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The reaction to the events of October 7 has made the growing radicalization of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—and, in particular, its indulgence of anti-Semitism—more clear than ever. And it has highlighted President Joe Biden’s role in resisting the leftward pull of those progressives, a stand of increasing importance not just for his party, but for the country as a whole.
In the early-morning hours of a Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, the terrorist group Hamas launched an unprovoked attack, committing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Civilians were intentionally targeted, and constituted the overwhelming majority of casualties. Israeli families were burned alive while hiding in their homes. People were decapitated. The bodies of babies were riddled with bullets. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking at a Senate hearing, told of a boy, 6, and a girl, 8, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast was cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed. “And then their executioners sat down and had a meal,” Blinken said. “That is what this society is dealing with.”
One survivor of Hamas’s attack on a music festival told PBS’s Nick Schifrin that the terrorists raped girls and then murdered them with knives. And after they did that, “they laughed. They always laughed … I can’t forget how they laughed.”
[Read: Why these progressives stopped helping Biden]
A video posted online showed a young woman, 22-year-old Shani Louk, “facedown in the bed of the truck with four militants, apparently being paraded through Gaza,” The Washington Post reported, as “one holds her hair while another raises a gun in the air and shouts, ‘Allahu akbar!’ A crowd follows the truck cheering. A boy spits in her hair.”
Shani Louk was later declared dead after forensic examiners found a bone fragment from her skull.
All told, the estimated Israeli death toll is nearly 1,200 in a country of less than 10 million; about 240 hostages, including dozens of children and the elderly, were taken. (About 110 have been released in exchange for nearly 250 Palestinian prisoners.)
The actions by Hamas were so vicious and so cruel that they defy human imagination. “The depravity of it is haunting,” an Israeli military official told CBS News of the scene in the Kfar Aza kibbutz. And yet sympathy for Israel began to fade in just a matter of days in some quarters in the U.S. It gave way to anti-Semitic ugliness, most of it found on the American left and yet only a slice of the spreading anti-Semitism we’re seeing across the globe.
We saw anti-Semitism in Philadelphia, where a restaurant, Goldie, was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli (the crowd chanted “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide”); in Queens, where hundreds of high-school students protested against a teacher who is Jewish and whose social-media profile photo showed her holding up an I Stand With Israel sign, forcing her to be moved to another part of the school; in Brooklyn, where a trio of young men beat up three Jewish strangers in separate attacks during a 40-minute “spree of hate crimes”; and in Times Square, where protesters cheered Israeli fatalities, made throat-slitting gestures, and flashed victory signs with their hands, a show of solidarity with Hamas.
Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a speech, “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on October 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in.”
“And yes,” he continued, “the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves; and, yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.” (He insists that these remarks have been taken out of context.)
CNN posted a story on anti-Semitic vandalism rattling Jewish communities: “An antisemitic phrase scrawled on a Holocaust survivor’s home in California. A display supporting Israeli hostages kicked over in Minnesota. Palestinian nationalist messaging spray-painted on a non-profit’s building in Rhode Island.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a Senate testimony that anti-Semitism in the U.S. is “a threat that is reaching, in some way, sort of historic levels.” He said that while Jews represent less than 3 percent of the population, they account for about 60 percent of all religious-based hate crimes.
On college campuses, a haven for progressives, anti-Semitic speech has skyrocketed. At Harvard, several student groups issued a statement after the attacks by Hamas saying that Israeli policies are “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” An Israeli Columbia student who confronted a woman ripping down posters of hostages was assaulted. A Cornell University student was charged with making threats against Jewish students on the campus.
A display outside the University of Minnesota’s Jewish student center showing the faces of several Israelis taken hostage by Hamas was reportedly kicked over and damaged. At Cooper Union in New York, pro-Palestinian protesters pounded on windows as Jewish students took shelter in a locked library. During a demonstration of solidarity for hostages held by Hamas, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst student was accused of punching a Jewish student holding an Israeli flag and then spitting on it. And at George Washington University, pro-Palestinian demonstrators projected slogans on to the side of a library, including Glory to our martyrs and Free Palestine from the river to the sea, a call for eliminating the Jewish state. Similar things have happened at other universities.
