Sunday, October 05, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
Harper’s Magazine has turned contempt for America and Israel into an editorial reflex, where ideology routinely trumps evidence.
The magazine asked Seth Harp to cover the 250th anniversary of the US Army celebration in Washington DC in June. Harp's first paragraph tells us how brilliant he is.
After the midair collision in January over the Potomac River between an Army helicopter and a regional jet packed with young figure skaters and their parents flying out of Wichita, Kansas, and considering the ongoing travails of the Boeing Company, which saw at least five of its airplanes crash last year, I was so concerned about the state of U.S. aviation that, when called on by this magazine to attend President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington, on June 14, 2025, I decided to drive all the way from my home in Austin, Texas, even though it cost me two days behind the wheel and a gas bill as expensive as a plane ticket.
No matter how you slice it, the chances of dying in an air crash is between 100 and 1000 times lower, depending on how you calculate it, than dying in a car crash for a 1,500 mile trip. Thus Harp immediately establishes himself as someone who has no idea how to interpret events.
The same disdain for evidence that led him to generalize anecdotes about air travel into making manifestly stupid decisions also shapes his view of the Middle East.
Which explains his later gratuitous mention of Israel:
The day before, Israel had bombed Iran, opening yet another front in the apartheid state’s war against its Muslim neighbors.
Iran shot rockets at Israel in April 2024, more than a year before the parade, in retaliation for Israel striking military targets near the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iranian-aligned Syrians and Iraqis, and the PA-controlled West Bank all attacked Israel before Israel struck them. But to oh-so-intellectual writers like Harp - for whom pesky things like facts must never interfere with the story - it was simply an Israeli war against Muslims.
One would think editors would do basic fact checks. But, this is Harper's, where they are so intellectual that mere facts re not relevant to their much higher standards of the truth as they prefer to pretend it is.
But even that doesn't hold a candle to Harp's almost orgasmic description of the Houthis:
Just one month before Trump’s parade, in May, our armed forces suffered a humiliating loss against a tiny but fearless adversary in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.
The Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah, have been defying the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel ever since they first emerged as a military force in 2004 protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the quisling Yemeni regime’s collaboration with the Bush Administration. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the Houthis, who had endured nearly a decade of starvation under a U.S.-backed Saudi blockade of their ports, tried to force Israel and its allies to lift the siege of Gaza by using their scrappy speedboat navy and homemade arsenal of cheaply manufactured missiles, drones, and unmanned underwater vehicles to choke off maritime traffic in the Red Sea. In response, the Biden Administration, invoking the threat posed by the Houthis to freedom of navigation, launched a wave of air strikes on Yemen and dispatched a naval fleet to reopen the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The campaign did not go well. .... The tough, ingenious (and dirt-poor) Houthis, protected by Yemen’s mountainous interior, fought back with the tenacity of drug-resistant microbes. They downed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Reaper drones; nearly managed to shoot several F-16s and an F-35 out of the sky; and evaded air defenses to strike Israel with long-range drones, all the while continuing to harass commercial shipping in the Red Sea, which plummeted by 60 percent.
How scrappy and resourceful the Houthis are! Maybe he can't yet say out loud how much he also admires Hamas for 10/7 and Al Qaeda for 9/11, but how can he not? They are just as successful at fighting the evil Israeli and American capitalist machines! Screw human rights - they are fighting on the right side of history!
If the Houthis weren't anti-American and anti-Israel, Harp wouldn't say a positive word about them. But their "death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews" slogan is irresistible to the privileged (NYU Law School, Columbia Journalism School, lawyer at Kirkland and Ellis), and very white, Harp.
This is the state of today's progressive intelligentsia, and I use the word advisedly. Harp, and Harper's, are smug and condescending while they don't have a clue about how the world actually works and cherry pick the facts that fit their preconceived and hateful ideas. In that sense, they are absolutely no different from the far-Right conspiracy theorists they profess to despise.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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