A lunatic is the leading GOP candidate for president
I’ve said it before: Donald J. Trump is one grain alcohol and rain water away from pulling a Browning machine gun out of his golf bag.
This person is a fucking lunatic, Republicans have just stopped talking him, and everyone is going along as if the next election is business as usual. Strange times. https://t.co/RZvcQbLCV9
Big cheers here at this Trump event in West Palm Beach after one of the speakers tonight, Rogan O’Handley, said: “My favorite memory of [Trump] is January 6th … I thank him every single day for holding that rally on January 6. I was there, I was damn proud to be there.” pic.twitter.com/V3dz3V9WLg
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.
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.
This piece by Eric Levitz brilliantly examines all the complexities I imagine many of you are feeling about the war in Israel. I know I am. It’s very difficult and social media has made it almost impossible to express any nuance about any of it. (I’m reeling from being buffeting in all directions.)
Anyway, this is the most honest, most mature analysis of how we should be thinking about this if we have a conscience:
This weekend in Israel, a far-right Islamist group perpetrated the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, murdering entire families, including babies, in their beds and slaughtering 260 concertgoers. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed in all, and over 100 others taken hostage.
Israel’s far-right government predictably responded by choking off all food, electricity, and fuel to Gaza’s 2 million residents and then preparing a military assault more untempered by concern for civilian casualties than ever before. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, made the brutality of what is to come plain on Monday, saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
And no small number of supposed leftists found in all this cause for celebration. Others, meanwhile, loudly refused to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, insisting it was not their place to decry the “military strategy” or “violent resistance” of oppressed Palestinians.
In my view, these responses constitute a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values. Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects or one doesn’t. What’s more, cheering (or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn) the murder of children isn’t just morally grotesque but also politically self-defeating.
The West’s apologists for Palestinian war crimes have far less power than its apologists for Israel’s brutal domination of the Palestinian territories and discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. But precisely because left-wing critics of Israeli apartheid lack power, we must not forfeit our moral authority. For decades, the Israeli government’s knee-jerk defenders have sought to equate opposition to the occupation with contempt for the security of Jewish Israelis. Now, a loud minority of Palestine’s self-styled champions are blithely affirming this smear, insisting that solidarity with Palestine requires callous indifference toward (or, at the very least, silence about) the mass murder of Jews. In so doing, they are making it easier for their adversaries to discredit and marginalize the broader cause of Palestinian liberation.
And that cause has never been more vital. It is therefore imperative for progressives to disavow all apologia for Hamas’s atrocities and for the broader public to understand that the left’s analysis of the conflict’s origins, and its prescriptions for its resolution, are wholly extricable from the blood lust of a loud minority of pseudo-radicals.
It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities. The national leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine declared the weekend’s events a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” touting Hamas’s success in “catching the enemy completely by surprise.” The Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauded the Palestinian resistance’s “unprecedented anti-colonial struggle,” pledged its solidarity to that struggle, and vowed, “No peace on stolen land!” At a rally co-sponsored by socialist organizations in New York City, one speaker spoke approvingly of the mass murder of Israeli teenagers, saying, “There was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”
Some left-wing intellectuals, meanwhile, chose to gussy up their ardor for war crimes in layers of impenetrable jargon. Speaking plainly would have required such thinkers to acknowledge that they were endorsing the mass murder of children, and thus to assume the extraordinary burden of justifying this stance; which is to say, the burden of explaining why we should believe that Palestinian liberation can be achieved through the killing of Jewish children and only through the killing of Jewish children. It’s understandable, then, that instead of forthrightly making this case, many chose to convey the sentiment “Oppressed people have a right to commit mass murder” with as much opacity and pseudo-profundity as their hard-won vocabularies would allow. These remarks from an editor of The Drift, a socialist magazine, are exemplary:
to search for an analogue seems almost inappropriate to Palestinians’ world-historical(!) audacity to seize the components of self-determination for themselves, if only because the idiom of liberation invents itself anew with each instance that the yoke of bondage is sloughed off
a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude — these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia. the thrum of history as it develops is one of force; its inertia and advance require some momentum
In this intellectual’s telling, the killings of entire families in their beds are not atrocities that contradict the left’s fundamental commitment to the inherent worth of every human life; they are “drastic actions in need of no apologia.” Such sentiments were not altogether aberrant among left-wing public intellectuals. A Marxist professor at Birkbeck University of London declared that the murder of 260 Israelis at a rave was a “consequence” for “partying on stolen land.” Other academics, and a wide variety of campus student organizations, issued statements pointedly refusing to criticize “Palestinian resistance.”
