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A Primer for the Perplexed: The Nine Big Lies Against Israel and What They Really Mean

 

A Primer for the Perplexed: The Nine Big Lies Against Israel and What They Really Mean

By

Gil Troy

Professor Gil Troy, a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the JPPI, the Global Think Tank of the Jewish People, is an American presidential historian, and, most recently, the editor of the three-volume set, Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People.

In 1917, California’s isolationist senator Hiram W. Johnson captured the cynicism of politics – especially during wartime. “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” he said, echoing earlier sages, as America embarked on a “war to end all wars,” which we now call World War I. 

While fabricating here and there may be every general’s pastime, Palestinian terrorists and their enablers have taken lying to a whole other level. Yet, despite building so much of their case on a foundation of falsehoods, they keep conning the world. Everyone “knows” that Israel occupies Gaza – despite disengaging from it in 2005; that “From the River to the Sea” envisions a democratic Palestine — when it envisions an exterminated Israel; and, most outrageously, that hundreds of innocent Israelis, young and old alike, deserved to be massacred, maimed, raped, and terrorized – while others denied all the evidence that the atrocities happened.

This primer picks nine of the most popular New Big Lies Palestinians and their enablers propagate. Let’s leave the number ten for more godly commandments, while stressing that despite being debunked repeatedly, these lies have countless lives.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.” Give the Palestinians credit here: at least they are honest. But I have to ask: If Palestine is free – meaning Jew-free – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – where is there room for me and 9 million other Israelis? “From the River to the Sea” is a one-state solution, meaning a no-Jewish state solution – and no Jews anywhere else, either. 

Some Palestinians prevaricate. They claim the slogan imagines a secular democratic state with Jews and Arabs living together. In fact, the phrase’s history is exclusionary and exterminationist.

In 1964, three years before the Six-Day War, the slogan was popularized by the Palestinian activists and terrorists who founded the Palestine Liberation Organization.  Their war aims were not to liberate the “occupied territories,” which Israel only secured three years later. They wanted – and want — to liberate the world from Israel itself. Similarly, since Hamas emerged in the late 1980s, the slogan has been a Hamas and Islamic Jihad mainstay.

October 7 offered at least one clear lesson: If your enemy calls for your destruction – your enemy is calling for your destruction. Jews should take the Palestinian death cries seriously, and Americans must start taking the Iranian mullahs’ death cries seriously. It’s actually bigoted not to take them at their word and decide they can’t really mean that. “Palestine from the River to the Sea” leaves no rooms for Jews – or the Jewish State.

“This is what decolonization looks like.” The world is a tough place. Over the centuries, powerful countries have colonized other places, sending explorers, then groups of settlers, away from the mother country to establish settlements, usually in order to extract resources. Inevitably, especially as national self-determination became a virtue, colonization led to decolonization. 

On one level, decolonization is simply an historical process, whereby people in the colonies rebel, or the empire collapses. Over the decades, scholars defined decolonization as a state of mind, too. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), born in Martinique, helped make decolonization trendy among some of the most settled and privileged people in the world’s richest and most expensive universities. 

As a psychiatrist, Fanon observed that colonized people often internalized a sense of inferiority. As a revolutionary, he wanted those colonies to break free – even violently. Considering violence cleansing, restoring some balance, some dignity to the powerless, he called violence “man recreating himself.” 

Fanon built on Marx’s binary dividing the world between the oppressing ruling class and the oppressed proletariat. For Fanon, the forever-guilty oppressor was the colonizer, the forever-innocent oppressed was the decolonizer. For the colonized, Fanon preached, “there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of strength.”

Fanon remains remarkably influential today. Call them woke. Call them postmodern. Call them identitarians. Today’s campus commissars have forged Marx’s seesaw between the oppressor and the oppressed with Fanon’s colonizer-decolonizer dynamic and deification of violence. These people frame the world – and America – as caught in a zero-sum power struggle. The oppressive colonizers in this Manichean, black-and-white world are always guilty, while the oppressed are forever pure and innocent, no matter what they do.

Viewing the world through this distorting prism, Israel is always guilty, the Palestinians forever innocent. As a result, the October 7 barbarian bloodbath was exhilarating, joyous, justified. One influencer even injected the Hamas-romanticizing term “settler-babies” into the mix. 

To see the world this way requires much fanaticism, many simplifications, multiple distortions, and, at the end of the day, a very, very bruised soul. But those blinders explain how so many feminists failed to see Hamas’s rape culture and child abuse, how so many liberals failed to acknowledge the despotism, how so many humanists failed to cry out in shame and horror as Palestinian marauders crossed every civilizational red line.

