Saturday Miscellany

First, on the treachery watch, an October 7 Israeli survivor said this:

I used to believe in peace, but I don’t anymore. I used to trust Arabs, but I don’t anymore. A guy named Khaleel lived in our village for 30 years. We called him our brother. He slept in our homes. He ended up drawing a map of our homes in the village and gave it to Hamas to slaughter us. How can I trust after this?

Second, from David Goldman:

Most practice of Islam is emphatically not violent, but most religious violence is perpetrated by Muslims in the name of religion. Violence is not a necessary characteristic of Islam as a religion, but it is evidently a susceptibility. Is there something about Islam as a religion that predisposes its believers toward terrorism?’

Third, the outburst of Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe is having predictable consequences. In the Netherlands, for example, the Wall Street Journal reports on a recent election:

Dutch anti-Islamic populist Geert Wilders is on course for a major election victory, marking a stark lurch to the right for a country known for its tolerance and progressive politics

Fourth, Victor Davis Hanson comments on how uncontrolled immigration has contributed to the decline and fall of Europe:

In many European countries, foreign-born emigrants comprise 20 percent of the population. Most of them have arrived poor, without education, in mass, illegally, with little desire to fully integrate, from inimical countries, and holding political and religious views hostile to Europe.

He adds that Europe and America have been projecting weakness on the world stage. The consequences should have been predictable:

Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, presumably on the assumption that current generations of Westerners in Israel, the U.S., and Europe would not react too strongly to its precivilizational barbarity if it entailed a subsequent messy war.

Fifth, the New York Post reports on the German government’s crackdown on Hamas followers. 

Hundreds of police officers searched the properties of Hamas members and followers in Germany on Thursday morning following a formal ban on any activity by or in support of the terrorist group.

The German government implemented the ban on Nov. 2 and dissolved Samidoun, a group that was behind a celebration in Berlin of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Germany’s domestic intelligence service estimates that Hamas has around 450 members in the country.

Their activities range from expressions of sympathy and propaganda activities to financing and fundraising activities to strengthen the organization abroad.

“We are continuing our consistent action against radical Islamists,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said. “By banning Hamas and Samidoun in Germany, we have sent a clear signal that we will not tolerate any glorification or support of Hamas’ barbaric terror against Israel.”

Sixth, from famed German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, in the Algemeiner, a few words about anti-Semitism:

 “Israel’s actions in no way justify antisemitic reactions, especially not in Germany. It is intolerable that Jews in Germany are once again exposed to threats to life and limb and have to fear physical violence on the streets.” Postwar Germany’s commitment to preserving both Jewish life and a secure existence for the State of Israel “is fundamental to our political life,” the statement asserted.

Seventh, in the ultimate indignity, the board of directors of a company called OpenAI voted out its leader, one Sam Altman, only to welcome him back within days-- under the aegis of a new reconstituted board of directors.

As it happened, the original board had two female members. The new board had zero female members. Naturally, the feminist intelligentsia is complaining bitterly, but I will refrain from reading anything into the change.

Eighth, Sam Bankman-Fried convicted felon, formerly leading light in the crypto currency world at FTX, is adapting to prison life.

Aside from giving crypto trading tips to prison guards, he is involved in commerce:

Disgraced FTX founder is trading $1 packs of dried fish in exchange for services at  Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center.

The services are haircuts.

Ninth, regarding the sanctions we have imposed on China in the matter of semiconductor sales, Stephen Roach offers a sobering qualification, via Twitter:

US sanctions on Chinese tech have backfired — leading to accelerated progress by China’s domestic chipmakers (SMIC) and a revival of Huawei. China bashing’s strategic miscalculations have resulted in precisely the opposite of what Washington sought!

