Both Canada and the States are presently rife with demonstrations against Israel for the suffering it has inflicted upon Palestinian civilians in its ongoing war with Hamas. Of course one laments the deaths of the innocent in such conflicts! But are the Jews the villains in this scenario or simply responding in the only way possible to a cadre of racist fanatics whose avowed goal is the annihilation of the Jewish State? I’ve covered this topic in previous blogs and won’t bore you with what you most likely already know. But nothing better illustrates the moral degeneracy of Hamas than its cowardly tactic of placing its military installations amongst innocent Palestinians in the hopes that the slaughter of such in Israeli attacks will lead the world to denounce the Jews as genocidal monsters. And of course nothing better illustrates the absurdity of this narrative than the fact that the Israelis have frequently warned Palestinian civilians of imminent attacks in the hope that they can flee to safety in advance of their onset.
In a recent interview with Dave Rubin, Denis Prager implied that anyone who couldn’t see the moral difference between Israel and Hamas was either a racist or a complete idiot. I absolutely agree. I am not suggesting Israeli governments have been flawless in dealing with this dilemma, but simply that their quest for a settlement in which Jews and Palestinians might live peacefully side by side is categorically more civilized than the Hamas desire to eliminate all Jews “from the river to the sea,” a chant repeated in most every anti-Israeli demonstration presently being held here in North America.
How depressing, then, that A.O.C., the Democrat elected to represent N.Y.’s 14th Congressional District, at an Earth Day event in Virginia a couple of days ago, should have expressed her admiration for the students at Columbia, Yale and elsewhere who inspired her with hope for America’s future with their “peaceful” demonstrations against what they deem the genocidal agenda of the Jews. Joe Biden attended the same event and expressed no disapproval whatsoever with what she had said.
Coincidentally, on April 23, The N. Y. Times published a piece by John McWhorter, a Columbia U. linguistics professor whose classes had been significantly compromised by the “infuriated chanting” outside his windows that had gone on for several days. McWhorter, a Black man, wondered to himself how long such protests would have been tolerated had their targets been Black as opposed to Jewish. I have no idea of his political affiliation, but what he said next entailed an indictment of the basic, informing narrative of the contemporary Left. The specters of White Supremacy and Colonialism have led many of today’s young, McWhorter suggested, to believe that it is always noble to “battle against whiteness and its power.” That this is basically an endorsement of anti-white racism seems self-evident. That it is a premise based on Marx’s grossly simplistic reading of History, is also true. Israel is by far the most politically progressive, economically and militarily powerful country in the Middle East. As Jews are also White, they therefore qualify as the epitome of what the contemporary Left has come to see as the primary source of most of the world’s social and economic inequities. While Prof. McWhorter clearly implies the narrative motivating the anti-Israeli protests at Columbia and elsewhere to be seriously flawed, Elon Musk recently posted a statement that succinctly summarizes the lunacy of that narrative. As reported by Not the Bee on April 27, Musk stated: “The axiomatic error undermining much of Western Civilization is ‘weak makes right.’ If someone accepts, explicitly or implicitly, that the oppressed are always the good guys, then the natural conclusion is that the strong are the bad guys.”
Thus are we living in a world turned upside down! Achievement, which most often yields prosperity, is now deemed to be tinged with evil, while those who have failed to achieve are automatically deemed to be victims of oppression. No one is suggesting there are not Capitalists who utterly deserve the disdain of the Left, but its loathing for Free Enterprise itself literally entails disdain for the very best Man might achieve. The upshot of this “compassionate” Neo-Marxist perspective is ironically a world rife with envy and resentment towards millions whose only sin is to have excelled in their existential journeys.
What was it that led to the Holocaust? Was it not Hitler’s demented belief that Germany’s Jews, by the very fact of their widespread affluence, were somehow inherently evil? Is that not the same sort of thinking informing the specious notion that “colonialist” Israel has no right to exist on lands that rightfully belong to the Palestinians? As this is a lie that has been endlessly repeated, I must point out that the Jews had occupied the land in question for hundreds of years before Arabs began to settle there in the 6th Century! This is a historical fact. Of course none of this affects the sympathy any decent person must feel for the innocent Palestinians being devastated by the ongoing conflict. But ought not the protests in question to be directed against Hamas, the true villains of this drama? Video evidence shows that many taking part in protests across North America appear to be of Arabic/Muslim heritage. Racism would seem to be their motivation. But why are young, White university students also engaged in aggressive, anti-Israeli demonstrations on campuses across the U.S.? An article by Derek Hunter, recently published on the website Townhall P.M., seems to me to have hit the proverbial nail right on the head. It is entitled: These Protests are the Result of Bad Parenting and an Educational System Churning Out Morons.”