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How Do We Reach Such People?
The depravity of Hamas is shocking but not surprising. The kneejerk supportive reaction of many Muslims, even many American Muslims, is also not surprising given the structural resistance within that creed for critical introspection. However, the number of non-Muslim Westerners who cheered the Hamas atrocities—and the intensity of that support–was a shocking and terrifying surprise. Affirming intentionally inhumane behavior is not a matter of ideological or geopolitical disagreement, nor in the case of non-Muslim American college kids, was it a function of defensive religious partisanship. Such people are characterologically and cognitively deformed. How can Americans get that way?
Could this really be merely the result of the bumper-sticker level of dialog on college campuses with its dogmatic categories based on race, sexual “identity” definitions of the moment, epithets of “denier,” “hater” or “____phobic” hurled at dissidents?
The one-size-fits-all category of oppressor/victim informed the dubious ideas that those who burned cities and injured people after the death of George Floyd should not be held culpable and that incarceration for violent minority offenders is unjust regardless of legal and factual guilt or innocence. But can it really cause people to approve the dismemberment of babies, rape, torture, and murder?
George Orwell pondered the effect of dumbing down language in Politics and the English Language:
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
What we are witnessing is not merely the depressing fact that younger Americans have absorbed some bad ideological content but that their mode of thinking and knowing itself appears to have been significantly damaged. What do you do with people who are being conditioned to become immune to natural human inclinations, common sense, evidence, logic, or original thought?
The sheer insanity of LGBTQ+ support for Hamas, or #MeToo devotees cheering rapists and misogyny, makes sense only if truth and justice are nothing more than allegiance to the workings of The Narrative in the moment. Resisting oppressors is justice and intersectional analysis denies or postpones even the most obvious conflicts of interest. That’s nuts.
The bumper-sticker thought processes of the woke seem to be the natural excretions of spectacularly vapid habits of mind as found in the works of prominent word salad emitters as if to validate Orwell’s notion that bad language and defective thought are both cause and effect. First, here is a sample of ethical deep thoughts from the incomparable Judith Butler:
[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance–to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.
So there, Kant, Aristotle, Maimonides, and Mill– take that! (Extra credit for diagramming the second sentence in the sample above.) Clarity in wokedom is reserved for politically useful artificial categories and identification of enemies. If in pursuing ethical inquiry, we were to make the mistake of thinking of ourselves as individuals expected to act on a well-informed conscience ready to work through even grey areas and nuance, then Robin DiAngelo is on the spot to push us each back into our assigned roles and race-defined categories:
Being good or bad is not relevant. Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture. All of us are socialized into the system of racism. Racism cannot be avoided. Whites have blind spots on racism, and I have blind spots on racism. Racism is complex, and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback. Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. Bias is implicit and unconscious.
Like mental patients who have constructed defenses against whatever intrusive realities might threaten the carefully crafted fictional world, we have a growing mass of malignant loons reinforcing each other’s delusion in a sea of stupid filled with linguistic garbage. There is growing evidence that the woke are less happy and more likely to report mental disorders (especially young left-leaning women). Does that make them more or less amenable to a new outlook? How do we roll back the rise of insanity and militant incompetence to be able to reach and rescue such people? Do we need a new language that provides both therapy and apostolate? Are we looking at a moment of momentous opportunity for uplifting reforms or the brink of despair?
Published in General
I too prefer a broad that’s built, not socially constructed.
How many of those demonstrators would say they were there to support Hamas and how many would say they were there to support Palestinians? The first step to reaching people is to hear what they are actually saying. jmho.
The U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1997. The 1988 charter of Hamas called for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic society in historic Palestine. The Arabs in the Gaza Strip elected Hamas knowing full well what the organization was and its aims.
ETA: But you know all this, Zafar.
Entirely related.
It’s hard to hear what they’re saying over the screams of Hamas’ victims and the wailing of their families. Maybe now’s not the best time to argue for Palestinian sovereignty. Simple condemnation of Hamas’ barbarity without a “but…” appended would make future pleas for the Palestinians more effective, imho.
A neighbor enquired of me: “As a lifelong pacifist, do I have to choose a side?”
And I said “yes.”
Note, here, that I hadn’t asked him to punch anyone. Only to convey some sympathy and solidarity with Jews (not Israelis, mind, just Jews) in our own, small community, neighbors and friends whose pain and fear had been met with an awkward, eerie silence.
He is a kind man. But that silence! And the irritated reaction to the suggestion that he might share some of that kindness towards Jews—is telling.
Want to know something really sad? I remember having a “conversation” with one my Rico-friends in which I declared myself completely willing to host him and his family, should some anti-semitic pogrom break out in his locality. I don’t doubt my own willingness to help, but I know that when I made that offer, I was picturing my little community as a safe, welcoming place, one where innocent people would be defended.
It is uncomfortable, to put it mildly, to find myself wondering, in the silence, whether I can still believe this?
