In Gaza, Does Silence Equal Violence?

The era of mandatory opinion once again rears its head

Israel is apparently threatening to destroy Gaza City in a “mighty hurricane” of bombardment if hostages aren’t released, so most of what’s written below is about to be irrelevant. But I’ve been pestered for years to say something about this issue and decided over the weekend to do so, so here it is.

Friday, amid news that Bari Weiss of The Free Press struck a $200 million deal to take over CBS, I tossed off a note about Bari, CBS, and “tears of legacy media.” A deluge of outraged comments followed. The math was Bari = Bad Person = Not Funny (when you solve for X in a lefty political equation, X inevitably equals Not Funny). Bari and I are not close. Once, I believed she was boxing me out of the Twitter Files and had to suppress thoughts of strangling her (she proved vital to the project). We have opposite politics. When she organized a debate on whether the U.S. should “still police the world,” she hired Lee Fang and me to argue the contra against her friends Jamie Kirchick and Bret Stephens. I came from independent media and won’t ever leave, while I believe she always hoped to return to prestige media, preferably as its conqueror.

When that actually happened, it was hilarious. CBS turned the 60 Minutes legacy of Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner into a rooting section for German meme-polizei and transformed the stage David Letterman made famous into a venue for dancing-syringe propaganda, but now came begging, ballgag in mouth, for a $200 million discipline session from a vaccine-skeptical Substack dominatrix. How do I not laugh at that?

This wasn’t laying laurels at the feet of Bari’s Israel views, just Schadenfreude before dingbats like Oliver Darcy, whose breathless coverage made it seem like CEO David Ellison kidnapped the very virtue of News by hiring Bari after vowing not to “politicize” CBS. This is the same Darcy who in his CNN days asked Comcast to deplatform Newsmax, OAN, and FOX. He also once retweeted, “Your Substack newsletter won’t make you a millionaire.”

That seemed funny to me, but hundreds of Palestine advocates online disagreed, racing to the more obvious explanation: conspiracy! I was a “Mossad toady,” an “apologist for a genocidal lying cunt,” either “caping” for a future CBS job (“You’ll get that FP paycheck eventually!!!!!”) or “horny AF.” One of the helpful qualities of the progressive left in America is its willingness not just to list jokes you may not make, but to write down exactly what you may say in their place. So, “The Nation couldn’t turn a profit if gifted the world’s oil supply” is out, but “Bari Weiss is an apologist for genocide” is correct. Don’t ponder whose cock Stephen Colbert’s mouth gets to holster now, but instead remember: “Bari Weiss is a Jewish supremacist agent for a foreign apartheid state.” And so on.

Israel supporters will argue with you. They will get defensive on days like today and lecture you about the history leading up to their decision. American advocates for Palestine don’t bother arguing. Since they don’t admit the possibility of honest disagreement, they move straight to the corrupt reasons you must have for failing to already embrace their view: payoffs, blackmail, cowardice, or submission to the Great Jewish Conspiracy. That once-forbidden last idea they suggest with the giddiness of teenagers who’ve just discovered oral sex.

Russell Dobular of Due Dissidence, who I like but deems me scum for not embracing His Issue, put it this way after the Bari column: “This really breaks my heart. Matt is officially into his Vegas lounge act years. I don’t get it. Do they have pictures of him next to a dead hooker in St. Petersburg?” The irony is, I’d bet Russell initially became a fan of mine because I think for myself and don’t regurgitate bromides about “threats to the region” or “rape camps” or the “existential threat to democracy” or whatever the official propaganda line of the day was at the time. Now though, it breaks his heart that I’m not speaking the magic words: genocide, Zionist, settler colonialism, etc. I don’t talk about hang-gliding terrorists or hostages either, but no matter. Left-activist clichés are better than Pentagon versions, so failure to salute them makes me a genocide apologist with a dead hooker on my conscience.

For those who wonder why I don’t talk about this issue, let me share a story or two:

Racket readers know a story from last April, when once-friends Briahna Joy Gray and Zaid Jilani did a whole segment on Hill: Rising about my “pandering” to a right-wing audience. The show included a string of silly factual errors (like that I’d covered up being shadowbanned by Elon Musk and “hadn’t searched for censorship of the left” in the Twitter Files), leading to this dismount by Briahna: “Maybe there’s something other than trying to preserve his relationship with Elon for the sake of journalism.” In other words, maybe I was paid off?

