Sam Harris asked a question. Peter Beinart spent 3,000 words to avoid answering it.

Recently, Sam Harris wrote an essay, "Why I won't Debate Critics of Israel," which has been widely cited and quoted. It boils down to one question: What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted? If Hamas had that power, it would carry out a genuine genocide, a project it has announced repeatedly and acted on when it could. If Israel had it, the war would already be over. Harris said the histories are irreconcilable and that no amount of relitigating 1948 will change what the two populations want and are willing to die for today, so the only honest test is the one applied to the present.

Peter Beinart's reply runs almost three thousand words and never answers the main question. That omission is the whole story. 

Beinart is a careful writer who knows exactly what Harris asked, and he declines to engage it because the answer cuts against him: Palestinians want the Jewish state destroyed, full stop. This applies to Muslims and Christians, religious and secular. Every poll shows that Palestinians overwhelmingly support specific terror attacks against Jews. Beinart cannot answer Harris' question because he knows Harris is right.

Instead, Beinart reopens every historical and legal sub-debate Harris specifically set aside, then frames Harris's refusal to be dragged backward as intellectual cowardice. Harris declined to argue the past because the present is dispositive. Beinart spends three thousand words proving him right by refusing to discuss the present at all.

Harris points at a question reality can answer and lets the answer stand. Beinart does what he has always done, the skill I have documented at length: he sets the frame so the other side's facts cannot be admitted, smuggling the accusation in as a shared premise rather than stating it as a claim the reader might examine. Beinart is very good at this sleight of hand. Here is what is behind the curtain in this case.

Harris called Israel a free society, and Beinart answers by describing a Palestinian living under military administration in the West Bank — no vote, military courts, permits to travel, Military Order 101 restricting political assembly. The claim was about Israel, the society that runs competitive elections, seats Arabs in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, and lets a free press savage the prime minister daily. Beinart pretends to rebut it by describing the governance of a territory whose final status Oslo left to negotiation where Arafat chose an intifada instead of a state. Moreover,  most Palestinians live under PA laws, not Israeli laws, and that is an unfree society - and would remain so under any Palestinian state. Hell, Gaza was practically independent, living completely under Palestinian/Hamas rule, imports through Israel were at an all time high,  and that didn't stop October 7. The collapsing of "a Palestinian in Area A or Gaza lives in Israel" is the same move he has run for years, the one that treats a population with its own flag, courts, passports, and UN membership as residents of a state denying them the vote; by that logic Canadians live in the United States because the US dominates Canada economically, and the US isn't a free society because Puerto Ricans cannot vote for President.  The subject changed between the claim and the rebuttal, and Beinart is counting on you not to notice.

Beinart offers George Habash, the Greek Orthodox choirboy who founded the PFLP, as proof that Palestinian nationalism cannot be reduced to jihadism, alongside Said, Ashrawi, and Bishara. Harris named the entire Middle East and a specific roster of Islamist groups as the fundamental regional problem, so Christian Palestinians never touched his thesis. But even if we accept Beinart's argument, Habash pioneered international airplane hijacking and ran a Marxist-Leninist program for the elimination of Jewish sovereignty by force. A secular Marxist and an Islamist arriving at the identical destination is not evidence that the nationalism is moderate; it is evidence that the eliminationist aim is the constant and the theology is interchangeable costume. Beinart reached for a counterexample and produced Harris's deeper point — the rejection of Jewish political existence predates Hamas, predates 1948, and survives every change of ideological dress.

Beinart says the Palestinian Authority laid down its arms for twenty years, coordinated security with the IDF, got nothing, and watched Fayyad resign in defeat. Harris's hypothetical asked for two things: laying down arms and abandoning the culture that valorizes killing Jews. The Palestinian Authority did the first and rewarded the second the entire time, paying graduated salaries to imprisoned and deceased terrorists and naming schools and squares after them across the very years Beinart is citing as proof of renunciation. You cannot offer Fayyad as evidence that nonviolence failed while the institution he served was cutting checks to murderers by the severity of the murder. Moreover, Fatah, the party that runs the PA and is headed by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, built into its platform during those very years that terrorism is legitimate and legal, just not tactically wise at this moment in time. Beinart's own framing finishes the demolition: he notes that Hamas "gains recognition and is strengthened" as Fayyad's moderation looks like failure, which concedes that the population rewarded the violent faction — the exact thing Harris's question was designed to surface.

