Hatred Born Of Failure

Yesterday, I woke to a front page photo of the New York Post’s print edition, highlighting thousands of protesters celebrating the 10/7 massacres perpetrated by Hamas on Israeli civilians last year.

I penned a string of articles after the attack that sought to make sense of this domestic pro-Hamas faction. I was not alone in concluding that, once you understand the core of modern Leftism, you can make sense of why Ivy League educated young people, among many others, would choose to vocally and sometimes violently side with the people who murdered, tortured, raped, and burned alive 1200 civilians, including teens and children, and the repressive culture that treats women like chattel, imprisons or kills gays, and has zero regard for the concept of individual rights and liberties baked into Western society.

And against the one nation/society in that part of the world that embraces Western ideals.

Here are some:

• Israel, Hamas, and the American Left

• About That Two-State Solution...

• Gazan Pawns

• Embracing Their Oppressors

• Proportional Garbage

• Give 'Em A Mantra...

• The Genocide Libel

• Reductionist Morons

• The Generation Of Fear And Hate

• The Two-State Delusion

• The New Swastika

• Fetishizing Failure

The last one is what I think hits closest to home in understanding American Hamas lovers, and it highlights one of the reasons I believe the hatred of Israel and of Jews in general persists in the Arab world.

Israelis took a parched stretch of nothing the size of New Jersey and built a thriving economy and vibrant culture in a span of a few decades. Israel’s per capita GDP is twelve times that of its Arab neighbors, its citizens (including Palestinians and Arabs) enjoy rights unheard of in those neighboring lands, and Israel stands as a damning indictment of the failure of those nations’ governments and values.

The leaders of those and other Arab-Muslim nations, both civil and religious, teach their citizens from childhood that their poor living conditions and repressed lifestyles are someone else’s fault, and we all know who that someone else is. The Jews first, and the Great Satan in the West second. The sort of visceral hate that is seared into people’s cores from a young age doesn’t dislodge easily and is widely immune to reason, logic, or facts.

That it leverages base human emotions such as envy and wrath is no accident, of course.

Here in the west, the phenomenon is similar. Modern leftism teaches victimhood. It informs the young that poor circumstances are never the fault of one’s own decisions, and always someone else’s doing. It also informs the young that success is the product of circumstance, not individual effort, and invariably zero-sum in that it requires taking from others.

Every social interaction is one of oppressor vs oppressed.

Success is a tell-tale of the oppressor.

So, Jews, who throughout history have overcome real oppression to achieve inordinate levels of success, must be oppressors and takers and abusers. Anyone who stands against them is therefore automatically oppressed and deserving of the unqualified support of the Best-and-Brightest.

That’s it in a nutshell. That’s all you need to make sense of rich, entitled kids wearing keffiyehs and celebrating mass slaughter.

It’s also all you need to understand the endless resentment and hatred for Jews that exists in Gaza and the West Bank and Iran and Yemen and other parts of the Muslim world.

Some of the West’s Hamas-lovers try to pretend that they don’t actually hate Jews, and are protesting the Israeli government’s response to 10/7. Back in 2019, well before 10/7 happened, I penned this piece, One Simple Question, that, as the title suggests, proffered one question to ask anyone who argues for Palestinian statehood.

Does Israel have the right to exist?

As I noted therein, it’s a simple yes-no question, and can be answered without equivocation, without qualification, and without whataboutism. Borders, a two-state solution, Jerusalem, disputed lands, settlements, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Gaza, military actions and responses, treatment of in-country Muslim minorities, and other issues can all be discussed and (vociferously) debated after a simple yes-no response to that question, and without one’s positions being undermined by a “yes” response.

If the person you’re asking says “no,” or won’t answer, congratulations, you now know who and what you’re dealing with, and “Jew-hatred” is the obvious conclusion. Where you go from there is up to you, but I would consider a line of conversation that asks why we should support hateful, illiberal, oppressive, theocratic, authoritarian, and most of all failed societies and nations above a tiny sliver of a land that stands as irrefutable proof of why Western liberalism offers a far superior set of values.