Fre d Halstead's 'Out Now' is a good book, and as I recall, he mentions me favorably at one point. I like dFred, too. We got along, I think, because he put ending the war first, and winning polemics second.
There's a lot of good meat in this piece, but it is hard to move past the problems that show up in its first two paragraphs:
(1) Failure to distinguish between "ultra-leftism", plain old leftism, progressivism, and liberalism; and
(2) Seeming to measure how "ultra-left" someone is by how much tolerance they have for Palestinian expressions of anger towards the Jewish mainstream (sometimes misdirected, sometimes not) or how vocally supportive they are of Arab armed resistance. Which is ridiculous. Hamas itself is a neoliberal organization. The Iranian government is not leftist in any way, shape or form (and massacred and repressed most of Iran's actual leftists, regardless where said leftists were on the spectrum from devout Muslims to secularist non-believers). Antisemitism exists across the political spectrum, and the fastest way to end misdirected rage against Zionism would be to end Zionist crimes against humanity.
Finally, starting this article by bringing up Susan Abulhawa is an awful look. Yes, sometimes things she says are not well thought out -- surprise surprise while her family is suffering a genocide conducted by Israel -- but she doesn't have an actual violent bone in her body towards random non Zionist Jewish people. She should be given grace for that, as it would be superhuman to do better in her circumstances. Instead she goes viral *because the Mayor's wife, whom she does not know, did something vaguely connected to her* while a torrent of Islamophobia proceeds unchecked.
Fre d Halstead's 'Out Now' is a good book, and as I recall, he mentions me favorably at one point. I like dFred, too. We got along, I think, because he put ending the war first, and winning polemics second.
There's a lot of good meat in this piece, but it is hard to move past the problems that show up in its first two paragraphs:
(1) Failure to distinguish between "ultra-leftism", plain old leftism, progressivism, and liberalism; and
(2) Seeming to measure how "ultra-left" someone is by how much tolerance they have for Palestinian expressions of anger towards the Jewish mainstream (sometimes misdirected, sometimes not) or how vocally supportive they are of Arab armed resistance. Which is ridiculous. Hamas itself is a neoliberal organization. The Iranian government is not leftist in any way, shape or form (and massacred and repressed most of Iran's actual leftists, regardless where said leftists were on the spectrum from devout Muslims to secularist non-believers). Antisemitism exists across the political spectrum, and the fastest way to end misdirected rage against Zionism would be to end Zionist crimes against humanity.
Finally, starting this article by bringing up Susan Abulhawa is an awful look. Yes, sometimes things she says are not well thought out -- surprise surprise while her family is suffering a genocide conducted by Israel -- but she doesn't have an actual violent bone in her body towards random non Zionist Jewish people. She should be given grace for that, as it would be superhuman to do better in her circumstances. Instead she goes viral *because the Mayor's wife, whom she does not know, did something vaguely connected to her* while a torrent of Islamophobia proceeds unchecked.