City Journal June 3, 2025 I don’t need to speak Hebrew or Arabic to recognize this domestic movement as an enemy.
It’s enough to read its literature and observe its supporters’ actions to see that it embodies the forces of barbarism — forces that, if left unchecked, would tear down the pillars of civilization both abroad and at home.
I don’t need to have visited Israel or the Gaza Strip to grasp the basic analogy driving this activism: Palestinians are to Israel as the Left is to America. In the Left’s narrative, Israel stands in for the American empire, and Jews represent the white oppressors the Left seeks to overthrow.
The academic Left views Hamas as heroic resistance fighters battling a technologically superior but morally bankrupt enemy — just as they see themselves as intellectual insurgents resisting capitalism and systemic oppression in the U.S. Campus activists celebrated the October 7 paragliders because Hamas achieved in practice what they can only imagine in theory.
The bloodshed offered emotional release — a euphoric political moment that made their ideology feel real.
