One of the most extraordinary things we have seen since the October 7 pogrom has been how Jews critical of Israel have found themselves marginalised if they fail to provide the most slanderous denunciations of the Jewish State. Think of Bernie Sanders, pilloried for correctly refusing to lie and say that Israel is committing genocide. And this comes from a man trying to threaten Israel with defeat by planning to restrict American military support for the embattled Jewish state facing murderous attack on three or more fronts!
It not being a genocide doesn't mean it's good, and as Sanders is it was supposedly representative of an American left, is it not fair that hed be criticised ? People have also criticised non Jews, like Biden and Harris.
It not being a genocide doesn't mean it's good, and as Sanders is it was supposedly representative of an American left, is it not fair that hed be criticised ? People have also criticised non Jews, like Biden and Harris.
Do you happen to have any links to Postone’s criticisms/analysis of Left-wing Anti-semitism? Particularly fascinated by your brief mentioning of his work but am not sure where to read it
Great article. I notice a mention of Maté-- Are you referring to Aron Maté? If so, I wonder if anyone has responded to the recent al-Jazeera documentary attempting to disprove Hamas' crimes against humanity on October 7? I read an article positing that Hamas hadn't committed the worst excesses reported by Israel, and though I have my own criticisms of this piece (while trying to localise Hamas' terrorist attack to being a 'military operation' to help the world remember the suffering of the Palestinians, the author made no mention of Hamas' planned massacres of Jews in synagogues abroad, which were foiled by intelligence agencies), I wondered if any on the pro-Israel side had examined these claims?
It's interesting how what the IDF is doing, and is absolutely justified in doing, is judged without what led to it. Any doubt, even suspicion of Israel's right to self-defence reeks of a lust for the death of Jews, just because they are Jews.
This is not about any ethnicity whatsoever. If we abstractize the situation (population A vs population B), which is difficult because it's abominable, I would like to believe that I would always be on the side of the oppressed, of the weakest, of the stateless, of the mass murdered ones. This was always the case until now, and I hope it will remain so.
Then you will surely extend your compassion to Jews and their history. If you know anything at all about the founding of the State of Israel, it would be the the side of Jews - unprovokingly attacked 4 times - in 1947, 1967, 1973, and 2023, by a coalition of powerful Arab states in the last 75 years - you should be on.
Definitely. That's why the first Israeli PM said this, "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."
Yes you are quite right of course. Israel (sheltering though it may be under Iron Dome, hundreds of nuclear weapons, billions in US military aid every year and a large US naval contingent in the Mediterranean) is under imminent threat of being destroyed by the missiles of the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah. And doubtless the almost daily Israeli bombing of Syria which has been going on for a few years now is to prevent another pogrom from occurring, somehow. And the US State Department is obviously being woke and liberal-lefty in claiming that Iran had no role in planning the Oct 7 attack (a claim unfathomably endorsed by Netanyahu). Killing thousands of children is clearly justifiably legitimate self-defense to prevent the possibility of another pogrom by a population permanently incarcerated in an open air concentration camp. Many thanks for clarification.
What you mean is that you would be on the side whom you would like to believe is oppressed. The problem is, you fail to explain how terrorists and their supporters (Palestinian polls show over 70% support Hamas terrorists) funded by numerous oil states running an extreme Islamic dictatorship constitute the 'oppressed... the weakest... the stateless (the Palestinians have been repeatedly offered a state and have repeatedly scuppered peace talks)... the mass murdered ones (the Palestinian population is larger than it was 70 years ago, and even taking Hamas' doctored death toll into account, the civilian death toll is less than 1% of Gaza's population).' Can you provide more details as to how you came to this conclusion?
Please elaborate the actual contents of these peace talks Do many Israelis not support Likud, and does Israel not get a lot backing from countries like America and Britain ? If so, why is it suddenly a problem for Iran to support Palestinians ?
Sorry, Elena... I know the left sucks, but if you're unironically citing Jeffrey Fucking Goldberg as some sort of moral authority, you've lost the plot, as the kids say
I appreciate your writing, but a couple (American) objections:
1) I can't imagine any of the woke pro-Palestine Ivy leaguers (i.e., "US keffiye-wearing students of Gender and Colonialisazion") chanting "Jews to the gas." I don't know what they're doing in Berlin, but as an objective fact, no groups of Ivy league rich kids are chanting that.
Thanks for this. In my living memory of the past 10-15 years, an atmosphere of intimidation, harrassment and open antisemitism has been prevailing at UK/US academic institutions, getting more serious after 7/10. Jewish students were threatened individually and decided to hide in their dorm rooms, others were told that the Nova ravers "deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land", yet others found scribbled notes saying "you deserve to die, Kike" in their study book, yet others were shouted at and intimidated on campus. This is one thing, which fulfils the criminal offence of harassment. The other is Intifada, from the River to Sea, which are all calls for the elimination of the Jewish state, which, let's be honest, means that Jews are fair game. In any case, University Codes of Conduct do not tolerate these things. As much as openly racist behaviour is to be condemned, openly antisemitic one should be as well. The fact that "context" is demanded alone is an antisemitic strategy. No one has to prove attacks on their well-being except Jews. This is problematic, to say the least.
