We have some friends who live in New England. Those friends have some friends who we sometimes have the pleasure of dining with. Unfortunately, that latter category also occasionally contains particularly obnoxious specimens of fashionable liberalism. Specimens who, armed with a New York Times editorial but lacking the basic grace not to discuss politics at dinner, insist on having ‘debates’ about the Israeli-Arab conflict. And inevitably, the conversation devolves into us having to explain that, no matter how much they believe Noam Chomsky, it is simply not the case that Israel murders tens of thousands of Palestinians a year. but lacking the manners which would inhibit friends – for reasons genuinely beyond our abilities to reason – often try to engage us in ‘debates’ about the Israeli-Arab conflict.
We are then forced to wonder: how can people be so obliviously stupid? Sometimes, the answer involves relatively nuanced discussions – ranging from the sensibilities embedded in insulated political communities to the effects of unconditional grade-school affirmation on a generation of otherwise mediocre, shallow ‘activists’. But other times, we’re inclined to believe that most of their problems come from just being willingly fed near-lies. Consider yesterday morning’s apologia for Hamas by Boston Globe staff writer Anne Barnard. Most of the article displays the usual feel-good liberal themes about Hamas (the election will moderate them, their support has nothing to do with their desire to kill Jews, etc), and that’s of course tired enough. But right in the middle, the contradictions become so blatant that Barnard has to sound like an idiot just to make them work.
The only people who believe that being elected by a majority of Palestinians will make Hamas moderate are people who who refuse to listen to Hamas:
Ahmed Bahr, a senior Hamas official who is running on the Hamas list, said his movement would not abandon the armed struggle against Israel even after it entered the PLC. “We are not running in the election for money or positions or prestige, but to carry the rifle in one hand and the motto of reforms and change in the other,” he said.
These enlightened staff writers are the ones who insisted throughout the Oslo years that putting Arafat in control and giving him billions in aid would cause him to give up terrorism. Throughout those years, Arafat repeatedly incited hatred and violence against Israelis, and then of course he went on to start that whole “war” thing. Yet these liberals – not embarrassed at all that Arafat ignored their patronizing insistence that they knew what he ‘really meant’ better than he did – are now shamelessly insisting that they know what Hamas ‘really means’ better than Hamas does.
The rest of the article repeats and amplifies the current chic talking point that all the Boston, New York, and Los Angeles cocktail party liberals have been passing off as nuanced analysis: Hamas is gaining support because they’re the anti-corruption party, not because Palestinians want to destroy Israel. The last time we addressed this nonsense, we sited all of the polling data that indicated the exact opposite. But Barnard is so certain in her conclusions that she feels comfortable citing and then (in her mind) refuting that polling data:
