While you folks have been having all sort of interesting conversations in the comments section, I have been hard at work preparing for my Harvard study group on volume 1 of Capital. The enrollment is now up to 35, with nine faculty, 23 undergraduates, and three graduate students. As I am sure some of you can imagine, this study group is for me, at the age of 90, both a great challenge and a very exciting opportunity. I have been thinking about very little else, except for the unavoidable problems of my Parkinson's. I watch a good deal of television news and keep up with the ins and outs of the legal cases enveloping Trump, but although I have all sorts of expectations, I have little or no professional knowledge and experience that would make my speculations any more useful than those I see on television. The same is true for the events unfolding in the Middle East.
The more I think about volume 1 of Capital, the more persuaded I am that it is the most important work of social and economic theory ever written. It has all sorts of problems, God knows, and important parts that are clearly wrong but the core idea is so powerful, and so original, that the book stands head and shoulders above everything else written on the subject. I hope very much that I can communicate that to the participants in the study group.
161 comments:
Professor Wolff’s upcoming Harvard study group on Marx raises the question of whether it would be illegal in Florida. A quick look at the relevant statutes tells me that the answer is “yes”.
(I had the cites handy, but I’m afraid I lost them when I was distracted by the more important question of just how much better Jennifer Lopez looked at the Golden Globes than our favorite singer. Answer: 33%.)
The next question is, if these were available online and, if I happened to be visiting my Mother-in-Law in Florida and watched them, and was thereby damaged in my thinking about our country, would I have a private right of action?
A test case beckons!
Capital v. 1 >? The Republic
Capital v. 1 >? The Politics
(The Occidento-centric perspective of this question is, perhaps, excusable since all 3 of these works are part of the Western intellectual tradition)
Certainly better than the Politics. Better than the Republic only because its central thesis is true and the central thesis of the Republic is not
John Pilette, As for your first Remark, I bow to your superior knowledge of Florida law. As for the second question, good Lord I would hope so. I hope I am not just spinning my wheels here.
"Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern."
(roughly) Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; but the point is to change it.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nudepumps/8193249045
David North opened a recent talk at Humboldt University with Marx's famous quote from the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach. I'm sure the rest of what North had to say would upset some of the readers here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruGrVp15N2w
(At ~ 40:00-60:00 he talks about the history of his family, Polish-Jewish muscians who emigrated to Germany around the turn of the 20th century, and especially his grandfather, the composer and conductor Ignatz Waghalter.)
How about Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex as the important work of social theory ever written?
s.w.
Nice to see you back in the comments.
Eric, Just looking at the title of his talk, I'm surprised he was permitted by the German state to give that talk. There have, I think, been other German cases of Jews with clear links to the Holocaust being constrained and even arrested for "antisemitism" because they were criticizing Israel for its savage assault on the Palestinians of Gaza.
That aside, did you intend by quoting from the Theses on Feuerbach to criticize our host philosopher, or does an interpretation of "Capital" not count as an interpretation of the world?
LFC,
Thank you very much.
I checked and the prosecutor for Palm Beach County, Dave Aronberg, is, as I suspected he might be, a good liberal democrat. Would he be interested in this endeavor? He is a Harvard grad (BA, Government and JD) so maybe … I can send his office a letter if you want to be the John T. Scopes of 2024.
Regarding the private right of action, I need to go back and take a closer look. Hold please.
I'm a sucker for 'What is the greatest X?' questions. But it might be even more interesting to put the question in the future tense, i.e. What will the greatest work of social and economic theory be as the unintended devastations of modern life (pollution, desertification, soil loss, mass extinctions) come to seem central to contemporary economic, social, and political action, practices, and institutions? I wonder whether the answer will be Capital, The Republic, or Aristotle's Politics. I've been reading extraordinarily interesting new volume The Composition of Worlds, interviews of the anthropologist Pierre Descola. On pp. 157-8 he says: "The main point is to stop conceiving of societies as sui generis entities, situated in an environment to which they must adapt and that they must shape and transform in order to acquire an identity and a historical destiny . . . We must therefore insist on the idea that humans are not ingenious demiurges who find fulfilment [sic] in work and in transforming nature into resources; what must come first instead is the fragile environments in which humans and nonhumans coexist and in which the realization of the good life for the former very largely depends on their interactions with the latter" etc. Following John Foster Bellamy, Paul Burkett, Andreas Malm et alia, one might think that Capital has much more to offer for thinking about this new problematic than The Republic or the Politics, but perhaps the greatest work will be one that treats the human-nonhuman-environment forms and interactions as central, and La Pensée Sauvage or Descola's own Beyond Nature and Culture are closer to that ideal.
anon.,
As North explains in the first minute of the talk, the students who invited him to speak were hassled by university authorities, who insisted that he could not give a talk with a title that referred to the recent conflict. So he gave a talk with a title that did not mention the conflict, although the content of the talk focused on the conflict.
did you intend by quoting from the Theses on Feuerbach to criticize our host philosopher, or does an interpretation of "Capital" not count as an interpretation of the world?
I have been thinking about that quote for a while. North's talk just provided an avenue to mention it.
I don't see sharing Marx's quote as a criticism of anyone, certainly not of Prof West; but rather an exhortation for all of us who are interested in philosophy, and especially those interested in ethics and politics. Otherwise we risk wasting whatever insights we may have gained from thinking about and studying philosophy to just debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, which seems to me, on a certain level, immoral.
I hope any of those who take Prof Wolff's class on Capital will be inspired to change the world for the better.
I quibble, but surely you can't be entirely right, Eric, when you say "I don't see sharing Marx's quote as a criticism of anyone." Surely he, Marx, had in mind a whole bunch of philosophers who he saw as doing what he said they shouldn't do? Surely, too, he also had his eye on those philosophers, such as Plato, for one, who wanted to change the world in, shall we say, unfortunate ways? (This last remark will not sit well with those who continue to think of his Socrates as either a quasi-christlike figure or as a democrat--note small "d".) cheers
Eric, I saw the YouTube video of David North's talk. It was the first time I ever heard of him and I thought while watching this guy has something important to say. I take him to be saying that labor is essential in changing the world. Right now the world awaits for an opening that brings to bear a cessation of the genocide of the Palestinians. At this point in history, those who seek to change the world face the ideology and power of the ruling elites. I think one action is to donate money to the cause of the Palestinians. Those hard at work in this effort are as vital as any philosopher.
Well, I took a closer look at the Florida education laws and I have to say that, for a bunch of fascists, these folks are kind of a disappointment. Are they real 100% Americans ready to purge the republic of the scourge of Marxism, or are they crypto-pantywaists?
Title XLVIII, § 1000.706(5)(a) indeed prohibits inclusion in the state’s K-20 curricula anything “that is based on theories that systemic … oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities”, but it does it in a weak-sister kind of way. Why not allow ambitious prosecutors, or outraged members of the (God-fearing, Bible-thumping, and flag-waving) public to enforce this provision? That’s what Benito (or Woodrow) would have done …
But no, it’s the Board of Governors of the State University who are in charge of enforcement. The obvious problem here is that these Governors, even when they start out as real Americans, run the risk of becoming weak by too-frequent contact and socializing with the eggheads, sissies, and rootless cosmopolitans that are using university education to poison the minds of the youth of the Sunshine State.
________
Seriously though, it would interesting if some philosophy professor in Florida would agree to host a Zoom feed of the study group for interested students in his seminar room. What would the Governors actually do?
"The more I think about volume 1 of Capital, the more persuaded I am that it is the most important work of social and economic theory ever written. It has all sorts of problems, God knows, and important parts that are clearly wrong but the core idea is so powerful, and so original, that the book stands head and shoulders above everything else written on the subject."
Certitude is no test for certainty, whether your Holmes or Plato or Descartes or Marx or Wolff
Posted by Robert Paul Wolff at 12:11 PM 15 comments:
@ John Pillette
What would the Governors do?
Nothing. They don't care about an exegesis of Capital v.1; they care about someone teaching the (white) youth of Fla. that they live in a country marked by a history of racism etc.
oops.
Anonymous @4:03 p.m. is me. Sorry about that.
Well John the Floridian authorities may be weak-sister fascists but they sure look fascistic enough for me. Are people really precluded from including in the curriculum anything “that is based on theories that systemic … oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities”? it is surely an obvious fact that systemic … oppression, and privilege are inherent in *some of* the institutions of the United States and that they were created *in part*to maintain social, political, and economic inequities. If people can't say either of these things they are precluded from telling the truth about US history and politics.
@ Charles Pigden
Yes. That is the whole point of the legislation.
Truth (or “truth”) is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong!
Regarding Anon’s prediction, if
(1) some Florida professor held a Zoom feed of the Marx Study Group in his classroom and
(2) the feed was duly reported to the Board of Governors and
(3) the Board in fact took no action,
Then would be grounds for a test case, brought by a Fla. taxpayer. I know a few of those …
Those of us who grew up in the U.S. in the 50's remember what McCarthyism combined with Anglo-Saxon puritanism was like.
Allan Ginsberg was banned, Genet was banned, Henry Miller was banned, Lady Chatterly's Lover was banned, The Naked Lunch (Burroughs) was banned and all talk of socialism and Marx was out of the question and hazard to your health.
In the 50's at least McCarthyism did not do away with formal democracy although there were some victims, for example, the Rosenbergs.
The 60's, the rebellion against the 50's, converted a lot of us, but not everyone and those who were not converted by the 60's have been resentfully waiting their turn for years and now it may be their turn.
anon.,
When I say change the world for the better, I mean change it so that it becomes more like the world of which Marx and Engels dreamed. The fact that Prof Wolff is offering this class at all is a positive. Now, I am not so naive as to expect everyone participating in a study group on Capital at Harvard would be likely to embrace Marx's ideas as their own, of course, but a deep exposure to Marx's thinking might be a first step for at least some.
More generally, if we're talking about fascists like Peter Thiel, and anti-democrats like Plato, rather than having them trying to change the world, I'd prefer that that group just limit themselves to debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I mentioned almost a month ago that it was good to see Sen. Bernie Sanders finally taking some small action to try to rein in the Israelis in their onslaught against the civilian population of Gaza, but it seemed to me that what he was proposing was too tepid. Sanders said he would be putting forth a bill in the New Year requiring the State Department to report to the Congress within 30 days all credible information on possible violations of human rights by Israel in the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank, to ensure that the US is meeting is legal obligations to not fund governments that are committing human rights abuses.
In the time between Sanders made that announcement and the Senate has even begun to think about whether to further consider his proposal, South Africa has already sued Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice and the ICJ has heard both South Africa's claims and Israel's defense. The ICJ is widely expected to issue some kind of preliminary ruling within the next few weeks, probably even before the State Dept would be required to provide its report should Sanders' bill actually be adopted.
As I write this, the Senate is voting on whether to table Sanders' proposal (I gather that under Senate rules, "to table" means to kill the resolution without further discussion). Thus far the vote is overwhelmingly against him (48:8).
Our representatives have been given every opportunity to do the right thing, and here we are.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/sres504/text
A good sign, for a change, in this election year item from Political Wire:
"Tom Keen (D) flipped a Republican-held seat in the Florida state House in a special election, Florida Politics reports."
I like to attribute results like these to our contributions to the DLCC. If it keeps up, there again will be books in Florida's school libraries.
Thanks for the link to the Sanders resolution, Eric.
The two Senators from Md. split on the Sanders resolution: Cardin (who is retiring from the Senate) made the motion to table; Van Hollen voted against the motion to table. The 11 voting against the motion to table were mostly Democrats, joined by two or three Repubs (one of whom was Rand Paul). Van Hollen has been outspoken and active on this issue.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1182/vote_118_2_00008.htm
s.w., I believe the consensus is that Julius was guilty and Ethel maybe. Execution was a bit too much. Roy Cohn was the part of the prosection. He went on to disbarment, disgrace, as well as mentoring Donald Trump, so Roy sort of lives on.
