Saturday, July 26, 2025

Passive Aggression on Campus: Redefining Hate-Speech

Besides using social pressure and anger to purge words that a student or faculty member deems unacceptable, the word police have found that they can get objectionable opinions criminalized. This runs 180 degrees from the sort of openness to different, even objectionable ideas that makes a college campus thrive with an academic rather than passive-aggressive atmosphere. Sometimes, getting the law to go against a pollical opinion that a fallible person deems to be intolerable can show just how dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary the criminalizing of ideas can be. Here I have in mind the case of Marianne Hirsh, a genocide scholar at Columbia University. It is a sign of going too far that political corrective would be weaponized with criminal punishments that such a scholar, whose parents had died in the Nazi Holocaust, would think that she would have to teach at another university to be able to continue teaching material from the notable twentieth-century scholar, Hannah Arendt, who wrote on the banality of evil in that Holocaust (and, were she still alive in the next century, would probably also write of the Gaza Holocaust in such terms). Behind political correctness is the arrogance and related intolerance that stem from the sin of self-idolatry: taking oneself to be omniscient and omnipotent (but not omnibenevolent).

Hirsch had been using Hannah Arendt’s book about the trial of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem; he was convicted of the war crime of forcing Jews in Hungary to march to a death camp in Poland so as many as possible would die on the way and thus reduce the killing needing to be done at the camp. Arendt, a Jew, is critical in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, of Israel’s illegal kidnapping of Eichmann in Argentina. Even mentioning that text, or explaining why Arendt criticized Israel’s founding, could run afoul of Columbia’s 2025 revision of antisemitism, “which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech.”[1] That’s pretty heavy language, and the penalties would surely go beyond getting fired from the university. So it is worthwhile to unpack the claim that criticism of Israel constitutes hate-speech.

For criticism of Israel to be taken as antisemitic, hence anti-Jewish, speech, the criticism would have to pertain to Jews generally, but to criticize Israelis is not to criticize Jews who are American and live in the United States, for example, unless they hold dual citizenship. Moreover, to conflate citizenship, which is a political designation, with a religious or social designation is to commit a category mistake, for the categories are distinct. To criticize another country is not to criticize a world religion (or even religion itself, as it is a distinct category).

Once we have properly identified criticism of a foreign government (or country) as political in nature, we can see that such criticism is acceptable in international relations; people criticize other countries all the time. It can even be said to be the human condition, and we are all in trouble if that is criminalized. It would be like making the breathing of air illegal. In short, criticizing other countries is so normalized in international relations that to make criticizing only one country illegal while another other country or government thereof is “fair game,” would be highly unfair. It would be especially unfair were that country’s government exterminating a people within its territory, for to not criticize such a country could be considered inhuman or at least insensitive to the desperate plight of other human beings.

That both Hirsch and Arendt are/were Jewish and yet included criticism of Israel should be enough to dispel the notion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. So it is ironic that Hirsch, whose very parents died in the 20th century holocaust, thought she might have to leave Columbia university to be able to continue to include Arendt’s political criticism of Israel in courses. This is not to say that Columbia’s new “definition” of antisemitism is itself antisemitic because both Hirsch and Arendt could be expunged for being in violation.

I contend that any government, and thus any country, is “fair game” in terms of being the recipient of political criticism, and that this does not constitute hate speech. In criticizing Israel’s role in the Gaza Holocaust, no hatred is being directed at or even implied to pertain to any Jews in America who are not Israelis. That Israelis in Israel can be criticized for their government’s policies and actions is fair because that country’s political system is democratic.  Even in an autocratic state such as Russia, the people can be criticized for not standing up sufficiently to an unprovoked invasion of another country. Perhaps Vatican City would be a closer parallel to Israel, but even in criticizing a political stance of the Pope or a public policy of Vatican City, a person is not criticizing being Catholic in terms of its religious culture or beliefs. Vatican City is recognized internationally as a country and thus as a political entity, and thus political criticism is fairly done without being labeled as hate speech against Catholics. Also, to criticize them for regarding the Virgin Mary as a divine being in being born without sin and being bodily assumed into heaven does not constitute a political criticism of the Vatican as political entity. It is not as if the Virgin Mary were president of Vatican City.

