In 1989, during his graduate program at the University of Philadelphia, a psychologist named Jonathan Haidt decided to test a theory about moral reasoning.
It's absolutely infuriating to note that many of the reality-denying insanities we've seen over the past few years, "men can become women," "everything is white supremacy," "Israel has spent 22 months killing 60,000 people and destroying 90% of civilian homes to free the hostages," have been enabled almost entirely by the fear that pointing out the obvious falsity of these statements would mean being called names.
For the first 1/3 of your article, I thought I was reading a thoughtful analysis on moral reasoning. And then I read the question (posed as if it were factual) about someone flying halfway around the world to steal someone’s home and it became instantly clear that the bait & switch was on.
Rather than applying moral reasoning to actual facts, we were going to be subjected to a series of historically inaccurate propaganda statements that, if true, would lead to obvious conclusions any 5 year old would reach. The unsuspecting reader would feel an artificial sense of pride that they reached the correct moral conclusion, and if they were truly a useful idiot they’d never even question all the false premises that tee’d up these softballs.
I wonder how many readers will be fooled by this sophomoric sleight of hand.
"And then I read the question (posed as if it were factual) about someone flying halfway around the world to steal someone’s home and it became instantly clear that the bait & switch was on"
I must admit, it is extremely frustrating to have to continually point out to readers who don't like what I've written that the text of almost every claim I ever make is a link to evidence.
In this case, the text "steals a woman's home" is a link to a video of a man from Long Island openly admitting that he is stealing a Palestinian woman's home. They are arguing about it in her back garden. He later explains to the reporter, in the same video, that he is doing this to secure a Jewish presence in the neighbourhood in the event of a future peace deal, which is the main point of all the illegal settlements.
So yes, I present the story as factual because it is factual. No bait & switch, no sleight of hand, simply facts that you appear not to like. Can we engage with the morality of those facts now?
Oh please… that’s not what you’re doing and we both know it. You’re cherry picking the most inflammatory snippets you can find (with zero context or counterpoints) in a transparent effort to spoon feed your audience the conclusion you wish them to reach - that Israel is evil.
You state lies as facts (e.g., starvation in Gaza) or anomalous incidents as if they are policy (e.g., 700,000 dispossessing innocent people).
You’re a pro-Hamas propagandist masquerading as a reasonable guy.
"You’re a pro-Hamas propagandist masquerading as a reasonable guy."
It is an oddly bittersweet form of validation to write about a problem and then have someone come barrelling into my comments to give us all a live demonstration.
You don’t even know what Israel is doing, but you already know that it isn’t wrong. So now you’re trying to “reason” your way to that conclusion by calling me a "pro-Hamas propagandist" in the comments of an article where I offer not a single word of support for Hamas and, indeed, criticise them and their atrocities.
For the record, it is not pro-Hamas to want Israel to stop killing tens of thousands of babies in Gaza through starvation and bombing and sniper fire. I genuinely thought this piece of moral calculus would be too simple for anybody to struggle with.
But as you are ably demonstrating, it is impossible to "spoon feed" someone to a conclusion that they are determined not to even consider. It is impossible to make them look at facts when they can't summon the courage to even click on a link and see the evidence for themselves.
My job is to explain how I’ve reached certain conclusions as clearly as I can, to provide the evidence that has led me to those conclusions, and then (and you aren't the first and won't be the last to do this) get yelled at by people who don't like the truth.
But hey, masterful job on avoiding confronting the morality of the acts I've described here, though. I guess that's the ultimate point of this whole performance.
First of all, you have it exactly backwards. What I actually did was lay out precisely what you’re doing and only then did I reach the inevitable conclusion that you’re pro-Hamas (your criticism of their atrocities is just lip service and cover).
Everything you say is just regurgitated Hamas propaganda - e.g., “killing tens of thousands of babies” (wrong - best estimates are around 44K deaths, with ~half being Hamas fighters. That’s an historic low combatant-to-civilian ratio of ~1:1). FYI - Hamas actively recruits boys as young as 13 (sometimes even younger since the war started) and then the Gaza Health Ministry (aka Hamas) reports their deaths as “innocent children” which you and many other western useful idiots just regurgitate as fact.
Then you mention “starving” something Hamas has been spewing for over a year. And yet we’ve seen no evidence of this, and mountains of counter-evidence (pictures) of healthy and often fat Gazans. It’s worth noting that when the NYT regurgitated this lie recently on their front page, they used a fake picture to do it. If there is mass starvation in Gaza, why use a fake picture? [insert obvious answer here]
So yes, you’ve done a “great job” (unintentionally) explaining how you reached your conclusions. I’m just helping your audience see that it is either 1) through painfully selective cherry picking, or 2) just straight up regurgitating Hamas propaganda as if it were facts.
"What I actually did was lay out precisely what you’re doing "
Man, please be serious. You didn't even realise that the factual story I wrote, with video evidence of the man in question explaining exactly the facts I described, was factual.
I have never, in my entire history of writing about this conflict, said a word in defence of Hamas. My first article on the topic was a full-throated condemnation of Hamas and terrorism. I've written several of them. Again, this "pro-Hamas" canard is nothing more than an attempt at monstering so that you can cling to your emotional position and avoid engaging with the facts.
The latest casualty figures (again, I included a link to the sources in the article, but here it is again - https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reported-impact-snapshot-gaza-strip-30-july-2025) are that over 17,000 children have been killed and at least 60,138 people. No idea where you're getting 44,000 from. I strongly suspect you won't provide any evidence for that figure, nor for the claim that half of them are terrorists.
Israel categorises children throwing stones at watchtowers as "Hamas fighters" I could provide you with dozens of reports of children being imprisoned for the most minor of offences or no offences at all, and labelled terrorists. But no amount of evidence of Israel's wrongdoing is ever enough.
But of course, if Israel tells you that these little children are all bloodthirsty maniacs, and this allows you to "reason" your way to justifying their murder, that's all it takes. As I say in the article, if you're shameless enough, you can just tell yourself all the children in Gaza are Hamas. You don't have or need evidence when Israel says something, just having the excuse to justify their murder is enough.
The NYT didn't post a fake picture, they posted a real picture of an emaciated child in Gaza, but didn't mention at the time (they've since updated) that he also had pre-existing conditions that affected his brain and muscle development. This doesn't change the fact that he is malnourished, it doesn't change the suffering he's enduring, but it's important context that was missing from the original piece. There are scores of other images of starvation in Gaza. You just don't want to acknowledge them.
Finally, as to starvation, even Donald Trump has acknowledged the starvation in Gaza (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AQxuVzwmFG0). Smotritch acknowledged publicly that Israel had been forced to let in a "minimal amount of aid" because the images of starving children were making it difficult for the West to continue supporting Israel's "war."
God, all this information is just so easy to come by. It's such a waste of my time constantly having to dig it up for people who aren't interested in facts anyway. The problem is simply that you don't want to know the truth. All you're after is whatever scraps you can find to justify your position. Again, it's not reasoning in search of truth, it's reasoning in search of justifications for your emotional responses. Only your emotional response is that the murder of tens of thousands of innocent people is fine.
You seem pretty fuzzy on what constitutes evidence. Social media today is inundated with videos that have been edited, often to show a particular sound bite that serves a narrative when if we look at the entire video we often get prior context that totally changes our initial impressions. This agenda driven manipulation is so ubiquitous that really it’s hard to believe anyone paying attention isn’t well aware of this happening on all sides of the political spectrum.
So sorry, but I’m not going to debate a snippet video without context and/or seeing it in its entirety. But I will say that if a full context examination supports your narrative, i condemn it categorically. I am against land theft of any rightful owners. And I’m very familiar with this issue in general throughout the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East and am happy to discuss.
I’m curious what evidence i could provide that would convince you that mass starvation is not happening in Gaza. The “fake” picture i mentioned was deliberately used to promote this starvation narrative. Only when they were caught did media organizations admit that the boy’s condition had nothing to do with any lack of food in Gaza. Did you also know the picture was cropped to leave out his perfectly healthy (and well fed) brother standing off to the side?
Again, why use this picture if mass starvation is truly happening? We should have thousands of “real” pictures documenting this tragedy. Where are they?
Your last paragraph is just an exercise in projection - one of us is most definitely “reasoning in search of justifications for your emotional responses” and it ain’t me.
PS - I don’t use Smotritch as a source for anything. He’s a fairly despicable character and not in charge of making policy decisions.
After you read my first reply (and comment as you see fit) since you posted a link presuming to show an Israeli settler stealing someone’s house, perhaps your audience would benefit from a larger discussion about Judea and Samaria (i.e., the West Bank) and “ethnic cleansing” in general.
Given your anecdotal cherry picking meant to spoon feed your audience the conclusion you prefer, I won’t hold my breath that you have any interest in such a conversation, but I make the offer in good faith regardless.
"since you posted a link presuming to show an Israeli settler stealing someone’s house"
No, it's not a video "presuming" to show an Israeli settler stealing someone's house. It's a video that shows a settler happily, openly admitting that he is stealing someone's house. Watch the video. If you think I've been dishonest, please point out where. Otherwise, stop with this dishonest weasel words crap.
You have already shown yourself to be enormously dishonest in this brief interaction, and so incompetent at fact-finding that you couldn't even click on a link that was RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU to discover that a factual story was, in fact, factual, so I'm not sure why you think I'd waste my time on a wider conversation about anything with you or why you think I'd believe you were capable of "good faith."
