By Jim
Geraghty
Tuesday,
October 10, 2023
On the
menu today: Forgive me, readers, but this is another day when the process of
writing this newsletter has left me intensely angry, and I suspect reading
today’s edition will make you angry, too. Our political scene and national
culture are angry enough, and a lot of times we watch our fellow citizens
getting angry over stupid, minimally consequential, ephemeral things that will
be forgotten in days, if not hours — look at what this ill-informed
celebrity said on social media, look at this microaggression, look at this
allegedly outrageous campaign ad that is deliberately provocative to get earned
media. We waste our anger on a lot of things that don’t deserve it.
As of
this writing, at least 900 Israelis are dead; 124 were
soldiers and 41 were police, leaving about 735 or so civilians — men, women, children, ordinary
young people attending a music festival, senior citizens — all dead because
Hamas spent a year planning this, and the Iranians
were right there alongside them, providing “military training and logistical help as
well as tens of millions of dollars for weapons.” This is
worth our anger.
Our
Morally Inept Leadership
“They’re
not anti-war, they’re on the other side.” That was a classic quip from law
professor Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. the
Instapundit, back
during the height of the War on Terror.
That
assessment still applies to certain voices on the left. I intended to begin
this newsletter by declaring, “Sure, everyone’s declaring that they’re a friend
of Israel now, but let’s see how long that lasts,” but it’s not true that
everyone is declaring they’re a friend of Israel right now. A whole lot of
people are proudly, loudly announcing for all the world to see that either they
see the state of Israel and its people as the moral equivalent of the butchers
of Hamas, or they outright are rooting for Hamas.
For
starters, who hears about Hamas executing a bloody massacre with brutal
executions of women and children and immediately decides, “It’s time to hold a
rally in support of the Palestinians”? The Democratic Socialists of America
didn’t even pause to denounce Hamas — they went straight to announcing
rallies “in
solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of
occupation and apartheid.”
Who
watches those videos of
Hamas thugs killing hostages and thinks, “Yes, this is the time to show solidarity with
the cause Hamas claims to be fighting for”?
If you
chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as those DSA
protesters did this weekend, you’re referring to the Jordanian River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The Jordanian
River begins at
Mount Hermon, straddling the border between Lebanon and Syria, runs south
through the Sea of Galilee, and empties into the Dead Sea between Israel and
Jordan. Whatever border lines you think Israel ought to have, the Jordan River
is effectively the eastern border of the state of Israel; the Mediterranean Sea
is the western border of the Jewish state. For the past
75 years, the state
of Israel has existed in that space “from the river to the sea.” That is not a
chant or slogan for coexistence or peace. That is a chant calling for Palestine
to displace or replace the state of Israel.
As our Zach
Kessel lays out,
even a few House Democrats are denouncing their colleagues in “the Squad” of
progressive Democrats who put out statements in the aftermath of the Hamas
attack that made the Israelis sound like the aggressors.
Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez of New York called for “an immediate ceasefire”
Saturday afternoon,
after Hamas massacred the Israelis but before the Israelis could respond.
If you
oppose the victims of a massive assault defending themselves and retaliating
against a massacre, you’re not really pro-peace. You just want to end the fight
after only one side has been attacked. In a clarifying
op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell called
for Americans to “distinguish between the aggressor and the victim. There can
be no calls for ‘both sides’ to de-escalate. Israel deserves the time and space
to defend itself.”
Michigan
Democrat Rashida Tlaib’s statement did not mention Hamas at all, but did declare, “I am
determined as ever to fight for a just future where everyone can live in peace,
without fear and with true freedom, equal rights, and human dignity. The path
to that future must include lifting the blockade, ending the occupation and
dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing
conditions that can lead to resistance.” Again, no specific denunciation of
Hamas, but a specific denunciation of Israel.
This morning, Ilhan Omar of
Minnesota retweeted a statement from Yousef Munayyer, the former executive director of the U.S.
Campaign for Palestinian Rights: “The international community must immediately
sound the alarm to prevent atrocities and war crimes, which an Israel with
unhinged leadership can easily carry out again.”
They
haven’t even finished counting the
dead from the Hamas massacre at that music festival, and Omar is worried about the possibility
that Israel‘s supposedly unhinged leaders will commit atrocities.
Watch
that video of the young
Israel woman begging for her life as she’s kidnapped and taken away on the motorcycle and see how “hinged” you feel.
Keep in
mind, Munayyer objects to the
White House calling the Hamas attack unprovoked: “To call this ‘unprovoked,’ as the initial WH
statement did, is to ignore the daily and constant Israeli violence and war
crimes against Palestinians which has only escalated in recent years. It is
language that erases Palestinians and enables continued violence against them.”
