There is a patronizing racism in the idea that slaughtering innocent people equates to noble freedom fighting, as if this were the only way to respond to oppression.
I've been saying to friends who seem to support what Hamas did that they are applauding 14th century barbarism and that if Hamas wins they will be living in a world that they don't want to live in.
They all say, "What Hamas did was terrible BUT"
I stop them at "BUT."
There is no "BUT" when civilians are purposefully targeted. Equating Hamas to the IDF, who warn civilians to get out of the way, is just antisemitism. I'm learning that these antisemites were always among us. This tragedy is just giving them a way to show it openly.
I always wish Mcwhorter would get off this favorite line of his. Minorities who receive preferential treatment do not care about being condescended to but grab as much undeserved power, influence and money as they can get, exactly like everybody else, including white people before them. And the white people who act like the fools that they are, are not condescending to anyone but merely making themselves feel righteous and good about sticking it to the man. And the wretched illiberal Left applauding terrorists is also not condescending to anybody but expressing their hatred for Israel and the US and fancy they stand with the truly oppressed. It's not as complicated as condescending to people they see as inferior. They simply see them as victims.
In honor of October 7th, going forward, October should be deemed "Useful Idiot" month. In October, Useful Idiot flags should be flown at full mast, with images of the past few years on an endless loop. Celebrations should include surgical masks dangling from frothing, zealous mouths, the ultimate mascot being the 'Queer for Palestine.' The telos of all this useful idiocy should be indulged; white people licking the boots of brown people, white people begging for forgiveness while brown people pummel their heads, denude their stores, kick in their windshields, etc, while the Useful Idiots cheer on this barbaric masochism.
At one campus where I work, during the "Summer of George Floyd" students whined that police cars parked near campus filled them with "terror," so the decades-long mutually beneficial arrangement with the nearby precinct ended. And now we have weirdos and criminals infiltrating campus, where students now have every real reason to feel "unsafe" having brought this useful idiocy on themselves.
Speaking of Useful Idiots, I can't help wondering why the Palestinians are crying over the Israelis cutting off their water supply (unless I misunderstand the situation, which is apparently very easy to do). I looked into this and note that Palestine buys some of its water from Israel. I guess they can't figure out how to build a water infrastructure of their own.
It amuses (and slightly frightens) me what qualities and values ascribe to Palestinians (or Islamic-fundamentalist nations in general). From about 30 seconds of research, many Islamic countries do not permit abortions at all other than if the mother's life is in danger. Sunni Islamic scholars (Gaza is like 99% Sunni Islam) have stated that a child is ensouled at 120 (or 80, or 40) days, so first trimester abortions are permissible but makruh. Meanwhile in Israel, abortion laws are far more lax, and can be approved by a committee to be funded via the public health basket.
So if reproductive rights is the most important issue, the best way to achieve that for Palestinians would be annexation into Israel and the elimination of the Palestinian state entirely.
Moral sanity is Satyagraha. This is the opposite: clinging to lies while committing pointless atrocities.
Here is the thing: Israel cannot "decolonize" anything. Hamas wants all Jews between the Jordan and the Mediterranean dead. They want genocide. A second Holocaust differing only in its personalized brutality from the first.
And these attacks: they knew and know that it will not get them any concrete advantages. What visas the Israelis were granting for Gazans to work in Israel and live better lives obviously dried up. What they were going to expand just disappeared.
No: the people who win, who drive all this, are the people who live in Qatar on money they siphon off the "aid" sent to Gaza, which increases when they force the Israelis into sane and proportional and careful responses to insane crimes.
This is a For Profit business built on the backs of largely innocent Gazans, who may individually hate Israelis, but who would have long ago built a stable and lasting peace if given the ability to do so, for the sake of their children.
Here is the thing: ideology is really an emotionally rooted obsessive mania that exists for its own sake. It is a raison d'etre. It is what keeps people who lack a purpose in life going. And as such, it inherently lacks the ability to see the world as it IS, and as a self blinded process, it generally makes the world worse, in the same way that none of us would drive a car well blindfolded. But to extend that example, none of us would drive blindfolded, then blame the road or the car or other drivers for our failure, which is what the Left does every day and has done for at least two hundred years.
This is a great perspective. What is so ironic is these people don’t realize that if decolonization is successful in Israel, it’s coming to Europe and North America. Actually the protests are showing it is here. This is not about multiculturalism and living peacefully/ it’s about people of European descent paying for the sins of their ancestors. So those in the protest mob will be among the first to go. It’s not about land acknowledgment statements. They want the land and us gone.
"It implies that Palestinians are so controlled by circumstance that they lack agency."
Yes, it's indeed true that Palestinian Arabs have agency - so much so, in fact, that in the internationally supervised 2006 Palestinian Authority elections, including in Gaza, a majority of the legislative seats were won by Hamas. Just as in the case of Hitler's rise to power, perpetrators of atrocities were freely elected; and just as in the case of the allied military campaign against Nazi Germany, while unfortunate, civilians will have to pay a large portion of the price of eliminating them.