Tenth, Israelis are special. They are certainly being held to different standards. As mobs of anti-Semites march in Western streets, accusing the Israelis of genocide, we can remark that none of these groups cared very much about mass slaughter that took place in other countries. The Secretary General of the UN has been denouncing the Israelis, ignoring all of the other loss of life in other wars:

Syria: 500,000 killed (Syrian Observatory for Human Right, 2021) 

Yemen: 377,000 killed 

Afganistan: 176,000 killed 

Darfur: 300,000 killed 

Iraq: 400,000 killed 

Ukraine: 500,000 killed 

Congo: 860,000+ killed 

The numbers come to us from the United Nations.

Eleventh, this is a little late, but it is surely better that you did not hear the dumbass Thanksgiving dinner advice that organizational psychologist Sunita Sah gave people in the New York Times before the holiday. 

Dr. Sah offered that people do better, when sitting down to their feasts, to speak their minds, not to hold anything back, though also to try not to offend anyone.

As I said, this is dumbass advice. What you should or should not say at the dinner table begins with an appreciation of your role, your place in the group, your relations with the other conviviants, and your ability to raise issues without offending other people. 

Your role at the dinner table is to contribute to social harmony, not to raise issues you do not understand, to insult people or even to make a fool of yourself.

It is, to say the least, a complex calculation. You gain nothing by reducing it to a general principle-- to speak your mind. And it is certainly not helpful, as Dr. Sah offers, to tell people that if they do not blurt out their most heartfelt beliefs on the most controversial topics, that they will suffer serious emotional disturbances and might even get cancer.

And, let’s not forget table manners. If you have good table manners and if everyone at the table is practicing the same manners, you have greater latitude regarding what is or is not permissible. If you all have bad manners, this reduces your latitude, because arguments and fights will more obviously threaten group cohesion.

Twelfth, and now a few words from Kevin. You might know it, but Kevin is New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s conservative brother. Once every year Dowd gives over her precious space to her brother.

He offers a Republican view of the current political environment. It’s better than scouring through a bunch of polls.

Keven said this:

Biden’s three years have been a disaster. An exorbitant round of unnecessary Covid spending sent inflation through the roof, leading to a destructive rise in interest rates and further squeezing consumers.

We should fear that John Kerry and Antony Blinken are projecting weakness, leading to an unimaginable alliance of China, Russia and Iran that threatens our future. Our botched and tragic withdrawal from Afghanistan set Putin’s invasion of Ukraine into motion.

The disgraceful show of support by college students for Hamas exposed the underlying antisemitism being taught and tolerated in our “best” universities. There should be no moral confusion here. This is a battle between good and evil, and encouraging the side that just massacred 1,200 people and is holding scores more hostages is a pretty clear example of what happens when you get your news from TikTok. It is incomprehensible to see Osama bin Laden lauded online as if he were a great writer, much less a visionary, a mere two decades after his orchestration of the worst terrorist attack in American history.

Biden’s posture toward Iran, the leading sponsor of terror in the world, is inexplicable. He tried to restart the Iran nuclear deal, thankfully to no avail. He even handed over $6 billion to release five hostages, money to which Iran was denied access only after Hamas’s attack.

Biden’s border policies unwittingly created a national security crisis, with asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants pouring over our Southern border; since Biden took office, border patrol estimates approximately 6.5 million encounters. Many of them remain in the United States, unvetted. The tidal wave of migrants has flooded many major cities.

Kevin is not an enthusiastic Trump supporter:

Trump’s behavior since the 2020 election has been reprehensible, and I fear it will grow worse. I am not sure he could beat Biden and I would find it difficult, if not impossible, to vote for anyone convicted of a felony.

I would prefer neither man be on the ballot in 2024. The temperature in Washington needs to be lowered. Surely, the greatest country in the world can do better than these two men. I could vote for Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or, better yet, both of them to begin the repair work.

Thirteenth, yesterday the first group of Israeli hostages were freed by Hamas. Joe Biden decided that it was a good moment to take a victory lap.

Among other things he proposed a two-state solution. To which Senator Mike Lee responded:

Tone deaf. Gaza has had a “two state solution” on the table since 2005, and defiantly refused to take it. You can’t have a two-state solution where one party is unwilling to recognize the other’s right to exist.