John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that rising anti-Semitism on college campuses is a “deep concern.”
Two weeks ago, in a moment that reverberated well beyond the academic world, the presidents of three of the most prestigious universities in America—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—were asked during a congressional hearing whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates these school’s rules on bullying and harassment. The answers by the presidents were lawyerly and evasive. One said it depended on “context.”
When University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill was pressed, she responded, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”
“‘Conduct’ meaning committing the act of genocide?” Republican Representative Elise Stefanik asked. “The speech is not harassment? This is unacceptable.” The comments by these three college presidents caused a firestorm of criticism that subsequent clarifications and apologies failed to dispel.
Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told Fox News that all three presidents should leave their posts. “You cannot call for the genocide of Jews, the genocide of any group of people, and not say that that’s harassment,” she said. Two days after the hearing, Magill resigned.
Jonathan Haidt, an NYU professor who has written strongly in favor of free speech on campus, says that he was most troubled by the double standard of the college presidents:
“What offends me is that since 2015, universities have been so quick to punish ‘microaggressions,’ including statements intended to be kind, if even one person from a favored group took offense,” Haidt wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “The presidents are now saying: ‘Jews are not a favored group, so offending or threatening Jews is not so bad. For Jews, it all depends on context.’ We might call this double standard ‘institutional anti-semitism.’” Yes, we might.
Many liberal Jews who considered themselves part of the progressive movement have felt betrayed by their left-wing allies—including Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America—since the October 7 massacre.
In Los Angeles, Rabbi Sharon Brous, whom The New York Times describes as “a well-known progressive activist who regularly criticizes the Israeli government,” told her congregants about the “existential loneliness” she and other Jews have felt since the Hamas attacks.
“The clear message from many people in the world, especially from our world—those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity—is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate,” she said.
Rabbi Brous’s sentiments are shared by others. Joanna Ware, the executive director of the Jewish Liberation Fund, a philanthropic group created in 2020, put it this way to the Times: “It has been painful to see some people I consider friends or comrades seeming to have a hard time empathizing with Israelis and, by extension, Jews in the United States.” And Daniel Sokatch, the CEO of the New Israel Fund, told the Times that it “felt like betrayal, not of us as allies, but of the values we all stand for.”
Last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, America’s highest-ranking Jewish elected official, delivered a deeply personal, 40-minute speech from the floor of the Senate explaining and condemning the wave of anti-Semitism we have witnessed since the attacks by Hamas. Schumer’s anguished words were primarily aimed at progressives and young people. The rising anti-Semitism, he said, isn’t coming from the far right but from “people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.”
“Not long ago, many of us marched together for Black and brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all,” Schumer said. “But apparently, in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.”
So how did we get to the point where progressives—those who define themselves as committed to social justice—would find themselves either reluctant to criticize, or in many cases expressing support for, Hamas? Hamas, after all, is a designated terrorist organization with a militant ideology and a charter endorsing genocide against the Jews. It persecutes LGBTQ people, systematically denies rights to women, and denies other basic political and legal rights to Gazans. But that doesn’t seem to bother many progressives.
For them, everything is understood through power differentials and identity politics. Israel is powerful and therefore an oppressor, which by definition makes the Jewish state evil; Palestinians are powerless and oppressed, which by definition makes their cause good. Israel can never be in the right, and Hamas can never be in the wrong.
One example: Knowing that a military response from Israeli was inevitable in the wake of savage attacks, Hamas encouraged Palestinian civilian casualties by using civilians as human shields. Hamas intentionally positions its military assets in civilian areas such as schoolyards and hospitals; it uses civilian infrastructure for its military purposes.
Yet the narrative of the left is that Israel, not Hamas, is guilty of “genocide.” And in their Orwellian world, Israel is itself responsible for the attacks it suffered.
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, in describing the thinking of what he calls the “illiberal left,” put it this way: “The legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed.” In his construct, murdering children or raping women isn’t intrinsically bad; its morality depends on who is doing the murdering and the raping. And those who are “privileged” are in no position to criticize those who are not. In addition, criticizing Hamas can only help the Zionist project, which is indefensible.
