My mentor Alasdair MacIntyre died this past Wednesday, at the age of 96. The last time I spoke to him in person was 2008, on the occasion of my dissertation defense. It had taken me seventeen years, from matriculation to defense, to finish the degree, and even at the defense itself, it was very far from clear whether I would actually finish. A minor civil war broke out within the defense over the merits of my work, but after tense negotiations, I passed. MacIntyre, amused by the fracas, described my having completed the degree as the best of the arguments for the existence of God: only a God, he said, could have ensured that Khawaja crossed the finish line. I laughed at first, but was then given pause. And that, in microcosm, describes my relationship with Alasdair MacIntyre.
I first encountered MacIntyre’s work more or less when “everyone” did, in the 1980s, when After Virtue was all the rage. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and on reading After Virtue, particularly its polemic against “liberal individualism,” was sure I’d encountered the Antagonist of All Antagonists–the personification of reactionary anti-liberal anti-individualism, the very Devil clothed in angelic garb. I resolved right then to meet the man, to become his student, to face down his arguments, and to vindicate my own holy, dogmatic conviction in “liberal individualism.” Clearly, either he was wrong, or I was, but only by confronting him would I know. And I had to know.
I’ve rarely been so motivated in life. I applied to Notre Dame, and got in. I got a phone call from MacIntyre assuring me that he wanted to work with me, and counted it a “blessing,” if an atheist is allowed those things. I got rejected almost everywhere else I applied, so off to Notre Dame I went.
I’d resolved to meet the man, and did. I faced down his arguments, or thought I had. At first, the whole exercise seemed to vindicate my liberal individualist convictions, because at first, anyway, MacIntyre’s views seemed laughable. Nietzsche or St. Benedict? A retreat to tradition? The moral hegemony of the Catholic Church? Could he really believe what he seemed to be saying? Who could? What the hell was he saying, anyway? Years later, after I’d left Notre Dame, after hard experience had left their mark on my life, I began to see how right he was–never fully right, but right enough to become a problem. “He was wrong or I was” turned out to be an inclusive disjunction, but also compatible with his being right about a bit too much for comfort.
I’ve found, despite anticipating this day for years, that there’s no way to enumerate the moral or intellectual debts I owe Alasdair. They range across everything, because he ranged across everything. They find their way into every crevice of my life, because he did. I could try to break the debts down into categories, but I know from trying that the categories themselves break down. I could give you a free associative list of suggestible items, but that would turn this post into a cryptic bit of autobiography. If I told you that I owed him the world, you might accuse me of sentimentality and exaggeration, but if I responded that my claim really was a case of adequatio ad rem, I think I’d be right, and might even induce his quiet agreement.
The work of Alasdair’s that ended up influencing me the most was Dependent Rational Animals, a short book on virtue and flourishing based on the Paul Carus Lectures he gave in 1997. I once remember browsing in Seminary Co-Op in Chicago when a bunch of Chicago grad students picked the book up off the shelf and began to make fun of it. “MacIntyre’s into dolphins!” one of them said, to snickers from the others. I had to stop myself from starting a fist fight with them. And that’s when I realized how far I’d fallen. 
Alasdair MacIntyre in Dublin, 2009. Photo credit: Sean O’Connor (Wikipedia)
I was convinced at first that much of what he said in the book was wrong–too much focus on dependency, too little on agency. But I grew convinced over the years that I was the one who was wrong. MacIntyre was a genius at conveying Christian ideas in ways that were plausible and palatable to non-Christians, and though I’m not a Christian and never will be, Dependent Rational Animals is the book that invited me, almost by seduction, into the Christian moral universe, and gave me a vivid sense of its pull. Not just Aquinas, but St. Francis; not just the philosophers but the Gospel; not just Jesus but St Paul; not just the disciples but the lepers.
It was MacIntyre who, without trying, helped me see the proto-fascist nihilism at the heart of so much “heroic individualism,” and who showed me the alternative wisdom to be found in loss, grief, and failure–along with the virtues of fighting unto death for a lost cause. No one else taught me that, and no one else could have. The Crucifix once elicited horror and disgust in me, along the lines of Goethe’s equation of it in his Venetian Epigrams with bedbugs, garlic, and tobacco. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it elicits now, but it’s a long way from that.
