"It's terrorism in the most vicious manner"
We should not forget who started this war, nor the manner in which they started it
But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
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(A short note before we get started: If you’ve been reading what I’ve written about Israel over the past few days, you’ll undoubtedly have noticed that I have some strong feelings on the subject. I make no apologies for that. One thing I will never do in this space is temper my views and opinions to mollify people. You can like what I have to say or not, but know that I will never compromise my views merely to avoid aggravation.
Of course, if I’m mistaken or incorrectly cite a source, I will own that. I want my readers to know I write what I believe and have the integrity to face the music when I fall short.)
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Over the past few days, the world has been given a master’s class in evil. From the beginning of the 10/7 terror attack in southern Israel, Hamas fighters didn’t go after people able to fight back. They went after unarmed civilians- mothers, children, babies, and senior citizens- who posed no military threat. It was an unbelievably cowardly attack. The sheer brutality and senselessness of the killings were exceeded only by Hamas’ pride in carrying it out.
By now, many of us have seen the pictures- burned babies, multiple dead bodies, executed innocents, and not one of them in a military uniform. Not that soldiers didn’t die, of course. Many died valiantly while trying to stave off Hamas fighters, but there were far more executed civilians.
But while people in places like New York City’s Times Square are holding rallies blaming Israel for the attacks, cooler heads must prevail. No one on the Left should participate in this type of public anti-Semitism.
This sick display is akin to those Arab-Americans The Former Guy swears he saw celebrating in New York on 9/11. No one should celebrate a movement that slaughters non-combatants- including children, babies, women, and senior citizens. That is precisely what this rally is doing.
NEW YORK — The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is facing a political firestorm after the organization promoted a pro-Palestine rally in the wake of Hamas militants’ attacks on Israeli communities.
The group did not organize Sunday’s rally, its leadership said Monday. But several lawmakers with DSA ties are distancing themselves from what was said at the event.
“It should not be hard to shut down hatred and antisemitism where we see it. That is a core tenet of solidarity,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y), one of six DSA members in Congress, in a statement late Monday — her first comments on the rally.
“The bigotry and callousness expressed in Times Square on Sunday were unacceptable and harmful in this devastating moment. It also did not speak for the thousands of New Yorkers who are capable of rejecting both Hamas’ horrifying attacks against innocent civilians as well as the grave injustices and violence Palestinians face under occupation,” she said.
Politically, I identify as a Democratic Socialist, but I cannot and would never get behind anything so patently offensive. The Times Square rally excuses and justifies the evil Hamas visited upon the people of Israel on 10/7, something there can be neither reason nor excuse for.
The rally was another example of anti-Semitism at work, even though those behind it would never admit it.
Nonetheless, anti-Semitism within New York’s DSA is nothing new.
In a statement, NYC-DSA Steering Committee Member Nadia Tykulsker said the group promoted the event “at the request of a coalition partner because we believe in equality and justice for all Palestinians and Israelis, and we know that war will take more lives.”
The group opposes harming and targeting civilians, Tykulsker said.
“It is shameful that politicians in our state are exploiting this moment to target a socialist organization and divide the vibrant left in New York — whose sole aim in politics is to grow the power of working people for freedom against exploitation and oppression — instead of focusing our attention where it should be: on the atrocities and tragic loss of life in the region,” she added.
Support for Israel has been a bedrock principle in New York politics; the state has more Jews outside of Israel than anywhere in the world. New York leaders in both parties often make trips there, burnishing their ties with Jewish communities back home.
The Democratic Socialists of America now find themselves at a crossroads for their apparent support of Hamas in the wake of the group’s 10/7 terrorist attack on Israel.
DSA finds itself now facing some very choppy waters.
The reckoning for the DSA in the wake of Hamas’ attacks on Israel could mark a realignment at the extreme end of the Democratic Party. Progressive politicians looking for an endorsement from the DSA have long faced a Middle East litmus test, answering questions about whether they’ll boycott Israel and if they back Palestinians “living under occupation.”