Payback began in 1964 when the Republicans chose to go to where the votes were and in 1968 when some folks couldn't see any difference between Humphrey and Nixon. Ditto 2000.
Since many of those who come here likely read many of the same sources, I apologise for passing on something that may not be new to you.
https://monthlyreview.org/2024/01/01/judge-irving-kaufman-the-liberal-establishment-and-the-rosenberg-case/
This is a review of the book on kaufman. The author of the review is one of the Rosenberg sons.
Anon,
Thanks.
One of my earliest memories is my mother crying while watching the news of the Rosenbergs' execution on our very new first TV. Since my mother wasn't particularly leftwing, I suppose that she just saw it all as a unjust and excessive punishment for two Jews like herself of the same generation.
The article is particularly interesting insofar as it brings up the role of the liberal establishment, so beloved by some readers of this blog, in the whole anti-communist witch-hunt of the 50's.
Following up on s. wallerstein on the 50s liberals: One of my favorite books is Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience, consisting mostly of essays that he wrote in the early-mid 50s for Commentary and the Partisan Review. The one turd in the punchbowl is the essay 'The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg', wherein he pitilessly analyzes the stilted prose of the Rosenberg's letters as they await trial and execution. The contrast with the penetrating intelligence and really exquisite sensitivity of the other essays (especially the famous ones on The Gangster movie, The Western, Chaplin, and his father) could not be greater. Warshow couldn't be bothered to mobilize his enormous gifts for those commie Jews.
Related to the general conversation here, I would note that philosophers, historians, social theorists, etc. tend to spend way too much time on theoretical criticism rather than theoretically informed analysis of and action to change society. In the lengthy discussion of the Israel/ Hamas/Houthi/Hezbollah, Iran conflict too much time was spent on what other people where saying about what other people were saying.
I think of this as an analog of commodity fetishism: we are all caught up in the phantasmagoric swirl of multitudes of ideologically based interpretations. Rather than swimming further into the abyss of endless B.S., interpretations by established groups with a stake in the argument be subjected to ideological critique. (Marx surely had the young Hegelians as his target who preferred ascending further away from reality rather than confronting it.)
Like Dr. Wolff I have been following the legal trials and tribulations of Trump, et.al., but I am focusing on the rise of political violence, how that will impact the election, and the harm that will inevitably come from having an insurrectionist as speaker of the house. I am stuck on how to characterize the current levels of violence. There are 250 or more Proud outfits around the country, and during the past year or so they have allied themselves with the anti-abortion cause, and using intimidation tactics (like showing up at the school board meeting in tactical gear. If there are political demonstrations, there will be armed counter demonstrators using the same tactics they used during the BLM movement demonstrations (motor vehicle attacks, agent provocateurs to instigate violence, etc.)
I am not particularly optimistic about this year. The worst is yet to come.
I think there is a place for all kinds of scholarly/academic/etc. work in terms of how close or far it is from "real world" problems. Scholars can orient their work to practical and immediate questions and proposals if they want, and being guided by some normative ideals/aspirations is perfectly fine and may even be necessary or unavoidable, but there is a difference, as I. Wallerstein observed a long time ago, between the role of scholar and that of advocate (or activist, I would add). In a recent blog post, I had occasion to quote him on this point, from the opening pp. of the first vol. of The Modern World-System (1974). N.b. There's nothing to stop someone from being both a scholar and activist, but the roles are different. I also think it's fine for academics to sign petitions, make statements on social media, write about public affairs, urge policies, etc. but that's not to say it's a necessary or integral part of their roles as scholars.
Here's the passage (I'm not nec. high on the bit about deriving "general principles" -- that depends -- but the basic point seems pretty much right; the gendered language is bc it's from decades ago):
“to be a scholar or a scientist is to perform a particular role in the social system, one quite different from being an apologist for any particular group. I am not denigrating the role of advocate. It is essential and honorable, but not the same as that of scholar or scientist. The latter’s role is to discern, within the framework of his commitments, the present reality of the phenomena he studies, to derive from this study general principles, from which ultimately particular applications may be made. In this sense, there is no area of study that is not ‘relevant.’ For the proper understanding of the social dynamics of the present requires a theoretical comprehension that can only be based on the study of the widest possible range of phenomena, including through all of historical time and space.” (Modern World-System I, p. 9; italics added)
Link to the post:
here.
Scholars can orient their work to practical and immediate questions and proposals if they want
Is that true during a crisis? For example, was it true in Britain during the 2nd World War? Scholars could just study whatever they wanted (and get funded to do so)? And if not, do you think they should have been able to?
I would argue that the challenges currently posed by rapid changes in the climate make for circumstances very different than anything the academy has faced in living memory. That doesn't necessarily mean that an individual scholar or student should be forced to focus on an area that holds no interest for him or her, but I think it does mean that the obligations that universities have in training the next generation are of a different character today (or ought to be) than at some other perhaps more carefree times during the past.
A lot of academics in Britain and the U.S. contributed to the war effort during WW2, plus many emigre scholars who had managed to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. (See, for example, the history of the OSS and its research branch.) The British govt probably wasn't funding much of anything in academic terms during WW2 except work directly relating to the war effort (but I don't know for sure).
The main role of universities is, I'd say, two-fold: teaching, and producing and disseminating knowledge (w the two being related). The government already shapes or influences the research agenda of some fields by choosing what things to emphasize in its funding, and universities recognize that they have an obligation, among other things, to contribute to the solution of climate change and other crises. But these obvs. are in many cases matters that require political/structural change that has to come from or involve whole societies.
Leftish critics wd point out, w some justification, that univs, in the US at any rate, play a role in reproducing class privilege and inequality. But that's a somewhat separate issue.
Readers of The Philosophers Stone may find this commentary on the Harvard/Gay affair illuminating:
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/moran-on-claudine-gay.pdf
Gee whiz Mulvaney, if you’re trying to bum us out, then mission accomplished. Remember, it’s “OPTIMISM of the WILL” … pessimism is meant to be contained within the intellect!
DZ,
Just when I thought we were done w that, you have to go and give another link! (Just kidding.) I haven't looked at it yet.
another side issue:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n02/sheila-fitzpatrick/bertie-wooster-in-murmansk
DZ,
Have now read it. (I wd have seen it eventually the next time I looked at Leiter's blog.)
So much for Israel's commitment to a two state solution.
Now it's explicitly "Greater Israel":
From today's Guardian:
"Benjamin Netanyahu has said he informed the US that he opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of any postwar scenario.
"Israel will only agree to a deal that would see the country gain security control over the entire Gaza Strip, the Israel prime minister said at a news conference on Thursday. He said:
"In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control all territory west of the Jordan. This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do?
"Netanyahu added that he had 'told this to the Americans', adding: 'The prime minister needs to be capable of saying no to our friends'."
From the river to the sea....
David Zimmerman,
I had expected more of Biden, that he'd be capable of telling the Israelis to stop massacring Palestinians and to work out a two state solution with the more sane members of the Palestinian National Authority, thus isolating Hamas and other extremists.
If Biden wants that, he needs to tell Netanyahu to stop the genocide in Gaza or there'll be no more arms and no more money.
Otherwise, I don't want to even imagine what will happen as Iran gets more and more involved in this mess.
Netanyahu opposing a two-state solution is not really news. One must hope that he and the far right ministers will not remain in power after the next election.
Why would one expect more of Biden? Putting it all down to the pusillanimity or the bad thinking--in either the moral or the analytical sense--of one person is never going to unveil what is unfolding in the world or in that small but far too weighty part of it that is the USA. Ditto, by the way, for those who can't see or think beyond the hideous figure of Trump.
That, by the way, is surely why RPW proclaims the virtues of Marx's Capital: it seeks to get at the way the world works.
I won't be so vain as to offer an answer. But it seems to me one has to begin to analyse the various social, economic, and political forces which make Biden point in a particular direction just as magnetic forces make a compass needle point in a particular direction. In other words, Biden won't point in another direction vis-a-vis Palestine unless enormous political pressure is generated, particularly here in the US, to force him to be other than an Israeli lickspittle.
I'd say something similar wrt other countries. Only an enormous political effort will make them make it evident that they will no longer be America's lap dogs. The only thing that's presently moving them--I'm obviously thinking of the Europeans in particular-- in that direction is fear that the internationalist capitalists will be displaced by the nationalist ones.
Anon,
Why expect more of Biden?
Among other reasons, because as long as Israel keeps massacring Palestinians, the Houthies will make it very difficult for ships to pass through the Red Sea to the Suez Canal, thus forcing them to go around Africa to reach Europe and the U.S., raising the price of oil and other goods, producing inflation, which might well cost Biden his re-election and I assume that Biden wants to be re-elected.
Ok. if he reins in Netanyahu, he is going to lose some Jewish big money campaign contributions, but he's already lost the Arab-American vote and finally, it's votes that decide elections.
I was at one point this afternoon listening on C Span radio to an interview w António Guterres (conducted at the World Ec. Forum in Davos). One of the more interesting things (at least to me) he said is that some middle-range powers now have more influence in certain key regions than the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. It's not, to be sure, an especially startling insight but it does bring home what the diffusion of power (to quote an old book title) means in the int'l system.
The U.S. could be exercising more leverage on Israel for sure, but the failure to do so is rooted in considerations that go beyond any one particular U.S. President. There is the long and close de facto alliance between Israel and the U.S., esp since 1967, which is supported by important domestic political forces that any U.S. President can't easily ignore. There is a growing split in the Dem Party now on the issue, however, which opens the possibility of a change in the U.S.-Israel relationship esp. once the current generation of leaders in the U.S. has left the scene. Biden himself has long had a close relationship w Israel going back at least to his meeting w Golda Meir during the Oct. '73 war (about which he has spoken more than once), so personal considerations do come into the picture here, though they're not the most important factor.
P.s. Just saw s.w.'s comment. Biden is not going to "rein in" Netanyahu in a significant way bc of what I said above, and also it's not just a matter of campaign contributions, but of that part of the divided U.S. Jewish community that identifies w Israel even if it may not like Netanyahu much -- these are also voters, and still mainly Democratic ones. Plus, AIPAC and similar orgs. still wield a fair amt of clout in Congress.
LFC,
With his support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, Biden is losing younger Jewish voters.
My nephew and niece, both in their 30's, are very critical of what Israel is doing in Gaza.
Will they vote for Trump?
Of course not, but they are so fed up with Biden that they may not vote or they might vote for Cornel West or Jill Stein.
Ok. They live in New York, which votes Democratic anyway and maybe Biden and the people behind him have that all calculated, but maybe not. I get the impression that the mentality of my niece and nephew is very wide-spread among younger progressive Jews in the U.S. Their mother, my sister, might follow suit too.
It’s all very well, and accurate up to a point, to point to the consequences of the disruption of the global distribution system, s.w., but it’s also necessary to ask what significant socio-economic forces will stop Biden from being moved to rein in the Israelis. Looking to “Jewish big money” and “the Arab-American vote” doesn’t really sound all that significant to me, which is not to dismiss them as utterly negligible considerations. But surely one has to look to the powerful interests linked to the Middle East (and beyond) to see what/who might be pressuring “Biden” to keep pointing in a pro-israel direction. That raises a question re LFC’s points: what has it been that has kept the US’s political compass pointing in a pro-Israel direction for all these many years despite the manifest cruelties and indignities being visited upon Palestine’s indigenous people?
One can, of course, point to the exploitation of the sympathy generated by the horrors of murderous, industrialised anti-semitism—something that no normal human being could become aware of without feeling horror and sympathy. But it is not, as I see it anti-semitic in its turn to point out that that horror and sympathy was exploited for purposes that we can now see have generated actions that now provoke new horror and sympathy. But I’d submit that the horror and sympathy for the Jewish people may be categorised alongside whoever it was told Truman he had to “scare the hell out of the American people” in order to get them on board with the Cold War project.
