October 7th Was Bad, And So Are The American Leftists Who Celebrated It

They aren't as bad as Hamas. But they are bad.

A year ago today, I woke up late and went to meet a friend of mine for lunch. One beer led to another and we decided to go out a canyon and shoot guns. Hours later, I came home and began tweeting about the “very nice Idaho day” I had had doing redneck shit like drinking beers and shooting the cans. Someone replied to me and said, “Is this really appropriate considering the terror attack taking place right now?” And I was like, “The what?”

It took a few seconds of looking to find headlines about this awful thing that had happened in Israel. My first reaction was relief that it wasn’t a terror attack on the US. About ten milliseconds later, I thought, this is a tragedy in a land of tragedies. Thoughts and prayers. And I went on tweeting about bullshit.

It wasn’t until the next day that I got around to actually reading some of the coverage and realized the magnitude, the horror, and understood it wasn’t just another case of sectarian violence in a land too often afflicted by it.

People often say stuff like “This story broke my heart,” but this story actually did make me have a very visceral reaction of despair and sorrow and anger. And then I went down the hole and read everything that could be read about Hamas’s evil attacks. And it was just worse with every detail. But as upset as I was, it would be totally dishonest to say that this affected me “as a Jew.”

I’m not a good Jew. I’m not religious. I don’t know that I even believe in God. I don’t really think about it a lot. I’m not a member of a synagogue…Like lots of American liberals, I have quite complicated feelings about Israel. I was as upset about October 7th as I would have been if it had happened anywhere in the world to any group of people. It was very sad and tragic but it had nothing to do with me. Obviously, I supported Israel shooting every member of Hamas in the head and throwing their bodies into the sea, but it didn’t require my personal investment.

Hamas Is Bad. People Shouldn't Defend Hamas.

It wasn’t until I saw the disgusting reaction from so many people on the American Left that my own identity was affected. It had already been a few years since I thought of myself as a part of the Left, but once upon a time, I had thought that.

The fact that so many people in this cohort that I at one time had somewhat identified with could instantly and gleefully side with the terrorist murderers made me the sort of angry that you only get when you feel betrayed.

I feel sort of silly admitting this because, obviously, Hamas killing people is worse than American morons posting watermelon memes and celebrating terrorism, but I’m an American. Of course, American discourse is more relevant to me than far-off violence.

I wrote about all of this at the time. The left’s refusal to treat the victims of October 7^th as flesh and blood humans was and is disgusting. And their response is well you’re doing the same thing to Palestinian civilians.

But I’m not.