If murdering babies is “reproductive justice,” then it logically follows that mass murder can be simply another tool by the “oppressed” in the name of “justice.” I mean, why not? If we sacrifice our children for our own “freedom,” then why can’t Hamas sacrifice their own children for their own freedom?
For those critiquing McWhorter for his supposed softness and ineffectiveness in focusing on the idea of condescension: I live in a bastion of toxic “liberal“ repression that has nearly destroyed my city (Seattle.) We, like Portland, are poster children for every bad idea, including defunding the police and support of the BLM riots as “the voice of the unheard.”
Primarily white speakers, are continually standing up to defend and patronize “Brown bodies” at every chance they get. Many of their “allies“ in the actually black community are grifters, taking whatever they can get from a white population that feels relentlessly guilty and is happy to handover money in $100 million increments to hire them to make things look better (and to shore up their own moral bunker.) I can guarantee you. They have never heard of John McWhorter. When I get into conversations and mentioned that there is a significant black community that opposes DEI and affirmative action, I think I am lying.
John McWhorter is not in a bubble, he is accurately targeting a still-powerful set of delusions fostered in government and non profits and disseminated at the university level. This week I watched white people attempt to blow up a brilliant grass roots environmental group using the term, “Intersectionality“ as “accused” people of being white. In drawing parallels between BLM and support for our own US riots and the rhetoric about Hamas I think he is using the term intersectionality as it should be, and I am grateful to see it.
John McWhorter, once again, gets right to the heart of the matter with startling insight and eloquence. As he's a columnist at the NYTimes should we even bother asking why this column appeared not there but in the FP?
Wake up. Democratic Socialism is an oxymoron. It is not Liberalism. Fascism and Socialism are two sides of the same coin. The coin being totalitarian rule by force. There is no such thing as good racism. There is no moral high ground or intellectual truth in dividing economics into capitalist oppressors and workers as victims. Unfortunately there is a kind of snobbish chic attached to Marxism/ Socialism exemplified by your quote from Susan Sontag. There is an alternative to Facism (right) and Socialism (left). It is articulated in the United States Constitution. That is liberalism defined and the base articulation of a political system that is the most successful in defining a system that rests on the consent of the governed. It stands against totalitarian Fascism and Socialism.
I've been saying to friends who seem to support what Hamas did that they are applauding 14th century barbarism and that if Hamas wins they will be living in a world that they don't want to live in.
They all say, "What Hamas did was terrible BUT"
I stop them at "BUT."
There is no "BUT" when civilians are purposefully targeted. Equating Hamas to the IDF, who warn civilians to get out of the way, is just antisemitism. I'm learning that these antisemites were always among us. This tragedy is just giving them a way to show it openly.
I always wish Mcwhorter would get off this favorite line of his. Minorities who receive preferential treatment do not care about being condescended to but grab as much undeserved power, influence and money as they can get, exactly like everybody else, including white people before them. And the white people who act like the fools that they are, are not condescending to anyone but merely making themselves feel righteous and good about sticking it to the man. And the wretched illiberal Left applauding terrorists is also not condescending to anybody but expressing their hatred for Israel and the US and fancy they stand with the truly oppressed. It's not as complicated as condescending to people they see as inferior. They simply see them as victims.
In honor of October 7th, going forward, October should be deemed "Useful Idiot" month. In October, Useful Idiot flags should be flown at full mast, with images of the past few years on an endless loop. Celebrations should include surgical masks dangling from frothing, zealous mouths, the ultimate mascot being the 'Queer for Palestine.' The telos of all this useful idiocy should be indulged; white people licking the boots of brown people, white people begging for forgiveness while brown people pummel their heads, denude their stores, kick in their windshields, etc, while the Useful Idiots cheer on this barbaric masochism.
At one campus where I work, during the "Summer of George Floyd" students whined that police cars parked near campus filled them with "terror," so the decades-long mutually beneficial arrangement with the nearby precinct ended. And now we have weirdos and criminals infiltrating campus, where students now have every real reason to feel "unsafe" having brought this useful idiocy on themselves.
Speaking of Useful Idiots, I can't help wondering why the Palestinians are crying over the Israelis cutting off their water supply (unless I misunderstand the situation, which is apparently very easy to do). I looked into this and note that Palestine buys some of its water from Israel. I guess they can't figure out how to build a water infrastructure of their own.
Which is what underscores all of this.
> "Reproductive Justice Means Free Palestine"
It amuses (and slightly frightens) me what qualities and values ascribe to Palestinians (or Islamic-fundamentalist nations in general). From about 30 seconds of research, many Islamic countries do not permit abortions at all other than if the mother's life is in danger. Sunni Islamic scholars (Gaza is like 99% Sunni Islam) have stated that a child is ensouled at 120 (or 80, or 40) days, so first trimester abortions are permissible but makruh. Meanwhile in Israel, abortion laws are far more lax, and can be approved by a committee to be funded via the public health basket.
