Michael Goldfarb Responds

Even more so than usual, there was some serious unhinging on the left this weekend on Israel-Gaza, in this case as it relates to Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard. Goldfarb applauded Israel's targeted assassination of Nizar Rayan last week, which generated an exceptionally despicable (and effusively effluvial) rant from Glenn Greenwald (and RawMuscleGlutes joined in here).

Here's Goldfarb's response:

Glenn Greenwald, as hysterical and long-winded as ever, accuses me of possessing "the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It's the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings." Another blogger accuses me of endorsing terrorist ethics, and the Atlantic's in-house gynecologist calls me a thug.

In fact, I was explicitly questioning whether such violence can be effective against a group like Hamas. The target of this strike had already sent one of his own sons into Israel as a suicide bomber. Greenwald presumes that I see Palestinians "as something less than civilized human beings" because I question whether they can be deterred "like us." But I wasn't talking about Palestinians in general, I was talking about the Hamas leadership in particular. If Greenwald believes that Hamas, a terrorist group, is itself the avatar of the Palestinian people, then he is the one who sees the Palestinians as less civilized than the rest of us. If not, then I wonder whether he is illiterate or simply disingenuous. But the Hamas leadership is not like us: Americans may send their sons to war, but they do not send them to certain death for the sake of slaughtering civilians.

It's also striking that Greenwald and his fellow travelers would use words like terrorist and thug to describe me while defending the rights of Hamas, an organization comprised of genuine terrorists and thugs. It's become common for the left to describe its ideological opponents as thugs, and the result, apparently, is the inability to recognize real thuggery when it's staring them in the face.

There is no doubt that Israel has the right to strike Nizar Rayan, even at the cost of killing so many women and children -- these civilians were not intentionally targeted. The question is whether or not this strike, in addition to eliminating a leader of Hamas (and the weapons depot in which he chose to house his family), will also deter Hamas from so brazenly ending the next cease fire. The fact that Greenwald & Co. would react so bizarrely to the mere posing of that question is precisely why their voices are being ignored in this debate. Just the other day Greenwald wrote of how he was perplexed by a poll showing that a majority of Democrats shared his views on Israel's assault, but still the Democratic party was almost uniform in its support for the action. Well, its possible for large numbers of people to hold views that simply aren't serious -- though of course a plurality of Americans still supports Israel's actions in Gaza -- and on this issue, like on telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping, a large portion of the left simply isn't serious.