Were you surprised by western academia coming out in support of Islamist terrorists even as they butchered people? If you were, here's why that may have happened

The arc of human civilisation bends towards fairness, equitability, and moral probity. That’s why slavery has been abolished, Adolf Hitler is confined to the dustbins of history and colonialism has rescinded. All these statements are subject to appropriate caveats, but it is impossible to argue that human civilisation still lives by the laws and moral standards that governed previous centuries.

The journey of human evolution towards egalitarianism, regardless of the numerous battles and reversals contained within, is irrefutable. The trajectory is reflected in all aspects of our lives, most explicitly perhaps in our creations of art, eclectic or populist, that largely pivot around natural justice and the triumph of good over evil. Even existential or nihilistic creations take these principles as the template to nullify or revolt against.

Good and evil are not just altruistic evaluations but universal principles where the logical fallacies are at their thinnest. This need not be relativism or a Manichean duality. For instance, it doesn’t require a giant leap of logical reasoning to denounce terrorism as evil, especially when directed at non-combatant, vulnerable populations — that includes foreign nationals who have nothing to do with the conflict — with express genocidal intent. To distinguish between this monstrosity and kinetic retaliation by a state defending its existence (that may also involve loss of civilian lives) and calling out the former as evil shouldn’t be difficult.

So, one would have thought making this distinction, which isn’t even a critical one, would be the default option for a society that propounds a dogmatic adherence to “diversity” and “social justice”. “Decolonization”, “progressive politics”, or “critical race theory”, one assumed, cannot be the code words for justifying mass murders.

This is what American philosopher John Rawls calls “reflective equilibrium”, the “end-point of a deliberative process in which we reflect on and revise our beliefs about an area of inquiry, moral or non-moral. The inquiry might be as specific… or might be much more general, asking which theory or account of justice or right action we should accept, or which principles of inductive reasoning we should use.”

Why am I talking about philosophical treatises in a piece on the ongoing war in West Asia? I am doing so because the moral implosion on display in western societies since the 7 October massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas, a bunch of sociopathic terrorists that seek to obliterate Jews from the face of the earth has been hard to accept, much less rationalise.

This isn’t exclusive. It is the same ideological perversion at work that prompts Pakistan-backed radical fundamentalists such as Hafiz Saeed, mastermind of the 26/11 terror attack on India, to call for the apocalyptic battle of ‘Ghazwa-e-Hind’ — an unending Islamist jihad to ‘conquer’ Hindustan and obliterate the Hindus.

Why do modern societies tiptoe around a medieval ideology that prefers death over life? It is as if the concepts of guilt, conscience, accountability, law, justice and all the associated moral values that we take as implicit in the journey of human evolution to modernity are inverted, and we are left with a total rejection of all teleological perspectives.

This is an impossible, soul-crushing void in the heart of human civilisation. Yet not only does it exist, but the moral inversion has also managed to indoctrinate itself in the cradle of western liberal democracies through dominant political projects and elite higher education institutions leading to a complete collapse of basic human values.

How can natural justice be upturned to the extent that when Islamist terrorists who have in their charter a stated objective to ethnically cleanse the Jews, slaughter, rape, defile, burn alive and kidnap girls, toddlers and senior citizens, wipe out entire families, pump indiscriminate bullets into hundreds of youth celebrating life at a music festival, and we are made to witness a justification of that mass atrocity?

We saw in these liberal democratic societies in the US, UK, Europe and even Australia street marches in support of the genocidal maniacs even as gruesome, stomach-churning pictures and videos of Jewish civilians getting slaughtered and tortured were streaming in. In this age of CCTV, bodycams, dashcams and social media, the brutalities became a reality TV show. And incredibly, out came the rallies of hundreds not to stop the flow of innocent blood, but to applaud Hamas’ depravity as “resistance” and call for “free Palestine”.

This isn’t about Israel alone. It is about the violation and degradation of basic human principles that we live by. If this template is allowed to be set, then the next 9/11 or 26/11 would be justified as a “moral victory of the oppressed over the oppressor” in the perverse progressive narrative.

Nellie Bowles writes in The Free Press of this moral inversion that even Playboy showed a “stronger moral compass” than Ivy League institutions. “After Hamas paragliders landed in a music festival in southern Israel and slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Jewish youth, the leaders of Black Lives Matter Chicago and various leftist groups knew just what to do. They turned the image of the paratrooper against the sky—captured on video by those Jewish youth in a panic before their slaughter—into a chic black and white logo.”

We saw student groups in Harvard, Columbia, UPenn, etc., civil societies join Muslim immigrants across the West who claim to be on the side of victims, marginalized, and “oppressed” communities not only fail to criticise the genocidal attack, but essentially celebrating the pogrom. The cathartic glee was evident even among scholars and professors whose job it is to develop the students’ moral compass.

As Jason L Riley summarizes in Wall Street Journal, we saw a “Cornell history professor appearing at a pro-Palestinian rally this week referred to Hamas’s butchery as ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energizing.’ Columbia political scientist Joseph Massad described the attack on Israel… as ‘awesome’ and a ‘major achievement of the resistance.’ And CNN reports that a Stanford instructor was suspended after students reported that he singled out Jews in his class by asking them to raise their hands, accused them of being ‘colonizers,’ and played down the significance of the Holocaust’s body count.”

