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• July 22, 2022

Essay page in a newspaper: Hyph.

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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Newspaper page with opinion essays (Hyph.) Crossword Clue

Newspaper page with opinion essays (hyph.) answer is: oped.

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Longtime Clinton Adviser Sounds The Alarm With ‘Biden Is Doing It All Wrong’ Essay

Reporter, HuffPost

A longtime adviser to former President Bill Clinton has spelled out what he believes could cost President Joe Biden victory in the 2024 election.

Mark Penn suggested in an essay for The New York Times — titled “ Biden Is Doing It All Wrong ” — that the president should stop pandering to his “political base on the left” and “chart a different course” if he wants to beat presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in November.

“By pitching too much to the base, he is leaving behind the centrist swing voters who shift between parties from election to election and, I believe, will be the key factor deciding the 2024 race,” Penn said of Biden.

“If Mr. Biden wants to serve another four years, he has to stop being dragged to the left and chart a different course closer to the center that appeals to those voters who favor bipartisan compromises to our core issues, fiscal discipline and a strong America,” he argued.

Biden is currently polling slightly behind Trump .

The president is not reaching out to moderate voters with policy ideas or a strong campaign message” and although “the 2024 election is a rematch” between Biden and the four-times-indicted predecessor, Biden’s victory in battleground states is anything but guaranteed,” Penn said.

Biden could “still move more to the center, hoover up swing voters who desperately want to reject Mr. Trump, strengthen his image as a leader by destroying Hamas, and rally the base at the end,” he continued.

“But that means first pushing back against the base rather than pandering to it, and remembering that when it comes to the math of elections, swing is king,” Penn concluded.

Read the full essay here.

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Guest Essay

What I Am Listening for in Michael Cohen’s Testimony

By Andrew Weissmann

Mr. Weissmann teaches at the N.Y.U. School of Law and is a co-author of “The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents With Commentary.”

For the final stage of the prosecutor’s case in the People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump, the prosecution is expected to call the witness who has received the lion’s share of attention since the indictment was brought a year ago: Michael Cohen.

Before the trial started, some observers thought Mr. Cohen would be an indispensable star witness. They said that without Mr. Cohen, the district attorney could not establish the elements of the charged criminal offenses. But having seen the proof laid out meticulously and methodically by the prosecution these past three weeks, I find myself wondering: Do prosecutors even need Michael Cohen as a witness? Does the jury need to hear from him?

To be sure, the case would not exist but for Mr. Cohen. It is he who first revealed to prosecutors in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s office (I was one of the special counsel prosecutors) and in New York the hush-money scheme to buy Stormy Daniels’s silence in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape’s disclosure.

But since then, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has amassed evidence that appears to independently both prove the crime and corroborate Mr. Cohen’s account.

To call Mr. Cohen as a witness carries with it not only the reward of adding further critical evidence to the prosecution’s case, but also the risk of undermining the case with issues related to Mr. Cohen’s personal baggage. He is, like Ms. Daniels, a colorful character, catnip to the press, and his broken bond with his former boss, Mr. Trump, is inherently dramatic.

He joins a line of famous underlings who turned state’s evidence against their boss. The prosecution will be relying on the testimony of an insider testifying “up,” against his boss. And what those insiders also have in common is that they can speak to the inner workings of an alleged conspiracy.

I have personally observed this in organized crime cases (Salvatore Gravano, the former underboss of the Gambino crime family, testifying against the former Gambino boss John Gotti), economic crime prosecutions (the former Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow testifying against the former chief executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling) and political corruption matters (Mr. Trump’s former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates testifying against the former campaign manager Paul Manafort).

Mr. Cohen can provide a detailed insider account of the charged scheme and Mr. Trump’s alleged role in it. And because the trial has already established that there is simply no alternative narrative that is consistent with all the trial proof, Mr. Cohen is far less important to its outcome than initially thought.

Testimony from witnesses like David Pecker, Jeffrey McConney and Hope Hicks has laid out a clear narrative of a scheme to kill derogatory stories about candidate Trump and disseminate damaging accounts about his political adversaries — including direct conversations with Mr. Trump. And smoking-gun handwritten notes of Trump Organization financial personnel provide evidence for the alleged cover-up of that scheme through documentation that disguises the reimbursement of the hush money as legal fees.

