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Arlington, VA
Joined December 2013
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Imagine thinking that Lula isn't an extremist. He has:
(1) Whitewashed Maduro’s repression in Venezuela, and in June 2023, when questioned about support for Maduro, Lula said the concept of democracy was “relative” and emphasized that Venezuela had held more elections than Brazil.
(2) Defended Cuba’s treatment of dissidents. In March 2010, amid hunger strikes by Cuban political prisoners, Lula compared their situation to that of ordinary Brazilian prisoners and argued that Cuba’s judicial decisions should be respected.
(3) Comparing Israel’s Gaza campaign to Hitler’s extermination of the Jews.
(4) Assigning Zelensky equal responsibility for Russia’s invasion. In his May 2022 Time interview, Lula said Zelensky was “as responsible as Putin for the war.”
It's called Holocaust inversion. The genocide lie isn't new, it's been around for over 50 years and was a mainstay of Soviet propaganda, to portray Israelis as the heirs to the Nazis and thus the natural enemy of the USSR and its fellow travelers, while removing any link between the history of Jewish suffering in the diaspora and the need for a Jewish homeland. But thanks for playing.
If I were a politician, I wouldn't brag about ignoring my constituents desire not to be disturbed in their homes.
I would also worry that there is some sort of hive above the sign and I will get attacked if I knock loudly.
If a "just war" theorist can't endorse an action (a) against a non-state adversary terrorist military that's been attacking a country with thousands of missiles aimed at civilians that (b) kills or wounds several thousand terrorists with only a handful of civilian casualties, he's become a pacifist theorist, not a just war theorist.
Or just caved into anti-Israel social pressure from his leftist colleagues, leading him to spout nonsense.
Whenever I write this, someone inevitably replies, "But Dresden was a war crime." It wasn't just Dresden. About 700K civilians were killed in the Allies' ground and air campaigns, not including Dresden, just as "normal" incidents to war, not including the USSR's eastern front.
People just don't seem to have any idea that civilians die in war even when they aren't intentionally targeted.
Note how ridiculous it is to let a terrorist government like Hamas in Gaza establish the ground rules for military action.
Putting it in another context, the US should have allowed Islamic State to set its military policy?
David Bernstein retweeted
Walzer was a last holdout on the social democratic left who was willing to make it possible for the West to fight its enemies without being completely hamstrung by ethical and legal rules that essentially allow the enemy to win so long as defeating them harms "too many" civilians.
Even if one believed this saved civilians in the short-run, in the long-run it leads to the end of civilized society, as civilized countries can't fight, but barbarians, who don't care about any moral or legal rules, aren't constrained at all.
This is moronic. There was infinitely more "carnage" caused by the Allies in WWII. 30-40K civilians were killed just in the invasion of Normandy.
Does that make fighting WWII "unjust?
Should the British have just surrendered to the Nazis?
Michael Walzer published “Just and Unjust Wars,” an attempt to delineate the rights and wrongs of warfare in both its causes and its conduct, in 1977. In the nearly 50 years since, no other book on the subject has matched its influence. The precepts are not complicated: it is just to defend your country from an invasion and it is unjust to invade a country that has not attacked you—although Walzer does allow for exceptions, mostly for humanitarian causes. It is just to assume certain risks to avoid civilian casualties and it is unjust to bomb towns indiscriminately to compel an enemy to surrender. The justice of going to war—what philosophers call jus ad bellum—is separate from jus in bello, the justice of how a war is fought.
The war in Gaza has made Walzer rethink one of the book’s fundamental principles. “The wall between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, which had sustained his theory for almost half a century, was no longer sturdy,” Jordi Graupera writes. As Walzer said to him, “There is a sense in which the carnage of Gaza, the ongoing carnage, simply made the war unjust.” Read about why a philosopher of war is now reconsidering his seminal work: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/T7…
Walzer was a last holdout on the social democratic left who was willing to make it possible for the West to fight its enemies without being completely hamstrung by ethical and legal rules that essentially allow the enemy to win so long as defeating them harms "too many" civilians.
Even if one believed this saved civilians in the short-run, in the long-run it leads to the end of civilized society, as civilized countries can't fight, but barbarians, who don't care about any moral or legal rules, aren't constrained at all.
Especially because the sanctions include Gush Etizon and the Jewish quarter of eastern Jerusalem, places that at least 90% of Jewish Israelis think are integral parts of Israel, not "settlements."
As I said when the sanctions were announced, if the goal was to change Israeli policy, they were in fact obviously designed to do the opposite. So they must have just been for domestic political consumption.
I’m quoted in this @Telegraph article about a poll showing UK sanctions on Israel actually help, not hurt Netanyahu (this was all before he made his crypto comment!)
“More centrist Israelis who do not strongly support settlements still tend to view international interventions at this level as undermining Israel’s independence and sovereignty, and as the Right is generally considered to be less susceptible to international pressure, it comes as no surprise that Israelis say Labour policies would push them Right.”
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
El-Sayed just refuses to address why he was among a few dozen Egyptian Americans who signed a letter calling on the Muslim Brotherhood government to assume dictatorial powers, accelerate it purge the opposition from the media, and ignore Western criticism for doing so.
This should be disqualifying.
WOW this exchange.
@BretBaier tried to give Abdul El-Sayed a chance to finally explain the 2012 letter in support of the Muslim Brotherhood and Abdul awkwardly tries to speak over him.
This flailing defensiveness is why we’re on week 3 on this issue.
He could have gotten way ahead of this and just stated something like "I was caught up in the Arab Spring and hopes for democracy. I was afraid that Mubarak's cronies would try to retake power. In retrospect, I was naive about the prospects for a 'temporary' expansion of the regime's power and what it would likely mean, and I would never suggest something like that again. I certainly didn't want a dictatorship to rule Egypt."
Abdul is the one who campaigned with notorious antisemitic Communist Hasan Piker, and it's Rogers who is divisive? LOL.
As I followed pro-El-Sayed Jewish canvasses, I found evidence that Rogers’s ethnic divide-and-conquer strategy was working with at least some Jews. Some expressed outright fear, with one saying that “if Abdul wins, there’s going to be another Holocaust.” jewishcurrents.org/in-michig…
David Bernstein retweeted
As I followed pro-El-Sayed Jewish canvasses, I found evidence that Rogers’s ethnic divide-and-conquer strategy was working with at least some Jews. Some expressed outright fear, with one saying that “if Abdul wins, there’s going to be another Holocaust.” jewishcurrents.org/in-michig…
I'm not inclined to inherently credit or debit a president for everything that happens when they are president, but Acker's claim isn't true, at least not according to ADL stats. There was a huge rise in antisemitic incidents in 2023 and 2024, and a drop in 2025.
On the one hand the increase resulted for a coordinated antisemitic campaign after 10/7. OTOH, the Biden administration did next to nothing to combat this campaign, and both Biden and Harris expressed empathy for those involved in it.
Cue the grainy video of a Jew in Italy in 1936 talking how the most important thing is to make sure the trains keep running on time.
This Jewish Democrat is talking about the importance of voting for Dr Abdul El-Sayed not just as a Jewish woman but as a woman who wants the right to make decisions about her body freely.
She speaks about equitable housing practices, basic rights to healthcare and food, which will be denied because of Mike Rogers and his policies.
Even @nytimes has finally caught up, though it can’t help trying to mitigate with some editorializing.
