Korol absolutely nails it. There is nothing more satisfying than watching the self-appointed vanguard of 'enlightenment' get stripped of their moral superiority and exposed for what they actually are: medieval minds running ancient, prejudiced software, just with worse haircuts, an asymmetrical bob, and a taxpayer-funded university grant.
The sheer arrogance of the modern activist class—lecturing a people on their own three-thousand-year history while unable to find the Jordan River without Google Maps—would be tragic if it weren't so hilariously absurd. This piece doesn't just critique the campus crowd; it drops a hard, brutal mirror in front of them. It’s a beautiful thing to watch them stare into the truth, shatter their own delicate illusions, and go screaming for the nearest safe space and a campus mental health counselor because reality finally hit them. More of this, please.
Sounds like you’re desperate to write off everyone who disagrees with you on this issue as stupid. That indicates you aren’t reading outside your own little bubble (if you’re reading at all).
Michael, your entire 'right to resist occupation' thesis relies on a completely fraudulent timeline. Let's look at the actual ground reality:
1. Gaza Was Not Occupied
Israel completely disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Every single soldier was withdrawn, every community was dismantled, and Israel even went so far as to dig up Jewish graves to leave the territory entirely to the Palestinians. They were handed a coastal territory with millions of dollars worth of fully intact, advanced agricultural greenhouses. They could have built a Mediterranean paradise or a regional economic hub. Instead, their leadership immediately destroyed that infrastructure to build terror tunnels and rocket-launching sites. They chose war over state-building. Gaza wasn't occupied on October 7th; they crossed a recognized international border to invade and occupy Israeli towns.
2. The Ultimate Betrayal
You romanticize this as a noble 'resistance' against 'oppressors,' completely ignoring who they actually targeted. The people butchered, raped, and kidnapped in the kibutzim directly outside the Gaza border weren't 'occupiers'—they were overwhelmingly members of the Israeli peace movement, activists from groups like Peace Now, and the very individuals who volunteered every single week to drive sick Gazan children from the border checkpoints to Israeli hospitals for life-saving medical care.
Your armchair theories completely collapse when faced with the truth: this wasn't 'resisting an occupation.' It was a calculated, genocidal assault on an international border, targeting the exact people who were trying to help them. But please, keep lecturing me on international law from your safe distance.
Michael, I don’t write off everyone who disagrees with me as stupid—just the ones who step up to the plate and swing this hard to prove it. You’re crying about "bubbles" while standing neck-deep in a puddle of your own hurt feelings. I’d suggest you go read something outside your comfort zone, but I’m worried a plot twist might give you whiplash. The mirror is brutal for a reason; don’t blame the glass just because you don't like what's reflecting back at you.
Netanyahu: Settlers who detained Ro Khanna don’t represent ‘law-abiding’ community
U.S. Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna called on Sunday for the arrest of four Israeli soldiers who he said assisted armed settlers in detaining him during a visit to the West Bank last week, arguing that "the Israeli government is lying to cover up for the troops' conduct."
On Saturday, after Reuters reported that settlers carrying U.S.-made rifles detained Khanna and his party near the abandoned Palestinian hamlet of Khirbet Zanuta, the California lawmaker posted an image and a video from the incident on X, writing that "when the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers."
While the IDF said that soldiers "quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians" who were blocking the congressman's car, people present with Khanna during the incident – among them Nadav Weiman, the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation NGO founded by former Israeli soldiers – disputed its version, with Weiman saying that "the IDF is lying and not for the first time."
Later on Sunday, PM Netanyahu said the incident was the result of "150 juvenile delinquents" who are not part of what he called the "law-abiding" settler community, and that Israel is "a country of laws, and people who break the law, we take them to court."
Over the weekend, at least 20 cases of settler violence and incursions into Palestinian communities were reported across the West Bank, including assaults, armed threats, property damage, trespassing and clashes that led Israeli security forces to arrest Palestinians.
One of the incidents involved CNN reporters, whom the channel said came to the area of the village of Sinjil on the first anniversary of Sayfollah "Saif" Musallet, a Palestinian American who settlers had beaten to death. According to CNN, a group of settlers blocked the road with their car, preventing the team from moving forward.
A really low-grade summary which demonstrates just how desperate the pro-Israel / Zionist apologists are getting now. Massive conflations of Israelis and Jews, assertions of anti-Zionism being antisemitism (which is pretty much a meme by now) and framing of resistance as terrorism. It's time to wake up and smell the coffee. You are just genocide deniers. Nothing more.
