Magic Words in Malign Times

You've probably heard of the shooting at a San Diego Islamic center that killed three people, along with the two shooters (who reportedly killed themselves). Early reports suggest that this was a White Supremacist attack.

I have little to say about this save the obvious -- that this is a despicable act of Islamophobic terror and that it flows directly from the cavalcade of anti-Muslim rhetoric and action that has emanated from the top levels of our government and society. That the perpetrators will never face true justice only underscores their monstrosity. Whatever comfort and support I can give to the victims and their loved ones, I extend it, even as I know I can do little.

I do want to note one other thing. I read the statement on the attack from my local Jewish Federation. It is, of course, horrified -- there was never any doubt of that. But it does not say the word "Islamophobia" or "Islamophobic".  In fact, other than naming the site of the shooting, it doesn't mention "Islam" or "Muslim" at all. The shooting is presented as emblematic of "the threat facing religious communities in America"; it underscores the need for "security funding to help protect all houses of worship and faith-based institutions nationwide."

I am not one to police statements such as these to see whether they have or omit certain "magic words". The tenor of the JFed's statement is clear enough; and if it speaks in universal language, well, I'm not a cheerleader for the overextension of the "all lives matter-ing" complaint. However, there are others out there who do make a habit out of scouring for magic words, and who work themselves up into very high dudgeon when a statement that seems on face perfectly appropriate doesn't use a certain specific word or phrase or framing. 

If such individuals wish to be truly equal opportunity in their critique, then they should have no problem with anyone who rakes the JFed over the coals for its omission. But if they think that would be unreasonable, and that the JFed deserves better than that, then I hope they'll consider extending similar grace to others in turn.

Of Course Dobbs Didn't Completely "Return Abortion to the States"

After a brief delay, the Supreme Court stayed (over dissents from Justices Thomas and Alito) the latest Fifth Circuit gambit to try and take mifepristone off the market. There's plenty to talk about, and plenty of others will talk about it. But I did want to flag one talking point in the dissent that stood out to me for its hackishness.

Justice Alito described the Dobbs decision as having "restored the right of each State to decide how to regulate abortions within its borders." Allowing mifepristone to be sent through the mail, consequently, "undermine[s]" the Dobbs ruling insofar as it permits abortion medication to be sent to states that have sought to ban it. The immediate problem with this logic is obvious: Dobbs did not completely "return abortion to the states." Dobbs held that there was no federally-protected constitutional right to an abortion. But there could be myriad ways the federal government might pass regulations on abortion -- for example, via its power to regulate the safety and distribution of pharmaceuticals.

This point is not novel. Scott Lemieux wrote today that "making mifepristone available through telehealth 'undermines' Dobbs only if the holding was not that the Constitution was silent on abortion but that the Constitution is hostile toward abortion. Louisiana has never had any jurisdiction over the federal drug approval process."

But what I haven't seen flagged yet is just how quickly the dissenters abandon this farkakteh position that they obviously don't believe in the first place. Because you know far you'll have to look in U.S. Reporter to find a Dobbs Justice emphasizing ongoing federal authority on the subject of abortion? Approximately one page, to Justice Thomas' dissent, where he contends that the mailing of mifepristone is illegal nationwide under the Comstock Act! Whatever else one might say about that argument, it is precisely an assertion that federal law continues to have a say on abortion. Which -- of course conservatives believe! There's never been any doubt of that! Or more precisely, there's no doubt of that in circumstances where the federal government might seek to assert authority to limit abortion access, rather than protect it.

As always, the actual meaning of any Supreme Court precedent for the Court's conservatives is whatever they want it to mean, for however long it is convenient for it to carry that meaning. When the Supreme Court in Callais confirmed the continued vitality of the Allen precedent, that commitment lasted approximately two weeks. That's an anemic showing, but it is no match for the one page the ultra-right faction took to travel from insisting that Dobbs forecloses federal regulations on abortion to insisting that federal regulation already makes the distribution of abortion drugs illegal.

Fighting AI Slop in Academic Publishing

The prominent academic pre-print repository arXiv has reportedly announced stiff new penalties for authors who submit papers with AI-generated hallucinations (e.g., fake citations). Violators will be subject to a one-year outright ban on submissions, and an indefinite requirement that any future uploads must have been accepted by a "reputable peer-reviewed venue".

