Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The Atlantic: "The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test"
This article is not about all progressives, Democrats, or the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The only politician mentioned is Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
The author notes that even though Ocasio-Cortez is a prominent DSA member, she still released a statement criticizing the celebratory march in NYC held the day after the terrorist attack.
The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test
The attack refutes the flawed assumption that all social-justice causes fit neatly together.
The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
The attack refutes the flawed assumption that all social-justice causes fit neatly together.
The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
snip===============================================
The New York branch of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a rally where protesters chanted “resistance is justified when people are occupied” and one participant displayed a swastika. These actions prompted criticism by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps the DSA’s most prominent figure, and the resignation of members including the comedian Sarah Silverman. In a statement, the New York City Democratic Socialists regretted the “confusion” that its rhetoric had caused, but added: “We are also concerned that some have chosen to focus on a rally while ignoring the root causes of violence in the region, the far-right Netanyahu government’s escalating human rights violations and explicitly genocidal rhetoric, and the dehumanization of the Palestinian people.”
snip=======================================================
The sheer number of apologies and climb downs that followed the initial wave of inflammatory posts suggests that some of their authors issued knee-jerk statements of solidarity before they understood exactly what they were endorsing. As the full extent of the weekend’s barbarity becomes clear, some on the intersectional left are—to their small credit—revising their initial reactions. But others are doubling down. Confronted with real violence by genocidal terrorists, they failed the test.
webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t2cNtmpmbCkJ:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/hamas-pop-intersectionality-leftism-israel/675625/&hl=en&gl=us
133 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Comment I've read at DU the past week.
This is ON Fucking HAMAS.
And for that I do apologize. 
There have been too few and I try to recognize each person who is willing to speak up.
I know war personally and far to intimately. My most sincere wish is that each war will be the last.
Unfortunately I see no way to crush Hamas without either war, where many Palestinians will die, or a long drawn out campaign of isolation, where many Palestinians will suffer and die.
As to you post below, I fully agree. Netanyahu should be physically thrown out the door of his office and dragged before the court to answer for his crimes against both Israelis and Palestinians.
Poring over his copy of the Protocols.
(my add: obviously the other poster went OTT by claiming Bibi is the 'biggest supporter of Hamas', but he definitely has helped to prop them up for years)
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products. Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm. Toward the end of Netanyahu’s fifth government in 2021, approximately 2,000-3,000 work permits were issued to Gazans. This number climbed to 5,000 and, during the Bennett-Lapid government, rose sharply to 10,000.
Since Netanyahu returned to power in January 2023, the number of work permits has soared to nearly 20,000. Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.
Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015. According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
snip
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products. Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm. Toward the end of Netanyahu’s fifth government in 2021, approximately 2,000-3,000 work permits were issued to Gazans. This number climbed to 5,000 and, during the Bennett-Lapid government, rose sharply to 10,000.
Since Netanyahu returned to power in January 2023, the number of work permits has soared to nearly 20,000. Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.
Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015. According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
snip
The Atlantic Has a Transphobia Problem
https://jezebel.com/the-atlantic-has-a-transphobia-problem-1833677331
On Friday, the Atlantic continued its recent tradition of giving a platform to transphobes and bigots under the cover of “ideological diversity” when it announced that it had hired Helen Lewis of the New Statesman, who will be joining its bureau in London. Lewis will be, according to a press release from the Atlantic, focusing on “some of the biggest issues shaping a changing world—the decline in democracy, the culture wars, toxicity in public discourse, and feminism.” Lewis indeed has some views on feminism and what the Atlantic tellingly calls the “culture wars.” Here she is on MeToo and Brett Kavanaugh, where she professes sympathy for Kavanaugh while watching his Senate confirmation hearings: “Nonetheless, I felt uneasy watching him sob and sniffle; it reminded me of the way in which rape complainants feel their characters are picked apart for credibility. A man can be an entitled, drunken, obnoxious misogynist and still not be a rapist.”