I was pissed but not shocked. In the last ten years or so what I once thought of as the principled left seems to have moved past the “If there’s no God, everything is permitted” chapter from The Brothers Karamazov and begun embracing the idea that it’s okay to lie about Bad People. It started with Trump, but has since spread to all non-believers. This year a real publishing company, Hachette, published a whole book called Owned by Eoin Higgins whose premise is Glenn Greenwald and I sold our integrity and “cashed in” with “billionaires” like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to betray the left. I never took a dime from these or any other “rich people paying for news,” a fact even Higgins writes about, saying “maybe” I really believe what I’m writing, but “it might be just the money,” a strange way to summarize your cover argument (the title was “a bit of a misnomer,” The New Republic conceded, far down an otherwise gushing review). Ironically one of the book’s most obnoxious parts is where Higgins compares me to Bari, who really did accept money from tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks to fund The Free Press. But who cares what’s true? What matters is the side you take.

The Hill refused corrections, but did have me on the show, where I confronted Briahna in a segment that I don’t think went well for her. I thought that was it. It wasn’t.

Around that same time, writer Coleman Hughes appeared on The View. The cast of facelifted View monsters hoped to devour Coleman because he’d written a book called The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. They were mad at him not for saying the country is colorblind, but that it should be, aspirationally. But The View’s own audience broke out in spontaneous applause when Hughes said, “We should try our very best to treat people without regard for race both in our personal lives and our public policy.”

A seething Sunny Hostin all but called Coleman an Uncle Tom. “Your argument for colorblindness,” she said, “I think is something that the right has co-opted and so many in the black community, if I’m being honest with you… believe that you are being used as a pawn by the right and that you are a charlatan of sorts.” Hostin then went on to say, “You’ve said that you’re a conservative.” He hadn’t. Media people in the Trump age just make things up about guests they believe deserve it.

I interviewed Hughes after the show and did a write-up of the event. Not long after, I got a call to do an appearance with a friend of Briahna’s, Sabrina “Sabby Sabs” Salvati, with whom I’d always gotten along. It was going fine, until we hit this question: “The Pentagon just issued a statement saying they don’t consider what’s happening in Gaza a genocide. I strongly disagree. How do you feel about what’s happening there?”

It was once considered a virtue in journalism to decline to answer a question if you don’t know what you’re talking about. I explained to her that Gaza wasn’t a subject that I had ever covered, and that as a reporter, you “get in trouble” when you speak outside your area of expertise. I was clearly talking about getting in trouble factually, but we live in a conspiratorial age.

“Get in trouble with who?” she said. “Zionists?”

This was nuts. I work for myself. My income is from individual subscribers sending a few dollars a month. Do “Zionists” have the power (or inclination!) to stop all those little transactions? “I just don’t think I’m obligated to talk about things I haven’t covered.” I said, trying to be polite.

“I think I disagree with that, Matt,” she said. (She disagreed that I prefer to only speak when I know what I’m talking about!) “Genocide is a serious, serious issue.” (She was telling me the answer to her question.) Next, she said Glenn Greenwald told her nobody is an expert and Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté “get a lot of pushback” and “people smear them all the time” for speaking about Israel. (All your friends have already given the right answer, why won’t you?) Then: “I don’t think you have to be afraid of the pushback.”

I tried pointing out that if I were to say something on the subject, I’d just be regurgitating someone else’s thoughts. She went with: “You’re a parent. How do you feel about the kids that have been killed?”

Whatever a discussion is, this was its opposite. It got worse. She moved to Coleman. “I think for me the reason why I wanted to have this conversation with you,” she said, “is because I wasn’t sure if you were familiar with who uh Coleman Hughes actually was.”

Uh-oh, I thought. Was there a damning biographical detail about Coleman that I should have known? I asked what she meant. “Often times what will happen is that there are outlets and there are organizations that they will use people like Coleman Hughes,” she said, “so they will use a black face to push forth with their agenda.”

What organizations? Was he on the WEF payroll? A fellow at an RNC-funded institute?

