OPINION
One of the most perplexing weirdnesses of these grim times is the sight of tens of thousands of ‘progressives’ loudly and often violently supporting a group who are the antithesis of nearly everything they profess to hold dear. From women’s rights to gay rights, human rights to secularism: Hamas are bloodily and brutally opposed to them all.
Hamas is a religiofascist ideology of horrific bloodthirstiness. Its roots are tied directly to the spectre of Nazi Germany, with whom Palestinian leaders willfully allied during WWII. As Douglas Murray points out, the one place in the world where a Nazi leader – the Grand Mufti of Palestine – was hailed as a returned hero at the end of the war was the Muslim Middle East.
Yet, the very people who screech endlessly about “fascists!” and “Nazis!” are willingly cheering for these modern religiofascist thugs. Indeed, literally prostrating themselves in bizarre displays of mass obedience.
Someone who knows a great deal about the brutal reality of Islamic thuggery is Salman Rushdie. He’s not having the bullshit of the “pro-Palestine” cretins.
It’s Salman Rushdie. Of course it is. It’s always Salman Rushdie. He’s become a beacon of moral clarity in these ethically dazed times. Now, delightedly, he’s applying his lucidity of thought to the Gaza calamity. In an interview with the German newspaper Bild he took aim, in typically avuncular style, at ‘young progressives’ whose hatred for Israel sometimes crosses the line into something like sympathy for Hamas. “There’s not a lot of deep thought happening”, he says. You can say that again, Salman.
There’s a pained frustration to his voice. Yes, it is “absolutely right”, he says, that people are “distressed by what is happening in Gaza”, given “the quantity of innocent death”. And yet, “I would just like some of the protesters to mention Hamas”, he continues, “because that’s where this started”.
Oh, but they do mention Hamas: they praise them as “freedom fighters”.
This is a “terrorist organisation”, he reminds them, and it is “very strange for young progressive student [activists] to kind of support a fascist terrorist group”. Indeed. It’s been mindblowing to watch the self-styled anti-fascists of the bourgeois left either stay schtum or even try to rationalise Hamas’s fascistic attack on the Jews of Southern Israel. These are the kind of people who think everything is ‘like the 1930s’ – Brexit, Trump, gender-critical feminism – and yet when there was a pogrom that was genuinely reminiscent of the 1930s they essentially said: ‘Well, what do you expect…?’
As for the idiotic chants of “Free Palestine”, they’re as moronic as chanting for a “Free Nazi Germany”.
We know exactly what the Nazis did when Chamberlain and Daladier bent over backwards to leave them be free to do as they pleased. We also know what Hamas would do if they were left free to run a neighbouring state to Israel.
Exactly what they did for the last 20 years.
Given a free hand to run Gaza, with tens of billions of dollars pouring in every year from foreign donors, and most of their infrastructure needs supplied by Israel for free, what did Hamas do? Turned the entirety of Gaza into a war machine with one aim only: to exterminate Jews.
“Right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas and that would make it a Taliban-like state… It would be a client state of Iran. And is that what the progressive movements of the Western left wish to create?” […]
And when activists holler ‘Globalise the intifada’, what are they saying? The only ‘intifada’ we’ve seen in recent years was the racist pogrom of 7 October. Globalise that? Rushdie is right to call for deeper thought, to muddy with pesky nuance the juvenile rage against Israel that has swept the Western world.
Spectator Australia
But deeper thought and nuance are the last thing these violent children, drunk on their own self-righteousness, are even capable of understanding.
We could be forgiven for thinking that the main reason they’re so enamoured of Palestinians is that they’re the only people stupider (never forget the average Gazan IQ of 78!) and more troglodyte than they are.