How a Ph.D. student reacted to facts about Israel and Gaza (Andrew Pessin) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, July 29, 2024

How a Ph.D. student reacted to facts about Israel and Gaza (Andrew Pessin)

Anti-Israelism and the Ph.D.

One doesn’t often get such delightful emails as this:

Do not contact me again you deranged, perverted, genocidal freak. Please save your poorly composed genocide denialism delusional fascist essay for your substack audience of 5 like-minded brain rotted sociopaths. Please know this pathetic email does not intimidate me, you and your creepy zionist alumni friends do not intimidate me, all of Israel, and all of their weapons, and their international impunity, and their corrupt imperial power do not intimidate me. I pity you. Your life must truly be so miserable and meaningless for you, at your big retired age, to be wasting your final days harassing young women you do not know and who do not wish to know or engage with you. How embarrassing!

Though it wasn’t actually me who received this, it might as well have been. I wrote an article refuting the current libel that Israel is perpetrating a “genocide” in Gaza, and a reader of that article forwarded it to the author of that email and was treated to this response. Not wanting to hog it to himself, he kindly shared it with me.

One might be tempted to chuckle were it not all so tragic and, ultimately, perhaps even deadly.

The author of this email is a graduate student at an elite university. I shall call her “H” (for Hamas and Hezbollah, whose side she takes in the current conflict) and call the university “Ivy.” In H’s response we see everything wrong not only with the general anti-Israel hatred present on so many campuses, including (or especially) elite campuses, but everything wrong with the academy in general over the past number of years.

Of all the many lies regularly told about Israel, the “genocide” allegation is currently the most important. If Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza then (a) Israel is evil and (b) all measures must be taken to stop it. Never mind its justification for being at war with Hamas, or the fact that Hamas is actually fighting back, or the prospects for some form of long-term peace: if it’s not just a bilateral war (with the tragic, if inevitable, civilian casualties) but a unilateral “genocide,” then Israel must unilaterally stop its military activity.

Nor should one imagine that labeling this activity as “genocide” is a measure of perfectly admirable concern for Gaza’s suffering civilian population. That suffering would, after all, be more quickly and permanently alleviated by the surrender of Hamas and return of hostages, which would end the war instantly and allow Gaza to be rebuilt for actual peace and prosperity. The “genocide” label in fact aims to delegitimize Israel’s war effort, to stop Israel with Hamas still in power and still holding the hostages, and thus to advance Hamas’s actually genocidal agenda toward the Jews. The allegation of “genocide” is in fact a weapon in the longstanding war against Israel.

Assuming, that is, that it is false.

Of course it is false. In fact it is demonstrably false. It is not even remotely true. Gaza may be experiencing significant destruction and Gazan civilians great suffering, but, regrettably but true, that is an ordinary (if tragic) consequence of war. Though you might not know it from the hyper-focus on Israel, there are well over 100 military conflicts occurring in the world right now, and there isn’t one of them that doesn’t involve significant destruction and civilian suffering and casualties. Many involve destruction and civilian casualties far exceeding those in the current Israel-Hamas war and even in the wider Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim conflict. Unless all wars are “genocides,” Israel’s war on Hamas is not remotely a “genocide,” even if it’s nearly the only one on that long list of conflicts that ever gets libeled by that label. My lengthy and detailed article defending this conclusion examines the reported casualty numbers and offers extensive evidence and many arguments to demonstrate that, to the contrary, Israel in its war against Hamas is taking literally unprecedented measures to target only militants and to spare civilian lives, and largely succeeding in doing so. To the contrary, too, the side actually seeking, and partially perpetrating, genocide is Hamas: the evidence for that is incontrovertible, starting with its never renounced foundational charter, including its four decades of terrorist activity and open declarations of genocidal intent, and of course its October 7 massacre and subsequent declarations. In light of all this evidence and these arguments, the “genocide” allegation can be seen for what it is: a weaponized blood libel that aims to delegitimize Israel and thus support Hamas’s genocidal war effort.

