Two Great Misunderstandings
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/05/opinion/jan-6-pardons.html?searchResultPosition=1
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/opinion/palestinians-israel-gaza.html?searchResultPosition=1
Today is January 6, 2025. Four years ago, you may remember, then- and soon-to-be-again President Donald Trump made a speech near the White House claiming falsely that he had won his bid for re-election (remember what all his supporters wrote on the Internet about “stopping the steal”).
Then, a large crowd of heavily armed (including guns) people moved toward the Capitol and stormed the undermanned police guarding our national symbol. This was not a peaceful demonstration as some have claimed. It was not a usual day of visitors on Capitol Hill. I have worked on Capitol Hill. I know what a usual day of visitors looks like. That was not it.
Rather, as is outlined in the first op-ed from The New York Times today by Aquilino Gonell, a former member of the Capitol Hill police, law enforcement officials died that day and in the days after. They were attacked with “flagpoles, metal bike racks, and projectiles.” They were hit with bear spray and they were beaten, some severely. Despite what Mr. Trump has intimated, many of the demonstrators had guns on the grounds of the Capitol. This meant that the crowd had come to do damage and that some planning had been done. This was no spontaneous demonstration incited by Mr. Trump. However, Mr. Trump did nothing to stop it for 187 minutes and was impeached for his behavior.
This was an insurrection in that it was an attempt to disrupt the normal order of the government as delineated in the Constitution. It was the very definition of an insurrection. You may believe that such action was warranted, but there is no doubt as to what it was. Those in the Southern states in 1861 thought the Civil War was warranted. That didn’t make it less of an insurrection.
Following this attack, there was a House Committee that investigated it that included two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Both are no longer members of Congress. Kinzinger retired. Cheney was primaried out of office by MAGA forces in Wyoming. Mr. Trump would like his new Justice Department to prosecute them and the rest of the House Committee despite the fact that all they were doing is their jobs.
I don’t care whether or not you like Mr. Trump. I also don’t care whether or not you believe he incited that riot on January 6, 2021. The riot occurred. It’s all there to see. Now, it seems, with Mr. Trump headed back to the White House, he may pardon many of those imprisoned for their behavior that January day. This would be a travesty of justice. They all had fair trials and there are more prosecutions scheduled. Hundreds of people were guilty of felonies. They need to pay their debt. They are not heroes and they are not hostages. They are, in essence, what soldiers of the Confederacy (and that includes Robert E. Lee who should have known better) once were. They are rebels.
Don’t let anyone tell you differently. This was an insurrection and those responsible must pay. If Trump lets them off, it “would be a desecration of justice.”
Here’s how Sergeant Gonell the author of the first op-ed put it:
“I do detest what MAGA extremism did to me and my team on Jan. 6. I resent the ongoing whitewashing of the barbarity and the collective amnesia of politicians who aren’t willing to hold Mr. Trump accountable.”
This brings me to the second article that really caused my blood to boil.
The author Khaled Elgindy is a senior fellow and director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute.
This is yet another article bemoaning the fate of the Palestinian people without even defining what a Palestinian is. It’s not a person from what was once the British Mandate of Palestine. It is an Arab who was born in that land or whose ancestors can trace their roots there. Two million Israeli citizens are Palestinians. They are not running to live in Gaza or the West Bank.
Much like the attempts to confuse people about January 6, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators on American university campuses as well as their many allies around the world forget the facts on the ground in an effort to fool the world.
Israel fought for its independence in the shadow of the Holocaust and became a sovereign nation in 1948. It was a war. Israel won.
Under the threat of existential annihilation by the combined forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967, the Israelis defeated these combatants in a war that left the Israelis with much of the territory formerly under Arab control including the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank.
Thanks to the late President Carter and the Yom Kippur War stalemate of 1973, Egypt got back the Sinai. Israel can never give back the Golan Heights from which they can be attacked. Most of the West Bank was offered to Yasser Arafat in 2000 by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton. Arafat said no and here we are.
In his op-ed, Elgindy makes his case for Palestinian hope. Frankly, I don’t see it and neither do most Israelis under the current conditions following October 7. However, Elgindy does raise the issue of the need for new leadership among the Palestinians to achieve the basis for hope. With that, I agree.
But let’s be clear. There was a riot on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. No amount of Republican hand waving can erase that.
Let’s also be clear. The Palestinian Arabs could have had a homeland 24 years ago. No amount of terrorism can erase that either.
History can trump a lot of Internet garbage.
