It’s OK to be indifferent to the lives of Palestinian civilians

I heard that people were walking out on Dave Chappelle’s comedy shows, and I was not surprised — he has a history of being offensive and expressing contempt for gay and trans people. But then I learned why they were walking out.

During his show at TD Garden on Thursday, Dave Chappelle spoke out about the Israel-Gaza conflict, which spurred a walkout by some of his audience members. According to The Wall Street Journal, the comedian first condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel before slamming Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the United States of “aiding the slaughter of innocent civilians.”

Chappelle’s comments were made after he said that he didn’t think students should lose job offers for being pro-Palestine. An audience member then demanded Chappelle to “shut up,” which elicited an emotional response from the comedian. Chappelle proceeded to bash the Israeli government for cutting off water and other essentials to Gaza and accused it of killing innocent people, according to those in attendance at the Boston show.

A few members of the crowd cheered and shouted “Free Palestine” in support of Chappelle, while others yelled, “What about Hamas,” the attendees said. Some individuals got up and left the show. At the end of his routine, Chappelle reportedly added that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” when speaking about Israeli policies and the Hamas attacks.

But wait, I marveled, I agree with Chappelle in this one case. I think that’s the only humane position to take, to both condemn Hamas and their terror attacks, and to condemn the state of Israel for their hateful history. This does not excuse his other views by any means, but he is not approving of Hamas’ cruelty; he is simply also not approving of Israel’s cruel policies.

Fortunately, I am not a comedian, so I’m safe from ‘cancellation’ (not that Chappelle is cancelled — members of an audience have always had the right to disagree with a comic.) And then I read that a prominent academic has lost his editor position for expecting sympathy for the Palestinian people.

Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of the prominent open access journal eLife and a longtime critic of traditional journals, says he is losing that job for publicly endorsing a satirical article that criticized people dying in Gaza for not condemning the recent attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas.

“I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians,” Eisen tweeted today.

The furor began on 13 October when Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, praised one of The Onion’s fake news stories on X, formerly Twitter. The story bore the headline “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.” Eisen said “The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university.”

Here’s the tweet that got him fired.

And the “offensive” tweet from The Onion.

And here’s a sampling of the responses.

I agree with Hector Rivera; they’re proving his point. Eisen was not approving of beheading babies, there was absolutely nothing heartless and callous said by Eisen. He was not expressing moral ambiguity, but moral clarity, by expecting that we’d have the same respect for all human life. I guess his big mistake was expecting that people would have some sympathy for all the civilians currently targeted for death by the Israeli military.

Hamas and Israel mark each day of war with new numbers measuring the accumulation of death and destruction. The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 5,000 Gaza residents have been killed so far, including 436 in the past 24 hours, primarily in the enclave’s south, where Israel has told more than 1 million Gazans to seek shelter from air raids in the north. The ministry’s figures, which could not be independently confirmed, are not broken down between civilians and militants.

Palestinian babies don’t count, I presume. I made a quick search of a few sites where the anti-“cancel culture” fanatics hang out, Bari Weiss, Heterodox “University”, Jerry Coyne, FIRE, etc. — ouch, that was painful, I normally avoid that crowd, with good reason — and surprise, surprise: they’re not raising a hullabaloo about the Eisen dismissal. They’re all about hating the right people, so I shouldn’t be surprised at all — hating Palestinians is a fine thing to do now, since, don’t you know, they’re all Hamas.

Look, see all the Hamas terrorists fleeing the righteous wrath of the holy IDF?

If you don’t agree they should all be shot or bombed, you should be ashamed and be fired.

Oh. So that’s why he was called “the Corsican Ogre”

I am coming off a four-day weekend, and I had decided I needed to get my mind off things, so my project was to read a book about a period of history I know very little about, a distraction from this period of history that is so thoroughly fucked up. I’ve missed out on the early 19th century, just a little gap in my education, so I picked up this free book via Kindle Unlimited, Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life, by Alan Schom.

As a book, it was OK: it tended to plod a bit, as it was a condensed biography that nevertheless tried to cram in as many details as it could, but I learned a fair bit. It didn’t take my mind off the current situation, though, because the early 19th century may have been even more fucked up than the early 21st.

I have a complaint, though. The author keeps telling me Napoleon is brilliant, a genius, a general impression I had from my pop culture understanding of the Great Man: that he was a great general. Reading what he actually did, though, it’s obvious he was a narcissistic psychopath who was a terrible general. He basically took the great wealth and manpower of France and threw it wastefully at grandiose campaigns that allowed him to loot entire nations, at the cost of great loss of life.

