Stupidest, Most Presumptive, Deeply Obnoxious Thing I've Ever Read

Normally, I ignore this tripe, but this crap got hundreds of likes, so I need to address its rampant idiocy section by segment, just for my own sanity and to clear my mental palate.

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” is a wonderful political maxim uttered by Lyndon Johnson. Basically, if you’re explaining why your opponent is wrong, you’re still focused on them, which is giving them social oxygen, so I try to just ignore idiots. But sometimes, it is crucial to not let a lie go unchallenged, lest people who see your silence take it as tacit agreement.

Beyond that, nothing enrages me more than someone who presumes to speak for me. Harriet Brown is a professor of journalism at Syracuse University. She is free to express her opinions. I do not claim to speak for her, yet she claims to speak for me. The title of her essay is “The Moral Bewilderment of American Jews.”

That is offensive. All the American Jews I know have zero “moral bewilderment” when it comes to the evil Fakestinians who do nothing but attack Jews and try to destroy Israel. We know right from wrong and know that a society whose members kidnap babies, strangle them with their bare hands and then pummel their bodies with rocks to try to pass off a lie about Israeli bombs being the cause of their death and then holding onto their corpses as bargaining chips is just evil. No “bewilderment” about it.

Feel free to pass this on to @harrietbrown because she has already blocked me on Substack. Maybe she’ll learn something.

The Moral Bewilderment of American Jews

We're going through a seismic shift in our relationship to Israel. And it's painful as hell.

Harriet Brown

Jan 02, 2025

In the wake of October 7^th and the war in Gaza, American Jews, especially those of us who identify as liberal, progressive, peace-loving, are being torn apart by our conflicting and conflicted feelings. We are being forced to reimagine our relationship to Israel, to Judaism, to our own long-held identities. I think this is a necessary and crucial process. It’s also painful, in the way it’s always painful to have to rethink the realities you’ve grown up with and that have shaped your identity.

I’ll take my first break here. What arrogance typical of the Left. No, Harriet, “American Jews” are not being “torn apart by our conflicted and conflicted feelings.” Normal, moral American Jews are being torn asunder by the simultaneous pain, weeping, rage and astonishment at what the savage Fakestinian animals did on October 7th and how much the world so badly hates Jews that it does not care about right and wrong, good and evil.

Harriet Brown

is correct that the vacuous morons devoid of morality “who identify as liberal, progressive and peace-loving” have been “conflicted” because they are idiots who are clearly too stupid to know the Fakestinians would have raped, killed and captured them at the Nova Festival had they been there.

When I started studying Hebrew again five years ago, my feelings about Israel were layered but fairly straightforward: I was glad the state of Israel existed, and I hated some of its policies and politics. I wanted to see it survive and thrive, and I wanted to see an autonomous Palestinian state. I really didn’t understand why this was so fraught, why even famously persuasive leaders like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had failed to bring about peace in the Middle East. I thought both sides were acting like spoiled two-year-olds refusing to share their toys.

The fact that she cites the Jew Hating fuckwit terrorist supporter Jimmy Carter as being “famously persuasive” is like a bad joke. Slick Willy sure was persuasive - he persuaded many women to accept him raping them, but he did jack shit to improve the Middle East.

This asshat “college professor” is then so arrogant as to compare the State of Israel and its seriously terrifying murderous enemies as “acting like spoiled two-year-olds refusing to share their toys.”

Just let that appallingly offensive, condescending and asinine analogy sink in. I don’t know what kind of two-year-old sociopaths this woman knows, but my two-year-olds never gang-raped young women who begged to die while cutting their breasts off mid-rape and eventually shooting them in the head while continuing to fuck the corpse. What does she views as “toys” in this deeply offensive comment? Sovereign territory? The right to live free of terror missiles shot from inside schools, hospitals and mosques?

I did not think someone this stupid could anger me this much. Harriet Brown is beyond an asshole.

On some level I still think that, although that’s obviously a specious perspective that ignores the deep complexities of the מצב, the situation. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to educate myself, and I’ve learned—and continue to learn—a lot about all sides of the issue. One of the people who helped me learn was a Palestinian student I taught two years ago.

