This isn’t a disagreement or a dispute over values. The response of progressives, academia, the mainstream media, Democrats and others in the now fully-dysfunctional American Left is a symptom of underlying ethics rot, the product of too many factors accumulating over decades. At what point will U.S. voters and reasonable citizens finally conclude, after so much evidence before this: “Run away!”? Well, we shall see.
Rather than recap how progressives got here, it is more useful—and easier—to show where they are. As Robert Spenser wrote this morning, “What kind of sickness overtakes people that they can see what the “Palestinian” jihadis did to innocent people on Saturday and think, “I’ve got to speak out in support of the attackers,” or even worse, ‘I’ve got to give those people some money’? It’s a rhetorical question. The sickness is Marxist, leftist cant and indoctrination, and it is as obvious on progressives and Democrats—and the news media, of course—as the buboes on a plague victim.
The ugly tell in this instance is the proclamation of a false equivalency between Hamas and Israel after Hamas launched a full-scale terrorist attack against civilians three days ago. The partner to that intellectually and ethically untenable delusion is that a ceasefire should immediately follow: Hamas attacks, slaughters, kidnaps, and Israel is asked to show “restraint.” To the contrary, Israel has promised to wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth. Bingo. That is the ethical response, completely and unequivocally. Israel has shown restraint, and this was its reward. (I’m waiting for Sonny Hostin or some other idiot to explain that Israel ‘turning the other cheek’ is the Christian thing to do.)
Let’s see:
1. 31 Harvard student organizations collectively published a letter entitled, “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” including Harvard’s affiliate of Amnesty International. The unforgivable letter starts, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” it continues. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.”
As they should. Who is responsible when a population elects a terrorist organization as its lawful government? Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers wrote that he was “sickened” by the failure of Harvard’s leadership to condemn the statement. “The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,” tweeted Summers. That’s right, but Summers was also complicit in turning Harvard into the one-view ideological indoctrination factory that it has become.
2. Hilariously, Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, desperately hustling to stem the bleeding after a vicious attack by Iran-sponsored Hamas quickly followed on the heels of his addled boss unfreezing $6 billion for Iran, tweeted a call for a cease-fire, then pulled the tweet after a backlash that any fool could have predicted, and had his own Department disavow his tweet as “unauthorized.” So now it’s up to the media propaganda hacks to cover for Biden and Blinken. On “Meet the Press,” new host Kristen Welker parroted Blinken’s statement that the $6 billion was not a factor in the attacks. Luckily, Nikki Haley was on hand to debunk that talking point, saying, “When I was at the United Nations…when those planes full of cash [were] sent by Obama to Iran,…What happened was those funds were sent to Hezbollah and Lebanon. They were sent to Hamas and Gaza. They were sent to the Houthis in Yemen. They go and spread terrorism every time they get a dollar.”
And Biden released the billions anyway.
3. CNN featured a guest who claimed, without contradiction, that Hamas had really only targeted “military installations” and that most hostages were soldiers. Appearing on Fareed Zarakia GPS, Mustafa Marghouti also insisted the attacks were the fault of Israel because of “the longest occupation in modern history” and “[a] much worse apartheid” than the one “in South Africa.” Showing that American journalism could get even worse, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation instructed its reporters not to refer to the Hamas terrorists who attacked innocent civilians, kidnapped those they did not kill and are threatening to murder them on live TV as “terrorists.” The CBC’s Director of Journalistic Standards, George Achi, stated, “Do not refer to militants, soldiers, or anyone else as ‘terrorists. The notion of terrorism remains highly politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as ‘terrorists,’ we should add context to ensure the audience understands this opinion, not fact.” The New York Times isn’t calling them terrorists either: its euphemism of choice at the moment is “militants.”
See Rationalization #64, “It isn’t what it is.”
4. “The Squad” was out in force. Rep. Rashida issued a statement drawing no distinction between the attackers and the attacked. “I grieve [that] the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day. I am determined as ever to fight for a just future where everyone can live in peace, without fear and with true freedom, equal rights, and human dignity,” she wrote. “The path to that future must include lifting the blockade, ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.” That’s right: the Israeli response to terrorism on a mass scale should be to give Hamas what it wants. Fellow Squad anti-Semite Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted, “Reminder, Gaza doesn’t have shelters or an iron dome and to please pray for them. May peace prevail in the region and move us towards a moral awakening to care about the human suffering we are seeing. Palestinians are human beings who have been in besieged [sic] and are deserving of protection from the international community.” The absurdity of this reasoning is stunning: ‘Pity the attackers, they don’t have an adequate defense to prevent the consequences they deserve.’
5. Intersectionality reigns. Code Pink tweeted, “PALESTINE WILL BE FREE! In D.C. today, we called on Biden to stop arming apartheid and impose sanctions on Israel!” The Nation ran an essay called, “Gaza Is a Nightmare Today, but We Will Not Stop Dreaming of Freedom: This war is happening for one reason: the prolonged suffering and occupation that Palestinians have endured for seven decades.”
