I recently discovered that I am not so liberal.

My whole life I thought that I was a liberal. This Israel-Hamas war changed my heart and my mind.

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Born and raised in Los Angeles, I was “liberal” for as long as I can remember.

And then I looked up the definition and realized I should probably check the dictionary first.

The first definition of a liberal is “someone who is willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own.”¹ Do you know anyone like that? Almost every liberal I know thinks they are smarter than most people.

All semi-kidding aside — every joke has some truth to it — this Israel-Hamas war has made me rethink my own premises about liberalism.

Don’t get me wrong; I still very much support individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise. But these values are a two-way street: I do not support individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise for others who repeatedly abuse these freedoms, and will eventually exploit their way to political power to take them away.

Freedom of religion, for example, means the right to adopt a religion or belief of a person’s choice, including the right to leave a religion and convert to another. But today, in America and the UK and France and many other places, “freedom of religion” seems to mean that you can openly say you want to kill Jews and “infidels,” and when Jews and “infidels” say they do not want to be killed, the perpetrators claim you have a “phobia” (you know, an irrational fear.)

Freedom of speech, which as a writer I fully embrace, has been manipulated into freedom of hate speech, coupled with bullying, harassment, psychological manipulation, and micro-aggressions. Then, when you try to call out hate speech, these folks label you racist, xenophobic, or “white privilege.” They slap the word “extremist” on every other point of view, except for theirs.

The irony is that so many of the people who asked for “space spaces” and decried that “words are violence” have recently been making the rest of us feel unsafe when we walk down the street in our cities, and they refuse to be accountable to their words so long as they are not followed by actions. Meaning, they can unapologetically call for the genocide of the Jews as long as they do not act upon this craving passion of theirs.

And what about freedom of the press? Nowadays, anyone can set up quasi-media outlets (e.g. Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye) to spew blatant lies and untruths, while people vow that “I can say and share whatever I want on social media” because “it’s a free country” and everyone is “entitled” to their own opinion. There ought to be a difference between thinking whatever you want to think, and broadcasting it to millions of people over the internet, no holds barred.

Liberalism preaches multiculturalism and cultural relativism — not judging a culture to our own standards of what is right or wrong, strange or normal — which is fine. I regularly travel to other countries and love to experience new cultures. But that does not mean we ought to welcome people who import suspect aspects of their cultures to our countries, especially when these aspects directly contradict or weaken some of the great values that our countries were built on.

For example, at a Kings College (London) course about counter-terrorism, designed for civil servants and professionals in this field, participants are taught: “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” and “Terrorism is not the problem, rather the systems they oppose are terrorist.”² Police and law enforcement in Western countries are given a lot of social justice-style training, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is not old-fashioned, proper policing.

“They’re obsessed with policing the internet and policing what people are putting on Twitter and stuff,” said Tim Cruddas, a former sergeant with London’s Metropolitan Police. “The average constable on the street is far less prepared than they were because they don’t even go through a training school anymore the way that we used to do.”³

This “modern approach” to policing has led cops to make bizarre decisions in London and elsewhere across the UK in recent months, including:

• Pro-Palestinian activists projecting the phrase “from the river to the sea” onto the Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben last week

• Police forcing a Jewish nonprofit to stop showing digital images of Israeli children who had been taken hostage by Hamas and were being displayed on vans driving through central London, saying these images were “breaching the peace”

• A Manchester police officer tearing down posters of Israeli children who had been taken hostage

• A leadership coordinator, Amina Ahmed, at Scotland Yard — the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police — posting on her LinkedIn: “if anyone openly agrees with the war in Gaza, they should be called out as Islamophobic and inciting hatred against Muslims”

Just last week, British Member of Parliament Andrew Percy said: “I felt safer in Israel than I do in this country at this moment in time.”

According to columnist Saul Goldman, “Liberal Europe has sided with extremist Islam and a Palestinian population of fellow travelers. The West faces a terrible war. But in the final analysis, it is not the war that is immoral. Throughout history men and women were called upon to resist evil. Perhaps we can win this war. But that depends upon having learned the lessons of history.”⁴

Part of these lessons of history ought to be putting the past in perspective. Too often, people today are blamed by liberals for actions, behaviors, and attitudes peddled by people who are long gone. As the great philosopher Thomas Sowell put it:

“Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?”

