kochanfe 🇺🇸🇮🇱

Optimism, Fallibilism, Classical Liberalism.

"Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble. Solutions create new problems in their turn."

עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

https://t.co/xGSzgGV2BM

[Richard Landes @richard_landes]

"Bartov’s tome is likely to contribute to the ongoing effort to make hatred of Israel respectable in the faculty lounge, the editorial office, the think tank, and in many political parties. I hope that in this case, the strategy of prestige transfer fails and that more discerning readers will ponder the question “What went wrong with Omer Bartov?” The book does not represent the standards expected from professional historians nor from what we should expect from a distinguished publisher such as Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Nevertheless, initial responses indicate that it may be a successful polemic and a commercial success. Its lack of scholarly distinction will not diminish its contribution to the global campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel. If so, it will not be the first time that a very bad book has an outsized impact on public and published opinion."

@JeffreyHerf's sober(ing) look at a reckless piece of pseudo-scholarship by @bartov_omer.
https://t.co/m29pERCuVt

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

This is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They're against certain types of people being crazy rich.

Artists and athletes make sense to them because they've played music and sports and because their success can be explained by "luck" and "talent". Messi's wealth is not offensive to them because they understand Messi is much better at football than they are.

But when it comes to business, the anti-capitalist leftist has no framework for understanding why Jeff Bezos might be super rich since 99% of them have never ever created a product, business or service that was of value to other people. They've never taken entrepreneurial risk. They've never employed people and felt the burden of responsibility that comes with that. They've never pick up a business and given it a play in the way they've picked up a ball or a guitar.

They *literally* don't understand wealth creation. They think there is a fixed amount of money and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly.

It's why they rage at Elon and other successful business leaders. Because they genuinely don't understand why they're wealthy.

Also, and this is just as important, athletes and artists are disproportionately young, attractive, "diverse", left wing etc. Business leaders are "evil" middle aged white men whose success offends the average anti-capitalist leftist because they don't understand a) what it is they do and b) that Elon Musk has the same talent advantage on them as Messi does, it's just harder to measure.

[Yehuda Teitelbaum @chalavyishmael]

The Yevsektsiya were Jews. They blamed Zionists and traditional Jews for alienating Soviet society. They believed that if Jews abandoned religion, nationalism, and every trait the regime found objectionable, Communism would reward them with acceptance.

They helped shut down synagogues, persecuted Hebrew teachers, and denounced fellow Jews as enemies of progress. When they were no longer useful, the Soviet state disbanded the Yevsektsiya. Many of its members were executed during Stalin's purges. Others disappeared into labor camps. Their loyalty bought them nothing.

The Antizionist League of Iraq was made up of Jews as well. Its members insisted that Zionism was the source of hostility toward Iraqi Jews. They argued that if Jews publicly rejected the idea of a Jewish state, suspicion and hatred would disappear. They were wrong. The League itself was dissolved and its leaders imprisoned. The Farhud left hundreds of Jews dead, Jewish homes and businesses were looted and destroyed, and over the following years an ancient community was driven into exile. Nobody stopped to ask whether their victims were Zionists before burning their homes or stabbing them in the streets.

A century ago, Baghdad had one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. Jews made up roughly a quarter of the city's population. Today there are fewer than ten Jews left in all of Iraq. Trying to prove that you are one of the "good Jews" has never altered the outcome.

German Jews were among the most assimilated Jews in the world. They were educated, patriotic, and deeply proud of being German. Many of them fought proudly in WWI. They often looked down on poorer Jews arriving from Eastern Europe. Some convinced themselves that antisemitism was directed only at those less refined than themselves. Even the Association of German National Jews sought accommodation with the Nazi movement and declared its opposition to Zionism. The Nazis outlawed the organization anyway. Its members were deported and murdered alongside the rest of European Jewry.

Today there are fewer Jews in all of Europe than there are Arab citizens of Israel. So much for Europe lecturing Israel about tolerance.

Once a society begins stigmatizing Jews, or even just one category of Jews, the writing is already on the wall. Assimilation has never provided lasting protection. Appeasement has never provided lasting protection. Explaining ourselves politely and hoping to be accepted as the "good ones" has never provided lasting protection.

We are living through a dangerous moment. The United States, and perhaps Argentina, remain among the few places where Jews are not broadly stigmatized. But even that cannot be taken for granted. A 2023 Harvard-Harris poll found that two thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors." Those young people will shape the future of public opinion.

We have no choice but to speak plainly about antizionism.

