It’s not the police, or the university administrations, or President Biden. It’s this:
These numbers are from late March, before your movement spread widely. We’ll have to see how your protests move the numbers—and in which direction.
I am sympathetic to student protests, having been in the leadership of some on two university campuses in the ‘60s. Our two main goals were 1) to end segregation (the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was our real leader on that) and 2) to end the war in Vietnam. In retrospect, I still believe today what I believed then: We were right on both counts.
But were we successful? On the first count, we accomplished a lot, although there was a long way to go, and there still is now. One big reason for this relative success was of course Dr. King, but another was President Lyndon Baynes Johnson, who politically strong-armed into existence the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (yes, the same laws being broken apart by the current Supreme Court). Nevertheless in those years the culture of the country with regard to race improved in some ways that are difficult to reverse.
But on the second goal, ending the war, we failed miserably. To us, Johnson’s pursuit of the war was so abhorrent that his civil rights record didn’t matter. I vividly remember the chants: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”—sound familiar? One evening in March 1968, he announced an end to the bombing if North Vietnam and also his refusal to run for re-election in November. Success, right? Wrong. The ground war continued and our protests escalated until the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was so disrupted by activists that the police reacted brutally (sound familiar?). Richard Nixon ran for president and won, on a law and order platform and a promise to wind down the war.
He kept the first promise but not the second. The war ran on into the 1970s despite ongoing protests. Not only that, but the Republicans held the White House—with a four-year weak interruption by Jimmy Carter—from 1969 to 1993. The voters were sick of our antics and they stayed sick of them for a very long time. So, looking back more broadly on the results of our efforts, I have to say it’s a mixed bag.
Are you planning to mount a disruptive assault on the Democratic Convention this August— which will be held in Chicago for only the second time since 1968? Or to put the question another way: are you planning to re-elect Donald Trump and bring about an end to our democracy, which is what he has promised to do?
In the meantime, may I give you some marketing advice regarding your current national sweep? You have already cancelled some graduation ceremonies. One of these is the University of Southern California, which would have celebrated with some dignity the completion of studies of some 18,000 students from undergraduate and graduate schools.
The undergraduates and many of the graduate students had their high school or college graduations cancelled by Covid. Now they are having their next big milestone in life cancelled by you. But it won’t be just those 18,000 who will be angry at you. Each will have wanted to bring two or three family members, so let’s call it conservatively 50,000 people whose hopes for a wonderful life moment you have trashed—at USC alone.
I know you are trying to do the same at scores of other universities, not all as large as USC but all cherished by their soon-to-be graduates. And the graduations you can’t cancel you will try to spoil in one way or another, using your right to free speech to sully the dreams of millions. Ah, but you are influencers! Surely your righteous efforts will win many friends among them, even though only a fraction supported your cause before you trashed this time of their lives, a time of joy now tainted by your fury.
Even if you can convince some of them to believe your lies about Israel and Gaza, the vast majority will never forgive you for ruining their commemorations. And what do you suppose the hundreds of millions of regular folks who are watching you on television will think?
So good luck turning your darling collections of tents into a mass movement. Enjoy the camp-outs while you can, don’t forget the marshmallows, and don’t be surprised when your cause completely fails.
Today is the thirtieth Sabbath of the Gaza War. It is also the Sabbath of Passover, the holiday called z’man cherutenu—the time of our freedom—since it celebrates the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. This comes from the Haggadah, the service read at the Passover seder, or sacred—and ordered—meal.
The service also contains the words, “In each generation they have stood against us to destroy us.” So many generations. So many different they’s. The Haggadah in some form has existed for at least two thousand years, and I don’t know when these exact words first appeared, but they are the same in my facsimile edition of The Copenhagen Haggadah of 1739, exactly two centuries before the Holocaust. And my friend Dr. Shlomit Finkelstein found the same words in a Haggadah dated to the late 1330s in Catalonia.
Thus, centuries before the Holocaust, before even the Cossack attempted genocide against Jews in 1648, Jews said every Passover, “In each generation they have stood against us to destroy us.” In this generation, the grotesque mass atrocities committed against Jews by Hamas—who soon promised to do the same a thousand times, as their charter pledges them to do—easily serve to confirm the Haggadah’s grim words. (For details of what Hamas did, see my description and this moving film starring Sheryl Sandberg.)
