How to Squander Good Will

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 18, 2026

 

One of the downsides of our celebrity-dominated culture is that our policy conversations often are so easily misdirected by spectacularly uninformed people such as rappers and the president of the United States of America.

 

Rational ignorance is a real thing, and most of us are entirely uninformed about most things. For example, I could not pick Macklemore out of a police lineup or tell you the name of a single one of his songs, but everybody has to have a Macklemore opinion this week after he was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour following an outbreak of imbecilic “Free Palestine!” baloney.

 

I do not have any definite views about Macklemore, and, though I am not proud of the fact, my view of the Palestinian situation is barely more developed: Like a dead owl, I don’t give a hoot.

 

I know that’s awful. There are children and innocents caught up in that mess, and it is unfair to write them all off because of the brutality of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc. But—just between us—that is more or less what I do. I used to try to care about the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians, but I stopped after the Sbarro bombing, which many Americans have forgotten because it happened right before 9/11. It was a horrible scene. A soldier who witnessed the aftermath reported: “The worst thing I saw, which I think will haunt me all my life, is a baby that was sitting in a stroller outside a shop and was dead. After the explosion, the baby’s mother came out of the store and started screaming hysterically.” Other children were blown through windows by the force of the bomb.

 

No doubt the Palestinians had—and have—legitimate complaints. What they have forfeited is any real moral right to have anybody care very much about that fact. Leaders are, in theory, responsible for their people; at a certain point, peoples also are responsible for their leaders. The terrorist leadership of the Palestinian quasi-statelet has not been imposed on a resistant Palestinian population at the point of a bayonet. It is difficult to think of the Palestinian leadership as legitimate, but it is, horribly enough, evidently representative.

 

The attack on the children at the pizza shop in downtown Jerusalem was carried out by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and by Hamas, a terrorist organization that the Palestinians were content to make their government in Gaza. Hamas would later stage the spectacular atrocities of October 7, 2023, butchering, raping, kidnapping, and torturing innocent people, many of them women and children, whose crime was being the Jewish citizens of a Jewish community. If I had had any residual interest in the Palestinians’ complaints, it would have evaporated at that time, but it already was long gone. I still follow the news, and I hear and read a great deal of settler this, checkpoint that, Zionist blah blah blah, and I … just don’t care about the Palestinians. Maybe one of these days they will get their act together but, as far as I am concerned, they need to be a generation away from their last bombing of a pizza shop before I am much interested in their supposed national aspirations.

 

I have long felt much the same way about the Irish Republican Army and the Irish republican cause. I remember walking through Heathrow Airport in the 1990s and hearing a young American woman asking why there were no trash cans. “Because if we had bins, we would have bombs in our bins,” came the curt answer from her British interlocutor. Of course, the Irish have been put-upon since forever, but they entrusted their cause to a gang of bloodthirsty savages and ordinary criminals, and the murderous campaign of terror directed at the United Kingdom by Irish republicans is something that should neither be forgotten nor easily forgiven.

 

Yes, the Ulster unionists were an unlovely bunch, too, but there’s no both-sides-ing away, e.g., the Omagh bombing, the victims of which included a dozen teens and children, a pregnant mother and her unborn twins, and many more. You don’t get to do that and enjoy my sympathy, and no amount of romantic Celtic twilight horsepucky is going to change that. Arabs, Irish, whomever—at a certain point, it’s just got to be: Screw you and your cause. There’s an effectively limited supply of sympathetic attention in the world, and the Palestinians and the Irish republicans have overdrawn their accounts. Terrorists who intentionally murder and torture children go to the bottom of my give-a-damn list, as do the people associated with them. Unfair? Maybe. But you can’t bring home every stray geopolitical puppy.

 

But, you know: I’m not a rapper.

 

Donald Trump, who is the president of these United States of America and an utter moron, decided to weigh in, off-the-cuff, in favor of the IRA’s project—which is to say, he endorsed dismantling the United Kingdom, our nation’s most important ally. “May as well happen now,” he said of disuniting the United Kingdom, of which what we now call Northern Ireland has been a part for two and a quarter centuries. On the same trip, Trump announced the suspension of tariffs on Irish whiskey, and he did so for the same reason he proposed ripping apart the United Kingdom—because he is a g-ddamned idiot who needs to hear applause every four minutes or else he starts to forget that he exists.

 

Macklemore has opinions about the Palestinians. Trump has opinions about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As noted, I do not know much about Macklemore. But, of the two men, at least one is a confirmed moron—and it is the guy with nuclear weapons.