To give him his due, though, he was aggressive and would fight to the last man: he won battles because his opponents would hesitate and back off when they lost tens of thousands of men, while Napoleon would just hurl another corps into the fray, and afterwards, write back to Paris and order another levy of 80,000 men.

Often, that wasn’t enough. His Egyptian campaign was logistically incompetent and a total failure. Do I need to even mention his ill-fated Russian campaign?

That was a moment for me. I’m reading this book, I’d gotten up to 1811, and his Spanish adventure was floundering, the French people were rioting, Austria was mobilizing, and I suddenly realized that I did know a bit about Napoleonic history — wasn’t there going to be a huge catastrophe at the walls of Moscow in 1812? I heard a symphony about that. There was no real prelude to those events, one month he’s flailing about in his fracturing and fractious empire, and the next he’s marching off to frolic in the Russian winter wonderland. It was insane.

Also appalling: he lost, was banished to the island of Elba, and then…he came back, and the enthusiastic French people, whose young men he’d slaughtered in futile, fatal wars, elevated him again in patriotic fervor, and sent him off to Brussels with another army. The masses promoting a lying boob against their own self-interest is not a novel behavior, I guess. End result: 25,000 Frenchman rotting in a field near Waterloo.

What I learned is that the Great Leaders of nations can easily be greedy, self-serving monsters who will sacrifice the lives of their supporters for their own gain, and there will always be historians who look at the body count and conclude that they must be a genius. My cynicism has risen again.

But it’s not all negative news. I also learned how to deal with petty tyrants: banish them to a small island in the south Atlantic (far enough away that he’s not going to be able to row back), and give them a nice house and a small party of their sycophantic supporters and let them cheat at cards (Napoleon was notorious for cheating disgracefully at games of chance, which says a lot about his character) together. Give them five years to grate on each other’s nerves, and also, for one or more of the party to slowly poison the unpleasant ex-dictator. It was a little pocket of hell on Earth. The British dealt with him generously, and it was the most unkind torture they could have performed.

At least I got a little pleasure from fantasizing about the banishment party I’d ship my least favorite modern monsters to. If I were to exile Donald Trump, for instance, who would I send to accompany him? His own children, for sure, and Rudy Giuliani, and maybe Sydney Powell and a few Fox News hosts. It’s easy to imagine a true hell-hole made up of his own most persistent supporters.

World-class sarcasm

Have you seen Piers Morgan’s interview of the Egyptian comedian, Bassem Youssef? I know, you hear “Piers” and you are immediately repelled, but it’s worth it — Morgan is so effectively punctured, without even realizing it, that he’s left floundering about like an empty balloon. Youssef totally dominates and leaves Morgan whimpering about ‘language,’ and also manages to skewer Ben Shapiro, all while making Israel look like a lying bully. And he does it with the most precise use of sarcasm I have ever witnessed.

Absolutely brilliant.

There’s a really good question in there, too. What is a “disproportionate response”? Has a “disproportionate response” ever worked? Hasn’t Israel been engaging in an ongoing “disproportionate response” for decades, and has it brought peace to the region? Maybe they ought to try something different.

The world is not helping my depression

I wish I could avoid this, but the world keeps slapping me in the face with the horrors going on in Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Israel has decided that the northern part of Gaza, with over a million people living there, must be completely emptied within 24 hours before the tanks roll in and the white phosphorus comes raining down and the soldiers march in and clear out the region house by house. This, I presume, they consider a reasonable approach to a terror attack. Just as America considered devastating an entire country and killing hundreds of thousands of people a proper approach to a terror attack that Iraqi citizens had nothing to do with.

Israeli commanders have said they’re readying a ground invasion of the territory in a bid to end Hamas rule there. The militant group launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on Saturday, killing more than 1,300 civilians and soldiers and taking scores of hostages.

Israel has responded with airstrikes and a siege. With exits to Israel and Egypt shut and food, drinkable water, medicine and fuel running low, the operations have effectively turned the densely populated 140-square-mile strip into a death trap.

No fuel has been allowed into the territory since the crisis began; many users, including the largest power plant, have run out or will soon. Nearly 1,800 people, roughly half of them women and children, have died in the bombing campaign, according to the territory’s health ministry. Another 7,300 have been wounded.

“Death trap” is right. This is another kind of terror attack against Palestinian citizens.

“The situation in Gaza has reached a dangerous new low,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told reporters. “Moving more than 1 million people across a densely populated war zone to a place with no food, water or accommodation when the entire territory is under siege is extremely dangerous and in some cases simply not possible.”

Clive Baldwin, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch, warned that the order “does not alter Israel’s obligations in military operations to never target civilians and take all the measures it can to minimize harm to them.”

