I’m a liberal consistent Democratic Party voter and around election time volunteer. The far Left and pro Palestinian ‘progressives’ are not allies, they’re antisemitic enemies that have done the full horseshoe to standing alongside far Right Neo Nazis. And this isn’t new - it was obvious to me since college days in the mid-late 90s, just now we all see their EXCITEMENT over dead Jews that is indistinguishable from any far Right terrorist in the US.
This is what more people need to see and understand. To me, this is where 40% of the country stands, but we are loosely united. This is the equivalent on the left of Neo-Nazis demonstrating at Disney. Actually, in some ways, it is worse. We need to call it out if we stand in that 40% of the "middle." We also want governance in line with the Constitution at all levels, and do in fact support a strong military and support the police. We also understand that our definitions of strength may differ, so we need to be prepared on multiple fronts so we're not taken by surprise (cyberattack, etc. - 21st century warfare) again. For us, violence must always be the last resort.
You're probably of a similar Gen-X model as me. We were the last ones raised to hate Russia. The Berlin Wall fell the year I graduated from high school. I did not know the truth about Vietnam prior to college (I probably still do not fully grasp it). My point is, I think we understand extremism better and need to speak out more. Violence is unacceptable.
Thank you for this, Ben. I’m 73 years old, I grew up in New York City. I have never, with a few trivial exceptions, encountered any real antisemitism in my personal life — until about six years ago, when TFG essentially gave white supremacists, anti-Semites, and bigots generally, permission and a voice.
By the way, I will argue that Jews are not in fact “white people”; I rely on the “argument from authority”: Who in this society cares most about who is ”white” and who isn’t? Answer: White supremacists. White supremacists do not consider Jew “white” (we’re a “mongrel race”). That’s good enough for me. I don’t wanna be associated with them, anyway…
Also, the attitude that Jews are subhuman, yet simultaneously in charge of everything, reminds me of the Republican attitude towards Joe Biden. On the one hand, he’s feeble and senile; on the other hand he’s some kind of mastermind behind an anti-woke agenda. Go figure.
Ben, this is the best essay I have read so far over the past few days about the seemingly never ending plague of antisemitism, and how events like this show us how deeply it is embedded in societies all over the world. That image of what was taking place in Sydney, Australia, absolutely turned my stomach. How obscene to be chanting death to an entire ethnic/religious group. I’ve come to believe that climate change is not what’s going to wipe us out, but hate will do it easily.
Well stated. I saw somewhere last night a post saying "Don't stand with the governments, stand with its PEOPLE." Anyone who can see the atrocities committed by Hamas & defend it in anyway needs to do some self-reflection. At the same time, anyone supporting what the leaders of Israel has done to Palestinians in the past & the war crimes committed by that government now in the name of retribution should also look inward.
Regardless how one views the overall situation, terrorism can never, ever be condoned. The response is important, too. We should want to see individuals held to account and be tried using Western-style justice. There will be leaders and individuals responsible.
What I’d like to see more of is “Yes, Israel, you were brutally attacked and those responsible must be found and punished. But, no, you don’t get to overreact and use it as an excuse to collectively punish civilians yourself.”
Israel’s moral authority to respond to this attack is lost when their response is to target *all* Palestinians.
Actually expecting Israel to act differently than other countries in the same situation is a mildly antisemitic burden. I don’t want to sacrifice my friends from work and younger cousins in reserve duty, my friends’ kids, to have a higher risk of dying for some performative exceptionalism. Hamas are fighting in tunnels under the homes of Palestinian civilians. Put the burden of not committing that war crime of taking human shields on them. Those civilians need to leave so those fucking war criminals can be buried alive in them. It’s about proportionality, and blowing up Hamas in their tunnels is nowhere near the massacre they committed. Less dead Jews, a safer campaign for the IDF, should be the goal. The Left and Right hate Jews anyway, and will moan about ‘Palestinian dead’ even if it’s mostly Hamas members, so we don’t need to appease the antisemites who can’t be appeased.
Because they’re fighting for their life still and weaker than Russia. And Russia, as much as Bucha was bad, did not massacre a thousand plus civilians in a single day. This is unprecedented.
“and blowing up Hamas in their tunnels is nowhere near the massacre they committed.”
