Progressives for Atrocity

How could it happen, NYU Journalism professor Susan Linfield asks, that the international left, the radically idealistic left could embrace Hamas after it had committed unspeakable atrocities? 

The truth is not debatable.

A young Palestinian man texts his parents the image of his blood-stained hands and brags about how many Jews he killed. And the radical left, true believers in equality and justice, either cheers or blames the Jews. 

A little Jewish blood with your afternoon tea, my dear!

Presumably, radical leftists are brimming over with the right sentiments. They care about the oppressed and the indigent. Some of them even consider themselves to be humanitarian; they care for all humans, on humanitarian grounds.

Except for Jews-- how did anyone miss that part?

Of course, Linfield suggests, no one should have been surprised to see the radical left embrace atrocity. She catalogs the instances where the left has been less than humane about massacres of civilians, even of women and children.

The history of the modern Left’s romance with terrorism … started with the Algerian War and gained momentum throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond with the emergence of the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen, and the panoply of organizations included in the Palestine Liberation Organization and, especially, its Rejectionist Front. The latter held pride of place: “For the Sixth International, the Palestinian resistance is a banner ... an inspiration for the revolt of the dispossessed, both in its ends and in its means,” proclaimed Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, a prominent Egyptian leftwing intellectual and activist.

When it comes to committing acts of terrorism against non-combatants, the Palestinian movement has led the charge:

But it is no exaggeration to say that the Palestinian movement, even before the founding of Israel in 1948, has been defined by terror more than any other, and that terrorist groups have always been prominent within the movement.

Those who want to rationalize progressive atrocities simply call them by a different name. Those who imagine that they can change reality by changing the way they use language were happy to comply. No more atrocities; acts of liberation and justice.

In the age of the “progressive atrocity,” PLO terrorist attacks on Israelis, Jews, and civilians throughout the world were hailed as instruments of liberation. A very partial list of such incidents would include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (the games continued, nonetheless) and the Lod Airport massacre the same year (death toll: 26, along with at least 80 injured); the Ma’alot massacre of 1974, in which 115 Israelis, mainly schoolchildren, were taken hostage (resulting deaths: 31); the Entebbe hijacking of 1976, in which Israeli and other Jewish passengers were separated from others and threatened with death (most were rescued by Israeli commandos); the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which a civilian bus was highjacked (death toll: 38, including 13 children; 71 wounded); the 1982 attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg kosher restaurant in Paris, considered at the time to be the worst incidence of antisemitism in France since the Holocaust (death toll: six, with 22 injured); and numerous other instances of air piracy. Various international groups, especially Baader Meinhof of Germany and the Japanese Red Army, sometimes assisted their Palestinian brothers “in solidarity.” Not all leftists or leftwing organizations supported these actions, but to criticize them was a sign of “bourgeois moralism” as Ghassan Kanafani, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put it. (Kanafani, who was also a gifted writer, was assassinated after the Lod attack by the Mossad.)

Linfield is shocked that the October 7 atrocities did not inspire any self-reflection or even a moral accounting on the left. Instead they have provoked an outpouring of unrestrained anti-Semitism:

One might have thought that an orgy of sadistic murder, of the kind that Hamas committed on October 7th, would have inspired serious moral and political self-interrogation. As the past four weeks have illustrated, however, the exact opposite is the case.

And the radical left has risen up to blame the victims of the massacre:

And nowhere are the victims—defenseless civilians, including children and their mothers—blamed for being murdered. That is what is happening now. The deadliest single day in the post-Holocaust history of the Jewish people has been greeted in some quarters with joy and—to be blunt—an entirely undisguised hatred of Jews.

Then again, not only was the attack on women and children an atrocity, but it was also, as I have remarked, an act of cowardice:

Why the cowardly inability to face the cruelty: the infants murdered with sharp objects, the heads without bodies and vice versa, the terrorizing of children, the women stripped naked and shot point-blank, the burning of entire families, the mutilations, the torture, and perhaps most of all, the jubilant laughter of the killers as they accomplished their tasks? 

