Month: October 2023

Another Response to Russell Moore and His Complaint Against “Bothsidesism”

This is my second post made in response to an article by Dr. Russell Moore, of Christianity Today magazine. My first response, issued quickly late last Wednesday night, was a reply to Moore’s previous editorial, “American Christians Should Stand with Israel Under Attack.”

Now I am at it again.

Several days ago, I received a request from my friend Steve, who pastors a church in Northwest Washington. He sent me a new article from Russell Moore’s Newsletter and asked if I might write a response. Dr. Moore’s  second article is titled “’Bothsidesism’ About Hamas Is a Moral Failure.”

Although Dr. Moore does not clearly define what he means by “bothsidesism,” he does clearly insist that there is only one moral position to take when viewing the current war between Israel and Hamas: Hamas is a terrorist organization that launched “a vicious and unprecedented attack” against Israel. Any attempt to explain Hamas’ motivations, anything that sounds like excuse-making or a justification for terrorism, has entered “a morally dangerous place” leading to “hackery,” according to Moore.

So, please excuse me while I put on my hackery hat for a moment.

One of the first lessons I learned in graduate school is that I cannot pretend to understand an issue until I have first examined all of the evidence available for all sides of a question. Knowing only how to defend one side – my side – of an argument demonstrates that I do not understand the argument well enough to talk about it. What are the strengths of the opposing views? Why are others convinced of things that I am not? Why do I think that my arguments are sufficiently convincing that I can, in good conscience, persuade others to share my opinion rather than anyone else’s?

It’s called being educated. Others may call it bothsidesism. I call it the essential foundation of a well-considered opinion.

Only after I am sufficiently educated on a subject (whether a question of war or a doctrinal controversy) am I in a position to then form a moral judgment about the matter at hand. Ill-informed, knee-jerk judgments are cheap and easy, especially when they keep us singing the same moralistic tune as all the other folks in our favorite community choir.

Condemning a well-considered educational process as bothsidesism is only a high-falutin, moralistic sounding way of dismissing the importance of knowing what one is talking about.

Explanation is not the same as making excuses. To excuse Hamas is one thing – a completely unacceptable thing. But explaining the motives behind Hamas terrorism is another thing altogether; something that can easily coexist with moral outrage over Hamas’ actions.

So, on the one hand, Dr. Moore is right. Our first response to Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians can only be condemnation. All the innocent victims, their families and friends deserve our deepest sympathies and whatever humanitarian assistance we can provide in their hour of need.

On the other hand, I am able to walk and chew gum at the same time. My second response is to insist that we apply the terrorism label even-handedly.

Terrorism is commonly defined as the use of violence against civilians to achieve a political or military aim. By that measure, the Hamas attack on October 7th was a massive act of terrorism. Firing Hamas rockets (which typically lack a guidance system) into Israeli territory is terrorism.

But it is pure, unadulterated, blind prejudice not to recognize that the Israeli government practices terrorism against the Palestinian people on a daily basis, and has done so for decades. Israeli leaders boasted about their deliberate terrorism when their defense minister promised to “wipe out” the “human animals” living in Gaza.

Israel commits terrorism when they slaughter over 3,000 human beings, including more than 1,000 children, while bombing the residential neighborhoods of Gaza.

Israel has committed crimes against humanity for over 16 years by imposing a strict military blockade around Gaza, reducing the population to extreme, dehumanizing living conditions as an act of collective punishment.

The Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, once described Gaza as “the largest concentration camp” in the world. Can you blame the inmates of a concentration camp for eventually attacking the prison guards who starve them, bomb them, and dehumanize them daily?

Israel is a settler-colonial, apartheid state that continues the state-sponsored land theft begun in 1948. The official government term is “Judaization.” All throughout Israel and the West Bank “legal” mechanisms are applied to dispossess Palestinian land-owners and replace them with Jewish settlers, settlers who frequently attack and kill innocent Palestinian civilians. (For more on the role of the Israeli military in Israel’s Judaization process, see my book Like Birds in a Cage.)

