No, Twitter -- Bari Weiss is not responsible for the death of Refaat Alareer

Did she fly over to Gaza on her magic Jewess broomstick with a rocket strapped to her back? Is it because she is a witchy creature who can materialise out of thin air with powers heretofore unseen?

Something truly crazed happened last week on X/Twitter. Journalist Bari Weiss trended because thousands of people were holding her responsible for murder, following the death of a Palestinian writer in an Israeli airstrike. Even by the standards of the clogged, overflowing toilet that is Twitter, this stunk to high heaven.

The Twitter notification that caught my eye on Friday, 8 December

 

The story went something like this: after the Oct. 7 attack, Refaat Alareer, “a professor of comparative literature at the Islamic University of Gaza”, made fun of the death of an Israeli infant at the hands of Hamas.

Bari Weiss then shared that quote Tweet, writing: “Here is Refaat Alareer joking about whether or not an Israeli baby, burned alive in an oven, was cooked ‘with or without baking powder.’” (The particularly sadistic death of this particular Jewish child has been widely denied by pro-Palestinians across social media.)

That was on October 30. 

The following day, Alareer responded to Weiss’s tweet by blaming her for his death should he be “killed by Israeli bombs.”

Why? What about Weiss’s tweet, exactly, would make her responsible for the military actions of a nation thousands of miles away?

Well, he took his reasoning to the grave, as on December 6, he was killed in an airstrike in northern Gaza. This would otherwise not have caught my attention were it not for the fact his death then caused #bariweiss to trend on Twitter.

I take almost nothing I see on Twitter at face value — unless the person writing the Tweet is a personal friend of mine, I don’t consider any of the things written there as ‘true’ — per se. Many of them are true, but Twitter is not the place I go to find truth. Rather, I see Twitter as a space of infinite noise and some signal. The most generous interpretation of Twitter is that it is full of posturing — but it’s also very clearly a battlefield, perhaps one of the most crucial ones, in the information war in which we are all combatants. We all know at this point that there are forces at work behind it that juice certain narratives, and crush others. We know that — at least before Elon — staff worked hand-in-hand with government to destroy true reporting in order to uphold oppressive government policy. We’ve all seen the weird Tweet storms in which multiple accounts tweet the exact same, word-for-word, thing — always on some controversial culture war issue. 

But even by those opaque standards, the #bariweiss trending thing seems significant to me. I’ve looked at enough of the tweets using the hashtag, and they are not (all) fake. Even Max Blumenthal, who apparently has a reputation as some sort of serious person, implicated Weiss in this man’s death, writing a lengthy Tweet claiming that in the days before the airstrike, Alareer received death threats from “Israeli soldiers…inspired by neocon pundit @bariweiss.” 

The Tweet also read:

“It appears Israel hunted down an internationally known academic and murdered him along with his family because it couldn’t take a joke.”

Because the thought of burning Jewish babies alive is funny to you?

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. There IS a rational, coherent argument to be made in favour of the Palestinian cause. But in the last few years, and then especially after the 7 October atrocity and subsequent war in Gaza, what has replaced it has been the most spectacular and consequential outbreak of personality disordered rage that we have seen since the woke culture wars broke out.

I say consequential because it has lead to open celebration of the mass murder of Jews, in countries across the world, and, even worse, the craven defence of it by elite institutions in education and in media. Does this really not ring any bells, to anyone who spent the last 7 years screaming that Trump is ‘literally Hitler’? 

The tweets accusing the diminutive, U.S.-based Weiss of being directly responsible for the death — in an airstrike — of this particular Palestinian living in the Middle East reveal two things: first, that her rather mild mannered Tweet which simply pointed to what Alareer himself said, gives her the exact same culpability as she would have had, had she personally hacked off his head with a gardening tool (another form of murder meted out by Hamas on October 7, according to a friend of mine who watched the video.)

Is this because she is Jewish? Did she fly over to Gaza on her magic Jewess broomstick with a rocket strapped to her back? Is it because she is a woman? A witchy creature who can materialise out of thin air with powers heretofore unseen? Or is it because nothing makes a toxic person hiss and scratch more than having a mirror held up to him or herself?

Second, it lights up the incoherence of the incessantly repeated “Gaza is an open air prison from which the only possible escape had to involve the slaughter of Jewish babies” argument. While reading the tributes to Alareer following his death, it struck me both that he was a comparative literature professor and, in one particular article, a friend posted a photograph of him sitting at a table in a Gaza restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. I am not suggesting that life in Gaza before October was all fun and games, but I certainly have never heard of a prison with seaside restaurants or comparative lit professors.

