Israel at War—Six Things

It's been 38 days since the Hamas committed atrocities that shocked even those of us who fully understood the utter depravity and hatred spewed by the Islamists.  In that time, six things have become clear, not only to those of us who now proudly state that we are right of center, but to a large number of center-left liberals, and even a non-trivial number of progressive Jews. I'll discuss each briefly in this post. 

Friends and support. For at least the past 60 years, Jews have been reflectively liberal and progressive. They have worked tirelessly and contributed generously to assist those who are viewed as downtrodden (think: the early civil rights movement). They have often voted against their best interests by helping elect Democrats who: (1) have been subtly anti-Israel (think: Barack Obama), (2) have championed "equity" policies that have blatantly discriminated against Jews (think: college admissions), (3) have enthusiastically supported organizations that are both anti-Israel (think: BLM), and (4) who refuse to condemn blatant anti-Semitic speech among at colleges across the country (think: most elite Universities) and throughout the public at large (think: far too many Democrat politicians). 

Jews have learned over the past 38 days that few in American leadership on the Left have their back, and many among the leftist organizations that they once supported have now made common cause with the palestinians—a group that would have no problem with the destruction of Israel and the elimination of all Jews in the region, not to mention throughout the world. 

Jews have an innate sense of danger. It's the only way they've survived for millennia. All but the most delusional leftist Jews [1] sense that something is amiss—that decades of information warfare and institutional capture have allowed the Left to take control of the narrative and the direction of Western culture. 

The Left sees things it can relate to in Muslim ideology [2] —exemplified by the Iranian Islamists who are Hamas' puppet masters—and for that reason, it champions the palestinians, excuses Hamas' atrocities, and lies, distorts and creates a fantasy history. People who support these things are NOT to be trusted, and as a consequence, those Jews who do sense the danger have become red-pilled. Let's hope the effects of the pill last indefinitely. 

The Danger. In a recent speech, Bari Weiss eloquently comments on the danger that has become evident over the past 38 days: 

The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, by a different kind of catastrophe. 

A moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified ... 

Hip, young people with pronouns in their bios are not just chanting the slogans of a genocidal death cult. They are tearing down the photographs of women and children who are currently being held hostage in the tunnels that run under the Gaza Strip. They do so with pleasure. They laugh. They mock the 9-month-old baby who was stolen from his parents. 

In doing so, they are tearing down—or at least trying to tear down—-the essence of our common humanity, or even the reality that hostages were taken at all. 

Or maybe it’s that they are trying to extinguish the memory of the hostages, who to them are not worth saving … or actually had it coming to them. 

Or maybe—and I say this as the mother of a young child whose face I see in the face of every captive—they are trying to tear down the divine image that is at the root of our civilization’s conception of the dignity of every human life. 

What could possibly explain this? 

The easy answer is that the human beings who were slaughtered on October 7 were Jews. And that antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. And that in every generation someone rises up to kill us. 

“They tried to wipe us out, they failed, let’s eat” as the old Jewish joke goes. 

But that is not the whole answer. Because the proliferation of antisemitism, as always, is a symptom. When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying. 

As I've argued throughout the "Israel at War" series (e.g., here, here, and here), the "breakdown" that Weiss describes has been caused by those on the Left who insist that we normalize insanity—that we collectively embrace insane ideas, insane claims, and insane mandates that are not only ... well, insane ... but also ruinous.

At some level, the left understands that (to parahrase Voltaire): If you can persuade people to believe in absurdities (insane ideas), you can convince them to commit atrocities. And that simple idea gives the Left enormous power. 

That's why our "society itself is breaking down." That is the danger. The Left MUST be stopped. 

Western Media. But who empowers the Left as it ramps up information warfare and institutional capture. The answer is obvious and very troubling. The mainstream media and much of social media are the Left's propaganda engine, feeding the American public approved leftist narratives about the Hamas-Israel war along with a tsunami of other insane ideas. 

In the context of the war, media propagandists continually present "pro-palestinian" voices (out of all proportion to their actual support among the citizenry) who accuse Israel of "genocide" or "apartheid" and in the last few weeks, "atrocities." As I've noted many times in the past, their accusations are actually psychological projection—something that Muslim activists and leftists have turned into an art form. 

In each case Hamas and/or the Arab Muslim countries that make up the Arab Crescent are guilty of attempted genocide (think: the Hamas charter); have achieved the overall goal of apartheid (removing one group (in this case, Jews) entirely from their countries' populations, and atrocities (think: 10/7). But the trained hamsters in our propaganda media gladly provide a voice to the psychological projectionists. 

For that reason, along with the simple reality that the propaganda media is dishonest, distorts the news to favor a leftist narrative, refuses to validate information coming from Hamas and the palestinians, never provides context that might clarify outrageous claims (i.e., lies) coming from palestinian pro-Hamas activists, and is structurally biased, sources like NYT, WaPo, LAT, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NBC, CBS, and ABC, Facebook, TicToc, and Instagram cannot and should not be trusted. 

Academia.  It turns out that those on the right who continually warned that colleges and universities were being used to groom a generation of hard core leftists were NOT conspiracy theorists. The extremely troubling outpouring of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment on college campuses, the literal enthusiasm of far too many college professors in their support for Hamas,  and the mealy-mouthed response of college administrations indicates that the leftists have taken over at many elite universities.

Students are young and impressionable. They can be easily influenced by an ideology that plays to their need to be virtuous and to save the world. So when insane leftist ideas are introduced by glib professors, they listen, having neither the experience nor the intellectual tools to think about those ideas critically. The result is what we have seen over the past 38 days.

