More than 1,300 innocent Israelis killed, including at least thirty-one American citizens, by the terrorist group Hamas. Hundreds — hundreds of young people at a music festival of — the festival was for peace — for peace — gunned down as they ran for their lives. Scores of innocents — from infants to elderly grandparents, Israelis and Americans — taken hostage. Children slaughtered. Babies slaughtered. Entire families massacred. Rape, beheadings, bodies burned alive. Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period.
— President Biden in remarks from Tel Aviv (October 18, 2023)
Here is the last circle of depravity: the slaughter of children. Infants. At this writing, the details of their slaughter are being disputed the way straws are grasped at, but the fact of it remains. Imagine what they must have felt — bewildered innocents in the hands of savage throwbacks. Yet within twenty-four hours, the mentality of the savage throwback had announced itself far and wide across the modern world. In some of the less modern precincts, ill-fitting enlightenment gave way to comfortable darkness. In exceedingly modern precincts, the civilized person's transcendent abhorrence of infanticide was overtopped by political fervor.
Many of our peers worldwide have expressed strong opposition to Hamas's attack and have offered unambiguous support for its victims. Prominent voices in the Arab world, too, have made it clear that there is no justification for sadistic murder of innocent people. However, to our dismay, some elements within the global left, individuals who were, until now, our political partners, have reacted with indifference to these horrific events and sometimes even justified Hamas's actions.
— Statement on Behalf of Israel-based Progressives and Peace Activists Regarding Debates over Recent Events in Our Region (October 16, 2023)
Western civilization has its liberals. It has its progressives, of whom I am one. And then there is the Left, too great of brain for civilization to compass. If you're not of the Left, or if you are of it but still in possession of your humanity, please don't trouble yourself to read on. What follows is addressed to those who carry water for jihadists.
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Since October 7, 2023, you've backed up sadistic fiends with the catchphrase, "by any means necessary." A wanton phrase. Before using words like means and necessary in reference to the slaughter of innocents, better call home and consult those who've known you all your life. There must have been a time when you wouldn't have believed you'd ever hear yourself say that killing babies was a necessary means to any end under the sun. This is not a subject on which decent human beings, be they ever so worldly, consider the context. What happened? Let's put our Gentile heads together and go through the explanations and contributing factors that come to mind.
First we need to account for the Left's inordinate interest in Palestinians as compared with Uyghurs or Armenians or the black population in Darfur. Mary Harrington lays her finger on the central piece of the puzzle, a certain blind spot:
And the size and ubiquity of this blind spot on the Left is best explained not by hatred of Jews (or not only by such hatred), but by the outsized symbolic role Israel plays as a proxy for American geopolitical hegemony.
For a Left animated by the old clockwork of Leninist aims and tactics, a focus on the Palestinians has not only the positive virtue of feeding into anti-American agitation, but also the negative virtue of not feeding into agitation against communist China or against the Muslim oppressors of blacks in Darfur (which would disturb the useful illusion of Muslim-black solidarity). That explains the political basis of the Left's absorption in the Palestinian cause, but it leaves us far from explaining how you came to care more about your politics than about the lives of children. For comparison, note that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez instantly knew the order of importance and declared, "I condemn Hamas' attack in the strongest possible terms." We must search on.
Was it runaway allyship? In the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when innocent Muslims in the US suffered acts of violence and bigotry, liberals (including many Jews) stood with them. It was essentially a principled stand, reinforced by compassion, against the particular wrong of blaming people who were innocent of a particular crime. However, those inclined to a reductive worldview for one reason or another chose to cut the Gordian knot of ethics and become unconditionally pro-Muslim. As I've written before, Donald Trump's antipathy to Muslims in later years set the seal on their standing with progressives. If Trump was against them, progressives would be for them — in toto.
The potential for doting allyship is strong in people who fancy that creature comforts have drained them of primal virtue (though it was lacking in the first place). The greater the comforts, the stronger the narcissistic sense of moral crisis requiring a baptism at the hands of the less privileged. For Americans, that means people who come from almost anywhere else but especially from places not touched by progress with a heavy hand. And for elite liberal Americans, no penance quite compares to the charade of sitting at the feet of an Old World guru; someone who is supposed to combine the virtue of the noble savage with the wisdom of the ages. One dreamily forgets that Old World people are not better known for timeless wisdom and virtue than for timeless prejudice and habit.
On an American university campus, Palestinian and other Muslim students are relatively likely to be the children of immigrants, if not immigrants themselves. If so, they're entitled to that goodwill which you extend to everyone at first, but not to any special respect or credence or solidarity. You're doing enough when you credit them with being free of Old World hatreds. Should they show that they're not, then don't drink the political brew they offer you. An exotic bigot is as bad as a domestic one.
Are you caught up in the savagery of a really polarized American body politic? Or the savagery of a seemingly polarized one? A recent paper by Rachel Kleinfeld from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports the latest of multiple findings that the general population of the US is not fundamentally polarized, but is beleaguered by politicians who strive to whip up a sense of polarization — and by the media (social and otherwise) to which this fuss is a stock in trade.
American voters are less ideologically polarized than they think they are, and that misperception is greatest for the most politically engaged people.
Kleinfeld goes on to note the reality of "affective polarization": a dislike of people on the other side of the partisan divide that's grounded in emotion, not ideological incompatibility. This emotion comes as no surprise when people have been taught to believe in underlying incompatibility. The finding that the most politically engaged people, including activists, are the most vulnerable to the misperception may be surprising until we reflect on the human tendency to exalt one's own endeavors. Political struggle is bound to be more satisfying when you think it's a population-wide clash of ideologies than when you don't.
A relentless, apocalyptic polarization scare not only keeps emotions high but also intensifies the "ammunition logic" whereby you anathematize the mention of any inconvenient truth for fear of loading the enemy's cannon. This logic, on a more coldly calculating plane, has a long history. In 1977, Noam Chomsky used his influence among progressives to inhibit early reporting and discussion of the Khmer Rouge genocide in The New York Review of Books. His apparent concern was that such reporting served the interests of the US administration and damaged the socialist cause. The magnitude of the atrocities couldn't be covered up for long; it was monstrous news that would outrage decent people everywhere; but Chomsky and those who followed his lead could, he reasoned, be good progressives by downplaying it. In today's political environment, the numbers of coldly calculating manipulators are augmented by many anxious true believers. Is that where you come in?
The decision to set aside your humanity for the benefit of Hamas may have needed no other driving force, but I suspect there was a big one: the game of progressive advocacy.
The principle of rolling competition animates everything. Academics will of course leapfrog to the ideological forefront opportunely. Activists will elbow their way into the vanguard of agitation. Lesser beings will vie to retail new conceits at their freshest. Still lesser ones in spirit or political acumen will scramble to stay abreast of attitudes that can keep them in the swim, bobbing safely on the waves.
Technology is the mother of degeneration. The comparatively sluggish world-changers of the twentieth century were different in themselves, but it probably matters more that they differed in their opportunities. Who, being constantly in touch with a multitude of other people, would not fall prey to an exaggerated sense of collective destiny and a concomitant dread of personal irrelevance? The feeling that a day mustn't go by without some new proof of revolutionary vigor belongs to an age of constant communication.
This competitive game began in earnest during the #MeToo boom, with a bidding-up of support that culminated in the supremely reductive "Believe women." Once that had been said, no one who wished to stay relevant as a pro-feminist progressive could afford to say less. Perhaps you find that, today, one can't say less than "From the river to the sea ... by any means necessary" and stay relevant in certain circles.
There's nothing wrong with becoming irrelevant there. The circles themselves are drawn in shifting sand, but your humanity is forever.
