Let me start by saying that when I talk about the left I'm not talking about, for example, Joe Biden, whom I believe has been as un-left as he feels he can be as bedlam has spread across America's college campuses. (Biden is scheduled to deliver a major address at the United States Holocaust museum next week, and I look forward to hearing his message). Rather, the people I'm talking about are the people who have been protesting, camping out, appropriating private and/or community property for their exclusive use, vandalizing and occupying buildings, etc. That's who I'm talking about when I say the left, and also those who support these people and their behaviors.
They have gone too far, again. What do I mean by again? Flashback if you will to the late spring and summer of 2020. George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police in what a court later judged to be a case of second degree murder, third degree murder, and second degree manslaughter. Americans across the political and racial spectrum witnessed what happened, saw it for the excessive use of force that it was, and were horrified.
A greater awareness immediately grew across the country about the problem of excessive use of force by police, especially against Black people, in the course of arrests. A consensus formed around the need to do something.
Before that consensus could lead to meaningful reforms, however, a large protest movement led by Black Lives Matter switched the narrative from one about the excessive use of force in some number of instances in some number of police departments to one about defunding the police. And then before you knew it, instead of discussing the continuing manifestations of racism amongst different parts of the population, the narrative switched to one about white supremacy. It wasn’t just that some white people were still racist and still acted in reprehensibly racist ways; rather, white people and whiteness itself were the problem, and everything white people were deemed to have produced, from ideas to systems of government and commerce, was inherently racist and rotten and due for dismantling.
For a period of time, it seemed that most of America was willing to swallow this. Ibram Kendi penned multiple bestsellers instructing white people on how they could fix themselves and become anti-racist and raise their children as anti-racist as well. The Golden Rule was no longer good enough. Kendi told us that “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
As things quickly moved in this direction, the connection between George Floyd's murder and the rhetoric of the movement it catalyzed, became, for most Americans, tenuous. Floyd's murder pointed to a problem. People of good faith could honestly discuss the best way to address that problem. But ultimately, most Americans weren't interested in being told that they or their world was inherently evil. America may have problems, even big problems, but what most of us of all races see when we look around is a place that does better by us than anywhere else we can think of living — and a place that we know more people around the world would move to, given the chance, than anywhere else. The movement was demanding a revolution; most Americans weren't interested.
Flash forward to today. Israel was attacked on October 7th in the most barbaric fashion and has responded militarily. The attacker, Hamas, intentionally uses a population of 2 million as human shields, and so, unfortunately, tragically, there is way more loss of civilian life than what otherwise would occur.
There could certainly be an intelligent debate over what level of civilian casualties — given these Hamas-created circumstances — is acceptable as Israel defends itself. There's a body of law covering this subject, and each of us has our own moral instincts as well.
But this is not the debate that we have had. Because what is at core a revolutionary anti colonialist ideology and movement cannot be sustained by a discussion about what level of response is excessive after an act of war such as October 7th. That won't do. So the narrative switches, very quickly, to one about a colonialist power seeking to ethnically cleanse an indigenous people from their homeland, perhaps even enact a genocide upon them. That the indigenous claims of the Jewish people to this particular land predate (don't invalidate, but predate) the Muslim claims by many centuries is ignored. That Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza entirely in 2005 is ignored. That the Gazan and West Bank populations of Arabs have only grown during this supposed period of ethnic cleansing and genocide is ignored. That the protesters’ chants explicitly call for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Jews (“From the river to the sea"! “Global Intifada"!) even as they accuse Israel of the very same acts is ignored. That they have become comfortable expressing support for the butchers of Hamas — and so quickly — doesn't trouble them. That they see the battle in racial terms even though Israel’s Jewish population is more than half people of color is lost on them.
And when it comes to the manner of their protest, while everyone would grant them the right to peacefully, enthusiastically express a point of view about what level of Israeli response is appropriate, that is not enough for them. It's not what they're interested in. They don't want to just criticize a policy, they want to marginalize and dehumanize an entire people. They want to deny Jews free passage across shared, university owned spaces; they want to deface and then occupy buildings; they want to lower American flags and raise Palestinian ones; they justify as a revolutionary necessity the butchery of 10/7, consistent with the anti colonialist play book as described by the theorist Frantz Fanon and others.
It is the same anti-colonialist fervor that animates a number of the largest Black Lives Matter chapters around the country. Recall the Chicago chapter’s pro Hamas propaganda in the immediate aftermath of 10/7 before Israel’s military response had even fully materialized.
All of this probably seemed isolated and a little fringy to most Americans on 10/10 when this image was tweeted, not something too widespread. Over the last couple of weeks, however, things have started to hit home for previously disengaged Americans. The anti-Israel, anti-Jewish rhetoric increased. The protesters at campuses all across the country demonstrated a total disregard for the basic property rights that underlie this or any other ordered society. American flags were taken down and destroyed and replaced by Palestinian ones.
I believe it is occurring to more and more Americans every day that the goal of these protesters isn't the moderation of Israel's military response but instead a kind of revolution — just as in 2020 it fairly quickly became evident that at least for the organizers, the goal was not primarily to address excessive use of force by police but rather to condemn America's systems as inherently racist and fatally flawed and to assert white supremacy as a continuing although somewhat reshapen force that white people could only address by owning and seeking to remedy their complicitness in the struggles of everyone who isn't white — and in the precise manner Ibram Kendi and others prescribed.
The bad news is that a lot of people, especially young people, have been schooled in this way of thinking and believe it. The good news is that most of us haven't and most of us don't. And that at some point, once the would-be revolutionaries overstep anything that common sense could ever justify, they will start to lose many of their one-time supporters as well. I hope and believe we have reached that moment regarding support for Hamas and the vilification of Israel.