Michael, I love that you proudly admitted you lacked the spine to speak your mind to your own students for 20 years. Nothing screams 'intellectual courage' quite like hiding your real thoughts for two decades to protect a pension, only to emerge as a brave keyboard warrior for a grand total of 29 subscribers.
You spent a lifetime lecturing on philosophy, yet you managed to miss the basic irony of calling someone else's argument a 'meme' while regurgitating the most copy-pasted, freshman-tier slogans on the internet. Calling mass murder 'resistance' and Jewish self-defense 'genocide' isn't deep philosophy, Professor—it’s just the same old ancient bias wrapped up in a retirement package. You tell people to wake up and smell the coffee, but you’ve been asleep at the wheel since the Clinton administration.
You're lecturing a guy who actually lives here, on the ground, dealing with the reality of what you call 'resistance' while you sit comfortably typed-up in a vacuum. Stick to retirement, Michael. You couldn't handle the truth when you were getting paid for it, and you certainly can't handle it now for free. Go back to being quiet for another 20 years. Even your own opinions are trying to distance themselves from you.
I wouldn't expect you to understand but that's how education works mate. Teaching is not indoctrination. I put my opinions to one side and I teach my students what different groups of people say and then they exercise their reasoning to make up their own minds. Adults telling young people what to believe is one of the reasons critical thinking is so lacking today. I've also been on SS for about 6 weeks so I think it's a bit early to judge my subs personally. The pension is fantastic by the way. Retired at 50.
As a military man I don't expect you to understand any of where I'm coming from since your epistemology amounts to "Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir!"
I didn't call an argument a meme, I called his assertion a meme. Which is just a statement of fact because it is.
An occupier cannot, by definition, practice self-defence against the territory it is suppressing. In fact, international law specifically states that the occupied can legally use force to resist such occupation.
Michael, if Israel were the 'genocidal' entity your textbooks claim, this war would have been over on October 8th. Air superiority and a nuclear arsenal tend to wrap things up quickly when destruction is the actual goal.
You sit in your armchair lecturing me on regional dynamics while completely ignoring why Egypt keeps its border with Gaza sealed shut. They remember history. They remember Jordan’s Black September, the destruction of Lebanon, the betrayal of Kuwait for Saddam Hussein, and the purges in Syria. Every surrounding Arab nation knows the destabilization that follows, just as they know the Palestinians have rejected every single two-state solution ever put on the table because they don’t want a state next to Israel—they want one instead of it.
You’re defending an identity manufactured in 1964 by an Egyptian named Yasser Arafat and his KGB handlers. Before that, the world called the Jews in the region Palestinians.
Don't lecture me on 'epistemology' or education. Your tenure-track theories don't mean a damn thing against a family history that has been on the ground, living this reality, since my ancestors arrived here in 1492. Enjoy your 29 subscribers, mate. You’re entirely out of your depth. And being military has no bearing on education. So stop with your smug oh I'm educated you're not you wouldn't understand. You're an asshole plain and simple. You think you're better than everybody else because you taught well don't forget there's an old saying those that can't, teach.
Please cite the internationally-recognised definition of genocide to the effect that it must take place quickly to be defined as one.
Sitting in a chair discredits one from having a view? Pray tell what must be one's bodily status to make one? Standing up?
The Palestinian state was completely within its rights to turn down every offer Israel ever made. If a thief broke into your house and murdered one of your family members , sexually assaulted others and told you you can live in a tent at the bottom of the garden, would you sign a peace treaty with the thieves agreeing you can move into the garage so long as you pay them taxes for the liberty?
Oh wow 500 years eh? I guess the Arabs who have Canaanite DNA must be jealous of your ancestry.
And you're proving your lack of intelligence by blindly asserting an aphorism without making a case for it. That's the conditioning you've been through. In order to get you to kill another human being on the basis of a superior ordering you to do so is the conditioning programme you've been through. You're literally proving that you're a jarhead but you don't even have the ability to spot it.
Michael, for a retired philosopher, your reading comprehension is surprisingly selective, and your grasp of history is completely broken. Let’s dismantle your emotional breakdown piece by piece:
1. The Genocide Math:
Nobody said the legal definition of genocide includes a speed requirement. I said intent does. The 1948 UN Convention states genocide requires the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. If Israel possesses the absolute military capability to erase Gaza in an afternoon but instead risks its own soldiers in ground operations, sends in thousands of aid trucks, and establishes evacuation corridors, it completely shreds your claim of 'intent.' You call it a slow genocide; the rest of the thinking world calls it an urban war against a terrorist group that intentionally uses its own civilians as human shields.
