Religion is a Mental Illness

The death of Iran’s president Raisi has exposed the sickness at the heart of the West

While women in Iran risk their lives to celebrate Raisi’s death, global bodies show how sick they are

The Telegraph

The women of Iran are dancing. Women blinded, with one eye, or one arm, are dancing. Iranian Kurds are dancing. Across Europe, Iranian dissidents are dancing. Iranians – often, relatives of the regime’s victims – are drinking to show their joy. The daughters of Minoo Majidi, a mother shot dead by security services during the 2022 protests, shared a video of them raising a glass to President Raisi’s death. 

Dark humour – the jokes of an oppressed people – are circulating. “Mr Raisi, you surprised us. We have no tapas for our drinks,” chuckles one Iranian in a celebratory video on social media. There was the gag about how a Mossad agent called “Eli Copter” had caused the crash. People have handed out cakes and sweets in public squares – an act of symbolic importance in Persian culture, often associated with joyous events. Celebratory fireworks filled the skies in Iranian cities.

Such courage is all the more impressive given how little Raisi’s death is likely to change anything in this closed prison of a society. It may somewhat alter the succession, since he had been one of the men tipped to succeed Khamenei, but the Ayatollahs retain their stranglehold. The bravery of anyone involved in any celebration or act of civil disobedience such as removing a headscarf, is astounding. Those letting off fireworks or handing out sweets are risking their lives. 

History will remember Raisi as a squalid tyrant who took a twisted pride in human suffering. He was involved in the torture and extrajudicial murder of thousands of political prisoners held in Iranian jails and the mass killings of opponents in 1988, when as many as 30,000 are believed to have lost their lives. As Mariam Memarsadeghi wrote in a chilling article for the Tablet, “virgins were systematically raped before their execution, to circumvent the Islamic prohibition on killing virgins and to prevent women and girls from reaching heaven”. 

And yet, the BBC posted about “President Ebrahim Raisi’s mixed legacy in Iran”. You can imagine the 1945 headlines about the mixed legacy of “motorway-builder, vegetarian rights enthusiast and dog-lover” Adolf Hitler, or that of “inspirational plus-size influencer” Hermann Goering. Reuters described how Raisi “rose through Iran’s theocracy from hardline prosecutor to uncompromising president, as he burnished his credentials to position himself to become the next supreme leader”. 

Reading such things you would think Raisi was, at worst, a slight renegade. A cheeky chappie in a kaftan whose loss will be felt by light entertainment for generations. They tweeted like he was Rod Hull – rather than, you know, someone nicknamed “the Butcher of Tehran”. But in the real world, faced with the real consequences of the regime he ran, people are dancing. 

It wasn’t just the BBC in its classic “tightrope walk” mode, either. Things were getting a bit Candle in the Wind at the UN, as the entire Security Council (including both the UK and US representatives) stood to observe a minute of silence for President Raisi. Goodbye Tehran’s rose. 

European Council president Charles Michel tweeted out his sincere condolences, while the “European Commissioner for Crisis Management” committed the EU’s Copernicus satellite system to help locate Raisi’s helicopter, in the name of “#EUSolidarity”. 

Lest we forget, Johan Floderus, a young EU official from Sweden, has been incarcerated at Iran’s notorious Evin prison for more than two years. We don’t see much “#EUSolidarity” coming from the other direction. Not to be undone, President Higgins of Ireland channelled the spirit of Eamon de Valera c.1945, by offering his “deepest sympathies” upon the death of a tyrant. 

Such statements go well beyond basic diplomacy. Nobody asked anyone to gush; they chose to. The message it sends is a slap in the face to those bravely putting their lives on the line for freedom. But it’s par for the course in what is (sometimes optimistically) termed the “international community”. 

Speaking of which, on Monday, the International Criminal Court put out joint bids for arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and the prime minister and defence minister of Israel. Given that the ICC has no jurisdiction, nor power of its own to arrest anyone, there was something bleakly comic about the manner of the announcement. Chief prosecutor Karim Khan delivered his statement flanked by a couple of glaring bureaucrats. The ICC appeared to be putting on its best “don’t mess with us” face. It looked like a geriatric version of Bugsy Malone.

The ICC application refers, pointedly, to the “territory of Israel” and the “state of Palestine”, which makes it clear which side its bread is buttered. It notably ignores Hamas’s use of human shields, surely a factor when assessing the civilian death toll. It even holds Israel entirely responsible for “closing the three border crossing points” after October 7. 

Yet Hamas destroyed the Erez crossing, murdering its operators and blowing up the barriers separating it from the Gaza strip. Small wonder border checkpoints weren’t up and running immediately. Condemning Israel for this is grotesque; gaslighting on an international scale. 

The timing is also telling. We have known about the crimes of October 7 from day one, thanks to the body-cams Hamas terrorists so proudly wore to document their butchery. Yet the ICC waited until May 2024 to condemn both Israel and Hamas on the same day. The effect is to suggest a moral equivalence between a democratic state and a genocidal terrorist group that says it wants to repeat the atrocities of October 7 indefinitely. You don’t have to believe Israel is above criticism – and nor should we – to recognise this. 

Multinational organisations like the ICC are often held up as moral arbiters in themselves, when they will only be as virtuous or corrupt as their component member states, and reflecting the same biases. The World Health Organisation has long excluded Taiwan from its membership due to Chinese pressure. A ruinous decision, when Taiwan’s early warnings about the risks of human-to-human transmission of Covid in late 2019 were ignored. Something is rotten in the state of many international bodies and moral courage is in short supply. 

Given such a clear-cut case of evil as Raisi, the mealy-mouthed global response does not bode well. For genuine bravery, we can look to the people at the sharp end of such regimes. Because still, in the midst of it all, the women of Iran dance. 

Melanie Phillips: Dead Israelis disturb the narrative. They upset the narrative. By which I mean that it's not just a view, it's become a kind of-- not even just a cause, it's a kind of article of faith among the progressive West that Israel was created by the Jews through Western guilt over the Holocaust, being parachuted in to a country called Palestine and uprooting the indigenous people of Palestine who've been there since time immemorial and taking over and booting them out and then oppressing the rest who remain. And who wish to expand their territory as a result.

Every single part of that is untrue. It's a lie. It's a falsehood, okay. But that is the narrative. The narrative is of oppressive Israelis and oppressed Palestinians. And therefore, because in our victim cultural world, if you are a victim and you are oppressed, you are given a moral free pass for anything that you do. Anything that you do that's bad, cannot be-- you cannot be morally responsible for it. It must be the result of what's been done to you.

So, Palestinian terrorism has been regarded as, okay we don't-- we don't approve of it, we can't bear violence but nevertheless it's resistance, it's understandable given the despair that they are in.

And conversely, anything the Israelis do as the oppressors cannot ever-- they cannot ever be victims. They cannot ever be victims; they can only be oppressors.

Suddenly one has, suddenly, people with this mindset have been faced with the appalling visual proof that the people and the cause they've supported resulted in acts of barbarism, of a kind that nobody ever thought they would see again after the Holocaust. And it's been perpetrated by people that they have broadly supported and a certainly a cause they have absolutely supported. And suddenly the cause turns into something which is genocide.

But they've been accusing Israel of genocide, which is amazing considering the population of Gaza and the Palestinian territories has increased by what, three times, four times since 1948 when Israel was created? That's some genocide. But put that to one side.

So, it's to serve the narrative and they can't have that. Now, why can't they have that? Why can't they say, okay it's a bit embarrassing to have to admit that the cause I've pinned my idealism on for the last 30 years is actually fake, but nevertheless, I have to agree, um, uh you know, uh, right.

Now, why can't they say that? And my view having been part of that way of thinking for a long time and certainly having had all my friends and colleagues as part of that way of thinking for a long time, and studied them up close, my view is that they can never say this to themselves because it's not simply a question of saying they're wrong, their belief system is based on the fact that every single thing they believe encompasses and embodies moral virtue.

