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Breaking the musical conventions. The post How The Beatles became Chris Cornell’s first love: “It was my music school” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

In moments of meditation or when gifted with a flash from Above, we can glimpse the infinite, where all good things are present and harmony reigns. Most of our lives are dedicated to realizing that good for which we yearn, but we mostly find that it comes piecemeal. As we find that this is a dominating truth of life as we live it, we come to learn the value of correct priorities. We cannot raise the walls without first setting the foundation, nor place the cupola before the walls. But lost in the politics has been the realization … that the ones who have set their sights on the Jews have their sights on them as well. Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s Foreign Minister, showed a competent awareness of the value of prioritizing in his remarks quoted by Elliot Kaufman in the August 27th Wall Street Journal. Talking about losses in the propaganda war with Hamas, Sa’ar said, “We need to survive first. After that, there comes popularity and how much we are able to convince others around the world.” Survival is the first of the rights listed in our Declaration; even liberty comes afterwards. Thus, we allow conscription to survive the danger to survival posed by those who seek us harm. Thus, we recognize a right to self-defense allowing citizens to employ even deadly force if necessary when faced with murderous intent. Thus, in Jewish law, clear threats to life require setting aside almost every legal restriction until life is secured. Thus, our Constitution allows even the most fundamental civil right, the writ of habeas corpus, to be suspended in time of an emergency threatening the life of the Republic. Yet any student of history knows that tyrants love to declare emergencies, that many dangerous situations can be defused, that the human heart can be touched and changed. We know as well that realizing the good in human affairs requires the willingness to sacrifice for its sake. Is it not noble to give up even one’s life to attain peace and understanding? Our heritage sets before us many venerated examples of such sacrifice. These last two paragraphs set out values that here, in our concrete and finite world, seem to be in mortal opposition. We can see the violent passion of some protestors for peace, whom we should assume at least the sake of a sound argument, are sincere in their protestations. We can sense the anger of those who believe with good reason (let us assume to escape following a trivial argument) that their lives are being discarded callously so that others can feel the glow of being thought peacemakers. We should know by now that any argument can be gamed. The world as it is does not follow the ideological preferences of either the dove or the hawk, and any human ideology has its explanatory and practical limits, beyond which it is incompetent. And there is a lamentable history of ideologues of all sorts leaning deeply into their incompetence and causing harm, which is sometimes immense. But at the heart of our civilization is a teaching of a Oneness that sets all apparent dualities in a redeeming context, resolving them as polarities that together express the whole. Darkness and light both are needed to make the first day; good and evil are both needed to give us the dignity of being moral agents, valued partners enlisted by the Creator to develop and preserve the beloved Creation. The ancient wisdom of Ecclesiastes put it so clearly that it even surfaced when I was a child on Top Forty radio — To everything there is season and a time to every purpose under heaven. In a time of relentless confrontation, the ancient words seemed to many of my generation to say that only one of the polarities was being tried, “a time for war” and not “a time for peace.” The balance shifted. But the questions Ecclesiastes encourages to raise require continuous raising. What was appropriate today may not be appropriate tomorrow. To fail to achieve a possible peace would be terrible; to fail to stop a preventable holocaust would be at the least equally terrible. In the blessed security of a nation whose power and prosperity has been the only experience of many of its citizens, deadly danger seems exceedingly remote. Power exercised in a democratic nation follows the will of the people, and sometimes that will becomes flaccid from the easy and variegated pleasures of a prosperous and easy-going life. Politicians seeking power and lacking principle (what a grim and bothersome thing principle is!) capitalize on the popular mood and can continue to do so until the consequences become too uncontrolled. Who needs sacrifice in fat times? But when hurt comes to the door, things change. The fat and powerful stand exposed. Think of Pelosi at her beauty salon, Newsom dining out during lockdown at the French Laundry, Boris Johnson and his pals partying. When people whose lives were shut down