The Democratic Socialists of America
also insist that
the Hamas massacres of civilians were “not unprovoked.”
Really?
What did those twin
six-year-old girls and their four-year-old brother do to provoke their
murder? What did those young women do
to provoke being raped? What did that Holocaust
survivor in a wheelchair who was dragged off to Gaza do to “provoke” Hamas, other
than exist in a world where a whole bunch of hateful maniacs wish they could
eradicate the Jews?
Other
members of “the Squad” believed that the correct American response to these
massacres was to declare to Israel, “We will no longer support you in your
defense.”
Cori
Bush, who represents
parts of St. Louis,
declared, “As part of achieving a just and lasting peace, we must do our part
to stop this violence and trauma by ending U.S. government support for Israeli
military occupation and apartheid.” Omar, too, argued, “Instead of continuing
unconditional weapons sales and military aid to Israel, I urge the United
States at long last to use its diplomatic might to push for peace.”
Israeli
president Isaac Herzog declared, “Not since the Holocaust have so
many Jews been killed on one day.” The Squad believes we should abandon the
Israelis in their most desperate hour.
This is
not some right-wing assessment; Politico summarized it, “The most pro-Palestinian
Democrats already see the conflict in starkly different terms from Biden and
are using language that equates the Hamas attack and the Israeli response.”
Push
came to shove, and these groups and these members of the American government
couldn’t come out and say, “You should not massacre kids. You should not rape
women. You should not
parade kidnapped children before cameras.”
This is
the most basic moral test imaginable. No one is asking these lawmakers to
abandon their desire to see the Palestinians prosperous and free — and let’s be
clear, a free Palestine would require a Palestine free from Hamas. The Hamas
torture chambers are every bit as effective at ending Palestinian lives as any Israeli bomb dropped
from the sky:
The PA and Hamas have said that abuses amount to no more than isolated
cases that are investigated and for which wrongdoers are held to account, but
years of research by Human Rights Watch, including its 147-page 2018 report, “Two
Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent,” contradict these claims. Palestinian authorities have consistently
failed to hold security forces accountable, as documented in
the parallel report.
In 2021, the ICHR received 252 complaints of torture and
ill-treatment and 279 of arbitrary arrest against PA authorities in the West
Bank and 193 complaints of torture and ill-treatment and 97 of arbitrary arrest
against Hamas authorities in Gaza. Hamas authorities have also executed 28
people in Gaza since seizing political control in June 2007, in a context in
which due process violations, coercion, and torture are prevalent, and
have summarily
executed scores
of other people without any judicial process, often on accusations of
collaboration with Israel.
Calling
for “peace” when the Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas is absurd. The only peace that
Hamas wants to see is the peace of the grave for every Israeli they can find.
Then
again, maybe the Squad is only a little ahead of the curve, compared to the
rest of the modern Democratic Party. In March, Gallup found that
self-identified Democrats were more
sympathetic to the Palestinians than to the Israelis — and it wasn’t even that
close:
After a decade in which Democrats have shown increasing affinity toward
the Palestinians, their sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the
Palestinians than the Israelis, 49 percent versus 38 percent.
Today’s attitudes reflect an 11-percentage-point increase over the past
year in Democrats’ sympathy with the Palestinians. At the same time, the
percentages sympathizing more with the Israelis (38 percent) and those not
favoring a side (13 percent) have dipped to new lows.
Sympathy toward the Palestinians is also at a new high among political
independents, up six points to 32 percent. However, more independents still
lean toward the Israelis (49 percent).
Westerners
often look back at the Holocaust and wonder how the world, and in particular
the leaders of their countries at that time, could be so slow to react, so
oblivious to the Nazis’s Final Solution, so callous in turning away Jewish
refugees and sending them back to a land determined to kill them. Everyone
likes to believe that if they had been there, they would have stood up against
the Nazis.
Well,
once again, there are maniacs out to kill as many Jews as possible, on the
march. Who’s willing to stand up against them now? Who is staying oddly silent,
or making excuses for them?
The good
news is that the Jews will always exist. The bad news is that it looks like
those who want to kill the Jews will always exist, too. And in these past few
days, watching the bloodshed on our screens, a whole bunch of people who insist
they’re smarter than us, wiser than us, more morally attuned than us looked at
it all and concluded, “Let’s not rush to judgment. It’s complicated.
This massacre wasn’t unprovoked. In fact, it’s our fault in some ways because
we support Israel.”
They’re
not anti-war. They’re anti-retaliation after massacres.
ADDENDUM: Hey, Biden
administration, you can
re-freeze that $6 billion you released to the Iranians any time you want.
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