But it is her views of trans people and trans rights, which she has written about at length at the New Statesman and in other publications, that have received the most focus since her hiring was announced last week. In 2017, Lewis came out strongly against the United Kingdom’s move to streamline the process of legally changing one’s gender and allowing what is commonly called self-identification in place of a lengthy bureaucratic process that involves a medical diagnosis from two separate doctors. In an op-ed titled “A man can’t just say he has turned into a woman” published in the Sunday Times, Lewis wrote, “What the government proposes is a radical rewriting of our understanding of identity: now it’s a question of an internal essence—a soul, if you will. Being a woman or a man is now entirely in your head.” She then brought up an argument that could have come from the mouth of a fear-mongering, right-wing Republican in the United States: “In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a women’s changing room?” In response to Lewis’s views on self-identification, trans writer and activist Juno Roche told the U.K.-based PinkNews, “Whilst some speculate wildly about what may happen if trans people are allowed far more freedom in relation to self-identification and how dangerous they perceive us to be—as they do that, people, real people, trans people are dying.”
Lewis has regularly positioned herself as someone saying the bold truths that few are willing to voice—an argument that others, like Jesse Singal, have also attempted to use to piously proclaim that they are on the side of trans people, all while raising arguments that trans people themselves have said are a threat to their basic rights, lives, and safety. “I’ve had two tedious years of being abused online as a transphobe and a ‘TERF’ or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’—despite my belief that trans women are women, and trans men are men—because I have expressed concerns about self-ID and its impact on single-sex spaces,” Lewis wrote in January of this year. In the same piece, she continued a short while later: “The imperial over-reach of a handful of trans activists, in trying to rewrite widely accepted ideas about gender by stealth, has done nothing to improve the lives of trans people.”
As the Atlantic likely realized—or already knew—in the process of hiring her, Lewis is widely known in the United Kingdom for her transphobic views. As the British journalist Edie Miller wrote in 2018 for the Outline, noting that Lewis has “promoted a barrage of anti-trans articles”: “It’s alarming the extent to which, in the U.K., transphobia has taken hold among people who understand themselves to be left-wing.” While Lewis regularly complains that she gets lumped in with TERFs despite her self-professed support for trans rights, there is a reason—her thinking is largely in line with and gives ideological cover to ideas that have been used to limit the rights of trans people. Consider this piece, where she hand-wrings over two topics that TERFs consistently raise to paint trans women as a threat to what she often describes as “biological” women—trans women in women’s prisons and trans women competing in sports.
snip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Lewis_(journalist)
https://jezebel.com/the-atlantic-has-a-transphobia-problem-1833677331
On Friday, the Atlantic continued its recent tradition of giving a platform to transphobes and bigots under the cover of “ideological diversity” when it announced that it had hired Helen Lewis of the New Statesman, who will be joining its bureau in London. Lewis will be, according to a press release from the Atlantic, focusing on “some of the biggest issues shaping a changing world—the decline in democracy, the culture wars, toxicity in public discourse, and feminism.” Lewis indeed has some views on feminism and what the Atlantic tellingly calls the “culture wars.” Here she is on MeToo and Brett Kavanaugh, where she professes sympathy for Kavanaugh while watching his Senate confirmation hearings: “Nonetheless, I felt uneasy watching him sob and sniffle; it reminded me of the way in which rape complainants feel their characters are picked apart for credibility. A man can be an entitled, drunken, obnoxious misogynist and still not be a rapist.”
But it is her views of trans people and trans rights, which she has written about at length at the New Statesman and in other publications, that have received the most focus since her hiring was announced last week. In 2017, Lewis came out strongly against the United Kingdom’s move to streamline the process of legally changing one’s gender and allowing what is commonly called self-identification in place of a lengthy bureaucratic process that involves a medical diagnosis from two separate doctors. In an op-ed titled “A man can’t just say he has turned into a woman” published in the Sunday Times, Lewis wrote, “What the government proposes is a radical rewriting of our understanding of identity: now it’s a question of an internal essence—a soul, if you will. Being a woman or a man is now entirely in your head.” She then brought up an argument that could have come from the mouth of a fear-mongering, right-wing Republican in the United States: “In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a women’s changing room?” In response to Lewis’s views on self-identification, trans writer and activist Juno Roche told the U.K.-based PinkNews, “Whilst some speculate wildly about what may happen if trans people are allowed far more freedom in relation to self-identification and how dangerous they perceive us to be—as they do that, people, real people, trans people are dying.”