Because if antizionism were merely opposition to Netanyahu, it would not predate Netanyahu. If it were merely opposition to Israeli policy, it would not predate Israel. Long before 1948, Jews were being massacred for refusing to accept their place as a tolerated minority.

The uncomfortable truth is that antizionism did not emerge in response to Jewish power. It emerged in response to the idea that Jews should possess power at all.

Kind explanations did not save the Jews of Baghdad. Compliance did not save the Jews of Germany. Revolutionary zeal did not save the Jews of the Soviet Union.

Clarity matters. Memory matters. And the refusal to lie about what we are facing matters most of all.

[David Wolpe @RabbiWolpe]

I long ago swore off angry reviews. But a book this packed with historical blunders, bad faith, and ideological toxicity makes restraint dishonorable. https://t.co/Eb521sVLtc

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

Most of what is cited are government contracts. You see the government, which you help run, wanted services and decided his company was best to provide them, which they did at a negotiated price. How on Earth that entitles you to the profit he made providing those services, which you guys wanted and agreed to, is beyond, well anyone especially you and yours.

And the subsidies he got for electric cars were FROM YOUR PARTY because he did WHAT YOU WANTED HIM TO (remember when he was your darling? Nah, you don’t do you?). You don’t get to cry over those either.

“Our money.” Disgusting.

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

And another thing that’s related…

Wealth / income is stupid for another reason and it’s under-appreciated and under-discussed. The super rich are not about to consume (e.g., buy 14% of everything) more than a tiny fraction of their wealth. Consumption inequality is way lower than income or wealth inequality (another way of saying the rich save/invest more). What a rational re-distributionist wants to re-distribute is consumption because they care about the poor and middle class living better. That’s actually harder to do than you think. When you move some wealth from the super-rich to others, and the super-rich don’t change their consumption, because barring gigantic confiscation (don’t give comrade Zuc any ideas) they don’t have to, you don’t just magically get more goods for the whole world to consume. On the other hand, because their MPC is higher, it is far easier to redistribute from say the middle class to the poor (you cut their wealth and they will consume less), which is essentially one big reason why Europe is more regressive than the USA. This is not a nefarious plot it’s just “maths.” Unless you think all “maths” are a nefarious plot.

Oh, I stipulated a “rational re-distributionist” above. What is an irrational re-distributionist? Funny you should ask. It’s one actually not trying to make the poor (and maybe the middle-class) better off, but one just filled with hate who just wants to hurt the rich.

Guess which one the French Socialists and their Stiglitz back-up singer are?

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

When Gabriel Zucman manipulated tax rate stats to show the wealthy paying less than the poor and tried to memory hole his own previously published numbers that undermined this claim, academia cheered him on because they liked his political narrative and gave him the Clark Medal.

When Kevin Kruse plagiarized multiple passages in his published works over the past two decades, academia circled the wagons around him, attacked the person who discovered it (i.e. me) as "politically motivated," and dismissed overwhelming evidence as "accidental copying and pasting."

When Quinn Slobodian got caught altering the text of Mises quotations to make them sound racist, academia made him co-editor of the journal where he did it and showered him with prizes.

When Nancy MacLean got caught engaging in wholesale fabrications of evidence (as well as egregious incompetence) in her book about James M. Buchanan, academia made her a finalist for the National Book Award.

When Nikole Hannah-Jones got caught denying and ghost-editing one of her most controversial claims out of the 1619 Project, academia handed her a cushy endowed professorship with full tenure despite her having nonexistent scholarly research outputs and zero teaching experience.

When Michael Bellesiles falsified historical documents to make an anti-second amendment argument as part of his history of gun ownership in America, academia gave him the Bancroft Prize and only rescinded it after the evidence became so overwhelming that they could not deny it anymore.

When Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple scholarly works over her career, academia made her president of Harvard and also tried to circle the wagons until the evidence became so overwhelming that they could not deny it anymore.

Yes, higher ed has a politicization problem and it often shows through in the exceedingly low standards of rigor in many of these fields. But it also manifests in other ways that are much more serious than a simple lack of rigor.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

This "report" is even more bonkers when you realize that Piketty and his pal Zucman routinely manipulate statistics to create the inequality "crisis" they purport to address.

This is akin to pulling the fire alarm so you can put out a nonexistent fire by bulldozing the building.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

The Question Jews Were Never Supposed to Ask https://t.co/aOV6wWtS2i

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

Brett Kavanaugh, a man in his 50s, had been valedictorian of his high school, at Yale College and a star student at Yale Law, had clerked for the Supreme Court, had a top career as an appellate lawyer and federal judge and a pristine reputation, and then a random woman from the town he grew up in claimed he had groped her at a party 35 years earlier when they were in high school.

