National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty said on Friday’s episode of The Editors that the response by sympathizers in the West to Hamas’s atrocities reflects a twisted worldview — and one that’s being taught in colleges and universities.
“Somehow,” Dougherty said, “our young people can’t distinguish between that which is a real genocidal impulse being acted out, and Israel defending itself with walls or with [the] Iron Dome [or] with trying to get diplomatic cover to destroy Hamas, which it’s targeting specifically.”
Dougherty made the point that “it is astonishing that the normal moral categories are totally blurred. You can go on Twitter now. You can search for video and audio of the massacre on October 7 in which fighters are calling their parents — one fighter in particular, I’ll never forget it — calling his parents back in Gaza and saying ‘I’ve killed ten Jews with my own hands. Their blood is on my hands. I’ve killed ten Jews.’ He’s not saying, ‘I’ve killed ten soldiers.’ ‘I’ve killed ten Israelis.’ ‘I’ve killed ten Jews.’”
Dougherty argued that one important factor is that academic literature “is being used to teach young people that Israelis are just whites. And white is basically reduced in . . . the pages of Ta-Nehisi Coates into a devil-kind of figure. . . . It is a political construct that justifies oppression for its own sake.”
Even some Jewish Americans have fallen victim to this mindset; Dougherty said he “saw a viral TikTok from a young American-Jewish woman saying she was raised by Zionists, but she knows that Israel is a colonialist state. And then she spins out this conspiracy theory that the British and the Americans decided after World War II just to put Israel there to do their own military labor in harassing brown peoples after World War II.”
He continued, “This kind of ignorant trash is everywhere. But like I said in the previous Editors, it is fundamentally serving a purpose, which is this patricidal impulse in Western culture, that the only way we’re going to get to freedom is by destroying ourselves and destroying what was handed on to us. And for that, the kind of all-consuming, violent jihadism preached by Hamas is a natural ally.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.