Dear Weekend Jolter,
The current events that become history often force us to see painful truths about the world — that it can be “anarchic, illiberal, and full of violent dangers,” as Noah Rothman put it.
Condoleezza Rice, speaking months after the 9/11 attacks, described “certain verities” reinforced that past September. On the need to confront terrorists and their hosts, she stressed that “terrorism can support no cause, it is never, never legitimate; it is, by its very nature, evil; terrorists have no positive agenda; terrorists are not for anything, they are against peace and freedom and life, itself.”
The Hamas invasion of and assault on Israel last weekend reinforced those verities again. Nothing — not geopolitics, not “colonialism” — can adequately explain the actions of these fervent rapists and butchers, beyond the recognition that evil dwells on earth. Yet not even the most heinous acts as witnessed in southern Israel could stir sympathizers in the West to reexamine their placards and talking points. The response these past several days on the streets of New York City and European capitals, at Harvard and other college campuses, and even in Congress was clarifying, in that it exposed a certain value set almost designed to excuse the knife-wielder for the bloodshed. It is also deeply alarming — a “bad omen,” Matthew Continetti writes — in that a noxious strain of moral relativism is rising anew in influential echelons of American society.
A now-notorious statement signed by more than 30 Harvard University student groups blamed Israel alone for the murders and rapes of its citizens. This touched off a depravity race, in which campus screeds seemed to get progressively more inhumane as the week went on. Professors joined in. Jimmy Quinn flagged one statement from a Columbia student group that cheered the “unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza.” The students’ takeaway from videos of desecrated bodies, screaming concert-goers under fire, and kidnapped children was essentially: This is a great day for justice. “Something is deeply, deeply wrong in academia,” as Princeton’s Robert P. George observed.
Echoes of Jeremiah Wright could be heard as well during this week’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Caroline Downey gathered revealing quotes from participants at the New York City rally. One protester casually described to NR what had just transpired this way: “Recently Palestinians crossed into Israeli territory, and this protest is in support of them.” In the media, the equivocation got so bad that Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt asked in disbelief on MSNBC, “Who’s writing the scripts?” And in Congress, “Squad” members miserably failed the moral test. Cori Bush managed to craft a statement assigning fault in perfectly equal measure to the attackers and the attacked, before putting the onus on Israel to deescalate. One from Rashida Tlaib included no specific condemnation of Hamas and instead took aim at Israel’s “occupation.”
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it bears repeating. This isn’t to say that Israel’s government is perfect. Its Gaza blockade contributes to misery there but wouldn’t be in place if Hamas hadn’t seized control; Israel “wanted to wash its hands of the place as much as possible,” as Rich Lowry writes. No entity bears more responsibility for the situation in Gaza than Hamas itself.
We’ve seen some encouraging signs in the reaction of Western governments to Hamas’s war. President Biden, in his Tuesday address, voiced unequivocal support for Israel and spoke without euphemism about acts of “pure, unadulterated evil.” The Squad founders encountered the scorn of adults in the Democratic Party for their initial response. Certain groups and politicians have felt compelled to backpedal in recent days. Even Squad recruit Jamaal Bowman, the only member of Congress on the fire department’s “do not serve” list, condemned the celebrations of gore by some on the left. Less encouraging — and in fact very worrying — is the nihilistic response from activists and from students currently riding the elite-college escalator to positions of influence in America: political office, big-name consultancies, etc. Social-media disavowals indicate that some of those ugly college statements were issued without full membership support, which certainly seems plausible — but that means organization leaders still drafted and/or decided to sign them on their own. If, stupefied by crude cultural allegiance, those future grads cannot recognize “pure, unadulterated evil,” we’d better hope they lose the battle of ideas to more rational minds as this generation ascends.
The joke about Donald Trump supporters, fittingly made by Trump himself, is that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. Hamas can apparently do far worse and not get blamed either by Western apologists. “Sometimes, there really is just Good and Evil,” as Charles C. W. Cooke writes. It shouldn’t be this difficult to distinguish the two.
