Category: Current events

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.

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.

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.

A Society of Baruch Goldsteins

On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, armed and wearing his reserve uniform, walked into Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs and found a room in which dozens of Muslims were praying. Provoked by nothing but his own madness, he lifted a Galil rifle and opened fire on the innocents, unloading 111 rounds and killing 29 people.

Israel was stunned.

Israel’s Response to a Jewish Terrorist

“I am shamed over the disgrace imposed upon us by a degenerate murderer,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told parliament. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” Rabin added, addressing not only Goldstein, who had already been beaten to death by others at the cave, but of anyone who thought like him.

The prime minister emphasized the point, saying that people like Goldstein were “not partners in the Zionist enterprise” and “a foreign implant” and “an errant weed.”

“A single, straight line connects the lunatics and racists of the entire world,” Rabin said, condemning all forms of terror. He added that Goldstein was no better than a terrorist who kills Jews, saying,  “A single line of blood and terrorism runs from the Islamic Holy War member who shot Jewish worshipers who stood in prayer in the synagogues of Istanbul, Paris, Amsterdam and Rome, to the Jewish Hamas member who shot Ramadan worshipers.”

The condemnation crossed partisan lines. Benjamin Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition, deplored the violence as a “despicable crime” and expressed his “unequivocal condemnation.”

Rabbis in Israel, including the Chief Rabbis, and around the world, including the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, then Britain’s chief rabbi, condemned Goldstein. Rabbi Sacks said that “Such an act is an obscenity and a travesty of Jewish values. That it should have been perpetrated against worshippers in a house of prayer at a holy time makes it a blasphemy as well.”

The state took action. Goldstein had been a member of the Kach movement, founded by Meir Kahane, who was assassinated several years before. Already banned in 1992 from running for elections in the Knesset, the movement was outlawed altogether after Goldstein’s massacre. A special body of inquiry, the Shagmar Comission, was even set up to probe the events.

Aside from a  vanishingly small number of people who actually believed that Goldstein had thwarted a terrorist plot – he hadn’t – Israeli society was united in its outrage. Even now, decades later, as Israel has moved further to the right politically, Goldstein is still reviled. There has been a great deal of scandal around Itamar ben Gvir joining Israel’s government, because he was at one time a supporter of Goldstein. But even he, perhaps Israel’s most extreme politician, had to announce that he was no longer a supporter to gain office. He might be honest, an Israeli version of Democratic U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, who went from recruiting friends to the Ku Klux Klan to endorsing Barack Obama for president. Or ben Gvir could be lying; either way, aside from a few political outcasts, Israeli society rejects Goldstein’s legacy and those who support him.

Compare the above to the morally abject displays across a wide swath of Palestinian society this past weekend.

Palestinian society’s response to a terrorist

On Jan. 27, 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, seven Israeli Jews, including a 14-year-old boy, were murdered by a Palestinian gunman in cold blood while leaving their synagogue in a Jerusalem suburb. The next day, another Palestinian terrorist, this one 13 years old, tried to kill a father and son who, luckily, survived.

Palestinian society’s response to the massacre of innocents at their place of worship was dramatically different from Israel’s. Instead of widespread condemnation, streets in the West Bank and Gaza erupted in celebration. Palestinians chanted and cheered, distributed candies, shot their many guns into the air, and even lit fireworks. And this was not the response of a small group of extremists: the streets were literally filled.

Read the rest of this article at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Jenna Ortega did the right thing. Will others?

In December, two articles appeared here asking which type of antisemitism was more dangerous for Jews: the kind promoted by Kanye West or Jenna Ortega. The comparison surprised many. The fallen-from-grace hip hop artist Kanye openly loves Hitler, while Ortega, star of Netflix’s Wednesday, seems a nice person who genuinely wants to help those in need. Judging by the controversy that ensued, the question was entirely warranted. The argument was never that Ortega’s an antisemite, but that antisemitism under the social justice guise of anti-Zionism is at least as dangerous as its other forms, because it is so easily accepted. The online outrage entirely validated the point.

