Brad begins by laying out the current state of conflict in Israel-Palestine: the ceasefire is over; Israel is threatening to displace millions in southern Gaza; 15,000 Palestinians have died; Netanyahu is talking about ending the Palestinian territory . . .
Dan then provides three ways that we are duped into thinking and talking about the conflict in reductive and binary frameworks - from zero sum arguments, to either/or thinking, to blame roulette.
Brad provides examples of each of these - the resolution in the House that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism; comments from the Biden administration on why it won't call for a ceasefire or put conditions on US aid to Israel; comments from college presidents about hate speech.
In the final segment, Brad examines how Biden's handling of the issue has led to calls to abandon him in 2024 from Muslim Americans. He also looks at data showing young people are losing enthusiasm for voting because of this issue.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And we were just talking, Brad, this trade-off that you have a child, which means you don't sleep, and that's like the rough part of having kids.
But you're also not grading now, and end-of-semester grading, and I am.
So, I don't know.
Toss a coin, but I'm pretty sure the kid is more work than grading, having done exactly what you're doing in the past.
No, I think it is.
I mean, yeah, I have a 10-week-old.
Overall, yes, I think there is no contest.
However, I will say I did look up the other day In my fatigue and my lack of sleep and my just total kind of, you know, melted coping brain and thought, you know, I'm not grading.
There are not 50 or 100.
Final projects waiting for me.
So I will say, it is a thing.
And for all of you teachers and professors and others out there, you know this time of year, it hurts.
It's a hard time of year.
So good luck grading.
There's a great meme going around that says, if you want your grading to be done, you actually have to grade.
So I don't know how you do it, Dan.
That's my problem.
I haven't graded in like 12 years.
I just give all my students fees.
It's fine.
I'm like, yeah.
Just don't tell the accreditors.
I sit down and I'm like, hey, if you grade five of these, you get to go get like a snack or you get to make coffee.
I'm a total self-reward person.
Like, yeah, like you set up the little things.
Do you ever, or the things you shouldn't do, like you've got the students who you know are just going to knock it out of the park.
And so you, you kind of save them to the end.
Cause if you do them first and yeah.
Well, but then it turns into like, I graded one, so now I get cookies, or I graded a half of one, so now I'll take a three-hour nap.
Anyway, all right.
All right, friends.
So today, there is a lot going on, and this is one of those days where I'm not going to lie.
I thought to myself, we really need to do more than an hour on a Friday, and I don't know if that will ever happen.
Dan is already looking at me like, what?
What did you just say?
But we could talk about the fact that Trump made dictator comments this week.
We could talk about fake electors in Nevada being being charged.
We could talk about Hunter Biden and tax evasion.
We could talk about Mike Johnson claiming that this is a Moses moment.
We could talk about just.
A litany of things.
I'm going to tell you right now, we're going to talk today almost exclusively about issues surrounding Israel and Palestine, about what's happening there, but also what's happening with US aid to the region.
To some comments and phenomena that have appeared on U.S.
soil this week in terms of politicians, U.S.
presidents, excuse me, college presidents.
I want to talk about Biden and Biden's losing support of Muslim Americans, of young people, and so on.
So that's all on the table.
Dan, I want to give just a minute of a little bit of like What's happening right now.
And then I'm going to throw it to you to give us a kind of conceptual analytical framework to guide today.
And I'll jump in at various points as you do that.
So let me start by just saying we are now at a point where the ceasefire has ended.
Hostages have been released.
And there's continued pressure from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to make sure that Israel's military operations in southern Gaza are protecting civilians.
However, there is very little indication that that is happening.
Civilian aid and civilian safety are collapsing.
And so if you think that that is just a sort of subjective opinion or just me kind of giving what I think, I will refer you to the Secretary General of the United Nations, who this week invoked Article 99.
Which is a huge deal.
It's the first time it's been done, I believe, since 1989.
And it really is used only when the Secretary General believes that a sense of peace and order on an international scale have been threatened.
I'll just read you like a sentence or two of the letter that he wrote on January 6th.
I am writing under Article 99 of the United Nations Charter to bring the attention of the Security Council a matter which, in my opinion, may aggravate existing threats to the maintenance of international peace and security.
More than eight weeks of hostilities in Gaza and Israel have created appalling human suffering, physical destruction, and collective trauma across Israel and the occupied Palestinian Authority.
There is a meeting today, I believe, Dan, Friday, of the UN Security Council about this very matter.
And so, we do have a situation.
And we've talked about this, Dan, over the last six, seven weeks on this show.
We have mentioned it, we have commented on it, but we will just say again, today, in an extended analysis of this, that I'm speaking for myself now.
That there have been 15,000 Palestinians killed since what happened in October, and there is indiscriminate bombing.
There is seemingly a ignoring of international law when it comes to warfare and the rules of engagement.
All of that to say, at this point we have, and y'all can go listen to the archives, please listen to the last five or six weeks of the show before you email me.
What happened with Hamas attacks on Israelis was horrific, as we have said maybe 10 times already.
What is happening now is truly a humanitarian crisis.
And it's one that I think what we want to get into today, among other things, It's tied up with American aid to Israel and the types of conditions or lack of conditions it puts on that aid.
It ties into calls for ceasefire and Biden not wanting to call for a ceasefire.
It plays into the Biden administration wanting to support Israel seemingly in ways that are, I'll just use the word indiscriminate, and yet also wanting to say that Humanitarian aid is being pushed to Gaza in ways that are going to be game-changing.
We'll get into all of that, but that is where we stand right now.
And so, Dan, I want to throw it to you because there's a lot happening here in this country regarding this issue with politicians and college presidents.
And I think you have some kind of four concepts or four ways that we can think about these issues that might be helpful and might at least illuminate the pitfalls that people often fall into when they are trying to think about supporting occupied Palestine and what appears to be an attempted genocide of Palestinian people, the displacement of millions of Palestinians in accordance with or simultaneous with or taking mind of the 1,200
the displacement of millions of Palestinians in accordance with or simultaneous with or taking mind of the 1,200 Israelis that were killed on October 7, the rising anti-Semitism in this country and other places, and so on and So Dan, I'll throw it to you to help us disentangle some of these things conceptually.
