As long as they hate us, they must be right

The appalling reaction of some progressives to the massacre of innocents has been decades in the making

Family and friends of fallen IDF soldier Afik Rozental, who died in a battle with Hamas militants, attend his funeral on October 9, 2023 in Kfar Menachem, Israel. (Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images)

‘He who hates himself must be feared, because we will be the victims of his vengeance. Let us therefore take care to teach him to love himself.’ - Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day.

I wish I could say that I was surprised by the grotesque reaction of some progressives to the slaughter of over 1,300 Jews by the terrorist group Hamas in Israel on Saturday. Yet I can’t say that because I haven’t been asleep for the past 30 years.

I was only a young child on Valentines Day 1989 when the Iranian mullahs issued a Fatwa (death sentence) against the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie. Yet I was old enough to hear some of the prattle about ‘legitimate grievances’ and ‘cultural sensitivities’ that seemed to get lodged in the throats of many prominent liberals. As a bounty of two-and-a-half million dollars was placed on Rushdie’s head and he was forced into hiding, many said that the real problem was the ‘offence’ that Rushdie’s novel - The Satanic Verses - had caused to Muslims. ‘The Rushdie affair’, wrote the Marxist critic John Berger within a few days of the Fatwa, ‘has already cost several human lives and threatens to cost many, many more’. The Labour MP Keith Vaz led a mob through Leicester calling for Rushdie’s book to be banned and the feminist critic Germaine Greer refused to sign a petition supporting Rushdie, describing him as a ‘megalomaniac’. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, demanded that the British government expand the Blasphemy Act to cover Islam.

There was plenty more of this sentiment swilling around, and it was a grim portent of things to come. Several years later, during Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal campaign of ethnic chauvinism against Bosnia and Kosovo, much of the left tried to hide in equivocal rhetoric about ‘both sides’ and ‘quagmires’. National treasure Tony Benn approvingly quoted Henry Kissinger, the blitzer of Cambodia, while Greer - previously so pious about the purported offence Rushdie had caused to Muslims - called on western leaders to go gentle on Slobodan Milosevic, the butcher of Belgrade, as he turned predominantly Muslim areas of the former Yugoslavia into a slaughterhouse. During that sorry episode the old left did what it does best: it dusted off worn-out old slogans to obscure the issue. Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party gave full-throated support to Serbia, as did various writers in publications such as the New Statesman.

The spectacle of minds curdled by a hatred of their own societies is not an endearing one. It’s also not a phenomenon that is confined to the left. I assumed it had reached its zenith in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States by Al Qaeda. The Socialist Worker gleefully described the murder of 2,977 people on its front page as the ‘Bitter Fruit of US Policy’. ‘They can’t see why they are hated’, ran the headline of a piece by Seumas Milne in the Guardian published 48 hours after the attacks. Seumas knew why though, and it was all the things he already disliked about the United States. Peter Wilby, then editor of the New Statesman (and today a convicted sex offender) wrote that dead American bond traders deserved it, at least a bit, for preferring ‘George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader’. ‘The subjects of the Empire had struck back,’ wrote Tariq Ali in his 2002 book The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Meanwhile the sainted Oxford academic Mary Beard wrote in typically chin-stroking fashion in the London Review of Books of the ‘feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming’.

This sort of thing continued as the Americans launched disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it continued too when the Americans didn’t go to war, such as in Syria in 2013, whose civil war was also - yes you guessed it - apparently our fault. When terrorists from the Islamic State murdered 130 people in Paris in 2015, that was our fault too. The influential Stop the War Coalition (StWC), whose former chair Jeremy Corbyn was at the time leader of the Labour Party, declared that France was ‘[reaping] the whirlwind of Western support for extremist violence in the Middle East’.

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When people show you who they are, believe them

The StWC is still around of course; it is currently calling on the British government to stop sending weapons to Ukraine, much as its leading lights supported an arms embargo against Bosnia in the lead up to the Srebrenica massacre. It blames NATO’s eastward expansion after the collapse of the Soviet Union for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite Russian leaders declaring to the contrary that the war is part of a quest for ‘greater Russian space’.