The brutality Saturday — violence of a greater scope and intensity than earlier Israeli-Palestinian clashes — has shaken some who had been boosted by the DSA. And the blowback has been felt across Congress, statehouses and city halls where the party has made inroads.
In Michigan, Rep. Shri Thanedar officially renounced his DSA membership, saying in a statement Wednesday that he won’t “associate with an organization unwilling to call out terrorism in all its forms.”
In Los Angeles, DSA-endorsed City Council member Nithya Raman rejected the group’s rhetoric late Tuesday, saying a national DSA statement on the attacks “failed to reckon with the horrors committed by Hamas and was unacceptably devoid of empathy for communities in Israel.”
In New York, Congressman Jamaal Bowman, a vocal critic of the Israeli government, allowed his DSA membership to lapse.
DSA is facing challenging times. Why? Because of a reluctance to unequivocally condemn Hamas for the largest massacre of Jews since WWII.
There is nothing in this attack that’s morally ambiguous. When the victims are unarmed civilians- women, children, babies, the elderly- there can be no defending the attack as a “military” action. There’s nothing “military” about calmly executing terrified civilians as they hide behind an automobile or burning their houses down so they’ll come out of their safe room and be killed.
There can be no proclaiming terrorism to be morally defensible. No matter what “justification” you may employ, terrorism is reprehensible. There is no- zero, zip, none, nada- circumstance that could begin to justify the execution of non-combatants.
This weekend in Israel, a far-right Islamist group perpetrated the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, murdering entire families, including babies, in their beds and slaughtering 260 concertgoers. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed in all, and over 100 others taken hostage.
Israel’s far-right government predictably responded by choking off all food, electricity, and fuel to Gaza’s 2 million residents and then preparing a military assault more untempered by concern for civilian casualties than ever before. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, made the brutality of what is to come plain on Monday, saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
And no small number of supposed leftists found in all this cause for celebration. Others, meanwhile, loudly refused to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, insisting it was not their place to decry the “military strategy” or “violent resistance” of oppressed Palestinians….
[T]hese responses constitute a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values. Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects or one doesn’t. What’s more, cheering (or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn) the murder of children isn’t just morally grotesque but also politically self-defeating.
Today, a loud minority of Palestine’s self-declared “champions” demand that loyalty to the cause requires blind indifference toward the mass murder of Jews.
(Meh, they’re only Jews. Look at how many Palestinians Israel has killed over the years.)
Some of the rhetoric in the aftermath of the 10/7 terrorist attack was unimaginably disgusting.
It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities. The national leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine declared the weekend’s events a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” touting Hamas’s success in “catching the enemy completely by surprise.” The Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauded the Palestinian resistance’s “unprecedented anti-colonial struggle,” pledged its solidarity to that struggle, and vowed, “No peace on stolen land!” At a rally co-sponsored by socialist organizations in New York City, one speaker spoke approvingly of the mass murder of Israeli teenagers, saying, “There was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”
Those “several dozen hipsters” were people with friends and loved ones, not things or political pawns, and certainly not abstract concepts like a derogatory label.
Many of those “hipsters” so readily dismissed by the unnamed speaker are now dead, victims of terrorists who wanted to kill anyone and everyone they crossed paths with. They weren’t military targets because Hamas isn’t an army. They’re a terrorist organization that aims to destroy Israel and push Jews into the Mediterranean Sea.
And yet these Leftists seem to have forgotten the most essential part of this equation- the basic humanity of the victims of 10/7.
Then again, some Left-wing intellectuals felt the need to camouflage their rhetoric to the point of indecipherability. Being plain-spoken would’ve made it clear they were giving a free pass for the mass murder of children and other non-combatants.