6. Then there are the demonstrations, with Black Lives Matter supporters prominent among the pro-Hamas protesters. Rallies took place in New York and Washington, D.C. In Philadelphia, a rally organized by the Philly Palestine Coalition proclaimed support for the sneak attack on Israel, with speakers proclaiming, “All of us here, standing today, are proud of what has occurred yesterday.” A spokesperson for the coalition, “not just about Palestine. It was about all oppressed people.” That’s because, a speaker explained, Hamas’ attacks on Israel was akin to fighting for the rights of American slaves forcing oppressors “…to get to the point where things had to happen like they happened yesterday, when the colonizers woke up and they felt the same kind of pressure that black people in this country put down on their slave masters when they woke up.”
The ignorance of history that feeds this orgy of warped values is palpable. I wonder if any of the demonstrators know how the Palestinians put themselves in this fix, by refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist, by being so addicted to terrorism that whole generations know nothing but hate and violence, and most of all, by repeatedly refusing to accept practical and peaceful resolutions to their problem. They could have had their own sovereign nation for the last 70 years.
A clear view of history, however, is another perceived impediment to the current passions of the American Left in 2023.
Added: Steve Witherspoon passed this along, and it is relevant:
Ethics Alarms 
Bingo. Thanks—I just added it to the post.
Youtube.com has this video blocked on their platform.
PWS
It seems to be playing on the post, where I just embedded it…
Thankfully, but click on Watch On YouTube
PWS
I’ve done some testing.
YouTube is not blocking the video on its platform. What appears to be happening is that any YouTube video that’s posted on a blog like Ethics Alarms or my blog will not open in the YouTube platform via the Watch On YouTube links that are visible in the video. It appears that the link text generated by the Watch In YouTube is incorrect for opening the video in the same tab window but if you press the Ctrl key while clicking on the link the video opens up in a new tab window.
I’ve seen that before on You Tube videos. If you left click on the “watch on You Tube’ link, it says it’s blocked. However, if you right click and select open in new tab, it plays.
Oh and whilst we are in internet quirks — I’m noticing that recently WordPress is now highlighting the email icon when I go to post a reply, rather than making me choose between WordPress, Facebook, or Email. Guess it is trainable to a degree.
The progressives are openly showing that they’re morally bankrupt racist and bigots by supporting actual terrorist violence against Israeli civilians, terrorism against those you oppose is acceptable behavior to progressives and the woke, the vail has been fully lifted. The rhetoric coming from progressives about the Palestine – Israeli war is a clear sign of the morally bankrupt things to come if more and more of the totalitarian progressive Marxists and fascist minded fools in the political left gain leadership positions across the USA.
Remember the progressive call-to-arms…
How do you like the changes that progressives have made in our politics, media, society and culture since 2008?
What gets me is how performative and reflexive this all is.
Progressive bobbleheads will go months, perhaps even years of their life without talking about their problems with how the Israelis are treating Palestinians, until Hamas blows something up in Israel, and then they’re balls to the wall for like a 48 hour news cycle over how bad Israel is.
I can’t even get outraged at their outrage anymore because it’s so painfully blatant and obvious that they don’t actually care about any of these issues, they just want to remind us all that they’re on the right side of The Current Thing and if we gave them the space to signal their virtue with all the brightness of 1000 stars they’d shortly crawl back under the rock they’ve temporarily emerged from.
The so-called “many Jewish people” who do not support this war probably do not include too many Israelis, who are never far from danger and often very limited in there personal access to weapons (in Israel, if you privately own a weapon, you have to have it locked up in a gun safe, and if it is stolen and the authorities don’t find a broken gun safe, you are held just as responsible for any crimes committed with the weapon as if you committed them yourself).
I’m guessing the Jewish people they are referring to are mostly the American JINO (Jewish in name only) people who wouldn’t have the first idea what a siddur or yad was for, haven’t seen the inside of a synagogue in years if not all their lives, and eat whatever they damn well please, but would be the first to demand that the yearly Christmas program at school be canceled or limited to purely secular stuff lest their kid say the name Jesus even once, who bring lawsuits about mangers, who snap at anyone who casually wishes them “Merry Christmas,” who snap and swear at police officers who tell them they can’t park here to drop off their kids (I saw just such a thing happen, the officer was not amused and hit her with every ticket he could think of, when he would have been well within his rights to drag her out of the car and arrest her in front of her kids), and who beat you over the head with the Holocaust every chance they get, even if their families were not touched by it. These are the people who are only interested in Judaism as far as it can benefit them and make them somehow better and entitled to special treatment, because beyond everything I’ve just said forth, they are usually staunch Democrats and voices on the left. This is not to say that the super strict Orthodox Jews are necessarily better than these people by virtue of practice, I’ve known more than a few of those folks who would lie, cheat, and bully, but taking a bite of a ham sandwich would be a major problem.
