Oct. 2, 2024: The Veep Debate

First IDF casualties in Lebanon; Steve Kerr silent as Bibi kills dad's killers; Rosh Hashanah

---

---

A note to readers: Today’s edition is authored by Seth Barron, who will contribute to The Scroll regularly in the coming months, alongside others who will be introduced in due course. The Scroll’s Great Helmsman and Senior Writer Park MacDougald remains at the tiller, firmly guiding the newsletter through the rocks of deception, delusion, and propaganda. 

The Big Story

Vice presidential debates are never known for their fireworks. They tend to have a courtly, collegial vibe. There’s little point, after all, in charging forward to land direct attacks on the opponent when the real target is his principal. Debates between vice presidential contenders are like what the conversations between “seconds” in 18th-century duels might have been. It’s one thing to slaughter a sacrificial goat, but you wouldn’t want to go overboard in desecrating its corpse.

Sen. J.D. Vance, by all accounts, did a neat and efficient job in dispatching Kamala Harris’ chosen representative, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who evidently didn’t see the knife coming and barely felt it slip in. Virtually everyone pretending to have objectivity in the matter agreed that Vance won. Nicole Wallace of MSNBC, frustrated beyond reason by what she called Vance’s “audacity” in lying about Donald Trump’s record, demanded to know why someone—the moderators? Walz?—didn’t stop the debate and “drop that F-bomb” in outrage at what the son of the trailer park was doing to America’s favorite coach.

Wallace made a telling remark about Vance’s attempts to correct the record about illegal immigration, claiming:

I actually think if you’re a woman, that might be the worst moment J.D. Vance had, because he was going to mansplain right over that mute button. He was, and again, I don’t pretend to know how everyone will react to this. I think that a lot of women, in positions of authority that should command respect just by virtue of that dynamic, will see themselves and some do that, disrespected them and talk over, you know, I mean, there was a moment like that in the Harris-Pence debate.

Vance, according to Wallace, “mansplained” his point about the CBP One phone app—which migrants use to make their expedited asylum claims and gain immediate entrance to the United States—by “talking over” his muted microphone. But was he mansplaining to Walz, another man? Wallace referenced the supposedly defining moment in Kamala Harris’ career, when, in the 2020 vice presidential debate, she interrupted Mike Pence by saying, “I’m speaking. I’m speaking.” This moment, which her campaign desperately wanted to re-create in the Harris-Trump debate, was meant to reflect the contemporary woman’s refusal to take a conversational backseat.

(Sidenote: Everyone remembers Kamala Harris telling Mike Pence that she was speaking. But nobody remembers what it was she was trying to say. Unfortunately for the history of oratory, her next remark, once Pence ceded the floor, was, “I want to ask the American people, how calm were you when you were panicked about where you’re going to get your next roll of toilet paper?” Cicero, it ain’t.)

In any case, Gov. Walz seemed to be playing catch-up with Vance. Social media went ablaze with images of sad sack Walz’s goggle-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights expression of dread as Vance stole his folksy schtick. “Christ, have mercy,” he intoned when hearing that Walz’s son witnessed a shooting at a community center. “I’m sorry about that.” 

Vance also schooled Walz, allegedly a civics teacher, on the issue of censorship when he quoted the governor as insisting that “there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation,” which is plainly untrue. Walz countered by blurting, “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.” In fact, it isn’t. The case in question regarded a Jewish socialist in Philadelphia, in 1917, mailing out densely printed leaflets arguing against conscription. Decades of social studies teachers have cited this precise example as an instance of government overreach, and since the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio case it has been understood that it is not illegal to urge people to break the law. Walz’s credulity didn’t do a lot to promote him as ready for the national stage.

In the end, though, it’s unlikely that last night’s debate will mean much one way or the other. Snap viewer polls showed that the audience was largely split on who won. Most people probably leaned on their prior opinions and allowed confirmation bias to assign victory.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Alex Joffe explains how anthropology can help us understand the Oct. 7 massacres

---

The Rest

→Iran’s Tuesday ballistic-missile attack struck Israeli air bases but did minimal damage, according to an Israeli Air Force assessment, which deemed the attack “ineffective.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a Hebrew-language warning on X: “With God’s help, the blows of the uprising front will become stronger and more painful on the worn and rotting body of the Zionist regime.” Meanwhile, he remains cloistered in a “secure location” as Israel prepares its response—which may include attacks on nuclear sites or oil production facilities, or more political assassinations—and as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hunts for suspected moles within its ranks. U.S. President Joe Biden said Wednesday that the United States and other G7 countries oppose an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, telling reporters that the Israelis must respond “proportionally.” 