What this all means in practice is that, in the name of social justice, progressives are betraying social justice. They are imposing an ideological prism on life and events that leads to dehumanization, a hardness of heart, cruelty, and a lack of conscience. It also distorts history, including distorting the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which I wrote about last year.
One can of course criticize the policies of various Israeli governments and military tactics without being anti-Semitic. People who love Israel can be critical of policies of Israel. One can also have deep compassion for the suffering that the Palestinian people have endured for generations and sympathize with their longing for a homeland. But a fair reading of the historical record—or at least my own reading of the historical record—shows that the obstacle to a Palestinian homeland lies much more with a militant and corrupt Palestinian leadership, which has created a malignant political culture, than with Israel, which has frequently shown a willingness to surrender land for genuine peace.
Israel did so with Egypt in 1978 and Jordan in 1994, and has tried to do so with Palestine, including in 1967 when Israel offered to return the land it had captured during the war that year in exchange for peace and normal relations, an offer that was summarily rejected by Arab leaders meeting in Khartoum; and 2000, when Yasir Arafat rejected Israel’s offer of Palestinian statehood with east Jerusalem as its capital, the return of all of Gaza and virtually all the land in the West Bank, and the readmission of refugees to the new Palestinian state.
What is happening on the American left is a cautionary tale. Like MAGA world, it has been deformed by a toxic ideology that not only rejects inconvenient truths; it inverts morality in order to confirm its presuppositions. In the case of the left, its ideology—a mix of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory, what my Atlantic colleague Yascha Mounk calls the “identity synthesis”—has played a role in aligning itself with one of the most malevolent groups on the planet, whose savagery was on full display on October 7.
Unlike those progressives who sided with Hamas after October 7, President Biden has offered extraordinary support for Israel. Just hours after the attack, Biden said what Hamas did was an “appalling assault.” He went on to say that his “support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.” Biden was true to his word.
The president traveled to Tel Aviv—and within range of Hamas rockets—just weeks after the attack. It was a remarkable gesture of solidarity; so was his request for more than $14 billion in additional assistance for Israel. Virtually every public comment about Israel by Biden and his advisers has been supportive of the Jewish state, even as he has taken steps to provide $100 million in humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. (Differences have surfaced, though, between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over what happens in Gaza after the war ends, and the intensity with which the conflict is being waged.) Biden has spoken out forcefully against rising anti-Semitism in America. He said at a White House Hanukkah reception, “I am a Zionist.” No one who is familiar with Biden’s 50-year public career is surprised by his stance.
Shalom Lipner, who was an adviser to more than a half dozen Israeli prime ministers, said Biden was now more popular in Israel than the country’s own leaders. “This isn’t just from today; we’re looking at a history here,” Lipner told Peter Baker of The New York Times. “He’s always been there.” (One senator referred to Biden as “the only Catholic Jew.”)
Not surprisingly, Biden has been criticized within his own party for being too pro-Israel. Nearly half of Democrats disapprove of how Biden is handling the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to one recent poll, while another poll found that the percent of Democrats under 35 who believe that the Biden administration is too pro-Israel has doubled to 41 percent. These findings highlight the deep, intense divisions within his party over the war. (At anti-war protests young progressives chanted, “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide; you signed off on genocide.”) Yet Biden shows no signs of wavering.
During the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump said Joe Biden was “a helpless puppet of the radical left.” In fact he has mostly proved to be a bulwark against it. Many of the radical ideas being championed by the left prior to the 2020 election—the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, increasing the marginal tax rate to 70 percent, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, packing the Supreme Court, putting an end to the Electoral College, reparations for Black Americans—have not been embraced by Biden. Neither has defunding the police. Biden has asked for and received increases in defense spending, which is at a record level. Under Biden, domestic oil production is at an all-time high. He’s been a fierce advocate for Ukraine in its war against Russia. He strengthened NATO and played an essential role in adding Finland and Sweden to it.