No single paragraph in twentieth century philosophy has influenced me as much as this one:
An Aristotelian critique of contemporary society has to recognize that the costs of economic development are generally paid by those least able to afford them; the benefits are appropriated in a way that has no regard to one’s merits. At the same time, large-scale politics has become barren. Attempts to reform the political systems of modernity from within are always transformed into collaborations with them. Attempts to overthrow them always degenerate into terrorism or quasi-terrorism. What is not thus barren is the politics involved in constructing and sustaining small-scale local communities, at the level of the family, the neighborhood, the workplace, the parish, the school, or clinic, communities within which the needs of the hungry and the homeless can be met. I am not a communitarian. I do not believe in ideals or forms of community as a nostrum for contemporary social ills. I give my political loyalty to no program. (from “Nietzsche or Aristotle?,” 1994 interview with Giovanna Borradorri in The American Philosopher).
You might think it a long way from South Bend to Jenin Refugee Camp, or MacIntyrean Catholicism to BDS, or Whose Justice? to Resistencia en Acción, but once you really read that paragraph, you come to know better. MacIntyre knew, better than any philosopher I ever met, the meaning of suffering, injustice, and death. He knew, far better than most Pragmatists I’ve ever met, that the response to those things was not theory but action. But he knew as well that activism brings its own hazards, hazards that demand the exercise of virtues that most of us lack. I can’t say that I’ve precisely found the mean he describes between co-optation and terrorism. I have a soft spot for terrorism. And I haven’t discovered how you construct a small-scale community as your political system descends into fascism. Despair sometimes seems a viable option. But the problem we face is as he stated it, and the responsibility of finding a solution is ours.
I never heard him raise his voice, and never saw him march in the streets. But he was a revolutionary, and his work is a subdued, persistent act of insurrection against the self-images of the age. I was both a target of that insurrection and its beneficiary–once a callow, ignorant opponent, now a wounded, chastened disciple. It’s been the longest, hardest apprenticeship of my life. I know with certainty that I’ve failed in both roles, and yet know with equal certainty that I’ve benefited from both. It was MacIntyre himself who solved this apparent paradox. Failure, he taught us, is its own triumph in a fallen world.
As a dedicated Thomist, of course, MacIntyre thought himself destined for another world. “Ultimate and perfect happiness,” Aquinas wrote, “can only be in the vision of the divine essence” (Summa Theologiae I-II, Q. 3, Art. 8). I don’t believe in ultimate or perfect happiness, in God or in the divine essence, but MacIntyre did. If anyone was capable of seeing that essence, or utterly deserving of being in its presence, it was him. I’m happy to be found wrong about God and the hereafter. I don’t know where that would put me, but I know where it would put him, and one success in two worlds beats failure in one. I’m all for it, Big Mac. I pray that you find yourself in the “vision of the divine essence.” Not that my prayers mean much. Not that you need them. But they’re yours all the same, a modest gift in return for the world you gave me.
Policy of Truth 
I had no idea you defended so recently. That’s just two years before me! So, we both had circuitous routes to finishing.
Your remembrance of MacIntyre reminds me of my undergraduate advisor, Paul Woodruff, who died somewhat publicly about a year and a half ago. Although a dissertation director–student relationship is much more intense than an advisor/mentor–undergrad relationship, still I wrote a thesis under his direction and had a more intense rapport with him than I ever managed to achieve subsequently in many years of graduate study, and his influence has stayed with me more strongly. It seems to me that his personal character and virtue (or the appearance of these, at least) contributed a lot to this. From your account, I gather MacIntyre was similar to Woodruff in this regard.
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I submitted the dissertation in 2006, defended it in March 2008, was awarded the degree in August 2008, and started at Felician about a week later. The gap between submission and defense arose because my manuscript somehow got “lost” after submission. Apparently, no one at ND had an electronic copy, and they were too embarrassed to tell me that they’d lost it. I waited about a year before I asked what had happened to it. Response: “Thanks for asking, could you re-send it?”
When I got to the defense, one member of the committee decided that I should be denied the degree for failing to follow up faster on who had lost it. And here I thought I was being polite. Anyway, that was the “minor civil war” I mentioned in the post, which was eventually resolved in my favor. And all the difference it made.