This is as good a prompt as any for why I am slightly -- slightly -- more optimistic about the ability of academia to fend off the tsunami of AI slop compared to other entities in the business of generating texts. One problem with AI slop in, say, the news space is that it's essentially impossible to impose meaningful sanctions on violators. It's essentially spam bots -- if one site gets delisted, another springs up in its place. The spammers don't care specifically about the reputation of this website or that (usually fake) author. The main goal is to get their text out in the world; it doesn't matter so much who it's attributed to (except insofar as that can aid the text getting more readers or otherwise embedding itself in the algorithm).

But academics are differently situated. True, an academic might have an incentive to look super-productive, and so an unscrupulous version of me might be tempted by the prospect of being to produce dozens of (low-quality, but cross-cited) papers in a short-period of time. But crucially, it's important that I be the one credited for all this productivity and all these citations. If I'm blacklisted from a bunch of journals, that's a genuine deterrent in a way that banning a spam bot is not for your typical spammer. Penalties like those that arXiv proposed exact meaningful costs that draw (ironically enough) on the self-interested nature of academics (if the only thing we cared about was getting our research into the world, without worrying about the credit, this deterrent wouldn't work). Academics need to put our own name on articles to get credit for articles, and that means that where we are found out to be misbehaving, there can be punishments which stick to us. For my part, I am generally a strong proponent of strong punishments -- including blacklists -- for academic authors who submit AI slop to journals.

This isn't to say there are no abusive uses of AI that wouldn't circumvent these reputational deterrents. I can think of two in particular.

The first is papers with fake authors which over-cite other articles by a real academic. Banning the fake authors would not exact costs on the real-world wrongdoer (the real academic whose presumably using some mill to generate the fake articles to goose his or her own citation counts). That said, where one can credibly ascertain that the over-cited scholar is the "real" author and that they've created a Potemkin article as a means of abusing a citation racket, they still can be subject to meaningful sanctions.

The second possible problem is articles which falsely claim to be authored by a real academic (who actually had no affiliation with the piece), hoping to trade on his or her genuine reputation to boost the reach of the slop article. This practice is especially dangerous because -- consistent with the above promotion of punishing the authors for bad AI practices -- it risks engendering false accusations. It appears that John Smith wrote a bogus AI-generated slop piece, so blacklist John Smith -- except John Smith actually had nothing to do with the piece; some scammers slapped his name on it. This could be a significant problem, though I'll note its scope is limited again by the fact that the main benefits of publishing a "bad" AI-generated article have to at some point accrue to a "real" author, and so eventually whichever co-author is the actual malign actor behind the charade should be able to be sussed out.

Hillel International Forbids Middlebury Chapter From Staying, Leaving

The Jewish students involved in Middlebury College's Hillel want to disaffiliate from Hillel International, citing (among other things) disagreement over implementation over the latter's "partnership policies."

Middlebury College’s Hillel student board made the decision last week after a yearlong consultation process with active participants in the campus organization, university administrators and Hillel International leadership, according to the student group’s co-presidents. The board also voted to disaffiliate from Hillel International, but were told by Middlebury’s administration that they lacked the authority to take that action, the co-presidents told the Middlebury campus newspaper.

The student group, renamed to Jewish Association of Middlebury, will continue to perform similar functions as Hillels do on hundreds of campuses around the world — holding events around Shabbat and Jewish holidays and other Jewish religious and social programming. The board says it will maintain an on-paper link with Hillel without adhering to its guidelines, and it will not receive any funding from the organization.

The response from Hillel International has been ... interesting:

Hillel International, which does not employ a rabbi or any professional staff at Middlebury, said in a statement that it was currently reviewing Hillel’s affiliation status with the college to confirm it will ensure that JAM “adheres to our mission and standards.”

“Hillel is committed to supporting all Jewish students — from all types of backgrounds and with a diversity of views and beliefs on a range of issues including Israel,” the statement in part read. “At the same time, we are a proudly Zionist organization, and do not provide a platform for programming that denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state within secure borders.

