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While most decent people responded with horror to the Hamas atrocities, the fringes responded with enthusiasm or defenses of the atrocities. The trouble though is that the Left stopped being a fringe and replaced liberalism as the driving ideological force of the Democratic Party. And the Hard Left became the driving force of the Left.
And the Hard Left supports Hamas. That’s uncomfortable for liberals and even leftists to deal with, but now even anti-Israel leftists are having trouble coping with the fact that their movement supports the rape and murder of Jews.
Now by anti-Israel Left, I don’t mean merely leftists that are critical of Israel. I mean leftists who built their careers on hating Israel and justifying the terrorists. Now that Hamas invaded a music festival, kidnapped, killed and raped women, and kidnapped an elderly “peace activist”, and massacred people like them on kibbutzim, they’re shocked that their ideological allies and friends are good with it.
Joshua Leifer, the editor of Jewish Currently, a violently anti-Israel publication which had its most infamous moment defending the rape and murder of Jews in Hebron back when it was part of the Communist Party, expressed discomfort.
Turned on my phone after the holiday and was overwhelmed by the images of death and horror. My partner and I frantically text friends and loved ones to make sure they’re okay. Everyone seems to have lost someone or knows someone who has. The loss, the tragedy—incomprehensible.
There’s also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for. I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families & children in their beds
I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. I thought we were leftists because our struggle was for all people to be able to live with freedom and dignity.
Are these not the values that led us to oppose the cruel siege on Gaza? To resist the brutalities of the occupation? To oppose apartheid? Where are these values when Israeli children are held hostage, families wiped out, corpses violated before cheering crowds?
Did Leifer really not understand that this was ‘Palestinianism’ from the very beginning? This is what he was fighting for.
What else have the so-called ‘Palestinians’ that he bled for ever done other than this? Built a state, created a functional society, music and art? No they hated Jews and ached to kill them in the most brutal and grotesque ways.
And they’ve done it with the support of leftists like Leifer.
Naomi Klein at the Guardian, like Leifer, also knows people who lost someone. Unlike many Hamas attacks which targeted ‘settlers’, these struck kibbutzim and people who had connections to members of the anti-Israel Left. That, frankly, is one reason why this touches them where the previous murder of women and children by Hamas did not.
“I spent the evening in candlelight and tears with a dear friend who just learned that a close family member was among those massacred in Israel. I won’t name the kibbutz to protect her privacy but yes, it was unequivocally a massacre,” she writes.
“Harder for us adults is the fact that, in their desire to celebrate the powerful symbolism of Palestinians escaping the open air prison that is Gaza — which occupied people have every right to do — some of our supposed comrades on the left continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and in some extreme cases, even seem to celebrate them. In fact these callous displays are a gift to militant Zionism, since they neatly shore up and reconfirm its core and governing belief: that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will – look, even the bleeding-heart left is making excuses for our killers and thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel.”
Rather than grappling with the reality of her movement, Klein tries to argue fellow leftists that they shouldn’t celebrate the rape and murder of Jews because… it’s a gift to Zionism. This is bad reasoning and worse morality.
Faced with the reality that the Left indeed “is making excuses for our killers and thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel”, Klein acts like the problem is not the reality, but that the reality will uphold a ‘Zionist’ narrative.
Klein then assails Israel for the “current murderous leveling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology” that being Zionism.
That’s in an article which never gets around to actually condemning Hamas.
Then she urges, “so how do we confront this violent ideology? (Zionism) For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists, that is experienced as antisemitism by a great many Jews. And antisemitism (besides being hateful) is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism.”
To “confront” Zionism stop supporting the rape and murder of Jews. It’s both pathetic and despicable.
At the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg tries to psychoanalyze and dismiss portions of the Left cheering the murder of Jews while acknowledging that much of this is personal. It’s their friends and neighbors that are doing this.
Of all the people he spoke to, he said, those most devastated were either people who had lost close friends or family, or young Jews “completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,” who were either justifying Hamas’s atrocities or celebrating them outright.
This sense of deep betrayal is not limited to New York. Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anticolonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.
“They thought were their own”. There’s a brief honesty in that before she turns back to attacking Israel and trying to psychoanalyze those leftists as an aberration.
“The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality. Che Guevara didn’t become a dorm room icon only for his motorcycle and rakish beret.