Harris charged that Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels and excluded its own civilians from them. Beinart answers that insurgents everywhere fight from within populations, that the Viet Cong dug tunnels too, and that the Kirya sits in downtown Tel Aviv. The Viet Cong tunnels sheltered fighters and villagers alike, which is the opposite of the accusation; the charge was not "Hamas fights in a city" but "Hamas kept its people above ground as cover." Locating a headquarters in a city and forbidding civilians to flee a combat zone are different acts, and the entire moral and legal weight of "human shield" rides on the difference. Beinart elides presence into shielding and moves on before you can object.

There are a number of other specific points where Beinart uses the same rhetorical devices - false framing, changing the subject, trying to change the playing field because he knows he cannot beat Harris' arguments. The pattern repeats: Harris makes a claim about the present, and Beinart answers a different claim about the past, the law, or some other country, performing the substitution at the seam and calling the result humility. The giveaway is not any single error. It is that the question Harris actually posed sits untouched on the page for three thousand words, because the man replying knows what reality would say if he let it answer.

Beinart closes by inviting Harris into a respectful public conversation, the implication being that confidence this firm must be fear of being tested. Harris already named the test. Beinart spent his entire reply avoiding it. This shows that Beinart is the one who is afraid of conversation, not Harris. And it proves Harris' point:  debating Beinart is a waste of time because he will keep on reframing the past and assume the audience misses his slippery methods instead of discussing the present reality. 

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

Peter Beinart argues that the Left's antizionism is different from the Right's. It isn't.

Peter Beinart's latest piece in the New York Times makes the argument that right-wing anti-Zionism is genuinely antisemitic because it roots Israel's behavior in Jewish identity, while left-wing anti-Zionism is morally serious because it roots Israel's behavior in systems — colonialism, nationalism, and power. Tucker Carlson blames Israel's crimes on its Jewishness; progressives analyze structures. Therefore, Beinart suggests, the two are categorically different, and the progressive arguments are serious and fact-based.

The argument is superficially appealing, but it confuses vocabulary with logic. Both versions of anti-Zionism, right and left, turn out to depend on the same underlying premise: that Jews cannot be trusted to tell the truth — a conclusion the piece will earn, not assert.

The left's central accusations against Israel are claims about intent, not descriptions of behavior. Genocide requires the intent to destroy a people. Apartheid requires the intent to permanently dominate. Colonialism requires the intent to displace and replace. If your evidence for those accusations is based on reading minds, it is not evidence — unless there is no other credible explanation.

There is one, and it is more credible. The left's explanation — deliberate targeting, racial domination, eliminationist expansionism — requires attributing to Israel a set of intentions that Israel explicitly denies and that the historical and strategic evidence does not support. Israel's explanation fits the facts better: Israel is a Jewish state built by a people who internalized two thousand years of antisemitism as lived experience rather than historical abstraction, whose founding principle of Never Again functions as an operational imperative rather than an empty slogan, and whose moral framework derives from three thousand years of Jewish ethical thinking that the West itself largely inherited — and that the left applies selectively, inverting it against its source.

That last point matters more than it usually gets credit for. Israel is not a state indifferent to civilian casualties. It is a state whose entire military and legal culture is organized around minimizing them, because that is what its moral tradition demands. The IDF's doctrine of purity of arms, the military advocate general's office, the post-operation investigations, the evacuation warnings that forfeit tactical surprise — these are the institutional expression of a moral seriousness that runs through Jewish law on the conduct of war. And they are precisely why Hamas uses human shields. That strategy only works because Hamas correctly calculates that Israel will accept higher costs to its own soldiers rather than kill civilians indiscriminately. An army with genocidal intent does not generate that calculation in its enemies; it generates the opposite one.

