The Anti-Israeli Left Is Turning Into QAnon

Not all of the Left! But a lot of it!

Many people on the Left of the #CeasefireNow persuasion are sane and nice folks. They think that the collateral cost of defeating Hamas is too great. Or they think doing so will lead to Hamas 2: Hamas Harder, so what is really needed is a long-term peace agreement.  I also am for a long-term peace agreement, but like the overwhelming majority of the Israeli population, I think first, Hamas needs to die.

OK, so we disagree about this, but their opinion isn’t some insane, evil position. It’s just a thing people can disagree about.

However, there are also many people on the Left who are batshit insane.

Take, for instance, the band Eve6. Their Twitter account is deep in with a lot of the Left and is utterly deranged. They subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the massacre at the music festival on October 7^th was in part or in whole committed by Israel. I don’t want to get into the details of this conspiracy theory because it doesn’t deserve it, but here is a tweet they sent last night suggesting that Israel was trying to cover up their evildoing.

This is QAnon shit. To be honest, it’s actually far more popular and widespread than QAnon! But it is just as insane. And this is a recurring theme of the Left going back to the afternoon of October 7^th.

They have seen conspiracies and lies everywhere.

The plans found on the dead Hamas terrorists? Those couldn’t be real because Hamas couldn’t possibly have color printers.

The babies who were beheaded? Those babies’ heads fell off postmortem.

The reports of rapes? The oldest wartime propaganda lies in the book!

The missile that hit the hospital? Israel did that! (Islamic Jihad did it.)

Hamas couldn’t be under the other hospital! (They were under the other hospital.)

The guns in the MRI room? Planted.

On and on.

At every point, the Left has had some new insane conspiracy theory, and they can basically all be summed up as “the powerful Israelis have faked this to justify their oppression and slaughter of the oppressed Palestinians, BUT they are also so incompetent at it that random lunatics on Twitter can catch them!”

There are dozens of these every day. I’m sure there are new ones happening right now.

There is no equivalent on the pro-Israeli side. The closest thing is people, including Biden, who have doubted the casualty numbers from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. I personally don’t think it was good of Biden to do that. Not because I trust the Gazan Health Ministry, but because even if it’s inflated, the fact is thousands and thousands of civilians have indeed died in Gaza. Whether it’s 9,000 instead of 11,000 or whatever, it’s still many thousands of dead people! Not all of those people are civilians, of course. But a lot of them are.

But second-guessing the accuracy of these numbers is worlds removed from the absolutely bananas theorizing the other side does daily.

A reasonable thing someone could object to about my position is that I don’t blame Israel sufficiently enough for those deaths. I blame Hamas.

As I wrote when this all began, the predictable and inevitable and unavoidable civilian deaths that were going to happen in Gaza during this war are something I add to Hamas’s tab.

Hamas shouldn’t have launched a murderous, unfathomably depraved attack on civilians on October 7^th. They have to be disarmed. The leaders and planners need to be imprisoned or killed. Of course, they do. You can’t do what they did and walk away. And even if sometimes people actually do stuff like that and walk away, those are very bad exceptions! Those are inefficiencies and failures. You shouldn’t expect to get away! Especially not when you’re committing those acts against a country a zillion times stronger than you and your 15 closest allies combined. A predictable consequence of those murders was that the response would get Palestinians killed.

I know of no way that Israel can get rid of Hamas without it incurring an awful and terrible number of civilian casualties. But that’s one of the many reasons Hamas shouldn’t have done what they did! And they continue doing things that are getting Palestinians killed.

Hamas shouldn’t hide amongst the civilian population! If they want to meet the “occupiers” on a battlefield far from innocent people, I’m sure the IDF would be happy to oblige.

But they don’t. Because they don’t give a shit about the civilian population of Gaza. They’re a terrorist organization!

Now, you can disagree with me about who is to blame for the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Gaza. You can look at the bombed-out building of Gaza City and say, “This has to have been too much.” That’s not hard for me to understand.

I personally don’t feel comfortable judging whether they have bombed too much in the wrong places because I’m just some dipshit in America. I don’t know why they bombed what, or who was where, or why. Maybe they have been terrible and indiscriminate. Maybe they have actually just had lots of targets to hit. Maybe a lot of things that I can’t know. And neither can you. Neither can the Left.

Presumably, the US government does have some sort of insight into those operational details, and that is why I am somewhat concerned when reports come out that the Biden administration has expressed concern. But it’s still silly for me to try to adjudicate that. However, I understand how someone who lives on Earth and doesn’t wear hats on their feet and shoes on their head could arrive at a different conclusion.

Fair enough! It takes all sorts to make a world.

But many people on the anti-Israeli Left are not content to just disagree about things like this. Instead, they trip the light fantastic into bizarre conspiracy theories that it’s hard not to think are a little anti-Semitic. These powerful, manipulative Jews using the media to push their evil, bloodthirsty lies!

When conservatives do this—when they invent hysterical, unhinged fantasies to justify their positions—the US media talks about it endlessly. Rightly so! It is bad and dangerous. It isn’t a crime to be a conspiracy theorist, but society is healthier when it is stigmatized.

And yet, you will be unsurprised to learn, that this aspect of the current situation is wholly absent from the coverage of this conflict.