* * *
Before moving on to the week’s stories, some company business: This week, the magazine made the official transition to monthly (meaning you’ll hear the word “fortnightly” less frequently around these parts). Subscribers will receive larger and better-looking issues with additional features. Coinciding with these changes, NR as an institution is recommitting itself to certain priorities, which you can find here (scroll to the end).
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The era of strategic tolerance toward Hamas is over: Israel Needs a Long Leash to Destroy Hamas
What sponsor of terrorism means, in practice: Iran Is Also Responsible
The House chaos is embarrassing: Republicans Need to Get Their House in Order
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: It’s Time to Sober Up
Elliott Abrams: The Hamas Attack Changes Everything
Jeffrey Blehar: There Is No ‘Both Sides’ Between Israel and Hamas
Michael Rosen: For Israelis, This Wasn’t 9/11, It Was Worse
Caroline Downey: ‘David vs. Goliath’: Israeli Rave Survivors Recount Hellish Escape from Hamas
Charles C. W. Cooke: Defenses of Donald Trump Are Completely Circular
Haley Strack: ‘Glory to Our Martyrs’: Georgetown University Students Mourn Palestinian Deaths, Ignore Hamas Atrocities
Ari Blaff: ‘Tiferet Is Our Sunshine’: Israeli Aunt Recounts Niece’s Horrifying Abduction at Music Festival
Ryan Mills: How Radical Jihadist-Linked Groups Spread the Cancer of Antisemitism across U.S. College Campuses
Ryan Mills: Project Dynamo Arrives in Israel to Rescue ‘Hundreds and Hundreds’ of Americans
Samuel Gregg: America’s Despotism of Debt
Donald Kimball: As Biden Tries to Revive Net Neutrality, Remember Proponents’ Bogus Claims
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Things I Couldn’t Conserve
Christian Schneider: Saturday Night Live Will Tell You the Future
Audrey Fahlberg: RNC Denies Virginia GOP’s Request for Cash ahead of 2023 Elections
CAPITAL MATTERS
Dominic Pino, on the new picket-line Republicans: Josh Hawley’s Pro-Union Folly
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White pens a tribute: Terence Davies, the Last Existential Filmmaker
Brian Allen highlights a timely piece of art news (and more): A Holocaust Restitution, a Newly Discovered Rembrandt, and a Native American Artist at the Biennale
FROM THE NEW, NOVEMBER 2023 ISSUE OF NR
Wilfred Reilly: Why Thomas Sowell Matters
Jonah Goldberg: What’s Wrong with Congress
Audrey Fahlberg: Hope and Despair in the Post-McCarthy House
Noah Rothman: Israel, Hamas, and the End of Pax Americana
John Byron Kuhner: A Fresh and Tragic Iliad
Charles C. W. Cooke: I Took My English Dad to an American Football Game
THE EXCERPTS, BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND
The new monthly issue of NR magazine is out, as noted above. It covers much ground, and I’d recommend finding a hard copy as well if you don’t already subscribe, if only to get a better sense of the new design and feel. Here, I’ll excerpt a bit of Wilfred Reilly’s essay on Thomas Sowell, and his influence:
Thomas Sowell is the only living human I care about meeting before he dies.
The best known “black conservative” of his era, and in my opinion one of the top ten social scientists, Sowell has influenced contemporary American discourse in a hundred ways — especially for those of us on the right. Most notably, he outlined the unconstrained and constrained visions of human behavior, the latter of which holds that knowledge is diffuse and widely dispersed rather than concentrated among self-anointed cliques of experts, and he introduced “quantitative culturalism” as an alternative to both biological determinism and the idea (see Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist) that racism is the cause of all inter-group disparities. Sowell made — at book length — the point that the mere existence of racism does not explain all, or most, such gaps between racial groups.
