meesai 🇵🇸🪐

What I see here: the art of bullshit- and something much, much more dangerous. Hasan Piker is a commentator and political activist who built his fame promoting a radical view of Israel while expressing sympathy for forces like Hezbollah, fundamentalist and reactionary movements abhorrent to any coherent progressivism. He knows very little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or its history. He stitches together fragments: scraps of history, anecdotal observations from different eras, pieces of unrelated circumstances. The result is bullshit dressed up as political insight. Example: At the beginning of the clip, Ezra Klein raises the question of Israeli security concerns, giving the impression that this is a substantive discussion. Piker responds by asking how Palestinians can be expected to live alongside “those who slaughtered them.” When wars and conflicts end, people routinely find themselves living alongside those they once fought. And Palestinians, of course, have slaughtered Israelis too. That's precisely why security concerns are a serious issue. Piker isn't interested in answering the question. He's interested in turning it into another opportunity to portray Israelis as monstrous, while evading the issue. It's just a shallow political performance. Klein knows well what Piker is doing. Yet he sits across from him with a straight face and treats him as an authority on the Middle East. He doesn't do it because Piker has anything illuminating to say. He does it because Piker commands an enormous young audience, and with it clicks. The performance rests on a bargain: Piker delivers his radical talking points, and everyone else pretends something intellectually serious is taking place => more hits. A legit onlyfans. Pornography simulates intimacy without providing any, and this kind of discourse simulates intellectual engagement without delivering any. It borrows the gestures of serious journalism, like measured questions, the thoughtful expressions and the look of open-minded inquiry, and empties them of substance. Why is this dangerous? Because hatred is one thing. People see the images from Gaza, believe passionately in Palestinian liberation, and come to hate Israel. That's an emotional response. But something fundamentally different happens when hatred masquerades as intellectualism. Hatred alone has limited political reach. Many people are reluctant to enlist in it. But dress it up as reasoned analysis, as a sophisticated debate that supposedly leads to the conclusion that Israel has no right to exist as a national home for Jews, and suddenly you can recruit people, institutions, justify policies, and legitimize violance. What started as the art of bullshit becomes the pornography of discourse, and ultimately something more dangerous: the transformation of prejudice into the shell of respectable thought.

It still amuses me that Hamas spent one morning starting a war, and then the next three years crying every single day about losing the war that they started.