Moral Clarity part 12: Dialogue with a friend

Y: Hey it's been a while since we spoke. What's happening? 

X: I've been so depressed. I haven't wanted to interact. Particularly with my Jewish friends. I mean I can't take the images anymore. The bombed out neighbourhoods in Gaza. The bloodied lifeless bodies of the children. 

Y: I know, it's heartbreaking.

X: And my social media is a horror show of people screaming at each other. Everyone is taking a side. It's like, if you don't take a side, you're on the wrong side. Part of me doesn't want to take a side, and part of me feels guilty for not taking a side. Most of my friends are saying the same thing, that the bombing is genocide. That it can't be justified. I know what you'll say. You'll say that what happened on October 7th was barbaric. You'll say that Israel can't NOT respond. A few of my friends are saying that. But one horrific, unjustifiable action can't excuse weeks and weeks of collective punishment against innocent civilians. It can't justify the thousands upon thousands of people being killed and displaced from their homes. It just can't. 

Y: I won't justify the killing of innocent people ever, Jewish or Palestinian. It was unjustifiable on October 7th and it's unjustifiable today. But frankly, the only people I've ever heard justifying any deaths of civilians, are the Palestinians. They cheered when Israelis died, and they say they are proud to be martyrs for their cause. You can't deny that they subscribe to an ideology that regards innocent lives as expendable, even desirable politically. The Israelis are definitely doing major damage in Gaza, but I believe their intentions are defensive, and their methods demonstrate it. They're doing the best they can to respect international norms of war. They really have no choice. They have to justify their actions to the international community. They tell people to get out of the way before they take action. But Hamas doesn't. They purposely put people in harm's way. It's unconscionable. It's been proven without any doubt that Hamas militants use schools, hospitals and other places where people have sought refuge to shield their operations. 

X: Okay, but knowing that innocent people remain in harm's way, Israel needs to stop the bombing. Whether they say it or not, they are committing a genocide.

Y: That word is being thrown around a lot, and frankly it bothers me. It's inaccurate and being used to elicit an emotional response, as a rallying cry. 'Genocide' was a term coined by a Jewish lawyer in 1944 to describe the systematic murder of Jews by the Nazis. It describes extermination with the intention of eliminating an entire group of people. That it's being used against Israel is a trick of propaganda, to flip the script. It's actually what Hamas wants to do to the Jews and the Jewish state. If Israel was trying to commit a genocide it wouldn't be dropping leaflets before they bomb. It wouldn't allow Palestinian self-governance in Gaza and the West Bank. I could show you in a dozen ways how 'genocide' isn't the word to describe what is happening.

X: Semantics. Okay, then call it mass-murder. That's what it is.

Y: No, it's war, and that's different. Israel is at war with Hamas. During war there are always civilian  victims. The question becomes whether the parties of a conflict care about protecting their citizens or not. Israel clearly does. Hamas clearly does not.   

X: Then there should be a ceasefire.

Y: Hamas can end the conflict tomorrow if they wanted. All they have to do is release the hostages. But they don't want the bombing to stop. They want as much bombing as possible. 

X: So Israel is playing into Hamas's hands.

Y: They don't have much choice. They have to eliminate the terrorists. Hopefully, they do it smartly, and minimize the civilian casualties. And they have to get the hostages back. A unilateral ceasefire would short circuit that process. Israel can not live with a terrorist organization dedicated to its destruction on its border. They tried that for years and it didn't work. You wouldn't live with someone living next door to you who said they wanted to kill you, and took pot-shots at your house every once in a while, would you? That's what has happened since Israel left Gaza in 2006. They spent all that time building a war machine against Israel, and depriving the Palestinians. 

X: You guys who support Israel at any cost talk as if history began on October 7th. Like it started with Hamas. I start the story in 1948.  

Y: I see where you are going here. So the founding of the State of Israel was the first crime? Is that it? 

X: It's the way it was founded. With the intimidation, murder and expulsion of Palestinians. 

Y: What do you know about the founding of the State of Israel? Have you read any books about it? 

X: I know about 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. 

