OPINION
The odious Greens’ deputy leader, Mehreen Faruqi, issued a rather telling tweet in response to the October 7 pogrom. When PM Anthony Albanese finally stirred himself to respond with a declaration of sympathy for Israel, Faruqi responded, “One colonial government supporting another, what a disgrace.”
The first takeaway from that tweet is that Faruqi clearly regards both Australia and Israel as “colonisers”. This illustrates, yet again, Natasha Hausdorff’s observation that “pro-Palestine” idiots are too often “desperately ignorant, yet highly opinionated”. After all, how does the Pakistani-born Muslim Faruqi imagine that the Jews, whose indigenous heritage in Israel stretches back at least 7,000 years, are “colonisers”? And what does she have to say about the Palestinian Arabs whose ancestors violently displaced the Jewish indigenes after the Islamic empire conquered the region?
Well, no one ever said that the Green left is the world’s brain’s trust. It’s also notable that Faruqi’s native Pakistan boasts an average IQ of 80, just nudging what Stanford-Binet euphemistically call “borderline impaired”.
But the second, and more alarming, implication of Faruqi’s impaired gibbering is shown by her incessant screeching of “Free Palestine”. Free “Palestine” from what? As her Twitter feed makes clear: “colonisers”. “De-colonisation”, in a word.
“De-colonisation” is one of the great monomanias of the Western left in recent years. Mostly fuelled, of course, by the sullen descendants of the formerly colonised who’ve been given open, diversity-access admission to the great institutions of the West, but who can’t help but notice that, even after more than half a century of being freed of the yoke of colonial oppression, their homelands are still mostly kleptocratic shitholes run by brutal nepotistic thugs. Far from being inspired by the dreaming spires to reach for similar greatness, the third-world troglodytes’ only impulse is to smash it all.
All in the name of “decolonising”, of course.
But smashing statues, replacing the sublime music of Mozart and Elgar with dull-witted trash like drill, shoving Turner aside for smears of elephant shit, and dethroning Shakespeare in favour of some baboon-arsed umbagumba “kween”, is just the start of “de-colonisation”.
If you really want to get a glimpse of “de-colonisation” in full swing, take a look at the smoking, blood-spattered ruins of Kfar Aza, and the piles of corpses at the Supernova festival grounds.
Don’t believe me? Ask the leftist supporters of Hamas’s atrocities.
Somali-American “writer” Najma Sharif, who hooted in response to the beheaded babies and burned-alive grandmothers of Kfar Aza, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers. ‘Not like this’ Then like what. Show us LOL.” Sharif is no fringe nutcase, it must be noted – she’s a nutcase right at the epicentre of cultural clout in racially-reckoned America. She writes for TeenVogue and Instyle. Her tweet garnered 100,000 Likes, including from Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah.
The Democratic Socialists of America cheered Hamas’s slaughter at a New York rally. Leftism-central Jacobin lauded Hamas as “the violent face of Palestinian resistance” – with heavy approval loaded on the “violent part”.
Because violence is part and parcel of the “decolonisation” narrative.
It began with the hateful “intellectual” Frantz Fanon. Given the very best educational opportunities in France by the “colonisers”, Fanon chose to return their generosity with undying hate. In particular, he celebrated and endorsed anti-white violence, coining the favourite leftist phrase “by any means necessary”.
Today’s “de-colonisers” share Fanon’s taste for anti-white violence with a vengeance. A TV “documentary” on Toussaint’s slave rebellion in Haiti re-enacts the rape and brutal murders of white women with the sort of relish that D W Griffith exploited in The Birth of a Nation. Quentin Tarantino cucks himself shamelessly with an orgy of white slaughter in Django Unchained, like Homer Simpson hooting that his fellow whites are “so lame”.
The toxicity of the “de-colonisation” ideology is now made clear, following October 7. Colliding with an inverted version of the Nazis’ racial hierarchy is a historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism, thrown into the hateful blender of identity politics. What emerges is a dull-witted, violent leftist dogma of “oppressed” and “oppressors”. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism.
This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities – and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigour – has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.
Jews cannot suffer racism, the narrative goes, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”. They cannot be victims, no matter how many and how brutally they are victimised. In a modern version of Himmler’s “filing card” mentality, where Jews en route to mass slaughter were reduced to mere numbers tattooed on their arms, left-wing intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether forty babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. The same people who refuse to drink cow’s milk because of animal cruelty regard a baby’s murder and mutilation as somehow an acceptable act of “by any means necessary” revolution – just so long as they weren’t beheaded. Or at least, not too many.
I mean, it’s not as if the left doesn’t have standards.
The irony is that Israel was once the poster child of the left. The worst atrocities were committed at Kibbutz Kfar Aza; the hundreds of concert-goers were massacred near Kibbutz Be’eri. These communes used to represent an ideal for many Western progressives, a victory for communalism over capitalism, miniature socialised, green utopias. It was as much a received orthodoxy for the Left in the 1950s and ’60s as “de-colonisation” is today.
What went wrong for the Jews, vis-a-vis the left?
Quite simply: they won. Nothing gets a “de-colonisation” fanatic’s back up quite like somebody else’s success. Frantz Fanon ignored Africans’ long history of conquering and enslaving each other, if not wiping each other out en masse if they could manage it. It was when white folks did it so much better than they ever had that he got resentful. Edward Said, another “de-colonisation” intellectual poster boy studiously ignored Islam’s brutal record of genocidal conquest and enslavement; the British empire really got his nose out of joint, though.
The narrative on Israel similarly shifted when the Jews just kept on winning. Especially when it humiliated its Arab opponents in 1967 and 1973. The left really hates winners. So, when Israel proved Adolf Hitler so wrong and became a testament to Jewish ability, as far as the left was concerned, it had joined the ranks of “oppressors”.
The left who are endlessly squawking about the “oppression of Palestinians” are as picky as ever. They say nothing, for instance, about the brutal persecution of Palestinian refugees by their “brother” Arabs in Syria or Lebanon. They ignore the fact that Muslim Egypt has, and still does, steadfastly locked out neighbouring Palestinians.
The left said nothing when more than a million Muslims were slaughtered on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. There were no open letters from lecturers about the half a million Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein in the decade after. On the contrary, left-wing “progressives” staged some of the largest marches in history, determined to keep him in power.
But all that was, after all, a series of dog fights between tribes of mutual brown losers. Without a handy skin-colour chart to tell them who the oppressed and oppressors were, the left simply dumped it all into the too-hard basket.
The Jews, though? Oh, that’s easy for a leftist. They’re oppressors, all the way. No wonder pumpkin-headed leftist poison-pinup Greta Thunberg strategically positioned a toy octopus in her “pro-Palestine” photo-op. The octopus is the age-old anti-Semitic metaphor: the Joos, with their tentacles controlling the world.
The Joos run everything, after all. So they’re the ultimate “oppressors”. Now, they’re being decolonised as bloodily as a leftist could ever hope for.
So take note of the piles of corpses in Kfar Azar and Be’eri. That’s what’s coming for the rest of the West – just ask Hamas, who are adamant that eradicating the Jews is only just the start of the “global intifada”.
What did y’all think “decolonisation” really meant, anyway?