I do not pretend to have the wisdom to decide who should live and who should die, and take no pleasure in anyone’s violent death. But Alareer was fond of throwing around the idea of collective punishment. In 2021, he was the subject of a New York Times article which quoted one of his social media posts:  “No form, act, or means of Palestinian resistance whatsoever is terror. All Israelis are soldiers. All Palestine is occupied.” (That same article contains a doozy of an editor’s note, worth clicking just to read it.)

If all Israelis are soldiers, that is the justification of murdering Jewish babies — an act which he then denied ever happened. Even though if it had, it would have been justified.

This is the standard line of argument on the Palestinian side today, slipping and sliding between ‘we didn’t do nothing!’ and ‘they deserved everything we did!’ And not only is that genocidal toward the Jews, it is also a huge disservice to Palestinians themselves, who like every other group on this earth need to have sane and wise leadership in order to survive and flourish. 

A few weeks ago, I  wrote a piece for Spiked that required me to listen to an interview given by a prominent leader of Hamas, in which he called for the “annihilation” of Israel, and said:

“The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood and tears. It’s Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000. Everything we do is justified.”

This is the perfect encapsulation of our current personality disordered culture.

Just like Alareer’s histrionic, pre-emptive blaming of Weiss, Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas leader who spoke those words, has inadvertently told the world that the dominant narrative in support of Palestinian liberation is actually the ultimate expression of a broad range of characteristics that we know to be associated with personality disorders.

We are victims. Nobody should blame us for the things we do. Even if those things include committing unspeakable violence, it’s not our fault. The starkness of these statements, the lack of maturity, really jumped out at me. It is adolescent. It is histrionic: Israel causes “all that blood, pain and tears.” It is hyperbolic:“everything we do is justified.” It’s egocentric and self-pitying: “we are the victims, period.” (For a whole body of work on the topic of our Cluster B personality disorder-infected culture, please see Disaffected by Joshua Slocum.)

This is not how true political leaders speak. It’s not even how normal, mature adults speak. As a statement, it’s embarrassing in its shallowness and malice. It’s a purely emotional outburst, driven by vitriol, grandiosity, resentment, and wounded pride. 

And this is why anti-Semitism is currently so closely aligned with the contemporary left. Because the contemporary left is also in the grips of Cluster B type thinking and has abandoned true politicking for straight-up bullying, intimidation, and blackmail targeted against their most hated demographics. A key thing to understand is that “politics” — as we might have understood it a generation ago — today is really beside the point. The point, for the most doctrinaire left-wingers and their many progressive hangers-on, is to inflict emotional terror and pain on their perceived enemy, in order to gain control over society. What passes in the mainstream for debates over policy or philosophy are actually misdirection plays to trick the neutral middle into thinking that we are still in the old paradigm. 

One of the main features of a borderline personality conflict is that it uses projection, mind-reading, and accusing others of what you, yourself, are guilty of. This is a fiendishly clever tactic, as it makes honest and robust disagreement impossible, and produces demoralisation. In this kind of conflict, the only thing a sane person can do is withdraw, give up, walk away. 

Scale that up to society-wide level, however, when the sane withdraw from the conflict, that also means giving up our most important institutions, and ultimately leaves us with no place to withdraw to. Which is how we end up with the degraded spectacle of the head of one of America’s top universities equivocating on whether or not calling for the genocide of Jews is harassment. “If the speech turns into harassment, yes,” said Liz Magill, adding: “It is a context dependent decision.” 

Hardly a robust denunciation from one of the most powerful people in the American elite. And I agree with her, context is important! According to this UPenn student, that context is a campus in which students and professors say things like “you’re a dirty little Jew, you deserve to die,”and anti-Israel demonstrators ignite smoke bombs, and deface school property.

Meanwhile, the left sets its own hair on fire with self-aggrandising statements like this one, in The Nation: “It is unquestionably risky to show support for Palestinians. But the bigger risk is saying nothing at all.” 

This mirroring is a signal that we are in a psychological war. Everything is an op. But I do not mean to imply that that makes it somehow unreal — the dead bodies of Palestinians and Jews are most definitely real. The teens whose bodies are mutilated in the name of gender are real. The mandatory Covid vaccines were real. 

But what is not ‘real’ is the concrete material reality of any of the left’s perceived enemies — whether that is a Jew or a TERF or an anti-vaxxer. People whose identities include those things are no longer real flesh and blood people, they are symbols upon which the personality disordered malcontents can project their self-hatred and unload their resentment, thus relieving themselves of the burden of carrying them.