“Israel is practicing apartheid.” The Jews seem to have magical powers. Over the centuries, Jews attracted all kinds of labels: Jews were too rich and too poor, too capitalist and too socialist, too traditional and too modern, too anxious to fit in and too eager to stand out. 

Today, the Jewish state has similar plastic powers. As trends change, Israel is deemed guilty of the most heinous of national sins. Today Israel is a white-supremacist or, even better, Jewish-supremacist state, and a settler-colonialist enterprise. In the 1990s, Israel was racist, colonialist, and imperialist, as well as guilty of “ethnic cleansing” once the Balkan mess introduced that phrase into the international vocabulary.  But since the 1970s, as the international community justifiably turned away in disgust from apartheid South Africa, Israel has been called an apartheid state.

Apartheid was a system of racial differentiation – apartness – based on all kinds of racial classifications and perverse beliefs that whites and blacks and colored people were not equal. The Apartheid Wall in Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum lists 148 laws sifting people into different racial categories to keep them apart and calibrate who deserved which privileges – and which restrictions. 

Israel has never passed one law defining people by racial categories. In fact, Israelis and Palestinians are involved in a national conflict, not a race war.

Moreover, if Israel wants to be racist, and create an apartheid state, it’s doing an awful job. Israeli-Arabs enjoy equal rights and have served as Supreme Court judges, Knesset members, key members of the last coalition. With about 20% of the population, Israeli-Arabs are overly represented in Israel’s medical system: About 20% of the doctors, as much as 40% of the nurses, and 43% of the pharmacists are Israeli-Arab. Finally, if Israelis hate Arabs so much and see them as inferior, why was there so much excitement about the Abraham Accords, and why are Hamas and Iran trying to subvert a Saudi Arabian deal with Israel? 

Maybe Israelis don’t hate Arabs – but only pass laws protecting themselves against enemies who seek to destroy them?

“Israel is carrying out genocide.” Genocide, literally tribe-killing, is defined as a systematic series of violent acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” For decades, Palestinians have been crying “genocide,” claiming Israel seeks to wipe them out. Yet the Palestinian population has at least quintupled since 1967, from just over 1 million to nearly 5-and-a-half million people. Zionists are even worse at genocide than they are at apartheid.

Pure hatred often involves projection: You hate in others what you hate in yourself, you imagine your enemies would do to you what you would do to them if you had a chance. These false cries that Israelis are targeting Palestinians for genocide reflect the sweeping, categorical, and thus genocidal tendencies in the Hamas charter, in the October 7 sadism, and in too many twisted corners of the Palestinian national soul.

“Israel is engaged in disproportionate bombing.” The phrase “disproportionate bombing” is in many ways redundant, like fattening fudge – one goes with the other. When terrorists attack your civilians, then hide behind their civilians, what can a serious army do? Inevitably, some of those human shields will die. 

Moreover, when you have an air force, and you have a choice between bombing an enemy from the air and sending your troops in door-to-door, what’s the moral call? A leader’s primary moral responsibility is to the led – and a defender’s primary moral responsibility is to defend those unfairly and viciously attacked. In April, 2002, Israel chose to send reservists into Jenin to apprehend terrorists instead of bombing from the air, U.S.-style. The result was a Palestinian ambush that killed 23 Israelis. Israel’s supporters may have felt momentarily pure – but 23 families were scarred for life that day.

When an enemy attacks, then cowers in mosques and hospitals and kindergartens and schools, those protected places become military objectives. Complaining about a “disproportionate response” from a regular army when fighting terrorists embedded in a city is in essence complaining about any response from the army. When your enemy calls for your annihilation, tries acting on it, then vows to try again and again, it’s unrealistic to expect no collateral damage. 

Let’s be clear: the moral onus for every death, every injury, every misfire, remains on Hamas for initiating this round. It’s unfair to forget that ultimately war is a clash of powerful, ugly forces. If you want to win, it’s logical – and moral – for your own side to mobilize as much force as you can – within the bounds of reason of course, but not being immediately criticized, as Israel is.

“Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza since 1967.” In June, 1967, threatened by three Arab armies, Israel fought for its life and more than tripled its size. It won the Golan Heights in the north from Syria. It took over Gaza and the Sinai in the South from Egypt. And it reunited Jerusalem, while securing the Biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria from Jordan – which had, ahem, occupied what it called its “West Bank” territories, with no international authorization, since the Jordanian Legion invaded to its west during the 1948-1949 Israel War of Independence.

While Israeli governments over the years wavered, using different legal theories including the laws of occupation to define Israel’s relationship to all the territories, calling them “occupied” was triply problematic – especially to historians. 

