Patrick Lawrence: Gaza: Kamala Harris and the Disgrace of Denial

Outrage is a very fine thing. So is indignity. They are good for the circulation and keep one alert, I have always found. This is why I read The New York Times as diligently as I do. The once-but-no-longer newspaper of record never lets me down.

So it was last Wednesday, when The Times published a remarkable opinion piece under the headline, “This Is Who Kamala Harris Fails.” The 1,200–word commentary  that follows reflects what we are calling the “Abandon Harris” movement. Hala Alyan, a Palestinian–American writer, calls for voters to reject Harris at the polls in November because — I will put this more bluntly than Alyan—Harris’s support for terrorist Israel’s genocide in Gaza while she professes a broken heart at the sight of the suffering is simply too much hypocrisy to take.

From the piece:

For me to lean into the powerful marketing of the current vice-president as a bastion of hope requires enormous amnesia—not only of this administration’s complicit funding of Palestinian slaughter but also of Ms. Harris’s track record on criminal reform, immigration, and law enforcement. 

This piece is to be read and considered carefully, even if Alyan sometimes seems slightly too gentle as she makes her case. It is among the most persuasive, thoughtfully assembled arguments I have read for rejecting Harris, who is at this point more confection than flesh and blood, for her refusal to hold the Zionist state responsible for its countless crimes—war crimes, crimes against humanity, transgressions of international law. “An inconsistent stance on accountability, Alyan writes, “isn’t real accountability.”

All good. Now to the outrage and indignation.

While I read comments attached to my own columns as a courtesy and a responsibility to readers, I do not much look at them when I read The Times. On this occasion I was encouraged to do so. I am sure The Times is carefully selective in deciding what comments it publishes so as to contain dissent and encourage conformity. And what a job it did on the Alyan piece. These comments, 2,264  of them by Monday, are beyond outrage and indignation. They give us the sound of an educated, liberal elite that has so lost its moorings it can no longer discern pure evil when it stares back at them—an elite that, indeed, condemns those who dare to raise their voices in objection, as every single one of us should.  

To read these comments is to wade through an intellectual and moral cesspit. A reader from Detroit tells Alyan, “I see no reason Gaza should be the decision maker on your vote.” A Los Angeleno going by JM says for Harris to depart from the Biden’s regime’s unconditional support for Israel’s terror operation in Gaza is “to commit political suicide and abandon reality.” An Atlanta man asserts, “There are more important issues in this election than petty ethnic whining about who owns what land in the Middle East.” 

 Petty ethnic whining. I had to type the phrase again to make sure I wasn’t having a bad dream. 

The running theme, the thread giving color to this repellant weave, is that the presence of Donald Trump in American politics is far more dangerous and objectionable than Israel’s slaughter of 40,000 human beings who are Palestinian. “The vast majority of Dems have other priorities than Israel/Gaza,” JM writes. “As we should.”

A special favorite in this line, for its exquisitely upside-down logic, comes from an Alaskan named Joe. “The author is missing the big picture. Trump poses an existential threat to the entire political framework, at both the national and international levels,” Joe writes. “So do you want to still have the right to protest without being shot at? Do you want for democracy to continue? Do you want for America to at least aspire to stand for freedom? Do you want for international law to exist?”

Do you want for international law?  

Holy St. Jamoli. What ethical abyss is this? To go by this comment thread, a good enough measure in my read, a great many Americans have no more idea of right and wrong than an Israel Defense Forces grunt machine-gunning a crowd of starving Gazans lining up for aid. Can there be any hope for a nation whose people—and these are the educated, we can assume—have retreated this far from the Age of Reason?    

In our household, we call people such as these “the good Germans.”  

Let us mull just a few of the comments appended to Alyan’s piece. From the thousands posted, I choose these as representative of the prevailing sentiments throughout the whole. I will leave the malapropisms as The Times published them:

From a Californian:

Have you asked yourself why no neighboring countries in the Levant will accept anymore Palestinian immigrants? It’s because woven in their body politic are some of the most ruthless and violent people on earth….

“Em S, Paradise, USA”:

In other words, “If you don’t support our foreign cause, we will destroy the USA by handing the election to Trump and Republican fascism”!… Gaza will not figure into my vote. I am incensed that some voters are trying to hold all of us hostage until we capitulate to Palestinian’s demands.

 From a Floridian:

The author misses the big point. You have to look where each side starts from. Israel wants peace and prosperity for everyone. The Palestinians want death and destruction for everyone.

R.W., a Pennsylvanian:

LOL. It’s not a genocide, silly. It’s a war—one that Palestinians started by killing, torturing, raping, and abducting innocent people, including children. Americans, by-and-large, don’t really care about Palestinians being killed because they rightly see the deaths in this context…. 