Meanwhile, social media was replete with claims that Hamas’s atrocities constituted heroic progress toward decolonization and that Jewish Israeli civilians were fair targets for violence as they are settlers occupying stolen lands.
All this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt. From my vantage, it looks as though a few leftists were eager to demonstrate their superlative moral clarity by fighting with liberals about the legitimacy of a Palestinian uprising aimed squarely at the IDF and conducted in the name of democratic equality; so eager that they would not be deterred by the fact that the weekend’s events bore scant resemblance to that scenario.
What we actually witnessed was not “the Palestinians” mounting a violent struggle for justice but a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood-and-soil nationalism. Hamas’s project is antithetical to the left’s foundational values of secularism, universalism, and egalitarianism. And it is also completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation. Western radicals’ predominant prescription for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is a “one-state solution,” in which Israelis and Palestinians all enjoy democratic equality in a single binational state. Hamas’s atrocities have not advanced this ideal but set it back, lending credence to those who insist a one-state solution is a recipe for ceaseless civil war. This weekend was not a triumph for the left’s project in Palestine but a disaster.
Meanwhile, although many aspects of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians can be justifiably described as neocolonial, analogies between the conflict and paradigmatic anti-colonial struggles can be misleading. This is not Algeria, and the Israelis aren’t the pied-noirs. Much of Israel’s Jewish population descends from people who were expelled from other Middle Eastern countries; which is to say, people who suffered the same sort of dispossession endured by the Palestinians. These people did not have anywhere else to seek refuge. And their grandchildren do not have any metropole to return to. The idea that they deserve to be shot to death while dancing because they were born in Israel, or for the crimes of a government many actively opposed, is hateful.
More broadly, the notion that an ethnic group can boast the exclusive right to occupy any stretch of land is not a left-wing one. Virtually all land is “stolen land” if one rolls the tape back far enough. Individuals who were dispossessed of property as a result of their ethnicity have a right of return and reparation. But ethnic groups do not have a right to cleanse any geographic area of outgroup members, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.
For these reasons, it is a moral imperative for progressives to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, affirm the human rights of Jewish Israelis, and reject the ethno-nationalist claim that Palestinians have a unique right to reside in the region. And it is also a political imperative for them to do so.
Those who approve or condone Hamas’s atrocities constitute a small minority of the left. Yet since algorithmic social media favors incendiary speech, from the vantage of many X and Instagram users, the left’s response to last weekend’s events is characterized by bloodlust. In the face of that response, multiple progressive-leaning people in my life have expressed a sense of estrangement from leftists and newfound doubts about their worldview. Seeing an ideological group embrace a position that one knows to be intellectually bankrupt and morally odious will naturally lead one to view that group’s other claims — especially those concerning matters one knows little about, such as the intricacies of the Israel-Palestine conflict — with greater skepticism. It’s important, therefore, to ensure that the majority of progressives who abhor all war crimes makes itself as visible as possible. In the present context, pointedly refusing to condemn Hamas’s atrocities might help a leftist to perform a more radical solidarity than squishy liberals can muster and thus win some points in a subcultural status game. But doing so will make it harder for them to actually advance their ostensible aims.
The political necessity of criticizing Israel on universalist grounds, rather than ethno-nationalist ones, is similarly urgent. In defending their apologias for war crimes, leftists tend to cite the gross power imbalance between the Palestinians and Israelis as somehow exculpatory. But precisely because Palestinians cannot hope to prevail in a contest of brute force, it is incumbent on their champions to make the case for their liberation in terms that honor the basic rights of Israelis. If we posit that some ethnic groups have a unique claim to specific stretches of land, and that they also have the right to commit war crimes so as to secure this heritage, then we will do the Israeli far-right’s ideological work for it. When supposed leftists embrace calls for the expulsion of all Jewish “settlers” from “the river to the sea,” they pit one group’s account of why its historical victimization gives it carte blanche to commit ethnic cleansing against another group’s account of the same. In a contest between competing visions of ethno-nationalist domination, the Palestinians cannot win. Their primary strength is the moral force of egalitarian universalism; in other words, of the idea that all people are entitled to security, self-government, and equality under the law. The moment that Palestine’s western supporters treat this idea as negotiable, they kick the legs out from under their own movement.
