Worcester State: Cowardly admins give in on free speech, antisemitism

On March 22, Worcester State University President Barry Maloney sent a college-wide email seemingly cementing the university’s reputation as an institution run by cowards who have allowed the college to turn hostile to Jews.

The email, in which Maloney implicitly blamed an observant Jewish professor for the school’s failure to stop anti-Israel and pro-Hamas* students from creating riot-like conditions on campus, was sent exactly 18 minutes before Shabbat began. On Shabbat, observant Jews refrain from social media and all forms of work; in the moments leading up to the weekly holy day, they are usually trying to finish any of the week’s unfinished business. It’s likely the professor/scapegoat is only seeing the message now.

As the top administrator of a university with a diverse student body, Maloney, or at least someone in his office, should have known that the timing of the email was a slap in the face to the professor and to the school’s Jewish community at large. Still, the form was perfect for the email’s content.

Maloney’s message, under the subject line “Moving Forward From March 13 Speaker Event” was different things to different people. For those who support Hamas, it was a huge victory. For campus Jews who – like the vast majority of Jews across America – support Israel and its war against Hamas, as well as all who support freedom of speech, the email was yet another insult from the university.

What happened on March 13?

The “March 13 speaker event” isn’t described in Maloney’s email, probably because of the immense embarrassment it was for the school. What happened was simple, though: after several engagements in which anti-Israel speakers lectured students about nonsense such as “settler colonialism” and questioned whether the atrocities of Oct. 7 actually happened, a Jewish professor invited IDF reservist Shahar Peled to speak. Peled, who was called up to duty as the massacre was ongoing, was to give an alternate point of view from what the university had previously offered, as well as to take questions and answers. As he was about to speak, a group of students, largely from the Muslim Student Association, disrupted the event to the point that it was entirely derailed.

Unlike members of a local socialist group, who protested peacefully outside, the MSA members and others forcibly disrupted the event, routinely shouting down Peled and making it impossible for attendees to hear more than a few words of his presentation. For example, Peled tried to describe a situation in which his battalion encountered an Arab family in northern Gaza after evacuations had already taken place. The family, Peled said, told soldiers that Hamas had shot their neighbors for trying to flee. Peled was interrupted by students heckling and accusing him of genocide.

A video on Twitter/X shows the moment a fire alarm caused the evacuation of Peled’s speech.

Moments later, after a few of the most egregious disruptors were escorted out, a protester pulled a fire alarm somewhere in the building. Everyone was ushered outside, where they waited for about 20 minutes. When the all-clear was given, attendees filed back in, but by that time any chance at order had vanished. The fire alarm sounded at least twice more (though the police knew it wasn’t necessary to evacuate everyone) and there was a general air of chaos in the room.

Antisemitism

While opposing the war itself isn’t inherently antisemitic, the display staged by the students clearly was. “It felt like a hate crime,” said one Jewish student after the event. A member of the Jewish community said that she was “shaken by the hate” the students displayed.

At one point, Peled said that he felt “proud to be Jewish” after all that had happened since Oct. 7. He was met with jeers.

Chaos reigns: This is while Peled was still trying to speak.

One or two students and a professor tried to provide cover for the antisemitism by saying that they were Jews against Israel, but these people represent an extremist fringe, tokens unrepresentative of the Jewish community. Recent polling shows that about 90 percent of all American Jews think Israel has a good reason to fight the current war, and more than two-thirds have no qualms about Israel’s handling of it.

For comparison, currently 17 percent of Black voters say they would back former President Trump for re-election. More than 1 in 5 Muslims, 21 percent, think that Hamas’s systematic rape, torture, and murder of civilians on Oct. 7 was acceptable. A Black voter is more likely to support Trump and a Muslim is more likely to support the Oct. 7 atrocities, according to the polling, than a Jew is likely to believe that Israel shouldn’t be fighting Hamas.

At one point, a student shouted at Peled that the conflict didn’t start on Oct. 7, to which Peled, trying to make himself heard, cited the 1929 Hebron Massacre, in which Arabs in pre-state Israel massacred dozens of Jews. Dropping any pretense that the protesters’ problem was with “Israelis” or “Zionists,” one of the students yelled, “The Jews started that,” letting his mask slip and garnering applause from most of the protesters inside the room.

The university’s response

How did the university respond to this? Did they condemn those who caused a long-scheduled event to end in chaos? Did the university condemn antisemitism? Did they punish any of the students shown clearly on video acting more like rioters than lecture attendees?

No.

First, Provost Lois Wims sent a message on March 14 saying that “there was a speaker on campus that has left some in the Worcester State community angry and upset, and we want to address these concerns.”

Note the language: people in the community were angry and upset – because of the speaker! The problem wasn’t the unruly antisemitic mob; it was the speaker who barely spoke.

These students whom the provost seems to believe were traumatized were only subject to having this speaker on campus because the “University upholds the First Amendment right to express differing viewpoints and acknowledges that some members of the community may find these viewpoints controversial or offensive.” Because the few words the speaker was able to get out might have been so traumatic, “students in need of support may contact the WSU Counseling Center.”

Really. The university’s leadership offered support to students because they voluntarily heard a few words from an Israeli Jew about Israel’s war on Hamas and yet had nothing to say about antisemitic disruptions that “felt like a hate crime.”

Flagrant dishonesty

There was not a single word in Wims’ message denouncing or criticizing the disruptions. Instead, the provost’s email dishonestly implied that the event went on as scheduled, despite a few interruptions. “While a majority of the audience listened respectfully, a handful of individuals were asked to leave the event after repeated requests to limit disruptions,” she wrote.

The audacious lunacy of Wims’ statement is easily visible in the videos of the event that circulated around the world, picked up even by Anadolu, Turkey’s official state-run news agency, And this ridiculous message was the only statement the university made until Maloney’s shameful March 22 email.

Worst practices

“Worcester State University stands firm in its commitment to academic freedom and to fostering an environment in which diverse perspectives can be shared in a safe and respectful manner,” Maloney wrote. This line sounds nice, but combined with the rest of the email, it is clearly an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak.

The students’ behavior was appalling; a (non-Jewish) professor at the event said, “I’ve never felt more ashamed of Worcester State students.” But who does Maloney blame in his email? Not the students. He writes, “I’ll note that the event on March 13 failed to adhere to some of our best practices with respect to WSU event sponsorship.”

You read that right! It wasn’t the students who silenced a speaker who are to be condemned. Instead, it was the professor who dared to invite someone a few find disagreeable to campus because he “failed to adhere to some of our best practices.” What are these best practices? Who knows? Maloney doesn’t say. Perhaps “best practices” involve not inviting Israelis? Not inviting Jews?

“Best practices” apparently allow for inviting a speaker to campus to accuse Israel of “settler colonialism” under the auspices of a lecture series that was supposed to be about domestic violence, as was the case with the Nov. 16, 2023, Candace Allen Lecture. That one-sided anti-Israel lecture was actually sponsored by the university’s office of multicultural affairs. (Contact me if you’d like a transcript.)

Maloney ends his email saying, “We expect that when members of the Worcester State community interact with one another they will uphold the University’s core values of academic excellence, engaged citizenship, the open exchange of ideas, diversity and inclusion, and civility and integrity. On these values, we must all stand firm and not allow any topic, artifact or individual undermine them.”

This is ironic, given that Maloney and Wims seem to “stand firm” on nothing. If they really care about “the open exchange of ideas,” why did Wims send an email downplaying out-of-control students disrupting an event while writing that those traumatized by the speaker can find counseling? Why does Maloney offer new rules for those organizing events and nothing for those who seek to shut them down? Why were none of the disruptors punished? Why do neither even condemn in general open and brazen behavior celebrating the shutting down of “the open exchange of ideas”?

Maloney, Wims, and the full administration should know that no one will be happy with their cowardly response. Those who support free speech and abhor antisemitism will view the university’s capitulation for what it is, a betrayal. The students they’re appeasing will only sneer, knowing that they’ve won.

*At least one of the students posted a video defending Hamas – not Palestinians, but Hamas itself – on the WSU 2024 Snapchat forum.

Remembering Deir Yassin – but this time without the mythology

One of the greatest problems in discussing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the fact that the vast majority of people speaking about the issue have no understanding of either the history or the current reality. This is especially true of those who claim to support the Palestinians, and who in reality support Hamas or the PLO, the Palestinians’ actual oppressors. The facts of the current reality simply do not align with the positions they take.

The fact that most rank-and-file members of the newly-solidified socialist/far right/Islamist axis know nothing about the current war does not stop them from expounding at great length on the subject, repeating things they have read in Instagram or Facebook infographics or from al-Jazeera’s AJ+ that superficially sound vaguely fact-y. Discuss anything about the conflict with these people and they respond with half-truths and untruths that are easily disproved by anyone who knows anything. Most of these people will simply stop responding, while others, who have more fact-like information, will continue on. But their arguments are in bad faith, almost always like an onion: peel away a layer of bad reporting, and you come to a layer of bad history, and then another, and another, all the way to the core. In the era of online debates, a 1994 term has even been popularized for this rhetorical tactic: “Gish gallop.” Wikipedia defines it well: “attempts to overwhelm [the] opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality”.

The axis’s liars and useful idiots will tell you “Israel did X” and, when shown X never happened or was actually done by the Palestinians, they’ll say, “Look at this picture from MSNBC of a guy Israel killed!” Then when it is demonstrated that the very same individual, either a great actor or another mythological Christ-like figure, was “killed” and revived multiple times on camera, they’ll move to something else, and then something else,  all the way back to the creation of the State of Israel and before. They will tell you about the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” when Israel supposedly just decided it would be a great idea to drive 700,000 Arabs out of land, obfuscating the fact that the mass migration was the result of a war initiated by Arab armies. Eventually the more learned of these people will come to the onion’s bitter, unattractive core: the purported Israeli atrocities at Deir Yassin.

The strength of the Deir Yassin narrative

Deir Yassin itself is well known, as is the story of the massacre said to have happened there. According to the accepted narrative, Jewish resistance fighters, members of groups called the Irgun and Lehi, carried out a brutal massacre on men, women, and children, even employing sexual violence. The difference between this story and others is that for decades it at least appeared to be true. Even stalwart defenders of Israel and Zionism saw what “happened” there as a black spot on the record of Israel’s founding. These defenders, long having accepted the narrative as a sad truth, meagerly point out that the Haganah, the main Israeli military body of the time, which eventually became the basis of the IDF, was totally uninvolved and condemned the actions of the smaller military organizations.

