Morally depraved @PeterBeinart's new phrase to sanitize terror attacks: "Armed resistance against civilians" ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, May 09, 2025

Morally depraved @PeterBeinart's new phrase to sanitize terror attacks: "Armed resistance against civilians"

Peter Beinart went to Harvard Divinity School to promote his new book about how difficult it is to be Jewish while Israel tries to destroy its enemies. His Judaism has very little to do with the Jewish scriptures.

His arguments and rhetoric are tired, even if they strike a chord among the ignorant. He says things like , "if you don't want people to fight you and kill Israelis...you have to deal with the roots of the problem, with the underlying grievances. " But he claims the grievances are the root of the problem when they are an excuse for the attacks. The root of the problem is Arab antisemitism and the honor/shame system that cannot deal with weak Jews having political power in their ancestral homeland. Because if you are looking for roots, you need to explain the Arab attacks on Jews before Zionism, the deadly attacks in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-39. "Grievances" do not explain why they beheaded little girls and murdered non-Zionist yeshiva students in Hebron before the State of Israel existed.

But there is one phrase Beinart used three times during his talk, a clearly deliberate choice of words that proves how utterly depraved he has become.

There was all kinds of Palestinian resistance before 1987, as after 1987. ...There's been Palestinian armed resistance against soldiers, and there's been Palestinian armed resistance against civilians.

And that didn't start with Hamas. In fact, one of the reasons the Israeli government was actually fairly sympathetic to Hamas in the late 1980s when Hamas was created was they couldn't imagine anything worse than the PLO. They couldn't do anything worse than Fatah and leftist groups like the PFLP, because those groups had been involved in armed resistance, including armed resistance against civilians.

....[P]eople in the Jewish community ...denounce Palestinian armed resistance against civilians, which I also oppose.

What the hell is "armed resistance against civilians"? Why can Beinart not say the words "terror" or "murder" or "jihad"?

In the ideological circles Beinart travels in—campuses, NGO salons, anti-Zionist conferences—the word “resistance” is a badge of honor. It connotes nobility. To even say the phrase “armed resistance against civilians” is to launder mass murder through the language of moral defiance. It’s how you make terror respectable. It’s how you turn Hamas atrocities into "tragic outgrowths of oppression."

That’s why he uses the term. Because his fans - those who wave "Resistance by any means necessary" banners and endorse BDS alongside open Hamas sympathizers - want their support of anti-Jewish violence given moral cover. And Beinart provides it.

He offers the progressive Left a sanitized vocabulary of terror: one in which murdering Jews isn’t antisemitic, just the inevitable consequence of how Jews act. In his view, Hamas isn’t genocidal, just misunderstood. To get published in the New York Times and invited to speak at Harvard, Beinart needs to nod to the idea that targeting the innocent is not ideal, while at the very same time excusing those same attacks.

Peter Beinart may claim to oppose killing civilians. But his language says otherwise. When you call terror “resistance,” you are not neutral. You are not moral. You are not Jewish in any meaningful sense of the word. You are a handmaiden to those who cheer when Jews are butchered.

Peter Beinart pretends to be against terror attacks, but his very deliberate phraseology shows that his opposition to attacking civilians comes with a wink to the type of people who will enthusiastically buy his book and use their quoting him as proof that they aren't antisemitic when they say that they support Hamas burning babies.

(h/t Eitan Fischberger)