Disclaimer: I am Israeli so not truly objective here and I am very left wing in Israel and support two states and full removal of all the settlements.
The problem most of us have with this situation in the universities and some other places around the world, is not about protests against the Israeli government and policy, that many of us also have, including myself. The problem is that many of this demonstrations are also supporting and justifying rape and massacre of innocent civilians, including kids, just because they are Jewish. An opinion that for some reason is ok to have now.
Yeah. I can tolerate any honest arguments about the history or political solutions. But I don’t have any problem axing the Cornell prof who jumped on a podium and declared Hamas’s massacre to be “exhilarating” and “exciting.”
The main lesson there is academics are a bit overrated. We (the public) should pay colleges (see Biden's IDR loan plan, the tax status of 529 college savings accounts) that employ them less. That is a lot more simple than demanding people who sincerely believe Jews are of the white/settler race (and therefore not worthy of an institutional mission like George Floyd's death) to change their beliefs. Just give them less public money and they can go find private money to make up the difference for their own purposes.
I don't see how hecould be allowed to teach after that, at least not any mandatory courses. And I would judge very harshly any colleague of his maintains friendly (as opposed to strictly professional) relations with him after that, and I would support his firing if he isn't tenured, but I imagine that tenure protections might hold even in this case, and that's perhaps a necessary evil. But that doesn't exempt the institution from treating him as anything less than a complete pariah after these comments. Failure to do so is a strong indication of the institution being anti semitic.
The clip of the Cornell professor sounded really bad. But it was a brief clip. We have no idea what he said before the clip starts. Maybe it provided more of an understandable context; maybe it didn't. But we've been aroused and enraged too often by out of context clips (e.g., the Covington kids) that I'm on a hair-trigger to be suspicious of anyone who presents a brief clip of something outrageous. I'm more than ready to suspect their motives. Our first reaction needs to be suspicion of anyone presenting something intended to be inflammatory. Don't trust, and seek to verify.
OK, so maybe people don't want to watch a 20 minute clip. So present the short clip but provide a link to the full-context video.
He does claim to abhor violence. But then he compares Hamas to Ella Baker, Sojourner Truth, and (most repellently) to Jews who resisted genocide. Notably, none of these people kidnapped, raped, or murdered innocent people. And he says "I would never presume, to tell an oppressed people how they should seek their liberation." I think it's fair to characterize the whole thing as part Hamas apologia, part progressive word salad.
Classic archetype. The son of a Stanford professor who wishes he were a revolutionary, but without the danger or privation.
Give me a break. Nobody would talk of “shades of gray” for this garbage if it justified the murder of members of any other group. Enough excusing antisemitism. He should be fired asap.
Thanks for this. I encourage everyone to read the full speech -- I think it contains a lot of wisdom. I find it repellent that he was exhilarated by even the initial reports of the attack, and unlike him, there are limits beyond which I would tell anyone -- no matter how oppressed -- that they are committing unforgivable atrocities. But the context of his mention of "exhilarated" is specifically *not* to the attack's full "horrific acts" (his words, in that same paragraph) -- he emphasizes that when Palestinians and he felt this, it was before they learned of the murders and atrocities, and in response to the breaking out from Gaza.
We all extend a degree of grace to people who have been through hell. It's normal and compassionate to consider mitigating circumstances. But suffering does not extinguish all moral agency and obligations. It's infantilizing and disrespectful to presume that the "victims" are incapable of moral behavior.
Eh, I suppose he was trying to distinguish between Hamas breaching the wall (exhilarating) and everything Hamas did afterwards (atrocious). A college professor should be able to articulate his meaning more clearly. And should have the good sense to realize that normal people will see the breach and slaughter as part of the same hideous operation. It's like extolling the skill with which the 9/11 hijackers maneuvered the plane.
Reading the entire transcript made me think he should be fired for being a blithering idiot with the analytical skill of a sophomore.
It’s not our job. It’s his employers job to conduct a thorough investigation. If it turns out that it is what it seems to be, then I believe the consequences I outlined should follow. That all such things are always pending proper investigation should go without saying. I acknowledge that unfortunately that’s not always obvious in this day and age.
That's too easy an out. You must be aware that everyone is viewing this, forming opinions, and joining a raging debate. Like Nancy Reagan, we should just say no and not form an opinion on this guy whatsoever unless and until we're satisfied we have enough information.
Re the Nancy Reagan reference--reminds me of an episode of the “Hidden Brain” podcast about outrage bait, and how a study found that outrage actually triggers the pleasure centers of the brain kind of like a drug...outrage is kind of like a “high” that people seek out.
They were quite obviously attacked because they were *Israeli*. Does Hamas hate Israel because it's a Jewish state? Sure, that's a documented part of their politics. Is there a significant overlap between Israeli and Jewish identity? Absolutely. So, yes, you can toss all these terms into a word salad and come out with one big conflation that they were "attacked because they are Jewish".
But the attack was against Israel. It targeted Israelis, not immediately because they were Jewish, but because they were Israeli. No one simultaneously bombed synagogues in the UK, or attacked Cypriot Jews. And it's highly likely that some appreciable minority of the victims of the attack were not even Jewish. Regardless, those victims were attacked all the same, because they were in Israeli towns that Hamas could strike, not because Hamas thought it was specifically targeting Jews for their Jewishness. Hamas simply made no effort to target Jewishness in the first place, despite being a horrifically antisemitic organization.
And this is what Matt was talking about with the stuff about accusations of bigotry. It's REALLY not helping your case to conflate the victims' Israeli-ness with their Jewishness. Because that conflation leads to the mistaken conclusion that, "Well, it's just plain old antisemitism, which we already understand, so we don't have to bother trying to understand anything more about this attack or anyone who supports it."
The reality is, it's not like a bunch of college kids all of a sudden decided it was "ok now" to kill people "just because they are Jewish". You'll never get an opinion poll saying that, because it's simply not true. The reality is, the Palestinian cause has been part of the global anti-imperialist movement for decades now, and gained steam because of the Palestinian and broader Muslim diaspora's growth in the West. It's absolutely a potential vector for antisemitism, and we've seen SOME incidents of outright antisemitism expressed at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. But that's NOT the same as it being an outright antisemitic movement _in_toto_.
So again, as Matt said, "the sins being committed are the commonplace ones of intellectual laziness and performative allyship rather than hatred or antisemitism". It's equally intellectually lazy to just label all of this as antisemitism.
I think it is helpful here to consider the roots of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Between about the end of WWI to the aftermath of WWII, there was a lot of moving state lines, displacement of people, creating new nations by drawing lines on maps, etc., including in the Middle East. The creation of Israel is merely one of many such examples. But it's the only one that has led to multiple wars with Arabs united against one common enemy and a conflict that has endured for decades. What's different between Israel and, say, Lebanon? Why are the Arabs so opposed to one and not the other?
More to the point - why are westerners so obsessed about this specific conflict, in the way they are not about far deadlier stuff happening literally next door?
IOW, the fact that they are Jews certainly plays a role in why the conflict started and why it persists. It's related to a really long and complicated history of Jewish and Arab competition over the Holy Land.
But there's nothing about their Jewishness that Hamas is specifically targeting. If you ask a random Hamas militant what it is he hates about Israelis/Jews, he's going to give you a litany of crimes (real and imagined) against his people, not some diatribe about the Rothschilds like you'd expect from an American Nazi.
Sorry, but this is just not true. I’ve read about the kind of education Palestinian children receive about Jews. Jews are portrayed as literally evil caricatures, complete with hooked noses and horns, like something straight out of 1930s Nazi propaganda.
I mean, I agree that antisemitism in Hamas is different from antisemitism in America or Europe, but Hamas and their supporters in the Middle East are still motivated in large part by Israelis being mostly Jewish. I guess I don't really understand your point.
The difference here is teleology. I'm basically arguing that the proximate causes (guy on the street is mostly immediately motivated by crimes against his people) are only partially antisemitic at best, but we keep having commentators like Mr. Tepper here conflating the deep (and very obviously antisemitic) _historical_ causes for widespread _proximate_ antisemitic sentiments.
And you're doing the same thing. "Motivated in large part by Israelis being mostly Jewish" is only really true on a broad historical level; it's simply not true at the proximate level of most of the individuals actually making up this conflict.
I'm not sure I'd really disagree with you, but I thought it was worth mentioning that in the minds of antisemites, antisemitism is always motivated by "crimes against their people": the Jews poisoned the well, the Jews kidnap and kill Christian children, the Jews murdered Christ, the Jews control banking and impoverish us, etc. To be clear, I don't think the crimes of the occupation are a conspiracy theory; they are real, and there are many of them. But I think this is why many Jewish people are skeptical of the idea that this time, unlike all the others, the hatred and violence were exclusively or even mostly provoked by real historical events rather than longer-standing antisemitic attitudes.
I see your point, but I do think you're slicing the salami pretty thin. Hamas ideology is that the area must be ruled by Muslims. You can technically say that this ideology is no more opposed to Jews than to any other religious group, but in practice they preach the murder of Jews specifically. Their supporters just tore down an old synagogue in Tunisia. There have been attacks on Jewish sites in Buenos Aires and Seattle and Paris. And Palestinian schoolbooks include all manner of anti-Jewish tropes and invective. I think you might be giving them more credit than they deserve.
Those attacks in BA/Seattle/Paris were by *supporters*, not Hamas themselves. I don't think that's "slicing it thin". It's just keeping a correct accounting of who's doing what and why.
I hear what you're saying, and please trust me when I say I'm not trying to give Hamas ANY kind of credit, except for being murderous fascistic bastards. The only thing they "deserve" IMO is those special Hellfire missiles that can kill a dude standing on a balcony while not harming the poor children in the next room whom the evil fuckhead is trying to use as human shields.
All I'm trying to do is make sure that we understand precisely WHO that fuckhead is, and ALL of the different and many-layered reasons why he's doing what he's doing -- not just SOME, and NOT just the ones that we want to tell ourselves where we and all our friends get to pretend we're history's only victims ever -- so that we can drive this conflict to a long-overdue peaceful conclusion with a minimum amount of whatever violence is necessary, applied in as specific and targeted a manner as possible.
"Those attacks in BA/Seattle/Paris were by *supporters*, not Hamas themselves."
And has Hamas disavowed these actions?
(OK, OK, maybe Hamas is too busy kidnapping, raping, and killing civilians right now to issue statements. Do you think they would *ever* disavow such supporters' actions?)
Respectfully, I'm not so sure your history is accurate.
Arab Jews and Arab Christians got along OK as second class citizens in Ottoman Asia. When something like the Farhud in Baghdad happened, Baghdadi Jews had never experienced anything like that.
When Israel was founded, both the Soviet Union and United States thought they could get Israel on their side. After a little while, the Soviet Union realized they couldn't pull Israel from the US, so they gave up on Israel. Soviets decided to push anti-semitism in the Arab and Muslim world, in order to generate opposition to the United States. They had thousands of embedded agents and mass misinformation campaigns. For example, producing a translation of "The Procolols of the Elders of Zion" in Arabic.
Zionism definitely created tension between Jews and Arabs, and things were far from fair or just beforehand, but the two groups have not been "fighting for the holy land" for a long time.
>Arab Jews and Arab Christians got along OK as second class citizens in Ottoman Asia.
Mizrahi Jews hate being called "Arab Jews". Albert Memmi has a famous passage that the Arabs never really let them be Arab Jews, even when they would have liked to be so.
Plus, "got along OK as second-class citizens" is the very definition of not getting along OK.
And, respectfully, you are wrong about 5900 of those 6000 years.
Michael already gave you some evidence towards this when he wrote "Arab Jews and Arab Christians got along OK as second class citizens in Ottoman Asia." Read more carefully.
"a really long and complicated history of Jewish and Arab competition over the Holy Land."
Now you say this is a 6000 year history. Wow. Judaism is not nearly 6000 years old, let alone Christianity or Islam.
The fact is that it was European Christians that oppressed Jews far worse than any Arabs. Jews (and Christians) lived as essentially second class citizens in the middle east, but they were relatively safe from violence. As "people of the book" they were allowed to practice their religion privately (but not to marry Muslims, had to pay a special tax, etc.).
Strong anti-Jewish sentiment in the middle east was a reaction to Zionism in Palestine.
This is the basic narrative you will hear from virtually any Arab Jew that left one of these countries. It is also the story told by their Christian and Islamic friends and neighbors that stayed behind. I don't see any reason whatsoever why Israeli Middle Eastern Jews would whitewash their own oppression at the hands of Arabs.
Muslims and Jews simply have not been longtime foes. It's a recent phenomenon.
Arab muslims have deeply opposed to the existence of a Jewish state in the middle east. It's a religious fundamentalist position that is highly egoistic. The Jews are "European Settler Colonialists"-- never mind that most Israelis are from Middle Eastern families.
the original Hamas charter (in theory, replaced a few years ago, I don't know how serious that actually was) approvingly cites the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", so there's definitely a lot of classic antisemitism mixed in there.
See the comments on teleology. Classic antisemitism can historically breed Hamas' ideology without the day-to-day conflict or individual attacks being specific examples of classic antisemitism.
Perhaps another way to put it is that I think it's more useful to think of antisemitism as a *driver* of individuals within the conflict than as an *individual motivation*. We might call the entire 10/7 attack a war crime driven by classic antisemitism, but it's a mistake to call the attack "classic antisemitism".
FWIW, I'm not trying to dice words here. It's just that it's a genuinely complex topic to discuss.
I don’t see how it’s useful to split hairs this way. If you want to write your own definition for something called “classic antisemitism,” then knock yourself out. But it seems to me that the 10/7 massacre was, in essence, a modern-day pogrom carried out in a particularly ruthless and efficient manner. Pogroms may not be “classic antisemitism,” but they’re surely near the top of the antisemitic greatest hits list.
At least some of the attackers made phone calls to parents announcing how many people they'd killed, and to some extent it appears they didn't say they killed "Israelis." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67198270
I don't think these motherfuckers can ever be accused of having the most accurate terminology. They'd be hilariously out of place in a meeting of all those woke college kids who are happily defending them right now.
The woke kids like assaulting Jewish students, they just do it less violently than their Hamas idols. Now pro Palestinian protestors in the streets - those guys got more serious intent than just mocking dead Jews. "Gas the Jews" - a pro Palestinian gem for the ages.
Think of it this way. Israel and Austria have about the same population. If the residents of the two countries changed places overnight, would Hamas be more interested in driving the Austrians out of Israel or going over to Austria to kill Jews/Israelis?
I’m pretty sure they’d drive the weak and disorganized Austrians out within a week, thank their lucky stars (and Allah) for this great blessing, and spend the next 40 years issuing North Korea-like rhetoric from their state media outlets calling the new Austrian Israel everything BUT a child of God.
I think you are collapsing a lot of stuff unhelpfully together to get to a barstool thesis on this one, and it's forcing you into a really simplistic view (for example, the bit about this being the only post-colonial conflict that has endured for decades) that is just flatly wrong. Just to take one obvious example, neither the Iranians nor the Egyptians think of themselves as "Arabs," and you could make a pretty strong argument that the centers of "Arab" power have been in conflict, including shooting, with Iran--and here we are kind of going down the Sunni-Shi'a road--for as long or longer than they have been in conflict with Israel.
That's mostly because Israel is a relatively new political entity, and I guess you could cobble together some kind of thesis about the region just since 1950 (although I'm not sure why you are writing off India-Pakistan), but the oversimplification is hurting your analysis. If you don't understand recent events in part through the lens of Iranian competition with the Arab states--a "conflict that has endured for decades"--you end up missing some fairly critical context.
None of that erases the antisemitism from the conflict, but I would argue that the strategic politics matters more here than the antisemitism. Absent the geopolitical realities, a lot of other stuff changes pretty massively.
Or maybe it’s because they have the steadfast support of the US no matter what? (In spite of not having any oil)? Not denying the Jewish part, but anti-Americanism is a thing, too. Fits with their “anti-colonial” narrative.
US support for Israel has always been a double-edged sword for Israel. The support helps them a lot, but there are major consequences to it.
In particular, US support for Israel basically drove the Arab states into the Soviet Union's arms. We tend to talk a lot about US weapons to Israel. That only really kicked up in the late 1960s. The US would not send weapons to Israel, fearing a regional arms race, for the first two decades of Israel's existence. The weapons that Israel's enemies wielded came predominantly from the Soviet Union.
In addition to needing to face down all this Soviet-supplied weaponry, the Israelis also had to deal with the Soviet disinformation machine. The present day "anti-colonial" lefty crap vis a vis Israel was all thoughtfully engineered in the Soviet Union. In addition to infecting (and funding) Western academic drivel, the Soviets stoked anti-semitism in the Arab world. Translating and exporting all sorts of anti-semitic content to the middle east via their thousands of embedded agents. Of course, the real underlying motivation was to generate hatred for the US, which is held hostage by Jews, or whatever.
Or, at best, because Israel is *non-Arab* and simultaneously *non-Muslim*. No Arab nationalist or Islamist group would dream of slaughtering Thai or Indian guest workers in Oman or Saudi Arabia as "colonizers".
So then we're left with the question of "is generalized reactionary hatred of minorities winning independence better or worse than antisemitism?", which is dumb.
No. Hamas always talks about Jews, not Israelis. Their supporters world wide target Jews and Jewish institutions (e.g. synagogues, kosher shops etc). You ought to respond to what reality actually is, not what would be perhaps more convenient but is just not true.
P.S.
You ought to actually look at opinion polls. Palestinians but also Muslims world wide hold very strong, very wide spread "classical" antisemitic views. On the other side, the far left has an old, infamous, super well attested and well known atnisemitic tradition. I really think you need to learn more about all of this.
You can just as easily turn this round though. Lots of people in Israel will express Islamophobic views too, but you would presumably consider their current operations in Gaza a response to a massacre by a particular group rather than a violent assault on Islam itself.
Of course it's true that there are many deeply-held bigotries at play here but the reason we're talking about this topic today and not geothermal permitting or whatever is the specific events of the last two weeks, which are about Israel and Palestine specifically, rather than about Judaism, Islam or 'the far left'.
Israel isn't dedicated to the systemic annihilation of muslims or Arabs. On the contrary its founding charter explicitly calls for racial religious and sexual equality, and adds explicit mention of a promise for equal citizenship and representation for Arabs. It's the literal polar opposite of the Hamas charter. Needless to say (I hope) the IDF isn't going to Palestinian homes deliberately murdering babies and raping women Finally, pro-Israel rallies on US college campuses don't include Isamphoboic or racist slogans, nor do their advertisement celebrate the killing of anyone, let alone civilians. It's also worth noting that according to FBI data antisemitic hate crimes in the US occur about 5 times (!) the frequency of Islamophobic and anti Arab crimes combined, despite the two populations being roughly equal in size. Whichever way you look at it there is just no symmetry here.
I'm not implying there is a symmetry in who's done what to who, though if we do go down that road then I'm obviously going to point out there a lot more dead Palestinians who were living two weeks ago than dead Israelis. But that's beside the point, which is that the conflict is not about killing people 'just because they're Jewish', even though I'm sure understanding that way is extremely useful for the Israeli government, who then get to pretend that their actual political actions have no impact on anything.
What "the conflict is about" is an ill-defined abstract question. What Hamas is doing isn't. They aren't at all shy about it. They are targeting "Jews" not "Israelis". They were very clear about that in their attacks. However choosing to ignore their explicit statements put into practice in their horrific actions is surely useful to them.
Settlement aren’t annihilation. They are, at worst, land dispossession. That’s bad but it isn’t annihilation. Murdering a thousand civilians in a day is.
P.S.
To claim that Israel is dedicated to the settlements, that postdate it, is an oversimplification. Most were built on private initiative if retroactively recognized. At times Israel dismantled some of them as part of peace agreement (in Sinai following peace with Egypt) or unilaterally (in Gaza and parts of West Bank).
Being slaughtered and indiscriminately shot at are VERY different than the injustice of having a Jewish suburb built nearby your town.
I'm not justifying the settlements--according to my understanding, Israel is militarily occupying the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem, which it has annexed), and thus should not permit the transfer its population there.
But this is not annihilation. It may complicate a future two-state solution. This arguably is a kind of segregation. And for the illegal outposts built on private land, it's land dispossession. But it isn't annihilation in the kind of way that Hamas wants to do to Jews, which is literal slaughter.
Annihilation means death, Nonexistence. Extermination. The word has a very specific and clear meaning. There is no "kind of."
Settlement means land expropriation or, in some cases, displacement. It is very bad and I oppose it. It is also very different and much less bad than annihilation.
Yes, and I think it's also worth stressing that conflating the two can only possibly escalate the fear, hurt and anger so it's a very useful rhetorical tool for 'inflaming the situation' and 'avoiding any introspection' but level heads need to insist on accuracy.
Exactly! The pro-Israel side gets to retreat into "This is antisemitism so we MUST fight it!" and the pro-Palestinian side gets to say, "We're not bigots, we're trying to stand up for the oppressed; it's clear that this is all just masking Islamophobia and pro-Israel media bias".
It's all bullshit. It's people telling themselves and each other comforting nostrums about how they're under attack, all to excuse the next round of attacks.
As someone going through a mid-life crisis and dealing with my own mortality, it all just seems so fucking petty. My life is the one thing I value the most in the world these days, and so the loss of ANY life just feels like an immense tragedy. I keep finding myself imagining the final moments of all these people who have died, and it makes me fucking sick (not like a fixation, just normal sick). And it puts everything else into perspective: the grudges, the grievances, the rage and murder. It all just needs to fucking stop. Sure, there are some bad people in this conflict who will still have to die before there can be peace, and that in itself is freaking tragic. But we HAVE to stop excusing the violence. We HAVE to stop letting our tribalism and accusations of mass bigotry drive the plane here. Because it's already a fucking WRECK.
Yeah, I don’t see how replacing “Jewish” with “Israeli” in the comment you’re replying to changes much.
> The problem is that many of this demonstrations are also supporting and justifying rape and massacre of innocent civilians, including kids, just because they are Jewish.
It’s the gruesome actions that are appalling to support and justify. The extent to which they were inspired by antisemitism is secondary to me.
Further, the terrorists who perpetrated these heinous atrocities included individuals who celebrated the Jewish identity of their victims. [1] Note that the actions described in the text of that tweet is too abhorrent for me to quote it here.
I think their position is that it's wrong to rape and massacre Jewish people generally, but it's right and good to rape and massacre Jewish people if they are in their backyard - that they're fine with Jewish people as long as they live somewhere else.
Interestingly, if you exclude the rape part and stick with just the kill part you are functionally describing the "castle doctrine" that governs firearms usage in the United States.
I don't even think it's *that*. I think their position is "The Israelis have forced us to do all these bad things by oppressing our people in what once was OUR backyard". Right or wrong, that's the position. (it's definitely wrong, no one "forces" anyone to murder and rape innocents)
But more broadly, you're right. Besides the usual lunatic fringe you'll find _anywhere_, no Palestinian really gives two shits about murdering Jews in, say, Brazil. And the proof is that before 1949, they literally did not give two shits about murdering Jews in Brazil.
Just because identity and bigotry are inextricable from this conflict doesn't mean that we can interpret every action within it to reflect some deep and abiding bigotry or another.
We know of at least one very famous Palestinian who was very into murdering Jews in Europe before 1949 though. Maybe there weren't enough Palestinians in Brazil before 1949? After 1949 we have things like the AMIA bombing in Argentina which explicitly targeted people for being Jewish while not being Israeli.
As I said in my comment, it changes how we analyze the attack.
Cf my reply to CarbonWaster on teleology. The deep historical causes may have a whole LOT to do with antisemitism, and indeed I didn't deny that. And sure, I'll grant you that there's direct evidence of some proximate role of antisemitism in the attacks themselves. Thank you for that, btw.
But that's VERY different from saying that the demonstrators must, to a one, be antisemitic, merely for supporting a horrific crime with some proximate antisemitism and loads of historical antisemitism. Correlation is not causation! Proximately speaking, there simply isn't a remotely respectable case that most of the demonstrators we so adamantly disagree with are even a mere plurality motivated by "the same old antisemitism", even if, as Matt points out, they all may be acting as "useful idiots" for a cause with deep antisemitic roots.
To analogize to a more familiar context, it's like the difference between saying, "American communists are communists because they hate America", and "Some American communists have come to hate America because they hate the un-communist things it does".
Again, the reason why it matters is because "the same old antisemitism" conclusion basically ends the discussion. And I simply don't think it's REMOTELY the end of the discussion.
No, the whole Palestinian project doesn't have to be anti-Semitic, but for 75+ years it has been suffused with it. . It's obvious that Jewish communities the world over are targets because of their presumed affinity for Israel, which has been a constant with the Palestinians since at least the 1960s and their spate of hijackings, bombings and terror attacks even when their terrorist organizations were secular Leftist.
Hamas is pretty open about its desire to kill Jews. Its goal isn’t merely the destruction of Israel, but purging Jews from the area and region. IOW, if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, Hamas would busy itself with killing/purging/cleansing Jews.
It's clearly both since it's specifically the Jews Hamas is targeting in that area and region. It's not a case of mostly one or the other, they are inextricably linked.
And who know what Hamas would actually do if they had the ability to hunt Jews to the ends of the Earth. I see no reason anyone should give them the benefit of the doubt that their hatred of Jews is limited only to those in a particular area.
As I've written elsewhere on this thread, I think there are significant and meaningful distinctions to be found on the level of teleology here. Please don't take this personally, but I've been spending all day reiterating the same basic point, so I'm kind of out of gas at the moment. Just read the other comments? Thanks.
For most Israeli Jews, their Jewish and Israeli identities are inexorably intertwined. Of course they are overlapping, not the same identities (there are non-Jewish Israelis and non-Israeli Jews), but to say Hamas wasn't attacking Jews only Israelis is like saying that China doesn't oppress Muslims, only Uyghurs. To say this wasn't attack targeting Jews is really misinformed and misguided. Clearly this attack was targeting Jews for their Jewishness. For one, Hamas is a radical Islamic movement based in the Muslim Brotherhood that very much views its mission in religious terms and as a holy struggle for Islam against Jews. It is not simply a secular struggle against the Jewish state (other Palestinian movements may be described more in this way, but not Hamas). Up until 2017, Hamas' charter specifically described its mission against the "Jews" who usurped the land, not "Israelis". (In 2017 they revised the charter to change this, but I do not believe that that reflected an actual reform in the groups ideology, but rather was a PR stunt).
I think it's a sad byproduct of social media-driven polarisation. Lies are created and people are expected to repeat them to show loyalty to the cause.
In the same way that people feel that you can't just be Republican, you have to actively say that Donald Trump is an honest and public-spirited person, who was defrauded of election in 2020.
You can't just say 'I think the Russians have been hard done by since 1990', you have to say that the current Russian invasion of Ukraine is pure self´defence.
And now many feel you can't say the Palestinians have been badly treated without denying that hundreds of shocking, documented atrocities by Hamas didn't happen.
I think another sad byproduct of our society is that people who know a tiny bit about a subject feel compelled to speak out and have their voice and opinion heard. It's an irrational confidence pandemic.
The Algorithm demands a response on social media. The whole ecosystem is about typing without thinking for that sweet, sweet hit of dopamine and piling on with your friends against the disfavored out group. You must love or hate everything and you have to decide NOW. Your past post will follow you and you will be forced to defend dumb stuff you said because you "never back down!". It's addict brain behavior and it feels like we are losing so many friends and family to a disease we haven't yet recognized.
This is a sympathetic position but one has to articulate a clearly defined bright line of what speech is off bounds, otherwise you end up in an anti-speech arms race exactly like the one Matt describes. And the problem, of course, is that you then end up litigating where exactly the line is, whether a particular piece of speech violates the line, etc.