Yeah, well, one of the things that makes me think of when you talk about the Biden administration response is, like, everybody has seen, or maybe you know, that parent who's, like, always telling their kid to stop doing something, but they never, like, actually do anything to stop the kid from doing it.
And that's, I feel like, the Biden administration often, like, you know, you've got Blinken and others who make these statements about what their expectations are and so forth, but there's nothing much that seems to be happening to, like, Force those through, right?
And I think that's something we'll come back to.
Yeah, so, you know, you and I talked, I know everybody listening to this has been talking to people in their lives about Israel-Palestine.
I have students who ask about this, colleagues who ask about this.
It came up at the conference I was at, you know, a couple years, a couple years ago, a couple weeks ago, and things like that.
And one of the things that I was thinking about this week is that I feel like it has become almost impossible to sort of meaningfully Or productively discuss it, because there are lots of cross-cutting issues.
I know I've gotten comments from folks, I think you probably have too, wanting us to do more, or saying we didn't do enough.
No matter where you are on the topic, somebody's not going to like where you are, and that kind of creates a pressure.
So I've been giving some thought to this, and I'm something of a slow processor.
I have to have time to kind of work through stuff, and I'm still learning, but I figured out a while back that I'm often better if I don't try to share my opinion on things before I actually kind of know what I think, than waiting until I actually do know what I think.
I get myself in less trouble.
So I've been thinking about this this week, and so what I really was thinking about is I think there are sort of four kind of fallacies.
That people fall into in trying to engage on issues of Israel-Palestine.
And these are issues, I think, No way we're going to have enough examples.
Like, you could do endless examples of all of these, right?
But they don't just map on to right or left.
They don't just map on to, like, religious Americans versus secular Americans.
They don't just map on to what kind of religion somebody is a part of, if they are a part of one.
They really cut across these, but I think some play out more than others.
And what I wanted to think about was These fallacies, and we're going to look at these.
I think you've got some examples that will illustrate some of these.
I've got some examples that will illustrate some of these.
But the first one is this.
I'm just going to dive into the first one.
I mentioned this a few episodes back, probably maybe the first time that we talked about this, going back to, you know, sort of that period in October, early November, whenever that was.
But the first one, and this has come up a lot with students this week, is the fallacy of conflating explanation with justification, right?
So what you can get on this is the kind of notion that if we explain why something happens, why a group does what it does, that that makes it okay that they did that, right?
That it justifies their actions.
And I see this sort of pervading a lot of the discussions about Israel-Palestine from a number of different ways, right?
So, I think all of us can understand, I think we should be able to, but I hear people say, why would anybody support Hamas?
Why would anybody support movements like this?
Well, you have to go back to a history of A settler colonial state and the displacement of Palestinians and the wars with Israel and occupied territory, all of that history, the history piece.
You have the ways that Israel has treated and the policies they've enacted against the Palestinians for decades, right at this point.
You have, I think, the hardening of those over time as Israel has moved further to the right politically, right?
I've noted this before.
There are parts of the governing coalition in Israel now that the U.S., right, and even Republicans in the U.S.
used to be very critical of and say it would be a terrible idea to have these people in power, and they are now part of the governing coalition.
So as Israeli politics have moved further to the right, their policies toward the Palestinians have become harsher.
You have basically the withdrawing of any kind of notion of a two-state solution All of that kind of stuff, right?
So it is completely understandable in situations like that why people cleave to movements that are opposed to Israel and Israel's policies, right?
Whether that would have been the Palestine Liberation Organization, whether that would have been Hamas, whatever.
You also have the fact that a lot of these groups do things to like help people, right?
They don't just do violent things, they do things like they provide food and welfare services and you have this... people have seen the maps about the population density in these occupied areas and lack of resources and so forth they provide.
So all that is to say We shouldn't be surprised when people cleave to all kinds of movements that promise to do something about what they're experiencing, that promise to help them, that promise to provide them with hope and so forth.
Okay?
That doesn't justify the actions that Hamas undertook in Israel.
And the reason I say that is this, I have seen people who I think are afraid to be critical of the actions that Hamas took because they think that this somehow means that They can't, you know, hold on to all of those oppositions to Israeli policies and so forth, right?
I have also seen, I've experienced plenty of people who say to me, well, why in the world would anybody support Hamas?
And I tell that story I just told.
I tell them things that they often didn't know about the formation of Israel and how, you know, it displaced lots of Palestinians and all of that stuff that a lot of our listeners know.
And they let me know that they know it, that you know, and they don't hear that.
And then they immediately say, oh, so I guess you don't have any problem.
With killing civilians and children and women, and of course I do, right?
It's not a justification.
If we want to cool the temperature down and look at another illustration of this, I taught a class this semester.
The class just ended, but it's just a global history class, so you talk about World War II, and it's got a section on why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, right?
And I tell my students, when I grew up, I don't think I ever heard any explanation of why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Strategic interests, military interests, the ideology, all that stuff.
Does it mean that I think it was cool, good, justified, whatever, that there was a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?
No, I don't.
Osama bin Laden gave reasons, I don't believe them, but he gave them for why they attacked the World Trade Center when they did.
I can explain the rationale.
Does it mean I accept it or think it's justified?
No.
So I think that's the first fallacy, and we have to be able to analyze something.
We have to be able to look at a situation and say, why did they do this?
Or what reasons did they give?
Or if somebody felt justified in doing something, why?
Whether I accept the justification or not.
I think this is the first fallacy, is that if we try to understand something, we're somehow justifying it.
Whether that is Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, because we'll get that too.
People will talk about, you know, the Arab neighbors who've talked about wanting to push Israel into the sea, and obviously the history coming out of the Holocaust, and the attempt to genocide of the Jewish people, and all of that background that goes into that.
That is all there.
Understanding that, does that mean that we have to think that everything that a particular state does is justified?
I don't think it does.
