Emotional policing is again in vogue
Have you condemned Hamas vigorously enough for [insert viral unconfirmed atrocity here]?
The murderous rampage by Hamas last weekend against Israeli civilians of all ages and how Israel responds will reverberate for years to come. Israel’s 9/11. In the wake of terrorist attacks here two decades ago, some pundit asked: Would America keep its head? I wrote later:
We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.
Did America keep its head? Uh, no.
It is happening again. Pro-Israel protesters in New York City think Gaza should be flattened to a parking lot. Wipe out all the Palestinians. There are calls for revenge, for collective punishment. War fever is on the rise again.
Someone on Bluesky last night posted that “every single Israeli child will one day be an active member of the IDF.” Thus, none are innocent. Thus, targets for Hamas. Col. John Chivington, a Methodist minister, used that reasoning in 1864 to direct the slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapaho children at Sand Creek in the Colorado territory. (The post has since been deleted.)
Responses to the Hamas attack recall not just 9/11 but the earlier Challenger disaster in 1986. Celebrated schoolteacher and payload specialist Christa McAuliffe died in the shuttle explosion along with six other crewmates. Network TV brought on therapists to tell children how they should process their feelings. Today, we see Americans policing others’ feelings about the Hamas attacks. They make moral judgments based on the strength of others’ outrage or, more likely, direct condemnation at those who cannot find the words. Join them in calling for blood or you are with the terrorists.
No doubt people who rail against language policing they’ve only ever heard about on Fox News are among those now insisting how others should feel.
Worse, some on the left in grotesque fits of performative anti-colonialism celebrate the slaughter. Or else “gussy up their ardor for war crimes in layers of impenetrable jargon,” as Eric Levitz observed. “All this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt,” he continued. Not to mention, he explains, an abandonment of progressive principles.
On Tuesday, Michelle Goldberg spoke with Israel-born Misha Shulman, rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue. Congregants who had lost loved ones and young Jews he’d spoken with were “‘completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,’ who were either justifying Hamas’s atrocities or celebrating them outright.” Some of those supposed progressives lean Chivington.
Goldberg writes:
Victimization and dispossession are not alibis for barbarism. The distinction between civilians and combatants must be respected. No cause, righteous or otherwise, excuses the killing of children.
[…]
“At the strategic level, it would be much more helpful if there was a large group of American leftists who had the moral credibility to say, ‘We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not to commit atrocities in Gaza,’” said Leifer.
There are, of course, leaders making exactly that argument. “Right now, the international community must focus on reducing humanitarian suffering and protecting innocent people on both sides of this conflict,” read a statement by Bernie Sanders. “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” That message is undermined when a loud part of the left insists that when it comes to Israelis, there is no such thing as civilians.
On the right, of course, not issuing loud public condemnations of Hamas that bolster support for indiscriminate killing in Gaza means you “are with the terrorists” whether one is, as Goldberg writes, the type to “relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty” or else too shell-shocked and depressed to make a public show of one’s revulsion.
Has Miss Manners issued guidelines, or did I miss them? Don’t worry, Fox News will.
Update (also added image): Paul Waldman offers a column on the same condemnation competition and blowback I’ve observed. Anyone wrestling with the complexity of what comes next is condemned for not possessing moral clarity:
You know who does have moral clarity? Hamas has moral clarity. The protesters in Sydney celebrating the Hamas attack with chants of “Gas the Jews” have moral clarity. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government have always had moral clarity, and it didn’t protect his nation’s people, so now they prepare to lay waste to Gaza. “We are fighting human animals,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as he announced that Israel would cut off electricity, water and food to the area as the bombing begins.
Hamas’s barbarism … is already producing a boiling desire for revenge. No one has a good answer to the question of what happens next, but even asking it will be seen as a violation of moral clarity.