I did a very poor job of managing my academic career. I started grad school in 1991, began to work on a dissertation with MacIntyre on Aristotle, but then changed both topics and advisors in mid-stream (in the mid 90s). That was reasonable enough, since MacIntyre had left Notre Dame for Duke (only to return a little while later). Strictly speaking, then, MacIntyre wasn’t my dissertation advisor. I worked with him for a few years on my first abortive dissertation, until he moved and I changed topics. He then advised me informally on the second, but the actual advisor was David Solomon, who died in March.
After MacIntyre left, I then inadvisedly gave up my funding at Notre Dame to live in New Jersey, which put me on the never-ending temp/adjunct/low pay/no benefits circuit until maybe 2005. Doing a dissertation under those circumstances was like doing one on Pluto. I was working full time, much of it in the corporate world, mostly disconnected from academic life. As an adjunct, I often taught at several places at once, so I was never a full fledged member of any one institution. At one point, my car was stolen, so I ended up commuting by mass transit, which wasted gigantic tranches of time. Under those circumstances, it’s a miracle the dissertation ever got written, but I guess it did. MacIntyre described me as having a “Technicolor life.” I’m still not sure whether that was gentle mockery, a compliment, or both at once. But it was pretty funny.
I’ve never read Woodruff, but he’s so often been compared to MacIntyre that I’ve wondered whether they ever crossed paths. Both were at Princeton, but at different times, I think. Woodruff’s work has been on my “to read” list for a long time, particularly the book on reverence, but also the one on Ajax. One of these days!
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Even after reading the paragraph you cite, I still can’t help but think that it is indeed “a long way from South Bend to Jenin Refugee Camp, or MacIntyrean Catholicism to BDS” – considering that he once wrote the following:
“Local communities engaged in systematic conversation about their own good have to treat certain questions as already decided. And among these by now are questions about the evils of antiSemitism. Indeed the poisons of anti-Semitism are such that no conception of the human good can be treated as rationally defensible whose defenders cannot show not only how allegiance to it can be dissociated from antiSemitism, but also how it can provide or acquire resources for neutralizing those poisons.”
This is no doubt the strongest condemnation of antisemitism I have ever read; and in light of these words, I have a hard time imagining that MacIntyre wouldn’t have seen the “Free Palestine” movement for what it really is.
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Your claim turns on the assertion that “Free Palestine” is an inherently anti-Semitic movement. I don’t accept that evaluation, see nothing resembling an argument for it in your comment, and have never encountered a plausible argument for it in my life. I never discussed Israel/Palestine with MacIntyre, but I think he would agree that what you’ve just done is engage in a bit of unargued character assassination while pretending that it’s more than that. Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether he would agree with me or not. Your modus operandi is pretty transparent with or without his testimony. I’m used to it now. It’s all that Israel’s defenders have left.
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And just to be explicit about some of the MacIntyrean norms I enforce around here: if you try that shit again, I’m blocking you.
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First, I do not care at all if you block me, since I discovered your blog only by coincidence today and have no intention whatsoever of becoming a regular reader. So block away, if you like.
Second, you are right to say that I did not offer an explicit argument for why I think that the “Free Palestine” movement is inherently antisemitic (or let’s say: 99.5% of its supporters). I do think that, for sure, and for a whole bunch of reasons:
I know, of course, that none of this will convince you, and maybe our shared admiration of Professor MacIntyre can help us think about why this is so.
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Your comment is a classic in its genre. It starts by telling me that you don’t care whether you’re blocked, and don’t intend to become a regular reader. It ends by inviting me to a discussion. This makes zero sense, but then, it’s of a piece with the rest of what you’ve written.
You don’t care whether you’re blocked, but you want to have a discussion. How would we have a discussion if you were blocked? We couldn’t. Do you care to have a discussion? Yes. So how can you not care if you’re blocked but still want to have a discussion? Because you’re the kind of person who wants to have things all ways at once, and wants my indulgence in doing so. Except that I don’t want to give it.
You don’t intend to become a regular reader, but you’re posthumously inviting Professor MacIntyre to “help us think about” why the pseudo-argument you’ve given above is convincing. How are we to do this without your regularly responding to any rejoinders I make to the regular comments you offer? Are you suggesting that we conduct our conversation by telepathy? Or is your suggestion that your comments are so convincing that one look at them should convince anyone of their blinding cogency without the need for follow ups?
