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Good evening. It's Monday, October 16.
Tonight: in the aftermath of 9/11, the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, adamantly denied having planned the attack or played any role in it. He did, however, offer theories as to why it was morally and legally justified to target American civilians with violence. Because American citizens choose their leaders, he argued, and then choose them again, when deciding to reelect them, Americans are directly responsible for those leaders' actions, including when they bomb civilians, impose sanctions regimes that starve and otherwise kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children; when they destabilize other countries or work to engineer coups in other countries and when they invade and attack other countries as they did with Iraq.
Indeed, after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney invaded Iraq and then bombed multiple other countries and tortured detainees, and implemented a program of kidnaping called “renditions,” Americans reelected them in 2004 – knowing that – and ratified all of that violence, including violence that ended up killing innocent people. Under bin Laden's theory, American civilians are not really civilians. By ratifying the violence carried out by their government, they became actively complicit in it and thus became legitimate military targets for those seeking to bring reprisals for violence by the United States against innocent people.
Bin Laden's theory at the time provoked worldwide indignation and revulsion. After all, the category of civilian that he sought to erase was central to the entire post-World War II framework that was implemented by numerous international bodies to prevent the Holocaust or to prevent other civilian targeting atrocities that came to define that war. One reason that the 9/11 attack provoked so much anger and unity around the world was due to the consensus that civilians are civilians in all cases and can never be justifiably targeted by violence. That's called terrorism. Civilian lives are sacrosanct and they can never be deliberately targeted. This has been the consensus, the legal framework in Western morality since at least the end of World War II.
While bin Laden's theory was widely and vehemently denounced, it has become popularized over the years and all with the same goal that he had: to find a way to justify killing civilians in large numbers, either by deliberately targeting them or dropping bombs and using violence in reckless disregard for their lives. In all wars, especially with the way they're now fought, civilian deaths are inevitable in large numbers, and we all learn the name in order to dismiss that: “collateral damage.” But what bin Laden did – as well as many others who have since followed in his footsteps – is something entirely different: it's a way of justifying either the failure to safeguard those innocent lives or to justify their targeting. If a theory can be offered as to why civilians are actually part of the military or a legitimate military target that one can legitimately destroy, then the responsibility to avoid killing civilians disappears.
When Hamas launched its horrific attack on Israeli civilians last Saturday, they did so based on the premise that there's no such thing as an innocent Israeli civilian because they elect their governments, which then occupy or blockade Palestinian land, or because they support the killing of innocent people in Gaza, or because they serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. The category of civilian is blurred or even erased when it comes to Israel under the worldview of Hamas. That's what drove what they did in Israel on Saturday. But it's not only Hamas that has embraced this view to justify their targeting of civilians and other atrocities. Over the last week, there have been explicit statements from Israeli officials and their American supporters that promulgate a quite similar theory, namely that because the people in Gaza elected Hamas – they did so the last time an election was permitted – 16 years ago – back in 2007 when most of the population either hadn't been born yet or were far too young to vote – then it means, however, that those so-called “Palestinian civilians” are not quite civilians since they either implicitly or even expertly endorse the violence of their Hamas leaders. The growing invocation of this theory to erode and erase the concept of civilian is quite dangerous and alarming, and we think it merits a good deal of thought and analysis.
Then: we have heard many accusations over the last week of people who are said to be “pro-Hamas,” namely, people who are said to have justified the massacres carried out against Israeli civilians or who, even worse, in general, are people who are calling for and cheering and advocating the murder of Jews. This rather pernicious label, “pro-Hamas” is often used to vilify anyone questioning, let alone opposing the actions of the Israeli and American governments – close your ears to all of that, we're told because those people are “pro-Hamas” – it's not just used to smear people's character, but it also justifies all sorts of cancel culture campaigns and even the kinds of censorship we have been reporting are now pervading the West in the wake of this new war. Echoing the left-liberal theory to justify censorship, we are told by those supporting such measures of repression: “Now about this war, we're not talking here about free speech. This is different. This is hate speech. This is incitement to violence. These people are calling for the murder of Jews.”
Are there some people who have justified the attack by Hamas and generally endorse the killing of all Israelis? Yes, of course, there are. You can find people advocating literally any idea if you look hard enough, but as we documented last week at length, the reason it was necessary to highlight people whose names nobody knew until last week – a stray speaker at a DSA rally or some local chapter of a Black Lives Matter group or a non-tenured assistant professor no one had ever heard of – is precisely because this “pro-Hamas” view was actually quite marginalized, really reserved only to the outermost fringes Very few people – almost none with any position of power or influence – did anything other than act with disgust at what Hamas did.
The reason this phrase “pro-Hamas” is being used so indiscriminately – applied to everyone who expresses any criticism about or opposition to the acts of the Israeli and U.S. governments in response, or who insists that the lives of Palestinian civilians have the same value and worth as anybody else's – is the same reason that the people who questioned the Bush-Cheney War on Terror were called “pro-terrorist” and those who opposed the invasion of Iraq were “pro-Saddam,” those who opposed the regime change wars of the CIA in Syria and Libya stood accused of being “pro-Assad” and “pro-Gaddafi” and those who now oppose the U.S. war in Ukraine are vilified as “pro-Putin” or “pro-Kremlin.” It's all designed to create a simple-minded dichotomy – in the words of George W. Bush: “You are either with us or you're with the terrorists.”
Exactly as it was done back in 2001 and 2002, this rancid propaganda framework is used to justify the imposition of authoritarian powers. As long as you can successfully pin the label “pro-Hamas” to the foreheads of those who dissent from the current war policies, who cares if they're censored, put on a blacklist, fired, made unemployable or worse? After all, they're “pro-Hamas,” who would possibly care what happens to such people?
The Biden administration announced just a few hours ago – as The Wall Street Journal reported – that “The U.S. military has selected roughly 2,000 troops to prepare for a potential deployment to support Israel, U.S. defense officials said." Don't worry, though they “are not intended to serve in a combat role,” the official said. This war is already more dangerous than the war in Ukraine, and that's a very dangerous war. It's between the U.S. and Russia, the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. In this new war, regional escalation is highly possible, if not likely. The U.S. is already heavily involved, deploying aircraft carriers, providing bombs and money, deploying more aircraft carriers, and now designating troops that might be deployed. Any tactics that are designed to vilify aid, vilify good faith dissent, or worse ones that are designed to justify official state censorship – such as France's banning of all pro-Palestinian protests while still allowing all pro-Israel protests because those are aligned with the government policy – any such tactics like that deserve our scorn and our attention. So that's what we're going to give it tonight as we explore the latest developments in this war between Israel and Gaza and how it is being discussed and exploited in the United States and the West more broadly.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