In other words, don’t we have to keep pressing deeper, beyond the well known ideological impositions and justifications, to begin try to understand all that really lies behind the support, the unyielding support, for those who are behaving with such unmitigated savagery? It must be something very powerful to keep honourable men and women—our Brutuses and Cassiuses—from behaving as they have done, are doing, and will likely continue to do.
If the response is, we've gone deep enough, RPW's exploration of Capital becomes pointless to you.
Devastating interview on NewsHour tonight w a doctor who had spent time in Gaza. (Link later.)
anon,
Go as deep as you want.
I'm not at all sure that Marx is the tool I'd select to dig deeper. I might prefer Freud or Lacan or Adorno or Nietzsche or Simone de Beauvoir, whom I mentioned above.
However, if you feel that Marx is the guy, as RPW does, let's see what you come up with.
And I agree with you that there are deeper forces underlying the situation than Biden's poll ratings.
John Pillette,
Who, may I ask, came up with '...it’s “OPTIMISM of the WILL” … pessimism is meant to be contained within the intellect!?' That aside, if that one short recitation of the dimensions of political violence that we face is enough to make you pessimistic, then you should look into the topic. Note, I didn't say I was pessimistic, rather I would characterize my position as realistic.
Political actors need a clear assessment of the situation and the inherent possibilities, both positive and negative contained therein. Should the House decide not to legislate anything, no spending bills, no debt limit increase, it could shut down government at a time of its choosing. What does Biden do then?
Say the 250+ proud boys chapters decide to intimidate voters, or disrupt the election in other ways. Are local police capable of defending voting places and tabulation centers from violence. Is the FBI prepared to deal with that, and is the justice department prepared to counter moves in republican legislatures to reject the legitimate vote count on grounds that the results are invalid due to polling place violence?
Can you address the subject raised in a manner other than a glib retort? That I would be interested in.
Brian Leiter has recently published a couple of posts on his blog scolding those who have raised questions about the veracity of claims Israelis have made attributing various atrocities to Hamas on October 7. While I am not entirely surprised by this, I am disappointed. I would have hoped that Leiter, as both a philosopher and a lawyer, would agree that extraordinary claims demand evidence, which is all that the critics of the Israeli claims whom I have been reading and watching have been asking for.
Leiter is not alone. Many journalists reporting in major news media outlets and commenters posting on social media platforms, as well as American politicians, all the way up to President Biden, Secretary Blinken, and Senator Sanders, continue to repeat allegations such as that Hamas "killed 1,200 [or 1,400] innocent civilians," that Hamas beheaded Jewish babies, that Hamas baked babies in an oven, and that Hamas fighters on October 7 were ordered by their command to systematically commit rapes & other sexual atrocities as part of their attack. At least one such has been made in the comments here on RPW's blog ("Israeli babies have been cruelly murdered (by decapitation) on the 7th of October").
The main problem is that many of these unsubstantiated claims have been coming from the Israeli Defense Force and the Israeli government, sources who have been shown time and again to play fast and loose with the truth when they have perceived narrative control to be key to protecting Israel's security. Why would you expect that people who have been justifying the actions we have been witnessing in Gaza as self-defense would not lie about what they claim to have been atrocities committed by the enemy if they feel doing so is also justified as self-defense?
Eric,
I've seen interviews where Max Blumenthal questions the narrative about Hamas atrocities on October 7.
Now in these situations you have to trust someone and I've come to trust Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, who has been very critical of IDF atrocities in Gaza.
Gideon Levy says that he visited the area attacked by Hamas on October 7 two days after the Hamas aggression and that while there may be some exaggeration in the official Israel version, it is basically true.
I sent an interview with Levy to Leiter and he linked to it on his blog, which means Leiter found it convincing too.
Here's the interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuSPFuHSopo
Someone like Levy has absolutely no reason to back up Netanyahu's version of things.
Max Blumenthal seems to me to be someone with an axe to grind, in search of conspiracy theories to peddle and that's how he earns his living.
Eric, we know from Tokyo, Hamburg, Grozny, Aleppo, Mariupol, etc. what happens to civilians when urban areas wind up looking like Gaza. There are multiple credible reports of the settlers and the IDF abusing and murdering Palestinians in the West Bank. Like s.w., I find Haaretz mostly credible. There are interviews in multiple venues with folks who managed to survive the 10/07 attack. Hamas owns up to taking hostages. There is video of Hamas launching massive rocket attacks and the Houthi seizing a ship engaged in innocent passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Etc.,etc., etc.
What signals would a (well deserved) break with Israel send? What options would that leave Israel? As with Ukraine, the Biden Administration is choosing to err on the side of caution - understandable but way too timid. Also, this isn't over Palestine being"free," but over which group of corrupt, god-bothering thugs (PLO, Hamas, Likud/settlers, etc.) gets to screw over the Palestinians.
OTOH, shipping stocks are up.
Eric:
That Hamas raped victims on Oct. 7 has been documented by Physicians for Human Rights. Here is their report:
https://www.phr.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/5771_Sexual_Violence_paper_Eng-final.pdf
The report was linked by the group academics4peace in an open letter that anyone could sign (and that is probably still open for signature) calling, among other things, for a ceasefire.
Oops. S/b Bab-el-Mandeb.
s. wallerstein
I've only now caught up with this thread and want to refer to your 7:10 p.m. post yesterday about your niece and nephew who disapprove of Biden's Gaza policy so strongly that they might vote for a third party candidate.
I hope you will point out to them that a vote for a third party candidate like West or Stein only increases the chances that we will wind up with a Trump victory. Unfortunately, in our system, a vote for a third party candidate is a half-vote for one of the two main candidates. The lesser of two evils indeed is still evil, but it is also lesser.
Adoption of ranked voting would solve the problem, but apart from Maine, so far as I know, no state uses it and I don't know whether Maine does for the presidency. They do it for the Senate and House as well as all state elections.
David Palmeter,
Seriously, I'm not going to lecture or sermonize two young people who are fed up by Biden's backing of Netanyahu.
They have heard that exact same message at least a thousand times, if not more, and I have no desire to bore them with one of those messages that the old deliver from the so-called "wisdom of age".
If they ask me for advice (which will not occur), I will suggest voting for Biden, but otherwise my philosophy is to let the young learn from experience, from their own experience, not from mine.
"...but otherwise my philosophy is to let the young learn from experience.."
Had some folks back in the 1960s not come to the conclusion that there was no difference between Humphrey and Nixon, Chilean history may well have been different and Kissinger would have stayed at Harvard. Ditto for Gore/Bush and the Middle East/global warming in the aughts. Everyone in the world has a stake in how Americans vote.
s. wallerstein @1:29pm,
Gideon Levy in that interview says that the attack was "barbaric," that he saw "horrible things" in the kibbutzim after the attack, but he does not elaborate. That is not evidence of the sexual violence or of the atrocities committed against babies that others have been claiming.
As for Max Blumenthal, I can fully appreciate your frustration with Blumenthal's style, which I share.
But in carefully reading his articles and listening to his interviews, laying aside the inflammatory and condemnatory language and focusing on the substance of the arguments, especially in his criticisms of outlets like the NYT and CNN, I have found him to be very persuasive. Perhaps what you may not realize is that for the facts he recites in his articles, he is drawing almost exclusively from material that has been reported in the Israeli press, including in Ha'aretz, but ignored or suppressed by the American press. He isn't just making up information or repeating wild claims from entirely dubious sources.
One may ask what reasons the Israelis would have to lie about Hamas atrocities.
The first is that such lies reinforce in the minds of US policymakers from Biden & Blinken to members of Congress the conviction that the Palestinians are savage, barbaric animals and that the continued unconditional military and diplomatic support of Israel is necessary to prevent any further atrocities against Israelis. The support of the US and other Western nations is all the more important as Israel itself faces claims of genocide and other human rights abuses.
Lies about atrocities also provide Western news media outlets like CNN and the New York Times with an excuse to continue to present one-sided accounts of the conflict, heavily biased in Israel's favor. In the Israeli domestic arena, stories about the barbarity of the attackers help unite in common hatred of the enemy factions of the public who might otherwise be politically divided.
aaall,
Not so sure about Chilean history.
Johnson backed the 1964 military coup in Brazil and sent the marines to the Dominican Republic in 1965. The CIA gave huge sums of money to back Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei against Salvador Allende in the 1964 Chilean presidential election and Frei won.
The 1970 presidential election in Chile was a three-way race and Allende won a plurality
against a rightwing candidate Alessandri and a Christian Democrat (center), Tomic.
Would a Democratic president have supported a coup against Allende, whose election they had opposed in 1964 through huge covert spending?
It is quite possible. Allende was a genuine Marxist (maybe Marxist-Leninist), friendly with Cuba, had no problems with the Soviet Union. the Communist Party participated in his government with several important cabinet posts. He nationalized the U.S. owned copper mines.
Democrats as well as Republicans were pretty fierce cold warriors back in those days. Maybe Carter a bit less, but otherwise, they had no qualms about overthrowing leftists governments.
DEATH TOLL
Consider first the issue of the number of deaths on October 7 and who were the people killed.
It was originally reported that 1,400 Israelis were killed by Hamas in the October 7 attack. Around November 10 the official number was lowered to 1,200, with Israeli officials saying at the time that some of the remains previously believed to have been of Israelis were actually of Hamas fighters.
On reviewing data published by the Israeli Social Security agency, Bituah Leumi, AFP reported in mid December that the final death toll was believed to be 1,139. That figure includes 695 Israeli civilians (36 of them children), 71 foreigners (mostly Thai workers), and 373 Israeli security forces (305 soldiers, 58 police, and 10 Shin Bet agents).
(These figures did not distinguish between security forces members who were on-duty and those who were off-duty at the time they were killed.)
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social-security-data-reveals-true-picture-of-oct-7-deaths
Insofar as no one other than pacifists argues that soldiers killed in a military conflict are "innocent" victims, we can conclude that according to the standards employed in describing any other military conflict, the number of deaths of potentially "innocent" victims of Hamas and allied fighters on October 7 was 766—that is, the 695 Israeli "civilians" plus the 71 foreigners.
(A further consideration is that a large percentage of the civilians who were killed were likely to have had training in the IDF as part of the mandatory service requirement to which the majority of Israelis are subject on turning 18, and some or even many may have been armed IDF reservists. By Israel's logic, which holds that all adult male Palestinians are Hamas, an argument could be made that many of the presumed Israeli "civilians" who were killed were legitimate military targets. I don't necessarily endorse this argument myself, but it would fit with the way of thinking typically employed by many of Israel's defenders.)
So the documented number of Israeli and foreign civilians killed by Hamas & allied fighters on October 7 is at max a little more than 750. Yet journalists and politicians continue to routinely cite figures of 1,200 or 1,400. For example, Senator Sanders' resolution this week seeking to obtain a report on possible human rights abuses by Israel in the Gaza conflict contained a whereas statement which read, "the current round of conflict began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas, a terrorist organization, unleashed a brutal attack against Israel, killing some 1,200 innocent men, women, and children."
If one's perspective is that the taking of a single civilian life is unconscionable and indefensible, then surely taking 750 or 800 is bad enough. What justification can there be for inflating the number other than as propaganda?
A second issue involves the question of which party was directly responsible for the deaths. Here again, journalists, politicians, and other defenders of Israel seek to blame Hamas for all of the deaths.