But just to test the waters on your capacity for honesty, let's be clear about Israel's borders. Is the West Bank within Israel's borders or isn't it?
I addressed the video issue in another comment above.
Your question about the Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) is curious. I’m happy to discuss it, but curious why you bring it up (since it has nothing to do with anything we’ve been discussing)?
Broadly speaking, the West Bank is not a sovereign state nor is it part of Israel proper. It is disputed “limbo” land according to international law - i.e., there are a number of interpretations of international law that render it complex and ambiguous.
I am glad you are a moral person. You can be appalled when individual soldiers commit war crimes and demand accountability, you can agonise over civilian suffering when an army has to fight a war in an urban area where soldiers hide behind civilians. You want to end the suffering. Good for you. But sadly, you don't want to acknowledge that the Hamas men and women of Gaza, and their Arab and Western supporters, don't share any of your morality or empathy. They support the religious and political ideology that is Arab Muslim supremacy. The Gazans will continue to kill, and raise their children to kill, any Israeli, child or adult - unless the Hamas regime is permanently disarmed and broken.
I'm an typical liberal Westerner. I supported every attempt to negotiate a lasting peace, and even marched for Palestinian statehood. Over the years I gradually despaired as the Arabs repeatedly rejected anything that wouldn't bring about the complete destruction of Israel; as they continued to wage war, through terrorism, on all Israelis, civilians or otherwise, and then begged our sympathy when Israel defended itself. The atrocities and massacre on 7th October 2023 were only the logical and perfect expression of what the people of Gaza, and the Arab world, genuinely wish for every single Jew in the Middle East. You should watch the joyous Arab reactions captured on TV and social media, from October 2023, to fully understand this horrible truth.
So I finally came to understand that, like the "innocent" citizens of Germany - who gloried in the war crimes of their Nazi regime, while countries were laid waste and millions of people were murdered because of their race - the ordinary civilians of Gaza (and their allies in the West and the Middle East) are not in fact moral people, as you or I understand morality. They will celebrate the killing of innocent families, not regret them, they will reward their soldiers for killing and raping civilians, not put them on trial, they will take, torture and starve innocent hostages. They believe that they are entitled to do anything they want, that everything is permitted, in order to win a Jew-free Middle East. For me the only moral thing to do, faced with these facts, is what Israel is attempting to do.
“But sadly, you don't want to acknowledge that the Hamas men and women of Gaza, and their Arab and Western supporters, don't share any of your morality or empathy. They support the religious and political ideology that is Arab Muslim supremacy.”
Okay, please help me understand this. I trust you’ll accept that this is a huge claim to make about the 2 million people living in Gaza, never mind the hundreds (thousands?) of millions of Muslims of living elsewhere.
So what’s the basis for your certainty that allows you to justify the murder of tens of thousands in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of millions?
If it’s the Quran, you’re out of luck. Sure, the Quran says some awful things, but so does the Talmud and the Torah and the Bible. I don’t judge every Jew or Christian on the basis of what’s in their holy books either (especially as pretty much no religious person can even manage to live up to the good stuff written in their books).
If it’s jihadism, again, there's a big problem. Yes, the Quran talks about Jihad, though not synonymously with violence, but Catholicism (and therefore Judaism), with honest, straightforward readings of the bible, can be used to justify genocide, slavery, and incest.
Christian nationalism has been responsible for several terror attacks and acts of extremism. As we all know, the Catholic Church has spent decades covering up a pedophilia scandal. But I’ve yet to meet anybody who claims or assumes all Christians support or practice these things.
Yet even though there are millions of Muslims living in peace around the world, even though Gaza is filled with painters and musicians and builders and fishermen, ordinary people living lives that are as ordinary as possible given the conditions Israel has spent decades imposing on them, you and many others seem endlessly comfortable condemning them all as extremists who deserve to die on the basis of the worst people who share their religion.
Maybe I’m hopelessly naive, maybe I haven’t been paying any attention, but I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to the level of evidence I’d need to accept this claim. Have you?
p.s. God, I’d even settle for evidence that any significant portion of the innocent people killed in Gaza were killed because Hamas were “hiding behind civilians” and not because Israel was deliberately targeting them. This all just sounds like uncritically accepted propaganda.
You mentioned good stuff and bad stuff in holy books. Here's a reference for the Bible, Quran & Book of Morman. Much of the Bible stuff (Old Testament) is from the Talmud and the Torah.
Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, the Torah is just the first five books of the Old Testament. So yes, lots of 1-1 similarities there. I often joke that the only way to believe that the Bible or any "holy book" is true and/or a functional moral guide is to have not read it.
I was responding to someone who said the dead chicken thing was immoral but that masturbation was not immoral. The chicken thing seems creepy, but since the chicken is dead and is the equivalent of a sex toy. The cooking and eating it is creepy too, but no one is hurt by it.
How does the dead chicken thing differ from masturbation vis a vis the devaluation of men and women and sex teaching us tenderness and mutual respect? I’m not trying to be argumentative, but the differentiation makes no sense.
I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you saying that masturbation and having sex with and then eating a dead chicken are equivalent? I'd say most people would disagree.
I'm not saying the latter is morally wrong, I don't think morality comes into it, but I think it's more likely to promote a disgust response.
How ironic. This is sort of a dubious moral reasoning to use expired chickens and dogs to introduce your revulsion of Israel acting like the SS. But, to the point, the dog-eating scenario is wrong because the dog belongs to a family. Presumably a lie would be told that "I don't know what happened; he must have ran away." If it were my dog, I would want closure, which the dog-eaters withheld. How interesting that the dog in this scenario was not a stray.
Who cares about the flag? It is a question of law and not morality.
Chicken-stuffing enforces not only the devaluation of women and men out there in the world, but the devaluation of the stuffer. There are people in this world who claim that sex is solely to act on our most basic urges, but it is to teach us all the importance of tenderness and mutual respect. It is a bond, not a compulsion.
Last and certainly not least, the slaughter of Gazans and their wholesale devaluation is demonic.
How does masturbating not devaluate men and women the way the chicken scenario does? How does it teach us the importance of tenderness and mutual respect in ways that the chicken thing doesn’t. How is the chicken any different from any sex toy used for personal pleasure.
In war our guys are good guys, and their guys are bad guys without honest consideration for morality. An accusation of anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas is "you are choosing the people I call bad guys. That crap wouldn't pass muster in a high school debating class.
"In war our guys are good guys, and their guys are bad guys without honest consideration for morality"
Yeah, that's why we need leaders who will make sound moral decisions for the good of their soldiers and their citizens and hopefully, peace.
Soldiers, simply speaking, are weapons; they go where you point them and shoot who you tell them. We could have a long sidebar about the morality of this. But whatever, we've normalised the idea in armed conflict that soldiers are "just following orders."
That's why it's so important to scrutinise the people who are giving the orders.
In boot camp I was taught that if I thought an order was unlawful I could refuse to follow it, but I should be prepared to defend that decision at my court-martial.
I was not at My Lai when the massacre took place, but I believe that I would not have shot non-combatants.
So as a matter of neuance I will say that there is space for morality in the mind of a soldier unless you consider all war to be without moral justification.
“unless you consider all war to be without moral justification.”
No, I think the space for moral justification is fairly narrow, but it certainly exists. But I also think there aren’t many people who will stand by their principles when they stand to lose something. Heck, as many people are ably demonstrating, there aren’t even many people who will stop advocating for a genocide as the war crimes become undeniable.
I watched an interview recently with an IDF soldier who chose to go to jail rather than return to Gaza after what he saw happening there in his first tour. There are good, principled people in the world, I just wish there were more of them.
What a shame. I liked and trusted your writing. However, having seen the contortions you perform in an effort to vilify Israel (incredibly ironically using Haidt’s analysis), I question everything you’ve written before. I feel duped. You’re either not good at fact finding or an awful human being.
"However, having seen the contortions you perform in an effort to vilify Israel"
Yeah, that is a shame, I'm genuinely sorry you feel that way. From past experience, I feel like asking this is probably a waste of time, but could you point to the contortions I've performed? Is there anything I've written here that isn't true?
I'm the same person I've always been, writing with the same care, honesty and attention I've always written. It's actually incredibly disappointing to me to discover how many people in my audience will perform a complete 180 as soon as I write facts they don't like.
You referenced Haidt’s experiment but not the book the experiment resulted in. The book is “The Righteous Mind”.
The core conclusion of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" is that morality is a complex interplay of innate intuitions and cultural learning, not solely based on reason. It suggests that our moral judgments are often driven by gut feelings, and reasoning primarily serves to justify these pre-existing intuitions. The book also explores how different moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty) shape our perspectives, leading to political and cultural divides
Then you jump into somehow how Haidt’s experiments justify your perspective on what Israel is doing in Gaza.
You missed the whole idea of what his research concluded. It’s not surprising to me given the interactions I have had with you over the years.
"Then you jump into somehow how Haidt’s experiments justify your perspective on what Israel is doing in Gaza."
How did I do this? Could you point out anywhere where I suggested Haidt's experiments justified my perspectives?
Could you tell me what "the whole idea of Haidt's research" is and how you think I missed it in this article?
