“I have had many conversations, as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months now. They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.” Hillary Clinton, MSNBC, Morning Joe, May 9, 2024
I have not forgiven Hillary, or for that matter Bill, for being such a destructive force on the Democratic Party and America.
Without details about all these issues, let’s just say that Hillary is a terrible national politician and leader, who convinced the Democratic Party, against all observation and evidence, that she would be a certain winner in the 2016 election. She didn’t win, and her foreseeable defeat changed America for the much worse.
I have said repeatedly that the best thing for the Democratic Party, for America, and selfishly, for me, would be if Hillary would just go away. Partly so she would stop saying stupid and unhelpful stuff like this. Partly because, as noted, she is responsible for where we are now.
If I were Israeli, and my leader and his braintrust were as incompetent, despicable and crazy as Bibi and his, I would be demonstrating too. Demonstrating to find out why they could not work out a way for the terrorists to finally release the remaining hostages, without literally alienating the entire world and killing tens of thousands of people.
The ongoing demonstrations in Israel had me wondering something that is absurd on its face, but maybe enlightening. Why aren’t there any protests in Gaza? Even if you believe the people in Gaza have nothing to legitimately complain about, you might understand the burdens of their situation.
You know the answer. Protesting against existential threats you can’t control is pointless, when all of your time and life force is used to survive, with a little left over for grief. It might actually get you jailed or killed as an enemy. Which is why others around the world are protesting for you. Contrary to the view that American and global protestors are motivated by some hateful, selfish, naïve, uniformed petulance, they are just doing what the people of Gaza can’t: Saying, shouting “no”.
Hind Rajab, age six, senior kindergarten graduation, killed by tank fire in Gaza
The rapper Macklemore just released the new track Hind’s Hall, about the war in Gaza and the protests.
Macklemore is a hugely popular artist. On Spotify, he has 32 million monthly listeners, making him 128th in the world. His tracks have been streamed 13 billion times.
Eleven years ago, his track Same Love celebrated the right of relationships between all people, at a time when same-sex marriage was not yet fully allowed or protected in America. It was a hit and has become an anthem.
His new track about the Gaza war is another powerful statement.
Hamilton Hall/Hind’s Hall, Columbia University
Artists in various media have taken on the war in Gaza. Slowly, tentatively, because many are concerned about being dropped or rejected. Musical artists have been the slowest. Macklemore, who has built a career independent of record labels, laments:
Yet the music industry’s quiet, complicit in their platform of silence What happened to the artist? What do you got to say? If I was on a label, you could drop me today I’d be fine with it ’cause the heart fed my page
Macklemore isn’t a hater, except of thoughtless war and repression. The millions who will stream this track (all streaming proceeds going to UNRWA) are not haters, except of thoughtless war and repression. It is notable that Spotify, in today’s New Music Friday playlist, doesn’t include Hind’s Hall.
Thank you Macklemore. Thank you all artists—writers, filmmakers, musicians—who have stood up and those who haven’t yet but will.
The U.S. and the Holocaust explores America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the 20th century. It dispels competing myths that Americans either were ignorant of the unspeakable persecution that Jews and other targeted minorities faced in Europe or that they looked on with callous indifference. The film tackles a range of questions that remain essential to our society today, including how racism influences policies related to immigration and refugees as well as how governments and people respond to the rise of authoritarian states that manipulate history and facts to consolidate power.
We consider it here and now because this is the week set aside to remember the Holocaust. It is the week that Biden remembers to talk about the Holocaust and about the antisemitism that drove it. He did not talk about Gaza.
What is missing, and what The U.S. and the Holocaust documents, is the inconvenient truth that America was ambivalent and late responding to the horror. Powerful politicians didn’t want to address it, because they didn’t like Jews, blacks, and anyone who wasn’t a white, right-thinking American. Journalists who tried to chronicle Germany’s program of hate were thrown out of that country.
There is a confusing conflation about Gaza. When those who were and are the victims of hate, then and now, respond to yet another massacre of hate on October 7, isn’t that hate—that antisemitism—the central and overriding issue, in Palestine and America? Doesn’t it push any other related horror to the margin and justify it?
That’s why The U.S. and the Holocaust is so important. For various reasons, we didn’t do more sooner, but we could have. For various reasons today in Gaza, we could do more, but we haven’t. Are those failures, then and now, missed opportunities for better and more humane outcomes? Or are those failures complicity?
Mehdi Hasan was the most dynamic journalist on MSNBC. While he never had an everyday slot, his weekend show was always smart, iconoclastic, entertaining and honest. He did not suffer fakers and fools. This January, MSNBC took away the show, essentially demoting him. He resigned.
He is back, as founder of new media platform Zeteo:
How many times have you complained about the ‘mainstream media’? About corporate control or censorship? About softball interview questions or lazy ‘both sides’ coverage?
Welcome to Zeteo, where independent and unfiltered journalism is making its comeback. Founded by award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and all-round troublemaker Mehdi Hasan, Zeteo – which comes from the ancient Greek word for ‘seeking out’ and ‘striving’ – is a new media organization that seeks answers for the questions that really matter, while always striving for the truth.
Through hard-hitting interviews, engaging podcasts and newsletters, and compelling op-eds and essays from an array of high-profile contributors – reporters, authors, celebrities, comedians and more – we will speak truth to power… and have some fun along the way. A broad range of voices you may not always agree with, but who bring important viewpoints to the conversation.
Zeteo is not just a media company; it’s a movement for media accountability. So join us as we challenge the powerful, change the narrative, and champion good ol’ fashioned adversarial journalism.