For the governments of Israel and the United States to wield antisemitism as a club so to curtail adverse political speech—and Columbia’s new definition doubtlessly came from pressure from the Trump Administration—represents a category mistake that is ethically and politically unfair, especially if a legitimate basis exists to criticize a policy and/or action of the Israeli government. The Gaza Holocaust evinces such a basis. In fact, ethically, it can be argued that it is the duty of every human being on the planet to criticize a government (or country) for being in the process of starving, shooting, and bombing an occupied population of people, who, unlike in the case of a war, could not fight back. In the 20th century as news of the Nazi holocaust broke, criticism of Nazi-Germany or even Germany itself was not “redefined” as anti-German hate speech because a legitimate reason for even harsh criticism existed. True to American culture, therefore, it is best to side with free political speech in international relations.



1. Jeff Offenhartz, “A Columbia Genocide Scholar Says She May Leave over University’s New Definition of Antisemitism,” The Associated Press, July 25, 2025.


Sunday, July 20, 2025

Pope Leo on the Fallacy of Collective Justice: The Case of Israel in Gaza

One of the many pitfalls in the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, whereby government officials acting as government can literally get away with murder domestically given the lack of credible de jure and de facto enforcement of international “law,” is the ability to inflict collective punishment based on group-identity, including the ideologies that hinge on identity politics. Going the actual culprits of a crime or even a revolt, collective punishment inflicts harm and even mass murder on an entire group, including individuals thereof who are not at all culpable. Unlike “collateral damage,” the ideology of collective justice includes intentionally harming such individuals. It is an ideology because it is based on beliefs about a group rather than an ethic that would justify normatively the infliction of pain and suffering on the innocent. Furthermore, collective justice is an ideology because it includes the artificial elevation of a group (i.e., the collective) over the individual even though members of a group are arguably foremost individuals, who typically belong to more than one group or organization. To put the collective abstraction first ontologically is thus tenuous at best. A person may be a Texan, a Democrat, a Catholic, and a member of a football team, for example, so the claim that that person is essentially any one of these would be dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In privileging a part over a whole, thus being partisan, an ideology is in a sense arbitrary, even in claiming that a state of affairs that is favored or desired is the present state of affairs, as if the statement were a fact of reason rather than a counter-factual statement.

It is one thing for intellectuals to debate and discuss ontological and ethical matters, and quite another when a leader on the world stage makes an explicit normative statement condemning collective punishment. The reason why such a public pronouncement by a person chosen to head a government or a global religious organization is important is that the Israeli government quickly discovered in 2023 that having its president state publicly that every resident of Gaza would be punished for being culpable in an atrocity committed by criminals in October of that year in Israel was not going over well in the media around the world. Because the collective-justice motive was from then on—for at least 21 months (and counting)—on stealth mode in the Israeli government even though the fingerprints were obvious in Gaza, to have a leader recognized globally state publicly that collective “justice” was being pursued by the Israeli government even though prohibited by international law. For some reason, facts on the ground, even when obvious, are not enough for human beings to think, Hmm, the Israelis really are pursuing collective justice on their subjugated people within Israel’s borders. Even with such a recognition and acknowledgement, the prerogative of absolute sovereignty can go on, unimpeded internationally.

Nevertheless, it is significant that Pope Leo of the Roman Catholic Church, whose billion-plus membership spans the globe, “said at the end of his Sunday Angelus prayer” on July 20, 2025, “I once again call for an immediate end to the barbarity of this war and for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.”[1] Typically, leaders on the global stage are satisfied to leave it at that; they condemn this or that without stating what actions in particular, or what ideologies behind those actions, are being castigated. In addition to bringing up the Israeli attack on the only Catholic church in Gaza just days earlier, the pontiff said, “I appeal to the international community to observe humanitarian law and respect the obligation to protect civilians as well as the prohibition of collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force, and the forced displacement of populations.”[2] Together with the barbarity of that war, the collective punishment, which presumes the validity of collective justice unless punishment is inflicted without cause, such as randomly, can be said to be extreme in its severity, and not just in its scale. If in fact the Vatican had turned a blind eye to the Nazi Holocaust, the Church was not making the same mistake on the Israeli Holocaust in Gaza. Pope Leo was essentially telling the Israeli government officials:

We know what you’re trying to do; you’re trying to extinguish the Palestinian people who now live in the uninhabitable area that you created so to decimate the Gazans, whom you view not only as culpable collectively, but also sub-human—as “animals,” as it were. This is not the first time in human history that a government has considered a people in its territory to be subhuman. It is ironic, is it not? The Torah makes clear that being Yahweh’s chosen people does not spare you from God’s wrath. You are not divine, so it is not your place to fete out collective justice that God can do by virtue of being omniscient as well as omnipotent.

Whereas the Pope would have to acknowledge the validity of divine collective justice in the Old Testament, Nietzsche argues that the conception of the deity wherein it is both omnibenevolent and vengeful, for “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” is discredited by whomever added that line, knowing that God must be perfect goodness. Perhaps collective justice is not vengeance, and a deity who knows all would only inflict collective punishment in cases in which everyone is in fact guilty of some injustice. Nietzsche was not an atheist; in fact, he may have been criticizing a flawed concept so that a new, healthier concept could be built.  An atheist would likely go further, arguing that collective justice is inherently unjust so positing it of a deity is wrongheaded, and in fact could do additional damage as Israeli officials could try to justify their heinous crimes against humanity by saying that Yahweh engages in collective justice in punishing Israel, such as by keeping the Hebrews in the wilderness for forty years and later by allowing them to be conquered for violating the covenant. Trying to exterminate a people who believe in the same deity—unlike the people in Jericho in the Bible story—is arguably such a violation. It would be ironic were Yahweh to apply collective justice on the Israelis by punishing Israel for having inflicted collective punishment on the Gazans as if every resident in Gaza in October, 2023 were a culprit. Whether collective justice rightfully applies to an omniscient deity or contradicts the very notion of divinity, the assumption that we mere mortals enjoy God’s prerogative is impious self-idolatry.  



1. The Associated Press, “Pope Repeats Call for Gaza Ceasefire as Israel Widens Evacuation Orders,” Euronews.com, July 20, 2025.
2. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.

Saturday, July 19, 2025

The Israeli Military Kills Starving Gazans Seeking Food as Police in Massachusetts Intimidate Human-Rights Protesters

Even as the Israeli military was shooting innocent, starving people waiting for food in Gaza, Massachusetts police were overreacting to a pro-Gaza, pro-human rights protest in Cambridge, where Harvard University has most of its campus. Whereas the Israeli military (intentionally?) did not engage in crowd control around a designated food-distribution site, Cambridge and Harvard police employees overreacted and in so doing, falsely presented the visuals of an emergency and intimidated peaceful protesters. Both the Israeli military and a local and a private police department in Massachusetts can thus be criticized, and the choices of all three were to the advantage of Israel in spite of its ongoing war crime and crime against humanity in regard to the Gaza Holocaust, and to the advantage of the American defense contractors profiting from the U.S. Government sending weapons to Israel.  

On July 19, 2025, “Israeli troops opened fire” on “crowds of Palestinians seeking food at a distribution point run by an Israeli-backed US company in southern Gaza, killing at least 32 Palestinians.”[1] As if killing starving people on their way to an Israeli-approved food-distribution point being managed by an American company, in “a separate incident, at least 18 more Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strikes (sic) on Gaza City . . . near hubs operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF).”[2] Of course, the “Israeli military did not immediately react to reports of the two incidents.”[3] Especially concerning the first, even an attempted justification that the crowd was unruly would only beg the question of why the Israeli military had so badly mismanaged crowd-control, as it could certainly be anticipated, given the extent of famine in Gaza, that a crowd of starving, desperate Gazans would manifest to get food. To fail to manage an easily anticipated crowd and then shoot on the crowd reflects badly on the Israeli government rather than the starving people.