Shutting off all food, electricity, fuel, etc to all of Gaza where nearly 50% of the population is children is not an acceptable response.
Should they people who planned and executed the attack be found and punished? Absolutely. If some are hiding in a residential neighborhood is bombing the civilian population to get your target acceptable? No.
Sure, human shields make the task of getting the terrorists more difficult but anyone who expected bringing them to justice was going to be easy shouldn’t be involved in getting them.
“Nowhere near the massacre they committed” suggests it’s just a numbers game. “They killed 900 so if we kill only 800 that’s okay. We’re not as bad as them.”? I don’t think so.
Buddy, when you have anyone in your family or community on the line, you’ll get to talk. I’m sure your family hasn’t been touched by generations of murderous racist violence, but mine has. My grandfather in Poland got to watch Polish youth throw his father off a moving train when he was a child, to his death. That’s why he made it to British Mandate Palestine to start a Kibbutz. My grandmother on my mom’s side escaped the Holocaust as a 15 year old with a 12 year old sister under her care. She later lost her first husband, a WW2 veteran to the invasion of Iraq into Israel - miles from where they lived, and a thousand miles from fucking Iraq. My dad has been through multiple wars. I’ve lost family members to Arab armies invading Israel in different generations more than once. You don’t fucking know and you don’t get to lecture about how people under existential threat respond to a massacre, you fucking prick.
“Buddy, when you have anyone in your family or community on the line, you’ll get to talk.”
You’re assuming I don’t. You’re ascribing to me something you have no idea about because it bolsters what you want to say. Don’t do that. For all you know my family history is even worse than yours.
You disagree with something I wrote, fine. Let’s discuss. But don’t make shit up about me to support your opinion.
I absolutely am assuming you're not aware what having countless generations in your family going back all affected by some form of racism (and yes, antisemitism is racism) and genocides big and small, and how that changes your feeling about existential threats of your entire people. But if I'm wrong, cards on the table.
Unfortunately you can’t arrest thousands of Hamas soldiers, just like the US couldn’t arrest the Nazi army and SS. At this scale it is war, as regrettable as it is. No other country has suffered even similar terrorism and didn’t respond justly with war against the opposing military, or in this case terrorist group.
I agree with you completely on the barbarism of the Hamas terrorist campaign, but you perhaps unintentionally defeat your whole argument by saying "They fought a war and kicked out the losers. This is the history of empire, and more recently the nation state." By this argument, Hamas is simply fighting a war with intent on kicking out the losers. I've always thought the "rules of war" were a major oxymoron because war itself is barbaric. This battle, and these atrocities, will continue for centuries until either one side is completely extinguished or both sides learn to cohabitate within one land or divide the land into two sovereign states. Sadly, the USA is prime example of the problems of cohabitation. Look at how oppressed most non-white/Christian/heterosexual people are here. The rise of MAGA parallels the rise of Hamas. Win election by capitalizing on outrage and fear, and then hold no further elections. What happened there is already happening here, and our "both sides" horserace media are doing nothing to stop it. Think about all the school shootings (dead children), mass shootings, rapes, and assaults we have in the USA any given year -- now imagine them all happening in a single weekend. I think we get desensitized to it because the violence and oppression here is constant, but at a lower volume than the sudden spike in violence in the Middle East.
“Hamas’s sickening act of violence is going to get more Palestinians killed, many of them entirely innocent. Israel will no doubt commit serious war crimes in its quest for vengeance, as it has done so often in the past. And they should be condemned for it because Palestinian life is no less valuable than Israeli life.”
This is the part that keeps coming to the forefront to me. Lives on both sides are precious. Both sides are guilty of heinous war crimes. Neither side is justified in using the other’s crimes as an excuse for their own. Yet pointing that out is viewed as either antisemitic or anti-Arab.
Yes, the attack on civilians by Hamas was deplorable and should rightly be condemned as such. Whatever treatment Palestinians have received at the hands of Israel does not excuse these tactics.
But the predictable result was Israelis will over react and use the Hamas attack as an excuse to be just as barbaric back at Palestinians. We’ve seen it almost immediately after the Hamas attack in the rhetoric from Israel’s leaders and in the counter attacks they’ve carried out.