They believe in the betterment of society, they believe in creating a better world, they believe in standing up for the oppressed against the oppressor, they believe in justice against Injustice, they believe in in all these wonderful things. And consequently, anybody who stands up and says anything against them, against any of these wonderful things is not only wrong but evil and has to be stamped out as basically an enemy of humanity. Now, we see this in our domestic politics, victim culture and all of that, over a range of domestic issues.

But it is absolutely part of their moral personality. What they dread more than anything else, the worst thing in the world that could happen to them, is to take a position which in their minds would make them a right-winger and therefore evil, or evil and therefore a right-winger, because all evil comes from the right and all right wingers are evil.

And consequently, faced with this situation that they saw on October the 7th unfolding in front of our horrified gaze, they are faced with the challenge in which they say to themselves, you know am I supposed to junk what I've believed? That will make me an evil right-winger. And that's so terrible to them because they think that will disintegrate their entire moral personality.

So, they're going to find a way of dealing with this. So, we hear, for example, on the one hand the silence. The silence from so-called "feminists" who have told the entire male population of the world they are intrinsically evil because they're all intrinsically potential rapists and therefore, you know, "the patriarchy" and all the rest of it you know.

Untold numbers of men are unable to have proper relationships with women because of that. All those feminists are silent. Well not perhaps all, perhaps some have come out. Silent when faced with the appalling rapes of women in that October the 7th atrocity. And the way they deal with it is by saying saying, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. Regardless of what we've all seen and heard.

So, there's those people who are silent. And then there are people who try to invert it. They say, well, I mean it was terrible, yes and of course I abhor these brutal things, but nevertheless, but, but, but...

As soon as you hear the "but," you know. The cause, the cause. And when you say to them, as I have done over decades, what are you talking about, the cause? What cause of despair? You're talking about the fact they don't have a Palestine state? They have been offered a Palestine state over and over again from the 1930s onwards. The last offer consisted of approximately 95% plus of the territory they were demanding, and their reaction has always been to refuse and to start murdering Jews again.

And when you say that to them, they say, no, no that's not true, that's not true, and they bring up a whole load of chaff, verbal chaff. In other words, their reaction is, it's not true, it's not true, I'm not believing what I'm seeing in front of my eyes even.

Because they cannot ever tolerate this idea that their moral personality was based on a monstrous inversion of morality.

A month ago, Raisi, the Butcher of Tehran, launched an unprecedented missile and drone strike on Israel to murder thousands of innocent Israelis. Deliberately. The blood of thousands of innocent Iranians on his hands. Women, members of the LGBTQ community, peaceful protesters and many, many others. He is responsible for butchering thousands around the globe. Thousands.

This is who the Security Council dedicates a moment of silence to? A terrorist? A man who murdered, oppressed and imprisoned so many? How can it be that your list of moral priorities is so distorted?

This Council, which has done nothing, nothing to advance the release of our hostages commemorates the man responsible for their suffering.

What's next? Will the Council hold a moment of silence for bin Laden? Will there be a vigil for Hitler?

Academia Versus Civilization

The antisemitism of campus leftism may be incidental. The barbarism is the point.

Quillette

Not one week after the October 7 massacres, as America’s most prestigious institutions revealed themselves to be thoroughly embedded with pro-Hamas revolutionaries, we wrote: “Campus administrators should consider making significant changes before the American people realize what they are condoning.” Unfortunately, those administrators didn’t get the message.

On December 5, in what must surely rank among the most shameful moments in the history of academia, the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn testified before a Congressional committee at a hearing about the surge of antisemitism on their campuses and refused to say that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate institutional policies. They opted instead for consultant-style newspeak, a whiplash-inducing rediscovery of the value of free expression, and contemptuous smirks. Their tone and coordination indicated that they stood not just for themselves but for the academy—a rarefied, insular, self-important world of its own—and they jolted Americans from their state of benign neglect towards our universities. In doing so, they revealed the acute need for a wholesale renovation of American universities to restore them as institutions that serve a socially useful function. We have subsidized and excused universities’ descent into factories of anti-social people and ideas. A band-aid will not suffice.

Many have responded to this moral collapse by demanding scalps. As of this writing, two of the three presidents who testified have resigned. Firings and resignations of leaders (and expulsions of students who vandalize property or occupy buildings) are necessary proximate goals, but cannot be the ultimate goal of the backlash. Rather, we must address the deeper problem of institutional capture by an ideology hostile to its host nation. What do we do when our finest schools have been overrun by students eager to cheer genocidal antisemitism, faculty and administrators who broadly agree, and a culture that could produce credentialed people so smugly disdainful of the West? 

Precisely diagnosing the disease is the first step towards offering effective prescriptions. The renovation of the American academy must be tailored to its problems, both quantitatively and qualitatively. 

One threshold observation is that a focus on the American university is warranted, because what happens on campus shapes our nation’s character and ethical instincts in sustained ways. For years, conventional wisdom held the opposite: young people always go through radical phases; they eventually grow out of it or leave it behind when they graduate; serious people could never take these ideas seriously enough for them to take hold. Both latter dismissals of the campus problem are wrong. They fail to account for the anti-civilizational turn campus radicalism has taken, and how liberals in the West are defenseless against its calls for “liberation” and “justice.”

This essay would hardly be the first to point out that young people immersed in the latest wave of leftist ideology wield their campus-cultivated ideas, intuitions, and jargon as weapons against well-meaning members of prior generations who hold the keys to leading corporate, media, government, and non-profit institutions. Anyone who has read James Bennet’s account of his ouster from the New York Times, the anti-Israel demands of anonymous low-level Biden administration staffers, or even progressive media coverage of the leftist non-profit landscape knows how many missionaries spread the Word about power differentials and liberation, and how they have pushed liberalism aside.

The mistaken belief that recent graduates are passionate advocates for civil rights and tolerance rather than adherents to a foreign and incompatible morality has allowed the gatekeepers to be bamboozled and bullied into handing over the keys, almost without resistance. Young ideologues now wear hollowed-out institutions—for-profit, non-profit, and government—as skinsuits. What happens on campus does not stay on campus, because universities currently function as seminaries of an aggressively proselytizing theology, the onward march of which is not easily resisted by complacent liberals and quickly becomes orthodoxy wherever it takes root.

In quantitative terms, this is a big deal—a major national problem that warrants aggressive countermeasures. Which brings us to an observation about the substance of the ideas that dominate campuses today, from presidents to pre-frosh. What makes them so viral, destructive, and difficult to resist? Understanding the nature of the disease depends on answering that question, which in turn requires a deep dive into the substance of the dominant form of campus leftism.

Since October 7, many analysts have noted that “decolonialism” (or “decolonization”), a sub-genre of antiracist progressive activism, now provides the ideological justification for students to say or do abhorrent things. To take one example: Before adherents of this movement decided that it would be politically convenient to claim that the rapes of October 7 never happened, they were fond of saying “this is what decolonization looks like.” Decolonialism gives progressives a lens through which to see complex geopolitical events as moral struggles, while upending traditional moral analysis.

Its analytical frame, borrowed from postmodernists and critical theorists, is seductively simple: the apparently powerful group is bad and its powerless opponent is good. One’s role is not to evaluate the moral worth of the conduct or aims of a given actor, but rather to engage in “solidarity” (or “allyship”) with those deemed weaker by some measure—often a superficial racialized measure, at that. And as always, the notion that a weaker party might be weaker precisely because of its conduct or aims is proscribed as bigoted.

