In the last issue of The Spire Professor Joseph, who had chaired the October 25th “Violence in Israel and Palestine” panel, criticized an unnamed professor for injecting the terms barbarism and civilization into the discussion. I am the unnamed professor and I must respond to the grotesque mischaracterization of my argument provided by Professor Joseph.
Before I revisit my reference to barbarism and civilization, I need to restate my fundamental criticism of the event. Peace and Conflict Studies and Middle East Studies organized a panel of four speakers (originally 5, but one speaker could not attend due to illness) to discuss the war in Israel and Gaza. When organizers put together panels with multiple speakers on controversial issues they have an obligation, derivative from the character of a liberal arts education, to provide diverse perspectives so that students can see that an issue is complex, that reasonable people can disagree (hopefully respectfully) and that students are free to make up their own minds concerning the merits of differing arguments. If all speakers share the same moral and political values, even if they differ in the specific expertise they bring to the event, then the panel becomes a form of ideological indoctrination rather than a contribution to a liberal arts education. The onus for providing diverse perspectives falls on panel organizers, not individual participants on the panel, and I have no quarrel with the individual speakers. Some speakers provided useful background information that would have contributed to a reasonable discussion of the conflict, but that contribution was lost due to the flawed nature of the event as a whole.
Professor Joseph purports to share my perspective. “… a liberal arts education should seek to expose students to multiple perspectives. I share that view.” Actions, however, speak louder than words. If he truly shared my views he would never have organized and chaired such a one-sided event. Every speaker condemned Israel and favored the Palestinians. Furthermore, by prearrangement the first speaker from the audience was a student who read his manifesto condemning college administrators and faculty for not issuing harsh condemnations of Israel, followed by a Palestinian professor who harshly condemned Israel. By this point any pretense of an academic discussion was lost as the event became a pro-Palestinian pep rally. In his open letter to me Professor Joseph says that “a fellow faculty member critiqued what he perceived to be the pro-Palestinian bias of the panel…” Perceived to be? Professor Joseph insinuates that the pro-Palestinian character of the panel was only a matter of my flawed perception and not an objective fact about his event. The perspective that was missing from the event was a defense of Israel. Does Professor Joseph deny this? Any attempt to characterize the panel as balanced and having diverse perspectives is blatantly disingenuous.
Professor Joseph’s foremost objection to my comments is stated in the following manner “… then expressed the position that the violence in Israel and Palestine amounts to a conflict between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’.” This is an egregious distortion of my remarks. I never said or suggested that Palestinians were barbarians. I did say that the Hamas attacks on Israel were barbaric, but I do not conflate Hamas with Palestine. The Palestinians have historical grievances against Israel, and it is my hope that the Palestinians and Israelis will find a way to compromise, a two-state solution which allows peace between their peoples. My hope presupposes the humanity of the Palestinians and belies Professor Joseph’s suggestion that my rhetoric is inconsistent with “an acknowledgment of shared humanity.”
Hamas will never be part of such a solution because it calls for the destruction of Israel as a nation. If Hamas prevails in this conflict, it will lead to a second Holocaust. The Hamas attacks on October 7th targeted civilians, not only killed but tortured children, beheaded babies and other bestial acts. Professor Joseph calls the attacks “horrific,” I call them “barbaric.” But Professor Joseph and I differ profoundly, and this is not just a matter of semantics. He shows his own pro-Palestinian biases when he compares Israeli and Palestinian casualty figures. He concludes that more Palestinian children have died in Israeli attacks on Hamas than Israeli children died on Oct. 7th, so Israel is more blameworthy. He makes no distinction between the deliberate targeting of civilians and the lamentable death of civilians by militaries that target enemy combatants. Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields to protect their terrorists. Insofar as they do this, Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for civilian casualties in Gaza – a consideration Professor Joseph ignores. Humanity is not a birthright. We are only worthy of shared humanity if we act consistent with fundamental moral norms. Would Professor Joseph object to my failure to recognize shared humanity if I called Hitler a barbarian?
The Spire is not the best venue for debating interpretations of Aristotle, but Professor Joseph’s misunderstanding of this great thinker is even more profound than his misunderstanding of me.
Donald Brand
Professor of Political Science
The Spire 
Donald I fear you have been misinformed. As Kelly stated above, Google is a great resource for that would easily debunk your entire statement. I couldn’t imagine being a Professor and having the power to make students listen to you on the daily, and use that power to spread misinformation. I do hope you have researched since you have made that post.
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at some point, this has to be intentional propaganda and at this point I think we’ve crossed that threshold. At this point, I don’t believe Prof. Brand would pass half of the classes of the panelists.
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Please, someone stop Kelly before she says, “All Lives Matter.”
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There are many worrying aspects of Prof. Brand’s diatribe, none, perhaps, worse than his blind repeating of the claim that Hamas beheaded babies on October 7. A simple Google search would show this sensationalist reporting has been not been confirmed, even by the IDF. While Hamas militants did undertake brutal and violent actions against Israeli civilians, including killing Israeli children, it does not help the conversation to blindly repeat false claims. I would have hoped a Holy Cross Political Science professor would understand this.
Roughly 40% of the 11,000 Palestinians killed have been children. This is four times the total number of Israelis killed on October 7. Many more children are being operated on in besieged Gazan hospitals with no anesthesia. Half of the Palestinians in Gaza are now homeless. What Hamas did on October 7 was unspeakable. What Israel has done since is not “lamentable.” It, too, is unspeakable.
It is an alarming state of affairs when people in positions of power make claims about which children’s lives are more valuable.
Kelly Gillespie ’99
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You’re absolutely right, but there’s a million more ways Prof. Brand is wrong here you didn’t touch upon that I’d like to. For one, it’s not fair to demonize Hamas while simultaneously ignoring that the creation of Hamas is Israel’s fault. The founder of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin, was motivated into hatred of Israel after his village, Al-Jura, was decimated during the Nakba. Want to blame “barbarism” for October 7th? Blame Israel’s. Perhaps the panel was one-sided because you can’t “both-sides” an expansionist imperial state. Further, the statement that humanity is not a birthright, as a matter of fact, is something the N*zis would have loved to hear. The statement that evil is born, not modeled, was crucial to the N*zi propaganda against its enemies, just as it is crucial in the Israeli propaganda against Palestinians. As a matter of fact, it’s rather disrespectful to Jewish people as myself to imply the Holocaust just sort of happened becuase H*tler was just an evil bad guy, and there were no red flags or ways to avoid it. Evil actions are shaped and learned, justified or unjustified, just as it was shaped among Israelis when Netanyahu called Palestinians the children of darkness.
As evidence of my previous claim: “The Fürher’s verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely stupid, primitive, and amorphous.” (G*ebbels). “On this planet of ours human culture and civilization are indissolubly bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he should be exterminated or subjugated, then the dark shroud of a new barbarian era would enfold the earth.” (H*tler) Israel is literally borrowing from H*tler’s handbook. So bringing him up here is insanely ironic.
P.s.: Also, Israel states the goal of their bombings is damage, not precision. https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-gaza-bombing. So the claim that the deaths are on hamas for the few instances of human shields is preposterous in a logistical sense too.
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