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| Why Young Wealthy White Americans Support Hamas | |
| 2023-11-09 | |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Sergey Khudiev [REGNUM] The Middle East conflict is accompanied by acute polarization of public opinion around the world. This is the reaction to any conflict, but here the horrific cruelty of what is happening, which is immediately shown on billions of screens around the world, causes a particularly violent reaction. Sometimes it looks quite expected: the authorities of the USA, Great Britain and other Western countries are for Israel, the Islamic world is for Palestine. People are predictably filled with intense indignation at civilians, especially children, killed by the enemy, and just as predictably ignore children killed by “their own.” However, there are also anomalies - sympathy for Palestine is expressed in places where, at first glance, it would be difficult to expect. On college campuses in the United States and the Western world in general. However, one can criticize Israel's actions from different positions. If one does not succumb to the pressure of the force field that drags every person to one pole or the other, it is quite possible that the point of view held, including by some Israelis, is that there can be no justification for the wild Hamas raid on October 7, but it is important not to succumb to the temptation to retaliate wildness. It is easy to become brutalized, it happens by itself, but it is very difficult to preserve the norms of humanitarian law that have been established with great difficulty. This can go both against the understandable vindictive sentiments of the public and, in some cases, against military expediency. But civilization is worth preserving in any circumstances, and therefore the blockade of Gaza, mass bombings, the majority of the victims of which turn out to be simply people who were unlucky to live there, is something that cannot be accepted and justified. As, for example, Israeli human rights activist Michael Sfard writes, “Being humane is hard work. Remaining humane in the face of inhuman cruelty is much more difficult... These are terrible times. We have survived the terrible trauma caused by people who have lost their humanity, and now we are bombing, killing and starving people, and most importantly, hardening our hearts to stone. Moral decay is no less dangerous to our survival than Hamas." "Keep the bastards in line." The key political mistake of the Anglo-Saxons This position does not imply any sympathy for Hamas, just as one does not have to be a Nazi supporter to consider the bombing of Dresden during World War II a war crime. However, the position that is loudly making itself known on American campuses looks different. This is precisely support for Hamas’s struggle for Palestine “from the river to the sea,” that is, for the destruction of Israel as a state, and, as wild as it may seem, even justification for the bloody raid on October 7. Moreover, supporters of such a radical position, as a rule, are not Palestinians, not Arabs or Muslims, who would be inclined to sympathize with their own. These are mostly white Americans from wealthy families with above-average incomes. Higher education in the United States is terribly expensive, and the students are clearly not from the oppressed and oppressed. Among them are ethnic Jews who are quick to voice their angry condemnation of Israel. What is the reason for this position? Western leftists are often accused of anti-Semitism - irrational hatred of Jews, attributing to them all the world's evils and troubles. But this accusation is usually unfounded. All the mythology of a sinister Jewish conspiracy that drank up all the water in the tap that characterized the Nazis and related movements is absent here.
Marxism divides people into the oppressed and the oppressors, and world history moves towards a better future thanks to the struggle of the former with the latter. The oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong. Therefore, any of their actions are assessed not from the point of view of some universal morality, but from the point of view of the struggle of the oppressed. For example, during the unrest caused by the death of George Floyd, rioters attacked synagogues . This did not cause any harsh condemnation, and this is not a matter of anti-Semitism. If the thugs had been white and represented, say, the Ku Klux Klan, the indignation of those same people would have known no bounds. And if one more of them had appeared in the signature red MAGA cap worn by Trump supporters, progressive students would have already convened a militia to fight against the rise of fascism. Trump supporters are not allowed because they are oppressors; Floyd supporters can, because they are oppressed. An important feature of this view of the world is ardent anti-colonialism. The struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America against colonialism in its overt or hidden forms is a sacred struggle and deserves unconditional support. At the same time, the fighters themselves can be either people of high humanistic convictions or frostbitten thugs. It doesn't matter. What matters is that they are on the right side of history. They are the oppressed who fight the oppressors. Hence such a strange, at an outsider’s glance, phenomenon as the same people’s ardent support for both LGBTQ+ people and militant Islamists who treat “sexual minorities” extremely harshly. The fact is that both are representatives of the “oppressed” and are on the right side of history. Israel, in this lens, looks like another example of Western colonialism, and those who fight against it are “oppressed, standing up for their rights.” There can never be any claims against them. American students are highly critical of the policies of the Western elite (and often a conflict between fathers and sons), and we may be tempted to recognize them as our own. Alas, this is not true. Russia, in the same decolonizing lens, is “the last colonial power of Europe,” which, during the imperialist wars, conquered many peoples, some of which were liberated during the collapse of the USSR, but some remain “under the yoke of European colonialists,” in this case, the Russians. This is not Russophobia as such, it is the same division of the world into good “oppressed” and bad “oppressors”. And we have good reasons not to welcome this way of looking at things. | |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #6 Young, wealthy, white Americans support Hamas because they were brainwashed in America's corrupt educational system. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2023-11-09 11:49 |
| #5 Little hard to be colonizers. If you dig enough in that part of the world, beyond the AD/BC line, you'll find tablets or scrolls actually written in Hebrew. You can dig deep in American soil and you'll unlikely find anything dated back to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2023-11-09 11:12 |
| #2 Eric Hoffer laid it out. Any fanatical cause does not need a God, but it absolutely needs a Devil. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-11-09 07:03 |
| #1 Because they're morons? |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2023-11-09 04:13 |