In the context of warring ethno-religious groups in the Levant, this takes the form of believing that Israeli Jews are white outsiders who have stolen Arab land, though a moment’s critical thought would reveal that this has things all wrong. Israel is history’s greatest “decolonization” success story, featuring the return of an exiled people to sovereignty in its ancient homeland. But that conclusion requires actual historical analysis. Comparing the two sides’ skin color and relative success is much simpler, yields a reliably clear path for solidarity, and in the process appears to parallel salient American cultural conflicts. The Jewish state of Israel is liberal, rich, and free, which means it must have exploited someone, just as the West was built on the exploitation of natives and minorities. Between its tendency to simplify a complex world and the ease with which young people can join the good side, it’s easy to see why this worldview is so appealing to well-meaning young Americans. 

But “decolonialism” emphasizes some unique principles. One is that land belongs to “indigenous” peoples, and anything such people do to liberate it from non-indigenous “colonizers” is justified. (Ideas, norms, and cultural touchstones enjoy the same status.) Hence the brazen campus celebrations of Hamas embodying “liberation by any means necessary” and the omnipresent claim that even Jewish children murdered or kidnapped in the kibbutzim near Gaza were colonizers who deserved their fate.

In short, on this worldview, liberating “indigenous” territory is such a high-order good that it outranks prohibitions against murder, rape, and every other atrocity that most Americans assume campus progressives must abhor. In this sense, accusations of left-wing hypocrisy miss the mark. A higher-order good like “liberating indigenous lands” can nullify lower-order evils like rape, torture, murder, and mutilation. Progressives celebrating Hamas’s atrocities are not being hypocrites, but consistent ideologues. If this ideology seems foreign and untenable, that may be because it cannot coherently coexist with the most basic elements of our civilization.

In accordance with the teachings of postcolonial authors like Frantz Fanon (whose earlier, more violent work is admired like scripture in viral anti-Israel materials), decolonial violence is worthy of celebration. Treating flesh-and-blood people as mere abstractions in a bloody fairy tale, today’s radicals—drawing on Sartre’s infamous preface to The Wretched of the Earth—imbue violence against ostensible colonizers with a redemptive quality. It eradicates not just colonizers’ bodies, literally, but the colonized’s own humiliating identity, spiritually.

Consider Professor Norman Finkelstein’s near-sociopathic reaction to the brutality of the October 7 massacres. In a (now-deleted) Substack post, he wrote: “I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza's smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.” Finkelstein often talks a good game about respect for international law, but the true moral force of his writing, and the source of his popularity, lies in his pathological embrace of Palestinian violence per se as spiritually redemptive (and embraced by a Jew, no less).

So, while civilized people around the world consider eliminating Israel’s sovereignty over its territory a non-starter because, in practice, it would mean the death and exile of millions of Jews, adherents to decolonialist radicalism are encouraged by that fact. In the meantime, they will continue to support, as a central part of their worldview, fanatical efforts to make Israel’s continued existence as painful as possible. While civilization depends on categorically rejecting lawless violence, decolonialism lionizes it with the claim that obedience to unjust laws allows the powerful to perpetuate their oppression of the powerless.

The activists may have trained their eyes on Israel for now, but in no way is this view limited to that conflict. To the contrary, anti-Israel activists frequently call for revolution in the West. Chants and activist materials call on the faithful to “globalize the intifada” and weave strings-on-corkboard conspiracy theories about the connections between capitalism, political liberalism, and Zionism. Witness, for example, a student at Columbia’s School of Social Work admiringly quoting Mao at a Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine event after October 7: “[Hamas] showed us that with creativity, determination, and combined strength, the masses can accomplish great feats, a fact we have seen in every heroic struggle for liberation from Vietnam to Afghanistan. As Mao says, ‘Dare to struggle, dare to win.’”

In the Red Sea skirmish between several NATO countries and the Shia Houthis, demonstrators have taken the side of slaveholding pirates, chanting for the Iranian proxies to “make us proud/turn another ship around!” National Students for Justice in Palestine helpfully clarified that it has its sights set on “Occupied Turtle Island” (that is, North America) in its global quest for the “one solution” to all its problems: “intifada, revolution!” Anti-Israel activism is a test-run for wild ideas about “liberating” the world from Western civilization. 

Why would liberation of indigenous territory rank so highly in these activists’ hierarchy of goals? Because returning every nation to its “rightful” original position in the world is central to their project. Contemporary progressives are animated by the conviction that history is most fundamentally characterized by one exploitation after another. This is a logical projection of their current view onto the past. Today, in the activist mind, every human interaction, no matter how mundane, is rife with oppression. The social interactions of the past—even the seemingly innocuous ones, like migration and commerce—all the more so. The only solution is a revolution returning humanity to its pre-exploration, pre-cooperative, pre-civilizational state.

This perspective helps explain not just why campus activists consistently take seemingly absurd positions (“Queers for Palestine”) but also why they behave in a manner best described as uncivilized (or anticivilized). Tearing down hostage posters, shouting obscenities, interrupting classes, vandalizing statues and storefronts—all these actions flout the norms of decency that make civilization possible. More so than even the unhinged radicals of the 20th century, the current crop of campus-trained die-hards are committed to the idea that civilization itself is a malicious fraud because it conceals and perpetuates artificial categories that necessarily result in exploitation. Freeing Palestine from Jewish control would show that the tide has turned in an unprecedented fashion towards undoing all the systems of oppression that apparently constitute Western civilization, and keep members of “marginalized” groups from true liberation. 

As a proxy war in a civilizational struggle, the current unrest is not due to arguments within the regular bounds of socially beneficial give-and-take. Rather, it is at base an argument about whether there can be any rules at all, or whether justice demands that we return to some kind of state of nature. When today’s activists reject neutral rules that create disparities between groups, they condemn the very attempt to transcend our differences through a cooperative civilization. Attacking law enforcement, shutting down bridges and newspaper presses, vandalism, and chanting for the violent overthrow of the West are all pointed expressions of this condemnation, and would remain a celebrated part of the perpetual revolution machine that would emerge when the facade of civilization falls.

These revolutionaries refuse the possibility of a positive-sum alternative represented by a liberal and mutually beneficial society. Evidence that such a civilization might actually serve formerly oppressed groups well—such as Jewish national success in Israel and communal success in the West—is recast as evidence that the group is in on the game, having flipped from oppressed to oppressor in some nefarious way. The antisemitism of this worldview may be incidental. The barbarism, however, is the point. No self-respecting society should tolerate such a movement, much less pretend that the institutions cultivating it need only minor tweaks to correct course.

This monstrous ideology’s metastasis within academia is an iterative process. To call it a failure of leadership is insufficient. Precisely where it begins—the administration, the professors, the students—is hard to know. It certainly does not end with its leaders. Humanities and social-science departments are dominated by fringe ideologues. Administrators hire DEI professionals and other bureaucrats who believe the university’s highest aim is social justice. Universities seek out, both tacitly and in application prompts, student social-justice activists, lavishing scholarships upon applicants who know which shibboleths signal that they are in tune with the latest revolutionary fad.

Whether schools do all this because they sense that students, applicants, rankings-compilers, or potential employers find it appealing or because top administrators are themselves revolutionaries is not clear. But no single facet of the academy presents an obvious target for an effective countervailing policy response. Even rooting out the thousands of DEI apparatchiks would not stem the tide, because DEI principles are so deeply entrenched and institutionalized in all aspects of campus life, from hiring and admissions practices to course curricula. Rather, the academy as a whole must be treated as the arm of an anti-civilizational ratchet. 

None of this analysis was inaccessible before the post-October 7 convulsions or the December 5 presidents’ debacle. It was only obscured somewhat by academics’ reliance on jargon in expressing simple but antisocial ideas. What has been revealed since then, most of all, is that the corruption of the university is not a joke. It is not a mere lack of seriousness in scholarship. It is the lack of even the possibility of seriousness in scholarship. The American academy has been turned against its host nation as never before, driven at every level by the conviction that the United States must be destroyed to achieve the higher-order good of undoing the evils of civilization, cultivated in laboratories of anti-Enlightenment morality and the contempt for the American nation its leaders displayed on Capitol Hill. 

