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Shame
They were dancing (very awkwardly, I might add) in the streets in Tel Aviv's Hostage Square on Thurs
Thank you H for always dealing in facts and truth, even the inconvenient kind. What you’ve written very much needed to be said. Sam Harris wrote a book awhile back, I think it was The End of Faith. In it he wrote of Selective Christianity, where one decides which parts of the holy book are convenient to follow and just ignore the rest. We live in a whole universe of ‘Selectives’ now. Pick which part of ‘love thy neighbor’ or ‘treat the least among you as you would treat me’ and conveniently ignore the rest. Select the parts of democracy you like and shit can the rest. Of course what happened in Gaza was genocide, but humanity will never figure out how to stop it until we first acknowledge it and shine a light into every crack and crevice. We’re trapped in a world where might, physical and economic, always make right for politicians.
On a secondary note, I can’t figure out how Israel with the indisputably best intelligence in the world was blindsided on Oct 7. Without that conflict where would Bibi be today.
I believe Bibi intentionally created the conditions for the Oct 7 terrorist attacks. It was reported, I forget where (probably MSNBC based on my viewing habits at the time), that shortly before Oct 7 security forces had a significant draw down along the Gaza border under the pretext of moving these forces to the West Bank for “police actions”. Bibi was losing grip on his seat (and freedom as he belongs in Israeli jail for his myriad crimes, the Hague is a whole separate set of crimes) with millions of Israelis protesting his widely known corruption. He needed a Hail Mary. Creating the opportunity for Oct 7 attacks was it. However, he probably thought it would cost 12 Israeli lives to secure his freedom. In his sick demented (likely psychopathic) mind this was a fair trade. As we know, it ended up being far worse then a “small” terrorist attack.
Hi H,
I hate semantic debates and I don’t claim to have a valid opinion on this conflict. However, I thought I would say this.
I don’t know about English but in my native language, also related to Latin from where the root of “race” is derived, “race” can ONLY be used to separate domestic animals of the same specie that were breaded to amplify a trait. This excludes, you will note, applying the word to homo sapiens. “Racist”, in that language, is define as claiming that there are races among humans (and implicitly that one of them is superior), in the accepted dictionaries; plainly nonsense.
That is why I don’t answer a census question that asks me what is my “race”. That’s offensive. Am I a milk cow?
So you will pardon me, with respect, for refusing the epithet of racist. I do agree more importantly with you that, I, like all of us, have some cognitive biases, very useful in the Neolithic, that makes my modern behaviour, from time to time, “racist” as you probably define it (and you can define words in your own blog whichever way you want!), I would use another word such as “xenophobic” or “prejudicial”.
Now that doesn’t do sh*t for the Palestinians, I realize. You are right, to be candid, that my first reaction after the Hamas attack was not sympathetic to the Palestinians. A week later, I was ashamed of my own thought process given the reaction of the IDF. That was a familiar feeling because this probably happened 20 times in the last 45 years of what seems to be continuous coverage of this conflict (my first memory is from the first Lebanon war). That’s my 2 cents from just another overwhelmed dude.
I’m willing to change my mind based on evidence or stronger arguments than mine, all the time (I can only hope).
Yeah, a lot of people will chafe at that racist sentence from the article. Which is (mostly) why I put it in there. I like to poke people’s nerves. But there’s a lot of truth to it. And I’d submit that the cognitive biases you mention do society more harm than they do you good, on average. For example, how many car jackings and armed robberies do you suppose white Americans’ cognitive biases have spared them versus the number of completely innocent black Americans demoralized and otherwise made to feel less human as a result of those same cognitive biases which white people mistakenly assume aren’t evident in their body language and demeanor?
Crash is wildly overrated, but it’s still a great, great film. It speaks both to the utility of our cognitive biases but also to how societally destructive those cognitive biases are.
Wholeheartedly agree and will check out Crash. Thanks
The war didn’t start on 10/7/23. Nor did it end this week. No one’s talking seriously about reconstruction, much less bringing back the dead. The survivors won’t have a warm and fuzzy feeling for the conquerors, and the next Yahwa Sinwar will leverage that. Add in the ongoing conquest of the West Bank. There won’t be peace there anytime soon. Not even when Israel reaches a final solution.
As I remember it “The War” actually started in 1967. I still see it philosophically as Israel’s birth cry in response to being born after its people suffered the great genocide of the Holocaust of WWII. That war has been continuous for nearly 60 years and will continue, unending for all time as far as I can see. No group seems to have any motive to quit. There is no cease-fire now, only a brief utterance of code words and a counting of the dead and other lost resources before the next round of revenge genocide.
One could make a case for “The War” starting in 1948. Or earlier (see: history).
I do not believe Bibi will actually stop. He might wait long enough to get the hostages out (which is all that Trump cares about), but he’ll go right back to it as soon as the last hostage is freed. Why wouldn’t he? There has been no push back to the genocide that has been obvious for almost 2 full years. He has personally benefited. And when it all stops, he will go down again, likely to jail. It took about a month or 2 for those who were paying attention (and not beholden to the false idol of any criticism of Israel is antisemitic) to realize that the what was happening was genocide. Yet, in America, it wasn’t until earlier this year that the institutionalist media started to admit it was probably genocide.
“ Shame”
The title and the photograph
Powerful! you would not have been faulted for exclamation points in the title.
“My God‘s better than your God and said I should kill you and have your stuff”
Me, as a 13 year-old explaining human history to my ageeing grandfather.
I always hoped I was wrong.
@ HB – would love your take on the Saudi and nuclear armed Pakistan, mutual defense agreement on Sept 17th… just 8 days after Israel sent that missile over Saudi Arabia in Qatar..
A small aside. When I was first introduced to the taxonomy of the animal kingdom my teacher was very insistent about defining the bottom of the ladder. As he pointed out the bottom rungs were labeled “genus” and “species.” What he also told us was that in some circles every species is divided into various “races.” My teacher insisted that there is no such thing as “race.” That was over 65 years ago. Since then I have marveled at the evolution of that term.
Damn, H. Definitely one of your more powerful pieces. Thank you.