We also shouldn’t underestimate the role of antisemitism in warping people’s moral sentiments. I’m reminded of the German New Left militants of the 1960s and ’70s. Though they were radicalized by abomination of the Nazism of their parents’ generation, some, in a grotesque irony, ended up committing anti-Jewish terrorism themselves. A group suspected of trying to bomb a Berlin Jewish center on the 1969 anniversary of Kristallnacht wrote in a communiqué, “The Jews, who have been driven away by fascism, have themselves become fascists, who in collaboration with American capital want to exterminate the Palestinian people.”
Does the hard Left attract people who relish cruelty for no apparent reason, or because the Left provides justification and structure for the expression of such cruelty?
Then Goldberg suggests that it might lead to a split like Stalinism did.
“It’s too early to know how the left’s widespread failure of solidarity will change our politics, but I suspect some sort of fracture is coming. Part of me thinks this could be a moment like after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which, coupled with revelations about the evils of Stalinism, led many left intellectuals to break with communism. “
I doubt it. There were a multitude of reasons that liberals broke from Communism and the revelations about Stalinism (which had been in the air for decades by that point) were probably the least of them. (But that’s a whole other extended topic.) The Left celebrating the murder of Jews may drive some out of the movement. And considering the role that Jewish ex-leftists played in the conservative movement (you’re on the site of one such man) that may prove significant. But a split within the Left? I doubt it.
“On social media, some scholars and activists are repeating the line “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” suggesting that the homicidal spree we just saw in Israel is not a departure from their ideology but the embodiment of it. I suspect they will come to regret it if people take them at their word.”
Will they?
Goldberg is that genocidal rhetoric like “decolonization is not a metaphor” has wider implications. But does she really think that they’ll regret calls for mass murder as a form of decolonization when their entire argument is premised on the idea that revolutions are violent and brutal purges of ‘settlers’ and ‘colonists’?
The only reason they’ll regret is if they end up on the other side.
A few anti-Israel leftists have briefly tasted the feeling of potentially being on the other side. They don’t put it in those naked terms.
They don’t say that “if my family had been visiting friends at that kibbutz and I was being raped and my children were being kidnapped or murdered, would you support that?”
That’s because they already know the answer and they don’t want to deal with that.
Instead, they’ll go on being useful idiots for a movement that they know wants to kill them.
Fathi Hamad. Boy does he have a punchable ugly face.
They never read the Hamas charter, they never listened to the words of Hezbollah’s Nasrallah or the Iranian ayatollahs and now I am supposed to feel sorry for them?
This is the way of leftists. “Many leftists naively thought that Khomeini was a leftist in clerical robes whereas, in fact, he was fooling everyone.
All those communist intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre who had feted the Ayatollah and praised his “progressive Islam” ended up with egg on their faces.
It seems ridiculous now, but everyone thought Khomeini would take power and pull off the turban and robe to reveal Cuban-style military fatigues underneath and a Qur’an in one hand and the Communist Manifesto in the other. Instead, he set to work wiping out all the leftists who had helped him overthrow the shah.”
Killing is generally a grand strategy to warn others to fall in line. In this case a real feel good story, although I doubt all the leftists are communists.
And I notice lefties and the islamopithecines always rail about Zionism. The last time I checked, Zionism is the belief that Jews should have a homeland, and Israel is that homeland. Sounds reasonable to me.
The islamopithecines have what, 97 countries, which that turd Bareback Hussein Obama thought was how many states America has? It was clear to see where his thoughts and loyalties lay when he said that stupid shit.
I have no sympathy for the sand monkeys in general. I know FPM’s Raymond Ibraham is ethnic Egyptian and he’s a good guy. I knew an attractive married couple from Egypt back in the day and they were nice people. The chick was quite beautiful and when I met her husband in a Walmart of all places, I was surprised to see how handsome he is. It just goes to show you, don’t prejudge entire demographics.
Indonesian moslems are generally good people because they have no idea what the Koran, Hadith and sura actually have written in them and very few of them are interested in jihad. They do want Islam to be the supreme cult, though.
But Islam is evil to its rotten core and even though I met a pretty and nice Psueodtinian from Tel Aviv in Modesto CA once, doesn’t mean I sympathize with their terrorism. I actually felt sorry for her because she believed Psuedostinian is an actual ethnicity. She was too young to know any better. If I hadn’t been married at the time I’d’ve been all over that.