Personally, I categorically reject the idea that words cause violence. Seeing people support Hamas attacks is obviously going to be very uncomfortable for Jewish students -- but would it be better for the pro-Hamas people who think murdering Jews is good to keep their opinions to themselves? Is it not better that they are able to speak their minds, and then subsequently Jews are free to disassociate themselves from such people?
My belief has always been, and remains, that you are free to hate people for their opinions, but also that opinions on their own never constitute an act so abominable as to be worthy of punishment from an institution acting in its official capacity. Because being willing to countenance bad opinions is table stakes for liberalism. The 'line' for me has always been whether you are explicitly advocating a particular *action* which is evil. I.e., the difference between "those guys who did terrorism are good" vs. "I think you students should all go out and find a Jew and murder them"
Racism against Black people is now socially taboo in the US. I think most of us believe this is a good state of affairs. We didn't need to erode free speech rights stricto sensu to achieve this, but we did need civil rights legislation and a social movement. There is no reason why antisemitic hate would be any different. No, you shouldn't be able to prosecute anyone for condoning the murder of Jews, but you sure as heck ought to think twice before hiring them. If the result is that people think twice before calling for the murder of others, then that's a feature not a bug.
I think I disagree. I think racist ideas are quite widespread in the US, and the taboo mainly has the effect of people keeping these views to themselves or to their close peers. To be clear, I think racist views are bad, but rather than shame people for expressing such views we should engage with them and make persuasive arguments as to why they are wrong. This may seem like an extreme view in the current landscape, but the work of Daryl Davis of engaging with actual white supremacists (like really, super racist people!) suggests that this can and does work.
Ok. You may think civil riights legislation is wrong. You may think it would be better if people could be explicitly racist and face no social consequneces. Understaandbly few minorities would agree. But that's an ok view in an abstract discussoin. Now let's get down to earth for a second, recall that there is an extremely widespread consesnsus about this in the US, and ask ourselves why does the far left wish to uniquely exempt Jews from the prtoection offered to everyone else?
Matt simply agrees with the pro Palestinian college students, professors, and journalists for whom Hamas can never do anything worse than Israel. Free speech doesn't mean other people can't call you on your horrid stances. When the bright 'progressives' keep chanting for genocide in Israel (and Matt is being incredibly disingenuous to claim they don't know what they're saying), it is fine for future employers to hold them accountable. Same thing would happen to far Right students chanting vile racist things...only that doesn't happen on campus. The only people you can be racist and genocidal about as a 'progressive' are Jews, particularly Israelis.
I don’t think that’s what civil rights legislation does--it says you can’t deprive people of employment or public accommodation on account of their race, it doesn’t say anything about expressing racist attitudes (other than, obviously, expressing those attitudes will make it easier for a plaintiff to prove their discrimination case against you if you try to deny them any of the aforementioned rights).
Yes, but the passage of civil rights legislation was a very large and well-publicized signal to all Americans that racism was bad, that anti-racism* constituted the consensus opinion, and that tolerating it in economic contexts (which pervade modern life) was no longer acceptable. You can't claim that didn't change people's responses to expressing racist attitudes.
* In the old-fashioned sense of opposing conscious discrimination on racial lines.
I did not say civil rights legislation is wrong. I said that it is counterproductive to engage in social shaming as punishment for people expressing racist views.
Would Daryl Davis’s work have been effective back in the days of Jim Crow? Maybe even more effective than today, since people were (by your formulation) more willing to speak their minds?
Actually they weren’t, it’s just that the social pressure was going in the opposite direction (expressing support for equal rights for black people could get you in a lot of trouble).
I think I'm being misunderstood. I am not saying institutionalized racism should not have been overturned. I am saying socially shaming people for expressing racist attitudes doesn't achieve what folks think it does, and that it would ultimately be more effective to discuss these issues openly. I could add a bunch of qualifiers, but one is that of course that doesn't mean you have to like racist people, invite them to dinner, or certainly not vote them into political office. In fact, wouldn't you want racists to be open about it so that we know who not to vote for or place in other positions of power?
I'm also not saying that people are just as racist now as in the Jim Crow era.
If we are not placing racists in positions of power, how is that different from socially shaming them? Wouldn't that create the strongest possible incentive to keep racist views secret?
At any rate, I'm in favor of discussing issues openly and of not trying to get people fired over disagreements, though I do think some attitudes are egregious enough to be beyond the pale.
>> The 'line' for me has always been whether you are explicitly advocating a particular *action* which is evil.
This is delicate to write about, but sometimes even evil speech can be useful for society to hear. Hearing the chants of "gas the Jews" on that video from Australia really reshaped my understanding of Israel's predicament. I knew that sentiment existed in parts of the Middle East, but to see it so out in the open and being repeated by so many people in a modern western society really affected me. However horrible this is to admit, sometimes we need to see and hear evil with our own eyes and ears to really grasp it.
I think that you can be pro Palestinian/Hamas but without supporting violence.
When I am being asked about the situation, I am saying that its a national tragedy for us and I am against any form of violence but I also can understand why the Palestinians hate us over the occupation.
Are you able to provide any evidence of people saying it's OK to kill Jewish kids? I've seen an interview with the #2 guy in Hamas and even he claims not to believe that.
I don't know if it's fair to ask for concrete examples of people saying this, because I think there are a lot of motte and Bailey tactics on this.
But two things comes to mind as getting pretty close: that BLM group (Chicago maybe) that posted a "Free Palestine" text over the image of a paratrooper. And personally, when I re-posted an Instagram story to the effect of "deliberate murder of civilians and children in never okay", someone I hadn't talked to since high school direct messaged me the response "do you support decolonization only in theory or in practice?"
So, yeah, I do think there are real voices out there condoning violence. They might not be especially prominent, and they may try to weasel out of that commitment if you press them on it, but there certainly are people who want to at least flirt with it. (This is what I mean by the rampant motte and bailey tactics.)
As annoying as my alma mater is, it’s given me the priceless gift of a highly-educated social circle in which basically every single person, no matter how lefty, will snort with derision when someone uses the term “decolonization” to refer to present-day happenings.
With all the discourse about appropriation around can I, as a part-indian, be offended at the appropriation of the term “colonization” to refer to anything that annoys you, like a McDonalds in Paris
I just roll my eyes if anyone implies something is a colony other than, you know, an actual colony (e.g., The Massachusetts Bay Colony) or a clump of bacteria in a Petri dish.
The Vietnamese have decided that Americans are the best thing since they learned about good bread from the French. We killed, what, 10% of the whole population within living memory?
This still doesn't support the claim people are saying it's OK to kill Jewish kids. They may be saying it's OK to kill Jewish Israeli kids. Which, let there be no doubt, I strongly oppose, as a former Jewish Israeli kid. But it's still different.
Binya: If you thought the original poster was trying to distinguish between the murder of "Jewish kids" and "Jewish Israeli kids", you're misinterpreting what he wrote. And to be honest, that kind of parsing is exactly the kind of behavior that many of us have found so abhorrent on the far left in recent weeks.
To be clear, the two things may be "different", but to anyone of any decency, they are equally abhorrent. No one should be ok with the massacre of any kids (or civilians of any kind), whether they are Israeli, Jewish, Palestinian, or anything else.
Now some folks will then raise the question about what about the deaths of kids in Gaza from Israeli bombs. And it's a fair question. I'd make the argument that there is a huge difference between the deliberate massacre of children and the killing of children in bombing raids targeted at a military force that is deliberately positioning itself among these children. Ultimately, I do think Hamas is to blame for those deaths as well, though I do think it's incumbent on Israelis to do all they reasonably can to reduce those deaths without putting their people at undue risk.
I'd be amazed if you can find any examples of anyone who is pro massacring kids, and even if you can, if it's anything but the most marginal and misrepresentative part of the people expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
Binya: It's not that people are pro massacring kids. It's that they're unwilling to unreservedly condemn massacring kids. And while I'm sure you're right that they're refusing to do so because they see it as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinians, that's what we find so disturbing.
I don't think too many people are saying it publicly. But when the response to the killing of babies is "Palestine has a right to defend itself like this" or "what did you think when we meant when we called for resistance?" then it sort of implicitly says the murder of babies is acceptable because it's in furtherance of the stated goals. You also have lots of private threats and hate speech getting leaked where people who have very polite public profiles are saying things like "Hitler should have eradicated all of you" in response to the murder of babies, so I think it's clear that lots of people who refuse to say such things publicly don't seem to have much moral qualm with it when framing their views privately.
As for the statements Hamas' #2 makes in interviews during PR appearances- I think it's far more important that Hamas actually committed the acts and doesn't seem to have condemned or apologized for those actions. He's doing an interview while trying to rally support for his cause- he's not going to say it was okay to commit those acts of barbarity, but his organization is the one that did it, so he doesn't seem to be all that bothered by it even when he's in public and knows he can't support it.
That is a completely different topic. “Do Hamas fighters who commit war crimes suck” vs “is there a casual acceptance of antisemitism on American college campuses”.
This is what Jane Coastan called “thing adjacent discourse”. There’s the thing (terrible Hamas attack, terrible Israeli policies and counterattacks) and then there’s the more juicy thing adjacent discourse: how are colleges reacting to the attacks? Is it appropriate? Is it hypocritical? Are people chanting something really racist or just that can be interpreted as racist or is it a “it’s okay to be white” style cover for racism?? What about news outlets? Did anyone report something and then walk it back? Etc. etc etc.
I find the thing adjacent discussions boring. The key fact is the Netanyahu has spent thirty years pursuing policies that led to this and now thousands of people are dying as a result, and it could get even worse if things spiral.
“The key fact is the Netanyahu has spent thirty years pursuing policies that led to this…”
That’s hardly a fact, let alone key. Or do you believe that the poor, put upon Palestinians ended the First Intifada and have conducted themselves peacefully and honorably ever since?
Palestinians were just doing their peaceful MLK thing since the 1920s and finally Netanyahu came along and started pressing them. They continued with their peaceful sit-ins until finally, finally, finally, they erupted on 10/7.
10/7. The date of the first ever Palestinian terror attack. The most peaceful people every finally got pushed over the edge.
Palestinian terror attacks prior to 10/7 that didn't happen:
Sbarro's Pizza
Hebron Massacre
Passover Massacre in Netanya
Munich
Airline hijackings
etc..
None of it happened!
Israel has been oppressing Palestinians for all this time, for no reason!
When you write "terrible Hamas attack, terrible Israeli policies and counterattacks" are you suggesting that the deliberate murder of children, rape of women etc. are equivalent to the "counterattack" targeting terrorists? When you say "pursuing policies that led to this" do you suggest that any policy at all could justify the deliberate murder of babies? Please do explain what on earth you mean by all this??
This is a side topic, but may I gently suggest that every prior case of "they are deliberately murdering BABIES" has turned out to be false on further investigation. The Germans butchered the Belgians, but did not actually systematically murder Belgian babies as alleged. The Iraqis did not actually unplug Kuwaiti NICUs. The Ryohinga did not massacre Burmese babies. The fog of war is thick, but we are fairly safe in rejecting claims of baby butchering absent extremely concrete evidence. It is the most predictable claim made early in a conflict, and it is almost always false.
The Holocaust is the exception that proves the rule. The Germans only murdered Jewish babies after they constructed a vast and terrifying apparatus for murdering everyone young and old, and even that was very difficult to run because ordinary people need a lot of scaffolding to let them do such monstrous work without breaking down psychologically.
"do you suggest that any policy at all could justify"
That is an easy question. No. No one is justifying what Hamas did. What I am saying is that what Hamas did is the obvious and inevitable unjust result of Netanyahu's life's work.
When something bad happens, it worth looking at it from two tracks. One is the person directly responsible. But the other is who is most responsible of the people not directly responsible.
If you get mugged late at night while drunkenly stumbling around in a bad neighborhood and singing with your purse dangling half off your shoulder, the mugger is most responsible. You are secondarily responsible for doing something that predictably led to bad consequences.
Netanyahu has deliberately treated the Gazans like dogs for thirty years. He put them in a cage with no exit. He has supported Hamas to weaken Fatah. He allowed his cabinet to provoke the Al Asqa issue. He made it clear that he was going to cut off all possibility of a change in status for Palestine by pursuing separate peace with the Arab states. In the year before the attacks, 200 West Bank Palestinians were murdered by settlers and the IDF. To facilitate this, Netanyahu shifted IDF resources away from Gaza and to the West Bank. All of that was dousing the region with gasoline, and now Hamas has come with match. Lighting the match was bad and dousing the gasoline was bad. There is no contradiction in saying so.
I'm sorry, are you saying that Hamas didn't kill babies on October 7?
>What I am saying is that what Hamas did is the obvious and inevitable unjust result of Netanyahu's life's work.
People keep saying this but they do nothing to back this up. There is no reason to think that Hamas, of all Palestinian organizations, is particularly upset about the failure of the peace process. Hamas does not want a peace process. Hamas existed before the peace process, during the peace process, and after the peace process. During that entire time, Hamas has tried to murder as many Israeli citizens as possible. The only thing that separates the October 7 operation from previous attempts is the scale of its success. This operation was years in the making. The blockade was at its most lenient point in years. There is absolutely no reason to tie the motivations to commit this particular massacre to the policies of the current coalition government of Bibi Netanyahu, which is only a few months old. Hamas likes to kill Jews! This was true before Bibi and after Bibi.
It's useful to ask yourself, if it's really so inevitable that Hamas would be driven to this as a result of Netanyahu's policies, or Israeli policies, if it's really true that the Palestinians were driven to this because of Policy X or Policy Y, why did only Hamas and related factions participate in it? Why didn't all 2.4 million Gazans, or at least a significant percentage of them, participate in the massacre?
If any interest in a peaceful solution was motivating Hamas at all, why did they murder civilians? In the most liberal peacenik part of the country? Why didn't they just go to the beach? Imagine the PR coup that would have been for the Palestinian national cause - 1400 Palestinians break out of their Gaza cage and go to the beach, and the IDF is running around like chickens with no head trying to catch them. They'd have a state in a week! But they didn't want to do that. They wanted to kill people. Which is all Hamas has ever wanted to do.
Saying October 7 is the inevitable result of Israeli policies suggests that if on October 6 Israel had ended the blockade, and tore down all the fences, October 7 wouldn't have happened. Does anyone really believe that?
>If you get mugged late at night while drunkenly stumbling around in a bad neighborhood and singing with your purse dangling half off your shoulder, the mugger is most responsible. You are secondarily responsible for doing something that predictably led to bad consequences.
First you said the "key fact" is that Netanyahu's actions led to this, and now you say he's secondarily responsible. Which is it?
The topic is US demonstrations. It is not accurate to say “many” of these demonstrations “support” deliberately killing Jewish civilians including kids because they are Jewish. I say this as a Jewish person who this month has been more likely to attend a pro-Israel rally than a pro-Palestinian one.
Many of the posters created by the organizers of these rallies informing people about them and inviting them to come pretty clearly glorified the attacks. Most included at least some people chanting explicit antisemitic content (e.g. "gas the Jews") and most certainly chanting highly dubious content ("from the river etc."). Quite a few twitterati bothered to justify if not celebrate the attacks. Very very few pro-Palestinain activists, organization etc. bothered to condemn them (apparently they haven't heard of "not in my name"). Quite a few official speakers in those rallies supported the attacks. I haven't seen evidence of the crowd booing or otherwise showing any discomfort with said speakers. So why, exactly, is it a priori so absurd to suppose that "many" of the protestors joining protests directly responding to the attacks, thus advertised and conducted by said organizers are fine or even happy with the attacks? Do you have any data to the contrary? Barring such data, wouldn't this be the most reasonable assumption? Why not? And how is your identity or politics material to this discussion?
The #2 guy at Hamas is lying about whether Hamas killed kids, because that is a fairly normal thing after killing children. Deny. Deny. Deny.
Either he does not know what Hamas did (then he’s not really #2, I argue) or he does know and he’s singing the praises of those who murder kids after he learned what they did.
It’s really strange how at least 2 comments are now debating whether Hamas does or does endorse murdering children.
(1) It’s not a mystery. Hamas murders children and they like it that way. Firing indiscriminately across the line and killing whoever is in the way. Then they send in terrorists and kill children at close range. I wish the debate was not about this because it’s so ridiculous.
(2) The essay was about American free speech culture after the Harpers letter. Nothing at all to do with Hamas “ethics” or rules of engagement, other than the overall news environment and its effect on American culture.
He wasn't denying they did it. He was making the same claim the IDF's defenders do: we focus on military targets but unfortunately in war some civilian casualties are inevitable. That is clearly a lie, Hamas obviously killed a lot of civilians needlessly, but it's instructive that they've noticed that there is so little support for killing civilians that they are trying to spin out of having done so and/or claiming that to extent they did it, they did not want to.
"it's instructive that they've noticed that there is so little support for killing civilians"
This doesn't seem like it would have been that hard to figure out beforehand.
But maybe not. Maybe overheated campus rhetoric has so clouded the waters that Hamas wasn't sure how people would react to murders. In that case, I would have to think it a very ironic result to the past few decades' analysis of "discourse harms".
Hamas has a very long history of speaking strategically in the English language.
Many are coming at this without realizing that Hamas has launched countless attacks targeting civilians since their founding in the late 1980s.
They have always been mealy-mouthed about it. Sometimes they deny they target civilians. Other times they claim all Israelis serve in the army at some point in their lives, so no one is a civilian. Other other times they say that they will stop targeting civilians when Israel does the same.
What is new this time is that Hamas is getting criticized by *Arab* audiences for targeting civilians and they are needing to bust out their peacenik rhetoric, even in Arabic.
This have everything to do with Arab-Iranian hostility and Hamas' status as a client of Iran. Arabs are separating Hamas from the Palestinian cause. They do not support a Palestinian state that is a puppet of Iran. So it is natural to criticize Hamas' methods. Arabs generally have been fine with attacks against Israeli citizens. When Munich went down, Jordan's King Hussein was the only Arab leader to condemn that attack on Israeli civilians, which wasn't even in Israel!
Hamas's days are numbers. They have lost the Arabs. Arabs want to put the old bloodfueds behind and start building real prosperity, at peace with their neighbors, even Israel. Hamas has slowed this process in the short-term, but has only hastened its inevitability.
There have been several that I think can fairly be described as supportive of Hamas’s attacks. For example, a pro Palestinian student group at Cal State Long Beach used posters with an image of a paraglider to promote a “Day of Resistance: Protest for Palestine” three days after the paragliders were used by Hamas on their terrorist attack at the music festival.
There was this incident with a UC Davis professor - you could argue that arguing for violence against the children of American "Zionist journalists" is not 100% identical to advocating against Jewish children specifically, because not all American Zionists are Jews, but it's definitely getting into that territory.
"One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misiniformation," Descristo allegedly wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "They have houses w addresses, kids in school," the professor allegedly said, adding "They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more," followed by a knife emoji, an axe emoji, and three blood drop emojis.
I once started reading a history of Israel, made it just over halfway through to around 1949 before it became too depressing to finish.
Tribal violence, by both sides, is as old as Jewish efforts to establish a homeland in Palestine. The great continuity is tribal violence. What has changed is the balance of power has tilted more and more towards Israelis and less and less towards Palestinians.
The Jewish people wanted a place to form a country for them to be able to defend themselves and control their own life. Israel was the place where Jews had historic connection to and there was already a community here. The Arabs in the country and other countries could not accept it and the UN two states, so they attacked several times and lost. We took the advantage of the situation to occupy territories and made the mistake of not giving them back in return to peace. We then made it worse by letting extreme religious people to form settlements there.
Simple. Not a tribal war more than US taking of Mexican lands.
That is basically describing a tribal conflict writ-large?
And the latter analogy is pretty bad; the entire Mexican Cession had fewer than 200,000 Mexican citizens on it, who were immediately offered American citizenship on annexation.
Weren't there around half a million Arabs in Palestine when the Zionist immigrations started en masse? Not sure I understand why this is supposed to be massively disanalogous
The US offered everyone citizenship in part because there were no concerns of being demographically swamped, and the Mexican landowners were easily co-opted into becoming part of the establishment in most every locale.
The Israelis didn’t feel themselves to have that luxury, and so expulsion was the order of the day for the most part.
Much more analogous to America’s running conflict with the Native peoples, right down to eventually achieving massive military superiority. And we all know what we did with that superiority.
Hopefully Israel can make a different choice but I am doubtful.
If the point is about citizenship - Arabs and Jews both would have been full citizens in their respective states if the partition plan hadn't been rejected. And Arabs remaining in the green line in 1948 *were* granted full citizenship.
200,000 in the Mexican cession is less than half the population in about 20 times the area. About two decades before the war, Mexico thought the land was so underpopulated by Mexicans that they actively recruited Americans to settle in Texas to civilize it and displace the indigenous people.
This seems a bit besides the point. No one is suggesting that one can't condemn those protests or the people who excuse the rapes and killing. I read this very peace as including such condemnation. But no universities are officially endorsing such positions.
And I don't think any reasonable person believes that we should be arresting people for their awful speach here or even violating the protections of tenure. So it's not the existence of some awful protests at universities that's really at issue here -- and if those universities had a general policy of not commenting on such protests/issues I don't think many people would have an issue.
The issue is that those universities haven't been following such a policy. Therefore their silence here sends an implied message that they don't think the kind of protests you mention are clearly morally unacceptable.
Palestinian activists generally view themselves as voices for the voiceless and take for granted that, given that the massive pro-Israel biases in the media and political establishment, the Israeli narrative of any given event will be spread far and wide and does not need further amplification by Palestinian activists. It's kind of like BLM activists refusing to say "blue lives matter" since while that phrase might technically true (no one wants to see dead cops) it's rather oblivious to the real power dynamics in the situation.
The “real power dynamics “ didn’t do jack squat for the teenage girl with cerebral palsy who was dragged out of her wheelchair and butchered at the music festival by Hamas terrorists.
"It's kind of like BLM activists refusing to say "blue lives matter" since while that phrase might technically true (no one wants to see dead cops) it's rather oblivious to the real power dynamics in the situation."
I think this is where you're assuming a reasonable position is the only position out there that people hold. There are BLM/Defund activists who would cheer dead cops. There are many pro Palestinian activists who cheer killing Jews regardless of who the Jews are.
It's always worth applying the 330+ million rule. I.e., this is a huge country with a lot of people. If one million people have crazy views, that sounds like a huge number of people, but it's a drop in the ocean.
The critical question is whether we should pay any attention to them. Maybe debates like this just pump oxygen into the fire they create.
A real challenge in the modern media environment is how many people believe something I think is crazy. I think saying that Biden didn't win in 2020 is crazy, but people say/believe that - should we ignore them or condemn them? Racists and antisemitism seem crazy to me...but plenty of people are out there showing their crazy.
And that's not a rhetorical question - I'm really not sure as to the best approach for dealing with certain types of crazy. I want to think that if we ignore them, they'll fade away. And sometimes they do. But other times, if you ignore the crazy, you get the Republican party not convicting Trump for Jan 6 because they hoped if they ignored it, then he would go away and he didn't.
Here's an easy way to tell the difference: if the majority of national leaders of a party, including its presumptive presidential nominee, believe something crazy then we should not condemn them. If limited numbers of people, with marginal representation or support at the highest levels of the political system (like Congress and the White House) then it's probably okay to ignore them.
I don't condemn the doofus who believes 2020 was stolen because he's parroting what he heard from Trump, Fox, etc. I condemn the majority of Republicans in Congress who refused to certify the vote. Just as I blame Republican Senators for not voting to convict Trump, not because they were ignoring the crazies (the opposite in fact) but because they're cowards and borderline traitors toward the Constitution and our system of government.
Isn’t it true that the 100 nights of idiocy in Portland had more to do with anarchists/nihilists/no-goodnicks latching on to the initial Floyd protests, which were peaceful, and turning them into something closer to riots? I live here and know people who participates early in peaceful marches before it all went loco.
>Palestinian activists generally view themselves as voices for the voiceless and take for granted that, given that the massive pro-Israel biases in the media and political establishment, the Israeli narrative of any given event will be spread far and wide and does not need further amplification by Palestinian activists.
This has never made any sense to me. They would lose absolutely nothing by recognizing that the massacre was bad and by saying they don't support the massacre. "Oh it's not necessary. Everyone else has already condemned it." This only makes it more conspicuous when you refuse to!
Transparently, wht's actually going on is that large parts of the "from the river to the sea" coalition do support the massacre and the people who say "oh it's not necessary, the MSM will do it" don't want to risk the intra-coalition fight with those people.
Good comment. I think you are still being too charitable to the "coalition [who] do not support the massacre". It is not merely that they need to avoid infighting with maniacs.
There is also the basic cognitive dissonance. Israel claims that they need to blockade/occupy Palestinians to ensure Israeli safety and security. The Pro-palestine crowd has always considered this argument to be merely pretextual.
When we see an attack like 10/7, which is something that would cause any nation to engage with the threat militarily, that upends their whole argument. So they have to just ignore it.
I agree with basically everything in this piece, but I'm sympathetic to right-of-center interlocutors who are (rightfully) skeptical that as soon as there's another George Floyd-esque situation, practically every college will throw out their newfound neutrality.
I think the chancellor of my new university, UC Irvine, has actually done a good job on this. He issued a “statement on statements” saying that he generally wouldn’t make statements on political issues that aren’t of direct relevance to the university, but not a blanket denial of all statements. He identified this moment as one where a statement was still necessary.
Where does that sympathy resolve to as a policy besides some idea of a "fairness doctrine" within a subjective and fluid overton window, such that we have quotas for discussing topics like Intelligent Design as much as Darwinian Evolution? Or then perhaps discussing phrenology as a reasonable theory in evolution?
It doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that resolves, except to refine that cultivated feeling of fragility that Matt mentioned.
Can it just resolve to scorn for moral exhibitionism and a healthy disregard for pompous institutions issuing their secular papal bulls to tiny constituencies?
The Vatican has one advantage though, which is that it speaks in a single voice, while Harvard's many departments are probably the most relevant comps. I doubt that Harvard qua Harvard (the administration ) even listens to itself.
Fostering a culture supportive of free speech, especially when it's done by an institution like a college, is a policy. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that can resolve, if you want to have it both ways. If right-of-center interlocutors were so concerned, then I think there'd be more readily available solutions or proposals how to get there.
I think this overcomplicates or maybe misses the issue somewhat. College kids can say whatever they want, just like anyone else. The actual issue has been one of a combination of endorsement and discouragement of speech by college administrations based on a very particular world view. Which I think is kind of Allan's point. I don't think anyone at these places is suddenly waking up at all. If anything it's kind of unfair to the students who have been endlessly rewarded for years for saying leftist craptrap, to suddenly now be told 'no but not THIS leftist claptrap!'
That is generally a good idea, especially if one doesn't have expertise, and doesn't want to say anything they regret, but Matt makes that case about making statements about controversial war crimes to gradually convince people it's worth considering.
I guess then if we have to put up guardrails on what kinda speech is allowed, they would exist but would be wider than it currently is, and would also include saying things like Israel is to blame for the 10/7 (but would also include saying things like there are two genders or whatever).
The Chicago Principles got mentioned in the main piece, and I really do recommend them (not just because they're my alma mater). The key distinction isn't whether they fit "a subjective and fluid Overton window". It's whether they're likely to disrupt university activity, either by invoking a crackdown by legal authorities, or because they physically make traditional scholarly activities like visiting a library or reading in peace impossible.
Those are good ideas to maintain neutrality that don't bias "center-right" or "center-left" concerns. I'm not sure how they can satisfy someone claiming the neutrality isn't real or reliable neutrality for their particular group, as Allan is concerned about.