In the past week or two, US college campuses have imploded with demonstrations and encampments in favor of Palestinians and often Hamas, and virulently anti-Israel and often antisemitic. I say imploded rather than exploded because although they have spread throughout the country, they are implosive because they have mainly damaged themselves. Many have crossed the line from free speech to illegal action, inviting local and state police suppression. Ironically, they have risen up just as deaths in Gaza have reached their lowest levels ever. (See chart.)
Deaths in Gaza as counted by Hamas’s Health Ministry and reported by the UN (OCHA).
Today, I will reveal the honorees for First Annual—okay, they might have to be more frequent—Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, for the individuals or collectives who have done the most recently to promote the Big Lie and the Blood Libel against the Jewish people (see chart for hints).
But first: Just as the holy, peaceful, month of Ramadan—including four sacred Fridays and the feast of Eid-al-Fitr—blessedly passed with none of the predicted Islamic violence on the Temple Mount (the Noble Sanctuary), in the Middle East, and throughout the world, so the martial, belligerent, massive, unprecedented attack on Israel last night passed with virtually no damage. The coalition that completely blocked the attack included the US, the UK, France, and Jordan shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and Saudi Arabia providing logistic support. Imagine the degree of cooperation that such coordinated response must have involved. Now imagine the formidable coalition that will follow the war, annealed by alliance against this attack. My brother likens the attack to an amateur boxer throwing a hundred punches none of which lands, then waiting with tired arms for the professional blow that will pop his lights out. Now we’ll see what punch Israel uses. Its stock market finished higher today.
But back to our Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, known colloquially as Goebbsies in honor of Joseph Goebbels, the master propagandist who put it to history’s most effective use.
The chart above shows today’s Goebbsie honorees against the timeline of the dramatically declining deaths in Gaza since the war started. These are total deaths in successive two-week periods (the blue line) as provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and reported by the United Nations. There are many reasons to doubt these numbers, which are almost certainly over-estimates, but I am accepting them for present purposes because I want to focus on the steep decline—by Hamas’s numbers—and the remarkable fact that the lower the number of deaths got, the bigger the Big Lie got and the Bloodier the Blood Libel got as well. Five of the six Big Lies and Blood Libels shown here were smeared on Israel and the Jews when the number of deaths was about one quarter of what it was in the first month of the war—and declining.
Some background. The Blood Libel is the accusation that Jews ritually kill Christian children before Passover and use their blood to make Matzoh. It existed by the 12th century and has occurred ever since, although not every year. It frequently resulted in pogroms and severe persecution of the Jews where the belief spread. It is also a Big Lie, since it was repeated so often that many believed it. It even became part of Nazi propaganda.
The Big Lie has always existed, but it was specifically named by Joseph Goebbels and separately by Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf. Ironically, both used the idea to describe how Jews carry out their conquest of Germany and the world, and they emphasized that if you repeat a lie often enough the masses of people will believe you. However, both Goebbels, who was Hitler’s chief propagandist and one of his closest associates, and Hitler as the voice, purveyed the Big Lie about the Jews—in one iteration, “Die Juden sind unser Unglück” (the Jews are our misfortune)—repeating it in speeches, radio, and film. It soon enough produced the consensus among “the masses” that led to the mass murder of Jews.
All of the honorees on the chart repeated the Big Lie now being leveled against Israel and the Jews, although in one case the grammar in which the Lie was couched was so convoluted as to be almost incomprehensible. The lie was also a Blood Libel, since the killing of innocents, including children, was supposedly deliberate. As far as I know, people are not yet accusing the Jews of using Palestinian children’s blood to make Matzoh, but I don’t use social media very much and with Passover imminent I would not be surprised to see this pop up somewhere.
In order of appearance, here are the nominees:
On January 11, South Africa argued its case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Despite having members known to be consistently anti-Israel (one of those was just elevated to be the Court’s President), the Court could not conclude that Israel is or was committing genocide; that requires a years-long process, which has to happen. But the court did not implement this item in the case: “South Africa has requested an Order for the immediate suspension of Israel’s military operations in and against Gaza.” (p. 78) This was the most important practical request from South Africa. Surely, if the Court thought that South Africa’s accusation of genocide was plausible, it would have ordered a ceasefire as requested. Instead, it issued warnings that Israel should act so as to prevent genocide, and that it should submit reports showing that it has done so. Since Israel had always acted as such, the reports write themselves. Incidentally, among democracies, Israel is ranked #30, South Africa #45; among countries ranked least to most corrupt, Israel is #33, South Africa #87. South Africa has extensive and growing ties with Iran.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who I’m ashamed to admit is a Brooklyn Jew like me, told the Senate “The US should be working to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, not aiding and abetting it,” and voted with 31 Republicans against aid to Israel; 67 Senators, including all Democrats, voted for the bill. Sanders has been anti-Israel in key Senate votes since 1988. His official and deliberate use of the word genocide to describe Israel’s actions makes him well worthy of the Big Lie-Blood Libel Award.