For many years Joe Biden was seen as an “amiable lightweight.” His political career seemed over when, as vice president, he was passed over by his party, which nominated Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. But history had other things in mind. Biden looks to be the only person standing between Donald Trump and a second term that would pose a catastrophic threat to the republic. At the same time, he is also the key person resisting the pull of the progressive left on the Democratic Party. A person who was thought to be a transitional president is turning out to be a consequential one. An awful lot hinges on the man from Scranton.
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On the day after Israel’s stunning victory in the June 1967 war, Yitzhak Rabin reportedly wrote about the need to “turn the fruits of this war into peace.” Rabin, who as chief of staff had masterminded the strategy and tactics that made the Israel Defense Forces so remarkably successful, understood that a conflict that ends without peace is merely an interregnum until the next war breaks out. Israeli and American policy makers should heed this lesson as they think about the day after the war against Hamas in Gaza.
Significant differences already exist among the key parties. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks of taking on a long-term security responsibility in Gaza, and has seemingly ruled out the return of the Palestinian Authority to govern the territory. American President Joe Biden rejects any extended Israeli presence and argues for resuming efforts to create a two-state peace settlement. The U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, wants a revitalized Palestinian Authority to resume control over Gaza. The PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, agrees with Blinken but argues that this can happen only in the context of a broader deal. These leaders might find a way to paper over their disagreements in the immediate aftermath of the war, but missing is a common vision for how to transform the fighting’s outcome, which will probably see Hamas’s military capabilities and political ambitions sharply curtailed, into some more durable arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians.
[Graeme Wood: Why the most hated man in Israel might stay in power]
When thinking about the day after, we need to be mindful that actions now will affect options later. Israel’s stated intention to destroy Hamas—an unlikely prospect—suggests continued fighting, a worsening situation on the ground, and even more civilian casualties. Hamas’s survival strategy is to hang on and emerge as intact as possible when the fighting stops. These war aims, as mutually exclusive as they are, could amount to the same result: a very prolonged conflict. That makes the task of bringing the fighting to an end all the more urgent, once Israel has severely degraded Hamas’s capabilities.
Part of that task is to decide what arrangements cannot work and should be discarded—namely, the 2020 Trump plan. That proposal included permission for Israel to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank; a Palestinian state in a number of noncontiguous cantons in the West Bank; and a de facto right for Israel to decide when the Palestinian state could come into being. Not only is that plan a nonstarter, but its reappearance as the basis for talks, as some have suggested, would kill a peacemaking process before it even began. Instead, the parties need to embrace complexity and hard choices.
A phased diplomatic strategy is required, one that operates on two tiers. The first tier involves providing security inside Gaza after the fighting stops and setting up a transitional government until the Palestinian Authority can take over; the second tier includes a serious, sustained effort to bring an end to the occupation and the beginning of a two-state solution. Both elements in this diplomacy will require American leadership to convene and organize representation from Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Arab Quartet (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), as well as major European allies. Support from and consultation with the African Union and other regional bodies could lend credibility and broader consent to the effort.
The first focus must be on rebuilding Gaza to ensure security and stability, and to pave the way for restoring governance by the Palestinian Authority. This process will be laborious and delicate, and will take time to achieve. First comes deescalation, providing monitoring and accountability for an armistice, when that takes effect. In turn, the security arrangements must enable the restoration of basic law and order. Alongside this, humanitarian assistance must resume, with as much aid as possible delivered as quickly as possible. This delivery of aid must also assure all parties of its integrity—that it is supplying civilians, not resupplying terrorists. An international conference may be required to facilitate donor countries’ pledges of funds for the reconstruction of Gaza.
[Graeme Wood: The theory of Hamas’s catastrophic success]
This initial phase can draw on the thousands of Palestinian civil servants and police officers employed by the Palestinian Authority. Because they will not agree to operate under Israeli supervision, a United Nations body or other international group will need to oversee the provision of basic civic services. Israel will likely retain a military presence in Gaza during this phase, but will need to start planning a complete withdrawal of its forces.
