All of this shameless sophistry and stirring tributes to radical violence (from a safe distance, of course) have nothing to do with the real, external world and are entirely rooted in the deep emotional, spiritual and psychological needs that Westerners have now that God is dead. Westerners don't just have a god-shaped hole, but a massive sucking wound where meaning, purpose and human dignity should be, not to mention the enormous guilt and shame people feel having been born in the rich safe West when so many others have so much less, and the ways they try to process and offload these without religious rituals. Thus these sad lost souls are deeply susceptible to all sorts of charlatans, from cult leaders to politicians to the great priests of our time: Socialist academics, who use their spurious commitment to universal egalitarianism as their lone credential and their magic alchemical jargon that turns lies to truth and hatred to love, which helps them sell Servitude in shiny bottles labeled Liberation.
Since the days of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks a priesthood with many disciples (mostly young and frustrated) has arisen and sells itself as being humanity’s righteous liberators, the new Chosen Ones who will kill off the old world and all it stands for—tribalism, bigotry, cruelty, poverty etc. (That all their socialist heroes have only worsened these things the moment they sieze power is either denied or quibbled away.) This chosen communal illusion appeals deeply to your average unremarkable teacher or student because it helps them imagine themselves as historical actors, white saviors and comic-book superheroes, who embody Good and devote their lives to fighting Evil.
Since 1968 or so, it's been clear that a certain cohort of our most well-off and well-educated children have only one ambition: to be the executioners of Western Civilization, in the name of Justice and on behalf of all the people either killed, displaced or left out as Europe conquered the globe and gave the world its current reigning culture. They look at their lives/futures and don't feel gifted or confident enough to create, so choose destruction instead as their path to immortality.
This explains why kind-hearted liberals and MSM journalists who'd be scared to jaywalk love to rhapsodize about terrorists, because "they did it for a good cause" or "want to make the world a better place" or some such sentimental nonsense, and why deranged liars like Norm Finkelstein and limp masochists like Peter Beinart will never go hungry. There's simply nothing you can do wrong (not even a mass rape and massacre), no matter how stupid, bloody or counterproductive, if it was done by or on behalf of the "oppressed" and their liberation.
This is the greatest of Western needs, our secular faith—to be the opposite of our ancestors and the creators and redeemers of a new more fair world (even if a few rivers of oppressor blood need to be spilled)—which is why there's so many entrepreneurs of rage and hate on every corner. What we consider terrorism, they consider a sales and marketing opportunity.
Rare as it may be there are moments in history when there is a coalescence of diverse groups, currently Governments, media , organisations and individuals who are for differing reasons willing to debase themselves to express their hatred of the Jewish State and Jews individually. A hatred that transcends the boundaries of time.
Comment by a friend of mine, a retired nonJewish professor of Comparative Religion living in Europe:
(Shared with permission)
“From my academic point of view, the article The radical Left is rebranding terrorism as resistance, is spot-on in the analysis. I would agree fully, down to the last conclusion, which is where I have trouble. I do not see the goal as the destruction of Western civilization. I see the struggle in more cosmic terms, between good and evil. Maybe I am influenced by the theology heard in my childhood, or maybe I am not. The image of Oct 7 is seared on my consciousness and determines my thought. This was not some struggle between civilizations.. This was pure evil attempting to destroy good. By good I do not mean that the people they killed never made mistakes and had a clear vision of right and wrong in very case. I do not much care for rock raves and I think Jews living on the border with Gaza were not only naive about Arabs, but wrong. It is more fundamental. The attack was grounded in a fundamental abstraction that boiled over into acts of destruction motivated by a diabolical hatred of life itself. The victims of the Oct 7 massacre did not represent good because of some ideology, or their morality, or their acts of charity, or the fact that they happened to be Jewish for the most part. They were good because they represented life. They were killed because those who killed them hated the goodness of life itself. This is not an attack on Western civilization, but on humanity.”
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them”.
I can only hope that these Western Leftist woke regressive ignorant useful idiots will actually get what they wish for, once Islam controls their lives.
