If you are expecting to read my usual Left Coast column, I tell you now that you will be disappointed. I write, today, from a place of horror—about the massacre unleashed against civilians in Israel this past week, and about the morally cretinous bloodlust reaction some who fashion themselves as bei...
I'm sorry, but this is like asking me to sympathize with Nazis when Warsaw rose up. I don't care how many Nazi kids are killed, or how many Nazi civilians die. The simple answer is do not be a genocidal apartheid ethnostate and do not support a genocidal apartheid ethnostate.
Israel sacrificed its moral support when it asked us to look away during its atrocities.
EDIT: Nazi kids are not a thing. I apologize. I was way too hasty. I'm leaving it up as a reminder for others to keep a cooler head.
Israel chose to put those kids in harm's way by inciting the conflict, but you should still care that they died. They didn't ask to be born into this mess and had no choice in becoming collateral damage. Take a break from gazing into the abyss.
War is terrible and the loss of any human life is a tragic and untenable waste but, as an American, children getting gunned down is just a Tuesday. I'm more concerned with the actions the deaths of these particular children will precipitate. Any sort of overly performative grief will only play into that
First, you aren't wrong and I want to complement you on you seeing the human lives here. It is important!
To give a reply, the only way I can grieve and denounce the violence is by pointedly withholding that grief precisely because that grief is weaponized by Israel to commit more atrocities. This removes the shield Israel uses and exposes them to their own horror.
To put it another way, I will also withhold support for an abuser because an abuser will use that as a means of defending and continuing their actions. Keeping that support from them, however objectively legitimate that support is, forces them to confront their own actions.
Yeah, well if I was a Soviet soldier who'd had his family starved to death for generalplan ost and then liberated a death camp I would struggle to not hold every adult German personally culpable.
Shocking that they had as much appetite for mercy as they did. And I'm glad they did, but I still wonder how they softened their hearts.