But here’s the thing about the Deir Yassin massacre: it never happened.

The narrative and the academy

In 2021, Israeli academic Eliezer Tauber published The Massacre that Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. In it, Tauber investigates – and demolishes – the story of the massacre. Sadly, despite the fact that the book was peer reviewed and had meticulous footnotes from Jewish, Arab, and western sources, it failed to find a publisher among heavily politicized Western academic publishing houses. Instead, the book was published by the small, mostly religious, Jewish publisher Toby Press.

Scholarly articles and monographs build off of each other. One writer will publish something in a journal or as a book, and then others will come along and critique it, either undermining, challenging, or supporting the thesis or findings; still someone will then build off this round of study, and then someone else will come after that, and so on. Some studies and findings are rubbish; they are (hopefully) criticized and discarded. Others have some truth, and still others are game changers that lead to a new paradigm.

Given the above, and given that Tauber’s book was published (in the U.S.) by such a small publisher, I waited more than two years from the time it hit the shelves in English to writing a review. Surely if Tauber is making such a revolutionary claim – that the massacre never happened – scholars would look into it over that period of time and debunk any mistakes.

No one’s said anything of substance. There are those on Goodreads or Amazon who accuse Tauber of “genocide denial” or some other such nonsense, but even after searching, I am unaware of any serious work refuting Tauber. This is entirely unsurprising, given how exceedingly meticulous he is in drawing his conclusions.

Tauber’s meticulous demolition of the Deir Yassin narrative

For anyone seeking to understand the events of Deir Yassin – and, given the fundamental importance of the narrative that emerged around the “massacre,” the “Nakba” itself – this book is vital. Tauber has collected an enormous amount of material, some of which is still technically classified in the IDF archives as secret (he writes that he obtained the material from historian Benny Morris, who had himself procured it during a period in the 1990s when it had been declassified).

The first thing that Tauber shows is that the Zionist militias’ attack on Deir Yassin was neither unprovoked nor aimed at some notion of expelling Arabs from the land. Instead, Deir Yassin was located in an area that made a battle strategically necessary to foil Arab militants’ plans to to disrupt the main road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which would have crippled the Jews’ self-defense capabilities.

Tauber also notes that in carrying out the strategic attack on the village in conditions of war, the Irgun decided to use a car with a loudspeaker to warn residents to leave or seek safety as the Jewish soldiers entered the village, giving up the element of surprise. Further, a route for escape was to be left open.

Using several lists of the village’s residents, Tauber put together the name of every single Arab villager in Deir Yassin, noting which list(s) they appeared on, and, where available, their ages and the way in which they passed. Using this and a wealth of other evidence, including primary source material from Jews and Arabs who were there, Tauber argues that there was no massacre at Deir Yassin. Instead, he writes, there was a ferocious battle that neither the Irgun and Lehi nor the Arab villagers expected, as both miscalculated what the other would do. And as ferocious as the battle was, it was still dwarfed by the rumors that surrounded it.

The kernel of truth in Deir Yassin mythology is that innocent civilians were killed in the battle (far, far fewer than the mythology suggests), but, using current terminology, they would be classified as “collateral damage.” Instead of being targets, their killing was a mistake made in conditions of battle by inexperienced fighters. (Here it is worth noting that Arab militias had been targeting Jewish civilians for decades by this point.)

Unlike previous researchers, Tauber relied on the first-hand experience of both those involved in the fighting and the Arabs in the village, all of whom gave remarkably similar descriptions of events pointing away from the massacre narrative. (Tauber points out that this should be unsurprising, given that they were the eyewitnesses.)

Why has the narrative of a massacre persisted?

Why is it, then, that despite no evidence of a massacre or, especially, sexual violence – both of which are abhorrent to Jewish values, and, more broadly, the values of all civilized people – rumors of such were able to persist and even become accepted?

One thing to note about the Zionist military forces of pre-state Israel is that they were divided. The original and largest was the Haganah, which for years exercised a “policy of restraint,” operating purely defensively, not engaging in retaliation. As Arab attacks on Jews intensified in the years leading up to 1948, the Irgun (or Etzel/אצ”ל, an acronym for “The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel”) and Lehi (an acronym for “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel” in its Hebrew form) split off, arguing that only retaliation against attacks could deter violence against the Jews living in Mandatory Palestine.

While Irgun and Lehi often worked together, there was infighting. The Haganah particularly disliked both splinter groups and only came to work with them, begrudgingly, immediately preceding the creation of the state. The feeling was mutual; the IDF (created out of the Haganah) and the Irgun (just before it fully merged itself into the IDF), nearly found themselves in a shooting battle over the acceptance of a ship, the Altalena, which was carrying weapons. The Haganah/IDF worried that the Irgun would use the weapons to take power, while the Irgun worried that the Haganah held on to too much of the old “self-restraint” policy. Largely because of the Irgun’s leader, Menachem Begin, the battle never happened, but the Haganah/Irgun rift carries on even now on the electoral/political front, through the interactions between the Labor Party and the Likud.

Tauber finds in this animosity much of the genealogy of the massacre narrative. The Haganah, wanting to distance itself from the fighting at Deir Yassin and to portray the Irgun and Lehi as hooligans and savages, did nothing to put an end to the rumors coming out of Deir Yassin (though Tauber shows that before the battle, the Haganah actually agreed with the Irgun that the fight was necessary and even accepted the Irgun’s plans). Instead, the Haganah actually helped to spread the rumors by denouncing the Irgun and Lehi at every turn.

Where did the narrative start?

But where did the rumors of massacre and sexual violence start? In a highly detailed and researched account, Tauber shows that these rumors – which for decades were accepted as facts – were actually the result of the miscalculations of a few Arab propagandists and broadcasters. Attempting to portray the Jews as bloodthirsty savages, the propagandists created out of thin air stories of mass rape. There was a strategic purpose: the propagandists hoped both to rouse the indignity of the Palestinian Arabs and lead them to fight harder, as well as – more importantly – to move the surrounding Arab states to do even more to wipe out the emerging Jewish state.

After pointing out that all interviewed survivors of Deir Yassin said that the sexual violence allegations were false, Tauber notes an oft-overlooked BBC interview with then-Palestinian broadcaster Hazam Nusseibi, who admits to having been told by Arab High Committee Secretary Hussein Khalidi to spread atrocity lies.

Tactics similar to those used now by sympathizers with the Hamas cause were used then as well. Tauber notes, “Rumors also spread that an Arab photographer took pictures in Deir Yassin of mutilated bodies. When the Arab Higher Committee published such photos, a Haganah intelligence man identified the bodies as actually Jewish victims of mutilation by Arabs.” Remember: the Haganah was no friend of the Irgun or Lehi and had no interest in defending them from accusations of bloodshed.

Arab leaders’ propaganda as a cause of the Nakba and the “refugee” problem

The strategy backfired. In fact, it actually became one of the main, if not the main, causes of the Nakba. Instead of rousing Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine to fight, the stories of grotesque sexual violence caused them to flee in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

“This was our biggest mistake,” Nusseibi said. “We did not realize how our people would react. As soon as they heard that women had been raped at Deir Yassin, Palestinians fled in terror.”

In the end, there was apparently no Deir Yassin massacre. Instead, there was a strategic battle, in conditions of a war that Arab militants had already started, in which some “collateral damage” occurred. It was similar to battles that took place across the land during the Arab-initiated war against the emerging Jewish state, with one important difference. The false stories of atrocities, created by Arab propagandists, were not denied by the Haganah, the official military organization of the Jews in pre-state Israel. Thus the rumors spread and, contrary to the expectations of Arab propagandists, caused fear throughout Palestinian Arab society, leading to a mass exodus.

The displacement of 700,000 Arabs from pre-state Israel is the genesis of the ongoing refugee problem (itself incredibly exaggerated by the special rules governing the status of Palestinian refugees as compared to all other refugees anywhere in the world). While Tauber does not expend much ink on the ramifications of this, it is worth noting that, given what we learn about Deir Yassin and its reverberation throughout Palestinian Arab society, the current refugee problem, however it is measured, is a direct result of decisions and miscalculations made by Arab leaders at the time. This is of fundamental importance, because the refugee situation is used, even now, as a justification for the Hamas-infiltrated UN Relief and Works Agency’s existence and as an excuse by Palestinian leadership for not accepting the numerous offers at a state that they have been given.

Essential reading

The Massacre that Never Was is essential reading, given how foundational Deir Yassin is to the anti-Israel mythology surrounding the creation of the Jewish state. While the painstaking detail can become tiresome, the work is of vital importance. Anyone can construct a narrative, but only an honest historian will seek out facts. And despite the density of the figures and lists, the book is overall extremely compelling.

As mentioned, I’ve waited nearly two and a half years after the book’s original publication to write this review (now does seem like a particularly good time), and there has been no real challenge to Tauber’s overall assessment.

That is, of course, why they’ve tried to bury it.

Book Review
The Massacre that Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Toby Press, 2021

Nguyen statement: pro-Hamas lies, incoherence, and immorality

On November 10, Thu Nguyen, a city council member in my hometown, released a statement condemning Israel action’s in the ongoing war started by Hamas. The statement is worth examining because it is emblematic of the moral confusion and intellectual rot that has crept into much of the American left.

For background, Nguyen, who uses they/them pronouns, barely won re-election to the city council Nov. 7. Every single person who had a funded campaign and lost in the at-large council race was an ally of Nguyen, so there was no real alternative. For the two years leading up to the next election, it will be necessary to keep reminding Worcester voters of the increasing depravity of Nguyen and the need to defeat them in 2025.

Before proceeding, a note: This is not Thu Nguyen’s most extremist statement; that was when they openly defended Hamas. Most Americans are not that extreme, so that statement, while it was worth highlighting for the people of Worcester, is not worth engaging.

Nguyen’s text, which is available here, has not been altered. I did not add “sic” after every error in grammar and spelling because there were simply too many instances. I cut-and-pasted all but the last line, which was only available in the Instagram photo. Below, the statement is interspersed with my responses. The divisions are entirely my own; Nguyen posted an undivided block of text.

Council Member Thu Nguyen on Israel/Palestine
Statement as it appeared on Instagram and Facebook

Let’s take a look:

Reflections on Proxy Wars and Ones That’ll Never Reach You

Free Palestine

This is the headline, apparently. It’s not clear what Nguyen means when writing “proxy wars,” but, based on the rest of the statement, it is safe to assume that they aren’t referring to Israel being a front line for the liberal democratic world order, along with Ukraine, and Hamas a proxy for the Tehran-Moscow-Beijing alliance. In fact, the word doesn’t show up anywhere else in the post. This seems to be nothing more than an attempt to sound sophisticated.