Mosab Abu Toha was working on an MFA in poetry at Syracuse University, where I teach journalism. He approached me about taking a class so he could acquire some journalistic storytelling tools. I was selfishly thrilled because I knew he would bring a different perspective into the room, one I had little access to otherwise. And he did.

Some lying shithead Fakestinian terrorist was casing Syracuse University for Hamas while pursuing a beyond useless “Masters” degree in poetry. Did James Joyce get a Masters of Fine Arts in poetry? How about Tennyson? What about Walt Whitman? Did ole Walt approach an idiot professor to “acquire some journalistic storytelling tools” before penning Leaves of Grass?

What does that even mean? I have been relating stories in business and in my personal life for decades. Am I doing it wrong because I did not “acquire some journalistic storytelling tools” from a Journalism Professor at Syracuse University?

All that nonsense aside, she’s all aflutter because a terrorist getting a bullshit degree brought Fakestinian lies, er, “a different perspective” into this nitwit’s classroom.

Mosab was born in northern Gaza in the Al-Shati refugee camp, which had been established in 1948 for Palestinian refugees who were forced out of the newly created state of Israel.

No, this festering pressure point on the Jews created by the Arabs called Al-Shati was established in 1948 to house people who started a war on Israel to kill all the Jews, after the assholes who started the war LOST and were rightfully tossed out of the country they tried to annihilate. Harriet is dumb enough to believe the Fakestinian lies.

He grew up during the First Intifada in this 25-mile-long strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea, a kind of shadow country with no government, no airport, where anything or anyone coming in or out has to go through checkpoints controlled by the Israeli military, the IDF.

Does this clown think the Israelis wanted to spend money and time on a security fence just for kicks? The damned wall and checkpoints were required and were built in response to a string of suicide bombers who crossed into Israel to yell “Allahu Akbar” before blowing themselves up in buses or in pizza parlors full of Jewish moms and kids. In Harriet’s mind, the IDF is doing… what, precisely? Just bugging good-hearted future poetry Masters degree holders as they tried to wander into Israel for poetic inspiration?

It reminds of the phrase, You have got to be seriously over educated to believe something so stupid.

These were the facts I knew.

She just recited a pack of bullshit lies, which she describes as “the facts I knew.”

I have to ask Harriet: Is this a joke? Is this whole ridiculous essay designed to test my patience with absurdity after absurdity?

I learned many other facts from Mosab in our time as professor and student in spring 2023, as he reported and wrote a magazine story about traumatized children in Gaza. He interviewed teachers and families who told stories about Palestinian children struggling with depression, rage, regressive behaviors, children who were too terrified to go to school because schools often functioned as shelters during bombing raids. He shared clinical details and family narratives. His story ended with a comment that despite these grim realities, healing from trauma was still possible. It was a plea: Don’t give up on an entire generation. Don’t give up on the children of Gaza.

So, Mosab works in Pallywood, too! He spoon fed one more clueless American academic massive heaps of lies which she lapped up as a boon to her pointlessly guilty soul.

Five months later, the situation Mosab described seemed almost idyllic compared with the brutal new realities. In those first weeks after October 7^th, I reached out to Mosab a few times, but I understood that communicating with an American Jew might not be high on his priority list. He was busy documenting the new reality, amplifying Palestinian voices, showing the world what was happening on the ground in Gaza. So in January 2024 when he announced a Zoom poetry fundraiser, I signed up. I wanted to show support. As the world grappled with the horrors of the Hamas attack, the hostages, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, I longed for the kind of narrative and moral clarity poetry can bring. I wanted to hear how other people were finding the words to articulate their tangled feelings.

Happy to help. Here is some moral clarity poetry. Ahem.