I can’t help but wonder if Dr. Moore has ever expressed the same moral clarity in writing an editorial condemning Israeli war crimes as he now possesses in condemning the recent Hamas attacks. At several points in his essay, he offers the bland bromide that we cannot grant “unthinking acceptance of anything the modern state of Israel does,” but when and where has Dr. Moore ever publicly criticized Israeli actions in the way he now justifiably criticizes Hamas?

I am happy to be corrected, but I suspect that he never has. In general, Israeli crimes are quietly accepted. Only Palestinian crimes are condemned.

So, excuse me while I find Dr. Moore’s warnings about bothsidesism to be a one-sided excuse for poo-pooing those who are working to describe an educated appraisal of the way war crimes beget war crimes.

It’s long past time to extend our criticisms even-handedly to both sides. For Hamas and Israel are both guilty. While Israelis and Palestinians are all suffering.

Watch My Interview with Stephen Sizer

The Rev. Stephen Sizer is a vicar with the Church of England who has been a strong advocate for Palestinian human rights for many years.

He is also a staunch disciple of Jesus Christ who vividly examplifies what it means to love one’s enemies.

As a result of Stephen’s witness to loving his neighbors in Palestine, he has also suffered a great deal of persecution and unjust suffering at the hands of the pro-Israel lobby in England.

I was pleased as punch when he asked me to do an interview about my new book with him on his podcast. Take a look:

 

 

Jeff Halper: Apartheid/Genocide or a Shared Democracy?

Jeff Halper is an Israeli anthropology professor and a political activist who founded the organization ICAHD, the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions.

Earlier this week the ICAHD newsletter included the following article from Jeff:

I am going to bed tonight in full certainty that as I sleep, Israel, a member state of the UN, abetted, armed, and egged on by the US and the other G-7 countries that rule the world, is committing genocide in Gaza.

Confining two and half million people to a tiny area (while cynically and cruelly advising them to “leave”), cutting off all food, water, and electricity, declaring that all Gazans are Hamas, thus making even children legitimate targets, carpet bombing for days to “soften” the terrain, and then, tonight as I sleep, invading with an army of 300,000 soldiers — that is THE definition of genocide.

The world is run by war criminals, which imperils oppressed and poor people the world over. But tonight, we must think of the people of Gaza, thousands of whom will die in the next days, their lives destroyed, their cities, town and villages obliterated.

Read the entire article here.

Jonathan Cook Talks About the Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Jonathan Cook is a British journalist living in Israel. Today he has an excellent post at Consortium News about the long-term, ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The current war is only the latest chapter in a heartbreaking, 75-year story.

Yes, the Hamas attack against Israel was a horrible war crime and deserves

The results of Israeli bombing in Gaza

to be condemned. Yet, it was a crime committed in response to 75 years of war crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.

Here is an excerpt:

The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night-and-day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state — when it was known as the Zionist movement.

Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettos inside those borders — as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders.

The “settler” project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: “Judaisation,” or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.

Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier.

Read the rest of the article here.

Ali Abunimah: “Israel is Reaping Exactly What They Have Sown”

Ali Abunimah is the co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of two excellent books: The Battle for Justice in Palestine, and  One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.  I have read them both.

In this recent interview with Al Jazeera English, Mr. Abunimah concisely describes the root causes of the current wave of violence in Israel-Palestine.

Workable solutions can only arise from honest analysis of the real problems.

 

Orly Noy: “Our Humanity is Being Put to the Test”

Orly Noy is an Israeli journalist writing from Israel. Her latest piece at +972 Magazine is titled, “Our Humanity is Being Put to the Test.”

Yes, the attack on Israel was a vile crime. Now, Israel’s response reveals the criminality (or humanity) of its own society.

Below is an excerpt:

Morality is never a privilege, a luxury, an accessory that we can don when it’s convenient or remove when less so. Morality isn’t an indulgence we can’t afford during a catastrophe.

Insisting on morality is an insistence on context, without which this horrible violence loses its meaning and gets reduced to “human animals that want to destroy us for no reason.” To insist on morality and context is not to justify a crime. On the contrary – it is to ensure our understanding of reality includes all of the factors that contribute to it, so that we can more effectively change it.