The basic idea of the constrained, or tragic, perspective on human behavior, the alternative to the rival and currently more popular vision of the self-anointed, is without exaggeration one of the most important concepts in contemporary conservative thought. Simply put, the good doctor argues that there are two “modellable” perspectives on how human decision-making does and should take place.
According to the “vision of the anointed,” useful knowledge is rare among the majority of people, whose cognitive capacities are blunted by vices such as religion or illogical race bias. Useful knowledge is, however, easy to obtain for members of the educated elite, whose “human capacity . . . is vast.” To advocates of this framework, knowledge “consists largely of the articulated intelligence of the more educated few,” and what’s best for society is to listen closely to, say, Dr. Fauci . . . or, less glibly, to follow “deliberate plans that utilize the special talents and more advanced views” of The Experts ™.
In contrast, the central claim of the constrained, or tragic, vision is that knowledge is difficult to obtain for all human beings (the wisest rules for human behavior are therefore centuries old and battle-tested) but widely dispersed throughout society. While the smartest person in any given room may indeed know more than any other person in that room — and the occasional shining genius still more — no single individual has more information or wisdom than, taken together, all of the ordinary country lawyers, housewives or home managers, general-practice doctors, and successful farmers of a single midsized town.
Further, Sowell more than hints, following 60-plus years of affirmative action and nepotistic legacy programs at elite U.S. institutions, that not all political leaders and social scientists are shining genii: Many are complete dunces. He describes human capacity as “severely and inherently limited for all” and the best system for social-policy-making as incremental improvement via systemic processes, such as free markets, which “convey the experiences and revealed preferences of the many” (italics mine).
A sideline to his discussion of the currently trendy anointed vision is Sowell’s criticism of what might be called intellectual fashions — although he does not use exactly this language. This idea is an interesting and important one. A cliché among journalists, businessmen, and intelligent non-scholars, to such an extent that it has become something of a joke, is that highly trained members of the intellectual elite often believe absurd and nonsensical things — for example, that rates of crime are wholly untethered from rates of policing. “You have to be very well educated to be that stupid!” goes the old barroom and country-club joke.
In several of his books, most notably A Conflict of Visions, Sowell touches on why this pattern exists. Essentially, he argues that — just as much of what is on display in Paris or New York City during the annual fashion week is unique and whimsical but far less flattering or desirable to the average person than a navy-blue suit from Brooks Brothers — many novel academic theories are high-IQ and genuinely interesting but are also curiosities that have never been tested successfully in the real world. Their advocates (one might think here of feminists who promote alternatives to the traditional family) therefore tend to have a far lower rate of practical success than do those who back the older, simpler frameworks consistent with the tragic vision.
Caroline Downey writes here about one couple’s terrifying escape from the rave that turned into a Hamas killing field:
The rave started at midnight on Friday. Hundreds of young Israelis came prepared to party well into Saturday evening.
Danielle Yehiel came with a group of eight friends to the Supernova music festival, held in the Negev desert in southern Israel. They had planned the excursion three months in advance, to celebrate their college graduation. Between the DJs, dancing, and light show, it was a spectacular production, Yehiel told National Review.
When the sun rose around 6:30 a.m., “it was the peak of the party,” Yehiel said. Many ravers were drunk and under the influence of psychedelic drugs.
Suddenly, peculiar clouds appeared in the sky. Missiles. . . .
By 7:00 a.m., it became clear to Yehiel and [her boyfriend] Ronald that Hamas had infiltrated the entire festival. Then began a deadly cat and mouse chase between the pair and the terrorists.
Yehiel and Ronald staked everything on their tiny, urban car.
“The car we drove is a model you don’t even have in the states,” Yehiel said. “It’s a really small car. Only a little bit bigger than a smart car. It’s a city car, not anything suitable for driving or escaping through roads.”
Searching for an exit, the two began hearing what sounded like automatic gunfire.
