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This is a guest essay by Tomer Persico, a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of “In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
We need an explanation that’s more than “ignorance” if we want to get to the bottom of a guitar-playing, Hezbollah-sympathizing Western student.
Ignorance is of course ubiquitous, but there’s something much deeper going on here, certainly when we realize that very learned people share such support, and at times, indeed, admiration.
I am talking about the support, by the radical left, of Islamist terrorism, which often taken as a form of legitimate “resistance” and as a liberation movement; more specifically, the interpretation, easily proven wrong, that Islamist terrorists form national liberation movements, or any kind of liberation movement in the colloquial modern sense for that matter.
The conception of Islamic terrorist movements, specifically Hamas and Hezbollah, as liberation movements, has become common in radical circles. The Anti-Defamation League collected dozens of statements to that effect about Hamas issued by student organizations between October 7 and 9, 2023. Of course, we shouldn’t expect too much from students attending elite universities. But what of an acclaimed intellectual like Judith Butler, who in 2006 asserted that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”
At about the same time, another scholar, Norman Finkelstein, wrote that Hezbollah’s capture and killing of Israeli soldiers was “a noble gesture.” And after October 7, 2023 he stated, “If we honor John Brown’s armed resistance to slavery, if we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto — then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza.”
Butler takes the same position. At a conference in France in March 2024, she felt it was “honest and historically correct” to claim that the “uprising” of October 7th was “an act of armed resistance” and that “it is not a terrorist attack.” In other words, Palestinian resistance is paragliding into civilian populations to kill, rape, and kidnap whoever they find.
To bring a final, grotesque example of this, we can turn to Peter Beinart’s 2025 book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.” Beinart fully condemns Hamas’ actions on October 7th, but never once uses the word “terrorism” to describe them or “terrorists” to describe Hamas. For Beinart, Hamas members are always “fighters,” and Hamas isn’t a terrorist organization but an “insurgent group” or a “guerrilla” organization.
Hamas is clearly portrayed in the book as a liberation movement. Beinart states:
“October 7th has more in common with the murder, torture, and rape of thousands of Europeans in newly independent Haiti in 1804, or the Fort Mims massacre of white settlers by Creek Indians in what is now Alabama in 1813, or the Lari massacre by Mau Mau rebels seeking to overthrow British colonialism in Kenya in 1953 — gruesome, pitiless attacks by oppressed peoples resisting dispossession.”
For Beinart, Hamas is simply another iteration in a long tradition of liberation movements. Brutal, no doubt, because liberation from oppression is never easy nor gentlemanly. But what do you expect? Hurt people hurt people and decolonization is not a metaphor. In the end, just as we see the freed slaves of Haiti as heroes, we must also see Hamas fighters (don’t say terrorists) as such.
The analogy to the enslaved and the natives is of course essential to the criticism of Israel as a colonial power and the justification and smoothing over of Hamas’ atrocities. It makes it possible to trivialize the acts of savagery committed by these movements and to legitimize almost any barbarity inflicted on Israelis and Jews.
But I think there’s more here than a tactical concession used for condemnation of a hated country or people. There’s a deeper transformation going on here, in the thought of certain circles within the radical Left. There is a shift in the very meaning of progressivism. In order to make this clear we need a quick dive into the history of terrorism.
The most useful framework for this would be David Rapoport’s analysis of “four waves” of modern terrorism: the anarchist, the anti-colonial, the New Left, and the fundamentalist religious.
We begin in the 19th century, when “terrorism” gradually migrates from the term as used in the French Revolution (violence deployed by a revolutionary government to intimidate and transform society) toward its modern meaning: violence against states and civilians in order to generate intimidation and achieve an ideological goal.
The first wave of terror was revolutionary and anarchist, beginning with the Russian Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), founded in 1879 and responsible for the assassination of Alexander II in 1881). It spread quickly and involved a large number of radical revolutionaries and activists.
Modern principles of popular sovereignty — political authority deriving from “the people,” all considered equal — as well as the modern understanding of political revolution as a good thing, Enlightenment values of liberty and equality, and radical Left ideologies such as anarchism, combine to create an extraordinary sequence of assassinations (such as Empress Elisabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy, and U.S. President William McKinley) and public bombings, all seeking an audience which is provided by the burgeoning press and the quickly expanding use of the telegraph.
World War I transforms the ideological environment. The breaking up of empires and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s belief that self-determination change the main motivating principle for terrorism from radical revolution to national self-determination. David Rapoport therefore identifies the second wave as nationalist and anti-colonial.
Ireland and the Irish Republican Army are an early paradigm, carrying out hundreds of attacks in the early 1920s; Egyptian nationalist terrorism operated at much the same time; and terrorist activity during the Indian struggle for independence began in 1925 and lasted till independence in 1947. Later cases include the Arab Revolt in British Mandate Palestine (from 1936 to 1939) and Jewish paramilitary organizations such as the Irgun and the Lehi (from the late 1930s to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948).
