Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Moral Corruption of the Left

Here is something that might surprise you

Here is something that might surprise you. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader recently killed by an Israeli air strike, could see a positive aspect to the creation of the state of Israel that his organisation is committed to destroy.

In a speech to the US Congress in 2015, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted Nasrallah saying the following:

For those who believe that Iran threatens the Jewish state, but not the Jewish people, listen to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s chief terrorist proxy. He said: If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of chasing them down around the world.

By these words, Nasrallah was expressing a desire and an intention that all the world’s Jews be systematically hunted down, not just those living in Israel.

In the aftermath, there were attempts to deny or downplay the significance of Nasrallah’s words appearing in the London Review of Books, the Washington Post, and other media outlets.

Netanyahu’s wording was a paraphrase of Nasrallah’s florid language, but not a misrepresentation, as subsequently confirmed by an audio recording. The intentions of Nasrallah and Hezbollah toward the Jews is every bit as evil as that of the Nazis, the only distinction being that, thank goodness, they currently lack the power to enact their plans.

Unlike the Nazis, who went to great lengths to conceal their Final Solution plan for the Jews at the notorious Wannsee Conference in January 1942—the official transcript was titled Secret Reich Matter—Hezbollah leaders see  no need to conceal their odious designs.

Likewise, Hamas, the other Iranian proxy organisation. In Article 7 of its odious 1988 founding Covenant, it looks forward to the day when “the stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

Again, some leftists try to downplay this, referring to a 2017 update of the Covenant produced for the benefit for Western media. While retaining the intention to annihilate Israel, this document softens the language somewhat and omits the explicitly genocidal words. However, when questioned Hamas leaders, especially when speaking in Arabic, are emphatic that the update does not nullify the original Covenant.

In any case, the dreadful pogrom on 7 October 2023 eliminates any doubts on this score. It is a prefiguration of what Hamas would like to do to the entire Jewish population of Israel, and ultimately the world, were they ever get the opportunity.

Then there is their funder and mentor, Iran, whose Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei predicted that by 2040 “there will be nothing left of the Zionist regime.” More ambitiously, Iran’s ambassador to Australia Ahmad Sadeghi wants to ensure “wiping out the Zionist plague out of the holy lands of Palestine happens no later than 2027.”

How remarkable then the apparent reluctance of many Western “progressives” to unequivocally condemn these groups. Indeed some, like the global doyen of queer theorists Judith Butler, have positive things to say about them. In an event at Berkeley discussing an earlier round of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Butler said the following:

I think: Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.

Why would anyone, let alone a leading queer theorist, say something so utterly morally obtuse as that? And why was she not drummed out of academia as a result, in this age of progressive speech policing and cancel culture?

Here is Butler’s defence after she was criticized over this:

I have always been in favor of non-violent political action, and this principle has consistently characterized my views. I was asked by a member of an academic audience a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and Hezbollah belonged to “the global left" and I replied with two points. My first point was merely descriptive: those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left.

My second point was then critical: as with any group on the left, one has to decide whether one is for that group or against that group, and one needs to critically evaluate their stand. I do not accept or endorse all groups on the global left. Indeed, these very remarks followed a talk that I gave that evening which emphasized the importance of public mourning and the political practices of non-violence…

This is pretty weak. Notice that in her original comment she included the word “progressive” in her characterization of Hamas and Hezbollah. When someone says to an audience of humanities academics that it is “extremely important” to acknowledge an entity as “progressive” and part of the global Left, that is an endorsement. What other construction would the audience put on it?

To be fair to Butler though, shortly after the October 7 pogrom she did at least come out with this: “I do condemn without qualification the violence committed by Hamas. This was a terrifying and revolting massacre.”

Given the climate prevailing in academia, that might have required a modicum of moral courage, though notice that she confines her condemnation to the violence committed by Hamas. To denounce the organisation and its repugnant goals more broadly may have been a bridge to far.

In the current climate of campus progressivism, however, to condemn Hamas or any of its acts in any terms is beyond the pale. On 3 March 2024 Butler partly corrected herself, giving this characterization of the Hamas pogrom:

It was an act of armed resistance. It is not a terrorist attack and it’s not an antisemitic attack; it was an attack against Israelis. You know I did not like that attack, I have gone public with this, and I have got in trouble for saying it was for anguishing, it was terrible.

So, deliberately targeting Israeli civilians, like the 364 young people slaughtered at the music festival, that is not terrorism? I wonder what Butler’s definition of terrorism is. The standard definition is deliberately and specifically attacking civilians to achieve some political or religious goal.

Butler is clearly a highly intelligent woman. She must realize how ridiculously incoherent her position is. But, as she acknowledged, she “got in trouble” for exhibiting a modicum of humanity towards the October 7 victims in her earlier statement.

