"A Crime of Passion"
On the fathomless dishonesty and utter shamelessness of the "anti-Zionist" Left
This morning in Substack Notes I found that someone had replied to a comment I’d made on the Justice Department’s decision to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the man who assassinated Brian Thompson, a health insurance CEO, on a New York City street. The question originally posed was: Why the death penalty in this case, when other brutal murderers get off more lightly? My answer ran as follows:
Well, let’s think a bit. It was a targeted assassination and an exceptionally cold-blooded case of murder. If the victim had been sleeping with the killer’s wife, that would be one thing. But Mangione sentenced Brian Thompson to death, not for anything he’d done, but solely for what he represented: a sector of the economy of which the killer disapproves.
Dostoevsky would surely have grasped the depth of evil thus displayed, but it seems that in these fallen times, even the deepest evil fails to make much of an impression. We see much the same moral depravity on display in the ranks of “anti-Zionist” activism, where the bestial atrocities of Hamas are cheered and celebrated.
And from one of those activists, I got this in reply: “The acts of Hamas seem closer to a crime of passion than the calculated mass slaughter that Israel has been carrying out.”
Thus was my observation on the moral depravity of the “anti-Zionist,” i.e. antisemitic, Left resoundingly validated.
On 10/7/2023, the world did not witness a “crime of passion.” It was on the contrary a well-planned, long-prepared pogrom, a “calculated mass slaughter,” whose bestial atrocities were perpetrated with the deliberate intent of striking terror into the hearts of Jews everywhere. This is what we think of you. This is the fate we envision for you. That was the message that Hamas intended to send. And that message was received. To some extent, yes, it terrorized the Jews. But that was not all. It recalled to them the founding principle of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state: Never Again. By openly pledging to finish the job that the Nazis started, Hamas and other Islamofascist terrorist groups have targeted themselves for annihilation. And war is hell.
Antisemitic activists on and off American university campuses profess themselves horrified at the human toll of the Gaza War. They are despicable hypocrites. Recall the joy with which they received the news of the 10/7 pogrom, their fervent declarations of support for Hamas, their open approval for the killing of “settler-colonialists,” not excluding small children and infants. So pardon me if I dismiss with contempt their hand wringing over death and destruction in Gaza, their false charge that Israel is engaged in genocide, and the reams of fake history they cite as the excuse for their own genocidal bigotry.
The case of Andrew Sullivan is especially telling. As the Trump Administration commenced its campaign to rid America of foreign-born antisemites and terrorist supporters, he stepped forth as a champion of constitutional rights and due process. Sullivan denounces what he claims is Trump’s authoritarian, if not fascistic, policy of removal. Hey, even antisemites and supporters of genocidal terrorism are entitled to free speech!
But conspicuously absent from Sullivan’s line of argument is any acknowledgement that American Jews have civil rights too, for instance to live their lives free of intimidation, harassment and violence at the hands of antisemites—especially those who are guests of this country. Heaven knows that we have no shortage of home-grown bigots. Why, then, should America tolerate the presence of undesirable aliens like Mahmoud Khalil? Sullivan doesn’t say. Mentally, as it seems, he has disappeared American Jews.
To be fair, however, Sullivan does spare some attention for the Jews: He has added his voice to the chorus of denunciation of Israel’s military operations in Gaza. In that context, it’s Hamas that disappears from the discussion. One might assume from his rants on the subject that the Israeli Defense Forces have launched an unprovoked attack on the Palestinians of Gaza, that they’re deliberately bombing schools and hospitals, deliberately picking out and killing Palestinian children. Who started the Gaza War, and why it continues to rage, are questions absent from his consciousness.
No doubt, Sullivan is confident in the moral probity of his stand. But moral clarity demands recognition of bedrock truth—in this instance, that the Gaza War began on 10/7/2023 with the Hamas invasion of southern Israel and the mass slaughter that followed. Not only what happened that day, but all the subsequent horrors of war, are the responsibility of Hamas and the many Palestinian civilians who support Hamas. The events of 10/7 made clear that the Palestinian national cause is nihilistic, terroristic, genocidal in root and branch.
Andrew Sullivan, alas, seems to have sought refuge from this truth in virtue signaling and soggy sentimentality.
In the final months of World War II in Europe, Winston Churchill observed to his wife that the fate descending on Germany was a tale of terror. In the east, the Red Army had reached the borders of the Reich, its soldiers intent on revenge for the devastation of their own country at the hands of the Germans. There were countless scenes of horror: mass rape, casual murder, millions of civilians transformed overnight into miserable refugees. Often to be seen were the bodies of German military deserters, dangling by the neck from lampposts and tree limbs. The British and American air forces had reduced to rubble much of urban Germany. So much, Churchill said, for talk of the glory of war. But he added: The German people deserve this. Yes, they did. By their embrace of Hitler and National Socialism, the German people summoned their fate.
Would any decent person with a moral compass in good working order append to this conclusion a caveat, arguing that the crimes of Nazism were mere crimes of passion, somehow less culpable? Of course not.
But “anti-Zionist” activists are not decent people with a moral compass in good working order. Their antisemitism manifests itself in the claim that Israel, alone among the nations of the earth, is an illegitimate entity that deserved what it got on 10/7/2023 and has no right to defend itself. That’s both dishonest and shameless: a willful, impudent reversal of reality, based solely on humanity’s oldest and most tenacious variant of racism. And whether he’s willing to admit it or not, that’s the position that Andrew Sullivan has embraced—seemingly oblivious of the fact that his denunciations of Israel, so thoroughly one-sided, negate his self-righteous defense free speech.
For moral clarity is indivisible.
Our modern society has developed the concept of narcissistic empathy, where common sense and logic are supplanted by the "cause of the day". Perpetrators of heinous crimes are given a pass because they are the supposed victims of oppression or extenuating circumstances.
Hence, Palestinians can slaughter their Israeli neighbors because they have been victimized for the last 60 years by the "system". Pro Hamas protestors can intimidate and threaten Jewish students because they are showing solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians.
An elite college-educated young man is excused for the cold-blooded murder of an insurance executive because of the actions and policies of the insurance industry as a whole.
We have become a society that now accepts atrocities if they are perpetrated by an underprivileged class and expect no level of responsibility or agency from those being cast as the "victims", while the true victims are either vilified or dismissed.
Thank you Thomas M Gregg. You’re a bright light in a darkening, morally bankrupt world.