“All campus Hillels — even those that are just a student group without dedicated professional Hillel staff — are expected to operate in line with our mission, vision, values, and policies.”

[....] 

At the university’s behest, the students then met virtually with Hillel International, whose representative reiterated that the board members must universally adopt Hillel International’s political views and values about Israel, according to the Campus. But the representative also conceded that it couldn’t stop the students from changing the organization’s name.

“We said we want to disaffiliate, and they said you can’t. And we said, well, we’re going to change the name anyway. And they said, we can’t stop you,” Jaffe said.

So to recap: the Middlebury Jewish students object to following the partnership guidelines. Hillel says campus chapters have to follow the partnership guidelines. So the students say they want to disaffiliate from Hillel. They're told they can't. So the students say they won't follow the partnership guidelines. And Hillel says ... they're reviewing the chapter's affiliation status?

Forgive me, but what exactly is Hillel endgame here? Disaffiliation? That's what the students wanted to begin with! It's just a farce at this point: "We're leaving" "You can't leave" "Well we're not following your rules" "Then we'll kick you out!"

I'm a general opponent of campus witch hunts targeting Hillel, which often does essential work as a center for Jewish life on campus. But it is a case that the national office of Hillel has a tendency to forget that it ultimately serves Jewish students, not the other way around, and this is yet another instance of Hillel resisting its badly needed dose of democracy. The reason why Hillel constantly steps in it when it comes to applying the partnership guidelines (among other issues) is that it lacks meaningful democratic accountability to its students. If the Jewish students of Middlebury involved in Hillel want to raise money for World Central Kitchen's relief efforts in Gaza (the incident which apparently set this whole train in motion), that's their prerogative, and it's outrageous that the national body thinks it should be entitled to intercede against it. 

Finally, it would be easy to connect the Middlebury students' decision with broader campaigns aimed at boycotting or rejecting Hillel as a "Zionist" or "Israel-connected" institutions. However, while their problems with Hillel International are certainly related to that organization's narrowness on Israel and Zionism, it's important to stress that the Middlebury students are very much not framing their decision as a general rejection of "Israel" or "Zionism":

“Let us be clear: this decision is not a rebuke of Zionism, Zionist students, or the importance of Israel to many in the Jewish community,” a Dec. 2025 email to JAM membership read. “Rather, it reflects a desire to create the most welcoming and pluralistic space possible.”

This choice, in other words, was not made by a group of radical purists who couldn't countenance brushing up against anything associated with the "Zionist entity." Rather, it was forced by a national office made up of, well, radical purists who couldn't countenance brushing up against anything associated with support for Palestinians. The latter category includes many Jews who most certainly do not see Israel as a dirty word, but nonetheless find themselves personae non gratae in too many Jewish spaces.

How Parenting Changes Politics

It's a cliche to say that becoming a parent changes your politics. But maybe not in the same way for everyone. Parenting, I think, amplifies one's protective instincts. It accentuates vulnerability -- there's this tiny baby, who you want all the best things for, but whom you are painfully aware is dependent on not just you but the whole world to determine the trajectory of his or her life. You want to keep your child safe, and yet you know that it's not ultimately all up to you (or your child, for that matter). It's one of those banalities that feels ridiculous but is true; that it's almost impossible to imagine loving and caring about someone more than the baby in your arms.

There are some people for whom that protectiveness manifests in a form of conservatism -- suddenly becoming a lot less willing to "risk" harms befalling their child (where "risk" is less "letting them climb a tree" and more "letting them attend school with the riff-raff"). But for me, at least, this overwhelming, almost painful sense of protectiveness unlocked a new level of empathy. That feeling of terror at the thought of something terrible happening your baby -- the omnipresent Geiger counter of fear? Every parent has that. Every child (and I include here adult children) has loved ones who feel that way about them too. To see something bad happen to another person -- for them to be in a position where they need help and can't get it -- it hits me like a tidal wave; oddly, not fully on their own behalf, but on behalf of those who love them. I both can't and can imagine how that would feel if it happened to Nathaniel. And all the clever rationalizations and political machinations that explain why this suffering or deprivation or injustice or explosion is the just one wither in the face of that crushing wall of empathy.

