Time to Throw the Intersectional Left Under the Bus!
The appalling terrorist attack by the appalling terrorist group Hamas, which slaughtered more than 1300 Israelis, 87 percent of whom were civilians, is the largest single day killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The response of America s intersectional left has also been appalling. As Sohrab Ahmari accurately noted in a Compact magazine article titled Woke Is Dying :
Many of those who spent the last few years promoting #Defund, intersectionality, and similar concepts refused to condemn Hamas s butchery that is, when they didn t celebrate it. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted, I Stand With Palestine, along with a picture of a paraglider, an allusion to how Hamas terrorists descended upon an outdoor party, murdering some 260 ravers. Yale American Studies professor Zareena Grewal declared: Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a Times Square rally at which murderers were hailed as liberators.
What is wrong with these people?
In my opinion, the rot goes very deep. This is not a one-off. Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it s effective or an argument by whether it s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.
This approach was always a terrible idea, in obvious contradiction to logic and common sense. But it has led much of the left and large sectors of the Democratic Party to take positions that have little purchase in social or political reality and are offensive to the basic values most people hold. The failure to unequivocally condemn the Hamas massacre as a crime against humanity is just the latest example of this intellectual and moral malignancy.
Ruy Teixeira.