It has always been politically dangerous for academics to be critical of Israel, either in a sane or in a bonkers way (of course everybody draws this line differently). Plenty get away with it, but as with other politically incorrect speech a basically random number suffer consequences, and this in turn has a chilling effect on everybody else.
As an academic, I agree that universities (and other institutions that don’t exist for political purposes) would be better off keeping their noses out of political issues that don’t directly concern their mission.
I think you’re too soft on people who unthinkingly yell slogans in the street or on social media. I agree that many do it ignorantly, but they are still responsible for the moral implications. Someone who wears a Free Mumia shirt should be explain why they believe he’s innocent in the murder of Daniel Faulkner. Someone who yells “From the River to the Sea” should be able to explain why they don’t think that means the slaughter of the Israeli Jews, when a good chunk of the Palestinian population (the Hamas supporters) clearly thinks that it does. If they can’t explain their slogan, then they shouldn’t be chanting in public. Otherwise, they can be justifiably accused of wanting a cop killer free and not valuing Israeli lives.
I think you are describing a bigger intellectual problem where people don't care what the words they say mean. They just think they are rhetorically convenient bludgeons to make themselves feel validated.
Building on that, from the point of view of cultura silencing, I'm more in favour for it when it comes to people who yell stuff that's just not true (Hamas don't kill civilians, Trump won the 2020 election) than people who adopt a particular position (Israel is the Jewish homeland because the Bible says so, or there should be one democratic state in 1947 Palestine). The latter is a key part of democratic debate, the former suggests that someone is just not interested in debate.
"I think you are describing a bigger intellectual problem where people don't care what the words they say mean."
I think you're describing a bigger philosophical problem, where words don't carry any sort of inherent meaning, only typical uses, and those uses can vary from community to community.
One of my favorite shirts I have ever seen is the famous Che Guevera face that's adorned thousands of dorm rooms over the years with the caption underneath "I have no idea who this is". Just encapsulates so much.
I agree with in principle; the protests you go to, the shirts you wear, the slogans you shout are all expressions of speech and expressions of a viewpoint you're trying to convey to the world. You should try to take two seconds to try to think about the message you're trying to send.
The caveat is II can't emphasize enough how often protests or rallies get hijacked by a few speakers or end being about views that you never knew were the real subject of the protest. I remember going to anti-Iraq war rally in March, 2023 (not a popular thing to do at the time). I actually spoke first at that rally. First few speakers including me had some sort of variation of why the invasion was wrong (I remember saying something to the effect of that it was patriotic to be against the war. I didn't want my country committing a mistake). But then a speaker got up and started shouting about (drumroll please)...Israel/Palestine and talked about freeing Palestine. And then someone got up and spoke about freeing Native American lands and I distinctly remember turning to my friend and saying "wait what is going on?"
There have been literally 100s of protests. I suspect at least some of the people attending knew exactly what these protests are about and maybe deserve opprobrium that comes their way for protests that end up defending Hamas. But I can't emphasize enough how many showed up to a rally because someone said "hey we're against war right, we should protest". And had no idea what the true agenda of some of the speakers really were.
I should also emphasize (have emphasized and will continue to emphasize) that so much of the college aesthetic experience is trying to recreate "THE 60S". Protests, posters on your wall and even how you dress (especially at liberal arts schools) are still echoes of 1968 and still this attempt to recreate that aesthetic moment 60 years later. I said in a previous post how overrated Hippy protests were (And also how much more destructive and extreme some of them were).
But reality is, I can't emphasize enough how much protests are an attempt at LARPING The 60s.
I fully agree with all of this. I attended anti-war protests that were full of posters ranging from off-topic to offensive. Pam Africa actually hijacked the mic at one protest and started yelling Free Mumia. It was incredibly frustrating. You can't really control who shows up at your protest. I would only hold people accountable for the things they individually did (including cheering for certain statements).
I had a Che poster in college. It was of a mural with a peasant selling food on the side of the street next to a faded picture of Che. I liked the juxtaposition.
I went to school with one of Faulkner's nephews and every time I see such a shirt I make sure to ask the person if they think he didn't murder Faulkner. Near-universal response: "Who's that?"
Wow, that's awful. Free Mumia was huge among progressives when I moved to Philly in the late 90s. I remember reading up on the case and concluding that Mumia almost certainly did murder Faulkner and definitely did not deserve all the valorization. At 18, it was my first break from the left.
Yep. These kids are just astonishingly ignorant, so much so that it’s nearly indistinguishable from stupidity.
I’m very much a believer in MY’s elite overproduction hypothesis, with the added twist that it’s been ongoing in the liberal arts for quite some time. It was concealed by bloat in administrative and bureaucratic staff at universities, which is mainly the tertiary education sector mopping up as large a share as it can of its own otherwise unemployable graduates to puff up graduate job numbers using donor and endowment funds.
It’s basically the original sin of modern higher education: they over-enrolled in cheap but low-value liberal arts degrees, then hired the less employable graduates thereof to prove the program had value, creating both a large constituency for on-campus lefty claptrap and a massive cost center that required tuition increases to meet, thereby necessitating a larger version of the same cycle next time.
3-4 working generations later, the end result is universities with administrative/bureaucratic staff five times the size of the professoriate, costs akin to debt peonage, rapidly degrading value for humanities programs with less and less critical content, and a populist revolt against academia that has wayyy too much genuine merit for me as a center-left type to be comfortable dismissing it out of hand.
It's moderately funny when you read about the origins of the most activist "X Studies" disciplines. Largely grew out of activist demands in the late 60s/early 70s; initially contained in a kind of 'quarantine' to sub-disciplines within the humanities; gradually, humanities, and then the social sciences, started to incorporate their ideas (not just as an avenue of exploration, but as more fundamental first principles); now the occasional report on how a physics paper needs a DEI statement.
I suppose the debate could be whether the movement towards these departments occurred as a kind of natural outbreak, or whether the ideas escaped from a contained lab where they were being experimented on.
Won't solve the problem. Better to try to legislate to make federal and state funding conditional on YoY reductions in support staff and tuition falls in real (or maybe even nominal) terms.
Purdue, of all places, is a leader in this, because Mitch freaking Daniels is committed to actual open inquiry and accessible tertiary education.
I think rigorous, empirical, grounded social science work really can produce meaningful and important work which helps us to better understand our world. Which is why it's annoying when the incorporation of these ideas make your post (which I still don't agree with) a fairer point.
The problem I have with the "Free Mumia" movement is the same as I have with the "Free Leonard Peltier" movement -- even if you accept the defendant's own statements about the crime uncritically, it seems clear that they themselves know who the (unalleged?) actual killers were, but refuse to identify them. If a criminal defendant is unwilling to provide testimony or evidence that would create obvious reasonable doubt about his own guilt (whether out of personal loyalty to the real criminal or political motivation), I have extremely little sympathy if they end up getting convicted of the crime.
You're correct in that a defendant has no obligation to testify. But if the defendant has information that would help create reasonable doubt, but chooses not to testify or make that information available to the jury, I'm not clear what the prosecution is supposed to do when the testimony and evidence that *IS* available to the prosecution points to conviction.
To put it another way, the prosecution has the burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, but the defense can also take actions to create reasonable doubt. If the prosecution proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt and the defense chooses to not present testimony that it has exclusive access to and would controvert the prosecution's case, that to me is the defense's problem.
Lucky! It mostly tapered off after Mumia's death sentence was commuted to life. But he was giving college commencement addresses from death row for a while.
That's insane. I found after a quick search at least two - Goddard College in Vermont (his alma mater) in 2014 and (not so surprising) Evergreen College in 1999(!).
I have relatives in Philly and even people who thought it was a bad idea to execute him thought he was guilty.
Back when the Free Mumia was a big thing, I would point this out to people who did not have any connection to Philly and they were alway flummoxed. I got a lot of “why do they think he’s guilty?” And I would explain that there’s a ton of evidence in favor of him being guilty. I think a lot of the conviction that he was innocent had to do with him having been featured on NPR and a general belief that someone who was on NPR couldn’t have possibly committed such a crime.
Great point. The average person in West Philly did not think Mumia should be free and did not want MOVE in their neighborhood. Those are different questions than whether Mumia should be executed or MOVE should have been firebombed.
I can’t agree with this enough. The stuff MOVE was doing would never have been tolerated in a rich neighborhood. People from other cities usually act like MOVE was pleasant to live next to and all of the objections to them were motivated by racism. They don’t realize they had a lot of weapons and were blasting rants from loudspeakers. Firebombing them was wrong but they were the neighbors from hell
Completely agree. Seems similar to people waiving the battle flag of Northern Virginia who say it's just a culture symbol and doesn't mean they are racist. Might be true, but if so is also just a signal of willful ignorance and foolishness.
> Someone who yells “From the River to the Sea” should be able to explain why they don’t think that means the slaughter of the Israeli Jews
The honest answer is that they got it off TikTok, the presenter doesn’t seem like someone who wants this, and they feel like they know the person thanks to parasociality.
It's a perfect analog to the controversy of saying 'all lives matter'
On the one hand, who would oppose palestinians being 'free?' (just as who would argue that all lives don't matter?). On the other hand, there is subtext there that one *should* be aware of.
The irritating thing there is that the movement so obviously should have run with either “All Lives Matter” or, better, “Our Lives Matter” as its slogan in the first place!
Now that I've learned that apparently "from the river to the sea" is appended with "Palestine will be free", I can understand a little better how people, particularly very young ones, who aren't familiar with the background of this dispute can also be unfamiliar with the longstanding meaning of the first phrase. They could think it's a more minimal interpretation of wanting a Palestinian state, or even a less minimalist but not maximalist statement of wanting one state and/or Palestinian right of return. I'd think/hope a stern explanation of the maximalist and most common interpretation of "from the river to the sea" could reorient some of the more ignorant among this crowd.
This is really dumb, imo. If you ask someone who chants “from the river to sea” why it means civilians won’t get killed, they can pretty easily respond that civilians are currently being killed under the status quo.
The status quo is brutal apartheid being conducted by an Israeli government that has killed, what, 20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed? For context, Assad and the Syrian military are closer to a 3:1 kill-death ratio and the entire world agrees that Assads crimes are nowhere near “proportional”
That response is "pretty easy" because it does not actually answer the question or address any of the critical issues involved.
First, you presume that "from the river to the sea" simply means "I dislike the status quo." It does not. It is a specific proposal for the elimination of Israel, and not the only alternative to the status quo. If someone chants it, they should be able to defend it on its own terms.
Second, you ignore the question of how many civilians would be killed. There is a major difference between civilian casualties of army operations against military targets (i.e., what is happening in Gaza) and a genocidal campaign of intentional mass slaughter (i.e., what Hamas openly proposes to do, attempted on 10/7, and will do if given the opportunity). This is akin to saying it's fine to abolish the police because there is already crime under the status quo; the point is that far MORE crime would occur without police.
Third, the number of deaths is not how proportionality is defined under international law. It's pretty much expected that the losing side will suffer more deaths - that's how wars work. Proportionality refers to whether the scale of an attack is proportional to the military objective. That is, when militants occupy a building, you can attack that particular building, but not the entire thirty block radius around the building.
Speaking from my experience of going to a left wing college 2013-2017, thinking that Israel should not exist is going to be an incredibly common and mainstream belief in these circles. As will agreeing with the Goldstone conclusion that the Israeli military regularly kills Palestinian civilians intentionally.
And I guess Israel is just unlucky then. They are racking up a kill ratio 7 times higher than Assad and its all on accident!
Saying a currently existing state and people should not exist is not addressing the fact that real people currently live there. At best it is hot air, and worst it’s calling for a second Holocaust.
The next time the US goes to war, I want an infinite kill ratio. I do not want American soldiers dying. American soldiers dying is not a necessary condition for a just war.
Whether the policy is "incredibly common and mainstream" has no relevance. If anything, its proponents should be even more prepared to defend its merits. Hence my original point. I'm not sure how this is even a rebuttal.
The Goldstone report specifically did not conclude that Israel or its military has a policy of killing Palestinian civilians. It did find instances where individual soldiers killed civilians - which is very bad and should be severely punished, but which happens in every armed conflict that has ever happened.
The reasons for the disparity in dead are extremely obvious. First, Israel invests heavily in protecting its population, while Hamas hides behind civilians in a dense urban environment. Hamas has built hundreds of miles of underground tunnels that it uses for its fighters and weapons, while deliberately keeping civilians exposed. It is impossible to target Hamas without civilian casualties. Second, Hamas does not have advanced weaponry or easy access to Israeli population centers. If it did, it would destroy Tel Aviv and all of its inhabitants at the first opportunity. In short, there is a disparity because Israel generally does a good job of protecting its people and containing Hamas.
Assad didn't bother protecting the population and did a poor job of containing his opposition, which was funded by a range of wealthy countries.
Incompetence is not a measure of intent or morality, FFS.
Assad is sending underaged conscripts to act as cannon-fodder, no shit his worthless army isn’t able to sustain a 20:1 casualty ratio.
And his opponents were, in the main, genuinely trying to protect their civilian populations instead of hiding behind them, something Hamas has never even made a vague gesture at.
I think this is a good comparison. American left-wing college students used to talk about South Africa a lot and since apartheid is over I didn't hear the country mentioned a single time while in college.
Sounds like u are saying that it is prob true they don’t understand the implications of what they are saying, but that does not mean they shouldn’t educate themselves and be more responsible. That sounds very similar to Matt’s position in the article.
I was thinking of this exact thing. It's why banning people from doing something offensive is wrong. I was really happy about having it taken down from government buildings (where it should have never been after the CW) but unhappy with the wholesale banning it from NASCAR events.
There is a good reason why it's offensive but there is also the counter that people mean something different by it (and there is even an argument about reclaiming symbolism with a problematic history into something more positive). It's complicated and censoring people rarely leads to a better outcome.
Really liked the point that *both* 'from the river to the sea' *and* it's absolute rejection in favour of the status quo are in fact rather extreme positions, properly considered.
The first, even in its generous form, assumes today's Israelis are going to have to share a country with, and indeed cough up a lot of money for, the Palestinian population, many of whom right now seem quite keen on the idea of inflicting hideous atrocities on Israeli civilians. It takes only a little reflection to see that this is probably an unreasonably big ask for a population that for obvious reasons has a fear of being permanently eliminated.
From the other side, certainly the basic 'stand with Israel' crowd seem very unwilling to reflect on how utterly unacceptable the status quo was, and is. The West Bank being deliberately ground into tiny enclosed Bantustans, surrounded by trigger-happy soldiers and vicious settlers. Hundreds of Gazans shot for demonstrating at the fences. Regular airstrikes wrecking entire building to get at a few militants. East Jerusalem annexed in clear violation of international law. Shocking deprivation, especially in Gaza.
Also, the article Matt shared was very clearly written by some *extremely* gullible people:
"And although many people point to Hamas’s 1988 charter as evidence of its hostility to Jews, in fact the group long ago distanced itself from that initial document, seeking a more explicit anti-colonial stance. Moreover, its 2017 revised charter makes even clearer that its conflict is with Zionism, not with Jews."
Of course Hamas is going to position itself as anti-colonialist, just as China defends itself against accusations of oppressing Uighurs by calling its opponents racists and sinophobes. We've done a very good job of exporting progressive speak to authoritarian groups.
The position that most of the pro-Palestinian left would take is that if the Palestinians were equal citizens of a single secular state as Israelis with the same income and education distribution as Israelis, then they would not want to inflict hideous atrocities on Israeli citizens.
Some think this is so obvious that they believe that everyone agrees with it - including the Israeli government - and that the only reason they don't do it is because they want to provoke Palestinian violence to provide an excuse for their intended genocide of the Palestinian people. Thus all violence by Palestinians, because it was deliberately and intentionally provoked by the Israeli government, is the moral responsibility of the Israeli government and Netanyahu killed those thousands of kids.
I think it's useful to look at how twisted the logic needs to be to reach the position in the second paragraph. But the first paragraph comes out of a lot of leftist rhetoric. People are violent because they are oppressed; stop oppressing them and they will stop being violent. It's the same camp as the people who think that the entire solution to violent crime is a welfare state.
I think that *directionally, theoretically* that your initial position would be the liberal position as well. And my own. (as evidence I would offer that the 'Israeli Arab' population, does not commit many atrocities, whilst still being on the receiving end of some discrimination).
However, speaking for myself, I would temper my general principles with the fact that there are some extremely difficult timing problems, and that going from 'extremely violent mutual detestation' to 'fellow citizens' would require a whole bunch of intermediate steps, none of which are currently obvious. So maybe other solutions, like a two state solution , would be better
Yeah, the difference between myself as a liberal and the leftists we're talking about is that I think that's the project of several generations and they think it's a magic spell that Netanyahu could say tomorrow and the entire thing would be sorted by Christmas.
Nah, the sorts of leftists I'm talking about live with the sorts of blinders where they don't really know the world and therefore they just use their own references. Or they think that Christmas is neutral between Judaism and Islam.
Israel actually got close-ish for a while in the late 1990s before spiralling into the current approach led by Sharon and Netanyahu. In theory the Israeli state could be used as a basis for a multi-ethnic state, in practice that would now take decades as the respective peoples recover from their suffering.
I think Thomas Friedman has been the clearest voice on this. He pointed out three goals for Israel - to be Jewish, Democratic and inclusive of the occupied territories and points out, correctly in my view, that you can only get 2. I, along with the Israeli left would choose Jewish and Democratic. The Israeli right would choose Jewish and inclusive of the territories. To the extent there are liberal Palestinians, they would chose one democratic country but, that would be the end of Zionism.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have full civil and political rights. Israel proper IS democratic. The West Bank, however, is an undemocratic occupation.
I was referring to the internationally recognised pre-1967 Israeli core. Obviously the governance of the Occupied Authorities both by the Israeli occupation authorities, and the relevant Palestinian authorities has never been either democratic or liberal. (and Hamas are appalling. But if we can understand, but abhor, the slide of the many Israelis into the hands of hardright Likud and their religious settler nut friends in the wake of terrorism and hostility, then we should also be able to understand, but abhor, the slide of many Palestinians, facing occupation, corruption and deprivation, into the hands of Hamas).
The Zionist have elected their leaders "like clockwork" since at least the 1890s. They did so LONG before they even had a State. Opposition parties operate freely and there is a free press.
Yes, you can criticize the Judicial reforms of the Netanyahu government, but these are still a long way from "not democracy".
If you want to debate whether Israel is or is about to be less democratic than the US, or the UK, go for it. Calling Israel not democratic is silly. Relative to which Middle Eastern country?
Very democratic. Not liberal, though. There's always been official special treatment of Jews in Israel, which is in itself not liberal, and the lean towards focusing on the privileged status of Jews in governing party rhetoric has gone up, not down. (plus there's the settlement policy which most countries officially consider a war crime)
This was always my biggest problem with the idea of "spreading democracy in the middle east" - if you give the backward sheepherders a vote, they tend to vote for authoritarian strongmen and/or religious extremists.
Nuclear hot take, but when I read Hannah Arendt's analysis of the history of the Boers in southern Africa in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," I thought that there was a lot there that could be read as applying to the situation of modern Israel.
It’s also a stated goal in some Palestinian circles that a unitary state would bring about an eventual Palestinian majority who would do to the Jewish population what every other Arab-Majority country has done.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to do this (particularly because I have fully converted to a 1A view on banning protests since I moved here), but since I'm one of the few commenters here who was born and raised in the EU I can try to steelman this. Again, I'm not in favor of such bans, and I'm glad that they happened in only a small part of the EU. Even when I lived there I was like "We should allow even Nazis to march.", so even though the 1A is truly different from EU culture and politics, I would have probably said the same thing back then.
First, I would say that the French nation is not obliged to tolerate the national(ist) movement of any other nation. The US is a nation of immigrants, so I have found that it's really hard to explain that to Americans, but waving the flags of other countries is not popular in Europe. (Burning the US flag is, though!)
Second, I would say that it's highly unlikely you can have a pro-Palestine rally in Europe without chants in support of Intifada (I know, because the Palestinian cause is very popular with the European left and you get chants for Intifada in like anti-austerity student protests during the economic crisis). People who have strong objections to the Passover massacre will probably point to a double standard since chants in favor of the wrong violent events are not tolerated (you can freely chant about the violent events that led to the creation of your nation state though).
Finally, now that the tensions are high, there has been violence and clashes with the police during pro-Palestine demonstrations in the EU. It's considered reasonable there for the police to restrict demonstrations if violence is suspected.
Again, I absolutely agree with you on this issue. I'm just trying to explain the culture I grew up in, because it's VERY different from the US.
"The US is a nation of immigrants, so I have found that it's really hard to explain that to Americans, but waving the flags of other countries is not popular in Europe."
What a crying *shame* that Western and Southern Europe will be nothing more than a retirement home for locals and tourist trap for vastly richer middle-class Americans and the rising middle classes of East, SE, and South Asia by century's end.
You are not completely wrong but we are only escaping western Europe's fate by pure luck. the cultural forces in our country that want to claw us back into the stone age somehow ended up in direct conflict with the cultural forces that want to regulate us to death and that has locked us into an inability to do anything, which while less than ideal, is much better than those cultural forces combining and doing both as has happened in the EU. I don't think there's any reason for us to get sanctimonious about it because if Democrats and Republicans could get along for five seconds, we'd end up going down the same path.
Europe’s social and economic compact is a cul-de-sac, an evolutionary dead end, a descent into a form of navel-gazing which purports to care about the future while doing none of the things which we owe our children, even the single one about which they purport to most fervently care.
None of the endless sanctimony is the least bit justified.
Europe is going to commit suicide over the coming century through sheer apathy, and I am deeply worried that the beachhead of European nihilism which appeared here in the US in the aftermath of our botched response to the GFC has already cut too deep for mere economic recovery to push out again.
I have no choice but to put faith in the newly minted Americans of Hispanic and Asian descent to push back on European-style declinism on both the left and right, both of which are coming almost exclusively from us white folk.
So forgive me if I cannot muster any sympathy for the people who originated this horseshit. At least in their senescence we’ll be there to keep them from being conquered. There won’t be anyone around to play that role for us if the rot is already too deep.
The US is bad enough when it comes to being aware that history ain’t over.
Europe’s navel-gazing, spineless, sanctimonious fecklessness is just unforgivable.
They can’t even be bothered to constrain Russia’s behavior when it has a third the population and a sixth the economic throw-weight of the EU, let alone see the genuine threat the PRC seeks to pose to liberalism and democracy globally.
"First, I would say that the French nation is not obliged to tolerate the national(ist) movement of any other nation. The US is a nation of immigrants, so I have found that it's really hard to explain that to Americans, but waving the flags of other countries is not popular in Europe. (Burning the US flag is, though!)"
The paragraph is fascinating to read as a whole, since in the late 1980s we came very close to carving out a First Amendment exception for burning the US flag. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/491/397]. The unexpected threat was from Stevens showing his rare 1A exceptions for purposes of national unity (he also would have sided with Alito against the Westboro Baptist Church [https://www.scotusblog.com/2011/05/stevens-casts-some-votes/]), but it was saved from Scalia also crossing over in the opposite direction, as that wasn't one of his own odd 1A exceptions that he was fond of.
I dunno; if Europe lapses into authoritarianism for the second time in less than a century, maybe America’s center-left will give up on the squeeing fanboyism for all things European?
"The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." -- Thomas Wolfe (rephrasing Jean-François Revel's statement, "The strange thing is that it's always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up, yet it's always America that is 'fascist.'“)
sure europe has had literal fascist regimes and everything but they pay for healthcare indirectly through taxes, so obviously that makes america the evil one by comparison
I’m still with Frigid here. Let’s fix the couple of sectors we’ve fucked up badly (healthcare, tertiary education, housing regulation, infrastructure costs) so that we’re just clearly better in every possible way and we can dismiss all future European chauvinism out of hand as is proper.
What was "truly terrible" recently was the deliberate mass murder of 1000 civilians. Banning hate-filled demonstrations in order to protect the most prosecuted minority in European history that is objectively under greater threat than any other in Europe right now may be a mistake, but isn't "truly terrible". Get your priorities and values straight.
I think that the "deliberate mass murder of 1000 civilians" is truly terrible and also that we should not let every act of terror or tragedy be a reason to erode our civil rights.
No protests were banned in the US, whereas banning hate speech and protests is a long European tradition. No "erosion" is happening here. In any case that's all besides the point. I didn't object to your view about free speech rights. I objected to your *wording*. If you see the European model of free speech as morally as repugnant as mass murder of cvilians there is something wrong with you. If you do not equate the two - why use the exact same words to describe both?
Yes, this safetyist mindset is indeed very European. And Europeans are allowed to live out their values. Personally, though, I'm glad to live in a country that prioritizes fundamental liberties over each individual instance where they could be weakened in the name of safety.
If I wanted to go to Paris and demonstrate passionately against zionism and israel but didn’t talk about hurting civilian jews and didn’t want to hurt them, that would be illegal, right? if so, how can there be discourse?
Are you equating Japanese internment with banning a protest?
Also, the point is the context. I didn’t object to someone calling European speech policies “truly terrible” as a hyperbole within an abstract discussion of comparative constitutionalism or something. I objected to in in the context of discussing responses to mass murder.
My claim is far more modest. That: 1. Employers consider it bad if people working for them publicly endorse deliberate murder of civilians.
2. That anyone choosing to publicly state such views cannot expect that “free speech” includes expecting institutions to actively help them avoid consequences for these actions (eg hiding retroactively their names from said statements, even and esp when they never bothered to backtrack and apologize).
That’s all, and I’m happy to have this moderate standard apply universally. I don’t think that contradicts any of my other positions ?
Have we? I didn’t endorse banning marches. In fact acknowledged it “may be a mistake” and in my other comments came out against it. All I was trying to say that though a position I disagree with, it’s not beyond the pale to do this. Thus calling it “truly terrible” is a hyperbole. To use such hyperbole in context of genuinely truly terrible things happening is in bad taste. That’s all I’m saying here.
P.S.
The employer thing is a response to other comments. Sorry for my confusion there.
IMO I think propalestinian demos should be allowed but have to be shut down if promoting violence or blatantly antisemitic. But also pro Israel ones if being hostile to Islam in general. I think it’s possible to have some guardrails like this while allowing opposing views some of which may be clearly wrong.
The challenge to this is that people will always invent code to get around this, and then claim that they're being misinterpreted. An example in this very thread is how "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" sounds innocent enough without knowing the background of the first half of the statement.
I 100% agree that we should be pressuring schools to accept the Chicago principles, but what exactly would such pressure look like? It seems to me it would look a damn lot like exactly what is happening right now -- imposing costs on those administrators because they've taken decidedly non-nuetral stands on previous issues of moral significance and won't loudly condemn Hamas.
The only way we are likely to see those administrators adopt something like the Chicago principles is if they are subject to substantial costs as a result of not adopting them. This is how those costs get imposed. If donors and alumni merely said, "you should adopt the Chicago principles" it wouldn't have the same kind of pressure that creates an object lesson about the harms of not adopting them. Such a demand wouldn't fire up people with righteous anger and thus wouldn't pressure the admins at all.
You're always saying that winning requires playing politics and saying the things that inspire action. That's whats happening here. Once I see any university administrator go "whoops, we should have been supporting the Chicago principles the whole time...we're signing up now" then I agree it's time to call off the demands to condemn Hamas/support Israel - but that won't happen if they only are stuck between one group demanding strong moral support and another saying "support the Chicago principles" because they aren't likely to lose a job or a bunch of alumni money over the later rhetoric.