A first point in this regard is that Hamas was not the only group who participated in the October 7 attack. Hamas coordinated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other organized groups in the attack. But Hamas leaders have claimed that unaffiliated fighters over whom they had no control passed through the breaches in the wall after Hamas and its formally allied co-combatants began their attack. One might argue that by creating those breaches in Israeli defenses, Hamas et al carry at least some responsibility for all deaths whether by their own fighters or by unaffiliated fighters, but that is very different than saying that Hamas "brutally murdered over 1,200 innocent civilians in cold blood," as Rep. Elise Stefanik tweeted this week, or as Israeli and other American officials have repeatedly said in the past few months.
Hamas' primary immediate aims on October 7 appear to have been to disable the Israeli Southern Command and to capture as many Israeli hostages as possible to be used in negotiations for release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. As dead bodies are far less valuable in exchange negotiations than live hostages, why would Hamas order their fighters to savagely kill and mutilate unarmed civilians rather than to take them hostage wherever possible?
A second and arguably more important point is that many of the Israelis killed October 7 were actually killed by Israeli forces themselves.
Critics of Israeli claims about the October 7 deaths, notably the late Refaat Alareer (who was killed in early December), Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, and Ali Abunimah and others of the Electronic Intifada, pointed out early on that the extent of destruction due to incineration appeared far more consistent with firepower unleashed by Israeli Apache helicopters and other heavy munitions than with the kinds of smaller handheld or shoulder-launched weaponry carried by Hamas fighters who entered Israel on foot or by paramotor.
There have now been several reports in Israeli media, but largely absent from reporting by US and other Western English-language media, that appear to confirm these suspicions.
Eric
You've been going on about the bias of mainstream news outlets (among other things). (I also notice you conveniently neglected to address the Physicians for Human Rts report that I linked.) This is a report from the mainstream outlet PBS NewsHr in which N. Schiffrin interviews an American doctor recently returned from Gaza. Anyone who watches/listens to this will conclude that the IDF operation is causing severe harm to civilians (and, to repeat, this is a mainstream U.S. news outlet):
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-doctor-who-worked-in-gaza-describes-dire-humanitarian-crisis-civilians-there-face
A new investigative report in Yedioth Ahronoth (ynet.com), for example, describing the challenges IDF forces encountered hour by hour on October 7, says that:
"[The officers in the helicopter squadron] succeed in reaching the division, and request, in fact, to throw away all the procedures, orders, and regulations. 'You have permission to fire freely,' the Zik operators from the division were told, that is - shoot at everything that looks threatening or enemy."
The report further says that hours later:
"This is the moment when the IDF decides on a kind of return of the 'Hannibal' order....
The '7 Days' investigation reveals that at midnight on October 7, the IDF instructs all its fighting units in practice to use the 'Hannibal Procedure,' although without clearly mentioning this explicit name. The instruction is to stop 'at all costs' any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to the original 'Hannibal Procedure,' despite repeated assurance by the security establishment that the procedure has been cancelled.
The actual meaning of the order is that the main goal is to stop the retreat of the Nukhba activists. And if they took hostages with them - then even if this means risking or harming the lives of civilians in the area, including abductees themselves....
It is not clear at this point how many of the abductees were killed due to the activation of this order on October 7. In the week after Black Shabbat, soldiers of elite units, at the initiative of the Southern Command, checked about 70 vehicles that remained in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. These are vehicles that did not reach Gaza, because on the way they were shot by a combat helicopter, and anti-tank missle or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed." [Google machine translation from Hebrew]
https://w.ynet.co.il/yediot/7-days/time-of-darkness
(btw, Google has been suppressing this link)
Other reports, including interviews of Israeli hostages who were released or escaped, such as Yasmin Porat, indicate that some of the Israelis who died on October 7 were killed by IDF soldiers firing indiscriminately, or by the IDF shelling homes where Israelis were sheltering.
In short, it is very likely that even the claim that 750-800 Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas fighters on October 7 is an overcount, as many of those deaths were due to indiscriminate use of heavy munitions by the IDF itself, from their inability to identify which of their targets were actual enemy fighters as opposed to Israeli civilians and/or their calculated decision to sacrifice any Israeli civilians along with Hamas fighters because their priority was to keep Hamas out of Israel at any cost and to keep Hamas from having hostages who could be used as bargaining chips.
ATROCITIES AGAINST CHILDREN
Turning now to the atrocities Hamas is alleged to have perpetrated against Israeli children...
In Israel's defense before the International Court of Justice on January 12, an Israeli attorney quoted an October 19 statement by the President of the European Commission that Hamas "mutilated children and even babies. Why? Because they were Jews."
Another of Israel's attorneys claimed at the same hearing:
"Openly displaying elation, they tortured children in front of parents, and parents in front of children, burned people, including infants, alive, and systematically raped and mutilated scores of women, men and children. All told, some 1,200 people were butchered that day...."
On October 13, CNN reported:
"Babies and toddlers were found 'decapitated' in Kfar Aza, Tal Heinrich, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Wednesday."
Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted on January 13:
"Supporters of the new Nazis dare to accuse us of genocide. Who do they support? Murderers, rapists, those who decapitate and those who burn babies?!"
In public remarks after a roundtable with Jewish leaders on October 11, President Biden said, "I never thought I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children." (This despite his having been advised by his staff not to mention this because the reports of beheaded babies had not been confirmed.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m4BpcK6OSM&t=671s (@ 11m11s)
On December 12, at a reelection campaign event, Biden repeated the claim:
"You know, they — I saw some of the photographs when I was there — tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman — totally, completely inhuman."
https://theintercept.com/2023/12/14/israel-biden-beheaded-babies-false/
As I noted above, a commenter here on RPW's blog said, "Israeli babies have been cruelly murdered (by decapitation) on the 7th of October."
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2023/12/answers-to-some-questions.html?showComment=1703047386422#c6908162399063097496
As a source for the latter claim, an article from France24 was provided, which says that IDF Col. Golan Vach, head of the military search and rescue service, had said he personally saw one decapitated baby which he himself put into a body bag.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231027-israeli-officer-says-he-found-baby-beheaded-in-hamas-attack
Here's the problem with all these claims:
Not only has the IDF failed to provide any other evidence to substantiate the claim that babies were beheaded by Hamas fighters, the official Israeli death registry lists a total of only 3 babies who died on October 7. None of them by beheading. (And it's possible that at least one of those babies who died on October 7 was mistakenly killed by Israel.) You can search the death registry yourself at Ha'aretz online.
Wrt Col Golan Vach's claim, Vach also said that "we found eight babies burned in this corner" of a home in kibbutz Be'eri. Yet, again, only 3 total babies are listed in the death registry, just one of them in kibbutz Be'eri. And the youngest child who died in Kfar Aza, where CNN claimed on October 13 that babies and toddlers were found decapitated, was actually 14 years old, hardly a baby or toddler.
Even if there were other babies whose names for whatever reason did not make it into the official death registry, the IDF has provided no evidence that the alleged beheading(s) or incineration of babies were intentionally perpetrated by Hamas fighters and not by the IDF's indiscriminate use of its own firepower.
In a December 4 article, reporters for Ha'aretz dispelled a long list of atrocity claims that have circulated widely on social media and been repeated by American officials, including President Biden and Secretary Blinken.
https://archive.is/H6rAm
(The reporters took pains to insist that there were in fact many other well-documented atrocities despite these false claims, although they did not discuss in any detail the claims that they said have been corroborated.)
Among the many other claims they addressed were:
"There is no evidence that children from several families were murdered together, rendering inaccurate Netanyahu’s remark to U.S. President Joe Biden that Hamas terrorists 'took dozens of children, tied them up, burned them and executed them.'"
"As for Col. Vach’s remarks on the bodies of eight burned babies, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said he 'described difficult sights that he saw during his various missions evacuating bodies at the start of the war. The review was conducted in English, and the officer used the word "babies" to describe a number of children’s bodies that were found. The error was made in good faith....'"
"Some of the incorrect descriptions were made by Zaka personnel; one repeatedly talked about 20 bound and burned bodies of children at a kibbutz.... This description does not conform to the list of the dead."
"The same Zaka member also repeatedly spoke about the body of a pregnant woman found at Kibbutz Be'eri whose abdomen had been cut open.... The kibbutz adds that 'the story of the pregnant woman reported by Zaka is not relevant to Be'eri.' The police say the case is not known to them, and a pathology source at the Shura army base told Haaretz that he was unaware of the case."
Eric
You're so obsessed with painting the Israelis as evil propagandists that you've lost sight of what really matters here.
First, the U.S. admin was going to behave as it has bc of the decades-long US-Israel relationship, irrespective of whether 700 or 1200 civilians were killed by Hamas, and irrespective of exactly how many atrocities Hamas committed.
Second, the Oct. 7 attack was basically a terrorist attack (in that after overrunning the army bases, it focused on civilians, including young people attending a "rave" i.e. a concert) and it can't be justified as legitimate resistance to oppression, because these means of resistance (terrorist attacks) aren't legitimate.
Third, the IDF operation in Gaza has caused enormous harm and suffering to civilians and civilian casualties that seem clearly outside what is permitted by international law and the law of armed conflict, and that incidentally must have severely damaged Israel's image in the world, whatever exactly that was before.
Fourth, the Biden admin and Congress shd be putting more real pressure on Netanyahu and conditioning aid but they aren't bc of domestic politics and where almost the whole Repub party and prob more than half the Dem party are on this.
Trying to convince some people on a blog that Israel has engaged in "propaganda" about Oct. 7 seems like a waste of time in these circumstances, b/c in light of what's actually going on it doesn't make a fucking bit of difference whether Hamas killed 700 civilians on Oct. 7 or 1200.
Do you really think that if Biden, Blinken, McConnell and Schumer knew that Hamas had killed "only" 700 civilians they wd say: "Oh well in that case we have to change our policy here"?
You seem to be living in some kind of fantasy world.
SYSTEMATIC RAPE AND OTHER ACTS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Over the past few weeks, Israeli officials and supporters of Israel have been accusing Hamas of the widespread and systematic use of sexual violence in the October 7 attack. Hamas leaders have, from the very beginning, categorically denied that their fighters were ordered, encouraged, or in any way authorized to commit atrocities against children or to sexually violate women or girls.
And I think it is noteworthy that afaik none of the released hostages who were allowed to speak to the press reported having been subjected to torture or sexual violence. (Israel began discouraging released hostages from speaking freely to the media after 85-year-old Yocheved Lifschitz's press conference in late October.)
Israel released video footage of interrogations of two Palestinian men, said to be Hamas fighters, who allegedly claimed in the recordings that they had been told to sexually violate female Israeli victims as part of the attack.
https://twitter.com/DonKlericuzio/status/1712047778627527116
https://twitter.com/AmichaiStein1/status/1716495492849299539
("Confessions" extracted under duress are suspect under the best of circumstances. Given that Israel is one of the few countries in the world where the security forces are legally authorized to employ torture during security emergencies, this testimony cannot be accepted as remotely credible, especially for the claim that systematic use of sexual violence was commanded by senior members of Hamas and allied groups.)
Let's suppose for the sake of supposing that Hamas did not behead or incinerate any babies on Oct. 7. Let's further suppose that Hamas did not kill anyone under the age of 15. They still attacked a rave where unarmed young people were partying and killed a number of them. They took hostages, including by all accounts some children. That in itself would almost certainly be enough to generate the sort of response the IDF has enacted.
So it really makes no difference, practically speaking or from the standpoint of basic justification, whether Hamas took a bunch of Israeli toddlers and smashed their heads in or whether they didn't touch a single hair on a single baby's head.
Eric
You have continued to ignore the PHR document I linked. Is PHR some kind of front for the Israeli government in your view?
From NYT:
"A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
"Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated."
Link to follow next box.
(I tried to copy text from the PHR report but couldn't.)
But what is curiously missing, given the allegation that rape and sexual violence are purported to have been systematic and widespread, is the total, or near-total, absence of accounts from actual survivors who were themselves raped. There are a handful of accounts from people who have claimed to have witnessed rapes and sexual mutilation, but their accounts are on the whole very unconvincing for numerous reasons that I won't go into here, as are those from people who found the remains of victims that they claimed appeared to have been sexually violated. (Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, reporters at Mondoweiss, and Briahna Joy Gray have dissected these in detail elsewhere.)
