A Mini-Series Coming Soon: Gaza, Israel, and Improper-ganda

It will require some intense reading on my part, but next week I will spend some time on these pages discussing two books which interest me and confirm intuitions I have long held. One is Jed Babbin with Herbet London, The BDS War Against Israel: The Orwellian Campaign to Destroy Israel Through the Boycot, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. The second is Joshua Muravchik, Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.  My plan is to report on these, at least giving a report on each. With so much of the weight of public clamor turned against Israel, I want to raise an informed and articulate dissenting voice. 

With Shakespeare, I think the time is out of joint. But the days that are upon us are perhaps best described in the remarkable poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming. It certainly bears reading, meditation, and discussion. 

And next week, some reports on readings . . . .

Meanwhile. . . 

 

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

 

THE SECOND COMING

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

 

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

 

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

 

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

 

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

 

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

 

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

 

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

 

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

 

 

The darkness drops again but now I know

 

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

 

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

 

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And then, read this article from the NY TImes cocerning anti-Semitism in Europe: http://goo.gl/IEtxsy