People absolutely should admit that they were wrong, and they absolutely should be encouraged to do so, but they need to do it with humility, and with some outward expression of remorse.

Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

A liberal Israel apologist named Brianna Wu has made a mealy-mouthed tweet acknowledging the reality of what’s happening in Gaza that is so obnoxious I need to have a quick rant about it.

Wu, who has managed to translate her public attention from the 2014 Gamergate harassment scandal into a role as a pro-Israel spinmeister, tweeted a screenshot from a New York Times headline titled “Total Failure’: Israel’s Return to War Heaped Ruin on Gaza and Did Little for Israelis”, captioning it as follows:

This was A1, above the fold in the Times today.

I support Israel as strongly as someone can, and I have extreme concerns about their past reporting. But every other paper is saying the same thing, so I have to conclude that finally, after countless exaggeration, the cries of wolf are actually true.

Israel has every right to defend itself and it has every right to exist. But I didn’t check my brain or my conscience at the door. Many friends who’ve stood with Israel all along share my concerns.

This enrages me in ways I’m struggling to fully articulate.

“After countless exaggeration, the cries of wolf are actually true”? So it wasn’t exaggeration or crying wolf then was it, you fucking asshole? Almost like you’ve spent two years defending A FUCKING GENOCIDE and attacking anyone who opposed it?

This whole post reads like it was rewritten a dozen times, carefully pared down until it was stripped of all meaning and said almost nothing. She’s admitting that she was wrong, but it’s just kind of dribbling out of the corner of her mouth as she sidles out the door while giving us all the finger.

This is the same person who wrote in The Boston Globe that “my fellow leftists are betraying our Jewish allies” and claiming “the casual antisemitism I’d looked past in progressive spaces became impossible to ignore” because the left was opposing the mass atrocity she now acknowledges we are seeing in Gaza. The same person who falsely claimed that “Civilians have never been targeted in Gaza” and that the onslaught “has the lowest civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare”. Who earlier this very month was complaining about “how susceptible we are to the ‘genocide’ propaganda” about Gaza.

I mean, how is she not weeping for mercy on her knees right now? How is she voicing these side-mouthed “concerns” while still accusing the people who’ve been speaking out about this of “crying wolf”, instead of desperately begging the people of Gaza for forgiveness?

If I had just realized I had helped butcher people by the tens of thousands, I personally do not think I could go on living. Like, I actually don’t think my organs would keep functioning. I can’t even imagine that I’d want them to.

Brianna, do you know what you have done? Have you fully taken account of your part in the horrific pain and unfathomable suffering that you have facilitated over the past 22 months? 

Because you are not just some rando on the internet who didn’t do her due diligence. Your words ran cover for a genocide. You are as guilty as Goebbels. You orchestrated PR campaigns with people whose publicly stated intention was to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of Palestinians. They were saying it with their mouth holes as far back as October 2023, and every time they did you doubled down. 

This is not something you can just brush off, either legally or morally.

Legally you are as culpable as Julius Streicher who hanged for his offenses in World War II.

Morally, if you fully humbled yourself to the horrors you had enabled, you would’ve fallen to the floor, praying for forgiveness for every child whose legs were ripped from their little bodies by shrapnel, who roam the tent cities orphaned and alone, who died of thirst trapped in a rubble tomb crying for their mother who lay dead just feet away from them. There are literally tens of thousands of stories just like this, and you carry blame for every single one of them.

Do you understand that? You can’t. I don’t believe it. If you did, every cell of your body would be trying to jump away from itself in the pure crystalline revulsion of that realization. If you fully took account and responsibility for your part in this man-made catastrophe you wouldn’t need to be hanged —  the depth of your own shame for your actions would be too much for your body, and you would collapse internally. Your heart would stop out of sheer shock.

The other day I wrote, “Today I got my first comment telling me I was wrong to oppose Israel in October 2023 but now I’m right because things have changed. I expect to receive many more such comments going forward as people navigate the difficult cognitive dissonance terrain of realizing they’ve been wrong this entire time.”

We’re seeing more and more of this as the truth emerges. I read another tweet by Yahoo Finance’s Jordan Weissmann saying, “As Dems converge on agreement that Israel has been committing an atrocity, I do think there needs to be some reckoning among mods that, while lots of ugly antisemitism burst from the left after Oct. 7, the leftists were fundamentally more right about what this war would become.”

“Ugly antisemitism”, Jordan? That “antisemitism” was people opposing the atrocities you now admit we were right about. If you’re going to admit you were wrong, just do it. Don’t try to drag down those of us who’ve been correct the entire time while you right your own wrongs.

This can’t be how people acknowledge they were wrong about Gaza as the truth comes out and becomes undeniable. It can’t be. This cannot stand. People absolutely should admit that they were wrong, and they absolutely should be encouraged to do so, but they need to do it with humility, and with some outward expression of remorse. Because they just spent two years of their lives promoting some of the very worst things that could possibly happen on this earth.

Try again, Brianna. Try to muster up some sincerity this time.

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