‘Brutal asymmetric contexts’: The Seductiveness of Hamas

‘Brutal asymmetric contexts’: The Seductiveness of Hamas

In the aftermath of Hamas’ shocking Oct. 7 attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “Hamas is at war against humanity.” He is correct and the attack is a watershed moment for the world because Hamas’ inhumanity forces us to reckon with our own humanity. These many decades after the Holocaust, a reprise would seem unthinkable but what Hamas did and will do, if permitted, should surprise no one. ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is a genocidal creed.

In light of Hamas’ recent barbarism, it is tempting to ask why Hamas’ actions were not universally condemned. Not that everyone will ever all agree on one thing but as a sentient species, are there acts which cannot be tolerated? Yes, there are, as we see in instruments like the Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and its predecessor the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment oif the Crime of Genocide. We have determined that some acts are crimes against humanity.

Hamas has just violated all of the above. Yet, while most states join in condemnation of Hamas, the same solidarity of outrage doesn’t exist among many of the peoples of those countries. Rather than condemning Hamas, some are excusing their violence and even condoning it. Perhaps, then, a better question is why would people want to justify Hamas’ crimes against humanity?

“Brutally asymmetric contexts;” it's a bad sign if a professor of international criminal law is willing to supply genocidaires with sanguine euphemisms. If political resistance can take the form of gunning down civilians and decapitating babies, what isn't beyond the pale? And if it is up to the Palestinians or any other people that sees themselves in a similar situation to define for themselves what is ‘resistance’, what is the point of international criminal law? Conceptualizing Hamas’ barbaric violence as resistance legitimizes that violence and implies that Israelis brought the horrors upon themselves..

One thing Hamas knew it could count on before it undertook this recent pogrom was a lot of international popular support ranging from willing bystanders to fellow travelers. One of the reasons Hamas could anticipate popular support in Western countries like Canada is because of the ‘zombie ideology’ of the Left.

Being socially progressive on the Left these days means agreeing to a bundle of ideological positions without necessarily thinking them through. In this case, the vilification of colonization which seldomly rises above two dimensions. Colonizers are bad and they hurt the natives who are always good. This blind ideological antipathy towards colonization is transferred to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Israel is the evil colonizer invading Palestinians’ homelands. The reason Professor Matthews can justify Hamas’ violent acts as legitimate political resistance - besides possible antisemitic leanings - is because she sees settler colonialism as worthy of barbaric acts. What the professor is showing us is a dialectic of retribution.  Against something as evil as colonization, especially when regarded as inherently genocidal, what isn’t permissible? 

Hamas makes no secret of its genocidal creed but that does not disaffect their friends in the West. Why not? And while many on the Left would ignore Hamas’ genocidal creed and its actual practice, many are eager to accuse Israel of committing genocide. 

Israel serves as the proxy for all settler colonialism. The moral bankruptcy that excuses genocide on the one side and falsely accuses the other of the crime stems from a tenet of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Just as only white people can be racist, only white people colonize. The depiction of Israel as a settler-colonial state is a microcosm of what white people do. Thus, Israelis/Jews are seen as white supremacists (a remarkable transference in itself considering 20th Century history) and all the classic antisemitic tropes of rapacious avarice, global domination and racial self-interest are projected on white people at large.

The moral perversity of CRT adherents is that for as much as they rail against racial discrimination, they don’t want to stop it. Rather, they want to monopolize it. They covet the power to racially discriminate and the pantomime of accusing multicultural liberal democracies of systemic racism in the 21st Century is only a justification for them to wield the power they covet. 

The list of the contemporary instruments of racial discrimination includes cultural appropriateness, parallelism and even outright segregation. In other words, all the former social taboos the Left once fought against - including antisemitism - are now tools for the contemporary Left. If people can flirt with those demons of the past, what else are they willing to abide?

Another Holocaust. 

The dichotomy between being indigenous or not that has dominated international human rights discourse so far this century is an enabling conceptual foundation for morally justifying the genocidal terrorism of Hamas. The dichotomy of being indigenous or not is ultimately a determination of who belongs here and who doesn’t. It is a determination of humanity by ancestry and another telling taboo that too many are willing to engage.The Left has generally seen itself as immune to the same dark impulses that gave rise to Nazism and typically view Nazism as an abomination of the Right but they overlook the Socialist aspect of the National German Socialist Workers Party. The Nazi vulture fed off both wings of the political spectrum.

The old, romantic conflict of settlers vs natives assigns, almost by moral reflex, a sympathy for the natives. The invading settlers are the Other, an alien people seeking to dispossess the natives of what is rightfully theirs. The Avatar movies, for example, are romantic fantasies where the Indigenous people overcome an invader of superior arms and technology with tribal guile and mysticism. Like the German cultural anthropologist Hartmut Lutz observed, “Aboriginal romanticism is the opposite side of the same coin as antisemitism.” The community of the Folk is defined as much by who is excluded as it is by those who are included.