I have a copy of The Righteous Mind right here on my bookshelf. I can easily and will happily refer to any passages that you think contradict any of the points I've made here.
You approach pretty much every comment you write here from the assumption that I've "missed the point" and then scrabble together post hoc justifications, almost always thought and evidence-free. I often ask you specific questions about your critiques, like those I've asked above, and you either don't answer or change the subject because you realise you can't.
Our interactions, therefore, are usually me pointing out that you haven't invested any thought or research in what you say, and are operating on your emotional desire to prove me wrong.
I may well be wrong, of course. I'm just waiting for you to ever, ever demonstrate why you think so with something more persuasive than your initial emotional reaction.
I gave away my copy of the righteous mind to a religious organization that was promoting discussion around gay issues 20 years ago.
Maybe we should start with the secondary title of the book “Why good people are divided by politics and religion.”
The key word is the secondary title is good. Your position on Gaza and Israel implies that the correct moral perspective is that Israel is committing crimes. That implies that I who very much disagree with your view have an incorrect moral perspective.
When I discuss Israel and Gaza I avoid any moral judgement. I refer to a fact about humanity - might makes right. You don’t like it when I state that. I get it.
Let’s go with the title of your article “ Israel, Hamas, And The Illusion Of Moral Reasoning”
You are clearly stating that you have an insight into moral reasoning that is more correct. You’re welcome to believe that as Haidt’s experiments would predict. But your belief don’t hold any weight weight versus other “good people.” Let’s take mine as an example.
Haidt’s view is that morality is not an absolute. It’s a function of many factors. Good people can have conflicting moral perspectives.
As for me bringing up Haidt’s book. Your article led with me going there. What was your goal in siting Haidt’s experiments?
"The key word is the secondary title is good. Your position on Gaza and Israel implies that the correct moral perspective is that Israel is committing crimes. That implies that I who very much disagree with your view have an incorrect moral perspective."
This is a key part of the problem with our "interactions." You make such wildly incorrect, incredibly wonky assertions based on stories you've made up in your head, and then act as if the conclusions you've drawn from them are "obvious."
What possible relevance does the wording of the secondary title of a book that I don't mention AT ALL, anywhere in the article, have on how I'm judging people who disagree with me? Like, what?! Do you seriously think I was using the subtitle of a book I don't even refer to anywhere to cast some secret moral judgment on you?
And no, the objective facts are that Israel is committing crimes. This has nothing to do with "moral perspectives."
Deliberately starving civilians, especially in a territory you are militarily blockading and occupying, is a crime. Using civilians as human shields is a crime. Killing civilians at aid centres is a crime. The unnecessary destruction of civilian infrastructure is a crime. Collective punishment is a crime. Ethnic cleansing is a crime. Genocide is a crime. Raping prisoners is a crime. The settlements in the West Bank are all illegal under international law.
You will presumably deny that Israel is doing these things, but in addition to the fact that Israeli soldiers and politicians have confessed to most of these crimes, and that many of these crimes are extremely well documented, the growing consensus of experts disagrees with you even on the more subjective claims like genocide, as well as all objective evidence. People both inside and outside of Israel are coming to the unavoidable conclusion. The prime minister of Israel is under an arrest warrant for war crimes.
You are free to disagree with or deny all of these expert assessments and facts, of course. There are still people who insist the Holocaust wasn't a genocide or even that it didn't happen. But if your position is, as many people's is, that you don't care about the facts, that you KNOW Israel is right because you feel it, and then you're just going to hunt around for justifications for this view, then you're falling exactly into the kind of motivated moral "reasoning" that Haidt describes.
THAT'S why I mentioned his experiments. I've seen this same pattern hundreds of times in the conversations I and others have had on this topic.
And on that note, no, actually, the point Haidt makes in his book is that moral reasoning, as most people think about it doesn't exist. We don't reason our way to moral conclusions, we arrive at our moral conclusions first through emotion and work backwards, often using extremely flimsy reasoning to do so.The title of my article refers to that problem, as does the article.
Many people on both sides aren't engaging with this conflict in a reasoned way, they aren't interested in evidence or facts, they've already made up their minds about how they feel. So now, even as the illegality of Israel's response becomes more and more clear, people just make up increasingly flimsy justifications for their pre-existing position. Or calls anyone who presents uncomfortable facts an "antisemite."
Lastly, as you say "might makes right: isn't a moral position at all. In fact, it is completely devoid of morality.
Taking this concept seriously, the Hamas fighters who killed innocent people on October 7th were "right" to do so because they had the "might" to do so. And now, Israel is "right" to kill as many people in Gaza as it has the "might" to kill. And if Hamas were mightier, well, then THEY would be "right" to destroy Israel, because whoever has the might to do something is right, isn't that so?
This is just so vacuous that I don't know what to say to it.
The point of the "Righteous Mind" is that there is no "wrong".
What is moral is dependent on many things.
Morality in the united states use to be tied to Protestant Christian perspectives. That has deteriorated. Ergo why the country is now the divided states versus the united states.
Many Protestant Christians believe that Israel has a right to exist including annexing all of the West Bank. They believe the Islam religion is immoral and especially Hamas take on it.
Your need to define what is morally right in Israel and claim I'm wrong is an absolute is an example of what Haidt's point it. You flamed at me. That is you acting out your righteous position.
If you really read the righteous mind, you would acknowledge that. I gave my copy of the book to the Christian organization that was working with same sex attraction so they would understand that their position is just one view of morality.
anywhere where Islam is the official religion, you are taught hate. Many ordinary Muslims don't like it, but no one can avoid it. I judge the Gazans by the actions of their men on 7th October. My father judged the Germans by the actions of their men in the German military and SS. He loaded the bombs onto the Lancaster planes that bombed German cities in WW2, , because the consequences of murderous fascists were that the citizens who had taught their Nazi children that they were entitled to destroy other human beings were rightly visited on those Germans, at home. Which Gazans are the innocent bystanders? The ones who cheered the mutilated body of a young woman? The ones who hold starving hostages? The ones who colluded in the murder of hostage children? You see the Arabs as some kind of children, or victims of some persecution who can therefore do what they like and we should go "it's just resistance". I see them as responsible human beings who choose evil over peace, over and over again.
"You see the Arabs as some kind of children, or victims of some persecution who can therefore do what they like and we should go "it's just resistance". I see them as responsible human beings who choose evil over peace, over and over again."
No, I don't see Palestinians as children. I hold them entirely responsible for their actions. That video of them cheering over the twisted body of Shani Louk is burned into my memory. It was absolutely monstrous.
But a) no sane person can use their feelings about the actions of those ~50 men to justify the ofetn far more brutal killing of 60,000 men, women and children, and b) even those ~50 men, disgusting as they are, don't deserve to be killed for cheering the death of someone they see as their enemy.
I have seen countless videos and reports of the most horrific crimes committed by Israelis both before and after October 7th, in Gaza and in the West Bank, by both soldiers and settlers.
I don't judge Israelis in general, and certainly not Jews in general, by these acts. I don't call for the deaths of the people in Israel who celebrate and condone these acts. The people in Israel who stormed a jail to demand the release of a soldier who raped a Palestinian prisoner. Is this not also disgusting? Do you think tens of thousands of Israelis should die because people like these exist in Israel?
So the difference between our views appears to be that I don't condemn millions of people by the most horrific acts of the people who live among them. And I'm consistent about that, whether they're Israelis or Palestinians.
encourage them to see Jews as the enemy of Allah and Muslims. You can't spend two minutes in a Muslim country (I have been to several, both in the Middle East and in Asia) without coming across official Jew-hate in media, political parties, and casual conversation. If you grow up in Gaza, or Turkey, or Malaysia, or Tunisia, or anuw
"You can't spend two minutes in a Muslim country (I have been to several, both in the Middle East and in Asia) without coming across official Jew-hate in media, political parties, and casual conversation."
I've been to several Muslim countries too. Turkey, Morocco, UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Malaysia, and I can't say I noticed any "official Hew-hate." But sure, I'm not Jewish, so maybe I'm not well attuned.
I will say, though, that any Muslim coming to the West could say the same thing. The absolute normalisation of anti-Muslim sentiment here, in everything from movies to politics to conversations about immigration, say, is far worse and more normalised. So I'm not sure this carries much weight as an argument about the intolerance of Muslim countries.
And, of course, the degree of "Muslim-hate" in Israel (and "Christian-hate" in Jerusalem), where I've also been, is almost cartoonish. Far more severe and shameless than anything I've seen ANYWHERE else.
I, as an atheist, think religious discrimination is bad whether it's directed against Jews or Muslims or Christians. Do you?
