It Is Literally Too Late For This Bullshit
You get zero points for suddenly noticing something bad is happening in Gaza.
Over the past week or so, a lot of powerful people appear to have noticed that something quite terrible is happening in Gaza.
“Aid organizations report that thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of starvation while trucks full of food sit waiting across the border. The full flow of humanitarian assistance must be restored immediately,” Hillary Clinton wrote on Thursday in what, apart from one tweet linking to an article she wrote, was quite literally her first-ever post about Gaza since 2023. (Not that the world was begging for her to say more, given what she thinks.)
“Witnessing the catastrophic hunger and suffering of civilians, especially children, women, the sick and elderly, in Gaza has been heartbreaking,” wrote Sen. Cory Booker, in what were his first tweets about Gaza in six months. “I’ve been gravely concerned by the increasing starvation in the Gaza Strip,” Sen. Jacky Rosen—who, along with Booker, was recently photographed alongside wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu—wrote on Sunday.
The folks over at The Free Press even acknowledged that something is wrong, though they did so in their own inimitable way. “Gaza may well be approaching a real hunger crisis,” Amit Segal wrote generously. “Let’s break down why, unlike past lies about the situation in Gaza, new research is a real cause for concern, and what it means for Israel.” Actually, maybe they don’t need to chime in on this one.
If your response to these sudden displays of supposed empathy with the people of Gaza, who are being deliberately starved to death by Israel and the United States, is to say “fuck you, where have you been for the past two years,” well, it’s nice to meet another member of the crew. But wait! Hold off on that outrage, because former Obama aide and current Pod Save America host Tommy Vietor wants to scold you.
That’s right. Don’t call people out on implicitly or explicitly backing genocide for two years. Call people in to become part of a movement that, according to Vietor, is free to continue denying that genocide is even taking place.
Vietor later helpfully clarified that it is actually cool to expect political leaders to take action rather than just put out press releases, which, glad we have permission from him to perform the basic function of citizens in a supposedly democratic society.
But even with that important proviso, Vietor’s statements still wildly miss the mark for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it’s hard to know what Vietor is responding to if not the backlash to the Hillarys of the world. Nobody’s out there raging at random normies who have only been half-following the news and just recoiled at images of starving babies. They’re raging at obvious attempts from people like Hillary Clinton to tweak their public posture ever-so-slightly to avoid tarnishing their reputations even further.
The second is that, contrary to what Vietor seems to think, it actually is very important that people who consider themselves allies to the Palestinian cause use the word “genocide.” It’s important not just because it’s the truth, but because acknowledging that truth is the bare minimum of what should be expected from a legitimate political movement. The only reason there is a famine in Gaza is because a genocide is taking place there. Israel is doing this on purpose, as part of a genocide. Brushing that aside in the name of a “big tent” is unacceptable. And not asking for real accountability from people who have helped genocide take place is equally unacceptable.
Finally, and most importantly, it is quite literally too late to wait for people to get their act together.
“I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality,” Refugees International President Jeremy Konyndyk wrote last week, adding, “Once a famine gathers momentum, the effort required to contain it increases exponentially. It would now take an overwhelmingly large aid operation to reverse the coming wave of mortality, and it would take months.”
In other words, the time for people to start figuring out that something needs to change in Gaza is long past. The worst is now setting in. That’s not to say that there is no need to urgently end the genocide—of course there is. But this is like watching someone get stabbed 50 times and, on the 51st attempt, saying, “OK, I’m very troubled by what I’m seeing.” It’s better than saying nothing at all, but that’s about it.
So you will forgive me if I have little patience for being lectured about my anger at powerful people deciding they’re finally ready to pretend like they care about Gaza. I’ll say it again: it is too late for us to worry about their feelings. And it is too late for them to wash the blood from their hands.
Just like with Iraq, the MSM and libs and war crime-enablers want to blame and punish the left for accurately calling a spade a spade and calling a genocide a genocide too early, i.e., when it was in an early enough stage to actually do something about it. No, the respectable thing to do is to never learn anything, never hold anyone accountable, and just throw up our hands and say with faux-compassion “who could’ve predicted this?”
It is so telling that this series of turns comes after the killing is due to starvation as opposed to bombs. If you condemn bombs, you might have to figure out where those bombs come from and how you might have enabled them to get there, but condemning starvation? Easy peasy. "Just feed them, Israel, and you can get back to bombing them without us saying anything," seems to be the clear message.