On the menu today: Why is it so allegedly "provocative" to hang up a poster of a kidnapped Israeli citizen, currently in the clutches of Hamas? Why do so many Americans, who claim to stand for truth and justice and freedom, feel an overwhelming desire to tear down those posters when they see them? And how can anyone in their right mind contend that these posters are some sort of trap or bait designed to get American supporters of the Palestinians exposed and fired from their jobs?
Pity the Poster-Tearers, They Have No Free Will and Are Easily Trapped
Have you ever encountered an argument that is so bad, wrong, and unconvincing, that you end up kind of liking it as a work of art of implausibility? An argument that, as ridiculous and unpersuasive as it is, offers an illuminating glimpse into the spectacularly wrongheaded mindset of the people making it?
Feast your eyes upon the argument from The Daily Dot that the posters of abducted Israeli children and adults in New York City and elsewhere are "like a trap," deliberately provocative bait that was designed to get pro-Palestinian Americans fired from their jobs:
The video is one of more than a dozen similar videos circulating online. Each depicts a person or people removing a poster of Israeli hostages while others confront them.
In one, a woman in a bright pink coat removes a poster from a street light and yells, "You support genocide, you a**hole!" at the person filming. In another, a person removing a poster from an electrical box appears to refer to the person filming them as a "dog." A man gets a camera shoved in his face in yet another clip that shows a small group accosting him for removing posters. He asks the crowd, "But what about the Palestinians?"
Most people depicted removing the posters have been identified, launching calls for them to lose their jobs, get kicked out of school, and a barrage of internet trolls.
Now some are wondering if the posters are being strategically placed to entrap those who tear them down, many of whom support the Palestinian people. . . .
Public calls to preemptively put up "kidnapped" posters in areas where Palestinian protests will occur have begun to appear online. At the Cooper Union, a college in lower Manhattan, a rally advocating for a ceasefire was countered by blown-up versions of the "kidnapped" posters, which were also taped to the ground facing the ceasefire demonstrators. Another rally for Palestine was countered by a rally called "Stand with Israel and Against Terrorism," where demonstrators held up "kidnapped" posters while calling pro-Palestine demonstrators terrorists. At that rally, a table was set up behind the Zionist side with a thick stack of posters available for people to take home.
First, why are there repeated scare quotes around the word "kidnapped"? I could understand using the quotation marks once, as a description of the posters, which you can see for yourselves here. But the repeated use of the quotes makes it appear that the status of the hostages being kidnapped is doubted or in dispute. These abductions were recorded on camera as they were happening (disturbing footage at the link) — a woman bound with zip ties, grabbed by her hair, and shoved into the back of a car; a tied-up hostage being beaten in the back of a pickup truck driven through a Gaza neighborhood; Hamas terrorists marching Israelis in T-shirts and shorts down a sunny street. The horrifying image of Noa Argamani taken away on a motorcycle. Hamas is releasing hostage videos.
Are the scare quotes around "kidnapped" supposed to imply that these people weren't really kidnapped, and they just decided to take a stroll into the Gaza Strip, escorted by some helpful Hamas tour guides? Put a pin in this point, we're going to come back to it.
Second, the examples cited in this story occur in New York City, where roughly 8.3 million people reside — and that's just residents within the five boroughs, not counting those who commute in to work or school from outside the city limits. When you have a lot of people living and working close together, you're more likely to have people who passionately support Israel and people who passionately support the Palestinians in close proximity. And on college campuses, you're likely to have a lot of young people, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, living near one another. No one should be particularly surprised that kidnapped posters and pro-Palestinian protests are being found in the same places.
The link in the Daily Dot piece contending that the supporters of Israel are putting the posters up "preemptively" links to a tweet from comedian Mendy Pellin, calling for posters of hostages in Gaza to be posted in Grand Army Plaza on Friday, October 27. Grand Army Plaza is the main entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, site of the largest and busiest traffic circle in the borough. What, did the Palestinian protesters call dibs on Grand Army Plaza? No one's allowed to put pro-Israeli signs there? You know roughly 600,000 Jews, including 300,000 Orthodox Jews, live in Brooklyn, right?
On the flip side, an estimated 22 percent of America's total Muslim population lives in New York City, and Brooklyn is home to roughly 100 mosques. Everybody's going to have to learn to tolerate seeing arguments they oppose.
Third, and most importantly, no one is making any pro-Palestinian protesters tear down these signs. They're taking these actions of their own free will, in a public space, knowing that we live in a society where everyone has a cell phone with a video camera in their pocket. They knew the risks of someone recording them doing this and putting their faces and actions up on the internet, and they did it anyway.
I know this is going to shock some leftists, but it turns out that we Americans on the right run into posters, signs, advertising, and media messages that we abhor all the time. We see sexually explicit advertising, ads that mock Christianity, and political ads that depict Republicans hunting down and attempting to murder children. Even those "in this house we believe" yard signs can be insufferable, because they reduce complicated public-policy issues to a bunch of slogans designed to showcase the homeowner's sterling moral superiority compared to all of those hateful, ignorant reprobates who think differently.
And 90-some percent of the time, we on the right shake our heads and then go about our day. If we felt the need to tear down every poster, sign, and message we disagreed with, we would never get anything else done! Encountering messages that you disagree with is an unavoidable part of living in a free society. If you don't like somebody else's poster, go out and make your own poster. The best, and arguably only justifiable response to constitutionally protected objectionable speech is more and better speech.
But all too often, our friends on the left respond with some version of, "To hell with the First Amendment, you shouldn't be allowed to say that." For a long time, the argument of the left was, "The First Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences. If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your free-speech rights aren't being violated."
But now that the shoe is on the other foot, and voices on the left are seeing personal economic consequences for their controversial stances and statements, many liberals are recoiling in horror.
Some are contending this is a sign that conservatives have embraced "cancel culture."
But very few critics of cancel culture ever argued employers never have any right to terminate a person's employment based upon their statements and actions inside or outside of the workplace. (The law on this is complicated.) The question is: What sort of statements are so inherently objectionable and heinous that the employer has a good reason to fire the employee? As I noted a little while back, if you show up to work with a Swastika armband, place a copy of Mein Kampf on your desk, and insist upon grooming a square mustache, it is very likely your boss will tell you to clean out your desk and mail you your last paycheck. If you show up to your workplace in Klan robes, your boss will fire you. (Unless you're a Democratic governor of Virginia, then everybody will just give you a pass.)
The contention of some liberals is that publicly expressing support for restrictions on abortion, the Bible's (and the Koran's!) view that marriage is between a man and a woman, or expressing other once-noncontroversial beliefs, is an automatic firing offense, but expressing support for Hamas right after the bloodiest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust shouldn't cost you your job. Sorry, folks, that's not the way it works in this country. There is no "free speech for me but not for thee" clause in the Constitution.
Contending that posters of kidnapped Israelis are bait designed to get American supporters of Palestine fired from their jobs is the Mona Lisa of bad arguments. Take a bow.
As for the scare quotes around kidnappings, which are seemingly designed to spur doubts about whether the kidnappings were actually kidnappings . . . my old friend Polimath observed recently, "I've now read a couple of sober pieces (Facebook posts, emails) from friends and colleagues who are effectively anti-Israel and now I think I understand the 'tearing down posters' thing a bit better. They absolutely refuse to acknowledge what happened on Oct 7th."
Some Americans, upon learning about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, chose to believe the Palestinians were the good guys. And there are reasons someone might draw this conclusion. There are, no doubt, good Palestinians in this world. They are almost always the underdogs in their conflict with Israel. Palestinian territories are poorer, have little infrastructure, fewer medical facilities, and few if any schools that do a good job of preparing their children to make a living in the global economy. Israel has a much more advanced military, and it has never had a light touch when it comes to confronting its enemies. Palestinians have a lot of Arab and Muslim allies who are willing to use them as propaganda tools, but who rarely actually help them in substantial and practical ways. Israel almost always has the United States in its corner.
But the horror of the Hamas massacre disrupts that simplistic narrative. It indicates that the Palestinians aren't always such a good and noble suffering people, and that the Israelis aren't always the morally indefensible aggressive bullies. The massacre indicates that the Palestinian cause is tainted by the absolute sadistic glee and barbaric methods of forces such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It suggests that even the good Palestinians in this world are defended by a bloodthirsty terrorist force that is morally indistinguishable from ISIS or al-Qaeda.
I think a bunch of Americans, at some point in the past, pushed all their chips to the center of the poker table and bet that the Palestinians would be seen as the good guys in this conflict. Then they lost that bet, and they're so shocked by that turn of events that psychologically, they can't deal with it. When they see a picture of an abducted Israeli, they feel an overwhelming desire to tear it down, because confronting the grim reality is just too harsh: They've been either implicitly or explicitly rooting for evil terrorists this whole time.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, President Biden did not seem all that intimidated by the ultimatum from the National Muslim Democratic Council, demanding that Biden tell the Israelis it was time for a ceasefire, or the NMDC would sit out the 2024 election.
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