In the well-known paper-company documentary, The Office, Dwight Schrute outlines an airtight defence against idiocy: Whenever I’m about to do something, I think, ‘Would an idiot do that?’ And if they would, I do not do that thing. But while this works well in everyday scenarios like deciding whether to put pineapple on a pizza or buy stock in Twitter, it’s not so helpful for untangling a highly polarised, 75-year-old (
“I believe it is better to die with dignity than to live in servitude and humiliation.”
There is no dignity to be found in something so dishonorable as rape, mutilation and murder of people have done nothing to you except exist, no matter how legitimate your grievance against the government they live under. It is cowardice.
"There is no dignity to be found in something so dishonorable as rape, mutilation and murder of people have done nothing to you"
1000% agree. I make this point to Khalid. If you want to "die with dignity," die. Especially if the alternative is murdering and raping innocent people. The idea that anything Hamas did was dignified or honourable is repulsive.
Hamas was likely trying to trigger Israel’s predictably savage response but by murdering, torturing, and raping innocents they harmed their cause.
Hamas should have attacked the settlers; getting those vile rabble before the cameras and focusing discussion on the theft of Palestinian land would have been much more rewarding.
They didn't just harm their cause, they completely invalidated it. Or, rather, they revealed it. Hamas' cause is to kill all the Jews and eradicate Israel. Neither of those things is gong to be allowed to happen. So while I think the theft of Palestinian land is a completely valid grievance, it's not Hamas' main grievance. And Hamas' actions have only emboldened Israel to steal even more land. It's happening right now in the West Bank with the support of the IDF.
"Hamas' cause is to kill all the Jews and eradicate Israel."
I don't place the significance on this preposterous claim that you do. It would be astonishing if they said anything less. As with Trump's claim of infanticide as abortion, it's intended to excite the listeners, but only a fool believes its true.
People who have buried their children, dead from IDS bullets, or crushed in the rubble of bombed buildings, aren't going to be satisfied hearing anything less.
Sure, the rhetoric gives an easy out to those who see validation in mouthing that "right to exist" garbage, but Hamas isn't going to get any support from them anyway. Their audiences want to hear maximally exteme stuff.
They're not going to destroy Israel, even without the USA bending to every Israeli breeze.
The alternative to attacking Israel is to be overrun and exterminated. And Israel's "mad dog" response to the butchery of 1200 or so has exposed Israel to the world, you won't see much #IStandWithIsrael on social media anymore.
But the savagery of Hamas' attack strengthened the "right to exist" mob (sorry, that absurd phrase annoys the hell out of me).
If Hamas had leveled a few of the settlements then the reaction would have been quite different. For one, the theft of their land is a legitimate Palestinian grievance that not enough people know about. Second, the settlers are repellent and vile people and getting them on camera would do Israel absolutely zero good. Third, the ensuing news-noise would have been about settlements and cruelty, not about raped and tortured women.
It was dumb to attack Israel instead of the settlers.
I mean, Hamas' actions on October 7th lend a degree of credibility to this, no? And interestingly enough, Israel's response has a shocking number of defenders. Even now, with ~17,000 Palestinians dead.
Attacking the settlements (without slaughtering and raping the settlers) would certainly have been more legitimate and would have, as you say, drawn attention to an issue not nearly enough people know about. Funnelling their billions of dollars into Gaza and helping the Palestinian people would have been even better.
But Hamas chose what they chose because it's the best route to what I still believe is they central aim. They might well also have been hoping for the reputational damage that would come from Israel's response. But this also reveals their disdain for the Palestinian people.
I hope you don't think I'm defending Hamas. I think their attack was stupid, atop everything else that was bad about it.
Agreed they don't care much for the Palestinians. They knew Israel would monstrously over-retaliate and pile the bodies up to the sky and did it anyway.
"without slaughtering and raping the settlers"
They could at least have not fired missiles as schools and hospitals, taken pains to spare children, and, yes, absolutely, refrained from rape. But there would have been "collateral damage," a term I hate as much as you do.
Khalid says "The fire of political Islam has been re-lit and being fanned with a vengeance by Israel itself. It only makes it stronger. Israel was a failed colonial settler experiment like all the previous colonial experiments its time too has come to an end."