Call out the Hamas attack as barbaric, but acknowledge the oppression of the Palestinian people and... you’re called antisemitic. Say Israel has committed crimes against Palestinians but does have a right to protect itself and... you’re accused of ignoring the plight of Palestinians.
It seems everyone wants to force everyone else into a “with me or against me” position, refusing to hear any non-black/white recognition of the realities that exist.
Two sides of a conflict don't always have an equally valid point. WW2 Nazi Germany and the Axis powers did not. Hamas with its Palestinian death squads and explicit promise of a larger genocide in the future is not on the same footing as Israel. I'm sure you'd acknowledge Hamas have been specifically bad for the Palestinians.
It would actually breathe some life into the chance of a peace process if Hamas was destroyed, just as Germany benefitted from losing WW2 and having a decent number of Nazis killed and purged from government (should have been many more, but that's water under the bridge).
I’d agree that Hamas is not improving Palestinian’s situation and in many ways making things worse for them.
A similar argument could be made to getting rid of the hardliners running the Israeli government who match Hamas in their calls for extermination of the opposing side and are also reducing the chances for ever achieving some form of peace.
The reason the Center Left has not been electable since 2007 is because the Palestinians turned out to be so adept at own goals that most people in Israel can’t trust a party that keeps insisting they are serious about a peaceful resolution. There are constant flashes of lies and excitement about the possibility of a ‘one state under Palestinian rule’, which every Israeli, and now some progressives maybe, know means a genocide, as Hamas just demonstrated.
Netanyahu will lose the next elections due to incompetence, but I doubt the Center Left will win any elections for a decade or more thanks to this massacre. It’s more likely that a farther Right leadership will lead Israel. I sure hope not, but I’m not optimistic.
X is an online extremism pipeline, if ever proof was needed it’s the image Ben posted. I cannot imagine that being posted anywhere else and not have the account banned.
I’m a liberal consistent Democratic Party voter and around election time volunteer. The far Left and pro Palestinian ‘progressives’ are not allies, they’re antisemitic enemies that have done the full horseshoe to standing alongside far Right Neo Nazis. And this isn’t new - it was obvious to me since college days in the mid-late 90s, just now we all see their EXCITEMENT over dead Jews that is indistinguishable from any far Right terrorist in the US.
This is what more people need to see and understand. To me, this is where 40% of the country stands, but we are loosely united. This is the equivalent on the left of Neo-Nazis demonstrating at Disney. Actually, in some ways, it is worse. We need to call it out if we stand in that 40% of the "middle." We also want governance in line with the Constitution at all levels, and do in fact support a strong military and support the police. We also understand that our definitions of strength may differ, so we need to be prepared on multiple fronts so we're not taken by surprise (cyberattack, etc. - 21st century warfare) again. For us, violence must always be the last resort.
You're probably of a similar Gen-X model as me. We were the last ones raised to hate Russia. The Berlin Wall fell the year I graduated from high school. I did not know the truth about Vietnam prior to college (I probably still do not fully grasp it). My point is, I think we understand extremism better and need to speak out more. Violence is unacceptable.
Thank you for this, Ben. I’m 73 years old, I grew up in New York City. I have never, with a few trivial exceptions, encountered any real antisemitism in my personal life — until about six years ago, when TFG essentially gave white supremacists, anti-Semites, and bigots generally, permission and a voice.
By the way, I will argue that Jews are not in fact “white people”; I rely on the “argument from authority”: Who in this society cares most about who is ”white” and who isn’t? Answer: White supremacists. White supremacists do not consider Jew “white” (we’re a “mongrel race”). That’s good enough for me. I don’t wanna be associated with them, anyway…
Also, the attitude that Jews are subhuman, yet simultaneously in charge of everything, reminds me of the Republican attitude towards Joe Biden. On the one hand, he’s feeble and senile; on the other hand he’s some kind of mastermind behind an anti-woke agenda. Go figure.
🤔😉😊
Ben, this is the best essay I have read so far over the past few days about the seemingly never ending plague of antisemitism, and how events like this show us how deeply it is embedded in societies all over the world. That image of what was taking place in Sydney, Australia, absolutely turned my stomach. How obscene to be chanting death to an entire ethnic/religious group. I’ve come to believe that climate change is not what’s going to wipe us out, but hate will do it easily.
