While taking a solitary hike a few days ago, Eve Barlow espied a former friend, someone who had turned to her many times for advice and encouragement, but had for over a year given her the cold shoulder. Their falling-out occurred because Barlow was anathematized by the liberal journalistic circles in which both women traveled. Her sin? Criticizing the anti-Semitism within the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020, and some of the other excesses of that moment. She reflects on the experience of being cancelled just when her star as a writer was on the rise:

The weekend of the initial BLM protests in Los Angeles, synagogues were vandalized, . . . and I put my foot in it. I tweeted “How dare you,” and all hell broke loose.

It was decreed that I was a racist by my entire industry. And I remember talking to this [same friend], and talking to my former editor at [the men’s magazine] GQ, who elicited empathy towards me but said that I’d had a “mini yikes” moment. Meanwhile everyone else was having a major yikes moment, in my opinion, becoming indoctrinated en masse.

Slowly but surely, the Internet began celebrating its hatred of me. People I’d known for years, who [had long curried my favor], turned on a knife’s edge against me—and with glee. The editor of [the influential music company] Bandcamp wrote some heinous bile about me being a hysterical mad woman; ironic given her affinity for feminism. A few months went by and I realized that I was no longer receiving the round-robin record-review emails from the editors at [the music-criticism website] Pitchfork, and . . . I noticed that all the staff writers, and my editor, had stopped following me [on social media].

The entire staff at Vulture unfollowed me if not on the same day, definitely within days of each other. I wish I knew if it was the same day, and I wouldn’t doubt there wasn’t some directive about it.

On Wednesday, Elliott Abrams testified before Congress about the Taylor Force Act, passed in 2018 to withhold U.S. funds from the Palestinian Authority (PA) so long as it continues to reward terrorists and their families with cash. Abrams cites several factors explaining the sharp increase in Palestinian terrorism this year, among them Iran’s attempt to wage proxy war on Israel; another is the “Palestinian Authority’s continuing refusal to fight terrorism.” (Video is available at the link below.)

As long as the “pay for slay” system continues, the message to Palestinians is that terrorists should be honored and rewarded. And indeed year after year, the PA honors individuals who have committed acts of terror by naming plazas or schools after them or announcing what heroes they are or were.

There are clear alternatives to “pay to slay.” It would be reasonable for the PA to say that, whatever the crime committed, the criminal’s family and children should not suffer for it. The PA could have implemented a welfare-based system, a system of family allowances based on the number of children—as one example. It has steadfastly refused to do so, precisely because such a system would no longer honor and reward terrorists based on the seriousness of their crimes.

These efforts, like the act itself, are not at all meant to diminish assistance to the Palestinian people. Rather, they are efforts to direct aid to the Palestinian people rather than to convicted terrorists. . . . [T]he Taylor Force Act does not stop U.S. assistance to Palestinians, but keeps it out of hands in the PA that are channels for paying rewards for terror.

[S]hould the United States continue to aid the Palestinian security forces? My answer is yes, and I note that it is also the answer of Israel and Jordan. As I’ve noted, PA efforts against Hamas or other groups may be self-interested—fights among rivals, not principled fights against terrorism. Yet they can have the same effect of lessening the Iranian-backed terrorism committed by Palestinian groups that Iran supports.