I'm an atheist from a Christian family, with a knowledge of and fondness for Muslim day to day culture, based on living with many Muslim neighbours in the UK and my travels in Muslim countries. I like the Muslim focus on family, their generosity to strangers, and their community spirit. I'm not fearful of Islam as practiced by ordinary people. That's probably why I have been able to have such candid conversations with Muslims about Jews and Israel. Muslims are deeply antisemitic, in a way that for them is just obvious because of what they grow up with - and that has little to do with the existence of Israel or the Palestinians. Many Muslims, like Christians, have detailed religious justifications for loathing Jews, and have discriminated against and actively harmed Jews in Muslim territories whenever Muslims have been in power. Add in Arab nationalism (the one apparently acceptable ethno-nationism of the Middle East, even though the Jews and Christians of the Middle East were there well before Islam converted the masses, through conquest and persuasion) and add the 20th century modern religious fundamentalism of the Sunni and the Shia branches of Islam, and you have a racist supremicist ideology, so that Islamic leaders were hosted by Hitler It is considered an insult to all Muslims (even the non-Arabs) for Jews to have a homeland on what was, at one time, Muslim land. What is happening to other religious and racial minorities where the Islamic fundamentalists take control (the Yazadis, the Druze, the Christians both in the Middle East and now in Africa) is what drives the determination to eradicate Israel - they are all contaminating the lands of Islam. All this understanding I have from Muslims themselves, who are very happy to explain the religious and political justification for the endless war on Israel. Quite a few Muslims just make the "right" noises and would rather have nothing to do with the politics of the Islamists and nationalists. I assume the two million Israel citizens who are Arab are not obsessed with destroying the Jewish nation they live in.
Millions of people were made refugees, or made to become citizens of new countries, in the last 150 years. Modern Turkey decided to expel their countrymen the Pontic Greeks, who had lived in Turkey for generations, and also to genocide the Armenians. The Czech Republic came into being and made hundreds of thousands of Czechs of German origin stateless. For me the most notable hypocrisy is Pakistan, a state created to be based on one state-sanctioned religion, that came about through the massacre and ethnic cleansing of Non-Muslims then living inside the new borders, creating a a Nakba for millions of Hindus and Sikhs, who lost their homes and lands.
None of these people, who suffered enormously from the creation of new countries that excluded them, are still refugees, none are held captive by an ideology that teaches them both hatred and that they can and should return to their grandparents' lost land and that they can drive out or kill the people who now live in the land they once lived in. Only the Palestinians, a "people" created to further Arab nationalism, religious fascism, and the Cold War aims of the Soviet Union, are treated as special victims. You seem to treat them as special, perhaps because you don't know the history, perhaps because you don't think Jews are as entitled to their lawfully created homeland, as the Turks or the Pakistanis are?
I still support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. I totally support, as a moral right, Israel's defence of its people and the destruction of the Hamas regime.
I'm wondering what mental gymnastics you're performing to allow you to make this statement:
"I'm an atheist from a Christian family, with a knowledge of and fondness for Muslim day to day culture, based on living with many Muslim neighbours in the UK and my travels in Muslim countries. I like the Muslim focus on family, their generosity to strangers, and their community spirit."
After making this statement:
"the Hamas men and women of Gaza, and their Arab and Western supporters, don't share any of your morality or empathy. They support the religious and political ideology that is Arab Muslim supremacy. The Gazans will continue to kill, and raise their children to kill, any Israeli, child or adult - unless the Hamas regime is permanently disarmed and broken."
Which is it? It can't be both. How can you respect a culture that has a focus on family, generosity of spirit and community spirit, while also claiming that they have no morality or empathy? How can you say they raise their children to kill when 99.7% of Gazans didn't harm a hair on an Israeli's head on October 7th?
And you're obviously not only talking about the Hamas fighters who carried out October 7th, because there are no Hamas women. So again, as you yourself said, you are judging ~2 million Gazans by the actions of ~2,900 men on 7th October. This is genuinely insane to my mind.
You are rightly condemning a horrific attack against innocent people while shrugging your shoulders as something far more horrific, both in scale and scope, is visited on a different group of innocent people.
I don't think any sane person has a problem with destroying Hamas. Do you think Israel and its actions over the years have anything to do with the rise of extremism? How do you feel about the West Bank, where Hamas don't operate being subject to land grabs and military raids that have killed over 1000 people, none of them combatants?
You know, lots of British people enjoyed the company of individual Germans and greatly admired German culture, throughout the first decades of the 20th century. Our societies had a lot in common. And then those "civilised" Germans willingly chose barbarity, adopted race supremacy and aggressive nationalism, and organised the greatest genocide and the most destructive war on other nations, in order to make Europe into their kingdom - with the Jews exterminated and the rest of us as serfs. And I'm proud to say, we stopped them, although we needed to destroy whole cities to defeat Hitler. War is horrible, even when necessary.
So I admire Muslim 'day to day' culture - I'm not one of those anxious (or racist) people that think all Muslims are essentially alien and hostile to Western culture - and yet I despise the Arab and Iranian religious extremism and race supremacy, that will not, for religious and nationalist reasons, abide the existence of any Jew in what is the historic Jewish homeland. I can indeed despise the teachings of Islam, in all Muslim countries, regarding the Jews, while respecting the way decent Muslims approach family-life and society. I have experienced great kindness from Muslim neighbours and consider them friends who I would help when I could. But if they were funding or organising terrorism I wouldn't hesitate to side with those who would arrest them. I won't try to "understand" the supposed political or religious grievances that, for example, led some individual British Muslim to blow himself up, killing many kids at a concert, or who ran over and stabbed to death fellow Londoners.
As far as I am concerned, the women of Gaza are not passive bystanders, they voted for Hamas and support the jihadi ideology. They don't get to say "nothing to do with me" after their sons and husbands went off burning families alive and calling them back home to celebrate. Note that not one Gazan has saved a hostage from death, or freed one. The people of Gaza have raised their children to be pitiless killers, as we saw. Their schools teach that the greatest goal for a Muslim is to wipe out Jews (it's not "Israelis" in the Arabic). The entire society has spent 20 years using aid money to build tunnels for weapons, firing rockets into civilian areas, committing acts of terror against any Israeli they can get at - and then rewarding the terrorist's family with cash. Finally, in October 2023, with great joy, they celebrated a successful local genocide that was only limited by the availability of sufficient Gazans in place to do the Jew- killing, and by time - how many families in how many places would have been murdered, if Gazans could have roamed freely across more Israeli villages, for a few days?
And how was that behaviour different from the actions of the Germans in the SS, who were simply acting out the sickness of an entire German nation that chose Nazi ideology, and that sent their men into Jewish homes to murder every adult and child? So no, you don't set out to massacre civilian Germans, or Gazans, you do try to move women and children out of the way of the armed men, in civilian clothes, holding your people hostages. But you are clear-eyed about the reality of a military campaign where the civilian population are very much supporting your armed enemy. If you are facing a whole society that has just proved it really does want you all dead, your elderly and children, disabled and not, if you are fighting a regime that deliberately hides all their soldiers in civilian clothes and uses civilian facilities for military purposes - and that has also taken hundreds of your people as hostages, murdering many - you fight, and you keep fighting until that regime is defeated. That's a moral choice I support.
The people of Gaza are indeed suffering horribly as a result of choices that their popular leaders made, and as a result of their own actions. Of course, Hamas officials could surrender right now, and stop the war, but as they keep telling us, the people of Gaza would rather die, rather than lose their war against Israel.
You and I see the world and morality very differently. We won't persuade each other.
"And I'm proud to say, we stopped them, although we needed to destroy whole cities to defeat Hitler. War is horrible, even when necessary."
First, this is untrue. If by "destroying whole cities" you mean Dresden, it is widely acknowledged that firebombing Dresden WASN'T necessary. It was an awful war crime that didn't aid the war effort, served as Nazi atrocity propaganda, and severely undermined the morale of the Allied soldiers involved. You can still see interviews with British veterans today talking about how they're haunted by it (https://youtu.be/8aUqi9CWTwg?si=kbTPvQuDSVoKcs5Y).
Why is it that some people find this so hard to understand? You can fight a war, you can even be on the "right side" of a war, and still do the wrong thing.
Secondly, defeating Hitler had very little, if not nothing, to do with saving the Jews from extermination. Antisemitism was rife in Europe, including in Britain, so a solution that got the Jews out of there was broadly popular. That's one reason why the Balfour Declaration exists, and why the European nations shamefully refused to take in enough Jewish refugees at the Evian conference to save them.
If Hitler had satisfied himself with Austria and Czechoslovakia and killing/ethnically cleansing Jews in Germany, Britain and the rest of the world would have been exactly as morally cowardly as they're now being about Gaza. And I'm sure lots of people who definitely weren't racist or antisemitic would have shrugged their shoulders and bought into the Nazi propaganda about them.
Lastly, the women in literally any country aren't passive bystanders. Women weren't passive bystanders in Britain in WWII. The children grew up to be soldiers and, indeed, as soon as they were able, often helped out in limited ways in the war effort.
So, no problem killing women and children in war? Is that the position? I'm just trying to be clear about where our morality differs.
As I said above, our morality differs because mine is consistent. I am willing to condemn the same crimes, whether they are committed by Hamas or Israel, equally, because I don't collectivise people and condemn them, even women and children, for the worst actions of the people in their group, and because I refuse to ignore the historical context of the conflict where Hamas literally and philosoophicaly couldn't have existed without the financial support and the ongoing oppression of the Israeli government.
I have Muslim neighbours, co-workers, and friends. They aren't trained up in our schools and mosques to kill Jews, but they are all antisemitic because of their religion, although many would rather ignore the teachings that
I think that people are more concerned with being called anti-semetic or pro-Hamas than they are about morality.
It's absolutely infuriating to note that many of the reality-denying insanities we've seen over the past few years, "men can become women," "everything is white supremacy," "Israel has spent 22 months killing 60,000 people and destroying 90% of civilian homes to free the hostages," have been enabled almost entirely by the fear that pointing out the obvious falsity of these statements would mean being called names.