Also what “reaching you” means is certainly up for debate. Given that antisemitism has skyrocketed to “historic” levels as a direct result of the war and that there have been increased instances of aggression and even a recent incident of lethal violence in Los Angeles, it is safe to say that the war has reached people far outside of Gaza, a fact to which Nguyen is either oblivious or finds uninteresting.

I find it interesting the people who never experience war on their land in their lifetime getting so worked up and reinforcing the violence of war and bombings on other humans. As if you ever walked miles towards safety, as if you ever had to decide between taking cover in a building for shelter or whether it was safer to stay outside in case the building collapsed on you- all in a split second.

It’s worth noting that many Jews in Worcester and around the U.S. and around the world actually know people and have relatives in Israel, people who are now fighting for their state’s survival. Some are Holocaust survivors; others are the children of Holocaust survivors. I personally have friends who are on the front lines, or who are living under rocket fire daily. A good friend of mine found out recently that one of those murdered on Oct. 7 was a relative.

The idea that the war is just some far off thing in some distant land is simply wrong, and it’s an offense to Nguyen’s constituents to tell us such a reprehensible and obvious lie.

Worth noting is that Nguyen, just like most of the protesters across the country, goes to great lengths to describe how terrible everything is for Gazans, but doesn’t even bother to mention or consider the sheer brutality of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

The council member, like other “progressives,” doesn’t consider how Israelis might feel, given that 1,400 compatriots were slaughtered. And even “slaughtered” sanitizes what happened. Hamas’s useful idiots encouraged online a ridiculous and shameful debate about whether babies were beheaded or simply murdered another way, as if that were better (they were beheaded), but we know that Hamas’s savagery was at least as extreme as the Nazis’. They murdered grandmothers and used the women’s own cellphones to upload the video to Facebook, so that their family members could watch their elders being slaughtered. Hamas’s thugs raped young girls – so hard their pelvic bones were broken – and, while doing so, took the girls’ phones and called their parents so the mothers and fathers could hear their daughters screaming as they were violated. They beheaded migrant workers with farm instruments. They cooked babies in ovens. Virtually every evil imaginable, they carried out.

Perhaps the reader is wondering whether Nguyen addressed this barbarity before. The answer is a resounding “no.” Nguyen could not even bring themself to vote in support of a resolution in the Worcester city council calling for the speedy release of hostages, many of whom were and are American. Nguyen gives every indication that they simply do not care about what happened on October 7.

Also, note that, while Nguyen doesn’t realize it, their description of daily life in Gaza also describes life in Israel: whole communities have been evacuated; people are still running for cover due to the ongoing rocket barrages from Hamas, as well as Hezbollah and even the Houthis in Yemen. And while Nguyen, like other American leftists, was happy to spread false information about Israel bombing a hospital in Gaza, they’ve said nothing about the fact that Hamas has bombed Barzilai Medical Center, a hospital in Ashkelon, at least three times since the war started. Hamas hit same hospital before; even in 2008, administrators moved many departments underground. The outrage is highly selective.

Both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering as a result of Hamas’s actions. Nguyen expresses sympathy for only one group and exudes an open disdain for the other.

Also note: Nguyen has never, ever, made a public statement from elected office about any other war in the world. Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh recently and forcibly displaced every single Armenian there. The images are staggering and horrifying. Nguyen said nothing.

The councilor did nothing to publicize the fight of the women of Iran to free themselves from theocracy. Nguyen has said nothing about any international conflict at all – not Azerbaijan; not Syria, not anywhere. Again, this is selective outrage.

Its troubling cause this isn’t our reality yet we have the audacity to say anything but demand a ceasefire. Its not our city being destroyed, bodies under rubble, and what we wake up to and close our eyes praying and falling to our knees about.

Ceasefire. Sounds nice. A lot of people – including people who, unlike Nguyen, are honest – have heard this phrase and are now calling for it. And it really does sound nice. It sounds like ending violence. It sounds like peace.

But it’s not.

A ceasefire before the return of the hostages and the overthrow of Hamas would simply set the stage for another October 7. Hamas has vowed that it would carry out the same kind of massacre again and again. As many have already noted, there was a ceasefire on October 6.

A ceasefire would let Hamas remain in power. And that is a moral depravity.

What’s more, a ceasefire would put a price tag on the head of every single civilian in the world. If Israel is pushed by the world into a ceasefire because of reports of civilian casualties (and, really, we don’t even know how many civilian casualties there are, given that the numbers are coming only from Hamas), then every single terror organization and rogue state in the world would know that they can act with complete and total impunity, so long as they are able to barricade themselves behind a few thousand civilians.

Based on the logic Nguyen uses here, the U.S. never could have fought World War II or the Civil War, because both brutalized civilians. Would Nguyen feel satisfied if this “principled stance’ were taken, even though it would have left the Nazis in power or slavery still in place in America? Is Nguyen pro-slavery? Pro-Nazi? Or does Nguyen single out only Israel because of a special animosity toward that state? Or does Nguyen simply have no idea what they’re talking about?

Of course these questions apply to everyone calling for a ceasefire.

There’s too many better logic and arguments for me to come up with more. If a shooter was in a school, we wouldn’t bomb the school. If hostages were held in a hospital, we don’t bomb a hospital. 

It’s probably for the best that Nguyen doesn’t come up with any of the “many better logic and arguments” than they’ve already put forward, because doing so would make them look even more ridiculous.

No, we don’t bomb a school if there is a shooter inside. But – get this – that’s an entirely different situation. A school shooter is a threat to anyone in the school. Bombing the school kills the shooter and everyone the shooter is a threat to. But Hamas isn’t a school shooter, and Hamas isn’t a threat only to the people in Gaza. Hamas is an organization that maintains state power and has genocidal intent for the people outside the “school.” If we wanted to simplify the situation down, as Nguyen does, the “shooter” would also be carrying a bomb large enough to blow up the city, and be intent on using. Instead of blowing up the school, the authorities would be planting snipers around the building, hoping to take out the shooter with minimal loss to civilians – essentially exactly what Israel is doing, but on a tiny scale. 

We condemn gas chambers used in the holocaust and agent orange in the Southeast Asian War yet white phosphorous chemical warfare is okay.

This statement is grotesque. The most obvious reason is that there is no hard evidence that Israel used white phosphorus at all, and we know for certain that Israel did not use it as an indiscriminate weapon of chemical warfare. In fact, white phosphorus is used legally in war as a way to light up an area. There is no question: Israel did not attack civilians with white phosphorus. Israel is not engaged in chemical warfare. The point bears repeating: if Israel did not care about reducing civilian casualties, the war would have been over on October 9.

The second, and more odious, reason this statement is grotesque is that Nguyen is comparing Israeli actions to the Holocaust. Comparing Israeli actions to Germany’s slaughter of two-thirds of all European Jewry is called “Holocaust inversion” and is a particularly insidious form of antisemitism, specifically named as such by the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

A simple model was dropped by her agent for making such odious statements, and yet Nguyen since in Worcester’s city council. Again: voters take note. In 2025, we have a moral duty to oust Nguyen.

And I find arguments unnecessary, a distraction, I can’t find words to reach people who don’t see children with names written on their arms to note their deaths tragic and just a fate one must accept under the pretense of war. I don’t see how to reach one’s empathy if they don’t think losing 3 generations in one day with no lineage left to light incense or create an altar to mourn the lives lost, simply erased upon this blood soaked earth.

In other words, “I’ll continue to condemn Israel and defend terrorists, even though I can’t figure out a legitimate argument for doing so.”

Here Nguyen does what you’ll find anti-Israel, pro-Hamas people doing all over the country: refusing any form of discussion. “I find arguments unnecessary,” Nguyen says. In writing this, Nguyen – who, as we’ve seen, either knows nothing about the conflict or is a useful idiot purveying misinformation – has decided that they don’t need to actually discuss the issue with anyone. There’s no need to listen to any Jews aside from the token few who agree with them.

Engaging with, in Nguyen’s case, the very people they purport to represent would be “a distraction” from spreading the latest and best misinformation Hamas sends through al-Jazeera.

I don’t see how we can explain history in a society that thinks critical race theory is a theory and not the experience of the majority of people in the United States in systems that rejects the truth.

Now Nguyen is, in a post about Palestinians, discussing critical race theory. Here, they are linking American racial problems to Israel, a conflation that makes no sense and serves only to demonize the Jewish state. It is common for American leftists to portray Israel as “white” and the Palestinians as “people of color,” even though Palestine is one of the most racist societies in the world toward Black people, with 44 percent of the population saying they wouldn’t want a neighbor of another race. (Check out how the Palestinian press depicted Condoleeza Rice, whom they referred to as a “Black spinster.”) The American white/Black dichotomy simply makes no sense when superimposed onto the conflict.

Also, in case Nguyen is reading: Critical race theory is a theory. It’s the third word in the actual name of the school of thought. In that phrase, it’s actually the noun: “critical” and “race” modify “theory.” Whether a person disagrees or agrees with it, it is still a theory, just like evolution is a theory. Nguyen seems not to understand that a “theory” in science is a way of best understanding a pattern of facts. Here’s a definition from the American Museum of Natural History.

The whole discussion of “what is a theory?” might seem like an aside, but it’s not. The point is that this level of ridiculousness is exactly where the anti-Israel argument is. The people who are so fervent in their condemnation of Israel are the people who speak so forcefully on topics about which they are completely and totally misinformed. Nguyen, who holds a Bachelor’s degree from a prestigious university, repeating “just a theory” like some proponent of intelligent design, is a perfect example of the sad reality.

What we are up against is monstrous, toxic to the bones.

Indeed, what we are up against is monstrous. Unfortunately Nguyen, full of disinformation and lies in service of Hamas, is part of that monstrosity. Worcester voters must take note.

It thrives on us giving up on each other. It thrives on us choosing ourselves over our collective liberation. It thrives on us refusing to acknowledge each other’s humanity. So I get our innate need of survival, but I don’t believe in doing it at the sake of others. At the sake of genocide. Free Palestine.

Again, Nguyen, like anti-Israel people across the country, is speaking nonsense. The word “genocide” actually has a meaning; it’s not simply an invective to be thrown around. According to Oxford, “genocide’ means “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” Unintended civilian collateral damage, no matter how awful, is not genocide.

