Joshua, this is an excellent article, and honestly the more I read pieces like this after October 7th, the more frustrated and disturbed I become by how many people still refuse to confront reality.
At some point, if people still cannot recognize that we are dealing with ideological movements that openly reject compromise, openly glorify violence, openly celebrate massacres, and openly seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, then I honestly do not know what evidence would ever be sufficient for them.
And I say this not only about parts of the Israeli Left, but increasingly about segments of the Western world generally. It reminds me of the same kind of delusional thinking that allows someone like Mamdani to gain major support in New York, including from many Jews themselves. At a certain point it stops being naïveté and starts becoming something genuinely dangerous.
October 7th should have shattered these illusions permanently. Instead, many people simply reset themselves back to old ideological factory settings as though nothing happened.
That is what I find so incomprehensible.
And honestly, for some people, if they still have not woken up by now, I increasingly suspect no argument, no evidence, and no atrocity will ever be enough to wake them up.
I'm stunned that Jews are not still protesting Nicholas Kristof's rape dogs article in the NY Times. Where are the angry crowds outside the offices of the NY Times? There were protests for a hot minute, but now there's silence. What is it going to take for Jews to protest these constant antisemitic onslaughts?
Yes Harari is much like Magid here at Harvard in the US. If many of us have to die to be the morally pure actor in any perceived conflict it is worth it. Being stateless and having little agency is, of course, the morally pure act…sorry, that is the height of ivory tower thinking that causes mass casualty events.
George Orwell once wrote “Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them. “ He was thinking of people like Harari. Unlike Harari who never served in the IDF Orwell learned his lessons about life the hard way. He learned about the underclass by working as a dishwasher and living homeless, he learned about war by fighting in the Spanish Civil War and almost getting killed and there he also learned about the treachery of the left and he learned about the working class by going down into the mines with them and living among them.
Harari has lived a sheltered existence all his life. He is not an outstanding intellectual but a popular one due to his book Sapiens which is both flawed and unoriginal. He loves to cozy up to Jew haters like Christianne Anampour of CNN where they can together spout meaningless moral sophistries such as “ one can be both a victim and perpetrator at the same time “. He is harmful both to Israel and to the Jewish people as a whole. One can only hope that one day his bubble will burst and he will have a taste of reality and maybe wake up but I doubt that that will ever happen. There are too many like him who have lived and died as fools their entire life.
Ideological capture is also crippling organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association. They are run by hard-leftist health care providers. Instead of producing medical knowledge and science, they are churning out propaganda.
I admired Harari's book Sapiens for its many insights but The Peter Principle is unyielding: everyone gets promoted to their first level of incompetence. Clearly Harari reached it trying to prescribe a political path for Israel.
The same tone-deaf attitude was seen in Shimon Peres in January 1994. That month 54 Israeli citizens were murdered in the first suicide bombings in the country, the first tangible results of the Oslo Accords signed just 4 months before. Shimon Peres explained it as "we will resume negotiations with the PLO after the funerals of the victims". That was the end of the Israeli Left.
I remember a lecture given by Shalom Hartman years ago in which he said that he was Jewish just because he was born that way; otherwise , he could easily be something else. Hartman was a compelling speaker, and his audience was enamored of him. But, at that moment, I knew that he had nothing of value or substance to convey to me about Judaism, which , to him was as much accidental and little meaning as his hair color. So, sadly, no surprise about Hartman Institute leaders now.
Tikkun Olam was highjacked: the idea of repairing of the world. Tikkun Olam has to do with individual accountability, repairing oneself and this is how the world gets better. We are responsible for our actions is the message of Tikkun Olam.
Something in our DNA prompts us to embrace our enemies to the point that we would rather die than realize the truth. A sort of genetic Stockholm Syndrome leading to suicidal empathy. Even the horrors of October 7 don't seem to impact this madness. I guess it was bred into us, well, some of us, by having to either toady up to our tormentors, flee, or die. But we now have control of our own Jewish destiny. It's time to embrace THAT mentality instead.
This is from Uri Silber's "The Jew Flu: The Strange Illness of Jewish anti-Semitism":
—The 1930s Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked "Is there another People on Earth so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape, robbery committed by their enemies fill their hearts with admiration and awe?"
What causes Jew Flu? Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Levin argues for twin culprits: so-called 'Stockholm Syndrome', where "population segments under chronic siege com-monly embrace the indictments of their besiegers however bigoted and outrageous", as well as "the psychodynamics of abused children who blame themselves for their situation and believe they could mollify their tormenters if they were 'good'."
Jew Flu is a condition in which being "more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than (one's) own metastasizes into a malignant emotional and moral identification with people committed to (one's) annihilation."
