Melanie Phillips: The west's mass psychopathy moment
This terrible conflict has been kept going by the west, which by supporting the Palestinian cause has indulged, funded, sanitised, legitimised and incentivised an agenda of annihilation, ethnic cleansing and murderous antisemitism.Brendan O'Neill: The normalisation of savagery
The problem of Gaza will only be solved, like the Palestinian issue itself, if the west stops supporting the Palestinian cause -- and start addressing this conflict not as a fight over the division of land but as a genocidal war of extermination against Israel and the Jewish people.
Israel is fighting in Gaza not just against Hamas but against Iran. It is fighting a war for its existence against a genocidal enemy. That’s why this is a just war by Israel — indeed it could hardly be more justified. And the failure by the west to grasp how this has come about is why the west is now being convulsed by the forces of barbarism from within.
For it’s impossible to exaggerate the extent to which support for the Palestinian cause has destroyed the west’s moral compass. It’s not just that it’s been supporting an agenda whose aim, whether people understand this or not, is the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews. It is that it has produced a diabolical and deranged inversion of morality, which views genocide against the Jews as resistance and Jewish resistance as genocide.
As a result, the west has the blood of countless Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli innocents on its hands — and unless it purges this poison from its culture, its hands will be stained by yet more.
So it is not surprising, or contradictory, that campus ideologues who fume against un-PC words now welcome, or at least excuse, neo-fascistic violence. They are projecting their ideology of safety on to events in the Middle East. In their minds, Israelis are violators of the Palestinian safe space, and thus vengeance against them is not only justified but good. It is striking how much the Western language of mental dread is being used to explain the crisis in the Middle East. There will be a ‘tsunami of mental-health woes’ as a result of the latest Israel-Gaza conflict, reports NPR. The assault on Gaza is having a terrible impact on the ‘mental health of Palestinian children’, says a US-based psychologist. Many campus radicals also read every event through the prism of Western notions of vulnerability. It would not be surprising if they viewed Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October less as a racist onslaught against the Jewish people than as an act of therapeutic vengeance against a ‘privileged’ neighbour – cathartic payback against those who make Arabs feel ‘unsafe’.David Harsanyi: Liberal Jews Have No Reason To Be Surprised By Progressive Antisemitism
Since the October pogrom, anti-Semitism has soared on campuses in the US, and much of it is underpinned by the self-regarding cult of safety. Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, reports a student saying to him that ‘what would make her feel safe’ in his law school would be ‘to get rid of the Zionists’. In short, to flatter my narcissistic feelings of psychic and ideological security, certain Jews must be kicked out. The safe space clearly licences racism, too.
The hate has been relentless. A professor at Columbia University said the Hamas assault on Israel was a ‘stunning victory’. A Yale professor said 7 October was an ‘extraordinary day’ and a great blow to the ‘genocidal settler state’ of Israel. An art professor in Chicago said ‘Israelis are pigs. Savages… Irredeemable excrement.’ A professor at the University of California, Davis ominously said ‘Zionist journalists… have houses [with] addresses, kids in school’, and ‘they should fear us’.
Note the vicarious thrill these people seem to derive from faraway acts of unimaginable violence. The cult of vulnerability – and its ugly cousin, vengeance – has robbed them of their humanity. Viewing Israelis as pigs and shit, and Western Zionists as suspect creatures who deserve to live in fear, speaks to the inhumanity of constantly abstracting individuals. Of treating people either as ‘oppressed’, and thus good, or ‘privileged’, and thus bad. It is a short step from academic theories of ‘white privilege’ to demeaning Israelis as excrement whose murders should be celebrated. The reason some in American universities are taking second-hand pleasure from Hamas’s pogrom is because they believe it fortifies their privilege / oppressor worldview and gives physical force to their own contempt for the merchants of unsafety. They welcome the pogrom as a kind of primal therapy.
It is chilling how many young people seem relaxed about Hamas terrorism. A Harvard poll in the US found that 52 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds support Israel but a staggering 48 per cent support Hamas. Fifty-one per cent said Hamas violence against Israeli civilians is justified. As a headline in Newsweek said, ‘An insane number of Gen Zers support Hamas’s slaughter of innocent Israelis’. Polls in the UK suggest significant numbers of young people reject the idea that Hamas are terrorists. There can be no greater indictment of our education system, and of all the new systems of socialisation, than the fact that many in the new generation witnessed the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust and thought: ‘Maybe Israel deserved it.’ We can now see, clear as anything, what a pernicious impact the politics of identity and cult of pity have had on the souls of the young. It has torn them from the values of our civilisation, to such an extent that they feel more affinity with the regressive, anti-Western barbarism of Hamas than they do with the Jewish civilians and democratic state that were desecrated by that barbarism.
We are living through a normalisation of violence. The decimation of the ideals of freedom, especially among millennials and Generation Z, has given rise to a situation where debate is discouraged on account of its hurtfulness, where brute force is wielded against dissenters, and where even genocidal terror can be celebrated if it silences the ‘privileged’. In the absence of freedom of speech, the pre-modern rituals of humiliating and punishing transgressors against orthodoxy have returned with a bloody vengeance. Surely the bleak and tragic month of October 2023 will be a wake-up call for the West.
Even Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League — a partisan group that’s spent years highlighting every dog whistle (real and imagined) while ignoring or actively diminishing the rise of antisemitism on the left — felt compelled to ask MSNBC, the leading left-wing cable network, “who is writing the scripts? Hamas?”
No, not Hamas. But their allies. MSNBC is where propagandists from the Qatar state-run theocratic network Al-Jazeera go to work. They host shows and join Al “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” Sharpton, cozying up to the Morning Joe crew. One of them, Mehdi Hasan, has called non-Muslims “cattle” and “people of no intelligence.” This would be tantamount to hiring a Pravada reporter to cover the Cold War.
It is only antisemitism for Democrats if you say something unkind about their sugar daddy, George Soros. An enemy of Jewish people, the billionaire not only funds BLM but numerous Jewish front groups to create the perception of support for terrorists. Two of these groups, “Jewish Voice for Peace” and IfNotNow, beneficiaries of at least $15 million, were at the Capitol calling for Israel to give Hamas terrorists a pass.
Maybe, just maybe, giving unfettered loyalty to a president who played footsie with likes of Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and who was good friends with former PLO spokesperson and agitprop Rashid Khalidi was a clue that this kind of thinking would be normalized on the mainstream left. Of course, not only did Obama (and, to a similar extent, Biden) bolster the Islamists in Iran — an effort to blunt Israel’s regional power — but he also reached out to Hamas and pumped millions into Gaza and Hamas.
Our elite schools and protest movements where philanthropic Jews drop millions every year sign petitions defending baby killers? Intersectionality. Decolonization. They’re all intertwined with identitarianism and antisemitism. Berkeley, like most campuses, is teeming Jew-baiting race-hustlers and pseudointellectuals who function in closed-minded havens for extremists. Sooner or later, those extremists are going to be emboldened. Sooner or later, they were going to be in positions of power.
Sooner is now.