Hollywood movie-maker Jonathan Glazer used his two minutes of fame accepting an Oscar, with 19.5 million movie fans watching, to say: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” Huh? Okay, it is possible with effort to parse this sentence, so awkward it’s almost opaque, but it’s not surprising that many thought he was “refuting” his “Jewishness.” What he is “refuting,” also speaking for his colleagues, is his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation” that “has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” He places the blame for the conflict squarely on Israel’s “occupation” and “refutes” Israel’s “hijacking the Holocaust.” Because he made a movie about it, he seems to think that the Holocaust belongs to him and that he has a right to decide how the word is used. The movie has been widely praised and won the Oscar, but TheSan Francisco Chronicle called it “a dead film,” the New Yorker “an extreme form of Holokitsch,” and The New York Times “a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.”
I’ve discussed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC’s) use of the Big Lie-Blood Libel, following the Goebbels playbook by multiple repetitions. Adding that Israel had “crossed the threshold of intent” in mass starvation of the Gazan people, “half of whom are children,” she joined a long line of blood-libelers, although she stopped short of saying that Jews’ “intent” in killing Palestinian children is to use their blood to make Matzoh. When she issued this Blood Libel the number of deaths in Gaza (as estimated by Hamas) was about a quarter of what it had been early in the war, a change due entirely to the care taken by the IDF to reduce civilian deaths while learning how to fight an enemy hiding behind children.
After three more weeks of declines in Gazan deaths, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), rival of Bernie Sanders for chief moralizer and most self-righteous advocate of all left-wing causes, followed AOC in the Big Lie-Blood Libel disinformation frenzy against the Jewish state. In an appearance at the Islamic Center of Boston, and referring to the ICJ, this supposed champion of truth and justice said, “If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so.” Three months earlier, the ICJ did not find sufficient evidence even to call for a cease-fire.
Last but not least, Nicaragua, that lovely vacation spot—see State Department warnings— brought a case in the ICJ not against Israel but against Germany, for aiding Israel’s “genocide.” Clever of the corrupt, autocratic, violent, and refugee-hemorrhaging Central American country to level this charge against Germany, which—knowing full well what “genocide” means—has done more to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and the dignity of its victims than almost any other country. Again, among democracies, Israel is ranked #30, Nicaragua #143; among countries ranked least to most corrupt, Israel is #33, Nicaragua #172. Nicaragua and Iran have growing military cooperation.
And the Goebsie goes too…
Sorry, the committee (namely me) has found all six of these nominees so accomplished in the Big Lie-Blood Libel, it’s impossible to choose one. We will therefore take the unprecedented step of dividing the Goebbsie—a polished-lead non-working microphone—among them. They can take turns using it to try to spread their bloody, libelous lies.
Meanwhile, today alone, the US, the UK, Germany, many other Western nations, several Arab ones, and even UN Secretary General António Guterres have condemned Iran’s attack on and declared solidarity with Israel in this moment of crisis. Perhaps it is dawning on them that Iran, not Hamas, is the real threat, and that the world, not Israel, is the target.
(Blogging on the Gaza War since January 14th. Please link them on to others.)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I shouldn’t have much more work to do this week. I started with the very good public website of Kevin Drum, who presented the first graph in the top half of the picture (panel a). Based on data from the (Hamas-run) Gaza Health Ministry via the UN, it displays the daily deaths (red dots) of Gazans from October 7 to February 19, with a linear function (dotted black line) fitted to the daily data. This function declines from between 300-400 in October to 100 in February.
