"What Did You Think Decolonization Meant?"
I haven’t been posting much in the past week or so because I’ve been busy with a lot of extra work that is now reaching fruition, including a big article that I’ve been working on for some time that was pushed back by the publisher because of the attacks in Israel. Supposedly it’s going up any day now, and I’ll update you when that happens.
In the meantime, I just had a new piece go up at Discourse as a follow-up to my previous comments on the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.
This article looks at the shock many center-left “liberals” have been experiencing as they watched a whole section of the American left come out in favor of anti-Jewish terrorism.
Some of it is in the usual ridiculous form.
Consider Ryna Workman, the president of New York University’s Student Bar Association, who issued a statement condemning Israel’s “settler colonialism” but declared, “I will not condemn Palestinian resistance”—no matter what form it takes. Yet according to the New York Post, “Mx.” Workman “identifies as binary,” which I am sure would go over well with the Islamic fanatics of Hamas. This is an old absurdity, summed up by “queer” leftists wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the image of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara—who presided over the persecution of homosexuals as “sexual perverts.”
This case got a lot of notice because it earned Workman the loss of a job offer at a major New York law firm, which some derided as “cancel culture.” Yet for all the absurdities of campus cancel culture, which seeks to ban people over ordinary political differences, free speech never required anyone to offer a platform to Nazis. It is reasonable that employees of a law firm wouldn’t want to work with someone who advocates the murder of Jews, so this is one of those points where I am inclined to offer one cheer for wokeness.
Let me also offer a cheer or two for anyone who wants to cancel the Cornell professor who said he was “exhilarated” by the Hamas attacks.
What we’re finding is what many of us suspected: For all its pretenses about “marginalized people,” wokeness somehow does not extend to protecting Jews from genocide. In fact, the type who think of themselves as “progressive” are dressing up genocide in the language of social justice, and that’s the connection I examine in this article.
I quote one leftist who sums it all up (by way of Peter Savodnik): “On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X [the corpse of Twitter]: ‘What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.’”
So this is what the latest leftist slogans really mean. I spend the rest of the piece tracking this down to the roots, and I connect it to my long crusade against the usual left-right political spectrum.
If you subscribe to an ideology where you are the “moderate” version of an “extreme” that celebrates killing babies, maybe the problem is how you defined your ideology in the first place—and you need to redefine it in a way that doesn’t put you on the same spectrum with genocide.
I also quote Ruy Teixeira of The Liberal Patriot who says liberals should “throw the intersectional left under the bus.” I hope some of them can work their way up to it.
Read the whole thing.
To get an idea of how widespread this problem is, see the grudging semi-apology the New York Times had to issue for a headline blaring that an Israeli bomb had killed 500 Palestinians at a Gaza hospital. Their source for this was Hamas—but it turned out to be a Palestinian rocket that had misfired. The apology is a lot of verbiage when all that was really required was, “We credulously repeated the propaganda of a terrorist organization, and the people responsible have been fired.” But nobody was fired, which means that they didn’t learn anything and will do this again.
At The Atlantic, Graeme Wood offers a harrowing report on the Israeli Defense Forces’ press-only screening of footage of vicious murders and torture carried out by Hamas attackers, who proudly filmed it all on their phones and body-cams. He describes it as “a record of pure, predatory sadism.” The real story is why this footage had to be shown: to counteract widespread denial in the press and even more widespread attempts to impute some kind of moral equivalence between Hamas and the IDF.
Something has gone deeply wrong when this has to happen, and the center-left establishment needs to treat this as a crisis.
Of course, there is also a problem on the right, though to a lesser extent. As conservative radio host Erick Erickson told Semafor, “There clearly is a level of antisemitism that conservatives unknowingly welcomed into the movement—people who, they hated the left, Israel wasn’t an issue, they never said anything, and now they’re amongst us and oh! It turns out they’re antisemites.” I agree with everything except the “uknowningly.” The racist alt-right has been steadily infiltrating the mainstream right for a long time. (More on that soon.)
The political spectrum of excuse-making for evil was summed up pretty well on Threads.
Incidentally, the weekend of the attacks in Israel was the point at which Threads began to replace Twitter as the joint where all the political media types hang out. It’s still not as big, but it’s less spammy and the engagement seems less angry and more genuine. And the guy who runs it doesn’t keep boosting antisemites. So follow me there under the username rtracinski.
There is one last important element of this story. The fact that Hamas shows no respect for individual human beings does not mean that we have to do the same.
There is no way this ends without further loss of civilian lives. No war ever does. But Israel has to have a plan for what comes next—for how they destroy Hamas while respecting the laws of war. And it’s not clear yet whether they do.
David French offers a very appropriate model to follow: the battle against ISIS, particularly a nasty fight to clear them out of the city of Mosul in Western Iraq.
In the fall of 2016, around 100,000 Iraqi security forces and their allies massed outside Mosul and faced a daunting task: to remove the Islamic State from a vast, densely populated city when that army was deeply embedded in the city and had been able to prepare elaborate defenses.
Compounding the problem were that the civilian population, unlike during other recent urban battles in Iraq, largely remained in the city and that ISIS had no desire to facilitate a civilian evacuation….
Mosul…was largely fought in and around the civilian population and was at the time quite possibly the largest and deadliest urban battle since the end of World War II. Iraqi soldiers—supported by American air power—assaulted a city of more than one million people. The resulting battle took nine months to complete; killed thousands of ISIS fighters, by most estimates; cost the Iraqi security forces thousands of casualties; and, despite considerable efforts to protect noncombatants, killed up to 11,000 civilians. But Iraq won, ISIS lost, and ISIS no longer controls Mosul.
French has a particularly well-grounded perspective on this because he served in Iraq as a JAG officer—a member of the military’s legal corps—and did precisely what he’s talking about: training his unit in the laws of war and helping them make decisions. I particularly like the way he reminds everyone that they are misinterpreting basic concepts like “proportionality,” which does not require that you take the same number of casualties as your enemy but rather that your use of force is proportional to your legitimate military objectives.
But the first law of war is to win it, because failing to eradicate Hamas just ensures more conflict and more death into the indefinite future. I have been appalled at the reports from Israel but not fundamentally shocked, because I have been expecting something like it ever since Israel adopted its policy of “disengagement” from Gaza about 20 years ago.
Israel adopted that policy because they did not want to engage in an ongoing, long-term counterinsurgency campaign. Nobody ever does. But that is precisely what they are going to have to learn (or re-learn) to do.
If it is death they want, then I say we give it to them!