So if reproductive rights is the most important issue, the best way to achieve that for Palestinians would be annexation into Israel and the elimination of the Palestinian state entirely.
Seeing John here leads me to believe his beloved NYT refused to publish this piece there.
John McWhorter continues to disassemble my Leftism in favor of liberalism.
Moral sanity is Satyagraha. This is the opposite: clinging to lies while committing pointless atrocities.
Here is the thing: Israel cannot "decolonize" anything. Hamas wants all Jews between the Jordan and the Mediterranean dead. They want genocide. A second Holocaust differing only in its personalized brutality from the first.
And these attacks: they knew and know that it will not get them any concrete advantages. What visas the Israelis were granting for Gazans to work in Israel and live better lives obviously dried up. What they were going to expand just disappeared.
No: the people who win, who drive all this, are the people who live in Qatar on money they siphon off the "aid" sent to Gaza, which increases when they force the Israelis into sane and proportional and careful responses to insane crimes.
This is a For Profit business built on the backs of largely innocent Gazans, who may individually hate Israelis, but who would have long ago built a stable and lasting peace if given the ability to do so, for the sake of their children.
Here is the thing: ideology is really an emotionally rooted obsessive mania that exists for its own sake. It is a raison d'etre. It is what keeps people who lack a purpose in life going. And as such, it inherently lacks the ability to see the world as it IS, and as a self blinded process, it generally makes the world worse, in the same way that none of us would drive a car well blindfolded. But to extend that example, none of us would drive blindfolded, then blame the road or the car or other drivers for our failure, which is what the Left does every day and has done for at least two hundred years.
This is a great perspective. What is so ironic is these people don’t realize that if decolonization is successful in Israel, it’s coming to Europe and North America. Actually the protests are showing it is here. This is not about multiculturalism and living peacefully/ it’s about people of European descent paying for the sins of their ancestors. So those in the protest mob will be among the first to go. It’s not about land acknowledgment statements. They want the land and us gone.
"It implies that Palestinians are so controlled by circumstance that they lack agency."
Yes, it's indeed true that Palestinian Arabs have agency - so much so, in fact, that in the internationally supervised 2006 Palestinian Authority elections, including in Gaza, a majority of the legislative seats were won by Hamas. Just as in the case of Hitler's rise to power, perpetrators of atrocities were freely elected; and just as in the case of the allied military campaign against Nazi Germany, while unfortunate, civilians will have to pay a large portion of the price of eliminating them.
The photo is telling of our time:
If murdering babies is “reproductive justice,” then it logically follows that mass murder can be simply another tool by the “oppressed” in the name of “justice.” I mean, why not? If we sacrifice our children for our own “freedom,” then why can’t Hamas sacrifice their own children for their own freedom?
We have truely lost our moral compass.
For those critiquing McWhorter for his supposed softness and ineffectiveness in focusing on the idea of condescension: I live in a bastion of toxic “liberal“ repression that has nearly destroyed my city (Seattle.) We, like Portland, are poster children for every bad idea, including defunding the police and support of the BLM riots as “the voice of the unheard.”
Primarily white speakers, are continually standing up to defend and patronize “Brown bodies” at every chance they get. Many of their “allies“ in the actually black community are grifters, taking whatever they can get from a white population that feels relentlessly guilty and is happy to handover money in $100 million increments to hire them to make things look better (and to shore up their own moral bunker.) I can guarantee you. They have never heard of John McWhorter. When I get into conversations and mentioned that there is a significant black community that opposes DEI and affirmative action, I think I am lying.
John McWhorter is not in a bubble, he is accurately targeting a still-powerful set of delusions fostered in government and non profits and disseminated at the university level. This week I watched white people attempt to blow up a brilliant grass roots environmental group using the term, “Intersectionality“ as “accused” people of being white. In drawing parallels between BLM and support for our own US riots and the rhetoric about Hamas I think he is using the term intersectionality as it should be, and I am grateful to see it.
John McWhorter, once again, gets right to the heart of the matter with startling insight and eloquence. As he's a columnist at the NYTimes should we even bother asking why this column appeared not there but in the FP?
Wake up. Democratic Socialism is an oxymoron. It is not Liberalism. Fascism and Socialism are two sides of the same coin. The coin being totalitarian rule by force. There is no such thing as good racism. There is no moral high ground or intellectual truth in dividing economics into capitalist oppressors and workers as victims. Unfortunately there is a kind of snobbish chic attached to Marxism/ Socialism exemplified by your quote from Susan Sontag. There is an alternative to Facism (right) and Socialism (left). It is articulated in the United States Constitution. That is liberalism defined and the base articulation of a political system that is the most successful in defining a system that rests on the consent of the governed. It stands against totalitarian Fascism and Socialism.
I love John McWhorter.
This generation is lost, confused and devoid of a moral compass. They are enabled by what are supposedly adults. So sad.
Great piece. As much as it is nice to see it in the Free Press, it would likely have more impact if it were published in his usual spot at the NYT.