Lewis has regularly positioned herself as someone saying the bold truths that few are willing to voice—an argument that others, like Jesse Singal, have also attempted to use to piously proclaim that they are on the side of trans people, all while raising arguments that trans people themselves have said are a threat to their basic rights, lives, and safety. “I’ve had two tedious years of being abused online as a transphobe and a ‘TERF’ or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’—despite my belief that trans women are women, and trans men are men—because I have expressed concerns about self-ID and its impact on single-sex spaces,” Lewis wrote in January of this year. In the same piece, she continued a short while later: “The imperial over-reach of a handful of trans activists, in trying to rewrite widely accepted ideas about gender by stealth, has done nothing to improve the lives of trans people.”
As the Atlantic likely realized—or already knew—in the process of hiring her, Lewis is widely known in the United Kingdom for her transphobic views. As the British journalist Edie Miller wrote in 2018 for the Outline, noting that Lewis has “promoted a barrage of anti-trans articles”: “It’s alarming the extent to which, in the U.K., transphobia has taken hold among people who understand themselves to be left-wing.” While Lewis regularly complains that she gets lumped in with TERFs despite her self-professed support for trans rights, there is a reason—her thinking is largely in line with and gives ideological cover to ideas that have been used to limit the rights of trans people. Consider this piece, where she hand-wrings over two topics that TERFs consistently raise to paint trans women as a threat to what she often describes as “biological” women—trans women in women’s prisons and trans women competing in sports.
snip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Lewis_(journalist)
that endorsed the Tory position of "streamlining" the transitioning process in the interest of saving NHS funding. Jezabel is on the side of the Tories on transgender issues!
The Labour Party is not of the same side as Jezebel and the Conservative Party.
=======================================
========================================
There's a reason why some people people write for Jezebel and other people write for The Atlantic and The New Statesman.
That's unfortunate especially since one of Jezebel's vaunted sources, Edie Miller, is on the side of the Conservative Party on transgender recognition as well.as well.
The main focus of transphobes’ ire in recent months has been the possibility of self-identification-based gender recognition being enshrined in law. Last week saw the closure of the British Government’s consultation on this possibility, a set of proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apparently, Jezebel's source, Edie Miller, thinks the vexing problem is the work of radical feminists.
The most vocal source of this hatred has emerged, sadly, from within circles of radical feminists. British feminism has an increasingly notorious TERF problem.
https://theoutline.com/post/6536/british-feminists-media-transphobic?zd=1&zi=sidko7ng
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jezebel and Jezebel's source Edie Miller are exemplars of the morphing of intersectionality into a "crude tallying of oppression points" as explained by the legal scholar who originated the idea, critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw.
From the Atlantic piece.
Crenshaw herself has expressed surprise at how the meaning of intersectionality has changed through its invocation in pop culture. “This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content,” she told Vox in 2019. In escaping from the academy into the mainstream, intersectionality morphed into both a crude tallying of oppression points and an assumption that social-justice struggles fit neatly together—with all of the marginalized people on one side and the powerful on the other.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t2cNtmpmbCkJ:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/hamas-pop-intersectionality-leftism-israel/675625/&hl=en&gl=us
Maybe it's time for an article asking the question "Did You Fail the Intersectionality Test?"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the way, I am the author of my OP, not Helen Lewis.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
a are sight indeed, lapucelle
but hey, you do you
oh, and btw, this is sheer pedantism:
By the way, I am the author of my OP, not Helen Lewis.