If Hamas’ crimes justify unmitigated destruction through the collective punishment of the people of Gaza, what morality can we claim to condemn Hamas, especially given the harm Israel has inflicted there over the years? 

Read the entire article here.

No. We Cannot Stand with Israel. That Has Always Been Part of Israel’s Problem

Every western power you can shake a stick at is pledging to “stand with Israel” in its new war against the people of Gaza and Hamas.

With the catastrophic Israeli death toll topping 900, with 100s more missing and taken as hostages, the well-polished rhetoric of Israel’s fight for civilization is now on display. It will be a war of light against darkness, we are told.

Innocent, ennobled Israeli victims will take up their weapons and fight “with purity of arms” against the unwashed, barbarian hoards inhabiting the Gaza Strip.

Earlier yesterday, the Israeli defense minister announced that Israel had been attacked “by human animals.” Thus, justifying Israel’s impending savage response as it pays the Palestinians back in kind, inhumanity for inhumanity.

Such rhetoric is not new. In fact, Israeli politicians have a long history of making degrading, dehumanizing remarks against the 5.4 million Palestinians who are kept under lock and key in the dungeons otherwise known as the Occupied Territories (consisting of Gaza and the West Bank).

Yes, people are right to point out that the Hamas attack against Israeli civilians was a war crime. But when have these defenders of Israeli virtue ever cried out against the perpetual war crimes committed against the people of Gaza?

50% of the Gazan population are children. The median age is 16. It is one of the most densely populated pieces of real estate on earth, denser than Tokyo.

For the past 16 years Israel has walled these people off from the rest of the world, literally encircling all 2.2 million behind a hi-tech military fence, complete with sniper towers and automated, high powered semi-automatic machine guns.

Israel has boasted about calculating the number of calories needed to sustain the population at a near starvation level. And the minimal caloric intake is enforced. A military blockade keeps a stranglehold on everything and everyone entering or leaving the Strip.

In past bombing campaigns, Israel has already destroyed all infrastructure, including power plants and water purification facilities. Native industries have been demolished. Unemployment is 60%. Only a small fraction of the available drinking water is fit for human consumption.

So, when anyone, whether politician or church leader, heartily invokes the pledge of “standing with Israel” as that country prepares to lay siege against 1.1 million malnourished, impoverished children and their family members, struggling as best they can to survive in a nearly impossible situation, I am forced to call a time out.

Israel boasts about planning its own war crimes, and now our leaders tell us it’s time to stand with Israel?

Excuse me?!

For 56 years the Palestinian people have been suffering under Israel’s military dictatorship.

For 16 years the people of Gaza have been suffocated – nearly to death – by a military blockade, from which it is impossible for them to escape.

When has the west ever objected? When have we protested? When has the US called Israel to account for its brutal mistreatment of our fellow human beings?

Are Israeli lives more precious than Palestinian lives? While paying pious, vapid lip-service to human rights, the western states certainly behave as if Israel were merely conducting innocent experiments on laboratory animals, not Mengele-like violations on 2.2 million precious Bearers of God’s Image.

In the last 10 months alone, approximately 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. How loudly – and when and where, exactly? – did President Biden, or any other western leader, lament over the flagrant killings of those people, including the 40 innocent Palestinian children included in that death toll? When were condolences sent to their grieving mothers and fathers?

Israelis curse the home-made rockets, sans guidance systems, that rain down on southern Israel from Gaza. Where was their grief when Israeli missiles bombarded the densely populated Jenin refugee camp only months ago? Oh, I remember, they were cheering and applauding for that exercise in slaughter.

Israelis grieve over the images of families torn apart as they are kidnapped and taken away to secret locations under Hamas control.

But this is daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank. Night raids are the norm. Family members are regularly ripped from each other’s’ arms as children are “disappeared” into IDF prison facilities. This is the typical state of affairs in Palestinian homes suffering under Israeli military occupation.

So, No. It is not time to stand with Israel.

It is long past time to confront Israel with the obvious question: What the bloody hell did you expect would happen?

