Thank you Jay,

Thank you for having this open dialogue about David on the podcast. I have been conflicted on David Pakman for the length of this current conflict in Gaza, and I only became aware of his show because of you. It got so bad that I had to stop listening to his show, which is not something I would normally do. I’m very interested in listening to all sides of an issue when I don’t agree, because that’s the only way for anyone to make progress on anything. I’m a progressive. I like progress.

But I also am confronted on a daily basis with this current conflict in Gaza, with images of dead children, which a civilian death toll at 80% and this can clearly not be a mistake or misses or collateral damage. These simply must be targeted killing of civilians. That was clear early on, but especially now after the beach attack and the UN shelter attack. And I hope you grab either of Jimmy Dore’s excellent rants on this from this week (either on TYT or The Jimmy Dore Show) when you cover this topic again, which I hope you will do very soon. I find your calm, rational, balanced, even handed, intelligent, fair coverage of every issue to be so calming for me. I see so many dead children every day online, and I get a little crazy, and then I listen to David Pakman and he’s framing most of his coverage of it as though all the problem lies with Hamas, and I just can’t do it. There is no context that matters to me that justifies this. There is nothing that justifies killing 80% civilians, even if every single one of the really was a human shield placed in front of a rocket depot.

David Pakman is a smart person, a good person. I can see that. The issues with Israel are very complex, I see that. The associations between the history of the Jewish people across the world and the Israeli State make it even more complex. If people had been killed or kicked out of every country they’ve ever been in, and finally through great struggle and after surviving near total genocide finally got a state of their own, it would be very difficult not to always want to side with them on issue that could even remotely, even theoretically pose a threat to that state. But this is not defense. Even with Hamas having as part of their charter the idea that they would like to wipe out Israel, it’s not defense, because they can’t do it. They have no chance at all of doing it. Israel is the 4th largest military on Earth, backed by the largest military power the Earth has ever known. But even if they were in dire, existential danger, it would not justify killing 80% civilians. That is just murder. It takes a very complex issue, and makes this part of it easy. That is murder and that is simply wrong, fundamentally immoral.

David is trying to reconcile these things by saying, and you actually chose the best example of this in that clip you chose for the show, in the clearest language he can, what he thinks about this. He was being very explicit in that clip because of some the conversations he had been having that week, to condemn Israel for their actions, but he didn’t condemn them because they were wrong, but because it was tactically ineffective to kill so many civilians. He thought it wasn’t a good idea for ending the conflict or for promoting peace, and that’s just not good enough for me. When you deliberately kill children who can’t possibly be part of your conflict, because they’re children, you are not just being tactically ineffective, your committing an outrageous moral offense, a war crime. I think that because of his background, he just cannot see the way his bias is dragging him toward a conclusion that his progressive nature would not let him come to on any other issue with any other country. Hamas is a terrible group. I do not support them at all, but they are merely the obvious and foregone conclusion of a people living under siege and occupation. In any prison, there will be gangs formed around tough guys who do violence, and the weaker people will flock to one or the other for protection. Gaza is a prison. This is true outside of prisons too. The Israelis support Netanyahu’s war at over 80%, because people who are made afraid will back a strong man. It’s why the US was able to invade Iraq, a country that posed no threat and had not attacked, because that fear makes us all irrational. Netanyahu, Hamas, George W. Bush, and many many others in history will always use this fear to achieve greater power. It should be condemned, not as tactically unwise and inefficient, but fundamentally wrong and immoral in China/Tibet, in US/Iraq, in ISIS’s campaigns through Syria and Iraq, and obviously in Israel/Palestine too.

Thank you for giving me a place to get this all out. I love you Jay. I love what you do. Your work has changed my life, and don’t really have the words to thank you for that.