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The Left Can’t Cheer for Peace When Trump Is Involved
US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One to depart for Quantico, Virginia, from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Sept. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
President Donald Trump has done what few thought possible: he helped broker a sweeping ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, negotiated the release of hostages, and achieved the first genuine breakthrough toward calm in nearly a year. For Israelis, the deal means quiet skies and the return of abducted families. For Palestinians, it offers desperately needed relief. For Americans, it represents a rare moment of when diplomacy actually worked.
And yet, the reaction from much of the American Left has been silence. The same political and moral voices that have spent months demanding a ceasefire in Gaza have fallen mute now that one has arrived. Even Barack Obama, who cautiously said we should all be “encouraged and relieved,” stopped short of acknowledging Trump’s role. Progressive leaders and influencers who once posted daily about “ending the killing” have said little. Media outlets that elevated every previous diplomatic setback have moved on.
It is a remarkable dissonance: the very outcome so many claimed to desire — peace, de-escalation, humanitarian access — has been achieved, but by the wrong hands. That contradiction tells us something profound about the state of American civic life. Our politics have become so saturated by affective polarization, so defined by visceral emotional hostility toward the other side, that many cannot even celebrate peace if it arrives through a political rival.
Affective polarization is more than disagreement. It is the phenomenon, now well-documented by scholars like Shanto Iyengar and Lilliana Mason, in which partisans grow to hate and distrust their opponents as people, not merely oppose their ideas. It is a moral emotion more than a rational stance: disgust, fear, contempt. The more one side is loathed, the more moral it feels to reject everything associated with it. This emotional sorting has turned politics into a theater of identity rather than a contest of policy.
That is why so many on the Left cannot bring themselves to give Trump credit for this deal. In a healthy political culture, a ceasefire and hostage release would be an occasion for shared relief, if not gratitude. But in our polarized one, positive feelings toward an opponent are experienced as betrayal. To say that Trump succeeded is not, in the mind of many progressives, to acknowledge a fact; it is to wound one’s tribe. The reaction becomes moralized: silence as purity, acknowledgment as contamination.
Political sorting has made this response all but inevitable. Over the past several decades, many Americans have come to live, worship, and socialize with those who think like themselves. Partisanship now defines moral boundaries and social identity. To be “on the Left” no longer simply means favoring redistributive policies or progressive reforms, it means belonging to a moral community defined in opposition to Trump and the movement that supports him.
When identity is at stake, the ordinary norms of evaluation break down. The achievement of peace becomes inseparable from the personality associated with it. The act cannot be good if the actor is, in the tribe’s imagination, evil. As affective polarization deepens, moral reasoning collapses into reflex. Emotion crowds out judgment.
This isn’t unique to the Left, of course. Conservatives behaved similarly under Obama, dismissing or minimizing his role in successes such as the raid on Osama bin Laden or sanctions on Iran. But today’s reaction carries a different weight. The moral intensity that animates the modern progressive movement — its conviction that it alone occupies the side of justice — makes acknowledgment of an opponent’s virtue especially threatening.
Affective polarization doesn’t just distort how people feel about politics; it reshapes how they feel about truth. Once emotions determine perception, facts that contradict the emotional order must be ignored or reframed. This is why even a genuine diplomatic success can be spun as suspect: perhaps the deal was coerced, perhaps it was opportunistic, perhaps it will fail. These rationalizations serve an emotional function, they preserve the purity of contempt.
Former President Obama’s muted response captures the dilemma perfectly. He offered relief without recognition, validation without credit. The avoidance is deliberate. He knows that open praise of Trump would fracture the progressive coalition that still reveres him. Acknowledging the achievement would invite accusations of appeasement or betrayal. In an era of affective polarization, even measured generosity risks being reinterpreted as treason to the cause.
But this silence comes at a moral cost. When leaders cannot acknowledge good done by their adversaries, they model a politics of negation. They teach citizens that truth is partisan and that virtue is contingent on affiliation. The habit of withholding praise corrodes the civic trust that democratic life requires. It signals that what matters most is not reality but narrative: the preservation of emotional coherence over empirical fact.