Regarding "calls for genocide are protected speech": I disgree. The comment by the authors at Fire is an interpretation of the law, but not - in my view - a correct interpretation. Brandenburg vs. Ohio as a landmark case which tries to protect free speech by differentiating it from "action", or, as Magill said, "conduct leading to action". In the case of open hostility against Jewish students, action has been taken. Jewish students were violently threatened in the actions I described above. How does this fall under "free speech"? It is the duty of the responsible party to publicly and clearly condemn this kind of behaviour. The free speech hypocrites who maintain that about everything is censorship that limits one's freedom of expression do not understand the law. If someone loses a job because the media has smeared that person as X or Y, the person in question can sue the media in question and will most likely win (see the Peterson case): there are defamation laws. This is all the more the case in open or indirect threats to one's personal integrity and well-being. Saying that censorship of true stories about C-19 vaccine side effects on Twitter and censorship of calls for genocide are the same thing does not understand that formally democratic societies abide by the rule of the principle of the protection of life. This often requires a cost-benefit analysis, brutally enough, but if the enunciation causes more harm that the non-enunciation does, then that speech must be restricted.
FWIW, while I think the Constitution is clear on this, the University Code of Conduct is even more so. And it clearly states that the kind of harrassment Jewish students were facing e.g. at Harvard cannot be tolerated, see "discriminatory harrassment", introduced September 1st (https://provost.harvard.edu/files/provost/).
Still interested in the integrity of facts here. You insult Greenwald for asking for proof of the chant, but don't provide any. I've been on the US campuses for 20 years. Whatever your experience in that same place, I defy the claim that chants of 'Jews to the gas' are even close to the rhetoric being used. You may see 'Palestine must be free from river to sea' as anti-semitic, but they do not, and that conflation is constantly wielded against them by the ADL and other lackeys of the US military.
hm, I do not see how you are interested in the facts with the insidious formulation at the end of this comment (I am not a fan of the ADL, but I do not need to imply the antisemitic stereotype of the "Jews behind the military-industrial complex"). That has been increasingly fascinating for me to watch: how antisemitism manifests itself in these little formulations, in the little, seemingly innocuous questions - "oh, I've got just a *totally unrelated* question: are you Jewish?" Sometimes, naturally, the comments here are more aggressive, which just bores me, but the subtle ones are truly fascinating.
Have you ever asked yourself what "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" means? Yes, Hitler's dream. Endlösung II.
If you think there is nothing antisemitic about it - nothing that expresses hatred for Israel as the expressly Jewish state - I have no time for you.
Who has time for whom here? Students in the US aren't chanting 'death to Jews'; claiming that wastes everyone's time. But that's the ADL's game - paint all critics of the US and Israel as anti-semitic while giving Yaroslav Hunka a pass, anyone can see through it.
Well, I don't know about US campuses, but I do know of a constituency who is calling for death to the Jews: Muslims in Western countries. Shortly after October 7, a largely Arabic/Muslim crowd was filmed chanting 'Gas the Jews' in Sydney. In Germany, largely Muslim migrants welcomed the terrorist attack on the Jews. In London, a largely Muslim crowd was filmed chasing after Jews and saying "We want Zionists! We want Jews!" We've also had largely Muslim culprits sending death threats and other intimidating actions to British MPs deemed to be having the wrong opinions on the Israel-Gaza war. We could have a whole discussion about this and what this means for the viability of Muslim immigration to Western countries, but I doubt anyone on the left is willing to risk being cancelled in order to address this uncomfortable fact.
I am sure global Intifadistas will spare this Good Jew.
Correct observation
One of the most extraordinary things we have seen since the October 7 pogrom has been how Jews critical of Israel have found themselves marginalised if they fail to provide the most slanderous denunciations of the Jewish State. Think of Bernie Sanders, pilloried for correctly refusing to lie and say that Israel is committing genocide. And this comes from a man trying to threaten Israel with defeat by planning to restrict American military support for the embattled Jewish state facing murderous attack on three or more fronts!
It not being a genocide doesn't mean it's good, and as Sanders is it was supposedly representative of an American left, is it not fair that hed be criticised ? People have also criticised non Jews, like Biden and Harris.
It not being a genocide doesn't mean it's good, and as Sanders is it was supposedly representative of an American left, is it not fair that hed be criticised ? People have also criticised non Jews, like Biden and Harris.
