In Nov. of last year, Maya Sulkin of the Free Press interviewed a young Black girl named Taryn Thomas in which the latter discussed her transformation from a pro-Palestinian activist to a staunch defender of Israeli Rights. At the time of the interview, Taryn was a fourth year pre-med student no doubt in her early twenties. Sulkin says she was moved to talk to Thomas by a video of her speaking at a Stanford U. vigil held a month earlier lamenting the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 innocent people.
Throughout the lengthy interview, Ms. Thomas repeatedly asserts that the Pro-Palestinian sympathizers with whom she used to consort were clearly the victims of “group think,” of mindlessly accepting the information they were being fed by a media failing in its obligation to report the whole truth and nothing but the Truth! At the same time, she says, many on the Left were converting Blacks such as herself to their anti-Israeli bias by claiming that the Palestinians were being subjected to the very same Racism that had plagued America since its inception. Her investigation of the historical facts coupled with the results of her visit to Israel in March of 2025, however, have now led her to realize that it is the Jews who have been the victims of Racism throughout the millenia, and moreover that their country is in fact a Liberal Democracy in which Jews, Muslims and Christians seem to co-exist peacefully in every city she visited!
Taryn Thomas is an articulate, intelligent young woman not given to irrationally simplistic views. She continues to be concerned with the welfare of innocent Palestinians and does not agree with all of Netanyahu’s moves. But while most of her former anti-Israeli friends will no longer even talk to her, her many new Jewish friends, she says, are perfectly willing to disagree with her on various issues without becoming abusive. The lesson implicit in both her personal evolution and her lengthy discussion with Maya Sulkin, is the radical difference between simplistic perspectives rooted in mindless sentiment, and those born of Man’s capacity to rationally assess the inarguable complexities of the Human Condition. If you have been reading my blogs, you of courser know I deem the contemporary Left to be rooted in the former, thereby leaving it with no other option than to denounce conservatives by calling them names!
The notion that European Colonialism brought nothing beneficial to the rest of the world, is grossly simplistic. The notion that the Civil War was not really fought to eradicate Slavery, is grossly simplistic. The notion that Canada’s Residential Schools were implicitly Genocidal, is grossly simplistic. The notion that the millions of Men who died over the centuries in defense of the Women they loved were “patriarchal” monsters, is grossly simplistic. The contemporary Left is awash with such absurdities, yet the intelligence/integrity of the lovely Taryn Thomas is a perfect manifestation of our capacity for Reason upon which the Philosophers of the Enlightenment based their faith in Democracy and the ultimate benefits of Freedom of Speech! It is this Principle, without which we are lost, that is the basis of the conservative world view!