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Good evening. It's Tuesday, October 17.
Tonight: the Biden Administration has repeatedly made clear that it intends for the United States to participate in and fully support Israel's war in Gaza – not necessarily with combat troops but doing what it has been doing in Ukraine funding, fueling and providing all the weapons needed for Israel to prosecute with this war. Tomorrow, Biden will travel to Jerusalem to stand at the side of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledge even more support – all while, just 50 miles away, the 2.2 million people living in Gaza are experiencing what can only be described, without exaggeration, as hell on earth. Regardless of your views on this conflict or how you think the blame should be assigned, what is happening in Gaza is one of the worst humanitarian crises in years. The death toll in Gaza is now in the thousands and rising every day.
Over the last week – over the last week – Israel has dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, with a population that is composed of at least half of children under the age of 18. That bombing amounts to more than what the United States dropped on Afghanistan, a much larger and more sparsely populated landmass, in an entire year. Let me just repeat with emphasis: Israel has dropped in the last week on Gaza more bombs than the United States had typically dropped on Afghanistan in an entire year. Their food supply and access to clean drinking water are dwindling to near zero. Unless you believe that there is no such thing as innocent civilian life in Gaza – and that view, as we devoted last night's show to documenting, is indeed one that is commonly and explicitly asserted in both Israeli and American discourse – then there is no way to look at what is happening there with anything other than horror, immense sadness, and a desire to see this increasingly horrifying war come to an end as soon as possible.
There is, though, no apparent diplomatic effort on the part of the United States to end the war, just as was true of Ukraine and the steady desire on the part of the United States to do everything possible to prolong and fuel it.
Then: one of the primary points we have emphasized from the start of this new war is that the lesson of the U.S. response to the 9/11 attack must be preserved and applied, As is true for Hamas's attack on Israel last Saturday, virtually everyone in the United States and the West reacted to the 9/11 attacks with rage, indignation and a desire for vengeance. But Americans quickly learned, and polling data confirms, that they still believe this. Not everything the United States government did in the name of waging war on the terrorists or destroying the perpetrators of those attacks turned out to be wise, justified, or even moral. To the contrary: so many actions undertaken by the U.S. government in the months and years following the 9/11 attack were self-destructive and shameful. That is the reason that the neocons who dominated the Bush-Cheney administration and George Bush and Dick Cheney themselves ended up discredited and in disgrace, at least until they magically rehabilitated themselves by denouncing Donald Trump, which absolves all sins. But the reason they were discredited and in disgrace is not because people reconsidered whether the 9/11 attack was morally unjustified. Americans still overwhelmingly believe that it was. The shame and horror from that era are, instead, due to the fact that so much of what the US did in the name of "fighting terror" had the opposite effect: either by inflaming it, turning the world against the U.S. and engaging in actions that destroyed the moral credibility of our government.
We cannot fall into this same trap this time. We cannot allow Israeli and American institutions of power to tell us that we have two – and only two – choices – either we uncritically approve and applaud everything our government does or stand accused of being "pro-Terrorist" – or, in the language of this new sequel we're all watching, "pro-Hamas." Yet rejuvenating and re-imposing that repressive post-9/11 framework is exactly what American elites are attempting to do – all to render it off limits to question or dissent from the acts of American and Israeli officials. We'll review exactly how this resurrection of the post-9/11 climate is being attempted, and why it is so vital that its manipulative propagandistic foundations be rejected.
And then finally: ever since this new war erupted, parts of the American right, not all but parts, have been copying at times verbatim the core rationale of the American liberal left when it comes to things like justifications for censorship, for “cancel culture” and for narratives of grievance and victimization. To hear some in mainstream venues tell it, the American establishment and American elites are largely and radically anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. That is the framework we're being presented that in the United States, anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian sentiments are pervasive among American elites.
There are several problems with this narrative, starting with the fact that vehement support for Israel has been foundational to the establishment wings of both political parties for decades. Just today, a resolution was introduced in the United States Senate that affirmed the United States government's commitment to standing by funding and arming this new Israeli war, a resolution that was immediately co-sponsored by all 100 senators, except for 1. The purpose people who are being censored right now, who are losing their jobs, who are being put on a blacklist, are not those who are defending Israel, but instead, those who are criticizing Israeli actions and the policy of the Biden administration to support everything Netanyahu does.
We understand, of course, that issues involving Israel provoke more intense emotion and passion among many Americans than almost any other issue, including even American wars themselves. There are few issues more polarizing than this one. We also realize that many people in our audience view this war from a different perspective and a different prism than we do on the show. And with my journalism, I never guarantee that I will always align with or validate the views and perspectives of all my readers and viewers. I do, though, guarantee that I will always do my best to approximate the truth and my journalism and reporting as best as I can that everything I say is the byproduct of my actual conviction rather than a strategic desire to please my audience, or worse, out of fear of provoking disagreement among some viewers. And that one of the paramount values for which we battle on every issue is the ability of people to engage in free inquiry, free dialog and free debate without being censored, fired, or subject to unjust vilification campaigns such as the effort to claim that anyone questioning Israel is either pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic. All debates, but especially ones involving the wars of a foreign country should be an overarching and unyielding unified value.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
