Israel at War—Absurdities

Humans are prone to hypocrisy. They're also prone to ignorance of history, belief in obviously counter-factual misinformation, innumeracy, and a variety of other absurdities. Over the past nine days, the hard-Left and their junior members at American universities along with their trained hamsters in the propaganda media have given new meaning to these failings. In my posts on "Israel at War," I've outlined many of their absurd beliefs.

Don Hannan discusses a broad-based societal reaction to another incident, driven primarily by leftist outrage about the police killing of one black man, and its broader implications to Israel at war:

When a black man was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, it was treated as an attack on black people everywhere. From Baden, Ontario, to Bridgetown, Barbados, to Bangalore and Bloemfontein, statues of white men were taken down. Police officers around the world sank to one knee. Corporations, charities, and arts groups endorsed Black Lives Matter.

The massacre of women and children in Israel has led to a very different response. No university has offered Jewish students special consideration in their exams, as many did to black students in 2020. No one has been fired for saying that Palestinian lives matter.

The killings in Israel were no less traumatic — on the contrary, they were both more numerous and more disturbing, the instinct to protect babies being among the most powerful in the human psyche. Nor were they any less racist. American police officers sometimes abuse their powers, and black men can be disproportionately on the receiving end of it, but this is not the same thing as slaughtering hundreds of civilians purely on the grounds of their ethnicity ...

The difference between BLM and these atrocities lies in the [leftist] “decolonize” doctrines that dominate our discourse. Society is conceived as a pyramid of privilege. Any group deemed to be oppressed is allowed to hit out at those imagined to be above it. Jews generally, and Israelis particularly, are too successful to be victims. Indeed, the state of Israel exists precisely because Jews had had enough of playing that role.

This way of thinking is why several BLM chapters reveled in the slaughter, posting images of the Hamas bulldozers and paragliders used in the attacks, and identifying black people with Palestinians. It also explains why parts of the Left have struggled to take sides unequivocally — even for babies and against their murderers.

-- Hypocrisy? Sure. 

-- Ignorance of history. Unquestionably — the leftists' purposeful disregard for historical fact about the Jews in Judea is obvious. 

-- And about the "palestinian people"? They're a construct invented in the 1960s. Don't believe me? How about a testimonial from the PLO itself in a statement from Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, in 1977: 

The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.

-- Belief in obviously counter-factual misinformation? Absolutely. The argument that "most" palestinians hate Hamas is belied by polling that indicates a 57% majority support the group.  

-- Innumeracy? Yes. How can Gaza claim a lack of food, shelter and water when hundreds of millions of dollars in western "humanitarian aid" has been delivered over the past few years ... unless that aid was spent elsewhere.

But in this case, these human foibles are very dangerous. The hard left and their University supporters have been taught to believe in absurdities. As Voltaire (1765) once said:  

Those who believe in absurdities can be convinced to commit atrocities. 

So far, those who believe absurdities are providing only rhetorical support for Hamas' atrocities, but there's a very real concern that words will ultimately morph into anti-Semitic violence. Beware.

UPDATE-1:

The Left's New Rules strike yet again. Recalling the furor surrounding any exceptions to the BLM mantra, I seem to recall that anyone who even suggested that "all lives matter" was accused of using a racist "dogwhistle." The rule was simple, the only focus can be on the group that has been attacked.

No more, at least in the case of the Hamas atrocities. Now the group that has been attacked—Israel and Jews— is not the victim, but the cause of the attack. The atrocities visited on the group are therefore justified.

But what about the New Rules? It would seem that anyone who suggests now that "all lives (Israel and palestinian) matter" is, according to the Left's own New Rules—a "racist." 

daTechGuy's Blog writes:

Why I’m shocked SHOCKED that Congresswoman [Rashida] Talib [D-MI] would DARE to suggest that “all lives matter” after all the best and the brightest of the elites have told us for almost half a decade now that any person who dares utter this phrase must be a horrible racist who should be shunned and disregarded.

Now of course I don’t believe that myself but these aren’t my rules, these are the rules that the left in media, academia and Politics have insisted on, so how can it be that Talib can say this without being denounced.

Like I said—hypocrisy and absurdities.

UPDATE-2:

The petulant child-activists on University campuses and in big blue cities have decided that being anti-Israel and borderline anti-Semitic is what the cool kids of the Left do. In thinking about that, it occurs to me that many of those children were not alive when the same brand of Islamic terrorists murdered about 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

At that time, the radical left had already become sympatico with Islamists, using its tired and absurd oppressed-oppressor meme to justify the Islamists barbarity in Israel and in other parts of the word. 

In the weeks after 9/11, even the radical leftists became eerily quiet. Our nation was shocked and angry, very angry. Millions upon millions of small American flags dotted front yeards across the country. No one talked about proportional responses. No one suggested that we supply al Qaeda with food, medicine, water and utilities. No one suggested that "both sides" need to show restraint. No one demanded that to believe that 9/11 happened, we needed to provide photos of all 3,000 bodies of Americans killed.

But that's not happening with Israel's 9/11. Hypocrisy and absurdity reign.