Leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory

ne has come to see during this last year, Israel could indeed be defeated in a military war, and the Jews could indeed be “decolonized,” which is to say, massacred. And if that were to happen, the proponents of the decolonization ideology in the American universities—not just the students, but the professors, enough of them to be noticeable—would respond, as they have already shown us, by cheering.

Also, of course, Israel is the ancestral home of the Jews – a point which could hardly have been advanced by those British colonisers staking their claims in North America and Australia.

Their cheers would be deep and vigorous, too. That is because, in the decolonization ideology, as Kirsch explains, “Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong,” and the destruction of Israel would be the triumph for the ideology itself and for every well-intentioned person and political movement around the world. And so, the new and exotic academic ideology that inveighs against “settler colonialism” has turned out to be a recognizable thing. It is one more variation on a phenomenon well known to the twentieth century—the noble doctrine that turns into its opposite. Kirsch makes the point: “I see it leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory, in ways that are all too familiar in modern history."

We pass through Frantz Fanon and Gary Snyder (the hippie/Buddhist San Francisco poet? Yes indeed)….

Finally:

But I think that chiefly it is worth recalling that, in our own moment, the ideological condemnation of Israel, Judaism, and the Jews that carries the most weight in the world is the one that comes from the Islamist movement—the religious-and-political movement, that is, whose goal is to resurrect the ancient Islamic utopia that can be found in the Qur’an. This movement commands the support right now of many millions of people across the denominations in Islam, and it enjoys the backing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is confident of its beliefs and its ultimate triumph someday in the future. And naturally it exerts a pressure on everyone else, and especially on the people in the university quads right now who are protesting against settler colonialism. The pressure is to come up with ideological explanations of every sort—scientific-sounding explanations in the anthropological mode, or political explanations in the national-liberation style of the 1960s, or human-rights explanations in the modern humanitarian fashion, or countercultural displays of universal spirituality—to show that Islamism’s wrath cannot be entirely misplaced, even if the Islamist rhetoric, half medieval-theological, and half pseudo-scientific in the Nazi style (“malignant cancerous tumor,” to quote Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, just now), grates disagreeably on the modern ear.

Which is how we come to the baffling sight of supposedly progressive anti-Israel protestors on our streets chanting in praise of Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and all the Islamist Jew-hating outfits that are backed and financed by the theocratic regime in Tehran.