This is Stupid. Don't be This.

 

There's simply no condemnation of Hamas that is not at the same time a condemnation of the Palestinian resistance. pic.twitter.com/FzZmsqUlQO

— Vijay Prashad (@vijayprashad) November 9, 2023

No, actually, you can condemn Hamas because they have not accomplished shit. If being a terrorist entity that lobs missiles all over the place, and most recently did a pogram and raped and mutilated Israeli and other people and went on to kidnap hostages and are the kinds of unstable fucks who don't care if literally tens of thousands of Palestinians die as a result because it's all GOOD PRESS, then actually, I would not call this shit "resistance" but "sociopathy."

If one was really interested in the cause of Palestinian liberation but didn't care if the people lived or died, I'd be skeptical. So let's talk stupid numbers: if the IDF has killed 10,000 people to get to 60 Hamas fighters (and they've killed more UN aides and journalists including their families) you probably see 500K Gazans dead before the government thought they were done routing out Hamas. MAYBE.

Don't ask what number of Gazan dead is OK for the Israel government: what is OK for the supposed liberators of Palestine? What the fuck are they doing? I condemn what is supposedly a "Palestinian resistance" because they aren't shit. They are not shit. The Palestinians dying all over the place? The way Hamas has fuel for rockets but not generators and all that? The way there is tunnels for terror, not to save lives? 

Heritage, Not Hate, You Guys

 

There were lovely peace marches today around the world only somewhat marred by counterprotests and, you know, antisemitic hate messages under the guise of liberation. I'm a simple human, so I have to ask you all: if you knew that for Israeli Jews, and for the founding statements of Hamas and as was actually dropped from the PLO platform back in the 1980s, that "from the river to the sea" actually was literally intended to mean "throw Jews into the sea because this is Arab land"--would you be shocked if many people interested in peace thought that slogan was uniquely unhelpful? Would you try to retcon it to mean something different? Can we make that statement more "All Lives Matter"-ish? 

Sure, it's got a rhyme and a good marching cadence, but would it be helpful? Would people chanting about "intifada" be helpful, or no? If it literally antagonized the people you want peace with who also have a fear of genocide? What does the chant "Palestine 48" mean to people? Why throw red paint like blood at the White House? 

See, I get that for people who have gotten deep into this conversation, anti-Zionism means a lot of different things, but Israel is as old as my dad. To me, 75 years old is old enough to have earned the right to be acknowledged. If Zionism is basically the thing where there is a Jewish state in the Middle East: here it is! There are people there! They have a government and guess what: the people know that what the Netanyahu government is doing is wrong and are protesting it. They want to acknowledge human rights and Palestinian dignity--not all Israelis are right-wing settler colonialists. Like, we can't at this point argue about Jews living there. They do. The alternative to that is a war crime. 

The Terror by Night

I think about the Bible sometimes. When the Internet was cut off in Gaza, and the electricity, I thought about the "terror by night"--the nameless and wordless horrors of the obscured, when the beasts come out after sundown, and you can barely make out the face of friend from foe. The thieves and knives come out at night. 

That terror is called "pachad". It is the terror for one's life. What is also to be feared? The arrow by day. 

That arrow pierces to the quick, because the target is seen. There is nothing done under cover of night that doesn't come out in the daylight.

I worry about people who want to use the Bible about this conflict. A lot of the ancient of days stuff is just outdated, and I don't think it's right that we hear a chant of "Khaybar, Khaybar" in pro-Palestine marches, or references to Simon of Trent. 

The Fabulous Mr. Whatshisname, Future MVP

 

If you want to know why House Squeaker Kevin McCarthy is sticking with serial fabulist and likely larcenist George Anthony Devolder Santos Zabrovski, I think we need to start with the shamelessness. You know, like the shamelessness of wearing a stolen scarf to a "Stop the Steal" rally. "They did to me as they did to Donald Trump" he said with a straight face (neither his not Trump's election had been stolen) in clothes he had stolen from someone else.

That level of shamelessness is a superpower. After all, when pressed on Santos' embellishments to his resume, McCarthy said "a lot of people here in the Senate and others" had done the same thing.  It might sound shocking to admit, "Hey, we're all pretty sketchy here", but his point is plain: wouldn't being a brazen liar only help?

Let's face it, by giving Santos his support, McCarthy hopes to get loyalty from Santos, so will perform for him just the way he performed for Baruch College, leading their volleyball team to the championship on two bad knees when he didn't even go there? (He seems to have stolen that story from one of his former bosses.)

That's moxie. 

George Whatshisname will be whatever McCarthy needs. He's already changing the party's diversity profile all by himself, you know, and will be a real influencer with conservative LGB(maybe)T folks. Just the way he's obviously influenced the Jewish community with his real-ish story about his ancestors that never happened. 

And let's talk experience. This is a man that already knows all about checks and balances. Like, if you steal checks, don't try to draw more on them than the account balances. He's really made an impression on NY local politicians--and it looks like he's made an even bigger one on local donors! (Click those last two lovely links--he's part of a very sleazy "only in the GOP" apparatus that doesn't blow the whistle on shady candidates and may even prefer them--and that treats its donors like an ATM with inauthentic repeat credit card drafts).

We all wait with baited breath to see what Santos does for his party next to reward McCarthy for his trust. Because trusting this guy seems to have gone so well for others!

