On the morning of Oct. 7th, 2023, while Hamas’s pogromists were murdering, torturing, raping and mutilating Israeli men, women and children, Jehad Abusalim, the Gaza-born Director of the US-based Institute for Palestine Studies, posted the following
This post, framing the Hamas massacre as an understandable act, wasn’t a one-off for Abusalim. A search on his X feed shows that he not only has he failed to even issue a throat-clearing condemnation of the attack, but, just four days ago he expressed support for the terror group by describing their actions and their refusal to surrender not as suicidial, or cruel to Palestinian civilians, but as “heroic”.
On Oct. 7th, 2024, the first anniversary of the antisemitic atrocity, Peter Beinart published a Guardian op-ed (“The mainstream media has failed us after 7 October“) lauding Abusalim and chiding journalists who covered Oct. 7th and its aftermath for not reaching out to him for insight into the ‘explosion’.
In an alternate universe, the American media would have answered 7 October by putting Jehad Abusalim on speed dial. Abusalim, who runs the Washington DC office of the Institute for Palestine Studies, is not only from Gaza, but also a Hebrew speaker who is completing a PhD in history, Hebrew and Judaic studies…It’s hard to think of anyone within taxi distance of America’s television studios who was better equipped to help Americans understand Hamas’s massacre and Israel’s brutal military response.
Beinart, of course, doesn’t mention Absualim’s effective justification for the Oct. 7th massacre, or his exprssion of support for Hamas’s “heroism”. He does, however, quote pearls of wisdom by the activist such as “there is no military solution to this crisis”. Absualim would have us believe, it seems, that Hamas invaded southern Israel and slaughtered over 1,000 Jews, not, as Hamas leaders have stated repeatedly, to destory the Jewish state, but, rather to bring Jerusalem to the negotiating table.
Beinart later chides the MSM for ignoring other Palestinian scholars who “cited Palestinians’ lack of freedom as crucial to understanding Hamas’s attack“. To understand this Palestinain insight putatively ignored by the media which Beinart is referring to, here’s the tweet he links to in that sentence, by Muhammad Shehada:
Like Beinart’s friend Jehad Absualim, Shehada, the Progammes and Communications Chief at a so-called ‘human rights’ group with ties to Hamas, wants us to believe that terror groups who call for Israel’s annihiation and promised to repeat Oct. 7th again and again, engaged in one of the most barbaric pogroms in Jewish history because of the failure of the peace process.
The fact that Beinart describes the terror apologetics from Absualim and Shehada as a crucial way to understand the events of Oct. 7th reveals his hand. Though he adds that “networks had every right to avoid commentators who justified the 7 October massacre“, Beinart, a former ‘Liberal Zionist‘ turned anti-Zionist, has become so in thrall to anti-Israel activists that he fails to see that the Palestinian commentators he thinks should be platformed, while not openly celebrating Oct. 7th, have effectively defended the sadistic violence by suggesting that the perpetrators had no other choice.
As Shany Mor wrote, Beinart has complained that the charge against him, that he never grants Palestinians agency, “is hasbara for ‘You’re not blaming Palestinians for their own oppression“, which is a way of deflecting the fact that he truly can’t see Arab or Palestinian choices. Beinart is unable to see, Mor observed, that the cataclysmic hate for Jews among Palestinians is not an effect of the conflict, but, rather, is one of its animating causes.