Fakestinian lying scum
pardon the triple redundancy
so evil
so evil
so ideologically poisonous
every Arab country who lets them in is ruined or exterminates them
gang raped, murdered, tortured and took hostages
on Simchat Torah
when we were celebrating the unimaginable joy of receiving the Torah
They were helped by idiot Western liberals who are too stupid to
breathe and walk at the same time
Red Cross and UNRWA employees helped with the killing
and hostage taking
and refused to provide medical attention or visit hostages held by savage
scum in Gaza
Hashem offered the Torah
to every nation, who
when they heard
and understood the 
613 mitzvahs, declined the burden
until He came to the Jews - 
we Chose to be His Light for the nations
who declined the rigorous honor
they all hate us for.

Mosab had lined up well-known writers like Carolyn Forché, Fanny Howe, and Eileen Myles, reading their own work and the work of William Blake, Ursula Le Guin, Mahmoud Darwish, and others. During the reading, people introduced themselves and commented in the chat box, creating the sense that we’d come together in this space for a shared and sacred purpose: to bear witness, to mourn, to remind ourselves that there was good in humanity as well as evil.

Without context, this paragraph might make sense, but when you realize these assholes came together not to condemn the Fakestinian aggressors, but to blame the victim of terrorist violence, it’s one more pebble in a moral person’s shoe.

I know I wasn’t the only Jew on the Zoom, but I may have been the only person identifying as a Zionist. That dividing line was made absolutely clear. Commenter after commenter wrote out of the shared assumption that Israel was evil—its government, its actions, its existence. The vibe was righteous, justified rage.

Bracelets commemorating three of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Bracelets made by Cheryl Brody Franklin. Photo by Harriet Brown.

So this “person identifying as a Zionist” said nothing while Jew Hating asshole after Jew Hating asshole vilified the State of Israel which had been attacked by medieval Islamist terrorists and was defending its people.

Some “Zionist.” What does Harriet even think that word means?

She tosses in a picture of some bracelets “commemorating three of the Israeli hostages,” as if this artsy crap means anything in a midst of an essay by one more leftwing self-hating Jew.

I stayed quiet. Intellectually, I understood these feelings. If my family had been forced out of its homeland, detained for generations, politically disenfranchised, subjected to ongoing humiliation and trauma, if our very humanity had been violated over and over in so many ways, I would feel the same. For instance: For decades after World War II, many American Jews wouldn’t buy anything manufactured in Germany, wouldn’t visit the country, wouldn’t speak the language.

Harriet, let me correct your rampant misunderstanding by rewriting your sentence to make it accurate.

If my family had waged war on Jews, lost that war, instead of moving somewhere else as millions of people do every year, been held prisoner by my “fellow Arabs” and a corrupt United Nations for generations as a tool of pressure against the Jewish State, politically radicalized to do nothing but kill Jews, subjected to ongoing trauma by my supposed “leaders” who live far away in Doha, if we had abandoned our very humanity over and over by being evil in so many ways, I would be a murdering sociopath who still insisted on dying while trying to kill Jews.

There. That is accurate.

But listening to the poems and scrolling through the comments, I felt a rush of dislocation, an emotional and physical vertigo, the kind of thing you might feel if suddenly each eye began feeding a separate stream of information to your optic nerve and your brain couldn’t combine them into a coherent picture. One eye wept at the images of broken, starving children, terrified adults, bombed-out buildings and bodies. The other blinked at the processional of snapshots from childhood: sun-stroked views of fields and hillsides, a promised land of milk and honey, a nation of kibbutzniks working toward a common, righteous goal. The disjunction felt irreparable.

Whatever. All the harm done in this war is the fault of the Fakestinians. War is unpleasant - that is why you shouldn’t start one you cannot win.

A year later, I’m still bewildered at the ways in which the truths I grew up with have changed. They are—maybe less true is the way to say it. Not wrong, necessarily, though some are; not complete lies, though some feel that way; but only part of a larger whole that was hidden from me before. This bewilderment feels literal, the blind men and the elephant phenomenon, where perceiving only part of the picture leads you to construct something monstrous rather than real. It feels metaphorical, a faulty basis on which to build a worldview. It feels moral, a jumbling of the categories of good and evil, right and wrong, beyond the necessary shifting of nuance and complexity.

