Sunday, October 15, 2023
From Ian:
Ilan Benjamin: Once, I Was a Peace Advocate. Now, I Have No Idealism Left.
Ilan Benjamin: Once, I Was a Peace Advocate. Now, I Have No Idealism Left.
After terrorists killed my cousin Daniel Pearl, my family called for peace. But after the worldwide celebration of our people’s slaughter, my hope for peace is dead.The cruelty of the Left
I watched the news in horror as terrorists massacred over 100 people at Kibbutz Be’eri. Women. Children. I frantically messaged my host family and heard nothing back. Like my cousin Danny years ago, my family was being held hostage. The good news: unlike Danny, my host family at Kibbutz Be’eri was saved. They are physically okay. But how can they really be okay, after watching their friends and neighbors being slaughtered?
There was a time when these types of events couldn’t shake my ideals. I used to argue relentlessly for a two-state solution. I fought bitterly with Israeli friends about the decency of the Palestinian people. Even though radical Islamists had murdered my cousin, even though civilians had been blown up in buses daily during the Second Intifada, I refused to give in to nihilism.
In 2012, I returned to the States to study film at University of Southern California, and published a book about my military service that criticized the Israeli government. This didn’t win me many friends, but I continued to advocate for nuance regardless. I proudly supported Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA+, and feminist causes. I called myself a progressive Jew.
But over the years, I noticed a disturbing trend: With all the atrocities in the world, why did my social justice warrior friends hate Israel so disproportionately? Why did it feel like intersectionality excluded Jews? Why did the left—who supposedly stood up for human rights—put child-murdering Hamas terrorists on a pedestal?
At first, I thought it must be miseducation.
“Ah, they think Palestinians are the indigenous people. I’ll show that Jewish history, and the archaeology to prove it, dates back millennia.”
“Ah, they think we’re white colonizers. I’ll show how many Jews are people of color, including those who are Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ethiopian.”
“Ah, they’ll get it once I show them that there are fifty Muslim countries, and only one Jewish state.”
But my friends weren’t interested in correcting their misunderstandings.
I agreed that the settlements were unlawful, that Gaza was a humanitarian crisis, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyuahu was a dictator. I assumed—if I cared enough, if I mourned for the Palestinian dead, if I put nuance above all else—our neighbors and their allies would give us the same decency.
How wrong I was. This past week, as over 1,300 Jews were slaughtered, the most murderous attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I saw the true face of Palestinians and their allies. All around the world, they celebrate. They gloat. They mock our tears. They do not protest against Hamas. They embrace pure evil.
And so, to the terrorists I now say:
When you killed my family, I forgave you. When you killed my people, I forgave you. But when you killed my idealism, I had no forgiveness left.
To non-Jewish friends who have reached out, thank you. It is simply the human thing to do. To friends who dare justify what has happened, you are not friends. You are nothing but Nazi supporters dressed up in leftist intellectual language. To the Palestinians: you have lost all moral authority to claim victimhood. I will never advocate for you again. To my family, friends in Israel, and Jews around the world hurting right now, I love you. Stay safe.
In Berlin, where I live today with my German-Ukrainian Jewish wife, Germans love to say “Never Again.” Right now, Never Again is happening again in real time, livestreamed for the whole world to see. I find myself looking up my military number in case the IDF reserves call for me. Unlike our enemy, I feel no joy at the prospect of going to war. But if our people’s existence is at stake, I will do what I must. I will be the world’s favorite villain: the Jew who has the audacity to defend his people.
On Oct. 7, Israel suffered its worst terrorist attack in the post-World War II era. The death toll, which includes infants, women, and the elderly, stands at about 1,300. An estimated 27 U.S. citizens were murdered. Hamas also took more than 100 hostages, many of them innocent civilians.David Collier: Our cities and streets are full of haters
Yet, the immediate response in so many colleges and universities was not to condemn the killings, the torture, the humiliations, or the kidnappings. The response was to praise Hamas while criticizing the victim of the slaughter. Equally disturbing is the fact that these rallies were not confined to institutions of higher learning. Large pro-Hamas rallies have taken place in major U.S. cities this week, the streets echoing the bloodlust articulated in the halls of academia.