For the first 1/3 of your article, I thought I was reading a thoughtful analysis on moral reasoning. And then I read the question (posed as if it were factual) about someone flying halfway around the world to steal someone’s home and it became instantly clear that the bait & switch was on.
Rather than applying moral reasoning to actual facts, we were going to be subjected to a series of historically inaccurate propaganda statements that, if true, would lead to obvious conclusions any 5 year old would reach. The unsuspecting reader would feel an artificial sense of pride that they reached the correct moral conclusion, and if they were truly a useful idiot they’d never even question all the false premises that tee’d up these softballs.
I wonder how many readers will be fooled by this sophomoric sleight of hand.
"And then I read the question (posed as if it were factual) about someone flying halfway around the world to steal someone’s home and it became instantly clear that the bait & switch was on"
I must admit, it is extremely frustrating to have to continually point out to readers who don't like what I've written that the text of almost every claim I ever make is a link to evidence.
In this case, the text "steals a woman's home" is a link to a video of a man from Long Island openly admitting that he is stealing a Palestinian woman's home. They are arguing about it in her back garden. He later explains to the reporter, in the same video, that he is doing this to secure a Jewish presence in the neighbourhood in the event of a future peace deal, which is the main point of all the illegal settlements.
So yes, I present the story as factual because it is factual. No bait & switch, no sleight of hand, simply facts that you appear not to like. Can we engage with the morality of those facts now?
Oh please… that’s not what you’re doing and we both know it. You’re cherry picking the most inflammatory snippets you can find (with zero context or counterpoints) in a transparent effort to spoon feed your audience the conclusion you wish them to reach - that Israel is evil.
You state lies as facts (e.g., starvation in Gaza) or anomalous incidents as if they are policy (e.g., 700,000 dispossessing innocent people).
You’re a pro-Hamas propagandist masquerading as a reasonable guy.
"You’re a pro-Hamas propagandist masquerading as a reasonable guy."
It is an oddly bittersweet form of validation to write about a problem and then have someone come barrelling into my comments to give us all a live demonstration.
You don’t even know what Israel is doing, but you already know that it isn’t wrong. So now you’re trying to “reason” your way to that conclusion by calling me a "pro-Hamas propagandist" in the comments of an article where I offer not a single word of support for Hamas and, indeed, criticise them and their atrocities.
For the record, it is not pro-Hamas to want Israel to stop killing tens of thousands of babies in Gaza through starvation and bombing and sniper fire. I genuinely thought this piece of moral calculus would be too simple for anybody to struggle with.
But as you are ably demonstrating, it is impossible to "spoon feed" someone to a conclusion that they are determined not to even consider. It is impossible to make them look at facts when they can't summon the courage to even click on a link and see the evidence for themselves.
My job is to explain how I’ve reached certain conclusions as clearly as I can, to provide the evidence that has led me to those conclusions, and then (and you aren't the first and won't be the last to do this) get yelled at by people who don't like the truth.
But hey, masterful job on avoiding confronting the morality of the acts I've described here, though. I guess that's the ultimate point of this whole performance.
First of all, you have it exactly backwards. What I actually did was lay out precisely what you’re doing and only then did I reach the inevitable conclusion that you’re pro-Hamas (your criticism of their atrocities is just lip service and cover).
Everything you say is just regurgitated Hamas propaganda - e.g., “killing tens of thousands of babies” (wrong - best estimates are around 44K deaths, with ~half being Hamas fighters. That’s an historic low combatant-to-civilian ratio of ~1:1). FYI - Hamas actively recruits boys as young as 13 (sometimes even younger since the war started) and then the Gaza Health Ministry (aka Hamas) reports their deaths as “innocent children” which you and many other western useful idiots just regurgitate as fact.
Then you mention “starving” something Hamas has been spewing for over a year. And yet we’ve seen no evidence of this, and mountains of counter-evidence (pictures) of healthy and often fat Gazans. It’s worth noting that when the NYT regurgitated this lie recently on their front page, they used a fake picture to do it. If there is mass starvation in Gaza, why use a fake picture? [insert obvious answer here]
So yes, you’ve done a “great job” (unintentionally) explaining how you reached your conclusions. I’m just helping your audience see that it is either 1) through painfully selective cherry picking, or 2) just straight up regurgitating Hamas propaganda as if it were facts.
"What I actually did was lay out precisely what you’re doing "
Man, please be serious. You didn't even realise that the factual story I wrote, with video evidence of the man in question explaining exactly the facts I described, was factual.
I have never, in my entire history of writing about this conflict, said a word in defence of Hamas. My first article on the topic was a full-throated condemnation of Hamas and terrorism. I've written several of them. Again, this "pro-Hamas" canard is nothing more than an attempt at monstering so that you can cling to your emotional position and avoid engaging with the facts.
The latest casualty figures (again, I included a link to the sources in the article, but here it is again - https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reported-impact-snapshot-gaza-strip-30-july-2025) are that over 17,000 children have been killed and at least 60,138 people. No idea where you're getting 44,000 from. I strongly suspect you won't provide any evidence for that figure, nor for the claim that half of them are terrorists.
Israel categorises children throwing stones at watchtowers as "Hamas fighters" I could provide you with dozens of reports of children being imprisoned for the most minor of offences or no offences at all, and labelled terrorists. But no amount of evidence of Israel's wrongdoing is ever enough.
But of course, if Israel tells you that these little children are all bloodthirsty maniacs, and this allows you to "reason" your way to justifying their murder, that's all it takes. As I say in the article, if you're shameless enough, you can just tell yourself all the children in Gaza are Hamas. You don't have or need evidence when Israel says something, just having the excuse to justify their murder is enough.
The NYT didn't post a fake picture, they posted a real picture of an emaciated child in Gaza, but didn't mention at the time (they've since updated) that he also had pre-existing conditions that affected his brain and muscle development. This doesn't change the fact that he is malnourished, it doesn't change the suffering he's enduring, but it's important context that was missing from the original piece. There are scores of other images of starvation in Gaza. You just don't want to acknowledge them.
Finally, as to starvation, even Donald Trump has acknowledged the starvation in Gaza (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AQxuVzwmFG0). Smotritch acknowledged publicly that Israel had been forced to let in a "minimal amount of aid" because the images of starving children were making it difficult for the West to continue supporting Israel's "war."
God, all this information is just so easy to come by. It's such a waste of my time constantly having to dig it up for people who aren't interested in facts anyway. The problem is simply that you don't want to know the truth. All you're after is whatever scraps you can find to justify your position. Again, it's not reasoning in search of truth, it's reasoning in search of justifications for your emotional responses. Only your emotional response is that the murder of tens of thousands of innocent people is fine.
You seem pretty fuzzy on what constitutes evidence. Social media today is inundated with videos that have been edited, often to show a particular sound bite that serves a narrative when if we look at the entire video we often get prior context that totally changes our initial impressions. This agenda driven manipulation is so ubiquitous that really it’s hard to believe anyone paying attention isn’t well aware of this happening on all sides of the political spectrum.
So sorry, but I’m not going to debate a snippet video without context and/or seeing it in its entirety. But I will say that if a full context examination supports your narrative, i condemn it categorically. I am against land theft of any rightful owners. And I’m very familiar with this issue in general throughout the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East and am happy to discuss.
I’m curious what evidence i could provide that would convince you that mass starvation is not happening in Gaza. The “fake” picture i mentioned was deliberately used to promote this starvation narrative. Only when they were caught did media organizations admit that the boy’s condition had nothing to do with any lack of food in Gaza. Did you also know the picture was cropped to leave out his perfectly healthy (and well fed) brother standing off to the side?
Again, why use this picture if mass starvation is truly happening? We should have thousands of “real” pictures documenting this tragedy. Where are they?
Your last paragraph is just an exercise in projection - one of us is most definitely “reasoning in search of justifications for your emotional responses” and it ain’t me.
PS - I don’t use Smotritch as a source for anything. He’s a fairly despicable character and not in charge of making policy decisions.
After you read my first reply (and comment as you see fit) since you posted a link presuming to show an Israeli settler stealing someone’s house, perhaps your audience would benefit from a larger discussion about Judea and Samaria (i.e., the West Bank) and “ethnic cleansing” in general.
Given your anecdotal cherry picking meant to spoon feed your audience the conclusion you prefer, I won’t hold my breath that you have any interest in such a conversation, but I make the offer in good faith regardless.
"since you posted a link presuming to show an Israeli settler stealing someone’s house"
No, it's not a video "presuming" to show an Israeli settler stealing someone's house. It's a video that shows a settler happily, openly admitting that he is stealing someone's house. Watch the video. If you think I've been dishonest, please point out where. Otherwise, stop with this dishonest weasel words crap.
You have already shown yourself to be enormously dishonest in this brief interaction, and so incompetent at fact-finding that you couldn't even click on a link that was RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU to discover that a factual story was, in fact, factual, so I'm not sure why you think I'd waste my time on a wider conversation about anything with you or why you think I'd believe you were capable of "good faith."
But just to test the waters on your capacity for honesty, let's be clear about Israel's borders. Is the West Bank within Israel's borders or isn't it?
Yes or no.
I addressed the video issue in another comment above.