Fourteenth, Biden also tried to recast the horrors of October 7 as a vote of confidence in his diplomatic prowess.

He claimed that Hamas attacked Israel because he was close to bringing peace to the region. This from a president who has been working long and hard to undermine Trump’s Abraham Accords, which were effectively the most consequential step toward peace in decades.

In truth, the reason Hamas attacked is the same reason why Iran keeps firing on American bases in the region. They think they can get away with it. They know that they are dealing with a band of cowards, sprinkled with Hamas sympathizers, in the Biden administration. And they know that Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken are fundamentally weak -- more likely to try to rein in the Israelis than Donald Trump would.

Fifteenth, in the realm of the pathetic, given the open border policy of the Biden administration and the damage that said policy has caused here and elsewhere, it sounds like it came from the Babylon Bee. Alas, it comes from the Department of Homeland Security. The manifestly incompetent Secretary Alejandro Majorkas has told his border agents to address illegal immigrants by their preferred pronouns. Without specifying which language.

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Bringing Children Up, or Bringing Them Down

I trust that I count among the very few who is not an aficionado of the writing of essayist David Sedaris. I prefer Tom Wolfe.

And yet, yesterday Bari Weiss’s The Free Press brought forth an interesting essay by Sedaris. Since I make a habit of reading what Weiss publishes, I happily waded into the Sedaris reflections on bringing up children. Apparently, we are no longer very good at it, so, we need all the help we can get.

One might say that we are no longer bringing up children. We are bringing them down.

Sedaris begins his essay with a day in the life of a member of Gen Z. It is too easy to expose the ridiculous pretension of this over-therapied generation, but we can indulge ourselves by offering one example.

A friend recently called on one of her assistants to deliver a statistic during a business meeting and was later charged with “casual violence.” Apparently Deborah needed to give advance warning that she was going to ask a question, one that might possibly put her employee—someone who was well paid to know stuff and be able to spew it forth—on the spot.

Now, Sedaris explains that this generation was mis-raised. Or better, brought down. They have been coddled and swaddled to the point where they cannot breathe-- and then they blame the climate for oxygen deficiency.

Who are these hothouse flowers, all so easily and consistently wounded? People whose parents never hit them, that’s who. People who don’t know what real pain is, but still want to throw the word around. 

Sorry to correct this, but it was less about the pain and more about the grotesque level of indulgence and permissiveness.

When I was a child, a slap across the face was too minor to qualify as “casual violence.” It was simply what you got for talking back or holding everyone up. It never hurt all that much; what stung was the swiftness of it, the surprise. Who knew my mother could move so fast, like someone belted in the martial arts. I don’t feel like it traumatized me to be knocked around a little. Blood was rarely drawn. No limbs were broken. Could my parents have made their point without resorting to violence? 

He continues, mentioning this near-worship of youth corresponds with a declining birth rate. People have fewer children. Ergo, they are more prone to spoil the children they have.

One might say, with some reason, that Sedaris has mistaken correlation for causation, but his observation still merits consideration:

One of the worst things that’s happened to us as a country is that people are having fewer children—1.8 as opposed to five 50 years ago. Sure, it’s good for the environment—fewer people means less demand for resources. The problem is that single children receive a freakish amount of love and attention. Most graduate at least twelve times before leaving high school. Their every move is recorded and celebrated, and it gives them an outsize sense of their own importance. 

Now, bad parenting insinuates itself into the school system. Children who did not learn to respect authority at home do not respect it in school. Worse yet, parents who glorify their often singular offspring refuse to accept that said offspring might be imperfect.

If our schools are a mess it’s in large part due to these parents who think their kids are special, who get mad if you contradict their brilliance, if you give them a bad grade or, God forbid, try to take their phones away.