Helen Lewis is the author of the article that is the absolute raison d'être of your OP
the Lewis-written article's title is literally the title of your OP
on gender recognition and blame radical feminists for stuff.
And I certainly wouldn't engage in virtue signalling based on a pop-cultural misunderstanding of complex issues .
That's probably why I passed the Hamas test.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
BTW
There's an edit feature. It's useful for when folks accidentally wind up writing clearly wrong and somewhat ridiculous things like "The author of the Atlantic is the author of your OP".
Helen Lewis happens to be the author of one of your OPs
C’est évident qu’on avait hâte d’utiliser un peu de français pour effet, mais hélas, l’erreur reste. C’est meilleur de corriger la faute et puis chercher une autre occasion dans laquelle on peut employer le français pour soutenir que quelle qu’une autre est pinailleuse.
Last edited Sun Oct 15, 2023, 11:15 AM - Edit history (2)
But the picture could be more giant sized.
But the real question is why anyone would attempt to distract from the uncomfortable question posed by the article.
My guess is that they perhaps failed the Hamas test and are desperate to blame it on something other than themselves.
but
[Netanyahu's] knee jerk response of bombing civilians is only increasing antisemitism around the world!
The article is not about the reaction of some progressives to the war that has been declared.
It is about the reaction in the immediate one or two days after the calculated, deliberate, savage, hands-on slaughter of festival goers and the unfortunate elderly, children, children, and babies in cribs who happened to live on kibbutzes, to say nothing of the kidnapped hostages and the brutalized corpses brought back - to great jubilation- as bargaining chips and human trophies.
It is about this:
The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism?
Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
snip----------------------------------------------
As the full extent of the weekend’s barbarity becomes clear, some on the intersectional left are—to their small credit—revising their initial reactions. But others are doubling down. Confronted with real violence by genocidal terrorists, they failed the test.
"Gazans" didn't massacre Israeli civilians. Hamas terrorists did.
As for American Jews protesting US aid to Israel because it might lead to genocide, that doesn't make sense. What genocide were they talking about? Do you have a link to the story? I don't see it on the MSNBC website.
And I don't think your rephrasing of the question (that you thought was an argument) is accurate at all.
Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism?
Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
Can a person simply hold space for Israelis and / or Jews to mourn? Can a person do that while keeping quiet about their own grievances (not forever, but for that moment) and expressing horror at a hands-on slaughter of hundreds of civilians?
We're glad to have you with us! And we usually get along pretty well here. 
DSA is not a political party. Several elected Democrats in NYC and NYS government are also members of DSA.
TALKING SOCIALISM | Catching up with AOC
March 19, 2021 by Don McIntosh
AOC spoke with me by Zoom Jan. 26.
McIntosh:What was your path to joining DSA?
AOC: I love this question because I think that my path in DSA very much shaped my organizing strategy.
March 19, 2021 by Don McIntosh
AOC spoke with me by Zoom Jan. 26.
McIntosh:What was your path to joining DSA?
AOC: I love this question because I think that my path in DSA very much shaped my organizing strategy.
Here's a link to the interview.
https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/aoc/
==========================================================
Here's a link to a list of elected office holders who are also DSA members.
The DSA is a political nonprofit organization and not a political party, therefore DSA members usually run as members of the Democratic Party, Green Party, Working Families Party, or as independents.
In the 2017 elections, DSA members were elected to fifteen state and local offices. In the 2018 midterm elections, DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib were elected to the United States House of Representatives and DSA members were elected to over forty state and local offices. In the 2020 elections, DSA members Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were elected to the House and at least thirty-six DSA members won office, earning more than 3.1 million votes
In the 2017 elections, DSA members were elected to fifteen state and local offices. In the 2018 midterm elections, DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib were elected to the United States House of Representatives and DSA members were elected to over forty state and local offices. In the 2020 elections, DSA members Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were elected to the House and at least thirty-six DSA members won office, earning more than 3.1 million votes
List_of_Democratic_Socialists_of_America_public_officeholders