“….but I was a university administrator, so I called the cops, egged them on, and assumed the role of aggrieved victim.”

Ironically, Emory University’s Caroline Fohlin specializes in the political economy of early twentieth century Germany. You can’t make shit like that up, but her arrest does starkly raise the question posed by Jason Brennan’s valuable book, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton, 2018): when, exactly, does it become legitimate to fight back? And how? Those aren’t rhetorical questions, and the answers don’t involve an infinite regress. Individual human beings have a right of self-defense, after all. Believe it or not, that right isn’t just the monopoly of Jewish States.

If Emory’s students and faculty had adopted Israel’s loudly professed rules of engagement, they would be perfectly justified in exterminating the entirety of Atlanta’s Police Department. For now, such options have to be relegated to thought-experiments and daydreams. But maybe it’s time for our ruling class to ask how long that will last. And not just them.

She asked them what they were doing. I can see why it upset them. But if they think the alternative is not to ask, they should re-consider. Because that’s not an option.

I can’t count the number of Americans and Europeans I’ve encountered in the last seven months who have argued that Israel’s war in Gaza is justified by how badly Palestinians treat “their women.” Well, this is how we treat “our women”: we beat the shit out of them for speaking out. Maybe one of these days someone will borrow that feminist premise of ours, and return the favor by bombing us to feminist liberation.