Agreed. The analogy that comes to mind is the laws of war as traditionally understood; back when the CSA threatened to lynch any black US soldiers they captured, the response was “we’ll hang a captured officer for every time that happens.”
The entire legal system is the codification of acceptable retaliation, outsourced to the state. International law is the same, without any outsourcing.
The only way Harvard is going to stop caving to its loudest students on issues like these is if the wider world inflicts consequences on it and them.
One of the biggest issues with "Free Speech" is that it is hard to decide what the means in a social context when we also have the concept of free association. I am not sure that anyone decides who to be friends with, work with or hire without considering the things they say. I remember working on a campaign where the hiring managers questioned people about what seemed like fairly innocuous tweets before they could be hired to knock on doors.
Matt has been on the anti-anti-hypocrisy beat for a while and I think the last paragraph is correct, that we should try to get people/institutions to change their ways instead of getting them to take "our" side in the latest issue. I would say that I think that universities stepping back and becoming apolitical seems a bit far-fetched and that part of the "politicization" was trying to create the consensus that there was no such thing as apolitical.
On the "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.", I think some commentators have gotten a bit lost in the sauce on this one. Matt says:
"But I also think it’s important for Jews (and our friends) to understand that to the people chanting, in this context, this is not what it means. Their understanding of themselves is that they are calling for a unitary secular democratic state encompassing both Jews and Arabs."
Is that what they understand themselves to be saying? All of them? This is a very specific phrasing, they could have chosen anything. The obvious parallel is "All Lives Matter" which is largely seen as obviously minimizing of the "Black Lives Matter" slogan even though without context it would be difficult for anyone to understand the objection.
I've seen a couple commenters, even those critical of the left, defend the use of "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." and I am not sure why they are so credulous. We are again in a hypocrisy space but I think that when people usually attuned to "dog whistles" are now explaining things away it is worth asking why.
The complete lack of introspection on the left about "from the river to the sea" is especially frustrating because we've gone through so many rounds of dialogue about the confederate flag that, broadly, covered similar issues. With that controversy, everyone on the left agreed that it was more important that the flag was understood as endorsing slavery and racism by those who saw it that way (including myself FWIW) than that the flag meant "southern pride" by those who flew it.
Now with "from the river", we have something understood to be a violent and hateful expression by many Jews or Israelis, but the answer from the left is just "well that's not what it means to us so just shut up." AKA "it just means southern pride" but for the pro-Palestinian side.
1) Free speech is probably a poor descriptor of the issue here. It's much closer to something like academic freedom...it's really the status of universities as institutions that seek to enable a very wide array of potentially controversial speech. If the universities aren't in some sense politically nuetral then support for them becomes political and that not only puts them in danger but creates pressure to squelch the 'wrong' sort of ideas.
2) Obviously, most of the people chanting the slogan haven't given any thought to what it means at all. It's just a means for them to show solidarity with their side of a conflict. But that's true of almost all political rallies and political supporters.
However, I think it is true that if you pressed them on the issue the vast vast majority of Americans would explain that this was what they meant -- or at least deny they meant anything about expelling the Jews. And given that most political speech happens with very little serious thought (it's mostly getting riled up by a friend or speech and going along) that's probably the closest you can get to saying that's what they really mean.
An organization can be political without resorting to censorship.
We decided many decades ago that individual freedoms don't extend to firing (or refusing to hire) someone because of e.g. their race. The potential for society-wide civil rights violations trumps a restriction on individual freedom in employment decisions. Freedom of speech is a civil right and there should be commonly understood restrictions on how far people can extend other rights to abridge or chill free speech.
Who you are is an innate characteristic; what you say isn’t.
The idea that you can restrict people’s freedom of association to prevent discrimination based on innate characteristics is, yes, an infringement… but a justifiable one.
But if your position is that I cannot consider broad classes of voluntary actions when deciding to employ or associate with people… that rabbit hole has no bottom.
Do I have to hire the product manager who can’t restrain himself from a racist screed but is otherwise most qualified in an interview when acting as hiring manager for my employer?
Do I have to hire an architect who is the most suitable but does the same for an addition to my home?
Do I have to continue going to the (best of a given type of) restaurant owned by someone who does the same?
These are all the same principle; where does it stop?
An employer has more power than a restaurant customer, so these are not the same principle. An organized boycott of a restaurant because of speech-based disagreements would be closer.
For most of the history of modern civilization, hiring was supposed to be based on a person's qualifications for the tasks relevant to the position. This idea that people are not just allowed, but obligated, to surround themselves with only like-minded individuals is much more toxic and exclusionary than the alternative.
This kind of censorship never stops at just extreme racist screeds.
“For most of the history of modern civilization, hiring was supposed to be based on a person's qualifications for the tasks relevant to the position.”
[UNCONTROLLABLE LAUGHTER]
Anyway, there’s never going to be any stomach for limiting freedom of association to the degree you want, thank god, nor does more than a tiny fraction of the population understand “being a dick will get you fired” to be a form of censorship.
“For most of the history of modern civilization, hiring was supposed to be based on a person's qualifications for the tasks relevant to the position”
No, that’s a very new idea. For most of history hiring was done based on a candidate’s family, ethnicity, religion, where he attended school, and membership in various civic organizations.
It's a very new idea, and generally speaking there are very few lines of work in which "don't be a shithead" is *not* a relevant task.
There are a great number of positions in which "be uncontroversial and circumspect when discussing politics if you do so at all" is a crucial part of the job.
The kids who willingly signed their names to NYU and Harvard's public letters did so because they never thought anyone would come after them for extremist views in the way that they've gone after others for non-extremist ones.
“The kids who willingly signed their names to NYU and Harvard's public letters did so because they never thought anyone would come after them for extremist views in the way that they've gone after others for non-extremist ones”
Not exactly products of a well-rounded education, I would say.
That level of faith in meritocracy is almost touching. Even extremely high-profile hiring with lots of money on the line often doesn't work like that. There have been loads of examples of Formula 1 drivers hired for nepotistic reasons, for instance.
I agree with the principle of free speech. I've been against many of the intrusions on free speech that have occurred.
I mostly agree with your take. I think there's no *problem* having a pro-Palestinian protest, and a *huge* problem with not allowing one to take place.
The main thing I'll point out:
1. Some people *did* cross the line into speech that even I'd consider worth distancing from. E.g. Professors "exhillirated" at the deaths of Israelis. E.g. a different professor IIRC that said something like "Zionists have addresses and family members, [ax-emoji]". E.g. crowds chanting "gas the Jews".
2. As an Israeli and a Jew, while I don't think pro-Palestinian protests are wrong, it's certainly been eye-opening to see the lack of ability of so many people on the left to be able to condemn Hamas. I don't even think being pro-Palestinian is at odds with condemning Hamas, quite the opposite - I think both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian people should have the same goal - eliminating Hamas, which is harming both Israelis *and Palestinians*!
3. As someone else pointed out, it's not the I think University presidents should opine about everything. Given that they *do* opine about everything, and given that they will almost certainly *continue to opine* about everything, it's both eye-opening and, frankly, damning, that they can't come out more forcefully against Hamas or Hamas sympathizers.
I'm fine moving towards a world where more political opinions are able to be aired and respected. I very much agree with Matthew's saying that it's important that some people can say Israel has committed war crimes. As an Israeli, *I also want to know* if that's happening. While I trust the Israeli government and free press probably more than non-Israelis do, I certainly don't want to live in a world in which there's no outside force that will show me if Israel is committing horrendous acts.
But given that we almost certainly aren't moving to that world, given the world we have now, I'm mostly in despair that it's more controversial to misgender someone than to praise Hamas for killing my countrymen. (And I'm in even more despair that people honestly think that to support Palestinians you need to support Hamas, as if they weren't their brutal oppressors in many ways.)
"I'm mostly in despair that it's more controversial to misgender someone than to praise Hamas for killing my countrymen."
Of course, this is totally not true for 99% of Americans. Totally the opposite. The unstated context, however, is "for many people on the Left." And that makes it true. But my question is: how much should we care? Why do we spend so much time worrying about the bullshit positions of these fringe groups and people?
We should because America’s inegalitarian biases means these antisemitic idiots will be the country’s future elite (or a disproportionate part of it anyway).
Re: 2 sure it's not logically incompatible but it's emotionally incompatible. On political issues people feel strongly about they don't act like policy wonks, they act as rhetorical foot soldiers for their side. This is true on all sides of these issues.
At an emotional/social level these people have three options. Somehow excuse, ignore or explain away as understandable what Hamas did, change sides or draw a line in the sand and say that anyone who supports or excuses Hamas isn't really on their side.
Obviously, what they should do is take the third option -- but that's like asking someone to say: "The Russians are awful people acting badly but they need to win the war with Ukraine". It might be an intellectually coherent position but it won't get people out in the streets as you can't really feel filled with pure moral indignation about waving your side's flag. So those people are never going to really be big players in the movement leaving only the people who take the first option to drive the protests.
I'm a longtime reader and subscriber who rarely comments. On this piece, since I am an Israeli Jew teaching Judaism at a left-leaning university, I have some things to say. Please forgive the essay.
1. I support free speech as a basic academic freedom. Having said that, there can be a thin line between unrestricted free speech and suppression of speech that I don't know how to navigate. On my campus every time the Jewish and Israel-supporting students (who are a tiny minority on campus) have an Israel related event, even if it is just a meal of Israeli food, SJP holds a protest outside with signs like 'Zionism is racism'. Yes, they have a right to do this. Yes, Jewish and Israel-supporting students ought to be resilient in the face of criticism. But in practice that means that Jewish students rarely want to do anything Israel-related because it is just so tiring. I can't say that this is, as you say, leading to robust and thoughtful dialogue on campus.
2. There is no right to unrestricted free speech in the classroom. Students are welcome to voice dissenting opinions when they are related to the topic of the class. They are not invited to give long speeches on things that are not the topic of the class, over and over. I teach Judaism to students who are not Jewish and often know little about Judaism but have strong (primarily negative) opinions about Israel. To be honest I rarely teach about Israel in my classes because when I do the students demand that their voices be heard, and then they repeat the opinions they had before coming into the class, which are the same opinions most people at the university have. It's hard for me to see any learning taking place from this. When I do teach about Israel I try to limit the conversation in advance - we are learning about specific texts and concepts that are within my area of expertise and I am not willing to broaden the conversation. Yes, this limits student free speech, but students have no right to unrestricted free speech in the classroom.
This isn't only about Israel, obviously. Students have a right to ask in class if Jews killed Jesus or if Jews control the world - once or twice. I have had in my classes students who believe antisemitic conspiracy theories or Holocaust denial and want them given equal time in class, and I don't have an obligation to do this, and if students keep pressing for this all I will do is devote class time to explaining the origins of antisemitic conspiracy theories and why they are wrong.
(Students also don't have a right to derail class conversations into a long digression about basketball or the Barbie movie so that we will cover less course material and there will be less on the final. How often do students try to do this? ALWAYS.)
But, if faculty don't have an obligation to give unrestricted free speech to their students in class, and if other faculty think about Israel the way I think about antisemitic conspiracy theories, this is going to create a not-great environment for Jewish students on campus. I don't know what to do about this. I do think professors have an ethical responsibility to present things neutrally and descriptively, and to present legitimate opposing views, but again from the perspective of a professor who is convinced that Israel is settler-colonialism maybe nothing pro-Israel is legitimate.
3. Regarding Black Lives Matter and Jewish faculty - it's not a them and us. The Jewish faculty at my campus were at the forefront of calling on the university to respond to police violence against Black people. We have also historically been at the forefront of pro-unionization efforts. The problem was, it became more and more the case that every time I spoke at a pro-union protest there would be another speaker who would for some reason bring in Palestine. It used to be that I could live with this. Right now I don't know that I can. I don't know that I would speak at a union rally right now, knowing that it would also be an anti-Israel rally, at a time when my friends and family in Israel are in danger.
I want to be clear, it's not a quid pro quo. I'm not saying I supported worker rights and not murdering Black people and now I want unionized workers and Black activists to support me. I'm saying I want to keep going to rallies for things I believe in without it also being a rally that actively opposes my own people. I was saying to someone in her 30s that I wish we could go back to single-issue activism and she said that she doesn't even know what that looks like, it is before her time. Her hope is that other progressives will remember the importance of Jews to their alliance. But that also seems unfair to me - the pro-Palestinian voice is also useful in the progressive alliance. If we can't find a way to reconstruct single-issue advocacy I don't know what else to do. I expect that progressive-leaning Jews (which are most American Jews) will have to become anti-Israel in order to be part of an alliance that they 98% agree with, but that's not going to be an option for me because I am actually Israeli.
4. As far as statements. I was in favor of my university making a statement on Black Lives Matter because that is something we could actually do something about. We teach students who will one day work in law enforcement. We employ security on campus. This is really not a bad place to think about racism in policing. We also - badly - need to think about (and fix) the underrepresentation of Black faculty on campus. I was not in favor of my university making any statement on Israel/Palestine. (Not that anyone asked me, even though I am the only Jewish Studies professor on campus.) But I didn't like the statement that they made, which was very "we grieve all the violence". If you are going to make a statement, think about what you can do to help. I don't think my university can, actually, do anyting to help Israel or Palestine. What it can do - if it cares to - is help Muslim and Jewish, Palestinian and Israeli students at our campus and in our city, who may be grieving family, or may be experiencing antisemitic or Islamophobic attacks, or who may be sick of people who have no personal stake in the situation coming up to them with their bad takes every minute of their lives on campus. If the university cared to, it could do things like 1. setting up designated spaces for grieving, and distinguishing between that and spaces for debate and protest 2. teaching more courses on Islam and Judaism in America, so that people have a better understanding of their local communities 3. organizing donation drives to reputable Israeli and Palestinian organizations on the ground so that people who want to help can help in ways that might actually make a difference. I don't think talking about antisemitism or Islamophobia is weaponizing feelings of unsafety. I think it is asking the university to focus on the people it can help - Jewish and Muslim students on campus - rather than trying to take the right position on issues it can't do anything about.
I really don't like the way that statements have become so much about positioning, figuring out what the one right answer is and trying to get out in front of it but without actually doing anything to help. But I also, to be honest, don't like that in this case the one right answer is - we're not taking a side. I dislike this for personal reasons, not for principled academic reasons. My principled, academic stance is that I would rather that they said nothing unless (as with Black Lives Matter) there are particular things they could actually do to help. Personally I feel sad that they got it together to say something and what they said was, even though your people just got murdered we aren't going to condemn it.
Yes, by not taking a stand they also told the Palestinians that they are not with them either. I'm ok with Palestinians on campus being mad about the statement too. Again, I would have preferred if the university hadn't said anything.
1. I agree the SJP should have the fight to right to conduct such protests. I also believe they shouldn’t (making individual students feel uncomfortable is bad and counterproductive to change). I think people should look down on those who engage in such protests and encourage them to stop.
2. I agree free speech can be restricted in the classroom, and that’s probably necessary to keep classes functioning. I think a focus on respect is critical here - even if you disagree, expressing your view in a reasonable and respectful manner means far fewer harms t students who disagree.
3. I think “can we do something productive” sounds like a good standard.
Nice comment. A lot of issues when it comes to campus speech and demonstrations. It really does take a leadership that puts the young peoples experience first and looks at each issue soberly. If Jewish folks on campus can’t have any events peacefully that’s a problem even if u want to allow propalestine groups their fair time as well. Navigating that isn’t easy and they have to take that duty seriously.
Literally every single pro Palestinian demonstration is mired with explicit antisemitism : swastikas, literal calls to kills Jews etc. many of the advertisements to those rallies glorified and celebrated the recent acts of mass murder, which were without a doubt the greatest antisemitic crimes committed since the Holocaust. You can’t understand things outside context. It’s in this context these protest took place. Sure, maybe some people are ill informed, but most of these students activists etc knew about the worst atrocities imaginable, didn’t condemn them and often explicitly justified and celebrated them. You don’t need to adopt the far lefts ridiculously low bar to identify other kinds of racism to see that in this case many many people have shown themselves to be chillingly hardcore antisemites.
I have a really simple question - how do you organise a pro-Palestinian demonstration that wouldn't attract explicit antisemites? Alternatively, how do you exclude people from your demonstration that you don't want there?
It's not a question with an easy answer. I organised demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2003. We couldn't find a way to stop people from carrying pro-Saddam posters. We also couldn't keep Israel/Palestine out of it. People were going to fly Palestinian flags whatever we did. We also found that various communist cults were going to turn up and we could do very little about them. The police would not help us to forcibly remove them or separate ourselves from them. We could spend all our time chanting about how awful they were - which meant we couldn't get the anti-war message across - or we could ignore them and hope people concentrated on the 90% of the posters and banners and people who weren't lunatics.
Sure, the percentages can vary and you can legitimately comment on that - but the fact is that most protests see the extremists drive out everyone else as they decide not to turn up next time.
Hmm start by not endorsing mass murder in your invitation to the protest? Have the organizers make sure to explicitly condemn such crimes ("not in my name")? Call such behavior out by the speakers? Have the crowd visibly boo, call out etc. anyone using such symbols or making such chants?
These are just some suggestions. When the precise opposite happens, again and again and again you can pretty reasonably conclude that your movement is steeped in hate. Pro Palestinian activism does not have to, in theory, be anti semitic. Some of the people in it aren't anti semites. But the movement as it is right now, in reality today, very clearly is very deeply steeped in anti semitism, and precious few of its adherents seem to mind that much.
I agree with a lot of this. All I'm saying is that the antisemites will always turn up and the non-antisemites are put off by the fact that they always will. Just to get a majority who aren't antisemites would require a major effort to convince people that the protest isn't going to be full of antisemites.
It's a pathology of the pro-Palestinian movement, yes, but it's also a pathology of using protests as a method of activism - extremists who put off everyone else will turn up and put off everyone else, and if you want to prevent that, you have to have infrequent large protests not frequent small ones (as well as a bunch of other requirements). The only movement I can think of in recent years that has pulled that off is the UK's pro-EU movement, where the worst excesses are cringe (google "EU supergirl") rather than hate or violence. But even they had to work hard to stop people who wanted to be full-time activists from taking over and holding protests every week in front of a few thousand, when they could hold two a year and attract hundreds of thousands. And what did we get instead? An unofficial protester (Steve Bray) who stayed out on continuous protest, and ended up promoting a bunch of conspiracy theories about the government and Brexit. Still, the official protests managed to avoid the worst of this and stopped inviting him on stage when he went down the rabbit hole.
Really, all I'm saying is that protests are a really bad representation of people who are more broadly sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian position, but the nature of protest means that Peter Beinart doesn't get invited to them.
I dunno. Maybe it’s a really good representation and you’re just underestimating how many people who go to protests are antisemites or have other trash views.
I’ve seen protests and known people who’ve gone to them. The idea that literally everyone there is some kind of below replacement level asshole is really easy for me to believe.
My point, to the extent I have one, is that the people who turn up to the protest are often terribly unrepresentative of the overall population that supports the cause for which they are protesting, and that people who have been to like two protests and then stopped are often just as hostile to the "below replacement level asshole"s who are the majority of those there because those very brlas turn up to every protest going.
So you can't use the protests to represent the movement (in the sense of the mass of ordinary people who sympathise), but you sometimes can to represent the movement (in the sense of the people who run the protests).
I was a Lib Dem on my local STWC board and quit when it became obvious that the SWP were going to take control of it by boring everyone else to death in meetings.
Respect was a coalition of three main groups: the SWP, Galloway and his fandom, and the Islamic groups. STWC was supposed to be a cross-party coalition, but the SWP did the thing they always do, dragged out all meeting with petty procedural points, tried to drive everyone else out of the room, and then seized control.
I'd been arguing for fewer, bigger protests, for getting people to be clear they represented only themselves, for removing party-political and all other outside-organisational banners, so TU banners, mosque banners, etc. That was really unpopular.
One way to interpreting the presence of swastikas is hyper-trolling: ‘Since Jews are indifferent to our suffering then we are indifferent to theirs”. It’s appalling to me to see swastikas displayed but it is a mistake to brand everything connected to it as Nazism and dismiss it in its entirety. That’s taking the bait, making it appear that you are truly indifferent to their suffering.
I am sure that the added cry “gas the Jews”, the vandalizing of kosher supermarkets, the targeting of Jewish students in a Stanford classroom, the murder of the president of a synagogue in Detroit and of course the systemic murder of over 1000 Jews which triggered the rest are similarly a cry for help wit no malice or hate intended? Some people clearly adamantly refuse to accept the sickeningly plain facts. It’s not a good look.
What has really happened with the post-pogrom discourse is that it revealed the illiberalism of many ideologically “left” persons and organizations. Many postmodernists ideas and critical theories that are popular on college campuses are constructed in opposition to liberal ideas and values. It’s a weird contrarianism. Many of the problems I have with DEI-washing is that it promotes illiberal ideas, rejects individual agency, and the ability for people to have difficult conversations.
Where am I going with this stream of thought? Well I guess we all have seen many mask off moments from people who supposedly claim to promote the social good. And it is cruel. And it is mean. And it is vindictive.
Excellent, excellent post. One of the seemingly forgotten points out there is that pro-Palestinian academics and activists are in many ways the OG victims of what we now call cancelation in the university space.
That of course doesn't mean they're right about everything or even anything. But I do think the counter-reaction to them and student groups endorsing more extreme talking points over the last weeks is not a defense of liberalism and principles of free speech. It's an attempt to reinforce another arbitrary shibbeloth about what can and can't be debated. I mean, what exactly is the message supposed to be, particularly in light of all of the other unhinged things that have come out of and been endorsed by universities over the last few years? Feel free to make all kinds of racially charged assertions about white and Asian people under Kendian theories of discrimination (to say nothing of black and hispanic people who disagree with that perspective), hold that all men are rapists until proven otherwise, or go crazy against feminists not on board with replacing the sex based rights regime with one based on gender identity, but tirades against Israel are a bridge too far!
The only caveat I would add is that the 1st Amendment does absolutely apply to many, maybe most, colleges and universities which are state institutions. At a certain point the Ivies can do what they want, though they also are often subject to a number of rules in exchange for state and federal benefits.
Lost in all of this is the real question of first principles. We should want to be a society that can talk through things, not one that holds all conversation hostage to a web of taboos and increasingly abstract ideas of harm. That was true with the MeToo/rape culture arguments, it was true with Floyd/Kendi and DEI, it's true with debates over gender identity, and it's true with this.
Matt keeps missing the point about Ivy league's "hypocrisy" here. As I said before, the hypocrisy isn't just bad qua hypocrisy but for what it suggests. If your institution's bar for action against people for any racial "microagression" is as low as the dead sea but when it comes to macroagression against Jews you suddenly suggests the bar should be up on the Everest then it suggests to me that your institution is "systemically" antisemitic (to use another fashionable term). A fortiori if this is combined with the institution itself being very reluctant and tame in condemning the most horrific violence against Jews after making a lot of noise with objectively far more minor things. And all the more still if your institution has a very sketchy history regarding its attitude towards Jews (cough Harvard cough Stanford...)
The simplest and most telling test of a person's professed belief in "Freedom of Speech" is how willingly they tolerate the saying the things they disagree with. In my experience this is a test that the vast majority of 'free speech absolutists' fail dismally. Mr Yglesias is an honourable exception.
Disclaimer: I am Israeli so not truly objective here and I am very left wing in Israel and support two states and full removal of all the settlements.
The problem most of us have with this situation in the universities and some other places around the world, is not about protests against the Israeli government and policy, that many of us also have, including myself. The problem is that many of this demonstrations are also supporting and justifying rape and massacre of innocent civilians, including kids, just because they are Jewish. An opinion that for some reason is ok to have now.
Yeah. I can tolerate any honest arguments about the history or political solutions. But I don’t have any problem axing the Cornell prof who jumped on a podium and declared Hamas’s massacre to be “exhilarating” and “exciting.”
The main lesson there is academics are a bit overrated. We (the public) should pay colleges (see Biden's IDR loan plan, the tax status of 529 college savings accounts) that employ them less. That is a lot more simple than demanding people who sincerely believe Jews are of the white/settler race (and therefore not worthy of an institutional mission like George Floyd's death) to change their beliefs. Just give them less public money and they can go find private money to make up the difference for their own purposes.
Ok and then what's your plan for when they do in fact find private (Qatari) money to make up the difference?
Exactly - There is a difference between making an unpopular or controversial argument and blatant anti-semitism.
I don't see how hecould be allowed to teach after that, at least not any mandatory courses. And I would judge very harshly any colleague of his maintains friendly (as opposed to strictly professional) relations with him after that, and I would support his firing if he isn't tenured, but I imagine that tenure protections might hold even in this case, and that's perhaps a necessary evil. But that doesn't exempt the institution from treating him as anything less than a complete pariah after these comments. Failure to do so is a strong indication of the institution being anti semitic.
The clip of the Cornell professor sounded really bad. But it was a brief clip. We have no idea what he said before the clip starts. Maybe it provided more of an understandable context; maybe it didn't. But we've been aroused and enraged too often by out of context clips (e.g., the Covington kids) that I'm on a hair-trigger to be suspicious of anyone who presents a brief clip of something outrageous. I'm more than ready to suspect their motives. Our first reaction needs to be suspicion of anyone presenting something intended to be inflammatory. Don't trust, and seek to verify.
OK, so maybe people don't want to watch a 20 minute clip. So present the short clip but provide a link to the full-context video.
Fair enough. Here's a 2-minute clip that provides some context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAZcG-ZHOz4. And a full transcript here: https://ithacavoice.org/2023/10/cornell-community-divided-rally-backs-prof-rickford-as-national-headlines-swirl/.
He does claim to abhor violence. But then he compares Hamas to Ella Baker, Sojourner Truth, and (most repellently) to Jews who resisted genocide. Notably, none of these people kidnapped, raped, or murdered innocent people. And he says "I would never presume, to tell an oppressed people how they should seek their liberation." I think it's fair to characterize the whole thing as part Hamas apologia, part progressive word salad.
Classic archetype. The son of a Stanford professor who wishes he were a revolutionary, but without the danger or privation.
Thanks for sharing this.
I wouldn't say the full context exonerates him but I would say it adds lots of shades of gray to what was presented as black and white.
Give me a break. Nobody would talk of “shades of gray” for this garbage if it justified the murder of members of any other group. Enough excusing antisemitism. He should be fired asap.
I thought the opposite. 🤷🏻♀️
Thanks for this. I encourage everyone to read the full speech -- I think it contains a lot of wisdom. I find it repellent that he was exhilarated by even the initial reports of the attack, and unlike him, there are limits beyond which I would tell anyone -- no matter how oppressed -- that they are committing unforgivable atrocities. But the context of his mention of "exhilarated" is specifically *not* to the attack's full "horrific acts" (his words, in that same paragraph) -- he emphasizes that when Palestinians and he felt this, it was before they learned of the murders and atrocities, and in response to the breaking out from Gaza.
We all extend a degree of grace to people who have been through hell. It's normal and compassionate to consider mitigating circumstances. But suffering does not extinguish all moral agency and obligations. It's infantilizing and disrespectful to presume that the "victims" are incapable of moral behavior.
Eh, I suppose he was trying to distinguish between Hamas breaching the wall (exhilarating) and everything Hamas did afterwards (atrocious). A college professor should be able to articulate his meaning more clearly. And should have the good sense to realize that normal people will see the breach and slaughter as part of the same hideous operation. It's like extolling the skill with which the 9/11 hijackers maneuvered the plane.
Reading the entire transcript made me think he should be fired for being a blithering idiot with the analytical skill of a sophomore.
I watched the whole thing, and if anything, context made it worse.