The student groups and the unassociated rallies are not right-wing. They are not right-of-center. They aren’t even moderate. They are left-wing, espousing what has become a mainstream position on the Left - that Palestine is the righteous actor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that its resistance "by any means" is both justified and moral, including even ethnic cleansing. This isn’t a fringe opinion anymore. So widespread does this position appear, in fact, that even those on the left-leaning side of things have expressed alarm.
"In nearly 50 years of [Harvard] affiliation," former Clinton and Obama Treasury official Larry Summers said in reference to the pro-Hamas Harvard letter, "I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today." Summers also previously served as the president of Harvard.
"Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me," said Puck's Washington correspondent Julia Ioffe. “I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR. But now I see that's not it.”
Yes, some liberals are eager to celebrate Hamas’s war crimes. But surely, claiming the Left delights in cruelty is going a bit too far.
Is it?
Academia
While the media is still held back by certain standards, academia is the land of freedom. Islamists and the hard left can do what they like there. For decades they have been drip-feeding destructive pseudo-science into wider society. The ‘decolonisation’ agenda is everywhere from the museum space and education to the NHS. The tsunami originated in academia, alongside other poisons such as gender studies and critical race theory.
But what does ‘decolonisation mean’? Well it seems we all found out on Saturday morning, when as over 1300 Jews were slaughtered, academics reminded us that ‘decolonisation is not a metaphor’.
The author of that sickening tweet is Dr Yara Hawari, who was a product of Illan Pappe’s conveyor belt at the University of Exeter (I first ran into her at a conference in Exeter in 2015). This vile message about decolonisation was repeated throughout the academic sector- with various tweets on the subject going viral.
These horrific retweets were from Dr Sara Camacho Felix. She is an Assistant Professor (Education) and Programme Lead at the LSE. She appears to support Palestinian resistance in ‘all its forms’. Which on that Saturday morning including raping young girls and butchering babies.
Dr Sara Salem is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the LSE. She deactivated her twitter account, but not before I had archived this tweet. In her eyes, no matter how bad the actions against them – Israelis can ‘never be the victims’:
How can academia be so lost, that 1300 Jews are slaughtered and these people still side with the murderers?
Students
With academics such as those above – what can we expect our students to turn out like?
- Hanin Barghouti, Women Students’ Officer at the University of Sussex students’ union spoke out at an anti-Israel demonstration in Brighton calling the Hamas attacks ‘inspiring’ and ‘beautiful’.
- The Student Welfare Officer at Cambridge University liked a run of outrageous tweets, including one that suggest the terrorist attack was a cause for a day of celebration – and the actions needed no apology.
- At a public demonstration, Dana Abuqamar, the Diversity Officer at the University of Manchester, spoke of her ‘pride and joy‘ in the Hamas ‘resistance’.
All students serving as part of their student unions. They all have roles dealing with the welfare of other students. All willing to applaud the slaughter of innocent Jews. On the streets
With academia and the media poisoned from within, the nation’s moral defences have crumbled. Within hours of Jews being slaughtered – masses of people went out to support Palestinian ‘resistance’. Images from London and Manchester:
London and Manchester
It is not just the Islamists. The hard -left put out their posters calling for victory to the Palestinians – an event about why it is right to ‘resist’.
Why it is right to resist
And then there are the open calls for violence. On 8th October, Richard Barnard (the co-founder of Palestine Action, the group that continually vandalises factories in the UK) – spoke at a pro-Palestine event about the current violence. He used the Hamas attack as inspiration – telling people listening that ‘this was just the start for them’ – and they need to turn the ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ (the name of Hamas operation) into ‘a tsunami over the whole world’.
In the clip he is supporting a proscribed terrorist group and inciting violence against British Jews. At the time of writing, he has still NOT BEEN ARRESTED.