But with some understanding of the depth and character of this threat, the American people, through their elected representatives and other means, can mount a proportionate response that targets the disease itself, and conditions the academy’s future on its commitment to reversing course. 

What would wholesale renovations look like? The scope of the problem and its target demand a multi-pronged campaign with contributions from policymakers and government officials, donors, employers, media, and regular American citizens. That campaign should be harsh and thorough, as universities have knowingly deranged our society for decades and gotten quite rich doing so through government subsidies, market-immune loans, and favorable tax status.

But a solution to this problem cannot be a “burn-it-all-down” pitchfork-led mob. It must still be guided by an alternative positive vision recognizing that universities, at their best, serve the public interest in advancing human understanding, wisdom, science, and gratitude for our inheritance. It is crucial to recognize that there is no other major institution currently doing this at scale in American society. This proposal is for a renovation—a major one, to be sure—not a demolition.

To the extent that the academy provides an opportunity for young people to spend their formative years becoming thoughtful people and critical but committed citizens, it has a strong claim to public largesse and the perception that its degrees mean something good. But the flipside is that states and the federal government should not treat universities as institutions that advance the public interest if they inculcate a theologically guided compulsion to derange and dismantle the West. Americans are under no obligation to subsidize thousands of active combatants in a war against themselves. 

Some public policy responses to institutional capture are already underway. Multiple states have passed legislation dismantling DEI bureaucracies in state universities. Federal legislation has been introduced to tax university endowments above certain amounts. States can and should follow suit. Massive grant- and other tuition-assistance programs allow schools to charge exorbitant tuition fees. All levels of government can condition this assistance on administrations submitting to external audits to ensure that academic freedom is protected without bleeding into revolutionary and barbaric activism. 

Lawsuits, both private and public, based on universities’ failure to protect Jews’ and Israeli-Americans’ civil rights may cost smaller universities non-trivial sums in settlement or damages. Information that comes out in discovery would also be useful in mounting a general-population campaign of shame and mockery that would help drain name-brand institutions of their residual prestige, making top high-schoolers think twice before applying there. 

But perhaps the more interesting avenue would entail state attorneys general investigating university administrations for deliberately creating environments hostile to racial and national-origin groups deemed “oppressors.” One question these AGs might ask is why admissions departments have ushered in so many students susceptible to the temptations of an intellectually facile and barbaric ideology. What procedures are in place that resulted in an inordinate number of university students embracing an anti-civilized philosophy, and which personnel are responsible for executing it?

Even if all the current student radicals were expelled, leaving the gatekeepers who admitted them in power would simply allow universities to replicate the same patterns. The key is to investigate and identify what characteristics and behaviors admissions departments have selected for on a systemic basis, revealing how they have abandoned the pretense of rigor in order to populate their campuses with scores of true-believer barbarians and their enablers.

Of course, such drastic action must be handled with care. An easy but mistaken route during this warranted crackdown is finding professors and administrators who have said unsavory things and firing them. But not only is violating genuine free-speech rights not in the interests of those who wish to see a renovated academy, it also risks falling into the same trap of pinning systemic problems on individuals. The problem is not that influential people have said insane things. The problem is that every level of the university is currently geared towards perpetuating and mainstreaming those insanities. Tactically, critics should remain focused on reorienting the processes that led to hiring radical staff and admitting sympathetic students, rather than getting bogged down in energy-intensive campaigns targeting individuals, which are distracting and likely to draw legal and cultural backlash. 

Another crucial strategy jumps right to advancing a positive vision of the university, aiming to pressure the old guard by subsidizing its competition. Some new and revitalized institutions have already begun drawing attention from donors who in the past would have given to traditionally prestigious institutions like Harvard and Penn. Donors and policymakers should feel a special solicitude towards those institutions that position themselves as explicitly pro-civilization, counterbalancing the very forces driving the traditionally prestigious schools mad.

The University of Austin, University of Florida, and Hillsdale College, to name just a few, deserve serious attention from donors and faculty who no longer wish to lend their support (and the prestige that comes with it) to experiments in anti-civilizational revolution. Organizations such as the Tikvah Fund, which has scaled up its pro-America, pro-Israel, and pro-Jewish educational programming for students of all ages, have risen to the moment by responding to the campus barbarians with a full-throated defense of Western civilization. (Full disclosure: both authors of this essay have held affiliations with Tikvah in the past.) 

New and truly prestigious graduate programs in attitudinally friendly, high-paying sectors like law, engineering, and finance, would add heft to the effort. Ackman-Rowan University, sporting a beautiful $5 billion campus, would attract serious academic talent and send tomorrow’s leaders and political thinkers into the workforce with a Masters of Economics or Finance that would command immediate respect from top-tier employers.

Increasing higher-ed competition is a long-haul strategy but a crucial one. Harvard, MIT, and Penn, among many other elite schools, largely maintain their reputations by inertia. Having abandoned their short-lived 20th-century experiment in meritocracy, they no longer even pretend to select among applicants based on objective qualifications, preferring instead some proprietary blend of academic adequacy and social-justice commitment. They have returned to their pre-1960s roles as finishing schools for American elites, only now they select for elite beliefs more than elite heritage (though they do that, too). Ultimately, they do not enjoy their current status on account of current merit. They are coasting on residual prestige from a time when they could at least claim to be something more than glorified communist summer camps. 

Eroding that prestige—which keeps employers coming back to campus job fairs and treating Harvard degrees as an application “plus,” and keeps talented high-schoolers dreaming of autumns in Cambridge—requires propping up competitors so they can compete for genuine teaching talent, build the amenities that will attract the best and brightest, and thus begin to drain the Ivys (and peers) of their mystique.

For years, wealth has been compounding at elite universities through the cycle of graduates obtaining high-paying jobs and repaying some of their income to their alma maters. But prestige, which is partly a function of wealth, is socially constructed. It can subsist on old gifts and accruing interest for a while, but not forever—especially if legislators work to prevent large gifts from adversaries like China and Qatar. And the best way to make pro-civilization campuses prestigious is simply to treat them—in our capacities as employers, parents, friends, consumers, and critics—as though they are. 

The public shaming and mocking of university leadership should continue until the moral rot is gone. Most Americans are not donors, legislators, or potential litigants who can wield these weapons in this fight. But they can work within their local culture to bring universities down to size. To be blunt, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and most of their peers should be laughing stocks, whose names receive the same respect we give Trump University. They have lost sight of their mission, welcoming a takeover of their administrations, faculty, and student bodies by an analytically pathetic and morally perverted ideology.

We regular citizens need to treat them accordingly in our everyday lives, by encouraging bright youth to take their talents elsewhere and maintaining a healthy skepticism of the value of the degrees they confer. And until they begin dismantling their own systemic institutional radicalism, university leaders should have their feet held to the fire at every public appearance, where they should be held to account for continuing to provide succor to those who hate the West.

It bears repeating that universities need not draw this kind of scrutiny forever. A commitment to free expression and academic freedom can coexist with some minimal commitment to not use university resources to work towards the demise of the nation in which it exists. But as long as the academy is committed to forming young people who are not interested in being decent citizens—indeed, who are trained to be exactly the opposite—it should be treated as the locus of the civilizational crisis it is. 

“To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” -- Aldous Huxley

The depravity of the Islamo-left

Tom Slater on the unholy alliance between leftists and Islamists.

spiked-online.com

Why do so many leftists struggle to condemn Hamas? Why do so-called progressives make excuses for Jew-killing, misogynistic, gay-bashing Islamists? It’s a long and damning story. Here, Tom Slater traces the history of the Islamo-left, an unholy alliance between left-wingers and Islamists that has once again burst out into the open following the pogrom in Israel on 7 October. Watch, share and let us know what you think in the comments.

Tom Slater: Is Hamas a terrorist group? Most people wouldn't struggle with that question. After all, this brutal Islamist organization, which rules over Gaza with an iron fist, just butchered 1,200 people on the 7th of October. The youngest victims were infants, the oldest were Holocaust survivors. Women were raped, hostages were taken.

When former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was asked this question on talk TV a few weeks back, he couldn't bring himself to utter the t-word.

Jeremy Corbyn: Can we have a discussion? Piers Morgan: Can you call them a terror group? Corbyn: Can we have... Morgan: Can you call them a terror group? Corbyn: Is it possible to have a rational discussion? Morgan: Are you prepared to call Hamas a terror group? Corbyn: Is it possible to have a rational discussion... Morgan: You can't, can you? Corbyn: Is it possible? Come on, answer that question? Morgan: You can't, can you? Corbyn: You answer it. Morgan: No.

Host Piers Morgan invited Corbyn to describe Hamas as terrorists no fewer than 15 times. But he refused. He couldn't. Instead, Corbyn just wittered on about needing to start a process that leads to a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He has since found the mineral to call Hamas a terrorist group in an article for Tribune. But that would perhaps be more reassuring if it wasn't for his long history of cozying up to Hamas and other Islamist terror groups. In 2009 addressing a public meeting, Corbyn infamously referred to Hamas and Lebanese Islamist Hezbollah as quote, "friends," unquote. He went further, railing against the designation of Hamas as a terrorist group.

Corbyn: And the idea that an organization that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labelled as a terrorist organization by the British government, is really a big, big historical mistake, and I would invite the government to reconsider its position on this matter and start talking directly to Hamas and Hezbollah. That is the only way forward to bring back...

Slater: And that's not all. In 2011, Corbyn invited Riyadh Salah, an alleged Hamas fundraiser who believes the Jews were behind 9/11 to tea in Westminster. During a visit to Tunisia in 2014, Corbin was filmed laying a wreath near the graves of the Palestinian Black September terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

You can see why, after all these sordid details trickled out, Corbyn proved to be such electoral cyanide, helping to deliver Labour's worst election defeat since 1935.

But there has been an unhelpful tendency to see Corbyn's dalliances with Islamists as a kind of personal moral failing on the part of him and his hangers on. The truth is that the rot runs much deeper. Corbyn is just one useful idiot among many on the dregs of the British left who have come to see Islamism not as the fascistic terroristic menace it is, but as a movement at the vanguard of global resistance to a malevolent West.

This is the unholy alliance that we've seen out in force on British streets in recent weeks, where Islamists and left-wingers have marched side by side, united in their hatred for Israel and barely batting an eyelid as antisemites shout Arabic War slogans and wave Jew hating placards.

Welcome to the Islamo-Left, a sinister marriage of convenience that all good people, whether left or right, religious or irreligious, must confront and reject.

This story begins with the radical left's abandonment of the working class and its decision to seek out new constituencies and embrace identity politics.

From the 1980s onwards, figure son the left perversely came to see working-class Brits as a reactionary block on progress, while mistaking radical Islamists, among other groups, as a potentially revolutionary force. This coincided with the rise of state multiculturalism, which had the effect of elevating and funding reactionary Muslim community leaders who were falsely presented as the supposedly authentic voice of British Muslims.

It is from this ecosystem of a growing Muslim identity politics that the grassroots British Muslim campaign against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses sprung up in the 1980s. Indeed, some of these groups were instrumental in pressuring Iran's supreme leader to issue his Infamous fatwa against Rushdie.

During the 1990s, sections of the Left, these supposed radicals and progressives, became increasingly, disturbingly sympathetic to the fundamentalists who continue to rage against Rushdie and his supposedly blasphemous book. Muslim identity politics was particularly appealing to a disoriented Left because it mapped onto their support for Palestinian self-determination. Many Leftists were prepared to overlook the dark heart of even full-blown Islamists in the interest of backing the supposed struggle against Western imperialism. The Palestinians became merely pawns in some grand conflict between the west and the rebellious global OIther. This is why today you'll notice that many Leftists ignore Hamas' trampling of the rights of the Palestinians and Islamism's usurpation of the Palestinian national cause.

Back in 1994, Chris Harman, then editor of the Socialist Worker, the party newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote a bizarre but revealing pamphlet entitled "The Prophets and the Proletariat." In it, Harman admitted that Islamism has some pretty fascistic qualities. From its opposition to modernity to its murderous intolerance and its brutal treatment of minorities. Which is all very good of him.

But the Islamists aren't all bad, he concluded. Islamists, Harman wrote, had opposed the state and elements of imperialism's political domination, particularly Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. In this, he presented Israel as little more than a Western imperial outpost. And so Islamism, Harman concluded, is born of a quote, "feeling of revolt that could be tapped for progressive purposes," unquote.

Failed Western revolutionaries were increasingly keen to outsource radical agency to Islamists, and to whitewash these reactionaries as a progressive force. This marriage of convenience was then consummated in the 2000s in the aftermath of 9/11 and amid the war on terror.

In 2002, the Stop the War Coalition, dominated by the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain, formed an alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain. Both Stop the War and the MAB had a pronounced presence on the anti-Iraq war protests of the early 2000s. And both groups are among the most prominent organizers of the quote, unquote, "Pro Palestine" demos that have recently been roiling London.

The Muslim Association of Britain might sound benign, but it was founded by none other than Mohamed Solwa, a former Hamas chief who now lives in London. His son is its vice-chair.

Over the years, leading figures from Stop the War have' been pretty open about their fondness for Hamas. One of Stop the War's co-founders, John Reese, once dubbed these antisemitic terrorists a, quote, "legitimate resistance movement," unquote.

At a Stop the War conference in 2006, Lindsey German a leading SWP figure said quote, "whatever disagreements I have with Hamas and Hezbollah, I would rather be in their camp. Democracy in the Middle East is Hamas, is Hezbollah," she said. Followers of the conflict will know that there hasn't been an election in Hamas-run Gaza since 2006 when German made that ridiculous speech.

Jeremy Corbyn was, of course, chairman of the Stop the War Coalition from 2011 till 2015 when he became Labour leader. German served as his vice chair. Stop the War consolidated the fledgling relationship between sections of the hard Left and actual Islamists. In doing so, it also fatally undermined many of the things that used to be essential to being left-wing, such as universalism, reason and humanism.

Anti-imperialism was reduced to little more than anti-Westernism, transforming regressive Islamists from Iran or Gaza into anti-colonial heroes in the process. And all this has fuelled identity politics here in the UK, transforming us from citizens with interests in common, into members of competing ethno-religious groups.

In particular, this anti-war Left and their Islamist allies have cultivated a divisive Muslim identity politics. Their cynicism paid off for the 2005 general election, when Respect, a Stop the War spin-off party led by George Galloway, won the East London seat of Bethnal Green and Bow, which has a large Muslim population. it was a triumph of militant anti-Westernism and pork-barrel identity politics.

These malign trends have since spread to the broader bourgeois left. Take Novara Media, a popular Corbyneaster YouTube channel and website run by a group of perennial postgraduates. In 2014, the Novara website published a glowing profile of Muhammad Deif as part of a Radical Lives series. It described him as an, "uncompromising and shrewd freedom fighter," who has contributed to the, "impressive evolution of the resistance in Gaza." Deif is the commander of Hamas' military wing and a vicious Islamist. Nine years after Novara's puff piece was published, he became one of the architects for Hamas' brutal incursion into Southern Israel earlier this year.

No wonder that one of Novara's editors, Rivkah Brown hailed the events of the seventh of October as a quote, "day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide."

After Hamas launched its brutal pogrom in Israel, many were shocked at the apologism and even cheerleading that some on the British left engaged in. The Socialist Worker, the paper once edited by Chris Harman, greeted the massacre with the headline, "Rejoice."