This isn’t just a compulsive need to appear “fair”, which stems from a self-image of unimpeachable righteousness — the belief that one is ruled by moral codes and non-negotiable normative ethics that govern actions and shape obligations. This is a moral obliviousness rooted in dogmatic identity politics that interprets the world through the Manichean lens of “oppressor” and the “oppressed”.

In this game of competitive victimhood, no matter how barbaric an assault the state of Israel suffers, no matter how many of its civilians are massacred, this is a battle the Jews cannot win.

Conversely, regardless of the terrorism that it inflicts on the Jewish people, no matter how many babies the terrorists kill, how many women they rape, how many corpses they defile and spit upon — the Islamist radicals of Hamas, its leaders and sympathizers will always be seen as “punching up”.

In the framework of identity politics when one group has been established as “oppressed” and the other as the “oppressor”, all atrocities — even mass murders and civilian bloodletting — of the group that has an integral claim to marginalisation will be rationalised as a ‘political project’ deserving of unmitigated backing by the “intersectional Left”.

The core objective is to bring together “marginalized people” for a fight in favour of social justice, even if it meant the “intersectional Left” was joining hands with sociopathic killers that descended on civilians with an insatiable bloodlust and at the receiving end were people under perennial threat of genocide.

To quote Helen Lewis from The Atlantic, “in the case of the incursion from Gaza into Israel, the idea of ‘punching up’ was extended to the murder of children. I simply cannot comprehend how any self-proclaimed feminist can watch footage of armed militants manhandling a woman whose pants are soaked with what looks like blood and decide that she has the power in that situation—and deserves her fate.”

The global Islamist movement has noted this Leftist ideological pitfall and has learnt to position itself at the intersection of identity politics to profit from the various formations of the social justice movement. The combination is a profound challenge to democratic freedom, and the very existence of tolerant, liberal societies. The extremism is masked in pop intersectionality and gullible media and academia have walked right into the trap.

As the blast in the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza showed, Hamas has become incredibly adept at weaponizing public opinion. As soon as the blast took place at the Al-Ahli Hospital where Palestinians, both in need of medical attention and those displaced were seeking shelter, major global networks immediately ran with the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claim that “Israeli airstrike” was responsible for the blast amid Israeli counterclaims that the explosion was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian terror group Islamic Jihad.

British and American networks such as BBC and CNN came at the receiving end of flak for uncritically accepting and amplifying Hamas’ claim, a terrorist group that lacks any credibility, that Israel is to blame for the blast that, according to Hamas’ estimates once again, had killed more than 500 people including a number of children. The New York Times, for instance, was caught subtly changing its headlines without clarifications as facts became clear.

Fog of war and disinformation is a legitimate problem compounded by the speed and reach of social media. As hours passed, however, independent verification from trusted sources such as OSINT analyst Nathan Ruser from ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre or Justin Bronk, senior research fellow for airpower and military technology at RUSI, a London think tank, pointing out “that an airstrike looks less likely than a rocket failure causing an explosion and fuel fire.”

A conclusion that Israel painstakingly insisted upon and released SIGINT evidence in the form of telephonic voice intercept of Hamas operatives discussing the failed launch to buttress its claim. According to analysts, Israel did so at a considerable risk of degrading its own SIGINT capabilities to mitigate the reputational damage caused by the hospital explosion at a time when it desperately needs global voice by its side. US president Joe Biden appeared to agree by dropping in Tel Aviv to send a message of solidarity and telling Benjamin Netanyahu that “based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it (Al Ahli blast) was done by the other team, not you,” but Biden also cautioned Israel not to get “consumed by rage”.

Regardless of the facts of the case, the Gaza blast has added fuel to the fire across entire West Asia and protests have erupted across Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia and Turkey, with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank facing a massive demonstration for being “weak” in front of Israel. In a sign of the turmoil, a summit planned in Jordan Wednesday between Biden, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was cancelled after Abbas, facing crowd ire, withdrew in protest, reports AP. Meanwhile, the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah is threatening to open up a simultaneous front against Israel.

Hamas couldn’t have planned it better. The Iran-backed terrorist group’s massacre of Israeli civilians has not only torpedoed all gains from Abraham Accords, Israel’s rage-filled response has entrenched its victimhood narrative. Hamas launched the biggest, vilest attack on Israel since the Holocaust, and as a wounded and angry Tel Aviv carries out a retributive bombing campaign, the Hamas leadership secure in the intricate and fortified tunnel network underneath the Strip, is placing citizens of Gaza in the line of fire to maximise casualties.

This helps in reinforcing victimhood and creating a manifestation of “collective punishment” and human suffering in Gaza that emphasizes Israel’s role as the “oppressor”, solidifies anger and unity in the Muslim world, puts the US under pressure and weaponizes global opinion against Israel as it prepares to launch a ground invasion in Gaza. This is a war Israel cannot win.