The second phase will involve stabilization measures—for example, providing security mechanisms to reassure Israel that it can begin that withdrawal, and reconstruction projects that enable civilians to return to rebuilt homes. In this phase, a contact group representing the PLO, the Arab Quartet, and the UN should meet to discuss the principles and timeline of a transition to Palestinian Authority rule in Gaza. This group could also spin off council bodies: one to oversee public safety and order, and another to oversee the allocation of goods and services.
A third phase would see the Palestinian Authority begin to take over the governance of Gaza. The contact group’s members would need to establish an interim ruling body, agree on a schedule and process for handing over full authority to the PA, accelerate reconstruction, and explore a constitutional convention. The group would also begin a process of disarming Hamas fighters and reintegrating them into civilian life.
The transition from one phase to another will need to progress on an agreed timeline, so that Palestinians see their lives being rebuilt and Israelis see credible governance and security emerging.
[Read: Netanyahu should quit. The U.S. can help with that.]
Even if this ambitious agenda for Gaza meets this series of goals, that will not be enough to gain wide support among Palestinians and Arabs of other countries. If these transitional measures are the only thing happening, Palestinians will see this as a return to an unacceptable status quo: Israeli occupation and blockade, and the denial of their freedoms. A narrow approach limited to Gaza’s reconstruction will end up building an elaborate sand castle that will wash away as soon as the terrorists regroup, rearm, and renew attacks—this time against both the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
The only approach to “the day after” that could prove enduring is to turn the postwar situation into an opportunity for a political settlement that would end the occupation and give Palestinians an opportunity to achieve self-determination. In parallel to the stabilization and reconstruction efforts in Gaza, a peacemaking process must get under way.
President Biden should begin it by delivering a major speech laying out America’s approach to this process. He should declare his determination to move toward a two-state outcome and outline the significant actions the U.S. will undertake. These would include reversing the malign actions of the previous administration: reestablishing the American consulate general in East Jerusalem, to operate independently of the U.S. embassy, and reopening the PLO’s office in Washington, D.C. He should also announce an increase in assistance to the Palestinian Authority to help it redevelop its capacities. He should demand that Israel crack down on settler violence in the West Bank, desist from enabling evictions of Palestinians from residences in Jerusalem, and stop new settlement activity (beyond the blocs that have been identified in previous negotiations to remain Israeli territory in return for “swaps” of land in Israel of equal size and value).
The president should also use this address to insist that the Palestinian Authority end welfare payments to families of terrorists. He must also emphasize the PA’s responsibility to eradicate organized violence and prevent the emergence of violent groups in areas it controls. And he should push for the PA to hold fresh elections throughout the occupied territories as early as the reconstruction of Gaza practically permits. The president should close by stressing his administration’s renewed commitment to the principles established by previous rounds of diplomacy in the Israel-Palestine dispute since the Clinton parameters in 2000.
Biden’s plan, if he adopts this approach, will be unlikely to gain immediate support from the Israeli government, and may not from the Palestinian Authority either. But it will create a firm basis for American policy and diplomacy, laying down the terms for negotiations when they can be resumed.
As the Palestinian Authority’s governance in Gaza is being restored, the U.S. needs to turn back to the effort to help Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations normalize their relations with Israel. The U.S. could also signal a willingness to recognize Palestinian statehood provided that the PA shows it can reform itself and prove capable of running an independent nation.
All of this will be very hard to achieve. The Palestinian Authority barely governs in the West Bank, and assuming the responsibility of governing Gaza and controlling security there will be extremely challenging. The elderly President Abbas has shown no inclination to reform the PA, hold elections, or plan for who might succeed him. As for Israel, the postwar period will be preoccupied with a political reckoning over the intelligence and security failures that preceded October 7. Netanyahu will try to hang on to power, and he and his extremist coalition will return to their agenda of overhauling Israel’s judicial system and paving the way for annexation of the occupied territories. Israelis in general are unlikely to favor freezing settlements or engaging in a peace process with the Palestinians.