And that movement is needed now more than ever. The current Israeli government is the most far-right in its history and has been working to de-facto annex the West Bank and entrench Jewish supremacy in that occupied Palestinian territory. Israeli settlers in that region have been carrying out attacks that even Israeli officials recognize as “pogroms.” Meanwhile, last year, Israeli troops in the West Bank killed a record number of Palestinians. And even before the present war, they were on pace to set a new one in 2023.
Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is an open anti-Arab racist who has called for the mass expulsion of disloyal Arab Israelis and whose sympathies for Jewish terrorists prevented him from serving in the Israeli army. The nation’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for wiping out Palestinian villages. This is a government that needed no provocation to demonstrate its contempt for Palestinian life. Now, Hamas has given it the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.
Israel has responded by promising that its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza will be unconstrained by concern for the lives of the 2 million civilians who are tightly packed into a strip of land twice the size of Washington, D.C. On Tuesday morning, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari announced that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on Gaza and noted that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
A member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party in Israel’s parliament tweeted in response to the attacks, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.” This is a reference to the original ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel.
At present, Israel’s allies in the West are giving it little incentive to temper its thirst for vengeance with concern for, say, the majority of Gazans who are under 18 years old. In his remarks on the attacks, Joe Biden offered the unqualified support of the U.S. for Israel’s response while lamenting Hamas’s use of Palestinian civilians as “human shields.” This is a real practice, but it also serves as an alibi for Israel to pursue aerial campaigns that emphasize “damage” over “accuracy.”
A precondition for a durable peace in Israel-Palestine is an Israeli government that honors its commitments under international law, ends its occupation of the West Bank, and forswears collective punishment as a tool of war against Hamas. To assert this is not to pretend that Hamas is an eager partner for peace. But that organization owes much of its popular legitimacy (and power) to Israel’s crimes.
The Israeli government will not honor the legal and moral rights of Palestinians absent concerted international pressure. And mounting such pressure requires a progressive movement with the moral authority to challenge popular narratives about the conflict that elide the crimes of the Israeli state.
Admittedly, the prospects for success on that front in the near term look bleak, irrespective of whether progressives denounce Hamas’s atrocities or justify them. But a left that refuses to condemn mass murder will ensure (and deserve) its own political irrelevance. To celebrate the slaughter of Jewish children as “decolonial” struggle, or to refuse to condemn the “military strategy” of far-right war criminals, is to place the performance of radicalism above the demands of moral integrity and political efficacy.
His points are clear. If those of us on the left have any hope that the we can continue to have a positive influence on this situation it’s vitally important that we hold fast to our principles and cling to our morals. His analysis of where this has gone astray in some quarters is valuable.
I’m reminded of the endless fatuous accusations from some that support for Ukraine is hypocritical when one was against the war in Iraq. My principles hold that I was against the invasion by the US and against the invasion by Russia. It’s not really complicated. Likewise, I find terrorism directed at civilians abhorrant and I don’t support it no matter who is doing it. That’s not really complicated either even though we have witnessed an inimaginable horror already from one side and can expect to see more of it from the other in reaction.
What’s happening in Israel makes it’s hard to stop yourself from throwing up your hands in despair. It’s all so awful. Cheering any of it from either side is grotesque. Levitz does a good job of breaking it down and helping to illuminate the problem.
.@chrislhayes: “Our neighbors of all backgrounds are not our enemies. That simple fact must be sacrosanct, our North Star, as we navigate this frightening and dangerous time.” pic.twitter.com/JfUZ07VdGG
Now that Bobby Jr has decided to run as an independent the Republicans don’t like him so much
Philip Bump reports on RFK Jr’s latest interview with Hannity now that he’s announced he’s running thrid party. It looks like the Trumpers have some regret about the monster they’ve helped nurture over the past several months:
In June, the Fox News host marveled that Kennedy was “surging in the Democratic primary,” potentially meaning that President Biden’s bid for renomination was in jeopardy. Kennedy wasn’t surging in the polls — at least not among Democrats — but Hannity seemed perfectly happy to try to will such a surge into existence.
In late July, he turned over a full hour of his program to Kennedy, the sort of campaign contribution that he normally reserved for Republican candidates (as he did so often before last year’s midterm elections). Kennedy was running against a Democrat, and that was good enough for Hannity. So he welcomed Kennedy to a “town hall” in front of a live audience — though the only one asking questions was Sean Hannity.