One thing that distinguishes Hamas’ fellow travelers from the Quislings of yesterday is that they know what Hamas intends. With the Holocaust, the extermination of a people was inconceivable to most people, including many Jews. People now know what Hamas intends and they are willing to permit it because Palestinians are seen as Indigenous and the Jews are not. Hamas’ genocidal barbarism doesn’t offend their moral sensibilities because vanquishing the colonizer validates their ideology at one level and satisfies a lust for the forbidden on another.

The popularity of the morally bankrupt and illiberal Critical Race Theory can be attributed, in part, to intellectual adolescence and its reliance on definition by opposition. Students on Western campuses rallying for Hamas are trying to find their political identity and by accusing Israel of settler colonialism, they are trying to focus on the hypocrisy of Israel, much in the same way the older Left railed against US imperialism during the Cold War. Those students are trying to substitute moral authority for intellectual authority.

The combination of adolescent definition by opposition, fetishized deconstruction, and an existential malaise of seeing Western civilization as a failure now leading towards planetary doom has promulgated a despair of liberalism and democracy. Hamas’ attack on Israel and, by extension, its attack on humanity, is cheered by those who wish to see what they perceive as a decadent world order extirpated root and stem.. The idealized indigenous state of being is seen not only as the way things should be; but also as the paradise that was lost because of colonization.

Indigeneity is a justification for racialism in our time as much as it was in the past. Certainly, the minds behind UNDRIP did not formulate indigenous rights as an intentional departure from common humanity but the rift was as inevitable as it was implicit in the distinction between indigenous and human rights. The particularism of the former contradicts the universalism of the latter and all definitions of being indigenous necessarily involve a racial connection.The need to establish a set of indigenous rights came from a perception that indigenous people were not adequately protected by universal human rights which do not allow for special considerations on the basis of ancestry. The differentiation of rights meant a differentiation in humanity and we see this in the acceptance of Hamas’ barbarism against Israel. 

CRT has allowed many to find a moral excuse for lusting after the very same things they accuse the Far Right of wishing for. racial supremacy and genocide.  The radical Left thought itself immune from the temptations of racialism and became blind to what their projections of white supremacy meant. They projected an enemy so evil, so immense and so powerful that it allowed them to justify arming themselves with racial discrimination, segregation and now annihilation.

In the Key of Solomon the King, a pseudepigraphic grimoire reprinted for a New Age audience, there is a magnificent quote: “The history of the people of God is the allegorical legend of humanity.” It is the legend of learning how to live with those who are not us and of what we will not allow other people to suffer just because they are not us. 

The dichotomy of being indigenous or not undermines the principle of a common humanity because it divides humanity into polar categories of belonging to a place or not. Not belonging to a place has its extreme expression in the colonizer: those who don’t belong dispossess those who do belong. Seeing Israel as the genocidal colonizer is not just a boorish iteration of juvenile bourgeois back-biters. The notion of Jews becoming the very evil that tried to destroy them provides some people with an absolute moral inversion that is difficult, in the final analysis, to not regard as intrinsically antisemitic.

Jews becoming like the Nazis is seen as a betrayal of all the humanity accrued since the Holocaust. It is the ‘stab in the back’ political myth of disgruntled German WWI veterans transposed to a global scale. Coupled with the sin of Israeli settler colonialism, this can account for why so many are willing to permit another Holocaust.

Is there another explanation for why so many would want to reopen the Road to Auschwitz?

The dichotomy of being indigenous or not allows people corrupted by their own cynicism to apportion their humanity according to who belongs and who doesn’t. The seductiveness of Hamas is finding excuses to unleash the barbaric impulses within; the brutal yet noble determinism of the natives vanquishing the alien invader. The perversity of western college students cheering on a genocide that could ultimately be traduced to their circumstances is the existential bankruptcy that inevitably comes with defining humanity by ancestry. It is a definition which places many people on the deficit side of the ledger. Many of the people excusing Hamas’ barbarism as legitimate if brutal resistance against settler colonialism are themselves descendants of settler colonists. That is a narrative of negative origin that, when internalized, inevitably sickens the soul. When people decide who deserves barbarism and genocide, we are witnessing the symptoms of acedia.

Tribalism isn’t just the antithesis of humanism, it is also the antecedent and being such, we must always exert our will to preserve humanity lest we revert to that brutish past we transcended. The allegorical legend of humanity is extending humanity to those who are not us. Solomon’s quote is the sublimation of divinity in humanity instead of the litany of parochial demigods waiting to be resurrected in the vacuum of inhumanity. When you hear, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” you are hearing the invocation of those demons. 