What the left consistently refuses to recognize is that Israel is not choosing between war and peace. It is choosing between two moral costs: accept civilian casualties in Gaza while fighting an enemy that has made those casualties structurally unavoidable, or allow that enemy to terrorize Israeli civilians forever and with impunity. That is a genuine moral dilemma, the kind that three thousand years of Jewish ethical tradition was actually developed to navigate. The left's framework collapses it into a morality play with only one moral agent — Israel — and one set of lives that count. The moral cost of allowing Hamas to terrorize Israeli civilians indefinitely simply does not register as a cost. That omission is not an oversight; it is the premise.

This framing also resolves what the left's framework struggles to explain structurally. Israel is not a colonial project in any meaningful sense; it is the return of a people to their ancestral homeland, a homeland they never ceased to inhabit, mourn, or orient their prayers toward. It extends full citizenship to Arab Israelis, seats them on its Supreme Court, and elects them to its parliament, while maintaining Jewish survival as a founding priority — a priority that is entirely coherent given the history. And it allows thousands of trucks of aid into Gaza even while fighting there, because feeding civilians in a war zone is consistent with its own moral position. That last fact is almost never processed seriously by the left, because it is flatly inconsistent with the assumption of Israeli immorality that anchors their framework.

Which is where the epicycles begin. Arab judges on Israel's Supreme Court? Tokenism. LGBTQ rights? Pinkwashing — a deliberate propaganda strategy to distract from "apartheid." Evacuation warnings before strikes? Public relations. Aid convoys into Gaza? Cover for genocide. Nothing counts against the theory; everything gets absorbed into it, reclassified as deception, filed under further evidence that the malice runs deeper than it appears.

The pro-Israel explanation is consistent with the facts as they present themselves. The left's explanation is coherent only by reclassifying every inconvenient fact as performance. One framework has to keep adding mind-reading and assumptions of deception to survive contact with reality. The other doesn't. Which means there is no structural difference between the progressive position and a conspiracy theory.

I've written before about the difference between correspondence and coherence theories of truth, and how conspiracy theories are epistemologically indistinguishable from the coherence model. In a correspondence framework, claims are tested against reality, and evidence can falsify them. In a coherence framework, claims are judged by how well they fit the narrative, and contradictions are reinterpreted until the system stays intact. Conspiracy theories survive exactly this way: counterevidence doesn't weaken the theory, it proves how deep the conspiracy goes.

The contemporary left critique of Israel has adopted that structure. Israel isn't liberal — it's pretending to be. Its institutions aren't genuine — they're performative. Its justifications aren't honest — they're propaganda. The particular content of the accusation varies, but the underlying move is the same: nothing Israel or its supporters say or demonstrate can be taken at face value, because the deception is total. Which is exactly how antisemites have looked at Jews for centuries — deceptive, cunning, conspiratorial, pursuing a hidden agenda of power over non-Jews.

Beinart argues that the left avoids essentializing Jews because it speaks the language of systems rather than identity. But the left's systemic framework only remains coherent if it assumes, as a standing premise, that Jewish institutions are uniquely deceptive — that their visible behavior is systematically misleading and their explanations are not to be accepted at face value the way Hamas's claims are. Without that premise, the coherent narrative collapses, because counterevidence would have to be taken seriously and the theory would have to update.

Which brings us back to Tucker Carlson, whose theories Beinart correctly identifies as antisemitic conspiracy thinking. Carlson speaks openly about Jewish civilizational threat and hidden manipulation. The mechanism is recognizable: start with a fixed conclusion, interpret all evidence through that lens, reclassify contradiction as proof of how cunning the deception is.

Strip away the vocabulary, and the left's framework runs on the same engine. The right says Jews are dangerous because they intend to control the world; the left says Israel is dangerous because of its predetermined intentions to dominate its Arab neighbors and population. Both use the same logic and the same assumptions of Jewish evil. Only one of them is honest enough to say "Jews."

