Israel at War—Mugged

Social justice warriors (SJWs) and the Jewish progressives who support them have long thought that their pseudo-virtue and pseudo-morality inoculates them against criticism from those who see them for what they are. At best, they are fantasy thinkers who cannot admit error when their fantasies collide with reality (BTW, reality always wins). At worst, they are authoritarians, who cannot countenance any opposition, resorting to name-calling, demonization, and cancellation that is both vicious and amoral. At at their extreme, they are rabid anti-Israel advocates that are, at their core, unapologetic anti-Semites.

As the pro-Palestinian Left and their Jewish progressive supporters try to absorb the atrocities committed by Islamists, many suffer from cognitive dissonance. After all, how can their sainted palestinian "victims" do such awful, barbaric things? Some try to reduce their cognitive dissonance by doubling down on their fantasy beliefs. They join useful idiots on college campuses and their anti-Semitic allies in anti-Israel protests, spouting abject nonsense like "genocide," "apartheid," and "colonialism," all to help justify their warped worldview and reduce the dissonance they feel.

Others, however, are Jewish liberals who have been mugged by reality. A figurative slap in the face by leftists who they once believed were their allies in social justice, provides them with needed clarity, and they have reacted accordingly. 

• They are moving away from leftist ideology because for the first time they realize it is anti-Israel to its core. 
• They are pulling their donations to alma maters whose faculty and administrators have become increasingly anti-Israel.
• Having once embraced the notion of Middle East peace at all cost, they now reject it, recognizing that you cannot make peace with people who want to exterminate you.
  
• They are appalled by the "ceasefire" advocates who are perfectly okay with Hamas going unpunished for the atrocities it gleefully committed and streamed to the rest of the world.
• They are disgusted by the entertainment industry glitterati who parrot Islamist lies and leftist anti-Israel propaganda.
• They are revolted by their favorite newspaper, The New York Times, for enthusiastically publishing Hamas propaganda (think: the "Hospital Bombing" blood libel).
• They have lost trust in biased mainstream broadcast media (e.g., CNN, MSNBC, PBS, CBS, ABC, NBC) who parrot unverified propaganda (e.g., "thousands of chiuldren have been killed by Israel attacks") as if it were true.
  
• They are arming up. Once avid anti-gun advocates, after seeing the anti-Semitic vitriol in cities across the United States, they are now buying weapons and getting training.
• They are even questioning their beloved Democratic party, asking why there has not been wholesale and very public condemnation of Hamas apologists like Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar.
• They are moving away from Joe Bidem, whose press secretary, KJP, when asked about anti-Semitism evidenced in pro-Palestinian/Hamas demonstrations across the country, lectures the reporters on ... "Islamophobia."
  

They are changing—maybe too late, maybe too slowly, maybe not enough. But they are changing.

Only time will tell whether the change is fleeting or permanent. I'm hoping for the latter. 

It's okay to make mistakes, even bad ones—as long as you learn from them and change your alliances and actions accordingly. 

At least some of America's progressive Jews are learning quickly and will, I hope, make their own second chances. Never again!

UPDATE:

To its credit, the left-leaning Atlantic published a gruesome summary of the videos taken by Hamas as they slaughtered, disfigured, raped and beheaded innocent civilians during the atrocities they committed on 10/7. The presentation was given by the IDF to the international press yesterday.

Graeme Wood, the author of the piece entitled, "A Record of Pure Predatory Sadism," does not pull any punches. To his credit he does not describe Hamas, in the smarmy and despicable tradition of the NYT, using phrases like "attacked the Israeli occupiers" or "vented their anger at years of deprivation and poverty." Instead he describes what he saw on the Hamas video clips and heard on Hamas phone calls, summarizing this way:

To me the most disturbing section was not visual at all. Like the clip of the father and his boys hunted in their pajamas, it was upsetting in part because it showed a relationship between parent and child. The clip is just a phone call—placed by a terrorist to his family back in Gaza. He tells his father that he is calling from a Jewish woman’s phone. (The phone recorded the call.) He tells his father that his son is now a “hero” and that “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands.” And he tells his family, about a dozen times, that they should open up WhatsApp on his phone, because he has sent photographs to prove what he has done. “Put on Mom!” he says. “Your son is a hero!”

His parents, I noticed, are not nearly as enthusiastic as he is. I believe that the mom says “praise be to God” at one point, which could be gratitude for her son’s crimes or pure reflex, indicating her loss for words to match her son’s unspeakable acts. They do not question what their son has done; they do not scold him. They tell him to come back to Gaza. They fear for his safety. He says, amid rounds of “Allahu akbar,” that he intends “victory or martyrdom”—which the parents must understand means that he will never come home. From their muted replies I wonder whether they also understand that even if he did come home, he would do so as a disgusting and degraded creature, and that it might be better for him not to.

There will be no peace with the son and his parents. There is too much Islamist-inspired hatred coming out of Gaza and its palestinian residents. Hamas and their many supporters are truly "disgusting and degraded creature[s]." It's time for this decades-old macabre "peace process" to end. Its time for Gaza as a nest of "disgusting and degraded creature[s]" to end. To grab a quote from the Left (just this once): By any means necessary.