Y: That's true. Mostly as a result of Israel's War of Independence, and the year of hostilities leading up to it. War always has the effect of displacing people. It didn't have to be that way. Before Israel was forced to fight for its independence, there was a UN partition plan for two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian. That was the first time the Palestinians and the other Arab nations around it had a chance to create a Palestinian state, but they rejected the idea. They decided to try to destroy Israel instead. That was only the first time. Israel has offered other two-state deals, over and over again, and the Palestinians rejected them all. They want all the land for themselves and have never accepted Israel no matter what the proposed configuration was. Every time the surrounding Arab countries attacked Israel, in 1967 and then again in 1973, they lost land, and the position of the Palestinians got worse and worse. That's not Israel's fault. 

X: Why do the Jews think they deserve a country anyway? I mean what other religious group in the world has a country of its own? There are plenty of countries where Jewish people live in peace and security. They don't need Palestine. They should give it back.

Y: No one 'deserves a country'. And by the way, I'm not sure where you get the idea that Israel is a religious state. It's a multi-ethnic democracy. There are around two million Arab-Israelis. Arabs have served in the government. Israel was not founded by a religious movement. Actually just the opposite. The modern Zionist movement was comprised of mostly western European Jews who were not religious at all, some were anti-religious socialists and communists. Fun fact, in Israel's Declaration of Independence there is one word missing that appears in the very first paragraph of the US Declaration of Independence: God. Yes, there are a lot of places today where Jewish people live in relative safety, but history shows that this is the exception not the rule. As a minority in every place they have lived, Jews have been defenseless and vulnerable to persecution. Sometimes the persecution came in sporadic flare-ups, at other times it was officially sanctioned. Rulers scapegoated their Jewish minority to deflect blame for their own incompetence and corruption. History is littered with such episodes, from the Spanish Inquisition to the pogroms of Western and Eastern Europe, to the Holocaust. If this new crisis has shown us anything, it's how unsafe Jewish communities around the world still are. From attacks on Jewish institutions in Montreal and Toronto, to an Israeli airplane being surrounded on the tarmac by an angry violent mob in Dagestan, Russia. Israel's existence is our only guarantee of protection. My question to you is why single Jews out? Why should Jews be the only ethnic group that shouldn't live in peace in its ancestral homeland?

X: I'm not singling out the Jews. I don't blame Jews in general for what's happening. I blame the Jews who support Zionism. Not all Jews are Zionists. You have to agree that many Jews are speaking out against Israel too. So please don't accuse me of being anti-Semitic. 

Y: Okay, I guess you were equally outraged when a hundred thousand innocent Arab civilians were killed by Assad in Syria? Or the hundreds of thousands that have been killed in other wars being fought around the world? I guess you were protesting those wars in the street too? Sorry, I don't mean to sound sarcastic. But Israel is always treated differently. There are undoubtedly many reasons for it, but one is certainly just good old fashioned anti-Semitism. We've known each other for a long time and I would never accuse you of being anti-Semitic. But you've got to ask yourself why this conflict matters to you in a way that others don't. It probably has something to do with the explosive and ongoing media attention. But when you say stuff like, 'why do the Jews deserve a country', frankly, it sounds anti-Semitic. Like there are some groups of people who merit a country and others who don't. I won't question the Palestinian desire for self-governance. And I don't think anyone should question the Jewish desire. By the same token, our right to defend our country should not be questioned, and when it is, it sounds as if you're saying only Jews should be defenseless.  

X: I gotta go. I really appreciate that you've taken the time to engage with me respectfully. What you've said doesn't make me feel any better about what's going on, but you've definitely given me lots of food for thought. 

Y: Trust me, I don't feel great about it either. You'd have to be a stone not to be affected by all the suffering. Hopefully we can agree on one thing. It's not a simple issue. Complicated problems are hard to process, and shouldn't be reduced to slogans or emotional responses, based on who you think is the bigger victim. That kind of thinking is impulsive, and doesn't do justice to a complex, difficult situation.  

Heads

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Heads.

A coin-toss orgasm.

Like words from a one hit wonder 

you never knew were there

until they're there

and Yeah!

A thought from nowhere,

a stored feeling

in your body 

shoots through you

at random

like a sniper's bullet 

fired

from a rooftop

striking a gas tank

Boom!

Heads.

Moral Clarity part 11: Survivor's guilt

Yesterday, one of my daughters saw an Instagram post that was apparently making the social media rounds. Posted by someone calling him/herself 'theindigenousanarchist', and reposted by my daughter's friend, it said "Imagine if in ten years Israel begins a holiday based on the events happening now. Imagine if they celebrate their 'success' of harming thousands of people with a federally recognized feast. That's your Thanksgiving." 