In fact, your “argument” is idiotic. The conclusion of the “argument” is that 99.5% of the supporters of Free Palestine are anti-Semitic. The 99.5% figure is obviously a confabulation plucked out of nowhere, but it conveniently (sort of) side-steps the immediate issue of whether you’re accusing me of anti-Semitism, and thus side-steps the possibility of being immediately blocked by me. You deserve credit for showing that cleverness is perfectly compatible with disingenuousness.
The assertions in your argument fall into two categories: (1) a series of psychologistic pronouncements, worthy of a soothsayer, intended to plumb the depth psychology of persons you’ve never met; (2) total irrelevancies that, whether true or false, have no bearing whatsoever on the truth of the conclusion you’re trying to establish. A person who’s just begun this conversation by accusing 99.5% of a movement of anti-Semitism, should be embarrassed to ask his interlocutors to “look into” their hearts to discern the truth of claims he hasn’t, and obviously can’t, bear out himself. But embarrassment presupposes self-knowledge that you seem to lack.
Look into whatever is left of your brain, and ask yourself how any combination of the garbage you’ve served up could possibly entail or probabilize that 99.5% of a movement consisted of anti-Semites. Even on the most over-charitable reading, granting all of your unargued assertions, and all of your hasty generalizations, there is a yawning gap between all of it and your intended conclusion. There simply is no way to get from the claims you’ve made to a figure like 99.5%, or 99%, or 95%, or 93%, or any percent. You’re obviously just making things up as you go along. You’ve imbibed a series of mindless cliches, internalized a cosmic sense of civilizational superiority, gotten yourself drunk on philo-Semitism, and invented a parallel universe in which anything can be said with impunity: if it’s for the Jews, there are no standards. Anything goes.
There is no way to get around any of the following:
A blockade is an act of war. Israel had imposed a blockade on Gaza in 2007, more than a decade before the October 7 attack. That was an initiatory act of aggression.
Israel agreed to a ceasefire on January 19, 2025, and had obviously violated it by mid March. That’s an initiatory act of aggression.
Israel had been attacking the cities of the West Bank, most notably Jenin, continuously from the beginning of 2023 onward. That was an act of aggression. Of course, the occupation of the West Bank is itself an act of aggression.
Israel’s occupation of Gaza is at least a double, really a triple or quadruple, act of aggression. A large proportion of the Palestinians people were forcibly expelled from what became Israel in 1947-49. Israel later attacked Gaza unilaterally in 1967 after having also attacked it in 1956. From 1967 on, it occupied, settled, and despoiled it. Part of the story of the latter despoilation is told here: https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1649448. But even that is an incomplete enumeration of Israel’s depredations against Gaza.
In a post written more than a year ago (March 15, 2024), Zachary Foster has listed dozens of acts of aggression by Israel against Palestinians in the immediate weeks before October 7, 2023. Every one of them justified a retaliatory response, much less all of them in aggregate. https://palestine.beehiiv.com/p/ceasefire-oct-6th-2023. Norman Finkelstein has given detailed accounts, but only up to 2018, of Israel’s attacks on Gaza: https://www.amazon.com/Gaza-Inquest-into-Its-Martyrdom/dp/0520295714. To offer hand-waving blather in lieu of a discussion of the claims of this literature is an act of public irresponsibility.
It’s Israel that has consistently been the aggressor in this conflict, not the Palestinians of Gaza (or anywhere else). One part of “Free Palestine” is to draw attention to this fact, to demand that the aggression stop, to demand that it never happen again, to demand that the West stop its complicity in this aggression, but also to insist that if it keeps happening, Palestinians have a right of self-defense, and should use it at their own discretion with consequences that Israelis have invited by their own hand.
Meanwhile, this is the character of the people of Israel, as described by a recent poll done by Penn State University: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/05/poll-shows-israeli-belief-that-palestinians-should-be-eradicated-is-no-longer-a-fringe-opinion/
65% of them believe that Palestinians are a present-day incarnation of “Amalek.” 93% of this 65% believes that Amalek should be exterminated and its memory extirpated from the world.
47% believe in the rightness of genocide apart from the Biblical reference.
82% believe in forced expulsion of Gaza.