Every time I see statements like this, I wonder how so many has forgotten that the Muslim empires were themselves colonial enterprises. I would argue that Mohammed himself would've been against these empires. The Quran specifically says that only defensive wars are justifiable, and I would argue that by most definitions he kept to this principle. It was only after he died that his successors jury-rigged an interpretation of the so-called sword passage to justify forcibly expanding their colonial empire. The only reason that Palestinians are Muslims today is that Muslims in what is today Saudi Arabia expanded their empire into the rest of the Middle East, then onto Africa and Asia. So the idea of Islamic Anti-Colonialism is rather Self Contradictory.
"So the idea of Islamic Anti-Colonialism is rather Self Contradictory."
Yep, absolutely. See also the often stated aim to spread sharia law all over the world. Just like the famously anti-colonial missionaries did. I've long since stopped looking for logical consistency in religious arguments. Or in ideological arguments of any sort.
Ideologues can't allow themselves to look at their actions or at history too closely. The hypocrisy is always too blinding.
I'm going to just cut and past a comment that I made on Medium that applies here:
With the advent of war with non-states, "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." became non-viable.
Before my trip to Vietnam, at Camp Pendelton we learned that "Luke the gook" was the enemy. Cognitive dissonance followed. Were the ARVN and ROK Marines in my proximity "gooks"? I asked a man in my platoon why the used the word when his face told me his Asian ancestry. He replied that it was easier to fit in. Years later the enemy was "Hajis" while serving with Muslims. The age-old dehumanization of the enemy became a recipe for failure.
Counterinsurgency is far more difficult than war against a state when you view it as such. I say it often enough that you may find it tiresome but good guys and bad guys become our guys and their guys when you are in the thick of it. That can lead to justification of the horrors of terrorists.
Are there bad guys? Hell yes, but with apologies to Syndrome of The Incredibles; If everyone is a bad guy, no one will be. How shall "the settlers" and Hamas be dehumanized without dehumanizing all Israelis and Palestinians?
[Clarification addition. Those of us who see the antagonists as properly being Hammas vs. Settlers and/or far-right Israeli government policy see it thru the lens of insurgency & counterinsurgency where non-combatants are not proper targets and to purposefully kill them (and other vile actions) is unarguably wrong. What we are seeing is more akin to war between states where all within Israeli or Palestinian territory are the enemy. The people taking sides often seem uncomfortably like the kill them all total war mob. I'm not a fan.]
You’re dealing with an Islamist - who will probably wonder why people like him get stomped in places such as Kashmir, Egypt, Xinjiang and yes, Gaza. Short answer: if you act like an asshole, people will treat you like one.
"It’s not worth your time to engage with anyone who doesn’t believe Israel has any right to exist"
I don't think the issue is a country's "right to exist." No country really has a "right" to exist. I think what a lot of people are struggling with, myself too if I'm honest, is the ostensible purpose of Israel. A "homeland" where rights and citizenship are preferentially granted by group identity/religion. The only such place in the world.
The idea of a country named Israel, located in that spot, is one thing. The idea that this is a god-given land and that Jews should have exclusive citizenship and civil rights there in perpetuity, is another. Especially given that both Arabs and Jews have long histories in that region.
Khalid and his nonsense aside, this is an aspect of Zionism that needs to be seriously and sincerely grappled with.
No, I wasn't familiar with this. But if I'm reading correctly, this is an outdated concept that is no longer practiced. Is that correct?
And no, I'm not objecting to Israel having a state religion. I don't think this is a necessity or a *right*--there's no Zoroastrian or pagan or atheist state, for example--but I have absolutely no objection to a country whose official religion is Judaism.
I'm questioning the idea that Jews, whether secular or orthodox, have a special right to citizenship and status in Israel that other people, especially Muslims, do not. This concept, as far as I'm aware, is unique to Israel. And if it's not, I'd question it in whatever other countries it applied to as well.
"My issue is that there is little-to-no discerning between Jewish and Israeli"
Agreed. This is a serious problem. Sadly, collectivism is at the root of all bigotry. In case it's not crystal clear, my criticisms of Israel are criticisms of the Israeli government's actions. Not of Jewish people, either in Israel or anywhere else in the world.
But the same is true of my criticisms of Palestine and especially of Hamas. I'm criticising those bodies, and not the Palestinians people or Muslims in general. There's a lack of differentiation here too in many cases.