So that's the first fallacy and just a really basic conceptual distinction that to explain something, to try to understand it, which is something that I think you and I have an interest in doing, right?
That's part of why we do the things that we do, is not to justify.
So, I'll throw it over to you.
Obviously, I've got three more of these, but that's the first one, is this notion of the fallacy of linking or conflating explanation of something for justification of something.
So, we've talked about this before, and I'll say again that I think what happens when you fall into the trap you're talking about, that if I try to understand, then I am thereby justifying.
That what accompanies that trap is binary thinking, something we've talked about on this show a million times.
So what it means is that if you think that trying to understand means that you are thereby justifying, you are probably going to be trapped in a, it's either this or that.
That if you are willing to, you know, talk about What happened in terms of 1200 Israelis losing their lives in an attack, hostages being taken, then you obviously don't care about the Palestinian people in any way, right?
Or if you are calling for a ceasefire, if you're calling for the stopping of indiscriminate bombing in Palestine, if you are calling for A way forward for autonomy and self-determination for Palestinian people.
You're clearly anti-semitic and you're clear or you just clearly are for Hamas.
I guess that's what you're saying.
And again, right, you see what happens there?
It's if you fall into the one trap, you're probably going to be trapped into binary thinking as well.
It's a forced choice, right?
That's what you're describing, that binary thinking.
You've got either this Or that.
To give the humorous example, it's Stephen Colbert, when he used to interview people, he'd be like, he'd get some Democrat, he'd be like, so George W. Bush, great president or the greatest president, right?
And of course, they don't want either option, but that's what it does, right?
It forces you into a binary, like you're describing, where you have to choose a choice, neither one of which is really the choice.
So I want to give you just two examples about this, Dan.
One is, there are a lot of pro-Palestine rallies happening.
And people ask me, are you pro-Palestine?
And when I say yes, what I mean is I'm pro-Palestine in the sense that A, no one ever, anywhere should experience an inhumane, indiscriminate mode of warfare that attacks civilians and women and children and people without any consideration, hospitals and so on and so forth.
Right, for self-determination and autonomy and a way forward that says this is not an occupied territory.
This is not a shadow nation or state.
This is a place where Palestinian people have the opportunity, right, to assert for themselves their right to govern, their right to livelihoods and so on.
However, I'm not going to lie.
Right?
There's also this, this like inhibition in me.
Anytime somebody says, are you pro Palestine?
Because let me just take it out of Palestine, Israel.
If somebody was like, hey, are you pro France?
I'd be like, well, um, I mean, what, well, I, what, can we get some coffee?
What does that mean?
I don't, what does it, what do you mean?
Because like, are you talking about like France versus Germany's occupying attempt in World War II?
Then yeah, I am.
Are you talking about France's colonial history in Africa?
No, I'm not.
Are you talking about France's approach, conceptually at least and philosophically, to laicite and secularism and a government that's not bound by religion?
Yes.
You're talking about what I take to be many Islamophobic policies in France that really marginalize Muslim people?
No.
You see what I'm saying, Dan?
It's like, if you make me just be pro-France, I'm like, I'm just looking at you like, I'm not going to, right?
So am I pro-Palestine?
Here I am on our podcast saying, yes, when that means autonomy, self-determination, the right to determine your government, and the freedom in this moment.
From indiscriminate bombing, from attempted genocide, from a war, from a state that is being funded by our government and others with, you know, the kinds of weapons that can lead to the destruction of an entire people or displacement of entire people, then yes, I am, you know.
But Whenever somebody asks me, like, are you pro this?
What kicks in for me is this forced choice and I'm like, I don't want to be in a forced choice where I'm either for that or against that.
I want to be in a situation where I can actually articulate what I am for in a way that attends to detail and complexity without falling into the traps of either or thinking plus the kind of explanation means justification that you talked about here.
I have another one, but I'm going to save it.
It's going to come up.
We're going to run out of time, and I feel like I'm going to get moving.
So give us number two.
What is the second principle?
The second one, and this links right into what you're talking about with binary thinking, right?
And these are all related, right?
If people wanted to do like a map of these different fallacies, there's a lot of overlap, right?
But I think this ties right in.
I would call it the sort of the zero-sum game fallacy, and the way that this one works is basically that says, it's almost like it imagines that there's a finite amount of condemnation that we can assign, and that if we assign it to one actor, or one action, or one organization, it somehow means we have to like not condemn another one.
The metaphor of balancing comes in here a lot, and I think that it's like this notion that there's something that has to be balanced.
And you see this all the time, for example, with just blanket support for Israel, right?
The notion that I support Israel, therefore, if I were to condemn anything that Israel does, it means that somehow I'm not supporting Israel anymore, right?
It's exactly the binary thinking that you're talking about, right?
But we have also seen it, so I want to condemn that, right?
Somebody can say, I support, you talk about autonomy and all of that, I support the right of Israel to exist.
I support the right of the state of Israel to be autonomous and self-directing and so forth as every nation state should be.
Absolutely.
Cool.
You can also oppose the policies of the State of Israel to, say, the Palestinians, right?
But I think that there's a fallacy people fall into that if I criticize them on that, I somehow can't support them over here, right?
It's like there's only so much support or condemnation that we can have, and we have to sort of balance that out.
And this is one that cuts, I think, across the ideological spectrum in different ways.
It takes shape in different ways, but it's the same fallacy.
It's the same logic.
It's the same flaw that forces us into that binary thinking that you're describing.
And it was on full display this week in a couple really problematic ways.
One was the Democratic Representative Jayapal, right, was in an interview on CNN with Dana Bash.
And Dana Bash pressed her to condemn Hamas's use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, right?
Now, real discussions to be had about, like, sort of why that question was asked then and what the aim of it is and, you know, so on and so forth, right?
Here for that, we don't have time, but that's a real question.
But it was disappointing because she flubbed the question badly, in my view, right?
And what she did, Bash accused her and some progressives of being quote downright silent on the issue.
She pushes back and appealed to the fact that they quote always talk about the impact of war on women in particular and cites work that she did with like during the Iraq war and so forth.
