Tag: Palestine

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

Voters take note: Thu Nguyen openly defends Hamas

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

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

Background

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

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

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

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

Next fact.

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

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

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

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

Thu Nguyen in support of Hamas

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

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

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

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

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

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

An aside

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I responded via X.

Nguyen still refuses to denounce Hamas

And Nguyen responded, almost incomprehensibly:

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

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

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

Thu Nguyen supports Hamas.

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).

Endangering Arabs to spite Israel: the results of “progressive” demands

How are we to understand the recent efforts of the “Justice” Democrats to cut funding for military assistance to the State of Israel? To hear them tell it, their actions are humanitarian and would stop a powerful bully (Israel) from using American tax dollars to kill innocent Palestinian Arab civilians.

This is nonsense.

Based on their recent statements, it seems apparent that the Justice Democrats – the group energized by Bernie Sanders’ campaign – give very little worry to the lives of Israeli civilians. But what has become increasingly apparent is that they also don’t give much consideration to endangering the safety of Arabs in the area, either – so long as it means the weakening, and eventual destruction of, Israel as a Jewish state. (While the “Justice Democrats” website does not go into much detail on any policy issues, the politics of the Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) overlap to such an extent that the leading members of the the former grouping are members of the latter, which has a page going into detail on their policy preferences for Israel and the disputed territories.)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a provision into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds America’s military goals yearly, to ban the transfer of $725 million worth of “JDAMs” to Israel. According to the representative, writing Sept. 17 on Twitter, the reason for the amendment was to punish the “Israeli gov over the bombing of Palestinian civilians, media centers”. Ocasio-Cortez knows well enough that the “media centers” (it  should be in the singular form, as there was only one building) was actually a base of Hamas operations, and she knows that the leadership of her own party have seen and accepted the proof of this. She also knows full well that Israel goes beyond any other country in warning civilians before bombs fall. Apparently, none of this matters. Instead of being upset at the death of civilians (which happened in Israel as well during the war brought about entirely by Hamas), this new strand in the progressive movement is upset at Israel having the ability to defend itself.

Why else would anyone oppose the sale of JDAMs, if not to undermine Israel’s defense mechanisms? JDAM is an acronym for “Joint Direct Attack Munitions.” It is possible that AOC is so uninformed that she doesn’t know what these are (“I’m not the expert in geopolitics on this issue,” she said during a Firing Line interview after being questioned as to why she used the term “occupation” to describe Israel’s presence in the West Bank), but let us assume that she has done the most basic of research on the policy she is trying to influence. If she has, she knows that JDAMs are not weapons themselves. Instead, they are kits that, when attached to regular bombs, turn them into GPS-enhanced precision-guided weapons. Rejecting the sale of JDAMs, therefore, means pushing Israel to use “dumb” bombs instead of precision weaponry.

Why would anyone want Israel using dumb bombs when its military is engaged in a campaign in Gaza? The Gaza Strip has a population density of 13,069.1 people per square mile, meaning the whole area is far more densely populated than Chicago, which has a density of 11,783 people per square mile. In the most recent conflict, 243 people, both terrorists and innocents, were killed in Gaza. Without detracting from the fact that the death of any innocent civilian is a tragedy beyond imagination, it is obvious that the only way that the number of casualties could be kept this low was due to the use of precision weaponry. Those 243 people died in the course of an  11-day-long protracted fight where thousands of bombs were exchanged between Israel and Hamas. As a thought experiment, imagine a military plane dropping a single dumb bomb on a block in Chicago. Is it even possible to imagine that less than 243 people would die? A single subway car holds about 250 people. If an El (Chicago’s light rail system) station was hit in a regular business district, thousands of people could have easily died due to one “dumb” bomb. Contemplating how many would die over the course of a whole military conflict in such a populated area is indeed a grim intellectual exercise.

In essence, the proposal would have kept Israeli bombs “dumb.” Leaving Israel with only dumb bombs the next time Hamas decides to launch a volley of rockets would mean one of two things: Israel would be forced to allow rockets to rain down on it (even the Iron Dome isn’t perfect; 12 Israelis died in the most recent conflict, including children) or Israel would be forced to go into Gaza using imprecise bombs, killings either thousands or tens of thousands of civilians. Neither of these situations is good for anyone – aside from Hamas or PIJ.

