—WARNING: TEDIOUS OVERLONG 🥩POST AHEAD—PROBABLY BEST IGNORED—

i’m late responding to this, but i’ve been spending the last week somewhere even stupider than than the internet (more on that to come). last week, though, Yassine Meskhout finally wrote a longform response to me. i’d been looking forward to him actually confronting my critiques, but disappointingly, the piece consists almost entirely of warmed-over nonsense i’ve already responded to, plus a load of vague insinuation about the alleged vagueness of my insinuations. it’s all remarkably empty and doesn’t really leave me with much to do. but here goes.

some background: yassine meskhout is a liberal and a lawyer, although i’m starting to question whether he really has the chops for either. according to his own account, before the attacks on october 7th he was generally neutral on israel/palestine, but afterwards he substantially changed his views in favour of israel. i don’t agree, but i think some kind of change in view is understandable: the massacre didn’t make me more sympathetic to israel, but it did make me a lot less sympathetic to the kind of vulgar palestinianism you find a lot in the western left. what’s strange is that when israel proceeded to carry out its own sadistic massacre of civilians, several orders of magnitude worse than the one carried out by hamas, meskhout didn’t update his views again to take into account the fact that israel is a plainly illiberal and murderous state. instead, he seems to be increasingly aligning himself with the dumbest, most kneejerk, least insightful fringe of the israeli right-wing. 

this usually takes the form of meskhout endorsing a lot of stunningly stupid bullshit on this plaform. so, for instance, in may this year, two israeli embassy workers were shot and killed at an event in dc. this was an act of murder, which i find both morally abominable and politically useless. but for meskhout, it’s not enough to say that murder is bad. instead, he approvingly quoted a frothing, hysterical post by some mouthbreather called david josef volodko, who asserted, on the basis of zero evidence whatsoever, that “this was not about gaza” and the two victims were targeted simply for being jews.

i object to this framing, because 1) it’s obviously untrue, 2) it feeds a hysterical victim-complex among people currently cheerleading a genocide, and 3) it collapses the distinction between israel and jews in a way i, a jew, find extremely unwelcome and dangerous. so i asked meskhout if he really believed this, and he essentially confirmed that he did. obviously, both he and volodko were completely wrong. if the killer was, as meskhout put it, “targeting random attendees at a jewish museum,” he wouldn’t have travelled to dc from chicago (which has plenty of jews), specifically identified the israeli embassy workers at the museum, shouted “this is for gaza” after killing them and no one else, or left a manifesto in which he explains that he was motivated specifically by israel’s crimes in gaza.

this put meskhout in a tricky spot. my mental model of the world allowed me to correctly predict the nature of events; his mental model has been built by psycho political extremists and is plainly not fit for service. so he tried to wriggle out of the situation in an extremely weird and annoying way: by pretending not to understand what i was talking about. he kept trying to bring the topic around to his assertion that there’s no meaningful difference between an attack on random jews motivated by straightforward antisemitism, and an attack on random jews motivated by anti-israel sentiment. he even wrote an entire post on the subject, despite the fact that there was no attack on random jews either way, and none of this had anything whatsoever to do with the actual topic at hand. (you can read it here: ymeskhout.com/p/slicing…) when i tried pointing out that the people who were killed were not random jews but israeli government employees, and that the two categories are not the same, he simply insisted that i was speaking meaningless riddles and he had no idea what i was trying to say. i’m such an airy-fairy littérateur, it’s sometimes hard to understand what i mean, with all this fancy talk about how not all jews are employed by the israeli government. what could this mean? what could it possibly mean? (yes, he literally said this. i wish i were making this up. look: substack.com/@ymeskhout…

meskhout is a public defender. i wonder if he’s ever tried the same trick in the courtroom. “your honour, my client is charged with murder, and there’s cctv footage showing him committing the crime. but what even is that? i’ve never even heard of any such thing. i challenge you to tell me the difference between killing a fly because it’s annoying and stepping on an ant by accident. i rest my case.”

anyway, meskhout has decided to write his big essayistic response to me in this vein. apparently, i’m using “cloudy language” and “argument by obfuscation.” he never actually explains what’s supposedly so cloudy and difficult about the things i say; he just quotes a few perfectly cogent analogies expressed without any particular poetic flourishes, and then goes “buh? zuh?” like a caveman confronted with some coloured string. i keep demonstrating how he’s forced to spout ideas that are either plainly idiotic or flatly untrue to justify his attachment to the wrong side in a genocidal war. he responds by saying that my “prose is endlessly and floridly compelling, but it can also be drowned in inscrutable fog.” as an attempt to engineer the reader’s perception of reality by fiat, this is not very impressive, but this kind of denial of reality by fiat is all he’s really left with.

the actual content of this particular spat is hardly worth getting into. meskhout approvingly quoted another dimwit (this one’s a personal trainer) who thought it was a slam-dunk to ask why palestine supporters don’t get behind an atlantic council initiative called “realign for palestine” instead of supporting armed violence. i have been a pretty prominent critic of armed palestinian violence and the left’s embrace of it, but this is an obviously idiotic thing to say. firstly, because while realign for palestine supposedly wants to realign palestinian politics towards a two-state solution, the two-state solution is already the current position of the palestinian government, and has been since the plo recognised israel in 1993. the current situation is downstream of the abject failure of the two-state process, making the whole project spectacularly pointless. secondly, because rfp is a project of the atlantic council, which is broadly aligned with israel in the current war. the atlantic council is not a neutral body, so even if you personally do support rfp it should be unsurprising that most people who support palestinians will not. in our exchange i listed a bunch of indigenous palestinian groups that promote reconciliation and nonviolence. (meskhout had never heard of any of them, obviously.) maybe you’d have a point if you asked why western leftists didn’t support those; smugly asking why they don’t support an atlantic council initiative is extremely thick.

but for some reason this isn’t enough for meskhout. apparently it’s illegitimate to question rfp’s institutional affiliation; i’m only allowed to disagree with their public statements. why? not clear! my best guess is that these weird ad hoc conditions and this selective illiteracy are the only means he has of papering over the cracks in an ideology that bears no relation to reality whatsoever. every day, dozens of people are murdered in cold blood as they try to get food for their families, and meskhout has aligned himself with the people murdering them. he is caught up in something profoundly evil. but whenever he’s confronted with this reality, or the stupidity and inhumanity he’s sunk to, he just complains that he doesn’t understand: he doesn’t understand that jews are not the same as israel, or that it is weird to expect people to support their enemies, or that people might oppose the mass slaughter for reasons other than antisemitism. it’s all so bewildering and disorienting, the real world. so he hides.

but i’m the hazy, cloudy one, obviously. i’m the one dealing in obfuscation and mystery, because i dared to use an analogy one time.

(ymeskhout.com/p/cloudy-…)