The faculty and administrators in US higher education are also disconnected from the viewpoints and needs of the general US population. Why isn't there more pushback from the consumers of US higher education? The Marxist faculty intentionally hire more Marxist faculty. There is intentional exclusion of conservatives from the faculties of US universities. There is next to no viewpoint diversity anymore within US universities. Yet consumers of this shoddy product are not complaining or pushing back on the universities, which have become propaganda machines.
I take the position that the Western and Israeli left share the same worldview and that no matter what evidence of atrocities committed as a result of the actions taken based on their assumptions about human nature and ideological motivations, they are unable to accept it, less they experience cognitive dissonance. The price for this blindness is death in every case. October 7th in Israel, rape gangs, stabbings, car rammings in markets, and houses of worship requiring armed security and being burned occur all the time in the West. Yet the left always finds a new understanding of morality to explain it all away. It's amazing.
The left, broadly speaking, often treats Judaism and Christianity as obstacles (hated as you said) rather than recognizing them as the very traditions that shaped the West’s moral and ethical foundations: law, justice, human dignity, charity, restraint of power, and social order. These frameworks did not emerge from nowhere. They were rooted in a moral realism that took seriously both the good and evil within human nature.
The left are aggressively attempting to remove this civilizational scaffolding in favor of abstract universal ideals detached from reality.
They operate as though humanity is fundamentally one shared moral community where openness alone eventually produces peace. But history, and frankly scripture, does not present such a naive view of mankind.
Even in Genesis 15:13–21, when God showed Abraham the land his descendants would inherit, He acknowledged the profound violence and corruption of the peoples inhabiting it, while still withholding judgment for centuries. The Tanakh consistently presents a sober understanding of human nature, conflict, survival, and moral responsibility.
That is why moral realism matters. The Torah was not merely spiritual instruction but a blueprint for building and sustaining a flourishing civilization while confronting real threats. “Choose life, so that you and your children may live” in Deuteronomy 30:19 speaks not only spiritually, but ethically and physically as well. Who would have fully understood those words at the moment they were said as we look back at it now?
Much of what the modern West’ values were inherited from the moral world that emerged from Sinai and Jerusalem and was later secularized. As the roots of the civilizational scaffolding is being spat on now by the vast majority of the population, Western societies now want the fruits of that civilization without understanding that those fruits will rot without responsibility and care for preservation.
These leftists don't care about human life even as they preach virtue through their various identitarian flags. What matters is narrative control and a replacement window of seeing the world that requires people to abandon the very ideas that helped ensure their survival.
I'd also like to respond to, "There is also something profoundly manipulative about the way critics frame this issue. Israelis are constantly asked whether they care about Palestinian suffering."
First, there is a difference between acknowledging and caring. We all know war is awful and yes I acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians.
Second, I am in war mode -- although I sit in comfort in West Palm Beach. I have mentally left Athens (where western values are beloved) and have mentally entered Sparta (in defense of Athens, of course). While in war mode, it is inconvenient to "care" about the enemy.
As Gad Saad calls it, "suicidal empathy" is just silly. So no, right now my brain does not have the bandwidth to actually care about the enemy's suffering -- although I do support all the processes Israel goes through to minimize Palestinian civilian deaths.
I suppose I might care more about their civilians dying when they care more about their civilians dying.
Your bewilderment about the Israeli Left is totally understandable but I believe that we need a psychologist to analyze the behavior of Jewish Leftist delusions.
Here is an unexplainable phenomenon:
The massacre at Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, was one of the most devastating events of that day, resulting in the murder of 47 residents and the abduction of 76 others by Hamas.
Yet residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz held a symbolic ceremony on the Gaza border during which they laid peace wreaths and released white pigeons to Gaza.
The ceremony was led by kibbutz member Gadi Mozes, who was released after being held hostage by Hamas for 482 days.
Joshua, this is an excellent article, and honestly the more I read pieces like this after October 7th, the more frustrated and disturbed I become by how many people still refuse to confront reality.
At some point, if people still cannot recognize that we are dealing with ideological movements that openly reject compromise, openly glorify violence, openly celebrate massacres, and openly seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, then I honestly do not know what evidence would ever be sufficient for them.
And I say this not only about parts of the Israeli Left, but increasingly about segments of the Western world generally. It reminds me of the same kind of delusional thinking that allows someone like Mamdani to gain major support in New York, including from many Jews themselves. At a certain point it stops being naïveté and starts becoming something genuinely dangerous.
October 7th should have shattered these illusions permanently. Instead, many people simply reset themselves back to old ideological factory settings as though nothing happened.