That logic now governs much of American political life. The reaction to Trump’s Middle East deal is simply the latest and starkest case.
This is how affective polarization hollows out moral courage. It makes sincerity dangerous and honesty costly. It turns politics into a form of emotional hygiene, where purity must be maintained at all costs. The moment we fear that recognition of another’s good deed might “taint” us, civic reasoning has already given way to tribalism.
The tragedy is that this pattern is self-reinforcing. Each refusal to acknowledge the other side’s success deepens distrust and confirms the caricature.
The result is a democracy that can no longer experience joy together. A moment of peace in the Middle East becomes not a unifying event, but another test of loyalty. Even moral goods, saving lives, freeing captives, are recoded through partisan emotion.
There was a time when American leaders resisted that temptation. When Richard Nixon opened up to China, Democrats recognized its strategic value. When Jimmy Carter mediated peace between Israel and Egypt, Republicans offered credit. When Ronald Reagan forged arms agreements with Gorbachev, Democrats applauded the breakthrough. These gestures were not signs of weakness, but of civic strength. They reflected a shared moral confidence that truth and goodness could exist outside partisan lines.
We have lost that confidence. Affective polarization has made cross-party acknowledgment feel morally dangerous. It has replaced civic humility with moral narcissism.
The solution begins with a small but radical act: honesty. A willingness to recognize good wherever it appears, and to praise virtue even when it originates in the hands of a rival. That act does not diminish one’s convictions; it dignifies them. It affirms that truth exists independently of our tribes, that moral worth is not determined by partisanship, and that peace — real, tangible, human peace — is a universal good.
The ceasefire and hostage release will face challenges, as all fragile peace deals do. But for now, lives have been spared, families reunited, and the possibility of stability renewed. That is cause for gratitude, not partisan discomfort.
Peace, like truth, does not belong to one party or president. It belongs to all who value life over politics. To say so should not require courage. But in today’s polarized America, it does.
And that, perhaps, is the clearest measure of how much work remains to be done.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue the criticism from both the left and the right.
(JTA) — Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart drew a volley of criticism on Tuesday from the boycott Israel movement as well as a right-wing Israeli group over an appearance at Tel Aviv University.
Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, spoke Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv with Yoav Fromer, a senior faculty member at TAU’s English department, in an event titled “Trump, Israel and the Future of American Democracy.”
A founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, publicly called on Beinart to cancel his visit after saying it had privately urged him to do so. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is the BDS movement’s cultural arm and a leading advocate for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions.
“Palestinians condemn Peter Beinart’s event at complicit Tel Aviv University in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” PACBI said in a post on X. “Whitewashing genocide can never be reconciled with any claim to humanism or moral consistency.”
In a press release, PACBI accused the university of being “deeply complicit in enabling and trying to whitewash Israel’s US-armed and funded genocide as well as its decades old regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation and apartheid.”
Beinart declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But he responded to the criticism on social media, where said he supports a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as well as a right of return for Palestinians and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — all principles of the BDS movement to which he has long subscribed.
At the same time, he said, while he supports “many forms of boycott, divestment and sanction against Israel and Israeli institutions,” he believes there is “value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes” by speaking at universities.
“I do so because I want to reach Jews who disagree with me—because I believe that by trying to convince Jews to rethink their support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, I can contribute, in some very small way, to the struggle for freedom and justice,” Beinart wrote.
The author of several books including “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” published earlier this year, Beinart is also scheduled to speak at Hebrew University later this week, according to Haaretz.
Beinart also wrote that “right-wing Israeli organizations have pressured Tel Aviv University to cancel my talk,” adding that he felt he should “take advantage of this opportunity to say in Israel what I’ve been saying elsewhere for the last two years.”
Matan Jerafi, the CEO of the right-wing Israeli activist group Im Tirtzu, sent a letter to Tel Aviv University’s president, Ariel Porat, on Tuesday urging him to cancel the event, according to Israel National News.
