484 Comments

A beam of purest common sense, more disinfecting than sunshine. Thank you Bari, the proliferation of anti-Semitic attitudes on the left was starting to make me feel very alone.

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Last week I was in DC. My Uber driver identified himself as an Ethiopian Jew whose family lives in Haifa. They are Black, obviously. He said the family is trying to avoid being inside as the risk of being rocketed is worse when inside a structure than outside the house. Pretty ironic that the Black Jew is being indiscriminately targeted by Arab rockets. Wonder how the Squad feels about that one. By the way, I got a lovely “Shalom” from him when I arrived at my destination.

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What the hell does this have to do with my comment?

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If Israeli settlers have the right to reclaim properties with deeds predating 1948, then the Palestinians should have the same rights to reclaim the properties they, or their ancestors lost in 1947-48. Yes Hamas' indiscriminate firing of rockets into Israel is horrifying. If you keep taking away people's rights and dignity, eventually there is going to be a huge backlash. Hopefully an Israeli government can be formed without requiring the likes of The Religious Zionist Party to make up the numbers. Then perhaps a more peaceful future would be possible.

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If Palestinians can reclaim the properties they lost, can Jews reclaim the properties they lost?

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I should add that Israel has every right to defend itself and retaliate against Hamas.

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the comment section is terrifying, people do not have any compassion for little babies and kids being bombed in Gaza. WTF! Where are the teachings of Judaism - where are the values of compassion, love, the sanctity of life, one would not get that impression reading the comments here. I am concerned about all human rights for Jews and Palestinians, but people out here do not give a shit what happens to innocent kids. What type of sickness is this?

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When you blame Israel for the murder of Palestinian children, which Hamas is responsible for, that is called Antisemitism.

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Over 4,000 rockets launched at Israel by the parents of those innocent babies, who then sheltered behind their innocent babies and dared the people they tried to murder to defend themselves. What the hell type of sickness is THAT?

And this is not whataboutery, either. These are terrorists who hide behind their own children, who shield themselves with innocent civilians while they try to murder more innocent civilians.

And you come in here and call it "sickness" when that is named for what it is: callous, uncaring murder, terrorism, and endangerment.

Save your moral outrage. You haven't got a moral leg to stand on.

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I am deeply disturbed at the lack of human compassion for Palestinian children being bombed and killed. Truth cannot be denied because people are pro - Israeli, an evil must be called out. Israel has far more manpower, ammunition and weapons to fight and Gaza is being decimated. I just joined Substack a couple of weeks ago, and I am rethinking my. membership. The comments by Bari Weiss concern me immensely - I get it she is Jewish, but, all of humanity must care about the death of hundred of children.

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The fault, and the blame, for any civilian Palestinian deaths is the Hamas terrorist holding them (often by force) as human shields.

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"Israel has far more manpower, ammunition and weapons to fight and Gaza is being decimated."

Over 4,000 rockets, Sarina. 4,000. Israel has only the ability to keep itself from being destroyed by genocidal terrorists, which apparently pisses you off to no end.

I for one am deeply disturbed at your classification of Palestinian terrorists, who throw 4,000 -- four comma zero zero zero zero -- rockets at Israeli civilians and then hide behind Palestinian civilians as they do it. How dare you demand compassion when that is what you are defending.

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If more Jews were murdered, it would make her feel better.

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If you watch the evening news in the US, you'd think the whole thing was Israel raining missiles upon Palestinian civilians and Palestinian teenagers throwing rocks. The fact that Hamas is raining rockets upon Israelis is literally not even mentioned.

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"The truth needs people who are willing to stand up for it. It needs people willing to publicly resist moral perversion and nihilism."

So here's a simple truth. The recently cancelled Palestinian elections had 3 factions. 1 faction calls for an endless war until Israel is destroyed. A second faction pays those who murder Israeli Jews and calls the murderers 'holy'. A third faction is led by a person in prison for his role in murdering 5 Israeli Jews.

It takes an extreme moral perversion to be OK with any of this. And yet, here are the progressives, not having even the hint of a problem with any of this. And I say this as a liberal who has voted liberal consistently -- and I am not a single issue voter.

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While I don't think the Jewish people are playing the victim, they are responsible for this madness in a way that Bari doesn't let on.

A lot of this 'anti-semitism' comes from the Jewish community itself. The vast majority of the Jewish community votes democratic. I've talked to Jews who are so far-left they hope that Isreal is destroyed.

For generations Jewish Americans have sat squarely on the side of big-government in the US and they are too locked in their own self-infatuation to realize that the institutions they helped empower are turning on them, quickly.