Israel is deliberately killing Hamas, and there is likely collateral damage. That’s not genocide. If that were genocide, then the Allies, who killed millions of Germans during World War II, would have been guilty of it against Germans. Of course we weren’t; only an idiot would think that.

The claim of “genocide” is particularly pernicious, because it paints Israel as a uniquely evil state, in line with Nazi Germany, aiming to wipe out an entire people. This is nothing more than a modern incarnation of Middle Ages blood libel.

If ya haven’t spoken up, its not too late.

While Nguyen didn’t mean it like this, this part is true. We missed our shot to get rid of Nguyen in the past election cycle – and really, looking at how far Nguyen dropped in votes, and taking note that there was no alternative who was not an ally of Nguyen, that was a huge missed opportunity to run someone good, or for someone of the challengers to have broken ranks, condemned Nguyen’s support for Hamas, and won. But there is another election in just a couple years, and the voters can get rid of Nguyen then.

For the reader not in Worcester, next year’s presidential and Congressional elections will present similar choices.

We need to escalate and stop the systems. We need to not live business as usual. We need to dig deep into our souls. This “Thanksgiving,” this Christmas, this New Year, this holiday season for everyone. We owe it to each other. Our humanity depends on it.

Here Nguyen wraps up with the nonsensical. “Thanksgiving” in quotation marks. Why? No one knows. Another thing no one, likely including Nguyen, knows is what exactly “stop the systems” means. Here, Nguyen, like some freshman in college just discovering socialism, throws in a word to sound clever, even though they won’t – likely can’t – articulate what it is they mean, what this “system” is.

And thus concludes Nguyen’s diatribe. Virtually every sentence is nonsense, and it is packed with all kids of misinformation, slander, antisemitism, and sophistry. Virtually every anti-Israel, pro-ceasefire argument that I’ve come across is nothing more than this. Granted, there are many actual well meaning people who get swept up in calls for ceasefire, but they’ve been swindled, taken in by arguments like those of Nguyen and other Hamas defenders.

Dear reader, these arguments are vacuous and dangerous. You know it. We all know it. Don’t let people like Nguyen and their allies dominate the discussions. Speak up. Respond to them. Call out their nonsense, and don’t be fooled by them throwing lots of words they themselves don’t understand into a statement or post on Facebook or Twitter.

Some lessons from the 2023 Worcester elections

Capping off an election season marked by harsher than normal rhetoric, a larger than usual portion of voters cast their ballots in the Worcester elections on Nov. 7, endorsing the status quo. In doing so, they gave their seal of approval to the work of Mayor Joe Petty, the city council as a body, and the city manager, providing a mandate to continue in a similar direction. Some initial thoughts on the lessons of this election are below.

This election cycle was marred by antisemites, terror apologists, and those who refused to condemn them. I’ve already written about that here, here, and here.

Overview of the results

In the city council at large races, every single incumbent maintained their seat. Their order of victory was similar as well, with a few changes. Petty came in first and Toomey came in second, as was the case a year ago. King still came in third, despite his run for mayor. In addition, the conservative Donna Colorio, who in 2021 came in sixth, traded places with Hamas-defender Thu Nguyen, who came in fourth then but this year dropped down to sixth.

In the district seats, the center-left Jennie Pacillo sailed to a clear victory in the open District 1, while the moderate incumbent Candy Carlson fended off leftist challenger Rob Bilotta, 52.8 to 47.2. George Russell easily defeated in District 3 a challenger with no clear political ideology, while newcomer Luis Ojeda, a well-loved gym teacher and coach at Claremont Academy, won the open seat in District 4. In the fifth district, Etel Haxhiaj prevailed over challenger Jose Rivera, 51.3 to 48.7, representing a decline in support from the previous election cycle, in which Haxhiaj won 54 to 46.

Joe Petty handily won the race for mayor, receiving half the vote total in a five-way race. His closest rival, King, only took about 25 percent.

School committee candidates this year ran under different rules than in prior years, so a direct comparison is difficult. Still, former Worcester Public Schools superintendent Maureen Binienda was by far the big winner. In her race for one of the two at-large school committee seats, she took more than 10,000 votes, more than anyone else in the whole election cycle, aside from Petty.

Larger turnout doesn’t mean progressive victory

In Worcester and across the country, progressives have often lamented low turnout in elections, particularly municipal elections, arguing that if only more people voted, there would be a dramatic leftward shift. That proved not to be the case in Worcester. On Nov. 7., 22 percent of voters turned out – more than in at least a decade. Voters trounced the left-wing slate, knocking off no incumbents at all.

The most left-wing of all the at-large city council members is Thu Nguyen (they/them), and they saw the most significant decrease in their percentage of the vote, dropping from fourth to sixth place. Etel Haxhiaj, who represents District 5, managed to hold onto her seat, but by a far smaller margin than she won it in the previous cycle.This year she edged out challenger Jose Rivera 51.3 to 48.7, while she won her seat 54 to 46 in 2021, her margin of victory shrinking from about eight points to less than three, and that is with the advantage of incumbency.  Meanwhile, in District 2, moderate Candy Carlson, a bête noire of Worcester’s progressives, defeated her left-wing challenger Robert Bilotta by nearly six points.

On the school committee, progressives fared even worse. Another of their bêtes noires, Maureen Binienda, took more votes than anyone else, and actually took more votes than any other candidate in any of the elections, aside from Joe Petty, as mentioned above. In the school committee districts, the most right-wing candidate of the cycle, Kathi Roy, defeated Nelly Medina, backed by progressives.

The fact that more people turned out and progressives did worse suggests that the general public is not nearly as left leaning as progressives have hoped.

Money and politics

While Bilotta had far less cash in hand than Carlson, his campaign was buoyed by money spent by left-wing groups such as the Worcester Working Families Independent Expenditure PAC and several other groups, which also provided volunteers.

Bilotta wasn’t the only progressive that the WWF IEP spent money on. Indeed, they spent tens of thousands of dollars on social media ads and mailings both supporting candidates they endorsed and denouncing liberal, moderate, and conservative candidates they opposed. It does not appear that the money did much.

WWF and their allies made a lot of noise about the Chamber of Commerce-backed Progress Worcester’s coming into being, but they never adequately explained to voters why money the WWF IEP spent, which came largely from two couples living in the suburbs, was legitimate and money the Chamber of Commerce spent on their PAC was some kind of anti-democratic measure.

In the end, it doesn’t appear that any of the money did very much. The only candidate backed by both Worcester Working Families and Progress Worcester was Guillermo Creamer, and he failed to take a seat in the at-large council race. While he was at the top of the list of those who did not win, he only beat the next highest vote getter in that category by 32 votes.

Voters support abortion rights – when they’re really on the ballot

Nov. 7 was a day of victory for pro-choice advocates. Voters in Virginia punished candidates who wanted to add restrictions to abortion, while voters in Ohio chose to enshrine abortion into their state’s constitution. As the New York Times wrote, abortion is a winning issue for Democrats.

At the same time, Worcester showed that voters are sophisticated enough to know the difference between when abortion is on the ballot and when charlatans cynically pretend pro-choice candidates are opposed to women’s rights. Nguyen, looking for an issue to rally voters, pushed a measure against so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that the city’s attorney – as well as others, including the liberal Democratic mayor of Easthampton, who used her veto powers for the first time since she was elected in 2017 to strike down a similar bill – said wasn’t constitutional and would open the city up to costly lawsuits it would likely lose.

Despite the fact that the question around the CPC legislation was about whether the city could constitutionally pass the ordinance, and not about abortion rights, Worcester Working Families painted every council member who voted in line with the attorney’s legal recommendation as anti-choice. They even smeared Petty as “siding with anti-choice extremists,” despite the fact that he, as well as others who voted against the CPC rule, were endorsed by Planned Parenthood in previous cycles.

The voters saw through this dishonesty.

Voters don’t like smear campaigns

WWF actually spent a lot of money spreading dishonest smears around Facebook, accusing people of “siding with extremists” and other such things. They accused council member Moe Bergman, who increased his share of the vote this cycle, of using “racist dog whistles” for saying a decade ago that society and kids are different than they were in previous decades.

Working with a newsletter called Worcester Sucks and I Love It, (WSILI)  this group has essentially recreated the dynamic that former city council member Michael Gaffney had with a blog called Turtleboy Sports. In fact, WWF/WSILI is essentially a left-wing mirror image of the right-wing Gaffney/Turtleboy alliance, which this blog played a lead role in dismantling. Both of these groupings work based on the assumption that those who disagree with them are enemies, not people with different opinions. Both used juvenile names for citizens with whom they disagreed: the right-wing faction referred to people as “fupasloths” while the left-wing grouping refers to “townies” and “lady uncles.”

WWF/WSILI, just like Gaffney/TBS, paint their opponents are some sort of conspiracy, as well. Gaffney referred to the cabal as the “McGovern crime family,” while WWF/WSILI think that there’s a “normative six” who work to thwart “progress.”

Just like Worcester voters rejected Gaffney and his grouping, they rejected the WWF/WSILI grouping. Sure, Nguyen is still in the council, but everyone else who had a real campaign was also aligned with Nguyen and the WWF grouping. While WWF made a point of arguing that calls for “civility” and “consensus” were some kind of right-wing trickery, these concepts resonated with voters, most of whom are tired of the extremes on each side constantly yelling and demonizing their opponents.

Conclusion

The above represents some initial thoughts about the results of the Worcester elections. Much of what is written here is fairly obvious, but it is worth stating. Most importantly, it is worth repeating Worcester’s voters sent a clear, unambiguous message that they reject ideological warfare. They want the city council and the school committee’s members to work together to solve the challenges that face the city.

Unfortunately, Council Member Nguyen seems to have already rejected the voters’ mandate. Instead of congratulating the victors and moving forward, Nguyen took the Trump route, complaining that the largest number of voters the city has seen in a decade defeated their allies in “the illusion of democracy.” The rest of the council should reject this attitude.

While the progressive bloc labeled the idea anathema, Worcester voters really do what consensus buildings.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said that Kate Toomey came in third place in the at-large city council race, with Khrystian King coming in second. In fact, King came in third and Toomey second.

Worcester Working Families IEP: Hypocrisy, smears, support for extremists

If you’ve been on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and you’re a Worcester voter, you’ve likely seen ads for a group called the Worcester Working Families IEP. Sadly, despite the moniker, this group is hardly representative of Worcester’s working families. Instead, it’s a vehicle that uses dishonest smear tactics to endorse at least one extremist candidate and a few others whose morality lies somewhere in a grey area. To do that, the group funnels tens of thousands of dollars from wealthy out-of-town donors to influence Worcester politics.

