Hamas is not the only evil in land of Israel. The Likud party and its genocidal coalition partners more than equal the depravity of Hamas. Likud's mission has been to dominate and annex Samaria and Judea (The West Bank) since they got power.
Israel is an apartied, racist country. Systemic racism about US society may be an exaggeration, but it perfectly describes Israeli society.
Hamas' attacks on the kibbutzim on Gaza's border are an abomination and I fully condemn them. But since the Gazans and residents of the West Bank are living under military occupation are deprived of self determination, they have the right to armed resistance as long as they don't commit war crimes.
(Did the French and Poles have the right to resist the Nazis or were they terrorists?)
Israel has no right to oppress those whom are occupying.
Very good on the whole, but a crucial piece of this sad situation was barely mentioned. Iran. Iran is on a "cressentade" to expand its Shiite power in the Middle East. Iran was the driving force behind Oct. 7. That our political leadership won't say so is shameful and cowardly.
Israel and many of the Sunni countries are natural allies with a common foe in Iran and common cause in reciprocal trade. Saudi Arabia and Gulf states were normalizing relations with Israel, but Hamas, an Iranian tentacle, has driven all that diplomacy off the rails for now. If you want to lay blame for the recent and coming deaths of Israelis and Palestinians, the Iranian leadership would be one place.
I have gone over to some other voices on Palestine since you guys and Coleman have adopted the usual Israeli storyline. I will continue to look to you on Wokeism stuff, but to minds like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein when it comes to Palestine.
Finkelstein sees October 12th as a revisitation of the Nat Turner rebellion, and I convert this to seeing Hamas and Turner as symptoms of more profound evils: the inhumanity of slavery and the criminal colonial settler occupation of Palestine.
These two rebellions did not just manifest for the hell of it, but from hells that two different populations were damned to by oppressors who stoked the thermostats whenever they could.
Gazan occupants have been living like caged animals for decades: supplied polluted water, harassed with electrical blackouts, and denied freedom of movement and their own economy; thus, 90 percent of their livelihood is charity. As a black man, I had more humanity under Jim Crow!
And don't let me forget the constant raids in which innocent Gaza souls were murdered with complete US immunity, even though some of these slain civilians were American citizens.
Bombs cannot destroy such rebellious ideologies, but bombs can amend them to nastier and more difficult menaces that can be more intractable.
Israel and its American enablers must understand that this time, it is not business as usual, for I am seeing a worldwide backblast like no other. I know the pendulum arm is on the backswing, and something historic will come from this.
For your viewers who need help understanding the issues, Norman Finkelstein has a very informative YouTube on this, Brief History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
I am disappointed in this treatment of the situation of the Jewish state. And surprised, for some reason. So much anguish over the deaths of Palestinian civilians, far more than about the deaths of Jews. Israel is the one tiny Jewish state in a big world that contains 22 Arab states. It has been detested by the Arabs since its founding amid the shards of the Ottoman empire and the European conflicts. Jews occupied the land thousands of years ago, while there was never a Palestinian nation state. Yet we hold the Israelis to a standard that no other country would accept and act as though the straits of the Palestinians are the fault of...the Israelis. Not the Palestinian people, not Hamas, not the Palestinian Authority, not the Arab states that never took them in because they wanted an excuse to demonize Israel, even as they expelled Jews from their lands, not the Europeans or the Turks or the Romans. It is always the Jews who are to blame for their own destruction at the hands of others. A glance at the UN's oft-stated hatred for Israel is instructive. They are all keeping the Palestinians in a wretched condition so they can blame the Jews. Terrorists can rape, maim, murder, kidnap, behead and torture Jews, and all anyone can talk about is, "What is to become of the Palestinians when Israel invades??" It's the fault of the Jews that Hamas embeds itself among civilians it couldn't care less about. It's the fault of the Jews that they have been hounded and massacred and virtually exterminated in Europe. They have been hated by pagans, Christians, Muslims and atheists. Yet it doesn't take a lot of time to learn the story of all this Jew-blaming. I think you guys should educate yourselves about it.
