An extremely belated account of Watcher’s Council results for August 11th. I swear, I’ll be late for my own funeral (actually, there are those who claim I already am, but never mind).Council posts:
The winner was We Could Be Heroes by Done With Mirrors, a meditation on the nature of heroism occasioned by reading a review of the movie World Trade Center, and relating it to his own experience in an emergency.
…when I thought about the hundreds of firefighters who ran to those terrible towers that were raining down molten metal and flaming people like tears, and who went into them — went up into them — and died there, I felt the flicker of connection. Like most other people who heard the stories, probably, I wondered if I would have been so brave, if I was made from the same stuff as those young men, and I had that one memory to say, “I think so.”
Second place was A Few Points That Are Not Morally Equivalent by AbbaGav, a diatribe against moral equivalence.
So I say it plainly: the morality of Israel’s self-defense is superior to the morality of those who attack her, decade after decade, through wars of annihilation and pizzeria suicide bombings alike.
ShrinkWrapped was in third place with Clans of the Alphane Moon, a discussion of the similarities between the modern Left and a schizophrenic during a psychotic break:
There are many similarities between the Arab/Muslim world and the world of the left and their allies in the media. All three clans have failed, and failing, models of the world. The modern world has repudiated communism almost completely and is well on the way to repudiating traditional welfare state liberalism; the media is facing a frightening environment where they no longer have a monopoly on information and its dissemination and are having significant difficulty adjusting to the change; the Islamist world view has been stagnant for 1400 years but only now has the contrast between the modern world and their failure become inescapable. Israel, to a large extent, and America in a much greater way, are the messengers of their doom and they are becoming increasingly shrill and delusional in their agitated and panicky attempts to maintain their sense of themselves as important.
Fourth was Joshuapundit with The War Against the Jews and the War Against Us. He reminds us of what’s important:
The last chapter of a 1,500 year old struggle is about to be played out.
And whether we like it or not, the War Against the Jews is a war against the rest of us, and it’s not just happening in the Middle East anymore.
Non-Council:
In first place was One Cosmos with Israel Has No Right to Exist. Gagdad Bob contemplates the state of anti-Semitism in the world today:
Let’s take the example of Mel Gibson. I don’t care about him as a person, and I have no interest in his particular case. Rather, I want to dispassionately focus more on the content of those things he uttered in his drunken rant. Where did they come from? How could such ideas even exist? But they do exist, and they have existed from the foundation of the world. It is not about the Jews, but about what the Jews represent and symbolize. Because of what they symbolize, they attract and literally generate their opposite, like a myth to defame.
“F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Again, not only untrue, but impossible. On the other hand, because of the thought-blocking effects of political correctness, it seems as if people are incapable of making the banal observation that Islam is quite literally responsible for almost all of the wars in the world.
Taking second place with A Photojournalist Weighs in on the Adnan Hajj Scandal, The Shape of Days interviews a freelance photographer about the process of her work. Through it one gets an insight into the business that created the “fauxtography” scandal so recently revealed in Lebanon.
Third-place winner was Islamist Bandwagons by Abu Aardvark, which looks at the gathering momentum of the Islamist movements:
From the perspective of the Saudis and Egyptians and others, promoting the Sunni-Shia divide was a form of divide and conquer — I think that they hoped that by framing it around “Sunni vs. Shia” they could prevent the consolidation of the “al-Jazeera” frame of “popular movement vs. the Axis of Israel/America/Arab regimes.” They failed. The latter frame has overwhelmingly won out, reflected and supported not only by al-Jazeera but by the Muslim Brotherhood, most press commentary, most political parties, and most of the street demonstrations over the last few weeks.
Read these and all the rest at the Watcher’s place.
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