The other trick that many liberals play on us is comparing two disparate events, thereby psychologically manipulating us for the sake of advancing their own ideology. For example, I cannot tell you how many times during the last four months I have heard people try to compare Israel’s response to the Hamas-led massacre on October 7th, to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Outside of the fact that both wars vaguely have the premise of fighting terrorism — and yes, terrorism is a real threat that should be repelled — there are very few resemblances between this Israel-Hamas war and, frankly, any other war in the Middle East. To try to compare it to other military campaigns in the region is, at best, intellectually lazy or idiotic, and at worst, gaslighting aimed at delegitimizing Israel’s right to defend itself and its citizens (which, after all, Israel must do according to international law).

“If British Leftists care as much as they claim to about the lives of innocent civilians in the Middle East,” asked columnist Michael Deacon, “why didn’t they hold weekly mass marches demanding a ceasefire in Syria?”⁵

I also cannot understand how people who call themselves “liberal” can somehow justify, in the name of “liberation” and “human rights,” the heinous Hamas-led crimes against humanity — but fail to comprehend that Israel has taken the most humanitarian steps in modern warfare history, hence a less than two-to-one ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties, which is nothing short of unprecedented.

“Here in America, the troubling trend has been unfolding in recent years as the support that Israel could always count on from America’s liberals has faltered. I consider myself a liberal, but I am not part of this trend,” said the HBO talk show host, Bill Maher. “It comes from the fact that the values that Israel upholds and exemplifies are my values, and the values of the people who attack Israel are not. It boggles my mind that so many people in my country who consider themselves ‘progressive’ somehow wind up in the streets cheering for some of the most illiberal people in the world.”

Even if you wish there was a better way for how Israel is defending itself, let’s recall the definition of being a liberal: “someone who is willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own.” Therefore, a true liberal would respect or accept how Israelis’ are responding to the Hamas-led massacre, whether or not they fully agree with it.

Let’s recall something: The vast majority of Israelis are totally supportive of how the State of Israel is responding in Gaza to the Hamas-led massacre. Each person is invited to see the situation from their ivory towers however they prefer, but if they are truly liberal, they ought to give Israelis the respect that we are quite competent and experienced in dealing with our enemies in our region.

The reality is that many people who describe themselves as “liberal” do so to make themselves sound or appear more intelligent, credible, esteemed, or superior to others. That is not liberalism. That is elitism. I don’t know about you, but I am pretty tired of this “we know better than you” business. Guess what? No they don’t. And acting as such just pushes people away from wanting to listen to all the genuinely good ideas they have.

Don’t even get me started about the “liberal Jews” who are marching alongside those chanting for their death, or who are hiding behind their “Jewish identity” to promote the destruction of the one and only Jewish state. As one social media account put it:

“You might as well be shoving Jews into the oven. But no, you’re not a Kapo (a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who watched over other Jewish prisoners). You’re worse than a Kapo. The Kapos had no choice. You’re doing it to assimilate with the ‘woke’ mob.”⁶

In Israel and amongst the vast majority of Israelis, our premise is pretty simple: We tolerate people who tolerate us. This is why some 30 percent of our population is not Jewish and has full rights as Israeli citizens. And it is also why Israel has made peace with every Arab country that has desired it.

There is, of course, a second side to this coin of tolerance: We do not tolerate people who do not tolerate us. Hence, our response in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria to the Hamas-led massacre. The same way that respect and trust are given to those who earn it, tolerance follows the same calculus.

If that does not make us liberal, so be it.

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1. Oxford Languages

2. “Scandalous Indoctrination: Inside a Kings College Counter-Terrorism Course for UK Civil Servants.” Fathom.

3. “British Police ‘Are Giving in to the Mob’.” The Free Press.

4. “Allowing Evil to Triumph for the Sake of Peace.” Future of Jewish.

5. “If these ‘pro-Palestinian’ marches aren’t anti-Semitic, answer me this.” The Telegraph.

6. The Persian Jewess on Instagram