Well stated. I saw somewhere last night a post saying "Don't stand with the governments, stand with its PEOPLE." Anyone who can see the atrocities committed by Hamas & defend it in anyway needs to do some self-reflection. At the same time, anyone supporting what the leaders of Israel has done to Palestinians in the past & the war crimes committed by that government now in the name of retribution should also look inward.
Regardless how one views the overall situation, terrorism can never, ever be condoned. The response is important, too. We should want to see individuals held to account and be tried using Western-style justice. There will be leaders and individuals responsible.
What I’d like to see more of is “Yes, Israel, you were brutally attacked and those responsible must be found and punished. But, no, you don’t get to overreact and use it as an excuse to collectively punish civilians yourself.”
Israel’s moral authority to respond to this attack is lost when their response is to target *all* Palestinians.
Actually expecting Israel to act differently than other countries in the same situation is a mildly antisemitic burden. I don’t want to sacrifice my friends from work and younger cousins in reserve duty, my friends’ kids, to have a higher risk of dying for some performative exceptionalism. Hamas are fighting in tunnels under the homes of Palestinian civilians. Put the burden of not committing that war crime of taking human shields on them. Those civilians need to leave so those fucking war criminals can be buried alive in them. It’s about proportionality, and blowing up Hamas in their tunnels is nowhere near the massacre they committed. Less dead Jews, a safer campaign for the IDF, should be the goal. The Left and Right hate Jews anyway, and will moan about ‘Palestinian dead’ even if it’s mostly Hamas members, so we don’t need to appease the antisemites who can’t be appeased.
“Actually expecting Israel to act differently than other countries in the same situation is a mildly antisemitic burden.”
“All countries would respond by committing war crimes” is not really a winning argument.
Nor is it true. When invaded Ukraine didn’t respond by targeting civilian populations.
Because they’re fighting for their life still and weaker than Russia. And Russia, as much as Bucha was bad, did not massacre a thousand plus civilians in a single day. This is unprecedented.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Israel is absolutely justified is hunting down and punishing those responsible.
But doing so by collectively punishing the civilian population of Palestinians as a group is wrong.
Punishing the civilian population is never Israel's goal, as opposed to Hamas. That's why Israel doesn't send death squads into Gaza.
“and blowing up Hamas in their tunnels is nowhere near the massacre they committed.”
Shutting off all food, electricity, fuel, etc to all of Gaza where nearly 50% of the population is children is not an acceptable response.
Should they people who planned and executed the attack be found and punished? Absolutely. If some are hiding in a residential neighborhood is bombing the civilian population to get your target acceptable? No.
Sure, human shields make the task of getting the terrorists more difficult but anyone who expected bringing them to justice was going to be easy shouldn’t be involved in getting them.
“Nowhere near the massacre they committed” suggests it’s just a numbers game. “They killed 900 so if we kill only 800 that’s okay. We’re not as bad as them.”? I don’t think so.
Buddy, when you have anyone in your family or community on the line, you’ll get to talk. I’m sure your family hasn’t been touched by generations of murderous racist violence, but mine has. My grandfather in Poland got to watch Polish youth throw his father off a moving train when he was a child, to his death. That’s why he made it to British Mandate Palestine to start a Kibbutz. My grandmother on my mom’s side escaped the Holocaust as a 15 year old with a 12 year old sister under her care. She later lost her first husband, a WW2 veteran to the invasion of Iraq into Israel - miles from where they lived, and a thousand miles from fucking Iraq. My dad has been through multiple wars. I’ve lost family members to Arab armies invading Israel in different generations more than once. You don’t fucking know and you don’t get to lecture about how people under existential threat respond to a massacre, you fucking prick.
“Buddy, when you have anyone in your family or community on the line, you’ll get to talk.”
You’re assuming I don’t. You’re ascribing to me something you have no idea about because it bolsters what you want to say. Don’t do that. For all you know my family history is even worse than yours.
You disagree with something I wrote, fine. Let’s discuss. But don’t make shit up about me to support your opinion.
I absolutely am assuming you're not aware what having countless generations in your family going back all affected by some form of racism (and yes, antisemitism is racism) and genocides big and small, and how that changes your feeling about existential threats of your entire people. But if I'm wrong, cards on the table.