It’s not our job. It’s his employers job to conduct a thorough investigation. If it turns out that it is what it seems to be, then I believe the consequences I outlined should follow. That all such things are always pending proper investigation should go without saying. I acknowledge that unfortunately that’s not always obvious in this day and age.
That's too easy an out. You must be aware that everyone is viewing this, forming opinions, and joining a raging debate. Like Nancy Reagan, we should just say no and not form an opinion on this guy whatsoever unless and until we're satisfied we have enough information.
Re the Nancy Reagan reference--reminds me of an episode of the “Hidden Brain” podcast about outrage bait, and how a study found that outrage actually triggers the pleasure centers of the brain kind of like a drug...outrage is kind of like a “high” that people seek out.
>> just because they are Jewish.
This is where you lose me.
They were quite obviously attacked because they were *Israeli*. Does Hamas hate Israel because it's a Jewish state? Sure, that's a documented part of their politics. Is there a significant overlap between Israeli and Jewish identity? Absolutely. So, yes, you can toss all these terms into a word salad and come out with one big conflation that they were "attacked because they are Jewish".
But the attack was against Israel. It targeted Israelis, not immediately because they were Jewish, but because they were Israeli. No one simultaneously bombed synagogues in the UK, or attacked Cypriot Jews. And it's highly likely that some appreciable minority of the victims of the attack were not even Jewish. Regardless, those victims were attacked all the same, because they were in Israeli towns that Hamas could strike, not because Hamas thought it was specifically targeting Jews for their Jewishness. Hamas simply made no effort to target Jewishness in the first place, despite being a horrifically antisemitic organization.
And this is what Matt was talking about with the stuff about accusations of bigotry. It's REALLY not helping your case to conflate the victims' Israeli-ness with their Jewishness. Because that conflation leads to the mistaken conclusion that, "Well, it's just plain old antisemitism, which we already understand, so we don't have to bother trying to understand anything more about this attack or anyone who supports it."
The reality is, it's not like a bunch of college kids all of a sudden decided it was "ok now" to kill people "just because they are Jewish". You'll never get an opinion poll saying that, because it's simply not true. The reality is, the Palestinian cause has been part of the global anti-imperialist movement for decades now, and gained steam because of the Palestinian and broader Muslim diaspora's growth in the West. It's absolutely a potential vector for antisemitism, and we've seen SOME incidents of outright antisemitism expressed at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. But that's NOT the same as it being an outright antisemitic movement _in_toto_.
So again, as Matt said, "the sins being committed are the commonplace ones of intellectual laziness and performative allyship rather than hatred or antisemitism". It's equally intellectually lazy to just label all of this as antisemitism.
I think it is helpful here to consider the roots of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Between about the end of WWI to the aftermath of WWII, there was a lot of moving state lines, displacement of people, creating new nations by drawing lines on maps, etc., including in the Middle East. The creation of Israel is merely one of many such examples. But it's the only one that has led to multiple wars with Arabs united against one common enemy and a conflict that has endured for decades. What's different between Israel and, say, Lebanon? Why are the Arabs so opposed to one and not the other?
It's because they're Jewish.
More to the point - why are westerners so obsessed about this specific conflict, in the way they are not about far deadlier stuff happening literally next door?
I've made this point to many people who are outraged that my view on the Israel/Gaza conflict is "Let's [US] not get involved."
My view is consistent with my views on Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Haiti.
Perhaps, but it's not because of their Jewish-NESS: https://www.slowboring.com/p/saturday-thread-b42/comment/41939325
IOW, the fact that they are Jews certainly plays a role in why the conflict started and why it persists. It's related to a really long and complicated history of Jewish and Arab competition over the Holy Land.
But there's nothing about their Jewishness that Hamas is specifically targeting. If you ask a random Hamas militant what it is he hates about Israelis/Jews, he's going to give you a litany of crimes (real and imagined) against his people, not some diatribe about the Rothschilds like you'd expect from an American Nazi.
Sorry, but this is just not true. I’ve read about the kind of education Palestinian children receive about Jews. Jews are portrayed as literally evil caricatures, complete with hooked noses and horns, like something straight out of 1930s Nazi propaganda.
That explains a lot.
I mean, I agree that antisemitism in Hamas is different from antisemitism in America or Europe, but Hamas and their supporters in the Middle East are still motivated in large part by Israelis being mostly Jewish. I guess I don't really understand your point.
See my other comments.
The difference here is teleology. I'm basically arguing that the proximate causes (guy on the street is mostly immediately motivated by crimes against his people) are only partially antisemitic at best, but we keep having commentators like Mr. Tepper here conflating the deep (and very obviously antisemitic) _historical_ causes for widespread _proximate_ antisemitic sentiments.
And you're doing the same thing. "Motivated in large part by Israelis being mostly Jewish" is only really true on a broad historical level; it's simply not true at the proximate level of most of the individuals actually making up this conflict.
I'm not sure I'd really disagree with you, but I thought it was worth mentioning that in the minds of antisemites, antisemitism is always motivated by "crimes against their people": the Jews poisoned the well, the Jews kidnap and kill Christian children, the Jews murdered Christ, the Jews control banking and impoverish us, etc. To be clear, I don't think the crimes of the occupation are a conspiracy theory; they are real, and there are many of them. But I think this is why many Jewish people are skeptical of the idea that this time, unlike all the others, the hatred and violence were exclusively or even mostly provoked by real historical events rather than longer-standing antisemitic attitudes.
I see your point, but I do think you're slicing the salami pretty thin. Hamas ideology is that the area must be ruled by Muslims. You can technically say that this ideology is no more opposed to Jews than to any other religious group, but in practice they preach the murder of Jews specifically. Their supporters just tore down an old synagogue in Tunisia. There have been attacks on Jewish sites in Buenos Aires and Seattle and Paris. And Palestinian schoolbooks include all manner of anti-Jewish tropes and invective. I think you might be giving them more credit than they deserve.
Those attacks in BA/Seattle/Paris were by *supporters*, not Hamas themselves. I don't think that's "slicing it thin". It's just keeping a correct accounting of who's doing what and why.
I hear what you're saying, and please trust me when I say I'm not trying to give Hamas ANY kind of credit, except for being murderous fascistic bastards. The only thing they "deserve" IMO is those special Hellfire missiles that can kill a dude standing on a balcony while not harming the poor children in the next room whom the evil fuckhead is trying to use as human shields.
All I'm trying to do is make sure that we understand precisely WHO that fuckhead is, and ALL of the different and many-layered reasons why he's doing what he's doing -- not just SOME, and NOT just the ones that we want to tell ourselves where we and all our friends get to pretend we're history's only victims ever -- so that we can drive this conflict to a long-overdue peaceful conclusion with a minimum amount of whatever violence is necessary, applied in as specific and targeted a manner as possible.
"Those attacks in BA/Seattle/Paris were by *supporters*, not Hamas themselves."
And has Hamas disavowed these actions?
(OK, OK, maybe Hamas is too busy kidnapping, raping, and killing civilians right now to issue statements. Do you think they would *ever* disavow such supporters' actions?)
Respectfully, I'm not so sure your history is accurate.
Arab Jews and Arab Christians got along OK as second class citizens in Ottoman Asia. When something like the Farhud in Baghdad happened, Baghdadi Jews had never experienced anything like that.
When Israel was founded, both the Soviet Union and United States thought they could get Israel on their side. After a little while, the Soviet Union realized they couldn't pull Israel from the US, so they gave up on Israel. Soviets decided to push anti-semitism in the Arab and Muslim world, in order to generate opposition to the United States. They had thousands of embedded agents and mass misinformation campaigns. For example, producing a translation of "The Procolols of the Elders of Zion" in Arabic.
Zionism definitely created tension between Jews and Arabs, and things were far from fair or just beforehand, but the two groups have not been "fighting for the holy land" for a long time.
>Arab Jews and Arab Christians got along OK as second class citizens in Ottoman Asia.
Mizrahi Jews hate being called "Arab Jews". Albert Memmi has a famous passage that the Arabs never really let them be Arab Jews, even when they would have liked to be so.
Plus, "got along OK as second-class citizens" is the very definition of not getting along OK.
Mizrahi is just Hebrew for "Eastern", but yes, nowadays Arab is not a word Jews would use to describe themselves.
In the first half of the 20th century, second-class citizen qualified as getting on OK, for Jews.
Respectfully, there's about 6000 years of history in the region to which I was alluding, not merely the last 60-80.
And, respectfully, you are wrong about 5900 of those 6000 years.
Michael already gave you some evidence towards this when he wrote "Arab Jews and Arab Christians got along OK as second class citizens in Ottoman Asia." Read more carefully.
This is what you said, slippery guy,
"a really long and complicated history of Jewish and Arab competition over the Holy Land."
Now you say this is a 6000 year history. Wow. Judaism is not nearly 6000 years old, let alone Christianity or Islam.
The fact is that it was European Christians that oppressed Jews far worse than any Arabs. Jews (and Christians) lived as essentially second class citizens in the middle east, but they were relatively safe from violence. As "people of the book" they were allowed to practice their religion privately (but not to marry Muslims, had to pay a special tax, etc.).
Strong anti-Jewish sentiment in the middle east was a reaction to Zionism in Palestine.
This is the basic narrative you will hear from virtually any Arab Jew that left one of these countries. It is also the story told by their Christian and Islamic friends and neighbors that stayed behind. I don't see any reason whatsoever why Israeli Middle Eastern Jews would whitewash their own oppression at the hands of Arabs.
Muslims and Jews simply have not been longtime foes. It's a recent phenomenon.
Arab muslims have deeply opposed to the existence of a Jewish state in the middle east. It's a religious fundamentalist position that is highly egoistic. The Jews are "European Settler Colonialists"-- never mind that most Israelis are from Middle Eastern families.
the original Hamas charter (in theory, replaced a few years ago, I don't know how serious that actually was) approvingly cites the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", so there's definitely a lot of classic antisemitism mixed in there.
See the comments on teleology. Classic antisemitism can historically breed Hamas' ideology without the day-to-day conflict or individual attacks being specific examples of classic antisemitism.
Perhaps another way to put it is that I think it's more useful to think of antisemitism as a *driver* of individuals within the conflict than as an *individual motivation*. We might call the entire 10/7 attack a war crime driven by classic antisemitism, but it's a mistake to call the attack "classic antisemitism".
FWIW, I'm not trying to dice words here. It's just that it's a genuinely complex topic to discuss.
I don’t see how it’s useful to split hairs this way. If you want to write your own definition for something called “classic antisemitism,” then knock yourself out. But it seems to me that the 10/7 massacre was, in essence, a modern-day pogrom carried out in a particularly ruthless and efficient manner. Pogroms may not be “classic antisemitism,” but they’re surely near the top of the antisemitic greatest hits list.
At least some of the attackers made phone calls to parents announcing how many people they'd killed, and to some extent it appears they didn't say they killed "Israelis." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67198270
I don't think these motherfuckers can ever be accused of having the most accurate terminology. They'd be hilariously out of place in a meeting of all those woke college kids who are happily defending them right now.
The woke kids like assaulting Jewish students, they just do it less violently than their Hamas idols. Now pro Palestinian protestors in the streets - those guys got more serious intent than just mocking dead Jews. "Gas the Jews" - a pro Palestinian gem for the ages.
If you actually ask a Hamas militant you'll get an ideological slurry of both things.
Think of it this way. Israel and Austria have about the same population. If the residents of the two countries changed places overnight, would Hamas be more interested in driving the Austrians out of Israel or going over to Austria to kill Jews/Israelis?
I think the Austrians would move back to Austria.
I’m pretty sure they’d drive the weak and disorganized Austrians out within a week, thank their lucky stars (and Allah) for this great blessing, and spend the next 40 years issuing North Korea-like rhetoric from their state media outlets calling the new Austrian Israel everything BUT a child of God.
Another day, another Anschluss.
I think you are collapsing a lot of stuff unhelpfully together to get to a barstool thesis on this one, and it's forcing you into a really simplistic view (for example, the bit about this being the only post-colonial conflict that has endured for decades) that is just flatly wrong. Just to take one obvious example, neither the Iranians nor the Egyptians think of themselves as "Arabs," and you could make a pretty strong argument that the centers of "Arab" power have been in conflict, including shooting, with Iran--and here we are kind of going down the Sunni-Shi'a road--for as long or longer than they have been in conflict with Israel.
That's mostly because Israel is a relatively new political entity, and I guess you could cobble together some kind of thesis about the region just since 1950 (although I'm not sure why you are writing off India-Pakistan), but the oversimplification is hurting your analysis. If you don't understand recent events in part through the lens of Iranian competition with the Arab states--a "conflict that has endured for decades"--you end up missing some fairly critical context.
None of that erases the antisemitism from the conflict, but I would argue that the strategic politics matters more here than the antisemitism. Absent the geopolitical realities, a lot of other stuff changes pretty massively.
Or maybe it’s because they have the steadfast support of the US no matter what? (In spite of not having any oil)? Not denying the Jewish part, but anti-Americanism is a thing, too. Fits with their “anti-colonial” narrative.
Good comment.
US support for Israel has always been a double-edged sword for Israel. The support helps them a lot, but there are major consequences to it.
In particular, US support for Israel basically drove the Arab states into the Soviet Union's arms. We tend to talk a lot about US weapons to Israel. That only really kicked up in the late 1960s. The US would not send weapons to Israel, fearing a regional arms race, for the first two decades of Israel's existence. The weapons that Israel's enemies wielded came predominantly from the Soviet Union.
In addition to needing to face down all this Soviet-supplied weaponry, the Israelis also had to deal with the Soviet disinformation machine. The present day "anti-colonial" lefty crap vis a vis Israel was all thoughtfully engineered in the Soviet Union. In addition to infecting (and funding) Western academic drivel, the Soviets stoked anti-semitism in the Arab world. Translating and exporting all sorts of anti-semitic content to the middle east via their thousands of embedded agents. Of course, the real underlying motivation was to generate hatred for the US, which is held hostage by Jews, or whatever.
Or, at best, because Israel is *non-Arab* and simultaneously *non-Muslim*. No Arab nationalist or Islamist group would dream of slaughtering Thai or Indian guest workers in Oman or Saudi Arabia as "colonizers".
So then we're left with the question of "is generalized reactionary hatred of minorities winning independence better or worse than antisemitism?", which is dumb.
No. Hamas always talks about Jews, not Israelis. Their supporters world wide target Jews and Jewish institutions (e.g. synagogues, kosher shops etc). You ought to respond to what reality actually is, not what would be perhaps more convenient but is just not true.
P.S.
You ought to actually look at opinion polls. Palestinians but also Muslims world wide hold very strong, very wide spread "classical" antisemitic views. On the other side, the far left has an old, infamous, super well attested and well known atnisemitic tradition. I really think you need to learn more about all of this.
You can just as easily turn this round though. Lots of people in Israel will express Islamophobic views too, but you would presumably consider their current operations in Gaza a response to a massacre by a particular group rather than a violent assault on Islam itself.
Of course it's true that there are many deeply-held bigotries at play here but the reason we're talking about this topic today and not geothermal permitting or whatever is the specific events of the last two weeks, which are about Israel and Palestine specifically, rather than about Judaism, Islam or 'the far left'.
Israel isn't dedicated to the systemic annihilation of muslims or Arabs. On the contrary its founding charter explicitly calls for racial religious and sexual equality, and adds explicit mention of a promise for equal citizenship and representation for Arabs. It's the literal polar opposite of the Hamas charter. Needless to say (I hope) the IDF isn't going to Palestinian homes deliberately murdering babies and raping women Finally, pro-Israel rallies on US college campuses don't include Isamphoboic or racist slogans, nor do their advertisement celebrate the killing of anyone, let alone civilians. It's also worth noting that according to FBI data antisemitic hate crimes in the US occur about 5 times (!) the frequency of Islamophobic and anti Arab crimes combined, despite the two populations being roughly equal in size. Whichever way you look at it there is just no symmetry here.
I'm not implying there is a symmetry in who's done what to who, though if we do go down that road then I'm obviously going to point out there a lot more dead Palestinians who were living two weeks ago than dead Israelis. But that's beside the point, which is that the conflict is not about killing people 'just because they're Jewish', even though I'm sure understanding that way is extremely useful for the Israeli government, who then get to pretend that their actual political actions have no impact on anything.
What "the conflict is about" is an ill-defined abstract question. What Hamas is doing isn't. They aren't at all shy about it. They are targeting "Jews" not "Israelis". They were very clear about that in their attacks. However choosing to ignore their explicit statements put into practice in their horrific actions is surely useful to them.
But Israel is kind of dedicated to the systematic annihilation of Palestinians. How else would you describe continued settlements?
Settlement aren’t annihilation. They are, at worst, land dispossession. That’s bad but it isn’t annihilation. Murdering a thousand civilians in a day is.
P.S.
To claim that Israel is dedicated to the settlements, that postdate it, is an oversimplification. Most were built on private initiative if retroactively recognized. At times Israel dismantled some of them as part of peace agreement (in Sinai following peace with Egypt) or unilaterally (in Gaza and parts of West Bank).
That is really misguided.
Being slaughtered and indiscriminately shot at are VERY different than the injustice of having a Jewish suburb built nearby your town.
I'm not justifying the settlements--according to my understanding, Israel is militarily occupying the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem, which it has annexed), and thus should not permit the transfer its population there.
But this is not annihilation. It may complicate a future two-state solution. This arguably is a kind of segregation. And for the illegal outposts built on private land, it's land dispossession. But it isn't annihilation in the kind of way that Hamas wants to do to Jews, which is literal slaughter.
Annihilation means death, Nonexistence. Extermination. The word has a very specific and clear meaning. There is no "kind of."
Settlement means land expropriation or, in some cases, displacement. It is very bad and I oppose it. It is also very different and much less bad than annihilation.
This is basically what I'm trying to argue. There's a really important teleological difference between the proximate and historical causes.
Yes, and I think it's also worth stressing that conflating the two can only possibly escalate the fear, hurt and anger so it's a very useful rhetorical tool for 'inflaming the situation' and 'avoiding any introspection' but level heads need to insist on accuracy.
Exactly! The pro-Israel side gets to retreat into "This is antisemitism so we MUST fight it!" and the pro-Palestinian side gets to say, "We're not bigots, we're trying to stand up for the oppressed; it's clear that this is all just masking Islamophobia and pro-Israel media bias".
It's all bullshit. It's people telling themselves and each other comforting nostrums about how they're under attack, all to excuse the next round of attacks.
As someone going through a mid-life crisis and dealing with my own mortality, it all just seems so fucking petty. My life is the one thing I value the most in the world these days, and so the loss of ANY life just feels like an immense tragedy. I keep finding myself imagining the final moments of all these people who have died, and it makes me fucking sick (not like a fixation, just normal sick). And it puts everything else into perspective: the grudges, the grievances, the rage and murder. It all just needs to fucking stop. Sure, there are some bad people in this conflict who will still have to die before there can be peace, and that in itself is freaking tragic. But we HAVE to stop excusing the violence. We HAVE to stop letting our tribalism and accusations of mass bigotry drive the plane here. Because it's already a fucking WRECK.
Yeah, I don’t see how replacing “Jewish” with “Israeli” in the comment you’re replying to changes much.
> The problem is that many of this demonstrations are also supporting and justifying rape and massacre of innocent civilians, including kids, just because they are Jewish.
It’s the gruesome actions that are appalling to support and justify. The extent to which they were inspired by antisemitism is secondary to me.
Further, the terrorists who perpetrated these heinous atrocities included individuals who celebrated the Jewish identity of their victims. [1] Note that the actions described in the text of that tweet is too abhorrent for me to quote it here.
[1] https://twitter.com/mrconfino/status/1716427167649661262
I think their position is that it's wrong to rape and massacre Jewish people generally, but it's right and good to rape and massacre Jewish people if they are in their backyard - that they're fine with Jewish people as long as they live somewhere else.
“I’m not going to rape or Kill you AS LONG AS you stay far away from me” is not a ringing endorsement of your existence, to put it mildly.
Interestingly, if you exclude the rape part and stick with just the kill part you are functionally describing the "castle doctrine" that governs firearms usage in the United States.
It isn't the greatest to be sure. Better than the Nazis though!
I don't even think it's *that*. I think their position is "The Israelis have forced us to do all these bad things by oppressing our people in what once was OUR backyard". Right or wrong, that's the position. (it's definitely wrong, no one "forces" anyone to murder and rape innocents)
But more broadly, you're right. Besides the usual lunatic fringe you'll find _anywhere_, no Palestinian really gives two shits about murdering Jews in, say, Brazil. And the proof is that before 1949, they literally did not give two shits about murdering Jews in Brazil.
Just because identity and bigotry are inextricable from this conflict doesn't mean that we can interpret every action within it to reflect some deep and abiding bigotry or another.
We know of at least one very famous Palestinian who was very into murdering Jews in Europe before 1949 though. Maybe there weren't enough Palestinians in Brazil before 1949? After 1949 we have things like the AMIA bombing in Argentina which explicitly targeted people for being Jewish while not being Israeli.
One of... millions? I did say "Besides the usual lunatic fringe".
This is so wrong that it's right.
Build lots of sweet luxury high-rises in Gaza and there'll be no more need for a right of return!
This and unironically is basically the political movement I want to build up.
As I said in my comment, it changes how we analyze the attack.
Cf my reply to CarbonWaster on teleology. The deep historical causes may have a whole LOT to do with antisemitism, and indeed I didn't deny that. And sure, I'll grant you that there's direct evidence of some proximate role of antisemitism in the attacks themselves. Thank you for that, btw.
But that's VERY different from saying that the demonstrators must, to a one, be antisemitic, merely for supporting a horrific crime with some proximate antisemitism and loads of historical antisemitism. Correlation is not causation! Proximately speaking, there simply isn't a remotely respectable case that most of the demonstrators we so adamantly disagree with are even a mere plurality motivated by "the same old antisemitism", even if, as Matt points out, they all may be acting as "useful idiots" for a cause with deep antisemitic roots.
To analogize to a more familiar context, it's like the difference between saying, "American communists are communists because they hate America", and "Some American communists have come to hate America because they hate the un-communist things it does".
Again, the reason why it matters is because "the same old antisemitism" conclusion basically ends the discussion. And I simply don't think it's REMOTELY the end of the discussion.
No, the whole Palestinian project doesn't have to be anti-Semitic, but for 75+ years it has been suffused with it. . It's obvious that Jewish communities the world over are targets because of their presumed affinity for Israel, which has been a constant with the Palestinians since at least the 1960s and their spate of hijackings, bombings and terror attacks even when their terrorist organizations were secular Leftist.
Hamas is pretty open about its desire to kill Jews. Its goal isn’t merely the destruction of Israel, but purging Jews from the area and region. IOW, if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, Hamas would busy itself with killing/purging/cleansing Jews.
My point is, it's mostly about the "from the area and region" part, not the "Jews" part. Hamas isn't going to hound them to the ends of the Earth.
It's clearly both since it's specifically the Jews Hamas is targeting in that area and region. It's not a case of mostly one or the other, they are inextricably linked.
And who know what Hamas would actually do if they had the ability to hunt Jews to the ends of the Earth. I see no reason anyone should give them the benefit of the doubt that their hatred of Jews is limited only to those in a particular area.
As I've written elsewhere on this thread, I think there are significant and meaningful distinctions to be found on the level of teleology here. Please don't take this personally, but I've been spending all day reiterating the same basic point, so I'm kind of out of gas at the moment. Just read the other comments? Thanks.
No worries. I haven't had the time to dig deeply in the comments yet, so missed your other explanations.
For most Israeli Jews, their Jewish and Israeli identities are inexorably intertwined. Of course they are overlapping, not the same identities (there are non-Jewish Israelis and non-Israeli Jews), but to say Hamas wasn't attacking Jews only Israelis is like saying that China doesn't oppress Muslims, only Uyghurs. To say this wasn't attack targeting Jews is really misinformed and misguided. Clearly this attack was targeting Jews for their Jewishness. For one, Hamas is a radical Islamic movement based in the Muslim Brotherhood that very much views its mission in religious terms and as a holy struggle for Islam against Jews. It is not simply a secular struggle against the Jewish state (other Palestinian movements may be described more in this way, but not Hamas). Up until 2017, Hamas' charter specifically described its mission against the "Jews" who usurped the land, not "Israelis". (In 2017 they revised the charter to change this, but I do not believe that that reflected an actual reform in the groups ideology, but rather was a PR stunt).
I think it's a sad byproduct of social media-driven polarisation. Lies are created and people are expected to repeat them to show loyalty to the cause.
In the same way that people feel that you can't just be Republican, you have to actively say that Donald Trump is an honest and public-spirited person, who was defrauded of election in 2020.
You can't just say 'I think the Russians have been hard done by since 1990', you have to say that the current Russian invasion of Ukraine is pure self´defence.
And now many feel you can't say the Palestinians have been badly treated without denying that hundreds of shocking, documented atrocities by Hamas didn't happen.
I think another sad byproduct of our society is that people who know a tiny bit about a subject feel compelled to speak out and have their voice and opinion heard. It's an irrational confidence pandemic.
The Algorithm demands a response on social media. The whole ecosystem is about typing without thinking for that sweet, sweet hit of dopamine and piling on with your friends against the disfavored out group. You must love or hate everything and you have to decide NOW. Your past post will follow you and you will be forced to defend dumb stuff you said because you "never back down!". It's addict brain behavior and it feels like we are losing so many friends and family to a disease we haven't yet recognized.
I agree.
This is a sympathetic position but one has to articulate a clearly defined bright line of what speech is off bounds, otherwise you end up in an anti-speech arms race exactly like the one Matt describes. And the problem, of course, is that you then end up litigating where exactly the line is, whether a particular piece of speech violates the line, etc.
Personally, I categorically reject the idea that words cause violence. Seeing people support Hamas attacks is obviously going to be very uncomfortable for Jewish students -- but would it be better for the pro-Hamas people who think murdering Jews is good to keep their opinions to themselves? Is it not better that they are able to speak their minds, and then subsequently Jews are free to disassociate themselves from such people?
My belief has always been, and remains, that you are free to hate people for their opinions, but also that opinions on their own never constitute an act so abominable as to be worthy of punishment from an institution acting in its official capacity. Because being willing to countenance bad opinions is table stakes for liberalism. The 'line' for me has always been whether you are explicitly advocating a particular *action* which is evil. I.e., the difference between "those guys who did terrorism are good" vs. "I think you students should all go out and find a Jew and murder them"
Racism against Black people is now socially taboo in the US. I think most of us believe this is a good state of affairs. We didn't need to erode free speech rights stricto sensu to achieve this, but we did need civil rights legislation and a social movement. There is no reason why antisemitic hate would be any different. No, you shouldn't be able to prosecute anyone for condoning the murder of Jews, but you sure as heck ought to think twice before hiring them. If the result is that people think twice before calling for the murder of others, then that's a feature not a bug.
I think I disagree. I think racist ideas are quite widespread in the US, and the taboo mainly has the effect of people keeping these views to themselves or to their close peers. To be clear, I think racist views are bad, but rather than shame people for expressing such views we should engage with them and make persuasive arguments as to why they are wrong. This may seem like an extreme view in the current landscape, but the work of Daryl Davis of engaging with actual white supremacists (like really, super racist people!) suggests that this can and does work.
Ok. You may think civil riights legislation is wrong. You may think it would be better if people could be explicitly racist and face no social consequneces. Understaandbly few minorities would agree. But that's an ok view in an abstract discussoin. Now let's get down to earth for a second, recall that there is an extremely widespread consesnsus about this in the US, and ask ourselves why does the far left wish to uniquely exempt Jews from the prtoection offered to everyone else?