Another comment - the Jews have been in Middle East including what constitutes Israel for at least four thousand years.
They were pushed out by the Babylonians and returned.
Then they were pushed out by the Romans and returned.
Then they were slaughtered by the Crusaders and fled and returned.
Then the Crusaders were expelled by the Ottomans and the Jews returned, some.
In 1936, the year of the Arab Rebellion against the British (and the Jews) there were about 450,000 Jews.
In 1948 when Israel declared independence approximately 900,000 Jews were expelled from Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Iran. These families had been in their prospective homes for thousands of years when they were forced to flee.
One last thing about 1492, since you brought it up - Columbus sailed a few days before the Inquisition was announced.
How can John McWhorter not understand that this is violence aimed Jews. There were non-Jewish Israelis killed but that was an artifact of the tactics used by Hamas.
The videos the Israeli Defense Force played for the media featured Hamas terrorist rejoicing in the murder of Jews.
And Mr. McWhorter, who has some fluency in Arabic should examine the Hamas charter. If he or Mr. Loury or anyone cannot read it, go to MEMRI. They're website is rich in original documents in Arabic that have been translated for our convenience.
October 7th was followed by a "Day of Rage" featuring large crowds calling for the death of Jews - not Israelis - in cities around the world. In New York, Sidney, Berlin, Paris, and more the police of these cities urged Jews to stay away and stay inside as they abdicated their responsibility to protect us, their Jewish citizens.
Yes, Glenn and John. You are right. You are both right.
We are on the brink of a chasm. From within, from every piece of news I get from Israel and from all around -- it is the brink of a chasm and I despair that there is any way of turning away.
There is a country, Israel, that since its establishment has been under attack, has been hated by its neighbours, has been helped and yet used as a symbol by her friends, a symbol of Western civilisation in the middle of lands that developed differently, and a symbol of the redemption of Western guilt.
There is a people, the Palestinians, that since the establishment of that country has been used by its neighbours as weapons, ideological and religious, and as a symbol all over the world of the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor.
This conflict has been going on since before 1948, and propaganda has played an immense role in it, as well as religious fanaticism and totalitarian or illiberal ideologies -- on both sides.
I, and my family, are heartbroken about the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza. But it is hard to see a way out of it. Hamas determinedly uses the civilian population as human shields, allows them no access to the tunnels where they could be sheltered from bombing, sets its headquarters in the most populous locations, has discouraged people from moving south. Every dead civilian is good propaganda for Hamas and they use it ruthlessly. Meanwhile, the civilian population, by every poll ever done, supports Hamas in the order of 70%.
Egypt does not want to open the border to the Palestinians. So does not Jordan. They are afraid of the Islamist militants in the middle of the civilians, because they are in dire danger against religious fundamentalism.
So Israel is in this place, between hammer and anvil. After the last attack, what constitutes a proportionate response? There can be no proportionate response. But one cannot sit back and do nothing, for tomorrow worse will come. So the one option is to go in and seek to root out the terrorists one by one... but aside from the many who have a known identity, how can you know the others? In an ordinary war, soldiers wear uniforms. This is no ordinary war.
A couple days ago my son sent a message to his mother: "When I see a group of people running toward me, how do I know who of them will throw a grenade?" How can he find a way to spare the others? I do not know, he does not know, nobody knows.
And this is the terrible thing, because I talk to my friends in Egypt too, and they have a better pulse of the situation in the Arab countries, and are terrified, because the so called "street" is going crazy, Islamist propaganda is at its highest and people fall to it like fish to the bait. They hate Israel, they hate the West. They believe the most outrageous stories and conspiracy theories.
And you do know who pulls the strings of Hamas and Hezbollah. This bloodshed serves the purposes of the path that Iran has envisioned, and every totalitarian regime in the world is excited to seize on it for its own goals, from Russia to China to India. With the help of that part of the Western Left who remains stuck to a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist approach to the understanding of the world -- so ridiculously idiotic in today's world, and yet resurgent with such force in that ideology that for lack of a better definition we call woke.
And the Jews are such a perfect target as the Enemy, especially when they defend themselves. It begins from Israel and it rapidly comes down to the Jews.