Again, yes, I recognise the existence of Israel. But that isn't quite the same as recognising a "right" to exist. I'm not sure what that means in the context of a country. Is it about the name? The borders? The current government or cultural norms?
Israel *does* exist. And I have no stronger feelings about that than I have about the existence of any other country. But the question of its rights to additional territory in that region or the land theft that is taking place in what's left of Palestine is quite different. As is the question of God-given rights to a region.
As I've said many times before, there are bad, antisemitic reasons for some of the criticism Israeli faces. But there are also good, human-rights violating reasons.
"My issue is that there is little-to-no discerning between Jewish and Israeli. They are not the same thing, yet Jewish people everywhere are collectively blamed for what Israel does."
You can thank those people who shout "antisemitism!" at every criticism of the Israeli occupation. Israel is a country, and at least before 10/7 a majority of its citizens wanted a two-state solution, something the Israeli right wing (read: the settler movement) is dead against.
You can thank people like Alan Dershowitz with his Byazantine rules for criticism of Israel (shorter: you can't).
Israel is not going to stop stealing land. Palestinians are not going to just take it.
That is an intellectually disqualifying noise. “Right to exist” is logical nonsense and is used as a distraction. The land has changed hands dozens of times and any claim by Israel to what was recently Palestine is absurd, “Jews lived here thousands of years ago,” who cares?
The issue is not your absurdity, the issue is Israel’s ongoing theft of land, Israel’s wanton butchery of innocent people.
Israel should be occupied by the UN, the settlers removed from the territories.
For someone that writes, "let's Champion Objective Reality" you sure do spout a lot of BS. Jews have maintained a presence in the land throughout time. There were Jews and Arabs living there under the British mandate. During the Peel Commission and and later the British mandate Arabs and Jews were offered a partition with each having their own state. All offers then were met with rejection by the Arabs. All additional offers throughout the years have also been rejected by the Arabs. Gaza was left to its own devices in 2005, so much possibility to only end in violence.
“I believe it is better to die with dignity than to live in servitude and humiliation.”
There is no dignity to be found in something so dishonorable as rape, mutilation and murder of people have done nothing to you except exist, no matter how legitimate your grievance against the government they live under. It is cowardice.
"There is no dignity to be found in something so dishonorable as rape, mutilation and murder of people have done nothing to you"
1000% agree. I make this point to Khalid. If you want to "die with dignity," die. Especially if the alternative is murdering and raping innocent people. The idea that anything Hamas did was dignified or honourable is repulsive.
Hamas was likely trying to trigger Israel’s predictably savage response but by murdering, torturing, and raping innocents they harmed their cause.
Hamas should have attacked the settlers; getting those vile rabble before the cameras and focusing discussion on the theft of Palestinian land would have been much more rewarding.
"they harmed their cause"
They didn't just harm their cause, they completely invalidated it. Or, rather, they revealed it. Hamas' cause is to kill all the Jews and eradicate Israel. Neither of those things is gong to be allowed to happen. So while I think the theft of Palestinian land is a completely valid grievance, it's not Hamas' main grievance. And Hamas' actions have only emboldened Israel to steal even more land. It's happening right now in the West Bank with the support of the IDF.
"Hamas' cause is to kill all the Jews and eradicate Israel."
I don't place the significance on this preposterous claim that you do. It would be astonishing if they said anything less. As with Trump's claim of infanticide as abortion, it's intended to excite the listeners, but only a fool believes its true.
People who have buried their children, dead from IDS bullets, or crushed in the rubble of bombed buildings, aren't going to be satisfied hearing anything less.
Sure, the rhetoric gives an easy out to those who see validation in mouthing that "right to exist" garbage, but Hamas isn't going to get any support from them anyway. Their audiences want to hear maximally exteme stuff.
They're not going to destroy Israel, even without the USA bending to every Israeli breeze.
The alternative to attacking Israel is to be overrun and exterminated. And Israel's "mad dog" response to the butchery of 1200 or so has exposed Israel to the world, you won't see much #IStandWithIsrael on social media anymore.
But the savagery of Hamas' attack strengthened the "right to exist" mob (sorry, that absurd phrase annoys the hell out of me).
If Hamas had leveled a few of the settlements then the reaction would have been quite different. For one, the theft of their land is a legitimate Palestinian grievance that not enough people know about. Second, the settlers are repellent and vile people and getting them on camera would do Israel absolutely zero good. Third, the ensuing news-noise would have been about settlements and cruelty, not about raped and tortured women.