2. The Historical Reality Check:
Your disgusting 'thief breaking into a house' analogy exposes how completely illiterate you are on regional law. There has never been an independent Arab Palestinian state in human history. Prior to 1948, it was a British Mandate; before that, the Ottoman Empire.
And let's talk about the land you call the 'West Bank'—historically Judea and Samaria. After the 1948 war, Jordan illegally annexed that territory and gave full Jordanian citizenship to the Arab population living there. Israel didn't 'steal' it from some mythical Palestinian state; Israel captured it in 1967 during a defensive war that Israel didn't even start, taking it from Jordan—an occupying power that subsequently stripped those people of their citizenship and washed their hands of them. They didn't turn down peace because they were defending a house; they turned it down because their leadership refused to accept any Jewish presence in the region.
3. The 500-Year Root vs. Your Keyboard:
You want to talk about Canaanite DNA? Genetic studies show modern Jews and Levantine Arabs share deep indigenous roots to this soil. The difference is my family has actually been here on the ground since 1492, living through the empires, the wars, and the grit. You’re a tourist sitting in Scandinavia trying to lecture a native on their own dirt using talking points you read on a Substack comment section.
4. The 'Conditioning' Cop-Out:
Ah, the classic, condescending academic trope: 'You only think that because you're a brainwashed soldier!' It’s the ultimate white flag of a pseudo-intellectual who can't handle a real-world opponent. My 'conditioning' is called reality. It comes from looking an enemy in the eye, understanding the brutal stakes of survival, and protecting my family. Your 'conditioning' involved 20 years of nodding along to institutional dogma so you wouldn't lose your state-funded tenure, only to retire early on a severely pro-rated, docked pension because you couldn't hack a full career.
You aren't enlightened, Michael. You're just a smug, armchair hypocrite who thinks typing big words from a safe distance makes him a radical. Keep running your mouth to your 29 subscribers. You're completely out of your depth.
Korol absolutely nails it. There is nothing more satisfying than watching the self-appointed vanguard of 'enlightenment' get stripped of their moral superiority and exposed for what they actually are: medieval minds running ancient, prejudiced software, just with worse haircuts, an asymmetrical bob, and a taxpayer-funded university grant.
The sheer arrogance of the modern activist class—lecturing a people on their own three-thousand-year history while unable to find the Jordan River without Google Maps—would be tragic if it weren't so hilariously absurd. This piece doesn't just critique the campus crowd; it drops a hard, brutal mirror in front of them. It’s a beautiful thing to watch them stare into the truth, shatter their own delicate illusions, and go screaming for the nearest safe space and a campus mental health counselor because reality finally hit them. More of this, please.
Sounds like you’re desperate to write off everyone who disagrees with you on this issue as stupid. That indicates you aren’t reading outside your own little bubble (if you’re reading at all).
Michael, your entire 'right to resist occupation' thesis relies on a completely fraudulent timeline. Let's look at the actual ground reality:
1. Gaza Was Not Occupied
Israel completely disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Every single soldier was withdrawn, every community was dismantled, and Israel even went so far as to dig up Jewish graves to leave the territory entirely to the Palestinians. They were handed a coastal territory with millions of dollars worth of fully intact, advanced agricultural greenhouses. They could have built a Mediterranean paradise or a regional economic hub. Instead, their leadership immediately destroyed that infrastructure to build terror tunnels and rocket-launching sites. They chose war over state-building. Gaza wasn't occupied on October 7th; they crossed a recognized international border to invade and occupy Israeli towns.
2. The Ultimate Betrayal
You romanticize this as a noble 'resistance' against 'oppressors,' completely ignoring who they actually targeted. The people butchered, raped, and kidnapped in the kibutzim directly outside the Gaza border weren't 'occupiers'—they were overwhelmingly members of the Israeli peace movement, activists from groups like Peace Now, and the very individuals who volunteered every single week to drive sick Gazan children from the border checkpoints to Israeli hospitals for life-saving medical care.
Your armchair theories completely collapse when faced with the truth: this wasn't 'resisting an occupation.' It was a calculated, genocidal assault on an international border, targeting the exact people who were trying to help them. But please, keep lecturing me on international law from your safe distance.