But I’m fallible. The evidence I invoke could be problematic. (The problem of obtaining accurate information in this war is particularly acute.) My reasoning could be fallacious. I admit that I could be mistaken in sundry ways. God knows I’ve been mistaken often enough, as everyone from my Ph.D. advisor to my wife seems to enjoy pointing out. But I’m an academic. So critique me. Challenge my evidence. Offer alternative sources of evidence. Show me where my reasoning goes wrong. That is how an academic—or anyone committed to the pursuit of truth—behaves. Do not read the extensive evidence and argument on offer and merely shout in response, “But, genocide!” Worse, do not not read the extensive evidence and argument and just shout, “But, genocide!” That is not how an academic behaves.

Especially not an academic affiliated with an elite institution—among the most elite academic institutions in the world, in fact, dedicated, as every elite institution mentions in their mission statements and public declarations, to the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge (and therefore truth). For one is surely not pursuing knowledge or truth if one refuses to read, or simply dismisses, views different from one’s own that are accompanied by evidence and argument. To behave that way is to decide in advance what is true independently of the evidence and arguments that are supposed to lead one to truth. To behave that way is essentially to make things up, presumably to further one’s political agenda. And that is just not how an academic supposedly in the business of truth should behave.

In more detail now: I shared my long article against the “genocide” allegation on my substack. A reader shared it on his own substack, noting (he emailed me) that “I typically forward my posts to, among others, those at [Ivy] I think might be, or should be, interested in hearing something other than the standard Hamas/Palestinian talking points.” And so he did, sending it to, among some seven dozen others, H. He sent it to H because he thought she was the president of a significant graduate student group at Ivy that is actively, and publicly, involved in anti-Israel activity there. He thought she was still president because several recent student newspaper articles identified her as such, and at least until this past week she lists herself as “president” on her LinkedIn page. (It turns out that, as of recently, she is no longer president, which my reader subsequently acknowledged. No matter.) To get a sense of her public platform, a search of her name on the Ivy student newspaper site returns 31 hits, many concerning her work with the group she until recently led. Many of these articles publicly provide her email address, perhaps as a contact for the public group she led. As for the group itself, it publicly declares that its members include “researchers,” “teachers,” and “mentors” at [Ivy] (i.e. academics), that it rejects all forms of discrimination, and that it nurtures both the personal and the professional lives of its members. Whether the group fulfills these virtuous claims toward many of its Jewish members is not clear, given that it has consistently been outspoken against Israel, dating back some years but especially so in supporting “resistance” (i.e. terror) since October 7, including through its prominent “Palestinian Solidarity Caucus.” So this is why H was included on the list of some seven dozen to receive my reader’s email: she was (until recently) the oft-publicly-quoted president of this very public anti-Israel group, somehow finding copious time for her anti-Israel advocacy while pursuing her PhD at Ivy in the humanities.

My reader was, arguably, doing the thing academics should do. This graduate student group publicly advocates for Hamas’s victory, in libeling Israel as perpetrating “genocide.” Since H is an Ivy academic, working toward a PhD, shouldn’t she at least grapple with an academic article contesting one of the fundamental claims repeatedly made by the group she so publicly represents?

One thing we can perhaps all agree on, given her response above, is that she didn’t like the article.

As to how or why her response is so objectionable, let us count the ways.

On the plus side, that H calls it “poorly composed” suggests she may have read it, or some, though one suspects, given the content, that she hasn’t, and, given the tone, that she’s just flinging insults. But all considered this message comes across as being from a person who has decided that the current war is a “genocide” and isn’t interested in actually examining or engaging with the evidence and arguments. Instead she offers some childish textbook ad hominem fallacy, calling the competing point of view, and the person endorsing it, “deranged,” “perverted,” “delusional,” and “fascist.” These are also the first clues that she is not in fact operating with the same English language that I am, at least. There is literally nothing in my anti-“genocide” article that conceivably has anything to do with fascism, for example, so she seems to be simply slapping that word on any point of view she doesn’t like. Ditto for “delusional,” which is an odd response to a 4000-word, detailed, heavily documented, and quite sober engagement with facts and evidence, all of which, though fallible, is about as far from “delusional” as one could be. If my theory doesn’t fit the facts, as they say, so much the worse for the facts: dismiss them as “delusional” and you don’t have to deal with them. Orwell would be proud here: the view that doesn’t engage with the facts is the truth, in her mind, while the actual facts are discredited as delusions.

