The West against the worst
Hugo Gurdon
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An Oakland City Council vote for a Gaza ceasefire resolution drew wide attention this week as speaker after speaker denounced efforts to insert language condemning Hamas for its murder of 1,200 people in Israel on Oct 7.
The level of dishonesty and bigotry on display among speakers defending Hamas was remarkable even after one has become accustomed to the language and behavior of kaffiyeh-wearing rioters fouling American politics with their moral blindness for nearly two months.
Here is a composite of what Oakland’s politically engaged residents said: “There’s not been beheadings of babies and rapings. Israel murdered their own people. … I support the right of Palestinians to resist the occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance. … To condemn Hamas is very anti-Arab racist. … Did anyone else notice that those who oppose this resolution are old white supremacists?”
From start to finish, the charade in the legislative chamber was intended to convey a false impression of broad community support for violent action against Israel. But the whole thing was scripted and orchestrated by Marxist organizations and people.
This raises again a profoundly important and revealing question: Why do today’s leftists stand shoulder to shoulder with ethno-fascists who are bent on exterminating the same people the Nazis entrained to Auschwitz and Treblinka four generations ago? There are some obvious points of similarity, of course, such as that Hamas and other Islamist organizations dismiss the Holocaust as the fraudulent invention of Zionist propaganda, just as the burghers of Oakland dismiss Hamas’s genocidal attack as a false flag operation by the Israel Defense Forces.
But isn’t the Left, on paper at least, diametrically opposed to all that Hamas stands for — to racial imperialism, triumphal religious fervor, extreme sexual repression, brutal subordination of women, and judicial execution of gay people, among other things?
Yes, that is so in theory. But what do Hamas and our own multicultural Marxists share? What is more important to them than anything else? What overarches all concerns and outweighs any differentiating particulars? It is that both are burning with desire for violent revolution. And the Islamist revolution against Israel is at bottom the same as the Marxist revolution in America against the enlightenment ideas undergirding Western liberal democracy that have brought our civilization success and global preeminence for 500 years.
Israel is a successful, rich, orderly, and peace-loving oasis in an illiberal and anti-democratic desert. It is surrounded by nations such as Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, where amoral and incompetent despots preside over immiserated and backward people. It is a living, breathing, high-functioning rebuke to them all.
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That is why Israel’s enemies cannot abide its thriving existence. Likewise, the American Left cannot abide the success of free people living as they choose, looking out for their own concerns and those of their neighbors, tolerating diverse opinions, and uninterested in being educated or improved by meddlesome socialists.
Israel’s fight against Hamas should be seen also as America’s fight against the domestic Left. Both battles are part of the same war. They want to overthrow all that is good. We should defend it — and defeat them.