And now the conversation has essentially collapsed into pointing out hypocrisy. This is exactly why I think Matt's piece is great.
Matt simply agrees with the pro Palestinian college students, professors, and journalists for whom Hamas can never do anything worse than Israel. Free speech doesn't mean other people can't call you on your horrid stances. When the bright 'progressives' keep chanting for genocide in Israel (and Matt is being incredibly disingenuous to claim they don't know what they're saying), it is fine for future employers to hold them accountable. Same thing would happen to far Right students chanting vile racist things...only that doesn't happen on campus. The only people you can be racist and genocidal about as a 'progressive' are Jews, particularly Israelis.
It's not hypocrisy, it's systemic racism. Matt ignores the elephant in the room to discuss incidental issues. That's why I think his piece is lousy.
I don’t think that’s what civil rights legislation does--it says you can’t deprive people of employment or public accommodation on account of their race, it doesn’t say anything about expressing racist attitudes (other than, obviously, expressing those attitudes will make it easier for a plaintiff to prove their discrimination case against you if you try to deny them any of the aforementioned rights).
Yes, but the passage of civil rights legislation was a very large and well-publicized signal to all Americans that racism was bad, that anti-racism* constituted the consensus opinion, and that tolerating it in economic contexts (which pervade modern life) was no longer acceptable. You can't claim that didn't change people's responses to expressing racist attitudes.
* In the old-fashioned sense of opposing conscious discrimination on racial lines.
I did not say civil rights legislation is wrong. I said that it is counterproductive to engage in social shaming as punishment for people expressing racist views.
Would Daryl Davis’s work have been effective back in the days of Jim Crow? Maybe even more effective than today, since people were (by your formulation) more willing to speak their minds?
Actually they weren’t, it’s just that the social pressure was going in the opposite direction (expressing support for equal rights for black people could get you in a lot of trouble).
I agree with you. I have always found the “people are just as racist now, they just hide it better” perspective to be highly under-baked.
I think I'm being misunderstood. I am not saying institutionalized racism should not have been overturned. I am saying socially shaming people for expressing racist attitudes doesn't achieve what folks think it does, and that it would ultimately be more effective to discuss these issues openly. I could add a bunch of qualifiers, but one is that of course that doesn't mean you have to like racist people, invite them to dinner, or certainly not vote them into political office. In fact, wouldn't you want racists to be open about it so that we know who not to vote for or place in other positions of power?
I'm also not saying that people are just as racist now as in the Jim Crow era.
If we are not placing racists in positions of power, how is that different from socially shaming them? Wouldn't that create the strongest possible incentive to keep racist views secret?
At any rate, I'm in favor of discussing issues openly and of not trying to get people fired over disagreements, though I do think some attitudes are egregious enough to be beyond the pale.
>> The 'line' for me has always been whether you are explicitly advocating a particular *action* which is evil.
This is delicate to write about, but sometimes even evil speech can be useful for society to hear. Hearing the chants of "gas the Jews" on that video from Australia really reshaped my understanding of Israel's predicament. I knew that sentiment existed in parts of the Middle East, but to see it so out in the open and being repeated by so many people in a modern western society really affected me. However horrible this is to admit, sometimes we need to see and hear evil with our own eyes and ears to really grasp it.
I think that you can be pro Palestinian/Hamas but without supporting violence.
When I am being asked about the situation, I am saying that its a national tragedy for us and I am against any form of violence but I also can understand why the Palestinians hate us over the occupation.
Are you able to provide any evidence of people saying it's OK to kill Jewish kids? I've seen an interview with the #2 guy in Hamas and even he claims not to believe that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkZDxJ3JhCA
I don't know if it's fair to ask for concrete examples of people saying this, because I think there are a lot of motte and Bailey tactics on this.
But two things comes to mind as getting pretty close: that BLM group (Chicago maybe) that posted a "Free Palestine" text over the image of a paratrooper. And personally, when I re-posted an Instagram story to the effect of "deliberate murder of civilians and children in never okay", someone I hadn't talked to since high school direct messaged me the response "do you support decolonization only in theory or in practice?"
So, yeah, I do think there are real voices out there condoning violence. They might not be especially prominent, and they may try to weasel out of that commitment if you press them on it, but there certainly are people who want to at least flirt with it. (This is what I mean by the rampant motte and bailey tactics.)
As annoying as my alma mater is, it’s given me the priceless gift of a highly-educated social circle in which basically every single person, no matter how lefty, will snort with derision when someone uses the term “decolonization” to refer to present-day happenings.
Would that the Ivies can some day achieve this.
With all the discourse about appropriation around can I, as a part-indian, be offended at the appropriation of the term “colonization” to refer to anything that annoys you, like a McDonalds in Paris
I just roll my eyes if anyone implies something is a colony other than, you know, an actual colony (e.g., The Massachusetts Bay Colony) or a clump of bacteria in a Petri dish.
The Vietnamese have decided that Americans are the best thing since they learned about good bread from the French. We killed, what, 10% of the whole population within living memory?
This still doesn't support the claim people are saying it's OK to kill Jewish kids. They may be saying it's OK to kill Jewish Israeli kids. Which, let there be no doubt, I strongly oppose, as a former Jewish Israeli kid. But it's still different.
Binya: If you thought the original poster was trying to distinguish between the murder of "Jewish kids" and "Jewish Israeli kids", you're misinterpreting what he wrote. And to be honest, that kind of parsing is exactly the kind of behavior that many of us have found so abhorrent on the far left in recent weeks.
To be clear, the two things may be "different", but to anyone of any decency, they are equally abhorrent. No one should be ok with the massacre of any kids (or civilians of any kind), whether they are Israeli, Jewish, Palestinian, or anything else.
Now some folks will then raise the question about what about the deaths of kids in Gaza from Israeli bombs. And it's a fair question. I'd make the argument that there is a huge difference between the deliberate massacre of children and the killing of children in bombing raids targeted at a military force that is deliberately positioning itself among these children. Ultimately, I do think Hamas is to blame for those deaths as well, though I do think it's incumbent on Israelis to do all they reasonably can to reduce those deaths without putting their people at undue risk.
I'd be amazed if you can find any examples of anyone who is pro massacring kids, and even if you can, if it's anything but the most marginal and misrepresentative part of the people expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
Binya: It's not that people are pro massacring kids. It's that they're unwilling to unreservedly condemn massacring kids. And while I'm sure you're right that they're refusing to do so because they see it as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinians, that's what we find so disturbing.
BLM Chicago soon after apologized for that posting.
https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1712155730109669762
There was no apology nor any attempt at accountability. They merely said they weren't proud of it.
I don't think too many people are saying it publicly. But when the response to the killing of babies is "Palestine has a right to defend itself like this" or "what did you think when we meant when we called for resistance?" then it sort of implicitly says the murder of babies is acceptable because it's in furtherance of the stated goals. You also have lots of private threats and hate speech getting leaked where people who have very polite public profiles are saying things like "Hitler should have eradicated all of you" in response to the murder of babies, so I think it's clear that lots of people who refuse to say such things publicly don't seem to have much moral qualm with it when framing their views privately.
As for the statements Hamas' #2 makes in interviews during PR appearances- I think it's far more important that Hamas actually committed the acts and doesn't seem to have condemned or apologized for those actions. He's doing an interview while trying to rally support for his cause- he's not going to say it was okay to commit those acts of barbarity, but his organization is the one that did it, so he doesn't seem to be all that bothered by it even when he's in public and knows he can't support it.
the people who killed the jewish kids probably thought it was ok, and their opinions are the ones that matter most
That is a completely different topic. “Do Hamas fighters who commit war crimes suck” vs “is there a casual acceptance of antisemitism on American college campuses”.
This is what Jane Coastan called “thing adjacent discourse”. There’s the thing (terrible Hamas attack, terrible Israeli policies and counterattacks) and then there’s the more juicy thing adjacent discourse: how are colleges reacting to the attacks? Is it appropriate? Is it hypocritical? Are people chanting something really racist or just that can be interpreted as racist or is it a “it’s okay to be white” style cover for racism?? What about news outlets? Did anyone report something and then walk it back? Etc. etc etc.
I find the thing adjacent discussions boring. The key fact is the Netanyahu has spent thirty years pursuing policies that led to this and now thousands of people are dying as a result, and it could get even worse if things spiral.
“The key fact is the Netanyahu has spent thirty years pursuing policies that led to this…”
That’s hardly a fact, let alone key. Or do you believe that the poor, put upon Palestinians ended the First Intifada and have conducted themselves peacefully and honorably ever since?
Nah Ken.
Palestinians were just doing their peaceful MLK thing since the 1920s and finally Netanyahu came along and started pressing them. They continued with their peaceful sit-ins until finally, finally, finally, they erupted on 10/7.
10/7. The date of the first ever Palestinian terror attack. The most peaceful people every finally got pushed over the edge.
Palestinian terror attacks prior to 10/7 that didn't happen:
Sbarro's Pizza
Hebron Massacre
Passover Massacre in Netanya
Munich
Airline hijackings
etc..
None of it happened!
Israel has been oppressing Palestinians for all this time, for no reason!
Have you ever had Sbarro’s pizza? Godawful. Unless it’s really, really late and you’re really, really drunk.
When you write "terrible Hamas attack, terrible Israeli policies and counterattacks" are you suggesting that the deliberate murder of children, rape of women etc. are equivalent to the "counterattack" targeting terrorists? When you say "pursuing policies that led to this" do you suggest that any policy at all could justify the deliberate murder of babies? Please do explain what on earth you mean by all this??
This is a side topic, but may I gently suggest that every prior case of "they are deliberately murdering BABIES" has turned out to be false on further investigation. The Germans butchered the Belgians, but did not actually systematically murder Belgian babies as alleged. The Iraqis did not actually unplug Kuwaiti NICUs. The Ryohinga did not massacre Burmese babies. The fog of war is thick, but we are fairly safe in rejecting claims of baby butchering absent extremely concrete evidence. It is the most predictable claim made early in a conflict, and it is almost always false.
The Holocaust is the exception that proves the rule. The Germans only murdered Jewish babies after they constructed a vast and terrifying apparatus for murdering everyone young and old, and even that was very difficult to run because ordinary people need a lot of scaffolding to let them do such monstrous work without breaking down psychologically.
"do you suggest that any policy at all could justify"
That is an easy question. No. No one is justifying what Hamas did. What I am saying is that what Hamas did is the obvious and inevitable unjust result of Netanyahu's life's work.
When something bad happens, it worth looking at it from two tracks. One is the person directly responsible. But the other is who is most responsible of the people not directly responsible.
If you get mugged late at night while drunkenly stumbling around in a bad neighborhood and singing with your purse dangling half off your shoulder, the mugger is most responsible. You are secondarily responsible for doing something that predictably led to bad consequences.
Netanyahu has deliberately treated the Gazans like dogs for thirty years. He put them in a cage with no exit. He has supported Hamas to weaken Fatah. He allowed his cabinet to provoke the Al Asqa issue. He made it clear that he was going to cut off all possibility of a change in status for Palestine by pursuing separate peace with the Arab states. In the year before the attacks, 200 West Bank Palestinians were murdered by settlers and the IDF. To facilitate this, Netanyahu shifted IDF resources away from Gaza and to the West Bank. All of that was dousing the region with gasoline, and now Hamas has come with match. Lighting the match was bad and dousing the gasoline was bad. There is no contradiction in saying so.
I'm sorry, are you saying that Hamas didn't kill babies on October 7?
>What I am saying is that what Hamas did is the obvious and inevitable unjust result of Netanyahu's life's work.
People keep saying this but they do nothing to back this up. There is no reason to think that Hamas, of all Palestinian organizations, is particularly upset about the failure of the peace process. Hamas does not want a peace process. Hamas existed before the peace process, during the peace process, and after the peace process. During that entire time, Hamas has tried to murder as many Israeli citizens as possible. The only thing that separates the October 7 operation from previous attempts is the scale of its success. This operation was years in the making. The blockade was at its most lenient point in years. There is absolutely no reason to tie the motivations to commit this particular massacre to the policies of the current coalition government of Bibi Netanyahu, which is only a few months old. Hamas likes to kill Jews! This was true before Bibi and after Bibi.
It's useful to ask yourself, if it's really so inevitable that Hamas would be driven to this as a result of Netanyahu's policies, or Israeli policies, if it's really true that the Palestinians were driven to this because of Policy X or Policy Y, why did only Hamas and related factions participate in it? Why didn't all 2.4 million Gazans, or at least a significant percentage of them, participate in the massacre?
If any interest in a peaceful solution was motivating Hamas at all, why did they murder civilians? In the most liberal peacenik part of the country? Why didn't they just go to the beach? Imagine the PR coup that would have been for the Palestinian national cause - 1400 Palestinians break out of their Gaza cage and go to the beach, and the IDF is running around like chickens with no head trying to catch them. They'd have a state in a week! But they didn't want to do that. They wanted to kill people. Which is all Hamas has ever wanted to do.
Saying October 7 is the inevitable result of Israeli policies suggests that if on October 6 Israel had ended the blockade, and tore down all the fences, October 7 wouldn't have happened. Does anyone really believe that?
>If you get mugged late at night while drunkenly stumbling around in a bad neighborhood and singing with your purse dangling half off your shoulder, the mugger is most responsible. You are secondarily responsible for doing something that predictably led to bad consequences.
First you said the "key fact" is that Netanyahu's actions led to this, and now you say he's secondarily responsible. Which is it?
The topic is US demonstrations. It is not accurate to say “many” of these demonstrations “support” deliberately killing Jewish civilians including kids because they are Jewish. I say this as a Jewish person who this month has been more likely to attend a pro-Israel rally than a pro-Palestinian one.
Many of the posters created by the organizers of these rallies informing people about them and inviting them to come pretty clearly glorified the attacks. Most included at least some people chanting explicit antisemitic content (e.g. "gas the Jews") and most certainly chanting highly dubious content ("from the river etc."). Quite a few twitterati bothered to justify if not celebrate the attacks. Very very few pro-Palestinain activists, organization etc. bothered to condemn them (apparently they haven't heard of "not in my name"). Quite a few official speakers in those rallies supported the attacks. I haven't seen evidence of the crowd booing or otherwise showing any discomfort with said speakers. So why, exactly, is it a priori so absurd to suppose that "many" of the protestors joining protests directly responding to the attacks, thus advertised and conducted by said organizers are fine or even happy with the attacks? Do you have any data to the contrary? Barring such data, wouldn't this be the most reasonable assumption? Why not? And how is your identity or politics material to this discussion?
On the question of American campuses and American free speech culture (the topic of the entire), Hamas does not matter at all.
Don’t change the subject. Please and thank you.
He was responding to a comment that highlighted the views of Hamas' #2- I think the door was opened by Binya to bring up Hamas' attitudes.
The #2 guy at Hamas is lying about whether Hamas killed kids, because that is a fairly normal thing after killing children. Deny. Deny. Deny.
Either he does not know what Hamas did (then he’s not really #2, I argue) or he does know and he’s singing the praises of those who murder kids after he learned what they did.
It’s really strange how at least 2 comments are now debating whether Hamas does or does endorse murdering children.
(1) It’s not a mystery. Hamas murders children and they like it that way. Firing indiscriminately across the line and killing whoever is in the way. Then they send in terrorists and kill children at close range. I wish the debate was not about this because it’s so ridiculous.
(2) The essay was about American free speech culture after the Harpers letter. Nothing at all to do with Hamas “ethics” or rules of engagement, other than the overall news environment and its effect on American culture.
He wasn't denying they did it. He was making the same claim the IDF's defenders do: we focus on military targets but unfortunately in war some civilian casualties are inevitable. That is clearly a lie, Hamas obviously killed a lot of civilians needlessly, but it's instructive that they've noticed that there is so little support for killing civilians that they are trying to spin out of having done so and/or claiming that to extent they did it, they did not want to.
"it's instructive that they've noticed that there is so little support for killing civilians"
This doesn't seem like it would have been that hard to figure out beforehand.
But maybe not. Maybe overheated campus rhetoric has so clouded the waters that Hamas wasn't sure how people would react to murders. In that case, I would have to think it a very ironic result to the past few decades' analysis of "discourse harms".
Hamas has a very long history of speaking strategically in the English language.
Many are coming at this without realizing that Hamas has launched countless attacks targeting civilians since their founding in the late 1980s.
They have always been mealy-mouthed about it. Sometimes they deny they target civilians. Other times they claim all Israelis serve in the army at some point in their lives, so no one is a civilian. Other other times they say that they will stop targeting civilians when Israel does the same.
What is new this time is that Hamas is getting criticized by *Arab* audiences for targeting civilians and they are needing to bust out their peacenik rhetoric, even in Arabic.
This have everything to do with Arab-Iranian hostility and Hamas' status as a client of Iran. Arabs are separating Hamas from the Palestinian cause. They do not support a Palestinian state that is a puppet of Iran. So it is natural to criticize Hamas' methods. Arabs generally have been fine with attacks against Israeli citizens. When Munich went down, Jordan's King Hussein was the only Arab leader to condemn that attack on Israeli civilians, which wasn't even in Israel!
Hamas's days are numbers. They have lost the Arabs. Arabs want to put the old bloodfueds behind and start building real prosperity, at peace with their neighbors, even Israel. Hamas has slowed this process in the short-term, but has only hastened its inevitability.
There have been several that I think can fairly be described as supportive of Hamas’s attacks. For example, a pro Palestinian student group at Cal State Long Beach used posters with an image of a paraglider to promote a “Day of Resistance: Protest for Palestine” three days after the paragliders were used by Hamas on their terrorist attack at the music festival.
There was this incident with a UC Davis professor - you could argue that arguing for violence against the children of American "Zionist journalists" is not 100% identical to advocating against Jewish children specifically, because not all American Zionists are Jews, but it's definitely getting into that territory.
"One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misiniformation," Descristo allegedly wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "They have houses w addresses, kids in school," the professor allegedly said, adding "They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more," followed by a knife emoji, an axe emoji, and three blood drop emojis.
https://www.newsweek.com/professor-threatening-pro-israel-journalist-kids-backlash-1836487
I once started reading a history of Israel, made it just over halfway through to around 1949 before it became too depressing to finish.
Tribal violence, by both sides, is as old as Jewish efforts to establish a homeland in Palestine. The great continuity is tribal violence. What has changed is the balance of power has tilted more and more towards Israelis and less and less towards Palestinians.
I think its more simple than you think.
The Jewish people wanted a place to form a country for them to be able to defend themselves and control their own life. Israel was the place where Jews had historic connection to and there was already a community here. The Arabs in the country and other countries could not accept it and the UN two states, so they attacked several times and lost. We took the advantage of the situation to occupy territories and made the mistake of not giving them back in return to peace. We then made it worse by letting extreme religious people to form settlements there.
Simple. Not a tribal war more than US taking of Mexican lands.
That is basically describing a tribal conflict writ-large?
And the latter analogy is pretty bad; the entire Mexican Cession had fewer than 200,000 Mexican citizens on it, who were immediately offered American citizenship on annexation.
A better analogy would be the Comanche Wars.
Weren't there around half a million Arabs in Palestine when the Zionist immigrations started en masse? Not sure I understand why this is supposed to be massively disanalogous
The US offered everyone citizenship in part because there were no concerns of being demographically swamped, and the Mexican landowners were easily co-opted into becoming part of the establishment in most every locale.
The Israelis didn’t feel themselves to have that luxury, and so expulsion was the order of the day for the most part.
Much more analogous to America’s running conflict with the Native peoples, right down to eventually achieving massive military superiority. And we all know what we did with that superiority.
Hopefully Israel can make a different choice but I am doubtful.
spot on
If the point is about citizenship - Arabs and Jews both would have been full citizens in their respective states if the partition plan hadn't been rejected. And Arabs remaining in the green line in 1948 *were* granted full citizenship.
"Arabs remaining in the green line in 1948 *were* granted full citizenship."
Well, eventually. Like 1966.
“Remaining” is a hell of a word in the context of having just forcibly expelled 700,000 of them.
I understand the reasons behind that decision, but let’s not pretend it was something other than what it was.
200,000 in the Mexican cession is less than half the population in about 20 times the area. About two decades before the war, Mexico thought the land was so underpopulated by Mexicans that they actively recruited Americans to settle in Texas to civilize it and displace the indigenous people.
This seems a bit besides the point. No one is suggesting that one can't condemn those protests or the people who excuse the rapes and killing. I read this very peace as including such condemnation. But no universities are officially endorsing such positions.
And I don't think any reasonable person believes that we should be arresting people for their awful speach here or even violating the protections of tenure. So it's not the existence of some awful protests at universities that's really at issue here -- and if those universities had a general policy of not commenting on such protests/issues I don't think many people would have an issue.
The issue is that those universities haven't been following such a policy. Therefore their silence here sends an implied message that they don't think the kind of protests you mention are clearly morally unacceptable.
Palestinian activists generally view themselves as voices for the voiceless and take for granted that, given that the massive pro-Israel biases in the media and political establishment, the Israeli narrative of any given event will be spread far and wide and does not need further amplification by Palestinian activists. It's kind of like BLM activists refusing to say "blue lives matter" since while that phrase might technically true (no one wants to see dead cops) it's rather oblivious to the real power dynamics in the situation.
The “real power dynamics “ didn’t do jack squat for the teenage girl with cerebral palsy who was dragged out of her wheelchair and butchered at the music festival by Hamas terrorists.
"It's kind of like BLM activists refusing to say "blue lives matter" since while that phrase might technically true (no one wants to see dead cops) it's rather oblivious to the real power dynamics in the situation."
I think this is where you're assuming a reasonable position is the only position out there that people hold. There are BLM/Defund activists who would cheer dead cops. There are many pro Palestinian activists who cheer killing Jews regardless of who the Jews are.
You can find scary extremists on any side of any issue.
It's always worth applying the 330+ million rule. I.e., this is a huge country with a lot of people. If one million people have crazy views, that sounds like a huge number of people, but it's a drop in the ocean.
The critical question is whether we should pay any attention to them. Maybe debates like this just pump oxygen into the fire they create.
What if we just ignored them?
A real challenge in the modern media environment is how many people believe something I think is crazy. I think saying that Biden didn't win in 2020 is crazy, but people say/believe that - should we ignore them or condemn them? Racists and antisemitism seem crazy to me...but plenty of people are out there showing their crazy.
And that's not a rhetorical question - I'm really not sure as to the best approach for dealing with certain types of crazy. I want to think that if we ignore them, they'll fade away. And sometimes they do. But other times, if you ignore the crazy, you get the Republican party not convicting Trump for Jan 6 because they hoped if they ignored it, then he would go away and he didn't.
Here's an easy way to tell the difference: if the majority of national leaders of a party, including its presumptive presidential nominee, believe something crazy then we should not condemn them. If limited numbers of people, with marginal representation or support at the highest levels of the political system (like Congress and the White House) then it's probably okay to ignore them.
I don't condemn the doofus who believes 2020 was stolen because he's parroting what he heard from Trump, Fox, etc. I condemn the majority of Republicans in Congress who refused to certify the vote. Just as I blame Republican Senators for not voting to convict Trump, not because they were ignoring the crazies (the opposite in fact) but because they're cowards and borderline traitors toward the Constitution and our system of government.
Isn’t it true that the 100 nights of idiocy in Portland had more to do with anarchists/nihilists/no-goodnicks latching on to the initial Floyd protests, which were peaceful, and turning them into something closer to riots? I live here and know people who participates early in peaceful marches before it all went loco.
Common, but unrepresentative.
>Palestinian activists generally view themselves as voices for the voiceless and take for granted that, given that the massive pro-Israel biases in the media and political establishment, the Israeli narrative of any given event will be spread far and wide and does not need further amplification by Palestinian activists.
This has never made any sense to me. They would lose absolutely nothing by recognizing that the massacre was bad and by saying they don't support the massacre. "Oh it's not necessary. Everyone else has already condemned it." This only makes it more conspicuous when you refuse to!
Transparently, wht's actually going on is that large parts of the "from the river to the sea" coalition do support the massacre and the people who say "oh it's not necessary, the MSM will do it" don't want to risk the intra-coalition fight with those people.
Good comment. I think you are still being too charitable to the "coalition [who] do not support the massacre". It is not merely that they need to avoid infighting with maniacs.
There is also the basic cognitive dissonance. Israel claims that they need to blockade/occupy Palestinians to ensure Israeli safety and security. The Pro-palestine crowd has always considered this argument to be merely pretextual.
When we see an attack like 10/7, which is something that would cause any nation to engage with the threat militarily, that upends their whole argument. So they have to just ignore it.
+100
I agree with basically everything in this piece, but I'm sympathetic to right-of-center interlocutors who are (rightfully) skeptical that as soon as there's another George Floyd-esque situation, practically every college will throw out their newfound neutrality.
I think the chancellor of my new university, UC Irvine, has actually done a good job on this. He issued a “statement on statements” saying that he generally wouldn’t make statements on political issues that aren’t of direct relevance to the university, but not a blanket denial of all statements. He identified this moment as one where a statement was still necessary.
https://chancellor.uci.edu/communications/campus/2023/231010-shared-commitment-to-humanity-and-understanding.php
Go Anteaters!
Looks great.
Johnny Hart reference?
Actually, I did some Googling and it supposedly is a Johnny Hart reference (the anteater being a recurring character in Hart's "B.C." strip): https://ucirvinesports.com/sports/2021/1/4/peter.aspx
Where does that sympathy resolve to as a policy besides some idea of a "fairness doctrine" within a subjective and fluid overton window, such that we have quotas for discussing topics like Intelligent Design as much as Darwinian Evolution? Or then perhaps discussing phrenology as a reasonable theory in evolution?
It doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that resolves, except to refine that cultivated feeling of fragility that Matt mentioned.
Can it just resolve to scorn for moral exhibitionism and a healthy disregard for pompous institutions issuing their secular papal bulls to tiny constituencies?
Is the US audience for a bull from Harvard University bigger or smaller than one from the Bishop of Rome?
Tough call these days!
The Vatican has one advantage though, which is that it speaks in a single voice, while Harvard's many departments are probably the most relevant comps. I doubt that Harvard qua Harvard (the administration ) even listens to itself.
I don't think this calls for a policy response and that we should just foster a culture that is supportive of the principle of free speech.
Fostering a culture supportive of free speech, especially when it's done by an institution like a college, is a policy. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that can resolve, if you want to have it both ways. If right-of-center interlocutors were so concerned, then I think there'd be more readily available solutions or proposals how to get there.
I think this overcomplicates or maybe misses the issue somewhat. College kids can say whatever they want, just like anyone else. The actual issue has been one of a combination of endorsement and discouragement of speech by college administrations based on a very particular world view. Which I think is kind of Allan's point. I don't think anyone at these places is suddenly waking up at all. If anything it's kind of unfair to the students who have been endlessly rewarded for years for saying leftist craptrap, to suddenly now be told 'no but not THIS leftist claptrap!'
Isn't the policy suggestion here just "don't make public statements about controversial events"?
That is generally a good idea, especially if one doesn't have expertise, and doesn't want to say anything they regret, but Matt makes that case about making statements about controversial war crimes to gradually convince people it's worth considering.
I guess then if we have to put up guardrails on what kinda speech is allowed, they would exist but would be wider than it currently is, and would also include saying things like Israel is to blame for the 10/7 (but would also include saying things like there are two genders or whatever).
I think that's a good example of what I meant about a subjective overton window.
Yeah my subjective overton window is probably larger and almost certainly a notch to the right of yours. What does yours look like?
