Our Zoom call this Friday will be at a special time: Noon ET. We’ll be talking about the 25th anniversary of September 11, and the enduring legacy of that day. Our guests will be Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the newsletter, Forever Wars, and Iyad El-Baghdadi, co-author of The Middle East Crisis Factory and Editor-in-Chief of Kulna, a new independent media platform for collective liberation and systems change. I can’t think of two better people to explain how 9/11 still haunts Americans, the Middle East and the entire world. Please join us.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Basel Adra reports on Israeli settlers’ theft of livestock as a way of pushing Palestinians off their land.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Ben Lorber, a Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates, about the accusations of antisemitism against Hasan Piker.
On September 10, I’ll be speaking online with Omer Bartov at the Stony Creek Forum.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This coming Friday, it’ll be the 25th anniversary of September 11th. I still think about that day a lot. It was formative for me, politically, but formative in some really problematic ways. What I remember about that period after September 11th, I think most of all, is the sense of righteous fury that existed in the country, a sense that Americans were united in our grief, in our rage against what had happened.
And there was a sense of moral clarity that this was horrifically wrong, what had been done to us, that there was this gaping national wound, and that it must be avenged, and that America had the right for this, to do this avenging. That that avenging would be violent. America would go to war. It would kill the evil people who had done this. And America would create a better world, but also that America would get its righteous revenge against the people who had done this.
And there really was very little space in that moment to try to ask the question of why this happened because any conversation about why it happened, unless the answer was simply the evil of the people and the ideology that had committed this, any conversation about why would be interpreted as something less than a full-throated moral opposition to what had been done. That it was impossible to have a conversation about why this happened without people claiming that you were justifying what had happened. And of course, what happened was fundamentally, completely unjustifiable. It was horrifying what had happened.
But there was a sense, I think, in which the righteous, unified, righteous fury of the country would be undermined if people said, well, maybe this is happening, in part, as a result of a reaction to what America has done in the larger Muslim world. And there were some people who tried to inject that conversation in, and I think they were generally ignored or shouted down. It was a very perilous thing to say at that point. And I say with shame that I didn’t try to create that conversation at all. Probably, I was one of those people who was trying to try to delegitimize that conversation as much as possible.
And it’s, I think, because of the inability of Americans to have an honest conversation about the role of America’s foreign policies in the Middle East, America’s support for brutal dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim world, America’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, that that made a conversation about why impossible, and led America to pursue policies that, even though they were justified by George W. Bush’s bringing freedom to people in the Arab-Muslim world, really his vision for how to bring freedom was more American imperialism, more American domination of these countries.
You know, so we would replace Saddam Hussein, his anti-American dictatorship with some kind of pro-American regime in the Middle East, as if people in the Middle East would have had any reason to believe that another American client state would bring them anything more than more repression.
And what saddens me in, you know, when I think back about all of the terrible, terrible costs that have been paid primarily by people in the Arab and Muslim world since 9/11, but also in the United States because so many of our fundamental liberties and the norms that allowed America to function to some degree as a liberal democracy have been undermined by this endless ‘war on terror.’
What really saddens me is that even after all of this, 25 years later, when we should have realized how conceptually, morally crucial it is to be able to say we can have a conversation about why something happens without justifying that action. That it’s still so difficult in the United States to do that. It was so difficult in the United States, in the Jewish community and beyond the Jewish community, in the wake of October 7th, to have any conversation about the reasons that October 7th happened, about the conditions for Palestinians in Gaza and beyond Gaza that might have helped us to explain why October 7th happened, while, of course, also saying that October 7th was a series of war crimes that were wrong.
And even today, you see when Abdul El-Sayed tried to say that the attack on the synagogue in Michigan was wrong—and he did absolutely say that this attack on the synagogue in Michigan earlier this year was wrong—but when he tried to make any gesture to a reference to the fact that understanding the reason for this attack, as wrong as it was, might have been related to the fact that the person who did this attack, that their brother was killed in Lebanon, in Israel’s assault on Lebanon, he was immediately denounced as antisemitic.
Or when Hassan Peiker says something that many of us have been saying for a long time, Ezra Klein has said, a lot of progressive Jewish commentators have been saying that if you conflate Jews and Israel, you are making it more likely that people will take out their hostility against Israel, against Jews. And even though Hasan Piker was clear that that is wrong, that Jews should not be—if you listen to the context of what he said, it’s clear that he thinks this conflation is wrong. He’s trying to argue against this conflation, right.
That’s what makes him different than people like Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens, who are conflating Jews and Israel. Hassan Piker is trying to do what many of the rest of us have been doing, which is saying, no, these are two different things. And so, it’s wrong to take out your anger against Israel at Jews, just like it would be wrong to take out your anger at Chinese Americans if you were angry at the Chinese government.
But just the fact that he said that this is a problem, that this is an explanation for why we might see rising antisemitism committed by people who are angry at Israel. Even though he was saying it’s wrong, he was just trying to explain why it’s happening, and what we need to do to fight it. Even then, again, he’s been pilloried as an antisemite.
I think a lot of this is in bad faith. These critiques, they’re not always in bad faith, but whether they’re in bad faith or not, you can’t have a reasoned public conversation about public policy for the United States, or about a wise strategy for American Jews, or for the state of Israel, or any entity or state, unless you can maintain this conceptual distinction between trying to understand why things happen and justifying things.
And this refusal to allow this space to happen in the conversation has cost us so much. It’s cost the world so much, it’s cost Americans so much over the last 25 years. I think it’s really, really tragic that we still so often don’t have the space to make that distinction today.