Nancy Okail, president of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, called the evacuation order “a license to kill. Because those who remain behind, it would be sort of a warranty to kill those who stay.”

The Norwegian Refugee Council, which operates in Gaza, said the demand to evacuate without clear guarantees of safety and return “would amount to the war crime of forcible transfer.”

Israel is planning to kill 2 million people, slowly and callously and brutally. The UN is posting alerts about what is about to happen.

Across the Gaza Strip, more than 2 million people are at risk as water runs out.

“It has become a matter of life and death. It is a must; fuel needs to be delivered now into Gaza to make water available for 2 million people,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner-General.

No humanitarian supplies have been allowed into Gaza for a week now.

Clean water is running out in the Gaza Strip, after its water plant and public water networks stopped working. People are now forced to use dirty water from wells, increasing risks of waterborne diseases. Gaza has also been under an electricity blackout since 11 October, impacting the water supply.

At the UN base in the southern Gaza Strip – where UNRWA has moved its operations- drinking water is also running out. Thousands of people have sought refuge there after Israel issued a warning to residents demanding them to leave their homes in the northern parts of the Strip.

Only in the past 12 hours, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. The exodus continues as people move to the southern parts of the Gaza Strip. Nearly 1 million people have been displaced in one week alone.

“We need to truck fuel into Gaza now. Fuel is the only way for people to have safe drinking water. If not, people will start dying of severe dehydration, among them young children, the elderly and women. Water is now the last remaining lifeline. I appeal for the siege on humanitarian assistance to be lifted now,” added Lazzarini.

I don’t know what to do. Do we just wait for the slow death of all those Palestinians, justified by the actions of a few terrorists? Just don’t ask me to ever support the criminal Israeli state ever again.

Apologists for state-sponsored violence can fuck right off

I knew this was coming. We saw it before with 9/11, when any criticism of American policy in the Middle East caused an instant knee-jerk response: you’re siding with the terrorists! You must hate America!

You all remember the madness, which is still ongoing.

Now we have a new horrendous terrorism event that will be used to polarize people and trigger more extremism, the terror attack by Hamas in Israel several days ago. There is no doubt that this was terrorist extremism, unjustifiable and vile. Unfortunately, it’s already become a tool to excuse all of the horrors perpetrated by Israel. You know you can condemn both sides, right? Some people seem to think you’re either good or evil, with nothing in between.

Case in point: this comment on a post I made in which I condemned the violence on both sides. I guess you aren’t allowed to do that.

Any re-think of the verging on Jew-hatred comments here now?

Not that the disgusting Old Testament “eye for an eye” murdering Israel is and will do is in any way justified, not American support for it.

Hamas was never an organization worthy of any respect or trust: terrorists only interested in murder and revenge. oppressor of their own people as well, Muslim extremists of the most intolerant type and motivated by hatred,

Except for ISIL, there the worst of the worst. That’s what they’ve been and what they are.

I really do want to hear what you have to say about this now, PZ. You have more facts and have had time to cool down and evaluate it. The Gurdian certainly isn’t pro-Likud, or even pro-Israel.

Certainly, I’ll never associate with anyone who excuses this ever again.

Fingers crossed in hope.

There was no “Jew-hatred”. The political state of Israel is not synonymous with Judaism, but this is the most common criticism I see: if you dare to oppose the military actions of the Israeli state then you are anti-Semitic. It’s a disgusting tactic.

No one here has offered any “respect or trust” for Hamas. Hamas is not synonymous with the Palestinian people. Standing with the Palestinian people in their demands for autonomy is not excusing the terror attack. Opposing genocide is not making excuses for terrorists.

There certainly are people who excuse it, but not me, and not the majority of commenters here.

As a humanist, I do evaluate my choices in light of my principles, and those principles tell me that all people, Palestinian and Israeli alike, have the right to life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. Anyone who tries to deprive others of that right is in the wrong. At least I’m consistent in that belief, are the apologists for Israeli atrocities?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not stand a chance of succeeding in his campaign for the presidency — he’s weird, he’s loony, he’s a crackpot. If he were a greedy sex-pest and liar, maybe he’d do better, but Trump has a lock on that niche. Now he’s running as an independent, which means Joe Biden is probably a bit relieved. Not that he had cause to worry, but at least the wacky anti-vaxxer isn’t tainting the Democratic ticket, and now maybe it’s Trump’s turn to be concerned.

Could Kennedy pull votes away from Trump? Trump’s campaign team certainly seems to think so, at least according to Shelby Talcott at Semafor. She reports that “internal campaign polling suggests his expected third party bid could draw more votes from Trump than President Joe Biden in a general election.” In their typical self-aggrandizing style, a Trump campaign member told Semafor they plan on “dropping napalm after napalm on his head reminding the public of his very liberal views.”