It's hard to believe that anyone would think of making a connection between Israel's response to the slaughter of 1400 of its citizens and the abduction of 240 hostages by terrorists, and the origins of the American Thanksgiving holiday, but there it is. I can understand an indigenous person wanting to call attention to the origins and myths surrounding American Thanksgiving, and how the holiday, which is so cherished and celebrated as a day of gratitude, may also represent an historical injustice to the First Nations of the Americas. But what could non-indigenous people be thinking when they gleefully share such a post as a criticism of Israel? Is this just a case of online virtue signalling, someone trying to prove their social justice warrior bonfides? Or is there something more pernicious, and perhaps subconscious, at work?

My daughter handled it well. She shut the Instagram re-poster down immediately with a firm but respectful message. I would not have been so diplomatic. In the ensuing exchange of messages one thing that her contact wrote leapt out at me: "Reading that post originally was painful. I am not indigenous, I am a colonizer and I celebrate Thanksgiving." So, she was inspired to spread a message of hate against Israel by the 'guilt' she was feeling as 'a colonizer'. She felt the 'pain' of an indigenous Canadian, and related to the 'pain' of Palestinians (implying their 'ethnic cleansing' or 'genocide' or one of the other catch-all euphemisms they use for the historical injustices suffered by oppressed indigenous peoples). And to expiate the colonialist sin to which she considers herself a party, she decided to full-throatedly join the ranks of those who denounce and demonize the State of Israel in its efforts to combat terrorism. 

This message reminded me of the exchange I had with my brother-in-law a few weeks ago when we briefly discussed the deplorable activities happening on university campuses across America. He's a professor of philosophy at a university in another province. I was telling him that one of my daughters who works at a local university was feeling unsafe to go to the office. I argued that things had gotten out of hand on university campuses and they should be shutting down political activities. My brother in law pushed back, saying that the universities had to support and encourage freedom of speech, and that they could handle any serious disruptions. (As if on cue, a few days later violence erupted at my daughter's university). I said, let them debate all they want in the classroom, it's political activity that I am objecting to, the kind that makes the students feel unsafe to come to class. Then I said to him, "The universities should be teaching their students to be informed, to do research and to think critically, not express their feelings of guilt." He answered, "They should feel guilty." The discussion ended there.

I'm not so sure how well they're doing teaching students to think, but they're certainly doing a good job teaching them to feel guilty. This week at my alma mater The Student Society adopted a pro-Palestine resolution, condemning Israel's war in Gaza as a 'genocidal bombing campaign' and criticizing the McGill administration for its "...persistent refusal to even acknowledge the mass murder of Palestinians... demonstrat(ing) a shocking, blatant, racist disregard for Palestinian and Arab lives." Not a single word in the text of the resolution - which passed by a vote of 77% - mentions the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th or the Israeli victims. If the university administration can't stop the Student Union from taking political positions, then there should at least be a way for members to opt out of paying their dues to the association.

Why don't I feel guilty for being a colonizer? What's wrong with me? Am I heartless? Am I so blinded by my 'white privilege' that I've lost the capacity to sympathize with people who are oppressed and powerless? Funny, I always thought my people were oppressed and powerless. When my family arrived here in the mass migration of Eastern European Jews during the first decade of the 20th century, they were fleeing poverty, pogroms and persecution. This country provided safe-haven, freedom and opportunity. My grandparents and parents took full advantage of the freedoms and opportunities afforded them that their predecessors never enjoyed. They worked their asses off and prospered. They planted roots and contributed to a flourishing community. They built businesses that employed thousands of people for generations (usually other recently arrived immigrants) and raised their family, educating their children to levels far above any they could have hoped to achieve. Don't get me wrong. I completely understand that there were many undeniable injustices and inhumanities done to indigenous peoples that accompanied the founding of this country 158 years ago. I understand that these injustices continue to this day and I wholeheartedly and unequivocally support further and ongoing action to make restitution for them. But I'm sorry, I can't feel guilt for being 'a colonizer'. I can only feel gratitude and appreciation for the safety, freedom and opportunity this great country has given to my kin and me. No matter what some will say, Thanksgiving remains untarnished to me. 