That is what I find so incomprehensible.
And honestly, for some people, if they still have not woken up by now, I increasingly suspect no argument, no evidence, and no atrocity will ever be enough to wake them up.
People willfully ignore the evil of www.thereligionofpeace.com Possessed by demonic forces
Does the site get out a newsletter?
Lack of ability to learn from the past and the guarantee of repeated blunders are identifying features of the left.
I'm stunned that Jews are not still protesting Nicholas Kristof's rape dogs article in the NY Times. Where are the angry crowds outside the offices of the NY Times? There were protests for a hot minute, but now there's silence. What is it going to take for Jews to protest these constant antisemitic onslaughts?
Yes Harari is much like Magid here at Harvard in the US. If many of us have to die to be the morally pure actor in any perceived conflict it is worth it. Being stateless and having little agency is, of course, the morally pure act…sorry, that is the height of ivory tower thinking that causes mass casualty events.
George Orwell once wrote “Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them. “ He was thinking of people like Harari. Unlike Harari who never served in the IDF Orwell learned his lessons about life the hard way. He learned about the underclass by working as a dishwasher and living homeless, he learned about war by fighting in the Spanish Civil War and almost getting killed and there he also learned about the treachery of the left and he learned about the working class by going down into the mines with them and living among them.
Harari has lived a sheltered existence all his life. He is not an outstanding intellectual but a popular one due to his book Sapiens which is both flawed and unoriginal. He loves to cozy up to Jew haters like Christianne Anampour of CNN where they can together spout meaningless moral sophistries such as “ one can be both a victim and perpetrator at the same time “. He is harmful both to Israel and to the Jewish people as a whole. One can only hope that one day his bubble will burst and he will have a taste of reality and maybe wake up but I doubt that that will ever happen. There are too many like him who have lived and died as fools their entire life.
Ideological capture is also crippling organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association. They are run by hard-leftist health care providers. Instead of producing medical knowledge and science, they are churning out propaganda.
I admired Harari's book Sapiens for its many insights but The Peter Principle is unyielding: everyone gets promoted to their first level of incompetence. Clearly Harari reached it trying to prescribe a political path for Israel.
The same tone-deaf attitude was seen in Shimon Peres in January 1994. That month 54 Israeli citizens were murdered in the first suicide bombings in the country, the first tangible results of the Oslo Accords signed just 4 months before. Shimon Peres explained it as "we will resume negotiations with the PLO after the funerals of the victims". That was the end of the Israeli Left.
Excellent article. Thank you for reading the NYT interview so we don’t have to.
The Jews that puzzle me and worry me the most are the Torah observant lefties.
Shalom Hartman Institute leaders are an example
as are some "Jewish Study professors" in universities and colleges across America
they are condescending and sanctimonious in tone.
they are Hararri like in content
They are shaping the minds (and have been) of young ppl , jew and non jew alike while wearing a Kippah and observing Shabbat and Kashrut
we Jews are are own worst enemy
I remember a lecture given by Shalom Hartman years ago in which he said that he was Jewish just because he was born that way; otherwise , he could easily be something else. Hartman was a compelling speaker, and his audience was enamored of him. But, at that moment, I knew that he had nothing of value or substance to convey to me about Judaism, which , to him was as much accidental and little meaning as his hair color. So, sadly, no surprise about Hartman Institute leaders now.
I was unfamiliar with Shalom Hartman until 10/7/23 .
Now I follow some of their leaders in negative fascination sort of way.
It’s as though they have blocked our all other parts of Torah that doesn’t align with their “Tikkun Olam as the only important tenet of Judaism”
Tikkun Olam was highjacked: the idea of repairing of the world. Tikkun Olam has to do with individual accountability, repairing oneself and this is how the world gets better. We are responsible for our actions is the message of Tikkun Olam.
Something in our DNA prompts us to embrace our enemies to the point that we would rather die than realize the truth. A sort of genetic Stockholm Syndrome leading to suicidal empathy. Even the horrors of October 7 don't seem to impact this madness. I guess it was bred into us, well, some of us, by having to either toady up to our tormentors, flee, or die. But we now have control of our own Jewish destiny. It's time to embrace THAT mentality instead.
The Jew without power seems to be a concept that just doesn’t go away. The assumed morality of powerlessness is the key.
This is from Uri Silber's "The Jew Flu: The Strange Illness of Jewish anti-Semitism":
—The 1930s Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked "Is there another People on Earth so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape, robbery committed by their enemies fill their hearts with admiration and awe?"