The original article argued that Ortega was doing damage to Jews, especially young Jews on college campuses, by pinning a link to the “Decolonize Palestine” website to her Twitter profile. That site has the look and feel of a progressive social justice advocacy page, but the veneer masks a series of talking points completely aligned with Hamas’s.

As it turned out, Hamas agreed and began featuring Ortega’s words on its Quds News Network.

Importantly, the intent was never to demonize the actress. As both articles note, she seems to be a decent person who would honestly tell anyone who asked that she deplores Jew hatred; that’s what made “her hate” so terrifying. The hate was “hers” only because when you post something on social media, it’s yours. That Ortega is actually a good person fooled by slick propaganda made her post all the more frightening.

With the previous articles, the aim was that maybe only a few thousand people would read them and that someone on Ortega’s publicity team would take note. The hope of the second article was more specific, that someone from a Jewish organization would reach out and explain to Ortega, first, that Decolonize is a hate site and, second, the amount of harm this type of propaganda does, especially on college campuses, where anti-Zionists often protest any Jewish organizations, political or not.

For example, someone should have explained to the Scream star that, due to ideology like this, Dyke Marches, like the one in D.C. and the one in Chicago, barred Jewish pride flags, causing LGBTQ Jews to fear for their safety. Or that this ideology caused the Washington, D.C., Sunrise Movement, an environmental organization, to boycott a national demonstration for voting rights due to the participation of liberal Jewish groups, including the Religious Action Center. RAC is the Reform Jewish movement’s political action arm, which advocates for almost all the issues Ortega supports and routinely criticizes Israel. Or perhaps she could have been educated on how American Jewish youth often hide all signs of their Jewishness for fear of being harassed on college campuses.

Hollywood unfriendly to open friends of Israel

What happened behind the scenes is unknown, but, as it turns out, Ortega did the right thing. Or, at least, the closest to the right thing she could do that wouldn’t also be career suicide: she unpinned the tweet from the top of her Twitter feed, meaning that anyone who wanted to see it would have to scroll back to March. This effectively consigned the tweet to oblivion without causing anti-Zionist pages that embedded her tweet to become filled with “tweet deleted” messages, which would have led to outrage from a well-organized, powerful movement that would immediately turn on her. Despite the antisemitic trope, it is hard to support, or even openly not hate, Israel in Hollywood. Gal Gadot was nearly canceled simply for saying during a recent war initiated by Hamas that she wants Israel and its neighbors to find a way to live in peace.

Calls for peace are “propaganda” for “ethnic cleansing.” That’s how these people think. Clearly, the anti-Zionist left/Hamas extremist grouping is dangerous to an actor, especially a rising celebrity.

Confirming the above, just after Ortega did the right thing, Twitter user Amir Amini posted a screen grab of the “Ortega vs. Kanye” article, dishonestly suggesting that the Times of Israel (the article and its headline are solely my own) was attacking Ortega for saying “Palestinians deserve to live.” Obviously part of a media campaign, his tweet was viewed 11.3 million times and retweeted 49 thousand times, creating such a controversy that Newsweek and others covered it, associating Ortega with Kanye not for a few thousand people who read the articles, but for millions who didn’t. This is an injustice to the actress, who took a step to right her mistake.

The Co-Founders of “Decolonize” Let the Truth Slip

Read the rest of this article at the Times of Israel. (No paywall)

Jenna Ortega becomes Hamas poster child, Jewish organizations silent

In a further illustration of what happens when people with seemingly good intent spread propaganda about things they don’t understand, Jenna Ortega, the American actress who rose to fame as Wednesday Addams on the eponymous Netflix series, has become – literally – a poster child for Hamas via their Quds News Network.

Shamefully, American Jewish organizations have said nothing.

