Nicholas Kristof has done it again – again.

It must be nice to live inside his head, where difficult moral issues are never really faced -- but where he always maintains his self-image as deeply moral and caring

I admit it. I find Nicholas Kristof (and his ilk) infuriating — partly because I disagree with him on a number of important issues, but even more so because he always tries to make sure he comes across as a deeply caring and always-morally-just human being, while never really facing up to the difficult moral choices that sometimes must be faced in this world.

I also find him irksome, and not really deserving of intellectual respect, because of the way he described himself in his column last July about affirmative action. In that column he wrote:

“Before I make an argument about affirmative action, let me tell you how I was a beneficiary of it.

I wasn’t a student of color, but I grew up on a farm and attended a small, rural high school where there wasn’t much math and nobody had ever applied to an Ivy League college. My grades and scores were strong but not extraordinary.

But I did have one thing going for me. Elite colleges were looking for farm kids from low-income areas to provide diversity. So a school that I had never visited, Harvard, took an enormous risk and accepted me, and I became a token country bumpkin to round out a class of polished overachievers. In time, Harvard gave me a wonderful education, transformed my life and set me on a path to becoming a columnist.”

That self-description shares a lot in common with Dr. Claudine Gay’s reference to herself as a “first generation American child of Haitian immigrants.” I’ve asked a number of people to give me their impression of Gay’s background after reading that sentence to them. In all cases, they have said that they assume that Gay came from a poor and disadvantaged background. Of course, that isn’t true at all. Gay’s parents were professionals, her family back in Haiti was wealthy and influential, and she went to one of the most elite private high schools in the United States.

In Kristof’s case, I don’t think the term “country bumpkin” really applies to who he was back in that “small rural high school”. As described in his Wikipedia entry: “Born in Chicago, Kristof was raised in Yamhill, Oregon, the son of two professors at nearby Portland State University. Kristof graduated from Yamhill Carlton High School, where he was student body president and school newspaper editor. “ Given that Harvard was looking for “geographical diversity” at the time, taking a risk on Kristof wasn’t much of a risk at all. He may have lived on a farm, but his parents weren’t farmers — they were both professors – and he wasn’t a country bumpkin. Maybe some others at his high school were, but not him. Give me a break.

Anyway – on to Kristof’s latest exercise in expressing his caring. His column in this past Sunday’s opinion section was titled “What can we possibly say to the children of Gaza?”, with the sub-heading “Yes Israel has the right to defend itself, but that doesn’t excuse this many civilian deaths”.

So right from the start, Kristof is playing both sides. He acknowledges that Israel had to do SOMETHING after the barbaric attacks of Oct. 7, but of course, for someone as caring as Kristof, that “something” cannot result in “this many civilian deaths”.

I wonder how many civilian deaths Kristof WOULD consider not “too many”? HE DOESN’T SAY. And not because no one could give an exact number. He doesn’t even hint at what that number might be. Half as many as have died? A quarter as many? One-hundredth as many? I have no idea, and apparently neither does he. All he says is that it should be way fewer than the number that have died so far. He also doesn’t even define “children”. In most reports from this war, the word “child” refers to anyone 18 or younger – even if those people were terrorist combatants. What do you think, Nicholas? Should they be included in your figures that make the total “too many”? Or is ONE tragic case too many? For Kristof, that seems to be the case, as implied by his focus, in the column, on one particularly tragic case of an innocent girl terribly injured in the war. Her case IS tragic. It is sad that she was injured. But this is the terrible kind of thing that happens during a war. If Kristof thinks Israel was justified in doing SOMETHING, then he HAS TO BE accepting that the Israeli response is going to involve some terribly tragic injuries and losses of life (including to Israelis). But that seems to be something Kristof simply does not want to think about.

What is most infuriating is that Kristof (in his always-caring way of course) acknowledges that “Israel did not start this war. Instead, Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas in a rampage of murder, torture and rape. Any government would have struck back, and Hamas maximized the suffering of civilians by using them as human shields.”

But he then continues by writing: “Some will blame all this on Hamas: If it had not attacked Israeli civilians, there would be no Israeli bombing. That’s true, but to me it seems an evasion of moral responsibility.”

Yes – so “some” would blame it all on Hamas. But NOT Kristof! And those who do, according to Kristof are evading moral responsibility. Really? My question for Kristof is whether he thinks Hamas is AT ALL responsible. Even while noting that Hamas uses civilians, including children, as human shields, he never states that he thinks they are. Certainly he does not hold them AT ALL responsible for ENDING the conflict. At no point in the column does he make ANY reference to Hamas’s responsibility to release the hostages. At no point does he make any reference to Hamas continuing to fire missiles at Israeli civilian centers. Instead – he places all responsibility for ending the bloodshed on Israel and the United States. And he feels smugly quite confident about substituting his judgment for that of the military and political leaders of Israel in deciding exactly how Israel should be responding to the monstrous barbarism of Hamas and to the stated intention of Hamas to attack Israeli civilians again and again and again.

I’ve said it before, but will say it again. I don’t think that anyone who criticizes the Israeli response to Oct. 7, and anyone who is calling for a ceasefire now, without calling on Hamas to end ITS attacks and without calling on Hamas to release ALL the hostages is not worthy respect. But I guess I’m just not as empathetic and caring as Nicholas Kristof is.