Friday will be the thousandth day since jihadis massacred 1,200 people in Israel. Which means we’ve been wrestling for about 999 days with the appalling fact that the pogroms increased support for Hamas and the other terrorists instead of revolting and alienating world opinion.
The jihadis tortured and mutilated their victims, raped and murdered them, burned and starved them, and forced them to watch as they inflicted their horrors on their mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, grandparents and babies. The fact that such evil would draw rather than repel millions of people seems, on the surface, inexplicable.
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Yet the killers of Oct. 7, 2023, knew it would happen. They calculated that visual evidence of their depravities would stoke enthusiasm. The rest of us should have known this, too. After all, we saw it happen only a decade earlier when young Westerners abandoned their home countries to join the Islamic State after seeing video of those black-clad executioners slit the throats, decapitate, and burn their caged victims alive.
So 1,000 days ago in Israel, the marauders strapped on cameras, recorded every atrocity, and uploaded the video for global viewing on the internet. They wanted the world to see. They knew it would not be only proud parents back in Gaza who’d swell with pride. It would be millions of others around the planet.
By Oct. 8, a Jew-hating subculture that had previously been underground emerged from tunnels beneath Western civilization to celebrate the barbarities we’d all just witnessed. They blamed Israel, they insisted rape was resistance, and they beat and intimidated fellow countrymen in America who happened to be Jews. They were not protesting Zionism or other policies, as they claimed. They were giving free, gleeful rein amid the madness of crowds, to a vile and visceral hatred.
This hatred is engulfing much of what we used to know as leftism. It explains why radical candidates lost in Democratic congressional primaries last week to other radical candidates. The difference and winning margin between the two was that the losers didn’t reject Israel’s right to exist and wouldn’t voice antisemitic hatred the way the victors did.
Subscribing to the lie that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is a litmus test. If you won’t say it, you’re an enemy of the Left. Or you’re a traitor to it, as Scott Wiener found out last weekend. Wiener is a radical transgender and pedophile activist running for Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) soon-to-be vacant seat in Congress, and he was barracked at a pride rally and accosted in a restaurant for being “terrible on Gaza.” For years, he has aced the old litmus tests of the LGBT left, but he’s Jewish, not jihadi, so now he’s unacceptable.
What is happening? Why has support for Israel’s murderous enemies grown despite their appalling crimes? This touches the heart of the matter but is the wrong question. Support for jihadi terrorism is burgeoning, not despite its atrocities but because of them. Nothing satisfies the Left’s craving for the rejection of norms quite so completely as orgiastic violence.
Left-wingers can always give you a rationale for their latest cause, but that’s often merely an intellectual cover for tribalism and a gut feeling. They will happily move on from one to the next cause without a backward glance because they are less concerned with the details of their causes than they are with the act of rebellion itself. They are gripped by a mindset of rejectionism. They would not admit this, but their frame of mind is captured by the words of the 1970s Sex Pistols’ hit “Anarchy in the UK” — “Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.”
They want the overthrow of everything normal, reasonable, accepted, and decent. People gripped by this monomania want to display their rejectionism as starkly as they can. The medium, shock itself, is the message.
That being so, focusing on the things they’ve been rejecting for years or decades isn’t enough anymore. The craving for radicalism is like a drug addiction — the more it’s indulged, the stronger it gets.
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Marriage, family, civility, good manners, civic responsibility, religious practice, freedom, markets, entrepreneurism, limits on sexual adventure and sexual predation — anything that works and produces happiness and prosperity has been attacked for so long that rejecting it has lost its frisson of excitement.
Terrorism involving murder, torture, beheadings, and the fervent desire to exterminate an entire race and civilization? Now, there is something that a really dedicated militant can sink his teeth into! It provides depravity at a sufficiently strong dosage that it can still give an extremist a buzz. How better to display the zeal and perfection of rejectionism than by glorying in the most evil excesses available to the imagination?