Barbarians within the Gates. In an earlier post, I wrote about the ascension of barbarians and their enablers on the Left: 

We ARE the majority. 

We recognize not only the absolute evil in Hamas' kinetic barbarism, but the evil among those who have such a broken moral compass that they find reasons—lies, distortions and hysteria driven by a form of insanity—to support and justify the kinetic barbarism ... 

Have we made mistakes? Sure we have. But on balance, we have recognized that those mistakes can be remedied without destroying our past, without dividing the world into "victims" and their "oppressors" and without an ideology that is based solely on lies that serve an authoritarian narrative whose goal is human control. That's what the Islamist and Leftist narratives are all about—control and the power that control provides. And that is why both ideologies gravitate toward evil ... 

Many have been astonished to see the marriage of Islamist and Leftist thinking since October 7th, and the lies and hatred that flow out of each ideology. It's time for the majority who have witnessed what we have witnessed to reject both—forcefully and absolutely. To call out their evil whenever we see it, and ultimately, to defeat them. But how exactly? How do we damp the normalization of insanity? How do we cripple the accelerating information warfare and institutional takeover? How do we stop our liberal society from dying? 

One step at a time. 

The First Steps. First, it's important to note we're playing hard ball with people who are vicious, people who use our constitutional protections as weapons to defeat us, people who use the courts and an increasingly corrupted justice system as human shields, people who are willing to win "by any means necessary." 

Okay ... if those are the New Rules, we have to play by them. And for those naive folks who argue that that will make us just like them, a warning—unless we play with a vicious determination that mirrors theirs, unless we adopt their rules as a weapon against them, unless we are relentless, we will lose. And with that loss, the lives and livelihoods of good, decent people will be ruined. Because ruin is what the Left is all about, and ruin us they will—all in an effort to consolidate authoritarian power. 

Bari Weiss emphasizes this when she writes about the Hamas-israel war but uses words that have a much broader import:: 

[The Left's] moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine: they see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and “colonizers,” so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good. No, it doesn’t matter that most Israelis are “people of color.” 

That baby? He is a colonizer first and a baby second. 

That woman raped to death? Shame it had to come to that, but she is a white oppressor. 

This is the ideology of vandalism in the true sense of the word—the Vandals sacked Rome. It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing of how to build. It knows only how to tear down and to destroy. And it has already torn down so very, very much. The civilization that feels as natural to us as oxygen? That takes thousands of years, thousands of nudges of progress, thousands of risks, thousands of forgotten sacrifices to build up. But vandals can make quick work of all that. 

Reagan used to say that freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. The same can be said of civilization. 

If there can be anything good that has come out of this nightmare that began on October 7 it is this: we have been shaken awake. We know the gravity of the stakes. And they are not theoretical. They are real. 

So ... what to do about "an ideology of vandalism"? Bari Weiss makes a number of suggestions that are well-worth reading. 

Gad Saad makes further suggestions on X: 

In order for the West to win this civilizational battle, it must: 

1. Proudly and unequivocally defend Western values; 
2. Reject cultural relativism and the unicornia vision of multiculturalism; 
3. Recommit to individual dignity over the celebration of collective identity politics; 
4. Recognize that all cultures are not equal; 
5. Recognize that all religious beliefs are not equally consistent with Western values; 
6. Recognize that all immigrants are not equally likely to assimiliate and adopt Western values; 
7. Recognize that immigrants who espouse intolerable values that seek to destroy our civilization will be deported (en masse); 
8. Implement a rational immigration policy that recognizes the importance of cultural homophily (choosing immigrants who hail from cultures that possess similar values to those of the host nations); 
9. Exhibit zero tolerance for seditious belief systems; such systems can be criminalized if they constitute an existential threat to our freedoms and liberties. 

I could go on but the latter nine items (some of which are correlated) would be a good start. 

Here is the problem: I don't think that the West has the testicular fortitude to implement more than a small subset of the latter nine. Hence, to reiterate a prediction that I've been making for several decades, the West is in death spiral. It will be ugly, painful, and bloody. The greatest tragedy is that the West brought this on itself because of parasitic "progressive" follies. The most dangerous weapon in nature is a human mind infected by ideological parasites. 

If Gad Saad is right about a lack of "testicular fortitude," I'm afraid he's right about the rest. But the testicular fortitude he mentions is really a recognition that we MUST play be the Left's rules and do so viciously, when required. 

I'll close this post with Bari Weiss' advice, along with her warnings. At the end of her speech, she quotes Ted Olsen, whose wife Barbara was murdered by another Islamist hate group, al Quaida, on 9/11: 

Ted once said of Barbara that “Barbara was Barbara because America, unlike any place in the world, gave her the space, freedom, oxygen, encouragement, and inspiration to be whatever she wanted to be.” 

There is no place like this country. And there is no second America to run to if this one fails. 

So let’s get up. Get up and fight for our future. This is the fight of—and for—our lives.

It is. As long as we understand the Left's New Rules and how to apply them viciously and relentlessly, we'll win. If we falter, evil will prevail. 

FOOTNOTES: 

 [1] There are still many delusional leftist Jews whose 'religion' is socialism, not Judaism. They will continue to believe that the Left loves them, up until it decides that it no longer needs them as useful idiots. 

[2] Strict adherence to an insane narrative and ideology, coupled with an authoritarian strain that demands compliance of all who follow, and enforced by a viciousness that often extends to violence when the narrative or the authoritarian approach is challenged.