Wednesday, December 10, 2025
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When I read that you’d signed
a letter calling for the release of
Marwan Barghouti, I wouldn’t say I was devastated. Just deeply sad that I
would now have to consign your music to the “do not listen to antisemites”
discard pile. That pile includes such luminaries as Massive Attack, whose
“Teardrop” was the theme song for the House MD series — a ringtone I
removed the moment I saw they had signed on to “No Music for Genocide.”
Carole King joined that same campaign, which involved
pressuring major labels to boycott Israeli platforms, at which point I realized
that when she sang, “You’ve Got a Friend,” she didn’t mean me. Because I live
in Israel. She doesn’t like that.
By the same token, I have sent Susan Sarandon, Cate
Blanchett, and Ben Affleck to the “do not watch antisemites on the silver
screen” garbage heap. At this point, I refuse to watch anything on Netflix
before checking the entire cast list against the Film Workers for
Palestine pledge. I’ve got that pledge bookmarked for convenience. (The
Big C has Cynthia Nixon
and Idris Elba in it? Nope, not watching it.)
But you, Mr. Simon — I didn’t imagine you would sign a
letter calling for the release of a mass murderer from prison. A man who
ordered the murder of Jews for no other reason than that they were Jews. And of
course, Barghouti didn’t only murder Jews. He was also responsible for the
killing of Father Georgios Tsibouktzakis, a Greek Orthodox monk-priest
shot in his car on the way back to his monastery because terrorists assumed —
based on his Israeli license plate — that he was a Jew. In other words, he was
murdered not because he was a Jew, but because he was thought to
be one.
So now I will no longer be listening to Diamonds on
the Soles of Her Shoes, because the singer-songwriter who created that
musical masterpiece supports the release of a mass murderer — a man convicted
on five counts of murder for attacks orchestrated by the networks under his
control. Attacks that targeted Jews. Jews like you, Mr. Simon.
Marwan Barghouti built his reputation on directing the
gunmen and bombers who left Israelis dead in buses, cafés, and on the roadside.
This is the man you’re calling on us to release.
He wouldn’t care that you’re not Israeli or a member of
the IDF. He wouldn’t care about your one-in-a-million gift for music. He would
only care that you are a Jew. And that is all Barghouti would care about if he
were released from prison: murdering innocent Jewish civilians. Violently.
As head of the Fatah supreme committee in the West Bank
and leader of the military wing of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, Barghouti had the
power to order his men to kill Jews. Jews like 45-year-old mother-of-two
Yoella Hen, murdered while
filling her gas tank on the way to a family wedding — murdered on the order
of Marwan Barghouti, for whose release you, Mr. Simon, are calling.
Barghouti also supplied weapons to the men who killed Yosef
Habibi and Eli Dahan as they were dining at a popular Tel Aviv café.
The terrorist lobbed grenades into the crowd, opened fire, and when his rifle
jammed, rushed inside stabbing anyone he could reach. Habibi and Dahan were
murdered. Habibi’s wife Haya was critically injured. A Druze policeman, Sergeant
Salim Barakat, ran to help and was stabbed to death as he bent over the
terrorist’s body.
Barghouti was also responsible for the shooting attack at
a bar mitzvah celebration held at a Hadera banquet hall — six murdered, 26
wounded. He directed the shooting spree on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem in which two
Israelis were killed and 37 wounded. He masterminded a shooting attack in the
residential Jerusalem neighborhood of Neve Yaakov, where a young policewoman
was killed and nine Israelis were wounded. A worker at a coffee factory in the
Atarot industrial zone was murdered by a terrorist who acted on Barghouti’s
orders.
In the end, Barghouti was convicted on five counts of murder. Which is why he is serving five consecutive life terms plus 40 years. Which is also why he is very popular among Palestinians — they would love to see this Jew-killer step into Mahmoud Abbas’s shoes, now in the twentieth year of his four-year term
Mr. Simon, I know I shouldn’t be surprised you threw your support behind a murderer — all the cool kids are doing it. But somehow I thought someone as obviously brilliant as yourself knew better than to listen to the lies about Barghouti’s victimhood. That you would know enough to look into the matter and find out why Barghouti is really in prison. Not because Israel is persecuting him, but because he is a stone-cold killer.But as it turns out, I shouldn’t have been surprised for
a different reason. Something I hadn’t known. Rafael
Medoff filled in the blank: years ago, you wrote The Capeman, a
Broadway musical about Salvador Agron — a gang member who stabbed two teenage
boys to death on a New York playground. You recast him as a troubled outsider
shaped by poverty and street culture.
And now here you are again, extending the same sympathy
to Marwan Barghouti. Only Barghouti’s “environment” is something else entirely.
Jew-hatred permeates the PA’s curriculum, its summer
camps, its official media, and the speeches of its political leaders (though
only when speechifying in Arabic, naturally). Even the sermons of imams praise
those who murder Jews, describing them as pigs and monkeys — just as the Nazis
saw Jews as cockroaches and rats.
When I heard you had joined the call for an
arch-Jew-murderer to be released into the general Israeli population, I
thought: He’s misinformed. They’re telling him lies, and the lies are so
pervasive that no one bothers to check.
I hoped you were one of the rare birds — someone with
enough intellectual curiosity to look into the real story of the war in Gaza.
Why it happened and why it didn’t. The war did not happen because Israel wanted
to wipe out the Gazan people. The war happened because of October 7 — because
of the rape of little girls, the burning of babies, the slaughter of families.
Civilians in Gaza cheered and filmed as hostages were dragged through the streets.
Ordinary Gazans held hostages in their homes.
Hamas has ruled Gaza exactly as it promised it would. It
hijacked aid, blocked distribution, and seized baby-formula shipments with
full awareness of the consequences. They knew infants would die, and they let
it happen because the deaths served their narrative.
During the worst of the days of the hunger crisis in Gaza in the past six months, Hamas deliberately hid literal tons of infant formula and nutritional shakes for children by storing them in clandestine warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
— Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (@afalkhatib) December 9, 2025
The goal, as I said… pic.twitter.com/pANo9uHfAb
And yet, instead of looking into any of this, you signed
your name to the accusation that your own people are committing genocide — while
calling for the release of a man who spent years trying to kill us.
The worst part is that so many of the Jews murdered on
October 7 were leftist peaceniks who did everything they could to help the
people of Gaza. You would know this, Mr. Simon, if you had bothered to check.
If you had bothered to come to Israel, even briefly, to see for yourself, to
offer support, to stand with your people in a moment of unimaginable pain.
Instead, you stood with a man who would gladly see you
dead.
I even looked for you online, thinking perhaps I could explain all this to you — that you would understand how deeply you’d been deceived. I searched for you on Facebook and X, but you have made yourself unreachable to your own people.
We cannot find you to tell you what you’ve done, the harm you’ve caused, how betrayed we feel.
This letter is all I can do. And you will never read it.
But you have placed yourself in a box now — the box
reserved for Jews who turn their backs on their own people. You can leave that
box anytime, Mr. Simon. It would be an easy enough thing to do. You can join
the side that is just, the side that holds life as its greatest value. Or you
can stay where you are and earn a footnote in Jewish history as a man who sided
with a murderer.
The choice is yours.
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