• First, in defending itself legitimately, Israel seized territory from a hostile neighbor – when those Jordanian-administered territories languished in a legal no-man’s-land. From 1949 to 1967, the Jordanian conquerors ignored the U.N. 1947 Partition Plan to make those areas an independent Arab state. The U.N. never recognized Jordanian sovereignty there, making the territories truly disputed, not occupied.  

• Second, this was no colonial expedition, going to some exotic locale in pith helmets and safari suits. Jews had international rights to the territories and a deep history there, especially the Biblical territories of Judaea and Samaria, which were deemed Jewish and open for Jewish settlement under the 1920 (often overlooked) San Remo conference and, subsequently, the British Mandate.

• Third, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan presciently noted in 1980, calling Israel an “occupier” implicitly compared Israel’s far more benign, legitimate, and rooted policies “to the Nazi practice of deporting or murdering vast numbers of persons in Western Poland – as at Auschwitz – and plans for settling the territory with Germans.” This false comparison, Moynihan noted, played “perfectly into the Soviet propaganda position” and the Palestinian projection that “Zionism is present-day fascism.”

Today, alas, the occupation preoccupation has become the main launching pad not only for the Bash Israel Firsters, but those hyper-critical Jews who habitually doubt Israel.  Moreover, Palestinians use the words “occupation” and “settlements” promiscuously, to delegitimize anything Zionist. Israel is “occupied,” all of Israel. Every Israeli is a “settler.” The plundered kibbutzim of the southwest Negev are “settlements,” despite lying in pre-1967 Israel, within the “Green Line,” the borders from the 1949 armistice with Jordan, hastily drawn in green pencil. This sweeping Big Lie helped legitimize Hamas’s savagery, deeming every Israeli, every Thai volunteer, every tourist an “occupier,” and deserving of any violence Hamas and the other Palestinian murderers could mete out. 

“Israel’s so-called disengagement from Gaza just turned it into an open-air prison.” In 2005, Israel disengaged from Gaza, uprooting over 9,000 Israeli citizens living in 25 settlements scattered through Gaza and northern Samaria. Amid the anguish, military strategists lobbied intensely to keep a strip of land for defensive purposes – the Philadelphi corridor. The Duke of Disengagement, Ariel Sharon, resisted. He claimed that if Israel even retained one grain of Gazan sand, critics would claim it was still “occupied.” And he was confident that once Gaza was no longer occupied, Israel could live in peace as the Gazans prospered. 

If there is one word that best explains Israelis’ current frustration and fury, it is “disengagement.” Eighteen years ago, there were some weapons in Gaza, no tunnels, and a limited terrorist infrastructure, because Israel still retained some control. Yet, almost immediately after withdrawing from Gaza, primitive Qassam rockets started bombarding Israel – while critics kept bombarding Israel with the o-word, the occupation charge. The violence against Israel – and the criticism — intensified when Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, killing fellow Palestinians brutally. 

Under the gun, now facing an implacable foe vowing to exterminate the Jewish state and the Jews – see the Hamas charter – Israel tried blockading Hamas. As a result, a whole series of lies burst forth: that Israel is occupying the territory it withdrew from completely (in fact, note how little control it had and how ineffectual its blockade was as Hamas built its deadly arsenal); that Gaza is the “most densely populated place on earth” (it doesn’t compare to Manhattan, Hong Kong, and other super-skyscrapered city centers); and that the Zionists have made it an “open air prison” or concentration camp (when you can see on a map that Egypt controls Gaza’s southern border, and know it keeps Gazans far, far away from Egyptians).

In short, Israel did everything it said it would when it disengaged. In doing so, Israel betrayed many of its own citizens. Nevertheless, Israel ended up with no peace, no peace of mind, and a piece of territory that became Hamasistan rather than the Mediterranean resort it could have been if its governing body had put its generous international aid to good use. Today, Israel has on its border a hostile, seething launching pad for tens of thousands of rockets and marauders, exporting so much trauma and misery – while those responsible treat their own people as cannon fodder, too.

 “Israel must agree to a humanitarian ceasefire.”  In the Middle East today, that phrase may be the ultimate oxymoron – like a moral terrorist, a pragmatic Hamasnik, a feminist Islamic Jihadist, a liberal-democratic Palestinian Authority member, a healthy cancer. For 18 years the world has yelled “disproportionate bombing” and keeps demanding “humanitarian ceasefires” whenever Israel tries defending itself. For 18 years, much humanitarian aid has been diverted to Hamas itself. After Hamas invaded and raided and shattered so many lives, from an Israeli perspective, what would be “humanitarian” about a premature ceasefire? 