Looking at Gaza, we people of reason ask Israel to restrain itself. But it does not seem that anybody has any suggestion of an alternative course of action. Ceasefire? with whom? You cannot negotiate with people who do what Hamas does. It is the same as those who proposed to negotiate with Hitler. Israel could stop fighting and retreat and build higher walls and wait until the day that 10/7 happens again. The country simply cannot stand it.
The world could propose to deploy a giant UN peacekeeping mission, capable of keeping Israel safe (it would be a first), and enforce negotiations between Israel and elected representatives of Gaza not affiliated with Hamas, along with Fatah. This is such a nice thought, but it is pure science fiction. There is no will, in the world or the United Nations, to go in that direction.
So, my friends, I see no solution. The chasm is there and is real, and we are walking on the brink of it. There does not seem to be anything that anybody can do, really, except be carried on with the slide. For those who want war, holy or otherwise, for those who feel that the world must be reforged in blood and fire, this must seem a splendid opportunity.
For me, it is horrifying. I do hope that we shall survive.
I have heard these eternal points-of-view since I was a boy in the seventies—and we supported Israel then because Jews needed a home after the holocaust, because Israel was a democracy, because it was the underdog among larger hostile neighbors, and because when threatened, the Israelis stood their ground. The only perspective I can honestly have now is to ask myself what would I do if October 7 had happened to me and my family and neighbors? What would you have done? I'm skeptical of anyone who says he wouldn't be doing just as the Israelis have done.
Have you heard the recording of the terrorist so excited to call his parents, to tell them that he had killed ten Israelis? "Put Mom on," he said, "she will be so proud of me!" Are those parents part of "the innocent Palestinians" ??
Of course there are good and decent Palestinians. But not all. When I hear the constant drone about "the innocent Palestinians," I can't help but think, "Well, who were all those people in the streets cheering as the terrorists paraded the near-naked body of a raped young Israeli through the street?"
I haven't listened yet, but I did read Glenn's introduction. Such moral confusion! When the Allies were bombing Berlin, was the focus on getting supplies in for German civilians?? Opening "corridors"?? Calling for a cease fire?? Fretting about "all the violence"? Were war reporters rushing to get photos of injured German civilians? No. Glenn, it appears that you have these concerns only when Jews are fighting (yet again) for their survival. There's always one thought that haunts me: Throughout human history, there have been terrible wars. The Romans probably took a million slaves. WW I was sheer slaughter, under unimaginable conditions. And on and on. But the Holocaust was the only time in all of human history where the intent was to annihilate a people completely -- to genetically remove all trace of them from existence. I am not Jewish, but I feel an unbreakable commitment to their survival. And for those who were blind to this before, surely everyone can now see by the anti-Semitism that is emerging from every dark corner, that Jews can never entrust their safety to others; they must have their own State.
I agree with the viewpoint expressed by John at the outset of this video. That's not the preferred way or the civilized way. But probably the only way to end this conflict rather than postponing it and engaging in it forever.
Obviously, neither John nor Glenn know much about Jews. Two sides can engage in murder and rape and terror. The MOSAD will be watching all players on the American left and they will make a little list of enemies. Expect them to start having mysterious accidents.
There are no good options with Gaza, and the suffering that lies ahead makes me sick. But the transcendent battle takes place in the media, on social media, in academia, at podiums and in front of TV cameras. In that war, despite a much more defensible set of values, Israel and the West are being routed. Until that changes, time is on the side of anarchy and hate.
As usual, you both offer sage wisdom on subjects of great importance. We are in-debt to you for keeping hope alive.
I am not sure this is all that much to add, but in addition to the things you mention it seems we have a society increasingly untethered from reason. We tell ourselves marriage is not necessary for the upbringing of kids, boys can become girls, the unlawful immigrant from another country has a right to the resources of the country of which I belong. I am supposed to watch babies and women get massacred and listen to people try and provide context? The media, the institutions, the kids. They are all not okay.
Hamas is not the only evil in land of Israel. The Likud party and its genocidal coalition partners more than equal the depravity of Hamas. Likud's mission has been to dominate and annex Samaria and Judea (The West Bank) since they got power.
