The picture is no better on American college campuses. At George Washington University, student activists projected such pro-Hamas messages as “Glory to the martyrs” on the side of a building, and the police had to rescue Jewish students from a mob at the Cooper Union in New York City. For some insight into this insanity, I urge you to read this essay by John McWhorter, a linguistics professor and incisive critic of the perversions of the academy:
Some leftists are framing Hamas’s killing of 1,400 Israelis and abduction of 222 more as “decolonization,” believing they’re championing the cause of oppressed Palestinians. In reality, these leftists are condescending to them.
Mass murder, these leftists suggest, is the understandable consequence of Jewish “colonization.” Such a perspective is deeply insulting to Palestinian humanity. It implies that Palestinians are so controlled by circumstance that they lack agency. It implies that Palestinians cannot be expected to behave according to the same ethical standards of those who refrain from mass murder.
The Hamas cheerleaders are effectively saying: men butchered legions of people in your name. Hooray for them and hooray for you! Classifying Palestinians as “brown” people, purportedly enlightened souls applaud this savagery from their representatives—but from a position of unintended, but ugly, condescension.
McWhorter’s analysis put me in mind an essay Mosaic published in 2018 called “The Zombie Doctrine,” which is worth revisiting. Perceptive as McWhorter is, I wonder how much the sympathy for jihadists stems not from condescension toward Palestinians but from animus toward Jews.
Read more on Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/p/john-mcwhorter-barbarism-recast-as-progress