But when she was pressed on whether this had explicitly included Hamas this fall, right, as this was going on, she fell into the fallacy trap, right?
And what she ended up saying was, or sort of suggesting, that condemnations of sexual violence against women as an act of war by Hamas needed to be balanced by, or sort of brought up with, an understanding of Israeli violations of humanitarian law in the conflict, right?
Now, let me be really clear about this.
I'm absolutely with you and agree everything that you said and summarized so effectively about what appear to be, to me as a non-specialist, violations of international law and humanitarian law in the way that Israel's conducting operations in Gaza.
Cool.
I am also going to unequivocally condemn the use of sexual violence as an act of war anywhere it happens, including Hamas, in October, November, right?
Well, and I think we can both say sexual violence anywhere, anytime, anyplace.
Period.
That's one of those moments where you're like, there is no context for sexual violence.
Yeah.
Sexual violence meaning without consent, in the form of assault, in the form of, right, I'm not talking about two adults engaging in some sort of, right, I'm talking about, right, okay.
Yeah, and explicitly as a form of warfare and torture in this case, right?
So, I condemn both of those things.
She issued a statement later kind of walking that back and trying to say that she condemns him unequivocally.
But what people who listen to It's in the Code, you know that for me the rhetoric matters, right?
Rhetoric tells us oftentimes what we're feeling, what we're thinking.
It tells us the sort of social codes that are circulating that we may not even be aware of.
What I think that that does is it gives voice to or expression to that sense that if I condemn Hamas on this, I somehow can't be critical of what Israel does, right?
The either-or.
There's only so much condemnation to go around, and if I want to condemn violations of humanitarian law from Israel, I have to kind of pull back or be silent on some of the violence that occurred by Hamas.
And what I'm saying is we have to reject that fallacy.
We have to reject that option.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that is terrible enough that there is plenty of condemnation to go around, right?
We can condemn, we should condemn, in my view, human rights violations by Israel in the way that they're conducting this, right?
And I'm with you, watching what the UN says, the data that they have, the things that they put out.
I'm also, as you say, going to unequivocally condemn sexual violence.
You had a similar thing, I was going to touch on this briefly, where you had the presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania and MIT sort of hauled in in front of Congress, in front of the House.
These people are paid a lot and they have like PR people and stuff, and I don't know if they didn't do coaching or what, but they walked into a trap when they were asked Would, if a student on your campus or somebody advocated for the genocide of Jewish people, okay, let me pause and just say I've not heard of that happening on college campuses, okay?
Would your policies against harassment and bullying and so forth protect those?
And all three of them kind of hemmed and hawed and wouldn't just come out and say yes, right?
And then they had to issue statements later.
The answer to that is really easy.
It is free speech is protected unless you threaten individuals or groups with violence, and then it's not.
We talk about this with Trump all the time.
What do I think it shows?
Again, I think it shows that reluctance to just come out and condemn something, because I think there's a concern, and this is that fallacy at work, that, well, if we condemn anti-Semitic speech over here, does it mean that we can't also be critical of Israel's policies over here, right?
And I think that's what enables these really, really problematic links between In some cases, pro-Palestinian positions and people who do use that as a license for anti-Semitism, right?
So, that's the second sort of fallacy I think is there, is this notion that, you know, it's like they're buckets.
You've got two buckets and you can only pour so much condemnation into one or the other, you have to balance them.
Instead of being able to say, no, we're going to call out moral condemnation when and as it should be called out, And that can be all over the political spectrum, all over the religious or ideological spectrum.
Yeah.
A couple examples I want to give and I want to touch on everything you just said.
Let's take a break and then we'll come back and we'll just continue this discussion.
Be right back.
All right, so Dan, I think that we are trained to do the two buckets thing, the zero sum thing.
And I think we're trained in a number of ways.
One of them is just internet culture.
So I don't want to be somebody who brings up a lot of sports on this show just all the time for a lot of reasons.
But if you watch sports, and it doesn't matter what sport, you can watch soccer, you can watch football, you can watch fencing, you can watch rugby, whatever it may be.
There's inevitably going to be like a conflict where, you know, maybe it's two players get in a fight, maybe it's a referee and a player, maybe it's an altercation, a disagreement, a referee and tennis being unfair to a player.
I don't know what we can, okay?
But in our culture is like, Who's the blame, right?
And you get on the like comment threads and you look at the clips and somebody has a different angle and somebody has a different way to look at, right?
And here's the goal.
The goal is you come down on team this or team that.
And that's it.
I think, right, this happens and I'm going to make an example that might feel silly, but friends, I'm not being blasé or jokey.
I just, I think this example will help us understand.
This happens with celebrity divorces.
And I know, Dan, you're very up on celebrity divorces.
Don't open the can of worms, Dan.
You know that's my hobby, right?
Clearly, that's what I'm into.
Okay.
I don't want to hear about Travis Kelce.
Okay.
But here's the thing, when you get to the celebrity divorce, it's like, well, whose fault?
Did Brad Pitt cheat?
Was Angelina Jolie doing this?
Was Ben Affleck doing that?
I heard Jennifer Lopez, blah, blah, blah, right?
And everybody's like, team this, team that.
People have a relationship that falls apart.
It's so much easier when one person was just clearly being unfaithful or backstabbing and everyone can be like, well, you're out.
Okay, I'm with so-and-so over here.
Those kinds of things They do a number of things for us.
They allow us to go to bed at night thinking, alright, I'm on the right side, I know what is right and wrong, I feel good, there's no ambiguity, there's no complexity, there's no grey area, there's no murkiness, no fog, it's just, they're wrong, I'm with them over there because they're right, or they were the attacker, so I'm with the victim, and that's it, right?
So I see how this happens, and here's always been my contention as a person, as a podcaster, as a scholar, as a teacher.
When it comes to life's most important things, That is when we should have the willingness, the fortitude, the discipline to say, I'm going to not give in to the either or, zero-sum, right?
I mean, you called it the zero-sum situation.
I'm not going to give in to zero-sum when it comes to life's most important things.
