Today on The Editors, Rich is joined by Noah, Charlie, and Jim to discuss the horrors that unfolded in Israel over the weekend. Rich asks Noah about the atrocious statements we’re seeing from those in academia.

“It’s no surprise to me,” Noah said, “that we see this rhetoric coming out of young, well-heeled, very educated Americans, because this is the sort of thing that you can only convince yourself of if you’ve subordinated all rationality to a series of intellectual exercises.”

That these people believe the perpetrators “are just carried along in the tides of history” and “see no agency in the people who shot seniors at bus stops and decapitate children and burn people alive in their homes and use rape as a weapon of war” is incomprehensible.

This position is “the sort of thing that you have to rationalize yourself into. You have to subordinate your humanity to it,” Noah says. “. . . Only if you have marinated in what passes for logic in academia among academicians can you convince yourself that this kind of brutality is justified by some historical grievance or another.”

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