A personal note

This section is a personal reflection on the conflicting feelings I felt about writing this, as well as why I felt the need to do it. If you’re interested only in the points I’m making about the group itself, just scroll down to the next sub-heading.

Before delving into the facts, I want to say that I hate to write this article. As I look through the list of those who’ve donated to the Worcester Working Families Independent Expenditure PAC and its officers, I count mostly people I don’t know or don’t know well, but there are a few people who I know to be decent, some of whom I even count as friends. I won’t use their names because of that, and also because I do not want to tar anyone who doesn’t deserve it. While OCPF lists two officers, I have no way of knowing how much control those officers have over the candidate selection and communications process. Indeed, according to an ad on Facebook, the group seems to have hired someone for communications.

I also don’t know how much of what the group does the donors actually know about; when you give money to an organization, you hope they will perform good deeds with it, but in reality, once the money is out of your hands, you have no control over what the group uses it for. It is possible that some of the donors thought they were donating to the Working Families Party, a well-known organization that I once worked with to help elect Tish James to the New York City Council. (WWF is not the WFP.)

This article is aimed at the organization political entity, not any individual or group of donors or staff.

While it would be easier for me to just look away, pretend I hadn’t noticed the group, I would then myself be a hypocrite. In this very blog I’ve criticized candidates and elected officials, almost entirely those on the right, for working with out-of-town entities to funnel money to local elections. Even if I agreed with everything WWF IEP said, how could I justify saying nothing about “the other side” doing the same exact thing?

A few years ago, I used this blog to combat former City Council Member Michael Gaffney and the blog that served, at least then, as his mouthpiece, Turtleboy Sports (TBS). While there were several things that appalled me about Turlteboy, I argued then that what upset me most about the Gaffney/TBS alliance was the complete lack of civility that was introduced into the discourse, including the demonization of anyone who disagreed with them.

I wasn’t lying. Later on, in 2020-2021, I watched along with the rest of America as people on both sides of the aisle lobbed invectives at each other, condemning the violence and anti-democratic tendencies of their opponents while excusing it on their side. I vowed then to call out bad behavior on both or all sides.

Sadly, WWF IEP, bolstered by big money from outside the city, is using tactics that are eerily reminiscent of TBS in order to support several candidates, one of whom is a left-wing incarnation of Mike Gaffney.

Just like TBS did, Worcester Working Families is destroying civility in Worcester’s elections and, more generally, Worcester itself. The only difference is the team they are batting for.

The Money

Where the money comes from isn’t a secret; anyone can find that date on the state’s campaign finance website. However, the average person who sees an ad on Facebook isn’t going to look there; thus it’s necessary to write about it here, names excluded, as mentioned above.

Over the course of its existence, which dates back one election cycle to the end of 2020, the organization has has raised a total of $36,211.59. In national politics, this would be a paltry sum, but in a local election, even half of that would be a huge amount. Of that amount, this organization, supposedly based in Worcester working families, has raised a whopping $22,774.00 from just two millionaire couples living in wealthy suburbs. That’s 62.89 percent of the total budget. The rest of the IEPAC’s money comes from less than 20 people in Worcester and a few more in the suburbs. Of that, nearly $12,000 comes from big donors and another candidate’s political committee.

I’m sure the out-of-town donors are lovely people. But it’s simply dishonest to call an organization “Worcester Working Families” when the overwhelming majority of its lucre comes from very rich people who do not live in Worcester. And why should people who live outside of the city have a much louder and more effective voice in Worcester’s elections than, say, me or you, simply because they have tens of thousands of dollars to dispose of?

It’s not fair. Progressives always argue that we shouldn’t allow people to “buy elections,” so why are progressives trying to buy elections? Just days ago, WWF blasted a new PAC called Progress Worcester, backed by the Worcester Area Chamber of Commerce, founded just recently, for pouring money into ads for candidates WFP opposes. But what’s the difference? If we’re to agree that anyone who has money can pour it into Worcester’s elections, then what’s the criticism?

Smear Tactics

As egregious as the financial hypocrisy is, the group’s smear tactics against its opponents are just as bad. I was filled with rage when Turtleboy Sports operated as a vehicle to smear some candidates, and now I feel the same when less vulgar, but just as ridiculous, tactics are used against other candidates by another group.

The most recent example is around so-called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” which are really just shady fronts for anti-abortion groups. A resolution was put before the city council to craft regulations aimed specifically at the two CPCs in Worcester. As it turns out, doing so is very likely not legal. The city solicitor advised against it, pointing to other cities’ actions: those that had passed such ordinances had no CPCs, while a similar resolution was vetoed by a liberal Democratic mayor in a city that has a CPC for fear of a lawsuit. Some councilors did shop around to find a lawyer who would say that the regulations were legal, but seeking out attorneys who tell you what you want to hear is obviously a bad recipe for avoiding lawsuits. And the ultra-conservative Massachusetts Family Institute already vowed to sue the city.

Petty and two of the other candidates Worcester Working Families smeared as anti-choice fanatics…were previously endorsed by Planned Parenthood!

A long drawn out fight took place in the city council. Some councilors voted to push on with the regulatory process, while the majority chose to effectively kill the regulations due to the potential for costly legal troubles. Both sides are legitimate: the CPCs are a problem, but a lawsuit the city would likely lose would lead to the same outcome – unfettered CPCs – but with the city’s budget significantly impacted and the CPCs public standing enhanced by their victory.

There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with one or both sides. What is wrong is to make inflammatory accusations against those who voted against, throwing truth into the trash in a dishonest pursuit of votes.

Example: slandering the mayor

WWF put forward ads like the above for everyone who voted against the order on CPCs, even if they had supported it before the legal opinions were given. The group knows that Joe Petty isn’t anti-choice, but this “anyone but Joe” ad implies strongly that he sides with “extremists.” Who are the extremists? It doesn’t say, but a whole bunch of people who ran across these ads on Facebook, and don’t have the time to follow the CPC saga, now probably think that Mayor Petty, as well as all the others who worried about lawsuits, is in line with southern lawmakers who want to ban abortion.

This, despite the fact that Petty voted for the regulations on CPCs before the city solicitor and, apparently, the attorney general’s office warned of a costly lawsuit!

This, despite the fact that that Petty said, “Abortion is healthcare. Period,” well before he voted for the CPC regulations in 2022.

The WWF ad is dishonest, but no one there seems to care about that. Recent elections show that candidates who are for abortion rights tend to win when their opponent is opposed. So why not pretend the opponent of the candidate you endorsed is anti-choice? Honesty just gets in the way.

If you were to believe “Worcester Working Families,” you would think that Petty is a candidate of the extreme right. But this is the same guy who became the first mayor to lead and help organize a huge, progressive rally at City Hall in defense of immigrant rights. Then, he was smeared by the right-wing out-of-town Turtleboy Sports and unhinged Mike Gaffney; now he’s being smeared by the left-wing out-of-town backed WWF.

Also: Petty and two of the other candidates Worcester Working Families smeared as anti-choice fanatics, Candy Carlson of District 2 and at-large council member Moe Bergman, were previously been endorsed by Planned Parenthood!

Endorsing a terrorist sympathizer

One of the candidates WWF has endorsed is incumbent council member Thu Nguyen. Nguyen (they/them) is a fairly bland candidate, except for a single fact:

Nguyen defended Hamas.

Sure, that sounds like a terrible exaggeration, as if I’m doing exactly what I said I didn’t want to do, i.e., to smear candidates I don’t like. But click the link above: In addition to spreading misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war, Nguyen literally posted a propaganda video defending Hamas.

I asked WWF via social media repeatedly what they were going to do about one of their endorsees endorsing Hamas and they simply didn’t reply. WWF obviously knows about this, and most organizations usually don’t keep silent when one of their candidates supports a U.S.-government-designated foreign terrorist organization. But from WWF there was no response forthcoming: not to me, not to the voters of Worcester.

Lack of moral clarity on antisemitism

While I wouldn’t classify WWF as antisemitic, there is a huge lack of moral clarity in their ranks on this kind of issue. While most of the people on their list have argued that representation matters, they are trying to push the only Jew on the city council, Moe Bergman, off of it at exactly the time that antisemitism in America has reached historic proportions. Further, every single one of the people they smear is someone who has attended a rally in support of Worcester’s Jewish community and/or the hostages, including Americans, currently held in captivity in Gaza.

Of their endorsees, not a single one – please correct me if I am wrong – has turned up to any of the events in solidarity with the Jewish community. On the other hand, two of those they’ve endorsed spoke at a nominally “pro-Palestine” (and if you’re not condemning Hamas, are you really pro-Palestinian?) rally, and at least one other, one of their school committee candidates, attended.

What does this say about them?

Assuming that they don’t agree with Nguyen that Hamas is just misunderstood, this shows that WWF is so hellbent on winning elections that they are willing to let support for a group listed by the U.S. government as a national enemy just slide. This doesn’t make any sense, because denouncing a candidate for supporting terrorists or – better yet – pushing that candidate to say they made a mistake – would garner sympathy from voters and, very likely, actually help Nguyen garner support. But they are too cowardly to do what is in their own interest!

At the very least, the group’s decisionmakers, whoever they may be, are at best cowardly and morally unclear.

Look twice at WWF endorsed candidates before voting

Really, if WWF’s decisionmakers can overlook support for an organization that beheads babies, what else might they overlook in the candidates they endorse? There might be a good candidate here or there that WWF supports, but one thing is for certain: Worcester voters shouldn’t trust anything that Worcester Working Families IEP says about them.

As for the candidates themselves, those who are touting openly an endorsement from Worcester Working Families should be considered morally suspect. At the very least, when you’re totaling up each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, the WFP endorsement, while not disqualifying, should be counted as a point against. That is unless they can at the very least make a statement saying that Nguyen was wrong for spreading disinformation and support for terror.

Is a bit of decency and consistency too much to ask for?

Voters take note: Thu Nguyen openly defends Hamas

I realize that the title of this post sounds crazy. The idea that a member of the Worcester City Council is defending a terrorist organization that has vowed to wipe out the world’s Jews, an anti-Israel and anti-America organization aligned with Iran, and through them Moscow and Beijing, sounds positively unhinged. Still, facts are facts.

Further, Nguyen’s defense of Hamas did not come out of nowhere; it fits into an escalating pattern of extremism on the part of the city councilor.

