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It's Wednesday, September 18.
Tonight: For the second consecutive day, Israel attacked not just Hezbollah, but the Lebanese people in civilian areas in unprecedented and quite dastardly ways. Unlike yesterday, when Israel dubiously claimed to have targeted mobile phones ordered and used exclusively by Hezbollah, a claim we deconstructed on last night's show, today's new destruction was clearly more indiscriminate with booby-trapped walkie talkies exploding all at the same time with much greater force, not only in civilian areas but in civilian infrastructure like apartment buildings and even in stores that sell – not to Hezbollah but to the public – the devices that Israel implanted with bombs and exploded in the stores. At least 20 more people were killed and another 400 were injured.
From the start of the October 7 attack, it seemed highly likely that Israeli citizens and their American supporters would embrace exactly the same mentality, premises and grave self-destructive mistakes that the U.S. and Americans made in response to the September 11 attacks: mistakes that wrought so much erosion of previously observed taboos of our national credibility and values, and which featured all sorts of dramatic victories that ultimately achieved nothing other than undermining our own interests – as evidenced by the Taliban's instant return to power as the United States left Afghanistan, their country, after 20 years.
To understand this mindset of random vengeance and then dehumanization that drove so much of the American War on Terror abuses that we're now seeing in the response to October 7, not just in Gaza now, but in Lebanon as well, it is useful to dive in a very visceral way to what happened to understand what enabled it not just to describe it, but we produced a video using one of the best videographers that we know to try and give a real sense of what that climate was like for those who had lived through it or those of you have forgotten a lot of it.
We're coming up on the anniversary of the 2001 anthrax attacks, which, coming so soon after the 9/11 attack, laid the groundwork for so much of what was to come, particularly since it was falsely blamed on Iraq. We want to take you somewhat back to that period in a very illustrative way to understand how similar it is to what is taking place all around Israel's violence and aggression today.
Then: while the ACLU has become an increasingly partisan organization so radically advancing the values that once defined it and made it so great – in fact, so partisan that it has even retreated now from its defining absolutist defense of free speech – another group, thankfully, has rapidly taken its place as a completely apolitical and nonpartisan, yet vehement defender of free speech. No matter whose speech is under attack and who the perpetrators of that attack are or what the cause in whose name the attackers of free speech are, that organization is FIRE.org, which we talked before about to a rather significant extent, and we are thrilled to speak to its executive vice president, Nico Perrino, about so many of the attacks on queer free expression, rapidly appearing more and more in America's key institutions, including academic campuses and increasingly in federal and state law, as well as a major victory that FIRE just achieved in response to a government attacking a Citizens First Amendment right in such a blatant way, as well as other victories that they piled up in fortifying the right of free expression for all of us.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