Please check out Zeteo and if you like it, consider subscribing. We need it now more than ever.
On May 4 I published a post about the National Guard shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.
Later that day, on May 4, I was tidying up a large media cabinet, looking for extra space. The cabinet contains CDs, DVDs, books, and an assortment of other items. I found a small pile of stuff taking up space, a pile I hadn’t looked at in years. I pulled out the pile and unstacked it. There between the CDs was a little brochure.
It was a brochure from a long-ago visit to the May 4 Visitors Center at Kent State University (see above).
I can’t explain it. Actually, I can come up with different explanations, none of which I can be certain of. While I haven’t calculated the odds of this happening by chance, they are astronomical. But things happen by chance. On the other hand, forces are at work that we can’t fully know, no matter how smart we claim to be. As Hamlet said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophie [science].”
There is magic in the universe. Believing in it makes us bigger and better.
“You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue. You name it. Get rid of the war there will be another one.”
Three days later, on May 4, 1970, the National Guard shot and killed four and wounded nine at Kent State University in Ohio.
Nixon won election in 1968 on a platform of law and order. He had no use for student protests. But even those Americans who still supported the Vietnam War and agreed that student protestors were “bums” were troubled. So Nixon ordered a Commission on Campus Unrest. The Commission, under the leadership of former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, investigated and issued a 537-page report. It included a special section on Kent State, containing a detailed day-by-day, minute-by-minute description, leading up to this moment:
Major Jones said he first heard an explosion which he thought was a firecracker. As he turned to his left, he heard another explosion which he knew to be an M-1 rifle shot. As he turned to his right, toward Taylor Hall, he said he saw guardsmen kneeling (photographs show some crouching) and bringing their rifles to their shoulders. He heard another M-1 shot, and then a volley of them. He yelled, “Cease fire!” several times, and rushed down the line shoving rifle barrels up and away from the crowd. He hit several guardsmen on their helmets with his swagger stick to stop them from firing.
General Canterbury stated that he first heard a single shot, which he thought was fired from some distance away on his left and which in his opinion did not come from a military weapon. Immediately afterward, he heard a volley of M-1 fire · from his right, the Taylor Hall end of the line. The Guard’s fie was directed away from the direction from which Canterbury thought the initial, nonmilitary shot came. His first reaction, like that of Fassinger and Jones, was to stop the firing.
Canterbury, Fassinger, and Jones–the three ranking officers on the hill–all said no order to fire was given. Twenty-eight guardsmen have acknowledged firing from Blanket Hill. Of these, 25 fired 55 shots from rifles, two fired five shots from .45 caliber pistols, and one fired a single blast from a shotgun. Sound tracks indicate that the firing of these 61 shots lasted approximately 13 seconds. The time of the shooting was approximately 12:25 p.m.
Four persons were killed and nine were wounded.
A map from the report:
Any lessons for today and beyond?
Whenever a university or a government decides to enforce its standard of order against gatherings and protests, that enforcement should be pursued carefully and judiciously, if at all. Things can and will happen when those forces are let loose. The choice of enforcement should be pursued only if there are no other options, which there almost always are. Emotions run high on all sides. Whenever weapons are officially introduced—from batons to rubber bullets to tear gas to guns and rifles—they can easily be used indiscriminately. And fatally.
Few things are more tragically ironic than anti-war protestors being injured or killed. It doesn’t have to be.
The primary point of the protests is bringing attention to the continuing horrors inflicted on Gaza. Most politicians of both parties and many media find this point uncomfortable and inconvenient for their purposes. So they would rather feature the protests themselves. Politicians believe too much attention to the underlying situation distracts from a law-and-order position or from support of Israel. Media believe that the protests are appropriately showy and newsworthy. A few injured or mistreated protestors make a good story. Thousands of dead, injured and mistreated don’t make for must-see TV and demand context.
Don’t forget that the primary point of the protests is Gaza. The protests have not surprisingly been mishandled by universities and government, and they will be. Free speech has been stifled, and it will be. These are important issues. But the people of Gaza, the families of the dead, injured, starving and displaced don’t care. They just want people to pay attention and act to help them.
When students protested the U.S. war in Vietnam, our elders told us, condescendingly, that we were too young to understand the big picture, but we would when we were older. (Understanding wasn’t helped by chronic government lies, but that’s another story.) It may seem, they said, that supporting a corrupt and autocratic regime in South Vietnam, conducting a war for them and sending our young men to kill and die, is not a good idea. But trust us, they said, it is what the people of Vietnam want, what the world needs, and it is for the best. Someday you’ll understand.
The war in Gaza is complicated. But something seems simple to the protestors. There is a level of aggression against innocent people that exceeds appropriate response, that is not justified, and that should not be enabled and supported. There is a lifetime to learn that relativism, equivocation and compromise have their place. Young as the protestors are, they know that Gaza is not it.
Above is a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. being arrested in Atlanta for taking part in a sit-in. Below is an excerpt from Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he was being imprisoned for taking part in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation.
You will not hear much mention of Dr. King from those cracking down on campus protests these days. It is inconvenient, because they would then have to make some fine distinctions between demonstrating for civil rights and demonstrating for human rights. Silence combined with force is easier.
It should not be necessary to explain the role of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience in American and world history. But apparently, the current thinking is that protesting this way proves that your cause is unworthy and wrongheaded. It is implied that if protestors don’t remove their campus encampments by a deadline, they are obviously illegitimate. Just as the civil rights movement was unworthy, wrongheaded and illegitimate to some.
From Letter from a Birmingham Jail
In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.
Bob Schwartz 