In an October 7, 2021 video report, VICE News obtained access to the tunnels Hamas’ built to conduct terrorist operations against Israel. Reporter Isobel Young conducted an interview with a 25-year-old individual who had joined Hamas during adolescence. During the interview, Young stated, “You guys fired the first rockets,” to which the Hamas terrorist responded, “The first aggression is the occupation.” Rank-and-file Hamas are taught to think this way by such figures as Omar Baddar, an anti-Israel propagandist based in Washington DC associated with the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) and other pro-Palestinian organizations, who argues that Palestinians shouldn’t bear the blame for violence, citing Israel’s status as an occupying power as the root cause. Torturing and massacring Jews is not an act of terrorism, in this view, a rationalization that many Western intellectuals are eager to soften, but just retaliation for Jews occupying their land. Muslims burning babies and raping and killing women is the Jews’ fault. They’re responsible. Indeed, what the West calls “terrorism” is actually the righteous struggle the Algerian psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon cast as that of the victim against his executioner, today couched in the rhetoric of “oppressed and oppressor.”
If you listen to what Hamas sympathizers in the West are saying, which parrots what the Hamas terrorists are saying, you can see how easy it has been for Western youth, taught to think this way in their college courses, and even by ideas embedded in K-12 curriculum, to rationalize the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Jewish and other civilians in Israel. It’s what also permits Western youth to rationalize the extraordinarily high levels of criminality in black-majority neighborhoods, i.e., to define deviance down. It’s what allows Western youth to rationalize violent Antifa, Trantifa, and Black Lives Matter action in America’s streets. And it’s why the core ethics of the West, ethics based on the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, are rejected, while those chanting “No Justice! No Peace!” embrace authoritarian and illiberal ideas and practices. The new fascism in our streets comes to us wrapped in a rhetoric of social justice and victimhood.
This viewpoint absolves those who portray themselves as the oppressed for any moral responsibility for their actions—for the theft and destruction of property and the maiming and killing of civilians. Just as whites, however much they seek allyship, no matter how many feet they wash, are a permanent problem for the woke progressive, the mere existence of Israel is the problem for Palestinians—and this justifies the violence. The narrative of Palestinian victimhood is fueled in the West by the body of critical theory corrupted by postmodernism, a viewpoint that at once asserts and denies universal truth, while reducing discourse to action all around. The narrative serves to empower terrorists foreign and domestic. It also serves to rationalize the invasion of the West by Third World culture bearers who refuse to integrate with the social and cultural systems of the host countries. The call to reject these ideologies and prevent their propagation in universities is emphasized by the rational to counteract this belief system; however, the oppressed-oppressor narrative has successfully colonized Western institutions and its agents in positions of power portray attempts to return to sanity as chauvinist, fascist, and racist.
I have covered in a great detail here on Freedom and Reason the intellectual and ideological work that has created the street-level army celebrating the killing of Jews (for some of my latest on the subject, see The Peril of Left-Wing Identitarianism; “You’re All Sinners!” The Religion of Critical Race Theory; The Woke-Islam Alliance and the Threat to Secularism; Why the Woke Hate the West; Woke Progressivism and the Party of God; We are the Rebels Now). However, there is another force in back of this that I’ve covered in the past, but it’s been awhile. It’s time to remind readers of that piece. In my September 2019 essay The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left, I trace the history of the Black Panther Party from Black Nationalism through revolutionary nationalism into Marxist-Leninism, with Maoism playing a significant role. Here is Kwame Ture, aka Stokely Carmichael, the man who articulated the core principles of Black Power, telling us about the Frantz Fanon and his fallacious thesis of the victim-executioner relation.
In his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocated violence not simply as legitimate action in the struggle for liberation but as a necessary step in overcoming the psychic complex of black inferiority, which was the result of centuries of demeaning white European colonization. Because all blacks are demeaned in this way, the victims of intergenerational trauma, they are not merely justified in using violence against any white person, but should do so for purposes of collective self-dignity and self-esteem. Social justice from the Black Power standpoint is not about justice, then, but about retribution. But it’s not only about settling the score. It doesn’t seek equality after that, but instead a new racial hierarchy, one that flips the script, with whites are on bottom and blacks and other oppressed minorities on top enjoying appropriated white wealth.
Fanon’s thesis, what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “a classic of anti-colonialism in which the Third World finds itself and speak to itself through his voice,” has been taken up by Third Worlders everywhere to cover for the criminal desire to appropriate what the West built. The success of the West is perceived by Fanon and his followers as not only purchased at the experience of wretched, but as the source of their wretchedness. The Third world looks the way it does not because the people there neither developed nor adopted the ways of the West but because the white man is a racist. Fanon’s thesis was joined with Mao Zedong thought to globalize the social logic of revolution against the West and shift the struggle from social class to racial identity (see The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological; Maoism and Wokism and the Tyranny of Bureaucratic Collectivism; The Cultural Revolution; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones).
The hatred of Jews is not because Jews stole Palestinian land. As I have shown, Jews had a continuous presence in what is today Israel for some 3500 years—before there was even an Arab culture and language (see Jew-Hatred in the Arab-Muslim World: An Ancient and Persistent Hatred). No, the hatred of Jews throughout history has been because Jews have been one of the most successful ethnic groups in history. The source of the hated and loathing is envy and resentment. With the Protestant Reformation, Christians became like the Jews and, like the Jews, became highly successful. Indeed, the most dynamic economic system in history, capitalism, is the result of Christians taking up rational economic behavior exemplified by Jewish culture and spreading it throughout the world. The United States is especially despised by the victims of culture and history because this country is the paradigm not only of capitalism but of civil liberties and rights and democratic-republic government. The US is a secular nation that accepts all races and all religions, that defends freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association. America led the way in abolishing slavery and establishing universal human rights. It follows that America would be portrayed as the “Great Satan” and the founding ethnic group as “white devils.” (See my recent essay The Education of Bill Maher—and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion to Christianity for a longer discussion of this point.)
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