Background

On October 17, Nguyen was one of only two city council members to vote against a resolution stating that Worcester would “condemn the recent barbaric and inhuman taking of hostages in Israel, including a number of American citizens, and prays for their immediate and safe release and return to their loved ones.”

Nguyen made a rambling statement before casting their vote against the resolution. While they made a token, sentence-long condemnation of the violence of Hamas, Nguyen repeated uncritically that organization’s propaganda, including that Israel was going to commit “genocide” against Palestinians and that the IDF, Israel’s military, had bombed a hospital, killing 500 people.

Even before Nguyen spoke, details had already emerged showing that it was extremely unlikely that Israel had bombed the medical facility. We now know, as the U.S. intelligence community has asserted with “high confidence,” that the explosion was due to a projectile misfired by the terrorist Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which had been aimed at Israel. While the “fog of war” was still heavy as the council meeting was ongoing, Nguyen doubled down on this false assertion the next day, October 18, the same day the president told the world Israel was not responsible.

The best-case scenario is that they are posting inflammatory rhetoric about something of which they are entirely ignorant. But Nguyen’s pattern of behavior suggests something more sinister.

Next fact.

As mentioned above, Nguyen stood in a public forum and accused Israel of “genocide.” No one who understands the definition of the term really believes that Israel is engaged in this crime against humanity, and we know that Nguyen had been made aware that this false accusation is an anti-Jewish blood libel. On October 16, Nguyen posted an image from a group called “Jewish Voice for Peace,” a non-Jewish organization (in fact, the founder of one of its chapters was a Muslim Palestinian-Jordanian also on the board of a group the U.S. government listed as a non-indicted co-conspirator with Hamas). According Anti-Defamation League, JVP is as an extremist group that uses antisemitic imagery and endangers Jews.

That day, I reached out to Nguyen via social media, as chronicled here, with a link to the ADL statement and, trying to appeal to Nguyen, said that using JVP as token “Jews” to advance such rhetoric was similar to using Candace Owens as the “voice of the Black community.’ It’s certain that Nguyen read the message, because they replied, saying glibly, “More like Angela Davis.” Nguyen therefore knew that they were spreading the views of an extremist organization engaged in antisemitism.

On Oct. 22 and 28, Nguyen published one-sided “free Palesitne” statements. The irony here is that as an excuse for voting against the resolution calling to free the hostages, Nguyen said “we need to grieve the death in both communities.” But Nguyen hasn’t done that: they spared only one throwaway, milquetoast line was given to the 1,400 innocent people who were slaughtered and raped by Hamas, and yet have written post after post on social media about Palestine and are urging people to a “free Palestine” demonstration, spreading Hamas propaganda and blood libel in the meanwhile.

Maybe the reader is asking, “Okay, the above evidence paints a picture of a person who is clearly anti-Israel and doesn’t care about the welfare of Jews, but can you really accuse Nguyen of supporting Hamas based on this?”

Thu Nguyen in support of Hamas

The answer is, of course, no. There are many different types of Israel-haters and antisemites; they don’t all support Hamas. But Nguyen cleared up any confusion we might have had on October 25.

On that day, Nguyen – the supposed defender of women’s rights – posted a defense of the organization whose members on October 7 raped girls so forcefully their pelvic bones were broken.

That’s right: a sitting Worcester city councilor told us via social media that the organization that slaughtered 1,400 people and kidnapped 200, including a six-month-old baby, is really not as bad as people think. Nguyen did this by linking to a video on Instagram showing hostages Hamas released saying that they had been treated well in captivity. The video concluded with a man insinuating that CNN had lied when the hostages said they “went through hell.”

Of course, the same hostage did say she went through hell. Being captured by a murderous group of thugs and brought to a foreign land isn’t pleasant. What Nguyen’s link failed to mention was that the husband of the former hostage is still locked in Gaza, dramatically limiting her ability to speak freely. And even if that weren’t the case, Stockholm Syndrome is extremely well known.

There is no possible reason imaginable that Nguyen would post this to their official campaign page except that they are sympathetic to the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization. And when I pointed this out on social media, they doubled down.

Instead of responding in a normal way – “I regret this terrible oversight, which certainly does not reflect my views,” etc. – Nguyen posted the following:

An aside

Let’s look at what Nguyen thinks, based on this statement. Even if they weren’t an antisemitic Hamas supporter, is this the kind of person who should represent us?

Someone who believes that constituents condemning their representative’s blood libel and support for Hamas on social media is a “stalkerish obsession”?

Someone who believes that, in a democratic system, when your representative comes out in support of terrorists – or, really, anything with which you disagree – you’re supposed to just “leave them alone”?

Someone who thinks “fearmongering” is the same as “look at what this person said”?

Someone who thinks criticizing a politician via social media is “intimidation”?

Anyway, I responded via X.

Nguyen still refuses to denounce Hamas

And Nguyen responded, almost incomprehensibly:

I responded that calling someone a “stalker” is slanderous, and Nguyen immediately removed that post and then blocked me on Facebook (which is not actually legal for municipal representatives to do on non-personal pages).

How can anyone believe Nguyen doesn’t sympathize with Hamas?

Thu Nguyen posted a link defending Hamas from accusations that they made the lives of the people they abducted hell. What other explanation could there be? Nguyen responded to criticism of their defense of the anti-Israeli, anti-American terrorist group that holds the people of Gaza captive by deflecting, by insulting one of their constituents. Why would they do this if they didn’t support Hamas? What possible reason could there be? There’s only one possible answer, unless we hear otherwise.

Thu Nguyen supports Hamas.

Jenna Ortega: Antisemite or useful idiot?

On Instagram alone, Gen Z superstar Jenna Ortega has more than 40 million followers, roughly three times as many people as there are Jews in the world. Consequently, what she says about us matters. And what she’s been saying has been bad.

Very bad.

I wrote in these pages last year that Ortega seemed to be an intelligent person who had, in her naivete, made an innocent mistake in posting propaganda from a website that justifies violence and seeks Israel’s destruction. I also argued that she probably isn’t an antisemite.

I retract at least one of these judgments.

She’s either a smart antisemite or a decent person who happens to be, to put it plainly, stupid. As I demonstrated in previous posts, the website she linked to had deeply antisemitic content. It was created by people who champion terrorists who killed civilians and who think that a “free Palestine” would mean most Jews leaving Israel and the remainder being “re-educated.” After the article and ensuing blowback, the actress quietly removed the pinned post from her Twitter (now X) feed.

Everyone makes mistakes, but a smart person in her position would be extremely careful in what content she posts moving forward, at least if she cares an ounce about the Jewish people. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been.

On October 18, yesterday, Ortega used her platform to broadcast to the world a message calling to “stop the genocide against Palestinians.” The idea that the planet’s only Jewish state, uniquely evil, is somehow hellbent on killing innocent Palestinians harkens back to the Middle Ages. Then, Jews were routinely accused of plotting to kill children or other crimes. It was common to accuse us even of trying to wipe out much of Europe by poisoning drinking water. The only difference is that before Jews were thought to be working out of their shtetls; now we are assumed to be using the miraculous state we established to kill for fun. 

The notion that Israel is consciously trying to kill off the Palestinians is not just insane – it is, as President Herzog himself said in reference to the various conspiracy theories being pedaled, a modern form of blood libel.

And now Ortega’s broadcast it to 40 million people, most of them young and impressionable kids who listen more to celebrities than thought leaders.

It should come as no surprise to any thinking person that these kinds of accusations fuel hatred against Jews and can end up getting people hurt – or worse. In recent years, but especially since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel and Israel’s response, Jews around the world have been fearful of going to synagogues, wearing their Magen Davids in public, sending their kids to Jewish schools, and a host of other things that non-Jews do without a care in the world.

They’re not fearful for no reason: the FBI and police departments across the country and world have been forced to step up security around Jewish institutions. Antisemitic incidents in the U.S., which had already been on the rise, rose by a whopping 300 percent, dramatically increasing after the Israel-Hamas war began. A teacher was stabbed in France. A synagogue was firebombed in Germany. The list goes on. Even as I write this, the news is reporting that a New York woman was just punched in the face by an assailant who yelled, “You are Jewish.”

And Ortega decided to fan the flames to her 40 million followers around the world.

Here’s the tricky part, the part that makes it unclear whether Ortega was motivated by a belief that Jews are generally bad and wanted to hide that unfortunate believe or if she is just really, really gullible.

The post Ortega shared was from a group called “Jewish Voice for Peace.”

Perhaps Ortega thought that JVP must not be a problem, given the term Jewish in their moniker. But a person of goodwill who had already been condemned for posting a call to destroy a nation, if they were smart, would have done at least a little bit of research into the organization whose voice they’re amplifying to millions, especially when it’s making accusations of genocide.

If Ortega merely spent a moment on Google, she would have found that JVP, far from being a nice and fluffy peace group full of Jews, is actually a shadowy organization flagged by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The ADL’s report is literally the second thing that comes up in a Google search for “Jewish Voice for Peace.”

The ADL states the problem with JVP very clearly: “JVP does not represent the mainstream Jewish community, which it views as bigoted for its association with Israel.” Further, “The spread of JVP’s most inflammatory ideas can help give rise to antisemitism.” The idea that the Jewish state is engaged in genocide is certainly one of its most extreme ideas.

Click here to read the rest of this post at the Times of Israel.

Worcester city council must reject Thu Nguyen’s indulgence of antisemitism

There is something deeply unsettling in Worcester City Council member Thu Nguyen’s attitude toward Jews and the Jewish state.

Most recently, Nguyen, who uses they/them pronouns, took issue with a statement that City Council Member Moe Bergman put forward for the council’s consideration. The text, below, seems uncontroversial:

That the City Council of the City of Worcester does hereby condemn the recent barbaric and inhuman taking of hostages in Israel, including a number of American citizens, and prays for their immediate and safe release and return to their loved ones.

Who could take issue with a statement calling for the release of hostages, many of whom are children? Apparently Thu Nguyen. They posted to social media Bergman’s proposed resolution, complaining, “There is no acknowledgement of the death and suffering of the Palestinians and what has unfolded. I urge us to speak. If we are to go on record regarding Israel-Hamas, we must also be on the record calling for a ceasefire and an end to the killing of Palestinians, the collective punishment, and imminent genocide.”

Other city council member’s should ignore, or even condemn, Nguyen.