Moral Clarity part 10: The symbolism, practice and consequences of hostage deals

I've been struggling with the deal. It's been a battle between heart and mind. My heart says it's the right thing to do. As human beings we have to do everything possible to get our captives released, even if it means giving the hostage takers a small victory. Even if it means they get time to re-arm, re-fortify, and re-organize. Even if it means a signal is once again being sent to the evil-doers that taking hostages is an effective strategy and pays hefty dividends. Even if, out of 240 hostages only 50 are being released and there will be 190 left for the criminals to make additional deals. My heart keeps telling me that we have to behave like human beings even if they are behaving like savages and animals. We have to show that we value human life even as they show that they could care less about the lives of their people. It's a question of 'who we are' versus 'who they are'. 

To give my heart more grounding in that effort to 'show who we are' I looked to Jewish thought and tradition. Unfortunately, in our history we've had many occasions to consider the lengths we must go to redeem our kin who've been taken captive, called pidyon shvuyim, in Jewish law. The payment of a ransom is categorized by our sages as a mitzvah rabbah, a 'great' obligation, or a duty of the highest order. According to Maimonides, "The redeeming of captives takes precedence over supporting the poor or clothing them. There is no greater mitzvah than redeeming captives, for the problems of the captive include being hungry, thirsty, unclothed, and they are in danger of their lives too.” In the Shulchan Aruch, the book that codifies Jewish Law, it says “Every moment that one delays freeing captives, in cases where it is possible to expedite their freedom, is considered to be tantamount to murder.”

My head makes other calculations. Ones that were not lost on our sages. They acknowledged the potentially far-reaching consequences of paying ransoms. “One does not ransom captives for more than their value because of Tikkun Olam (literally 'fixing the world' ie. for the good order of the world, as a precaution for the general good)." It is understood that this restriction is aimed at avoiding encouragement to kidnappers who will seek to take advantage of the extremely high value Jews place on human life, and understand that they can demand equally high ransoms. The long term consequences of paying an 'exorbitant' price for a captive has been seen in the recent past. In 2011, the ransom paid for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who had been held hostage for more than 5 years, was over 1000 prisoners, many of whom had been convicted for murder and acts of terrorism. Dozens of those released resumed their terrorist activities, including Yahya Sinwar, reportedly one of the masterminds of the October 7th attack. 

And then there is the symbolism of hostage-taking. What's actually at stake is not life, but something even more valuable, individual freedom. The reaction of Thomas Hand comes to mind. When he was told by authorities that his 9-year old daughter Emily had been murdered on October 7th, he initially responded by exclaiming "Good!" He later explained, “I was relieved. It is a very strange thing to say when somebody comes up and says, 'Sorry, your daughter's dead,' and you go, 'Thank God for that.' Because I did not want her to be kidnapped and in the tunnels of Gaza. That was worse in my head.” The original report was wrong. Hand's worst nightmare came true. His daughter was a captive. It reminds us that there is a symbolism to holding a person against their will that goes beyond the loss of life. It's what Hamas, and more importantly, their religious extremist autocratic sponsors in Tehran represent. They don't care about life. For them it's an attack on individual freedom that is more potent and symbolically valuable, because it's what they hate most about the West. 

This morning I listened to a discussion about Israel's restraint at the outset of this catastrophic conflict. The commentators discussed how admirable it was that Israel resisted the temptation to 'level Gaza' out of vengeance and retribution. 'They could have done that,' one commentator said, 'they had the means, and lord knows they had the desire. There were calls for it. But the leadership resisted the pressure. Cooler heads prevailed.' Then the discussion turned to comparisons with Jimmy Carter and the hostage crisis that you might say started it all. The 1979 taking of 52 Americans at the Embassy in Tehran by fundamentalist student revolutionaries. That crisis ended with the safe return of the captives after 444 days of agonizing negotiations, and a failed attempted rescue. The consequences of that event were far-reaching indeed. In the immediate aftermath it contributed greatly to turning Carter, the man who brokered peace between Egypt and Israel, into a one-term president. It also sent shockwaves around the world, signalling to terrorist groups, how relatively inexpensive and powerful hostage-taking as a strategy could be, bringing a world nuclear superpower to its knees. It was also the opening salvo in a 'holy' war waged by Iranian Islamic fundamentalists against the West that would continue for the next four decades until today. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the actions of Iran in 1979 and the American response to it inspired and emboldened millions of religious radicals across the Middle East and around the globe, and has cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent lives.

The commentators this morning extolled Carter's restraint in response to the hostage crisis in Iran. 'He could have levelled Tehran if he wanted to,' they said, but he chose not to. Thinking about Iran's support of Hamas and Hezbollah today, I could not help wondering how the world would have been different had Carter not been so restrained.