And this is part of, I think, the reason both of us left evangelicalism, is because so many of life's most important issues, abortion, Sexuality, gender, salvation, are you going to heaven, was reduced to zero sum, one or the other, right?
It's either this or that.
And so I'll give one more example and then I'll throw it back to you for number three.
I think a lot of people are aware of this, but this week the House of Representatives in the United States passed a resolution That, and I'm quoting now, clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
So, I know you're going to have things to say about this, but the House passed this.
Now, the House is Republican controlled with a small majority, 92 Democratic members abstained by voting present.
Some Democrats did vote for this, okay?
But you're saying anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
So you're basically saying it's a zero-sum game.
If you criticize Israel, you are anti-Semitic.
Zero-sum.
Which one are you going to go for?
And people have resisted this, I think rightly, because what this means is like, If I criticize Israel, the state, if I criticize Benjamin Netanyahu, if I criticize Israel's policies on anything from like childcare, healthcare, all the way down to what is happening in southern Gaza right now, am I anti-Semitic?
Does that mean that I hate people who have the identity as a Jew, somebody who is religiously or ethnically Jewish?
It does not.
But you can see that this is like the Republican House of Representatives doing a forced choice, as you said earlier, and making it a zero sign.
Hey, you over here?
You over there?
Which one?
It's you either have to put your money on red or black.
We're playing roulette.
You decide.
And people are like, But they also want to force Democrats and others into a position where they do not vote for this.
And then they can get on the campaign trail and get on TV and say, oh, look, the Democrats are anti-Semitic.
The Democrats hate Israel.
This rep over here hates Israel.
That's what they want.
And so it's politically expedient.
All right.
Thoughts on that.
And then give us number three, if you like.
I'll come into that.
And I mean, really, as I'm thinking about this, this wraps together couples.
This is like, I think the last of these like big fallacies, but links on this and that that is To conflate the political state of Israel with the Jewish people, right?
And what do I mean by that?
I know I'm always wonky, but I gotta get even a little bit wonky, right?
When we talk about a political state, we mean Like, this political organization, it's recognized by the UN, it has a government, the government doesn't reduce just to the people who are in power, and so forth, right?
It's a geopolitical state, prides itself on being, you know, as it says, the only democratic country in the Middle East, and so on and so forth, right?
And then you have the Jewish people, right?
Everybody who's Jewish.
And that can mean a lot of different things to folks, right?
That can be religious identity, ethnic identity, you have secular Jewish people, obviously a lot of different ways to be Jewish.
Many of whom live in Israel, right?
But many of whom don't.
The two largest population Jewish countries in the world are the U.S.
and Israel, right?
And I think exactly what you're describing is the fallacy.
And this one, I think, is like the bread and butter, much more on the political ideological right.
I think that this operates more there.
But I think there is that, I'm just going to say it, a kind of older generation of Democrats.
We've talked about this, right?
view among the Democratic Party about Israel-Palestine and how that kind of breaks down on generational lines, right?
So you've got this kind of younger generation of lawmakers who are more critical of Israel than say Biden, you know, the Bidens, the Clintons, that sort of era of the Democratic Party.
And what that does, as you say, is to say that if you critique what this political state does, the country, This political unit, if you critique its policies, you are critiquing the Jewish people.
And that is a conflation that it just doesn't stand for a lot of reasons, right?
As you said, it tends to be sort of selectively used, right?
So, you said, I don't know what Israel's, like, I don't know, income tax policy is.
I don't know how income taxes work in Israel.
But I'll bet there are people who don't like their policy.
Whatever it is, right?
If you want to choose a policy that you know people are going to disagree with, just choose taxes.
Does that mean everybody who, like, opposes Israel's tax model is anti-semitic?
I don't think so.
That sounds ridiculous.
That feels ridiculous to us.
The question I would have when folks bring this up is, if that's ridiculous, why is it ridiculous to suggest that, you know what, maybe I could oppose or raise critical questions about the state of Israel and its policy to the Palestinians And that has nothing to do with the Jewish people.
It has nothing to do with Judaism versus Islam.
It has nothing to do with the rights to exist or, you know, all of that kind of stuff.
It's about the political policies of a political state.
It's a political question.
Right?
And we've talked about this before, and I know other people do too, does it mean that all the people in Israel who don't support Israeli policy, it seems nonsensical to say that they're all anti-semitic, right?
Lots of Jews in the United States, lots of Jewish people do not agree with Israel's policy toward the Palestinians.
Lots do, but lots don't.
Does it mean that they're anti-semitic?
It doesn't, it sort of doesn't even make sense But this is one of those, and it can be really complicated, as you say, because Judaism can be so many different things.
You have the history of Israel coming, again, out of the Holocaust, out of a sort of European history and so forth.
But this is one of the big fallacies that is, I think, used often just as a conversation stopper.
That's what the name of the game is.
Just as you say, it's political theater sometimes, it's a way to It's a way to force people into positions.
It's a way to stop conversations.
It's one of the most sensitive, complex issues to deal with, but it's one that I think we have to come to terms with, right?
The same way that I don't think that you're anti-American if you critique what a particular president does, right?
Or, you know, US policies on different things.
We've talked about this a lot.
There's more to say about that, but I think that touches on everything you're saying as well, that conflation.
And just one thing that I've heard people say, people have said this to me, emails and other places, and I know they're thinking them.
Well, hey, you voted for Netanyahu.
You voted.
I mean, people will say this about Hamas.
Oh, the Palestinians chose Hamas, right?
And again, that's a whole thing to jump into.
We're going to run out of time.
We don't have 40 minutes to do that, but I'll just say, In 2016, Dan, Donald Trump won the popular, excuse me, he won the electoral college, but he lost the popular vote by about two percentage points.
About 60% of eligible Americans voted in 2016.
I'll just round up.
That's not quite that much.
If Donald Trump got less than half of that vote, we can just say with rough and quick and dirty numbers here, about 30% of Americans voted for Donald Trump to be president in 2016.
He didn't even win a plurality, right?
Not just a majority.