This bewilderment has shifted the way I think about myself—a secular, non-religious Jew who believes in equity and justice but not in God. Since childhood I’ve thought about Israel as a land where Jews belong, where Jews have done what needs to be done to protect and empower themselves in a world that has consistently despised us. As an adult I came to understand that Israel has also been, and still is, a homeland for Palestinians as well.

If Harriet does not believe in God, what does she mean by being a “secular, non-religious Jew?” She got the point that Israel is the homeland of the Jews, who spent thousands of years in exile and have come home.

As a (liberal idiot) adult, she also bought the bullshit about the Fakestinians having some kind of tie to the land, which they do not. Even if they had, they have lost all rights by being murdering sociopaths who do nothing but try to kill Jews.

These realities did not and still don’t seem incompatible to me. Uncomfortable, yes; excruciatingly difficult to work out in the details, sure; but possible—absolutely. But in the Middle East of the last 20 years, and especially in this moment, this is no longer true. And many of the people I have respected and loved, on both sides of the issue, no longer want it to be true. I find this unbearable. Or rather I don’t know what mental, emotional, and moral gymnastics I would need to do in order to bear it.

Given the often heinous behaviors of the U.S. government over the last 250 years, I’ve never felt proud of being American; on the contrary, I’ve felt deep shame at the atrocities my country has enacted. How can you rationalize patriotism toward a country that does such unspeakable things? On the other hand, doesn’t every country do heinous things when it’s in their national self-interest? This is not a plea to rationalize but rather an expression of my complete confusion on the issue.

Harriet, pumpkin, your complete confusion rests in believing the Draft Dodger Generation’s lies. What “heinous behaviors of the US government” are you referring to? Mankind’s history has always been mean, brutal and self-interested. The U.S. is almost unique in history in trying to move towards a more ideal state.

Harriet is one more completely ungrateful brat. She’s “never felt proud of being American.” No shit - one more liberal woman who can do nothing but cry, bitch and moan about the literally freest country on earth, the freest that has ever existed. Where, precisely, would she prefer to live?

Growing up, I thought of Israel as my other country, my real homeland. When we stood in school to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I stayed silent. Like other Jewish children in the 1960s, I was raised on stories of the Shoah, the calamity. (I wish I’d also learned about the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe.)

Again, classic Leftist asshole who did not even stand up as a spoiled little shit to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to a country whose soldiers over centuries fought and died for her to have the freedoms she grew up with. What a brat.

The Holocaust in Europe - the deliberate, systematic rounding up, torture and murder of six million Jews along with another six million “undesirables” by the Nazis and their delighted collaborators - has literally zero to do with the Arab armies trying to kill all Jews and shove Israel into the sea.

Maybe no one taught Harriet logic, but I am going to try to give her a crash course here.

Holocaust/Shoah - Jew Haters got together, rounded up Jews and murdered them in their homes, in nations they had lived in for centuries. The Jews did not ask for this to be done to them.

“Nakhba” - The Arabs who had been killing Jews in the Holy Land going back to the 1800s simply because the Arabs hated Jews got together the armies of many nations surrounding the tiny, fledgling state of Israel in 1948 and decided to attack it to kill all the Jews and destroy Israel. The Arabs LOST the war of extermination they initiated and had to flee because, well, they failed at killing all the Jews they wanted to kill. Later, their propagandists came up with this idiotic “catastrophe” lie to sway dumbass Leftist opinion, which in Harriet’s case, worked.

HOW can people like Harriet be this damned stupid to equate the two? It’s mind boggling. Truly.

By the time I was 12 I’d read at least a dozen Holocaust memoirs. I had a plan: If it happened here—and those memoirs seemed to prove that it could—I was heading to Israel, to a place where no one could make us wear yellow stars, keep us out of school, force us into ghettos, starve us, kill us. Where I’d be with other people just like me.

As I got older, I saw Israel as a country that made plenty of mistakes but still stood for values I admired: protection, equity, taking a stand against oppression. I trusted Israel and what it stood for.

At the same time, one of my first thoughts on October 7^th was This is what happens when you treat people so badly for so long. Somewhere inside I must have been holding another view, one I couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate, even to myself.

