“We must start with what was done. Terrorists calling themselves a resistance movement passed over the border from Gaza and murdered little children; they took infants hostage as they screamed. They murdered old women, tormented and raped young women, targeted an overnight music festival and murdered the unarmed young people in cold blood or mowed them down as they ran screaming. They murdered whole families as they begged for their lives; they burned people alive; they decapitated babies.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n “There is no cause on earth that justifies what these murderers did. There is no historical grievance that excuses or ‘gives greater context’ to their actions. Spare me ‘this is the inevitable result when a people are long abused.’ No, this is what happens when savages hold the day: They imperil the very idea of civilization. They killed a grandmother and uploaded pictures of her corpse to her Facebook page.<\/em><\/strong>“<\/p>\nPeggy Noonan “The October Horror Is Something New”<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n It reminded me for all the world of the Gaza<\/a> Strip<\/a> movies I watched some six years ago that impressed me deeply<\/a>. If you were to give them free reign, would Hamas gunmen I listened to at length in that movie do these horrible things? Absolutely. We can be surprised at the Israeli security failing to prevent Hamas gunmen from penetrating deeply into their country, but we should not be surprised at what happened afterward. October 6th is the largest violent attacks against Jews since the Holocaust, echoing uncomfortably of the Einsatzgruppen<\/em> atrocities of the Nazis or pogroms of Tsarist Russia before that. Gunmen ravaging families and taking screaming hostages back with them for ransom resembles the Viking raids of the Dark Ages or some Mad Max movie. It is shocking. But it should not be surprising, considering we are talking about Hamas. They were honest about what they were about.<\/a> As I wrote in my article about Gaza:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It is a tenuous thing to have regular army soldiers with a clear chain of command and legal accountability to an established government obey the rules and not abuse their power in a combat situation. You have a rifle and buddies with rifles; you have the power of life and death. That is a dangerous authority to give anyone. But give ‘gunmen’ rather than soldiers that power in a situation with few rules and almost no accountability and it is a prescription for widespread and unstoppable violence.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I am not in the least surprised that a Hamas gunmen would do any number of unspeakable acts, if Israeli soldiers were not around to stop them. Last week, they did these things. <\/p>\n\n\n Once the Hamas gunmen breached Israeli border defenses, it was “Lord of the Flies.” <\/p>\n\n\n The Hamas attacks last week were the greatest loss of Jewish life from a violent attack on a single day since the Holocaust. Almost immediately I thought to myself the following: Hamas will do some brutal underhanded thing, like they did last Saturday; and then they will flee back to the Gaza Strip and hide among the civilian population from Israeli reprisals; and the innocent Palestinians surrounding them will pay the price. \u201cHow typical, that many helpless poor people in Gaza will suffer for the crimes of a relatively small number of their brazenly violent brethren. So it goes in other parts of the world, too.\u201d<\/em> And that seems to be exactly what has happened since last Saturday: Hamas goes underground, often literally, hiding from the Israeli Defense Forces by cowering next to Palestinian civilians in and under the Gaza Strip, in effect using them as human shields. So predictable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But also predictable, and depressing, is the support Hamas has received from elements of American society. As a teacher in California, I have had occasion to see the \u201csocial justice educators\u201d preach the message of \u201cdecolonizing\u201d everything from university curricula (\u201cget rid of the dead white males!\u201d) to the offerings in libraries and museums, to replacing \u201cColumbus Day\u201d with \u201cIndigenous People\u2019s Day, for financial reparations for African Americans for slavery and segregation, in favor of \u201cland acknowledgements\u201d for Native Americans, and support for the Boycott, Divest, and Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (\u201cBDS\u201d) movement against Zionism and Israel \u2013 it is a whole ideological \u201cantiracist\u201d pose to \u201cpunch up\u201d at oppressors on behalf of the oppressed. The arguments urged native peoples need to strike back at \u201csettlers\u201d and \u201cdecolonize\u201d on behalf of indigenous peoples towards \u201cliberation.\u201d In the United States nowadays a person supposedly does not live in Ventura, California or Manhattan, New York; no, they live on \u201coccupied Chumash land\u201d or \u201crightfully Lenape territory.\u201d This take is so radical as to be farcical, if one were to take it seriously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But then this Hamas attack took place and college students in America in too many places took to the streets to support the attacks; if they were talking the talk, now they were walking the walk. George Washington University\u2019s Students for Justice in Palestine rejected any difference between civilians and combatants in the effort for \u201coppressed\u201d to overthrow \u201coppressor\u201d in the battle for \u201cjustice.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDecolonization is not a metaphor. It is not an abstract theory to be discussed and debated in classrooms and papers. It is a tangible, material event in which the colonized rise up against the colonizer \u2026 We reject the distinction between \u2018civilian\u2019 and \u2018militant.\u2019 We reject the distinction between \u2018settler\u2019 and \u2018soldier.\u2019 Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not surprised. I had heard this before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Or how about this one from the Swarthmore Students for Justice in Palestine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe call on all Swarthmore community members to unite in solidarity with the plight of the oppressed and confront the dishonest, racist tropes that view resistance as barbaric and uncivilized only when it is exerted by indigenous people.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n There was plenty more of this type on social media:<\/p>\n\n\n On the extreme left, this is a consistent ideological stance across the board. It is the thinking behind \u201cethnic studies\u201d of \u201cResistance, Autonomy, Liberation.\u201d It is the essence of left wing identity politics generally. The enemy: colonialism and imperialism, capitalism and power; under the banner of race and equity. It is about \u201cresisting settler white supremacy colonialism\u201d via Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (\u201cDEI\u201d) work through \u201cintersectionality\u201d study, both at home and abroad. You find this ideology mostly in American universities, among professors and students there, or in traditional lefty haunts like Brooklyn or Portland. But not only there. I have seen it in the California public schools, too. It captures the mood of a certain slice of the American populace, although it is nowhere near the majority of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I spoke at length last year<\/a> on how I can\u2019t stand these people with their dogmatic denunciations of anyone who deviates from their worldview \u2013 the thin-skinned radical educators and student activists who are all too ready to denounce others as \u201cracists\u201d or whatever \u2014 in the context of the call at that time to \u201ccancel\u201d author JK Rowling<\/a> for her views on trans women:<\/p>\n\n\n I took their positions one at a time, and responded to them. I took them seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But most Americans, or at least those outside of academia, did not pay the people in this ideological bubble much mind. But the Hamas Gaza War has opened their eyes. Universities in the United States in the past week have seen pro-Hamas protests, and cheerleading for the attacks. Look at these high school students in San Francisco \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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