It was dumb to attack Israel instead of the settlers.
"but only a fool believes its true."
I mean, Hamas' actions on October 7th lend a degree of credibility to this, no? And interestingly enough, Israel's response has a shocking number of defenders. Even now, with ~17,000 Palestinians dead.
Attacking the settlements (without slaughtering and raping the settlers) would certainly have been more legitimate and would have, as you say, drawn attention to an issue not nearly enough people know about. Funnelling their billions of dollars into Gaza and helping the Palestinian people would have been even better.
But Hamas chose what they chose because it's the best route to what I still believe is they central aim. They might well also have been hoping for the reputational damage that would come from Israel's response. But this also reveals their disdain for the Palestinian people.
I hope you don't think I'm defending Hamas. I think their attack was stupid, atop everything else that was bad about it.
Agreed they don't care much for the Palestinians. They knew Israel would monstrously over-retaliate and pile the bodies up to the sky and did it anyway.
"without slaughtering and raping the settlers"
They could at least have not fired missiles as schools and hospitals, taken pains to spare children, and, yes, absolutely, refrained from rape. But there would have been "collateral damage," a term I hate as much as you do.
"I hope you don't think I'm defending Hamas."
Oh, no, of course not. I know you better than that.
Khalid says "The fire of political Islam has been re-lit and being fanned with a vengeance by Israel itself. It only makes it stronger. Israel was a failed colonial settler experiment like all the previous colonial experiments its time too has come to an end."
Every time I see statements like this, I wonder how so many has forgotten that the Muslim empires were themselves colonial enterprises. I would argue that Mohammed himself would've been against these empires. The Quran specifically says that only defensive wars are justifiable, and I would argue that by most definitions he kept to this principle. It was only after he died that his successors jury-rigged an interpretation of the so-called sword passage to justify forcibly expanding their colonial empire. The only reason that Palestinians are Muslims today is that Muslims in what is today Saudi Arabia expanded their empire into the rest of the Middle East, then onto Africa and Asia. So the idea of Islamic Anti-Colonialism is rather Self Contradictory.
"So the idea of Islamic Anti-Colonialism is rather Self Contradictory."
Yep, absolutely. See also the often stated aim to spread sharia law all over the world. Just like the famously anti-colonial missionaries did. I've long since stopped looking for logical consistency in religious arguments. Or in ideological arguments of any sort.
Ideologues can't allow themselves to look at their actions or at history too closely. The hypocrisy is always too blinding.
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/03/13/senior-muslim-clerics-issue-fatwa-against-hamas/
Wow! I'd love to see more of this. Not only the wider recognition of Hamas' mistreatment of Palestinians, but Muslims speaking out against extremism.
That was in March of this year. Do they say the same now?
Perfectly right on, imho. Thanks as always.
Thank you Steve for writing this.
I'm going to just cut and past a comment that I made on Medium that applies here:
With the advent of war with non-states, "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." became non-viable.
Before my trip to Vietnam, at Camp Pendelton we learned that "Luke the gook" was the enemy. Cognitive dissonance followed. Were the ARVN and ROK Marines in my proximity "gooks"? I asked a man in my platoon why the used the word when his face told me his Asian ancestry. He replied that it was easier to fit in. Years later the enemy was "Hajis" while serving with Muslims. The age-old dehumanization of the enemy became a recipe for failure.
Counterinsurgency is far more difficult than war against a state when you view it as such. I say it often enough that you may find it tiresome but good guys and bad guys become our guys and their guys when you are in the thick of it. That can lead to justification of the horrors of terrorists.
Are there bad guys? Hell yes, but with apologies to Syndrome of The Incredibles; If everyone is a bad guy, no one will be. How shall "the settlers" and Hamas be dehumanized without dehumanizing all Israelis and Palestinians?
[Clarification addition. Those of us who see the antagonists as properly being Hammas vs. Settlers and/or far-right Israeli government policy see it thru the lens of insurgency & counterinsurgency where non-combatants are not proper targets and to purposefully kill them (and other vile actions) is unarguably wrong. What we are seeing is more akin to war between states where all within Israeli or Palestinian territory are the enemy. The people taking sides often seem uncomfortably like the kill them all total war mob. I'm not a fan.]