Beinart wants to draw a moral boundary, and there is one — only it falls in a different place than he draws it. The dividing line runs between those willing to test their claims against reality and those who build arguments that reality is not permitted to challenge. Cross that line and it no longer matters how sophisticated your language is or how carefully you avoid biological essentialism.

Beinart writes that "combating the anti-Israel right's conflation of Israel and Jewishness is made harder by pro-Israel American Jewish organizations that have conflated those two things as well." Yet Beinart's own argument depends on antisemitic tropes no less than Carlson's does — the assumption of Israeli Jewish intent to dominate and destroy, which is the complete opposite of how Jews and Israel understand themselves and their history. His framework requires that premise to function. 

Whether he sees it or not, he is in the same epistemic territory as Tucker Carlson.

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

Beinart's apology is, ironically, the antithesis of humility

My last post on Peter Beinart's craven apology to his BDS comrades for speaking at Tel Aviv University was scathing, but it didn't examine his thought process. And a deeper examination reveals something that we all need to learn from.

Beinart is very smart. He knew about the BDSers' anger at his talk beforehand, and he went ahead and gave it anyway. So why would he defend his decision before the talk and then, afterwards, apologize for it? The BDSers who aren't accepting his apology have a point - if he really cares about their feelings, as his apology stated, then he was as aware of their objections before the talk as he was afterwards.

Something must have happened at the talk that prompted him to reverse his opinion on the propriety of his speech. 

Unfortunately, there is no video of the speech or the Q&A. But there is one detailed article about it as a blog at Times of Israel, by Alec Mauer.

Mauer says that Beinart was one of his childhood heroes. He shares Beinart's ideas of 15 years ago about the two state solution, of being against BDS. He is disappointed that Beinart's position today makes no sense to living, breathing Israelis - including the liberal ones who attend TAU or who make films. Beinart repeated BDS claims that they are not boycotting individuals but only institutions, and being at one such institution, he understands that this is a nonsensical distinction.

Based on his report, it appears that many of the students who attended were like him - people who are liberal, who want Palestinians to have a state and equal rights, but who actually live there. 

In other words, Beinart 2025 met Beinart 2010 - and couldn't win an argument with himself. He was confronted with people who share his stated goals but actually think about them realistically. And he failed to move them. 

In the past 15 years, while Beinart moved more and more to the anti-Israel Left, he came up with reasons that sounded reasonable to his new audience - but that made increasingly little sense to those on the Israeli Left who would be affected by his desired policies. He spoke to echo chambers of progressives in America who look at the world through the simplistic oppressor vs. oppressed lens and the feedback in that echo chamber prompted him to keep moving that way. 

One crucial point that is not often mentioned in these contexts: his livelihood became more and more dependent on his political positions. It is incredibly difficult to think independently when your income depends on thinking only one way. As progressive Americans moved more towards blatant antisemitism, Beinart had to work not to alienate them. 

His talk at TAU showed him that his progression from liberal Zionist to anti-Israel activist, which he pretends was a natural evolution, did not impress those who are exactly like he used to be. They knew his arguments and they wanted to hear him answer their questions about them. He couldn't do it. 

Before the talk, he believed the praise heaped on him by his followers, that his arguments are airtight, that he can convince any sincere liberal Zionist of the righteousness of his new positions by quoting Amnesty and B'Tselem. When he realized that he was not nearly as consistent or smart as he thought he was, he decided that going to TAU was a mistake. But he cannot admit he couldn't win the arguments.

Beinart didn't go to Israel for dialogue. He went to admonish the students. He went not as an intellectual but as a prophet. And the students would have none of that. 

A truly humble person would have listened to the students and admitted that he doesn't have the answers. A conceited person blames those who refuted him as being part of the evil enemy. 

Beinart's apology was not an act of contrition. It was an act of conceit to avoid admitting his hypocrisy. Usually apologies are signs of humility, but in this case, Beinart's apology was an act of self preservation. And the BDSers understand that. 

