Welcome to Hell on Earth … and to The Fifth Column Community!

A primer for our brand-new subscribers, plus the usual Weekend Links to related goings-on.

The above picture, from my iPhone camera roll, was taken 11 months ago at the Netiv HaAsara moshav, the Israeli settlement closest to the Gaza Strip. As our dear friend Yael Bar tur, who was with us on our week-long, Israeli-consulate-funded trip all over Israel, wrote Tuesday in a raw, must-read essay titled “Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again”:

Israel uprooted 8,600 people in 21 towns, along with entire schools, houses, and cemeteries (!!) from Gaza in 2005 so that it could go back to Palestinian control. One of these small towns is “Netiv HaAsara” which moved over to Israel and called themselves a gateway to peace. The whole town is decorated with images of doves and olive branches. Yesterday 15 people were murdered there in cold blood.

(Harrowing survivor tales here.)

Yael, an atheist Israeli who lives in New York (but is back home at the moment, watching her information-rich Twitter feed double and triple by the day, and doing stuff like appearing on Manhattan Institute podcasts), is someone we met because this podcast exists. As is her partner in podcasting crime Chaya Leah Sufrin, the Orthodox, LBC-reppin’, shabbat-hosting dynamo whose semi-bewildered yet unbelievably generous family has invited dozens of us rabble (dozens!) into their lovely home to break challah bread (my 8-year-old calls it, in any context, “Chaya Leah bread”) and provide that precious thing in this fallen world, community.

For those hundreds of new subscribers this week, welcome to The Fifth Column community! It’s … a pretty weird place, not gonna sugarcoat that. But also just a fount of constant wonder. I’m not precisely sure what everyone here has in common—it’s certainly not politics or ideology (including about the Middle East, or Covid, or Donald Trump, or abortion, or immigration, or crime, or anything else that people get mad about). Mayyyyybe there’s a bit of over-indexing when it comes to Cold War obscura, or identity-politics skepticism, or media criticism writ large. After 7.5 years of this, including nearly 4 now with the paid-subscription option, I have come to see the throughline of an otherwise all-over-the-map community as: 1) having an active and indelicate sense of humor; and 2) being genuinely tolerant of those who have good-faith disagreement over (*waves hands frantically*) all this. Those of you who were generous enough to loosen your wallets, don’t be shy about introducing yourself in the comments! I’ll put some other community-based links lower in this post.

* These Workin’ for the Weekend posts are basically jackassy roundups of what we, our former guests, and our broader community have been doing and saying in public all week, as well as throwbacks/updates to topics recently covered, and links aplenty to prior episodes. As such we should begin with the pained Zoom-cast this week of Ask a Jew. (Past guests on that fine podcast include me and Moynihan.) In the spirit of healing, here’s Yael in her happy place, petting an animal in the Tel Aviv recording studio where Moynihan and I interviewed Nadav Eyal for Episode #382:  

* Moshe Dayan-shirt-wearing lunatic Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326, #368, #407), who was on our Second Sunday Zoom-cast this week (as the name spells out, we chat with paying subscribers on the Second Sunday of every month, give or take logistical challenges), has understandably been productive this week, with a new episode of The Re-Education with Eli Lake titled “Delusions Shattered by Atrocity,” as well as guesting on a “far more explicit—and way more rage-ful” episode than usual of Adaam James Levin-Areddy’s podcast Uncertain Things. (I was on Uncertain Things in January 2021; Moynihan has previously re-educated Eli about Christopher Hitchens and “why so many creative geniuses have embraced some truly vulgar and horrific political causes and movements.”) Oh yeah, Eli was also on The Megyn Kelly Show Wednesday starting at the 36-minute mark. Here’s a clip discussing the much-talked about pro-Hamas rallies on college campuses and elsewhere:

* Joining Eli on Members Only #184 was former congressman and future Senator (R – Kabul) Peter Meijer, another frequent Fif’ guest (S.D. #51, #307, #339, #367,  #424). Meijer, a supermarket heir who served in Iraq as an Army intelligence officer and also spent quality time as a private citizen in Afghanistan (basically CIA, is what I’m saying), has been unimpressed with some of the collegiate goings-on his home state of Michigan: “Condemning the barbaric slaughter of innocents should be the reflexive impulse to any feeling person- yet on campuses across the country we see vile antisemitism and outright celebration of Hamas’ bloodlust. Absolutely shameful.”