But while we certainly had a right to be shocked at such inhuman and depraved talk, we probably shouldn't have been surprised. For decades now, Britain's radical Left has been morally self-immolating. Its deranged alliance with Islamists has stripped it of any claim it might once have had to the moral high ground. So now, weekend after weekend, we see supposed anti-racists and anti-fascists march alongside people chanting for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel.

They can dress this up as resistance or anti-imperialism all they want, but it really is nothing of the sort. The supposed left-wingers have embraced barbarism. They've got into bed with bona fide fascists. Identity politics has rotted their brains and their souls.

The Return of the Indecent Left

How the war between Israel and Hamas resuscitated an ignoble tradition.

liberalpatriot.com

More than twenty years ago, the philosopher Michael Walzer famously asked whether or not there could be a “decent left.” After seeing the left’s reaction to the heinous October 7 terrorist atrocities in Israel, the answer is clearly no, there is no decent left—and we shouldn’t expect one to come into being any time soon.

It seemed that this indecent left had gone into remission with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Outside a subset of inveterate anti-American ideologues, it was left to self-proclaimed realists to make the case for letting Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine stand—or, failing that, negotiate a settlement that would reward the Kremlin with chunks of Ukrainian territory. Indeed, a number of individuals affiliated with the so-called “restraint” school of foreign policy disassociated themselves from their erstwhile comrades while Democratic political leaders brutally smacked down half-baked calls from progressives to negotiate away Ukrainian sovereignty on terms favorable to Vladimir Putin.

But the indecent left roared back to life with a vengeance almost immediately after October 7, excusing and “contextualizing”—and sometimes outright denying—deliberate mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of ordinary Israeli civilians and foreigners. Outright anti-Semitism permeated the indecent left’s reaction to the Hamas terror attacks from the start, with a number of left-wing activists, academics, and intellectuals alike either celebrating or apologizing for the pogrom as soon as it occurred. At best, the left issued impotent calls for an immediate ceasefire that amounted to demands that Israel do nothing after 1,200 of its citizens were brutally massacred and another 240 or so taken hostage by Hamas and its allies.

If anything, the pathologies Walzer described two decades ago have only gotten worse. This is not a political movement that wants to think seriously or coherently about the war between Israel and Hamas or foreign policy and armed conflict more generally; as Walzer wrote twenty years ago, “ideologically primed leftists were likely to think that they already understood whatever needed to be understood.” An epidemic of denial has characterized the indecent left’s response to October 7, one marked by three great refusals.

A refusal to deal with the problem at hand: what to do about Hamas?

Many ceasefire calls mean well: ordinary people are understandably appalled by the death and destruction and quite reasonably just want it to stop. While this humanitarian sentiment is commendable, it fails to address the question at the heart of the current conflict: what to do about Hamas in the wake of October 7? Other much-touted ceasefire calls from politicians like Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) essentially amount to terms of surrender for Hamas—immediate release of all hostages, giving up arms, and relinquishing control over Gaza. Likewise, the hostage release deal the Biden administration and Middle East partners brokered between Israel and Hamas only temporarily pauses the fighting.

Most immediate ceasefire calls coming from the indecent left essentially call for Israel to do nothing in response to October 7. Occasionally they come with provisions requiring Hamas release the hostages it took during its attack, but typically they amount to demands for a unilateral Israeli ceasefire without any explicit reciprocity from Hamas to, say, stop firing rockets into Israeli cities. Worse, they fail to take into account repeated threats by Hamas leaders to carry out October 7-style pogroms over and over again, much less the terrorist group’s long-standing, recently restated objective of destroying Israel itself. Since October 7, it’s obvious that many on the indecent left would have no problem with that outcome.

When asked what Israel—or America and the world at large—should do about Hamas after the cruelty of October 7, the indecent left’s repeated calls for an immediate ceasefire make clear that its answer is, at best, “nothing.” There may not be any good answers to this question, but “nothing” remains a grossly inadequate response.

A neo-Orientalist refusal to take either Palestinians or Israelis seriously

By and large, the indecent left has also demonstrated a remarkable lack of curiosity about either Palestinian or Israeli society and politics. It’s part and parcel of what TLP’s Brian Katulis dubbed neo-Orientalism: the use of nations and people overseas as props in America’s own domestic political debates. In particular, the indecent left spouts simplistic slogans while it professes “great concern and sympathy for the people of the region, while remaining largely indifferent to the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives within particular countries and societies.” That’s especially acute when it comes to discussions of Israel and the Palestinians, where the indecent left attempts to force the conflict into its own parochial ideological frameworks of “decolonization,” “white supremacy,” and “systemic racism.”

In other words, the indecent left thinks it already knows everything it needs to know about any given conflict—and especially any conflict that involves Israel. While “decolonization” provides the indecent left with a marginally coherent ideological framework, it amounts to little more than a “historically nonsensical” but nonetheless toxic stew of Soviet-era propaganda, half-baked academic theories, and contemporary identity politics. That includes the vogue to blame anything and everything on a mystical, all-pervasive white supremacy of which Israeli Jews somehow bizarrely partake. Why should the indecent left engage with the particularities of Palestinian politics or even give so much as a second glance to Israeli society when its ideology already gives it all the answers it needs?

As a result, the indecent left engages very little with actual Palestinian politics and society. It refuses to grant Palestinians any real agency and therefore refuses to acknowledge any real politics among Palestinians themselves, much less the fact that Hamas has repeatedly put forward an openly genocidal program or that it violently suppresses dissent among the Palestinians under its authority. Instead, many on the left fantasize about a single binational state in what was once the British Mandate of Palestine—something few Palestinians actually favor. Other leftists endorse slogans calling for a single Palestinian Arab state, but either way few of them actually delve into the complex power dynamics within Palestinian society—including those factions that don’t respect the basic rights and freedoms of a wide range of people.

If indecent leftists generally fail to engage with Palestinian politics and society in any meaningful way, they actively avoid any sort of real engagement with—or even understanding—of Israeli society and politics. At best, the indecent left ignores Israeli society and politics; at worst, it views Israeli society as somehow counterfeit. Other segments of the indecent left, especially in academia, actively discourage any engagement with Israelis and Israeli institutions. With zero understanding of Israeli society and politics, it cannot understand Israeli fears or motivations in any real way. The indecent left doesn’t know anything about Israeli society, and it doesn’t want to know anything about it.

A refusal to make elementary—if difficult—moral and ethical distinctions

In its rhetoric and analysis of the war between Israel and Hamas, the indecent left frequently equates the deliberate and premeditated murder, rape, and kidnapping of ordinary civilians with the inadvertent and unintentional deaths of civilians in what appear to be otherwise legitimate and legal military operations. Here as elsewhere, the left refuses to make what Walzer calls “one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing.” At some fundamental level, many on the indecent left understand this distinction—as seen by the strenuous effort to portray just about any and every Israeli military action as unlawful and illegitimate by definition.

It may well be the case that the Israeli military has played fast and loose with the laws of war or committed war crimes in its war against Hamas. The sheer amount of ordnance dropped on Gaza between October 7 and the start of the Israeli ground offensive roughly three weeks later remains stunning—but it’s not necessarily illegal. It’s entirely legitimate and very much appropriate to question how well or how seriously the Israeli military takes its obligations to protect civilians, but as Walzer points out it’s impossible for any military to fight a war without putting civilians at risk. The Israeli military can and should probably do a better job protecting civilians, but it’s unrealistic to expect any war to end with zero civilian casualties.

By contrast, the indecent left remains either silent or in denial about blatant Hamas war crimes. It’s been an open secret for well over a decade that Hamas uses hospitals, schools, mosques, and other protected civilian buildings and facilities as command centers and bases for operations against Israel; sources ranging from the New York Times and PBS to non-governmental organizations typically unsympathetic to Israel like Amnesty International and even UNRWA attest to this fact. It’s not surprising to see the maze of tunnels uncovered beneath the Shifa hospital complex, nor is it shocking to see that Hamas brought hostages seized on October 7 to this medical facility. These Hamas abuses don’t even cover the deliberate and premeditated targeting of civilians for murder and rape on October 7 itself.

