Two handed lawyers need not apply
I had a client once who told me he would never hire a two-handed lawyer. When he received his lawyer’s advice about a legal issue, in his experience it was usually followed by advice that began, on the other hand. Maybe this is one reason why lawyers often have a bad reputation; they will argue both sides of the issue depending only on who pays the bill. While that might work for lawyers, it can be exactly the wrong approach in other contexts.
In some situations, there simply are not two sides to the coin. Some things are black and white, right or wrong, good or evil, one or the other and there is nothing in between. Those who look for some context or explanation that shows what appears to be unmitigated evil is not as bad as it looks are on a fool’s errand. They fall prey to the post-modern belief there is no objective verifiable truth. George Orwell described these zealots in his essay, “Politics and the English Language” where he wrote, political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind".
That is precisely where we find ourselves when certain leaders speak about the sexual atrocities that Hamas inflicted on women in Israel on October 7. During an interview on CNN, West Seattle’s Congressional Representative Pramila Jayapal said that while Hamas should be condemned for what they did, there was an “on the other hand” to issue. She said: “However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.” Set aside for the moment – if you can – that the Israeli Defense Forces do not rape women or burn babies alive while filming themselves in the act. No, Ms. Jayapal, there is no “however” in this issue. No amount of wishful thinking brings balance to the atrocities Hamas inflicted on women, children and the elderly in Israel on October 7.
The presidents of three of our most elite universities, Harvard, U Penn, and MIT fell into the same bottomless pit in testimony before Congress. Each of them was unwilling to unequivocally condemn the Hamas atrocities or students and faculty chanting “genocide the Jews” without arguing the fig leaf of what they claimed was a right to free speech.
They would have had no compulsion against unequivocally condemning a march by the Ku Klux Klan or lynching black boys in the South. You would never hear them say, “Well, he shouldn’t have looked at that white woman,” or to the rape victim, “she shouldn’t have worn that dress.” They would not search for a context or excuse to mitigate those atrocities. But as for what happened in Israel on October 7, they use language that tries to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, as in: Israel commits genocide and Hamas resists.
What is revealed by the response of leaders like Ms. Jayapal and the Ivy League university presidents is a particular feature of the victims of the atrocities of October 7. They were Jewish. The explosion of antisemitism in America, let’s call it what it is – Jew hatred – on college campuses, the streets of many major cities, some corners of Congress and the graffiti desecration of synagogues around the country, Mercer Island and Seattle is evil and nothing else, nothing less. It must be condemned and not excused. No “but”, “however” or “on the other hand” utterance should be tolerated, and those who use such weasel words should be ashamed to be revealed.