Mika Tosca, an associate professor of climate science at the University of California , Irvine, apologized last week for calling Israelis “pigs” and “savages” in an Oct. 17 Instagram story. The professor said it was wrong to have called a country full of people “irredeemable excrement” and a mistake to type, “May you rot in hell.”

The apology is twice as long as the original invective. As with most publicly issued apologies that smack of crisis-management craftsmanship, it is a wordy awareness declaration that leaves the aggressor, rather than the target, feeling restored.

Not everyone who posts shocking displays of human failing online apologizes, so it is tempting to celebrate when it happens. This is not one of those times.

“I allowed my reaction to the violence in Israel and Palestine to take an inappropriate and offensive form,” Tosca explained, suggesting the post was an uncontrolled outburst and failing to explain the absence of the same irrepressible passion after Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.

“I recognize that my harmful words are an unfortunate distraction from what I feel deep in my heart,” the statement reads, in an effort to disconnect the writer from the work.

Tosca desperately misses the point. Jews and Israelis are not “hurt” by derogatory words one professor stole from Islamist literature and economist Paul Krugman. We all got a reality check on the definition of the word “hurt” when we watched Hamas terrorists’ body camera footage as they raped, tortured, and killed innocent civilians. That is pain. What right-thinking people feel when people such as Tosca virtue-signal with their moral inversion online isn’t “hurt” — it’s rage and disgust.

The “hurt” caused by this professor is self-directed. Thoughts that dark degrade the soul. The need to share them publicly is a devastating personal indictment. If there is regret, it should be that neither adulthood nor an elite Western education created firewalls of responsible thinking between Tosca’s worst impulses and the narcissistic desire to broadcast them online, as though they were worthy of an airing.

The remedy is within, not in a public relations post. Israelis and Jews don’t need this day-after declaration. The best apology would be to get off social media — to spend less time speaking out and more time quietly investigating the depths of one’s own brokenness so that no matter how exercised Tosca becomes by future world events, we won’t have to be subjected to another apology.

Rebecca Sugar is a writer living in New York. Her column, The Cocktail Party Contrarian, appears every other Friday in the New York Sun.