It has been funded and sponsored by Iran, by a revolutionary movement that has has eaten its own. Leftists who support Hamas today supported the Iranian revolution yesterday. At the least, they do not have the excuse of not knowing what happens when such people have real political power:

In 1979, leftists who supported the Iranian Revolution had a rude awakening when the mullahs came to power and promptly executed them, along with secularists, union organizers, intellectuals, feminists, and everyone else who fit into the enormously capacious category of a counterrevolutionary.

Things in Hamas-run Gaza are no different. Again, the conditions on the ground in Gaza deviate radically from the leftist agenda. They systematically betray all ideals:

There’s little liberation, justice, or freedom to be found in Gaza, where there are no opposition political parties, no elections, and no freedom of religion, the press, or protest. Opponents are arrested, tortured, and sometimes executed. (Yahya Sinwar, a head of Hamas’s armed wing, was known as “the butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutality toward other Palestinians.) Abortion and homosexuality are outlawed (what are those protestors with “Queers for Palestine” signs thinking?); mentioning trans rights would be unwise. It is legal for husbands to beat their wives, and so-called honor killings go unpunished. 

One might say that Israelis have oppressed Palestinians, but, in truth, that is merely a coward’s way of refusing to take responsibility for one’s actions:

Oppression is not a carte blanche for severing heads from bodies, shooting hundreds of young festival-goers, bludgeoning people to death, murdering children in front of parents and vice versa, killing naked women point-blank, and kidnapping babies and the elderly; there is no universe in which these are revolutionary, emancipatory, or anticolonialist acts, much less “beautiful” ones. Sadism and violence are not synonyms. Sexual torture cannot be anti-imperialist—nor is it an understandable, much less inevitable, response to oppression. An eliminationist program is not a freedom charter. History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice. There is no room for “yes, but.” Why, when it comes to the deaths of Israelis, is this so hard to understand? 

Linfield considers herself a woman of the left, so she is especially chagrined to see what her movement has become:

The Western Left’s response to October 7th will, I believe, be viewed as a moment of moral corruption on a par with the defense of Stalin’s purges, Czechoslovakia’s antisemitic show trials of 1952, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s antisemitic expulsions of 1968, along with the denial of the Khmer Rouge genocide (see under: Chomsky, Noam) and the adulation of China’s vicious Cultural Revolution.

For some reason-- yet to be determined-- the radical international left cannot think straight. You might think that that is the least of its problems, but it is worth noting:

 A Left that is fixated on “decolonization” mistakes a death cult for a liberation movement and is unable to recognize a bloodbath, even one that was filmed, and publicized worldwide, by the killers themselves. A Left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy. A Left that divides the world between racists and antiracists and is obsessed with “people who look like me” can’t understand that the clash of two national movements has nothing to do with color or race.

A Left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protestors demanding women’s freedom; the homicidal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad; and Hezbollah, another fundamentalist Islamic group that is dedicated to Israel’s destruction and that terrorizes, and sometimes assassinates, fellow Lebanese who oppose it. What kind of Left gets into bed with such forces?

As for how it happened, I have hinted at the answer, here and elsewhere. The left is married to its ideals. It is married to correct sentiments. This implies that it does not feel compelled to play the game by the rules. 

Leftists feel that they are too good and too righteous to play by the rules, even when the rules proscribe murdering women and children. 

In a world where the righteous truth will inevitably win out, playing by the rules feels like a fool’s game. It feels like following the rules of good conduct and the rules of the competitive marketplace. And since leftists believe that if they play by the rules, they will not win and will not be able to compete, they arrogate to themselves the right to do whatever they want. It’s infantile posturing, but it feels godlike.

As for defying the rules of war, beyond murdering women and children, Hamas has also used civilians as human shields and has turned hospitals into military headquarters. These are all war crimes.

If you were to ask who created the first community that was based on following rules, not on following your bliss or on worshiping idols, the answer is: Moses himself. What else did you think that the exodus was about?

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