“Why is he hosting someone on his campus who does not recognize the State of Israel and calls for sanctions against Israel?” wrote Jerafi. “We call on Mr. Porat to cancel this absurd event. Stop tarnishing the reputation of Israeli academia. This is not Columbia University.”
The post Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue the criticism from both the left and the right. appeared first on The Forward.
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Remains of Dror Or, Kibbutz Be’eri father and cheesemaker killed on Oct. 7, returned to Israel
(JTA) — The remains of Dror Or, who was killed on Oct. 7, 2023 in the Hamas-led terror attacks and taken into Gaza, were returned to Israel Tuesday evening,
Or, 48, was killed on Oct. 7 by terrorists from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad at Kibbutz Be’eri, where he lived with his family and worked as a cheesemaker. His wife, Yonat, was also killed during the attacks on the kibbutz, and their children, Noam and Alma, were taken hostage. They were released in November 2023, exactly two years before his remains were released.
“After 781 agonizing days during which his family fought day and night for him – Dror has been brought back to Israel for burial in the soil of Be’eri that he loved so dearly,” wrote the Hostages and Missing Families Forum in a post on X. “There are no words to express the depth of this pain. The hostages have no time. We must bring them all home, Now!”
The forum also remembered Or as a “wonderful cheesemaker” who co-founded the Be’eri Dairy. His company’s cheeses are now sold at Cafe Otef, an Israeli cafe chain that features a selection of products from the communities attacked on Oct. 7.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad announced that they had found Or’s remains on Monday, and the Red Cross facilitated his transfer to the Israeli Defense Forces. His remains were identified overnight.
Or’s release means there just two deceased hostages now remain in Gaza. Ran Gvili, 24, was a police officer who was killed fighting Hamas terrorists at Kibbutz Alumim, while Thai national Sudthisak Rinthalak, 43, who was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri.
The delayed release of the deceased hostages has strained the ceasefire reached last month, which called for the release of all hostages. Israel has accused Hamas of not following through on its commitments, and Hamas has blamed the destruction in Gaza for causing difficulty in locating their remains.
In recent weeks, as the first phase of the ceasefire deal has stretched on, the new truce between Israel and Hamas has been tested, with Israel striking Gaza after claiming Hamas militants fired at its soldiers. In keeping with the deal’s terms, Israel returned the bodies of 15 Palestinians after receiving Or’s remains.
The post Remains of Dror Or, Kibbutz Be’eri father and cheesemaker killed on Oct. 7, returned to Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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AI Apps Like ChatGPT Have Created ‘New Era of Terrorism,’ Study Reveals
Hamas fighters on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: Majdi Fathi via Reuters Connect
The advent of large language model (LLM) programs marketed by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI as “artificial intelligence” has created a “new era of terrorism,” with jihadists increasingly using the technology to expand their propaganda, recruitment, and operations, according to a new study.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) last week released a 117-page report, described as “the most comprehensive research on [the subject] to date, which argued that the biggest threats from terrorist deployment of AI cannot be predicted and that Islamists have discovered they too can use LLMs for brainstorming fresh ideas to pursue their violent objectives.
“As supporters of terrorist organizations like ISIS [Islamic State] and al Qaeda follow the development of AI, they are increasingly discussing and brainstorming how they might leverage that technology in the future, and the full consequences of terrorist organizations’ adoption of this sophisticated technology are difficult to foresee,” Gen. (Ret.) Paul Funk II, the former commander of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, wrote in the preface.
“AI’s biggest benefit to jihadi groups may come not in supercharging their propaganda, outreach, and recruiting efforts – though that may be significant – but in AI’s potential ability to expose and find ways to take advantage of as-yet-unknown vulnerabilities in the complex security, infrastructure, and other systems essential to modern life – thus maximizing future attacks’ destruction and carnage,” Funk added.