56% want a forced expulsion of Israel proper.
These numbers aren’t totally unprecedented. 45% of Israelis wanted a forced expulsion of Gazans as early as 2003, and 31% wanted a forced expulsion from Israel proper in 2003.
“Free Palestine” opposes these attitudes. Feel free to defend them if you like. You may as well do so explicitly, since this is what you’re committed to defending if you defend Israel. You’re defending a population of sociopaths with an entitlement complex, driven either by secular amoralism or a primitive form of religious fundamentalism.
I’ve lived under Israeli apartheid. I know what it looks like, and is like, first hand. Your rationalizations for it are indistinguishable from the rationalizations for Jim Crow given by its defenders in the American South from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. There are now hundreds of pages written about Israel’s apartheid regime. Your ignorant claims make no contact with any of it.
https://www.btselem.org/topic/apartheid
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/
https://www.pennpress.org/9780812239270/ethnocracy/
You have no real arguments, your supposed argument has no discernible structure, and you haven’t dealt with even the most basic relevant facts. That’s not an auspicious beginning.
I’ve lived 15 years in a Jewish household, and probably half or a third of the members of the Palestine liberation movement I know and work with are Jewish. None of them believe the tired propaganda you’re serving up, and no one else should. I’ve been hearing your Zionist song for forty years now. It never changes, and the people singing it never change, either. It’s the same Jewish supremacy or philo-Semitic supremacism issuing the same dogmatic denunications, the same ignorant generalizations; rationalizing every atrocity, deleting each one, pretending it didn’t happen, and proceeding to the next.
The best you seem to be able to do is look into some imagined crystal ball and tell your interlocutors what we care about, and what we don’t, what we’re feeling, and what we’re not. That’s your excuse for genocide by mass starvation. I shouldn’t have to tell you that your pretensions to omniscience are an embarrassment. You should be able to figure that out on your own. But if not, let me just be explicit: they are. If you are heir to the Zionist future, it has no future. It’s reached a dead end. No surprises there, since that’s where it was headed from the start.
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Markus, I am Jewish. Not one word you have puked out is representative of my beliefs.
You spat out, like a machine, the same exact thoroughly debunked talking points that I’ve heard from every Zionist, whether it’s those, like you, who superimpose upon themselves a friable, decomposing even as it is frantically applied, intellectual mantle of expression OR those who would be considered too creepy to be in a remake of “Deliverance.”
Since, it is obvious you care nothing about Palestinian lives (it’s a tautology to even say that about Zionists), I’ll address, first, your grotesque antisemitism.
The most potent, effective fomenter of antisemitism (and I am ignoring, as a lost cause, that, except for Arab Jews, Jews are not Semites, while Palestinians are) is Zionism—and not by accident, but by intent. Antisemitism is the bread and butter of the Zionist Lobby/Israel. Without it, there would be no need for an Israel or its lobby.
Since, in the US, for decades, actual antisemitism has been as much a thing as has hatred of Norwegians, it is grotesque to focus on it, when genocide is being committed (on top of over 100 years of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, murderous Jewish supremacism, war crimes, and every atrocity under the sun), by the self-named “Jewish State.” And, by antisemitism, I am not talking about personal dislike that relatively powerless people might have against Jews, when that personal dislike is not institutional dislike that can prevent individuals in a group from getting a job, rising to the top in their chosen profession, avoiding redlining, joining country clubs, getting into colleges, not being singled out for cop violence, etc. There is a power imbalance in this country, but Jews are not at the bottom of it. This is not to say that every Jew does well, but those who do not, fail to succeed due to capitalism, and other factors, not due to being Jewish. Being Jewish is a boon, when it comes to success in almost any endeavor. Compare this to the situation of being Black in the US.
It is Zionism that is successfully fomenting world-wide hate against Jews, by conflating Israel’s decades of jaw-dropping cruelty and destruction with all Jews.
To harp on antisemitism, and for this country (run by both Christian and Jewish Zionists) to give Zionists (Zionists, not Jews, as we anti-Zionist Jews are targeted, along with marginalized groups), who are not oppressed, in any way, special protection, and special status, while actually TAKING hard-won protections away, especially now, from everyone else, is repulsive. And, it is embarrassing to we anti-fascist Jews, as we watch this shithole country oppress Black and Indigenous people, among others, while the US smashes every law, every norm, every shard of democracy we’ve ever been allowed, to protect Zionists from having to face the sort of facts that would make them have to face their consciences.