Given this abuse of language, her use of “genocide” becomes equally suspect.

Indeed, notice how she tosses in, quite strategically, that word “genocidal” and the phrase “genocide denialism.” Apparently someone who denies that a “genocide” is occurring in some particular instance is ipso facto in favor of, or complicit in, that (non-existing) genocide. That leap of logic is hard to bridge: denying something is an instance of genocide literally has nothing to do with whether one is in favor of or in any way complicit in anything. I am myself quite opposed to all forms of genocide and my writing that article literally perpetrated nothing, except an article. It’s even quite logically possible to deny a “genocide” is occurring and still be quite opposed to the way the Israeli military is conducting its Gaza campaign, as a more honest anti-Israelist might hold. Her move only makes sense when we realize she isn’t using “genocide” to mean genocide here. It may just mean, in her mind, any military activity she doesn’t like, or specifically any Israeli military activity, period, regardless of whether that activity is, well, actually “genocidal.” She quite obviously doesn’t like any Israeli military activity, including, given her public history, even that in the form of self-defense or that which clearly targets militants while attempting to minimize civilian casualties. So she calls all Israeli military activity “genocide” no matter how it is exercised, and any article that seemingly defends any Israeli military activity—including by denying the genocide libel levied against it—is therefore in support of “genocide.” Now that makes sense, apart from the fact that she’s making up her own meaning for the word “genocide.” As with her use of “fascist” and “delusional,” “genocide” becomes a label she slaps on everything Israel she doesn’t like. Orwell would again be proud, though perhaps her elementary school English teachers, and the Webster dictionary, might be a little disappointed.

Beyond the childish insults and the flagrant abuse of language, also note the neat rhetorical trick here. She libels Israel with “genocide,” then labels anyone who questions her libel as a “genocidal genocide denialist.” This move supplements her textbook ad hominem fallacy with some textbook “poisoning the well” fallacy (with perhaps some textbook “begging the question” fallacy and simple gaslighting thrown in for good measure). To see the problem, imagine I falsely alleged that your friend was a pedophile, and the moment you began to refute the allegation I responded by calling you a “pedophilic pedophile-denier.” That would be an obvious attempt to discredit you in advance, before you can even offer the evidence or arguments to refute the libel, thus making the libel impossible to challenge. Your demonstrating that the allegation is false is transformed into actively supporting the evil activity falsely being alleged! It’s like falsely charging someone with a crime then charging anyone who offers evidence to refute the charge with the same crime. It’s called a fallacy because that strategy obviously doesn’t mean the original allegation is true; it amounts to refusing even to consider the relevant evidence to determine whether the allegation is true, thus shows a profound disinterest in truth. But “fallacy” is too technical, and polite, a term: it’s deeply dishonest and, frankly, sleazy. It’s political advocacy, bullying, dressed up as rational discourse. It’s Soviet-style totalitarian propaganda and manipulation, worthy of a Stalinesque show trial.

It’s not what someone who cares about truth would do. Yet the person doing this is en route to a PhD at an elite institution. One would be tempted to share this behavior with her PhD committee, as evidence of her unsuitedness to the degree, did one not suspect or fear that many on her committee would behave the same way as she.

Note next the nice little dig at her antagonist’s allegedly small following, of “5 like-minded brain rotted sociopaths.” Points for the amusing insults, though once again one suspects that “sociopath,” like “fascist” etc., is simply a slur here that she flings against any position or person she does not like. My guess is that she believes all Zionists are ipso facto sociopaths, which means that for her, those who believe that Jews have basic human rights, including the right to live in security in their ancestral homeland, are evil mentally defectives. I believe, to the contrary, that this reveals far more about her deep-rooted bigotry against Jews than it does anything about Zionists or Jews.