Diplomats and pro-Palestinian demonstrators say “humanitarian ceasefire.” Israelis hear “a chance for Hamas to regroup” and “more of the same.” Many Israelis wonder: “When do the hostages get such a pause, especially those who might be tortured or enduring the agony of sexual slavery?” Until the hostages are released, Israel cannot relent.

Israel can move to ease the burden of the truly innocent stuck between Hamas and the IDF. Israel could set up field hospitals or temporary refuges in empty parts of Gaza, in Egypt, or even in isolated parts of the Negev. But let’s not kid ourselves. Hamas will take advantage of any break or kindness: at least one-third of the first wave of what was supposed to be foreign nationals evacuated to Egypt were wounded Hamas terrorists, trying to sneak away. Fuel delivered by international organizations has long been hijacked by Hamas for its war machine.

Some claim Hamas is a small group holding the peace-loving Gazans hostage. But if Hamas is abusing people, a humanitarian pause giving the terrorists a break increases Palestinian misery, too. It delays the liberation they need. In fact, most Gazans, like most Palestinians, celebrated the carnage on October 7, and many zealously participated.  

So, yes, try improvising ways to help, to minimize civilian suffering. But the phrase “humanitarian aid” sounds like resupplying Hamas, and “ceasefire” sounds like letting the killers regroup.

“Israel must pursue a two-state solution.” In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181. It was epic, recognizing the Jewish right to a national home – a right rooted in the Bible, promised in the Balfour Declaration and San Remo redeemed through the blood, sweat, and tears of Zionist pioneers who had already built an impressive infrastructure for the state that would be declared in May, 1948. To treat – in the parlance of the time — the Palestinian Jews and the Palestinian Arabs fairly, the U.N. partitioned the area, envisioning a Jewish state and an Arab entity, while internationalizing Jerusalem, the Jewish people’s forever-capital.

The Jews found this compromise devastating. But Palestinian Jewry’s leadership, pushed by David Ben-Gurion, decided that half a loaf was better than none. Two years after the Holocaust ended, Ben-Gurion feared more bloodshed. The Jews needed a state. The day after the U.N. Resolution passed, as Jews finished singing and dancing, Arab rejectionists rioted, trashing Jerusalem’s commercial district. 

That started an historic pattern. Again and again, the Jews – and after 1948 what became the State of Israel — offered compromises, were willing to split territory, to cede territory. Yet again and again, the Palestinian leadership rejected it. No wonder the leading historian Efraim Karsh titled his book about the era, “Palestine Betrayed,” emphasizing that Hitlerian extremists like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem betrayed their own Palestinian Arab people.

In 1974, the U.N. passed a resolution endorsing “two States, Israel and Palestine … side by side within secure and recognized borders.” Thus began this diplomatic Holy Grail, pursuing a “two-state solution.” The most dramatic attempt to achieve it – the Oslo Peace Process of the 1990s – ended in bloodshed, when after the Camp David Peace Talks in 2000 Yasir Arafat rejected any compromise and led his people from negotiation right back to terror.

So yes, for decades there has been talk of a “two-state solution,” and many Israelis would love to see a territorial split. But, especially after October 7, the phrase stings. It reeks of three lies – the lies they tell us, the lies the world buys, and the lies we tell ourselves. 

• First, when Palestinian diplomats and propagandists play the two-state game, they imply that once they have their territorial share, one of two states, the conflict will be solved. But the Palestinian leadership consistently refuses even to adjust its sweeping, all-or-nothing rhetoric promising to wipe Israel off the map. The Americans worked so hard in the 1990s to get Yasir Arafat to change the PLO charter calling for Israel’s destruction – and were so desperate to succeed — they overlooked what Arafat kept saying in Arabic, when he thought Bill Clinton and company weren’t paying attention. Again and again, especially Arafat in 2000, Mahmoud Abbas when he rejected Ehud Olmert’s compromise in 2008 and, most dramatically, Hamas in Gaza, showed no interest in a true “solution” that leaves Israel intact. Hamas’s charter is explicit about that.

• Today, the phrase is even more misleading and infuriating because it’s usually used as code in the international community and certain parts of the Jewish community for “Israel, just do the right thing, give them their territory ‘back’ and we will have peace.”  But, especially after October 7, most Israelis know that the call on the Palestinian side is a ruse. Gazans had the potential to make a state. Israel and the international community would have showered peaceful, constructive Palestinians with money. Instead, they turned their strip of land into a multi-layered stationary warship – and the international community still showered them with money. 

• Most upsetting, “the two-state solution” represents the lies we told ourselves. Admittedly under great international pressure (don’t just throw Bibi under the bus) Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence establishment decided that Hamas was “pragmatic,” Hamas could be contained. After all, no credible person could really believe the rantings in Hamas’s charter using the Quaran to justify destroying Israel and killing the Jews. 

This is not to say that the problem is insoluble. At certain moments, no one imagined peace with Egypt or Jordan or the UAE. But that particular slogan is too compromised, and too associated with the lives and limbs and love and faith Israelis just lost.

Clearly, the Palestinians and their propagandists have developed a whole lexicon, a series of talking points and slogans that distorts words, negates history, and obscures Palestinian intentions. Israel went along with these lies for too long, often bullied into guilelessness by a gullible international community. October 7 was a nightmarish wake-up call. Israel must be moral – for its own sake, for its soldiers’ consciences and its national soul. But the game of buying into Palestinian lies and international niceties ended when those terrorists swarmed the peaceful kibbutzim and villages, sowing death and destruction. The challenge now is creating a new reality – and a new lexicon to acknowledge that reality—and build a better, fairer and genuinely safer new Middle East from there.

 

New INC. Magazine Column from Howard Tullman

 

Don't Fall for Cheap Card Tricks

Hallmark and other purveyors of insincere sentiments have earned tons of money by pressing business owners to reward team members for showing up. Your people want and deserve rewards that are grounded in reality. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@HOWARDTULLMAN1

 

Many years ago, I came to believe that the Hallmark greeting card people were among the most flagrant and prolific creators and marketers of fake holidays, false acknowledgments, and other useless and insincere celebrations. True, these schemes and scenarios have been massively profitable for them over several decades even though it's difficult to understand the appeal of the cheap sentimentality and horrible "jokes" that are at the heart of their offerings.

The "occasions" that Hallmark created were ultimately designed to sell saccharine-soaked cards, pithy and pious posters, and ephemeral sloganized balloons to an audience that includes millions of business owners and managers. These poor employers are shamed into participating in inauthentic gestures to preserve peace, prosperity, and civil working relationships in their businesses. Maybe Hallmark was just the most visible proponent of this stupidity because it's also clear that the FTD florists, balloon sellers, and swag merchants are all equally guilty co-conspirators.

For me, it wasn't simply the fraudulent sentimentality that sucked, or the awkwardness and forced informality of the gatherings, or even the rapidly deflating detritus that hung sadly from fences for weeks afterward; it was mainly the fact that the whole grab bag of gratuitous gestures was a costly waste of time and energy that sent utterly artificial messages to the troops. Like parents who tell their kids that the reason they're never around is because they're working for the money to buy them nice things or take them on vacation. Even the kids know that's BS.

Managers who buy into these gimmicks do their companies a serious disservice, put uncomfortable pressure on their peers to make similarly empty gestures, and offend people in their organizations who prefer to recognize real achievement. Not every administrative assistant is killing it these days and needs to be recognized because Hallmark and other happiness hustlers say so. Not everyone needs to get an atta-boy if they're barely getting their jobs done.

If you've ever had to preside over one of these things, you know how the compliments can stick in your throat and how the general eye-rolling in the audience can make you nauseous. The smart and productive people in any company appreciate that an honest appraisal - good or bad - is far better and more productive than an insincere evaluation or a phony achievement award.

Most of these office ceremonies are about as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral. They're held along with all the annual awards programs -- whether warranted or not -- and often without regard to the actual business results. They're reminiscent of the newly mandatory native land acknowledgments that apparently must precede every college graduation ceremony in order to stave off protests of one kind or another by newly minted graduates. No one knows what these pro forma tribal references mean or recognizes the names, and clearly no one cares to hear or learn anything of substance about the long-gone criminal circumstances.

Foolishly, I thought that Secretaries' Day (which now must be called Administrative Professionals' Day), Boss Day and Sweetest Day were the heights of this crass commercialism, but I was naive and failed to fully appreciate the inventiveness and imagination of these marketers. There's always another excuse to buy their crap. As the year ends, in the spirit of Eminem's "Cleanin' Out My Closet," there are several new "traditions" that have been added relatively recently to the list that I'd like to see consigned to the junkpile as soon as possible.  

Number one on the list, for sure, are Gender Reveal ceremonies for expectant mothers. I'm guessing that Kmart sells a complete kit. They feature red or blue displays (please don't ask about the availability of other colors) on banners and clothing. And let's not forget the fireworks, which apart from starting brush fires, have also caused bodily injuries. Perhaps the ultimate message was sent when some pilot in Mexico who was hired to fly a banner over the excited crowd crashed his plane and killed himself.  I'm truly sorry for the loss of life but reminded of an old adage: "If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you."