Your question about the Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) is curious. I’m happy to discuss it, but curious why you bring it up (since it has nothing to do with anything we’ve been discussing)?
Broadly speaking, the West Bank is not a sovereign state nor is it part of Israel proper. It is disputed “limbo” land according to international law - i.e., there are a number of interpretations of international law that render it complex and ambiguous.
I am glad you are a moral person. You can be appalled when individual soldiers commit war crimes and demand accountability, you can agonise over civilian suffering when an army has to fight a war in an urban area where soldiers hide behind civilians. You want to end the suffering. Good for you. But sadly, you don't want to acknowledge that the Hamas men and women of Gaza, and their Arab and Western supporters, don't share any of your morality or empathy. They support the religious and political ideology that is Arab Muslim supremacy. The Gazans will continue to kill, and raise their children to kill, any Israeli, child or adult - unless the Hamas regime is permanently disarmed and broken.
I'm an typical liberal Westerner. I supported every attempt to negotiate a lasting peace, and even marched for Palestinian statehood. Over the years I gradually despaired as the Arabs repeatedly rejected anything that wouldn't bring about the complete destruction of Israel; as they continued to wage war, through terrorism, on all Israelis, civilians or otherwise, and then begged our sympathy when Israel defended itself. The atrocities and massacre on 7th October 2023 were only the logical and perfect expression of what the people of Gaza, and the Arab world, genuinely wish for every single Jew in the Middle East. You should watch the joyous Arab reactions captured on TV and social media, from October 2023, to fully understand this horrible truth.
So I finally came to understand that, like the "innocent" citizens of Germany - who gloried in the war crimes of their Nazi regime, while countries were laid waste and millions of people were murdered because of their race - the ordinary civilians of Gaza (and their allies in the West and the Middle East) are not in fact moral people, as you or I understand morality. They will celebrate the killing of innocent families, not regret them, they will reward their soldiers for killing and raping civilians, not put them on trial, they will take, torture and starve innocent hostages. They believe that they are entitled to do anything they want, that everything is permitted, in order to win a Jew-free Middle East. For me the only moral thing to do, faced with these facts, is what Israel is attempting to do.
“But sadly, you don't want to acknowledge that the Hamas men and women of Gaza, and their Arab and Western supporters, don't share any of your morality or empathy. They support the religious and political ideology that is Arab Muslim supremacy.”
Okay, please help me understand this. I trust you’ll accept that this is a huge claim to make about the 2 million people living in Gaza, never mind the hundreds (thousands?) of millions of Muslims of living elsewhere.
So what’s the basis for your certainty that allows you to justify the murder of tens of thousands in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of millions?
If it’s the Quran, you’re out of luck. Sure, the Quran says some awful things, but so does the Talmud and the Torah and the Bible. I don’t judge every Jew or Christian on the basis of what’s in their holy books either (especially as pretty much no religious person can even manage to live up to the good stuff written in their books).
If it’s jihadism, again, there's a big problem. Yes, the Quran talks about Jihad, though not synonymously with violence, but Catholicism (and therefore Judaism), with honest, straightforward readings of the bible, can be used to justify genocide, slavery, and incest.
Christian nationalism has been responsible for several terror attacks and acts of extremism. As we all know, the Catholic Church has spent decades covering up a pedophilia scandal. But I’ve yet to meet anybody who claims or assumes all Christians support or practice these things.
Yet even though there are millions of Muslims living in peace around the world, even though Gaza is filled with painters and musicians and builders and fishermen, ordinary people living lives that are as ordinary as possible given the conditions Israel has spent decades imposing on them, you and many others seem endlessly comfortable condemning them all as extremists who deserve to die on the basis of the worst people who share their religion.
Maybe I’m hopelessly naive, maybe I haven’t been paying any attention, but I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to the level of evidence I’d need to accept this claim. Have you?
p.s. God, I’d even settle for evidence that any significant portion of the innocent people killed in Gaza were killed because Hamas were “hiding behind civilians” and not because Israel was deliberately targeting them. This all just sounds like uncritically accepted propaganda.
You mentioned good stuff and bad stuff in holy books. Here's a reference for the Bible, Quran & Book of Morman. Much of the Bible stuff (Old Testament) is from the Talmud and the Torah.
https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/
Adherents to the big three cherry pick "good stuff from mine", "bad stuff from theirs".
Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, the Torah is just the first five books of the Old Testament. So yes, lots of 1-1 similarities there. I often joke that the only way to believe that the Bible or any "holy book" is true and/or a functional moral guide is to have not read it.
I was responding to someone who said the dead chicken thing was immoral but that masturbation was not immoral. The chicken thing seems creepy, but since the chicken is dead and is the equivalent of a sex toy. The cooking and eating it is creepy too, but no one is hurt by it.
“ The cooking and eating it is creepy too, but no one is hurt by it.”
Yeah, exactly. Agreed.
How does the dead chicken thing differ from masturbation vis a vis the devaluation of men and women and sex teaching us tenderness and mutual respect? I’m not trying to be argumentative, but the differentiation makes no sense.
I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you saying that masturbation and having sex with and then eating a dead chicken are equivalent? I'd say most people would disagree.
I'm not saying the latter is morally wrong, I don't think morality comes into it, but I think it's more likely to promote a disgust response.
How ironic. This is sort of a dubious moral reasoning to use expired chickens and dogs to introduce your revulsion of Israel acting like the SS. But, to the point, the dog-eating scenario is wrong because the dog belongs to a family. Presumably a lie would be told that "I don't know what happened; he must have ran away." If it were my dog, I would want closure, which the dog-eaters withheld. How interesting that the dog in this scenario was not a stray.
Who cares about the flag? It is a question of law and not morality.
Chicken-stuffing enforces not only the devaluation of women and men out there in the world, but the devaluation of the stuffer. There are people in this world who claim that sex is solely to act on our most basic urges, but it is to teach us all the importance of tenderness and mutual respect. It is a bond, not a compulsion.
Last and certainly not least, the slaughter of Gazans and their wholesale devaluation is demonic.
Is masturbation immoral for, basically, the same reason?
Masturbation is not immoral. Unless you're writing of masturbatory "clever" ripostes.
How does masturbating not devaluate men and women the way the chicken scenario does? How does it teach us the importance of tenderness and mutual respect in ways that the chicken thing doesn’t. How is the chicken any different from any sex toy used for personal pleasure.
In war our guys are good guys, and their guys are bad guys without honest consideration for morality. An accusation of anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas is "you are choosing the people I call bad guys. That crap wouldn't pass muster in a high school debating class.
"In war our guys are good guys, and their guys are bad guys without honest consideration for morality"
Yeah, that's why we need leaders who will make sound moral decisions for the good of their soldiers and their citizens and hopefully, peace.
Soldiers, simply speaking, are weapons; they go where you point them and shoot who you tell them. We could have a long sidebar about the morality of this. But whatever, we've normalised the idea in armed conflict that soldiers are "just following orders."
That's why it's so important to scrutinise the people who are giving the orders.
In boot camp I was taught that if I thought an order was unlawful I could refuse to follow it, but I should be prepared to defend that decision at my court-martial.
I was not at My Lai when the massacre took place, but I believe that I would not have shot non-combatants.
So as a matter of neuance I will say that there is space for morality in the mind of a soldier unless you consider all war to be without moral justification.
“unless you consider all war to be without moral justification.”
No, I think the space for moral justification is fairly narrow, but it certainly exists. But I also think there aren’t many people who will stand by their principles when they stand to lose something. Heck, as many people are ably demonstrating, there aren’t even many people who will stop advocating for a genocide as the war crimes become undeniable.
I watched an interview recently with an IDF soldier who chose to go to jail rather than return to Gaza after what he saw happening there in his first tour. There are good, principled people in the world, I just wish there were more of them.
What a shame. I liked and trusted your writing. However, having seen the contortions you perform in an effort to vilify Israel (incredibly ironically using Haidt’s analysis), I question everything you’ve written before. I feel duped. You’re either not good at fact finding or an awful human being.
"However, having seen the contortions you perform in an effort to vilify Israel"
Yeah, that is a shame, I'm genuinely sorry you feel that way. From past experience, I feel like asking this is probably a waste of time, but could you point to the contortions I've performed? Is there anything I've written here that isn't true?
I'm the same person I've always been, writing with the same care, honesty and attention I've always written. It's actually incredibly disappointing to me to discover how many people in my audience will perform a complete 180 as soon as I write facts they don't like.
You referenced Haidt’s experiment but not the book the experiment resulted in. The book is “The Righteous Mind”.
The core conclusion of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" is that morality is a complex interplay of innate intuitions and cultural learning, not solely based on reason. It suggests that our moral judgments are often driven by gut feelings, and reasoning primarily serves to justify these pre-existing intuitions. The book also explores how different moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty) shape our perspectives, leading to political and cultural divides
Then you jump into somehow how Haidt’s experiments justify your perspective on what Israel is doing in Gaza.
You missed the whole idea of what his research concluded. It’s not surprising to me given the interactions I have had with you over the years.
"Then you jump into somehow how Haidt’s experiments justify your perspective on what Israel is doing in Gaza."
How did I do this? Could you point out anywhere where I suggested Haidt's experiments justified my perspectives?
Could you tell me what "the whole idea of Haidt's research" is and how you think I missed it in this article?