Ortega’s Tweets

As noted previously, the actress shared a link to the “Decolonize Palestine” website. At first glance, it seemed in keeping with previous social media posts – she’s championed the cause of Planned Parenthood, Ukrainians, the women of Iran, and children in Iraq and Yemen. However, while she supports women rising up against Islamic theocrats in Tehran, the “Decolonize” link was essentially a list of talking points in line with Hamas, an organization funded in large part by Iran and which imposes an Iranian-style theocracy on Gaza. Some of what appears on the site has been disavowed even by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, which the site calls “subcontractors for Israeli control of Palestine” (as does Hamas).

Lest anyone think that Israel’s new right-wing government is the problem, the “Decolonize” link Ortega promoted goes out of its way in its “myths” section to argue that this is wrong. Instead, any Israeli government, even if it were composed entirely of left-wing pro-Palestinians, would be the same, since, we’re told, “a colonial society will also produce a colonial ‘left’, and even a colonial ‘peace’ movement. This was exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin.”

Needless to say, the site is full of anti-Semitic tropes, portraying Jews as shadowy operators, lurking behind the scenes to exert control. Take any 19th-century anti-Semitic work, replace “Jew” with “Zionist,” and you’ll have something that looks like “Decolonize Palestine.”

Ortega’s tweet has been shared nearly 10,000 times, and has received more than 32,000 likes. For context, the top 25 percent of Twitter users receive on average only 37 likes and a single retweet per month. Each retweet and each like exposes the link to an even greater audience, and, because she has the tweet “pinned” to the top of her profile, people continue to see it for the first time each day.

The Face of a U.S.-Designated Terrorist Organization

Read the rest of this post at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Neither the Democrats nor MAGA won yesterday

Yesterday was bad for Democrats. They won, or, at least, they didn’t lose as badly as expected (results still too close to call), probably maintaining control of the Senate and losing the House by far fewer seats than expected. This is a victory, to be sure, but it’s a pyrrhic victory, setting the stage for a 2024 decimation of the Democratic Party at both the executive and legislative levels.

By all accounts, the Democrats should have seen a resounding defeat yesterday. Off-year election cycles routinely deliver bad results to the governing party, and the most important indicators – crime, the economy, etc. – favored an opposition party over a governing party. Combine that with a president who’s quite obviously non compos mentis, and the expected result is, as George W. Bush once described it, “a thumpin’.” But that didn’t happen, so the obvious question is: Why?

Why were the Democrats able to defy the odds and pull off what amounts to a victory? Only two real options are available: the Democrats did just about everything right, or the Republicans did just about everything wrong. If Democrats are being honest with themselves, it should be obvious to them that the electorate voted against the Republicans, not for the Democrats. If there was widespread content with the Democrats, the polls don’t show it. They don’t show it in the presidential approval rating or in confidence in Democrats’ ability to handle key issues like crime and inflation; the Democrats don’t even fully dominate the area they’ve tried to make their key issue: protecting democracy (though, to be sure, this is an area where they beat the Republicans).

Throughout the race, the Democrats broadcast their lack of faith in their standing with the voters. While Biden was making speeches arguing MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy, other members of his party were openly funding the most extreme of these threats, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. A cynical move, ostensibly fighting for democracy while funding democracy’s supposed gravediggers, but it worked. With a few exceptions, almost all of the Trump-favored extremists, including those the Democrats helped to beat out over their moderate, regular Republican, challengers, lost. But therein lies the problem for the future.

Victory leads to complacency, while defeat leads to soul searching, as was the case in 2020, when Democrats like Abigail Spannberger forcefully questioned the “defund the police” slogan with which the Democratic Party had become too comfortable. Recall that 2020 was a defeat for Democrats in the same way that 2022 is a victory: while this time they didn’t lose by as much as they would have been expected to, two years ago they didn’t win by nearly as much as they should have. Indeed, the only reason they won a “majority” (really, 50-50 plus the vice president’s tie-breaking vote) of the Senate was because Trump went to Georgia and convinced Republicans their votes didn’t matter, because the election was “rigged” and “stolen.”