Much safer to call it an act of “armed resistance”, which is the received line of the Trotskyist groups that have clearly become a major influence on the university encampment activities since the pogrom.

Armed resistance? To what end? Not to defeat the Israeli military, obviously, at least not this time. And why the massacre, rape and torture of civilians, many of whom living in the area were known to be dedicated to peace and reconciliation with the Palestinians?

By declaring an intention to repeat October 7 “again and again and again”, and saying it was “just a rehearsal”, Hamas leaders must have known that this would amount to a declaration of war that would inevitably lead to a huge military response from Israel with all the civilian suffering this would inevitably entail.

By diverting aid funds to construct an immense subterranean apparatus of war beneath densely populated residential areas, and especially key infrastructure like hospitals and schools, Hamas sought to ensure that in order to get at Hamas’ military forces and infrastructure the IDF would have to go through these civilian facilities.

John Spencer, one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare, including the subterranean warfare employed by Hamas, contends talk of Hamas using human shields does not capture the enormity of what its strategy entails:

Hamas uses a human sacrifice strategy, not a human shield strategy. I can’t think of any other evil actor in military history who said and acted to get as many of their own population killed as possible to achieve their political goals.

A human sacrifice strategy indeed. Hamas has not made the slightest attempt to protect the civilian population of Gaza, not made available any part of its 600-kilometre-long tunnel system to protect Gazan civilians. Normal, civilized countries like Ukraine and Israel try to get civilians out of the line of fire in a conflict. Hamas strives to keep them in the line of fire, the bodies of the dead and injured fodder for their global propaganda efforts.

That apparently is what Butler has in mind when she talks of “armed resistance.” And acts of armed resistance by oppressed groups must never be condemned.

Sydney Uni students vote to support Hamas

Throughout the Western world, the climate on university campuses has become utterly toxic for Jews, to the point where the historian Niall Ferguson has compared the climate on Western campuses to that in Germany under the Third Reich.

Consider the situation at Sydney University. In August 2024, a meeting of around 800 students organised by the Students Representative Council (SRC) voted overwhelmingly to support Hamas’s “armed resistance” against Israel. It then overwhelmingly voted down a motion condemning the 7 October pogrom and labelling Hamas a terrorist group put forward by two lonely dissenters in the audience.

The atmosphere at this gathering was appalling, with the two courageous students speaking against Hamas subjected to jeering and ridicule. One of the students, Freya Leach, when interviewed by Rita Panahi on Sky News, said she was spat at and described one girl screaming “Allahu Akbar” in her face. She went on to say:

Campuses have always been hotbeds for political activism and debate, and that’s how it should be. But now this is not activism. It is actually just hate. And its all about spreading hate and shutting down anybody that disagrees with you and dehumanizing them.

Check out the video below of an interview by student activist Drew Pavlou, a rare voice against all this campus lunacy, of a pair of participants in the encampment at the University of Queensland. The interviewees make the following claims, as preposterous as they are chilling:

• Just about all the civilian casualties, including those at the music festival, were actually shot by the IDF, not Hamas.

• Zionism is a form of white supremacy. When challenged about the large proportion of the Israeli population made up of non-white Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern origin, they assert that most white supremacists are actually not white people.

• Every single Israeli civilian is guilty of colonialism because they are all active settlers on Palestinian land.

• Therefore, there are no genuine civilians in Israel, since a settler is not a civilian.

• When asked how many civilians deaths would be justified to liberate Palestine, one of the pair replied, “as many as necessary.”

Note especially the final point. This morally challenged duo apparently endorse Hamas’s human sacrifice strategy, with no limit on the civilian toll.

Sacrifice on a huge scale, to achieve what? A “free” Palestine almost certainly under the benign rule of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or some like entity.

This is typical of what is occurring on campuses, and on the streets, all over the Western world. The striking feature of all this “progressive” activism is just how reactionary it is.

Here, we have people who identify as leftists making common cause with some of the most retrograde religious ideologues on the face of the earth. Gays for Palestine espouse the cause of people who think people like them should be thrown off tall buildings.

Then there is the ubiquitous slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” A free Palestine? They must be kidding. A judenrein (Jew free) Palestine certainly, if Hamas, Hezbollah and their patron state Iran were to succeed in their murderous project. This, rather than the delusional talk by Western leftists about a secular democracy in Palestine, is what would eventuate should Hamas and its allies prevail.

Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist. Any glimmerings of dissent are dealt with ruthlessly. According to an Amnesty International report, Hamas has resorted to “strangling necks, abduction, torture and summary killings” of Palestinians it accuses of collaborating with Israel.

Some freedom! Contrast that with Israel, where Arab gays can live and celebrate in safety and security, and where Arab Muslims have the right to vote, to run for parliament, to engage in ordinary political activity, all rights denied to people everywhere else in the Arab world.