Israel is an apartied, racist country. Systemic racism about US society may be an exaggeration, but it perfectly describes Israeli society.
Hamas' attacks on the kibbutzim on Gaza's border are an abomination and I fully condemn them. But since the Gazans and residents of the West Bank are living under military occupation are deprived of self determination, they have the right to armed resistance as long as they don't commit war crimes.
(Did the French and Poles have the right to resist the Nazis or were they terrorists?)
Israel has no right to oppress those whom are occupying.
Very good on the whole, but a crucial piece of this sad situation was barely mentioned. Iran. Iran is on a "cressentade" to expand its Shiite power in the Middle East. Iran was the driving force behind Oct. 7. That our political leadership won't say so is shameful and cowardly.
Israel and many of the Sunni countries are natural allies with a common foe in Iran and common cause in reciprocal trade. Saudi Arabia and Gulf states were normalizing relations with Israel, but Hamas, an Iranian tentacle, has driven all that diplomacy off the rails for now. If you want to lay blame for the recent and coming deaths of Israelis and Palestinians, the Iranian leadership would be one place.
I have gone over to some other voices on Palestine since you guys and Coleman have adopted the usual Israeli storyline. I will continue to look to you on Wokeism stuff, but to minds like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein when it comes to Palestine.
Finkelstein sees October 12th as a revisitation of the Nat Turner rebellion, and I convert this to seeing Hamas and Turner as symptoms of more profound evils: the inhumanity of slavery and the criminal colonial settler occupation of Palestine.
These two rebellions did not just manifest for the hell of it, but from hells that two different populations were damned to by oppressors who stoked the thermostats whenever they could.
Gazan occupants have been living like caged animals for decades: supplied polluted water, harassed with electrical blackouts, and denied freedom of movement and their own economy; thus, 90 percent of their livelihood is charity. As a black man, I had more humanity under Jim Crow!
And don't let me forget the constant raids in which innocent Gaza souls were murdered with complete US immunity, even though some of these slain civilians were American citizens.
Bombs cannot destroy such rebellious ideologies, but bombs can amend them to nastier and more difficult menaces that can be more intractable.
Israel and its American enablers must understand that this time, it is not business as usual, for I am seeing a worldwide backblast like no other. I know the pendulum arm is on the backswing, and something historic will come from this.
For your viewers who need help understanding the issues, Norman Finkelstein has a very informative YouTube on this, Brief History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUfWTHbCS78
I am disappointed in this treatment of the situation of the Jewish state. And surprised, for some reason. So much anguish over the deaths of Palestinian civilians, far more than about the deaths of Jews. Israel is the one tiny Jewish state in a big world that contains 22 Arab states. It has been detested by the Arabs since its founding amid the shards of the Ottoman empire and the European conflicts. Jews occupied the land thousands of years ago, while there was never a Palestinian nation state. Yet we hold the Israelis to a standard that no other country would accept and act as though the straits of the Palestinians are the fault of...the Israelis. Not the Palestinian people, not Hamas, not the Palestinian Authority, not the Arab states that never took them in because they wanted an excuse to demonize Israel, even as they expelled Jews from their lands, not the Europeans or the Turks or the Romans. It is always the Jews who are to blame for their own destruction at the hands of others. A glance at the UN's oft-stated hatred for Israel is instructive. They are all keeping the Palestinians in a wretched condition so they can blame the Jews. Terrorists can rape, maim, murder, kidnap, behead and torture Jews, and all anyone can talk about is, "What is to become of the Palestinians when Israel invades??" It's the fault of the Jews that Hamas embeds itself among civilians it couldn't care less about. It's the fault of the Jews that they have been hounded and massacred and virtually exterminated in Europe. They have been hated by pagans, Christians, Muslims and atheists. Yet it doesn't take a lot of time to learn the story of all this Jew-blaming. I think you guys should educate yourselves about it.
Another comment - the Jews have been in Middle East including what constitutes Israel for at least four thousand years.
They were pushed out by the Babylonians and returned.