[Read: Why these progressives stopped helping Biden]
Soon also, Biden will be drawn into a hard-fought battle for reelection. The policy on Gaza and peace that I’m proposing will be controversial among American supporters of Israel; Republicans would probably seize on parts of it to attack the president. Some in Biden’s camp will see little near-term upside in adopting this approach during an election year. But Biden has exercised bold diplomacy in other parts of the world, and it can work here too—advancing the prospects of peace, ensuring Israeli security, and addressing Palestinian grievances. This will help rebuild support for his presidency among disaffected domestic constituencies as well as among foreign allies.
Only such a transformational approach holds the possibility, slim as it is, of changing the disastrous trajectory of Israeli-Palestinian relations. We all know what that looks like: continued occupation, repression, radicalization, and conflict, ensuring an endless cycle of the trauma and tragedy that these two peoples have experienced these past months. We have the choice to try something different.
www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2023 › 12 › murder-in-boston-hbo-review › 676338
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In October 1991, Mark Wahlberg’s erstwhile hip-hop crew, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, released “Wildside,” the second single from their debut studio album, Music for the People. The Boston group sampled Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” reinterpreting the rock classic as a rap anthem that warned of the dangers lurking in their New England hometown. With no surplus of elegance, the song’s third verse tackled the October 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, a crime that roiled the city: “Charles and his brother came up with a plan / Kill Carol, collect a big check / Blame it on a Black man. What the heck!”
“Wildside” was arguably the most hackneyed narration of that case, in which Carol’s husband, Charles, conspired to kill her for insurance money, then told the police that they’d been attacked by a Black man. (Both of the Stuarts were white.) But the Funky Bunch wasn’t the first to use the Stuart story as entertainment fodder. In the first year after Carol’s murder, there was a “special episode” of the reality-television series Rescue 911 (which included actual footage of the dying woman’s pregnant stomach), a made-for-TV film, and a Law & Order episode referencing the story. More crime shows and docudramas would follow. Even poems have been written about the case, and of course, it’s invoked in City on a Hill, the 2019 crime drama co–executive produced by Boston’s unofficial ambassador to Hollywood, Ben Affleck.
So what else could there be left to say about the Stuart murder? I was skeptical heading into a new HBO docuseries about the case. Considering the glut of true-crime productions now spanning every imaginable artistic medium, I anticipated another exploitative repackaging of a family’s public pain. But Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning is a worthwhile addition, largely because it resists two of the most common (and most troubling) impulses of true-crime narratives: relishing the gory specifics of a real human being’s violent death, and spending much of its run time on the psychology of a murderer. Instead, the three-part series revisits the notorious case with an eye toward how Charles Stuart’s initial accusation both relied on and intensified Boston’s stark racial divisions.
Even when it retreads widely publicized facts of the original crime, the care and depth with which the director, Jason Hehir, handles his hometown’s macabre history make the series feel insightful. Today, it suggests, Boston remains a liberal bastion perennially concerned about its racist branding yet seldom committed to undoing the structural discrimination that created that public image. In repeatedly underscoring how the racism of the city’s police force and media figured into the Stuart case, Murder in Boston reveals how vigilantism neglects the victims ostensibly being avenged, especially women.
Hehir is best known for directing The Last Dance, about Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls—another docuseries about a figure whose story has been retold repeatedly over decades. Murder in Boston offers a similarly modern—and more definitive—look at its main subjects. But where The Last Dance was sometimes constrained by Jordan’s input, Murder in Boston makes no attempt to soften valid criticisms of Boston, and certainly not of Charles Stuart. The first episode opens with the 911 call that Charles made the night Carol was shot, in which he told the police that they’d been attacked by a Black man in a tracksuit while on their way home from a birthing class at a downtown hospital. The inclusion of this archival clip, which comes before Charles’s involvement in his wife’s killing is presented in the second episode, underscores the cynicism of his ploy to pin the grisly crime on a phantom.