This fascism, this smashing of free speech and free assembly rights, this threat to people of conscience (by those with no conscience) that they will face losing their employment, schooling, housing, residency, ability to safely travel and return to the US, and face imprisonment and/or deportation, for speaking out against genocide, is all laid at the feet of Israel. It is all being done in service to Israel (and to whatever geopolitical and greedy interests that Israel serves for the US).
While Israel intentionally foments antisemitism, by inventing out of whole cloth (or false flagging) supposed incidents of antisemitism, it ignores the actual, virulent, antisemitism from the right, whether from US Christian fascists or antisemitic world leaders, because these antisemites support Israel. They admire Israel’s ethno-nationalism, and barbaric treatment of the people they have colonized, just as they want to do in their own countries (whether the US or India or Brazil). Israel enthusiastically partners with those who hate Jews, because Zionism has nothing to do with concern for Jews—its only focus is protecting their genocidal state. Israel does not care that Christian fascists only interest in Israel is in service to their apocalyptic biblical fantasies, which end with all Jews who don’t convert, burning forever.
What ideology or “state” or individual, who claims to care about Jews, would calls these antisemites their most valued partners?
Because Jews (who had not been considered white, historically, by the EUROPEANS–not Palestinians–who oppressed and tried to eliminate them), after the Holocaust, chose adjacency to white power, and chose, in Israel, to emulate Western colonialism, and because Israel served US imperial interests, the actual hatred of Jews by these fascist antisemites takes a back seat to the use that the these powerful, European antisemites could make of Israel, by partnering with it, in its crimes against humanity. Antisemitism has never been Israel’s enemy, but its most favored tool.
Zionists did not wish to build a home in the Middle East, but to totally dominate and destroy every vestige of its culture, and to replace it with Western culture, making it the West’s murderous outpost in the Middle East. Read about the history of how Zionists committed terrorist acts against Arab Jews and synagogues, in the Middle Eastern countries, in which they thrived, to scare them into moving to Palestine, for demographic reasons (everything Israel does is for demographic reasons). Read about how they bludgeoned the Arab-ness out of Arab Jews, as this was to be a Western project, to hell with it being in the Middle East. Ashkenazi Jews have NO connection of Palestine, other than it being the place they stole from the people who have a deep connection to the land. As we have recently seen, through the Jewish National Fund, Palestine’s native olive trees were replaced, for decades, with pine trees, to intentionally de-Arabize Palestine, and it is the presence of these non-native, flammable trees, that are the cause of the recent fires in NaziLand.
The statistic that Irfan pointed out that you pulled from your ass—that 99.5% of those against genocide (and being against genocide, and against the Occupation, the apartheid, the blockade, are exactly what the Free Palestine movement exists to oppose/dismantle) are antisemitic: since a large percentage of the pro-Palestine movement are Jewish, are you including us, as antisemites?
For those who think that Jews must have their own state, let’s be clear—do you think that Jews (or any group) have the inherent right to steal that land from the people who live there? And not to just live with them (and, note that the Palestinians welcomed in Jewish refugees from the Nazis, only to have their homes/lands/country stolen by these Jews who thought that Never Again, only applied to them), but to rape, murder/expel them, and to destroy every physical aspect of their culture.
Zionists, while committing every atrocity imaginable, are the butt of the world’s joke for claiming to be the eternal victims, while they mow over actual victims, mercilessly. But, even if it were true that these present-day Nazis (and I maintain that there is NO meaningful distinction between Zionism and Nazism) were the victims, does it make sense to gather all Jews in the world (who have fought and died for hundreds of years to attain safety and create lives, in the diaspora) into one space, where they can be easily targeted. Is the greed just that hypnotic that it trumps safety?
I won’t even get into the easily debunked nonsense that you, like every Zionist, has memorized and spit out, on cue. Irfan dealt with that, already. Every talking point was not only false, but contemptible. Unsurprisingly, for someone who does not have the capacity, will, or knowledge to argue in good faith, you even resorted to pinkwashing.