The writer who precipitated this gathering of narcissistic ignorance is a formidable figure. Hala Alyan was born in the States and grew up in Kuwait until her parents sought asylum in the U.S. when the Gulf War erupted in August 1990. She is now a clinical psychologist and a published poet and novelist whose themes run to forced exile and the reunions of families dispersed over decades of geopolitical conflict. She did not, in short, come to the thoughts expressed in her Times commentary lightly or the day before yesterday.

Alyan makes a perfectly rational case, reasoned and compassionate at once, for what is wrong with the Harris campaign’s way of addressing the Zionist state’s conduct in Gaza and now the West Bank—or, better put, its inexcusable flinch, its refusal to address all the atrocities and crimes. Harris’s few mentions of the agonies of the people of Gaza are always rendered in the passive voice. They suffer, but there is no one inflicting the suffering.

From Alyan’s piece:

I appreciate Ms. Harris’s broken heart. What I’d appreciate more is a direct naming of who is killing and starving Palestinians, acts that are neither inevitable nor without a perpetrator. I’d appreciate the upholding of international law through sanctions and an arms embargo. It’s hard to abide the passive framing of Palestinian death in the same speech that reasserts a nuclear power’s right to defend itself — a “defense” that in the past few months has included both American and Israeli representatives calling to level Gaza, mobs rioting to defend the rights of soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian prisoner, and bombs shredding hundreds of starving children in refugee camps. 

Where is the acknowledgement of this heinousness, Alyan asks. Where is the context? Where is the history extending back 75 years (if not longer, depending on how you count) prior to the events of last Oct. 7? From whence arises this faith that a Harris administration would depart from the Biden White House’s shameless endorsement of Israel’s terror operation? How can Democratic voters satisfy themselves with nothing more than show-biz display, spectacle?

Anyone of sound, integrated mind must endorse Alyan as she poses such questions and levels this kind of critical observation. But to the majority of Times readers commenting on her column, Alyan has belched in chapel. Don’t bother me about Gaza and the Palestinians, who are dreadful people. I don’t want to think about all that. There is nothing anyone, or even America, can do about Gaza. What?! You want to talk about genocide and not Donald Trump—Trump the dictator, Trump the fascist, Trump the danger to our democracy? Have you lost your mind, woman?

I have never in my days come across such a collection of misinformed vulgarians in one place. Alyan gets to the core of their disgrace better than I:

It is maddening how people advocating the freedom of Palestinians are spoken about, as though their invocation of the genocide were the real problem, the downer, the Trump enabler. It implies that mentioning this administration’s material support to massacre Palestinian civilians is what ruins the vibes, not the act of sending billions of dollars in unconditional military aid to Israel. It is an obnoxious magic trick that makes naming the crime the crime. 

You have to be a casualty of unrelenting psychological mistreatment to believe-without-thinking (but think you are thinking) that the genocide taking place before our eyes and with our nation’s complicity is of no importance or can be misrepresented to the point it is acceptable. You have to have surrendered all capacity for discernment—autonomous judgment in the Jesuits’ definition of the term—to believe there is nothing on earth, not even mass murder in your name, more important than keeping a second, third, fourth-rate figure in a tin-foil cap out of our post-democratic politics. 

Yes, I mark down the Democratic mainstream and its clerks in the media—the one as much to blame as the other—as wholly responsible for what we witness and hear as we watch and listen to the beyond-belief inanity of the Harris-for-president mobs. Willfully blind, willfully un– or misinformed, willfully coarse: I see the Democratic majority in the comments attached to Alyan’s piece. And this is exactly what the party elite wanted when they conjured the various frenzies associated with Russiagate to explain their failure in 2016: people who come to prefer lies to the truth, just as Arendt, shortly before she died in 1975, warned those subjected to constant deceit are bound to do.

I read the comment thread appended to Hala Alyan’s commentary as a small measure of a greatly larger reality. Emmanuel Todd, the celebrated French historian (The Defeat of the West, 2024; After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, 2006), argues that we now live amid “an anthropological rupture.” Humanity—humanity in the Western post-democracies, Todd means—has altogether lost its way. We are living through a civilizational collapse, in Toynbee’s terms. Those purporting to lead us are unserious people. A world-historical disorder defines us, for their capacity and ours for rational thought and action, to say nothing of moral principle and empathy, has comprehensively lapsed.

The comments following Hala Alyan’s supremely humane argument are what it sounds like on the far side of the rupture Todd sees among us.

With the assistance of Cara Marianna.