Humility is a necessary component of growth. Beinart's arrogance shows what happens when one believes that they are infallible - their own ethics go out the window to keep from admitting they are wrong. 

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

It was inevitable, but @PeterBeinart has now outsourced his brain to BDS

Peter Beinart spoke at Tel Aviv University this week. Both Israel haters and Zionists criticized him for this, and he apologized to only one side.

But one aspect of his craven apology appears to be Beinart's first direct support for BDS against all Israeli institutions, not just "settlements" or "aspects of BDS"  as he had argued before.

By speaking earlier this week at Tel Aviv University, I made a serious mistake.

In the past, when formulating my views about Israel-Palestine, I’ve sought out Palestinian friends and interlocutors and listened carefully to their views. In this case, I did not.

I really wanted to speak to Israelis. In the US, I’ve cultivated conversations with Jews with whom I strongly disagree, both to listen and in hopes of changing their minds. Over the horrifying last two years, I’ve hoped for more conversations with Israelis, to explain why I believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and why I believe Jewish supremacy is fundamentally wrong. My motivation for giving the talk wasn’t financial; I didn’t receive an honorarium. I wanted to say certain things to an Israeli audience. Speaking at Tel Aviv University seemed to offer that chance.

I let my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians, who in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide have asked the world boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit in their oppression. As Noura Erakat and others have pointed out, there are ways for me to talk to Israelis without violating BDS guidelines and undermining a collective effort against oppression. I could have had the exchange I desired while respecting a non-violent movement based on human rights and international law. Had I listened more to Palestinians, I would have realized that earlier.

It’s embarrassing to admit such a serious mistake. I dearly wish I had not made this one, which has caused particular harm because international pressure is crucial to ensuring Palestinian freedom. This was a failure of judgment. I am sorry.

He sounds like an abused wife apologizing to her husband after being beaten.

And so the transformation from "Zionist critic of Israel" to "non-Zionist critic of Israel" to "BDS supporter" is complete. From now on, Beinart now takes all of his instructions on how to act, what to write, what to do, what to say and what to think  from the BDS movement. 

He has finally outsourced his brain to terrorist lovers like Noura Erekat, who must approve everything he does in the future. 

This is a role that Beinart now enthusiastically supports. He just wants to be loved by terrorists.  (His magazine, Jewish Currents, refuses to condemn Hamas for October 7.)

But that isn't enough! Even after his groveling apology, the haters weren't mollified. TOI writes:

His apology, however, drew more backlash from leading anti-Israel activists. Nerdeen Kiswani, a leading anti-Zionist organizer in New York City, posted on X, “Peter consistently disrespects communities he claims to support, particularly Palestinians, and then apologizes for it.”

Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website, wrote, “It’s hard not to see this as anything other than an exercise in damage control, to restore his marketability following the overwhelming backlash to his informed, conscious, willful decision to violate a clear picket line.”

This is the BDS playbook. As soon as you give them an inch, they berate you even more to browbeat you into total submission. 

To the BDS crowd, Beinart isn't an articulate supporter of the Palestinian cause who should be applauded for telling Zionists they are wrong. He is just a Jew, and Jews are useless unless they act like dhimmis, begging for acceptance and protection from their Palestinian overlords and agreeing that Jews who think for themselves are just closet Zionists. 

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

The flip side of consequentialism: A response to Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart criticizes the US strike on Iran's nuclear program in terms of the US not considering the long term consequences of its actions:

Let's say the US does set back the Iranian nuclear program by a long way, and Iran is just too afraid or too weak to really do much in response. So it's a success, right? But over what time frame? I mean you could have said that the US had a big success when it overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in the fifties, because he was going to nationalize oil industry and do things that America didn't like, and it might have been for years after that it looked like a good idea. But you were laying the groundwork for a politics in Iran that was ultimately going to lead decades later to the overthrow of a pro-American leader, and the emergence of a militant anti-American leadership. The point, is, when you do things, you produce political consequences that play out over long, long periods of time and you don't know what the long term consequences are going to be. 