This is not to deny that Arabs in Israel have some legitimate grievances, especially in relation to settler activity on the West Bank, but there is some interesting recent polling data about how Israel’s non-Jewish population view their status.  According to one credible poll taken in 2020, 23 percent of non-Jewish residents of Israel identify as Israeli, 51 as Arab-Israeli, and only 7 percent as Palestinian.

A separate poll showed that a large (85 percent), and increasing, majority of non-Jews living in Israel “feel comfortable in Israel being themselves”, and 65 percent responded to the question “to what extent do you feel like a real Israeli” with either “a fair amount” or “very much.”

Given which, it seems unlikely that most Arab citizens of Israel are yearning to be “freed” from the Israeli yoke by Hamas and/or Hezbollah.

Source: https://jppi.org.il/en/index2020/

So how did we get to this point? The obvious response would be to point to the dominance of identity politics in academia and beyond, especially in fields like Critical Race Theory and Postcolonialism, the latter invoked to designate Israel as a “settler colonial” society.

But this does not seem to account for the sheer extremity of many pro-Palestinian activists. Why would people who identify as progressives back groups whose ideology is the complete antithesis of every cause they have spent years campaigning for in the realms of women’s rights, gay rights, and so on.

And in the name of “freedom”, to support groups with an unbroken track record of viciously repressing dissidents within their own communities, as Hamas has done during its control of Gaza? To gloss over or deny disturbing instances of harassment of visibly Jewish students on campuses around the Western world?

Moreover, it is one thing to claim that Israelis, like Australians, Americans and others, are settler colonialists who should acknowledge their debt to indigenous populations, notwithstanding that if any group has a claim to indigeneity in the land of Israel, it is the Jews, who occupied the territory for two millennia before the Arab conquests.

It is a huge further step, however, to assert that their settler-colonialist makes all Israeli civilians justified targets of the “armed resistance”, or at least like Judith Butler cited above to deny such attacks should be described as terrorism.

What is going on here? The British political theorist and activist Alan Johnson offers an intriguing hypothesis in an article titled Little Short of Lunatics: Post-Trotsky Trotskyism and the Radical Left’s Degenerate Response to 7 October that appeared in the June 2024 edition of the journal Fathom.

Johnson, himself a recovering Trotskyist, traces the movement’s ideological evolution in the decades following the murder of Trotsky by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in August 1940 as it, like other parts of the communist movement, tries to adapt to the manifest failure of hopes in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.

When we think of Trotskyism in Western countries, a multitude of tiny parties with negligible electoral support come to mind. Johnson argues, however, that it has been able to have a significant impact on the Left, through several channels of influence that he describes. Developments in the universities, and the emergence of pro-Palestinian movements throughout the Western world, have provided new opportunities for Trotskyist activists.

Johnson thinks Trotskyist parties have contributed significantly to the moral degeneration described above. Here is his summation:

There are several causes of this political degeneracy, including the influence of both Islamist and postmodern / identitarian ideas, but I focus here on the lesser-known role of the political tradition of ‘post-Trotsky Trotskyism’ and four bad ideas, which I label campism, unconditionality, reality-inversion and substitutionism, that have their source in that tradition, but which been flowing into the wider left through three channels.

In Australia, there is no doubt that several Trotskyist groups, especially Socialist Alternative, have been very effective on university campuses nationally. The large meeting of students at Sydney University that passed pro-Hamas motions and rejected any criticism of that terrorist entity was organized by the Students Representative Council, in which Socialist Alternative is now the largest faction. Moreover, the spokesman for the Palestine Action Group that was planning rallies on or around the first anniversary of the October 7 pogrom is a character called Josh Lees, is also a member of Socialist Alternative.

Alan Johnson’s article describes various channels of influence through which British Trotskyists have been able to influence and shape left-wing thinking, especially during the Corbyn ascendancy.

Johnson’s argument might seem like a long bow, but it is striking how some of the concepts he mentions do seem to recur in leftist discourse about Palestine.

Take what Johnson calls campism and unconditionality. Campism is the idea that the world can be crudely divided into two camps, the camp of Imperialism and the camp of the Revolution. Unconditionality is the idea that the camp of Revolution must be supported unconditionally “when and because it is in conflict with Imperialism whatever its own ideas or actions were.” This leads to an inversion of political reality, with the “seemingly reactionary being redefined as ‘objectively progressive’.”

Such nonsensical and obnoxious notions. But consider the resonance with Judith Butler’s defence (cited above) of her statement that Hamas and Hezbollah are part of the global progressive Left:

I was asked by a member of an academic audience a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and Hezbollah belonged to “the global Left" and I replied with two points. My first point was merely descriptive: those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left.

So, Butler thinks Hamas and Hezbollah are part of the global Left simply by virtue of their being anti-imperialist, notwithstanding their ultra-reactionary religious ideology and propensity to psychopathic violence.

How postmodern. How post-Trotsky Trotskyist.