I find one notion amusing, even if it does not make a lot of sense. Saying that children have no natural predators does give us a picture of children who follow their whims, their bliss and the call of their gut. Said children have been taught not to answer to any external authority:

Children now are like animals who have no natural predators left. Had I arrived at my elementary school with a bleeding head wound, explaining that my father had just thrown me out of his moving car because I was teasing my sister, the teacher would have handed me a Band-Aid, saying, “Well, I hope you learned a lesson from it.” Now, even a scratch on the back of your hand could get your parents locked up for abuse. And children know this! 

Neuroscience tells us that children do not develop the brain function that makes them moral beings until late adolescence. Giving morally underdeveloped children the power to do what they please is a very bad idea. See what happened during China’s Cultural Revolution.

Naturally, Sedaris does not want to sound like a crank, like someone who can only find fault. At the least, he feels obliged to offer a better, shining example of good parenting. To find it he had to go to Yokohama, Japan.

I know that that is far away, but certainly he was not going to find it in the West:

I wondered, thinking of a couple I saw on the subway in Yokohama once. Their eighteen-month-old son was with them, and when the boy wanted to look out the window, his mother removed his shoes, and took a towel out of her bag that he could stand on. Just before we reached their station, the woman pulled out a small spray bottle along with a paper napkin and cleaned the kid’s handprints off the glass. So actually, maybe that’s the solution. You have a child or two, and then send them off to be raised in Japan until they’re eighteen or so, and have learned proper manners. When they return and you tell them how absolutely awesome and special they are, they’ll look at you and blink, not understanding, and thus not believing, a word of it.

Fancy that, learning good manners. It’s the basis of being well brought up. Children who have no manners have been brought down, even before they are launched.

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Giving Thanks

Tis the day to feel gratitude. It does not cost anything, so there is no real excuse for not showing how grateful we all are.

And yet, gratitude now seems more to be the exception than the rule. We have gotten over the urge to feel grateful because we have gotten over the cultural imperative to connect with other people.

And, not because I have not analyzed the problem. Four years ago, on Thanksgiving, I wrote this:

Given how obsessed we are with our Selves, we refuse to accept the generosity offered by others, and certainly not the generosity offered by God. We are no longer grateful because we no longer want to feel that we depend on anyone but our Selves. We are so independent and autonomous, so thoroughly atomized, that we refuse to enter into the most elementary transactions with other people. We trust no one. We rely on no one. And we cannot figure out why we are so isolated.

We do not feel gratitude because we have overdosed on therapy. Even if we missed out on therapy sessions, we have embraced the values that therapy has been promulgating-- beginning with radical individualism. We imagined that it was a good thing to be independent and autonomous, but we failed to recognize that such a deviant cultural precept has a very high price.

Gratitude is about other people. David DeSteno explained it well in the New York Times:

Research by the psychologist Sara Algoe has shown that when we feel grateful for other people’s thoughtfulness, we consider that they might be worth getting to know a little better. Gratitude pushes us to take the first steps in forming relationships with new people. And once we know people better, continued feelings of gratitude strengthen our ties to them. Feeling grateful to one person for a favor also makes us more likely to “pay forward” favors to others we don’t know — a phenomenon identified by the psychologist Monica Bartlett — which, in turn, can lead them to want to get to know us.

Similarly, Joel Kotkin explained that young people especially have lost the habit of gratitude:

Most Americans, according to a Templeton Foundation survey, feel they receive little gratitude at home or the office. The feeling of gratitude appears to drop with age. Today’s millennials are the least grateful. This is not surprising given the new generations’ low levels of interest in the very things we are likely to feel grateful for, such as family, religion or America itself.

Kotkin is surely correct to see that losing religion has caused us to lose a sense of social connection. Again, therapy culture has aided and abetted this disaggregation. It is opposed to religion and works to undermine community ties.

We have lost religion. Since religion turns isolated individuals into a community, losing it is hardly inconsequential.

Religion, for all its undoubted spurs to divisiveness, underpinned their sense of gratitude that extended well beyond the Puritans. It later inspired even outsiders, such as Jews, Latinos and African Americans, to celebrate the New England experience. As Americans, we all embraced the notion that we were all fortunate for the blessings of home and family, even when paltry, that divinity bequeathed to us.