As for the Diaspora Jews, they have an option today thar they didn't have 85 years ago.
About 10 years ago, anti-Israel fools simply denied terror (e.g., "the knife was planted"). Now, they've embraced it. Media which refuse to call it "terror" don't help. It gets worse, as the hostage postage rippers demonstrated. The 10/7 rape deniers will soon be openly saying the rapes were "justified." Some already do.
They use language as a weapon, tranforming and altering terms and definitions as one would change magazines in a rifle or switch from pistol to shotgun to rifle.
The response to spoiled Western kids and their college Professors which I have found to be the most effective is: Get a proper Job. Private sector self-made and self-sustaining people know the real world. Those sustained by the Public Purse thus fear their more able rivals, and accordingly learn the politics of resentment and the specious attractions of Liberal narcissism and politics-as-Display. Further, the attraction of Terrorism has always been rebranded anger, performative violence and the support for violence masking Shame: A simple transaction which the rest of us see through. And waiting to take full advantage of this weakness in The West’s Elites is The new Wolf in sheep’s clothing, murderous Islam, who would dispatch them all as they did in Iran.
One day these hypocrites will find that the"resistance" targets them as Islam takes over Western Europe, Britain and other susceptible countries. This is the least these racists deserve.
Zionism was a national liberation movement. Hamas et al are islamic terror gangs whose purpose is spreading global jihad and islamic imperialism and supremacy. The useful idiot leftists on campuses have it exactly backwards.
Great article, but let's be honest--the radical left started out by condoning terrorism as resistance from its very inception. The Bolshevik revolution and the French revolution were founded on the basis of terrorism, nihilism, murder and subjugation of all those who opposed them. Sadly, the west has lost its moral compass and there are no indications that it will ever recover.
The radical left has been outrageous in the plagiarism of literature, technology and history since the rise of Bolshevism and shamelessly so in cyber-squatting on the French Resistance. Since they believe Islamists are the useful idiots of the left, they will be debating how to milk that particular cow,
The former consensus that mentally ill belong in mental asylums no longer prevails.
Yet these "ideas" do not originate in the deranged and neglected minds of the self-styled "progressives" themselves; rather, they come from their parents, teachers, and professors—almost always from individuals who have "missed out" in life, or believe they have, and who seek "revenge" or attempt to achieve "success" through underhanded, Arday-style tactics.
As adolescents, they often had authority figures who were truly worthy of hatred—figures onto whom they projected these feelings, extending them to all "adults" and "society"—and subsequently sought to "justify" this attitude.
The fact that such figures can wield so much influence is simply due to their having been dismissed for too long, to their views being shrugged off as merely one "opinion" among many, and to the prevalence of an inability to engage in debate alongside a culture of anything-goes relativism.
Incidentally, a great many participants at the "Nova" music festival—and a significant portion of the Israeli (and international) techno and electronic music scene—belong(ed) to the ranks of "Western leftists" who were either naive or, in some cases, driven by (self-)hatred.
They bear the primary responsibility for the doors having been thrown so wide open to Hamas.
That is likely why they are all the more vociferous in seeking to pin the "blame on Netanyahu", rather than acknowledging that the vast majority of "P*lestinians" do not care in the slightest whether the Jews facing them are "left-wing," "moderate," or "conservative."
They hate them all. They will never be spared by the widest majority of Muslims.
"The West is the problem, and anyone resisting it is ipso facto laudable." With the nadir of religion in the West people fall back on their "feelings" which means there is NO moral center allowing whatever one wishes to take precedence no matter how irrational. I've always found it ironic that the leftist "God is dead" crowd supports Islamic terrorists whose entire worldview is centered on Allah, their term for God.
True. However as someone points out elsewhere in the comments, the people with a God shaped hole are joined by their governments and the media. And, I would add, many established Churches. Have we ever seen much of society supporting nihilism like this?