* Fellow Michigander Robby Soave (#332), who I work with at Reason, got far more furious in public on Friday than I have ever seen him in private, going absolutely Medieval at his Rising co-host and former Bernie Sanders national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray:

* The same broad topic, and bitter contentiousness thereof, formed a big chunk of last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher, featuring former Sanders foreign policy guy (and Nader 2000 campaign staffer, back when I was covering it!) Matt Duss, as well as our old pal, Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347, #394). I found myself at various points nodding along with each of the three men arguing over the domestic outbursts of Hamas enthusiasm, but then an old post-9/11 worry/guilt-reflex kicked in over disproportionate discourse-policing. If you watch(ed) the whole show (did I mention I was on last week?), ask yourself: Wasn’t by far the most nourishing bits when they were having informed arguments about the complicated history and current policies of the region?

* Which gets me to our comrade Noam Dworman, proprietor of NYC’s world-famous Comedy Cellar, host of the Live From the Table podcast (which Moynihan was on last month), and musician extraordinaire. Noam, who went with us on that Israeli junket mentioned at the top, is nobody’s shrinking violet when it comes to supporting Israel and arguing vociferously with the country’s critics (do check out his pre-Oct. 7 interview with the great historian Benny Morris, about whether Israel can fairly be described as an “apartheid state”). Yet by Wednesday of this week he was already warning against overzealous reaction against campus idiots, and today he announced that he was stepping back from Twitter arguments:

I'm extremely pro-Israel, but I realize I'm out of step on a few things being argued about.

For instance, it's ok with me to point out inaccuracies and expect corrections - even about decapitations. It's journalism - should the inaccurate stories just stand? I don't doubt for one fuckin' minute the impurity of some motives, but I can't read everyone's mind, and I don't like the atmosphere of intimidation. The truth is more than sufficient to support Israel in this situation.

Do we really need to fire people who tweet in support Hamas? Even students? Fire the professors who brainwash to an agenda rather than teach rigorous thinking skills. Fire the cat-got-their-tongue university heads who hired the professors! Again: the atmosphere of intimidation turns me off. Let's have the open debate and win it.

* Another journalist who was on our trip, and who isn’t impressed with the post-Oct. 7 censoriousness, is Lee Fang, formerly of The Intercept, now right here on Substack. On Thursday Fang published an interview with former congressman Brian Baird. From the intro:

I wrote several drafts about the situation and deleted them. I initially wrote about my own experience in the region. Last November, I traveled to Israel and to the West Bank and learned a great deal about the very diverse perspectives around the conflict. Part of the trip was with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which stressed the real security concerns faced by Israel, and for a few days, I was with B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that documents human rights abuses suffered by Palestinian people. I also spent time on my own meeting filmmakers, journalists, and ordinary Israelis and Palestinians. 

But instead of writing my own essay on this seemingly intractable crisis, I thought to talk to someone with more experience, who has spent considerable time exploring the region and the issues from a relatively independent perspective. Congressman Brian Baird is not a radical. He was elected in 1998 as a moderate, a member of the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition, representing a suburban district outside of Seattle.

Very few lawmakers have a balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Baird has not only traveled repeatedly to Israel and viewed the conflict from the perspective of the Israeli government, but he also struck out on his own and decided to visit Gaza to investigate on his own, a very unusual move that set him apart from the Washington establishment. The experience deeply moved him and he became an outspoken voice on Capitol Hill on issues concerning peace in the region. He left office in 2010. 