That pilot's premature passing brings us to the next stupid display, where groups gather to mourn someone's death by releasing a bunch of helium balloons, without regard to where they may land, what birds and other animals may be injured by them, and who will retrieve and recycle the busted and deflated balloons. These are the same people who constantly complain about pollution and garbage on the streets, but who are eager to add to the clutter with their aerial salute to the departed. Here again, the helium hucksters and balloon vendors are happy to help.  

Finally, as the collision injuries and unfortunate deaths of cyclists rise in our cities due to congestion, inattention, poor signage and aggressive riding, another foolish memorial -- ghost bikes painted white and decked out with fake flowers - has begun to clutter sidewalks, lampposts, and bike lanes at or near the crash scene. These displays often also incorporate elaborate explanatory signs guaranteed to distract passersby - in cars or on bikes - and likely to cause further problems.

Bottom line: you have to believe that in so many of these events -- from office activities to outdoor memorials -- if the people actually involved were free to speak, they would tell you to save your money, skip the show, and get on with your lives. Perhaps there's an appropriate card with that sentiment already in the works. Because the cards are always original and inventive - it's just the sentiments that are fake. That's the thing about sincerity.  Once you can fake it, you've got it made.

Carl Sagan

 

With Trump moving closer to renomination, rewriting Jan. 6 attack gains urgency

 

With Trump moving closer to renomination, rewriting Jan. 6 attack gains urgency

 

Analysis by Philip Bump

National columnist

November 27, 2023 at 11:58 a.m. EST

 

 

There is no mystery about the Capitol riot. There is nothing intangible, no unseen engine for what occurred. There is no uncertainty about what happened and why.

 

But because everything about what unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, implicates the cultural leader of the Republican Party — and because pretending that a mystery exists benefits him — we approach the third anniversary of that day with renewed efforts to rewrite its history.

 

Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and very obviously refused to accept it. Any questions about the legitimacy of the vote — stoked by Trump for years — evaporated within weeks, if not days. Many of his allies shifted to vague arguments about how the system was working against him. But Trump didn’t. He argued that there was fraud covered up by Trump haters and, with increasing desperation, demanded that his supporters in Washington and elsewhere rise to his defense.

 

A few hours after a heated Oval Office argument in which his team tried to figure out how to retain power, he shared a post on social media calling for supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6. The day’s protest, he promised, would “be wild.” This message itself comes up repeatedly when looking at the triggers for participants to be at the Capitol on that day.

 

Thousands came. Trump, still trying to figure out how to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election, gave a speech to the crowd making more false claims about fraud, including debunked ones, and encouraged people to march to the Capitol. They did. There was a riot. People died. Scores of police officers were assaulted. A few hours later, Trump’s loss was formalized.

 

In short, the day’s violence was carried out by Trump supporters and supporters of Trump’s politics. They were there not only because Trump specified that day and place as the location of a “protest” but because he’d relentlessly argued that a protest was needed. The intent was explicitly to challenge the results of the 2020 election. That Trump used the word “peacefully” once in his speech is no more exculpatory than the fact that thousands of Trump supporters weren’t violent and didn’t enter the Capitol. There was violence and there were violent actors; they were there because Trump refused to accept that voters had rejected him.

 

There was a point at which this might have understandably seemed like the coda to Trump’s tenure in politics. Trump lost the election and then stoked a violent response to the transfer of power. History books, if not Hollywood, suggest an epilogue in which he spends his remaining years exiled to the wilderness.

 

But he was never exiled. Less than two weeks after Trump’s departure from Washington, the leader of the House Republican conference, seeking to solidify his own power, paid the former president a sycophantic visit. Since 2015, Republicans had figured out that even valid criticisms of Trump could be pivoted to his and their advantage, and the riot was no different. So they did and, 1,000 days after the riot, Trump found himself the clear front-runner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.

 

This adds new urgency to efforts by Trump’s allies to neutralize his response to the 2020 election as a political issue. Trump’s opponents, including President Biden, have focused on Trump’s rejection of the election results — on his efforts to sideline democracy — as a central reason to oppose him in 2024. There’s evidence that many voters view 2024 through this lens. While many of the right’s defenses of Trump center on the short-term rewards of allying with his rhetoric, some of them are obviously more tactical.

 

These defenses take a number of forms.

 

The most deluded centers on the idea that the riot was not actually a function of Trump supporters or a desire to see Trump retain power. Two alternative culprits are generally proposed: federal agents or left-wing actors.

 

The latter idea was voiced immediately after the riot and was quickly debunked. But it lingers: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who’s selling a book, told Donald Trump Jr. on a recent podcast that “nobody could tell me that those were Trump supporters” and that she believes “they were antifa — [Black Lives Matter] rioters.”

