Mick Hartley

Jake Wallis Simons in the Spectator:

Oppression has become the most desirable social bauble on the left. The influx of identity politics from the United States has caused British liberals to embrace a hierarchy of race-based victimhood. Those suffering from the disadvantage of whiteness, meanwhile, have devised a way to haul themselves up the pyramid by hitching their identity to one of a bewildering array of sexual minority groups. That is the cultural dynamic that has grown to dominate social assumptions in Britain. It has led to the Labour leadership, police officers and footballers taking the knee, even while many black people – and the American football team – do not. If you thought that was bad, now it has led to the bizarre state of affairs in which the more progressive you are, the more likely you are to support Hamas….

As I have explored in detail elsewhere, including in my book Israelophobia, from 1967 onwards, the Soviet Union pumped out huge volumes of propaganda aimed at undermining the Jewish state. Building on existing antisemitic tropes, it succeeded in presenting Israel as a colonial, white supremacist, racist state that practised ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Although none of this is true, it insinuated itself into the bloodstream of leftist politics in the west, and from there seeped into the mainstream. It also began to course heavily through the veins of the radical racial movement.

Fast forward to today and this blend of identity politics and hard-left ideology has been adopted as the new orthodoxy of the elites. It is enforced downwards upon the public from the very top of our institutions, from universities and the civil service to museums and advertising agencies in the form of rainbow lanyards, unconscious bias training and the zealous pursuit of ‘diversity’. It is also projected onto every social struggle, both at home and abroad. It is impossible, therefore, for devotees to view the Israel-Hamas conflict without donning the goggles of identity politics. Hence the drive to reimagine Hamas as Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

To make matters worse, the sound and fury that is unleashed towards Israel – which is always far more intense than that directed towards any other conflict, even those involving far worse human rights abuses – stems from the social justice movement’s problem with Jews.

Although they are persecuted for their race, Jews are perceived to hold malevolent and supernatural power over the financial markets, media and world affairs. Also, many of them appear to be white, troubling the simplicity of the radical worldview upon which the entire edifice of identity politics is constructed. The solution is to drain Jews of racial significance – think Whoopi Goldberg blathering that the Holocaust was ‘not about race’ because it involved ‘two groups of white people’. In fact, so powerful are the Jews in their minds that they have labelled them ‘hyper-white’. (In 2018, a man called Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Black Movement Center, said that attacks on Jews in Crown Heights was due not to antisemitism but ‘a form of almost hyper-whiteness’.)…

The desire to fashion Hamas in its own image is one of the most egregious expressions of the narcissism of the contemporary progressive movement today. So narcissistic is it, in fact, that it is insensible to its own absurdity. Do I need to mention Queers for Palestine and the fact that gays are pushed off roofs in Gaza? But in the context of radical leftism, turning a blind eye to the brutality of the supposed underdog is hardly a new idea. John Rees, a leading figure in both the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Workers Party, spelled it out in his book 30 years ago. ‘Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if [the oppressed] are undemocratic and persecute minorities, as Saddam Hussein persecutes Kurds and Castro persecutes gays,’ he wrote.

This toxic blend of modern racial and sexual politics and traditional hard-left ideology is one of the main explanations for the love affair between the progressive movement and Hamas. And it underlines why this poisonous dogma must be resisted in all its forms, wherever it raises its head. The culture wars are real. Pick a side.

Antisemitism is "punching up" – so not a problem in progressive circles.