Amir Alexander

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

@simon_schama It's the difference between debating whether to have a baby, and talking about killing the baby after it is born. The first is family planning, the second is murder.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

The question of genocide in Gaza is not just a matter of “semantics,” as many are now claiming, quietly backpedaling from their earlier confident assertions. It is not a borderline case, or a matter of interpretation, or an issue on which reasonable people can differ.

It is an obscene lie, contradicted by everything we know about Israel’s conduct during the war (which is not to absolve the IDF of war crimes). Here are 76 retired senior military leaders and legal experts flatly rejecting the genocide allegation:

“Israel has not committed genocide but rather set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians.”

The fact that the rector of my own university wanted to prohibit questioning the “Gaza genocide,” as though it were the equivalent of flat-earthism or climate denialism, still fills me with disbelief and rage. One day it will become clear who are the real flat-earthers here.

https://t.co/ZFzzPn4SLp

[Judea Pearl @yudapearl]

"Today, Oct. 10, is the birthday of my son, Daniel Pearl, who would have been 63 years old today.
Lacking eloquent words to describe his life, his work, and his vision until his brutal murder in 2002, I am posting a poem I wrote in his memory, called 'The Lion's Den': https://t.co/phQEQzThYX
followed by David Broza's recording, written for that poem: https://t.co/WAjs8y0gaP, ending with Benjamin Lapidus "Kaddish Para Daniel"  https://t.co/RzvpC1hb57"
Join me in Yitgadal V'Yitkadash Shmei Rabah

[John Allen Paulos @JohnAllenPaulos]

https://t.co/TwkFgpIM3A

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

@KSHartnett @WSJ I very much enjoyed your book! And learned a great deal. Glad to see you like the review.

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

https://t.co/kJLcWtiZUw
My latest in the Wall Street Journal: A review of Kevin Hartnett's "The Proof in the Code."

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Three Accusations against Israel: Apartheid, Settler Colonialism, and Genocide. Are they historically accurate, or just morally loaded vilifications? New paper scrutinizes the Legal and Historical issues. @SSRN https://t.co/NBL0DRPxzr

[Shany Mor שני מור شني مور @ShMMor]

Calculating the collateral damage of a proposed military action isn't some bloodthirsty ritual, it is a requirement of the laws of armed combat (proportionality), something civilized armies do, but terrorists and genocidaires do not.

[Shany Mor שני מור شني مور @ShMMor]

"Collateral damage" is a weird angle to focus on if you genuinely believe there is a genocide, because the very conceptualization of it and calculation of it indicates definitively that there is no genocide.

[Judea Pearl @yudapearl]

Dear Readers:

I am happy to learn that UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk has joined me in rebuking @UCLA_LAW for choreographing an offensive symposium on September 11:
https://t.co/gE1vZJ45Pd

Unfortunately, The Los Angeles Times did not present my quote in its entirety, thereby significantly altering its context and intent. To correct for any distortion, I am providing readers with the full text of my statement:
----------------start of statement ----
I stand ashamed of my university and, especially, the five centers within the UCLA School of Law sponsoring this disturbing symposium.

September 11 and October 7 are two painful events that should be used to commemorate the victims of those attacks -- Americans and Israelis.

Platforming organizations like CAIR that have been sympathetic to the attackers is distasteful, if not despicable.

To my esteemed colleagues at these five centers: Please find different dates to engage us with your political sophistry. Let us spend these two days in serene prayers with our dear ones — find yourselves different dates.
-------------------------end of statement ---
Please help me correct this misquote by reposting my original statement to your readers.

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

@yudapearl @zacharylipton @erichorvitz @DaphneKoller @eliasbareinboim CongratulationsJudea!!

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

The erudite, angry, powerful @simon_schama on why calling the Israel-Hamas war ‘a genocide’ is a blood libel and antisemitism.
I hope the Labour politicians sitting in the room for the @HolocaustUK dinner felt uneasy.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Sam Harris has written the best thing you’ll read today.

https://t.co/gI0wZZNH4m

[Daniel Schwartz @danschwartz88]

“How could it not be Jewish?”

That was Leonard Cohen’s response when people asked whether his music was Jewish.

Of course it was.

The poetry. The questions. The resilience. The refusal to surrender hope even after seeing the darkness of the world.

Cohen never treated being Jewish as something to hide, apologize for, or water down. It was woven into everything he created because it was woven into who he was.

He believed in peace. He believed in humanity. But he also understood that peace requires confronting reality, not escaping it.

There is something beautiful about that kind of confidence. Not loud. Not performative. Just deeply rooted.

Leonard Cohen didn’t become great despite being Jewish.

He became Leonard Cohen by being unapologetically Jewish.