One of the main problems is that many of the allegations of evidence of sexual violence have been made by members of ultra-orthodox groups such as Zaka, who the military uses to retrieve remains in ways intended to honor religious obligations. However, members of these groups are not trained to identify rape and sexual violence and have been caught reporting misleading information in the past. And given that they rely on charitable contributions, they are financially incentivized to describe the scenes from which they collect remains in the most horrific possible ways they can imagine.)
Link un-paywalled:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.PE0.D75u.ZY9gj2pmqLbr&smid=url-share
What would have played out differently if Hamas had raped or mutilated zero women?
Nothing.
What this ignores is the basic problem of justification. See my comments above. Why don't you address that instead of spending hours on YouTube watching Briahna Joy Gray et al.?
The Israeli police have even said that they have been having difficulty finding Israelis who personally claim to have survived being raped on October 7. The Israeli medical community has said that in the rush to identify remains and bury bodies as soon as possible in observance of Jewish rites it was with few exceptions not possible for the bodies to be examined by professionals formally trained to identify physical evidence of sexual assault or to collect forensic specimens for rape. A November 9 Times of Israel report was able to quote a dentist(!) working as part of the medical forensic team who claimed to have seen signs she thought indicated rape, but the Times strangely couldn't find an actual forensic pathologist with details of evidence of sexual violence for that news report. (The dentist's statement was included as part of the "evidence" of systematic sexual violence that was included in the Physicians for Human Rights position paper from November that LFC linked to above.)
Yet, while repeatedly alleging that Hamas and their allies systematically used rape in its October 7 attack, Israel has been refusing to participate with an investigation of the sexual violence allegations by a commission of the UN, or to allow Israeli doctors to speak with members of the commission, claiming that the investigators are biased and antisemitic.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/government-forbids-doctors-from-speaking-to-un-group-investigating-oct-7-atrocities/
Similarly, Israel claims that there is video evidence of sexual violence, but refuses to release all of the video evidence, and has only allowed select members of the press and diplomatic community to view video Israel says is incriminating.
I have not seen any reasonable critic of Israel's claims say that there were no acts of sexual violence of October 7. On the contrary, it is highly likely that there were indeed some such acts, just given the number of fighters who were involved and the duration and nature of the wider conflict of which the October 7 attack was a part.
What critics have been seeking is evidence to substantiate Israel's claims that sexual violence was widespread, systematic, and ordered by the Hamas and allied groups' command as part of their military strategy—not perpetrated by individual fighters or squads of Hamas fighters acting on their own, or by unaffiliated fighters who followed Hamas through the breaks in the wall. Given that Israel is refusing to even participate in an international investigation, it seems unlikely that such evidence, should it exist, will be produced any time soon.
LFC: What would have played out differently if Hamas had raped or mutilated zero women? Nothing.
The argument works both ways.
Why exaggerate the horrors if it makes no difference?
They are clearly having an impact because Biden & Netanyahu continue to cite these unsubstantiated atrocity claims.
Eric @ 8:24 p.m.
"In short, it is very likely that even the claim that 750-800 Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas fighters on October 7 is an overcount, as many of those deaths were due to indiscriminate use of heavy munitions by the IDF itself..." (my italics)
So here you say "many" but in the preceding paragraph you quote Yasmin Porat as saying "some."
So there's no difference between "some" and "many"?
Let's say as a hypothetical that Hamas did not kill 750 Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. Let's say hypothetically they killed 350 civilians. I take it you would see that as a legitimate act of resistance to oppression?
The numbers thing can work both ways. The Gaza Health Ministry says IDF has killed upwards of 24,000 civilians in Gaza. What if the number were 10,000?
It remains that the Hamas attack was unjustified and the IDF response has way exceeded the bounds of anything morally acceptable.
All these details about whether babies were burned and women were raped are important for the historical record, but not for the basic moral and political judgments at stake. It would not be surprising if both sides have been engaging in propaganda. That's what happens in war and conflict.
LFC,
I read the PHR paper as soon as it was published. I read it again when the commenter here made that remark about babies being beheaded. I read it again today after you cited it.
The woman and man claiming to have witnessed gang rape and mutilation appear to be cited twice, in different parts of the paper (page 4 and page 7), making it seem that there were more people claiming to have witnessed especially horrific rapes than there were. Their credibility has been challenged; see reports by critics I mentioned above. The credibility of the Zaka volunteers mentioned in the PHR paper is also suspect, as I noted above (including for the claim that a pregnant woman's abdomen was dissected and her fetus stabbed, p. 9; see the Ha'aretz article I linked to above).
The PHR paper includes these statements: "A month after the attacks, an Israeli broadcaster reported that the Lahav 433 police unit had collected hundreds of testimonies from survivors.... Among them was the testimony of a woman who detailed the group rape and murder of a young woman.... This testimony was later cited as the only account of a rape to have been collected by police." (my emphasis) pp. 4-5
The paper also notes that most of the claims of visual identification of signs of sexual violence were made by people who were not professionally trained to identify whether rape had occurred. p. 6
The paper concludes:
"the accounts and reports of sexual abuse committed during the October 7 Hamas attacks, including those brought to our attention and those made public, provide sufficient evidence to require an investigation of crimes against humanity."
and
"A professional inquiry is required to determine whether these incidents were perpetrated as part of the overall attack orders and whether they were systematic and premeditated....
Given that determining whether crimes against humanity have been committed is a matter of legal nature, it falls upon those making these assertions to prove that the violence was perpetrated systematically."
and
"Local and international bodies must investigate the testimonies and reports to determine whether the accounts they describe amount to crimes against humanity."
I agree with all three of these statements. Israel should cooperate with, not stonewall, the UN committee and other international bodies seeking to investigate the claims.
LFC @9:24pm,
You're confusing two different scenarios. One involved the IDF shooting and indiscriminately shelling houses where Israelis were sheltering or being held hostage, such as the house from which Yasmin Porat was released. The other involved the IDF using heavy firepower such as from Apache helicopters, possibly under the Hannibal Directive, to incinerate everything that moved, including at the music festival and on roads leading back to Gaza. I have seen reports saying 70 cars appear to have been incinerated in this fashion. If many of those cars contained hostages, those when combined with the hostages and the other Israelis who were just hiding in houses that the IDF fired on would make for "many" deaths from IDF firepower.
LFC @8:59pm & 9:01pm,
Mondoweiss discusses NYT "Scream Without Words" piece here:
"Family of key case in New York Times October 7 sexual violence report renounces story, says reporters manipulated them"
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/family-of-key-case-in-new-york-times-october-7-sexual-violence-report-renounces-story-says-reporters-manipulated-them/
Ali Abunimah of The Electronic Intifada discusses in depth here:
"The New York Times 'weaponized' Hamas rape story is a fraud. Ali Abunimah debunks it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VvGF9vYnlw
and briefly here:
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-ny-times-investigation-mass-rape-hamas-falls-apart
Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté of The Grayzone discuss here:
"Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report"
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/
Here is Ryan Grim tweeting a CNN video clip of one of the people claiming to have witnessed a rape and murder on Oct 7 (the man who gave the NYT the quote for its article title, "scream without words.") The man says the perpetrators appeared to him not to have been Hamas fighters but other men who followed Hamas through the breach in the wall.
https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1743129298112790949
I think, and this is my last comment for a while, that the forest is perhaps being lost for the trees here. (Plus I've turned off computer and am on phone w tiny keyboard.)
There is no such thing as a non-horrific terrorist attack. And even if all your sources are correct and there was no systematic, widespread rape or sexual abuse and no babies beheaded, it was still a large-scale terrorist attack.
And the IDF response would not be subject to a different evaluation depending on whether the Oct 7 attack did or did not include systematic rape. So while all this is relevant to the issues of propaganda and alleged lying, and to questions of journalistic practice, it does not have that much to do with the basic moral and political issues at stake.
Now if there were evidence or indication that the IDF killed more civilians, either negligently or recklessly or inadvertently or whatever, than Hamas did on Oct 7, that would be...well, an explosive allegation. But apparently not even Mondoweiss et al. are saying that, though no doubt somewhere in cyberspace someone is...
Eric's comments minimize Hamas' role in the Oct. 7 attacks and suggest that Hamas didn't set out to rape and butcher as many innocent Israelis as possible.
Hamas would be incensed by such claims.
Eric,
My sister lived for several years in Israel, speaks Hebrew fluently, has many Israeli friends, all of them on the left and critical of IDF atrocities in Gaza.
She's in several whatsapp groups where people talk about October 7, most of them being obsessed by it because it was a terrible traumatic shock for them. Many or most of them
know victims or survivors of the October 7 attacks, which affected many kibbutzim with leftwing and peacenik philosophies.
I've talked to her about Blumenthal's accusations and while she is in no position to answer the details, she notes that the leftwing Israelis, many of them women of course, some of them survivors or close relatives of survivors, do not question that sexual violence occurred there, even though those who carried out the sexual violence may not have beem Hamas members, but rather Palestinians from other groups.
Finally, it is very traumatic for women to talk about rape. Blumenthal does not seem to understand that. He is very insensitive about the trauma of rape. How many years did it take the woman currently accusing Trump of rape to get it together to accuse him? Let's imagine an Israeli woman who was gang-rapped by Hamas members or other Palestinians in the midst of people being killed around her? What is her level of trauma? Will she want to appear on TV or in a newspaper interview to talk about it? It may take years before, even with therapy, she is ready to talk about it publicly.
The last paragraph is awkwardly phrased but I assume what I'm getting at is understood -- I'm referring to IDF and Hamas behavior on Oct 7 itself.
LFC: Trying to convince some people on a blog that Israel has engaged in "propaganda" about Oct. 7 seems like a waste of time in these circumstances, b/c in light of what's actually going on it doesn't make a fucking bit of difference whether Hamas killed 700 civilians on Oct. 7 or 1200....
You seem to be living in some kind of fantasy world.
Given the terrible things occurring in the world today, what then is the point of arguing with people on a blog about whether they should vote for Biden in the next election? For that matter, is it not a "waste of time" to read this, or Leiter's, blog at all?
GJ: Eric's comments minimize Hamas' role in the Oct. 7 attacks and suggest that Hamas didn't set out to rape and butcher as many innocent Israelis as possible.
There is no denying that Hamas played a central role in planning and carrying out the October 7 attack, and they are clearly very proud of this. The issue is whether they actually perpetrated the most incendiary atrocities attributed to them (beheading and burning babies, baking babies in an oven, eviscerating a pregnant woman, etc), as Biden continues to cite these claims as fact and Israel has cited them in court in its defense of its actions in Gaza. Hamas deny these claims.
My position is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Wrt many of these atrocity claims, we don't even have basic evidence.
Hamas are an extremely conservative religious group. As I think I have said in the comments here before, I have a lot of problems with religious fundamentalists and I don't think societies should be politically organized according to theocratic principles. I would not want to live in a society governed by Hamas.
By the same token, it would seem inconsistent for Hamas to have encouraged its fighters to engage in acts that, to the limited degree that I understand it, are strictly forbidden by most interpretations of their religion, such as harming babies. Is this evidence that they did not do so? Clearly not. But it makes claims to the contrary all the more suspect.
I have a couple of comments on the above. I will make one now and come back for the other later.