But I digress. The main point about this dig is that it is fallacious as well. Since when, in the pursuit of truth, does the number of followers matter? Truth isn’t a democracy. Sometimes the minority, sometimes even the single brave individual standing against the mob, has the truth on their side. The Nazis had massive popular support in Germany of their time; does that mean they were right in their worldview? In academia, in fact, one is often encouraged to find one’s own point of view, one’s own original angle or theory, that differs from others’. What have you contributed, what use are you as an academic, after all, if you are merely going to parrot whatever the majority already thinks? On this perspective it may well be a plus that you have few followers, or even better that you stand alone, particularly in the humanities. Or perhaps not—because the only thing that matters, when it comes to determining the truth, is what the evidence and arguments have to say, not the numbers of people who agree.

All she is really doing here, with her juvenile insults, is trying to bully my reader into silence by somehow embarrassing or shaming him. As a PhD in progress her preference for fallacies, disinterest in evidence and arguments, and now bullying behavior, are all truly quite alarming.

Please know this pathetic email does not intimidate me, you and your creepy zionist alumni friends do not intimidate me, all of Israel, and all of their weapons, and their international impunity, and their corrupt imperial power do not intimidate me.

So, then, to present this person with evidence and arguments that challenge her preconceived opinion is apparently perceived by her as an attempt to “intimidate” her. People sometimes complain about the current generation of “snowflake” students; one wonders if this is what they mean. Indeed, the truth can be intimidating: it doesn’t care what you think or feel about it, and you ignore it or deny it at your peril. Eventually, we have to hope, it will get you to comply. But at minimum an academic who is interested in truth would want to comply. And a truth-seeker would want to hear alternative points of view and opposing arguments. On what grounds do you believe whatever you believe to be true, after all, if not evidence and arguments? And if you want the truth, to avoid being mistaken, don’t you want to hear all the evidence and arguments? How would you ever determine that you are wrong about something unless you seriously consider the evidence and arguments that support the other side?

H’s reply reveals that she is playing a very different game here. To bring evidence and arguments is, for her, not a commendable attempt to persuade by rational truth-seeking means but a condemnable attempt to “intimidate.” See, too, the immediate link she makes between the emailed attempt to persuade her and “all of Israel, and all of their weapons”: the attempt to persuade is equated with the force of a military and its weapons. This person apparently sees no difference between offering evidence and arguments for a position and coming in with guns blazing. There are indeed academic theories, fairly popular across various disciplines, that hold more or less that view, that persuasion should be construed as a form of intimidation. But now where persuasion is discredited as “intimidation” one’s opinion becomes divorced from truth. Opinion is no longer based on evidence and arguments, whose whole point is to “persuade.” Opinion becomes untouchable, insensitive to evidence and arguments, to be preserved no matter what the evidence and arguments, the truth, might be. Someone who holds this is simply not concerned with the truth, since the truth, to the degree that we can determine it, is closely connected to evidence and arguments.

The opinion matters—having the right opinion as determined by some scale or persons or political agenda having nothing to do with the truth—but not the truth.

This is apparently what they are teaching in this PhD program at Ivy.

This person will soon be a professor in a classroom near you.

I pity you. Your life must truly be so miserable and meaningless for you, at your big retired age, to be wasting your final days harassing young women you do not know and who do not wish to know or engage with you. How embarrassing!

In case the fallacies above, the disinterest in truth, and the “persuasion is intimidation” (and now “harassment”) worldview weren’t enough to have you concerned about higher education today, she closes with a finale smorgasbord of bigotry and more fallacies.

Yes my reader is an alum of that same Ivy from some decades back. But why is she invoking his age? In what universe does that matter? He sent this budding academic an academic article challenging something she publicly alleges, using the email address she publicly posts when making her allegations. What matters is only whether what he (or the article) is saying, or arguing, whether it is true or correct or persuasive, not who is saying it or how old they are. The gratuitous meanness (“your big retired age,” “wasting your final days”) reveals what is happening here: she is attempting to dismiss him, discredit him without having to listen to him, as a worthless old fogey.

For the record, discrediting people on the basis of their age isn’t merely an additional ad hominem and poisoning the well fallacy: it’s also a form of bigotry. It’s called ageism—and it’s one of the forms of discrimination that her own graduate student group publicly claims it is opposed to. One only hopes she treats her grandparents, and maybe her more senior professors, with at least a little more respect than this. And may she merit that her future grandchildren not treat her the way she treats her seniors.

