Since October 7, talking to my family and Jewish friends, we feel buffeted by relentless hate and lies. Checking social media is like doom-scrolling through a never-ending ‘two minutes hate’ that has replaced Orwell’s Emmanual Goldstein with the state of Israel. At first I was shocked to find that ‘intersectional feminists’ and Hamas terrorists shared the same basic contorted version of history and framing of that black Sabbath. I was determined to understand why people I once called my friends justified rape, torture, and murder as ‘resistance’.
The coalition of the Islamist extremism of Hamas and the radical left in the West form a diabolical embrace – but this is not merely an alliance of convenience. It is a solidarity based out of a shared enmity for Israel and ‘the West’. A familiar pattern emerges, one not just of shared lies, or the twisting of facts, but a total inversion of reality underlying this moral bankruptcy. It is a chain of reality-reversal, patented by the Nazis, perfected by the Soviet Union, handed to Hamas the torch-bearers of al-Husseini’s Final Solution in the Middle East, and eventually reflected back by the radical left in the West.
A recent poll indicates that 50 per cent of 18-24-year-old Americans side with Hamas and that 67 per cent of the same cohort think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as such. Siding with Hamas appears to stem from the latter ideology – a moral inversion through the indoctrination of a false binary. This false oppressor/oppressed dichotomy offers a reassuringly simple narrative in the place of historical and political complexity. In Sydney, protesters chant, ‘From Gadigal to Gaza, long live the Intifada!’ and at the ‘Invasion Day’ rallies crowds yell, ‘Abolish the date, abolish the state!’ beneath Palestinian and Aboriginal flags. The killing of George Floyd along with Aboriginal deaths in custody are seen as analogous with the oppression of the Palestinians, who are all, in their view, victims of white supremacist settler-colonial states.
In 2021, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar told reporters that, ‘The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by Israel against the Palestinians.’ At first it seems astonishing that progressive media would platform such an individual, but once you realise they see them as brothers in arms in the struggle for decolonisation, it all makes a kind of demented sense. Tearing down posters of victims kidnapped by Hamas, shouting for intifada at a protest, or harassing Jews at university campuses is the new hazing ritual for the activist class. Their radicalisation is redolent of Mao’s Red Guards. Just as Palestinian children are force-fed a constant stream of hate-filled antisemitic propaganda in UNRWA-run schools and on local TV stations, teenagers in the West are being indoctrinated into an identitarian ideology that flattens history and morality, while unmooring them from reality. This provides a fertile substrate for extremist ideas to take root.
Just as news of Hamas’s deadly pogrom was beginning to surface, academics at prestigious Western universities leapt onto twitter to defend the attacks as legitimate resistance against a murderous, genocidal settler state – demonstrating Holocaust-inversion in real time. These academics defend terrorism as a defensive jihad analogous to Nazi propaganda that asserted Germany had a right to annihilate Jews in self-defence. When October 7 is denied, diminished, twisted, or justified we find it being re-written to frame the hostage-takers as humanitarians.
The aim is demoralisation. Alex Ryvchin perfectly explains this wicked tactic:
‘There is an old Jewish saying: the antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence. The rape deniers know women were raped, mutilated and tortured. They just don’t care. And they are enjoying seeing our wounded and violated people have to turn out our pockets to prove we’re not liars.’
One of the most influential voices in post-colonial studies, and mandatory reading in humanities departments, has been Marxist Frantz Fanon. Eli Lake calls him, the ‘oracle of decolonisation’. While Fanon did espouse the cleansing power of violence, Gaza is not analogous to Algeria in 1956 and some critics see this application of his ideas in this context as a misunderstanding. Nevertheless, students at an Australian university were outraged that a meeting called, ‘Palestine: the case for global intifada’ was banned, citing the hypocrisy of teaching Fanon while condemning activism in the spirit of his teaching.
Writing in Honi Soit, ‘The University tolerates us studying people like Fanon, just as long as students don’t apply his observations to the colonial oppression unfolding before our eyes. This is why we reject the relentless calls to ‘condemn Hamas’ which saturates mainstream politics. These calls are aimed at legitimising Israel’s occupation.’
Dan Diker explains that Islamic fundamentalist movements like Hamas have internalised the revolutionary ethos of the Marxist radical politics of their immediate political predecessors, such as the PFLP, asserting ‘Fanonian decolonisation was wedded to Islamic religious and historical symbols’. Thus Hamas’ mission speaks directly to radicals at Western universities because of a shared language, a monstrous synergy of Marxist identitarianism, and anti-Zionism.
