librehab

Yassine Meskhout is a Moroccan-American lawyer who works primarily as a public defender. He also writes a blog on the side. As far as I can tell, he is an ex-Muslim, and he used to be some sort of leftist when he was younger, but now has receded to being more of a centrist liberal. He mentioned in a post written in 2019 that he "used to be part of a leftwing gun rights group".

Since October 7th of last year, he's posted the following pieces:

Nov 1st, 2023: The Jewish Conspiracy to Change My Mind
Dec 22nd, 2023: Follow-Up On That Jewish Conspiracy
Jul 21st, 2024: I don't know if it's really antisemitism, but I have nothing else

I've copy-pasted some of the more salient passages below (FYI, there are a lot of hyperlinks in the original posts that I did not copy over, so you should check the original posts):

Motte-and-Bailey: I admit, I never knew what ‘Zionist’ meant except as a grave denunciation yet the Zionist movement has been fairly transparent about its goals from its beginning in the 19th century. You could categorize its aim across a spectrum, simplified from least to most radical: 1) Jewish homeland somewhere, 2) Jewish homeland somewhere in the Levant, and 3) Exclusive and total Jewish domination of the entire Holy Land. Both pro & anti-Zionism labels have a strategic ambiguity that can be intentionally levered by any extremist wishing to blend in the crowd. There’s a similar dynamic with the Palestinian chant ‘From the river to the sea’, because is it calling for totally and completely erasing Israel from the map? Or is it simply advocating for a coexisting independent Palestine in both the West Bank (river) and Gaza (sea)? Whatever you want!

Orthogonal Violence: I’m not a pacifist, but anyone who decides to deploy violence as a tool should be extremely careful they’re not simply succumbing towards quenching a primeval bloodthirst. Any application of violence should be oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility...
In contrast, I find no justification for indiscriminate attacks on orthogonal targets. What exactly is the objective and how does murdering Olympic athletes, or bombing a discotheque, or bombing a pizzeria, or murdering bus passengers, or sniping a baby in a stroller get anyone closer to it?

No matter how righteous a cause might be, it will never be worth having this as one of its Wikipedia pages.

I don’t believe I’ve encountered anyone directly defending the strategic merits of indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks, or music festival mass shootings. Instead, I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn’t cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that “resistance” is justified through “any means necessary”. Hamas leadership parrot this argument, as seen in this rare moment where Ghazi Hamad breaks into English to say that as the victims in this conflict, anything they do is by definition justified. This view is beyond heinous, because it has no bounds. It posits an insane moral outlook that once someone is anointed as sufficiently oppressed, their actions — no matter what! — are indefinitely beyond reproach or scrutiny.

Israel has demonstrated a broader commitment to cosmopolitan multiculturalism, as illustrated by how the Temple Mount is governed. It’s the former site of the destroyed Second Temple (Judaism’s holiest site) which was later replaced by the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam’s third holiest site) and despite its central importance within Jewish lore, I was surprised to find out that Israel has prohibited all Jewish prayer since its takeover of the area in 1967 after the Six Day War. The Temple Mount area is governed by a religious committee composed only of Muslims members. I can’t fathom the countervailing scenario where Muslims are willing to prohibit prayers at Al-Aqsa.

Previously, I would roll my eyes at the reflexive refrain that any criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Jewish bigotry. I was generally skeptical of bare allegations of bigotry in any context (as a baseline), but particularly within Israeli discourse given the potential for nationalistic motives to skew reasoning. Some of my skepticism remains warranted, but I readily admit I had seriously underestimated the ambient level of anti-Jewish bigotry.

I feel like I’m insulting everyone’s intelligence here because they’re not even trying to hide it, otherwise why would anyone cite the expulsion of the Khaybar Jewish community by the Muslims in 628 CE supposedly to protest a country founded in 1948?

The Hamas-run show Tomorrow’s Pioneers aired the most deranged children’s television segment I have ever seen. In one episode, children sang about how qualified they are for martyrdom (can you believe it gets worse?) and in another, the actual children of Reem Riyashi are invited to sing a song written from their perspectives, about how it’s ok their mom couldn’t hug them on the last day they saw her…because her arm was too busy holding a bomb.
What’s the counter-argument here? Is the homicidal propaganda taken out of context? Is the claim that it’s not representative? Maybe that’s true, but how can you tell?

It’s baffling that anyone seriously believes the Palestinian cause is primarily motivated by someone’s great-great-grandparent losing their farm 75 years ago. Al-Aqsa Mosque imagery is inextricably linked with the broader messaging. Hamas names everything after it (TV, brigades, floods, etc.), and Israel’s administration of the Mosque itself remains a point of serious contention.

I did not revisit some personal interactions until recent events prompted otherwise. Whenever I visited my family back home in Morocco, no other topic generated as much acrimony as Israel. It’s a common trope for home families to worry their emigrated members will be brainwashed into secularism, and bizarrely the most scrutiny I ever received from them about my life in the United States wasn’t about whether I ate bacon or drank alcohol, but whether I was friends with any Jews.

Amnesty International is a widely respected international human rights advocacy organization that issued a fucking 280-page novel in 2022 lamenting the injustices of Israel's security barriers. They outline scores of legitimate concerns (which I’ll get to later) but across those hundreds of pages, not once does the report say anything about the rash of suicide bombings that prompted construction of the barriers and checkpoints. The only reference I could find was near the end on page 263 where they obliquely mention Israel justifies its policies on unspecified “security grounds”. Amnesty International can’t pretend to be ignorant here, as they already condemned the practice of Palestinian child suicide bombers in 2005...
Anyone who reads *only *this report (all 280 pages!) to educate themselves about the topic would be left with the bizarre and misleading impression that Israel chose to dedicate immense resources into building up an elaborate security apparatus because…they’re mean I guess?

I was shocked to find out that everyone’s favorite geographic chant has a *completely *different meaning in the original Arabic, conveniently transmogrifying “Palestine will be free” from the far less palatable “Palestine is Arab” in the original.