible has not been established. We must keep in mind that in the context of a propaganda war, it is important to appear to be the blameless victim of evil people. Some might remember the young girl bawling her eyes out on American television claiming to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators? Years later it turned out she had never even been to Kuwait, and that she received acting lessons to make her performance more convincing.

Today protesting against genocide is near illegal and attracts accusations of being “anti-Semitic.” I had to look up the meaning of Semitic because I always thought that Semitic includes the Arabs and their language. Like a lazy undergrad I banged it into the A.I. thing and found I was not mistaken, below is the A.I. answer.

The term Semitic originates from the name Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 10). Shem is traditionally considered the ancestor of a group of peoples and languages mentioned in the Bible, including the Hebrews, Arameans, Assyrians, and others.

Linguistic Origin

The term Semitic languages was first coined by German scholar August Ludwig von Schlözer in the late 18th century. He used it to categorize a group of related languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Akkadian. These languages share common linguistic features, such as similar root systems and grammatical structures. They were associated with peoples thought to be descendants of Shem based on the biblical genealogies.

Broader Usage

Over time, the term expanded in meaning:

1. Linguistic: Referring to the Semitic language family, which includes ancient and modern languages such as:
   • Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian)
   • Hebrew
   • Aramaic
   • Arabic
   • Phoenician
   • Amharic and Tigrinya (spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea)
2. Ethnic and Cultural: It was historically used to describe peoples speaking Semitic languages, though this usage is now less common due to its imprecision and potential for misuse.

Modern Considerations

The term “Semitic” today is most commonly associated with linguistics, but it is also linked to the concept of anti-Semitism, which specifically refers to prejudice against Jews. This usage arose in the 19th century but is misleading, as it implies hostility toward all Semitic-speaking peoples, which was not its original intent.

Recently in an article I was reading on the al Jazeera website the author described our era as ‘awful.’ The subject was the Gaza massacre and its implications for global relations which undeniably give truth to the old saying that the decay of a neighborhood starts with a single broken window remaining broken.

If our western civilization were a neighborhood, then we could indeed say its windows are been smashed by a gang of juvenile delinquents who by the absence of consequences are assured they can do whatever they want. If Israel can annex territories not included in the 1948 UN resolution that created Israel, then Russia can take as much of Ukraine as it can afford to pay for in dead young men, the Chinese could well invade Taiwan, and the United States take over Greenland. Trump, in an interview, would not exclude using the military to achieve the annexation of Greenland, and why would he exclude using what he has at his disposal? International law? Increasingly not worth the paper it’s written on.

A powerful nation might one day decide Australia is too big for the size of its population which could be forcefully displaced to Tasmania, leaving the rest with all its resources to be occupied by hundreds of millions of settlers, maybe as moral justification claiming a god of their own making said it was in fact theirs.

At a national level it’s not much better. The vandals have been hard at work dismantling the structures upon which western civilization was erected. The rot has spread throughout the system and probably beginning with those at society’s fringes who actively and in a post-modernist way, rendered empirical truth an old fashioned concept. Legislators and the executive were quick to find advantage in truth being whatever fits the theory, or can be invented if necessary, and as a consequence today in legislation and its enforcement, truth is meaningless. The end no longer justifies the means because in the absence of an unbiased moral authority there is no longer need to justify anything.

There’s an Koan (Zen teaching story) in which a young monk goes to the master requesting permission to travel to a nearby kingdom to lecture its king on how wrong is his use of fear and repression. The master refuses the young monk permission explaining he well knows the king in question, and that he would neither listen nor change. Sometimes, the master further explains, people need to find their own way to enlightenment by a process of mistake and painful consequence. The same applies to nations, and if they fail to correct their errors then only collapse can be the outcome.

I’ve nearly finished reading T. E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” My liking of this book is not as an historical record of the Arab revolt, but as a tableau of existence as lived by Lawrence and his Arab fighters during the rebellion. It was living in a state of hyper-masculinity that found expression in physical and mental suffering, heroic battles, heroic friendships which often extended into a hyper-male sexual expression. I’ll have a few more comments to make, and including the irony of how Lawrence died.

And, last Sunday’s demo. Better numbers than the week before. Maybe that had something to do with the fact Sydney trains were running near normally…

“The idea is not to publish anything, it’s to publish everything that makes people doubt, brings them to reflect, to ask questions, to not end up closed in by ideology,”

Director of Charlie Hebdo ‘Riss,’ who survived the 2015 attack, in an interview with newspaper “Le Monde.”

Continuing with our anti-war demos. Actually what’s happening in the Middle East can barely be described as a ‘war’ in the traditional meaning of the word. A better description would be ‘murder war’ in response to an insurrection. That being murdering as many people as possible to crush their legitimate aspirations of freedom and sovereignty over their ancestral lands. It should have been expected from the very beginning when in 1948 the Palestinians were punished for crimes committed by the Germans. Wrong in every way it could be, even Albert Einstein thought the creation of Israel a mistake.

If Israel has any ambition of surviving into the next century, then this massacre must stop and negotiations begin whilst that remains possible. They can’t count on mama United States to forever protect them from the consequences of their undeniable crimes, and the Arabs are winning hearts and minds, are becoming stronger in unity, and increasingly are better armed. Israel’s nuclear deterrent will be null and void when the creators of advanced mathematics build an arsenal of their own, something not lost on the Israeli far-right. The greatest threat to Israel’s survival is not what they call ‘human animals,’ but rather the Israeli far-right whose imbecility is only matched by their coward cruelty.

Our demos have somewhat shrunk in number of participants, but not in passion and I think we can say it is having an effect. Our government, who are for the most part decent Aussies, have changed tack on questions of Palestinian sovereignty and put up barriers to war criminals and far right Israeli extremists from entering the country. A wise step away from Australia being branded a supporter of genocide by all nations other than the United States.

Off topic, but I can’t help having a dig. Below is a drawing done by Michelangelo of his boyfriend Tommaso dei Cavalieri. I was led to believe he was the model for Michelangelo’s “David’, but apparently not, the claim is that ‘David’ was sculptured from imagination and knowledge of human anatomy. I find that a bit hard to believe, there’s no reason the artist would not have used a model. For sure there were plenty of young men with decent bodies in the backstreets of renaissance Florence.