Trite Young Things
When facing barbarism, there is no, 'Yes, but.'
Consider the unspeakable depravity of October 7. Families burned alive. Babies beheaded. Peaceful youngsters cut down whilst frolicking at a music festival. Over 1,300 innocents rubbed out. Shot, stabbed, bombed, raped, spat upon—their erasure live-streamed by cackling, primaeval jackals armed with machine guns and iPhones.
Their murderers’ top-secret intentions were not top secret for long: Maximum carnage. Kidnap and kill children. Waste as many Jews as possible.
Consider the provenance of the blood on that young Israeli girl’s crotch. Witness her captors’ pride, parading someone’s child like a hunting trophy. Consider her loved ones enduring that image—forever.
Now consider this statement from left-wing activist, Rivkah Brown. As the pogrom boiled in full, murderous flow, she said:
“Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide, as Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory. The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it.”
Despite the heinous, graphic evidence lapping all around her, and unbidden by civilised collective disgust, Rivkah Brown doubled down.
Four days later, she apologised. Rivkah blamed ‘heightened emotion’ for her celebration of a pogrom. Few believe her bullshit. It’s all there in that qualifying and fatal last line.
Others were not quite so trenchant. Many preferred to split hairs. You can always rely on The Guardian to serve up the finest of self-deceptions. In a now-deleted tweet, their Jerusalem correspondent was ‘horrified’ by headlines ‘claiming 40 babies beheaded by Hamas.’
‘Yes, many children were murdered. Yes, there were several beheadings,’ she said, but this claim was ‘unverified.’ Reader, speeding doesn’t kill. Hitting a wall at 120 mph, kills.
Notice, too, the truth-obscuring passive in that sentence. Not ‘Hamas beheaded babies,’ but ‘Yes, many children were murdered. Yes, there were several beheadings.’ Yes, and committed by whom?
On that amoral teat, the desperate suckled like famished kittens. At least until the photos came out.
We must take solace. Our future CEOs, professors, industry leaders, and tastemakers, are not so much bloodthirsty sadists, but obscene social climbers. Harvard students will say anything for a place at the top table.
In a statement of wanton historical illiteracy, Harvard University students held Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for the massacre. How principled. How ironic. The very people who cancel others for misgendering, for microaggressions, and for other imaginary misdeeds, blamed the victims.
And then they didn’t. After learning that the civilised world frowns upon murder, rape, plunder and pillage, the students scrambled to scrub their signatures off their succès de scandale.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire, said he’d pull a few strings and banish the signatories from cushy Wall Street jobs. Oh well, kids. Recite your own little mantra: It’s not cancel culture. It’s accountability culture.
Gradually, then suddenly, the bankrupt Harvard students converted their principles to whichever principles their future bosses would prefer. I’m no debutant, but ‘avoid celebrating rape and murder,’ would be a good start. Vileness is one thing. Vileness-for-hire is quite another.
Incidentally, nothing will end cancel culture quicker than the momentary discomfort of Harvard brats.
How revealing. It’s like a modern update of Glengarry Glen Ross. Scheming, venal students headed for America’s elite drop their conniving, socially profitable opinions the very moment corporate America threatens their craven ambitions. Now there’s a David Mamet play, if I ever saw one.
They should read the story of Haman, in the Book of Esther. The proud and ambitious Haman demands all bow down before him. Mordecai refuses. Enraged, Haman connives the king to order the death of the Jews. Foiled by Queen Esther, Haman meets his fate on the very gallows he built for his murderous intentions. The moral of the story is you—yes, even Harvard students—so often reap what you sow.
And now the activists and agitators, who usually see everything in black and white, demand nuance and measure. Those crude practitioners who divide into oppressors and oppressed, demand assiduous eyes and calmer heads.
The same people who lauded the simplistic work of Ibram X. Kendi as revealed truth, now say human affairs are rather complex. The prattling pretenders concerned with the spectre of ‘stare rape’ are oddly silent on actual rape.
They destroy the lives of anyone who confuses yesterday’s gospel with today’s heresy. Now they seek clemency. They demand we sever consequences from actions. They can say and do whatever they like, no matter how repellent, and a trite therapy-speak-riddled apology should do the trick.
Until reality intrudes, those fooled by the bullshit causes of history truly believe they are right and just. Perhaps the pogrom taught these kids what ‘decolonisation’ means in the living, breathing, and bleeding real world. It’s not ‘vibes.’ It’s not an Instagrammable protest. It’s a fancy term for ethnic cleansing.
I’m not alone in sensing an epochal shift underfoot. A certain shattering of the spell under which too many have succumbed.
For a start, notice the cordon sanitaire erected around the radioactive, intersectional left. A heady dose of political Narcan has revived many on the side of sanity.
That shift depends upon what it has always depended upon—to say what you think and to think what you say.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, laid it out: “There is no ‘Yes, but’. Those who confuse the justification of terrorism, and the Palestinian cause, are making a strategic, political, and moral error.”
He’s right. There is no excuse for barbarism. In life, few things are black and white. This is one of them. Whatever you may think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its long and complicated history, the conditions in Gaza, the West Bank settlements, or the legitimate aspirations of both peoples, the choice is simple.
Either we speak up and recognise without qualification, equivocation, whataboutism and cant this premodern evil, or we forever forfeit all sense of honesty. There is no ‘yes, but.’ The most destructive lies are the lies we tell ourselves. Look away now, and never see clearly again.
On that note, I’ll leave you with the only words I have left: Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live.
The mentality of the campus brats and other banner-waving performative 'Progressives' is not even really about a concern for the Palestinian people. The real driver is to signal that your privileged narcissistic little wonderful self is ever on the side of the 'oppressed'. 'Oppression' is a shallow abstraction that serves to inflate their personal vanity as 'social justice' warriors. This poisonous vanity has been pouring out of Western academia for decades. I still remember the drug-addled anti-Zionist 'sit-in' at my UK university in 1973.
Another one outa the park, sir. Thanks.