He did not win a plurality of American voters.
So we could dig into the numbers of Netanyahu's victory.
We can talk about what happened with how Hamas came to power close to two decades ago.
We can do all of that.
But I think if somebody says to you, well, they voted for him, so Israel is the Jewish people.
The Jewish people are the state of Israel.
The American people are the American government.
You know what I mean?
Now you're in a place where you're like, That's so dangerous and it so betrays what is actually real on the ground.
One more example is we always say red states aren't red, like Texas.
Go to Texas, y'all.
Do you think that 98% of Texas is like, you know who I love?
Ted Cruz.
You know who my favorite is?
Greg Abbott.
There are so many folks.
Who are people of color, who are not people of color, who are queer, who are straight, who are Christian, who are not Christian in Texas, who are not up for what's happening with their state government and yet the state government, right?
So anyway, we need to separate those two.
All right.
Give us your third example.
One example, and I'll stop after this, but here's an example to make that point is I mentioned 9-11.
I bring up the 9-11 example because it's far enough in the rear view mirror that I think it can illustrate things and maybe turn the volume and the heat down a little bit.
Bin Laden, in statements that he wrote after the 9-11 attack, responded to the accusation that they had killed lots of innocent civilians.
His response was, they were Americans, they're in a democracy, they voted for their leaders, therefore they are not innocent.
I mean, it's Bin Laden logic.
It's the same logic that Bin Laden uses whether we're going to use it about Israeli leadership, whether we're going to use it about Hamas leadership, whether we're going to use it about American leadership.
We have to be able to distinguish states, political states, from everybody in them.
They do not conflate to this, and I think that's the key point.
So, you've got other things to tell us.
I think that's enough of fallacious reasoning for the day for me.
Yeah, well what are some other, lots of other things to talk about.
I've taken us down enough rabbit holes for the day, right?
Well, no, I'm laughing because somebody on the internet's going to be like, Dan just admitted that everything he said is fallacious reasoning.
I think what you meant is that- Enough reasoning about fallacies.
How's that?
No, yeah.
What I think you were saying is you kind of gave us a quasi-logic class, like kind of the things we would do in logic class, and then we kind of applied those to what's happening right now in the world.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back, and I'll get into a couple of those things.
All right.
So, one thing that I want to link, Dan, is there are growing calls, increasing calls for Biden to advocate for a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine.
What the response has been from the Biden administration is they're not going to do that, A, and here's some of the kind of reasoning that's coming out.
Okay, so this is from a piece by Karen DeYoung at WAPO.
Look, we share the concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Name one other nation, any nation that's doing as much as the United States to alleviate the pain and suffering of the people of Gaza.
You can't.
You just can't.
The United States, through President Biden, is leading the effort to get trucks, food, water, medicine, and fuel into the people of Gaza.
Name another nation that is doing more to urge the Israeli counterparts, our Israeli counterparts, to be as cautious and deliberate as they can In the prosecution of the military operations, you can't.
So this is another form of fallacy in my mind, Dan, because it's like, well, you want us to do that?
Name another group that's doing as much as we are on this.
And it's like, well, I wasn't asking you about who's doing the most.
Does that mean that it's what you should be doing or that it's enough?
is gonna sound silly, but this is one of those. - Or why don't you do more, right?
No.
You may be doing the most, does that mean that it's what you should be doing or that it's enough?
No, like that's the fallacy in there. - And the flip side can be, can you name a nation that is giving more aid to Israel for the operation they're carrying out militarily, Can you?
Right?
So if you are saying, we're doing the most to help Gaza, the next question logically is, well, you're doing, one hand is doing a lot, you say.
For humanitarian purposes in Gaza, but the other hand is saying, hey, Israel, here's this much money, right, to carry out your operation in Gaza.
And so a lot of folks would say, what you should be doing if you want to do humanitarian aid is, I don't know, condition the aid you're giving to Israel, on one hand, on the fact that they will not carry out indiscriminate bombing and commit war crimes.
That would be a good idea.
So, here's some more from that piece.
There would be no hostages released and no aid coming into Gaza at all if it weren't for U.S.
intervention and Biden's personal intervention, said Aaron Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former diplomat who advised both Republican and Democratic administrations on Arab-Israeli issues.
It's not as if the Biden administration has done nothing.
Okay.
You know, he is admitting, Miller is admitting, Biden administration is A, providing humanitarian aid to Gaza and B, Blinken and others are trying to convince Netanyahu and his government, you can't do this, right?
You can't approach this conflict in this way.
This is not humanitarian.
It is not okay.
It is not good, right?
Miller continues, however, but let's be clear.
Biden has tethered himself to Israel's war aims, and he has now attached his administration to a freight train that is charging through Gaza with the aim of eradicating Hamas military presence above and below ground and killing its leadership.
This is the part, Dan, that has really become, I think, the issue.
And it's the issue for me, and it's the issue for others, which is He has tied his train to Netanyahu and others war train.
So yes, you can provide aid.
Yes, you can go urge them to have a ceasefire.
But if you're going to say, we'll give you the billions of dollars no matter what, we just hope you use it for the right reasons.
We'll give you all the aid you want or that we can get through.
We just hope you're smart with it, you know?
There's a world where you can say, hey, we're not giving you the money unless you agree that there's no way you're going to use it for the kinds of military operations we have seen that are akin to attempted genocide.
This is Politico, Alexander Ward, Jonathan Lemire.
This month, Congressional Democrats first quietly and then publicly came out in support of imposing conditions on the aid to Israel that I'm talking about.
Bernie Sanders was first out of the gate, proposing that Israel not get any more weapons until it stops the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and commits to serious peace talks, among other stipulations.
Biden's comment appears to have made other lawmakers more comfortable to advocate for the once toxic idea, though many Republicans and Democrats remain opposed to it.
So Chris Murphy, who I generally usually appreciate, especially when it comes to his approach to gun violence and gun laws, Senator from Connecticut.
We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with U.S.
and international law.
It's very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies.
I hear you, Senator Murphy.
But about half an hour ago, I read a letter from the U.N.