 

There’s no evidence of this at all. In fact, it defies any logic. For Greene, though, this is a long-held argument. During the riot itself, she texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to tell him that she and others “think they are Antifa … [d]ressed like Trump supporters.” Of course, that was about 90 minutes after she’d texted Meadows to exhort him to “[p]lease tell the President to calm people[.] This isn’t the way to solve anything.”

 

Greene’s response to Jan. 6 has been nearly as fungible and opportunistic as Trump’s. The rioters were antifa — except that those being held for committing acts of violence are also political prisoners being targeted for their Trump support by a nefarious Joe Biden.

 

This argument depends on a useful glossing over of what detainees actually did. Many of those who are in prison agreed to plea deals — which is to say they admitted guilt. Others were convicted of assaults on police officers. Others still were members of groups such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers who actively planned to disrupt the transition of power or to aid Trump in doing so. Lumping them all together as victims of a punitive state makes it much easier to ignore what they actually did.

 

It also makes it easier to cast Trump himself as the target of Deep State hostility. This has been his line for years, of course, but it gained new heft after the multiple indictments obtained against him this year. Many Trump supporters think he’s being unfairly targeted by leftist prosecutors; it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that this extends back to the weeks before Jan. 6, 2021. There’s no more evidence (much less logical reason) to support the idea that federal agents triggered the riot than there is to believe antifa did it. But every time someone is incorrectly identified as a federal agent or just asks questions about it, new space is introduced for Trump to argue that this is all meant to impede his power.

 

Elevation of doubt is at the heart of so much of this. You don’t need to know precisely what federal agent provocateur made Jan. 6 happen, but if you’re open to the idea that perhaps one did, you’re probably less compelled by arguments that Trump posed or poses a threat to democracy. If you are convinced that the House select committee investigating the riot was trying to take down Trump, it becomes easier to wave away the evidence presented that showed Trump’s culpability. And then, by extension, shrug at the similar or overlapping evidence from special counsel Jack Smith.

 

Elevation of doubt, in fact, offers its own political rewards. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently announced that he would make available thousands of hours of security footage from the Capitol on that day — footage that has already been used to suggest both that nefarious, non-Trump actors were involved and that the day’s violence was overstated, given that much of the footage shows nothing but empty corridors. Cameras in the aft section of the Titanic would have shown tranquil scenes, too, until they were submerged.

Republican voices in opposition to reframing the aftermath of the 2020 election are becoming more scarce.

 

“Everyone who makes the argument that January 6 was an unguided tour of the Capitol is lying to America,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “Everyone who says that the prisoners who are being prosecuted right now for their involvement in January 6, that they are somehow political prisoners or that they didn’t commit crimes, those folks are lying to America.”

 

Buck may feel more free to say these true things because he announced that he would not seek reelection. Former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney (R) was free to challenge Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) misinformation about Capitol security footage because she no longer needs to appeal to Republican voters. Lee does.

 

No one is happier to elevate doubt about the Capitol riot than Trump, of course. He’s floated pardoning those involved in the violence, reinforcing the idea that they — like him, of course! — are being unfairly targeted. He’s argued that the day’s events were not his fault and attacked critics who suggest otherwise.

 

Put another way: What Trump is doing now, 340-odd days before the 2024 general election, is amplifying self-serving falsehoods and finding a hungry audience for them. This is also precisely what he was doing in the weeks before the Capitol riot.

HOW SAD....

 

TAKE THE GLOVES OFF

 

WORDS OF WISDOM - J & K

 

J

 

Jealously guard the values and principles of our heritage.  They did not come easy.

 

Jeanettics

 

Jets aren’t aircraft, they are time machines.

 

Jewish Telegram: “Start worrying. Details to follow.”

 

Jews Contribution to World:  Hope and Dissatisfaction

 

Jews of no religion.

 

Job description: high stress, low priority.

Job interviews are not really about you. They are about the employer’s needs and how you can fill them.

Jobs was like dynamite. Dynamite clears paths, but it also destroys everything around it.

 

Jogging precipitates; it does not settle.

 

Joi Ito: Resilience over Strength. Pull over Push. Risk over Safety. Systems over Objects. Compasses over Maps. Practice over Theory. Disobedience over Compliance. Emergence over Authority. Learning over Education.

 

Joint venture: same bed, different dreams.

 

Journals don’t publish excuses.

 

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

 

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

 

Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

 

Jugaad – making do with what you have. (Punjabi)

 

Jump and find your wings on the way down.

 

Jump on it like a bulldog on a meat truck.

 

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.