First, it’s worth pointing out that Bergman’s statement is directed only at those held captive by Hamas. There is also no acknowledgement of the death and suffering of the hundreds of Israelis who were slaughtered, unprovoked, by the thugs who streamed into Israel on October 7. Nguyen doesn’t seem to mind that they were not mentioned. Why would this be?

Unfounded accusations of Israeli of “genocide”

But notice something else in this statement. Nguyen not only minimizes the horrors perpetuated by Hamas; they also accuse Israel of “genocide.” This is an antisemitic trope with no basis in reality. The idea that evil Israel is plotting to wipe out an entire population of innocent victims is nothing more than a modern form of blood libel.

On October 7, Hamas perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, perhaps the worst ever carried out in the developed world. Babies were burned and beheaded, girls were raped while their parents were forced to listen by cellphone, people were burnt alive in bomb shelters, Holocaust survivors and toddlers were taken captive and brought into Gaza. The list goes on.

What does Nguyen think the proper response should be to a state-like entity sending its “warriors” across the border to rape, murder, and kill? Israel decided it would topple the terrorist organization responsible. While President Biden agrees with this decision – he even said it was necessary to do so – Nguyen wrote in another rambling statement, “Demanding that people leave within 2/4 hours and then bombing the escape routes. We cannot with our conscious(sic) encourage this behavior. We must call for a ceasefire and negotiate towards peace.”

Nguyen’s statement on Facebook

A ceasefire! Negotiations toward “peace”! How nice that sounds. Israel should just lay down its weapons and have a nice conversation with those who came to rape and murder her citizens! That will solve everything! Obviously, this is a stupid idea. No “negotiations” are possible with a group that wants to murder you – and Hamas’s founding charter, which calls for the eradication of all Jews – makes that intent clear.

Propaganda directly from Hamas

Also notice the little detail about “Demanding that people leave…and then bombing the escape routes.” This is propaganda directly from Hamas. Hama’s supporters spread this narrative around the Internet for a bit, before video emerged debunking the claim: the “bombing” was an explosion of a vehicle, which couldn’t have been caused by Israel, as there were no troops in Gaza, nothing flying overhead, and no projectile incoming. Smarter antisemites stopped talking about this before Nguyen made their post.

But let’s look closer at Nguyen’s two statements. One accuses Israel of plotting “genocide.” The other condemns Israel for telling Gazan civilians to get out of areas where there is going to be intense bombing and fighting. If Israel is plotting to murder all Gazans, why is it telling them to go a dozen miles south temporarily so that they can avoid being endangered?

Special standards for Israel

Yes, it’s true that Gazan civilians are dying in Israel’s response to Hamas. That is sad, and every Jew I’ve spoken with or texted with, including friends who are now in the IDF, who are scared but desperate to fight Hamas, have expressed sorrow at the deaths of innocent Gazans. But has Nguyen no idea of what happens in war? Can Nguyen, or anyone, name a war in which civilians weren’t killed? Has Nguyen ever looked at the photos of Berlin or Rome or many other European cities, bombed out as a result of World War II? No one accuses the U.S. of genocide, even though our air force carried out a bombing raid on Tokyo that killed 100,000 civilians on a single night in 1945.

Would Nguyen argue that the U.S. should have just sat out the war and “negotiated” for “peace” with the Nazis?

War is horrible. You don’t judge a country’s entry into a war based on the ugliness of the conflict. You judge the war based on whether or not the intended outcome is just, and whether the country making war is doing its part to prevent civilian casualties.

Europe after World War II

Israel is obviously doing its part. It gave civilians notice, while Hamas gave none to the innocents before they raped and murdered and captured them. That’s why Israel even extended the deadline for people to leave northern Gaza. That’s why Israel turned on water to southern Gaza and why it’s made way for food shipments.

Given the above, that Israel’s aims are just and that its defense forces are doing their part to get civilians out of harm’s way, it is impossible to imagine that anyone could seriously believe that Israel is trying to wipe the Gazans from the face of the Earth, i.e., to commit genocide. Also interesting to note is that Nguyen hasn’t condemned any other country for “genocide” or war crimes. They didn’t even note that Azerbaijan expelled nearly every single ethnic Armenian from Nagorno-Karabach a few weeks ago. Worcester has one of the largest Armenian populations in America, so this is certainly as local an issue as Palestinian suffering.

Clearly, given that their only statements on foreign policy relate to Israel, and that they expend far more words condemning the Jewish state than Hamas, Nguyen is singling Israel out as an actor of unique evil, the Jew of nations.

Not only did this statement make nonsensical claims that promote antisemitism – endangering Jews everywhere – but Nguyen also includes another piece of dishonesty. They write, “I did not intend on writing a statement not because I don’t care but because I am still learning and working through my emotions.”

Nguyen doesn’t seem to have been “still learning and working through my emotions.” Before posting that statement, they had already spread lies. On October 12, the eve of the “day of rage” proclaimed by Hamas, when tens of thousands of Jews around the world, including here, were deciding whether to send their kids to school or to keep them home for fear of violence, when Worcester synagogues needed police protection to ensure Jews’ safety, Nguyen had already decided they “learned” and “worked through” their emotions enough to post a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace accusing Israel of plotting genocide.

Again: at the very moment Jews around the world and here in Worcester were taking shelter, Nguyen posted an inflammatory statement accusing the Jewish state of genocide.

And don’t be fooled by the word “Jewish” (or the word “peace”) in JVP’s name. As I pointed out to Nguyen, JVP is labeled by the Anti-Defamation League as an extremist organization that fans the flames of antisemitism. This is an organization that literally posted a picture of IDF soldiers drinking the blood of children.

“Jewish Voice for Peace” sounds nice, but it’s an extremist organization

Using a fake Jewish organization to spread lies about Israel is a grotesque form of tokenizing Jews. As a public servant, Nguyen should know that the vast majority of Jews in their community are still reeling from the violence of October 7 and, along with President Biden, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and a host of other American leaders, support Israel in defending herself.

Nguyen must at least intuit that they’re engaging in gross antisemitism; that’s why, throughout their statements they use this fake Jewish organization and refer to their Jewish friends as cover. It’s a form of tokenizing, as in the case of every white racist who assures the world that they have Black friends.

I responded to Nguyen on Instagram, noting that using JVP as a way to express the opinions of the Jewish community is similar to using Candace Owens as a messenger of the opinions of the Black community. Nguyen replied, oddly, only that they viewed JVP as Angela Davis. I wrote about this and, of course, Nguyen felt aggrieved, bringing us to another act of dishonesty on the council member’s part.

While most people would issue an apology if someone pointed out that they shared a post from an organization identified by the ADL as an extremist group, Nguyen let the propaganda stand. Then, when this Jew-endangering behavior was pointed out, they jumped to an old standby: “…believing in the dignity, the right to live and freedom of Palestinians is not anti-semitic. This notion of being anti-Jewish over the simple acknowledgement of a community is a reductive argument that detracts from the conversation of history and people’s humanity…” Obviously, I never called Nguyen an antisemite for “believing in the dignity,” etc. of Palestinians. I suggested that they were ignorant or antisemitic for dishonestly accusing the Jewish state of “genocide,” a form of blood libel, on the eve of a day when violence against Jews had been called for worldwide.

The Worcester city council should reject an amendments to the statement condemning kidnapping from the council member most guilty of spreading antisemitism.

And voters should reject Nguyen in November.

Condemning Israel like condemning Allied powers during WWII

Question: Was it wrong for America and her allies to fight World War II, given that our bombing caused an immense amount of suffering for the German, Italian, Japanese, and other people, including innocent women, children, and even babies?

Keep in mind that the U.S. and allied forces used atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also literally lit the air of Dresden on fire, killing everyone around, combatant or not, in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable.

If your answer to the above question is “yes,” that fighting WWII was morally wrong, you’ve chosen the side of depravity. In the interest of “peace” and “humanitarian efforts,” you’ve agreed it would have been acceptable to allow the Nazi Reich to maintain power at the expense of the lives of millions of people, especially Jews and the Romani, but millions of others as well – across Europe and, eventually, the world.

If you answered “no,” congratulations. You’ve made the hard choice that the people we tasked with making these choices made, in the interests of justice. And if you answered this way, then you must logically support Israel’s actions in Gaza, especially given that Israel has not, and will never, commit anything remotely approaching the scale – or type – of Dresden or Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Israel will never target civilians.

Egregious lies

And yet there are people, even now, days after the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, urging Israel to move toward de-escalation and restraint in its just and proper war against Hamas in Gaza. Israel should not accept their council. This same advice would have left the Nazis in power in Germany.

Even more egregious, some are publicly accusing Israel of war crimes, including even ethnic cleansing and genocide. The best of these people is that they are completely devoid of any realistic understanding of the situation. The worst of them are purposely repeating Hamas talking points, aimed at undermining Israel’s just response. During World War II, these same people would likely be repeating Nazi talking points about the poor suffering Aryans.

In my own city of Worcester, Massachusetts, there is a city council member, Thu Nguyen, who falls into this latter category, though I can’t make any claim to know if Nguyen, who uses they/them pronouns, is an ignoramus or a conscious defender of Hamas. They posted to Instagram a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization designated by the ADL as an extremist group dangerous to the Jewish community, accusing Israel of plotting “imminent genocide.”

With Nguyen, I have to assume that they are in the “defenders of Hamas category,” as I responded to them with a link from the ADL explaining who and what JVP is and pointing out that tokenizing a “Jewish” group to promote anti-Jewish ideas is akin to using a statement from Candace Owens as representative of the Black community. Nguyen ignored the ADL’s statement, responding only that they (Nguyen) considered JVP to be more like Angela Davis, whatever that means. Needless to say, Nguyen’s accusation of genocide has not been removed from their Instagram feed.

Unfortunately, there are people like Nguyen across the country, all across social media and cable news making these ridiculous claims. It’s as if some of these people don’t even understand the words they are using.

The falsity of the “genocide” claims

How can anyone accuse Israel of genocide? Israel’s military could easily kill every single man, woman, and child in Gaza right now. That is not what they are doing; the goal of the war has been announced: to destroy the military capabilities of Hamas. While Thu Nguyen and others might not make a distinction between Hamas and innocent civilians, Israel does.

Israel is conducting targeted air strikes to remove Hamas targets so that a ground invasion can begin. Before the airstrikes began, Israel sent video messages in Arabic to the people of Gaza telling them the general area where the bombs would fall and where to go for safety. As the ground invasion comes closer to commencing, Israel has given warning – something that the slaughtered in Israel didn’t receive from Hamas – telling everyone in northern Gaza to evacuate to south of Wadi, or about ten or 15 miles south of Gaza’s most extreme northern border.

