A car full of Israeli civilians tried to escape Kibbutz Be’eri, which was under Hamas attack. Hamas burned them alive. Israeli soldiers found their charred corpses inside the car; you can see it if you click here, which I encourage to do only so you will understand that what Hamas did was literally a holocaust—a burnt offering to whatever demonic god they worship.
Maybe the only good thing to emerge so far from this unspeakable horror is that the moral bankruptcy of the progressive Left has been unmasked. On many college campuses, including the Ivy League, protesters have gathered to mark with good cheer the Hamas holocaust. Black Lives Matter chapters have issued statements of solidarity with the killers of babies and others. Progressive politicians across the West have sounded their support for Hamas. Exuberant Muslim mobs in Western capitals have declared their enthusiasm for the slaughter.
What we are now seeing is the ultimate conclusion of the morally idiotic victim/oppressor framework, in which the Bad People are those with power, and the Good People are those without it. In this scheme, the line between good and evil passes not through each human heart, but between identity groups. This concept has been thoroughly mainstreamed in Western institutions under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ The Hamas backers were simply applying this logic to the events in Israel. Because the Israelis are alleged oppressors, and the Palestinians are allegedly oppressed, anything the Palestinians choose to do to the Israelis in the name of self-liberation is just.
This is not the first time we have seen this kind of thing. During the Red Terror, in which the victorious Bolsheviks wiped out the last resistance to their tyrannical rule, Martin Latsis, head of the Bolshevik secret police in Ukraine, issued this guidance to his agents:
Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.
One of the most honest statements in the past few days came from Najma Sharif, a Minnesota-based writer of Somali origin, who tweeted, “What did y’all think decolonization means? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.”
Yes, I think that’s what a lot of the fashionable progressive Americans did think it was. It’s all a fun left-wing game until innocent people start to die.
People who fled Soviet communism to the United States have been warning us for years that what calls itself ‘social justice’—the various movements captured by the umbrella term ‘wokeness’—are in fact recrudescent totalitarianism. Few people have wanted to listen. They have instead continued to get high on this kind of rhetoric.
Six years ago, someone at Texas A&M, a large state university, tipped me off that Tommy Curry, a radical black philosopher, routinely engaged in anti-white racist speech. The white racist agitator Richard Spencer had given a talk on campus, and though my correspondent found Spencer appalling, he wondered why the university administration was more troubled by what Spencer said than by the more overtly racist language of its associate professor of philosophy.
I looked into the matter, and was shocked by what turned up. Curry once gave an interview in which he denounced black liberals like Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama for being soft, and said, “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die.” In a different interview, Curry denied that white people have the capacity to reason.
Years back, Curry published a paper that, beneath its critical studies jargon, argues for indiscriminate killing of whites for the cause of black liberation. In the paper, Curry argues that he is “trying to question if it is the case that the only way to end racism is to challenge the existence of those whose breaths of life sustain the racist structure.”
He goes on:
White socialization reproduces white ways of life, white values, and an ideology of white superiority engrained [sic] in the narratives and history of American society. Even causal analyses of racial events in American society are framed in ways that uphold white sensibilities of justice and fairness, especially when those events would imply racism as the cause.
If you switched out the word ‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ for white in that paragraph, you would get something that could have come from a Hamas propagandist laying the groundwork for extermination.
Curry praised anti-white violence as “a revolt against both the colonial structures of the America context, as well as the rebellion against the individual whites who choose to claim the legacy of that oppression in a white racial identity.” And: “Violence is anger realized as liberation.”
The philosopher cited approvingly Frantz Fanon’s belief that there are no innocents in a colonial situation. A white person under colonialism—and he believes that American blacks live under a kind of colonialism—is guilty by virtue of the fact of being white. The title of his paper includes the phrase “violence against whiteness.” Of course, there is no such thing as violence against ‘whiteness’; there is only violence against flesh and blood white people.
The Chronicle Of Higher Education published a long, sympathetic profile of Curry, who was under fire from attacks stirred up by a right-wing blogger (me). The reaction of the professoriat entailed the rather astonishing belief that deeply radical, even racist, statements can and should be made by academics, and if that academic is a member of one of the Left’s favored victim classes, angry reactions are illegitimate. Perhaps they expected that all whites would react, and should react, as their white campus colleagues do: by groveling and agreeing that yes, they probably do deserve to die.
Curry eventually quit his job at Texas A&M and decamped for the University of Edinburgh, in a country that is 96% white. The students there are hearing from Prof. Curry that good and evil are Western myths, and that moral right and moral wrong come down to power.
If you think Tommy Curry is an outlier in academia, you’re wrong. It’s not that everybody in academia—on philosophy faculties and elsewhere—agrees with him. It’s that those who disagree are too uninterested or too intimidated to object. The tolerance within academic institutions of this kind of objectively racist discourse trains young minds to think that yes, Good and Evil are determined not by individual acts, but by a calculus involving racial identity and power dynamics.