What causes Jew Flu? Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Levin argues for twin culprits: so-called 'Stockholm Syndrome', where "population segments under chronic siege com-monly embrace the indictments of their besiegers however bigoted and outrageous", as well as "the psychodynamics of abused children who blame themselves for their situation and believe they could mollify their tormenters if they were 'good'."
Jew Flu is a condition in which being "more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than (one's) own metastasizes into a malignant emotional and moral identification with people committed to (one's) annihilation."
Suggested book to read that was recently released - Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy
Great article and observation of the cognitive dissonance that is rampant among those that consider themselves 'intellectual elites'.
GOD BLESSISRAEL AND ITS PEOPLE
The faculty and administrators in US higher education are also disconnected from the viewpoints and needs of the general US population. Why isn't there more pushback from the consumers of US higher education? The Marxist faculty intentionally hire more Marxist faculty. There is intentional exclusion of conservatives from the faculties of US universities. There is next to no viewpoint diversity anymore within US universities. Yet consumers of this shoddy product are not complaining or pushing back on the universities, which have become propaganda machines.
Some progress. Stanford has a new Israel Studies Program at the FSI for International Studies.
I take the position that the Western and Israeli left share the same worldview and that no matter what evidence of atrocities committed as a result of the actions taken based on their assumptions about human nature and ideological motivations, they are unable to accept it, less they experience cognitive dissonance. The price for this blindness is death in every case. October 7th in Israel, rape gangs, stabbings, car rammings in markets, and houses of worship requiring armed security and being burned occur all the time in the West. Yet the left always finds a new understanding of morality to explain it all away. It's amazing.
The left, broadly speaking, often treats Judaism and Christianity as obstacles (hated as you said) rather than recognizing them as the very traditions that shaped the West’s moral and ethical foundations: law, justice, human dignity, charity, restraint of power, and social order. These frameworks did not emerge from nowhere. They were rooted in a moral realism that took seriously both the good and evil within human nature.
The left are aggressively attempting to remove this civilizational scaffolding in favor of abstract universal ideals detached from reality.
They operate as though humanity is fundamentally one shared moral community where openness alone eventually produces peace. But history, and frankly scripture, does not present such a naive view of mankind.
Even in Genesis 15:13–21, when God showed Abraham the land his descendants would inherit, He acknowledged the profound violence and corruption of the peoples inhabiting it, while still withholding judgment for centuries. The Tanakh consistently presents a sober understanding of human nature, conflict, survival, and moral responsibility.
That is why moral realism matters. The Torah was not merely spiritual instruction but a blueprint for building and sustaining a flourishing civilization while confronting real threats. “Choose life, so that you and your children may live” in Deuteronomy 30:19 speaks not only spiritually, but ethically and physically as well. Who would have fully understood those words at the moment they were said as we look back at it now?
Much of what the modern West’ values were inherited from the moral world that emerged from Sinai and Jerusalem and was later secularized. As the roots of the civilizational scaffolding is being spat on now by the vast majority of the population, Western societies now want the fruits of that civilization without understanding that those fruits will rot without responsibility and care for preservation.
These leftists don't care about human life even as they preach virtue through their various identitarian flags. What matters is narrative control and a replacement window of seeing the world that requires people to abandon the very ideas that helped ensure their survival.
I'd also like to respond to, "There is also something profoundly manipulative about the way critics frame this issue. Israelis are constantly asked whether they care about Palestinian suffering."
First, there is a difference between acknowledging and caring. We all know war is awful and yes I acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians.
Second, I am in war mode -- although I sit in comfort in West Palm Beach. I have mentally left Athens (where western values are beloved) and have mentally entered Sparta (in defense of Athens, of course). While in war mode, it is inconvenient to "care" about the enemy.
As Gad Saad calls it, "suicidal empathy" is just silly. So no, right now my brain does not have the bandwidth to actually care about the enemy's suffering -- although I do support all the processes Israel goes through to minimize Palestinian civilian deaths.
I suppose I might care more about their civilians dying when they care more about their civilians dying.
Your bewilderment about the Israeli Left is totally understandable but I believe that we need a psychologist to analyze the behavior of Jewish Leftist delusions.
Here is an unexplainable phenomenon:
The massacre at Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, was one of the most devastating events of that day, resulting in the murder of 47 residents and the abduction of 76 others by Hamas.
Yet residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz held a symbolic ceremony on the Gaza border during which they laid peace wreaths and released white pigeons to Gaza.
The ceremony was led by kibbutz member Gadi Mozes, who was released after being held hostage by Hamas for 482 days.
httes://www.facebook.com/watch/?v= 4041751272792298&vanit =mosheradman
I cannot even begin to imagine what to think of these useful idiots.