The Chicago Principles got mentioned in the main piece, and I really do recommend them (not just because they're my alma mater). The key distinction isn't whether they fit "a subjective and fluid Overton window". It's whether they're likely to disrupt university activity, either by invoking a crackdown by legal authorities, or because they physically make traditional scholarly activities like visiting a library or reading in peace impossible.
Thanks, those make sense and I agree.
Those are good ideas to maintain neutrality that don't bias "center-right" or "center-left" concerns. I'm not sure how they can satisfy someone claiming the neutrality isn't real or reliable neutrality for their particular group, as Allan is concerned about.
It has always been politically dangerous for academics to be critical of Israel, either in a sane or in a bonkers way (of course everybody draws this line differently). Plenty get away with it, but as with other politically incorrect speech a basically random number suffer consequences, and this in turn has a chilling effect on everybody else.
> a culture that encourages people to cultivate their own sense of subjective fragility in order to silence enemies.
Sentence of the year, at least!
I want this on merch.
I want the T-shirt
As an academic, I agree that universities (and other institutions that don’t exist for political purposes) would be better off keeping their noses out of political issues that don’t directly concern their mission.
I think you’re too soft on people who unthinkingly yell slogans in the street or on social media. I agree that many do it ignorantly, but they are still responsible for the moral implications. Someone who wears a Free Mumia shirt should be explain why they believe he’s innocent in the murder of Daniel Faulkner. Someone who yells “From the River to the Sea” should be able to explain why they don’t think that means the slaughter of the Israeli Jews, when a good chunk of the Palestinian population (the Hamas supporters) clearly thinks that it does. If they can’t explain their slogan, then they shouldn’t be chanting in public. Otherwise, they can be justifiably accused of wanting a cop killer free and not valuing Israeli lives.
I think you are describing a bigger intellectual problem where people don't care what the words they say mean. They just think they are rhetorically convenient bludgeons to make themselves feel validated.
Building on that, from the point of view of cultura silencing, I'm more in favour for it when it comes to people who yell stuff that's just not true (Hamas don't kill civilians, Trump won the 2020 election) than people who adopt a particular position (Israel is the Jewish homeland because the Bible says so, or there should be one democratic state in 1947 Palestine). The latter is a key part of democratic debate, the former suggests that someone is just not interested in debate.
I would say that the former is that they are uninterested in knowing and are unconcerned with truth.
"I think you are describing a bigger intellectual problem where people don't care what the words they say mean."
I think you're describing a bigger philosophical problem, where words don't carry any sort of inherent meaning, only typical uses, and those uses can vary from community to community.
One of my favorite shirts I have ever seen is the famous Che Guevera face that's adorned thousands of dorm rooms over the years with the caption underneath "I have no idea who this is". Just encapsulates so much.
I agree with in principle; the protests you go to, the shirts you wear, the slogans you shout are all expressions of speech and expressions of a viewpoint you're trying to convey to the world. You should try to take two seconds to try to think about the message you're trying to send.
The caveat is II can't emphasize enough how often protests or rallies get hijacked by a few speakers or end being about views that you never knew were the real subject of the protest. I remember going to anti-Iraq war rally in March, 2023 (not a popular thing to do at the time). I actually spoke first at that rally. First few speakers including me had some sort of variation of why the invasion was wrong (I remember saying something to the effect of that it was patriotic to be against the war. I didn't want my country committing a mistake). But then a speaker got up and started shouting about (drumroll please)...Israel/Palestine and talked about freeing Palestine. And then someone got up and spoke about freeing Native American lands and I distinctly remember turning to my friend and saying "wait what is going on?"
There have been literally 100s of protests. I suspect at least some of the people attending knew exactly what these protests are about and maybe deserve opprobrium that comes their way for protests that end up defending Hamas. But I can't emphasize enough how many showed up to a rally because someone said "hey we're against war right, we should protest". And had no idea what the true agenda of some of the speakers really were.
I should also emphasize (have emphasized and will continue to emphasize) that so much of the college aesthetic experience is trying to recreate "THE 60S". Protests, posters on your wall and even how you dress (especially at liberal arts schools) are still echoes of 1968 and still this attempt to recreate that aesthetic moment 60 years later. I said in a previous post how overrated Hippy protests were (And also how much more destructive and extreme some of them were).
But reality is, I can't emphasize enough how much protests are an attempt at LARPING The 60s.
I fully agree with all of this. I attended anti-war protests that were full of posters ranging from off-topic to offensive. Pam Africa actually hijacked the mic at one protest and started yelling Free Mumia. It was incredibly frustrating. You can't really control who shows up at your protest. I would only hold people accountable for the things they individually did (including cheering for certain statements).
I had a Che poster in college. It was of a mural with a peasant selling food on the side of the street next to a faded picture of Che. I liked the juxtaposition.
2023 -> 2003?
I went to school with one of Faulkner's nephews and every time I see such a shirt I make sure to ask the person if they think he didn't murder Faulkner. Near-universal response: "Who's that?"
Wow, that's awful. Free Mumia was huge among progressives when I moved to Philly in the late 90s. I remember reading up on the case and concluding that Mumia almost certainly did murder Faulkner and definitely did not deserve all the valorization. At 18, it was my first break from the left.
Yep. These kids are just astonishingly ignorant, so much so that it’s nearly indistinguishable from stupidity.
I’m very much a believer in MY’s elite overproduction hypothesis, with the added twist that it’s been ongoing in the liberal arts for quite some time. It was concealed by bloat in administrative and bureaucratic staff at universities, which is mainly the tertiary education sector mopping up as large a share as it can of its own otherwise unemployable graduates to puff up graduate job numbers using donor and endowment funds.
It’s basically the original sin of modern higher education: they over-enrolled in cheap but low-value liberal arts degrees, then hired the less employable graduates thereof to prove the program had value, creating both a large constituency for on-campus lefty claptrap and a massive cost center that required tuition increases to meet, thereby necessitating a larger version of the same cycle next time.
3-4 working generations later, the end result is universities with administrative/bureaucratic staff five times the size of the professoriate, costs akin to debt peonage, rapidly degrading value for humanities programs with less and less critical content, and a populist revolt against academia that has wayyy too much genuine merit for me as a center-left type to be comfortable dismissing it out of hand.
It's moderately funny when you read about the origins of the most activist "X Studies" disciplines. Largely grew out of activist demands in the late 60s/early 70s; initially contained in a kind of 'quarantine' to sub-disciplines within the humanities; gradually, humanities, and then the social sciences, started to incorporate their ideas (not just as an avenue of exploration, but as more fundamental first principles); now the occasional report on how a physics paper needs a DEI statement.
I suppose the debate could be whether the movement towards these departments occurred as a kind of natural outbreak, or whether the ideas escaped from a contained lab where they were being experimented on.
I am personally for the 100% Federal defunding of all non-STEM degree programs other than those at state & community colleges.
Won't solve the problem. Better to try to legislate to make federal and state funding conditional on YoY reductions in support staff and tuition falls in real (or maybe even nominal) terms.
Purdue, of all places, is a leader in this, because Mitch freaking Daniels is committed to actual open inquiry and accessible tertiary education.
We need 5,000 more of him.
I think rigorous, empirical, grounded social science work really can produce meaningful and important work which helps us to better understand our world. Which is why it's annoying when the incorporation of these ideas make your post (which I still don't agree with) a fairer point.
The problem I have with the "Free Mumia" movement is the same as I have with the "Free Leonard Peltier" movement -- even if you accept the defendant's own statements about the crime uncritically, it seems clear that they themselves know who the (unalleged?) actual killers were, but refuse to identify them. If a criminal defendant is unwilling to provide testimony or evidence that would create obvious reasonable doubt about his own guilt (whether out of personal loyalty to the real criminal or political motivation), I have extremely little sympathy if they end up getting convicted of the crime.
OK, but that principle doesn't seem compatible with the way our legal system functions (5th Amendment, etc.).
You're correct in that a defendant has no obligation to testify. But if the defendant has information that would help create reasonable doubt, but chooses not to testify or make that information available to the jury, I'm not clear what the prosecution is supposed to do when the testimony and evidence that *IS* available to the prosecution points to conviction.
To put it another way, the prosecution has the burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, but the defense can also take actions to create reasonable doubt. If the prosecution proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt and the defense chooses to not present testimony that it has exclusive access to and would controvert the prosecution's case, that to me is the defense's problem.
Yeah, I think my previous take here was half-baked. I came back to delete it, but I'm too late....
Thankfully I must have missed this one. The most prominent "Free" campaign I can remember was the comparatively banal Free Tibet statements.
Lucky! It mostly tapered off after Mumia's death sentence was commuted to life. But he was giving college commencement addresses from death row for a while.
That's insane. I found after a quick search at least two - Goddard College in Vermont (his alma mater) in 2014 and (not so surprising) Evergreen College in 1999(!).
https://www.businessinsider.com/mumia-abu-jamal-commencement-speech-at-evergreen-state-college-2015-4
I have relatives in Philly and even people who thought it was a bad idea to execute him thought he was guilty.
Back when the Free Mumia was a big thing, I would point this out to people who did not have any connection to Philly and they were alway flummoxed. I got a lot of “why do they think he’s guilty?” And I would explain that there’s a ton of evidence in favor of him being guilty. I think a lot of the conviction that he was innocent had to do with him having been featured on NPR and a general belief that someone who was on NPR couldn’t have possibly committed such a crime.
Great point. The average person in West Philly did not think Mumia should be free and did not want MOVE in their neighborhood. Those are different questions than whether Mumia should be executed or MOVE should have been firebombed.
I can’t agree with this enough. The stuff MOVE was doing would never have been tolerated in a rich neighborhood. People from other cities usually act like MOVE was pleasant to live next to and all of the objections to them were motivated by racism. They don’t realize they had a lot of weapons and were blasting rants from loudspeakers. Firebombing them was wrong but they were the neighbors from hell
Completely agree. Seems similar to people waiving the battle flag of Northern Virginia who say it's just a culture symbol and doesn't mean they are racist. Might be true, but if so is also just a signal of willful ignorance and foolishness.
> Someone who yells “From the River to the Sea” should be able to explain why they don’t think that means the slaughter of the Israeli Jews
The honest answer is that they got it off TikTok, the presenter doesn’t seem like someone who wants this, and they feel like they know the person thanks to parasociality.
It's a perfect analog to the controversy of saying 'all lives matter'
On the one hand, who would oppose palestinians being 'free?' (just as who would argue that all lives don't matter?). On the other hand, there is subtext there that one *should* be aware of.
The irritating thing there is that the movement so obviously should have run with either “All Lives Matter” or, better, “Our Lives Matter” as its slogan in the first place!
Now that I've learned that apparently "from the river to the sea" is appended with "Palestine will be free", I can understand a little better how people, particularly very young ones, who aren't familiar with the background of this dispute can also be unfamiliar with the longstanding meaning of the first phrase. They could think it's a more minimal interpretation of wanting a Palestinian state, or even a less minimalist but not maximalist statement of wanting one state and/or Palestinian right of return. I'd think/hope a stern explanation of the maximalist and most common interpretation of "from the river to the sea" could reorient some of the more ignorant among this crowd.
This is really dumb, imo. If you ask someone who chants “from the river to sea” why it means civilians won’t get killed, they can pretty easily respond that civilians are currently being killed under the status quo.
The status quo is brutal apartheid being conducted by an Israeli government that has killed, what, 20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed? For context, Assad and the Syrian military are closer to a 3:1 kill-death ratio and the entire world agrees that Assads crimes are nowhere near “proportional”
That response is "pretty easy" because it does not actually answer the question or address any of the critical issues involved.
First, you presume that "from the river to the sea" simply means "I dislike the status quo." It does not. It is a specific proposal for the elimination of Israel, and not the only alternative to the status quo. If someone chants it, they should be able to defend it on its own terms.
Second, you ignore the question of how many civilians would be killed. There is a major difference between civilian casualties of army operations against military targets (i.e., what is happening in Gaza) and a genocidal campaign of intentional mass slaughter (i.e., what Hamas openly proposes to do, attempted on 10/7, and will do if given the opportunity). This is akin to saying it's fine to abolish the police because there is already crime under the status quo; the point is that far MORE crime would occur without police.
Third, the number of deaths is not how proportionality is defined under international law. It's pretty much expected that the losing side will suffer more deaths - that's how wars work. Proportionality refers to whether the scale of an attack is proportional to the military objective. That is, when militants occupy a building, you can attack that particular building, but not the entire thirty block radius around the building.
Please crack a book before you call me dumb.
Speaking from my experience of going to a left wing college 2013-2017, thinking that Israel should not exist is going to be an incredibly common and mainstream belief in these circles. As will agreeing with the Goldstone conclusion that the Israeli military regularly kills Palestinian civilians intentionally.
And I guess Israel is just unlucky then. They are racking up a kill ratio 7 times higher than Assad and its all on accident!
Saying a currently existing state and people should not exist is not addressing the fact that real people currently live there. At best it is hot air, and worst it’s calling for a second Holocaust.
Your fixation on kill ratios is misguided.
The next time the US goes to war, I want an infinite kill ratio. I do not want American soldiers dying. American soldiers dying is not a necessary condition for a just war.
Whether the policy is "incredibly common and mainstream" has no relevance. If anything, its proponents should be even more prepared to defend its merits. Hence my original point. I'm not sure how this is even a rebuttal.
The Goldstone report specifically did not conclude that Israel or its military has a policy of killing Palestinian civilians. It did find instances where individual soldiers killed civilians - which is very bad and should be severely punished, but which happens in every armed conflict that has ever happened.
The reasons for the disparity in dead are extremely obvious. First, Israel invests heavily in protecting its population, while Hamas hides behind civilians in a dense urban environment. Hamas has built hundreds of miles of underground tunnels that it uses for its fighters and weapons, while deliberately keeping civilians exposed. It is impossible to target Hamas without civilian casualties. Second, Hamas does not have advanced weaponry or easy access to Israeli population centers. If it did, it would destroy Tel Aviv and all of its inhabitants at the first opportunity. In short, there is a disparity because Israel generally does a good job of protecting its people and containing Hamas.
Assad didn't bother protecting the population and did a poor job of containing his opposition, which was funded by a range of wealthy countries.
Incompetence is not a measure of intent or morality, FFS.
Assad is sending underaged conscripts to act as cannon-fodder, no shit his worthless army isn’t able to sustain a 20:1 casualty ratio.
And his opponents were, in the main, genuinely trying to protect their civilian populations instead of hiding behind them, something Hamas has never even made a vague gesture at.
Syrian opposition was as sectarian or more than Hamas
I’d certainly quibble with the word “more,” but it’s irrelevant.
Their sectarian nature doesn’t speak at all to the tactics and proficiency of either side in that conflict.
I think this is a good comparison. American left-wing college students used to talk about South Africa a lot and since apartheid is over I didn't hear the country mentioned a single time while in college.
Sounds like u are saying that it is prob true they don’t understand the implications of what they are saying, but that does not mean they shouldn’t educate themselves and be more responsible. That sounds very similar to Matt’s position in the article.
Yes, I have, as a matter of fact. The people shouting those slogans and wearing those shirts are accountable for them. What's your point?
I was thinking of this exact thing. It's why banning people from doing something offensive is wrong. I was really happy about having it taken down from government buildings (where it should have never been after the CW) but unhappy with the wholesale banning it from NASCAR events.
There is a good reason why it's offensive but there is also the counter that people mean something different by it (and there is even an argument about reclaiming symbolism with a problematic history into something more positive). It's complicated and censoring people rarely leads to a better outcome.
Really liked the point that *both* 'from the river to the sea' *and* it's absolute rejection in favour of the status quo are in fact rather extreme positions, properly considered.
The first, even in its generous form, assumes today's Israelis are going to have to share a country with, and indeed cough up a lot of money for, the Palestinian population, many of whom right now seem quite keen on the idea of inflicting hideous atrocities on Israeli civilians. It takes only a little reflection to see that this is probably an unreasonably big ask for a population that for obvious reasons has a fear of being permanently eliminated.
From the other side, certainly the basic 'stand with Israel' crowd seem very unwilling to reflect on how utterly unacceptable the status quo was, and is. The West Bank being deliberately ground into tiny enclosed Bantustans, surrounded by trigger-happy soldiers and vicious settlers. Hundreds of Gazans shot for demonstrating at the fences. Regular airstrikes wrecking entire building to get at a few militants. East Jerusalem annexed in clear violation of international law. Shocking deprivation, especially in Gaza.
Also, the article Matt shared was very clearly written by some *extremely* gullible people:
"And although many people point to Hamas’s 1988 charter as evidence of its hostility to Jews, in fact the group long ago distanced itself from that initial document, seeking a more explicit anti-colonial stance. Moreover, its 2017 revised charter makes even clearer that its conflict is with Zionism, not with Jews."
How did that turn out?
Of course Hamas is going to position itself as anti-colonialist, just as China defends itself against accusations of oppressing Uighurs by calling its opponents racists and sinophobes. We've done a very good job of exporting progressive speak to authoritarian groups.
The position that most of the pro-Palestinian left would take is that if the Palestinians were equal citizens of a single secular state as Israelis with the same income and education distribution as Israelis, then they would not want to inflict hideous atrocities on Israeli citizens.
Some think this is so obvious that they believe that everyone agrees with it - including the Israeli government - and that the only reason they don't do it is because they want to provoke Palestinian violence to provide an excuse for their intended genocide of the Palestinian people. Thus all violence by Palestinians, because it was deliberately and intentionally provoked by the Israeli government, is the moral responsibility of the Israeli government and Netanyahu killed those thousands of kids.
I think it's useful to look at how twisted the logic needs to be to reach the position in the second paragraph. But the first paragraph comes out of a lot of leftist rhetoric. People are violent because they are oppressed; stop oppressing them and they will stop being violent. It's the same camp as the people who think that the entire solution to violent crime is a welfare state.
I think that *directionally, theoretically* that your initial position would be the liberal position as well. And my own. (as evidence I would offer that the 'Israeli Arab' population, does not commit many atrocities, whilst still being on the receiving end of some discrimination).
However, speaking for myself, I would temper my general principles with the fact that there are some extremely difficult timing problems, and that going from 'extremely violent mutual detestation' to 'fellow citizens' would require a whole bunch of intermediate steps, none of which are currently obvious. So maybe other solutions, like a two state solution , would be better
Yeah, the difference between myself as a liberal and the leftists we're talking about is that I think that's the project of several generations and they think it's a magic spell that Netanyahu could say tomorrow and the entire thing would be sorted by Christmas.
Hanukkah
Nah, the sorts of leftists I'm talking about live with the sorts of blinders where they don't really know the world and therefore they just use their own references. Or they think that Christmas is neutral between Judaism and Islam.
Sure, which is why I wanted to distinguish between the first two paragraphs. And I'd say that it likely would end up there if given a few generations.
Yeah I'm not sure how anyone thinks any country in the middle east can be both democratic and liberal.
Israel actually got close-ish for a while in the late 1990s before spiralling into the current approach led by Sharon and Netanyahu. In theory the Israeli state could be used as a basis for a multi-ethnic state, in practice that would now take decades as the respective peoples recover from their suffering.
I think Thomas Friedman has been the clearest voice on this. He pointed out three goals for Israel - to be Jewish, Democratic and inclusive of the occupied territories and points out, correctly in my view, that you can only get 2. I, along with the Israeli left would choose Jewish and Democratic. The Israeli right would choose Jewish and inclusive of the territories. To the extent there are liberal Palestinians, they would chose one democratic country but, that would be the end of Zionism.
Yeah it seems Israel is largely liberal but if there is disenfranchisement of Palestinians then it clearly isn't democratic.
But given that Palestinians democratically elected Hamas in 2006, I kinda get it.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have full civil and political rights. Israel proper IS democratic. The West Bank, however, is an undemocratic occupation.
I was referring to the internationally recognised pre-1967 Israeli core. Obviously the governance of the Occupied Authorities both by the Israeli occupation authorities, and the relevant Palestinian authorities has never been either democratic or liberal. (and Hamas are appalling. But if we can understand, but abhor, the slide of the many Israelis into the hands of hardright Likud and their religious settler nut friends in the wake of terrorism and hostility, then we should also be able to understand, but abhor, the slide of many Palestinians, facing occupation, corruption and deprivation, into the hands of Hamas).
Close-ish?
The Zionist have elected their leaders "like clockwork" since at least the 1890s. They did so LONG before they even had a State. Opposition parties operate freely and there is a free press.
Yes, you can criticize the Judicial reforms of the Netanyahu government, but these are still a long way from "not democracy".
If you want to debate whether Israel is or is about to be less democratic than the US, or the UK, go for it. Calling Israel not democratic is silly. Relative to which Middle Eastern country?
Very democratic. Not liberal, though. There's always been official special treatment of Jews in Israel, which is in itself not liberal, and the lean towards focusing on the privileged status of Jews in governing party rhetoric has gone up, not down. (plus there's the settlement policy which most countries officially consider a war crime)
"There's always been official special treatment of Jews in Israel, which is in itself not liberal"
You are just making assertions without any evidence.
Glad to hear the Law of Return, the JNF and the Nation-State Bill have all been repealed. My mistake
This was always my biggest problem with the idea of "spreading democracy in the middle east" - if you give the backward sheepherders a vote, they tend to vote for authoritarian strongmen and/or religious extremists.
Ignorance of the phenomenon you cited is foundational to the Anti-Israel camp.
Nuclear hot take, but when I read Hannah Arendt's analysis of the history of the Boers in southern Africa in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," I thought that there was a lot there that could be read as applying to the situation of modern Israel.
…I mean, there's a reason the historical analogy people use to describe the settlements is "apartheid".
It’s also a stated goal in some Palestinian circles that a unitary state would bring about an eventual Palestinian majority who would do to the Jewish population what every other Arab-Majority country has done.
The bans of pro-Palestine demonstrations seem truly terrible and are one of many reasons I think the US free-speech paradigm is better actually.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to do this (particularly because I have fully converted to a 1A view on banning protests since I moved here), but since I'm one of the few commenters here who was born and raised in the EU I can try to steelman this. Again, I'm not in favor of such bans, and I'm glad that they happened in only a small part of the EU. Even when I lived there I was like "We should allow even Nazis to march.", so even though the 1A is truly different from EU culture and politics, I would have probably said the same thing back then.
First, I would say that the French nation is not obliged to tolerate the national(ist) movement of any other nation. The US is a nation of immigrants, so I have found that it's really hard to explain that to Americans, but waving the flags of other countries is not popular in Europe. (Burning the US flag is, though!)
Second, I would say that it's highly unlikely you can have a pro-Palestine rally in Europe without chants in support of Intifada (I know, because the Palestinian cause is very popular with the European left and you get chants for Intifada in like anti-austerity student protests during the economic crisis). People who have strong objections to the Passover massacre will probably point to a double standard since chants in favor of the wrong violent events are not tolerated (you can freely chant about the violent events that led to the creation of your nation state though).
Finally, now that the tensions are high, there has been violence and clashes with the police during pro-Palestine demonstrations in the EU. It's considered reasonable there for the police to restrict demonstrations if violence is suspected.
Again, I absolutely agree with you on this issue. I'm just trying to explain the culture I grew up in, because it's VERY different from the US.
"The US is a nation of immigrants, so I have found that it's really hard to explain that to Americans, but waving the flags of other countries is not popular in Europe."
What a crying *shame* that Western and Southern Europe will be nothing more than a retirement home for locals and tourist trap for vastly richer middle-class Americans and the rising middle classes of East, SE, and South Asia by century's end.
[ANYWAY.GIF]
You are not completely wrong but we are only escaping western Europe's fate by pure luck. the cultural forces in our country that want to claw us back into the stone age somehow ended up in direct conflict with the cultural forces that want to regulate us to death and that has locked us into an inability to do anything, which while less than ideal, is much better than those cultural forces combining and doing both as has happened in the EU. I don't think there's any reason for us to get sanctimonious about it because if Democrats and Republicans could get along for five seconds, we'd end up going down the same path.
Disagreed, fervently.
It is unfortunate that David R is being kind of a dick because there's some decent insight in there if he could articulate himself like an adult
Lol, fine.
Europe’s social and economic compact is a cul-de-sac, an evolutionary dead end, a descent into a form of navel-gazing which purports to care about the future while doing none of the things which we owe our children, even the single one about which they purport to most fervently care.
None of the endless sanctimony is the least bit justified.
Europe is going to commit suicide over the coming century through sheer apathy, and I am deeply worried that the beachhead of European nihilism which appeared here in the US in the aftermath of our botched response to the GFC has already cut too deep for mere economic recovery to push out again.
I have no choice but to put faith in the newly minted Americans of Hispanic and Asian descent to push back on European-style declinism on both the left and right, both of which are coming almost exclusively from us white folk.
So forgive me if I cannot muster any sympathy for the people who originated this horseshit. At least in their senescence we’ll be there to keep them from being conquered. There won’t be anyone around to play that role for us if the rot is already too deep.
The US is bad enough when it comes to being aware that history ain’t over.
Europe’s navel-gazing, spineless, sanctimonious fecklessness is just unforgivable.
They can’t even be bothered to constrain Russia’s behavior when it has a third the population and a sixth the economic throw-weight of the EU, let alone see the genuine threat the PRC seeks to pose to liberalism and democracy globally.
"First, I would say that the French nation is not obliged to tolerate the national(ist) movement of any other nation. The US is a nation of immigrants, so I have found that it's really hard to explain that to Americans, but waving the flags of other countries is not popular in Europe. (Burning the US flag is, though!)"
The paragraph is fascinating to read as a whole, since in the late 1980s we came very close to carving out a First Amendment exception for burning the US flag. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/491/397]. The unexpected threat was from Stevens showing his rare 1A exceptions for purposes of national unity (he also would have sided with Alito against the Westboro Baptist Church [https://www.scotusblog.com/2011/05/stevens-casts-some-votes/]), but it was saved from Scalia also crossing over in the opposite direction, as that wasn't one of his own odd 1A exceptions that he was fond of.
I dunno; if Europe lapses into authoritarianism for the second time in less than a century, maybe America’s center-left will give up on the squeeing fanboyism for all things European?
"The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." -- Thomas Wolfe (rephrasing Jean-François Revel's statement, "The strange thing is that it's always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up, yet it's always America that is 'fascist.'“)
sure europe has had literal fascist regimes and everything but they pay for healthcare indirectly through taxes, so obviously that makes america the evil one by comparison
"Sure disposable incomes in Amerikkka are roughly 50% higher than here in Europe but at least we have trains! Suck it yanks!"
I’m still with Frigid here. Let’s fix the couple of sectors we’ve fucked up badly (healthcare, tertiary education, housing regulation, infrastructure costs) so that we’re just clearly better in every possible way and we can dismiss all future European chauvinism out of hand as is proper.
What was "truly terrible" recently was the deliberate mass murder of 1000 civilians. Banning hate-filled demonstrations in order to protect the most prosecuted minority in European history that is objectively under greater threat than any other in Europe right now may be a mistake, but isn't "truly terrible". Get your priorities and values straight.
I think that the "deliberate mass murder of 1000 civilians" is truly terrible and also that we should not let every act of terror or tragedy be a reason to erode our civil rights.
No protests were banned in the US, whereas banning hate speech and protests is a long European tradition. No "erosion" is happening here. In any case that's all besides the point. I didn't object to your view about free speech rights. I objected to your *wording*. If you see the European model of free speech as morally as repugnant as mass murder of cvilians there is something wrong with you. If you do not equate the two - why use the exact same words to describe both?
More sophistry and nitpicking of word choices.
That's literally all you contribute here anymore, aside from virulent anti-immigrant screeds.
Two things can be unequally "terrible" and both still use the word.