Without normatively evaluating their actions, it’s important to note that we again witness what clearly are liberation movements. All are struggling against colonial oppression and for the modern conception of a people’s right to self-determination. The strategic logic is to make colonial rule politically, economically, and normatively non-viable, and the importance of this wave is that contrary to the former: It succeeds, colonial forces withdraw, and nation states are born.
David Rapoport’s third wave (from the 1960s to the 1980s) offers varied manifestations of New Left movements. Stimulated particularly by the Vietnam War, the Cuban Revolution and Third World Communist and Maoist revolutionary movements, and infused with radicalization gestating in Western universities, this wave presents many of the infamous organizations of the 1960s to the 1980s: the Red Army Faction, the Weather Underground, Action Directe, the Japanese Red Army, and so forth.
This wave is also when the Palestinian struggle takes center stage. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is founded in 1964 and attracts Westerners to its cause. Organizations that devote themselves to this cause are crucial to the transformation of terrorism during this period, helping make it transnational and international, while engaging in daring, media-spectacular operations. This is when we are introduced to airplane hijackings, hostage taking, embassy seizures, and attacks at international events (such as the 1972 Munich Olympics).
They are all, at least in their perpetrators’ own understanding, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and all aim to promote equality and liberate the downtrodden.
The fourth wave is where things dramatically change. David Rapoport dates the fourth wave precisely to 1979, stressing two geopolitical events: the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. To these he adds the seizure, in the same year, by hundreds of extremist Sunnis from 12 different countries, of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking over the holy site and proclaiming that the Mahdi had arrived. These developments inspire a wave of terrorist activity centered around fundamentalist religion, specifically Islam.
Iran’s Islamic revolution makes it into a global exporter of terrorism, funding and directing terrorist activity and indeed whole terrorist organizations. In Afghanistan, fundamentalist religion humiliates and drives off a secular superpower, arousing religious enthusiasm in soviet republics with large Muslim populations.
Islamic forces rise in Bosnia; Kashmir heats up. Suicide bombings and self-martyrdom become the distinguishing terrorist tactics in this wave, and it extends all the way to al-Qaeda and ISIS, both ruthless and extremely media-savvy, and both devoting their violence to the realization of a contemporary caliphate in which Islamic rule replaces modern nation states and modern humanistic and liberal values.
While Islamic groups are responsible for the greatest number and deadliest terrorist attacks in this wave, other religions did not sit idly by. The Jewish Underground of the early 1980s attempted to blow up Al Aqsa, Islam’s sacred shrine in Jerusalem, with messianic hopes, and Aum Shinrikyo (combining Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian theology) released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995, seeking to restore “original Buddhism” and anticipating “Armageddon” in 1997.
The transformation this wave brings is scale: Attacks become more numerous and considerably larger, more deadly, and, in the case of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, state-funded. From an ideological perspective, with the fourth wave violence justified primarily through revolutionary, national and historical narratives becomes violence embedded in metahistorical or transcendent narratives. Legitimation for action comes not from “the people” but from God.
This leads to the greatest break between the previous three waves and the fourth. As David Rapoport writes: “The first three waves aimed to achieve various goals the French Revolution had introduced. But the Fourth Wave was hostile to the French Revolution’s aim of creating a world of secular nation-states.”
But he does not develop this point, which is most important: Within the fourth wave, terrorism for the first time does not insist its struggle is devoted to the realization of Enlightenment values. In fact, it rejects them and it clearly states its fighting to overthrow them.
The first three waves justified themselves within the normative grammar of Enlightenment modernity. Even when they radically rejected liberalism, they championed popular sovereignty, emancipation, equality, national self-determination, and secular historical progress.
The fourth wave is the first major wave of modern terrorism whose distinctive ideological contribution is not another radical interpretation of the Enlightenment, not another modern promise of emancipation, but a principled challenge to the Enlightenment values and indeed to Western modernity. It is in fact a rebellion against universal humanism and the values of freedom and equality, not to mention secularity, as understood in the tradition of Western Enlightenment.
What, then, can we make of the insistence of major radical Left figures on treating this wave as if it were another version of the previous three, as if it was promoting liberty and equality in the sense that they themselves espouse?
One answer to this question is that the radical Left has shifted its understanding of progressivism from a substantive conception to a positional one. A movement is no longer judged by its vision, but by where it stands in a structure of power: colonized versus colonizer, oppressed versus oppressor, East versus West, resistance versus empire.