I have no idea what precise instructions Hamas fighters were given before the attack. Once the breach in the defenses was made, however, anyone could cross the border; no doubt some who crossed were not formally part of the Hamas military wing but were other Palestinians. A Hamas leader, according to something I recall seeing, was quoted as saying "there was chaos in the area." That may be, if anything, an understatement. In that context it is bizarre to suppose that everyone who crossed the border was going to stick rigidly to an operational plan, whatever that plan might have been, esp. since not everyone might even have known what it was (assuming it existed). Because Hamas planned the attack and breached the border defenses, such as they were, it must bear a considerable measure of responsibility for whatever was done in the course of the attack. The precise character of the acts by Palestinians on Oct. 7 -- i. e. whether there were "incendiary" atrocities or not -- is irrelevant to the current proceeding before the Intl Ct of Justice, which is the point that I will come back to later.
s. wallerstein,
Again, no one (certainly no one who seems reasonable to me) is claiming that there was no sexual violence on October 7. It invariably occurs in military conflicts such as this. The question is whether it was as widespread as claimed and whether it was a planned part of the attack, authorized by the organizers of the attack.
I also don't think anyone reasonable is saying that it is clearly established that it was not a planned part of the attack. What they are saying is that these claims are suspect because evidence to support them is lacking and the Israelis are blocking attempts to investigate them.
It's entirely understandable that many victims of sexual violence would not want to have to relive the trauma of the event by talking about what happened to them, not even to the police, and certainly not to the media. But what that means is that until any such survivors are ready to speak, the claims made by others (eg Netanyahu) must be regarded as unsubstantiated, or must depend on far weaker kinds of evidence, especially since there has been a scarcity of incontrovertible forensic evidence.
Whatever you think of Max Blumenthal, there are others who have raised similar concerns about the sexual violence atrocity claims. Briahna Joy Gray and Katie Halper have discussed these on their programs in the alternative media space.
This is from a recent article in the Times of Israel:
"Sima Shakhsari, who works at the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies [at the University of Minnesota], said she had not seen evidence of Israeli victims of rape and sexual violence while testifying last Thursday....
'Of course, any person who has been raped — I am a rape crisis counselor, I believe the survivors. I am yet to see Israeli rape survivors of Hamas come and speak,' Shakhsari said."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-professor-who-denies-oct-7-rape-cases-up-for-top-role-at-campus-diversity-office/
This is from Australian sociologist Randa Abdel-Fattah on January 14:
"Israeli government claims of systematic sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women by Hamas and The New York Times article have been thoroughly and compellingly discredited and debunked by both independent investigative journalists and MENA human rights and feminist organizations and initiatives. At this point, anybody who still insists on believing the mass rape claims and/or amplifies The New York Times report is doing so against a growing body of evidence that has called into question the credibility of the claims....
Even though Israeli police admit that they still have no victims or eyewitnesses; even though the sister of the report's primary victim, Gal Abdush, has publicly denied that her sister was raped, accusing The New York Times of manipulating her family for the story; and even though there is no forensic evidence, and there are questions to be answered about the reliability and independence of the supposed witnesses and their testimonies put forward so far, the mass rape claims are still actively being circulated and given credence by elites in the media and those with institutional power....
To be clear, the allegations of mass rape have come from the Israeli regime, not women. This is where accountability is crucial. The compelling question here is if, indeed, women do come forward, and there is evidence to make a case for systematic rape, does this then justify genocide? To put it more clearly, does sexual violence against a particular group of women ever justify the systematic annihilation of another group to whom the alleged perpetrators belong?"
(see the original for links to cited sources)
Abdel-Fattah argues that the Israeli government is deliberately playing on racist tropes of Arab men as sex fiends and rapists to justify genocide.
https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1655054
Eric,
Here's an article from Thursday's Guardian about the claims of sexual violence during the October 7 attacks.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/evidence-points-to-systematic-use-of-rape-by-hamas-in-7-october-attacks
Marc Susselman bombards me with emails accusing you of being an anti-semite. I don't always open them, but just glancing at the first line, I can see what they are about.
I don't believe that you are an anti-semite, but you might want to make an explicit statement explaining that you are not one here in the blog because Marc's emails go to several other people, who may be tempted to believe his slanderous claims about you.
Eric
Still not on my computer, so this will be (relatively) brief.
You have not answered my previous question in one of my comments, namely whether you think the Oct 7 attack was a legitimate act of resistance against oppression.
You are obsessing over issues that, while they are important to fine-grained, so to speak, moral assessment, are basically irrelevant to the larger questions of moral (and political) judgment here.
My position fwiw is:
1) the Oct 7 attack was basically a terrorist act, not a legitimate act of military resistance against oppression. That judgment does not depend on whether any women were raped or whether there were any other "incendiary" atrocities such as baking babies in ovens etc. Oct 7 deliberately targeted civilians on a significant scale.
2) The Oct 7 attack does not justify a response of the sort that the IDF has carried out in Gaza (nor would the presence or absence of incendiary atrocities change that judgment). The response has been, to say the least, insufficiently discriminating and insufficiently targeted. (Whether it meets the criteria for genocide is debatable but not imo that important once one has concluded it is exceeding the bounds of what is justified. An ICJ ruling of genocide would trigger legal obligations of other states but in practice will be unlikely to have any effect on state behavior, given the political context.)
If you want you can continue obsessing over the peripheral issues you are so concerned about.
For what it’s worth, I think “terrorism” is, as it always has been, a most suspect category. But given the way it has entered into the public discourse, yes, what Hamas did was terrorism. I’d go on to say, however, that by that same criterion israel has been waging terrorism on the Palestinians from day one in 1948—much of it “state terrorism” but some of it the same sort of more spontaneous terrorism that’s now being publicised against people in the West Bank. What Israel is now doing to the people of Gaza, whom they’ve subjected to another sort of terrorism for the last 16 years or so, goes way beyond terrorism—whatever the International Court, an institution it would be silly to think of as entirely free from national political pressures, that’s genocide.
One of my abiding memories is a film about the Warsaw ghetto where a very young Jewish man walks up to a Nazi soldier and shoots him. He did right! A legitimate act of resistance against oppression.
If Hamas on Oct. 7 had limited its attacks (mainly) to IDF soldiers, one's judgment might well be different. But after overrunning army bases near the border, Hamas went on to attack civilians -- and as the intended targets.
As for whether terrorism is "a most suspect category," I'll let someone else discuss that with you. I don't know for sure which of the several Anonymouses who post here you are, and I'm not too enthusiastic right now about conversing with someone who doesn't have enough imagination to give himself or herself or themselves a pseudonym.
But FTR, I don't think it's a particularly suspect category. You can look up the generally accepted definition.
Meanwhile, to repeat myself, I think whether or not women were raped or babies were beheaded has rather little bearing on the basic judgments one reaches about Oct. 7. It does bear on the question of how the parties have been presenting themselves to the world, but that is, for me at any rate, not the central point.
P.s. Invoking the Warsaw Ghetto is not particularly apt. (It's also deliberately inflammatory, but I'll put that to one side.)
The Nazis murdered 90 percent (roughly) of Poland's Jewish population, if I'm recalling the figures correctly, and apart from a v. small number of armed resisters who managed to escape, no one got out of the Warsaw Ghetto alive.
I've already said I think what Israel is doing in Gaza is totally indefensible, but I don't think comparisons of the sort you (implicitly) draw are going to do anything except further polarize the discussion. However I'm not going to say anything more on that pt.
My friend gave me a link below to a Jewish speaker who wants to clear up why the injustices of Palestinians who worked to destroy Israel are far worse than the injustices of Israeli & IDF men in the defense of Israel.
Two very good points in the video. (1) Jews are the true indigenous people of Palestine over its entire past. And (2) while Palestinian men have raped Israeli women in war, no IDF soldier has ever raped a Palestinian woman during a conflict.
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W9badc-Y9M"
As an admirer of Islam, Judaism, & Christianity, I wish all three sons & daughters of Abraham, whether blood tied or symbolically tied, would live in peace & harmony.
Which one is generally accepted, LFC? As you can see from even this brief list of references, there are an awful lot of them.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/095465590899768
https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1400&context=jil
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA103363.pdf
As to polarising the discussion, facts on the ground have surely already rendered a polarised discussion among people very very marginal to those conditions ludicrously trivial. And don't you think it's just a bit silly to criticise someone for simply using the convenience of clicking on "Anonymous"--how much imagination did it take to come up with LFC?
Michael: the true indigenous people of that part of the world? I suggest you read the Old Testament.
Clarification: A sizable number of people died in the Warsaw Ghetto of starvation and disease, and by shooting. A larger number were transported to Treblinka. By mid September 1942, more than 253,000 had been transported to Treblinka and gassed. (R.J. Evans, _The Third Reich at War_, p. 308) The armed resistance was crushed by May 1943, and in June 1943 Himmler ordered the ruins of the ghetto razed. (p. 311)
M.L., "indigenous" is relative and in all cases privileges humans over other species. Your assertion assumes a relatively recent special creation by a deity that also grants fee title. Take a look at a map. It's quite likely that just about every hominid that left Africa over the past few million years passed through Israel/Palestine. Everyone is from some other place. From the horse's mouth:
"2. And Joshua said to the whole nation, "Thus said the Lord God of Israel, 'Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the river from earliest time, Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor; and they served other gods.
3. And I took your father Abraham from the other side of the river, and led him throughout all the land of Canaan, and multiplied his seed, and gave him Isaac...
8. And I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who dwelt on the other side of the Jordan, and they waged war with you; and I delivered them into your hand, and you inherited their land; and I destroyed them from before you."
Tough luck for those Amorites, I guess.
Recently Bibi dragged the Amalekites into this when referencing the Palestinians - that's sort of genocidal.
aaall
But who has an unbroken civilized line for the past 3,000 years? The Israelites. Meaning the Tribe of Judah (Jews) & the Samaritans (the Ten plus or minus Tribes of Northern Israel) that broke away from Solomon's son who then could only rule over the Southern Kingdom. Like the Jewish man said in the video: most pottery for the past two or three thousand years found throughout Palestine only has writing on it that modern Jews can read: i.e. Hebrew.
As far as Ishmael is concerned, his descendants were basically desert people that dwelt in and around Saudi Arabia and areas inside Egypt until the time of the Prophet in the 6th century. Arabic (& before that the Kufic script) is not really found at all in Israel prior to the 6th century. Jewish pottery shards predate such periods by 1,500 years.
And just because the Romans deported most Jews from Palestine in the 4th century (soon after the 3rd revolt against the Romans) that didn't make the Roman settlers indigenous to Palestine any more than it made the Jewish people less indigenous to that part of the world. And that rings true for all other foreigners that settled there afterwards. Except of course for the Jewish people who embraced Zionism from the 19th century up to the present day.
Michael Llenos,
You claim above that no IDF soldiers has ever raped a Palestinian woman. That is simply false. There are numerous claims of IDF soldiers raping and sexually abusing Palestinian women.
In fact, there are many claims of male IDF soldiers sexually harassing female IDF soldiers.
Have the claims of sexual violence by IDF soldiers ever been proven? You will counter.
No, but neither have the claims of rape by Hamas. In wartime situations there are not likely to be any rape kits around.
The whole claim that the IDF is the most moral army in the world is bullshit and stems from the equally bullshit claim that Jews are special or the chosen people.
No one is special. Any and all human groups commit atrocities if they are given the green light.
For reflection upon s. wallerstein's claim that 'any and all human groups commit atrocities if they are given the green light', I really must recommend Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Despite the horrific subject matter, I've found the book to be an invaluable, indeed essential, contribution to thinking about the subject. Perhaps wallerstein's claim is right, but there are whole worlds of complexity and qualification.
It's all very primitive. Basically, it's our tribe versus their tribe, although most contemporary tribes dress up their tribal urges with moralistic bullshit rhetoric.