Those who make genocide generally don’t give warnings to their intended victims telling them where to go for safety. Unfortunately, for bad actors like Nguyen and others, this has brought no good will for Israel. Instead, they suggest that the temporary evacuation is a form of ethnic cleansing!

By the standards of those who argue Israel is engaged in the practice, the U.S. ethnically cleanses Florida every so often, each time a hurricane approaches the region.

If we agree that World War II was a just war, we have to agree that Israel’s actions in Gaza are just, given that Israel is taking a dramatically more proactive effort to preserve the lives of civilians than we ever did. Who would you rather be, a Gazan driving or walking ten miles from home or a citizen of Dresden, where the air was turned into fire?

The real war criminals

As I wrote before, there will sadly be casualties in the Israel-Hamas war, both Gazans and Israeli soldiers. Despite this, Israel has to fight. The past couple decades of relative security have been due to the perception that Israel is a powerhouse. If Israel loses that edge, not only Hamas, but Hezbollah and their director financiers, Iran, will be emboldened. The horrors those groups could unleash are unimaginable.

Make no mistake: there is no justification for war crimes, and any soldier who loses their mind and commits a vile act should and would be prosecuted. Israel will not commit them. Hamas, on the other hand, is and has been.

Hamas is using civilians as shields.

Hamas raped young girls and forced their parents to listen.

Hamas killed children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.

Hamas is refusing to let Gazan civilians evacuate.

Hamas burned babies alive.

Hamas has turned schools, hospitals, mosques, and other areas into military installations.

Hamas is targeting civilians.

Hamas is torturing people.

Hamas commits rape as an act of war.

All of these are war crimes, crimes against humanity and Hamas must be made to pay for them.

Choose the right side

Any blood spilled in this conflict is on the hands of Hamas’s leaders and members. Any decent person, should they learn of a civilian killed in Gaza, should mourn them, but they should assign blame appropriately. Allowing the terror group to stay in power, ruling over Gaza, would itself be a crime against humanity, a crime that Thu Nguyen and many other “peace” lovers seem fully content with.

There is no “context” to consider. There are no shades of gray. In this conflict, Israel is on the side of good. And if you’re opposed to the side of good, either through restraining it or spreading ridiculous lies and propaganda pieces from the other side, you’ve chosen the side of evil.

Featured image: Montecruz Foto // Creative Commons License

A Time for War

Thousands of years ago, Israel’s King Solomon wrote that there is a time for peace and a time for war. The wise king understood that, while unpleasant, war is not always wrong. In fact, not making war at the right time is a grievous injustice. In the millennia since the Jewish monarch wrote, religious figures and philosophical traditions have grappled with the question of military conflict, and it is generally understood that there are just wars.

The events of October 7, 2023, make it perfectly clear: Now is the time for war.

Only a person completely devoid of morality – and sadly there are many, including many Western so-called “progressives” – could watch the events that transpired that morning in southern Israel and not realize that an unprecedented response was necessary, for both strategic and moral reasons.

Even now, the number of dead in Israel is still unknown; so far we are aware that about 1,200 innocents were murdered. We still don’t know how many people the savages of Hamas stole into captivity, except that the number is somewhere over 100 people. But numbers only tell part of the story.

The Barbarity

The pure savagery unleashed by Hamas after its fighters stormed into Israel by air, land, and sea continues to horrify all who are decent. Hundreds of young people were murdered simply because they happened to be at a desert music festival. The thugs raped many women and, while in the process, used the their victim’s cellphones to call their parents so that they could hear the sounds of their child being violated. They filmed themselves murdering an elderly woman and then used her phone to upload it to her own Facebook account so that her family could see.

Babies were dismembered. Initial reports were that 40 were found beheaded, but now the army can’t verify that this is the case. A friend in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) told me that the reason for the uncertainty is that the infants are literally in pieces; they’d been blown apart by machine guns, and it’s not possible to determine whether the heads came off first. Other babies were burned alive.

Under interrogation, a Hamas member was asked why women and children were captured. His answer, in Arabic: “To rape them.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu eloquently described the evil, saying, “We saw the beasts of prey. We saw the barbarians that we are facing. We saw a cruel enemy. An enemy worse than ISIS. We saw boys and girls, bound, shot in the head. Men and women burned alive. Young women raped and slaughtered. Fighters decapitated… In one place, they set fire to tires around them, and burned them alive.”

These evildoers were so unencumbered by feelings of guilt as they slaughtered hundreds of Jews – more than had been murdered in any single day since the Holocaust – that they gleefully filmed their acts and posted them to social media, providing the world evidence of their crimes against humanity.

Anyone who reads the news reads accounts of brutality on a daily basis. Someone, somewhere does something ghastly to their family or their friend or their neighbor all too often. But this was different. What happened on October 7 was not some individual losing their mind. Instead, it was a well planned out, orchestrated campaign of terror directed by the governing entity of Gaza, Hamas.

Despite what progressives and those who style themselves as urbane sophisticates might tell you, the context does not matter. Whatever you think of Israel’s “occupation” of Palestine, whatever you think of their building settlements (apartment blocks) far away from Gaza in Area C of the West Bank, whatever you think of any of that simply doesn’t matter. There is no excuse, no context, nothing at all that could justify what the terrorists did.

The only option

After this, Hamas can no longer be allowed to govern Gaza. For years, Israel thought that they could live with Hamas next door, periodically “mowing the lawn,” their term for using rockets to destroy Hamas’s rocket launchers when they came too close to threatening Israel. October 7 made it clear that Israel cannot live with Hamas. The civilized world cannot live with Hamas. Thousands already do not live because of Hamas.

The Israel Defense Force has started what is likely to be a long, brutal fight against Hamas in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of reservists have been mobilized. The war against Hamas is going to be ugly. Horrible images will fill television screens and other news media. Israel will be accused of atrocities.

Netanyahu stated clearly the intent of his government, saying, “Every Hamas member is a dead man.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Hamas “will be wiped from the face of the Earth. It will not continue to exist.” And Israel cannot simply kill Hamas; there needs to be some sort of government. It’s likely that Israel will need to retake control of the Gaza Strip, which they gave up nearly two decades ago in the interest of peace.

As always, the IDF will do its utmost to protect civilian lives. Well before fighting began, Netanyahu warned the civilians of Gaza to get out. But where should they go? The IDF has produced videos and maps warning people where bombs are likely to fall and where to go for safety. The IDF’s leaders know that Hamas will exploit this information and use it against Israeli soldiers, but protecting innocent life is part of the ethical DNA of Israel’s defense force.

Still, there will be “collateral damage,” a horrific term, because it sanitizes the information it conveys: civilians in Gaza will die. Hamas will continue to launch their rockets and fighting force not from legitimate military bases, but from schools and hospitals and apartment buildings and mosques. Israel will be obliged to destroy them. They will put children where the bombs will fall, aiming to score a pile of bodies that they can parade across television in order to accuse Israel of war crimes.

None of the above should be taken to mean that the lives of Gazans don’t matter. Gazan civilians – not members of Hamas and their supporters – are as human as any of the rest of us. A Gazan child or baby is as precious as any other. The point, though, is that Israel (and perhaps allies – there are American hostages in Gaza as well) has been forced to act. Any blood shed will be on the hands of Hamas.

Americans should resist the urge to call for “peace” or a “peace process.” As alluded to above, it was a move for peace, Israeli disengagement from Gaza, that brought Hamas to power.

No to negotiations

War is a horror show. And yet it is necessary. Not going to war after such evil as was perpetrated against the Israeli people on October 7 will leave the perpetrators unpunished. It will advertise to the world that Israel is open to having its children murdered and burnt, its women raped, its elderly killed on Facebook, its music festivals turned into killing fields. A price tag would be on the head of every Israeli.

The lack of a devastating response by Israel would have reverberations across the Middle East.

As ugly images fill television screens and atrocities attributed to Israel’s soldiers are shown, the liberal West will find a familiar temptation, the temptation to call for negotiations. But with Hamas, there can be no negotiation. Their charter calls for the elimination not only of Israel, but of the Jewish people as a whole. Negotiating with them would be useless, because there is nothing that Israel can offer, short of national suicide, that would appease the terror organization.

In historical context, we understand that war and its accompanying horrors are in certain situations not only morally acceptable, but morally necessary. The Civil War devastated civilians in the South. Some consider Sherman’s March to be the first iteration of what is now called “total war.” No one says the Civil War shouldn’t have been fought, that the Union should have negotiated with the Confederacy. World War II, which liberated Europe and ended the Holocaust, was marked by ghastly actions the Allied Forces deemed necessary, including the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We don’t debate the morality of World War II.

Times have changed, and there are rules of war now. The IDF will follow those, as the U.S. did during the Gulf War. Even then, though, there was “collateral damage.”

Anyone who argues that now is not a time for war, that Israel should negotiate some kind of deal with Hamas instead of destroying them, has to either argue that Hamas is not as bad as the Nazis or the Confederacy or that America’s entrance into World War II and the Union’s entrance into the Civil War were grave injustices.

Does anyone want to make these arguments?

Our Duty

Our duty as Americans and others who support civilization over savagery is to push back against those who would call for the immorality of letting Hamas maintain its rule over Gaza. We cannot let the ugly pictures that will show up in the media in the coming days, weeks, and months cause us to demand Washington stay Israel’s hand as it roots out Hamas and its affiliates, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and, likely, retakes control of Gaza.

Already, people like Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., are already calling for the U.S. to use our power to restrain Israel. Even senators who clearly don’t hate Jews, like Massachusetts’ Ed Markey, have started calling for the injustice of a fake “peace” already. Thankfully, President Biden has more moral clarity than they do, but his co-partisans are likely to exert pressure on him to change course. The more the horrors of war appear on television, the more strength they will have. It is unlikely that Israel will allow itself to be restrained, given what they’ve just been through. Still, a supportive United States allows Israel a free hand to conduct the war as they see fit, within the confines of the IDF code of ethics. The world did not attempt to tell the U.S. how to respond after 9/11, and we should not do that to Israel. Instead, we should work to ensure that America leads the world in support for Israel, encouraging fickle European allies not to waver.

We have to maintain moral clarity. While it is fashionable now to engage in moral equivalence and to deny the existence of good and evil, doing so is wrong. Hamas is evil. Israel’s response, as they go to war against evil, is just.

And there is no alternative.