On the very same day, presumably many hours later, a “Free Palestine” small protest took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whereas the Israeli military lapsed in managing a crowd, the Cambridge police surrounded the small group of protests on both sides. Even a city block away, Harvard’s private police employees had infiltrated Smith Hall, which is just across a street from Harvard Yard. Even though no university administration office was open on that Saturday in Smith Hall, which doubles as a student hang-out space, at least eight police employees interspersed themselves out in front, and left four or five of their cars double-parked on the street. To say that both the local and university police overreacted, given the small size of the protest and where it was taking place, is an understatement. The extent of police-presence around the small group of protesters can even be interpreted as an attempt to deny Americans their right of political protest and free speech by visible intimidation. When Black Lives Matter protests were going on several years earlier in Phoenix, Arizona, such intimidation was at the extreme of police surrounding protesters with machine guns even though the protests were all non-violent. The presumptuous “right” of police to deter by intimidation deserves to be contested in a U.S. district court, for the convenient (in terms of power-aggrandizement by police) assumption that peaceful protest will turn violent and thus should be treated as such is fallacious.

In short, there is simply too much show of military/police force evinced in these two cases—one in Gaza and the other in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The instinctual urge to bully ought to be checked by local governments, and even private universities that operate as de facto non-democratic local governments, against military and police employees, including their respective directors. Starving people being shot on the way to an approved food-distribution site and pro-human rights protestors being intimidated by an excessive show of presence by police up close and even a city-block away from the protest itself can both be taken as “red-flags.” Absolute power corrupts absolutely. No Harvard administrator would say to that university’s police unit that its presence was excessive in front of Smith Hall, and no government official in Netanyahu’s government in Israel would chastise the military for letting the crowd of starving people get out of hand, if in fact that crowd became unruly as opposed to being “sitting ducks” for Israeli troops hateful of Palestinians.

The Pro-Palestine Protest in Cambridge on July 19, 2025




Meanwhile, over at Harvard, an invasion of human-rights advocates was expected . . . 






And, just for added fun, photos of the Massachusetts Army intimidating Americans at Boston's Fireworks on July 4th





With the celebration of liberty obscured by the smoke of intimidation, I left in utter disgust as the booms of the "bombs" in the sky began. As I walked away quite determined, the first few powerful thuds I could feel through my body made the show of force on the ground seem somehow more real. A celebration of raw force by means of weapanry, or liberty from autocratic intimidation? It is no wonder that the U.S. was being so helpful to Israel. My visit to Boston was eventful and enlightening. I hear that Geneva is wonderful. 

1. Malek Fouda, “Israeli Troops Open Fire on Palestianians en Route to Food Distribution Site, killing 32,” Euronews.com, July 19, 2025, italics added for emphasis.
2. Ibid. The grammar error aside, there were more than one strike, as the report also mentions them as “attacks.”
3. Ibid.

Friday, July 11, 2025

Negotiating from Weakness: The Plight of the European Union

To go to much effort to construct an economy on the scale of an empire only to refer instead to the economies within such a union, whether the E.U. or U.S. is to pay excessive homage to an ideology that can be termed Euroskeptic and anti-federalist, respectively. To refer to economies in one union and the economy in the other is just one means by which an ideology can distort a person’s reasoning and perception without the person being conscious of the underlying logical inconsistency. Such an inconsistency is incurred not only in “having it both ways” in the E.U. being a common market even as the states are referred to as economies even though many share a currency and thus a central bank, but also in referring to the federal system as if it were a mere “bloc,” or “network.”  In all of these cases of ideological word-games, the E.U. itself is minimized and thus implicitly marginalized from within. With Russia invading Ukraine and Israel eviscerating the Muslim residents of Gaza, self-marginalization for ideological purposes is indeed costly. Even referring to the federal official who is in charge of foreign policy as a “high representative” is implicitly denigrating and thus counter-productive to the E.U. being able to stand up to Putin and even Netanyahu in 2025.

