The Roots of the Palestinian Sickness The West’s embrace of Hamas’s brutality is no accident—it was carefully cultivated over decades by intellectuals who legitimized atrocities under the guise of “resistance.” By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/22/the-roots-of-the-palestinian-sickness/
This week, as the civilized peoples of the West once again recoil in horror at the grotesque and violent spectacle that is Hamas, it is worth remembering that the bloody, brutal, and depraved character of the Palestinian animosity toward Israel and the Jewish people did not arise from natural circumstances. The blind and merciless hatred the radical Palestinians feel toward Israel is neither normal nor accidental. It was carefully and purposefully cultivated over the course of nearly a century and has been intentionally intensified and amplified by the intellectual discourse in Europe and the United States.
The monstrous treatment of the Bibas family—the kidnapping and murder of an innocent woman and her two small children, the parading of the corpses through a celebratory rally, the apparent attempts to hide the real causes of the children’s death, and the utter refusal to return the remains of their mother, Shiri—is not the behavior one would ever expect from a conventional regime, even one that bills itself as the “resistance” to an “occupying” force. Rather, it is behavior consistent with the ugliest, vilest, most brutal sects man has ever known—the Nazis, Lenin and Stalin’s Soviets, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and so on. This is no mere coincidence. The Palestinian/Hamas-nik consciousness springs from many of the same sources as the most horrific regimes of the twentieth century.
Nowhere in the world have the anti-realist philosophies of cultural Marxism been more ingrained and more destructive than in the discourse around and the practical politics of the Middle East. Arab nationalism was an early 20th-century identity movement that surfaced amidst the dying of the Ottoman Empire and which was patterned in many ways on the German nationalist undertaking. The early thinkers and founders of Arab nationalism looked to define themselves and their people and to build an independent pan-Arab state that stretched, essentially, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. The identity the Arab nationalists created for themselves and the Arab people was defined principally in terms of who the Arabs were not, rather than who they were. And who they were not is European colonialists.
In this sense, the Arab Nationalist movement was quintessentially postmodern. It arose in opposition to the “truth” of Western cultural hegemony and obsessed over the sins and perceived slights of the colonial powers—including the Zionists. It fashioned for itself a majestic yet “lost” past of the Arab people. And it sought to restore that past through opposition to the prevalent ideas of Western liberalism.
Additionally, and more to the point, the Middle East as it exists in the mind of the Western intellectual or wannabe intellectual today is largely the creation of a narrative that was fashioned more than five decades ago, in the fevered imagination of a literary theorist named Edward Said. Said was ostensibly a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. But he was also the man most responsible for the current Western-liberal view of the Middle East and especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
On November 13, 1974, Yasser Arafat, the Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, made a historic appearance and addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. He spoke at length about the plight of the Palestinian people and especially their oppression at the hands of “colonizers.” “Our world,” Arafat began, “aspires to peace, justice, equality, and freedom. It wishes that oppressed nations, bent under the weight of imperialism, might gain their freedom and their right to self-determination. It hopes to place the relations between nations on a basis of equality, peaceful coexistence, mutual respect for each other’s internal affairs….” The problem, he continued, was that “such aspirations cannot be realized in a world that is at present ruled over by tension, injustice, oppression, racial discrimination, and exploitation, a world also threatened with unending economic disasters, war, and crisis.” The problem, in short, was the “colonizers,” chief among them the Israelis, who occupied Arab lands and forced the “oppressed peoples” of Palestine into confrontation, confrontation that was both “legitimate and just.”
Arafat’s speech was eloquent and powerful, blending intellect with emotion. It played upon sympathies and manipulated sentiments. In many ways, it shocked much of the foreign policy world and altered the way the PLO and its struggle were viewed. Arafat’s words inaugurated a decades-long reassessment of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the West and the United States in particular.
Additionally—and more to the point—Arafat’s speech was written by none other than Edward Said, a friend, confidant, and ghostwriter for Arafat for many years—right up to the moment that Arafat made nominal “peace” with Israel in 1993, a token of conciliation that the more radical Said simply could not stomach.
Said was not your average political activist, nor was he your average American of Palestinian descent. He was, among other things, a cultural Marxist, one of the most important and most influential successors to the academic world-destroyers of the Frankfurt School. Said was steeped, intellectually, in both Theodor Adorno’s critical theory and Michel Foucault’s transgressive structuralism/postmodernism. He believed deeply in the power of language to create narratives and of narratives to alter or reinforce the distribution of power. He interpreted everything—history, literature, politics—from the perspective of the world’s “oppressed” peoples, those who had, from antiquity, been subjugated by Western intellectual and physical colonization.
In a 2005 piece for World Affairs Journal, Joshua Muravchik, an American Enterprise Institute scholar and a fellow at Johns Hopkins’ School for Advanced International Studies, wrote that Said “not only transformed the West’s perception of the Israel-Arab conflict; he also led the way toward a new, post-socialist life for leftism in which the proletariat was replaced by ‘people of color’ as the redeemers of humankind.”
In other words, Edward Said took the frustration and resentment of the Palestinian people and legitimized it. He gave it intellectual heft and justified any response they might have to the Israelis, no matter how horrific or monstrous. In the words of his puppet, Yasser Arafat, he made their struggle, whatever form it might take, “legitimate and just.” He gave the green light to Arafat and his successors in Hamas to do as they wished to their “oppressors.” And just as importantly, he convinced the intellectuals of the West to hate the “oppressors” as well.
Torturing and murdering babies is behavior that is not a normal part of the human condition. It is so aberrant and so repulsive that it must be cultivated, encouraged, and deeply and profoundly ingrained by a movement so depraved as to defy understanding by morally sentient people.
But nor is it normal for men and women to witness such atrocities and then throw their support to those who commit them. That too is cultivated behavior.
There is a sickness at the heart of the Palestinian “struggle,” but it is a sickness that is shared by many in the West who profess to be on the side of the angels. Fortunately, this sickness was purposefully fostered, and its opposite can be fostered as well. That will take understanding and will, however, two things currently in short supply among global elites.
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