I pity Isreal and I pity the victims of anti-semitism, but that's all I can do. If you want solutions go look at the 80% of Jewish-democrat voters who insist the biggest threat to them are backwoods Nazis in Idaho while the US government funnels hundreds of millions into the hands of radical islamist.

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Right-wingers are the ones who shoot up synagogues and chant JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US. These are simple facts. Right-wing violence is a massive problem. I'd not say that the majority of the problem comes from the left at all -- it seems larger there because most Jews are center-left and hence close enough to the problem to smell it. It is also uniquely frightening because the center-left is where Jews have historically found solace. When even your safe space doesn't offer you safety from the monsters on the other side, it is profoundly undermining.

But the monsters ARE on the other side.

I now await the accusations that I am completely absolving the whacko leftists from any Jew-hatred at all.

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Only a small percentage of those 80% are against israel, and save for the progressive wing of the D party, they’ve always been pro Israel. I’m not pro D but you’re over generalizing.

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There are definitely 'kapos' among the Jewish community, bernie sanders are the head of the line. But I'm more concerned for the younger ones, who risk getting ostracized on college campuses for standing up for what is right.

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People might want to read this piece in the WSJ regarding the evictions in East Jerusalem. The progressive left is portraying them as human rights violations and that really isn't the case.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/almost-nothing-youve-heard-about-evictions-in-jerusalem-is-true-11621019410?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Bari, Seems they are coming after you on social media. Stay strong.

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I've wondered when the nyt or wapo would actually cover the issue. As best as I can tell, the WSJ is the rare leading publication to actually cover what is actually happening. Overwhelmingly, there is a tendency to avoid the actual facts.

The single most important aspect of this is the simplest. Rule of law. I don't care who wins or loses this court case. I do care that whatever decision is made, is made under rule of law.

But today, badly misinformed people choose sides instead of choosing justice. Rule of law doesn't mean laws are perfect, but that whoever shows up in court gets a fair hearing and their case fairly decided by law. This is what is happening, and it should be encouraged.

This clearly isn't something most media and more than a few politicians (who make a living because rule of law matters) care about.

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Actually, that article was an opinion piece. The news side of the WSJ doesn’t touch issues like that. Most of the news pieces sound like Hamas propaganda.

Many issues are only found in the OpEd section. The WSJ “news” side leans left woke.

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I was suspended from Facebook for 30 days yesterday, for writing a post in support of Israel. It was a simple reminder of the history of anti-semitism and the persecution of the Jews under Pharaoh, Hitler, Black September, the PLO and now Hamas. I referenced the Munich Olympic games of 1972. I ended with, God save Israel. I was told my post violated community standards. This is the crippling power of The Narrative, especially on social media. I am an immigration lawyer. I practice asylum and refugee law. I see what happens when you demonize a group of people. What allows the demonization to metastasize is the silence, forced or acquiescent, of those who would defend the humanity of the demonized. This is not new, but it is frightening.

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Facebook does this to a lot of people for different types of issues. I was kicked off FB for refusing to say that men can become women, and biology matters. I was kicked off 3 times.

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I’ve also been censored, had my voice silenced, as a Jewish person, and I’m still processing what the implications of that are. I’ve had 2 or 3 completely respectful comments censored by the NYT when I’ve mentioned Israel. One was in response to someone who had commented something along the lines of, “The Palestinians are like the Native Americans, and tragically we all saw how that went”. The comment had many likes. I commented back along the lines of, “The situation is more analogous to other forms of sectarian violence in the Middle East, such as the conflicts between Copts, Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Yazidis, Alawites, etc. You can’t really compare Palestinians to Native Americans.” That comment got denied. I’ve commented countless times on NYT, and my comments on Israel are the only ones that have been denied. They are literally censoring Jewish voices from conversations about Israel, while allowing literally everyone else, with no skin in the game and no knowledge of the situation beyond memes and sound bites, to converse freely. Needless to say, I don’t even read NYT anymore, much less subscribe.

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I too was censored by the New York Times. They initially posted my comment, then took it down. I suggested that Mayor diBlasio may have been anti-Semitic when he forbid the Brooklyn Orthodox Jews from congregating during Covid lockdown for the funeral of a revered Rabbi, but he said nothing about the George Floyd protests in Manhattan. I immediately cancelled my subscription.

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"Trump was not the enemy!"

Someone forgot to tell his voters marching around Charlottesville with tiki torches chanting JEW WILL NOT REPLACE US.

NO ONE is blameless here. Jews, like women, pretty much have no firm allies on either side.