Especially since sovereign Palestinians elected Hamas.
I know what you mean. A young man of my acquaintance recently repeated the “open-air prison” shibboleth, as well as “the Jews killed Christ.” He’s very conservative for his age. I was shocked.
I don’t know that it would. People seem pretty stuck in their views.
As for condemning without a but. How much sympathy for Palestinian civilian casualties have you seen expressed on Ricochet without a version of ‘but it’s their fault’ tacked on the end?
It’s sad, but that’s how we all seem to approach this stuff.
How many demonstrators say that the atrocities were unacceptable, that they understand that an Israeli response is unavoidable, urge Palestinians to eschew support for terrorism and express the hope that this message is so widely accepted and shared such that Israelis will feel less threatened and less inclined to inflict damage?
At the present time, the Palestinian flag and “from the river to the sea” are seen correctly as an unambiguous endorsement of the Oct 7 horror show precisely because there is zero effort by Palestinians and their supporters to make any such distinction and so many who expressly endorsed the abomination.
To expect much less demand that the rest of us “listen” to what they are “really”saying and pretend to hear an innocuous alternative message is absurd.
That’s what happens in war. And you know, you absolutely do know, that Hamas deliberately locates its headquarters, command centers, rocket launch sites, munitions dumps, etc., in or next to civilian buildings. That includes hospitals, mosques, office buildings, refugee camps, and so on. It. Is. Deliberate.
The frogs are supposed to “listen” to the scorpions who want free taxi rides: This time the scorpions won’t sting. Really. They promise.
But will they spawn before going extinct? Studies have been done showing women would prefer strong, masculine men as mates, but what are they being offered? Man-bun wearing, thin, pale, weak echoes of maleness. Seems the weaker the men become, the more strident, shrill, violent, the females become…
Yes, excellent! Thanks for posting.
Irresponsibility — a lack of (moral) agency — is the ideological water we’re swimming in. Hamas leaders say it — “no one should blame us for what we do.” Because, you see, it’s all the fault of the Jews. (take note Zafar).
BLM and antifa are excused because of “white supremacy.” I’ve noted before that this started when I was a kid — academic excellence was “acting white.”
This is all very intentional on the part of the Left, since people taught to resent and envy — people who adopt the victim mentality — will excuse every evil they commit as being someone else’s fault. They become the revolutionaries. The destroyers of all objective values.
We’re at the end of our civilizational cycle. Bishop Barron explicates the situation beautifully, if tragically. “You will be as gods” was the false promise leading to The Fall, and our civilization has fallen for it.
What part of “Glory to the Martyrs” do you not understand?
Indeed. When people are celebrating the rape of babies, by marching and chanting for genocide, there is nothing left to discuss.
Do you really want to reach people who don’t already agree with you?
We see a lot of that, actually.
As opposed to all the fault of the Muslims?
Way to go!
Seems relevant to a number of conversations we’re having here:
https://x.com/RitchieTorres/status/1719856894032875796?s=20
Hamas’s actions are Hamas’s fault and no one else’s. They brought on the Israeli response and they use their own people as shields, so civilian casualties in the conflict are their fault too. The failure to condemn them for the atrocities they commit and to make excuses — occupation, displacement, apartheid, open-air prison, etc., etc. — is the moral indifferentism Bishop Barron addresses. A sensible and morally coherent response is to — at minimum — condemn the rape, torture, and beheading of women and children. That so many are incapable of making that judgment call and, indeed, glorifying the atrocities, signals the end of all civility. And it’s your side — the Left — which has “accomplished” the upending of western (objective) values.
Wa-a-ay back when the motto on my blog was “Freedom is wasted on him who will not work to make others free.” Later I changed it to “If history has taught us anything, it is this: the surest way to change a man’s mind is with a rock.”
YMMV.
Thank you.
Now tell me why criticism of Israel’s actions or policies is only and always blaming everything on The Joos.
Also, Ben Franklin: “Experience keeps a hard school, but fools will learn in no other.”
I don’t know who this Judith Butler is, either, but she must be teaching at one of our elite universities.
What they are saying is “Let’s kill all the Jews.”
I don’t think most of the dead or wounded Palestinian civilians are directly to blame for Hamas actions. Many (though as you point out, we don’t know how many) are indirectly to blame in the sense that they contributed to the general antiSemitism and voted for/support (or at least get out of the way) of Hamas launching rockets, etc.
In any case, no civilian deserves to die in a war. Most civilized people agree on this.
Just not Hamas.
The ethos(es) of the region are the fault of all concerned, to one degree or another.
The deaths in Israel were the fault of one nation. Period.
Would there be an invasion into Gaza from the Israelis if Hamas didn’t attack?
Radical feminist Marxist queer theorist moonbat. Opposes the existence of Israel. Supports Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. Opposes the institution of marriage. (And a professor of literature, unsurprisingly.)
Well, when you criticize Israel for defending itself from murderous enemies…