Normalizing Atrocities Landmarks of shame. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/normalizing-atrocities/
Hamas’ orgy of rape, murder, and callous, indiscriminate cruelty such as mutilation, torture, burning alive, and beheadings that began last October 7 and is continuing almost a year later, marks an escalation extreme even by the standards of that blood-stained region. Morally horrific have been the “protests” on prestigious U.S. university campuses, abetted by simpatico, or cowardly, professors and administrators. These riotous displays also feature property damage, record-breaking assaults against Jews, and chants explicitly or implicitly calling for another Holocaust, and celebrating the Nazis’ Final Solution.
Yet another landmark of shame has been the covert and overt support for Hamas by European governments and the E.U., including America’s president who for electoral gain poisoned the materiel support given to Israel, and is still pressuring Israel’s government to come to an agreement with genocidal murderers, instead of destroying them and degrading their capacity to slaughter more innocent Israeli citizens.
What the West has done is to normalize unspeakable atrocities, and legitimize blatant antisemitism that in the postwar period used to be a hatred mainly typical of marginalized political freaks. How does that transformation––from a widely proscribed and condemned hatred, to one exuberantly flaunted during protests, and legitimize by government policies––happen? And what has to change to put such beliefs back into the realm of cranks and conspiracy mongers?
The first question has a general answer found in humanity’s universal practice of dehumanizing enemies. Historically, human beings’ default stance toward strangers and those different from one’s tribe is distrust and dislike, if not hatred. The idea of our elite’s “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism arose in ancient Greece, but parochial loyalties and hatreds remained powerful in Greek poleis. The tendency to prefer those like ourselves, whether culturally, politically, ideologically, or ethnically, is particularly obvious today in political factions, and ideological identity politics. Like James Madison’s “factions,” this tendency is “sown in the nature of man.”
A byproduct of this sorting is some level of dehumanization. In a relatively peaceful society such as ours today, the “other” is typically identified linguistically by insulting or demeaning epithets, on the left many of them compounds sporting the suffix “-phobic.” Sometimes metaphors using animals or insects make the dehumanization explicit. All such insults, however, don’t necessarily lead to mass murder or other atrocities. Pace wannabe censors, words are not violence. But heinous actions by definition are, and such crimes invariably call on a catalogue of dehumanizing epithets.
The pro-Hamas protests and display of support, however, are extreme even by the standards of advocacy apparent during the antiwar protests in the Sixties or during the post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, antiwar activists, many of them Marxists, did give aid and comfort to the enemy, lied about the actions of our troops, and worked to discredit the war in the minds of voters and Congressmen.
In the case of Vietnam, it worked. President Nixon’s bombing of the North’s attempted offensives, by 1973 had brought the North to the bargaining table. But snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and bullied by antiwar protests, our government abandoned our South Vietnam allies in a humiliating retreat from Saigon.
But all the violent protests and bombings against America’s war in Vietnam, costly as they were, never reached the level of moral idiocy we’ve seen among mostly affluent, privileged college students protesting U.S. support of Israel, despite Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and its atrocities committed against its people, including mass rapes, and willful targeting of children, infants, and the elderly.
The general dehumanization of an enemy during a conflict can’t account for enormity of this moral debasement of our universities. One factor, which the media and government tip-toe around ever since 9/11, is the large number of Muslim foreign students among the protestors, most from the Middle East.
As such, these likely devout students have a very different set of beliefs than American students, who are most likely unchurched. Even self-identified Christians are not as religiously observant as Muslims. As the late Bernard Lewis pointed out, “most Islamic countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian . . . in no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders count on the degree of belief and participation that remain normal in Muslim lands . . . Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority that is still normal and acceptable in most Muslim countries.”
These Muslim protestors, then, likely view the Israeli-Arab conflict not in terms of geopolitics and secular nation-states, but of creed. This fact explains why the diplomatic magical thinking of the “two states living side-by-side in peace” solution has for decades failed serially to end the conflict. Rather, most Muslims understand the war in creedal terms, and particularly the 14 centuries of Islamic doctrines.
Over the nearly eight decades since the birth of Israel, moreover, traditionalist Muslims’ perceptions and understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict have been shaped by the Koran, the uncreated, immutable, infallible words of Allah; and by other Islamic writings, of which, I’d wager, most American students marching and chanting have little or no inkling.
More consequential, antisemitism is a constant theme of Islamic scripture and jurisprudence. In one example from the Koran, Jews are cursed with “abasement and humiliation,” and are “deserving of Allah’s wrath” because they rejected Mohammed’s revelation. Jews are further characterized as corrupt, treacherous rebels and infidels whose destiny is to be the enemy of the true believers. In an illustration of the common use of animal metaphors in dehumanizing the enemy “other,” Jews are fated to be transformation into “apes” or “apes and swine.” These insults have remained current in Islamic writings, polemics and sermons to this day.
These 14 centuries of Islamic antisemitism no doubt explains its widespread expression in Muslim nations, regularly documented in opinion surveys. As Andrew G. Bostom, author of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, recently wrote on Gatestone Institute, “Discussion of the most plausible and discernible explanation for this global surfeit of Muslim Jew-hatred is also shunned: relentless inculcation of antisemitic motifs from the Qur’an itself, and other core Islamic texts, by the pre-eminent authoritative religious teaching institutions in Islam, such as Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s putative “Vatican.’”
Moreover, a few hours after Hamas’s massacre of 1200 Israelis, Bostom writes, “Al-Azhar University’s current Papal equivalent Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb, and other Al-Azhar luminaries, celebrated (here; here; here; here) Hamas’ jihad carnage, on the University’s social media platforms. Less than 2-weeks later, Al-Azhar issued a fatwa declaring that all Israelis were legitimate targets of jihad terror: ‘the term “civilians” does not apply to the Zionist settlers of the occupied land,’ mirroring the Islamic jurisprudence of Al Azhar fatwas, or the resolutions of Al-Azhar Conference Proceedings, regarding Jews and Israel, put forth regularly, since the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.”
That reality about how radically different is the Islamic sensibility, is obviously unknown to pampered and privileged young Americans, who are slaves to political fads, dull clichés, and incontinent virtue-signaling and moral preening. Nor have they learned the facts of history that vaccinate people from those viruses of ignorance
For American “woke” students, Muslim students are just exotically dressed wokesters like themselves. And like most callow leftists, are reflexive haters of the U.S. and its proxy Israel. Their Muslim confreres are “victims” of American imperialist sins, and so are deserving of uncritical support and solidarity, no matter how inhuman their actions. Being ignorant of Islam’s illiberal tenets and record of conquest, occupation, “settler colonialism,” and the history of the region after World War I, they are easy prey of Islamic propagandists and apologists who no doubt regard them as “useful idiots.”
Yet most troubling about these protests is the moral idiocy of celebrating the sadism of the murderers, and of American politicians who are being leveraged by badly educated punks into compromising Israel’s self-defense against such dehumanizing atrocities. That’s the fact that tells us atrocities have been normalized.
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