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.
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.