I have a copy of The Righteous Mind right here on my bookshelf. I can easily and will happily refer to any passages that you think contradict any of the points I've made here.
You approach pretty much every comment you write here from the assumption that I've "missed the point" and then scrabble together post hoc justifications, almost always thought and evidence-free. I often ask you specific questions about your critiques, like those I've asked above, and you either don't answer or change the subject because you realise you can't.
Our interactions, therefore, are usually me pointing out that you haven't invested any thought or research in what you say, and are operating on your emotional desire to prove me wrong.
I may well be wrong, of course. I'm just waiting for you to ever, ever demonstrate why you think so with something more persuasive than your initial emotional reaction.
I gave away my copy of the righteous mind to a religious organization that was promoting discussion around gay issues 20 years ago.
Maybe we should start with the secondary title of the book “Why good people are divided by politics and religion.”
The key word is the secondary title is good. Your position on Gaza and Israel implies that the correct moral perspective is that Israel is committing crimes. That implies that I who very much disagree with your view have an incorrect moral perspective.
When I discuss Israel and Gaza I avoid any moral judgement. I refer to a fact about humanity - might makes right. You don’t like it when I state that. I get it.
Let’s go with the title of your article “ Israel, Hamas, And The Illusion Of Moral Reasoning”
You are clearly stating that you have an insight into moral reasoning that is more correct. You’re welcome to believe that as Haidt’s experiments would predict. But your belief don’t hold any weight weight versus other “good people.” Let’s take mine as an example.
Haidt’s view is that morality is not an absolute. It’s a function of many factors. Good people can have conflicting moral perspectives.
As for me bringing up Haidt’s book. Your article led with me going there. What was your goal in siting Haidt’s experiments?
"The key word is the secondary title is good. Your position on Gaza and Israel implies that the correct moral perspective is that Israel is committing crimes. That implies that I who very much disagree with your view have an incorrect moral perspective."
This is a key part of the problem with our "interactions." You make such wildly incorrect, incredibly wonky assertions based on stories you've made up in your head, and then act as if the conclusions you've drawn from them are "obvious."
What possible relevance does the wording of the secondary title of a book that I don't mention AT ALL, anywhere in the article, have on how I'm judging people who disagree with me? Like, what?! Do you seriously think I was using the subtitle of a book I don't even refer to anywhere to cast some secret moral judgment on you?
And no, the objective facts are that Israel is committing crimes. This has nothing to do with "moral perspectives."
Deliberately starving civilians, especially in a territory you are militarily blockading and occupying, is a crime. Using civilians as human shields is a crime. Killing civilians at aid centres is a crime. The unnecessary destruction of civilian infrastructure is a crime. Collective punishment is a crime. Ethnic cleansing is a crime. Genocide is a crime. Raping prisoners is a crime. The settlements in the West Bank are all illegal under international law.
You will presumably deny that Israel is doing these things, but in addition to the fact that Israeli soldiers and politicians have confessed to most of these crimes, and that many of these crimes are extremely well documented, the growing consensus of experts disagrees with you even on the more subjective claims like genocide, as well as all objective evidence. People both inside and outside of Israel are coming to the unavoidable conclusion. The prime minister of Israel is under an arrest warrant for war crimes.
You are free to disagree with or deny all of these expert assessments and facts, of course. There are still people who insist the Holocaust wasn't a genocide or even that it didn't happen. But if your position is, as many people's is, that you don't care about the facts, that you KNOW Israel is right because you feel it, and then you're just going to hunt around for justifications for this view, then you're falling exactly into the kind of motivated moral "reasoning" that Haidt describes.
THAT'S why I mentioned his experiments. I've seen this same pattern hundreds of times in the conversations I and others have had on this topic.
And on that note, no, actually, the point Haidt makes in his book is that moral reasoning, as most people think about it doesn't exist. We don't reason our way to moral conclusions, we arrive at our moral conclusions first through emotion and work backwards, often using extremely flimsy reasoning to do so.The title of my article refers to that problem, as does the article.
Many people on both sides aren't engaging with this conflict in a reasoned way, they aren't interested in evidence or facts, they've already made up their minds about how they feel. So now, even as the illegality of Israel's response becomes more and more clear, people just make up increasingly flimsy justifications for their pre-existing position. Or calls anyone who presents uncomfortable facts an "antisemite."
Lastly, as you say "might makes right: isn't a moral position at all. In fact, it is completely devoid of morality.
Taking this concept seriously, the Hamas fighters who killed innocent people on October 7th were "right" to do so because they had the "might" to do so. And now, Israel is "right" to kill as many people in Gaza as it has the "might" to kill. And if Hamas were mightier, well, then THEY would be "right" to destroy Israel, because whoever has the might to do something is right, isn't that so?
This is just so vacuous that I don't know what to say to it.
Your whole rant is QED for my position.
Haha, sure man. When you realise you're wrong, simply claim victory.
The point of the "Righteous Mind" is that there is no "wrong".
What is moral is dependent on many things.
Morality in the united states use to be tied to Protestant Christian perspectives. That has deteriorated. Ergo why the country is now the divided states versus the united states.
Many Protestant Christians believe that Israel has a right to exist including annexing all of the West Bank. They believe the Islam religion is immoral and especially Hamas take on it.
Your need to define what is morally right in Israel and claim I'm wrong is an absolute is an example of what Haidt's point it. You flamed at me. That is you acting out your righteous position.
If you really read the righteous mind, you would acknowledge that. I gave my copy of the book to the Christian organization that was working with same sex attraction so they would understand that their position is just one view of morality.
anywhere where Islam is the official religion, you are taught hate. Many ordinary Muslims don't like it, but no one can avoid it. I judge the Gazans by the actions of their men on 7th October. My father judged the Germans by the actions of their men in the German military and SS. He loaded the bombs onto the Lancaster planes that bombed German cities in WW2, , because the consequences of murderous fascists were that the citizens who had taught their Nazi children that they were entitled to destroy other human beings were rightly visited on those Germans, at home. Which Gazans are the innocent bystanders? The ones who cheered the mutilated body of a young woman? The ones who hold starving hostages? The ones who colluded in the murder of hostage children? You see the Arabs as some kind of children, or victims of some persecution who can therefore do what they like and we should go "it's just resistance". I see them as responsible human beings who choose evil over peace, over and over again.
You are
"You see the Arabs as some kind of children, or victims of some persecution who can therefore do what they like and we should go "it's just resistance". I see them as responsible human beings who choose evil over peace, over and over again."
No, I don't see Palestinians as children. I hold them entirely responsible for their actions. That video of them cheering over the twisted body of Shani Louk is burned into my memory. It was absolutely monstrous.
But a) no sane person can use their feelings about the actions of those ~50 men to justify the ofetn far more brutal killing of 60,000 men, women and children, and b) even those ~50 men, disgusting as they are, don't deserve to be killed for cheering the death of someone they see as their enemy.
I have seen countless videos and reports of the most horrific crimes committed by Israelis both before and after October 7th, in Gaza and in the West Bank, by both soldiers and settlers.
I don't judge Israelis in general, and certainly not Jews in general, by these acts. I don't call for the deaths of the people in Israel who celebrate and condone these acts. The people in Israel who stormed a jail to demand the release of a soldier who raped a Palestinian prisoner. Is this not also disgusting? Do you think tens of thousands of Israelis should die because people like these exist in Israel?
So the difference between our views appears to be that I don't condemn millions of people by the most horrific acts of the people who live among them. And I'm consistent about that, whether they're Israelis or Palestinians.
encourage them to see Jews as the enemy of Allah and Muslims. You can't spend two minutes in a Muslim country (I have been to several, both in the Middle East and in Asia) without coming across official Jew-hate in media, political parties, and casual conversation. If you grow up in Gaza, or Turkey, or Malaysia, or Tunisia, or anuw
"You can't spend two minutes in a Muslim country (I have been to several, both in the Middle East and in Asia) without coming across official Jew-hate in media, political parties, and casual conversation."
I've been to several Muslim countries too. Turkey, Morocco, UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Malaysia, and I can't say I noticed any "official Hew-hate." But sure, I'm not Jewish, so maybe I'm not well attuned.
I will say, though, that any Muslim coming to the West could say the same thing. The absolute normalisation of anti-Muslim sentiment here, in everything from movies to politics to conversations about immigration, say, is far worse and more normalised. So I'm not sure this carries much weight as an argument about the intolerance of Muslim countries.
And, of course, the degree of "Muslim-hate" in Israel (and "Christian-hate" in Jerusalem), where I've also been, is almost cartoonish. Far more severe and shameless than anything I've seen ANYWHERE else.
I, as an atheist, think religious discrimination is bad whether it's directed against Jews or Muslims or Christians. Do you?