Is the “News” You Watch Informative or Is It Propaganda?

Signing the first Oslo Accords

This past summer marked the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, the supposed peace agreements that were intended (or were they?) to end the incessant hostilities between Zionist Israel and the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Territories.

Below are two different video news reports ostensibly covering the negotiations and eventual signing of these peace accords.

The first report is from CBN, a supposedly Christian news organization. As such, I expect them to maintain a high level of honesty, even-handedness, and truthfulness.

The second report is from Mondoweiss. (I will also disclose that it is produced and narrated by a friend of mine, Umna Patel.) Mondoweiss is a secular organization claiming to tell both sides of the story when it comes to Israel-Palestine.

While watching these two videos, ask yourself: Which one tells me about the details of the Oslo Accords? Which report best informs me about this piece of Middle East history, the role played by Oslo, and its long-term effects? Which one attempts to explain the specifics of why the Accords did not bring peace?

I’ll give you a hint on what I consider a dead give-away in rating these two clips.

Notice that the CBN report starkly portrays the characters involved as good guys in white hats (Israel) and bad guys in black hats (Palestinians). Period. There is no nuance or explanation. We are only told that Palestinians are inclined to violence and that they hate Israel. (Really, is anything in life that simple?)

In the CBN report, Israel is always the innocent victim of irrational Palestinian hatred. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are always bent on destroying Israel.

Sadly, the supposed “Christian” account is pure propaganda.

It’s the secular Mondoweiss account that informs and explains the real story in a balanced fashion.

The CBN report:

The Mondoweiss report:

Current Affairs Magazine: “Biden Couldn’t Care Less About Human Rights”

Nathan J. Robinson has an excellent piece in the online magazine Current Affairs detailing the utter disregard, indeed distain, with which President Joe Biden treats matters of human rights in international affairs.

Biden has filled his administration with neo-conservatives who push American imperialism above every other consideration. How foreign governments treat their own people, including their dissidents — most especially their dissidents — matters not one whit to this Biden administration.

He has proven his gross disinterest time and again.

Check out Robinson’s article filled with more than enough evidence to indict Biden as one of the most hard-hearted, inhumane presidents of all time.

Below is an excerpt:

. . . The pattern is consistent. Biden believes that U.S. global power matters far more than freedom and democracy (emphasis mine). As a result, he has totally ignored the pleas of human rights activists to exert even mild pressure on authoritarian regimes. 

Consider the case of Egypt. Earlier this month, the U.S. “approved $235 million in military aid for Egypt that it had withheld for the past two years because of the country’s repressive policies.” The details of the policy are ugly. That money was legally only supposed to be provided to Egypt if it met basic conditions of human rights. Eleven members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee sent a letter to Biden imploring him to withhold the aid, citing Egypt’s jailing of  “journalists, peaceful civil society activists, human rights defenders and political figures.” Biden ignored the plea and waived the legal requirement that Egypt respect basic human rights in order to receive this aid. The New York Times says the administration concluded that “national security interests outweigh congressionally mandated benchmarks for Egyptian progress on human rights.” Of course, nobody ever says how our “national security” is served by giving Egypt hundreds of millions of dollars without imposing any of the human rights requirements that Congress had demanded. Egypt has certainly learned the lesson that it need not make any human rights concessions to the U.S., because the money will keep flowing regardless. . . 

Read the entire article here.

Check Out an Intelligent Conversation About the US War with Russia in Ukraine (Yep, It’s a Needless Proxy War Threatening Nuclear Annihilation)

Below is as worthwhile conversation between Judge Andew Nepolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer about the current war in Ukraine.

Mearsheimer opens by explaining the two competing perspectives on this war. He then explains why the prevailing Western/US perspective is not only wrong-headed but extremely dangerous.

The US public is the #1 financier of this needless bloodbath — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It is well worth your time to hear what Professor Mearsheimer has to say.

After listening, I urge you to call your elected representatives and urge them to insist that (1) all parties to the conflict begin immediate peace negotiations, and (2) the US stop funding Ukrainian weaponry and intelligence.