To be sure, here and there one runs into what Auden describes as "ironic points of light"
in his poem, September 1939. Here's ending of the poem.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
You're really stretching things, Michael. Having been reminded of the Amalekites, the Canaanites, and the Philistines who were all there before your chosen people, you now try to shift the goal line. But even then you don't take into account (a) that no group of invaders ever completely extirpated those who were there before them, and (b) that there have always been inflows and outflows of people into almost everywhere on Earth including that little bit of the "Middle East" which as it so happens has been a migrational crossing point since we humans came out of Africa. (Didn't Freud suggest that the Jews were actually Egyptians?) I'd bet there are many who now identify as Jews who include non-Jews among their ancestors and that there are many who now identify themselves as, say, Palestinians who include Jews among their ancestors. Humanity is a very mixed up lot, and the sooner we all recognised that, instead of clinging to some false ethnic purity, the better off we'd all be.
Further, it's just absurd to claim that the non-Jews were all "desert people" whatever that is supposed to mean. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like an attempt to justify Israel pushing the Gazans--to be followed, no doubt, by the West Bankers and the East Jerusalemites--out into some desert or other.
s.w. Maybe you know of this:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/31/wh-auden-september-1-1939-poem
James Wilson,
Thanks.
The other lines of the poem, which seem all too relevant are:
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
That describes Hamas perfectly.
And, to be fair, it describes Israel's response to Hamas's evil.
A cycle of evil and vengeance that is very depressing to witness and at the same time "to show an affirming flame", as the poem concludes.
Breaking:
DeSantis is out.
Via Harretz:
"■ ISRAEL: Israel's security cabinet approved a plan to transfer tax funds to the Palestinian Authority through Norway. The sole cabinet opponent was far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir."
Congratulations. What a tribute. I will join the chorus and urge that your lecture be recorded in some fashion or transcribed. Too precious for it not to be. Excerpts from your post would make a fabulous promotion for the series.
I thought I knew a lot about the Arab-Israel historical context until I watched this 40-minute video by Ben Shapiro. Video Link:
"https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dEoVzKyD_IM"
Ben Shapiro?
Oy.
@ Jerry Fresia
There are two sides to the issue of whether RPW's study group on Marx should be recorded. If it is going to be a lecture with no opportunity for questions or comments by the 25 (or whatever the number is) participants, then recording is fine. OTOH if the participants are going to be allowed to ask questions and/or make comments, one must consider whether recording would have an inhibiting effect on that, esp. perhaps for the undergraduates who will be attending.
A bit belated, but the discussion of indigeneity (who speaks for the Canaanites?) in far western Asia reminded me of the philosopher-comedian Stewart Lee's reflections on the relationship between length of settlement and the strength of claims to collective ownership. He ends with what sounds like a metaphysically-minded Taylor Swift putting her hand to a drinking song: https://vimeo.com/437542256
s. wallerstein @ January 20, 2024 at 12:39 PM,
I try very hard to avoid stooping to ad hominem arguments. (I'm not always successful, but I try very, very hard.) I wish those who disagree with the substance of my arguments would extend me that same courtesy.
[Eric] is, essentially, calling the Israelis liars, because, as we all know from history, Israelis, being Jewish, are prone to duplicity.
If I believed Jews are inveterate liars, why would I cite with approval the research and the opinions of so many Jews? In what world does that make any sense?
Or do only the opinions of some Jews count?
Zionist viewpoints are acceptable; any other argument is antisemitic?
Eric,
I don't know what your profession is, but I sense that you are either an academic or a graduate student.
I get the impression that there is a new McCarthyism in academic life directed against those who are very critical of Israel and are labelled as "anti-semitic".
Therefore, I thought it wise to warn you that there are very determined people, like Marc Susselman, who have you on their hate-list.
That's all. Take care,
Michael Llenos - if you want to learn something about the "Arab - Israel historical context" from an expert, rather than a conservative culture-warrior, do review William K. Polk's article series on "The Struggle for Palestine " it's available online here: https://www.williampolk.com/articles/ and Professor Wolff has posted links in the past. The article is long and comprehensive and will involve more effort than a 40 minute YouTube watch.
William R. Polk, pardon.
s. wallerstein,
I am a doctor. Many of the most influential people in my education in elementary school, college, and medical school were Jewish, as were professors under whom I trained in residency, one of my mentors among them. More than half of my fellow residents during training were Jewish. When I lived in NYC, many of my patients were Jewish, a few of them Holocaust survivors who still bore the tattoos from the camps. So I have known and respected many Jewish people most of my life.
I am also someone who cries while watching films like Schindler's List, Shoah, and Hotel Terminus.
But I have written elsewhere in the comments of this blog that, growing up and living in this society, it is very hard to not harbor some racist (and misogynistic and homophobic) feelings, if even on a subconscious level. That is true for all of us, including members of groups who themselves face discrimination; being a woman or a member of a racial or ethnic minority group that is a frequent victim of discrimination does not automatically guarantee that someone is completely free of prejudices, including against his or her own group. It takes a lot of work to overcome those feelings/impulses. Any American who claims they don't have a racist bone in their body is probably lying or very un-selfaware.
Please, please record these. :)
Eric,
Thanks for explaining. I appreciate your frankness.
from William R. Polk's 2014 essays on Gaza The Long View, describing the Zionist movement in the late 1930s:
"So, the Zionists felt justified in slandering, boycotting or even destroying those who thwarted or threatened to reveal their actions. When the head of the United Nations program charged with giving aid to the displaced persons in Germany, General Sir Frederick Morgan, reported that some 'unknown Jewish organization' was running a program to transfer European Jews to Palestine -- exactly what they were doing -- he was pilloried as an anti-Semite. That charge came easily. It was a charge, not unlike the McCarthyite charge of being a Communist, that all those who dealt with or wrote about the Palestine problem would learn to fear. It was used often, usually effectively and was always bitterly resented by those so attacked. It is a tactic that Zionists and their supporters often employed and is still employ frequently today."
"As a Jew on the left, who is intensely antiracist and intensely aware of what antisemitism is and how dangerous it is, to be called an antisemite oneself is about as low as it gets.
It's a bit like being accused of pedophilia or something. I cannot really think of anything worse. And it undermines the fight against real antisemitism....
People have been weaponizing accusations of antisemitism for political ends. The fact that that is going on seriously undermines and endangers our chances of dealing with genuine antisemitism, which is a real threat in our society.
One of the biggest problems we face is the treatment of our community as if it was just one monolithic block. This is a typical trope of all forms of racism. The Jewish community is not one undifferentiated thing.... And we find it deeply disturbing that the whole community is treated as one.
A lot of us are anti-Zionist. And people need to realize that going back generations, Zionism was not the creed followed by all Jews. Far from it.
Marek Edelman, leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, said that Jews should always be with the oppressed and never with the oppressor.... The fact that people with that history [of persecution] should identify with the oppressed in every setting seems self-evident to us. And that's where our support for justice for Palestinians comes in. We are identifying with the oppressed. And for anybody to suggest that it is the Israeli state which represents the oppressed in that conflict is pretty shortsighted and misguided....
One of the most important Jewish academics who has spoken on this [the problem of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism] and been ignored is actually the American academic [and attorney] Kenneth Stern, who wrote the original document upon which the IHRA definition [of antisemitism] is based. And he has said on a number of occasions ..., 'I abhor the way this definition that I drafted to assist data collection is being used to suppress free speech; I abhor the way it is being deployed in universities to prevent people who have a certain view about Palestine and Israel from expressing it.'"
—Naomi Winborne-Idrissi, co-founder of Jewish Voice for [UK] Labour, speaking in 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjhHhL_15Nw
Eric, I’m pleased to see your reference to Jewish Voice for Labour and to Naomi Winbourne-Idrissi. For those who are interested in doing a little bit of follow-up:
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/why-the-man-who-drafted-the-ihra-definition-condemns-its-use/
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/on-the-suspension-of-naomi-wimborne-idrissi/
For those of us who’ve for some years been following the ways in which the charge of anti-semitism has been and continues to be exploited in the factional in-fighting with the British Labour Party in the attempt to destroy the left, the on-going ideological struggle within the US, in its universities and elsewhere, will seem very familiar.
PS the British case was debated on this blog some years back between someone who obviously knew the British case well and the less than knowledgeable M.S>
Eric,
You say above: Any American who claims they don't have a racist bone in their body is probably lying or very un-selfaware.
That's probably true, but ethics is about how I act, not about what's in my semi-conscious or unconscious mind.
I strive to see each other as a person like me and to treat them as such. That's true of other races, other cultures, other genders and other sexual orientations. I may slip up at times, but I work at it fairly consistently as do many others.
I don't believe that so-called thought crimes are crimes. Crimes are what I or you do.
LFC,
I get it. But...
This is a rare, major league, once in lifetime lecture. I guess I'm an old school curmudgeon then. Screw the "an inhibiting effect" on our snow flakey undergrads. I would just let it be known that this is Harvard, step up young lads and lassies, or simply sit still and enjoy the privilege. Posterity wins out on this one. L'ultima lezione needs to be preserved for the tens of thousands of interested parties. Or each lecture could be followed by a non-recorded 15 minutes for the snow flakes.
Jerry Fresia,
A few observations.
1) Prof. Wolff already has a 7- part YouTube series on Marx, mostly on Capital vol. 1 iirc. While I'm sure what he says in this study group won't be identical to that, my guess is that it's not going to be radically different.
2) When I was an undergrad (late 1970s), I would have hated the presence of any recording device in any of the smaller classes where I was expected to participate in a discussion.
3) If you're so eager for more interpretation and exegesis of _Capital_, you could read that major and fairly recent work, _Marx's Inferno_, and report back for the edification of those of us who are unlikely to get around to reading it ourselves. But of course it's easier to write encomiums on the Internet to "once in a lifetime" lectures that an alleged "tens of thousands" of people are waiting for.
P.s. Or you could just re-read (since I assume you've already read them) RPW's _Moneybags Must Be So Lucky_ and _Understanding Marx_, plus the many words RPW has written about Marx on this blog.
LFC,
I agree that it's wiser not to record the classes.
When I was an undergraduate in the 1960's, I would have had no problems in having my class participation recorded.
However, when I recall how contrarian, nihilistic and perverse I was at age 18 or 19,
I'm happy that no class that I then participated in was recorded so that no one can blackmail me today.
It seems there may have been some disgreement here over whether news media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been fair vs biased.
As it turns out, several quantitative analyses have now been done to assess the reporting in this regard of major American corporate media, both in print and on broadcast platforms, as well as of the BBC and CBC.
One particularly striking finding from a study of ~ 5,000 BBC reports between October 7 and December 2 was in the BBC's use of the words "murder(ed)," "massacre(d)," "slaughter(ed)," and "died" in relation to Israelis vs Palestinians.
murder(ed) Israelis 101x, Palestinians 1x
massacre(d) Israelis 23x, Palestinians 1x
slaughter(ed) Israelis 20x, Palestinians 0x
vs
died Israelis 82x, Palestinians 201x
https://github.com/liet-git/bbc-bias
In reporting on casualties, these media outlets were much more likely to personalize the Israeli victims, giving their individual names and details about their family members. By contrast, Palestinian victims were frequently described in terms of depersonalized numbers, when their deaths or injuries were mentioned at all.
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palestine-bias-new-york-times/
https://www.columnblog.com/p/massacred-vs-left-to-die-documenting
https://breachmedia.ca/canadian-media-ctv-racist-double-standards-palestinians/
https://breachmedia.ca/cbc-the-national-more-israelis-than-palestinians-gaza/
Just to put that last post in perspective, recall that while Jews were being persecuted by the Nazis in Germany and areas controlled by Germany, the New York Times deliberately decided to ignore or underreport what was actually going on, as Laurel Leff showed in Buried By The Times.
According to one estimate, the Times published nearly 12,000 front-page articles about WWII in 1939-1945, but only 26 about the Holocaust.