It prepares young people to stand in public celebrating solidarity with gunmen who killed defenseless families, decapitated babies, raped women next to the bodies of their murdered friends, and burned others alive—all for the sake of turning anger into liberation.
In the wake of the Hamas holocaust, there has been some urgent and necessary talk this week about how foolish the United States and the European Union have been in opening the doors to mass immigration by unvetted peoples. But when will we have the conversation about the death-loving homegrown radicals we have coddled and indulged within our leading institutions of thought and culture?
Larry Summers, who was Harvard University’s president from 2001 to 2006, tweeted his utter disgust at the reaction to the terrorist acts by the university, and by various pro-Hamas Harvard student groups. “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” tweeted Summers, who is Jewish.
Who can blame him? But it’s also important to ask: “What did you do, Larry, when you held power at Harvard, to resist the deep forces in academic culture that produced such an evil outcome?” Probably the same thing that Sir Peter Mathieson, the current head of the University of Edinburgh, and nearly every other university president is doing: smiling, foot-shuffling, throat-clearing, and hoping that nothing bad happens on their watch. Meanwhile, the moral and intellectual rot advances.
This is what ‘decolonization’ means: the heads of Jewish babies and burned corpses of Jews in cars. This is what all this pseudo-sophisticated critical studies rhetoric means. This is the suicidal and genocidal hatred being nurtured in the intellectual heart of the West. If this holocaust in Israel doesn’t wake us up to the dehumanization wrought by Leftist academia, what is it going to take?
October 13 UPDATE: Over at The Critic, Sebastian Milbank reports that Dr. Curry, along with many of his equally radical colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, has been a busy beaver defending Hamas murderers this week. Excerpt:
Of course to invite a lunatic speaker is one thing, and could perhaps be excused as a gross error in judgement. But how does one account for appointing someone with fantastically offensive and violent views to teach students at Edinburgh University? I am speaking of Tommy Curry, who holds a distinguished personal chair in “Africana Philosophy & Black Male Studies” at Edinburgh’s faculty of Philosophy. Professor Curry was also keen to express his views on Palestine, writing on Twitter that “Phallicism or the simultaneous construction of racialized males as the rapist while they are subject to rape & sexual violence remains an undertheorized aspect of race/gender theory despite being observable in every theatre of war & colonial oppression such as Palenstine [sic]”.
Milbank uncovered one of Curry’s academic papers, in which he observes that “the white woman cries out for rape.”
These are the kind of monsters that the triumph of the radical left in academia has created. One is once again reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observation, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that elites in pre-totalitarian Russia and Germany were pleased to oversee the destruction of pillars of civilization for the fun of seeing marginalized peoples rush in. What sane person would want to study at the University of Edinburgh now? Who at that old and venerable institution has allowed ideological apologists for rape and murder to teach there, and proclaim their hateful views? And: who will hold them accountable?
What the ‘Hamas Holocaust’ Reveals About the West’s Corruption
Photo by Bryan R. Smith / AFP
A car full of Israeli civilians tried to escape Kibbutz Be’eri, which was under Hamas attack. Hamas burned them alive. Israeli soldiers found their charred corpses inside the car; you can see it if you click here, which I encourage to do only so you will understand that what Hamas did was literally a holocaust—a burnt offering to whatever demonic god they worship.
Maybe the only good thing to emerge so far from this unspeakable horror is that the moral bankruptcy of the progressive Left has been unmasked. On many college campuses, including the Ivy League, protesters have gathered to mark with good cheer the Hamas holocaust. Black Lives Matter chapters have issued statements of solidarity with the killers of babies and others. Progressive politicians across the West have sounded their support for Hamas. Exuberant Muslim mobs in Western capitals have declared their enthusiasm for the slaughter.
What we are now seeing is the ultimate conclusion of the morally idiotic victim/oppressor framework, in which the Bad People are those with power, and the Good People are those without it. In this scheme, the line between good and evil passes not through each human heart, but between identity groups. This concept has been thoroughly mainstreamed in Western institutions under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ The Hamas backers were simply applying this logic to the events in Israel. Because the Israelis are alleged oppressors, and the Palestinians are allegedly oppressed, anything the Palestinians choose to do to the Israelis in the name of self-liberation is just.
This is not the first time we have seen this kind of thing. During the Red Terror, in which the victorious Bolsheviks wiped out the last resistance to their tyrannical rule, Martin Latsis, head of the Bolshevik secret police in Ukraine, issued this guidance to his agents:
One of the most honest statements in the past few days came from Najma Sharif, a Minnesota-based writer of Somali origin, who tweeted, “What did y’all think decolonization means? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.”
Yes, I think that’s what a lot of the fashionable progressive Americans did think it was. It’s all a fun left-wing game until innocent people start to die.
People who fled Soviet communism to the United States have been warning us for years that what calls itself ‘social justice’—the various movements captured by the umbrella term ‘wokeness’—are in fact recrudescent totalitarianism. Few people have wanted to listen. They have instead continued to get high on this kind of rhetoric.