Then they were pushed out by the Romans and returned.
Then they were slaughtered by the Crusaders and fled and returned.
Then the Crusaders were expelled by the Ottomans and the Jews returned, some.
In 1936, the year of the Arab Rebellion against the British (and the Jews) there were about 450,000 Jews.
In 1948 when Israel declared independence approximately 900,000 Jews were expelled from Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Iran. These families had been in their prospective homes for thousands of years when they were forced to flee.
One last thing about 1492, since you brought it up - Columbus sailed a few days before the Inquisition was announced.
How can John McWhorter not understand that this is violence aimed Jews. There were non-Jewish Israelis killed but that was an artifact of the tactics used by Hamas.
The videos the Israeli Defense Force played for the media featured Hamas terrorist rejoicing in the murder of Jews.
And Mr. McWhorter, who has some fluency in Arabic should examine the Hamas charter. If he or Mr. Loury or anyone cannot read it, go to MEMRI. They're website is rich in original documents in Arabic that have been translated for our convenience.
October 7th was followed by a "Day of Rage" featuring large crowds calling for the death of Jews - not Israelis - in cities around the world. In New York, Sidney, Berlin, Paris, and more the police of these cities urged Jews to stay away and stay inside as they abdicated their responsibility to protect us, their Jewish citizens.
Yes, Glenn and John. You are right. You are both right.
We are on the brink of a chasm. From within, from every piece of news I get from Israel and from all around -- it is the brink of a chasm and I despair that there is any way of turning away.
There is a country, Israel, that since its establishment has been under attack, has been hated by its neighbours, has been helped and yet used as a symbol by her friends, a symbol of Western civilisation in the middle of lands that developed differently, and a symbol of the redemption of Western guilt.
There is a people, the Palestinians, that since the establishment of that country has been used by its neighbours as weapons, ideological and religious, and as a symbol all over the world of the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor.
This conflict has been going on since before 1948, and propaganda has played an immense role in it, as well as religious fanaticism and totalitarian or illiberal ideologies -- on both sides.
I, and my family, are heartbroken about the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza. But it is hard to see a way out of it. Hamas determinedly uses the civilian population as human shields, allows them no access to the tunnels where they could be sheltered from bombing, sets its headquarters in the most populous locations, has discouraged people from moving south. Every dead civilian is good propaganda for Hamas and they use it ruthlessly. Meanwhile, the civilian population, by every poll ever done, supports Hamas in the order of 70%.
Egypt does not want to open the border to the Palestinians. So does not Jordan. They are afraid of the Islamist militants in the middle of the civilians, because they are in dire danger against religious fundamentalism.
So Israel is in this place, between hammer and anvil. After the last attack, what constitutes a proportionate response? There can be no proportionate response. But one cannot sit back and do nothing, for tomorrow worse will come. So the one option is to go in and seek to root out the terrorists one by one... but aside from the many who have a known identity, how can you know the others? In an ordinary war, soldiers wear uniforms. This is no ordinary war.
A couple days ago my son sent a message to his mother: "When I see a group of people running toward me, how do I know who of them will throw a grenade?" How can he find a way to spare the others? I do not know, he does not know, nobody knows.
And this is the terrible thing, because I talk to my friends in Egypt too, and they have a better pulse of the situation in the Arab countries, and are terrified, because the so called "street" is going crazy, Islamist propaganda is at its highest and people fall to it like fish to the bait. They hate Israel, they hate the West. They believe the most outrageous stories and conspiracy theories.
And you do know who pulls the strings of Hamas and Hezbollah. This bloodshed serves the purposes of the path that Iran has envisioned, and every totalitarian regime in the world is excited to seize on it for its own goals, from Russia to China to India. With the help of that part of the Western Left who remains stuck to a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist approach to the understanding of the world -- so ridiculously idiotic in today's world, and yet resurgent with such force in that ideology that for lack of a better definition we call woke.
And the Jews are such a perfect target as the Enemy, especially when they defend themselves. It begins from Israel and it rapidly comes down to the Jews.