The lower part of the figure (panel b, my responsibility alone) is my attempt to extend Drum’s excellent graph from February to today. The daily deaths (also from the Gaza Health Ministry via the UN) are shown as blue dots, with the red line representing the 7-day moving average. Please note that the two graphs are on very different scales. Continue reading →
(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)
Given certain remarks in the news lately, I thought it might be silly season, but not everybody is silly. Upon careful investigation I learned about Silly Sauce. Like beluga caviar, it is only for a select few—but not the rich. Only political leaders who can’t resist sipping it and don’t mind brain fog.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first alerted me. He must have sipped some from his hip flask before going down to the Senate floor on March 14th. It was an interesting speech, touching to me in many ways. He said he was speaking for “a silent majority” of “mainstream Jewish Americans” in his “nuanced” view of the Gaza War. He’s a landsman of mine; I went to the next high school over from his a few years earlier. We grew up in the same culture of Brooklyn-Jewish love for Israel in the time when its survival was unlikely. “We love Israel in our bones.”
But, “What horrifies so many Jews especially…is that Israel is falling short” of “distinctive Jewish values.” What exactly are those? He recounts the history of the conflict and the “perfidy” of Hamas in a way that most Jews, including Israelis, can accept. He blasts the right-wing thugs in the Israeli cabinet and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as “obstacles to peace.”
Fine. But he gives Bibi Netanyahu special attention. Almost all he says about Bibi would be endorsed by the great majority of Israelis. Eighty-five percent disapprove of Bibi, and a growing number support early elections—which Schumer crossed a line to call for.
But here’s the silly part: Schumer calls Bibi too an obstacle to peace, which implies that without him the war would be different. It would not. If 85 percent of Israelis dislike Bibi, about the same percentage approve of how the war is being conducted. Replace Bibi with Gantz or Gallant, and you will get the same war, the same operation in Rafa, the same checking of aid trucks for weapons. The vast majority of Israelis want the war to continue until Hamas is completely disabled.
Apparently Chuck then passed the Silly Sauce on to Vice President Kamala Harris, Continue reading →
(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)
We have passed not just the start of Ramadan, but the first and second Fridays, with today’s noon service considered particularly sacred. Forty thousand Israeli Muslim citizens and East Jerusalem Residents have come to the Noble Sanctuary—for Jews, The Temple Mount—each Friday to pray in one of its two great mosques, without a single untoward incident. Aside from a lone gunman in the West Bank, these Ramadan Fridays have been peaceful in the region and throughout the Muslim world. Estimates of Muslims visiting the Old City of Jerusalem today are up to 120,000. An Israeli journalist reporting from the crowded Noble Sanctuary as services let out described the atmosphere as reverent and celebratory.
Meanwhile, the tiny Jewish world—there are 100 Muslims for every Jew—is preparing for Purim, an irreverent, raucous, often drunken celebration of the survival of the Persian Jews, who came under deadly threat some 2,600 years ago. The Book of Esther, chanted aloud in the evening and following morning in synagogues circling the globe, tells the story.
This year Purim begins tomorrow, Saturday, exactly 24 weeks after the Saturday (both the Sabbath and another Jewish holy day), on which Hamas terrorists committed grotesque mass atrocities against 1200 Jews and others in Israel, deliberately inviting destruction on themselves and the women and children they hide behind. Many say that this was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. That it was, but actually the Nazis rarely took the time to rape women with knives or cut off the limbs of children before killing them. The Nazis did torture Jews at times, but mainly aimed at efficient mass murder.
(Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.)
This will be my most personal posting, since its wellspring is my childhood experience. Although I supply citations, I could have written this from memory. One example: during the years I was praying regularly (age 8-17), I said these words every day: V’tekhazena eyneynu b’shuvkha l’Tzion b’rakhamim—May our eyes behold Thy return to Zion in mercy. In fact, observant Jews said it three times every day for twenty centuries, as part of the Amidah,[1] the holiest prayer after the Shema (Hear O Israel). Along with God’s Unity and the primacy of Torah—the first five books of the Bible—the longing for Zion is intrinsic to the Jewish faith.
Let’s go back to, not the beginning of Judaism, but early enough: the composition of Psalm 137, roughly 2,500 years old, describing the exile of Jews in Babylon. Some may recall the 1970s Rastafari song that echoed the Psalm:
By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,
And there we wept, when we remembered Zion…
For the Jamaican singers, Zion stood for Africa, but, as with other African diaspora songs, they adopted the ancient Jewish narrative as a symbol for their suffering. But for the Jews in Babylon it was no metaphor. It was brutal exile and a desperate longing for home. The psalm begins as the song does, but in lines 5-6,
If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning…
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
(Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.)
We are days from Ramadan, sacred to Muslims—30 days of strict daytime fasting ending in a celebratory feast (Eid-al-Fitr) on the last day. It is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the others being ritual prayer, alms, the holy pilgrimage of the Hajj, and bearing witness to the Oneness of God and the truth of the Prophet Muhammad.
It is a bit confusing to outsiders that Ramadan rotates around the year, because unlike the Chinese and Jewish calendars, which come back to the solar cycle, the Muslim calendar is purely lunar, losing 11 days each year. So the ambience of Ramadan changes—one year wintry, another autumnal—back through the seasons. For my Muslim students, this is a time for spiritual reflection.
However, the idea that Ramadan should restrain Israel from attacking Gaza is very naive. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur of 1973, the holiest day of the year when Israeli Jews were in synagogues fasting, and the mass atrocities committed by Hamas came on what was both the Sabbath and a holy day. But Muslims have never considered Ramadan a time when war must stop, because the Qur’an does not forbid it.
In the long war between Iraq and Iran, both Islamic, key assaults by each side not only coincided with Ramadan but were named for it. Iran launched Operation Ramadan, then the largest land battle since World War II, on July 13, 1982, three weeks into the fast. 100,000 troops swept into Iraq in human waves; many had signed martyrdom contracts called “Passports to Paradise.” In six weeks an estimated 80,000 were killed on both sides.
And Iraq launched Operation Ramadan Mubarak (Blessed Ramadan) the day before Ramadan began in 1988, sending 100,000 troops against Iran with heavy use of chemical weapons. Iranian resistance collapsed. Continue reading →
(Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.)
Fair Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng,
And in faith with thy glorious past,
By these odious rites now surrender thee o’er
To the murders and rapes of Hamas.*
This rewrite of the first stanza of Harvard’s alma mater—find the original wording and the history here—is impolite but not unfair, given the recent outpouring of hatred of Israel and, to a lesser extent, of Jews, on this nearly 400-year-old American campus. Most pointedly, Harvard’s students and faculty have supported a terror group whose grotesque atrocities against Jews and others in Israel are unprecedented in modern times. Can Harvard students and faculty be useful idiots, shills for Hamas mass murderers?
Don’t get me wrong. I have no desire to limit the free speech of deluded or even malicious faculty and students. Only a few have gone so far as to merit a legal crackdown against them. I’m not saying it’s fine to spew hatred of Israel, Zionism, and Jews, merely that I have to weigh these wrongs against the wrong of muzzling them, and given the first amendment’s protections, letting them puke up their lies is the lesser of two evils. But that doesn’t mean there are no remedies.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wisely said that the remedy for noxious speech is more speech, and Jewish students on these campuses can avail themselves of that opportunity—although at a risk of harm if they do or even if they let it be known that they are Jewish. They of course cannot have anything like the kind of college experience they signed up and paid for, just to stay in their rooms and go warily to class in groups and in daylight hours. That is the price they must pay for the first amendment protections of others, and ultimately their own, if they go to those schools.
Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.
On November 11, 1918, the last day of World War I, there were higher than usual casualties, because General John J. Pershing—“Black Jack Pershing” as his men often called him—resented the Armistice. He insisted on hurting the Germans further, at high cost to his own troops, and continuing, to the last minute—the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month—to inflict German losses. He reportedly said: “They never knew they were beaten in Berlin. It will have to be done all over again.” *
A myth arose. The German generals spread the word that their army was “undefeated in the field” but was “stabbed in the back” by politicians bent on surrender. Actually, their defeat in the field was staggering. After four years of what was mostly standoff, a million Americans arrived and, with their reinvigorated allies, swept across German-occupied France and Belgium in three months. The allies occupied a small part of western Germany for a while before they went home. But in Berlin, they never knew they were beaten. Pershing, alas, had to observe in his later years the rearming of Germany and the second world war he had predicted, with all its dreadful costs. His warnings, like Churchill’s in Britain, were ignored.
After that second war, they knew they were beaten in Berlin, and they knew they were beaten in Tokyo too, because the US and its allies took the war into those capitals and insisted on unconditional surrender. Although greatly complicated by the division of Germany and the Soviet role, the US (along with the UK and France) transitioned from military control, including denazification, dissolution of the German army, and occupiers’ rule of law, through municipal elections, to the buildup of a democratic state, officially declared four years after the war. The US State Department explicitly decreed that this governance “does not effect the annexation of Germany.” West Germany regained “near-sovereignty” in 1955, but it remained nominally occupied until 1991, after re-unification. Continue reading →
