Jerry Seinfeld likened the Free Palestine movement to the Ku Klux Klan — even saying those who use the phrase “Free Palestine” are worse than the white supremacist group — at a student event at Duke University meant to honor hostages who are being held in Gaza.
Seinfeld spoke at the school in Durham, North Carolina, to introduce a former Israeli hostage, Omer Shem Tov, when he made the remarks, according to the university’s student newspaper, The Duke Chronicle. He reportedly started by saying, in reference to the Free Palestine activist movement, “Just say you don’t like Jews.”
“By saying ‘Free Palestine,’ you’re not admitting what you really think. So it’s actually — compared to the Ku Klux Klan, I’m actually thinking the Klan is actually a little better here, because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ Okay, that’s honest,'" the Chronicle reported Seinfeld said.
It’s the reasonable consequence of what you’re saying. Israel’s war is genocidal - we can all see that, from the absurd number of civilian deaths, to the use of starvation as an indiscriminate weapon, to the statements about mass population removals. Even if you purposefully ignore that reality, only the willfully stupid can deny that Israel’s war is in flagrant breach of the principles of proportionality and discrimination between combatants and non-combatants.
So we start from a position where Israel is committing horrifying war crimes and murdering children every single day in extremely cruel ways.
It is also completely evident that it is impossible to eliminate Hamas. Just like it was impossible to eliminate the Taliban, or Al-Qaida, you can’t destroy a resistance movement by force. You can prevent (some) terrorist attacks committed by those movements by force, but all attempts at destruction result in new recruits, unless you destroy the entire population among which the resistance exists.
So you are saying that “this only ends with the complete destruction of Hamas” which is only possible by the complete destruction of the Palestinian people. You only make demands of Hamas, not of Israel, even though Israel is perpetrating crimes against humanity every single day and has killed orders of magnitude more Palestinian civilians in this war than Hamas did in the instigating event (never mind before 2023). That favours their genocide.
Well written. And I do call for Israel to stop its wonton disregard for civilian safety and their embargo on aid - not that my voice means much. I do avoid the g word because it’s not well defined and I don’t think it’s useful. I agree that Hamas cannot be completely destroyed - but I think the Israeli perspective is that it can be meaningfully reduced so as to provide some period of peace (for Israelis). As unacceptable as it is, their response to the Oct attack will likely dissuade further such actions for a while.