Your repeated resorting to ad hominem is as tiresome as it is loathsome.
Calling an argument "sophistry and nitpicking" is not an ad hominem attack.
I'll merely ask, for my own curiosity, why you've chosen to immigrate to a country whose core values which you mostly despise?
Yes, it is good that we are not doing what Europe is doing and it is bad that they are doing it.
Note my edit.
Are you asking why I said both were "truly terrible"? If so it is because you quoted my phrasing in your reply.
No, I’m objecting to hyperbole when it’s in very bad taste.
Yes, this safetyist mindset is indeed very European. And Europeans are allowed to live out their values. Personally, though, I'm glad to live in a country that prioritizes fundamental liberties over each individual instance where they could be weakened in the name of safety.
Both things can be true.
The bans on peaceful (albeit legitimately hate-filled) demonstrations can be truly terrible, and the massacre of civilians even more terrible.
By saying the former, I don't think the OP was disagreeing with the latter.
If I wanted to go to Paris and demonstrate passionately against zionism and israel but didn’t talk about hurting civilian jews and didn’t want to hurt them, that would be illegal, right? if so, how can there be discourse?
Would you call for tone policing “Japanese internment was truly terrible”? I find it hard to believe this is a consistent standard
Are you equating Japanese internment with banning a protest?
Also, the point is the context. I didn’t object to someone calling European speech policies “truly terrible” as a hyperbole within an abstract discussion of comparative constitutionalism or something. I objected to in in the context of discussing responses to mass murder.
My claim is far more modest. That: 1. Employers consider it bad if people working for them publicly endorse deliberate murder of civilians.
2. That anyone choosing to publicly state such views cannot expect that “free speech” includes expecting institutions to actively help them avoid consequences for these actions (eg hiding retroactively their names from said statements, even and esp when they never bothered to backtrack and apologize).
That’s all, and I’m happy to have this moderate standard apply universally. I don’t think that contradicts any of my other positions ?
Have we? I didn’t endorse banning marches. In fact acknowledged it “may be a mistake” and in my other comments came out against it. All I was trying to say that though a position I disagree with, it’s not beyond the pale to do this. Thus calling it “truly terrible” is a hyperbole. To use such hyperbole in context of genuinely truly terrible things happening is in bad taste. That’s all I’m saying here.
P.S.
The employer thing is a response to other comments. Sorry for my confusion there.
IMO I think propalestinian demos should be allowed but have to be shut down if promoting violence or blatantly antisemitic. But also pro Israel ones if being hostile to Islam in general. I think it’s possible to have some guardrails like this while allowing opposing views some of which may be clearly wrong.
The challenge to this is that people will always invent code to get around this, and then claim that they're being misinterpreted. An example in this very thread is how "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" sounds innocent enough without knowing the background of the first half of the statement.
I 100% agree that we should be pressuring schools to accept the Chicago principles, but what exactly would such pressure look like? It seems to me it would look a damn lot like exactly what is happening right now -- imposing costs on those administrators because they've taken decidedly non-nuetral stands on previous issues of moral significance and won't loudly condemn Hamas.
The only way we are likely to see those administrators adopt something like the Chicago principles is if they are subject to substantial costs as a result of not adopting them. This is how those costs get imposed. If donors and alumni merely said, "you should adopt the Chicago principles" it wouldn't have the same kind of pressure that creates an object lesson about the harms of not adopting them. Such a demand wouldn't fire up people with righteous anger and thus wouldn't pressure the admins at all.
You're always saying that winning requires playing politics and saying the things that inspire action. That's whats happening here. Once I see any university administrator go "whoops, we should have been supporting the Chicago principles the whole time...we're signing up now" then I agree it's time to call off the demands to condemn Hamas/support Israel - but that won't happen if they only are stuck between one group demanding strong moral support and another saying "support the Chicago principles" because they aren't likely to lose a job or a bunch of alumni money over the later rhetoric.
Agreed. The analogy that comes to mind is the laws of war as traditionally understood; back when the CSA threatened to lynch any black US soldiers they captured, the response was “we’ll hang a captured officer for every time that happens.”
The entire legal system is the codification of acceptable retaliation, outsourced to the state. International law is the same, without any outsourcing.
The only way Harvard is going to stop caving to its loudest students on issues like these is if the wider world inflicts consequences on it and them.
One of the biggest issues with "Free Speech" is that it is hard to decide what the means in a social context when we also have the concept of free association. I am not sure that anyone decides who to be friends with, work with or hire without considering the things they say. I remember working on a campaign where the hiring managers questioned people about what seemed like fairly innocuous tweets before they could be hired to knock on doors.
Matt has been on the anti-anti-hypocrisy beat for a while and I think the last paragraph is correct, that we should try to get people/institutions to change their ways instead of getting them to take "our" side in the latest issue. I would say that I think that universities stepping back and becoming apolitical seems a bit far-fetched and that part of the "politicization" was trying to create the consensus that there was no such thing as apolitical.
On the "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.", I think some commentators have gotten a bit lost in the sauce on this one. Matt says:
"But I also think it’s important for Jews (and our friends) to understand that to the people chanting, in this context, this is not what it means. Their understanding of themselves is that they are calling for a unitary secular democratic state encompassing both Jews and Arabs."
Is that what they understand themselves to be saying? All of them? This is a very specific phrasing, they could have chosen anything. The obvious parallel is "All Lives Matter" which is largely seen as obviously minimizing of the "Black Lives Matter" slogan even though without context it would be difficult for anyone to understand the objection.
I've seen a couple commenters, even those critical of the left, defend the use of "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." and I am not sure why they are so credulous. We are again in a hypocrisy space but I think that when people usually attuned to "dog whistles" are now explaining things away it is worth asking why.
The complete lack of introspection on the left about "from the river to the sea" is especially frustrating because we've gone through so many rounds of dialogue about the confederate flag that, broadly, covered similar issues. With that controversy, everyone on the left agreed that it was more important that the flag was understood as endorsing slavery and racism by those who saw it that way (including myself FWIW) than that the flag meant "southern pride" by those who flew it.
Now with "from the river", we have something understood to be a violent and hateful expression by many Jews or Israelis, but the answer from the left is just "well that's not what it means to us so just shut up." AKA "it just means southern pride" but for the pro-Palestinian side.
Two notes:
1) Free speech is probably a poor descriptor of the issue here. It's much closer to something like academic freedom...it's really the status of universities as institutions that seek to enable a very wide array of potentially controversial speech. If the universities aren't in some sense politically nuetral then support for them becomes political and that not only puts them in danger but creates pressure to squelch the 'wrong' sort of ideas.
2) Obviously, most of the people chanting the slogan haven't given any thought to what it means at all. It's just a means for them to show solidarity with their side of a conflict. But that's true of almost all political rallies and political supporters.
However, I think it is true that if you pressed them on the issue the vast vast majority of Americans would explain that this was what they meant -- or at least deny they meant anything about expelling the Jews. And given that most political speech happens with very little serious thought (it's mostly getting riled up by a friend or speech and going along) that's probably the closest you can get to saying that's what they really mean.
An organization can be political without resorting to censorship.
We decided many decades ago that individual freedoms don't extend to firing (or refusing to hire) someone because of e.g. their race. The potential for society-wide civil rights violations trumps a restriction on individual freedom in employment decisions. Freedom of speech is a civil right and there should be commonly understood restrictions on how far people can extend other rights to abridge or chill free speech.
Who you are is an innate characteristic; what you say isn’t.
The idea that you can restrict people’s freedom of association to prevent discrimination based on innate characteristics is, yes, an infringement… but a justifiable one.
But if your position is that I cannot consider broad classes of voluntary actions when deciding to employ or associate with people… that rabbit hole has no bottom.
Do I have to hire the product manager who can’t restrain himself from a racist screed but is otherwise most qualified in an interview when acting as hiring manager for my employer?
Do I have to hire an architect who is the most suitable but does the same for an addition to my home?
Do I have to continue going to the (best of a given type of) restaurant owned by someone who does the same?
These are all the same principle; where does it stop?
An employer has more power than a restaurant customer, so these are not the same principle. An organized boycott of a restaurant because of speech-based disagreements would be closer.
For most of the history of modern civilization, hiring was supposed to be based on a person's qualifications for the tasks relevant to the position. This idea that people are not just allowed, but obligated, to surround themselves with only like-minded individuals is much more toxic and exclusionary than the alternative.
This kind of censorship never stops at just extreme racist screeds.
“For most of the history of modern civilization, hiring was supposed to be based on a person's qualifications for the tasks relevant to the position.”
[UNCONTROLLABLE LAUGHTER]
Anyway, there’s never going to be any stomach for limiting freedom of association to the degree you want, thank god, nor does more than a tiny fraction of the population understand “being a dick will get you fired” to be a form of censorship.
“For most of the history of modern civilization, hiring was supposed to be based on a person's qualifications for the tasks relevant to the position”
No, that’s a very new idea. For most of history hiring was done based on a candidate’s family, ethnicity, religion, where he attended school, and membership in various civic organizations.
It's a very new idea, and generally speaking there are very few lines of work in which "don't be a shithead" is *not* a relevant task.
There are a great number of positions in which "be uncontroversial and circumspect when discussing politics if you do so at all" is a crucial part of the job.
The kids who willingly signed their names to NYU and Harvard's public letters did so because they never thought anyone would come after them for extremist views in the way that they've gone after others for non-extremist ones.
Oops, is all I can say.
“The kids who willingly signed their names to NYU and Harvard's public letters did so because they never thought anyone would come after them for extremist views in the way that they've gone after others for non-extremist ones”
Not exactly products of a well-rounded education, I would say.
That level of faith in meritocracy is almost touching. Even extremely high-profile hiring with lots of money on the line often doesn't work like that. There have been loads of examples of Formula 1 drivers hired for nepotistic reasons, for instance.
I think it was implicit in Ken's comment that the "very new idea" hasn't been fully realized.
"there should be commonly understood restrictions on how far people can extend other rights to abridge or chill free speech."
But we don't really have these "commonly understood restrictions" right? That's kind of the problem.
(I'm Israeli.)
I agree with the principle of free speech. I've been against many of the intrusions on free speech that have occurred.
I mostly agree with your take. I think there's no *problem* having a pro-Palestinian protest, and a *huge* problem with not allowing one to take place.
The main thing I'll point out:
1. Some people *did* cross the line into speech that even I'd consider worth distancing from. E.g. Professors "exhillirated" at the deaths of Israelis. E.g. a different professor IIRC that said something like "Zionists have addresses and family members, [ax-emoji]". E.g. crowds chanting "gas the Jews".
2. As an Israeli and a Jew, while I don't think pro-Palestinian protests are wrong, it's certainly been eye-opening to see the lack of ability of so many people on the left to be able to condemn Hamas. I don't even think being pro-Palestinian is at odds with condemning Hamas, quite the opposite - I think both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian people should have the same goal - eliminating Hamas, which is harming both Israelis *and Palestinians*!
3. As someone else pointed out, it's not the I think University presidents should opine about everything. Given that they *do* opine about everything, and given that they will almost certainly *continue to opine* about everything, it's both eye-opening and, frankly, damning, that they can't come out more forcefully against Hamas or Hamas sympathizers.
I'm fine moving towards a world where more political opinions are able to be aired and respected. I very much agree with Matthew's saying that it's important that some people can say Israel has committed war crimes. As an Israeli, *I also want to know* if that's happening. While I trust the Israeli government and free press probably more than non-Israelis do, I certainly don't want to live in a world in which there's no outside force that will show me if Israel is committing horrendous acts.
But given that we almost certainly aren't moving to that world, given the world we have now, I'm mostly in despair that it's more controversial to misgender someone than to praise Hamas for killing my countrymen. (And I'm in even more despair that people honestly think that to support Palestinians you need to support Hamas, as if they weren't their brutal oppressors in many ways.)
"I'm mostly in despair that it's more controversial to misgender someone than to praise Hamas for killing my countrymen."
Of course, this is totally not true for 99% of Americans. Totally the opposite. The unstated context, however, is "for many people on the Left." And that makes it true. But my question is: how much should we care? Why do we spend so much time worrying about the bullshit positions of these fringe groups and people?
Presumably because “the left”
1. Holds huge amounts of cultural and economic power.
2. Makes up the vast majority of the PMC social circle due to educational polarisation.
We should because America’s inegalitarian biases means these antisemitic idiots will be the country’s future elite (or a disproportionate part of it anyway).
Re: 2 sure it's not logically incompatible but it's emotionally incompatible. On political issues people feel strongly about they don't act like policy wonks, they act as rhetorical foot soldiers for their side. This is true on all sides of these issues.
At an emotional/social level these people have three options. Somehow excuse, ignore or explain away as understandable what Hamas did, change sides or draw a line in the sand and say that anyone who supports or excuses Hamas isn't really on their side.
Obviously, what they should do is take the third option -- but that's like asking someone to say: "The Russians are awful people acting badly but they need to win the war with Ukraine". It might be an intellectually coherent position but it won't get people out in the streets as you can't really feel filled with pure moral indignation about waving your side's flag. So those people are never going to really be big players in the movement leaving only the people who take the first option to drive the protests.
I'm a longtime reader and subscriber who rarely comments. On this piece, since I am an Israeli Jew teaching Judaism at a left-leaning university, I have some things to say. Please forgive the essay.
1. I support free speech as a basic academic freedom. Having said that, there can be a thin line between unrestricted free speech and suppression of speech that I don't know how to navigate. On my campus every time the Jewish and Israel-supporting students (who are a tiny minority on campus) have an Israel related event, even if it is just a meal of Israeli food, SJP holds a protest outside with signs like 'Zionism is racism'. Yes, they have a right to do this. Yes, Jewish and Israel-supporting students ought to be resilient in the face of criticism. But in practice that means that Jewish students rarely want to do anything Israel-related because it is just so tiring. I can't say that this is, as you say, leading to robust and thoughtful dialogue on campus.
2. There is no right to unrestricted free speech in the classroom. Students are welcome to voice dissenting opinions when they are related to the topic of the class. They are not invited to give long speeches on things that are not the topic of the class, over and over. I teach Judaism to students who are not Jewish and often know little about Judaism but have strong (primarily negative) opinions about Israel. To be honest I rarely teach about Israel in my classes because when I do the students demand that their voices be heard, and then they repeat the opinions they had before coming into the class, which are the same opinions most people at the university have. It's hard for me to see any learning taking place from this. When I do teach about Israel I try to limit the conversation in advance - we are learning about specific texts and concepts that are within my area of expertise and I am not willing to broaden the conversation. Yes, this limits student free speech, but students have no right to unrestricted free speech in the classroom.
This isn't only about Israel, obviously. Students have a right to ask in class if Jews killed Jesus or if Jews control the world - once or twice. I have had in my classes students who believe antisemitic conspiracy theories or Holocaust denial and want them given equal time in class, and I don't have an obligation to do this, and if students keep pressing for this all I will do is devote class time to explaining the origins of antisemitic conspiracy theories and why they are wrong.
(Students also don't have a right to derail class conversations into a long digression about basketball or the Barbie movie so that we will cover less course material and there will be less on the final. How often do students try to do this? ALWAYS.)
But, if faculty don't have an obligation to give unrestricted free speech to their students in class, and if other faculty think about Israel the way I think about antisemitic conspiracy theories, this is going to create a not-great environment for Jewish students on campus. I don't know what to do about this. I do think professors have an ethical responsibility to present things neutrally and descriptively, and to present legitimate opposing views, but again from the perspective of a professor who is convinced that Israel is settler-colonialism maybe nothing pro-Israel is legitimate.
3. Regarding Black Lives Matter and Jewish faculty - it's not a them and us. The Jewish faculty at my campus were at the forefront of calling on the university to respond to police violence against Black people. We have also historically been at the forefront of pro-unionization efforts. The problem was, it became more and more the case that every time I spoke at a pro-union protest there would be another speaker who would for some reason bring in Palestine. It used to be that I could live with this. Right now I don't know that I can. I don't know that I would speak at a union rally right now, knowing that it would also be an anti-Israel rally, at a time when my friends and family in Israel are in danger.
I want to be clear, it's not a quid pro quo. I'm not saying I supported worker rights and not murdering Black people and now I want unionized workers and Black activists to support me. I'm saying I want to keep going to rallies for things I believe in without it also being a rally that actively opposes my own people. I was saying to someone in her 30s that I wish we could go back to single-issue activism and she said that she doesn't even know what that looks like, it is before her time. Her hope is that other progressives will remember the importance of Jews to their alliance. But that also seems unfair to me - the pro-Palestinian voice is also useful in the progressive alliance. If we can't find a way to reconstruct single-issue advocacy I don't know what else to do. I expect that progressive-leaning Jews (which are most American Jews) will have to become anti-Israel in order to be part of an alliance that they 98% agree with, but that's not going to be an option for me because I am actually Israeli.
4. As far as statements. I was in favor of my university making a statement on Black Lives Matter because that is something we could actually do something about. We teach students who will one day work in law enforcement. We employ security on campus. This is really not a bad place to think about racism in policing. We also - badly - need to think about (and fix) the underrepresentation of Black faculty on campus. I was not in favor of my university making any statement on Israel/Palestine. (Not that anyone asked me, even though I am the only Jewish Studies professor on campus.) But I didn't like the statement that they made, which was very "we grieve all the violence". If you are going to make a statement, think about what you can do to help. I don't think my university can, actually, do anyting to help Israel or Palestine. What it can do - if it cares to - is help Muslim and Jewish, Palestinian and Israeli students at our campus and in our city, who may be grieving family, or may be experiencing antisemitic or Islamophobic attacks, or who may be sick of people who have no personal stake in the situation coming up to them with their bad takes every minute of their lives on campus. If the university cared to, it could do things like 1. setting up designated spaces for grieving, and distinguishing between that and spaces for debate and protest 2. teaching more courses on Islam and Judaism in America, so that people have a better understanding of their local communities 3. organizing donation drives to reputable Israeli and Palestinian organizations on the ground so that people who want to help can help in ways that might actually make a difference. I don't think talking about antisemitism or Islamophobia is weaponizing feelings of unsafety. I think it is asking the university to focus on the people it can help - Jewish and Muslim students on campus - rather than trying to take the right position on issues it can't do anything about.
I really don't like the way that statements have become so much about positioning, figuring out what the one right answer is and trying to get out in front of it but without actually doing anything to help. But I also, to be honest, don't like that in this case the one right answer is - we're not taking a side. I dislike this for personal reasons, not for principled academic reasons. My principled, academic stance is that I would rather that they said nothing unless (as with Black Lives Matter) there are particular things they could actually do to help. Personally I feel sad that they got it together to say something and what they said was, even though your people just got murdered we aren't going to condemn it.
Yes, by not taking a stand they also told the Palestinians that they are not with them either. I'm ok with Palestinians on campus being mad about the statement too. Again, I would have preferred if the university hadn't said anything.
Thanks for this comment.
1. I agree the SJP should have the fight to right to conduct such protests. I also believe they shouldn’t (making individual students feel uncomfortable is bad and counterproductive to change). I think people should look down on those who engage in such protests and encourage them to stop.
2. I agree free speech can be restricted in the classroom, and that’s probably necessary to keep classes functioning. I think a focus on respect is critical here - even if you disagree, expressing your view in a reasonable and respectful manner means far fewer harms t students who disagree.
3. I think “can we do something productive” sounds like a good standard.
Nice comment. A lot of issues when it comes to campus speech and demonstrations. It really does take a leadership that puts the young peoples experience first and looks at each issue soberly. If Jewish folks on campus can’t have any events peacefully that’s a problem even if u want to allow propalestine groups their fair time as well. Navigating that isn’t easy and they have to take that duty seriously.
Literally every single pro Palestinian demonstration is mired with explicit antisemitism : swastikas, literal calls to kills Jews etc. many of the advertisements to those rallies glorified and celebrated the recent acts of mass murder, which were without a doubt the greatest antisemitic crimes committed since the Holocaust. You can’t understand things outside context. It’s in this context these protest took place. Sure, maybe some people are ill informed, but most of these students activists etc knew about the worst atrocities imaginable, didn’t condemn them and often explicitly justified and celebrated them. You don’t need to adopt the far lefts ridiculously low bar to identify other kinds of racism to see that in this case many many people have shown themselves to be chillingly hardcore antisemites.
I have a really simple question - how do you organise a pro-Palestinian demonstration that wouldn't attract explicit antisemites? Alternatively, how do you exclude people from your demonstration that you don't want there?
It's not a question with an easy answer. I organised demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2003. We couldn't find a way to stop people from carrying pro-Saddam posters. We also couldn't keep Israel/Palestine out of it. People were going to fly Palestinian flags whatever we did. We also found that various communist cults were going to turn up and we could do very little about them. The police would not help us to forcibly remove them or separate ourselves from them. We could spend all our time chanting about how awful they were - which meant we couldn't get the anti-war message across - or we could ignore them and hope people concentrated on the 90% of the posters and banners and people who weren't lunatics.
Sure, the percentages can vary and you can legitimately comment on that - but the fact is that most protests see the extremists drive out everyone else as they decide not to turn up next time.
Hmm start by not endorsing mass murder in your invitation to the protest? Have the organizers make sure to explicitly condemn such crimes ("not in my name")? Call such behavior out by the speakers? Have the crowd visibly boo, call out etc. anyone using such symbols or making such chants?
These are just some suggestions. When the precise opposite happens, again and again and again you can pretty reasonably conclude that your movement is steeped in hate. Pro Palestinian activism does not have to, in theory, be anti semitic. Some of the people in it aren't anti semites. But the movement as it is right now, in reality today, very clearly is very deeply steeped in anti semitism, and precious few of its adherents seem to mind that much.
I agree with a lot of this. All I'm saying is that the antisemites will always turn up and the non-antisemites are put off by the fact that they always will. Just to get a majority who aren't antisemites would require a major effort to convince people that the protest isn't going to be full of antisemites.
It's a pathology of the pro-Palestinian movement, yes, but it's also a pathology of using protests as a method of activism - extremists who put off everyone else will turn up and put off everyone else, and if you want to prevent that, you have to have infrequent large protests not frequent small ones (as well as a bunch of other requirements). The only movement I can think of in recent years that has pulled that off is the UK's pro-EU movement, where the worst excesses are cringe (google "EU supergirl") rather than hate or violence. But even they had to work hard to stop people who wanted to be full-time activists from taking over and holding protests every week in front of a few thousand, when they could hold two a year and attract hundreds of thousands. And what did we get instead? An unofficial protester (Steve Bray) who stayed out on continuous protest, and ended up promoting a bunch of conspiracy theories about the government and Brexit. Still, the official protests managed to avoid the worst of this and stopped inviting him on stage when he went down the rabbit hole.
Really, all I'm saying is that protests are a really bad representation of people who are more broadly sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian position, but the nature of protest means that Peter Beinart doesn't get invited to them.
I dunno. Maybe it’s a really good representation and you’re just underestimating how many people who go to protests are antisemites or have other trash views.
I’ve seen protests and known people who’ve gone to them. The idea that literally everyone there is some kind of below replacement level asshole is really easy for me to believe.
My point, to the extent I have one, is that the people who turn up to the protest are often terribly unrepresentative of the overall population that supports the cause for which they are protesting, and that people who have been to like two protests and then stopped are often just as hostile to the "below replacement level asshole"s who are the majority of those there because those very brlas turn up to every protest going.
So you can't use the protests to represent the movement (in the sense of the mass of ordinary people who sympathise), but you sometimes can to represent the movement (in the sense of the people who run the protests).
I was a Lib Dem on my local STWC board and quit when it became obvious that the SWP were going to take control of it by boring everyone else to death in meetings.
Respect was a coalition of three main groups: the SWP, Galloway and his fandom, and the Islamic groups. STWC was supposed to be a cross-party coalition, but the SWP did the thing they always do, dragged out all meeting with petty procedural points, tried to drive everyone else out of the room, and then seized control.
I'd been arguing for fewer, bigger protests, for getting people to be clear they represented only themselves, for removing party-political and all other outside-organisational banners, so TU banners, mosque banners, etc. That was really unpopular.
One way to interpreting the presence of swastikas is hyper-trolling: ‘Since Jews are indifferent to our suffering then we are indifferent to theirs”. It’s appalling to me to see swastikas displayed but it is a mistake to brand everything connected to it as Nazism and dismiss it in its entirety. That’s taking the bait, making it appear that you are truly indifferent to their suffering.
I am sure that the added cry “gas the Jews”, the vandalizing of kosher supermarkets, the targeting of Jewish students in a Stanford classroom, the murder of the president of a synagogue in Detroit and of course the systemic murder of over 1000 Jews which triggered the rest are similarly a cry for help wit no malice or hate intended? Some people clearly adamantly refuse to accept the sickeningly plain facts. It’s not a good look.
What has really happened with the post-pogrom discourse is that it revealed the illiberalism of many ideologically “left” persons and organizations. Many postmodernists ideas and critical theories that are popular on college campuses are constructed in opposition to liberal ideas and values. It’s a weird contrarianism. Many of the problems I have with DEI-washing is that it promotes illiberal ideas, rejects individual agency, and the ability for people to have difficult conversations.
Where am I going with this stream of thought? Well I guess we all have seen many mask off moments from people who supposedly claim to promote the social good. And it is cruel. And it is mean. And it is vindictive.
Certain social goods are more socially good than others. Or something like that.
Excellent, excellent post. One of the seemingly forgotten points out there is that pro-Palestinian academics and activists are in many ways the OG victims of what we now call cancelation in the university space.
That of course doesn't mean they're right about everything or even anything. But I do think the counter-reaction to them and student groups endorsing more extreme talking points over the last weeks is not a defense of liberalism and principles of free speech. It's an attempt to reinforce another arbitrary shibbeloth about what can and can't be debated. I mean, what exactly is the message supposed to be, particularly in light of all of the other unhinged things that have come out of and been endorsed by universities over the last few years? Feel free to make all kinds of racially charged assertions about white and Asian people under Kendian theories of discrimination (to say nothing of black and hispanic people who disagree with that perspective), hold that all men are rapists until proven otherwise, or go crazy against feminists not on board with replacing the sex based rights regime with one based on gender identity, but tirades against Israel are a bridge too far!
The only caveat I would add is that the 1st Amendment does absolutely apply to many, maybe most, colleges and universities which are state institutions. At a certain point the Ivies can do what they want, though they also are often subject to a number of rules in exchange for state and federal benefits.
Lost in all of this is the real question of first principles. We should want to be a society that can talk through things, not one that holds all conversation hostage to a web of taboos and increasingly abstract ideas of harm. That was true with the MeToo/rape culture arguments, it was true with Floyd/Kendi and DEI, it's true with debates over gender identity, and it's true with this.
Yeah, Steven Salaita is a good early example of cancel culture.
Matt keeps missing the point about Ivy league's "hypocrisy" here. As I said before, the hypocrisy isn't just bad qua hypocrisy but for what it suggests. If your institution's bar for action against people for any racial "microagression" is as low as the dead sea but when it comes to macroagression against Jews you suddenly suggests the bar should be up on the Everest then it suggests to me that your institution is "systemically" antisemitic (to use another fashionable term). A fortiori if this is combined with the institution itself being very reluctant and tame in condemning the most horrific violence against Jews after making a lot of noise with objectively far more minor things. And all the more still if your institution has a very sketchy history regarding its attitude towards Jews (cough Harvard cough Stanford...)
The simplest and most telling test of a person's professed belief in "Freedom of Speech" is how willingly they tolerate the saying the things they disagree with. In my experience this is a test that the vast majority of 'free speech absolutists' fail dismally. Mr Yglesias is an honourable exception.
I have never been prouder of Matt than after reading this article.