It is a sign of the unusual political dimension of this trial that Ms. Daniels, and not the far more legally damaging witnesses Mr. Pecker and Ms. Hicks, was subject to the far more intense cross-examination.

A key remaining issue — and one that Mr. Cohen can address — is whether Mr. Trump was aware of the alleged cover-up scheme involving reimbursement checks to Mr. Cohen disguised as legal payments. Mr. Cohen laid out the hush-money payments to Ms. Daniels by taking out a home-equity credit line for $130,000, a fact that was well established by direct and circumstantial evidence.

Take the handwritten notes from Allen Weisselberg, the former Trump Organization chief financial officer. They reveal that he must have been aware of the hush-money scheme and its alleged cover-up. His notes (and the notes of the former Trump Organization controller who prosecutors say helped to carry out the scheme) detail how to reimburse Mr. Cohen the $130,000 the amount would need to be doubled, or “grossed” up, to account for taxes on the amount of this disguised income. The idea that Mr. Weisselberg, a Trump Organization veteran who has apparently been willing to serve time in jail rather than turn against Mr. Trump and remained on the Trump payroll even after his guilty pleas, would have approved these payments on his own is far-fetched. Trial evidence establishes that he could not approve expenses over $10,000, and here he would be approving not just the payment of $130,000 to Mr. Cohen, but doubling it to make him whole.

Witness after witness — as well as Mr. Trump’s own words read to the jury — attest to his being both a micromanager and a penny-pincher. And Mr. Trump signed check after check reimbursing Mr. Cohen for what he paid Ms. Daniels plus much more. In short, it seems implausible that either Mr. Cohen or Mr. Weisselberg would dare such a move without Mr. Trumps’ permission.

Against all this evidence and more, we are now expected to hear from Mr. Cohen. Successful prosecutions can often not be made without such witnesses. This is particularly true when the bosses consciously do not leave a paper trail. Mr. Trump famously groused about his White House counsel taking notes, observing that one of his favorite lawyers, Roy Cohn, never did.

So no doubt Mr. Bragg and his prosecutors believe they must call Mr. Cohen to testify. Still, calling Mr. Cohen as a witness does carry significant risk for Mr. Bragg. He brings baggage: He recently claimed under oath in a New York civil fraud trial against Mr. Trump (where the court found him credible and ruled against Mr. Trump) that he lied to a federal judge when he pleaded guilty to one of several crimes. By way of explanation, he seemed to contend he was pressured to plead guilty by the federal prosecutors.

Even accepting Mr. Cohen’s story, it means he lied to a federal judge after taking an oath to tell the truth — the same oath he will take at the criminal trial of Mr. Trump. And his story would support an anticipated defense claim that the federal prosecutors were so intent on making a case against Mr. Trump that they were willing to trample on Mr. Cohen’s rights — and that ugly federal muck will splatter on the state prosecutors.

The other option is that Mr. Cohen is lying about not being guilty of the charge — which may be a very distinct possibility given the proof against him. If that is the case, it would mean he lied in the recent state court fraud case. As a federal judge in New York recently concluded in denying Mr. Cohen’s motion for early termination of his criminal sentence, he lied in one forum or the other.

Still, that does not mean Mr. Cohen should not be called. I have repeatedly observed an interesting phenomenon in cases in which the prosecution has a mountain of independent evidence of guilt, but still calls a flawed insider to provide unique detailed and direct evidence to the jury of the defendant’s guilt.

Jurors often want to hear someone recount what they already know occurred, but that has not been said directly. The jurors will then often reach a verdict of guilty, and despite having found the conspiracy existed as recounted by a key criminal accomplice — someone like Mr. Cohen — they will later say they did not believe or need that witness’s testimony.

We will soon learn whether that will happen again in the People v. Trump.

Andrew Weissmann teaches at the N.Y.U. School of Law and is a co-author of “The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents With Commentary.” He was a senior prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and is a co-host of the podcast “ Prosecuting Donald Trump .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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