Once Upon a Time We Had a Little Poodle

Once upon a time we had a little poodle. Very much like the one in the pic, incidentally. He came to us on his own accord—we neither bought him nor got him from anyone else. Later we learnt he had been dumped. As a result, he always remained a little reluctant to get into a car (on the way out, not the return journey). I first met him when he joined me on my walks with our bitch, Sandy. When I returned home and shut the gate after me he would look at me with his dog’s eyes. I just could not stand it; so we took him in. So neglected was he that we only found out he was a poodle after he had been properly trimmed and cleaned. We called him Poonch and he was with us for about ten years during which we loved him very much. In the end he got cancer and suffered terribly. Even as the vet put him to sleep in Dvora’s arms, he licked her hand for the last time.

Like all poodles, Poonch was clever and quick on the ball. However, he had a problem. Perhaps being aware of small size, he was afraid of large dogs. Being afraid of large dogs, he regularly barked at them and sometimes attacked them. As a result he got what you would expect and what, in fact, he deserved. Twice he was almost bitten to death. But he seemed never to learn.

And why am I telling you about this? Because it reminds me of the foolishness of some feminists. By all means get furious at me, but let me explain first. Nature has made men considerably stronger, physically, than women. Thanks in part to the military, which in its attempts to understand what women can and cannot do in its ranks has been studying the issue for decades, the details have been worked out quite precisely. But is such study really necessary? There are some things that the dumbest person on earth knows, or at any rate should know, without ever having attended school.

An American friend of mine keeps telling me that men are being pushed to the wall by women. Primarily, but of course not only, in the United States. Women, he says, are surpassing men in terms of education and professional achievement. And, perhaps most important of all, their ability to present themselves as victims. Not only does criminal law discriminate in their favor—in some ways it has done so ever since the world began. But for a man to win a suit against a woman has become difficult, sometimes all but impossible. He even sent me an article, “How to Prepare Our Sons for Matriarchy,” by one Jenny Hoople—Jenny who?—at the “Good Men Project.”

As Poonch’s injuries showed, the combination of superior physical strength with the feeling that one is under attack is as dangerous as dangerous can be. Not just any psychologist but any ten-year old can tell you that. Unfortunately, I fear, the outcome will be that more and more women are going to get killed by men. Especially men whom they know and who may very well have loved them at one point or another.

The following headlines seem to confirm my guess.

1. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/vio.2017.0016

“Although the prevalence of intimate partner homicide in the late 1970s was similar for men and women, the number of male victims has steadily declined ever since… In contrast, female intimate partner homicides actually increased up until the early 1990s before experiencing a far modest decline.”

2. Garen Wintemute et al., “Increased Risk of Intimate Partner Homicide Among California Women Who Purchased Handguns,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 41, no. 2 (2003): 282.

“The results of a California analysis show that “purchasing a handgun provides no protection against homicide among women and is associated with an increase in their risk for intimate partner homicide.”

3. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/14/mexico-murders-women-rise-sharply-drug-war-intensifies

“Of the 52,210 killings of women recorded over the 32-year period, nearly a third took place in the last six years, the report said.”

4. https://www.ozy.com/acumen/why-are-so-many-women-being-killed-in-rich-countries/83636

Seven countries with high GDPs and low rates of violence saw equal or greater numbers of women being killed than men in 2016: Austria, Germany, Belgium, Japan, Slovenia, South Korea and Switzerland.
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5. https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/gender-based-violence-rise,

“Femicide is on the rise in South Africa, with Statistics South Africa reporting that the murder rate for women increased drastically by 117% between 2015 and 2016/17.”

6. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/growing-epidemic-of-femicide-and-impunity/

“Femicide is practically an epidemic throughout the world.”

7. http://time.com/3670126/femicides-turkey-women-murders/

“Karen Ingala Smith, chief executive of British anti-violence organization nia, has been keeping track of all women killed by men (all men–not just current or former partners). On her blog, Counting Dead Women, she’s tallied up 126 women killed by men in 2012, 144 in 2013, and 148 in 2014.”

8. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/03/murdered-women-spain-tackles-femicide-rates-170319132509999.html.

“Women are protesting as rates of violence against them rise, [in Spain].” 

9. https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/04/01/inenglish/1459514254_172242.html

“With one femicide every 30 hours, gender violence on rise in Argentina”

10.   https://unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/mexico_nov2014/Session%203%20UNODC%20ppt.pdf

“[In six European countries] decline of females’ homicide rates slower than males.”