We never got there. Instead, she described an argument Coleman had on Twitter with Aaron and Briahna Joy Gray over, you guessed it, Israel. This was about whether rapes occurred on October 7th, or whether it was nails pushed into the gentials of a female corpse, or — I lost track. I did learn that Coleman took the pro-Israel side and Aaron took the pro-Palestinian side (“Dear genocide apologist,” he began). After this detour, Sabrina explained that sometimes, “the media” and “powerful people… in this country” will “use… a face like a Coleman Hughes” to forward their “agenda.”

So, the “organizations” turned out to be “the media” and “powerful people.”

I ignored this and just said I thought racial harmony as an aspiration was a good thing. If she was trying to imply by proxy that I shared Coleman’s Israel views, it’s worth noting I’d written in support of Aaron a lot more than once.

In the world of left-leaning podcasts that exploded to prominence in the wake of October 7th (they are the modern answer to right-wing talk shows that proliferated after 9/11), I was raked over the coals for this appearance. The hosts of Vanguard, who between them have the brains of one Skee-Ball attendant, did a segment about how I “floundered” in the face of “easy” questions about Israel.

Vanguard rewound tape of me saying that if I spoke I’d just be regurgitating someone else’s words. Heckle said to Jeckle: “He doesn’t want to say that he opposes the fucking slaughter of children, he’s too fucking cowardly, what a little bitch.” Jeckle to Heckle: “Again, all he has to say is, like, even if you don’t want to condemn it, just be like, ‘I think it’s despicable that people are being censored for speaking out about this.’”

Never mind that I had spoken about Israeli censorship (probably before these assholes hit puberty), that I’ve repeatedly said Palestine is often a canary in the coal mine previewing new forms of censorship, that I defended Roger Waters after German authorities investigated his Palestine remarks, or that I opposed the Antisemitism Awareness Act and Trump’s Executive Orders on Antisemitism. I wasn’t asked about censorship. I was asked to agree with the “easy” proposition that Gaza is a genocide.

Is that an “easy” question? Of course not. Nothing about Israel and Palestine is “easy.”

Ask me about the bombing of women and children in a vacuum, and of course I’m against it. Ask me about the zeal I hear in Rabbi Ronen Shaulov’s voice when he talks about starving children in Gaza, and I’ll tell you I feel revulsion and horror. I was against Israel’s suppression of Palestinian Internet accounts when I first wrote on the topic seven years ago and still am. Do I want the United States to be funding any of these activities? That’s an easy no for me, too, as I’ve said. Israel doesn’t need American taxpayer money, particularly if it implicates us in morally extreme acts. Moreover, they know it. I talked to an Israeli reporter early in the conflict who saw the anti-Israel political movement in the United States as a good thing, something that might lead to a less incestuous and interdependent relationship. Even Tablet, often accused of being an Israeli mouthpiece, ran “End U.S. Aid to Israel.”*

None of this is taking place in a vacuum, though, and what’s made me reluctant to salute the constant demands to denounce Israel is the way the pro-Palestinian movement has broadened and inspired its American followers to accept more and more extreme ideas. Until 2023 I thought it was uncontroversial that terrorist murder of civilians was morally abhorrent, but the events of October 7th, 2023 have gradually been reframed as “resistance” and a necessity, a way to “raise an alarm” about the plight of Palestine.

I grew up in a left tradition that revered Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. I’m familiar with the argument frequently made by Noam Chomsky that Israel and the United States are themselves terrorist states, but if you’re now telling me terrorism is an acceptable form of “resistance,” don’t act like that’s not a huge shift in liberal thought. Same with the taking of hostages, justification of which is now at the center of the coming drama. I didn’t like it when George Bush used “enemy combatant” terminology to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, and protests that implicitly support Hamas’s continued holding of hostages mass-delegitimizes the Geneva rules. A response I hear a lot is that Israel’s Palestinian prisoners are also hostages, but that’s no answer. You’re still asking me to justify an abhorrent practice.

This is typically when someone says, “Well, why don’t you complain about Israel’s behavior?” Then I point out I don’t say anything at all. The refusal to wink at murder and kidnapping is the thought process that’s made me a bête noire of the left.

You know what should be easy? Protesting on behalf of a persecuted minority. That shouldn’t require mass c-bombing women or forming squads of joke police or denouncing people for failing to prioritize your happy words or repeatedly libeling people over things they don’t say. I remember it being about eliciting sympathy, but maybe “they” got to me?

*An early verrsion incorrectly identified the Tablet article as published in the Free Press