Fuck you, Harriet Brown. Fuck you for all eternity. Do you blame Jewish university women students who get gang raped “because” they dress saucily and walk past the Muslim boys on campus who then, after being “treated so badly for so long,” decide to get all gang-rapey late on Saturday night?

What an asshole. Sadly, Harriet is typical of the muddled-brain American Left.

I made myself watch raw footage from the attacks, some taken from bodycams worn by Hamas terrorists, some taken on cell phones. It is nothing like the shoot-em-ups you see in movies or even the most violent TV shows. There’s no dramatic music to pace the scene or subtly remind you that this is fiction. There are no tactful jump cuts or lingering close-ups.

This is Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil on full display: Sunlight slants across the faces of young men and women who are being chased, slashed, shot. A stuffed blue dog lies in a pool of congealed blood on the roadway. An officer at the site of the Nova music festival calls “Is anyone alive? Anyone?” He steps over bodies dressed in crop tops and satin pants, flowered dresses smeared with mud and blood.

Talk about misunderstanding Arendt’s “banality of evil.” There is nothing banal about the horrific scenes of death and torture. How could Harriet have watched the most gut-wrenching, horrifying acts of evil and ponder the lack of dramatic music “to pace the scene” and come away thinking that footage is “banal?”

I mean, really, that sounds like a damned sociopath to me. I refuse to look away and have watched hours of footage of this great evil, and it is always stomach-turning, enraging and the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.

Harriet thinks it’s “banal?!” As the kids say, WTF???

Arendt was reporting on the Nuremberg Trials, in which everyone is clean, neatly dressed and giving deadpan testimony about prior acts of pure evil. That weirdly bureaucratic, polite scenario was indeed banal, which made it all the weirder for Arendt who was seeing monsters in tailored suits discuss calmly murdering millions of people without regret or indeed emotion.

Unlike the evil Fakestinians live-streaming their carnage and calling back home to Gaza to celebrate killing Jews.

A teenager runs over to a parked car, swings a machine gun off his back, sprays bullets into another teenager hiding under the car, runs off again. A couple about my age are dragged one at a time from under the table in their safe room, yanked through the smoking ruins of their home into an unspeakable future.

Eventually I make myself stop watching, my stomach roiling with nausea. Over the next weeks and months, I force myself to also click on videos of Israeli bombings and attacks in Gaza. Much of it is official documentation rather than casually recorded snippets, its emphasis on military response rather than individual cruelties. But plenty of that surfaces too: Israeli soldiers kicking bodies off a rooftop in the West Bank, seeming to rape a prisoner in a military prison, ripping head scarfs off Palestinian women, draping bound prisoners in Israeli flags.

It is all sickening, it’s all unacceptable, it all makes me despair for the entire human race.

Well, at least she gets it is not banal. It made me want to rain hellfire down on the evil people who did this - not the “entire human race.”

The first time I heard the term Zionist used as an epithet rather than an adjective, I experienced the kind of shock you might feel on hearing that your beloved grandfather was a pedophile. We can’t be talking about the same thing. Can we? Weeks into the ground war in Gaza, I was still trying to process the events of that Saturday. I understood the Israeli response, though the magnitude and longevity of the attacks, the numbers of civilians who were losing their homes, being injured, dying, appalled me. Even I knew there was no way Israel could destroy Hamas completely. And I was not at all certain it should be trying.

Harriet - the journalism professor - “knew there was no way Israel could destroy Hamas completely.” Fascinating - I’d love to know how this experienced soldier and military strategist “knew” something that many people more experienced and certainly smarter did not “know.”

Jesus, the arrogance of the Left! Always wrong - never in doubt.

I wrote something along those lines to a friend, mourning the Hamas attacks, the fate of the hostages, and also the devastation being wrought in Gaza. (Something about this issue seems to call up Biblical language.) His response was unequivocal: Hamas was evil and it had to be destroyed; Israel needed to respond aggressively.

Listen to your friend, Harriet. He seems to be one person in your life who has his head screwed on properly.

I said but what if Hamas’ attack had grown directly out of the decades of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians? Didn’t that muddy the waters, ethically speaking? Did that call for a different kind of response?