As Russia’s Putin was ordering an unprecedented sustained bombing of Kiev, Euronews ran a story asking, “Which European economy stands to suffer the most from US tariffs?” In the article, Euronews wrote, “Germany and Ireland are standing out as the two most exposed EU economies threatened by higher US tariffs, as Brussels works towards a trade deal with Washington . . .”[1] That Brussels, meaning the European Commission, was negotiating with Washington was itself being undercut by the message that the E.U. doesn’t even have its own economy. Furthermore, the governors of Germany and Ireland could feel free to undercut the Commission by negotiating directly with the U.S. in the interest of those two states at the expense of the other E.U. states and even the E.U. as a whole. It is never good for a whole when a part can easily exploit a vulnerability in order to put the part’s own interests above the whole. Is the E.U. even a whole?  If not, as is implied in the article, why is Brussels even negotiating with the Washington? To expect the Commission to negotiate while portraying the E.U. states as having the real economies is like a person unilaterally deciding to fight with one arm tied up! Is it really so important to the political elite in Europe to cement the Euroskeptic ideology as the basic paradigm by implicitly denying that an economy exists that stretches across the E.U., even as a large federalized economy across the ocean is raising tariffs?

“In 2024, the United States was the largest partner for EU exports of goods, making up 20.6% of all EU goods exports outside the bloc.”[2] Even denigrating the European Union to a “bloc” subtly undermines the ability of the Commission to protect the exports to the U.S. from being suffocated by higher tariffs, for how is the U.S. supposed to regard negotiating with a mere “bloc”? To contend that new American tariffs could really hurt the E.U.’s export market and in the very same sentence to refer to the E.U. as a mere “bloc” is logically abhorrent to any rational mind, and yet even in advocating for the E.U.’s exports, the undermining ideology cannot keep silent!  C’est absolument incroyablevraiment. Das ist seltsam. Superbia malum est.

The same self-destructiveness can be seen in yet another Euronews article on the very same day: “The ministers of Israel and Palestine will be in the same room in Brussels a day before the bloc discusses options in response to Israel’s breach of its partnership agreement” with the European Union.[3] The talks were indeed high-stakes, given Israel’s continued daily killing of Palestinian civilians even as they waited in line for food, and yet how is the Israeli delegation to approach negotiations being held by a mere “bloc” of countries?  The temptation to go to a governor of a favorably inclined E.U. state to undermine a unfavorable position by the Commission in the negotiations. That the partnership agreement is with the E.U. itself rather than with any of its state governments and yet the E.U. is only a “bloc” shows just how weakening the self-belittling choice of the word, bloc, is. For it is neither Israel nor the Palestinians where came up with that term to describe what the E.U. is; rather, the Europeans did that themselves. Encore, incroyable.  


1. Doloresz Katanich, “Which European Economy Stands to Suffer the Most from US Tariffs?” Euronews.com, July 11, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Shona Murray, Maia de La Baume, and Jorge Liboreiro, “Exclusive: Israel and Palestine to Join High Level Brussels Meeting Despite Tense EU Relations,” Euronews.com, July 11, 2025.

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Russia Benefits from Flawed E.U. Federalism

In the E.U., the 27 state governments are able to wield a veto on most important policy proposals in the European Council. Expecting unanimity where not even consensus is enough is so utterly unrealistic at 27 that it may be time to reconsider whether the E.U. can afford such an easy (and tempting) means by which state governors can exploit the E.U. by essentially holding it hostage. To be sure, like the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, the veto in the European Council represents the residual sovereignty that states in both unions enjoy, but extortion for financial gain by means of threatening or exercising a veto in the European Council (and the committees of the Council of the E.U.) suggests that the continued use of a veto by state governments is too problematic to be continued. Residual sovereignty can find adequate representation by qualified majority voting, which is closer the threshold needed to maintain a filibuster in the U.S. Senate. That the E.U. state of Slovakia maintained its veto on a proposed number of federal sanctions against Russia on July 9, 2025 when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia had violated international law in invading Ukraine is a good indication that the veto had outlived its usefulness and was being used by governors for sordid purposes by using the E.U. rather than strengthening it in foreign affairs.


The full essay is at "Russia Benefits from Flawed E.U. Federalism."