All of this shameless sophistry and stirring tributes to radical violence (from a safe distance, of course) have nothing to do with the real, external world and are entirely rooted in the deep emotional, spiritual and psychological needs that Westerners have now that God is dead. Westerners don't just have a god-shaped hole, but a massive sucking wound where meaning, purpose and human dignity should be, not to mention the enormous guilt and shame people feel having been born in the rich safe West when so many others have so much less, and the ways they try to process and offload these without religious rituals. Thus these sad lost souls are deeply susceptible to all sorts of charlatans, from cult leaders to politicians to the great priests of our time: Socialist academics, who use their spurious commitment to universal egalitarianism as their lone credential and their magic alchemical jargon that turns lies to truth and hatred to love, which helps them sell Servitude in shiny bottles labeled Liberation.
Since the days of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks a priesthood with many disciples (mostly young and frustrated) has arisen and sells itself as being humanity’s righteous liberators, the new Chosen Ones who will kill off the old world and all it stands for—tribalism, bigotry, cruelty, poverty etc. (That all their socialist heroes have only worsened these things the moment they sieze power is either denied or quibbled away.) This chosen communal illusion appeals deeply to your average unremarkable teacher or student because it helps them imagine themselves as historical actors, white saviors and comic-book superheroes, who embody Good and devote their lives to fighting Evil.
Since 1968 or so, it's been clear that a certain cohort of our most well-off and well-educated children have only one ambition: to be the executioners of Western Civilization, in the name of Justice and on behalf of all the people either killed, displaced or left out as Europe conquered the globe and gave the world its current reigning culture. They look at their lives/futures and don't feel gifted or confident enough to create, so choose destruction instead as their path to immortality.
This explains why kind-hearted liberals and MSM journalists who'd be scared to jaywalk love to rhapsodize about terrorists, because "they did it for a good cause" or "want to make the world a better place" or some such sentimental nonsense, and why deranged liars like Norm Finkelstein and limp masochists like Peter Beinart will never go hungry. There's simply nothing you can do wrong (not even a mass rape and massacre), no matter how stupid, bloody or counterproductive, if it was done by or on behalf of the "oppressed" and their liberation.
This is the greatest of Western needs, our secular faith—to be the opposite of our ancestors and the creators and redeemers of a new more fair world (even if a few rivers of oppressor blood need to be spilled)—which is why there's so many entrepreneurs of rage and hate on every corner. What we consider terrorism, they consider a sales and marketing opportunity.
Sophistry indeed.
Rare as it may be there are moments in history when there is a coalescence of diverse groups, currently Governments, media , organisations and individuals who are for differing reasons willing to debase themselves to express their hatred of the Jewish State and Jews individually. A hatred that transcends the boundaries of time.
Comment by a friend of mine, a retired nonJewish professor of Comparative Religion living in Europe:
(Shared with permission)
“From my academic point of view, the article The radical Left is rebranding terrorism as resistance, is spot-on in the analysis. I would agree fully, down to the last conclusion, which is where I have trouble. I do not see the goal as the destruction of Western civilization. I see the struggle in more cosmic terms, between good and evil. Maybe I am influenced by the theology heard in my childhood, or maybe I am not. The image of Oct 7 is seared on my consciousness and determines my thought. This was not some struggle between civilizations.. This was pure evil attempting to destroy good. By good I do not mean that the people they killed never made mistakes and had a clear vision of right and wrong in very case. I do not much care for rock raves and I think Jews living on the border with Gaza were not only naive about Arabs, but wrong. It is more fundamental. The attack was grounded in a fundamental abstraction that boiled over into acts of destruction motivated by a diabolical hatred of life itself. The victims of the Oct 7 massacre did not represent good because of some ideology, or their morality, or their acts of charity, or the fact that they happened to be Jewish for the most part. They were good because they represented life. They were killed because those who killed them hated the goodness of life itself. This is not an attack on Western civilization, but on humanity.”
George Orwell said that:
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them”.
I can only hope that these Western Leftist woke regressive ignorant useful idiots will actually get what they wish for, once Islam controls their lives.