* The person I’ve been most keen to read on the protest/campus/speech/cancel-culture stuff of this week is Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #417), president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which was recently upgraded from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. This decidedly nonpartisan organization, which picks up where “old-school ACLU” left off long ago, has rich and litigious history of defending the rights of right-wing firebrand and pro-Palestinian activist alike. On Tuesday, Greg went on the Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em podcast of Fifdom stalwarts Sarah Hepola (#354) and Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.D. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111). Then on Friday, he uncorked an essay that began with a history of post-9/11 campus speech crackdownery, then pivoted to our current moment:

When professors, students, and administrators see their community facing backlash and even being canceled for what they say about the attacks on Israel and the response, they will suddenly rediscover the value of academic freedom and free speech. In fact, we’ve already seen this happening. […]

As the news came in and the horrors became more clear to us all, the silence of institutions that had otherwise been very vocal in their political stances was difficult to ignore. Criticisms came swiftly, and I think ex-Harvard President Lawrence Summers and Sarah Lawrence professor Samuel Abrams were entirely right in saying that if universities are going to comment on everything else, it is outrageous not to comment on the murder of so many civilians.

This is the kind of quagmire universities find themselves in when they don’t adopt the position of institutional neutrality famously outlined in the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, which FIRE emphatically supports. Once an institution begins taking positions on political issues, they open themselves up to all kinds of problems—namely, calls for censorship of critical and dissenting voices, pressure from partisans that the university officially adopt their position, and even the endless hassle of deciding what should and shouldn’t be commented on.

As we saw in the wake of 9/11, in the coming weeks and months students and professors will get into trouble for making statements on either side of this issue. FIRE will defend their free speech and academic freedom rights, as we always have. It’s a good sign that universities are following suit, but it’s difficult to ignore the fact that it took students cheering on the rape and murder of civilians for schools to suddenly reverse course. Embarrassment on the part of university leadership is clearly playing an outsized role in these developments, and it's a shame it had to come to that for the principles of free speech and academic freedom to be reaffirmed and upheld.

Still, as cynical as I might be about it, if universities adopt the Kalven standard and stick to it, I’ll be glad. If not, these recent moves will reveal themselves as far more cynical than even I feared, and our already plummeting faith in our institutions of higher education will hit an even lower low. 

* I know I promised a bunch of Community-related links for the newbies here, but daylight’s burnin’, and this thing is pretty damned long already. Please refer to this post from May 2022 with links to our (listener-curated) book-references list, (more freshly updated) Spotify playlist of outro songs, Discord channel (whatever that means), Subreddit (complete with sweet new tattoos!), and so forth. On WhatsApp there’s a Book Club, some regional groupings, a chaotic all-purpose ChatterMax, and a new Israel Updates—I would put links to that stuff here, but I don’t really know how, and anyway this is all what the community conjures up and maintains, constantly. I’m sure people in the comments will leave instructions for joining.

*  Comment of the Week comes from Not a True Scotsman:

Below are some books, documentaries, and websites that were mentioned in the Zoom chat. I've added a couple of my own recommendations as well. I also recommend subscribing to The Free Press as they're pumping out quality content right now.

*Live updates from The Times of Israel https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-october-10-2023/

*NR on the reaction of the American press and politicians https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-house-members-who-flunked-the-moral-test/

*Book - "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor" by Yossi Klein Halevi

*Book - "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East" By Michael Oren

*Book - "Two Rothschild's in the Land of Israel" by Simon Schama

*Book - Various books by Shlomo Ben-Ami

*Video - Coleman Hughes interviews Dr. Benny Morris 

*Translations of middle eastern news 

https://www.memri.org

*Hamas children's propaganda https://www.memri.org/tv/mickey-mouse-character-hamas-tv-teaches-children-about-islamic-rule-world

*Book - "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" and the related documentary on Netflix: "Ordinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaust"

Walkoff music is my kinda goddamned cosmopolitanism: