The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Why the Left Can't Think Straight on Hamas
On Monday, our Douglas Andrews followed the weekend’s news of Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel with analysis of the Left’s awful response](https://patriotpost.us/articles/101095-the-lefts-anti-israel-moral-equivalence-2023-10-09). Plenty of folks have noticed the obtuse, obnoxious, and sometimes hateful responses coming from the Left after Hamas terrorists went so far as to behead babies. Washington Examiner editor-in-chief Hugo Gurdon is one of them.
Most people, he says, don’t have trouble seeing the unambiguous difference between good and evil. “Most people see nothing about which to equivocate — and they are right.”
Disquiet on the Left, however, often flows from moral confusion and dishonorable calculation. Where concern about Hamas exists at all among “progressives,” it is troublingly alloyed with tactical and strategic considerations rather than arising purely from humane and honorable sympathy.
He notes the varying responses of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, and the “Squad” in Congress. That’s when he begins to dig into the real reasons for leftist pontification.
The Left’s sympathizers are engaged because Israel is successful, lets its citizens thrive, prosper, and be happy, and protects them as best it can against mortal threats. It is a nation built on what we loosely think of as a Western model, and this gets to the heart of the problem for the Left’s, which cannot abide the West, with its systems of governments and societies that conduce to human flourishing.
Hamas, in contrast, has created a ruthless tyranny in Gaza that immiserates the 2 million Palestinians who live under its thumb, allowing them no choice in how they are governed, no opportunity to prosper, and no chance of living in peace. It indoctrinates children with a vile racial hatred, steeping them in lies as soon as they can walk and talk, so they grow up to be willing and enthusiastic cannon fodder in the effort to destroy Israel while their overlords live in luxurious safety in the Persian Gulf.
The Left wants Israel wiped off the map not despite its being an admirable and successful civilization but because of that success. Similarly, the Left cleaves to Hamas-run Gaza because it is an utter failure. A defining feature of modern progressivism is that it venerates and supports dysfunction and degradation while excoriating and reviling competence, good order, and traditional values. That’s why it hates America.
He concludes:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict fits neatly into the Left’s Manichean moral order, in which backward nations of the “global South” are to be excused and supported because their miserable conditions are allegedly due not to failings of their own but to predation by successful developed democracies.
Through this distorted lens, the awfulness of Gaza has nothing to do with Gazans ruining the functioning territory Israel handed them 18 years ago, then choosing a terrorist government that abandoned elections, tyrannized the populace, and spends all its energy and resources killing Jews.
The Left’s ideology rejects personal responsibility and reflexively blames economic, social, and cultural forces for all inequalities in the lives of different peoples. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing way of thinking. In denigrating success and excusing failure, it is also, of course, naturally revolutionary.
Its problem today is that Hamas’s outrages have helped expose it as a colossal lie.