I'm a little under the weather — hacking up green stuff — so you won't be hearing my voice on my usual podcasts, but the fingers still work, and I guess we'll see if the brain is working the way it should.
On the menu today: The horrific descriptions of captivity from the released hostages have me thinking big thoughts about good, evil, why some people are willing to excuse the inexcusable and justify the unjustifiable, and why a quite small but disproportionately loud segment of Americans is siding with the enemy by supporting Hamas.
We Are Good and Worth Protecting
Earlier this month, I wrote, "There is something like self-loathing at work in our culture, a mentality that refuses to accept the contentions that we are good and worth protecting."
You may have seen this video of those testifying before the Oakland City Council, when it voted on a resolution to call for a cease-fire, and a city council member tried to insert language condemning Hamas. The reactions are horrifying and delusional, an insistence that the victims were evil and that those who perpetuated great evil were actually the victims: "Israel murdered their own people on October 7!" "Calling Hamas a terrorist organization is ridiculous, racist, and plays into genocidal propaganda." "I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance." "As an Arab, asking with this context to condemn Hamas is very anti-Arab racist!" "The notion that this was a massacre of Jews was a fabricated narrative. . . . Many of those killed on October 7, including children, were killed by the IDF." "To hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wife beater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back!" "Did anyone else notice that those who oppose this resolution are old white supremacists?"
You can say these folks represent the lunatic fringe, but they got their way; the city council chose to not condemn Hamas. The outcome of the war will not depend upon what Oakland city officials say about it. But there was a proposal to denounce what is self-evidently evil, and it was rejected, likely in part because of Oakland citizens like this.
Within this crowd, you can find those who insist Hamas did not perpetuate the massacre on October 7, and that it was an elaborate hoax perpetuated by the IDF. And you can also find those who believe Hamas committed the massacre, but that it was morally justified. Curiously, you almost never hear or see these two groups of lunatics arguing with each other.
I suspect these groups rarely if ever argue with each other because both interpretations end in the same place: All Israelis, including everyone of every age who got slaughtered that day, are the villains, and all Palestinians, including everyone who committed every atrocity that day, are justified heroes. And that's all that really matters to these people; they will believe whatever they have to believe to preserve that foundational idea: that Israelis are the villains and Palestinians are the heroes, all the time, in every circumstance.
Both the attacks and the celebrations of the attacks are on video, all over the Gaza Strip, with Hamas members themselves posting the videos on social media. No one in Hamas is claiming they're being framed or falsely accused. (There was an unnamed Hamas battalion leader who told the British newspaper The Mail on Sunday that the original plan was to take Israeli soldiers hostage and, "We didn't expect it to go like this.")
Hamas killed 31 Americans that we know about. That death toll of Americans on the October 7 massacre ranks as the eighth-highest death toll of any terrorist attack against Americans — more dead Americans than the Fort Hood shooting, the San Bernardino attack, or the Pittsburgh synagogue attack. I cannot help but suspect that some people don't see October 7 as an attack on Americans because the victims had dual citizenship and thus they somehow "don't count." As if the blood was any less red.
There are nine Americans unaccounted for since the attack, and it is believed that some of them are currently held hostage by Hamas.
Hamas is an American enemy. The U.S. State Department designated it a terrorist group back in 1997, and that designation has been reaffirmed by both Republican and Democrat administrations in the decades since. But, as former Israeli justice minister Gideon Sa'ar wrote, the group is really better characterized as a "terrorist state," because it so effectively controls the Gaza Strip, and runs whatever limited government services are available there. Remember: The one time the Palestinian territories had something resembling a free and fair election, Hamas won the most seats.
It doesn't matter if you think the U.S. should get out of the Middle East or mind our own business. Hamas doesn't see it that way. It doesn't matter how much you don't want to fight with it; it wants to fight with you. It sees us as legitimate targets.
In fact, you can make a strong argument that Hamas is really an enemy of the world. In the massacre, Hamas killed seven Argentinians, at least one Cambodian, at least one Canadian, two French, ten Nepalese, one Russian, 18 Thai citizens, two Ukrainians, and one British citizen; the missing and hostages include Austrians, Brazilians, Chileans, Colombians, Germans, Irish, Mexicans, Panamanians, Paraguayans, Peruvians, Filipinos, and Tanzanians.
The people who showed up at that Oakland City Council meeting and insisted that Hamas was innocent, or that its actions were justified, are Americans (I presume), but they are not on the American side. They are choosing to stand with those who have killed innocent American civilians and are holding innocent American civilians hostage. They do not believe that Americans are good and worthy of protection.
For a long stretch of human history, we lived in tribes, and the continued existence of the tribe depended upon just a handful of key tasks. Acquiring food and shelter was important; reproducing and ensuring there was a future generation was important, too. But the tribe could be wiped out or enslaved by another tribe quickly if it could not protect itself.
A prerequisite for self-protection is the belief that you are worth protecting. There are Americans who look at our society in the year 2023, see nothing but flaws, and choose to root for the enemies who have killed us and seek to kill more of us.
We would all be safer and better off if every last militant in Hamas were locked up or struck down. If you're running around demanding a "permanent cease-fire," that's the way you get there. It is not reassuring that yesterday, President Biden — or more likely, someone on his staff — offered a tweet declaring, "To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can't do that." Just how does Biden want the Israelis to address the threat that Hamas presents without using violence?
If there were a nonviolent and friendly way to eliminate the threat from Hamas, I'm sure the Israeli government would be open to it. And no, "Just give Hamas what it wants" doesn't count. The Hamas charter declares, in some of its first words, "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."
Your mileage may vary, but I find supporting Hamas morally indistinguishable from supporting al-Qaeda, ISIS, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and the Chinese government's ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people, or the psychotic and cruel regime in North Korea. America and its allies have real flaws, but this is not a difficult call.
There are Americans who say they support the Palestinians, but not Hamas, and mean it. And there are Americans who say they support the Palestinians, but not Hamas, and who don't really mean it. And as we can see from the Oakland City Council meeting, there are Americans who support the Palestinians and Hamas; we are not hallucinating these people. They may not represent the average Democratic lawmaker or the average Democratic voter, but they're a not-so-small chunk of the progressive activist class.
And we can find people in some positions of responsibility and public leadership who are unwilling or afraid to denounce Hamas actions. The group United Nations Women issued a definitive statement on Friday that condemned "the brutal attacks by Hamas". . . and then deleted it. The Council on American-Islamic Relations insists it's perfectly legitimate for a state hate-crime-commission member to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. College presidents who will rush to the ramparts to denounce any expression of remotely right-of-center thought sat on their hands and hid when antisemitic mobs tore through their campuses.
This week, we're learning more about the captivity of the hostages. It's as bad as you would imagine; some women and children were kept in cages. (As one Twitter user observed, it is likely we heard more about "binders full of women" during Mitt Romney's presidential campaign than we will ever hear about Hamas's women in cages.) They were poorly fed, held in darkness, terrified, and threatened. In some cases, the children among them were forced to watch videos of the atrocities.
As Noam Blum observed:
It's no accident that Western Hamas apparatchiks were quick to invent stories about the hostages being treated well, since they knew it would take a day or two for the horror stories to come out. It's all about getting ahead of the truth. Doing crisis PR comms for Nazis.
Normal, healthy, well-functioning people with a conscience cannot justify forcing kids to watch traumatizing videos of atrocities, or keeping women and children in cages, or releasing children without their parents or vice versa. (In fact, not too long ago, the separation of children from their parents by the U.S. Border Patrol was considered, ipso facto, evidence that U.S. immigration policy was immoral and unjustifiable. Then the Biden administration reinstated the practice and everyone shrugged. Remember, separating children from their parents isn't harmful as long as the president is a Democrat.)
Because it is so unjustifiable, those who have already bet their entire sense of self-worth on Hamas being the good guys in this conflict will either deny it and insist that the hostages are making up stories about their abuse, or make up some sort of BS claim that Hamas had no choice but to mistreat the hostages because of things the Israelis had allegedly done.
One of the most notorious examples of the "Hamas treated the hostages well" spin came from a Twitter user, allegedly a journalist and "Ex Big 5 consultancy Managing Director" writing under the name Maree Campbell, who contended, "I'm not a facial expression expert, but judging by the look in her eyes and the expression on her face, I'd say that is a look of appreciation and thanks. Might it be that she is saying thanks for being treated unexpectedly well whilst in captivity?" (That tweet now has the added context, "Mia Regev was shot by Palestinian terrorists before they abducted her & her brother. They held her with a bullet wound for 50 days as a hostage and only released her pursuant to an agreement freeing convicted criminals from jail. She needed immediate medical care upon release."
Kat Rosenfeld, among others, lays out the evidence that "Maree Campbell" is not a real person — "account created in March 2023, no internet footprint apart from a clearly phony LinkedIn page, no other pics of her apart from this one, the syntax of her tweets suggests they're being written by a nonnative English speaker, etc."
In other words, this outraging nonsense contention was likely written by someone who knows darn well that it's outraging nonsense, and who simply wants to muddy the waters and put out the counter-narrative that the thugs of Hamas are actually kind and gentle guys, well-known for their compassion to women.
ADDENDUM: Bill Kristol is hoping that Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank host Mark Cuban will run for president.
Apparently, Kristol wants our lives to turn into a Sharknado movie.
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