That helps explain why these terrorists were able to be so effective at slaughtering Israeli citizens. When I was reading these reports, I had assumed that many Israelis — especially ones in border kibbutzes — would have weapons, precisely because they lived in a country surrounded by enemies.
Surely this was the case in the early days of Israel when it was more common for Arab terrorists to sneak across the border and attack Israelis.
I wonder if this policy might change? I wonder if Hamas would have taken this course if they had known they might be up against armed Israelis?
This is true, because it has been so engineered by Hamas and its enablers in the Arab world. Who would be responsible for providing shelters for civilians? That would be Hamas. Who would have the power to established demilitarized civilian safe zones within Gaza? Hamas again. Who would be responsible for evacuating civilians from Gaza? Hamas.
Over and over again, Hamas puts its own civilians in harm’s way, specifically to drum up support from sycophants and antisemites like the Harvard gang.
According to some on the progressive side, they’ll be there with clipboards and emergency supplies right after. Sure, Hamas is a charitable NGO. By the way, I found out on Monday that Doctors Without Borders does not accept Israeli physicians. Just let that sink in.
Wait, what?
This is completely expected. One of the big buzzwords in wokeworld is ‘colonizer’. The woke solution to ‘colonization’ is ‘decolonization’. The attack in Israel is decolonization in practice. Of course the left celebrates it. This is what they want to happen here. The only reason all these leftists don’t do the same thing here is that they are cowards. The BLM crowd would have happily shot Israeli civilians in solidarity with Hamas this weekend, as long as they knew no one would shoot back. I think they would have taken captives and raped women as well, if other people were doing it.
Some people don’t do bad things because they are good people. Some people don’t do bad things because they are just cowards. Cowards don’t do bad things because they fear jail, or being shunned by their social group or at work. You can tell the difference between good people and cowards when the protest turns into a riot. When the vandalism and the looting starts, the good people leave. The cowards join in because theft, vandalism, and violence are suddenly acceptable and they see no repercussions. Look at the BLM ‘protests’ and realize that there were NO good people there. Now that the fear of repercussions, legal and social, are gone in most of our big cities, crime is rampant. That is because there are a lot more cowards than actual good people. Once the civil order is not the overwhelming norm, it will be very difficult to get it back.
Add to it this story:
https://notthebee.com/article/report-40-babies-slaughtered-by-hamas-found-in-nursery-in-israeli-farming-community
It’s not that I don’t agree that the Israeli military is not the most objective source. I just find it… Amusing? Repulsive? Weirded out?…. that this story is the one where they draw the line at atrocity reporting.
Well, speaking of the Israeli military, I remember the reports that came in on the radio at the beginning of the 1967 war. The Israelis were claiming to have destroyed hundreds of Arabs planes (and I presume tanks, although that didn’t stick in my memory). The Arabs were also claiming to have shot down hundreds of Israeli planes. My initial thought was that both sides were exaggerating.
Well, guess what? It turned out that the Israelis were actually telling the truth. Amazingly it also turned out that the Arabs reports were wildly overstated or simply fabricated.
I have kept that in mind ever since, when it comes to deciding who to believe in the Middle East.
It’s also an object lesson in why it is not a good idea for a government to lie to the public.
I would like to remind people that Trump was ridiculed and called a liar when he said he witnessed pro Islamic persons dancing on rooftops after 9/11.
How long will it be before the celebrations taking place in American cities are buried by the media.
As traumatic and incendiary as they might be the American people should have to see the images of the beheaded and mutilated babies. I want to see the squad attempt to defend that. So when I call these terrorists animals it is based on behavior and not their race.
I second the comment except for the first sentence. Yes, he was ridiculed and called a liar: I did, among others. There are no such videos of such celebrations in the US, which is what he claimed.
Jack
I was not pointing at anyone in particular. While there was footage of people on rooftops in NY and NJ it is hard to tell if Trump saw what he claimed but it was obvious that there was a huge attempt to prevent anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11 so minimizing what may have been the case was the preferred standard. Given that so many are upfront in their support of Hamas right now it is probable that his interpretation of those congregating on Brooklyn rooftops was in fact correct. Lack of hard proof does not mean something did not occur just as an habitual prevaricator can often tell the truth.
Jack as a follow up. Perhaps there was no video because the first phone that could take video did not hit the market until the Nokia 95 until 2007 which was followed by the first IPhone. So it is unlikely that very many people got out their bulky camcorders to take video of what was going on on rooftops on November 11 2001.
If I recall correctly Trump’s recollection of what he saw or may have seen took place in 2015 when video on phones was ubiquitous. We sometimes lose track of technical capabilities when the growth of technology changes virtually overnight.
He claimed he saw it on TV. Nobody has ever indicated that there is such a tape, or was.
It’s not an Ethics “whiff” like these guys are “accidentally” lining up with the bad guys every single time Israel is attacked. No, after a while, it’s very apparent, they hate Israel – and that’s not by accident.