Michael, I don’t write off everyone who disagrees with me as stupid—just the ones who step up to the plate and swing this hard to prove it. You’re crying about "bubbles" while standing neck-deep in a puddle of your own hurt feelings. I’d suggest you go read something outside your comfort zone, but I’m worried a plot twist might give you whiplash. The mirror is brutal for a reason; don’t blame the glass just because you don't like what's reflecting back at you.
“So which is it? Are Jews too weak or too powerful? Too ancient or too modern? Too tribal or too universal? Too diasporic or too sovereign?
The answer is yes. Whatever is needed at the time. “
Again, read the book “Anti-Judaism”, by David Nirenberg
A worthy effort at whistling by the graveyard within an echo chamber. But…..
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/israel/rep-ro-khanna-detained-israeli-settlers-west-bank-visit-rcna472068
And……(credit Haaretz)…..
Netanyahu: Settlers who detained Ro Khanna don’t represent ‘law-abiding’ community
U.S. Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna called on Sunday for the arrest of four Israeli soldiers who he said assisted armed settlers in detaining him during a visit to the West Bank last week, arguing that "the Israeli government is lying to cover up for the troops' conduct."
On Saturday, after Reuters reported that settlers carrying U.S.-made rifles detained Khanna and his party near the abandoned Palestinian hamlet of Khirbet Zanuta, the California lawmaker posted an image and a video from the incident on X, writing that "when the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers."
While the IDF said that soldiers "quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians" who were blocking the congressman's car, people present with Khanna during the incident – among them Nadav Weiman, the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation NGO founded by former Israeli soldiers – disputed its version, with Weiman saying that "the IDF is lying and not for the first time."
Later on Sunday, PM Netanyahu said the incident was the result of "150 juvenile delinquents" who are not part of what he called the "law-abiding" settler community, and that Israel is "a country of laws, and people who break the law, we take them to court."
Over the weekend, at least 20 cases of settler violence and incursions into Palestinian communities were reported across the West Bank, including assaults, armed threats, property damage, trespassing and clashes that led Israeli security forces to arrest Palestinians.
One of the incidents involved CNN reporters, whom the channel said came to the area of the village of Sinjil on the first anniversary of Sayfollah "Saif" Musallet, a Palestinian American who settlers had beaten to death. According to CNN, a group of settlers blocked the road with their car, preventing the team from moving forward.
A really low-grade summary which demonstrates just how desperate the pro-Israel / Zionist apologists are getting now. Massive conflations of Israelis and Jews, assertions of anti-Zionism being antisemitism (which is pretty much a meme by now) and framing of resistance as terrorism. It's time to wake up and smell the coffee. You are just genocide deniers. Nothing more.
Michael, I love that you proudly admitted you lacked the spine to speak your mind to your own students for 20 years. Nothing screams 'intellectual courage' quite like hiding your real thoughts for two decades to protect a pension, only to emerge as a brave keyboard warrior for a grand total of 29 subscribers.
You spent a lifetime lecturing on philosophy, yet you managed to miss the basic irony of calling someone else's argument a 'meme' while regurgitating the most copy-pasted, freshman-tier slogans on the internet. Calling mass murder 'resistance' and Jewish self-defense 'genocide' isn't deep philosophy, Professor—it’s just the same old ancient bias wrapped up in a retirement package. You tell people to wake up and smell the coffee, but you’ve been asleep at the wheel since the Clinton administration.
You're lecturing a guy who actually lives here, on the ground, dealing with the reality of what you call 'resistance' while you sit comfortably typed-up in a vacuum. Stick to retirement, Michael. You couldn't handle the truth when you were getting paid for it, and you certainly can't handle it now for free. Go back to being quiet for another 20 years. Even your own opinions are trying to distance themselves from you.
I wouldn't expect you to understand but that's how education works mate. Teaching is not indoctrination. I put my opinions to one side and I teach my students what different groups of people say and then they exercise their reasoning to make up their own minds. Adults telling young people what to believe is one of the reasons critical thinking is so lacking today. I've also been on SS for about 6 weeks so I think it's a bit early to judge my subs personally. The pension is fantastic by the way. Retired at 50.
As a military man I don't expect you to understand any of where I'm coming from since your epistemology amounts to "Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir!"
I didn't call an argument a meme, I called his assertion a meme. Which is just a statement of fact because it is.
An occupier cannot, by definition, practice self-defence against the territory it is suppressing. In fact, international law specifically states that the occupied can legally use force to resist such occupation.
Michael, if Israel were the 'genocidal' entity your textbooks claim, this war would have been over on October 8th. Air superiority and a nuclear arsenal tend to wrap things up quickly when destruction is the actual goal.