And of course two can play at that game: this young whippersnapper seems awfully sure of herself, for such a young, inexperienced whippersnapper. She is even arrogant enough to offer advice to my reader on how he should spend his golden years! That arrogance, incidentally, violates the standpoint theory quite prevalent in her social circles, according to which it’s considered offensive to speak to the experience of identities different from yours. Imagine a white person instructing a person of color how they should live their lives as a person of color; a man instructing a woman; a heterosexual instructing a gay. That offensive arrogance makes a truly painful combination with her simultaneous youthful ignorance. In her view, his interest in defending the truth—not to mention defending the Jews from the blood libels relentlessly flung against them—is not among her candidates for well-spent golden years time. To the contrary, when hate-filled young whippersnappers spread dangerous lies, I can think of little more meaningful activity than countering it—however old you are.

But don’t listen to me. I’m an older guy too.

“Wasting your final days ….”

This is not a serious person.

This is a young bully, self-absorbed into her echo chamber, slinging mud to shame and to silence.

Because ageism apparently isn’t bigotry enough she throws in some sexism as well, framing his missive as an instance of “harassing young women.” She may be a “young woman,” but why, exactly, is that relevant? As we noted, my reader regularly writes to many people who publicly espouse anti-Israel or antisemitic views, regardless of their age or sex, including many of the publicly anti-Israel professors that fill this graduate student’s Ivy campus and perhaps department. The email in question, he informed me, he bcc’d to some seven dozen people. Her accusation is trying to imply something sinister here, as if she were targeted for that identity, by the older man she has already disparaged for his age. What in fact was a reasonable attempt to engage intellectually, by challenging her publicly expressed position, is experienced as targeting her as a young woman. Again, this is a PhD candidate at an elite institution. Has no one told her that part of getting a PhD, of becoming an intellectual, an academic, a researcher, one who searches for truth—is having your claims, your allegations, your arguments actually challenged? Is every such academic challenge an attack on a “young woman”? Are men not allowed to challenge what women say? Or just older men aren’t allowed?

Or are just Jews not allowed?

Or is no one allowed to challenge her, ever?

Just what, oh what, are they teaching them in her graduate program?

I try to be fair to the people I disagree with. That’s part of my own commitment to the truth: you won’t get at the truth unless you give alternative views the very best hearings you can give them, which includes giving one’s intellectual opponents a fair hearing and the benefit of the doubt. So I try to put myself in their shoes, to the degree possible.

All I know of this person is this email, and what I’ve read in a half-dozen articles by or about her in the Ivy student newspaper. Though I share the human inclination to make large, snap judgments based on partial information, I do my best to resist that here. For all I know she is a wonderful human being in many ways that I would recognize, so I take my remarks above to express judgments about that email alone and not ultimately about the person making them. Plus, I recently published a novel partly about how different we can become from our college-age (or graduate school age) selves, so I recognize: she’s a young whippersnapper, and has plenty of time to grow and change ahead.

I understand she sincerely believes a “genocide” is occurring. Though I am critical of the grounds on which she believes that, I recognize that if I believed that, I too would be deeply emotional, deeply active, and filled with not very nice feelings toward those I believed were perpetrating, complicit in, or just generally supportive of that genocide. That is why my feelings toward Hamas, and toward the many on campuses who either openly or implicitly support Hamas, are not very positive. So I get that.

The closest example I can think of for myself might be that of a Holocaust denier. Suppose someone sent me a long, documented article “demonstrating” that various aspects of the Holocaust never happened: challenging the numbers, denying the gas chambers, etc. Many such articles (and books) in fact exist, and are all too easy to find on the internet, and all too many people fall into that category. I can understand not engaging with such a person, because there is no point; I can understand, even, sending an angry email not dissimilar to the one this young woman sent to my reader (though more likely I would simply not engage at all). Genocide-deniers, indeed. So I even get that email, too.

In not engaging with the Holocaust denier, in even contemplating sending a similarly dismissive email to the Holocaust denier, am I guilty of some or all of the things I have just levied against her?

The cases seem profoundly different to me.

But that is a matter for another article, so I leave it here for now.

Follow Andrew Pessin on substack (https://andrewpessin.substack.com/), twitter (@AndrewPessin), or at www.andrewpessin.com....

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