Now, the election results have made the Democrats complacent, while the Republicans search their souls, along with their strategic playbook. While many have been arguing that Trump is an albatross around the Republicans’ collective neck, yesterday made it clear that he’s not an albatross, but a noose. The candidates Trump picked lost yesterday, but in places where the former president didn’t interfere, Republicans fared much better. Georgia’s Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is locked in a dead heat with Republican Herschel Walker, an unhinged figure who was endorsed by Trump. Walker could win, but Democrats only need to look elsewhere in Georgia to see something that should terrify them: Brian Kemp, a conservative Republican who Trump declared an enemy, destroyed Democratic superstar Stacey Abrams in the race for governor, 54-46, despite few problems and high turnout.

One could look also at New York’s 17th Congressional district. There, Sean Patrick Maloney was defeated by Republican state legislator Mike Lawler. Lawler, despite having been a Trump delegate to the RNC in previous times, sought to distance himself from Trump and focused his campaign on crime and inflation. Lawler’s website, especially its foreign policy section, shows a candidate at pains to paint himself as a strongly conservative – not an America Firster. And Maloney should have won easily: there was some redistricting, but Biden won the general area of the district by 10 points – and Maloney is chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the organization that’s responsible for raising and doling out money to the party’s Congressional candidates. No DCCC member has lost in four decades.

Other examples abound, but the most important is in Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis handily beat Democrat Charlie Crist. Trump has been strongly, and publicly, signaling that he hates DeSantis, holding a rally at the same time as the Florida governor and warning DeSantis not to run for president because, “I know more about him than anybody — other than, perhaps, his wife.” Were DeSantis to run, Trump said, the Florida governor “could hurt himself very badly.”

So far, DeSantis hasn’t hurt himself at all. He’s been able to build a huge base of support in Florida, straddling the lines between competent administrator (If he runs for president, he’s sure to point to his handling of the pandemic, as compared to the disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, responsible for the state’s nursing home scandal), conservative, and Trump-style troll (as evinced in his apery of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s transport of undocumented immigrants to blue states).

Coming days will reveal more information about how Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters cast their ballots, but they are clearly shifting Republican – and DeSantis has made huge headway with, at least, Hispanic voters in his state, beating Biden’s share of that demographic’s vote in 2020. While commentators then pointed to Cubans and Venezuelans fearing the stated socialism of AOC, Sanders, and their bloc, the same explanation doesn’t hold now. DeSantis won 50 percent of all Hispanic voters in Florida, and a whopping 55 percent of Puerto Rican voters in the state.

The Florida governor is clearly the rising star in the Republican Party, and, if that dynamic isn’t halted, it likely means an eclipse for the Democrats. DeSantis might actually be able to purge the GOP of Trump’s influence, or at least to wrest control from him. That, combined with the quite obvious rebuke of Trumpism by the voters, can expunge MAGA and rob the Democrats of their key talking point in 2022. In 2024, they’ll have to focus on their record and the state of the country, and economists are still predicting a recession.

And if DeSantis becomes the Republican nominee, Biden would not stand a chance. Biden won in 2020 by promising not to be Trump. While Biden and the Democrats didn’t seem to get the message, it was pretty clear: voters wanted simply a return to normalcy, to pre-Trump politics. They didn’t want a lurch to the left or to the right; they wanted to make America normal again. Biden hasn’t done that; everyone who’s honest admits that there’s something terribly amiss in the Biden administration’s handling of almost everything, and the president isn’t even able to hold his own against friendly interviewers. How will he perform against DeSantis who will, after winning the primary and hew moderate? DeSantis is a fairly skilled orator, full of facts and figures, easily able to defeat Biden in a debate.

Each party has work to do. For Republicans, the steps forward are clear: expunge Trump’s influence. For Democrats, the work is clear, but both the problem and the necessary steps forward are obscured by the fog of victory. Recent Democratic statements seem to indicate that Biden and his inner circle, as well as many legislative Democrats, believe that there has been a vindication of their policies, encouraging them to simply keep doing what they’ve done for the past two years. That, though, is a path to electoral disaster. As for the actual steps the Democrats should take moving forward, George Will has some decent suggestions.

If Trump is gone, a winning strategy will no longer consist of not being Trump.