With the decline in religious observance, Thanksgiving, not surprisingly, seems to have lost its spiritual essence. It is a holiday now more identified with football and gluttony than anything of spiritual value.

Kotkin offers Mary Eberstadt’s analysis, based on identity politics. She argued that the loss of patriotic loyalty has forced people to cling to factions, to identity groups, based on victimhood and grievance:

With family and community ties weakened, Eberstadt notes, more people, again particularly the young, seek to embrace not the overall community, but an “identity” group. These are often based on grievance ideology built around sexual preference, race, gender identity or physical disability. Such identarian ideology is particularly common in our key intellectual centers such as Manhattan, where a majority of households are single. The hotbeds of identity politics — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston — all have among the lowest rates of family formation in the nation.

All of this to say, I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving.

Wednesday Potpourri

 First, from the inimitable Louisiana senator, John Kennedy, in conversation with Martha MacCallum. Sen. Kennedy takes the full measure of the political moment:

“The American people may be poorer under President Biden, but they’re not stupid…. They see an open border, they experience inflation, they see the rampant crime. The American people look around and see the world on fire, the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, the embers smoldering in China and they have concluded that fair or unfair, Martha, I’m not saying this is accurate but I can read a poll and the American people have concluded that President Biden is old and he needs soup and an early bedtime and they have concluded that Vice President Harris is not capable, that when her IQ gets to 75, she should sell.”

Second, from the much reviled Hungarian president Victor Orban:

The Hungarian model works! Many people in Western Europe would give half their lives if they could have a country without illegal migrants again. In Hungary we have zero #ILLEGALimmigrants. Only those can come whom we let in.

Third, in regard to what seems to be an outbreak of bad behavior by Congresspeople-- consider Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin getting ready to brawl with the Teamsters’ Union president, Peggy Noonan has this to say:

I think the biggest reason for Congress’s behavioral deterioration may be simply that all Americans now, especially people in politics, are media-addled. Lawmakers don’t experience themselves as political figures doing the business of the nation but as actors in a streaming series called “Populism!” on some tacky cable network, and they have to keep it lively and keep the action going. They are celebrities back home, like Real Housewives, famous for being famous and eager to do selfies to show how salt-of-the-earth they are. Once I talked to the producer of a weekly TV drama and told him I found it interesting that his actors, in their scenes, always seem to show they’re thinking. Before answering a question they linger and take time, as if they’re trying to show how thinking looks. He smiled and said no, it’s just an actor’s trick, they’re trying to keep the camera on their face.

Here we point out why all this is bad for America. It makes democracy look cruddy and small, like something shrinking before our eyes. It makes our leaders look second rate and insubstantial. It disheartens parents, who are trying to create rules for the road for their children. It disheartens normal Americans who are worried for their country and see in its increasing wildness and lack of dignity a sign that we may not be able to hold together in the long term.

And of course it pleases our competitors in the world. They think we’re a sinking nation, poorly educated, riven by race, seeking refuge in drugs. The embarrassing behavior of our political leaders is, to them, more evidence of our breakup. Do you wish you knew Chinese president Xi’s thoughts this week as he traveled through a San Francisco bedecked in Chinese flags? I’ll tell you. He thinks we are on a long slide, our time is over, America was the 20th century but this is the 21st.

Fourth, it does not quite rate with the moment when the Amsterdam synagogue excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, but still….

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has disavowed Candace Owens:

The conservative group that helped launch the career of Candace Owens is cutting ties with the political commentator, citing her “ignorant, hateful and morally obtuse remarks about Israel and the Jews.”

The David Horowitz Freedom Center released a statement on Monday disavowing its years-long association with Owens, the former blogger who rose to become a prominent social media personality and podcaster.

Fifth, from Aaron Sibarium:

A sign at the Harvard-Yale football game reads: “Exchange each hostage for 100 Pro-Hamas Harvard Students & Faculty.”