You’re dealing with an Islamist - who will probably wonder why people like him get stomped in places such as Kashmir, Egypt, Xinjiang and yes, Gaza. Short answer: if you act like an asshole, people will treat you like one.
"It’s not worth your time to engage with anyone who doesn’t believe Israel has any right to exist"
I don't think the issue is a country's "right to exist." No country really has a "right" to exist. I think what a lot of people are struggling with, myself too if I'm honest, is the ostensible purpose of Israel. A "homeland" where rights and citizenship are preferentially granted by group identity/religion. The only such place in the world.
The idea of a country named Israel, located in that spot, is one thing. The idea that this is a god-given land and that Jews should have exclusive citizenship and civil rights there in perpetuity, is another. Especially given that both Arabs and Jews have long histories in that region.
Khalid and his nonsense aside, this is an aspect of Zionism that needs to be seriously and sincerely grappled with.
"Are you familiar with the term dhimmi/dhimmism?"
No, I wasn't familiar with this. But if I'm reading correctly, this is an outdated concept that is no longer practiced. Is that correct?
And no, I'm not objecting to Israel having a state religion. I don't think this is a necessity or a *right*--there's no Zoroastrian or pagan or atheist state, for example--but I have absolutely no objection to a country whose official religion is Judaism.
I'm questioning the idea that Jews, whether secular or orthodox, have a special right to citizenship and status in Israel that other people, especially Muslims, do not. This concept, as far as I'm aware, is unique to Israel. And if it's not, I'd question it in whatever other countries it applied to as well.
"Why does virtually every Muslim nation not recognize Israel"
Maybe it has something to do with that "Arabs are filthy animals" rhetoric.
"My issue is that there is little-to-no discerning between Jewish and Israeli"
Agreed. This is a serious problem. Sadly, collectivism is at the root of all bigotry. In case it's not crystal clear, my criticisms of Israel are criticisms of the Israeli government's actions. Not of Jewish people, either in Israel or anywhere else in the world.
But the same is true of my criticisms of Palestine and especially of Hamas. I'm criticising those bodies, and not the Palestinians people or Muslims in general. There's a lack of differentiation here too in many cases.
Again, yes, I recognise the existence of Israel. But that isn't quite the same as recognising a "right" to exist. I'm not sure what that means in the context of a country. Is it about the name? The borders? The current government or cultural norms?
Israel *does* exist. And I have no stronger feelings about that than I have about the existence of any other country. But the question of its rights to additional territory in that region or the land theft that is taking place in what's left of Palestine is quite different. As is the question of God-given rights to a region.
As I've said many times before, there are bad, antisemitic reasons for some of the criticism Israeli faces. But there are also good, human-rights violating reasons.
"My issue is that there is little-to-no discerning between Jewish and Israeli. They are not the same thing, yet Jewish people everywhere are collectively blamed for what Israel does."
You can thank those people who shout "antisemitism!" at every criticism of the Israeli occupation. Israel is a country, and at least before 10/7 a majority of its citizens wanted a two-state solution, something the Israeli right wing (read: the settler movement) is dead against.
You can thank people like Alan Dershowitz with his Byazantine rules for criticism of Israel (shorter: you can't).
Israel is not going to stop stealing land. Palestinians are not going to just take it.
That is an intellectually disqualifying noise. “Right to exist” is logical nonsense and is used as a distraction. The land has changed hands dozens of times and any claim by Israel to what was recently Palestine is absurd, “Jews lived here thousands of years ago,” who cares?
The issue is not your absurdity, the issue is Israel’s ongoing theft of land, Israel’s wanton butchery of innocent people.
Israel should be occupied by the UN, the settlers removed from the territories.
For someone that writes, "let's Champion Objective Reality" you sure do spout a lot of BS. Jews have maintained a presence in the land throughout time. There were Jews and Arabs living there under the British mandate. During the Peel Commission and and later the British mandate Arabs and Jews were offered a partition with each having their own state. All offers then were met with rejection by the Arabs. All additional offers throughout the years have also been rejected by the Arabs. Gaza was left to its own devices in 2005, so much possibility to only end in violence.
Absurd. If Mexico took 2/3 of Texas and offered the remainder, would that be regarded as a good deal?
Yes there were Jews in Palestine and they got along with Arabs.
Until 1948.
Yeah, Gaza was left to its own devices. Blockaded and isolated. And it was Netanyahu who put Hamas in charge of it.