Eric,
Of course, there's a big difference between doing print and broadcast journalism in the age of the Internet and social media, and doing print journalism, or any journalism, in WW2. The Nazis were able to hide a good deal of what they were doing, and what nonetheless became known was often not believed (cf. (Justice) Felix Frankfurter's statement to Jan Karski: "I am unable to believe you"). In an age of cell-phone cameras, even in a war zone, it's much less easy to hide things. I usually listen to the PBS NewsHour, a broadcast program, on the radio, and then go on the computer if I want to get the accompanying video for a particular piece. The NewsHour has not been shying away at all from reporting on the situation in a way that does not seem to be underplaying anything. (Take a look at what they aired tonight, e.g.) I'm sure there is some imbalance in the reporting generally, but the photos on the front pages of the newspapers (or in the online editions) are often fairly graphic, or that's my impression at any rate, and there is the old saying about pictures speaking louder than words.
As a side point (or maybe not such a side point), you seem to be determined to draw analogies between IDF behavior and that of the Nazis. There are two problems with this. First, it would be possible to condemn IDF behavior simply by laying out what it is, without reaching for the most inflammatory of all possible analogies. If you want to argue that the IDF is committing genocide, why not compare them to the genocidaires in Rwanda, or to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia? By reaching for the most inflammatory analogy, you actually detract from the force of your argument.
The second, more important point is that it's not a particularly accurate analogy. For the IDF to be really analogous to the Nazis, the IDF would have to be embarked on a conscious, deliberate, organized effort to kill the entire Palestinian civilian population of Gaza. Not displace that population or de-house it, but exterminate it. Three months into the war, some 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry, and some 1.8 million displaced, and a great deal of the housing stock destroyed, and the civilian infrastructure in tatters w/ a resulting humanitarian catastrophe. That is awful, but it is not a Nazi-style genocide, which would be more along the lines of rounding up large groups of civilians and just gunning them down, and doing that repeatedly. Does that mean that what the IDF is doing is ok or justifiable? Of course not. But by framing your argument in these terms, you decrease the likelihood, imo, that it will be taken seriously.
I'm of the view that the Israeli govt's behavior, policies, and actions in Gaza and the West Bank in recent years amount to war crimes and serious violations of intl law. That argument can be made without reference to a historical analogy that is not a particularly accurate one, and is also one that will almost ensure that some people will stop listening to you before you've even begun.
P.s. FF wasn't calling Karski a liar -- rather saying that he found what he was being told inconceivable.
The comparison of the IDF with Nazis is of course not a very accurate analogy, but it seems almost inevitable.
The Jews see themselves as the eternal victims, from being slaves of the Pharoah in Egypt to the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests to the Romans to the Crusades to the Inquisition to the pogroms in Russia to the Dreyfus case up to the Nazis. Everybody has done what they could to persecute them in spite of their pure innocence. That's what they teach their children: I speak from personal experience and I've talked this over with many Jewish friends on the left.
In their mentality since they are victims, how could they be persecutors?
Given this level of hypocrisy and outright blindness about who they are and what they are up after over 55 years of illegal occupation of Palestinian land and a system widely described as apartheid, it seems "poetically just" that people will begin to compare them to Nazis.
You convert yourself into your own worst fear. The victims of the Holocaust commit their own mini-Holocaust. And you will be the last one to realize that as the rest of humanity points its finger at you. In fact, you will call them "Nazis" for calling you "Nazis".
s.w.
I don't esp. want to make generalizations on this, but as for my personal experience: neither of my parents, both of whom were Jewish, conveyed to me the message that Jews were "purely innocent," either collectively or individually. Nor, I think, does Judaism as a religion. The holiest day in the Jewish calendar is, of course, the Day of Atonement, which has a built-in assumption that every Jew has committed sins or transgressions, and moreover will continue to do so, year after year. The slate is in a sense wiped clean but new sins will be written on it. To be clear, I'm not at all religious now (and actually never was), and my parents weren't particularly either, but we did belong to a synagogue etc. and unlike RPW, I was not given a choice about whether to have a bar mitzvah.
All that said, I understand the point you're setting out here.
LFC,
Yes, I'm familiar with Yom Kippur and given the character of the Jewish god, it's impossible to live up to his expectations.
So faced with their god, the Jews are constantly falling short of his demands and laws, but if you look at the Jewish history, as narrated to a child (me) in the 1950's, in a reform synagagogue, "we" (the Jews) were the eternal victims of their intolerance and persecution, persecuted mainly because "we" strived to be faithful to god's commandments. Thus, "we" were not only the victims, but victimized because we were god-fearing and god-loving.
In my Jewish mis-education they never brought up the case of Spinoza, persecuted by the same Jews for thinking too much.
I myself simply refused to have a bar mitzvah.
LFC: you seem to be determined to draw analogies between IDF behavior and that of the Nazis
I have mentioned the Nazis about a half dozen times here since October 7. On none of those occasions was I comparing the IDF with the Nazis. Perhaps you are confusing me with someone else you've had discussions with?
LFC: For the IDF to be really analogous to the Nazis, the IDF would have to be embarked on a conscious, deliberate, organized effort to kill the entire Palestinian civilian population of Gaza. Not displace that population or de-house it, but exterminate it.
Some Holocaust and genocide scholars stress that genocide is a process. Your argument is focusing on the final stage of what the Nazis were doing, when it was too late to save many of their victims.
The Nazis did not start out with a conscious effort to kill all the Jews. They did not start out with gas chambers. They started out with apartheid policies, encouragement of emigration, and forced ghettoization, and they expored the possibility of forced deportation. As they acquired more territory through conquest, with more Jews and other groups of people they viewed as a threat, they concluded that their earlier attempts at ethnic cleansing alone would not be sufficient, so they and their collaborators began rounding up large numbers of people and shooting or gassing them.
Raz Segal interview @35:04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUeEnjULHe0&t=2093s
(NB: While I have said several times in the comments here that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza, I have not taken the time to post an argument explaining why Israel's actions in Gaza are genocide.)
There are either one out of two strategies of mine that Bibi should have implemented in the first weeks following the October 7th attacks:
(1) Bomb the Northern part of Gaza with nitrous oxide, and then send in the Israeli Special Forces to recover the hostages. Yes, I know that gas can lead to accidents! I've seen the Cider House Rules...
(2) Get some mercenary Air Force (like a type of Air America) to bomb Northern Gaza with pigs feet & pork juice. Then declare a perpetual Octoberfest & tell the German brown shirts (& nones) of Germany that they can set-up shop as a vassal of Israel with all the free real estate they could ever want in Northern Gaza. Any self respecting Hamas member will declare Northern Gaza haram (or unclean) & will not set foot in Northern Gaza for another 100 years. Let Nazi fight Hamas doing all the work fighting one another! (And after rescuing all of the hostages, the German mercenaries can be rewarded the use of the tunnels rent-free for curing hams & cabbages.)
--Some may say this joking has gone too far. But what would anyone else have done in Bibi's place? There would have been no easy decisions to make back then. And I believe 900 out of 1,000 plans would have ended up botched. Just as my two plans would have ended up in the crapper. It's more than easy to judge by hindsight today. And instead of pundits thinking up ways to get Bibi out of that fix, most of them want to just criticize him as things get worse & worse.
"But what would anyone else have done in Bibi's place?"
Perhaps composing a haiku acknowledging his failings followed by seppuku?
Air America was a CIA project.
"Air America was a CIA project."
The CIA also works with other nations.
I've been in love with the CIA ever since I was a kid. Three of my top ten favorite movies are: The Hunt for Red October, The Sum of All Fears, & Sniper 1.
Michael Llenos:
You'll doubtless also join me and Bob Dylan in loving The Fugs's 'CIA Man':https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW9cCWm53H4
Although intelligence agencies take life at times, they also save many more lives in the long-run.
XIII. THE USE OF SPIES
1. Sun Tzu said: Raising a host of a hundred thousand men and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the State. The daily expenditure will amount to a thousand ounces of silver. There will be commotion at home and abroad, and men will drop down exhausted on the highways.
....
6. Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.
....
7. Hence the use of spies....
Michael,
The CIA isn't just spying, it's covert operations against legitimate democratically elected govenments such as that of Salvador Allende, elected in Chile in 1970.
Actually, the CIA covert coperations in Chile began long before that: they funneled money into the 1964 presidential campaign, lots of money, to make sure that Eduardo Frei, a centrist Christian Democrat, would be elected and not Allende.
From the day Allende was elected, the CIA began to plot his downfall. His sin in their eyes: being a socialist and a symbol for other Latin Americans that democratic socialism was possible.
In 1973 the CIA played a key role in backing a coup against Allende, which was carried out by the Chilean military led by Augusto Pinochet, leading to a corrupt, brutal 17 year dictatorship.
There are many instances where the CIA played a similar role. One thing is that you enjoy CIA movies; I enjoy Mafia movies like the Godfather, but that doesn't mean I find the Mafia to be admirable in its actions. You can sit back and enjoy CIA movies without necessarily believing that in the real world they are a force for good in general.
SW
I don't blame the military for wars like Iraq & Somalia. I blame the politicians who get us there in the first place. And a lot of times it has nothing to do with the POTUS. But rather because of some graft thirsty congressional committee. In the same way I don't blame the CIA. They're operators & not policy makers. Of course that doesn't justify operators who go rogue & break with the Geneva convention--or law or guidebook for modern warfare.
And, yes, I agree the POTUS backs up & enables many of the military actions throughout the globe.
'The more I think about volume 1 of Capital, the more persuaded I am that it is the most important work of social and economic theory ever written. '
How important is that? ;)
'the core idea is so powerful, and so original,'
What's the core idea?
'I hope very much that I can communicate that to the participants in the study group.'
Oh well. Something along the lines of what capital is? I'm aware that the nature of this ‘capital in general’ is supposedly such that profit, interest, rent are explicable in terms of particular forms of capital. And, that Marx considered this latter point to be one of the two best in his entire work. The other was the notion of abstract and concrete labor. I'm not even a little bit impressed, it seems like Marx tends to gobbledygook, he seems, to me, temperamentally all wrong for understanding stuff, to the degree that I speculate on how essential this is to his fame. I won't insist on the last word on Marx around here, just call it a reminder that this is what the rough consensus is in the world today too.
I suppose I can’t be bothered to offer rebuttals to Marx that go beyond glib denunciations. But I can offer this for a 'core idea'..?
'Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells . . .'
Michael Llenos said...
'But what would anyone else have done in Bibi's place?'
Quite a thread to digest, this point. Here is a question. Not a rhetorical question. What Bibi did seem like it was the most predictable thing, of course, and maybe it even takes real imagination to conceive of anything else here. Like, just sit back and take it, and talk about forgiveness? It at least doesn't seem like it could be politically popular, to say the least. What could a great leader do with these cards? Maybe further back in the past, years back, many years back, there was some other road, better options, at least in retrospect, though I'm not even sure how far back to go. Back to Clinton or something? It wouldn't even matter, but hypothetically, I just don't have answers.
Anonymous Anonymous said...
'You're really stretching things, Michael. Having been reminded of the Amalekites, the Canaanites, and the Philistines who were all there before your chosen people, you now try to shift the goal line.'
Michael stretched things by giving Israel to the Israelites. I'm putting it a bit tendentiously. In his words, it's 'Jews are the true indigenous people of Palestine over its entire past.'
For whatever it is worth. The question looks different, as soon as you contemplate actually supporting or practicing imperialism. Who says imperialism is a bad thing? Well, it was originally coined in the 19th century to decry Napoleon's despotic militarism. Maybe Napoleon's despotic militarism, is a bad thing? I realize it's pretty radical to question such a basic notion, but if you pursue it to its logical end, then the behavior of empires at all times and places is a bad thing. At that point, I wonder if it is relevant to worry about it. I remember Nietzsche saying something like 'life is essentially immoral', or such. I can see myself from the perspective of the termites, when I pour pesticide on their heads. Being a pest, is it a bad thing? Heck, I'm a pest in the thread, you tell me.
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