Sixth, in the matter of the ever embarrassing Gen Z, the New York Post reports that the younger generation has decided to reject the notion of a chaste relationship. They do not want to be tied down to a single sexual or romantic partner. Yet, as the story explains, the poll was taken by the adultery site, Ashley Madison.

As though we did not have enough to worry about:

More than half (59%) of Gen Zers either want an open or a polyamorous relationship, according to a recent study from Ashley Madison.

Sixty-five percent believe those types of relationships provide fuller sexual and romantic life experiences, while nearly half admit that one sexual partner simply can’t fulfill their sexual needs.

While it should be noted that the results of the study are slightly skewed as the people polled were all users of Ashley Madison — a dating site for married people that encourages affairs — experts agree that Gen Z is more accepting of open relationships than previous generations.

“In the past, people couldn’t wrap their head around polygamy not being tied to infidelity,” New York licensed social worker and life coach Francesa Maximé told The Post.

But as every generation does, Gen Z is breaking the mold of everything from workplace etiquette to relationship norms.

“There is certainly a new perspective in terms of how we look at relationships and what it means to be in a committed one. Open relationships are nothing new, although our willingness to openly talk about them is a fairly recent trend,” psychologist Dr. Michele Leno told The Post.

And Gen Z specifically appears to be more willing to discuss and engage in open relationships for a multitude of reasons.

Seventh, speaking of GenZ, they are apparently incapable of contributing to business productivity, so they want everyone to believe that they should be hired for their ebullient, scintillating personalities. The New York Post has the story:

Forget the resume — Gen Z thinks you should hire them for their personalities.

According to the youngest generation in the workforce, their humor and wit provides a certain vibrance older employees apparently lack.

They’ve even invented a term — “personality hire” — to describe their self-perceived function in a corporate setting: to provide all the jokes, banter and playfulness needed in order to “set the vibes.”

Eighth, surely you are against all forms of authoritarian government and favor democracy. Fair enough.

But, have you ever considered what happens in society when we fail to respect authority, whether the authority of the police or the authority of classroom teachers.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew offers an interesting hypothesis in the Deseret News:

Unfortunately, many educators at every level today appear both personally and ideologically opposed to authority. 

As a result, rampant disorder, violence toward students and teachers, abysmal test scores and a truancy problem are just some of the issues facing schools across the nation. Even if we had both the resolve and the resources to fix these issues that have become ever more prevalent since the ill-advised school shutdowns that teachers unions demanded in 2020, doing so would prove both costly and difficult. But it could be done. 

However, without an accurate understanding of the real issue undergirding this descent into chaos, even resolve and resources would get us nowhere. It is the abdication of parental, institutional and societal authority that has wrought this exponential growth in violence, mediocrity and insubordination. 

Ninth, Gerard Baker sums up the cultural rot in once-Great Britain, for the Wall Street Journal:

In Britain, you can be arrested for silently saying a prayer within a few hundred yards of an abortion clinic, but you can call for the destruction of Israel and praise Adolf Hitler and the boys in blue will ensure you’re allowed to scream your bile unimpeded.

Tenth, Dr. Eli David remarks that the BBC has called itself out for its anti-Israeli bias:

Wow, @BBCNews is admitting that Israel was right all along: Hamas' terror tunnels are under Shifa hospital, and the hospital was used for keeping hostages. Even BBC can no longer lie in the face of evidence!

Eleventh, interviewed by Mark Levin, Alan Dershowitz debunked the moral equivalence between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia:

I’ve got news for you. There is no Islamophobia at any university in the United States. It’s a fake. It’s virtue parading. Oh, we have to fight anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Let me tell you who the anti-Semites are. They are largely, not completely, the radical Muslims who claim to be victims of Islamophobia. This is a one-sided issue.

Twelfth, Seth Dillon offers this sobering thought on Twitter:

If you believe the Hamas-loving Left is genuinely concerned about antisemitic content on X, you are an idiot.

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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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