Race realism as the path to sane and humane opinions

My manifesto of sorts

I listened to this debate between Coleman Hughes and Peter Beinart. You can listen too, or you can just assume that I won’t flagrantly lie about its contents (haha!).

Coleman is easily the best defender of Israel today. It’s a good thing he’s around because even a guilty man deserves good representation, and we sure as chips are chips can’t do it ourselves right now.¹ Palestinians are blessed with plenty of people who can get on western media and sanewash their political aspirations and activities, so it’s fair for us to get a few too. I think Hughes must know that some of the things he says aren’t really true (I messaged him and explained some of them, so he must know), but he does a good job of showing how someone in our position would do kind of what we do if you zoom out and don’t look at the details. I believe that Hughes arrived at his robust pro-Israel stance because of negative polarisation against leftwing campus radicalism, his original signature issue. Zionists complain about the grotesqueries and stupidities of pro-Palestinian activism, but without them we’d have no supporters left at all, certainly not any of his calibre.

However, overall I’d say Hughes gets massively wrecked by Beinart, who isn’t an accomplished thinker, and certainly isn’t an accomplished debater. There are two basic reasons for this. First, Israel has spent the last three years frenetically cucking out anyone who steps up to defend it. ‘It is a ridiculous libel, explicable only in terms of two thousand years of entrenched prejudice, to suggest that Israel would use the withholding of food to a civilian population as a weapon of war, wait … ahem … you sure they did that? … so anyway, as I was saying, the concept of a siege is hardly a new one in the annals of warfare’. Imagine you are a lawyer tasked with representing a defendant on rape charge and that (though strictly it doesn’t matter) you are sincerely convinced of his innocence. You’re doing a good job, but then in the middle of trial your client pulls down his trousers and starts furiously masturbating. OK, that’s pretty bad, but it doesn’t prove anything; maybe, in fact, it’s his propensity to do that kind of thing that generates the false accusations. Interesting angle. You can move on from this if you’re deft enough. Then the next day he climbs on the table and shouts ‘I LOVE RAPE; RAPE IS GOOD; IT’S WHAT I LOVE TO DO’. That’s roughly what it’s like being endlessly demoralised as an Israel advocate, and Beinart has enough practice rattling off this kind of stuff to induce demoralisation.

The second reason, though, is our topic for today. Even when Hughes holds frame and keeps the topic on the genuine dilemma Israel faces in response to a century of Arab intransigence and terrorism, Beinart still comes out kind of top because there are places Hughes won’t go, and Beinart knows Hughes won’t go there, and Hughes knows Beinart knows Hughes won’t go there. So, it’s all a bit stupid, but Beinart looks better. The clearest example of this is how Beinart repeatedly steers the conversation towards the case of South Africa, showing how the arguments Israelis make against extending equal political rights to all those living under its military control were made by the Afrikaners defending apartheid. Hughes tries to draw distinctions between the two cases, but it’s not very convincing. If anything, once you add them all up, the Afrikaners who, in their heimat of Cape Colony at least, predate the Bantu population, come off looking better. But this is all completely missing the main point, which is that South Africa sucks!