And that’s something worth being proud of. 🇮🇱🎶

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

This matters.
An obscure London event on the history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in Judea and Israel is cancelled because of ‘security concerns’ and it turns out this was a reaction to a campaign to fill and then undermine the event by activist disrupters.
How strange! Why would a posse of aggressive activists be interested in the arcane details of bullae and steles and ostraca and inscriptions and numismatics in some small South Levantine kingdoms in the Iron Age?
Well, it is a little more than that which is why it is both disturbing and important. And it matters because at its least it is a threat to history in Britain’s - but also the world’s - greatest temple of History @britishmuseum - and its scholarly integrity.
The BM and its leadership are decent and well-meaning and have explained that they wished to save an event from disruption by bullying vandals but I am sure the BM realizes it is essential to announce a new event fast lest it give the impression that the permission of tiny cadres of aggressive bullies are required before it hold events. But the significance is wider than an event about the Moab and Tel Dan steles in a great museum.
British cultural life is the right and exercise of civic and cultural freedom – a privilege of our liberal democracy - that does not require the permission of gangs of ideological activists nor can it cancelled or postponed nor endured at their beck and sufferance nor permitted with a bend of the knee to their permissions or veto. But that is what this appears to be.
Across the cultural world in the West, though the bewildered middleaged managers of our institutions that are confronting and often submitting to a wave of self-righteous blackmail and mob threat, there is an increasingly thin – indeed ever more fragile and sometimes nigh invisible – line between ‘security concerns’ – and institutional pusillanimity.
Then there is the history itself.
This event concerns the study of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel that existed between roughly 1100BC and 586BCin the Levant. It is not a coincidence that this was chosen for disruption. The history of the Judean kingdoms and the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem that stood for most of the time between 1000BC and 70ADetc is important and fascinating history in its own right, supported by complex and growing archaeological finds.
These small kingdoms and the subsequent Temple priestly mini-state (restored by the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius 539BC) and then the larger Judean kingdoms of the Hasmoneans and Herodians – between 167BC and 135AD chronicle the long indigenous history of Jews in the region – which the protesters are keen to erase. This is a political project of ideological erasure and malicious incitement of course concerned with the complex, brutal Israel-Palestine conflict that has now gone on for a hundred years and is unlikely to be solved in a small lecture theatre in the British Museum. But it also attempts to deny or erase Jewish history itself – and by implication the heritage of British Jews who live here in Britain, a small community that is now under cultural and sometimes physical threat.
Incidentally - but it is worth saying, this history does not deny anyone else’s history, nor the many other small realms in this region through ancient times nor the many names of the region and its entities and the historical origins of those names (Canaan, or Philistia or Peleset, Phoenicia, Aram Damascus or Moab or later Nabatea and the provinces of Palaestina Prime, Seconda and Tertia and the Ghassanid kingdoms and so on etc etc). The history of one can not be used to erase the history of the other and does not need to do so. The pursuit of knowledge which is one of the delights of human life and is the mission of the BM and indeed anyone who writes, reads or enjoys history, can celebrate and recognize all of these.
Yet this protest and the many like it deployed across Britain nowadays is the opposite of that - an attack on history using the methods of intimidation and vandalism. Much of this involves distorting or dismantling actual history or often lying to replace it with a fabricated ideological structure that nourishes no one and helps no one but degrades our culture and civic life not to speak of history itself. By the way, the frequent claims that these histories or names are ‘denied’ or ‘noone knows them’ is nonsense: anyone and everyone who is interested knows this history. (Much of it appears for example in my book Jerusalem a history of the Holy Land.)
And this is relevant not just to those of us who write study or enjoy the history of the region but also to those who believe that cultural life and civic society is a right that must not be submitted to the aggressions and plots of loud well-organized much-indulged ideologues who take advantage of the freedoms of our society to undermine its principles and the very freedoms they are designed to guard.
Just as vital is a rule of history itself that concerrns the rise and fall of civilizations: the society that ceases to allow to free discussion of ideas and stops respecting and recognizing the value of scientific and historical sources and facts is a society that will fail.

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

@faniaoz To be clear, I agree with Fania on most things and greatly admire her courage for speaking out. I just disagree on this point. Israelis often think they have more control over how they are perceived than they actually do.

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

@faniaoz Not so, Fania. I was at UCLA in the days after 10/7, and the hate started immediately. From day 1 masked mobs on campus were screaming "Intifada, Intifada!" and "We don't want no Zionists here!" I am no fan of Netanyahu, but he is not the cause of this bigotry.

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

@ShMMor @edwest Not to mention Admiral Halsey's "Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill more Japs!" which was reproduced on billboards. Another of his favorites was "Before we're done with 'em, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell." Unmistakably "genocidal intent" by current standards.

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

@NickAPappas Critics, rightly, blame President Johnson.
When it comes to the Iran War, however, the same critics blame not America, but nefarious Israeli machinations that "dragged" America into it.
Why the difference? The antisemitic undercurrent seems to me undeniable.

[Amir Alexander @amiralex]

@NickAPappas Nothing "rational" about it. The decision to enter the war, rightly or wrongly, was 100% American.
For comparison, the Vietnam War lasted over a decade and cost the lives of 60,000 Americans. Most believe it was a mistake, but I have never heard anyone blame South Vietnam for it.