Moral Clarity part 9: The history of it...not

I learned something from a podcast discussion between Israeli historian Noah Yuval Harari and Sam Harris. Sometimes you've got to forget about history. Let bygones be bygones. Sometimes putting history aside is essential to dealing with the present, if you want to have a future. 

Harari was talking about the current conflagration in the Middle East, a place particularly obsessed with history. For his part, Harari has written some insightful books about history that provide wisdom and understanding about our past and how it reflects on where we may be heading in the future. I suppose this makes it all the more puzzling that he's saying history is not the answer to this current problem. In fact, he's saying it's part of the problem.

Harari's message resonated with me in relation to all of the commentary I've been seeing on YouTube, TV, and articles online, that emphasize understanding the historical context of the conflict. This conflict, if it suffers from anything, it's an overemphasis on history. Like Harari I've come to the conclusion that history has its limits. In the Harris interview, Harari says something like (I paraphrase), no political dispute in history has ever been settled by trying to right the wrongs of the past. By definition, a conflict has two competing views of history, and two opposing narratives which usually includes two sets of victims, and any attempt to reconcile them is doomed to failure. Politics is by definition the art of the possible. In order to arrive at a political resolution, and that's what we are after (as opposed to a military resolution), we must take the conflict out of the absolutist realm of moral claims (ie. Justice, punishment, retribution) and focus on present realities in order to be able to negotiate and compromise. 

From this standpoint, it's history that's the problem. The Palestinians are stuck in a mindset in which correcting the 'wrong' of the past (the so-called 'nakhba') is the prerequisite to peace. Unfortunately, that means Israel should never have been established 75 years ago, because it's the result of what they call a 'colonial' injustice. That's one dimension. Another, related to living in the past, is religious. A great many Palestinians live in a 12th century messianic Islamic dreamworld (admittedly there are Israeli types like that as well). We don't have much control over that. But those people are aided and abetted by guilt-ridden Ivory Tower academics and idealistic students who champion their historical claims, and in the process advocate (some unwittingly) for the extermination of Israel. It's an odd alliance in which 'enlightened' westerners end up supporting mass murdering dark-age jihadists, and turning them into heroes. A bit of a related aside: I've always objected to the use of the term 'Zionist'. Zionism was a late 19th/early 20th century movement that advocated for the creation of a modern Jewish homeland. Calling Israelis Zionists is like using the term "Whigs" - what the British Americans called themselves prior to the Revolutionary War - to describe Americans. The day Israel declared its independence in 1948 was the day Zionism had achieved its objective and ceased to exist as a project. The reason that Arabs continue to use the term 'Zionist' to describe Israelis is to delegitimize the State of Israel. It's a way of putting a doubt into people's minds that Israel is a fact (or that it should be a fact). Israel is not just a reality, it has demonstrated the strength and resilience of its existence repeatedly over the last seven and a half decades. The sooner the Palestinians, the Arab world (and their misguided western allies) realize that Israel isn't going anywhere, the sooner peace will be possibile. If history teaches us anything in this case, it's that sometimes you have to put history aside to move forward.

Summit

I reached the summit,

        understood I was climbing 

out of a deep pit.

Moral Clarity part 8: Who's to Blame, What's at Stake

Shots were fired again at a Jewish school, the same school in my daughter's neighbourhood that was shot at last week. This time my daughter reports hearing the gunshots, they woke her up at about 5am.

That is unnerving enough.