These people are insufferable. She repeats the tired trope of “But if Israel weren’t mean to the poor Fakestinians, the poor Fakestinians wouldn’t react by taking missiles from Iran to shoot at Jewish schools.”

You’ll notice you never hear them say the opposite, which is, “What sovereign nation would put up with thousands of missiles shot at them every year from a hostile terrorist neighbor? If the Fakestinians keep trying to kill Jews, surely they can’t be surprised when the Jews retaliate.”

Her vapidity also obscures the fact that Arabs in the Holy Land have been killing Jews in pogroms since the early 1800s Peasant Revolt, and the Hebron Massacre in 1929 - long before there was a State of Israel. These evil fuckheads just love killing Jews. They killed Jews, they celebrated killing Jews, they taught their kids to kill Jews and now that Jews fight back, they celebrate their dead sons as shahids - martyrs - who die trying to kill Jews.

Enough of these poisoned scum, already.

He said the Palestinians had chosen Hamas as their leadership and now had to pay the price.

Yes, smart man, there. Harriet should listen to him.

OK, I said, but what about the children and families whose lives were being destroyed? What do we do with the moral ambivalence and repulsion we feel right alongside our longing to see Israel survive?

Fuck them all. 80% of Fakestinians polled support the actions of Hamas.

Not one single Fakestinian over 500+ days came forward to release a hostage or tell the IDF where one was. Those well-fed, well-dressed assholes cheered in the streets spitting on the naked raped bodies of Israelis brought back as trophies from October 7th.

Fuck. Them. All.

As for Harriet's “moral ambivalence and revulsion,” I have nothing but scorn. There is and was no “ambivalence” about what the Fakestinians brought down on themselves.

I know I’m not alone in posing these unanswerable questions. Earlier this year, about 80% of the American Jews surveyed by the Jewish Federations of North America said they felt strong emotional bonds to Israel. About two-thirds said they still felt comfortable supporting Israel publicly. (The study was relatively small, though, and I wonder whether the fact that it was done by the Federations skewed the responses.)

This is some great stuff. She acknowledges empirical data, but then instantly filters rational, moral people’s reactions by whining about the “relatively small” study.

But as we experience a kind of collective moral bewilderment, those realities are beginning to shift. Reporters from the NPR program “Code Switch” talked to young American Jews like Eli Klein, 26, who considers themselves pro-Palestinian and also Zionist and who struggles with some of the more extreme positions they hear in their community. “On the one hand, I am not anti-Zionist enough,” they told NPR. “On the other hand, I am too anti-Zionist.”

So Communist Network NPR talks to another Leftist American Idiot Jew asking to be murdered who is “pro-Fakestinian” and thinks he can work harder at being anti-Zionist.

Eli Klein, 26, is simply put, a suicidal idiot. He should go to Gaza wearing his kippah and try to explain how anti-Zionist he is while they are raping and lynching him.

This year even one of my elderly relatives, a longtime supporter of Israel, asked that none of his annual donation to a major Jewish philanthropy go there. “This has to stop,” he said, meaning the West Bank settlements, the bombings in Gaza and Lebanon, the starving children, the relentless militarism of the current government.

Her relative is right. This constant bombardment of Israel and incessant terror attacks on Jews around the world has to stop. The Jew Hating hordes marching in the streets of Canada, (liberal States in) America, Europe and Australia need to be pepper sprayed while the dogs and firehoses are trained on them.

As for Judea, Samaria and Gaza - those are part of Israel and the Fakestinians can die or go away. Enough is more than enough, and asshole Leftist diaspora Jews in America can shut up.

But it goes on. And on. And as it does, those of us who live 5,000 miles away are left wondering how to feel, what to do, how to help.

Part 2 of this post will be published next week.

There you have it, folks - one more clown the Nazis would have shoved into the ovens, worrying herself sick over the modern-day actual Nazis who are the direct cultural and genetic descendants of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the evil imam who instigated the 1929 Hebron Massacre, who later went to work in Berlin for the Nazis during WW2, whose nephew was…. Yasser Arafat.

Some journalist.