 

Just because it came first doesn’t mean it caused the later event.

 

Just because it happened to you doesn’t make it interesting.

 

Just because it’s hard to hear doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

 

Just because it’s math doesn’t mean it’s good math.

 

Just because it’s not my first rodeo doesn’t mean it’s not a rough ride.

Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility.

Just because someone carries it well doesn’t mean it isn’t heavy.

 

Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.

 

Just because something has the feel of truth, doesn't mean it fits the facts.

 

Just because something’s popular doesn’t mean it’s bad.

 

Just because something’s a rule doesn’t mean it’s right.

 

Just because the river is quiet doesn't mean the crocodiles have left.

 

Just because will is free does not mean that we pay no price for exercising it.

 

Just because you can reproduce doesn’t mean you should.

 

Just because you don’t yell doesn’t mean you’re not being mean. 

 

Just because you have a hammer in your hand doesn’t mean that everything is a nail.

 

Just because you killed a cow doesn’t mean you’re gonna eat steak for dinner. There’s lots of messy work to do, and none of it is easy.

 

Just because you love clothes doesn’t mean you love shopping.

 

Just because you love it, that doesn't mean you'll make any money doing it.

 

Just because you run a business, it doesn’t mean you’re entitled to a profit.

 

Just because you sold your soul doesn’t mean you made a good deal.

 

Just because you're lost, don't think your compass is broken.

 

Just because you’re not dead doesn’t mean you’re alive.

 

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that someone's not out to get you.

 

Just because your doctor has a name for your condition doesn’t mean he knows what it is.

 

Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.

 

Just 'cause somethin' ain't been done don't mean it can't be did.

 

Just don’t piss in the soup that all of us got to eat. (LBJ)

 

Just lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue.

 

Just like Jell-O on springs.

 

Just the three of us-you and me and all that stuff we're scared of.

 

Just when I nearly had the answer, I forgot the question.

 

Just showing up is 80% of the game.

 

Just take this step, the horizon will take care of itself.

 

Just when you think nothing is going to change, everything changes.

 

Justice limps along…but it gets there just the same.

 

Justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done.

 

K

 

Karma never loses an address.

 

K.G.O.Y.  -  kids grow older younger

 

Keep a clear eye and hit 'em where they ain't.

 

Keep an eye on the main chance.

 

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.  Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

 

Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.

 

Keep me in your heart for a while.

 

Keep pounding away and the breaks will come.

 

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

 

Keep something in reserve.

 

Keep something in the tank.

 

Keep within your heart a place for dreams.

 

Keep your friends close to you, but keep your enemies closer.

 

Keep your head in the sand long enough, and you suffocate.

 

Keep your kids short on pocket change and long on hugs.

 

Keep your plans dark and impenetrable as night and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

 

Keep your principles few and simple so you may refer to them at a moment’s notice.

 

Keeping it simple is a complicated business.

 

Key it as you see it.

 

Key to success:            Know what you’re doing

                                    Like what you’re doing

                                    Believe in what you’re doing

Keystroke samurai

 

Kick ass and break glass.

 

Kicking your own ass. (Cuban)

 

Kids think of science as a textbook, but it’s a process.

 

Killing for peace is like fucking for virginity.

 

Killing time is not murder, it's suicide.

 

Kindness alone won’t solve the world’s problems.

 

Kindness costs nothing but its value is priceless.

 

Kindness feels good, even when it’s based on a false notion of your identity and purpose.

 

Kindness, like a boomerang, always returns. The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid.

 

Kindness, like mischief and spontaneous singing, can touch our souls in unexpected ways

 

Kisses aren’t contracts and presents aren’t promises.

 

Kludgeocracy

 

Knock on old doors.

 

Know a man’s past and you know his weakness.

 

Know before you go.

 

Know what you should know.

 

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

 

Knowing that things could be worse shouldn’t stop us from trying to make them better

 

Knowing that tragedies befall everyone, and that, although one may seem singled out for special sorrows, worse things have happened many times to others in the world, and it is not tears, but determination, that makes pain bearable.

 

Knowing when to launch is a subtle art at best and a drunken coin toss at worst.

 

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. 

 

Knowledge doesn't become power until it's used.

 

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. 

 

Knowledge is being aware of what you can do; wisdom is knowing when not to do it.

 

Knowledge is no antidote to the most destructive human qualities. 

 

Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns.

 

Knowledge is useless unless you know how to communicate it – in writing.

 

Knowledge makes life messier. (the upside to ignorance)

 

Knowledge should be advanced at all costs.

 

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.

 

Knowledge workers need to manage themselves. Managers just need to set them up to succeed.

 

Kranzberg’s law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.