Those questions were no less pointed than the ones 2022 Republican candidates faced. Kennedy’s challenge to Biden was framed in near heroic terms, positioning the conspiracy theory enthusiast as the sole person brave enough to challenge the Democratic establishment.
“Many of his fellow Democrats and others in the media mob, make no mistake, they are right now furious with RFK Jr.,” Hannity said as he was introducing his guest. “They seem to loathe his stance on medical freedom and privacy” — a sanitization of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance. “They are angry he does not toe the party line on the war in Ukraine and former president Donald Trump. They can’t seem to stand that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a free thinker with classic liberal principles. And today, well, today’s Democratic Party is about compliance. It’s about going along. It’s about groupthink.”
So Hannity was happy to provide a soapbox.
About 2.2 million people tuned in to Hannity’s program that night, about in line with Hannity’s regular weeknight audience. They heard Hannity tee up a number of issues on which he could express agreement, from economic insecurity to the effort to sideline hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19.
Hannity made clear his welcoming intent at the outset.
“We definitely don’t agree on everything,” he said, “but that’s not my role here tonight. We’re not going to shut down Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” He noted that some people wanted to “deplatform” Kennedy — because he regularly spreads misinformation about vaccine safety, though Hannity didn’t mention that. “I actually believe in freedom and freedom of speech and the freedom of the American people to hear things that they may disagree with and ascertain and determine for themselves whether they agree or don’t agree, Hannity solemnly stated.
Then Kennedy announced that he would run not as a Democrat against Biden but as an independent — against both Biden and whoever wins the Republican nomination for president. That almost certainly means running against Hannity’s friend Donald Trump. It also may mean pulling more support from Trump than from Biden, which is very much not what Hannity or other Republicans would like to see.
So, when Kennedy again joined Hannity on Tuesday night, he earned a much briefer and colder reception.
“Everybody is now trying to analyze, you know, whether it there’s a three-way race with you, Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” Hannity said as he began his interview. “You know, who would you more likely draw from? So I hope you don’t mind, but I did a little research on you.”
“You’re pretty liberal,” he continued. “You’ve called for curbing logging, oil drilling, fracking. You wanted to eliminate it and call it a ‘victory for democracy.’ You want to curb U.S. fossil fuel extraction, keep it in the ground. You once tweeted you want a ban on fossil fuel extraction, a ban on fracking. You called the NRA once a terror group. You supported over the years Democrats [Al] Gore, [John] Kerry, [Barack] Obama, Hillary [Clinton]. You praised Bernie Sanders multiple times. You support affirmative action. So why is this party of yours, why didn’t they even allow you to compete? Because that’s as pretty liberal of a record as anybody I know!”
Kennedy responded to this unsubtle line of questioning with a chuckle, noting that Hannity didn’t really ask any question.
“Do you want to talk about my positions, Sean,” he asked, “or do you want to read talking points from the Trump campaign?”
“Excuse me,” Hannity replied. “These are called ‘Hannity points.’ I do my own research.”
This is certainly possible in theory. But it is true that, on Tuesday, the Republican National Committee published a list of Kennedy’s positions intended to frame him as unacceptably liberal. The list included most of the assertions Hannity presented in introducing his guest. It’s also the case that Kennedy’s announcement had already triggered Republican condemnation. Last week, Semafor reported on the Trump campaign’s preparations to undercut the independent. Kennedy can be forgiven for drawing that line.
At times, Hannity’s prosecution of Kennedy on Tuesday was almost revelatory, a glimpse of what might be possible in a world where Hannity didn’t dedicate his show night after night to aiding Trump or Trump’s party.
“Do you still believe the NRA is a terror group?” Hannity asked, for example.
“I support the Second Amendment,” Kennedy replied, “like I do all the amendments in the Constitution …”
“I didn’t ask you if you support the Second Amendment,” Hannity firmly interjected. “In 2018, you said Parkland students are right, the NRA’s a terror group. Do you believe that?”
“I don’t consider the NRA a terror group,” Kennedy replied, seemingly chastened.
The segment ended with Hannity and Kennedy sparring over the feasibility of replacing fossil fuels, with Hannity insisting that Kennedy’s claims weren’t true — something that it’s hard to imagine him saying during a Trump interview. But, then, Hannity’s interviews are focused on helping Trump, not hurting him.