Forget about MSNBC, and the everpresent Ayman Mohideen, who looks like he's about to explode as he tries to withhold his bias every time he's asked to provide 'analysis' of the conflict. On the weekend I watched the gorefest, otherwise known as the coverage of "Israel's War With Hamas" as they call it on CNN. Why is Fox looking moderate these days, as the so-called mainstream media tries to 'two-sides' this. Have they not learned a thing from the trump years? On CNN I watched the heartwrenching pleas from a Norwegian doctor working in Gaza  named Mads Gilbert. His face filled the screen, eyes looked desperate and frightened, as he pleaded to 'President Biden and Mr. Blinken' to stop the bombing, amid horrific background screams. You'd have to be a stone not to feel for this man's anxiety. But a few minutes passed, the high emotion of the moment receded (I changed the channel) and then I asked myself, wait, why is he asking for Biden and Blinken to take action? They aren't the ones dropping the bombs and firing the bullets. Why the two-step dance. Why not ask Hamas to release the hostages and surrender? That would do the trick in one straightforward step. Easy. The answer is just as straightforward. Because he knows Hamas won't do it. He knows they don't give two hoots about all the lives of the people at the hospital. He knows that Hamas has been sacrificing those lives, innocent women and children, for almost two decades at this point, and more bloodshed is their best strategy  because they are so outgunned. He knows that Biden and Blinken may actually be the only ones with any influence who care. A little online digging reveals that in addition to being a physician who has worked in Gaza, Dr. Gilbert is a Norwegian politician and activist. He is outspoken about US 'aggression' in the Middle-East and has been a public apologist for terror attacks against both Israel and the US. He even excused the attacks of 9/11 as morally justified. In 2006 he encouraged people to boycott Medecins Sans Frontiere (Doctors Without Borders) because they were not political enough. You wouldn't know any of this from the clip that aired on CNN. 

It's affective journalism to personalize news coverage. When it comes to covering conflict, they talk to the people directly involved, the eyewitnesses and people impacted by the terrible events. There are always victims on both sides, so once you hear from one side of the victim equation, you have to hear from the other side if there is going to be 'journalistic balance'. The coverage becomes all about which side is suffering more, which encourages the sides to play up their suffering as much as possible, of course. From the standpoint of optimizing TV viewership this gets dicey, because at some point a fascination with suffering becomes overwhelming and starts turning people off. Rather than turning people off hopefully it gets them to take a step back from the pain and horror to think about which side they should be on, the side that perpetuates the conflict or the side that wants it to end: 

The side that cares about the wellbeing of its citizens, or the side that sees them as expendable? 

The side that has achievable political goals like peace and security, or the side that is motivated by absolutist religious ideology that glorifies maryrdom? 

Whenever I've been asked about what side of the Israel-Palestine conflict I'm on, I always say the side of peace. I support any policies, actions and initiatives that I believe will take us closer to peace. What I know for certain is that Hamas is not interested in peace. Iran is not interested in peace. The media is not interested in peace. Flag-waving students chanting for intifada to 'Free Palestine' are not interested in peace. Defeating Hamas is a step toward peace. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. 

Moral Clarity part 7: Words with consequence

A man on a balcony in a Canadian downtown takes a microphone and leads a public prayer for the violent eradication of the “Zionist aggressors.” “Allah, count every one of them, and kill them all, and do not exempt even one of them,” he says in Arabic. Below him, a crowd of hundreds respond with cheers.

The speaker was Montreal Imam Adil Charkaoui, and the venue was the city’s Oct. 28 “Stop the Genocide in Gaza” rally — one of dozens of Canadian events organized over the last 30 days by the Palestinian Youth Movement, a group that has openly praised the Oct. 7 massacres and called for continued violence against Israel.

Charkaoui’s speech may very well have been overlooked entirely if he hadn’t posted it online himself. He posted it (from multiple angles) to his Twitter, Instagram and Facebook profiles — along with lengthy screeds calling for the violent destruction of Israel, and denouncing Western media and politicians as Zionist collaborators.

If this does not constitute hate speech and incitement to violence, then I don't know what does.

I disembarked from the social media joyride (house of horrors) about two years ago. It initially took over my life on the day trump rode down the golden escalator. For a year before the election I tried my darndest to warn anyone who would listen about the five alarm fire a trump presidency would represent. I argued that he would try to burn the house down and dismantle the international order we've been relying on for safety and relative peace since 1945. To me it was obvious how dangerously divisive and damaging he was going to be at home and abroad. And once he was improbably elected I ratcheted up my efforts, opposing him as much as I could, like a cyber-shepherd crying out from the digital hills. Two things happened. First, the echo of my voice bounced back at me across the cyber valley, straining relationships with family and friends (and in a couple of cases ending them). Second, I realized how I had completely underestimated how dangerous trump would turn out to be. I didn't fully grasp how he and his enablers could leverage the power of social media to amplify, harden and exacerbate social and political divisions. About 6 months before the 2020 election, confident trump was going to lose, I decided I'd fought the good fight and had had enough of the vitriol. I deleted my social media accounts for good. Sure, I might miss the latest news on what my high-school graduating classmates of 1981 are up to these days, but if that was the price I had to pay for not having to wade through the cesspool of online inaninity, hostility, ignorance and uncivility, it was more than worth it.