Good point about the 57 states. That is also how many countries the Muslims have. A kind of Freudian slip by Big O.
Yeah’ like when he mentioned his “muslim faith” to that turd burgler, George Stephanoupolus, or whatever his fake Greek name is. He’s obviously a Turk.
And Bareback is such an effete dilettante he doesn’t know the difference between Moslem and islam. He’s a Moslem in name only, like self professed Christians who never go to Church. He probably uses his prayer rug to wipe his scrawny ass.
Right, 57, not 97. I’m a lousy typist.
Islamopithecuses? That is an insult to monkeys. Even islamoswines would be an unsult to pigs. Islamoexcrements is their name.
“Islamoexcerments.” I like that. 🙂
I think the assaholah is naked under his robes like a kiddie flasher in a playground. I bet he’s hung like an Iranian field mouse, too.
I thought that Naomi Klein has changed, but looks like the opposition to the Covid vaccine is the only thing we have in common. Conservative outlets were the only one allowing her access to their venues.
Lefties Jews are idiots all. They think that they’re Lefty dreams of “peace” and “saving the world” will stop Muslim savages from murdering them and their families. David Horowitz had his come to reality moment. These morons should have had a starring role in IDIOCRACY.
Do you mean Wolf? If so, don’t get me started.
Shes been featured here so I wont say too much except she wrote ridiculous lies about what my community was doing and how it was doing during Covid lockdowns. IMO like RFK Jr she grifts making money from the desperation of those of us frustrated by Covid.. The enormous focus on vaccines vaccines vaccines which somehow was not censored distracted many of us from the core issue of vote fraud and a stolen election which was for a long time completely censored.
Vaccines failed. I don’t want one. But declining the vaccine doesn’t make one Paul Revere and Nathan Hale. Borders are still open, voting is iffy, at best, We are not energy independent and Hamas and friends are beheading babies while our college students cheer it on. So many other important issues await our attention.
Marxism opposes the nation state and nationalism. Marx opposed Jews. That adds up to opposing Israel. The Soviet Union supported Arab nationalism against western colonialization and economic control. The position of the left as a whole followed the Soviet line. The left today uses any idea or group against Western civilization. That includes anti-Semitism.
If said…leftist “Jews”…can’t find their way back into a more authentic fold, then may the cognitive dissonance make their heads explode.
“even the bleeding-heart left is making excuses”
The left is not bleeding hearts, they are full of hatred and self-righteousness. They don’t care about poor people, they hate rich people. They don’t care about illegal immigrants, they hate working class Americans. They don’t care about Arabs, they hate Jews.
More than anything else they hate God. They hate the God of the Bible, but their allies the Muslims love the god of the koran. The god of the koran has a lot in common with satan.
The left has a lot in common with satan who is said to present himself as an angel of light.
“Goldberg is [aware] that genocidal rhetoric” – take a minute to copy-edit your terrific pieces, Mr. Goldberg!
The Leifer quote assumes leftist are against war, torture, killing, cruelty, and violence as distinguishing and uniting principles, but these are the desires of all peoples; so the uniting principle must be in the means of achieving these ends.
Leftist fundamentally misunderstand the nature of man, so their societies reliably produce the very atrocities they claim to hate. They hate hierarchy and believe equality is sameness. So the pursuit of sameness requires open borders, redistribution of wealth and resources, the elimination of qualifications ensuring the excellence of policemen, firemen, engineers, physicians, air traffic controllers, aircraft mechanics. Redistribution means making everybody equally stupid, poor and powerless.
I believe leftists fundamentally HATE humanity and deny the ugly and beautiful parts of it – perhaps because their own lives are effete. They look down upon others who differ from themselves, not realizing all of us have diverse abilities making civilization work. Who has not felt grateful for the service of a good waiter, plumber, or maid?
We need to become intolerant of all leftist stupidity, with its false ideas about the nature of man. We should endeavor to live apart from them and keep them from positions of authority over us.
let us hope the frontpage.mag crowd will finally see Trump is nut based on his recent comments on Hizbollah and Israeli PM
some times you feel like a nut, sometimes you dont’
Eat a bag of dicks.
Oh wait. That’s a blessing to a sicko like you.
Hm. Go eat a bag of pussys.
None other than a Trump, 2024
Trump’s a better friend to Israel than most presidents have been. I’ll settle.