It’s understandable that Kennedy would want to do Hannity’s show, given the uphill task he faces in winning the presidency. But it’s surprising that he wouldn’t have been prepared for a very different reception from Hannity now that he’ll probably be running against Trump
I don’t think there were very many Fox viewers who were ever going to vote for Kennedy one way or the other. The danger will come from the fringe right (of which there are many millions) who have gone down the AntiVaxx-conspiracy rabbit hole and that’s centered on the internet. Hannity and Steve Bannon helped lift Kennedy into the conversation on the right in general but it’s taken on a life of its own now.
The main problem for Kennedy will be getting on the ballot. Both parties are going to try to stop him from doing that but it will only take him succeeding in a couple of the swing states to sabotage the election. The only question is who his sabotage will benefit. Democrats have been here before in 2000 and it didn’t work out to well for them. But at least they didn’t help boost the third party candidate because of a trollish desire to own the other side. If Kennedy manages to help defeat Trump the Republicans have only themselves to blame. Frankly, I don’t think it will be necessary but I’m an optimist.
There are so many horrifying accounbts about last Saturday’s terrorist attack coming out of Israel that I’m starting to feel numb in spite of my efforts not to look away. And I’m equally horrified as I contemplate what’s to come. There’s so much carnage that it’s overwhelming.
There are some stories that are so poignant and speak so clearly to the total insanity of terrorism and war that they just break my heart. This is one of them:
On the Israeli side of the Gaza border lie a number of residential collectives whose members tend to be left of center and supportive of peace initiatives and Palestinian rights. Many of those residents were among the missing or dead after Hamas’s assault on Saturday.
Vivian Silver, 74, a member of Kibbutz Be’eri, near the northern end of Gaza, was still missing on Monday night and presumed to have been taken hostage. Ms. Silver, a native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, was among the leaders of Women Wage Peace, a large grass-roots movement founded in the aftermath of the Gaza War of 2014 to promote a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
She served for many years on the board of directors of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that said Israel was an apartheid state. She made visits to the occupied territories to express solidarity with Palestinians and volunteered with an organization that drove sick Palestinians from Gaza into Israel for medical treatment. She is the executive director of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development and co-founded the Arab Jewish Center for Equality Empowerment and Cooperation.
One of her sons, Yonatan Zeigen, told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he last communicated with her on Saturday morning, when she said she was hiding in a closet in a safe room on the kibbutz. They started to text rather than speak as the sound of shooting got closer, but there was no communication from her after 11:07 a.m., he said.
Ms. Silver is “probably worried sick about the Palestinian contacts in her phone, a friend wrote on Facebook. “She probably thinks of the danger they will now face for being seen as collaborators with the enemy.”
That peace-oriented Israelis were among Hamas’s targets has fueled further resentment of the Netanyahu government, which was caught by surprise on Saturday when Hamas fighters from the Gaza Strip streamed into Israel on Saturday, meeting little resistance.
Some Israelis said that, by contrast, the country’s military forces had been beefed up to protect settlers in the West Bank, who have clashed repeatedly with Palestinian residents.
Rachel Gur, an Israeli involved in the search for the missing, said that many of the residents of the collectives near Gaza had similar politics. “These are kibbutzniks, the people who vote for the left, who support coexistence,” she said. “You’re talking about the old time secular leftists, who want peace, who are against annexation.”
Another peace activist, Hayim Katsman, was initially believed to have been taken hostage on Saturday but was found killed in his home on Kibbutz Holit, near the southern end of Gaza. He had studied conservative trends and radicalism within the Zionist religious community, and played bass guitar and worked as a D.J. playing Arabic music.
He did gardening and landscaping at Kibbutz Holit, his mother, Hannah Wacholder Katsman, said. He had also worked as a mechanic, and taught at various colleges and pre-army programs. On her Facebook page, she mourned him as “beautiful, generous and talented.” He was also “very industrious and independent,” she said in a text message on Monday.
Mr. Katsman recently completed his doctorate at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he won an award for the best graduate paper in the Association for Israel Studies. During his time there, he served as co-coordinator of the Israel-Palestine research group at the university.
His doctorate was titled, “Religious nationalism in Israel/Palestine.” It is unusual for Israelis to refer to the region in that way, rather than simply as “Israel,” or “Israel and the occupied territories.”
Bilha and Yakovi Inon, who were peace activists and the parents of a prominent activist, Maoz Inon, were also killed on Saturday. The couple were killed in their farming collective, of Netiv Ha’Asara, which lies just north of Gaza.
