I Don't Need the Lecture

Response to a PhD-Brandishing Reader/Subscriber*

*A reader at CounterPunch, not here.

The essay in question: Paul Street, “Empire Joe Gaslighting in Tel Aviv,” CounterPunch, October 20, 2023.

A. “Dear CounterPunch:

Please pass the following on to Paul Street:

In the current weekend addition (in your essay titled ‘Empire Joe Gaslighting in Tel Aviv’), you do a good job deconstructing Biden's Tel Aviv speech -- until you come to Hamas, calling their incursion ‘certainly despicable’, which quite negates everything else you say in your article. You tell me and your readers: what are the Palestinians to do? What options are/were open to them now that haven't been since the Nakba? I suggest you listen to Norm Finkelstein's recent  interview with Chris Hedges. You need to be educated. 

Norm Finkelstein says he will not condemn Hamas. Listen to his rationale carefully. You might learn something, Mr. Street.

JXXXXX BXXX

Ph.D. 

Holocaust Survivor

Subscriber”

B. My response:

Dear JB, Ph.D. and H.S.:

Thanks for writing.  You can certainly tell from the piece that I am a dedicated enemy of US imperialism and its Judeo-fascist ally and outpost Israel.  In short, I am an ally. I make one small reference to the obvious heinous criminality of the 10-7 Hamas attack, and you think I need a Finkelstein lecture on how Hamas is Nat Turner and John Brown? Seriously?

Let’s have a look at my supposed sin (in boldface) in this weekend’s CounterPunch:  

“Under the deranged leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu (an arch-authoritarian even in relation to his own people), Israel has responded to the supposedly surprising and certainly despicable October 7 attack on its civilians (by the reactionary Islamist group Hamas) by ordering a great crime against 2.5 million Palestinians. Israel has enacted a state of siege on top of the already existing blockade: the shutting off of Gazan access to food, fuel, electricity, water, and medicine.”

(Bear in mind, this is the essay’s single reference to Hamas’s revanchism and criminality in an essay that is 98% dedicated to denouncing US imperialism and Israel.)

So, like, wow. Please note that I say, “supposedly surprising.”  That means that I find the 10-7 attack to have been completely predictable given what Israel has done to the people of Gaza and Palestine. Yes, this is what occupation, blockade, and apartheid breed.  Of course.  Getting that is elementary.

You find it controversial for me to have called the attack “certainly despicable”? I don’t know what to say.  They butchered hundreds of people at a dance party.  They murdered seven people waiting for a bus.  I trust you saw the video of the guy executed trying to hide under his car. I could go on.

I don’t care what Norman (from whose work I have learned a great deal about Israel’s US-backed crimes) says, (a) organized military/paramilitary attacks on noncombatants are great crimes in the 21st Century and (b) Hamas is part of a revanchist, Islamo-fascist tendency that has nothing to do with liberation. It’s not a forward looking “option” at all. References to 19th Century slave rebellion leaders Nat Turner and John Brown or for that matter to the well-deserved deaths of Custer and his troops (I used to struggle with my undergraduate history students to see the logic behind those great acts of resistance to slavery, racism and genocide) don’t change any of that.

If you disagree with (a) and/or (b), you just live in a different moral and ideological universe than I do.  I am a revolutionary communist who is opposed to both Israel’s US-backed judeo-fascism and to Hamas’ vengeful Islamo-fascist revanchism.  As the Revcoms say: choose one side of that dichotomy and you empower the other one.  I say choose neither.  Choose socialist revolution instead.   That’s the option you can’t or won’t imagine. That is (in my doctorally-stamped - LOL) view our only option going forward on numerous fronts — in the struggle against ecocide, in the effort to prevent widened and potentially nuclear war (the current situation in and around Israel has the potential to light a regional and global fire), in resistance to patriarchy, in the fight against racism, and in the struggle against fascism both at home (in the USA for me) and abroad.

The notion that considering Hamas’s attack despicable/criminal somehow negates my critique of the United States and Israel is so stupid that it’s hard to fathom that anyone with or without a PhD could actually advance it. Good grief. So, you think finding 9/11 criminal negates the analysis of those of us who thought (as I did) that a major Islamist attack on the US was likely (thanks to US imperialist policy in the Middle East) before the jetliners hit — and who then (after 9/11) said (as I did) that the attack would be used by the American Empire to justify escalated US war in the Middle East? How moronic.

You put (c)“Holocaust Survivor” and (d) “Ph.D.” under your name.  Regarding (c), Finkelstein (a son of Holocaust survivors) is right to be apprehensive about playing the Holocaust card: contrary to the academic travesty called standpoint epistemology, subjective experience is not a substitute for scientific understanding. Your own horrific personal experience (which I would never deny) is not part of the relevant evidence base for forming a judgement on the nature and character of Hamas and its actions.

Regarding (d)…please. Ugh. I almost never mention my doctorate if I can help it. I grew up around academics and spent decades around them as an adult. Looking back on how many clueless, conservative, cowardly, dysfunctional, and demented (and just flat out stupid) academics I’ve had to struggle with and against over the many years, I now have the half-joking suspicion that (with the exception of genius sorts like Noam Chomsky, Perry Anderson, and some others) people get social science and humanities PhDs to cover an understandable intellectual inferiority complex. In any event, most --- not all but most --- of the smartest, best, most radical and courageous and effective intellectuals and activists I know had the common sense not to stay in school so long as to put “Piled Higher and Deeper” at the end of their name!