"Queers for Palestine" makes about as much sense as "Chickens for Kentucky Fried Chicken," but a decades-long inversion, perversion, and subversion of the core values of Western civilization has accelerated in the wake of Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel.
Herta Muller, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, has written a powerful essay detailing how far the West has sunk, drawing parallels with the moral collapse that made possible the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany: Herta Muller — OPEN LETTER should be read in full, but I will quote and comment on a few choice excerpts:
Since October 7, I have been thinking again and again about a book about the Nazi era, the book "Ganz normale Männer" by Christopher R. Browning. He describes the annihilation of Jewish villages in Poland by the Reserve Police Battalion 110, when the large gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz did not yet exist. It was like the bloodlust of the Hamas terrorists at the music festival and in the kibbutzim. In just one day in July 1942, the 1,500 Jewish inhabitants of the village of Józefów were slaughtered. Children and infants were shot in the street in front of their houses, the old and sick in their beds. All the others were driven into the forest, where they had to strip naked and crawl on the ground. They were mocked and tortured, then shot and left lying in a bloody forest. The murder became perverse.
The book is called "Ganz normale Männer" (Quite Normal Men) because this reserve police battalion did not consist of SS men or Wehrmacht soldiers, but of civilians who were no longer considered suitable for military service because they were too old. They came from completely normal professions and turned into monsters. It was not until 1962 that a trial began in this case of war crimes. The trial records show that some of the men "got a huge kick out of the whole thing." The sadism went so far that a newly married captain brought his wife to the massacres to celebrate their honeymoon. Because the bloodlust continued in other villages. And the woman strolled around in the white wedding dress she had brought with her, among the Jews who had been herded together in the market square.
I agree with Muller that a comparison of Hamas with the Nazis is apt; the only difference between Hamas and the Nazis is that the Nazis possessed the necessary military/industrial complex to carry out genocide against the Jewish people on an unprecedented scale. If Hamas had similar capabilities they would do what the Nazis did to the Jews; indeed, Hamas' leaders have publicly pledged to repeat the October 7 massacre "again and again and again."
Muller is concerned not only with Hamas' depravity, but with the extent to which the West overtly sympathizes with Hamas' depravity:
I lived in a dictatorship for over thirty years. And when I came to Western Europe, I could not imagine that democracy could ever be called into question in such a way. I thought that in a dictatorship, people are systematically brainwashed. And that in democracies, people learn to think for themselves because the individual counts. Unlike in a dictatorship, where independent thought is forbidden and the forced collective trains people. And where the individual is not a part of the collective, but an enemy. I am appalled that young people, students in the West, are so confused that they are no longer aware of their freedom. That they have apparently lost the ability to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship.
On December 5, 2023, I described an alarming phenomenon that has happened since October 7: Hamas has exposed the moral bankruptcy of self-proclaimed "progressives":
In general, it is crystal clear that "intersectionality," "antiracism," and "social justice" are empty slogans that do not apply to Jews. Hamas kills Jews because they are Jews, and the self-proclaimed "progressives" support Hamas based on a perverse and twisted worldview that condemns all white people as oppressors while excusing any actions committed by non-white people as justifiable "resistance." In this twisted worldview, Jews are classified as white even though white supremacists/Nazis reject the notion that Jews are white (and the reality is that individual Jews may be members of any racial group, and the Jewish community as a whole cannot correctly be classified as white or any other race)...
...As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explained in their 2001 book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, "Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law."
People and groups who attack the "very foundations of the liberal order" are fundamentally incapable of distinguishing between a terrorist group like Hamas that tortures children, rapes women, massacres civilians, and takes civilians hostage and a democratic nation like Israel that is fighting a defensive war. Civilian hostages held captive by Hamas are not morally equivalent to terrorists arrested by Israel, convicted in a court of law, and sentenced to prison sentences, but many media outlets act as if there is no difference between Hamas terrorizing civilians and Israel lawfully detaining terrorists and criminals.
Instead, self-proclaimed "progressives" divide the world into oppressors and oppressed--much like intellectual lightweight Ibram X. Kendi divides the world into racists and antiracists--with the oppressors almost always being white. Oppressed people are permitted to do anything in service of "resistance," while oppressors have no rights. The liberal order speaks of basic rights such as life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The self-proclaimed "progressives" look at murdered Jews and feel joy that the resistance has been successful.
Muller rues the extent to which many people accept Hamas' inversions of historical truths:
I have the impression that the strategy of Hamas and its supporters is to make everything Israeli, and therefore everything Jewish, unbearable to the world. Hamas wants to maintain anti-Semitism as a permanent global mood. That is why it also wants to reinterpret the Shoah. The Nazi persecution and the rescue flight to Palestine are also to be called into question. And ultimately, the right of Israel to exist. This manipulation goes as far as to claim that German Holocaust remembrance only serves as a cultural weapon to legitimize the Western-white "settlement project" of Israel. Such ahistorical and cynical reversals of the perpetrator-victim relationship are intended to prevent any differentiation between the Shoah and colonialism. With all these stacked constructs, Israel is no longer seen as the only democracy in the Middle East, but as a colonialist model state. And as an eternal aggressor, against whom blind hatred is justified. And even the desire for its destruction.
As I noted in Applying the Law of War to Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah, Leftist support of Hamas is not about helping Gazans or creating a peaceful Palestinian state that could coexist with Israel: "The sad reality is that the people who are protesting the loudest about Israel's alleged war crimes do not care at all about the alleged war crimes victims; the protesters hate the Jewish people, and seek to cloak their antisemitism as 'merely' anti-Zionism--but anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from antisemitism because Israel is the Jewish homeland. It should be noted that being Jewish does not mean that you cannot be antisemitic, and there are some Jews who hate their own heritage and their own people--in short, they are traitors: instead of expressing concern for the October 7 victims and their families, these traitors give aid and comfort to Hamas' rapists, kidnappers, and murderers."
It is easy to feel discouraged, but we have to cling to the hope--the belief--that Love of Life Will Triumph Over Lust for Death: "Our enemies declare that they love death more than we love life. That is why they will lose. Life and love are more powerful than any death-loving cult. History has shown this time and again. Long after those who love death attain that which they most fervently desire, those of us who love life will bury our dead, wipe away our tears, and rebuild our lives."
No comments:
Post a Comment