Kavanaugh didn’t try to argue that the incident was consensual. He didn’t claim he remembered things differently than she did. He immediately stated that he had never even met the accuser. Denying ever meeting the accuser is a much stronger claim than merely denying assaulting her, and much easier to refute. After Kavanaugh made this denial, Christine Blasey-Ford no longer had to prove he had sexually assaulted her to scuttle his nomination, she only had to prove that the two of them had attended a party together at which such an assault might have occurred.

She was unable to do so. She did not know whose house the alleged assault occurred at. None of the people she claimed attended the party corroborated any aspect of her account. Leland Keyser, a friend of Blasey-Ford’s, who the accuser claimed was at the alleged party, said she recalled no such event and had never met Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh produced a detailed calendar he had kept during the summer Blasey-Ford alleged she was assaulted, which included his whereabouts of every weekend night and listing who he was with. Kavanaugh argued that he could alibi himself and provide witnesses for any night Blasey-Ford claimed she might have been at a party with him. Blasey-Ford responded that she did not know the date of her assault and was not entirely certain it even occurred that year. Instead of being seen as persuasive, Kavanaugh’s calendar was mocked in both mainstream and social media because the reason he kept it was for a drinking contest he was having with his friends.

Nearly a decade later, there is still not a single shred of proof or a single witness who will corroborate the claim that Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford were ever in the same room before she testified at his confirmation hearing. Nonetheless, people like Nick Kristof still claim Kavanaugh was “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting this woman.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

A while ago, I watched the infamous 47-minute video documenting the atrocities of October 7th — the one not made publicly available, to protect the privacy of the victims.

The worst part of this video is not what it displays, but who is displaying it: the perpetrators themselves. Gleefully. Sadistically. Unabashedly. Most of the footage was filmed by Hamas terrorists on their GoPro bodycams, some also by ordinary Gazan civilians on their cellphones.

Even the Nazis tried to cover up their atrocities, but Hamas brags about theirs for the entire world to see. The killers are euphoric throughout the massacre, and their relentless, ecstatic cries of "Allahu Akbar" (punctuated by the occasional "Kill the Jew!") are simply nauseating.

Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear — one with his eye socket hanging out of his face — asking his brother whether he thinks they're going to die, while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade in their saferoom helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.

Neither will I ever forget the terrorists playing football with a severed head. Or the Thai migrant worker whose head is viciously hacked off with a garden hoe — another "Zionist colonizer" getting what he deserved, right?https://t.co/JvfJEtk8LA
Or the throngs of Gazans crowding around pickup trucks loaded with the mutilated corpses of Jewish women, filming and spitting on the bodies. Or the woman in Kibbutz Mefalsim, crouching and begging in vain for mercy.

There is some evidence of sexual violence in the video — the charred corpse of a young woman with her legs splayed and her genitals exposed — but not much. Apparently even Hamas draws a line somewhere: they are not as proud of raping Jewish women as they are of murdering them. Or, more likely, they simply didn't want to embarrass the delicate sensibilities of their legions of useful idiots in the West.

But yes — there was rape. Not "rape" in scare quotes, as the apologists would have it, but sadistic, murderous sexual violence, documented in a new damning new report by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women's rights NGO. (video summary here: https://t.co/LTTjiO1s7E)

Across its 180 pages, the report describes "a recurring pattern of rape and gang rape; sexual torture; mutilation; targeted shooting to the face, head and genital area; forced nudity; binding and restraint; genital burning; objects inserted into intimate areas; post-mortem sexual humiliation; and execution during or after sexual assault."

And it was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like "take off your pants," "lie down," "spread your legs," and "don't make trouble." I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?

I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.
https://t.co/PoKUfIHeXV

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Israel’s Creation: The Ultimate ‘Decolonisation’ Project https://t.co/ifeYQNMrHk

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

They are not rationalizing violence against Jews because they believe Israel is doing evil; they are accusing Israel of evil in order to rationalize violence against Jews.

The accusation itself becomes psychological license by which ancient resentment can masquerade as virtue.

