“There is an ironically neocolonial feel to the cultural elites’ absolution of Hamas. It is their indoctrination into the politics of identity that leads them to view Israel as the culpable adult in this relationship and the Palestinians as blameless children. Critical-race-theory narratives about white privilege and brown victimhood have led to a situation where not only are whites demonised as powerful and destructive but also non-white people are patronised to an obscene degree as non-powerful and pathetic. This hollow, pat explanation for every political event has now been cut-and-pasted on to the Middle East (despite the fact that Israel is not a ‘white’ country). The end result? Both Israelis and Palestinians are denuded of their humanity, the former damned as the conscious authors of all ills, the latter reduced to the moral infants of world affairs, whom ‘nobody should blame’ even ‘for the things we do’, in Hamad’s words. The anti-Israel elites take a far more racially paternalistic view of Palestinians than Israel does.”
– The relentlessly quotable Brendan O’Neill, at Spiked.
Another crushingly good paragraph:
“There is a serious danger in the neo-racist absolution of Hamas. It serves as a green light to further terror. For if you are never held to account for what you do, you can do anything you like. Hamas now knows, from the global fallout from its pogrom, that it will always be absolved. That it enjoys a kind of moral impunity among the opinion-formers of the West. That its mass slaughter will be contextualised, explained, forgiven. That even its use of civilian buildings and civilian vehicles to store and transport the machinery of its war crimes will not bother the consciences of those who pose as pro-Palestinian. Our elites have done something even worse than blame Israelis for their own deaths – they have signalled to Hamas that if it were to do the same again, there would be no moral consequences. Its blamelessness would remain intact. The failure of our intellectual elites to condemn the Hamas pogrom is an implicit approval of future pogroms.”
Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.
By the way, the expression “intellectual elite” deserves to be covered in scare quotes. “Elite” implies quality, but I see little evidence of it.