For the Left in the past, the question was what a certain movement seeks (universal emancipation, equality, self-government, liberation from hierarchy). But in the current Third-Worldist imagination, one simply asks against whom does a certain movement struggle. Progressive status has migrated from ends to position. It no longer depends on what you stand for, but on whom you stand against. Fourth-wave terrorist organizations are thus judged not by their ideology or agenda, but by their status relative to other powers.
This, of course, gets boosted to a ridiculous degree when the side doing the oppressing and being fought against is Israel, which the radical Left considers the most extreme manifestation of Western, colonial, imperial, capitalist, white civilization, making any organization engaged in destroying it the veritable savior of humanity. Within this context, Hamas and Hezbollah are treated as “progressive” not because of the society they want to build, but because of the society they want to destroy.
A second answer shifts attention from the position occupied by the terrorists to the identity of the power they resist: the West. What is most damning about Israel is not that it is, in their eyes, a colonial project, but that it is a Western colonial project. Indeed, we all know these groups hardly have any issue with Arab, Turkish, Persian, Russian, or Chinese colonialism or oppression. Here, then, the axis to make judgement on the basis of isn’t colonizer versus colonized, but West versus non-West.
The West is the problem, and anyone resisting it is ipso facto laudable.
If so, the fact that the fourth wave of terrorism rejects Enlightenment values is not a flaw on its part, but precisely what makes it so attractive. Enlightenment for these radicals is, of course, not the promise of reason, science, separation of church and state, personal freedom, and equality, but “the dialectics of Enlightenment” that inescapably bring about an industrialized, mechanized society of alienated one-dimensional men schematizing their lives according to instrumental reason in the great panoptical prison which is Western capitalist society.
Progress itself acquires a negative connotation. Therefore, a movement not only need not offer a more egalitarian, liberal or humane form of society, but may qualify as emancipatory precisely by negating the civilization understood to have become an industrialized dungeon.
Any resistance to that is of course liberating “resistance,” and this is exactly what fundamentalist Islam offers — the same that already in 1978 fascinated French philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote fawning articles in praise of Ruhollah Khomeini’s coming Shia revolution in Iran, the same that on 9/11 orchestrated what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard hailed as an “absolute event” aimed at the heart of the “system of generalized exchange.”
What we find here, then, is a deep yearning for liberation from the West, construed as a positive, “progressive” move. A movement’s refusal of Enlightenment humanism is no longer a disqualification from “progressive” credentials; in fact it can be seen as the more radical, more authentic decolonization, because it refuses not just territorial occupation but the entire framework of Western modernity, which itself is read as one big (bureaucratic, disciplinary) colonizing project.
The counter-Enlightenment content of the movement (divine sovereignty, collapsing separation of religion and state, patriarchy, hierarchy between believer and unbeliever, opposition to sexual equality, rejection of personal autonomy) becomes what is specifically liberating about it.
This also explains a curious asymmetry: Western liberal order is judged against its own universal claims (equality, freedom, democracy, human rights) and condemned whenever it fails to live up to them. Its enemies, by contrast, are exempted from those standards not only because the liberal order is itself suspected of being a Western imposition, but because subverting Enlightenment values is the “progressive” thing to do.
Western Enlightenment values are thus both the standard by which the West is condemned and an instrument of domination which the non-Western dissenter is praised for undermining.
The enslaved people that freed themselves in Haiti, or the Native Americans that fought in Alabama, never wanted anything beyond their freedom. They had no plans for world conquest nor the religious coercion of others. They rebelled against their oppressors, and the atrocities they committed were done for the liberation of their community. Neither rebellion was religious, let alone fundamentalist, and neither had messianic aims.
As much as we condemn some of their actions, they were liberation movements in the common-sense, colloquial meaning of the term.
Moreover, the enslaved and the indigenous Americans carried out terror in the name of values linked to the Enlightenment tradition and the history of humanist struggles against oppression: freedom, self-determination, human dignity.
But the analogy to the enslaved, the natives, and numerous national liberation movements, as far-fetched as it is, is essential to the criticism from the radical Left, because it alone allows the members of the fourth wave of terrorism to be recognized as heroes struggling against villains. It alone allows the atrocities done by those movements to be glossed over and it alone allows any abomination administered towards Israelis to be justified.
But there’s more here than simply finding a way to justify violence against Jews, facts and morals be damned. This is not only an intellectual compromise born out of convenience. We are witnessing a shift, within radical circles, in the vector of normativity, with a new understanding of progressivism not as a humanistic endeavor, but as code for the “oppressed” or as a medal to be bestowed on whoever and whatever undermines the West.
Consequently, we are presented not only with Ivy League students but with acclaimed intellectuals that seemingly miss the vital differences in ideological character between successive waves of terrorism, in practice changing the very meaning of progressivism, and contributing to the fulfillment of a deeply held wish, sometimes subconscious and sometimes spoken out bluntly, for the destruction of Western civilization.
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.
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.