The other day I had an idea for a painting series (that is, if I were a talented artist, which I am not), which was to take classic depictions of war and battle and replace all the faces of the soldiers with those of babies. The thought of the painting makes me want to shut my eyes to and run away from my own imagination (which, from an artistic standpoint, is a good sign -- good art makes you feel things after all -- but is less pleasant when one can't create and just has to live with it in your own mind). Each man charging, rearing, falling, crying, in agony, lying still -- they are all someone's baby. No matter what side they're on, they have loved ones grieving for them. How can we not do everything in our power to avert such grief? It is an awful experience even to imagine it, much less to live through it. Even if the rational part of me can fathom -- barely -- that this cannot always be the absolute number one priority, boy should it put one hefty thumb on the scale.

Between "One-Sided" and "Equating", Part II

A few days ago there was a dust-up at the Park Slope Food Coop after a member, during a coop meeting, stated that "Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country." Following an outcry, the store's general manager condemned the remark, along with that of a different member who decried "Arab supremacy" in the context of speaking out against October 7 and criticizing the Muslim Brotherhood.

I read that sequence and thought "that's about as satisfactory an outcome as I could hope for." Whatever theoretical or academic justifications one can use to validate either "Jewish supremacism" or "Arab supremacy", if you want to take the temperature down in these sorts of settings you have to clamp down on that sort of thing. If one isn't okay, then the other isn't either. If anything, it is nicely convenient that both phrases were used, as it lets the coop leadership make clear that there position is one of principle, not a backdoor means of showing favoritism to one group at the expense of another.

But I knew my satisfaction would be another's ill-temper, and so it is here. I wasn't surprised, of course, to see that the coop's pro-Palestinian activists were going to the mat for their right to assail "Jewish supremacism." And unfortunately, I also wasn't surprised to see others complain that to condemn the phrase "Arab supremacy" may as well have nullified the condemnation of the phrase "Jewish supremacism".

For coop member Ramon Maislen, who condemned the comments allegedly made by Huarachi last week, Szladek’s email created a false equivalency between the two remarks.

[....] 

Maislen said he believed Szladek’s email “completely minimizes what Jewish people are feeling at the coop.”

“I don’t think there’s much coded language around Arab supremacy that I’m aware of,” Maislen said. “So I think it’s very, very disappointing when you see an email go out after such a mask-off moment for the hatred within the anti-Zionist movement, and to have the general coordinators basically, completely, make it some sort of like equality between the two statements.”

On Thursday, Coop4Unity, an anti-BDS coalition at the coop that Maislen serves as an organizer of, issued a press release calling on [coop General Manager Joe] Szladek to “issue an unequivocal condemnation of antisemitism,” arguing that his previous email created a “false moral equivalence that members say dilutes the gravity of what occurred.”

“In his statement, General Manager Szladek cited a separate member’s use of the phrase ‘Arab supremacy’ — offered in the context of referencing October 7th and the Muslim Brotherhood — and presented it as a parallel offense to the ‘Jewish supremacy’ remark that drew crowd applause,” the release read. “Coop4Unity argues this is a false equivalence that obscures rather than addresses what took place.”

Ah yes, "false equivalency" -- a sin most heinous. Except, that is, when one doesn't do it -- for then one is committing the equally grievous sin of being "one-sided". I wrote on this subject five years ago, and it remains resonant today. But unfortunately, I feel as if things have gotten worse rather than better. 

And -- morality aside -- this is such a dumb hill to die on. Is it really so important that one be able to rail about "Arab supremacy" that you'll risk undermining a condemnation of people going on about "Jewish supremacism"? Take the win! This whole logic is how you get backed into a corner of being mad at people for saying the JDL is bad, when what one should do is be delighted anytime someone says "JDL is bad" and be ecstatic at the opportunity to negatively polarize your constituency against them and their apologists. The Park Slope group had the opportunity to set the polarity of the debate as "mainstream coop members versus people who are livid that they can't hurl 'supremacist' charges at ethnic minorities", and they squandered it. Again, I think the ethics are bad here, but I'm almost madder at the tactical idiocy of it all.

