A devastating reply to moral philosopher Jeff McMahan on the Gaza war, by Quassim Cassam (@QCassam). Frankly, I’m amazed—in a positive way—that Cassam managed to get this response published in an academic journal like Analyse & Kritik. He did face pushback from the editors, but they ultimately treated him fairly. Kudos to them. McMahan is one of countless academics who seem to have suspended their critical faculties when it comes to the Gaza war, and Cassam doesn’t pull any punches in exposing this. McMahan’s claim that everything horrendous Hamas has done has been done “to a much greater extent” by Israel is, Cassam argues, “not only false but ludicrous when the evidence is properly considered.” In his effort to downplay the sadistic atrocities committed on 7 October, the distinguished bioethicist even ends up parroting Hamas propaganda. This, Cassam rightly argues, is “the single most pernicious aspect” of his argument. From a moral point of view, nothing Israel has done during this horrible war even comes close to what Hamas did on 7 October. There has not been a single instance of Israeli soldiers executing women and children at close range, engaging in mass rape, abducting babies and the elderly, or parading mutilated corpses through the streets in jubilation—the kinds of atrocities Hamas deliberately committed that day. Hamas maximizes civilian casualties; Israel tries its best to minimize them. Yet the moral pressure on academics to toe the anti-Israel line is so immense that even a distinguished ethicist like Jeff McMahan can become blind to this stark moral divide. Worse still, he can end up pretending that the moral divide runs in the opposite direction—that Israel is “much worse” than Hamas. Thank you for this public service, Quassim. Not everyone in academia has gone crazy, phew. degruyterbrill.com/document/…

Excellent paper by philosopher @QCassam. It's very rare to read such an unflinching, level-headed analysis about the Gaza war in an academic journal these days! "Until now, wars have largely been fought on the assumption that: (a) it is possible to lose militarily without being totally annihilated; (b) in such cases, the losing side recognizes that it has lost and gives up because it recognizes that it has lost; and (c) there are limits to how much pain and suffering each side is willing to tolerate before it sues for peace. Even the Japanese surrendered at the end of the Second World War once the United States deployed nuclear weapons. In contrast, Hamas and Iran like to give the impression that they are fanatics who will not accept that they have lost as long as they are still standing and do not care at all about the wellbeing of their own people." degruyterbrill.com/document/…