[Read: The gross spectacle of murder fandom]
But Murder in Boston isn’t a close read of a killer so much as an indictment of the people and the system that nearly exonerated him. By the time Charles Stuart’s brother Matthew confessed that Charles had actually orchestrated Carol’s death, the city’s Black residents had already suffered the devastating consequences of Charles’s convenient lie. As one New York Times op-ed from January 1990 outlines, the narrative of a “mad dog Black gunman” targeting an innocent “Camelot couple” had gripped the city. Then-Mayor Ray Flynn called for “every available detective” to be assigned to the Stuart case, and pledged to “get the animals responsible” for the attack. Republican politicians called for the return of the death penalty, which had been abolished in Massachusetts in 1984. Officers ramped up their stop-and-frisk campaigns in Boston’s Black neighborhoods, especially Mission Hill, where the police had found the Stuarts’ car the night of the attack. The media echoed Charles’s claim with little pushback, even following his public suicide the morning after his brother’s confession.
The documentary includes interviews with Dereck Jackson, a Mission Hill resident who was a teenager at the time of the murder. He looks visibly shaken as he describes how Boston police pushed him to identify Willie Bennett—one of two Black men wrongfully arrested in the case—as the killer. Bennett was exonerated shortly after Matthew Stuart informed the police of his brother Charles’s guilt, but the ordeal didn’t end there. Days after Charles’s suicide, The Boston Globe’s Mike Barnicle published multiple columns praising the police for their handling of the case and suggesting that Black political leaders were opportunistic in their defenses of Bennett. Later that year, Bennett was convicted of an unrelated robbery, for which he served 12 years in prison. The Boston police never admitted to mistreating Bennett in the Stuart case, and his family’s attempts to sue the city of Boston in federal and state courts earned them only $12,500 after years of litigation. Bennett’s mother died a few months after getting the money, having never received a public apology. His younger sister told the Globe that she had heard their mother reference the Stuart case in her last moments.
The irony of Boston’s immediate uproar over falsified incidences of “Black-on-white violence” is how easily real crimes like Charles Stuart’s then go uninterrogated. Even as the city’s police, media, and concerned white citizens clamored to express concerns about the safety of women and children, their racist hysteria created a blind spot that left victims like Carol and her unborn child unprotected. On this note, Murder in Boston does sometimes lose sight of the larger phenomenon of intimate-partner violence—in the United States, homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women. This omission was a consistent feature of the case’s media coverage: In the days after Charles’s suicide, Carol’s father told The Washington Post, “With all the stuff that is being reported, I wish somebody would say something about what a wonderful daughter we lost.”
The docuseries, which was produced in conjunction with an extensive investigation (and accompanying podcast) by The Boston Globe, is most revelatory when surfacing new findings and pointing out gaps in the original coverage. It paints a troubling picture of the city’s antipathy toward Black Bostonians, and spends significant time with the people who played a hand in stoking resentment or legitimizing Charles’s account: In one interview, a retired detective who worked the Stuart case insists that he regrets nothing about the police’s approach—and seems to even suggest that he still believes that Bennett was the murderer. A former Boston Herald journalist who covered the story speaks candidly about the regret she feels over not pushing harder to find sources who would’ve implicated Charles sooner. (By the time of Matthew Stuart’s confession to the police, days after his brother had falsely identified Willie Bennett as the attacker, 33 people knew that Charles had killed his wife, according to the Globe’s new investigation.) And through archival footage, Murder in Boston contrasts Mayor Flynn’s aggressive profiling in the first days of the case with the fact that incidents of racial violence appeared to have dramatically decreased early in his tenure.
The elapsed time between the murder and the documentary’s production grants it a gravity that many previous depictions of the Stuart case have lacked. For viewers already familiar with the case, or those less inclined to be surprised by racism in policing and media coverage, the new series also offers a rare look at how Black Bostonians have attempted to recover from that damage. It’s easy to look back now and condemn public misdeeds from three decades ago, but much of the devastation wrought then remains. In some of the documentary’s more affecting moments, Murder in Boston turns its attention to Mission Hill residents, Black journalists, and members of Willie Bennett’s family. Speaking about her uncle’s arrest and the police raid of his mother’s home, Bennett’s niece echoes her relatives’ sentiments about the lack of relief they feel: “If none of that would’ve happened,” she says, “I feel like my grandmother would’ve lived longer.”
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www.bbc.co.uk › sport › boxing › 67607260
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