They may find that this is a more difficult task than their belligerent rhetoric suggests. Because the slice of voters Trump and Kennedy could be competing over aren’t defined by political beliefs that map neatly onto concepts like “liberal” or “conservative.” Instead, they’re fighting over the crank vote: People who are addicted to gobbling down kooky, bizarre and above all, false information. The QAnon crowd, in other words.

Splitting the crank vote and diminishing their ability to poison the election sounds like good news to me.

It’s also good to see the words of WB Yeats apply to the far right. Fracture away!

Kill them all, let god sort them out

I’ve heard this sort of call to action many times before. Here’s Marco Rubio with his solution to the Israel/Palestine problem.

I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic offramp with these savages. I mean, these are people, as you have been reporting and others have seen, that deliberately targeted teenage girls, women, children, the elderly, not just for rape and murder, but then dumping their bodies off in the streets of Gaza, where the crowds can then defile their lifeless bodies.
I mean, just horrifying things. And I don’t think we know the full extent of it yet. I mean, there’s more to come in the days and weeks ahead. You can’t coexist. They have to be eradicated.

“Savages.” “They have to be eradicated.” What a familiar sentiment! And what a deplorable perspective.

Notice that Tapper pointed out that a million of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are children, and Rubio just ignored that reality to call for their murder. I agree that the individuals who executed that horrific attack were evil people who need to be caught and punished, that there should be no forgiveness for their crimes, but that’s very different from pointing at an entire people, most of whom had nothing to do with the attack, and declaring that they all, women, children, the elderly, need to be eradicated. Wrong. They all deserve to live happy lives, a right they’ve been denied, and only the guilty need to be removed from civil society.

I’m just afraid that Rubio’s attitude is going to be popular among the right-wing fascists. When horrors are piling up on horrors, you don’t end the cycle by adding fresh horrors to the pile.

Signs of hope

About 15 years ago, Minnesota was dealing with a bunch of ignorant radicals who were packing school boards, and had even captured the position of educational commissioner in the form of Cheri Yecke. It was ugly. I was attending school board meetings that featured train of young earth creationists standing up to parrot nonsense…but, fortunately, we also had genuine grass roots people standing up to oppose them. We’ve still got wretched right wingers filling school boards, but at least I think we totally crushed the creationist insurgence here, and Yecke is long gone.

Now, though, the US (not so much Minnesota) is dealing with another group of astro-turfing assholes, Moms for Liberty. There are signs that they are getting desperate. Would you believe Moms for Liberty was trying to build a claque to attend a school board meeting? They were recruiting “talented clappers” to pack the audience.

It’s not working.

What’s happening instead is that the general public is getting fired up. They hate those arrogant Karens. They’ve recently won school board elections, but like the creationists, as word gets around, the public rises up and notices and starts firing back.

Most of the attendees saw that appeal as a minor victory, or at least as evidence that they were gaining ground in the battle for control over the school district — one of hundreds of similar battles unfolding all over the country. Yes, the Pennridge school board was dominated by far-right members, one of whom had been present in Washington for Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally-turned-riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Yes, at least five of the nine board members were linked to Moms for Liberty, a right-wing “astroturf” organization that has orchestrated a national campaign to remake public education along arch-conservative and anti-intellectual lines. But Pennridge board meetings for months had been dominated by outraged parents speaking out against the Moms for Liberty incursion and the board majority’s apparent agenda. Conservative forces were sufficiently worried about the optics, it appeared, that they were eager to pull in “talented clappers” from outside the community.

A tightly packed group of Moms for Liberty supporters did indeed show up, huddled together in a few rows of seats. Their mood could best be described as “glowering.” These were not exactly the “joyful warriors” that Moms for Liberty proudly proclaims fights on their behalf. That term would better fit the majority of attendees at Pennridge High that night, who needed no coaxing to whoop and applaud as one speaker after another took the mic, defending the basic freedom to read whatever books one wants, and denouncing the ahistorical and misleading curriculum that conservative board members wanted to force upon the district’s teachers.

This is news that gives me a little optimism. I think the public at large wants to do what is right, even as a minority of hateful, motivated scumbags exploit the system to secure some degree of power. Temporarily.

Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day

And I don’t want to hear you say otherwise. We don’t celebrate greedy genocidal monsters around these here parts, we honor the people who lived on this land.

For the third year running, a U.S. president has officially recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

President Biden issued a proclamation on Friday to observe Monday, Oct. 9, as a day to honor Native Americans, their “resilience, strength, and perseverance” and “determination to preserve cultures, identities, and ways of life,” even as they have faced “violence and devastation,” he said.