→Israel on Wednesday announced the names of eight IDF troops killed in battles with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon since the start of the ground offensive on Monday, including six Egoz commandos who died in a firefight in an unidentified village, per a report in The Times of Israel. Among those celebrating the Israeli casualties, as Jordan Schachtel observed on X, was the Arabic-language news site and Telegram channel Dearborn.org, headquartered in Dearborn, MI. In a Wednesday afternoon update, the channel crowed: “The Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance targeted … the Israeli enemy forces while they were moving inside the Shtula settlement with rocket weapons and hit them directly.” A video posted to the “Dearborn Area Community Members” Facebook page and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute showed large crowds at a Sunday vigil for Lebanon chanting, in Arabic, “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews! The Army of Muhammed will return!”

— PM

→Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff has been lauded for giving America a new “model of masculinity.” Time magazine praised him for being “gushy without being slavish, supportive but not submissive, a true partner but completely self-sufficient”; MSNBC’s Jen Psaki said that Emhoff has “reshaped” cultural ideas of manhood; and The New York Times argues that “we’ve never heard men wade this deeply into the intimate details of coupledom.” All this “New Man” stuff seems hard to assimilate with reports that Emhoff impregnated his mistress—a teacher in his children’s school—during his first marriage, and now with news that he slapped another ex-girlfriend in the face while waiting in a taxi line in Cannes, France, in 2012. Evidently thinking she was flirting with the valet, he drunkenly hit her so hard she was “spun around,” according to three of her friends, who spoke to the Daily Mail. It’s hard to imagine Kamala Harris accepting this kind of treatment, but perhaps the Second Gentleman has mellowed with age.

→Jewish institutions are on a tear, purging anti-Zionists from their ranks. A Hebrew teacher at a South Bend, Indiana, synagogue (where “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg earned his eternal nickname) described losing his gig after he attended an “All Out for Palestine” rally a few days after the Oct. 7 massacre. “Support for Israel and its government’s assault on Gaza appear to have become a defining feature of employability, and those Jewish professionals who are speaking out in solidarity with Palestinians are often finding themselves unemployed,” frets In These Times, a “Progressive” journal that has long allied itself with the anti-Zionist left.

→The aftermath of Hurricane Helene grows grislier as days pass. Images of an elderly couple stuck on a roof with their grandchild before being swept away by a flood were followed by news of a dozen factory workers who were overwhelmed by the waters. The deluge, reminiscent of some of the worst scenes of natural disasters in U.S. history, has horrified observers. The administration’s response has seemed less than urgent; President Biden insisted that he has spent a lot of time “on the phone” dealing with the situation, but he reserved his real outrage for Donald Trump’s insinuation that he’s been napping through it. “He’s lying,” Biden said. “I don’t know why he does this. And the reason I get so angry about it—I don’t care what he says about me—but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are.”

→Steve Kerr has had a legendary NBA career. He won five championship rings as a point guard for the Chicago Bulls and the San Antonio Spurs, then almost filled up his other hand by winning four more as coach of the Golden State Warriors. A lesser-known fact about Kerr, however, is that he was born in Beirut to a family with deep ties to the region. Kerr’s father, Malcolm Kerr, was president of the American University of Beirut when he was assassinated in 1984 outside his office by members of Islamic Jihad, an early alias for Hezbollah. In fact, a Washington, D.C., court ruled in 2003 in a wrongful death suit that Malcolm Kerr was killed “with the logistical and financial support of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which had “financed their operations, provided their weapons and other logistical support, and gave them sanctuary as needed to enable its agents to evade capture.” But, as Israeli Ynetnews reports, it is unlikely that Kerr will celebrate the death of Nasrallah and his cronies, much less thank Bibi Netanyahu for erasing his father’s likely killers, Ibrahim Aqil and Fuad Shukr, from the earth. Steve Kerr, more than any other NBA coach, has made woke politics part of his brand.

→Jews around the world (now numbering 15.8 million, though it’s hard to understand how 0.2% of the world’s population could command so much attention) are celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which begins tonight at sunset. The Scroll will not publish during the two days of the festival so we will back on Monday. We wish everyone—Jewish and otherwise—a sweet and prosperous year.

→Neither Joe Biden, nor doctor Jill Biden, nor Kamala Harris, nor Doug Emhoff, has yet mentioned the holiday. Former First Lady Melania Trump, however, posted the following message to X on Thursday afternoon:

— PM

---

TODAY IN TABLET:

Eternity Is Beneath My Feet, by Dara Horn

A mosaic on the Lower East Side by the late artist Mark Podwal shows who we are, and must be

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

Headhunters

How anthropology helps us understand the Oct. 7 massacres and the people who committed them

By Alex Joffe

I have a theory that Neolithic farmers occasionally took part in headhunting: the ritual practice of severing and preserving human heads. At various sites in Syria and the Levant, like Jericho, archaeologists found plastered and otherwise decorated skulls. Whereas most scholars believe that the skulls belonged to venerated ancestors, I and a few other archaeologists believe that these were victims of headhunting expeditions—ritualized violence. As in much later cultures, the skulls were artifacts of magic and power collected by deeply violent societies.