Secretary of General about Article 99, calling for a meeting of the Security Council because There is a humanitarian crisis that threatens international peace and order as a result of what is happening in Gaza.
So, I hear you that we regularly say we won't give aid to allies unless they follow international law.
Guess what?
It seems like they're not.
So we should probably not be afraid to say publicly that we are totally going to support you, Israel, in some way if you're the Biden administration.
But it cannot be for this.
We will not support that.
I'm sorry.
OK, this leads to Biden losing support around the country.
I'll talk about that in a minute, but throw it to you.
Thoughts on this part?
Just a couple of things about the politics of this that I think also comes in.
Is I think we can't dive into this but I think it's also worth just remembering that layered on to all of this is you know Benjamin Netanyahu who's a highly Embattled, right, Israeli Prime Minister.
Israel has an interest, not just, you know, self-preservation and such, but Netanyahu has an interest in this conflict because Israel, his administration is coming under immense criticism from within Israel and other places for the intelligence failure that led to this, in the mind of many Israelis, for failing to protect them from this attack.
And so all of this is also a way of showing that they are doing something, right?
And sort of putting up a smoke screen to avoid dealing with that.
All of which is just to say, there needs to be a counter pressure to that.
Because there's an immense political pressure in Israel To undertake this kind of action, so much so that there was news that broke this week of like leaked audiotapes of some of the released hostages engaging with the Netanyahu administration, and some of them were critical of the way it's being carried out.
They talked about they had to be moved from facility to facility because they were being shelled by the Israeli military, like where they were being held.
So the indiscriminate nature of the attack Was, as it comes out, even threatening the hostages who's supposedly undertaken for, all of which is to say there's a lot of pressure coming from and on Netanyahu because of his sort of personal and political precarious position to undertake this kind of really, really violent, aggressive tactics and so forth.
It needs something with the weight of, for example, the United States, to really push back on that.
And so, to reiterate the points that you're making, it has to be harder than, well, as long as you're, you know, following international law.
Well, they're not.
So, let's start with that and see where that goes.
And if you listen to Netanyahu, Netanyahu's indicated that his intention is, after this is over, there will be no Palestinian territory, you know, that what is now the Palestinian occupied territory will just be Israeli territory.
I mean, if you listen to Netanyahu, that's how he's talking.
And then you hear Blinken and Biden and they're like, well, yeah, after this is finished, we're really hoping that there will be a kind of approach, a bilateral approach that will include, you know, self-determination for the Palestinian bubble.
And it's like it's like two different realities from these from these camps.
Now, what's happening as a result of this, Dan, is that You have various constituencies that really helped push Biden over the finish line in 2020 now openly saying no.
So, this is from Al Jazeera.
Muslim American leaders in several pivotal states pledged on Saturday to rally their communities against President Joe Biden's bid for re-election due to his steadfast backing of Israel's war in Gaza.
The hashtag Abandon Biden campaign began with Minnesota Muslim Americans demanded Biden call for a ceasefire by Halloween, and it has spread to Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
There's another set of data out there that shows that Biden is losing the enthusiasm of young voters, people under 30 who have, A, not only had an impact on 2020, but whose enthusiasm for things like reproductive rights have been a big deal for Democratic but whose enthusiasm for things like reproductive rights have been a big deal
This is Tessa Stewart writing at Rolling Stone about the Biden campaign reaching out to Gen Z influencers to get them to kind of use their millions of followers on TikTok and their big, you know, platforms to advocate for Biden in 2024.
Here's what some of is written there.
In 2024, the Biden campaign is doubling down with plans to add even more than roughly two dozen staffers who worked on the campaign's influencer program in 2020.
But this time around, there are real questions about whether that strategy will work.
So there's one example in the pee stand that I want to highlight, and that is George Lee Jr.
George Lee Jr.
has 2.4 million followers as the conscious Lee on TikTok.
George Lee has been invited to the State of the Union Watch Party at the White House and is somebody that has been courted, I shall say, to be a kind of, hey, vote for Biden kind of voice, or at least a vote against Trump voice on TikTok.
Here's what Lee says now.
I would imagine I will probably never get invited again, especially with the way I've been so unapologetic with this Palestinian genocide that's happening.
Joe Biden is really shooting himself in the foot.
When we start talking about the lesser of two evils, a lot of my followers, all 3 million of them, are literally asking the question like, damn, so the lesser of the two evils is the one that is supporting genocide?
Noted, noted, noted.
To me, Dan, this is a big deal.
And it's a big deal for all of the reasons we've talked about today.
It's a big deal in human terms.
It's a big deal in suffering terms.
It's a big deal in on the ground, people losing their lives, their livelihoods.
It's all of that.
Also a big deal when it comes to this country and the possibility of Trump getting reelected.
If young people lose enthusiasm, if constituencies such as Muslim Americans, Black Americans, Latino, Latinx Americans lose enthusiasm to vote, if they just say, I'm going to stay home.
If they do something, right, that says, Allah 2016, you know, both candidates, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, not my choice, I'm staying home.
If that happens in any measurable, significant way, Joe Biden will be in trouble.
And I'm going to throw it out there.
We're not going to talk about it today.
I'm sure we're going to come back to this idea, Dan.
I'm not declaring this.
I'm not coming out in favor of it.
I'm not saying this is what should happen.
So if you're academic out there, this is not a normative statement.
Okay?
I have thought over the last couple of weeks, this could be a situation that Biden could drop out over.
And I'm serious about it.
I'm serious that I can see a situation over the next two months where This issue is not going to go away.
I kind of think Biden bet on the fact that we would forget about what he promised when it came to student loans, right?
I kind of think Biden forgot, you know, or was hoping we'd forget about some other stuff.
Hey, those 28-year-olds, they'll forget.
They'll forget that I didn't actually come through on student loans like I said, even when I tried to do, Supreme Court or not, or Republicans or not.
Hey, they might forget what I promised on this or that.
I don't know, Dan.
I just don't know.
I don't know.
Young people haven't forgotten about reproductive rights.