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Yea, he got the Neo Nazi contingent. Or, some of them. Didn’t David Duke disown him or something? But, Trump also moved the embassy and set the stage for the Accords. Know who’s defending Israel right now? The UAE. The Neo Nazis have no political power. Know who does? Ilhan Omar. MTG got her ass handed to her. You think Omar’s gonna get the same?

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Israel (with more than 3,500 years of history) is not a country? But Muslim Arab Palestinians who never had a constitution or a parliament or a government or borders or a currency or passports, is a country? How uneducated must Anna Sarkisian be?

Arabs own about 1,100 times more land than Israel. The greed of Arab radicals and their leftwing allies has no depth. The Arabs even refuse to give Muslim Arab Palestinians living in Arab countries citizenship. They are treated as a 2nd class people, and are denied university and healthcare and government jobs. But the left never protests this real apartheid.

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You are a treasure Bari. Thank you so much for your fearless advocacy and analysis. I’m a liberal with no interest in the culture wars, and my political interests lie in practical concerns like the thousands of DDT barrels leaking in California and how we can solve the affordable housing crisis. I know these are things the GOP doesn’t care about, and I’ve never voted anything other than progressive, and I’ve always been unshakably democratic, including in the most recent election. And yet, strangely and nearly unbelievably, I’ve found myself in a place where my mental health has taken such an intense downward spiral from the relentless anti-Semitism in progressive circles that I’m planning on voting down-ticket Republican for the time being. I took a look at Marjorie Taylor Green’s face and decided I could live with that more. Decided that for all the hundreds of ways that the GOP doesn’t align with my values and is actively imperiling American democracy, it was somehow affecting my day-to-day mental health and sense of well-being less. I should never have been someone you could have converted to the GOP by my vote, if not in actuality. If you had told me a year ago this is where I would have ended up I would have laughed in your face. I’m too aligned with most Democratic values, too aware of the ways the GOP mostly charts a path forward I can’t get behind. But now I’m more terrified by the Democratic Party, and I don’t even know what that means going forward.

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I've learned over time to avoid comment sections but this was such an important article I wanted to see the reactions. I was pleasantly surprised at first by the level of discourse but as I read it appears there are some serious trolls here too. Oh well.

I'm a Classical Liberal and independent voter my whole life. I am so disturbed by how much the Democratic Party has lurched far left and sadly I am not surprised by how this current administration is playing out. Their attitudes directly lead to these actions by Hamas. The hypocrisies of the woke crowd are staggering. As mentioned by others, only seeing it as substitute religion allows it be understood. Facts don't matter to a narrative.

One bit of history to remember is that during the Carter Administration Israel offered a deal that got to 95+% of everything the Palestinians wanted. Arafat turned it down just like every other deal that doesn't result in the complete destruction of the State of Israel.

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Hi Jack, please educate me, I’m not being snarky, but what does the term “Classical Liberal” mean? I have seen it used by others in this commentary.

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A classical liberal is not a conservative in the technical sense. A classical liberal believes in the primacy of the individual and that there should be minimal interference by the state in the affairs of the individual, unless fraud or the commission of a crime. The term classical is based on the fact that this philosophy arose in Europe and was developed by David Hume, John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith. In living memory, Milton Friedman and FA Hayek would be exemplars of that philosophy.

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Thank you for taking the time to respond. I understand now. I am a Classical Liberal!

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Conservatives are classical liberals. The left is hijacking language and whitewashing themselves by calling themselves liberal. They are not. Everywhere except for North America, Liberal means centrist or conservative.

Being socially liberal does not make one a liberal. One has to be economically liberal (private ownership) and politically liberal (democratic) to be a liberal. Accepting gay marriage and transgender assignment and abortion does not make the person a liberal.

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Thank you, Eshan. If I am a Classical Liberal, which I now know I am, how would one describe the current moderate and left wing of the Democratic Party? I obviously need to read more philosophy.

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This is a generalized answer. Individuals might emphasize some points over others.. It advocates private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. A classical liberal might say. "I disagree with what you say but will fight for your right to say it."

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I get it, now, thanks to all who have responded.

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Gee, I agree with all those tenants, but I think of myself as a moderate conservative!

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Excellent writing Bari. I learn so much from you and this community. It’s horrific and unsettling to see what power the uneducated Squad wield. Yet, I believe the squad barely represents anyone’s viewpoint. However, through social media platforms, their voices are amplified. It’s disheartening that a lie told over and over these days becomes “truth” with the help of establishment media elite and these vile politicians. Keep writing and working. Actions matter, so do words. Thank you for your voice. It’s important. And I hope your new family addition happens soon.

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