Sorry everyone, I know I still owe you a response on the Gaza piece, but I've been distracted fighting with Holocaust (quasi) deniers and the Jews who defend them
Yep, this has turned into one of those months where I piss EVERYONE off. But, no, I have not forgotten.
A quick update: last night, the comedian Dave Smith posted on X to his 800,000 followers: “You cannot be pro-life and pro-war.”
Smith is wrong. Wrong generally and specifically. War is sometimes necessary. Israel had to invade Gaza in 2023, even if it is wrong to put civilians at risk now.
But if Smith’s name is familiar to you, it may be from his April appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Smith debated Douglas Murray about Israel - and the historian Darryl Cooper, whose revisionist (to put it politely) takes on World War 2 and the Holocaust are highly popular with the isolationist right.
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(A surprising number of you heard my clarion call - what Unreported Truths stands for, why it matters - last Friday and joined up. If you didn’t then, I hope you will now.)
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Cooper is very clever.
He does not deny the Nazis killed Jews, he just refuses to admit that those killings came in an organized, genocidal campaign to eradicate Jews.
I don’t know why Cooper won’t admit the truth. Only he does. But in doing so he denies the true horror of the Nazis and the reality of the Holocaust.
Even stranger to me: Smith, who claims to be Jewish and have lost family members in the Holocaust, defends Cooper — as he did on Rogan’s show.
So I mocked Smith’s “pro-life and pro-war” tweet, saying he “thinks Auschwitz is a spa and Unit 731 was a cool sushi place.” [Unit 731 was a Japanese military division which killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese prisoners in some of the most inhumane medical experiments imaginable during World War 2.]
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Smith didn’t like my calling him out. Then Cooper got involved too. I had a long back-and-forth with both on X.
Now I have agreed to debate Smith on Rav Arora’s podcast tomorrow (Rav is an independent journalist - I published his interview with Dr. Philip Krause, a former top vaccine regulator, in May).
So instead of explaining to all of you why I think Israel can and must prevent famine in Gaza, I need to get ready to debate a guy who seems to think Israel has no right to defend itself at all. “Israel’s intention is to have all the land,” Smith said on November 3, 2023 — November 3, 2023, even as Israel was still counting its dead from the October 7 attacks.
Yep, looks like it’s one of those weeks when I have managed to make both sides want to punch me in the face. Doing somethin’ right!
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(Defending the truth and historical reality — from left and right. Nothing matters more to me.)
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I am going to follow up on that Gaza piece. I fully expect a lot of you will remain unconvinced. But I want to say: it’s precisely because of the insidious games guys like Smith and Cooper play that people who believe Israel does have the right to defend itself (as I do) insist that it do so according to the laws of war and not fall into the trap of dehumanizing a civilian population.
That doesn’t mean avoiding all, or even most, civilian casualties. But when Israeli government officials talk about “driving out” the Gazan population, they are crossing a very bright line. I cannot disagree with Dave Smith on that.
So.
Wish me luck tomorrow. Rav’s Substack is here. Not sure about timing.
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My piece last year about Darryl Cooper and the rhetorical games he plays is here:
Alex, you are misrepresenting Darryl Cooper and you should spend the hours listening to his entire podcast.
He has been extremely vocal about how horribly the Jews have suffered throughout history and that the Nazis were evil and systematically killed the Jews. His description of the atrocities Jews endured during the pograms in Europe literally made me weep in my car. He denoted in very great detail how one Ukrainian Jew was shot by the Nazis and thrown in a ditch filled with dead bodies and had to fake death in order to survive.
What he refuses to do is hold the Holocaust above every other form of mass suffering that humanity has brought upon each other, and that is likely why he draws the ire of some Jews. Cooper rejects this line of thought and believe suffering is akin to suffering. The Holocaust is extremely horrific but so is the Cambodian genocide, and other forms of mass murder. But many Jews will tell you if you think the Holocaust isn't the absolute worst thing humanity has done, then it's because you're an anti-semite. Even mentioning the Holocaust alongside other atrocities like African American slavery will get you attacked for trying to diminish what the Holocaust was.
There is a deep form of propaganda that tries to convince people that criticizing Israel is the same as anti-semitism. In the SF Bay Area, there are massive billboards that try to gaslight people into thinking that if you criticize Israel but you don't criticize Congo or Sudan, then you are basically an anti-semite. This is obvious propaganda but I'm sure many people will fall for it.
If you think Israel is even remotely implicated in the supposed starvation in Gaza you have a very poor understanding of events taking place there. Do your homework!