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

This is correct. The test is simple. Duriing the period between October 7 and the beginning of Israel's military campaign did we see sympathy that was subsequently lost by the ferocity of that campaign? We did not. what we saw - especially on campuses was the celebration or rationalisation of the mass murder, sexualised sadism and torture and hostage taking as legitimate resistance against colonial oppressors irrespective if they were children, Nova festival goers, elderly holocaust survivors, people who had spent lives working for peace. The slaughter excited a thirst for more not less Jew- killing and not the end of occupation but the end of Israel. Then came the world wide avalanche of Jew hatred and Hamas cosplaying by drum- beating white people guilty about their own colonial history and displacing it on to Jews that gets ever more toxically racist; a virulent hatred so intense it of course strenthens not weakens the case for Zionism,

[kochanfe 🇺🇸🇮🇱 @kochanfe]

The @UMich history department should be ashamed.

I'm embarrassed to inhabit the same institution as this empty-headed moral reprobate, and whichever genius decided that it was a good idea for him to deliver a commencement address ought to be mortified.

[David Frum @davidfrum]

Amendment: "Globalize the Intifada" means "It's too difficult and dangerous to kill Jews powerfully protected by Israel's defense forces, so let's try kill them instead where they are half-heartedly protected by unsympathetic governments and weak police."

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

As a kid, I remember being depressed about global desertification and the depletion of fresh water (which accounts for only 2.5% of the planet's water resources, my Greenpeace magazine told me).

I distinctly remember reading about desalination for the first time: just turn seawater into fresh water, problem solved. It was an eye-watering moment of awakening. What the hell—why hadn’t any environmentalist NGO ever told me this?

With human ingenuity, resources are never finite. The only thing standing between us and infinity, as @DavidDeutschOxf taught me years later, is better knowledge.

https://t.co/fNWi04fY3p

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Yes, the people who call themselves 'trans' exist and they deserve exactly the same rights as everyone else, which, fortunately, they already have in the UK. It would rightly be considered discrimination if a person was refused employment, housing or the vote because they identified as trans.

'Trans women are women' is a thought-terminating cliché. Men are not women. That doesn't mean they're not allowed to present themselves however they like, call themselves whatever they like and believe whatever they like about themselves. It means they haven't changed sex.

If we replace the objective, observable characteristic of sex with the unfalsifiable concept of gender identify, women and girls lose, among other things, their right to fair and safe sport and women-only spaces, including changing rooms, prison cells and rape crisis services.

Women and girls are provably more vulnerable to forms of abuse including sexual assault, harassment and voyeurism in mixed-sex spaces. There is no evidence that trans-identified men don't have exactly the same rates of criminal offending as all other men.

Trans people exist. I have no desire for them not to exist; indeed, I wish them safety, happiness and health. However, 'existence' does not, and should not, mean the violation of other people's right to privacy, dignity and freedom of speech, or the reconfiguration of society to indulge a fallacy.

[Izabella Tabarovsky @IzaTabaro]

The skewering is real.

The “Gazologists” in @MattiFriedman's brilliant essay come across as worthy heirs to Soviet Zionology’s literary club.

On Pankaj Mishra: “Mishra seems to want to be Primo Levi, and even if we understand this is impossible—because Levi is gifted and Mishra is not, because Levi is a witness and Mishra is a voyeur, because Levi’s Holocaust was real and Mishra’s is an ideological fantasy—one still finds something authentic and plaintive in this longing.”

On Peter Beinart: “Any worldview that places Jewish malfeasance at its center will draw Jewish adherents who see the advantage of being at the center of something, and on the Gazology shelf we find a sad little volume by Peter Beinart, an American journalist.”

It's satisfying for me to see that today’s antizionist literati are just as incompetent, ungifted, and opportunistic as their Soviet predecessors — and have the same instinct for jumping on any bandwagon that can carry them to the heart of the prevailing zeitgeist.

And since the zeitgeist today is increasingly coalescing around an antizionist version of the “Jewish Question,” that’s where the grifters are. They’re jumping on the “Jewish Question” fad because that’s what opens doors to cultural insider circles, puts you in the running for the most prestigious literary prizes, and boosts your financial prospects.

Most of the “Gazologists” Matti reviews are not the hard-core ideologues: they are downstream from them, busily building their careers as they work ideology into culture.

Matti notes that dismissing them would be a mistake, and he is right. The more social, financial, and professional incentives align with the current “Jewish Question” moment, the more cultural entrepreneurs will line up to jump on the trend, populating the cultural sphere with "instaclassics" of post-Soviet Zionology.

So we should take them seriously — but we should also laugh at them. And that is exactly what Matti's essay does so beautifully. The "Gazologists" and their enablers have earned every word of ridicule he delivers.