So here’s the thing: Hamas are headhunters.

If you’ve never seen a person beheaded I do not recommend it. There are several aspects, the sawing motion, which takes a good deal of time and effort, is one. But mostly there is the transformation of a human being into meat. And then there is the person doing the sawing.

There are many striking things about the full video of the Oct. 7 massacres, which I recently saw for the first time, many more than I can process in a few days. The death, the blood and gore, dramatic yet not, somehow banal, only by virtue of the unstaged, uncinematic, often silent, nature of the footage. The screaming and panic, unrehearsed, the scene uncomposed. Reality is chaotic but our human minds look for structure, for flow. We know the narrative, but a 45-minute video composed of clips in which 139 Israelis are murdered cannot provide that structure.

But the humans who executed the act were the most striking of all. They provide the structure. There are countless academic and literary explorations of “perpetrators.” These have undoubted value. But to see murderers, as we cannot see the Nazis, in full color, unrehearsed, is something nearly beyond comprehension.

The image of the headhunter epitomizes the exotic, faraway native in an uncharted land, whose stories are told by adventurers, travelers, and anthropologists. But what happens when that act is recorded and celebrated by the society itself? How do the rest of us judge and what conclusions can we draw?

It is easy to fall back on terms like primitive, meaning crude or ancestral. The instinct is to separate ourselves as quickly and completely as possibly from those who undertake acts that are practically unthinkable to us. And yet here they are. Taking a man’s head and then carrying it off is the most inexplicable thing I’ve ever seen. The joyousness though—no, the mixture of total glee and total matter of factness, that is the real crux of the matter.

One thing I haven’t figured out about the Neolithic headhunters is whether the practice was the religion itself or just a part of their culture. What is the relationship between religion and culture anyway?

You could conclude from the Oct. 7 video that the slaughter was a religious act: not a form of extremism, but absolutely routine hatred that has nothing to do with land and everything to do with Jews. The cosmic affront to the attackers’ orthodoxy posed by Jews with dignity, sovereignty, and power, causes them to cry out in pain and, at the moment of their triumph, in celebration, constantly, as if it were the only phrase they know: Allahu akbar—the most frequently heard term throughout the video. The Jew’s magical power has not only been conquered, but absorbed.

Or you could conclude it’s culture: habitual behavior and violence. The routineness of the exercise leads them to casually or even with annoyance, instruct each other to get on with it and shoot women hiding in a room. In the head, they repeat, in the head. Or to kill a man with a grenade and take a bottle from the refrigerator while his two sons shriek in the same room, close the refrigerator door—because that is what one does with a refrigerator door—and then walk out. And the radioed instructions to crucify victims in order for crowds to abuse their bodies, simply part of the job. They are playing with the head, the radio voices report. Routine.

To see it all unfold, from the initial attack to the slaughter to the taking and abuse of captives is to see an updated version of a classic razzia of the seventh century and later. The tribal honor accrued is frankly reflected in the excited phone call made by one participant to his father—he exclaimed that he had killed 10 Jews with his own hands. He then demanded his mother be put on the phone and repeated the claim as she wept with happiness.

This is not brainwashing or extremism. It is casual orthodoxy. The end of the Jews of the Banu Qurayza beheaded in 627—just the males, “those over whom the razors had passed,” the women and children were sold as slaves—effectively ending Judaism in northern Arabia. In southern Israel, the head of an already dead Jew is a good start.

***

But to see it happen, recorded by the perpetrators themselves—that empty word again—standing in for so much, including the most inexplicable act of violence one person can perpetrate against another, puts the events in another category. It puts the people in another category.

Normative language used to describe let alone make sense of these acts is completely inadequate, as it refers to an entirely different reality, and is therefore misleading. The ban on using atavistic language prevents us from plainly describing reality. But anthropologists should have no such misplaced scruples.

Primitive? We may dismiss that phrase despite the appeal. Animals? Also too easy. Subhuman? Another pejorative. All these terms remove human agency, willfulness, glee, obedience, structure, intent.

Headhunters. Anthropological descriptions of headhunting are clinical and nonjudgmental, which is useful, at least initially, in understanding what is before us.