I was rudely awakened from the blissful stupor of my online absence in the last couple of weeks, thanks to my wife and kids. As the war rages on in Israel and the heartbreaking death toll mounts every day, another battle is being fiercely waged for digital terrain.The social media war is taking a stressful sleepless toll, especially on my kids (they're adults, the youngest is 19). They've been sharing with me some of the insensitive, offensive and often blatantly antisemitic social media posts of their 'friends', acquaintances and co-workers. Messages, comments, infographics and memes, that either bluntly or implicitly side with the terrorists, justify their barbarism, and/or call for the destruction of Israel and extermination of its citizens in the name of social Justice. In response, my kids are experiencing another kind of trauma. They seem to have transitioned through stages of shock, outrage, fear, disbelief, disappointment, and have finally settled into a malaise of mistrust and grief. They’ve had to learn to accept a new reality of insecurity, one that disconnects them from many of their former friends, and reconnects them to others from our community who are feeling the same way. My kids have also been communicating a lot with each other to try to sort through their emotions, thank goodness for having siblings. I've tried to add my two cents to the discussions, providing some background and historical perspective. Admittedly, my efforts have been lame. For my kids this experience is very emotional and immediate. The aspect that has given them the most heartache has been the realization that their peers don’t care. It’s not like they try to sympathize but can’t. They just don’t care to even try. They see no problem with sharing and promoting incendiary messages that have the obvious potential of putting the security of their Jewish friend and her community at risk. When my daughters try to explain the insecurity they are feeling, their peers are often unapologetic, callous and combative. My kids can't comprehend how the desire to virtue-signal could be more important than the physical safety of a friend. One message received by my daughter was, 'Don't let your sense of safety be warped and exploited to become something that is worth the lives of thousands of childen'. Of course, this clueless social Justice warrior isn't Jewish and is writing from the safety of his cushy office on Bay Street in downtown Toronto.   

Here in Montreal, in the week after the speech quoted above was delivered and shared uncountable times online, two molotov cocktails were thrown, one at a synagogue and the other at a Jewish community center in the west end of the city. Yesterday there was student violence downtown on campus at Concordia University. Last night shots were fired at two Jewish schools in central Montreal, one located less than a block away from my daughter's apartment in a heavily orthodox Jewish neighbourhood. Suddenly we are all feeling like we're living back in another time and place. A time of atrocities that we only read about in history books, and a place we heard about from our elders who fled. The only difference is that these days the hate spreads at the speed of light, and violent mobs can organize with the press of a button. Coincidentally, today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Doktor This and Herr Professor That

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He recalls the arrogance of his youth,

And wonders how he might get there again,

A kind of nostalgia that intoxicates and soothes,

The mind of a man aged three score and ten. 

He sips his tea to calm his indigestion,

His mind abuzz with responsibilities,

Thinks of regrets, makes a list for confession,   

And counts the blessings of his family.

Ah, to be so damned sure of what I know,

To see it clearly the smooth path ahead,

My predecessors those dumb average joes,

Who lived a short life and are better off dead.

Life is for young energetic know-it-alls,

Who'll correct the injustices of the past,

Fight for the oppressed colonials,

Victims of the capitalist upper-class.

Then he watches marchers on TV,

Students from the local university,

Waving placards and flags like artillery, 

Chanting for Palestine 'From the River To The Sea'.

Hatred rises from the street like putrid smoke,

To purify, assuage their western guilt,

Self-loathing worn like a blood-stained cloak,

Learned in the institutions their parents built. 

And now he recalls the German masses,

Who took their script from some sick theory, 

Renowned for philosophy and poisonous gases,

Convinced of their superiority. 

How fervently those folk cast their lot,

With Doktor This and Herr Professor That,

The scientific method that they taught, 

Ordaining the truth by fist and fiat.  

He watches these students declaring intifada,

Arabic that they think means 'revolution', 

No doubt there's also the whiff of marijuana, 

As they holler, justice demands a final solution.

Caught up in the moment and entranced,

Artists and poets believing themselves righteous,

Unable to grasp their own ignorance,

As bystanders stare without making a fuss.

He nervously coughs and blows his nose,

Thinks about discerning wrong from right,

Says to himself, it's always how it goes,

New slogans for the anti-Semite. 