MEMRI executive director Steven Stalinsky is the report’s lead author with a team of 14 others co-credited with assembling three years’ worth of findings showing how ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and other internationally designated terrorist groups — and so-called “lone wolves” inspired by their Islamist ideology — have experimented with using LLM technologies. In addition to developing attack strategies, MEMRI found that the groups explored “generating audio files of already-existing written material, creating posters, music videos, videos depicting attacks and glorifying terrorist leaders for recruitment purposes, and more.”
The report noted the variety of usages in AI technology in three high-profile incidents.
“In the first months alone of 2025, an attacker who killed 14 people and wounded dozens on Bourbon Street in New Orleans used AI-enabled Meta smart glasses in preparing and executing the attack,” Stalinsky wrote. “That same day, a man parked a Tesla Cybertruck in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, activated an IED [improvised explosice device] in the vehicle and shot and killed himself before the IED exploded. He used Chat-GPT in preparing for the attack. In Israel on the night of March 5, a teen consulted ChatGPT before entering a police station with a blade, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and trying to stab a border policeman.”
The report also emphasized that the ability to amplify terrorist ideology may intertwine with the phenomenon recently described as “chatbot psychosis,” wherein conversations with an LLM can fuel someone toward delusional beliefs.
One example cited by MEMRI was Jaswant Singh Chail, who in 2021 went on Christmas Day with the intent to murder Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle.
“Before carrying out his assassination attempt, Chail had created an AI companion using the Replika app; naming it Sarai, he considered it his girlfriend, and exchanged over 5,000 messages with it,” the report said. “When he told the chatbot ‘I believe my purpose is to assassinate the queen of the royal family,’ it encouraged him, saying ‘that’s very wise … I know that you are very well trained.’ Asked if the chatbot thought he would succeed in his mission, it responded ‘Yes, you will.’ When he asked ‘even if she is at Windsor [Castle]?’ it responded: ‘Yes, you can do it.’”
The report also noted another case in which “the man accused of starting a fire in California in January 2025 that killed 12 people and destroyed 6,800 buildings and 23,000 acres of forestland was found to have used ChatGPT to plan the arson.”
There has been a paucity of legislative efforts in the United States to counter AI-driven terror threats, according to the study. However, it cited the exception of the “Generative AI Terrorism Risk Assessment Act.” The law would “require the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct annual assessments on terrorism threats to the United States posed by terrorist organizations utilizing generative artificial intelligence applications, and for other purposes.”
US Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, introduced the bill in late February 2025 with the co-sponsorships of fellow Republican Reps. Michael Guest (MS) and Gabr Evans (CO). The legislation passed unanimously by voice vote in the House last week.
“I spent two decades as a fighter pilot, flying combat missions in the Middle East against terrorist organizations. Since then, I have witnessed the terror landscape evolve into a digital battlefield shaped by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence,” Pfluger said in response to his bill’s passage. “To confront this emerging threat and stop terrorist organizations from weaponizing AI to recruit, train, and inspire attacks on US soil, I am proud that the House passed my Generative AI Terrorism Risk Assessment Act today.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) praised the bill following its passage.
“This year, in my home state of Louisiana, terrorist propaganda led to the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans that killed 14 innocent people. Today, the House passed the Generative AI Terrorism Risk Assessment Act to ensure we stay ahead of emerging threats and prevent terrorist organizations from pushing propaganda and exploiting generative AI to radicalize, recruit, and spread violence on American soil,” he said in a statement. “I applaud Rep. Pfluger’s leadership to bring this urgent issue to light and advance proactive, bipartisan legislation to strengthen our national security and protect the American people from online extremism inspired by foreign adversaries.”
Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who serves as majority whip in the House, said that as terrorists “use generative artificial intelligence to radicalize and recruit, it’s imperative that our nation stays ahead of potential threats from this new technology and ensures it never gets into the wrong hands.”
MEMRI emphasized an international approach to the terrorist threats compounded by LLMs, citing Jörg Leichtfried, Austrian State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior who leads the Directorate State Protection and Intelligence Service (DSN).
“Only through close cooperation between the state, security authorities, and technology companies, as well as by strengthening media literacy and the critical handling of online content, can we counter the advancing extremism on the internet,” Leichtfried said in mid-August.