Do you happen to have any links to Postone’s criticisms/analysis of Left-wing Anti-semitism? Particularly fascinated by your brief mentioning of his work but am not sure where to read it
For an introduction to left wing antisemitism, this is good: https://libcom.org/article/anti-semitism-and-national-socialism-moishe-postone
I used to read some Greenwald articles about the lack of freedom of speech due to Dem pressure since 2016.
I did not realize he hates Israel so much, and still can't understand why.
Well, it’s more or less his whole motivation. In hindsight, he‘s a US-hating leftist.
Great article. I notice a mention of Maté-- Are you referring to Aron Maté? If so, I wonder if anyone has responded to the recent al-Jazeera documentary attempting to disprove Hamas' crimes against humanity on October 7? I read an article positing that Hamas hadn't committed the worst excesses reported by Israel, and though I have my own criticisms of this piece (while trying to localise Hamas' terrorist attack to being a 'military operation' to help the world remember the suffering of the Palestinians, the author made no mention of Hamas' planned massacres of Jews in synagogues abroad, which were foiled by intelligence agencies), I wondered if any on the pro-Israel side had examined these claims?
I’m afraid I haven’t watched the documentary, and I wonder if responding to Al-Jazeera propaganda isn’t a lost cause.
There is no way in which a human being can defend or justify what Israel is doing.
It's interesting how what the IDF is doing, and is absolutely justified in doing, is judged without what led to it. Any doubt, even suspicion of Israel's right to self-defence reeks of a lust for the death of Jews, just because they are Jews.
This is not about any ethnicity whatsoever. If we abstractize the situation (population A vs population B), which is difficult because it's abominable, I would like to believe that I would always be on the side of the oppressed, of the weakest, of the stateless, of the mass murdered ones. This was always the case until now, and I hope it will remain so.
Then you will surely extend your compassion to Jews and their history. If you know anything at all about the founding of the State of Israel, it would be the the side of Jews - unprovokingly attacked 4 times - in 1947, 1967, 1973, and 2023, by a coalition of powerful Arab states in the last 75 years - you should be on.
Unprovoking attacked LMAO
Betrays how you know fuck all about Israel‘s history.
Definitely. That's why the first Israeli PM said this, "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."
Could you please list the "coallition of powerful Arab states" which attacked Israel in 2023?
Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Yemen. With direct cruise missile attacks from the North, North east, and the South.
You didn’t think the Hamas pogrom was the end of it, did you?
Yes you are quite right of course. Israel (sheltering though it may be under Iron Dome, hundreds of nuclear weapons, billions in US military aid every year and a large US naval contingent in the Mediterranean) is under imminent threat of being destroyed by the missiles of the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah. And doubtless the almost daily Israeli bombing of Syria which has been going on for a few years now is to prevent another pogrom from occurring, somehow. And the US State Department is obviously being woke and liberal-lefty in claiming that Iran had no role in planning the Oct 7 attack (a claim unfathomably endorsed by Netanyahu). Killing thousands of children is clearly justifiably legitimate self-defense to prevent the possibility of another pogrom by a population permanently incarcerated in an open air concentration camp. Many thanks for clarification.
What you mean is that you would be on the side whom you would like to believe is oppressed. The problem is, you fail to explain how terrorists and their supporters (Palestinian polls show over 70% support Hamas terrorists) funded by numerous oil states running an extreme Islamic dictatorship constitute the 'oppressed... the weakest... the stateless (the Palestinians have been repeatedly offered a state and have repeatedly scuppered peace talks)... the mass murdered ones (the Palestinian population is larger than it was 70 years ago, and even taking Hamas' doctored death toll into account, the civilian death toll is less than 1% of Gaza's population).' Can you provide more details as to how you came to this conclusion?
Please elaborate the actual contents of these peace talks Do many Israelis not support Likud, and does Israel not get a lot backing from countries like America and Britain ? If so, why is it suddenly a problem for Iran to support Palestinians ?
Viewing Hamas as oppressed is a neat little trick.
To always side with the weak is to always side with the next round of fighting.
There are lots of ways. Perhaps you are not one with an interest to do so.
Wow he’s always hated Israel he’s utter human garbage
Sorry, Elena... I know the left sucks, but if you're unironically citing Jeffrey Fucking Goldberg as some sort of moral authority, you've lost the plot, as the kids say
Yes, I quoted him unironically. Did he do a wrongthink?
Just out of curiosity, & on a completely unrelated note - Do you happen to be Jewish?
Do you happen to be Jewish?
Wrong.
He always was!
I appreciate your writing, but a couple (American) objections:
1) I can't imagine any of the woke pro-Palestine Ivy leaguers (i.e., "US keffiye-wearing students of Gender and Colonialisazion") chanting "Jews to the gas." I don't know what they're doing in Berlin, but as an objective fact, no groups of Ivy league rich kids are chanting that.