Headhunting globally had many purposes or meanings centered around ancestors and enemies. In Borneo decapitation was the beginning of a long relationship between the perpetrator and the deceased, who became a kind of venerated guest. In Iron Age Europe there was a relationship between the taking of human heads and natural fertility, as their bones are sometimes commingled in deposits with those of animals. But this is complemented by a more base militarism connected to emerging structures of authority that encouraged dehumanization and brutality. I think this is how it worked in the Neolithic era of the Near East.

And of course it happens in war (Japanese officers loved their swords). And to prisoners (think William Wallace and Cromwell). Nineteenth-century Montenegrins going into battle would have a pact to take each other’s head so as not to be buried by the enemy. And then there’s anthropology and archaeology (grave-robbing for science!). There is always a system. But what drives the system?

As practiced in Gaza, headhunting as ritual violence entails enacting, preferably for the camera, multiple deaths, one of the living Jew and another of the dead Jew. Humiliating the individual and, by broadcasting those deaths at home and to others as part of continuing celebrations, targeting the Jewish collective; by holding, torturing and finally killing hostages, and hiding their bodies for the possibility of later exchange, prolonging death.

Death is a continuing, unfolding, unending process. The object of headhunting is not, as in some anthropologically attested cultures, to steal the power of the defeated enemy, or to hold the head as a trophy of a battle glorious. It is to enact and reenact deaths, to steal life from the living who learn of the acts. It is the pinnacle act of torture that underpins their own society, which also trumpets its own welcoming of death, as if there is a death competition which they must win, some calculus of killing and dying/dying and killing. In that sense headhunting is cosmological; it is punishment and sacrifice that sustains a universe. So is it religion? Then what about the ritual defacement of hostage posters, the Upper West Side’s kinder, gentler form of beheading?

Stealing dead bodies which are gleefully abused by civilians—a term that makes too much of a moral distinction, especially as they film themselves stomping and cursing dead bodies—or hidden as currency, transports death into the heart of their society. It provides sustenance, while the quantum uncertainty of death/not death tortures the living.

Are headhunters like us? Neolithic headhunters, were there indeed any, were people in the act of becoming fully human. Separating themselves from the animal world through self-awareness and action was accomplished by growing food, creating villages, and enacting horrific violence upon one another for no particular reason except that they could. All things that animals cannot do. Well, except hunt together. So perhaps a link to the animal world.

Certainly ethnographically attested headhunters saw this specific act of violence, as well as murder and torture generally, as natural means to maintain the sense of difference from one another. You capture others for fun and profit and to make a point, then torture, enslave and murder them. This is part, although not all, of maintaining the self. Sometimes you eat them just to make a point, or if you’re hungry (see under, man corn, the Nahuatl word tlacatlaolli). They were fully human in the sense of being bipeds with cultures, stories, looking to the skies for clues or instructions. The people they killed were too, but that commonality meant little to nothing. Like us but not like us.

How then do we categorize Hamas headhunters? Religion has been stressed, as has the absolute centrality of death. This is not a mere ideology, an argument that can be replaced by a better argument—more complete, more logical, more parsimonious; it is essential, constitutive. We love death, they always say, we raise our children to be martyrs, the mothers proudly announce. Indeed they do, the flip side being the willingness to saw off people’s heads and steal them. So, culture?

Violence, blood, feuds, abuse of women, children and animals, these have always been present in Palestinian society, as they are in most patriarchal, theocratic, and authoritarian societies. But something is different: the glee, not of the id temporarily unleashed (who remembers My Lai, or necklaces of ears, raise your hand), but the id triumphant, the superego gone who knows where.

That’s still not it. The entire superstructure services the id, looting, murder, rape, in this life and the next, those are the supreme goals.

You see a person beheaded and nothing makes much sense after that, unless it makes a certain kind of terrible sense. As a system.

Well, they’re all dead. All the faces of all the Hamasniks, laughing, yelling, talking, shooting, they percolate through databases that lead only to their deaths, now or later, on the battlefield or below, from a 5.56 mm round or a munition of greater or lesser power, or merely over time, in a cell, alas. Stamping out the headhunters and their cults is how the world was won, and rightly so.

The headhunting instinct, however, is intrinsic to orthodoxy, and erupts periodically worldwide. Falling upon the neck is increasingly popular as an orthodox solution, for example in France (look up Samuel Paty, or just ask Salman Rushdie). After the video I tried to explain this to a state attorney general, that it’s not “hate” or extremism; that orthodoxy is here, in this country and his state. He said he was still educating himself.

Headhunting and its discontents, something I never thought I would have to think about except as a contrarian prehistorian, from a safe remove of 10,000 years, now collapsing in on me, much less try to explain something that took place 20 miles from my sister’s house. Headhunters are not like us. Scratch away the present and it looks a lot like the past, but there are different paths to us and them.