This past week, this band of “progressives” convinced House Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to remove a billion dollars’ worth of support for Israel’s Iron Dome from a government funding bill. In essence, they told Pelosi, “Remove this money for Israel, or we’ll vote against keeping the federal government open.” Shamefully, Pelosi acceded to this measure. A billion dollars is, in relation to the federal budget, actually a relatively small amount, and anyone looking for pork to cut would do far better looking elsewhere. The aim was decidedly not to save money, but to cripple the Iron Dome. (The discussion of why the U.S. sends aid to Israel is long and complex; suffice it to say that the relationship is mutually beneficial, and also to point out that the U.S. sends military and other aid to many countries.)

Aside from hatred for Israel – increasingly common on the left and the right, fueled by non-factual “news” pieces from outlets like al-Jazeera – it is hard to imagine why anyone would oppose the Iron Dome. Composed of a set of purely defensive missiles, the Dome’s sole mission is to shoot down rockets fired into Israel, most often by Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The Dome quite literally does nothing more than defend the lives of Israelis from foreign rockets.

Indirectly, the Iron Dome saves Arab lives in Gaza. Without the Iron Dome, every single missile that enters Israeli air space every single time Hamas or PIJ decides to launch them would

The Iron Dome in action. On the right are missiles launched from Gaza while, on the left, Iron Dome missiles intercept them over the State of Israel.
The Iron Dome in action. On the right are missiles launched from Gaza while, on the left, Iron Dome missiles intercept them over the State of Israel.

potentially scores of kill civilians, and Israel would have no choice but to respond. With the Iron Dome, Israeli military officials are able to monitor how many missiles are coming in at a given time, and decide whether it is necessary to respond at all. Further, without the Dome, it is highly likely that the IDF would need to enter into a costly, in terms of human lives, ground battle in Gaza either to seek out and destroy all of Hamas’s rocket-launching capabilities or to dislodge Hamas outright. Regardless of how carefully the IDF and Israeli Air Force engage in combat, this would probably kill thousands.

Eliminating the Iron Dome would mean death for countless Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. There is no question of this. The only possible explanations for these Congressional representatives – who have never expressed any desire for fiscal constraint – and their ideological allies (including a few Republicans) to oppose the Iron Dome’s funding is either stupidity or a callous disregard for the lives of Jews so intense that this group is willing to see Arabs severely endangered only to spite Israel. Note that here “hatred of Jews” is written purposely instead of “hatred of Israel,”  because eliminating the Iron Dome would not harm Israel’s self defense as a state; it has a strong military that would easily defeat Hamas. Eliminating the Iron Dome would leave the State of Israel fully intact even as it would cause the deaths of scores of Israelis and potentially thousands of Palestinian Arabs.

Thankfully, the efforts of the the Justice Democrats, in alliance with a few extremist America First Republicans, have so far ended in abject failure. Only yesterday, House Democrats introduced a resolution separate from the federal spending bill, House Resolution 5323, the Iron Dome Supplemental Appropriations Act, which passed 420-9, guaranteeing funding for the Iron Dome. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (D-Ky.) who in 2019 was the only member of the House to vote against a bills supporting democracy in Hong Kong  and condemning the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs in China, voted against the Iron Dome funding. On the Democratic side of the aisle, Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Andre Carson (D-In.), Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Marie Newman (D-Ill.), and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-Ill.)  – Justice Democrats and their allies – voted against it, as Ocasio-Cortez and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) voted “present.” 

The vast majority of the Democratic and Republican Parties voted the right way, as did the overwhelming majorities of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues. A number of Democrats made excellent speeches, including the new progressive Democrat Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), the first gay Black member of Congress, who represents the district adjacent to AOC’s. Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) said what many were thinking when he responded to one of the Justice Democrats, Rep. Tlaib, and accused her of antisemitism for her more egregious statements. It is important to note, however, that Deutch’s statements can’t be interpreted as directed solely at one member of Congress, nor should this controversy be seen only as the work of a few members of the House. Instead, it is indicative of a rise in anti-Israel – connected very strongly to antisemitic – sentiment in America on both the far right and the far left. From Massie, it represents the resurgence of right-wing antisemitism under the guise of “human rights.” From the “progressives”, it represents the encroachment into the U.S. of Soviet-style antisemitism, displayed most vividly in recent times in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, through the recently radicalized Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats, and other such groups. The influence of this group is growing and, if it is left unchecked, it could metastasize throughout the Democratic Party, potentially Corbynizing the Democratic Party. While Rep. Pelosi should be applauded for introducing the Iron Dome funding in a standalone bill, her original cowardly decision to strip it from the NDAA – and not to fight the move – is not promising.

Democrats and Republicans must clean house and replace those who hate Israel and Jews so much that they would sacrifice anything, even Arab safety, to spite Israel with better representatives – and they must combat the lie that legitimate criticism of Israel includes the vicious slander that the new “progressives” lodge.