Voicing support for Palestinians doesn’t sound like a terribly irreparable ethical breach. But as Mediaite’s Caleb Howe points out, the letter actually says: “Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people.” Now we’re getting somewhere. Click on over to that petition and you find actual, if weak, justifications for Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage, which included chopping apart babies and raping women in addition to standard mass murder. “We stand,” say the signers, “with [the Palestinians’] anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation,” using the now-famous euphemism for making the land Judenrein by force. “Words alone,” we’re later told, “cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives.”

Thus we have our usual media translation: writers and artists call to kill the Jews, and the Times characterizes it as “protest[ing] Israel’s siege.”

[Is it my imagination, or is this getting a lot worse over the last four weeks? It certainly feels that way to me. — Ed]