Then there’s the moral equivalence many on the indecent left have drawn between Israeli hostages held by Hamas and Palestinians jailed by Israel. There are many flaws and abuses in the way Israel treats detained Palestinians (particularly in East Jerusalem and the West Bank), but it’s hard to know what drives people to try and establish a moral equivalence between a four-year-old abducted by Hamas after terrorists killed her parents and a failed car bomber. However, that’s typical of an indecent left that tears down posters of hostages held by Hamas after October 7.

In its failure to make difficult but necessary moral distinctions, the indecent left contributes in its own way to the erosion of both the laws of war and the idea of crimes against humanity. It diminishes the force of both while giving the perpetrators of actual war crimes and atrocities effective political and moral cover. If there are no relevant distinctions between legal and legitimate actions in war and illegal and illegitimate ones—much less between legal and legitimate military operations and deliberate atrocities like October 7—it simply makes war even more brutal and appalling crimes against humanity more likely.

* * *

The pathologies of the indecent left burst out into the open once again after October 7, but they’ve been present in large swathes of the left for decades now. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that these pathologies are inherent to and embedded in the left, and that no amount of argumentation or persuasion will eliminate or mitigate them. There are many decent leftists, but there is no decent left.

What should liberals and decent leftists do, then?

First, recognize that the indecent left is not your friend in any way, shape, or form. Indeed, the indecent left sees liberals and decent leftists—not conservatives or right-wing populists—as its primary adversaries. Even when there are ostensible areas of agreement, the underlying analysis and motivations and goals of the indecent left stand at odds with those of the broader center-left. It may not seem like much, but it’s important for mainstream liberals and decent leftists to understand this basic fact.

As a corollary, it’s important to note that the indecent left remains a small faction in American politics—it’s a paper tiger that garners excessive attention through activity on social media platforms and destructive political tactics. Different polls use different definitions and give different results, but the “progressive left” amounted to just six percent of the population in a 2021 Pew poll and eight percent in the 2018 Hidden Tribes poll.

Next, quarantine the indecent left. Much as mainstream liberals and decent leftists did in the late 1940s, today’s liberals and decent leftists must establish intellectual and political firewalls against the indecent left. That’s easier said than done, especially given the structure of contemporary center-left politics; unions and political parties that once filtered out bad-faith actors and indecent politics have weakened enormously in the intervening decades. Many of the same problems that plague domestic politics—an overreliance on college-educated professionals from foundation-funded non-profit institutions to staff government offices and agencies, for instance—likewise make it more difficult to combat indecent leftists on foreign policy.

Finally, liberals and the decent left need to articulate their own vision of foreign policy. The Biden administration and others on the mainstream center-left have been slowly groping their way toward this vision, particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But liberals and the decent left need to accelerate their own efforts to establish a foreign policy that stands in opposition not only to the indecent left but the isolationist America First right and the technocratic approach of the post-Cold War era. It’s an urgent task that can no longer be postponed.

Liberals and decent leftists did it once before, albeit under vastly different circumstances. But that should give us hope that we can do it again today.

Weekend Listening: The Bright Line Between Good and Evil

It is crucial to understand what our enemies actually believe.

https://www.thefp.com/

The latest episode Honestly features something a little different. It’s a replay of an episode of my friend Sam Harris’s podcast, Making Sense. I wanted to put this episode down the Honestly feed—despite the amount of Israel-related content we have already published—because of the moral confusion plaguing this moment. It’s everywhere: from college campuses to Congress. 

Sam, better than almost anyone I know, is able to speak to that confusion, with facts, nuance, and clarity. Read an edited excerpt below, or click to listen to the episode in full. Sam’s words are illuminating and well worth your time. —BW 

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, it’s important to keep in view the bright line that exists between good and a very specific form of evil. It is the evil of bad ideas—ideas so bad that they can make even ordinary human beings impossible to live with. 

There’s a piece of audio from October 7 that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone.

Here’s a partial transcript of what he said:

“Hi, Dad—open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!”

And his dad says, “May God protect you.”

“Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, Dad. Open the phone, Dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran.] Put Mom on.”

And the father says, “Oh, my son. God bless you!”

“I swear, ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!”

And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.”

“Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.”

And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.”

“Mom, your son is a hero!”

And then, apparently talking to his comrades, he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.”

And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town, and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!”

And the brother says, “You killed ten?”

“Yes, I killed ten. I swear!”

Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference.] Hold your head up, father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.”

And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.”

And he says, “What do you mean, come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.”

And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp. . . 

“Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.”

And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”

I don’t speak any Arabic, and it seems to me that not every word in the audio that’s being circulated was translated, but I think we get the gist. When I spoke to Graeme Wood about this, he said that to him, the mother and father sounded more shocked and worried than anything else, which would be understandable. But I would submit to you that this piece of audio is more than just the worst WhatsApp commercial ever conceived. It is a window onto a culture. As I told Graeme, this is not the type of call that would have been placed from Vietnam, by an American who just participated in the My Lai massacre. Nor is it the parental reaction one would expect from an American family, had their beloved son just called them from a killing field. I mean, as terrible as Vietnam was, can you imagine a call back to Nebraska, “Mom, I killed ten with my own hands! I killed a woman and her husband, and I’m calling from the dead woman’s phone. Mom, your son is a hero!” Do you see what a total aberration that would have been, even in extremis? 

This call wasn’t a total aberration. This wasn’t Ted Bundy calling his mom. This was an ordinary member of Hamas, a group that might still win an election today, especially in the West Bank, calling an ordinary Palestinian family, and the mere existence of that call, to say nothing of its contents, reveals something about the wider culture among the Palestinians.

It’s important to point out that not only members of Hamas but ordinary Gazans appear to have taken part in the torture and murder of innocent Israelis and the taking of hostages. How many did this? And how many ordinary Gazans were dancing in the streets and spitting on the captured women and girls who were paraded before them after having been raped and tortured? What percentage of Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, many of whom are said to hate Hamas for their corruption and incompetence and brutality, nevertheless support what they did on October 7 with a clear conscience, based on what they believe about Jews and the ethics of jihad? I don’t know, but I’m sure that the answers to these questions would be quite alarming. We’re talking about a culture that teaches Jew hatred and the love of martyrdom in its elementary schools, many of which are funded by the UN. 

Of course, all of this horror is compounded by the irony that the Jews who were killed on October 7 were, for the most part, committed liberals and peace activists. Hamas killed the sorts of people who volunteer to drive sick Palestinians into Israel for medical treatments. They murdered the most idealistic people in Israel. They raped, tortured, and killed young people at a trance dance music festival devoted to peace, half of whom were probably on MDMA feeling nothing but love for all humanity when the jihadists arrived. In terms of a cultural and moral distance, it’s like the fucking Vikings showed up at Burning Man and butchered everyone in sight. 

Just think about what happened at the Supernova music festival: at least 260 people were murdered in the most sadistically gruesome ways possible. Decapitated, burned alive, blown up with grenades. . . and from the jihadist side, this wasn’t an error. It’s not that if they could have known what was in the hearts of those beautiful young people, they would have thought, “Oh my God, we’re killing the wrong people. These people aren’t our enemies. These people are filled with love and compassion and want nothing more than to live in peace with us.” No, the true horror is that, given what jihadists believe, those were precisely the sorts of people any good Muslim should kill and send to hell where they can be tortured in fire for eternity. From the jihadist point of view, there is no mistake here. And there is no basis for remorse. Please absorb this fact: for the jihadist, all of this sadism—the torture and murder of helpless, terrified people—is an act of worship. This is the sacrament. This isn’t some nauseating departure from the path to God. This isn’t stalled spiritual progress, much less sin. This is what you do for the glory of God. This is what Muhammed himself did. 

