West’s Honor Killings Blind Spot, Australia Imported Violent Antisemitism and other commentary
Crime desk: West’s Honor Killings Blind Spot
In the West, “an institutional reluctance to name the motive” in honor killings yields disaster, warns Kevin Cohen at The Wall Street Journal. In the Netherlands, a Syrian refugee father and two brothers are
“accused of murdering” a girl, 18: They saw “an intolerable breach of family honor” in her “ordinary assimilation into Dutch norms.” Fact is, “Asylum and refugee pathways increasingly admit families” without
checking if their social codes match the “host society.” Plus, Western “police departments routinely categorize honor-based incidents under generic domestic-violence headings — often reporting them without reference to ideological motives.” Argh! “We need clear legal definitions, specialized policing, mandatory integration frameworks and a willingness to confront cultural practices that conflict with individual rights.”
Hate beat: Australia Imported Violent Antisemitism
Jews have a “deep history” in Australia of “proud service to thenation,” with no real “historic anti-Semitism,” observes Misha Saul at City Journal. “Murderous Jew hatred is an imported scourge.” After the
Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, police in New South Wales “asked Jews to leave the Sydney central business district” because they couldn’t protect them. “Hundreds of men” marched to the famed Opera House “to light flares, threaten and chant against the Jews.” While Australia “has been incredibly successful” at assimilating immigrants, the country ought to “be more selective” to avoid “importing ethnic or religious hatreds.” The solution is “not better barricades”; it is “to prevent the enemies of civilization from entering the gates.”
Conservative: Albanese Failed To Curb Jew-hatred
“Australians have not come to expect much from Anthony Albanese when it comes to moral leadership,” grumbles Spiked’s Hugo Timms. True to form, he didn’t answer the Bondi Beach massacre with “the kind of frank speech on anti-Semitism and its causes that Australia’s Jewish community had been waiting to hear for over two years,” instead “talking about reforming Australia’s already strict gun laws.” His government’s “indifference to the terrifying rise of Jew hatred in Australia must now be judged as its biggest and most unforgivable” failure. For Albanese and his Labor Party, “allowing a toxic loathing of Israel to fester in Australia was the price for a second term of government.” Combating antisemitism requires treating “it with the seriousness it deserves” — which Albanese “failed to do.”
Media watch: Podcasting Hate
Podcaster Jennifer Welch is a prime “example of how many on the left” now “constitute some of the greatest sources of” disinformation, thunders Jonathan Turley at Res ipsa loquitur. Her latest low: Declaring that Charlie “Kirk ‘justified’ his own killing” by citing the “repeatedly debunked” claim that “Kirk shrugged off the killing of school kids from gun violence.” No: He was defending gun rights, arguing “that there will clearly always be examples of gun violence and that it is ridiculous to treat the right as invalid if such deaths occur.” Indeed, people “will also abuse religious rights and associational rights in committing crimes. The point is that these rights are greater than such abuses.” No matter: Welch will “will continue not only to inject” hate “directly into the veins of her listeners but also to fan the rage by assuring them that” they’re “not hateful in engaging in such hateful rhetoric.”
Culture critic: Gen Z’s Self-Diagnosis Craze
“Mental-health problems should not be stigmatized,” but the trend of younger people self-diagnosing “should be,” argues Lily Hamson at UnHerd. Ever-more teens are “diagnosing themselves with psychiatric
conditions, using information gleaned from friends” or the Web, and “working these supposed conditions into their self-images and behaving accordingly.” “Many never seek professional help,” which could catch
the misdiagnosis. This ramped up during “the pandemic years,” and “McCarthyism-levels of cancel culture”; were “straight, white, affluent” young people “using neurodivergence to join the ranks of the
marginalized”? When the culture “systematically rewards suffering, people tend to find a reason to suffer” — at “grave risk of romanticizing, or trivializing, the real issues.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