As for the Diaspora Jews, they have an option today thar they didn't have 85 years ago.
About 10 years ago, anti-Israel fools simply denied terror (e.g., "the knife was planted"). Now, they've embraced it. Media which refuse to call it "terror" don't help. It gets worse, as the hostage postage rippers demonstrated. The 10/7 rape deniers will soon be openly saying the rapes were "justified." Some already do.
They use language as a weapon, tranforming and altering terms and definitions as one would change magazines in a rifle or switch from pistol to shotgun to rifle.
The response to spoiled Western kids and their college Professors which I have found to be the most effective is: Get a proper Job. Private sector self-made and self-sustaining people know the real world. Those sustained by the Public Purse thus fear their more able rivals, and accordingly learn the politics of resentment and the specious attractions of Liberal narcissism and politics-as-Display. Further, the attraction of Terrorism has always been rebranded anger, performative violence and the support for violence masking Shame: A simple transaction which the rest of us see through. And waiting to take full advantage of this weakness in The West’s Elites is The new Wolf in sheep’s clothing, murderous Islam, who would dispatch them all as they did in Iran.
One day these hypocrites will find that the"resistance" targets them as Islam takes over Western Europe, Britain and other susceptible countries. This is the least these racists deserve.
Zionism was a national liberation movement. Hamas et al are islamic terror gangs whose purpose is spreading global jihad and islamic imperialism and supremacy. The useful idiot leftists on campuses have it exactly backwards.
Great article, but let's be honest--the radical left started out by condoning terrorism as resistance from its very inception. The Bolshevik revolution and the French revolution were founded on the basis of terrorism, nihilism, murder and subjugation of all those who opposed them. Sadly, the west has lost its moral compass and there are no indications that it will ever recover.
The radical left has been outrageous in the plagiarism of literature, technology and history since the rise of Bolshevism and shamelessly so in cyber-squatting on the French Resistance. Since they believe Islamists are the useful idiots of the left, they will be debating how to milk that particular cow,
The former consensus that mentally ill belong in mental asylums no longer prevails.
Yet these "ideas" do not originate in the deranged and neglected minds of the self-styled "progressives" themselves; rather, they come from their parents, teachers, and professors—almost always from individuals who have "missed out" in life, or believe they have, and who seek "revenge" or attempt to achieve "success" through underhanded, Arday-style tactics.
As adolescents, they often had authority figures who were truly worthy of hatred—figures onto whom they projected these feelings, extending them to all "adults" and "society"—and subsequently sought to "justify" this attitude.
The fact that such figures can wield so much influence is simply due to their having been dismissed for too long, to their views being shrugged off as merely one "opinion" among many, and to the prevalence of an inability to engage in debate alongside a culture of anything-goes relativism.
Incidentally, a great many participants at the "Nova" music festival—and a significant portion of the Israeli (and international) techno and electronic music scene—belong(ed) to the ranks of "Western leftists" who were either naive or, in some cases, driven by (self-)hatred.
They bear the primary responsibility for the doors having been thrown so wide open to Hamas.
That is likely why they are all the more vociferous in seeking to pin the "blame on Netanyahu", rather than acknowledging that the vast majority of "P*lestinians" do not care in the slightest whether the Jews facing them are "left-wing," "moderate," or "conservative."
They hate them all. They will never be spared by the widest majority of Muslims.
No. The responsibility is at Hamas.
"The West is the problem, and anyone resisting it is ipso facto laudable." With the nadir of religion in the West people fall back on their "feelings" which means there is NO moral center allowing whatever one wishes to take precedence no matter how irrational. I've always found it ironic that the leftist "God is dead" crowd supports Islamic terrorists whose entire worldview is centered on Allah, their term for God.
Masterpiece!
True. However as someone points out elsewhere in the comments, the people with a God shaped hole are joined by their governments and the media. And, I would add, many established Churches. Have we ever seen much of society supporting nihilism like this?
What happened to all those cars?