I don’t know who first coined the rather folksy saying above but it’s clear that a lot of people are heavily invested in doing the exact opposite. The most accurate and penetrating criticism of Neville Chamberlain is that he was unable to imagine a man like Hitler or a party like the Nazis. The psychology of murderous, psychopathic totalitarianism was simply beyond the comprehension of a parochial Tory from Birmingham City Council. To paraphrase Orwell, he was both too sane and too stupid to comprehend it. Similarly, today in the cosseted world of academia it’s considered immoderate and alarmist to take Hamas at their word. Their charter may say that they want to murder Jews, yet some sleek little professor knows better, and will be on hand with his carefully road-tested pieties to tell you that they don’t really mean it, that they’re actually very pragmatic, and that if they do bad things then that’s really the fault of the Israelis and - by extension - the West. As long as they hate us, they must be right.

This philistine shrewdness is contemptible to be sure, but not as contemptible as the timid fanatics of violence whose first response to the largest mass killing of Jews since 1945 was to preen and posture about the necessary slaughter of children and pensioners and Holocaust survivors. These armchair revolutionaries resemble what Arthur Koestler once likened to ‘peeping toms’, peering through a hole in the wall at history while not having to experience it themselves.

Only people at several thousand miles remove from the killing can swaddle themselves in Fanonist drivel about decolonisation and the therapeutic properties of wanton violence. Or perhaps politics for them is merely a piece of kitsch from top to bottom, a stylised identity that’s more about in-group belonging and status signalling than social justice. How else does the president of Sussex University feminist society reconcile being an ‘empathy-driven feminist’ with ‘celebrating’ (her words) the use of rape and violence against women and children? How does one do the mental gymnastics required to square that circle - to claim that words are violence but the killing of babies is ‘revolutionary’?

Such loose talk - taking place in ultra-bourgeois Brighton of all places - is inherently unserious. There is plenty more of this stuff - and not only from fringe student activists. This person is a professor at Yale:

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The appalling reaction of some progressives to the massacre of innocents over the weekend is, I’m afraid, not some ghastly aberration but rather has been decades in the making. Self-proclaimed anti-imperialists habitually divide the world into the crudest of binaries like this. It’s goodies versus baddies, global north versus global south, imperialists versus anti-imperialists. The downtrodden are represented by the leaders they have, and those leaders - often tyrannical, authoritarian and racist - are treated as a blank slate upon whom the hopeful emblem of revolution is drawn*, the Palestinians as an angelic people who are exempted from moral responsibility because of the sins of Israel.

I do believe that the Palestinians have every right to self-determination and a state of their own. I also believe that the civilians of Gaza will suffer immensely as they face a retaliatory onslaught by the Israeli military. This is a tragedy every bit as painful as the pogrom carried out in Israel last weekend.

But I won’t listen to calls for ‘restraint’ from people who just a few days ago were demanding no limits. They don’t care about civilian life in Gaza (or anywhere else for that matter). It should have been obvious to any thinking person that Israel would lash out following the sickening murder of over 1,300 people on Saturday. Yet one gets a horrible feeling that this is what some activists actually wanted all along, because now they can say they were right about Israel, and being right on the internet is what politics boils down to for lots of people.

There is a time and a place for talk of ‘context’ and ‘root causes’ and the ‘conditions’ that might have produced a situation in the Middle East that is propitious to violence. But it isn’t when the bodies are still warm, which is akin to picketing the funerals of innocent people: screeching slogans and shoving placards in the faces of grieving relatives. Behind all the ‘postcolonial’ jargon and equivocation it’s the same old stupid sentiment: as long as they hate us, they must be right. I want nothing to do with it.

*As John Rees, leader of the StWC, wrote in 2006: ‘Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like Saddam Hussein.’