Six years ago, someone at Texas A&M, a large state university, tipped me off that Tommy Curry, a radical black philosopher, routinely engaged in anti-white racist speech. The white racist agitator Richard Spencer had given a talk on campus, and though my correspondent found Spencer appalling, he wondered why the university administration was more troubled by what Spencer said than by the more overtly racist language of its associate professor of philosophy.
I looked into the matter, and was shocked by what turned up. Curry once gave an interview in which he denounced black liberals like Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama for being soft, and said, “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die.” In a different interview, Curry denied that white people have the capacity to reason.
Years back, Curry published a paper that, beneath its critical studies jargon, argues for indiscriminate killing of whites for the cause of black liberation. In the paper, Curry argues that he is “trying to question if it is the case that the only way to end racism is to challenge the existence of those whose breaths of life sustain the racist structure.”
He goes on:
If you switched out the word ‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ for white in that paragraph, you would get something that could have come from a Hamas propagandist laying the groundwork for extermination.
Curry praised anti-white violence as “a revolt against both the colonial structures of the America context, as well as the rebellion against the individual whites who choose to claim the legacy of that oppression in a white racial identity.” And: “Violence is anger realized as liberation.”
The philosopher cited approvingly Frantz Fanon’s belief that there are no innocents in a colonial situation. A white person under colonialism—and he believes that American blacks live under a kind of colonialism—is guilty by virtue of the fact of being white. The title of his paper includes the phrase “violence against whiteness.” Of course, there is no such thing as violence against ‘whiteness’; there is only violence against flesh and blood white people.
The Chronicle Of Higher Education published a long, sympathetic profile of Curry, who was under fire from attacks stirred up by a right-wing blogger (me). The reaction of the professoriat entailed the rather astonishing belief that deeply radical, even racist, statements can and should be made by academics, and if that academic is a member of one of the Left’s favored victim classes, angry reactions are illegitimate. Perhaps they expected that all whites would react, and should react, as their white campus colleagues do: by groveling and agreeing that yes, they probably do deserve to die.
Curry eventually quit his job at Texas A&M and decamped for the University of Edinburgh, in a country that is 96% white. The students there are hearing from Prof. Curry that good and evil are Western myths, and that moral right and moral wrong come down to power.
If you think Tommy Curry is an outlier in academia, you’re wrong. It’s not that everybody in academia—on philosophy faculties and elsewhere—agrees with him. It’s that those who disagree are too uninterested or too intimidated to object. The tolerance within academic institutions of this kind of objectively racist discourse trains young minds to think that yes, Good and Evil are determined not by individual acts, but by a calculus involving racial identity and power dynamics.
It prepares young people to stand in public celebrating solidarity with gunmen who killed defenseless families, decapitated babies, raped women next to the bodies of their murdered friends, and burned others alive—all for the sake of turning anger into liberation.
In the wake of the Hamas holocaust, there has been some urgent and necessary talk this week about how foolish the United States and the European Union have been in opening the doors to mass immigration by unvetted peoples. But when will we have the conversation about the death-loving homegrown radicals we have coddled and indulged within our leading institutions of thought and culture?
Larry Summers, who was Harvard University’s president from 2001 to 2006, tweeted his utter disgust at the reaction to the terrorist acts by the university, and by various pro-Hamas Harvard student groups. “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” tweeted Summers, who is Jewish.
Who can blame him? But it’s also important to ask: “What did you do, Larry, when you held power at Harvard, to resist the deep forces in academic culture that produced such an evil outcome?” Probably the same thing that Sir Peter Mathieson, the current head of the University of Edinburgh, and nearly every other university president is doing: smiling, foot-shuffling, throat-clearing, and hoping that nothing bad happens on their watch. Meanwhile, the moral and intellectual rot advances.
This is what ‘decolonization’ means: the heads of Jewish babies and burned corpses of Jews in cars. This is what all this pseudo-sophisticated critical studies rhetoric means. This is the suicidal and genocidal hatred being nurtured in the intellectual heart of the West. If this holocaust in Israel doesn’t wake us up to the dehumanization wrought by Leftist academia, what is it going to take?
October 13 UPDATE: Over at The Critic, Sebastian Milbank reports that Dr. Curry, along with many of his equally radical colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, has been a busy beaver defending Hamas murderers this week. Excerpt:
Milbank uncovered one of Curry’s academic papers, in which he observes that “the white woman cries out for rape.”
These are the kind of monsters that the triumph of the radical left in academia has created. One is once again reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observation, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that elites in pre-totalitarian Russia and Germany were pleased to oversee the destruction of pillars of civilization for the fun of seeing marginalized peoples rush in. What sane person would want to study at the University of Edinburgh now? Who at that old and venerable institution has allowed ideological apologists for rape and murder to teach there, and proclaim their hateful views? And: who will hold them accountable?
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