It’s a terrible irony that the southern region of Israel is where many of the anti-Netanyau and Likud members were centered. Certainly it’s much less right wing than Netanyahu’s base among the far right settlers in the West Bank where he centered so many troops, leaving the south largely unprotected.
Terrorism seeks to demoralize the civilian population and creating a sense of futility among those who have good intentions is one consequence of it. Terrorists are all-or-nothing political actors. Netanyahu’s “strategy” gave them the opening they needed.
Update:
wow… Israel minister is thrown out of the hospital with people yelling: You've destroyed this country! https://t.co/waYrQeMofS
They are right to be overwhelmingly angry at the Netanyahu government. The entire premise for allowing the corrupt authoritarian monster to stay in office has been blown to smithereens.
Democrats are furious at GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden for a curse-laden outburst that interrupted a White House briefing on the Israel terrorist attack.
Multiple attendees described Van Orden (R-Wis.) as acting belligerent towards the Biden administration briefers when he asked questions. Several people said Van Orden cursed directly at the briefers, prompting loud boos in the room. One person in the room said Van Orden shouted that the briefers’ presentation was “pathetic.” Another attendee described it as “offensive and inappropriate.”
One member, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), shouted “shame on you” in response to Van Orden’s verbal affront — prompting Van Orden to drop an f-bomb toward the Minnesota Democrat, who is Jewish.
“He was rude and attacked the presenters. I thought they had very substantive things to say. But he just had this blanket attack saying that ‘this is the worst information I’ve ever had,’” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.). “And basically attacking them for being incompetent.”
Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) followed Van Orden in the briefing, then apologized for his colleague’s conduct, telling the briefers, “I apologize for this guy,” the attendees said.
The incident was a topic of conversation in the closed-door House Democratic caucus meeting following the briefing too, as lawmakers on the left recounted the incident (and tried to identify Van Orden).
Van Orden’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Senate leaders in both parties spoke out against his behavior toward their chamber’s pages in July, when Van Orden used profanity toward a group of the young people.
This sort of thing has become more common as GOP voters have become enamored of angry performance artists who are choosing politics as their stage. If you watch any right wing TV you’ll see plenty of this type of behavior. And there’s Trump, of course.
Unfortunately, like him, they’retoo ignorant and emotionally stunted to know when to turn it off. This man apparently thought his act was even appropriate during a briefing on the war in Israel. But then look at Donald Trump:
And it doesn’t look as if they are getting any closer to pulling themselves together
As the whole world watches the events unfolding in Israel in slack jawed horror, I think most people are vastly relieved that the person who won the 2022 American presidential election was not Donald Trump. As Israel’s most powerful ally, President Joe Biden has been a steady hand at the wheel trying to ensure that the war doesn’t spread beyond Israel’s borders and reassuring everyone that the US is not going off the rails despite its ongoing political turmoil.
You can’t say the same for the putative Republican nominee for president in 2024, Donald Trump whose only contribution to the discourse has been to repeatedly assert on his Truth Social feed that this never would have happened if he were still president and proclaim “I KEPT ISRAEL SAFE! NOBODY ELSE WILL, NOBODY ELSE CAN, AND I KNOW ALL OF THE PLAYERS!!!” He has also taken the time to insult Forbes magazine, the NY Attorney General, Rosie O’Donnell and others and hold a raucous rally in New Hampshire where his brief comments about the war included a rousing recitation of “The Snake.” Let’s just say that he has never seemed more out of his depth.
In Washington the Republicans are hardly any more serious. In the senate, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville is still refusing to allow the promotions of 300 military officers unless they agree to change some rules about abortion that are more to his liking. We have a conflagration in the Middle East happening as we speak but his hobby horse still takes precedence. He obviously believes that he can wear the Democrats down and get his way but at some point the Democratic majority needs to step up and change the rule that allows him to continue with this silly tantrum. This has gone on long enough.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley galloped around on his hobby horse as well this week demanding that all Ukraine aid be immediately redirected to Israel. I don’t know how he’s going to break it to Marjorie Taylor Greene who has been demanding for months that the Ukraine aid be diverted to the southern border which she now claims is leaving Americans vulnerable to Hamas terrorists. She’s not alone in that. Her mentor Donald Trump posted this on Monday:
“The same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers. Are they planning an attack within our Country? Crooked Joe Biden and his BOSS, Barack Hussein Obama, did this to us!”