I will just note that it is exactly those of us who advocate for Palestine who are the ones who speak out about Sudan, and other victims of western imperialism. And, it is exactly those who support genocide who never mention Sudan, except in the disingenuous way that you did.
I am disgusted by any Jew, any citizen of the US, who does not speak out against the genocide (and, again, against the 100+ years of Zionist terrorism), and who does not speak out against what is being done in our name, and against our tax dollars are being spent for a demon, rogue entity (I don’t even want to dignify it, by calling it a state) to rape, plunder, murder, and destroy an entire civilization.
The hasbara train has gone entirely off the rails. The world knows that Nazis never disappeared, but resurfaced as Zionists, and they view Israelis as the barbarians, the destroyers that they are (poll after poll has demonstrated what demons almost the entire populace is), while they view Palestinians as the creators, the bravest population on earth (along with the Yemenis). Even if we activists never said a thing, as long as there is social media, the Zionists announce to the world, with abandon, their glee at being monsters. Which is why, of course, that the monsters do everything they can to crack down on social media, on activism, on everyone and everything that exposes Israel as the barbaric, terrorist entity that it is.
Markus, you need not die ignorant and in support of one of the greatest evils of human history. You don’t have to wonder how many of those you support will be in Hague’s version of the Nuremberg Trials’ glass box. You can get in touch with your conscience, and you can crack open books, and read articles, by writers who are not fascists. We are not wedded to our noxious ideas unless we want to be.
I will end with just 2 links from the thousands I’ve saved/shared:
1. If Israeli doctors are INDISTINGUISHABLE from Nazi doctors, what does this say about Israel?
There is a paywall, so insert this link, below, into https://archive.ph/, for the free, archived, version.
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/05/31/the-shame-of-israeli-medicine/
https://archive.ph/Z7Izp
From the article: One doctor confided to one of us that coworkers “withheld painkillers after invasive procedures, and then explained to colleagues that pain medication is a privilege that Palestinian detainees do not deserve.
2. Human Rights Council, “More than a human can bear”: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023; Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session58/a-hrc-58-crp-6.pdf
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Coming back to MacIntyre, I realize tonight that I still have not faced his passing. It seems finally to have hit me. It’s weird how much my motive for coming to Notre Dame was like Irfan’s, although I also thought I was coming to work on philosophy of religion with Plantinga. I had thought MacIntrye’s read of Kierkegaard must not be correct when I read his work and met him briefly as an undergraduate at Yale (he was visiting that year). I have a patient letter from him telling me why I was wrong. All of this ended up as the Kierkegaard After MacIntyre collection, with his response at the end. Like Irfan, I think Dependent Rational Animals was his greatest work. I also defended his narrative conception of personal identity in Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality (although I left him a copy, I’m not sure if he ever noticed this defense; it seems that by 2012, “MacIntrye studies” had become a bit of a cottage industry; I was not part of that, and wonder what he thought of it). Still, in a few brief email interactions, I asked him if he could possibly see his way to endorsing the existence of human rights. He would not. I still feel an awful sorrow over this, but I understand his integrity in sticking to his convictions.
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I second all that. My agenda in coming to Notre Dame was to press MacIntyre on two issues: foundationalism and rights. The argument over foundationalism foundered over differences in vocabulary and issues of conceptual commensurability. MacIntyre thought that analytic formulations of the problem of foundationalism were incommensurable with Aristotle’s account, and resisted my attempts to speak the language of “epistemic foundationalism.”
But on rights, we understood one another perfectly, and just disagreed at a deep substantive level. I think his view was ultimately that rights only had a rationale within what he regarded as the morally corrupt milieu of liberal modernity and the liberal State and corporation. Change the milieu, and the need for the concept disappears. Rights can be replaced with jus, which is incompatible with rights talk. We disagreed to the end on that, but as you say, his view had a coherence and integrity about it, and it was impossible not to learn something from engagement with him.
I actually wanted to talk about the MacIntyre industry with him as well, but we never did. I think he had legitimately mixed feelings, but we never actually talked about it. He told me very early on that he “tended not to collect disciples.” Around the same time, Mark Murphy, who had once been a Randian Objectivist, told me that he came to Notre Dame to become MacIntyre’s discipline. MacIntyre certainly collected a bunch after that! I wish we knew what he thought about it, but I could say that about a lot of things.
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