I've mentioned a number of times that Beinart is a master propagandist, and this is yet another example of how he uses propaganda techniques brilliantly to promote a completely wrong and immoral anti-Israel and anti-American position. 

After all, he has a point: there could be very bad long term consequences of any action by the US, or Israel, that could be worse than short term gains. 

This actually is true of every decision we make, big or small, international or personal. Beinart gives examples of decisions in the Middle East that may have caused bad long term consequences. So, everything must be done with caution, and Beinart says that the US did not use the proper amount of caution.

There are three problems with his argument, and they are difficult to see without realizing that Beinart always frames his arguments to preclude serious disagreement.

The first one is simple: yes, sometimes the consequences are bad. And sometimes they are good. Israel decimating Hezbollah last year resulted in Hezbollah not raining down tens of thousands of missiles on Israel, today. That is a pretty good consequence! Similarly, Israel's destruction of Syria's clandestine nuclear program cannot be regarded as anything but a success. So consequentialism goes both ways, and there is no way for Beinart to know the long term consequences any more than anyone else - whether they would be good or bad. So should no one ever make any decision because we cannot know every possible consequence? That is absurd, but if we accept Beinart's logic, that is the result.

In the real world, you make the best decisions you can based on the information you have now. You don't stay paralyzed because you might make the wrong decision. Beinart knows this, but he doesn't want you to think about it. 

Secondly, Beinart describes possible downsides of military action. But he ignores, completely, not only the possible upsides or action, but the the potential negative consequences of inaction. Iran clearly was hiding a secret nuclear program that is only compatible with weaponization. No one can seriously doubt it. What are the consequences of a nation that is the world's biggest sponsor of terror, that funds terror groups worldwide, having a stockpile of nuclear weapons? Beinart frames his argument in terms of actions, not inactions, so the casual consumer of his ideas does not realize that Beinart is creating a straitjacket in his argument that does not allow the thinking outside the box that Beinart deliberately constructs.

The third problem is when Beinart says:

I think Jewish tradition, like most other moral traditions, has some version of the idea of “what goes around comes around.” In Hebrew, it’s, “midah k'neged midah.” 

Guess what? Jewish ethics is not consequentialist. In Jewish ethics, the top priority is preserving life, your own and your nation's before your enemies. Iran's actions that clearly point towards building a nuclear weapon, plus its genocidal rhetoric against Israel that goes back to 1979, all point to the fact that Iran intends to destroy Israel - either with nuclear weapons or by using the threat of nuclear weapons to attack with impunity without fear of, yes, consequences.. This is not morally acceptable under Jewish ethics. Beinart's argument here indicates that he does not give a damn about the survival of the Jewish state or the Jewish people who live there. 

So when Beinart tries to use a Jewish ethical argument that Iran's nuclear weapons program must not be attacked, he is not only being deceptive. He is tacitly supporting the idea that Israel should not have the right to defend itself.

And it is hard to think of something more immoral than that.

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

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)

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

Once again, @PeterBeinart in the @NYTimes supports those who violate Jewish rights on campus

Peter Beinart writes in the New York Times with an article originally titled "You Want to Protect Jewish Students? What About Jewish Student Protesters? and later "Trump Doesn’t Want to Protect All Jewish Students — Just Those on His Team."

You can already see where this is going:

On April 29, 2024, Tess Segal, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Florida, joined her fellow activists at a prominent plaza on campus calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and boycott academic institutions in Israel. Some protesters studied or played cards. Later they read obituaries of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip.

Then law enforcement moved in. And although Ms. Segal says she did not resist arrest, she was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was held overnight.

....In an era in which students without U.S. citizenship are snatched off the street by federal agents, Ms. Segal’s punishment may seem comparatively mild. But her case contains a special irony. Ms. Segal is Jewish.