The framing of Jihadist terror as decolonial resistance aims to obscure the explicit religious motivations behind Hamas violence. Hamas, in Article 27 of its (unrevoked) 1988 Charter, speaks of the PLO’s espousal of secular ideology as a product of the confusion caused by ‘Orientalism, Christian missionary activity and colonialism’. However, Hamas spokesmen, when talking to Western audiences, deliberately obfuscate their Islamist and genocidal aims, and have reframed their mission from one of jihad against ‘the Jews, the warmongers’ to the more palatable struggle ‘against the Zionist occupation’. The tactical ruse behind this revision for Western ears as encapsulated in the 2017 Hamas Charter was made explicit on October the 7th.
The enemies of Israel base the righteousness of their ‘defensive jihad’ on the ‘big lie’. The ‘big lie’ is an idea espoused by Hitler in Mein Kampf that a lie so audacious will not be refuted as easily as a small lie, and went on to form a basis of Nazi propaganda.
‘In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously…’
The ‘big lie’ in this case, a lie that underpins all the other lies of modern anti-Zionist rhetoric, is that Zionism is fascism and that Israelis and their supporters are Nazis. Zionism is the idea that led to the creation of the modern State of Israel – a nation for the Jewish people, seeking asylum in their ancestral homeland. Once celebrated by the left, it is now the very incarnation of evil. Despite initial Soviet support for the nascent Jewish state, once it was clear that Israel would be aligned with the West and capitalism it became the enemy of the USSR. Subsequently, the Jews’ fight for their survival against five Arab armies, determined on their annihilation, was recast as a colonialist endeavour of racial supremacy – independence contorted into imperialism. And in 1967, with the defeat of the Soviet Union’s proxies, Egypt, and Syria in the Six-Day War, the propaganda campaign was waged with new zeal.
Joel Fishman documents how the Komsomolskaya Pravda (the newspaper of the communist youth league) on October 4, 1967, declared that ‘Zionism is dedicated to genocide, racism, treachery, aggression, and annexation … all characteristic attributes of fascists’. In 1971, Vladimir Viktorovich Bolshakov wrote in Pravda, ‘The tragedy of Babi Yar will forever be a reminder not only of the monstrous barbarity of the Nazis but also of the indelible disgrace of their accomplices and followers – the Zionists.’ In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which designated that Zionism is a form of racism and ‘a threat to world peace and security’ and called upon all countries to oppose this ‘racist and imperialist settler ideology’. At the time, the United States Ambassador to the United Nation was Daniel Moynihan who warned ‘a great evil has been loosed upon the world’ and added that he would go on to call this slander the ‘big red lie’.
Hamas’ 1988 Charter refers to the ‘Nazism of the Jews’. This is antisemitism again on a totalitarian scale. It is an all encompassing inversion of reality where the aim of maligning and ultimately destroying the state of Israel eclipses all other goals. This inversion of reality, compressed into slogans, ‘Zionism is racism’ or ‘Zionism is fascism’ are ready for viral memetic transmission in a form of Soviet ‘doublespeak’ whereby racism has acquired a new meaning and Jew-hatred is transmuted into a virtue.
Through the eloquence of Edward Said and his The Question of Palestine, the plight of the dispossessed and oppressed Palestinians was translated for Western intelligentsia into the language of nascent identity politics. Zionism was deconstructed and the idea of Israel as a white colonial state then became the founding myth of the budding field of post-colonial studies.
While it is important to acknowledge past dispossession and contemporary oppression and settler violence in the West Bank, the reduction of the entire state of Israel to a form of ‘white settler colonialism’ is ahistorical. In contrast to European settler-colonial projects such as America and Australia, the modern Zionist movement did not set out to subjugate an existing population or exploit resources to enrich a mother country. This is made plain by the Jews’ acceptance of the 1947 United Nations partition plan which would have established an Arab independent state alongside a Jewish state. The Zionists said yes, while the Arabs, ideologically opposed to a Jewish state, said no and waged war. Calling Jews ‘white’ disregards centuries of persecution for the crime of being not-white and alien that culminated in their extermination in the Nazi death camps. It also erases Mizrahi (who make up a majority of Israeli Jews and were persecuted and uprooted from Muslim lands) and continual Jewish presence in Israel. It is a perfect display of the protean nature of antisemitism that once being ‘white’ fell from a sign of perceived superiority to a mark of shameful ‘privilege’, the Jew was reclassified. Historically, Jews were persecuted for being alien ‘semitic’ imposters and told to ‘go back to the holy land’, and now modern anti-Zionists claim that Jewish Israelis are white Europeans imposters and swindlers stealing Palestinian land. By flattening the world into a one-dimensional dichotomy of the oppressed and their oppressors, or white and coloured, Woke identitarianism again finds the world’s Jews as unwelcome outsiders.