by the COVID policies of these politicians who were exposed as violating their own rules that had immiserated everyone else, there was hell to pay. But Sa’ar is talking about something even more basic than the suspended liberties of 2020-2022. He is talking about survival itself. That too has been a problem for politicians to defend. Years after Hitler had broken its treaty obligations and rebuilt Germany’s army, air force, and submarine fleet, years after he had started his concentration camps, had banished Jews from schools, professions, and civil rights, had started gassing the handicapped and mentally ill, had marched into the demilitarized Rhineland, and had seized Austria by threatening invasion, and when he was presently threatening Europe with war if his demands to seize territory from Czecho-slovakia were not met, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain justified his unwillingness to confront Hitler not only by expounding on the moral imperative of peace, but by making the case that the damage a weak peace would make was too distant for Britons to care about: How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. Yet at the same time, when war came, and it was Chamberlain who led Britain into war in September 1939, his earnest seeking of peace brought a distinct advantage that we don’t often hear mentioned today. Winston Churchill, at first isolated and scorned for his opposition to appeasement, was the one who pointed this out in Parliament the day war was declared: In this solemn hour it is a consolation to recall and to dwell upon our repeated efforts for peace. All have been ill-starred, but all have been faithful and sincere. This is of the highest moral value — and not only moral value, but practical value — at the present time, because the wholehearted concurrence of scores of millions of men and women, whose co-operation is indispensable and whose comradeship and brotherhood are indispensable, is the only foundation upon which the trial and tribulation of modern war can be endured and surmounted. This moral conviction alone affords that ever-fresh resilience which renews the strength and energy of people in long, doubtful, and dark days. The ability to see the value of the position he had so strongly opposed is a rare thing to see in politicians in any day. Usually, it is because the causes we embrace have been small causes, or smaller than they need to be. Churchill stood for the largest of causes, for civilization itself, and he succeeded in communicating that to the people who had to fight and win the war in the face of frightful, powerful evil. People on all sides saw that and their seeing it allowed him to effectively unite a nation and the world to the supreme cause. In an era of increasing disunity, political fracturing has brought about unnecessary defeat. The authoritarians whom we fight, who seek to impose their ideologies at the point of a gun, see what they think is weakness in the way free nations hash issues through. It can become excruciatingly dissonant, like the last moments of a Bach fugue, just before all the clashing threads resolve into a triumphant tonic. But those who have little trust in harmony and see only force as regnant. Watching and hearing the fugue of our constitutional politics, the authoritarians see only chaos and hear only discord. The question to us is: have we given up as well? Is that all we hear and see? It is at that moment that we can turn to the score. We conservatives are the ones who know the ancient sources of our freedoms and our civilization. We do not worship mere newness but know that if we are to fully grasp the moment, we need all the gifts that have been garnered in the long march towards the light and have been given to us to use. We know the score; we know where this music is going and how it will come out. We know how to play it. We cannot fail to be fully in the moment. But that moment for us is connected to what came before it and where it is going, and to lose that is to fail. And it is part of the drama to know that there are some things one must do even at the risk of it being impolitic, because of the responsibility of our knowledge and because of our trust that, given the time, we can win for them, those who disagree with us will see what we have done and we will march forward to triumph together. Thus, at a point of disagreement about priorities in war strategies amongst the Allies, Churchill telegraphed to his closest political associate: “It is no use planning for defeat in the field in order to give temporary political satisfaction.” This is what Sa’ar was speaking of today. The flaccid Europeans and their fatuous friends in Canada have scraped together their ruling coalitions by making cheap peace with the Hamas vote, which has been enough to get them power. But lost in the politics has been the realization that was so slow in coming in the Thirties — that the ones who have set their sights on the Jews have their sights on them as well. The trimmers ruling the EU and Canada do not see the stark reality that