After a year of “studying”, Konstantin Kisin is still ignorant.

By Colter Louwerse

Konstantin Kisin, a conservative pundit, “satirist”, and co-host of the popular TRIGGERnometry podcast, has a self-proclaimed “lack of interest” in, and “ignorance” of, the Israel-Palestine conflict. Ignorance did not deter him, however, from putting out a video a few days ago—already viewed millions of times on Twitter—announcing he has “come off the fence” about October 7 and Israel’s war on Gaza. After a year of open-minded study, listening to “prominent pro-Palestine guests” like Norman Finkelstein, and carefully applying “first-principles thinking”, he’s concluded that “anti-Israel arguments” are “disingenuous”, “irrelevant”, and “designed…  to obscure the hard reality of this conflict: we would respond exactly the way Israel has”.

How did “first-principles thinking”—moving past the “emotional context” to “see the structure of an argument”—inform Kisin’s analysis of the Israel-Gaza conflict? “The obvious approach”, he asserts, is to compare the October 7 attacks to “other terrorist attacks in recent history”. Unfortunately, this is an “impossible project” because “on a proportionate basis, the Western world has never experienced an attack of this scale”:

If we take 9/11, the most impactful terrorist attack in living memory … we see that 2,977 people were killed in a country of 285 million people. On October 7, approximately 1,200 people were killed in a country of 9 million people. 

People keep calling October 7 Israel’s 9/11, but that isn’t remotely true. If October 7 was Israel’s 9/11, on a per capita basis, only 100 people would have been killed. In other words, October 7 was at least 12 times as bad as 9/11. 

Kisin points out that, adjusting on a per-capita basis, October 7th would have killed 36,000 Americans! “How would America have reacted?”

Fair enough. But of course, Kisin discards the other half of the equation: Palestinian casualties. If the United States is Kisin’s metric, if we assume Palestinians aren’t subhuman scum, and if we adjust the casualties of both sides on a per-capita basis, then what does it mean for Israel to have killed 42,000 Palestinians since October 7 in a territory of just 2.1 million people? 

It turns out that, if Israel’s assault on Gaza had occurred in the United States c. 2001, it would have killed close to 5,500,000 people. 

Put otherwise: applying Kisin’s logic across the board, on October 7, Hamas committed an unprecedented terrorist massacre…  and Israel responded by perpetrating a Holocaust. 

So much, then, for “first-principles thinking”.