Recognizing that sometimes you have to do more than one thing at a time, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has reportedly been working with a bipartisan group of senators and the White House to put together a spending package linking Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan aid. Since the Senate is marginally more functional than the House there’s a decent chance they can get it passed. Unfortunately the House is still in chaos so it’s still very much up in the air if anything will get done before the deadline to keep the government open is upon us.
There has not been a lot of progress on the quest for a new Speaker since Rep. Kevin McCarthy was ignominiously removed last week. They are set to vote today and it does not appear that anyone has the votes to win it. McCarthy announced that he would not run again last week and then re-opened the door to it earlier this week. He reportedly told members since then not to nominate him but it’s fairly clear that if duty calls he will be available.
The first meeting of the caucus after McCarthy’s ouster last week was apparently something of a free for all with some members almost coming to blows. And the anger and resentment against the eight members who voted to oust McCarthy is still raw today. One of them, the rather bizarre Nancy Mace of North Carolina posted this on twitter/X :
I don’t think she understands what “The Scarlet Letter ” was all about but she seems to think that she is being targeted in her caucus as a woman when in reality she’s been ostracized because she inexplicably threw in with Matt Gaetz and his band of rebels. It’s unlikely this sort of stunt will get her or any of the rest of them back into the caucus’s good graces.
After taking a few days to cool down the caucus met again this week to clear the air and set forth a plan. It doesn’t sound as if anything was resolved. There is much talk of reforming the rules to require that the vote not come to the floor unless someone can earn 217 votes from Republicans. I guess they don’t want any more public humiliations. You’d think they’d have already agreed to get rid of McCarthy’s suicidal agreement to allow one member to make a motion to vacate the chair but there’s no sign that’s happened yet or if it will. That means the new speaker will have the same sword hanging over his head that McCarthy had.
Some of the more centrist members are vowing to keep voting for McCarthy over and over again in protest over the other two choices Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Oh., and Rep. Steve Scalise,R-La., both of whom are hardline right wingers. Scalise appeals more to the more traditional far right conservatives and has experience in the leadership while Jordan is a MAGA standard bearer who has Donald Trump’s endorsement. (I’m a little suprised that hasn’t carried more weight in this contest since Trump is almost certain to win the presidential nomination.) It will be surprising if these centrists follow through but you never know.
Both Jordan and Scalise have promised to keep the impeachment of Joe Biden on track so at least we know they do share the top priority of the nation. Jordan had said that he would shut down the government but according to CNN he offered a plan in Tuesday night’s meeting for “a long-term, stopgap spending bill that would cut current spending levels by 1% in order to give them more time to pass individual spending bills.” This appealed to some of the alleged moderates which may be the kiss of death. We’ll just have to see if that marks him a RINO-squish in waiting or if his credibility as a MAGA warrior will keep the right wingers with him anyway.
At this point we have no idea if this can be resolved this week or even this month. There is no consensus and feelings are still running high. But one thing we do know is that whether it’s Scalise, Jordan, McCarthy or some dark horse we haven’t heard of yet, nothing is going to change. The dynamics that brought them to this place are exactly as they were last week. The Republican Party is still completely dysfunctional and they have no idea how to fix it.
Update:
This morning they were unable to make the new rule requiring unanimity to bring a nomination to the floor. So, the vote was split between Scalise and Jordan (with Scalise winning 113 and Jordan 99.) So now Scalise is the “official” nominee but the vote has not been taken and Jordan has a ton of support, including from Donald Trump so it looks like we have another circus on our hands.
This was not unexpected. When North Carolina Republicans are not creating secret police forces, they are conjuring new ways to make it harder for non-Republicans to vote. They’re creative that way. So when they passed SB 747 and their supremajorities (thanks, Tricia Cotham!) overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, I expected state Democrats and Marc Elias to jump right on that.
On Tuesday, Oct. 10, Voto Latino, the Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force, Down Home North Carolina and two individual voters filed a federal lawsuit challenging part of North Carolina’s newly enacted voter suppression law, Senate Bill 747.
The new lawsuit ensued just minutes after the Republican-controlled North Carolina Legislature overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) veto of S.B. 747.
The lawsuit specifically challenges S.B. 747’s new “Undeliverable Mail Provision,” which the plaintiffs contend will arbitrarily disenfranchise North Carolina’s same-day voters, those who register to vote on the same day they cast their ballots during the state’s early voting period.