Republicans Don't Care About Your Family

 

Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg had sharp words for the Republicans opposing a bill codifying the right to same-sex marriages, urging them to support the legislation's passage in the Senate after it won bipartisan House approval. https://t.co/mBKJi45Egb

— ABC News (@ABC) July 24, 2022

Republicans demonstrated with their vote in the House against supporting same-sex or interracial marriages that they don't care about all of our American families. After all, House Republicans also failed to support access to contraception.  They don't care if lack of access to abortion means that a pregnant person dies, or that pregnant people can't move freely across the country to access their right to bodily autonomy according to their own conscience. 

It has to be finally admitted--they don't care about your family. Republicans chatted quite comfortably with a gay man and then right afterwards told him his family did not matter to them. They don't care about his family, and his young children. They don't care about his parental rights and those of his spouse. 

They would not care about your family, that you made via IVF, because it offends the anti-abortion people. I want you to know that. 

If you are Jewish or gay, they would probably prefer you not adopt because you aren't the right sort of people to raise kids. Marjorie Taylor Greene considers adoptive parents "fake" and thinks they are a danger to children. 

Unintended Consequences

Although the Trump Administration is coloring an upcoming executive order that will redefine Judaism as a nationality rather than a religion as a means of combating anti-Semitism, I'm deeply skeptical. A nationality implies that all persons considered "Jewish" are of a particular nation--presumably Israel, but this doesn't take into account that American Jews are American, and hail from many different geographical areas. It isn't just a way of blurring out the identity of Jews as Americans, but it feels a little like a form of erasure of the diversity of the diaspora. 

Also, it is a mistake to associate disagreement with the policies of a nation, Israel, in the form of its current government, with a hatred for Jewish people--these things are quite different. Americans are not a monolith, and American Jews are not a monolith; there is diversity of opinion, which includes proponents of BDS regarding the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli territory. This move appears to conflate freedom of speech against policies with hate speech against people--it limits freedom of political speech and action in a way that is shocking for an administration that found there were good people on "both sides" of a conflict where one side chanted "Jews will not replace us." (And whose greatest apologists on Fox News often cite Soros conspiracy theories.)

It also perpetuates a trope about dual allegiance by Jewish people to their home country and their larger identity as Jews. There is nothing about this that will not have unintended consequences, but the Trump Administration being what it is, I struggle to understand which parts are the fully unintended ones.  Singling out people by nationality simply has a bad historical precedent. This administration has tried a Muslim ban and centered it on certain countries, and has detained people of many countries who seek immigration or asylum under heinous conditions. I don't like the looks of this lurch towards Nuremberg.

A Matter of Speaking

There have been two episodes of absolute communications-failure that have happened lately that I think expressed dangerous anti-Semitic tropes (whether inadvertently or not) and are truly regrettable, but should, I hope, teach something. (And not to the same degree.)

One of these things was when Turning Point's Candace Owens blathered about nationalism and felt she had to use Hitler and National Socialism as her example, which ignorantly resulted in her sort of forgetting that scapegoating a minority population and exterminating them was a large part of the nationalist domestic policy of Hitler's Germany. She let on that she felt the problem wasn't so much what Hitler wanted to do in his own country but just the way he exported it. A thing just isn't national if it goes "international" am I right? Which gave off the grim idea that she didn't find the "Vernichtung durch arbeit" (where "arbeit macht frei" means through death) entirely condemnable except when it was franchised, to, say Poland, or....

For a communications person repping Turning Point, she had a pretty serious communication problem if she only understood the nationalism she wanted to represent via the literal worst and most murderous example. She could have expressed nationalism in the actual immediate founding sense of Garibaldi for Italy or the unification of Germany under Bismarck, or even the Young Ireland movement. But no, she went to Hitler. This is how I know American children just don't learn world history--and it well should settle whether Turning Point speakers actually have anything to show a broader audience. (They do not. They do not know, in fact, actual shit. But they may have made more money at not knowing shit than I did at their age actually knowing shit with an entire liberal arts degree and doing retail work, so basically, I hate them body and soul. Except you could not have paid me to ever say the things they do even when I was living off dollar store beans in my 20s.)

The other thing was when recently sworn Congressperson Ilhan Omar made a Twitter commentary to the effect that the RW in this country is beholden to the "Benjamins" of pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC. Everything about the way she said this was flippant and a bit insensitive. I don't know that in essence, what she said was factually entirely wrong--AIPAC is a broadly influential political group--but expressing their influence solely in terms of money was wrong, and I would say the kind of abbreviated wrong that Twitter definitely lends itself to. 

The Massacre of Innocents

They never rose up. The dead of the Shoah will never rise again, and are remembered because their lives were disrupted by a great evil that cut off their existence. Their world was abruptly ended. They  at one time could not find livelihoods. They could not own property. They could live in some places--and then? They could not live at all. These people who were slowly erased from time, need to be understood as the victims of lies and propaganda that annihilated their humanity and then took their physical bodies. They were victims of lying. They were the victims of religious bigotry. Mike Pence, I believe, has a justification for why some humans should not live or be served by businesses for religious reasons. His pious claims are full of bullshit.

Zionism gave a homeland to other Jewish people--but it did not make the victims of the Shoah rise again. Nothing will. This is the wretchedness, the horror, of Vernichtung, the destruction or attempted destruction, the genocide, against the Jewish people enacted by the race-selective policies of the German nation. The dead rose from no ashes. They stayed as memories and were maybe remembered in the naming of babies, and as grainy photos, and in the stories of old people with tattoos on their arms and the dignity of remembered sorrow haunting their lives. 

The race and sexual-orientation biases of a very particular strain of conservatism remind us of how near we always are to the horrors that the Nazis promised. Pence is the wrong one to try and tell us #Neveragain when he himself is a reminder that discrimination is everywhere, and eliminationism is happening right now.