I didn't spend any time researching this specific case, but it is obvious from Beinart's description that Tess Segal was not arrested or discriminated against because of her Jewishness or her support for the Jewish state. On the contrary, she was part of a campus mob protesting against Jewish rights and to make an exception for academic freedom for Jewish Zionist students who may want to study in Israel or collaborate with their Israeli counterparts. 

Beinart can argue all he wants for free speech rights for anti-Zionists, but pretending that Jews are being targeted on campus for anti-Zionist speech and require special protection as Jewish Zionist students do is peak Beinart-style deception. 

His deceit extends to other examples in the article:

Since Oct. 7, at least four universities have temporarily suspended or placed on probation their chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace.

He doesn't mention that it was because they violated campus policies. Should Jewish students be allowed to violate policies because they are Jewish? Only if they agree with Beinart's anti-Zionist politics, it seems.

At a pro-Israel event at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York on Oct. 12, 2023, a Jewish student who briefly shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine” was reportedly suspended for the rest of the academic year. 

This was an indoor event, a "Unity Gathering in Support of Israel," held while the kibbutzim were still smoldering. Most colleges recognize that disrupting an event is not free speech - it is a violation of the free speech rights of the organizers of the event.  In fact, many of the college suspensions of anti-Israel protesters are for that exact reason - there is no inherent right to disrupt normal activities on campus.

Beinart is claiming, in effect, that pro-Zionist Jews do not have the right to have their own events free from being interrupted, disrupted and shut down by protesters. He is against free speech when that speech goes against his hateful "principles."

In May 2024, a Jewish tenured professor in anthropology at Muhlenberg College said she was fired after she reposted an Instagram post that declared, in part: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable.” 

First of all, the post by Maura Finkelstein also said "Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist." She is directly saying that 90% of Jews - on campus or anywhere - should not have the same rights as anyone else and calling them fascists. Can anyone who attends her classes feel comfortable?

They don't. Beinart omits the other reason she was fired - because within a  week of October 7 she taught two classes of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda. In her own words, on October 12, "I had dedicated both of my classes to contextualizing the events unfolding in Gaza and giving my students space to ask questions. ...In our first meeting, the provost told me that several Title VI complaints had come to her through the college’s Title IX office; “Multiple students felt you created an unsafe atmosphere and that you have been targeting and harassing them.”

Beinart, skillfully posting half-truths and omitting context about college policies and the events he is describing, is pretending that Jewish students and faculty are being targeted when in most cases they were violating the rights of Jewish students whose opinions they disagree with. On campuses where free speech is supposedly a sacred right, Beinart is supporting those who want to quash it - in one direction.

His last example is even more absurd:

Even when protest has taken the form of Jewish religious observance, it often has been shut down. Last fall, when Jewish students opposing the war during the holiday of Sukkot built Gaza solidarity sukkahs, temporary boothlike structures in which Jews eat, learn and sleep during the holiday, at least eight universities forcibly dismantled them, or required the students to do so, or canceled approval for their construction. (The universities said that the groups were not allowed to erect structures on campus.)

 These groups obviously tried to use sukkahs as a way to get around existing regulations against building encampments or other structures by pretending that they are for a religious purpose.  They clearly weren't - none of the people who built them would ever build a sukkah for religious purposes. They pervert Judaism for politics, and Beinart pretends that they were just practicing their religion - much like those who blow shofars at any "Jewish anti-Zionist" occasion and pretend that this is a religious obligation. 

No one is saying that anti-Israel students, Jewish or not, do not have the right for protests and speech that do not violate campus policies. Beinart is claiming that anti-Zionists, uniquely, have the right to violate campus policies. 

This is not a defense of free speech. It is a demand for privileged speech – for one side only.

By selectively presenting facts, omitting crucial context, and portraying violators of others' rights as victims, Peter Beinart is not merely misleading. He is manufacturing antisemitic propaganda: turning those who seek to destroy Jewish communal life on campus into the new “Jewish victims.” And the New York Times eagerly provides him the platform, without even basic fact-checking.

It’s not just deception. It’s complicity.

 

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More