Doublespeak and Holy War
Like Pro-Palestinian activists who exploit token anti-Zionist Jews as ‘beards’ for their antisemitism, the resurgent Jew hatred uses the lexicon of decolonisation and neo-Marxist identitarianism as a camouflage and shield.
This strategy pivots on certain phrases or words having two meanings, a form of ‘doublespeak’. When protesters chant ‘Free Palestine!’ or ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’ they employ a type of doublespeak common to Woke discourse called a motte-and-bailey strategy. A motte-and-bailey is a type of castle, with a ‘bailey’ or courtyard where people typically reside even though it is vulnerable to attack, and a ‘motte’ being a defensible but uninhabitable fortification that the people can retreat to at need if under attack.
Who could be against freeing Palestine, a seemingly benign and easily defendable idea of liberation? This is the motte. The bailey, is their true meaning understood by initiates. Cynthia Farahat explains that the Muslim Brotherhood (whose Gazan branch is Hamas) uses ‘coded Islamist language’ to veil their true intentions, such as the word freedom, which they use to mean ‘freedom from transgressions against the Shari’a’ (Islamic Law). Hamas calls for the ‘full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea’. When questioned about what ‘from the river to the sea’ means, activists retreat to the easily defensible position of ‘an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate’. However, when pressed about what a ‘Free Palestine’ looks like or entails, activists invariably end up confirming their rejection of Israel’s right to exist, reject the Oslo Accords, and call for the destruction of Israel and for the Jews to ‘disappear’. Fulfilling the pledge made by the head of the Muslim Brotherhood Sheikh Hassan el-Bana, in 1948, ‘If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realised by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea.’
For those determined on the complete abolition of the state of Israel ‘Free Palestine’ is at best, a fanciful vision of a single-state solution where Jews will no longer be able to protect themselves from the terrorists who paraded the mangled bodies of women and the crowds that cheered them on. This idealism completely ignores the reality that Jihadist Jew-hatred is the biggest obstacle to peace. Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub articulated this in 2009:
‘Your belief regarding the Jews should be, first, that they are infidels, and second, that they are enemies. They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing. Allah said: ‘You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the disbelievers [sic] to be the Jews and the polytheists.’ Third, you must believe that the Jews will never stop fighting and killing us. They [fight] not for the sake of land and security, as they claim, but for the sake of their religion […] We must believe that our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle – and this is the fourth point. You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.’
ISIS in recent days has called its supporters around the world to kill Jews wherever they find them, and Islamic religious scholars have issued fatwas to kill Jews around the world. In Australia, Hamas sympathisers have preached that ‘Jihad is the solution’. When masked radicals on the streets call for Jihad, they obfuscate their intent by retreating to a more defensible interpretation of the word as ‘inner struggle’, and even the London police have refused to arrest chanters, with the defence that the ‘phrase could have a number of meanings’.
The disgusting and dehumanising rhetoric of some Israeli leaders also needs to be condemned. For instance, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, who suggested that Israel drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and said there were ‘no uninvolved civilians’ in the enclave. Hopefully the footage of brave Gazans protesting Hamas and calling out both Sinwar and Netanyahu that have surfaced in recent days, and carrying signs saying ‘yes to handing over the hostages’ prove that there are indeed innocent Gazans who desperately want peace. It is startling that while Gazans are risking their lives to march against Hamas, a world away mobs chant ceaselessly ‘Intifada! Intifada!’ and hostages remain unmentionable propaganda ‘legitimising genocide’.
As Hamas hides in tunnels and behind children, extremists in our midst hide behind words like ‘freedom’ and ‘resistance’ to obfuscate their violent and often antisemitic agenda. The destabilisation of the Western psyche, and increasing polarisation – through this writhing tumult of propaganda whether all part of an anti-Western coalition’s plan, or just a diabolical consequence, will ultimately play into the hands of the jihadist terrorists and all who wish for the destruction of liberal democracies and Western Civilisation.
Unquestionably, the ultimate aim of Hamas is to establish a global Islamist Caliphate, with Jerusalem as its capital, happily expending the lives of Gazans to this end. Extremist ideologues and religious zealots alike are peddling in hate; their irreconcilable narratives make peace impossible. In this current battle, started by Hamas, where the aims are a political and not military victory, the importance of the rhetoric wielded cannot be overstated.