Unfortunately you can’t arrest thousands of Hamas soldiers, just like the US couldn’t arrest the Nazi army and SS. At this scale it is war, as regrettable as it is. No other country has suffered even similar terrorism and didn’t respond justly with war against the opposing military, or in this case terrorist group.
I agree with you completely on the barbarism of the Hamas terrorist campaign, but you perhaps unintentionally defeat your whole argument by saying "They fought a war and kicked out the losers. This is the history of empire, and more recently the nation state." By this argument, Hamas is simply fighting a war with intent on kicking out the losers. I've always thought the "rules of war" were a major oxymoron because war itself is barbaric. This battle, and these atrocities, will continue for centuries until either one side is completely extinguished or both sides learn to cohabitate within one land or divide the land into two sovereign states. Sadly, the USA is prime example of the problems of cohabitation. Look at how oppressed most non-white/Christian/heterosexual people are here. The rise of MAGA parallels the rise of Hamas. Win election by capitalizing on outrage and fear, and then hold no further elections. What happened there is already happening here, and our "both sides" horserace media are doing nothing to stop it. Think about all the school shootings (dead children), mass shootings, rapes, and assaults we have in the USA any given year -- now imagine them all happening in a single weekend. I think we get desensitized to it because the violence and oppression here is constant, but at a lower volume than the sudden spike in violence in the Middle East.
“Hamas’s sickening act of violence is going to get more Palestinians killed, many of them entirely innocent. Israel will no doubt commit serious war crimes in its quest for vengeance, as it has done so often in the past. And they should be condemned for it because Palestinian life is no less valuable than Israeli life.”
This is the part that keeps coming to the forefront to me. Lives on both sides are precious. Both sides are guilty of heinous war crimes. Neither side is justified in using the other’s crimes as an excuse for their own. Yet pointing that out is viewed as either antisemitic or anti-Arab.
Yes, the attack on civilians by Hamas was deplorable and should rightly be condemned as such. Whatever treatment Palestinians have received at the hands of Israel does not excuse these tactics.
But the predictable result was Israelis will over react and use the Hamas attack as an excuse to be just as barbaric back at Palestinians. We’ve seen it almost immediately after the Hamas attack in the rhetoric from Israel’s leaders and in the counter attacks they’ve carried out.
Call out the Hamas attack as barbaric, but acknowledge the oppression of the Palestinian people and... you’re called antisemitic. Say Israel has committed crimes against Palestinians but does have a right to protect itself and... you’re accused of ignoring the plight of Palestinians.
It seems everyone wants to force everyone else into a “with me or against me” position, refusing to hear any non-black/white recognition of the realities that exist.
Two sides of a conflict don't always have an equally valid point. WW2 Nazi Germany and the Axis powers did not. Hamas with its Palestinian death squads and explicit promise of a larger genocide in the future is not on the same footing as Israel. I'm sure you'd acknowledge Hamas have been specifically bad for the Palestinians.
It would actually breathe some life into the chance of a peace process if Hamas was destroyed, just as Germany benefitted from losing WW2 and having a decent number of Nazis killed and purged from government (should have been many more, but that's water under the bridge).
I’d agree that Hamas is not improving Palestinian’s situation and in many ways making things worse for them.
A similar argument could be made to getting rid of the hardliners running the Israeli government who match Hamas in their calls for extermination of the opposing side and are also reducing the chances for ever achieving some form of peace.
The reason the Center Left has not been electable since 2007 is because the Palestinians turned out to be so adept at own goals that most people in Israel can’t trust a party that keeps insisting they are serious about a peaceful resolution. There are constant flashes of lies and excitement about the possibility of a ‘one state under Palestinian rule’, which every Israeli, and now some progressives maybe, know means a genocide, as Hamas just demonstrated.
Netanyahu will lose the next elections due to incompetence, but I doubt the Center Left will win any elections for a decade or more thanks to this massacre. It’s more likely that a farther Right leadership will lead Israel. I sure hope not, but I’m not optimistic.
Plus, the role of Russia and Iran in this nightmare cannot be ignored.
X is an online extremism pipeline, if ever proof was needed it’s the image Ben posted. I cannot imagine that being posted anywhere else and not have the account banned.