In terms of being obtuse, however, few committed more verbal atrocities than an editor at Harper’s:
to search for an analogue seems almost inappropriate to Palestinians’ world-historical(!) audacity to seize the components of self-determination for themselves, if only because the idiom of liberation invents itself anew with each instance that the yoke of bondage is sloughed off
a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude — these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia. the thrum of history as it develops is one of force; its inertia and advance require some momentum
I’ve read through those two paragraphs a half-dozen times without knowing being able to decipher what the word salad is supposed to mean, but as verbal vomit goes, it’s rather impressive. Someone did take the time to decode it, though I suspect it left him with a headache and a need for a drink:
In this intellectual’s telling, the killings of entire families in their beds are not atrocities that contradict the left’s fundamental commitment to the inherent worth of every human life; they are “drastic actions in need of no apologia.” Such sentiments were not altogether aberrant among left-wing public intellectuals. A Marxist professor at Birkbeck University of London declared that the murder of 260 Israelis at a rave was a “consequence” for “partying on stolen land.” Other academics, and a wide variety of campus student organizations, issued statements pointedly refusing to criticize “Palestinian resistance.”
Meanwhile, social media was replete with claims that Hamas’s atrocities constituted heroic progress toward decolonization and that Jewish Israeli civilians were fair targets for violence as they are settlers occupying stolen lands.
All this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt.
Or morally bankrupt and intellectually sick; take your pick.
The idea of being murdered in a terrorist attack as a “consequence” for “partying on stolen land” is an egregiously amoral judgment for an equally egregiously amoral academic to pass. It’s an easy and ridiculously insensitive thing to say when sitting in the comfort of an overstuffed chair behind your mahogany desk, swirling a snifter of fine cognac.
What happened on 10/7 was not “Palestinian resistance.” It was “terrorism,” or if you want to split hairs, “mass murder.” Hamas’ atrocities don’t constitute “heroic progress” unless you believe slaughtering families, burning babies, executing defenseless civilians, and raping women represent “heroic progress.” If that’s the case, I’d submit that you’re a sick bastard badly in need of a morality transplant.
[I]t looks as though a few leftists were eager to demonstrate their superlative moral clarity by fighting with liberals about the legitimacy of a Palestinian uprising aimed squarely at the IDF and conducted in the name of democratic equality; so eager that they would not be deterred by the fact that the weekend’s events bore scant resemblance to that scenario.
Um…that would be because “the weekend’s events” had nothing to do with “the legitimacy of a Palestinian uprising aimed squarely at the IDF.” Hamas had no intention of aiming anything “squarely at the IDF” because they knew they were outmanned, outgunned, and would be wiped out in short order. No, taking on unarmed civilians and killing indiscriminately is much easier.
What we actually witnessed was not “the Palestinians” mounting a violent struggle for justice but a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood-and-soil nationalism. Hamas’s project is antithetical to the left’s foundational values of secularism, universalism, and egalitarianism. And it is also completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation. Western radicals’ predominant prescription for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is a “one-state solution,” in which Israelis and Palestinians all enjoy democratic equality in a single binational state. Hamas’s atrocities have not advanced this ideal but set it back, lending credence to those who insist a one-state solution is a recipe for ceaseless civil war. This weekend was not a triumph for the left’s project in Palestine but a disaster.
The Left’s vision for Palestine is about as unrealistic and unworkable as possible. Hamas aims to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t bode well for a “one-state solution” in which Israelis and Palestinians enjoy democratic equality in a binational state.
Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
The problem is that the Palestine solution Leftists like DSA want to see has no relation to the reality on the ground. Some of these folks believe Israelis and Palestinians could coexist harmoniously if only they were provided the right incentives and motivations.
The truth is that while that might be a noble goal, it will be a long time before Jews and Muslims line arms around a campfire, make S’mores, and sing “Kum Bah Yah.” There’s too much anger and hatred, too much blood has been spilled, and there are too many with too much invested in maintaining the status quo.
So, no, 10/7 wasn’t an act of “heroic Palestinian resistance.” Nor was it a “consequence” of “partying on stolen land” or “drastic actions in need of no apologia.” It was terrorism, the mass murder of innocent civilians in the name of…well, nothing meaningful. Hamas attacked and massacred more than 1000 innocent civilians because they could.
Let’s not make it more than it was.
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