There is no substitute for understanding what our enemies actually want and believe. I’m pretty sure that many of you reading this aren’t even comfortable with my use of the term enemy, because you don’t want to believe that you have any. I understand that. But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7 were practicing their religion, sincerely. They were being every bit as spiritual, from their point of view, as the trance dancers at the Supernova festival were being from theirs. They were equally devoted to their highest values. Equally uplifted. Ecstatic. Amazed at their good fortune. They wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone. Let this image land in your brain: they were shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) all day long, as they murdered women and children. And these people are now being celebrated the world over by those who understand exactly what they did. Yes, many of those college kids at Harvard and Stanford and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world. But in the Muslim community, and that includes the crowds in London and Sydney and Brooklyn, Hamas is being celebrated by people who understand exactly what motivates them. 

Again, watch Hotel Mumbai or read a book about the Islamic State so that you can see jihadism in another context—where literally not one of the variables that people imagine to be important here is present. There are no settlers or blockades or daily humiliations at checkpoints or differing interpretations of history—and yet we have same grotesque distortion of the spiritual impulse, the same otherworldliness framed by murder, the same absolute evil that doesn’t require the presence of evil people, just confused ones—just true believers. 

Of course, we can do our best to turn the temperature down now. And we can trust that the news cycle will get captured by another story. We can direct our attention again to Russia, or China, or climate change, or AI alignment, and I will do that on this podcast, but the problem of jihadism and the much wider problem of sympathy for it isn’t going away. And civilized people—non-Muslim and Muslim alike—have to deal with it. As I said in a previous podcast on this topic: we all live in Israel now. It’s just that most of us haven’t realized it yet.

many of those college kids at Harvard and Stanford and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world. But in the Muslim community, and that includes the crowds in London and Sydney and Brooklyn, Hamas is being celebrated by people who understand exactly what motivates them. 

"Israel is only the first target. The entire planet will be under our law." -- Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas Commander

This is a message for those who claim to care about protecting innocent Palestinian lives.

Yes, I'm speaking to you, Angelina Jolie, Rashida Talib, Cori Bush and of course Bella and Gigi Hadid.

Where were you when more than 4,000 Palestinians in refugee camps were slaughtered in the Syrian Civil War?

Where was your outrage when Lebanon banned Palestinians from working as doctors, lawyers or from owning land?

Where were you when it was exposed that the Palestinian Authority tortures Palestinian prisoners?

When Palestinian Police murdered journalist Nizar Banat for opposing the government?

Where were you when 850,000 Palestinians were displaced by the Syrian Civil War?

When Lebanese militias killed 2,500 Palestinians in refugee camps and displaced another 30,000 Palestinians from 1985 to 1987?

Where is your outrage over Hamas dragging the bodies of innocent Palestinians through the streets of Gaza for collaborating with Israel?

Where were you when Hamas stored rockets in Palestinian schools?

When they recruited children to join the Jihad?

When they murdered one of the last Christian Pastors in Gaza?

When they stole electricity, water, fuel and humanitarian aid for their own terror activities instead of supporting their people?

Where is your protest against Arab states for refusing to accept a single Palestinian refugee, even temporarily?

If you're only outraged by Israel's actions, you aren't pro-Palestinian and you don't care about Palestinian lives, you're blinded by your own hatred of Israel.

The best way to protect Palestinian lives is the destruction of Hamas.

Moral Equivalency and its Discontents

Hamas and Israel are not equivalent—that should be obvious, but it's not for many on the far Left who have lost their moral conscience and c

michaelshermer.substack.com

action, special action, large-scale action, reprisal action, pacification action, radical action, cleaning-up or cleansing action, cleared or cleared of Jews, freeing the area of Jews, Jewish problem solved, handled appropriately, handled according to orders, liquidated, over-hauling, rendered harmless, ruthless collection measures, severe measures, special treatment or special measures, executive tasks, elimination, evacuation, eradication, relocation, and, of course, Final Solution (Endlösung).

Reichsfuhrer-SS Field HQ April 9, 1943 Top Secret! To the Chief of the Security Police and SD Berlin: I have received the Inspector of Statistics’ report on the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. I consider this report well executed for purposes of camouflage and potentially useful for later times. For the moment, it can neither be published nor can anyone be allowed sight of it. The most important for me remains that whatever remains of Jews is shipped East. All I want to be told as of now by the Security Police, very briefly, is what has been shipped and what, at any points, is still left of Jews. Hh

• Over 30 student groups at Harvard said of the 1,200 Israelis who have been slaughtered that “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
• A joint statement from Columbia University’s Palestine Solidarity groups wrote “we remind Columbia students that the Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land.”
• Northwestern University’s Middle Eastern and North African Student Association “grieves for the martyrs and the civilians lost in this time.”
• A student group at California State University in Long Beach advertised its “Day of Resistance: Protest for Palestine” event on Tuesday with a poster that showed a crowd waving the Palestinian flag and a Hamas paraglider—a symbol of mass murder—in the top corner. 
• At Stanford, hand-painted signs appeared on buildings declaring: “The Israeli occupation is NOTHING BUT AN ILLUSION OF DUST.” (In The Stanford Review, Free Press intern Julia Steinberg wrote that, on Instagram, “my classmates posted infographics declaring that, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ ”)
• Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia declared on Sunday that “The events that took place yesterday are a step towards a free Palestine.”

Ironically, after denying that the Nazis intended to exterminate the Jews, deniers argue that what the Nazis did to the Jews is really no different from what other nations do to their perceived enemies. David Irving, for example, points out that the U.S. government obliterated two Japanese cities and their civilian populations with atomic weapons—the only government in history to do so. Furthermore, Mark Weber notes, Americans concentrated Japanese Americans in camps, much as Germans did to their perceived internal enemy—the Jews. These examples and others, such as Irving’s citation of the mass bombing of Dresden, have a not-so-hidden agenda: to implicate America and Britain as equally guilty, along with Germany, in the mass destruction of the Second World War.

But what is missing in this comparison? First, there is a big difference between two nations fighting one another, both using trained soldiers, and the systematic, state-organized killing of unarmed, unsuspecting people—not in self-defense, not to gain territory or wealth (although these may accrue as a beneficial by-product), but because of anti-Semitism. Scholars and the general public debate the morality of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, and the mass bombing of Dresden. But historians do not try to equate these actions with the Holocaust. If we take the mass bombing of Dresden, for instance—although it was admittedly one of the worst acts against the Axis powers by the Allies, it resulted in about 35,000 deaths, not the 250,000 first claimed by the Germans (Goebbles exaggerated the number for propaganda purposes), and nowhere near the 6 million of the Holocaust.

Judge Benjamin Halevi to Eichmann: You have often compared the extermination of the Jews with the bombing raids on German cities and you compared the murder of Jewish women and children with the death of German women in aerial bombardments. Surely it must be clear to you that there is a basic distinction between these two things. On the one hand the bombing is used as an instrument of forcing the enemy to surrender. Just as the Germans tried to force the British to surrender by their bombing. In that case it is a war objective to bring an armed enemy to his knees. On the other hand, when you take unarmed Jewish men, women, and children from their homes, hand then over to the Gestapo, and then send the to Auschwitz for extermination it is an entirely different thing, is it not?

Eichmann: The difference is enormous. But at that time these crimes had been legalized by the state and the responsibility, therefore, belongs to those who issued the orders.

Judge Halevi: But you must know surely that there are internationally recognized Laws and Customs of War whereby the civilian population is protected from actions which are not essential for the prosecution of the war itself.

Eichmann: Yes, I am aware of that.

Judge Halevi: Did you never feel a conflict of loyalties between your duty and your conscience?

Eichmann: I suppose one could call it an internal split. It was a personal dilemma when one swayed from one extreme to the other.

Judge Halevi: One had to overlook and forget one’s conscience.

Eichmann: Yes, one could put it that way.