2) Hate speech is a constitutionally protected civil right in the USA, and that includes "calling for genocide": https://www.thefire.org/news/why-most-calls-genocide-are-protected-speech
Thanks for this. In my living memory of the past 10-15 years, an atmosphere of intimidation, harrassment and open antisemitism has been prevailing at UK/US academic institutions, getting more serious after 7/10. Jewish students were threatened individually and decided to hide in their dorm rooms, others were told that the Nova ravers "deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land", yet others found scribbled notes saying "you deserve to die, Kike" in their study book, yet others were shouted at and intimidated on campus. This is one thing, which fulfils the criminal offence of harassment. The other is Intifada, from the River to Sea, which are all calls for the elimination of the Jewish state, which, let's be honest, means that Jews are fair game. In any case, University Codes of Conduct do not tolerate these things. As much as openly racist behaviour is to be condemned, openly antisemitic one should be as well. The fact that "context" is demanded alone is an antisemitic strategy. No one has to prove attacks on their well-being except Jews. This is problematic, to say the least.
Regarding "calls for genocide are protected speech": I disgree. The comment by the authors at Fire is an interpretation of the law, but not - in my view - a correct interpretation. Brandenburg vs. Ohio as a landmark case which tries to protect free speech by differentiating it from "action", or, as Magill said, "conduct leading to action". In the case of open hostility against Jewish students, action has been taken. Jewish students were violently threatened in the actions I described above. How does this fall under "free speech"? It is the duty of the responsible party to publicly and clearly condemn this kind of behaviour. The free speech hypocrites who maintain that about everything is censorship that limits one's freedom of expression do not understand the law. If someone loses a job because the media has smeared that person as X or Y, the person in question can sue the media in question and will most likely win (see the Peterson case): there are defamation laws. This is all the more the case in open or indirect threats to one's personal integrity and well-being. Saying that censorship of true stories about C-19 vaccine side effects on Twitter and censorship of calls for genocide are the same thing does not understand that formally democratic societies abide by the rule of the principle of the protection of life. This often requires a cost-benefit analysis, brutally enough, but if the enunciation causes more harm that the non-enunciation does, then that speech must be restricted.
FWIW, while I think the Constitution is clear on this, the University Code of Conduct is even more so. And it clearly states that the kind of harrassment Jewish students were facing e.g. at Harvard cannot be tolerated, see "discriminatory harrassment", introduced September 1st (https://provost.harvard.edu/files/provost/).
Still interested in the integrity of facts here. You insult Greenwald for asking for proof of the chant, but don't provide any. I've been on the US campuses for 20 years. Whatever your experience in that same place, I defy the claim that chants of 'Jews to the gas' are even close to the rhetoric being used. You may see 'Palestine must be free from river to sea' as anti-semitic, but they do not, and that conflation is constantly wielded against them by the ADL and other lackeys of the US military.
hm, I do not see how you are interested in the facts with the insidious formulation at the end of this comment (I am not a fan of the ADL, but I do not need to imply the antisemitic stereotype of the "Jews behind the military-industrial complex"). That has been increasingly fascinating for me to watch: how antisemitism manifests itself in these little formulations, in the little, seemingly innocuous questions - "oh, I've got just a *totally unrelated* question: are you Jewish?" Sometimes, naturally, the comments here are more aggressive, which just bores me, but the subtle ones are truly fascinating.
Have you ever asked yourself what "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" means? Yes, Hitler's dream. Endlösung II.
If you think there is nothing antisemitic about it - nothing that expresses hatred for Israel as the expressly Jewish state - I have no time for you.
Who has time for whom here? Students in the US aren't chanting 'death to Jews'; claiming that wastes everyone's time. But that's the ADL's game - paint all critics of the US and Israel as anti-semitic while giving Yaroslav Hunka a pass, anyone can see through it.
Well, I don't know about US campuses, but I do know of a constituency who is calling for death to the Jews: Muslims in Western countries. Shortly after October 7, a largely Arabic/Muslim crowd was filmed chanting 'Gas the Jews' in Sydney. In Germany, largely Muslim migrants welcomed the terrorist attack on the Jews. In London, a largely Muslim crowd was filmed chasing after Jews and saying "We want Zionists! We want Jews!" We've also had largely Muslim culprits sending death threats and other intimidating actions to British MPs deemed to be having the wrong opinions on the Israel-Gaza war. We could have a whole discussion about this and what this means for the viability of Muslim immigration to Western countries, but I doubt anyone on the left is willing to risk being cancelled in order to address this uncomfortable fact.
“Nah, none of this happened. It’s just Zionist propaganda”
"Have you ever asked yourself what "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" means? Yes, Hitler's dream. Endlösung"
Says who, and wasn't there a similar Likud saying ? If so, why is one ok but not the other ?
Ok, good bye 😘
Ok, goodbye 👋🏻