As they witness the bloodless cynicism of the social-justice Left, the anti-Ukraine Right should hear how they’ve always sounded to the rest of us.
A feature of antisemitism from time immemorial has been to ascribe the acts of violent bigots to the objects of their hatred. So, when Jews are targeted with acts of violence, those attacks perversely but predictably inspire even more acts of violence against Jews. And just as the sun rises in the east, the 10/7 massacre has precipitated a wave of attacks on Jews all over the world. That street-level thuggery is either justified or rationalized away by those in possession of the same hatreds but higher offices.
Today, the educated and affluent gleefully tear down images of young Israeli children in the captivity of the people who murdered their friends and families. When the vandals are made to explain themselves, they erect elaborate excuses that portray terrorism as the product of a variety of historical grievances — that is, when they don’t insist that we’ve been sold a bill of goods about the 10/7 massacre. Advocates of supposed social justice apply equally chauvinistic and nonsensical heuristics to the conflict in the Middle East, equating Israelis with American slaveholders and the Gazan people who’ve lived on entirely unoccupied land since 2005 as their “field hands.” They mute the severity of the atrocities Hamas has committed or deny them — or, if they deign to acknowledge our shared reality, they insist that Americans should not come to Israel’s assistance. After all, we have our own problems at home to deal with.
To their credit, Republicans have generally responded to these displays of grotesque inhumanity with revulsion. Thankfully, the GOP’s elected officials all but universally recognize what our enemies in the region clearly understand — that Israel’s geopolitical interests and America’s are aligned. And even if they’re inclined toward a parochial belief that America’s resources should be spent exclusively inside its own borders, Republican elected officials and rank-and-file voters alike refuse to countenance the moral equivalencies deployed by Israel’s detractors to justify the slaughter of innocents.
Republicans would do well to keep all this in mind the next time they encounter arguments in favor of abandoning Ukraine to Russia amid Moscow’s war of conquest and subjugation. If Republicans think the social-justice Left sounds callous and utterly indifferent to human suffering when it excuses Hamas’s bloodletting, how to do they think it sounds to the 1 million Ukrainians in America, their descendants, and their supporters when the Right engages in a similar enterprise?
When those Americans hear people like Tucker Carlson insisting that Vladimir Putin isn’t so bad because he hasn’t called the former Fox News host a “racist,” isn’t trying to “snuff out Christianity,” and doesn’t “eat dogs,” how do those Americans react? When Senator J. D. Vance says he doesn’t “care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” and when he and his ideological compatriots attribute American sympathy to a conspiracy “from our idiot leaders” designed to “distract us from our actual problems,” do they not sound similar to the Hamasniks who attribute Washington’s support for Israel to the insidious machinations of global Jewry? When the Right insists that America’s support for the aspirations of the former Warsaw Pact members who acceded to NATO membership provoked Russia to (twice) invade Ukraine, do they not realize that they sound precisely like the so-called realists who insist that it is only because America supports Israel that terrorists engage in spectacular butchery like the one we witnessed on 10/7?
The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are distinct in many ways, though they are linked by the strategic interest both Russia and Hamas’s Iranian sponsors have in diminishing the United States by taking its allies and partners off the global chessboard. In tactical terms, however, the methods deployed against Israelis and Ukrainians are stomach-churningly similar.
Hamas executed Israeli civilians summarily and en masse. So, too, were Ukrainian civilians shot in the back, their corpses left to rot in the open air or in mass graves. Israeli women were savaged, brutalized, and raped by their abusers. Ukrainian women, too, have been subjected to that same dehumanizing torture. Israeli bodies have been desecrated posthumously, as were those of Ukrainians who were killed fighting against Russia’s attempt to erase their very national identity from the human tapestry. And just as Hamas has taken children captive to advance the terror group’s strategic interests, Ukrainian children languish in Russian camps to which they’ve been absconded. There, these kids are undergoing a campaign of reeducation designed to erase the memories imparted to them by their parents and grandparents.
At the very least, decency demands that Republicans not talk about Russia’s war in Europe like the social-justice Left discusses the terror meted out against Israelis — reducing it to an academic exercise so its victims can be rendered abstractions and its perpetrators the justified executors of history’s verdict. Of course, not all the Right’s Ukraine skeptics talk about the conflict in Europe in these terms, but too many do. For them, Ukraine’s war of national survival is little more than fodder in their unending domestic culture war — the “current thing” about which only the myopic and mesmerized care. They mistake bloodless cynicism for wisdom. Maybe now that the social-justice Left has assumed a similar posture, the anti-Ukraine Right can hear how they’ve always sounded to the rest of us.