is, now as in the Thirties, a choice between democracy and a cult of death. Israel cannot afford the luxury of working this through slowly. That ran out on October 7, 2023. If it is a choice between survival and politics, they must choose survival. That is a choice made not in defiance of civilizational norms, but in defense of them, giving the West a little more time to get the picture. Just so, Churchill and Britain bought America precious time to get ready for the war with the death cults of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan. Let us see the large picture, hear the great music. It depends on us day by day to clarify the stakes, to make principled stands, to risk being misunderstood knowing that we will be thanked for it in the end. We will not look for cheap advantage in our own politics at the expense of our deepest principles and commitments. We will carry on, and with God’s help, we will not fail. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Group Allegiances Are Good. Just Not the Fake Ones of DEI. The Stark Differences Between Democracy and Tyranny Europe Learned the Wrong Lesson From the October 7 Attack

Israel’s fair weather allies took depictions of famine in Gaza as their longed-for window to recognize “Palestine.” The blockbuster will be staged at a September sitting of the UN General Assembly, that forum of duplicitous diplomats, fickle and treacherous, inveterate feudists, liars, and extortionists. It would be a storm in a teacup if the catchphrase was a mere misnomer. To the contrary, it grew into a monster. The pretext for leaders of Canada, Australia, Britain and France to preen their virtue feathers couldn’t be more persuasive. The consensus condemns Israel as a child-killing juggernaut.  Small wonder that the four handed down a penal sentence chockfull of spite, ready to declare a state of Palestine knowing that Hamas remains a force to be reckoned with. As a minister in the Australian government put the grimy excuse for diplomacy  “Both Syria and Iraq had a long period where parts of those countries were being occupied and realistically controlled by ISIS. It didn’t stop us from recognizing and having diplomatic relations with those countries.” The long and short of it is that a kamikaze neighbor dumped on the doorstep of Israelis will have de facto license to infiltrate their metropolises, towns, and settlements. Only the UN could pull off a gimmick of this magnitude. Of course ‘Palestine’ won’t exactly be real. It won’t however be a trick of the imagination. Call it a contrivance. Some dignitary will cut a ribbon and salute the colors tottering up a Ramallah flagpole. The ceremonials done with, Israel having decimated one Gaza, will be lured into committing “genocide” in a second arena. “This reflects a commitment to international law and support for the Palestinian people’s rights to self-determination,” said a Palestinian diplomat, speaking in UN mother tongue. He meant a commitment to the game of International Law. The object is to displace Star of David counters on the game board with keffiyeh counters while you mimic, “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Can such buffoonery amount to much? Israel may find itself skating on thin ice. For international law it involves relegation to a fun amateur league. Dreamers of the Two-State Solution will take the recognition of Palestine as a consolation prize. To nine-tenths of UN members it means a step closer to axing Israel’s right to exist. Washington and Brussels will relish a new arm-twister for making Israel do their bidding. To every participant it amounts to a global “Game of Thrones.” Giving the Pals a state is all well and good. But where shall it be fitted? On who’s land? To what extent between the river and the sea? The gift of the givers may not be theirs to give — the Pals are not the only people with skin in the game. Make-believing that Israel’s hot and cold allies are bona fide “critics,” from the get-go they fixated on two criticisms: Israel violates international law. Israel occupies “Palestinian Territory.” The government’s new plan for Gaza rejuvenated the claims which, it is not difficult to prove, are nothing but clumsy calumnies. For instance: Norway’s Foreign Minister declared, “Israel’s takeover of the entire Gaza Strip is an unacceptable violation of international law.” Holland’s Foreign Minister declared, “We have always been clear: Gaza belongs to the Palestinians.” Foreign ministers of the UK, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and Australia issued a joint warning that, “Any attempts at annexation or of settlement extension, violate international law.” You don’t have to be a professor of international law or make a futile Wiki search to hit on the makeshift trick. Indelible records of binding Jewish rights go back to the British Mandate. Cactus thorns to actors who make no bones that Jews have no right to claim any rights, the play book is to not acknowledge that records exist. Referencing instead the ICJ — that go-to kangaroo court for the pro-Hamas