You sit in your armchair lecturing me on regional dynamics while completely ignoring why Egypt keeps its border with Gaza sealed shut. They remember history. They remember Jordan’s Black September, the destruction of Lebanon, the betrayal of Kuwait for Saddam Hussein, and the purges in Syria. Every surrounding Arab nation knows the destabilization that follows, just as they know the Palestinians have rejected every single two-state solution ever put on the table because they don’t want a state next to Israel—they want one instead of it.
You’re defending an identity manufactured in 1964 by an Egyptian named Yasser Arafat and his KGB handlers. Before that, the world called the Jews in the region Palestinians.
Don't lecture me on 'epistemology' or education. Your tenure-track theories don't mean a damn thing against a family history that has been on the ground, living this reality, since my ancestors arrived here in 1492. Enjoy your 29 subscribers, mate. You’re entirely out of your depth. And being military has no bearing on education. So stop with your smug oh I'm educated you're not you wouldn't understand. You're an asshole plain and simple. You think you're better than everybody else because you taught well don't forget there's an old saying those that can't, teach.
Please cite the internationally-recognised definition of genocide to the effect that it must take place quickly to be defined as one.
Sitting in a chair discredits one from having a view? Pray tell what must be one's bodily status to make one? Standing up?
The Palestinian state was completely within its rights to turn down every offer Israel ever made. If a thief broke into your house and murdered one of your family members , sexually assaulted others and told you you can live in a tent at the bottom of the garden, would you sign a peace treaty with the thieves agreeing you can move into the garage so long as you pay them taxes for the liberty?
Oh wow 500 years eh? I guess the Arabs who have Canaanite DNA must be jealous of your ancestry.
And you're proving your lack of intelligence by blindly asserting an aphorism without making a case for it. That's the conditioning you've been through. In order to get you to kill another human being on the basis of a superior ordering you to do so is the conditioning programme you've been through. You're literally proving that you're a jarhead but you don't even have the ability to spot it.
Michael, for a retired philosopher, your reading comprehension is surprisingly selective, and your grasp of history is completely broken. Let’s dismantle your emotional breakdown piece by piece:
1. The Genocide Math:
Nobody said the legal definition of genocide includes a speed requirement. I said intent does. The 1948 UN Convention states genocide requires the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. If Israel possesses the absolute military capability to erase Gaza in an afternoon but instead risks its own soldiers in ground operations, sends in thousands of aid trucks, and establishes evacuation corridors, it completely shreds your claim of 'intent.' You call it a slow genocide; the rest of the thinking world calls it an urban war against a terrorist group that intentionally uses its own civilians as human shields.
2. The Historical Reality Check:
Your disgusting 'thief breaking into a house' analogy exposes how completely illiterate you are on regional law. There has never been an independent Arab Palestinian state in human history. Prior to 1948, it was a British Mandate; before that, the Ottoman Empire.
And let's talk about the land you call the 'West Bank'—historically Judea and Samaria. After the 1948 war, Jordan illegally annexed that territory and gave full Jordanian citizenship to the Arab population living there. Israel didn't 'steal' it from some mythical Palestinian state; Israel captured it in 1967 during a defensive war that Israel didn't even start, taking it from Jordan—an occupying power that subsequently stripped those people of their citizenship and washed their hands of them. They didn't turn down peace because they were defending a house; they turned it down because their leadership refused to accept any Jewish presence in the region.
3. The 500-Year Root vs. Your Keyboard:
You want to talk about Canaanite DNA? Genetic studies show modern Jews and Levantine Arabs share deep indigenous roots to this soil. The difference is my family has actually been here on the ground since 1492, living through the empires, the wars, and the grit. You’re a tourist sitting in Scandinavia trying to lecture a native on their own dirt using talking points you read on a Substack comment section.
4. The 'Conditioning' Cop-Out:
Ah, the classic, condescending academic trope: 'You only think that because you're a brainwashed soldier!' It’s the ultimate white flag of a pseudo-intellectual who can't handle a real-world opponent. My 'conditioning' is called reality. It comes from looking an enemy in the eye, understanding the brutal stakes of survival, and protecting my family. Your 'conditioning' involved 20 years of nodding along to institutional dogma so you wouldn't lose your state-funded tenure, only to retire early on a severely pro-rated, docked pension because you couldn't hack a full career.
You aren't enlightened, Michael. You're just a smug, armchair hypocrite who thinks typing big words from a safe distance makes him a radical. Keep running your mouth to your 29 subscribers. You're completely out of your depth.