I can already hear the shrill shrieks. Feminists claiming, as they so often do, that it is all a question of blaming the victim. I can see their point. But shouldn’t potential victims try to be a little smarter than poor Poonch, bless his soul, used to be?

Whom the Gods Want to Destroy…

IDF-Soldier-who-shot-neutralized-terrorist-is-suspected-of-murder-Israel-PalestineThe killing last week by an Israeli soldier of a wounded Palestinian terrorist who was lying helplessly on his back has sent the country into a turmoil. No sooner was the picture published on the Net then the Israeli media mounted a wave of protest. Taking up from there, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Minister of Defense Yeelon, and chief of staff Eisenkot quickly denounced the deed and promised that the soldier in question would be put on trial and punished. This was followed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attorney general’s announcement that the charge would be murder.

Israelis like to think that theirs is “the most moral army in the world.” Consequently there was much palaver about the IDF’s “ethos,” its “values,” and so on. But not everyone agreed that the killer was in fact being treated as he deserved to be. Not only did his family and friends stand by him, but images of him, in handcuffs, led to an equally strong wave of protest in his support accompanied by rioting. That caused Netanyahu, a weathervane if ever one there was, to soften his original stance on the case pending a court investigation. Not content with that, right-wing politicians, smelling blood, entered the fray. They lionized the soldier and accused the chief of staff of failing to back his troops. One notorious extreme right-wing activist, Itamar Ben Gvir, demanded that the police investigate Be-Tzelem, the humanitarian organization responsible for taking the image and spreading it. One rabbi has even suggested that, for having the soldier tried, the chief of staff himself should be put on trial.

In his defense, the soldier claimed that the terrorist was moving and that he was afraid that he, the terrorist, might be carrying an explosive belt on his body. This was denied by the man’s commanders and made doubtful by the fact that the terrorist, who had been lying there for no fewer than six minutes before he was killed, had been examined and found unarmed. As always happens in such situations, charges and countercharges quickly multiplied until they congealed into a single opaque, stinking, tissue of truths and falsehoods. I do not know what the outcome is going to be. But I am prepared to bet that the soldier will not be punished as murderers in Israel usually are, i.e. with life in prison. Assuming he is punished at all, almost certainly he will get a pardon of some kind.

All this is still in the future. Meanwhile the fallout from the case is splitting Israeli society from top to bottom. Not to mention other soldiers’ justified fear that, should they be caught in a similar situation or commit a similar deed, their superiors, instead of backing them up, will wash their hands of them. To be sure, the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are not the world’s worst human rights offenders. Unfortunately, though, they are bad enough.

Sun Tzu, in the first chapter of his celebrated On War, says that victory will go to the side who keeps the favor of heaven—meaning, the moral advantage—by formulating rules of behavior and sticking to them. I agree. For those of you who have never read my best-known book, The Transformation of War, or who have forgotten its contents, here is what I wrote about this topic a quarter century ago:

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“[Suppose a war] where one belligerent is much stronger than the other. Under such circumstances, the conduct of war can become problematic even as a matter of definition… Over the long run… fighting the weak demeans those who engage in it, and therefore undermines its own purpose. He who loses out to the weak loses; he who triumphs over the weak also loses. In such an enterprise there can be neither profit nor honor. Provided only the exercise is repeated often enough, as surely as night follows day the point will come when enterprise collapses… Since the very act of fighting the weak invites excess, in fact is excess, it obliges the strong to impose controls in the forms of laws, regulations, and rules of engagement… The net effect of such regulations is to demoralize the troops who are prevented from operating freely and using their initiative. They are contrary to sound command practice if they are observed and subversive of fighting discipline of they are not. Hence Clausewitz’s dictum, plainly observable in every low-intensity conflict fought since World War I, that regular troops combating a Volkskrieg are like robots to men.

A sword, plunged into salt water, will rust…A strong force made to confront the weak for any length of time will violate its own regulations and commit crimes, some inadvertent and others not. Forced to lie in order to conceal its crimes, it will find the system of military justice undermined, the process of command distorted, and a credibility gap opening up at its feet. In such a process there are neither heroes nor villains, but only victims: whom the gods want to destroy, they first strike blind.”

Mr. Netanyahu, are you listening? For God’s sake, GET OUT OF THE TERRITORIES!!!