“It’s not like a bullet here, a bullet there,” she said. “It’s like ten bullets at a time, 20 bullets at a time. We see a mass of people running by foot in total chaos.
They decided not to leave the car, thinking “this is what will keep us alive.”
From 7:15 a.m. or so until 8:30 a.m., Yehiel and Ronald navigated the desert under gun fire.
“We played with them,” Yehiel said. “It was like a game. They came from the right, we went left. They came from the left; we drove to the right. We got locked in the party. The terrorists had surrounded the exits. For an hour we drove inside the party area. We were constantly shot at. We saw the terrorists, we saw them shoot people, they shot the car. They shot the car nonstop.”
Noah Rothman, in light of events, issues an appeal for our politics to abandon the nonsense — and meet the moment:
It’s worth reflecting on the issues that dominated the American political landscape just a few days ago if only to fully apprehend just how inconsequential they are.
For the better part of a month, House Republicans argued amongst themselves over whether it was necessary or even desirable to keep the U.S. government open if they failed to use leverage they did not have over Democrats to secure spending cuts. It was a conversation divorced from political reality, and it produced only one concession from the party in power — cutting off support for a U.S. partner that has been ruthlessly invaded by an overt American enemy. That concession proved unsatisfying because the debate in question was only ever a proxy fight over which Republicans had enough power to satisfy their ambitions. In the end, a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to oust the speaker, paralyzing the House and calling into question the body’s legal authority to respond to world-altering events overseas.
The Biden administration had committed itself to frenetic gestures in its effort to convince its constituents that it wasn’t completely feckless. Last week, it was busily attacking Republicans for taking advantage of a law as it was written to make some obtuse case for ignoring the Constitution in the effort to cancel student loans. . . .
It all seems so fatuous and trivial today. The slaughter of civilians in Gaza was not a “tragedy,” as some rote expressions of sympathy for the hundreds of dead Israelis suggest. It was an assault on civilization itself. And it was not a rogue act. Evidence indicates that this medieval barbarism was supported, operationally or otherwise, by America’s state-based enemies. Nor is that an accident: Hamas’s actions facilitate the goals of the West’s adversaries all over the globe. The U.S.-led geopolitical order we take for granted is under attack. . . .
Politics is not a sport; it is in fact often deadly serious business. We have drunk deeply from the intoxicating well of partisan political combat for so long that we’ve lost the plot. It’s time to sober up.
Ryan Mills revisits a remarkable group, now springing into action in Israel to help Americans:
A team of American military veterans with the nonprofit Project Dynamo is on the ground in Israel with plans to start rescuing Americans trapped in the warzone.
Bryan Stern, a U.S. Army and Navy vet and international security consultant who formed the donor-funded rescue operation during the bungled American withdrawal from Afghanistan, said his case managers in the U.S. have “been awake for three days just fielding hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of requests from Americans who are stuck.”
“We are completely saturated with requests,” he said.
Stern expressed frustration with the Biden administration, which he believes should be taking the lead on getting Americans out of harm’s way. “Project Dynamo shouldn’t be rescuing any American in any warzone, ever,” he said. But over the last few years, after engaging in rescue operations around the globe, including in Ukraine and in Sudan, Stern said, “We’ve learned that’s just not the case. It’s just not. That’s why we’re here.”
Stern said there are basically three “tranches” of Americans his team is looking at: hostages held by Hamas terrorists, which are the “most severe and hardest” cases; Americans trapped inside the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Palestinian-controlled territories; and Americans stuck in Israel between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which will likely be the easier cases.
Shout-Outs
Yaakov Katz, at the Free Press: How Israel Got Ambushed
Liel Leibovitz, at Tablet: Eyewitness Account of the Rave Massacre
Nancy Rommelmann, at RealClearWire: Anatomy of a Random, Unhinged Assault in Portland, City of Professed Benevolence
CODA