Prosecuting Our Military When It Murders

The United States military continues to carry out illegal strikes on civilian boats allegedly engaged in drug trafficking.

The case that this is criminal is, in my view, not close. Contrary to the President's assertions, there is no serious argument that we are in the midst of an armed conflict with ... who exactly? Drug traffickers? Their behavior (if indeed the boaters are engaged in wrongful activity at all, which is hardly assured) is the epitome of criminal misconduct, which must be dealt with via criminal proceedings. We do not get to fire rockets at the vehicles of suspected criminals. And even if one could strain to argue that this falls under a military engagement, the follow-up strikes on shipwrecked sailors violates longstanding rules in the law of warfare. We literally sentenced Nazis to death for doing this.

There is a lot of enthusiasm for "prosecutions" amongst Democrats now. I share that enthusiasm. We must make clear that, if and when Democrats retake power, there will be consequences for the criminal activities that have run rampant through this administrative. And in many ways, this represents both an easy and an important case. 

It's easy because not only is the law incredibly clear, but there's no difficulty identifying the responsible party. This isn't a situation where we have to track down a masked unknown grunt who stood out for particularly brutal aggression (as in many of the ICE cases), or alternatively, where we have to do difficult work in tying said grunt's actions to specific orders from higher-ups. Here the military context makes command responsibility obvious, and the commanding General, Francis Donovan, is named in the Pentagon press releases bragging about the "operations".

It's important because restoring the applicability of law of war principles to the U.S. military is of absolute existential importance for a nation with the most powerful military on the planet. Without downplaying the many, many breaches, there is a huge difference between a military that is internally committed to law of war rules and one that from the top decides to openly flout them. The latter situation is how you do start seeing what Trump wanted to do, but couldn't, in term 1 -- deploying the full might of the American military apparatus against the American citizenry to retain a dictatorial grip on power.

And on top of all that, of all the potential criminals one might find harbored by the Trump administration, General Donovan is probably among the most vulnerable. The president's pardon power does seem to extend at least partially into the realm of military justice (and in fact, Trump has already pardoned several war criminals). but it seems clear to me that the pardon power cannot completely obstruct a future Commander-in-Chief's power to drum out of service an officer whom the CinC lacks faith in as a legitimate holder of rank and service. Of everybody implicated in Trumpist crimes, those in the military are, formally speaking, probably the least insulated from facing accountability from a future administration.

But in spite of all that, I suspect that prosecuting General Donovan and his compatriots responsible for criminal actions on the high seas will be much more fraught and less popular than essentially any other prosecution a future administration might bring. The political gravity pulling against prosecuting members of the military -- regardless of the context -- is just going to be too strong. Rightly or wrongly, I suspect it will be insurmountable for any junior officers or enlisted men involved in the operation. And even for the senior leadership, I can't imagine it going over well even in a context where there is a significant demand to prosecute, say, ICE leaders or Trump associates found to have embezzled money.

I don't have a good answer for this because, again, the need to restore deterrence here is nothing short of existential. We've seen in the Israeli case -- it barely managed to limp across a conviction in 2016 when IDF soldier Elor Azaria shot an unarmed Palestinian, and just doing that nearly tore the country apart. That set the stage for the non-prosecution decision for soldiers accused of sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees ten years later -- a decision that again came on the heels of widespread government intervention (including joining in outright rioting) in support of the abusers. The culture of impunity that's developed in the intervening years no doubt plays no small role in the brutal devastation the IDF has wreaked against civilian infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon (the soldiers punished for vandalizing a Jesus statute had every reasonable expectation of assuming they'd be let off scot-free were it not for the  bad fortune of angering one of the few foreign constituencies the Israeli government still cares about appeasing). As disastrous as that trajectory has been in the Israeli case, I don't think they're in any way unique -- most countries (and certainly our country) blanches at holding their uniformed military personnel accountable for misdeeds.

So I don't know. It might that these prosecutions, or other retributive measures, have to be a little less media-forward than others. They might not be political winners (and to be clear, I do think that going after corrupt Trump apparatchiks will, in general, very much be a political winner in addition to being the right thing to do). But it still needs to be done.