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Everyone has read the reports by now. On Oct. 7, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza called Hamas launched a surprise invasion of Israel. They shot, tortured, raped, beheaded and abducted every Jew they could find. Most were women, children and babies.
Over 1,200 Jews died, and countless more were injured. It was a Jewish pogrom, right out of the Middle Ages. The perpetrators filmed their gruesome bloodbath and gleefully posted it on the internet.
Hamas also took about 200 hostages back to the underground tunnels of Gaza, where they’ve been using them as human shields, trading them for Hamas terrorists captured by Israel, and torturing them to death.
Outrage is the world’s rightful response to this sick and sadistic massacre.
But not everyone feels that way. Ordinary Palestinians don’t feel that way at all. Polls show that 70-80% of the Palestinians in Gaza support the massacre.
Even among developed nations, a surprising number of otherwise civilized people are weak in their condemnation of the attack and ensuing atrocities.
Most disturbing is that on many America college campuses, the condemnation is not of Hamas, but of Israel. Groups well-funded by leftist organizations and individuals like George Soros have expressed sympathies for the massacre, going so far as to claim that it was justified on the grounds that Israel is a “colonizer” of land that is rightly Palestinian.
The position of these groups is that the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which constitutes all of Israel, should be taken from the Jews and given instead to the Palestinians. Until that happens, they say any and all acts are permissible by the Palestinians and terrorist groups purporting to represent them such as Hamas.
Never mind that there is no concrete definition of who is a “Palestinian” and the term scarcely existed when the United Nations set up the nation of Israel in 1948. And never mind that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected the “Two State Solution” where they get land to exist adjacent Israel. And never mind that Israel nonetheless turned Gaza over to them back in 2005 to effectively establish a Palestinian nation at the time without receiving anything in return from the Palestinians other than endless rocket bombardments.
And never mind that the Jews have suffered though 3,000 years of persecution when their ancestral lands were taken by, among others, the Babylonians, then the Romans, then the Ottomans, and then the British. And never mind that six million of them were murdered in Europe – about half their population there at the time – until the United Nations finally offered them a permanent home in the land of Abraham, Issac and Jacob.
Let’s never mind all that, and instead say hypothetically for a moment that the Palestinians are correct that they are the rightful owners of the land from the river to the sea, and Israel is wrong. Would that justify the murders, the rapes, the beheadings, the torture and the hostage-taking?
Here is where the Hamas sympathizers start to squirm and equivocate, at least the ones who are not psychopathic killers to the same degree as Hamas itself. They point to the low education levels of the Palestinians, their poverty, their status as oppressed people.
In other words, they point to their skin color.
Woke American college kids – and their woke professors and administrators and the other cool kids with whom the professors and administrators want to pal – reflexively and group-thinkingly side with people with dark skin. The Palestinians have it, and most Israelis don’t (though many do, and many are Arabs).
History doesn’t matter to these sympathizers, and atrocities don’t matter. All that matters is skin color.
I submit that this condescension to excuse horrific acts is not only wrong, it’s racist. It rests on the notion that people with dark skin living in poverty are unable to distinguish between right and wrong. They lack the intelligence to live in a civilized society. They are barbarians. They are savages.
But they’re not. The Palestinians have televisions, internet and schools, and they can read and write. They know right from wrong.They are ordinary people but have a grievance.
Lots of other people have grievances. I’m still smarting over the genocidal clearances of the Scottish Highlands. Japanese-Americans still grieve the incarceration of their ancestors in camps in California in WWII. Black Americans still grieve the enslavement of their ancestors a few hundred years ago and Jim Crow laws in the 20th century. Tibetans grieve the present-day occupation of their ancestral lands by the Chinese. For that matter, Jews still grieve the Holocaust, understandably.
But none of them think their grievances justify terrorism against civilian men, women and children.
Except the Palestinians. Like those other groups with grievances, Palestinians know right from wrong. But unlike those other aggrieved groups, the Palestinians consciously act wrong. They think, uniquely these days, that their grievances justify anything.
The Palestinians’ intentionally wrongful acts are enabled and even tangibly supported by their sympathizers. The sympathizers know the acts are wrong – even atrocious – but they excuse them as the ignorant and stupid acts of dark-skinned savages.
It’s the bigotry of low expectations. That bigotry has enabled a Jewish pogrom in the year 2023, and threatens another Jewish genocide.
Until their sympathizers demand that Palestinians act like the civilized people that they are fully capable of being, their sympathizers are collaborators in the Palestinian atrocities against the Jews, and racist in their view of Palestinians themselves.
But of course, the sympathizers don’t care about Jews and don’t care about Palestinians. All they care about is feeling and signaling the virtue that they vainly and mistakenly perceive in themselves. |