The provision at issue requires election officials to send a single address verification notice to same-day voters via the mail. If the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) returns the address verification notice as “undeliverable” before the canvassing of ballots, election officials are prohibited from registering the same-day voter and are required to exclude their ballot from the official vote count. In turn, the plaintiffs argue that “a single piece of undeliverable mail” can result in the disenfranchisement of “fully eligible voters.”
Under the new law, the voter receives no notice of the cancellation of their ballot and registration and is given no opportunity to contest it. The plaintiffs assert that the provision “undermines North Carolina’s long-standing same-day registration process,” which was utilized by 104,336 voters in the 2022 general election.
Prior to S.B. 747, a same-day voter who completed and fulfilled all other registration requirements could not be denied the right to vote unless the USPS returned two undeliverable address notices to the applicant. Furthermore, North Carolina law previously guaranteed that if either of the two address notices were returned as undeliverable “after a person has already voted in an election,” then “the county board shall treat the person as a registered voter.” North Carolina voters also previously had an opportunity to “defend their registration and ballots from rejection” at a hearing before the county board of elections.
This new provision will automatically disenfranchise North Carolinians through no fault of their own. As the complaint explains: “[S]tudies have shown that up to 23% of all undeliverable mail is the result of USPS error rather than a faulty address. Compounding the problem, poll workers often complete registration applications for same-day registrants and may make mistakes in recording the voter’s address.”
According to the complaint, Black, Latinx, and young North Carolinians are more likely to have mail returned as undeliverable due to housing insecurity, having a college campus address or living in multi-generational households. The complaint also notes that these groups — “who have historically been excluded from voting” — disproportionately utilize same-day voter registration.
S.B. 747 “represents the General Assembly’s most recent unjustifiable attack on same-day [voter] registration,” the complaint states. The pro-voting groups allege that the Undeliverable Mail Provision violates the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment and places an undue burden on the right to vote in violation of the First and 14th Amendments. The lawsuit requests that a federal court declare the provision unconstitutional and prevent its enforcement.
Instead of legislative street theater, Republicans could be directing their limited creative juices to solving human misery, to improving public schools, to preventing rural hospitals from closing, to preventing gun violence, and more. But what the party devotes itself to with a passion is monkeywrenching elections with whatever tool is at hand: the census, redistricting, and tweaking elections laws and underfunding boards of election. They’ve been hard at it here for a decade.
Today, @TheDemocrats & @NCDemParty filed a lawsuit against SB-747 after the NCGOP’s override of Governor Cooper’s veto. This bill is a wide-ranging voter suppression law that will restrict access to early voting across NC & make it harder to vote. 🧵https://t.co/7t60bV3Brb
We who watched Iraq invade Kuwait in 1990 and the Trade Towers fall in 2001 have seen war fever take hold. The fever is not just a product of justified outrage nor of the “fog” of sketchy information, but also of active propaganda. Google: Nayirah and Office of Special Plans. Approach with caution.
At least 1,200 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’ October 7 onslaught when armed militants poured over the border into Israel, raiding homes, rampaging through communities and taking as many as 150 hostages back to Gaza. In retaliation for the atrocities, Israeli jets have been pounding Gaza — the densely inhabited coastal strip that Hamas controls — with hundreds of airstrikes, reducing neighborhoods to rubble. Officials say a “complete siege” has trapped residents, cutting them off from food, electricity and resources. Many survivors are in critical condition and struggling with an overwhelming emotional toll as a humanitarian crisis swiftly unfolds in the region.
When wars break out anywhere in this world, innocents die. If we cannot muster the compassion for the foreign dead and their families or restrain the urge for collective punishment, remember this: When wars break out anywhere in this world, Americans die too. Wherever the lines of battle are drawn, Americans find themselves trapped on both sides of them. That fact is also lost in the fog.
We mourn for the slaughtered. We pray for the survivors. We call for justice. And people lose their minds. Watching that happen in real time just down the street is almost as horrifying as the carnage in Israel. And in Gaza.
Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent tweets, “I just wept reading the beautiful words of a rabbi mourning the dead of both his Israeli family and the Palestinians. A brief respite from the past few days, so fkng soul crushing, reeling from the sheer brutality against innocents. I’m horrified that the worst is yet to come.”
“We are heading for a wider war,” NBC’s Richard Engel reports.
“We are now preparing for a ground war here.”
NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel reports from near the Gaza border in Israel. pic.twitter.com/fSfpnup0dt
The “rules-based world order” is on the verge of breaking down, Anne Applebaum warns. “Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.”
