Left-Wing Defenses of Hamas Are an Insult to Palestinians

[BlueCheeseAgain]

Matt Johnson
Published Nov. 01, 2023 8:11PM EDT

On Oct. 30, a long list of faculty at Columbia University and Barnard College attached their names to an open letter which argued that the murders, rapes, and kidnappings committed by Hamas against Israelis and foreign nationals in Israel—mostly civilians—were a “military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years.”

The open letter is just the latest episode in a broader convulsion of cruel stupidity on the Western left since the atrocities of Oct. 7.

Protesters celebrated the massacre of young concert attendees in New York. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) declared the slaughter of civilians was a “direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime” and “not unprovoked.” An open letter from a “coalition of Palestine solidarity groups” at Harvard University announced that Israel is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and stated that the “apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

Underneath the outright refusal to condemn an explicitly genocidal organization that just carried out the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, there are a couple of revealing assumptions. These assumptions—which are obscured by the language of faux anti-imperialism and humanitarian concern—help to explain why otherwise decent people can excuse (and even endorse) the worst crimes imaginable.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/left-wing-defenses-of-hamas-are-an-insult-to-palestinians

This piece goes into something that has really bothered me this month-- why are so many of the people who supportive of Hamas on the left? And not just any people-- highly educated and supposedly informed ones? University professors, college students, political activists. A lot of it seems to derive from the generally admirable idea of siding with the perceived oppressed against the perceived oppressors, combined with the somewhat inaccurately-identified ethnic backgrounds of the two sides. But how has this point of view turned into something where people go out and celebrate the massacre of innocents? Where they go out of their way to rip down posters of kidnapped kids?

This article doesn't really explain the how, but it does go a bit into why such thinking may be wrong, at least from the author's point of view. For my part, it's simply embarrassing as a liberal to watch Republicans point to these examples and crow about how they were right about what they claim is "wokism" in academia.