Looking at Gaza, we people of reason ask Israel to restrain itself. But it does not seem that anybody has any suggestion of an alternative course of action. Ceasefire? with whom? You cannot negotiate with people who do what Hamas does. It is the same as those who proposed to negotiate with Hitler. Israel could stop fighting and retreat and build higher walls and wait until the day that 10/7 happens again. The country simply cannot stand it.
The world could propose to deploy a giant UN peacekeeping mission, capable of keeping Israel safe (it would be a first), and enforce negotiations between Israel and elected representatives of Gaza not affiliated with Hamas, along with Fatah. This is such a nice thought, but it is pure science fiction. There is no will, in the world or the United Nations, to go in that direction.
So, my friends, I see no solution. The chasm is there and is real, and we are walking on the brink of it. There does not seem to be anything that anybody can do, really, except be carried on with the slide. For those who want war, holy or otherwise, for those who feel that the world must be reforged in blood and fire, this must seem a splendid opportunity.
For me, it is horrifying. I do hope that we shall survive.
And by we, I mean Western civilisation, truly.
I have heard these eternal points-of-view since I was a boy in the seventies—and we supported Israel then because Jews needed a home after the holocaust, because Israel was a democracy, because it was the underdog among larger hostile neighbors, and because when threatened, the Israelis stood their ground. The only perspective I can honestly have now is to ask myself what would I do if October 7 had happened to me and my family and neighbors? What would you have done? I'm skeptical of anyone who says he wouldn't be doing just as the Israelis have done.
Have you heard the recording of the terrorist so excited to call his parents, to tell them that he had killed ten Israelis? "Put Mom on," he said, "she will be so proud of me!" Are those parents part of "the innocent Palestinians" ??
Of course there are good and decent Palestinians. But not all. When I hear the constant drone about "the innocent Palestinians," I can't help but think, "Well, who were all those people in the streets cheering as the terrorists paraded the near-naked body of a raped young Israeli through the street?"
I haven't listened yet, but I did read Glenn's introduction. Such moral confusion! When the Allies were bombing Berlin, was the focus on getting supplies in for German civilians?? Opening "corridors"?? Calling for a cease fire?? Fretting about "all the violence"? Were war reporters rushing to get photos of injured German civilians? No. Glenn, it appears that you have these concerns only when Jews are fighting (yet again) for their survival. There's always one thought that haunts me: Throughout human history, there have been terrible wars. The Romans probably took a million slaves. WW I was sheer slaughter, under unimaginable conditions. And on and on. But the Holocaust was the only time in all of human history where the intent was to annihilate a people completely -- to genetically remove all trace of them from existence. I am not Jewish, but I feel an unbreakable commitment to their survival. And for those who were blind to this before, surely everyone can now see by the anti-Semitism that is emerging from every dark corner, that Jews can never entrust their safety to others; they must have their own State.
I agree with the viewpoint expressed by John at the outset of this video. That's not the preferred way or the civilized way. But probably the only way to end this conflict rather than postponing it and engaging in it forever.
What would happen if someone started putting up posters of the slain children of Gaza next to the posters of kidnapped Israelis?
All this killing will eventually die down. Then the campaign for disinvestment in Israel will come roaring back.
Obviously, neither John nor Glenn know much about Jews. Two sides can engage in murder and rape and terror. The MOSAD will be watching all players on the American left and they will make a little list of enemies. Expect them to start having mysterious accidents.
There are no good options with Gaza, and the suffering that lies ahead makes me sick. But the transcendent battle takes place in the media, on social media, in academia, at podiums and in front of TV cameras. In that war, despite a much more defensible set of values, Israel and the West are being routed. Until that changes, time is on the side of anarchy and hate.
As usual, you both offer sage wisdom on subjects of great importance. We are in-debt to you for keeping hope alive.
I am not sure this is all that much to add, but in addition to the things you mention it seems we have a society increasingly untethered from reason. We tell ourselves marriage is not necessary for the upbringing of kids, boys can become girls, the unlawful immigrant from another country has a right to the resources of the country of which I belong. I am supposed to watch babies and women get massacred and listen to people try and provide context? The media, the institutions, the kids. They are all not okay.