Yascha Mounk on Hamas and idenniny:

…the reaction to the worst murder of Jews since the end of the Second World War has continued to range from oddly muted to openly celebratory. Reacting to Hamas’s massacre in its immediate aftermath, Rivkah Brown, an editor at Novara Media, wrote that “today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide”. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter sent out an invitation to a solidarity rally with Palestine that featured a picture of the Hamas fighters on paramotors who murdered over 250 people at a music festival.

During the following weeks, hundreds of prominent artists and writers, actors, academics and medical professionals, including Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan, signed open letters in publications such as Artforum and the London Review of Books. Virtually all singled out Israel for criticism without bothering to condemn Hamas or calling for the release of the 200 hostages the group still holds.

The reasons are several and complicated, he says, but one stands out.

It is rooted in the rise of a new ideology that insists on seeing the world through the prism of simplistic identity categories. And it now gives many people a highfalutin excuse to indulge in their basest human instincts even as they claim to fight against injustice.

Simplistic identity categories, but not all simplistic identity categories. Jews need not apply, nor need women.

By the summer of 2020, a vulgarised version of what I call the “identity synthesis”, most prominently championed by the bestselling authors Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi, was being parroted by senior politicians and the chief executives of major companies, by directors of the world’s most renowned cultural institutions and in the pages of its most widely read publications.

…

The “identity synthesis” claims that the key to understanding the world is to examine it through the prism of group identities such as race, gender and sexual orientation. It argues that supposedly universal values and neutral rules — like those at the core of liberal democracies — serve to obscure the ways in which privileged groups dominate those that are marginalised. This explains why we have (supposedly) failed to make any progress in the fight against racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. And it concludes that the only way to build a better world is to adopt norms and laws that explicitly make the way the state treats each citizen — and the way citizens treat each other — depend on the identity groups to which they belong.

…

Four common themes of modern-day social justice movements are particularly important. First, many activists now seem to believe that the world can be split into two clear categories: white people and “people of colour”…

Second, the world can simultaneously be split into another set of categories, which theoretically differ from but in practice overlap with those of race: settlers and their victims…

Third, we need to dispense with traditional notions of racism…many activists have gone a step further, supplanting the older concept of racism with one that is exclusively structural in nature. Since racism has nothing at all to do with individual beliefs, they maintain, it is impossible for members of a (supposedly) marginalised group to be racist towards members of a (supposedly) dominant group…

Fourth and finally, all forms of oppression are connected. 

Aka “intersectionality.”

Over recent weeks, these four ideological building blocks have been pressed into the service of discounting the suffering of Jewish civilians. According to the global left, Jews are white. Israel is a European settler colony repeating the crimes once committed by Americans and Australians. Since Palestinians are people of colour who have suffered settler colonialism, they are incapable of being racist and are justified in inflicting any amount of suffering on their oppressors. And if you want to be a good feminist or environmentalist — or merely an artist or academic in good standing with the juste milieu — it is your duty to sign an open letter, join a solidarity rally and make common cause with a theocratic terrorist group that happens to be diametrically opposed to every value you claim to cherish.

See also: Charlie Hebdo. See also: some of the reactions to Does God Hate Women?

The same loss of common sense is evident in the claim that all forms of oppression are interrelated. Even if this mantra is repeated ad nauseam, it cannot succeed in beating a stubbornly messy reality into submission. No matter how often activists continue to profess their belief that such causes as gay liberation and reproductive rights go hand-in-hand with the Palestinian cause, Hamas remains implacably opposed to both. Yet when reality does not comply with one’s wishes, there’s always the option to look the other way.

But, oddly enough, not to emigrate to Afghanistan. I wonder why not.