Like most people you’ve probably been wondering how so many, particularly on college campuses, are supporting the Hamas baby-killers and hostage-takers instead of the victim Israelis. Writing for RealClearPolitics, Richard Samuelson does an excellent job of explaining how this comes about. Here are a couple of his key points, but you should really read his whole column.
When a member of one protected class discriminates against another or endorses bigotry against another, it threatens to undermine the larger framework according to which “oppressors” are always, essentially, Bull Connor. It would undermine the DEI approach to civil rights law enforcement that focuses upon cases of individual discrimination rather than upon the large push to transform racial power disparities. That’s why the civil rights ideology seized upon the idea of “intersectionality” – the recognition that a given person might be oppressed from more than one angle (African American, Asian, Hispanic, female, lesbian, trans, etc.). In any given situation who is to be protected? Presumably, it’s the person with the most intersectional points, as if that’s a rationale way to organize a society – or could ever be an objective scale.
The idea that Palestinians can be moral monsters is in and of itself an idea at war with the woke view of progress. The reason Jews ceased to be treated as minorities – that is to say, as people who can be on the wrong side of discrimination and oppression – is because Jews are doing so well in the post-Holocaust world. (A parallel process is happening to Asian Americans today.) As the Palestinians check off more oppression boxes than Jews, it must be the case that Hamas, and the people who voted them into power, cannot be responsible for crimes against humanity, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary.
People will go to extreme lengths to protect and defend an ideology to which they are committed, and “woke” is one such ideology.