Moral Clarity part 6: The Main Points

 1. Proportionality: There is no moral equivalence between a country waging a war to protect its citizens and the activities of a terrorist group. This should be self-evident, but it seems not to be to a lot of people. A war waging country is bound by the norms and conventions of international law. A terrorist group ignores those norms and conventions. Terrorist groups intentionally employ particularly heinous barbaric tactics, and targets civilians. Terrorist groups may claim to represent people, but in fact they don't. If they represent any group, it is the interests of their patrons. Iran funds many such groups in the Middle East as its proxies in order to skirt international scrutiny and accountability. The Israel-Hamas conflict must be understood as an assymetrical conflict. The notion of proportionality cannot apply, because in this conflict the two sides are operating by different rules. We can only ask whether a response to an aggression is proportional if the parties involved are playing at the same table. The attacks of terror groups must be seen as not only a threat to particular parties directly involved in the conflict, but also as a threat to the integrity of the entire international system of norms, conventions and rules. Any response to terror must be disproportionately great, because the stakes are disproportionately high, effecting all of us. 

2. Why no ceasefire? In the commonly accepted rules of warfare a conflict ends when the two sides negotiate a cessation of hostilities, or when one side surrenders to the other. Terrorist groups, because they are unaccountable to anyone other than their patrons, do neither. They continue to fight until they die. Israel has effectively been at war with Hamas since it unilaterally evacuated Gaza in 2006. Every temporary cessation of hostilities since then has only been an opportunity for Hamas to re-arm, re-fortify and prepare for the next battle. In a ‘normal’ war, between states, when one side is overwhelmed by the other side, as Israel is now doing in Gaza, the losing side typically surrenders to protect its citizens. But the demand for a ceasefire, in this case, is not actually a demand for both parties to stop hostilities, it's a demand for Israel to stop, because the perception is that Israel needs to protect the innocent Palestinians in harm's way. And why would Israel need to do this? Because Hamas won't take the most logical action to protect its own citizens, surrender. Hamas, in fact has no interest in taking any action to save innocent Palestinians. Its interest is for as many innocent Palestinians, preferably women and children, to die because it's the best way for them to get Israel to stop by bringing international pressure to bear. That would short circuit the inevitable, and perpetuate the conflict, leading to more bloodshed and death. The only logical conclusion to ensure the end of the conflict and the least casualties in the long-run, is the complete elimination of Hamas as quickly and decisively as possible. This is what the world should be cheering for.

3. The Palestinians are not Hamas: True. Therefore, any joining of Palestinian political rights/claims and Hamas's terrorist actions are merely a smokescreen to gain popular support. There are many militant and administrative factions claiming to represent the Palestinian people. In fact none of them do. The most recent polling in Gaza shows that the vast majority of Palestinians don't support Hamas and believe it is corrupt (the same for The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas.) It's the main reason there has not been elections in 16 years. Hamas would lose. The leadership of Hamas is located in Doha, Qatar, far away from Gaza and the West Bank. The upper-echelon of Hamas leaders is estimated to be worth many billion dollars. The net worth of Abu Marzuk, deputy chair of the Hamas Political Bureau, is estimated at $3 billion, while senior leaders Khaled Mashal and Ismail Haniyeh are each worth about $4 billion. Gaza is essentially a kleptocracy. Hamas is financed by Iran. Supporting the Palestinian people should mean ridding them of the kleptocrats who steal from them, deprive them, and indoctrinate their children with hate. The Palestinian situation, properly understood, is that they are not the victims of Israeli aggression, but rather of their own degradation at the hands of their supposed leaders and representatives. 

4. Being pro-peace: Those in the west who wave the Palestinian flag and chant "From The River To The Sea" are calling for the elimination of the State of Israel, the Jewish homeland. They should be seen as genocidal warmongers, not peaceniks. Being pro-Palestinian should mean being pro-peace, and being pro-peace must begin with the acceptance of the legitimacy and existence of the State of Israel. There's an often repeated truism: if Israel were to lay down its arms there would be a genocide. If the Palestinian militias (funded by Iran and corruption) were to lay down their arms there would be a chance for peace. 

5. The hostage crisis: The current hostilities should be seen first and foremost as an ongoing hostage crisis. Israel's response is not solely a response to the events of October 7th. It is a rescue operation as much as it is an operation to bring to justice the perpetrators of heinous barbaric murders. The moral calculation involved in any response must take this into account. And the question everyone should be asking themselves is, how far would I go to rescue my mother, father, sister, brother and children from a hostage-taker?