Decolonization, as it manifested in the Oct. 7 pogrom, is the leveraging of historic grievance to justify barbarism and genocide. But because decolonization can be theoretically applied far beyond Israel, it has a terrible potential for exceeding what was vowed to never happen again. 

The sickness of collective acedia has advanced to the point of reaching back into that ancient psychic substructure of warring gods which, in itself, is a metaphor of the tribal struggle to dominate.The struggle to dominate is the inevitable outcome of the struggle to exist in a tribal context. Tribalism presupposes that one tribe thrives at the expense of another.

If humanity matters most, it cannot matter who was here first. If. The danger for us all lies in the ideological ability to contract humanity to suit ideology.

“But instead of addressing the root of the problem, everyone spins their wheels on Hamas’s violence on Oct. 7. The focus on that one act — rather than on the seven decades of settler colonial violence that precipitated it and the genocidal project Israel is preparing to carry out as reprisal — suggests to me that many people expected Gazans to just accept the escalating violence of the apartheid regime. It seems obvious that someone was going to do something evil in response to evil.”

The author cited above is Jessie Krahn, writing for a Canadian student paper. Her views are typical of many university students weaned on Leftism. If genocidal terror attacks are what 75 years of settler colonialism warrants in retaliation, what does Canada deserve for twice as many years of committing the same evils? Or Britain or France for their many years and acts of colonization?

Krahn is willing to countenance inhumanity if it is committed in the context of her rather selective sense of social justice. 

Krahn personalizes the evil of settler colonialism: “In the same way my grandfather justified Canadian settler colonialism on the grounds that Canada offered him safety from war-torn Europe, many people are convinced that Israel’s continued settler colonialism is prerequisite to the safety of not just Israelis, but Jewish people around the world. The opposite is true.”

If the opposite is true for Jews all over the world, is it also true for all of us who owe our present residence to our ancestors who falsely found humanity in a colonial nation? It’s hard to tell if Krahn realizes that the implication of her argument and her reduction of humanity ultimately includes her own self, regardless of how much she professes solidarity with the Indigenous underdogs. Maybe Krahn does foresee a time when she will have to return to the Russland or such but for Jews, where can they go if not the tiny state of Israel?

Like too many others, Krahn is willing to let Israelis suffer genocide by accusing them of genocide. This isn’t very far from how the Nazis justified their war against Jews.

“If we are the losers in the struggle which will decide this,” Himmler warned his SS officers in 1938, “Not even a reservation of Germans will remain.”

Whether or not Krahn realizes her ideological condemnation includes herself, it does. And whether she is oblivious to that implication or realizes and accepts it, she is expressing a death wish that could be fulfilled on a global scale. That is when acedia becomes collectively terminal.

Acedia poisons the psyche which very often externalizes its internal corruption. Remonstrating against the Jews is an example of this externalization. Jews are particularly targeted by the acedia-afflicted because they resent the ability of Jewish culture and Judaism to resist and preserve their souls. Krahn, like so many of her generation, have been robbed of the concept and sense of soul due to the ascendancy of postmodernism in recent years. The sundry Critical Theories particularly exemplify this elision of the soul in the conspicuous way these theories do not accept that transcendence of things like racism and sexism is possible.

Although CRT functions like an orthodox religion with its own tenets and dogmas, it is spiritually bankrupt because its core belief is human failure; the failure to get beyond the ancient bigotries and hatreds. Critical Race theorists want to manage the failures because that is all they can do; they have no ability to conceive of a way past those failures. Above all, CRT is counter-humanism; it doesn’t believe in human agency at all and seeks rather to seize the state and use the powers of the state to correct society. Because CRT absolutely devalues human agency, it robs its adherents of the transcendental inner discourse made possible by the concept of soul and replaces it with social dogma and scripted moralism. That is why Krahn burbles on about apartheid in Israel; it’s a narrative she’s been fed and a narrative she must repeat if she wishes to belong to the social progressives caste.

Caught and blinded by the mental prison of her progressiveness, Krahn can only unconsciously redirect the dissolution of her trapped psyche to the world. Her patented enmity towards Israel can be seen as her own psychodrama; her cheering of genocidal terrorism is her own unconscious death wish. Unable to escape her own prison, she wants to see the world collapse and thereby bring her prison walls down.

There is no rational reason why anyone would justify Hamas’ genocidal terrorism; there is only a spiritual reason.

“Leadership and the media’s collective refusal to acknowledge that settler colonialism and apartheid created the conditions that led to the deaths of so many is only going to lead to more loss of life.”

That statement illustrates the artifices of self=loathing so profound that it is turned wholly outward. It is telling that the terms of vilification - settler colonialism and apartheid - are readily applicable to where she lives, Canada. The death of settler colonialism that she and so many others seek is really their own allegorical ‘death’.