You, you are with college students every day.
You know what this is like.
Are these young folks going to be like, yeah, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to go out and tick the box because if enough of them are not going to, and some of the constituencies that Democrats take for granted, people that feel like they are used at times, black voters, black women, mentor ties groups, Where are we?
And I bring this up as somebody who has consistently said, if Trump is reelected, American democracy may no longer exist.
And so that is a part of what I'm talking about here.
Thoughts on this before we have to go.
We'll come back.
I'm not asking you to tell me if Biden should drop out.
I'm not trying to say yes or no.
Forced choice right now.
I'm just saying thoughts about some of the support he's losing among folks on this issue and the unwillingness to kind of stand up and put any conditions on the aid, et cetera.
My first thought is I thought you were going to announce your candidacy, and I was really excited there, right?
So, you know, thanks for the letdown on that.
No.
I asked my wife.
She says, look, we just bought the minivan, and I'm not putting a campaign thing on the side of it.
So, you do what you want.
And I said, well, if I can't put my face on the side of the minivan, I don't know how I get elected.
And we had a big argument and that's where it ended.
So I'm not running.
2028 probably.
Yep.
Everybody got to hear it here.
No, in all seriousness, you know, as you're talking about all that, and I've been following all those things too, Donald Trump won the presidency because of a lack of enthusiasm.
Like, I mean, that's, I think it's that simple.
Whether that was partly And complacency.
People who just assume that all the polls are right and Hillary Clinton was going to kind of cruise to victory, but also a lot of people who just were not excited about a Democratic candidate that they didn't feel like spoke for them.
They weren't supporting Trump.
They weren't going to support Trump.
I cannot imagine, maybe I'm wrong, I can't imagine most Of these Muslim Americans who are angry with Biden right now, turning around and voting for Trump.
I imagine they're just not going to vote for Biden.
But it cost us.
It cost us a lot in 2016 to 2020.
And I'm with you.
In every analysis I read, Trump's own statements, everything says a second Trump term will be worse and more authoritarian and more fascist than a first term.
So yeah, I think this is incredibly worrying and the same thought has occurred to me and we'll watch it and we'll see what the Biden administration does.
We'll see what other things happen between now and then because the world throws these curves and sometimes they, you know, they help or hurt somebody.
But yeah, there's a growing lack of enthusiasm and I don't think it's picking up.
I don't think it's that there was a lack and it's, you know, people are more enthusiastic.
I think it's getting worse for Biden.
So yeah, I think it's worth watching.
I don't know where it goes, and I'm also not making a prediction about that, but I think it's something to pay attention to and something to think about.
Biden's been running for president since like 1944.
So, you know, the idea that he's going to be like, yeah, not my time.
I'll just, I'm going to bow out.
It's probably not realistic, right?
So it would take a lot.
It would take, you know, and I'd have to look up my American history, but I think it's like Rutherford B. Hayes, the last guy who served four years and was like, I'm good.
I'm going to go play pickleball.
So the idea that he would do this just because he would wake up one day and think it's the right thing to do is far from realistic.
But anyway, we'll keep an eye on it.
I will tell you, I'll just last comment on this.
Cornel West is a person that some of those folks that we're talking about, young people, people of color, Muslims in this country, will find in him a overwhelmingly anti-war, anti-Palestinian genocide, for lack of a better term, pro-Palestinian voice.
And so, I haven't tracked what his numbers are right now, but Cornel West is somebody who I imagine.
That some of the students that you know and I know, some of the young folks, some of the folks that feel used by the Democratic Party will say, sure, let's do it.
Cornel West might be my man.
And back to your very first point for today, I understand that.
I don't think that's the right, I will say openly, I don't think that's the right move, but I do understand it.
I can think myself into it.
I understand the rationale and I can definitely see From the perspective of various people in the country, why that would be something you would think would be good.
All right, we really got to go.
I got a reason for hope, Dan, and that is that Karen Smith was sworn in to her school board post, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and she swore in, not on the Bible.
Nothing against the Bible.
Well, you know, I got a complicated relationship with the Bible.
But she swore in on banned books.
That's how you do it, Dan.
That is how you do it.
She swore in on banned books.
That's like a mic drop move.
Man, I'm going to hang up right now and make an Etsy shirt of Karen Smith doing that.
Just like, deal with it.
You know what I mean?
Props to you, Karen Smith.
Badass.
All right, go ahead.
Mine, we've already touched on it.
It was the UN, right?
And I think the one thing that has happened, the UN gets a lot of crap, right?
And because of the structure of the Security Council and the US role on it and permanent members having veto power and all of that, it's very hard for the UN to do Things without the support of states like the US or Russia, depending on the issue.
But I feel like the UN and the Secretary of the UN have kept this issue front and center, have remained vocal about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
And when they made this move that you were talking about, and the sort of not unprecedented, but extremely rare nature of it, I think spoke volumes.
And I think that that creates a lot of just global visibility and increasing pressure on the United States.
To step up and so yeah, that was my reason for hope is that the UN I think is pulling the levers it can pull to try to make something happen on the ceasefire front in Gaza.
All right, friends.
I want to say thank you to all our patrons, all the people that support us, all the people that send messages, reach out.
Dan says this on the code, but I'll say it too.
We just appreciate you and care about you and thankful for you.
If you wrote us an email or message, we're not actively ignoring you.
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I'll just say coming Monday, December 11, 2023, is the first episode of Pure White by our friend and colleague, Sarah Malzner.
It's all about the white supremacist origins Of evangelical purity culture.
You may have lived through purity culture.
You may think you know a few things about it just as a historical subject, but I guarantee you Sarah will give you just an absolutely new vista on how to understand purity culture and all of its trappings.
So take a look at that.
It's in the show notes and we hope you'll listen.
Other than that, we'll be back next week.
I have a big interview next week, Dan.
I'm very excited, so all of you should listen on Monday to my interview with Representative James Tallarico of the great state of Texas, who talks all about being a Christian who is against Christian nationalism, fighting the school vouchers, the Ten Commandments, and the other Thanks, Brad.
