Netanyahu Speaks
Updates from the continuing capital of European conservatism
Events This Week
Will Wood, a man whose name is an exemplar of both the future and past tense of the verb ‘can’, will (and can) talk to Dr David Levy, today from 4:30 PM till 6:00 PM.
Professor at the John Cabot University, on Plato and Aristotle on How Music Can Make Us Better (Or Worse).
Plato was famously anti-art, suggesting it was mimesis — representation of reality rather than reality itself (and thus corrupted our experience). Though perhaps if he’d seen the films of Rob Schneider he might have changed his mind.
Tas Vezér utca. Register here:
https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-11-plato-and-aristotle-on-how-music-can-make-us-better-or-worse
On Thursday, MCC are putting The Youth under the microscope at their new seminar: Emerging Voices 3.0, Perspectives From Scholars In The Next Generation of Youth Research.
A one day conference, it focuses on two themes:
“Revolutions” – Political activism, changes, and shifts in participation among the new political generation
The AI-generation – Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of artificial intelligence
10AM till 4PM at MCC HQ,
Sign up here.
https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-14-emerging-voices-3-0-perspectives-from-the-next-generation-of-scholars-in-youth-research
Etymology can be a great form of social archaeology. Many will know that before the 1960s the word ‘genocide’ didn’t exist — yet today we think of it as being as old as the hills.
Likewise, did you know that the term ‘soft power’ was made up, in 1990, by one American professor with a book to sell?
Joseph Nye was that professor. He died last year. But not before gifting the world an expression that covers everything from Coca Cola to Rhodes Scholars to think tanks in the Castle District.
Soft power has come in for a lot of flak lately: it’s immeasurable, after all. Best rebutted by Stalin’s quip about the Pope.
Far better, many now argue, to buy another Lockheed Martin PrSM guided missile, than to put on a folk opera in Gdansk.
Raking over the role of soft power, MCC is hosting a one day event, featuring clean-living Ralph Schoelhammer, among many others.
It’s Wednesday, 9AM-5PM.
Sign up here:
https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-12-convincing-the-world-soft-power-potentials-and-competitiveness-in-the-digital-age
Ibrahim Mammadov is the Khanate incarnate, a man who certainly knows his geopolitics onions when it comes to Asia Minor. Ibrahim is a DI fellow of course, but today he’s up at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, from 4PM, explaining Peacebuilding in the Shadow of a War – The Iran War and the Future of the Karabakh Peace Process.
https://hiia.hu/en/esemeny/peacebuilding-in-the-shadow-of-a-war-the-iran-war-and-the-future-of-the-karabakh-peace-process/
Around Town
Do some Israelis hate Christians? That was the frame for Raymond Ibrahim’s sit-down discussion with Netanyahu last week.
“Political leaders in the West are weak,” Netanyahu told Ray.
“How can I respond to the action of a single soldier who’s an idiot, who’s maybe full of hate?” Netanyahu went on.
That’s right: this was an exclusive interview with Dr Iddo Netanyahu, the world’s second most famous Netanyahu (and brother of the first), on Ray’s fantastic YouTube channel.
Sean Paul is in Budapest. Act accordingly.
Now is the summer of our content. Tonight it’s Richard III at the Nemzeti Szinház, in English, with an Israeli touring cast. We may also have two tickets to the show. Enquire within if you would like to snap them up.
Still not enough Shakespeare? Ballet Pécs are doing Romeo & Juliet at the MUPA, Friday and Saturday.
If you loved Episode One of Who’s In Who’s Out, the DI’s excellent new podcast with the excellent Dr Jonathan Price, then you’ll adore Episode Two.
Jonathan talks to two very fine Oxford academics about their cultural bête noirs and hidden gems. Jane Cooper of All Souls chose to banish Bob Dylan from the Western Canon. While Charles Foster, barrister, magistrate and polar explorer, chose to chuck out The Waste Land. In: exquisite Elizabethan poet Robert Southwell, and the 19th century romp Zorba The Greek.
Paper of the Week
The Place of Christianity in the Survival of the West
Iain McGilchrist
Iain McGilchrist is a genre-defying academic who asks the biggest questions about who we are. Most famous for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019), he was a key speaker at our Christian Revival Conference at Oxford Pusey House in March. Now, we’re happy to have a paper from him, spun out of that speech.
In brief: McGilchrist believes we are losing the capacity to narrate ourselves, as narrative gives way to slop: the cacophony of AI, social media, a fractionated attention span. What can redeem that? Perhaps only The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Low self-respect leads to moral degeneracy, deceitfulness, selfishness, lower achievement levels and addiction. This is where I believe we now are, and we need to rediscover all that our right hemispheres at a deeper level know, but which we are now taught to disattend to and disregard. The right hemisphere alone has the capacity to understand the depths of meaning required by those who would approach the ideals on which anciently Western civilisation was founded: Plato’s the good, the true and the beautiful. And I would add at the pinnacle of all the sacred. Without this wiser understanding, human life is already over.
But life can be snatched from the jaws of death. We matter and there is hope. That too is the Christian story.
Ki koran kel aranyat lel
‘Who gets up early will find the gold’