I'm an atheist from a Christian family, with a knowledge of and fondness for Muslim day to day culture, based on living with many Muslim neighbours in the UK and my travels in Muslim countries. I like the Muslim focus on family, their generosity to strangers, and their community spirit. I'm not fearful of Islam as practiced by ordinary people. That's probably why I have been able to have such candid conversations with Muslims about Jews and Israel. Muslims are deeply antisemitic, in a way that for them is just obvious because of what they grow up with - and that has little to do with the existence of Israel or the Palestinians. Many Muslims, like Christians, have detailed religious justifications for loathing Jews, and have discriminated against and actively harmed Jews in Muslim territories whenever Muslims have been in power. Add in Arab nationalism (the one apparently acceptable ethno-nationism of the Middle East, even though the Jews and Christians of the Middle East were there well before Islam converted the masses, through conquest and persuasion) and add the 20th century modern religious fundamentalism of the Sunni and the Shia branches of Islam, and you have a racist supremicist ideology, so that Islamic leaders were hosted by Hitler It is considered an insult to all Muslims (even the non-Arabs) for Jews to have a homeland on what was, at one time, Muslim land. What is happening to other religious and racial minorities where the Islamic fundamentalists take control (the Yazadis, the Druze, the Christians both in the Middle East and now in Africa) is what drives the determination to eradicate Israel - they are all contaminating the lands of Islam. All this understanding I have from Muslims themselves, who are very happy to explain the religious and political justification for the endless war on Israel. Quite a few Muslims just make the "right" noises and would rather have nothing to do with the politics of the Islamists and nationalists. I assume the two million Israel citizens who are Arab are not obsessed with destroying the Jewish nation they live in.
Millions of people were made refugees, or made to become citizens of new countries, in the last 150 years. Modern Turkey decided to expel their countrymen the Pontic Greeks, who had lived in Turkey for generations, and also to genocide the Armenians. The Czech Republic came into being and made hundreds of thousands of Czechs of German origin stateless. For me the most notable hypocrisy is Pakistan, a state created to be based on one state-sanctioned religion, that came about through the massacre and ethnic cleansing of Non-Muslims then living inside the new borders, creating a a Nakba for millions of Hindus and Sikhs, who lost their homes and lands.
None of these people, who suffered enormously from the creation of new countries that excluded them, are still refugees, none are held captive by an ideology that teaches them both hatred and that they can and should return to their grandparents' lost land and that they can drive out or kill the people who now live in the land they once lived in. Only the Palestinians, a "people" created to further Arab nationalism, religious fascism, and the Cold War aims of the Soviet Union, are treated as special victims. You seem to treat them as special, perhaps because you don't know the history, perhaps because you don't think Jews are as entitled to their lawfully created homeland, as the Turks or the Pakistanis are?
I still support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. I totally support, as a moral right, Israel's defence of its people and the destruction of the Hamas regime.
I'm wondering what mental gymnastics you're performing to allow you to make this statement:
"I'm an atheist from a Christian family, with a knowledge of and fondness for Muslim day to day culture, based on living with many Muslim neighbours in the UK and my travels in Muslim countries. I like the Muslim focus on family, their generosity to strangers, and their community spirit."
After making this statement:
"the Hamas men and women of Gaza, and their Arab and Western supporters, don't share any of your morality or empathy. They support the religious and political ideology that is Arab Muslim supremacy. The Gazans will continue to kill, and raise their children to kill, any Israeli, child or adult - unless the Hamas regime is permanently disarmed and broken."
Which is it? It can't be both. How can you respect a culture that has a focus on family, generosity of spirit and community spirit, while also claiming that they have no morality or empathy? How can you say they raise their children to kill when 99.7% of Gazans didn't harm a hair on an Israeli's head on October 7th?
And you're obviously not only talking about the Hamas fighters who carried out October 7th, because there are no Hamas women. So again, as you yourself said, you are judging ~2 million Gazans by the actions of ~2,900 men on 7th October. This is genuinely insane to my mind.
You are rightly condemning a horrific attack against innocent people while shrugging your shoulders as something far more horrific, both in scale and scope, is visited on a different group of innocent people.
I don't think any sane person has a problem with destroying Hamas. Do you think Israel and its actions over the years have anything to do with the rise of extremism? How do you feel about the West Bank, where Hamas don't operate being subject to land grabs and military raids that have killed over 1000 people, none of them combatants?
You know, lots of British people enjoyed the company of individual Germans and greatly admired German culture, throughout the first decades of the 20th century. Our societies had a lot in common. And then those "civilised" Germans willingly chose barbarity, adopted race supremacy and aggressive nationalism, and organised the greatest genocide and the most destructive war on other nations, in order to make Europe into their kingdom - with the Jews exterminated and the rest of us as serfs. And I'm proud to say, we stopped them, although we needed to destroy whole cities to defeat Hitler. War is horrible, even when necessary.
So I admire Muslim 'day to day' culture - I'm not one of those anxious (or racist) people that think all Muslims are essentially alien and hostile to Western culture - and yet I despise the Arab and Iranian religious extremism and race supremacy, that will not, for religious and nationalist reasons, abide the existence of any Jew in what is the historic Jewish homeland. I can indeed despise the teachings of Islam, in all Muslim countries, regarding the Jews, while respecting the way decent Muslims approach family-life and society. I have experienced great kindness from Muslim neighbours and consider them friends who I would help when I could. But if they were funding or organising terrorism I wouldn't hesitate to side with those who would arrest them. I won't try to "understand" the supposed political or religious grievances that, for example, led some individual British Muslim to blow himself up, killing many kids at a concert, or who ran over and stabbed to death fellow Londoners.
As far as I am concerned, the women of Gaza are not passive bystanders, they voted for Hamas and support the jihadi ideology. They don't get to say "nothing to do with me" after their sons and husbands went off burning families alive and calling them back home to celebrate. Note that not one Gazan has saved a hostage from death, or freed one. The people of Gaza have raised their children to be pitiless killers, as we saw. Their schools teach that the greatest goal for a Muslim is to wipe out Jews (it's not "Israelis" in the Arabic). The entire society has spent 20 years using aid money to build tunnels for weapons, firing rockets into civilian areas, committing acts of terror against any Israeli they can get at - and then rewarding the terrorist's family with cash. Finally, in October 2023, with great joy, they celebrated a successful local genocide that was only limited by the availability of sufficient Gazans in place to do the Jew- killing, and by time - how many families in how many places would have been murdered, if Gazans could have roamed freely across more Israeli villages, for a few days?
And how was that behaviour different from the actions of the Germans in the SS, who were simply acting out the sickness of an entire German nation that chose Nazi ideology, and that sent their men into Jewish homes to murder every adult and child? So no, you don't set out to massacre civilian Germans, or Gazans, you do try to move women and children out of the way of the armed men, in civilian clothes, holding your people hostages. But you are clear-eyed about the reality of a military campaign where the civilian population are very much supporting your armed enemy. If you are facing a whole society that has just proved it really does want you all dead, your elderly and children, disabled and not, if you are fighting a regime that deliberately hides all their soldiers in civilian clothes and uses civilian facilities for military purposes - and that has also taken hundreds of your people as hostages, murdering many - you fight, and you keep fighting until that regime is defeated. That's a moral choice I support.
The people of Gaza are indeed suffering horribly as a result of choices that their popular leaders made, and as a result of their own actions. Of course, Hamas officials could surrender right now, and stop the war, but as they keep telling us, the people of Gaza would rather die, rather than lose their war against Israel.
You and I see the world and morality very differently. We won't persuade each other.
"And I'm proud to say, we stopped them, although we needed to destroy whole cities to defeat Hitler. War is horrible, even when necessary."
First, this is untrue. If by "destroying whole cities" you mean Dresden, it is widely acknowledged that firebombing Dresden WASN'T necessary. It was an awful war crime that didn't aid the war effort, served as Nazi atrocity propaganda, and severely undermined the morale of the Allied soldiers involved. You can still see interviews with British veterans today talking about how they're haunted by it (https://youtu.be/8aUqi9CWTwg?si=kbTPvQuDSVoKcs5Y).
Why is it that some people find this so hard to understand? You can fight a war, you can even be on the "right side" of a war, and still do the wrong thing.
Secondly, defeating Hitler had very little, if not nothing, to do with saving the Jews from extermination. Antisemitism was rife in Europe, including in Britain, so a solution that got the Jews out of there was broadly popular. That's one reason why the Balfour Declaration exists, and why the European nations shamefully refused to take in enough Jewish refugees at the Evian conference to save them.
If Hitler had satisfied himself with Austria and Czechoslovakia and killing/ethnically cleansing Jews in Germany, Britain and the rest of the world would have been exactly as morally cowardly as they're now being about Gaza. And I'm sure lots of people who definitely weren't racist or antisemitic would have shrugged their shoulders and bought into the Nazi propaganda about them.
Lastly, the women in literally any country aren't passive bystanders. Women weren't passive bystanders in Britain in WWII. The children grew up to be soldiers and, indeed, as soon as they were able, often helped out in limited ways in the war effort.
So, no problem killing women and children in war? Is that the position? I'm just trying to be clear about where our morality differs.
As I said above, our morality differs because mine is consistent. I am willing to condemn the same crimes, whether they are committed by Hamas or Israel, equally, because I don't collectivise people and condemn them, even women and children, for the worst actions of the people in their group, and because I refuse to ignore the historical context of the conflict where Hamas literally and philosoophicaly couldn't have existed without the financial support and the ongoing oppression of the Israeli government.
I have Muslim neighbours, co-workers, and friends. They aren't trained up in our schools and mosques to kill Jews, but they are all antisemitic because of their religion, although many would rather ignore the teachings that
"but they are all antisemitic because of their religion, although many would rather ignore the teachings that"
Do you think it's fair to say that many Jews, especially in Israel, are Islamophobic?