Leftist Lunacy Fuels Hamas Atrocity J.T. Young
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/leftist-lunacy-fuels-hamas-atrocity/
Israel’s descent into tragedy at the hands of Hamas reveals America’s descent into idiocy at the hands of the Left. Every anti-Semitic outrage, all the Hamas apologists, each excuse for terrorism — together they reveal that we are not confronting just terrorism alone but an absolutist ideology. The left has prepared the ground in which Hamas and its supporters have sown their hate, and America is witnessing its flowering.
As the aftermath of October 7th continues unfolding, we see mounting examples of leftist arguments defending it. The latest lunacy occurred on Nov. 23 when Sky News’ Kay Burley interviewed Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy about the exchange of 150 Hamas prisoners for 50 Israeli hostages. Burley stated: “I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning…. and he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?”
Shocked temporarily speechless, Levy recovered: “It is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offenses, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don’t care about Palestinian lives? Really, that’s a disgusting accusation.”
Assuredly “disgusting,” the accusation is also disturbing in its revelation of the shallowness to which the left has spiraled this discussion’s descent. Deconstructing the accusation shows that there is no debate — and cannot be one — with the left.
First, it was Hamas that created this vile market for the exchanging of human beings. Hamas abducted 240 innocent Israeli civilians and did so for the clear purpose of doing what it is doing now: obtaining the release of its captured terrorists. And without captured terrorists, there would be no one to exchange Hamas’ hostages for. So, Hamas created both sides of this transaction.
Second, the inequality in this exchange is also of Hamas’ making. From a moral standpoint, Hamas sent in terrorists and took out innocent civilians. From any civilized moral perspective, there is no equivalency here. The transactional inequality is therefore inherent: the innocent for the guilty, the unsuspecting for the premeditated.
Finally, Hamas created the ratio of the exchange. On a moral weighting, the correct ratio would have been 240 Israeli hostages for nothing. These people should never have been taken in the first place; once taken, they should have been returned.
However, once the bartering began, it was clearly Hamas who set the bidding. As Levy correctly observed in the interview “If we could release one prisoner for every one hostage, we would obviously do that.” For Israel, the lower the number of Hamas prisoners exchanged for Israeli hostages, the better off it would be. That the ratio came to be three to one must have come from Hamas’ negotiating. So, if anyone is guilty of not valuing Palestinian lives “as highly as Israeli lives,” it is Hamas.
But of course, we already knew that Hamas placed a low value on Palestinian lives. The evidence is clear from its embedding of its terrorist operations in civilian areas, its firing of faulty homemade rockets over its civilian population, and its decision to launch a terrorist attack that it knew would prompt Israel to defend itself militarily.
While the accusation tells us nothing about the truth, it tells us everything about what prompted it and what we are dealing with: leftist ideology. Logic and reasoning have no place here and if introduced into it, they carry no currency. All that matters is the left’s identity-group mindset of a priori judgment that determines exploiter and exploited, victim and abuser, beforehand.
Like a black hole, all is sucked into its density and no light is emitted from its closed-loop system of summary judgment. All else follows from the left’s definitional determinism: any behavior that conforms to its ideology is absolved (even terrorism) and any that diverges from it is condemned (even self-defense).
The left’s ideology that offers this systemic way of viewing, by which an individual or episode is seen and judged — even before actually being seen — prepared the ground for the vacuous reasoning that now makes Hamas the victim of the atrocities it committed.
The atrocities that occurred on Oct. 7 in Israel must spur our revulsion, but they must equally spur our reevaluation of the mindset that now defends them. The anti-Semitic protests and attacks — especially on our college campuses — are not the result of what is happening in Israel; they are the result of America standing silent while the Left has defined reason into oblivion and education into indoctrination.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.
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