in human garb — they quote “thunderous intonations about international law.” Who needs adversaries when the four powers count themselves among allies of Israel? It all begs the question: why did successive Israeli governments, led mostly by Netanyahu, never challenge libels which helped to make Israel a global pariah? What stopped him from demanding to be told the laws of war it violates? And while at it, why not insist on a disclosure of the event by which Israel came to occupy the Pals precious territory. Normally forthright to a fault, Bibi ought to be a safe bet for telling the four powers to stop with their publicity stunt “violations” and “occupation.” To call their bluff. Alas. Even the brilliant orator delivered a risible lesson: “Appeasement towards jihadist terrorists always fails,” said Netanyahu. “Palestine will not happen.” Sadly the firepower of Israel pundits was no less deficient. The general complaint was that recognizing Palestine will reward Oct. 7 and be a slap in the face for victims and hostages. It took a group of British lawyers to attack the incoming missile. Looking to explode the menace in midair, it warned Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s law advisor that recognition of Palestine risked breaking international law. What possible difference could that make? It depends on a catchphrase and its power. Every cause must have one. And since demonizing Israel is the mother of all causes, nothing but the Coca-Cola of catchphrases will suffice. It is demonstrably true that if not for the manic misnomer “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Israel could declare victory in the propaganda war instead of lamenting its victimhood. “Occupation” thus saddled Israel with a nemesis from hell. Skittish governments, fearing to step onto a diplomatic minefield, stumbled onto the mother of all minefields. The catchphrase is anti-Zionism’s Hail Mary. On platforms from Harvard Yard to Piers Morgan Uncensored, Occupation abetted by #GazaHolocaust, excused Oct 7. To believe the narrative there is a beginning to everything, and Oct.7 was not it. Occupation was the beginning. Truth be told, a dereliction of duty by Israeli governments also had a beginning. After more than a decade Netanyahu clutches the key to combat lawfare against the Jewish state. As a younger, more tepid and timid Prime Minister he kicked-started in 2012 an offensive. A commission under retired Chief Justice Edmund Levy was tasked to “Examine the Status of Building in Judea and Samaria.” Netanyahu’s objective was to “regularize” unauthorized settlements on the West Bank. It confirmed his worst fears: Jewish settlements are perfectly in keeping with international law. The panel of three concluded that the West Bank was not occupied territory, and that no legal impediment stood in the way of settlement-building. He got cold feet, and archived the now abandoned arsenal in a document. But there’s a real beginning, and the Levy Report was not it. By winning the 1967 war in six days, and capturing territories from aggressors who intended a second Holocaust — one they would not have denied but proclaimed — the Jews’ military committed a grievous sin. Anticipating diplomatic toil and trouble, the High Court bound Israel to the Geneva Conventions. Its ruling on June 30, 2004 underlies lawfare to this day. It both initiated and perpetuated the international community’s insistence that Israel’s occupation violated international law. Leaving no room for doubt, the High Court wrapped up Israel’s guilt “to go” by using the red flag word, “belligerent”: “The military commander of territory held in belligerent occupation must balance between the needs of the army on one hand, and the needs of local inhabitants on the other.” The ruling willfully ignored the opinion of Judge Stephen M Schwebel, alias U.S. Supreme Court justice, alias Professor of International Law at John Hopkins University, alias member of the UN Law Commission, alias twice elected President of the once proud International Court of Justice. In 1994 he wrote the seminal “Self-Defense” principle, beginning:   “A state [Israel] acting in lawful exercise of its right of self-defense may seize and occupy foreign territory as long as such seizure and occupation are necessary to its self-defense.” To be fair Israel’s High Court tried to ring-fence its ruling. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting mass transfer of population into occupied territory, as practiced by the 3rd Reich in World War II, was not meant to apply to Israelis who chose to live in Judea and Samaria. “Not meant to apply”… A jeweler who decorates his window with all that glitters never meant to be burgled. The High Court chose to attract global condemnation of Israeli occupation. It only goes to prove that honorable intentions, when Jews have them, are marked down as a demerit. And so it happened that “Occupation of Palestinian Territories” (OPT) became the bane of Israel’s disputed existence. It would be a storm in a teacup if the catchphrase was a mere misnomer. To the contrary, it grew into a monster which created facts on the ground. For one thing, the international community adopted OPT. For another, a vocal section of the Diaspora, and even Israelis, nailed their colors to that mast. Third, an economic bubble developed around OPT. Monthly pay slips of untold hundreds of thousands of UN employees depend on the unreal real estate. Thousands of human rights entities owe their business to it. But for the big hoax the world would be a different, if quieter, place. And the Zionist enterprise would not be under pressure to capitulate to Hamas, declare a unilateral ceasefire, and consign the few live hostages to the living dead. READ MORE from Steve Apfel: The UN Wants a New State Bent on the West’s Destruction Can Trump Force Regime Change on Toxic South Africa? South African President Ramaphosa to the White House  

There’s an old saying in politics: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. The same holds true for migration. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, two Israeli parliamentarians — Danny Danon and Ram Ben-Barak — implored America and Europe to welcome Palestinians from Gaza. It was pitched as duty, framed as decency, marketed as morality. For too long, that world has dodged this responsibility, outsourcing it to Europe’s suburbs and America’s cities. But Denmark, of all places, has already believed the evidence the first time. And last month, it finally slammed the door. In August 2025, Copenhagen refused even Palestinian cancer patients, citing the risk that medical mercy becomes migratory permanence. Cruel? That’s what the critics screamed. Clear-eyed? That’s what the Danes knew. Because they had already tried, already paid, already tallied the receipts. The experiment began in 1992, when Denmark took in 321 Palestinians. A tiny figure by global standards. The sort of number a government could proudly point to at international conferences. A token of Nordic benevolence. But like so many tokens, it was symbolic without being thought through. Because those 321 arrivals did not become model citizens. They became a case study in what happens when noble sentiment collides with cultural reality. By 2019, 204 of them — nearly two-thirds — had criminal convictions. Not parking tickets. Convictions. Their children, 999 in number, didn’t break the cycle — they repeated it. Roughly a third, about 330 kids, had convictions of their own. This is not compassion at work. It is arithmetic. A trickle became a torrent: 321 → 204 criminals. 999 → 330 convicts. And still the bill didn’t end there. A 2018 Finance Ministry report estimated that non-Western immigrants and their descendants cost Danish taxpayers €2.4 billion ($2.8 billion) annually, with Palestinians punching far above their demographic weight in welfare dependency. Denmark’s welfare state, built as a civic covenant with its own people, became a bank account for others. So when critics demand to know why Denmark won’t even let in Gaza’s sick, the answer is written in those numbers. Compassion wasn’t denied. Compassion was already tried — and it left scars. The lesson here is not that Palestinians are irredeemable. The lesson is that Western democracies are the wrong vessel for this burden. Europe’s fragile social contracts cannot absorb entire populations forged in a crucible of grievance and resistance. Liberal democracies fracture when stretched beyond their cultural seams. The Danish test proved it. Which is why the future should not be decided in Copenhagen or Chicago, but in Riyadh, Doha, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. The Gulf monarchies, flush with oil wealth and urban megaprojects, can construct new towns in months; surely they can construct new lives for fellow Arabs. Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, and Malaysia, where Islamic tradition underpins civic life, have already signaled willingness to welcome Palestinians. Those initiatives should be encouraged and expanded, because they represent precisely the kind of culturally aligned, regionally grounded solutions that can succeed where Western democracies have failed. Jordan has shouldered millions, to the point that it is now demographically Palestinian in all but name. Lebanon, brittle and broken, has hosted hundreds of thousands for decades, though at immense strain. Egypt, by contrast, has consistently refused permanent resettlement, restricting citizenship and framing Palestinian presence as temporary. But the wider Arab and Muslim world has the resources, proximity, and cultural continuity to assume greater responsibility. For too long, that world has dodged this responsibility, outsourcing it to Europe’s suburbs and America’s cities. That dodge ends now. Because Denmark has spoken. Not in rhetoric but in results. The Danish test was run, the figures recorded, the budget tallied, the verdict written: Never again. READ MORE from Kevin Cohen: Import the Third World, Become the Third World Digital Landmines: Beijing’s Quiet Invasion Syria’s Peace Bid Could Mean Turkey’s Regional Dominance