The absurdity of calls for "decolonization"
The "progressive" term is deployed to undo decades of Mideast peace efforts
Listening to the discourse around the Middle East can feel like a journey in time back to the 1960s, when the Arabs rejected the very existence of Israel. But in the new iteration, Arab maximalism is being supported by Western progressives who see the world through a haze of “decolonization” and “oppressed-oppressor” narratives.
One might call it a red-green alliance, and it is a problem for the West. It fuses together the burgeoning illiberalism among Western youth with the misogyny and nihilism of Iranian-backed jihadism. Improbable and incongruous though it may seem, this alliance is already undermining academia and the media, where it makes a mockery of intellectual inquiry and objective reportage. The issue was laid bare in Congress this week, when the heads of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania (my undergraduate alma mater!) refused to state that calls for genocide against Jews constituted harassment or violated their code of conduct.
Unless stopped, this madness will spread as the youth become adults, and will devastate the economy and make a monkey house of politics. Thus do empires crumble — slowly at first, as we know, and then with stunning speed.
How could all this possibly relate to a bunch of terrorists in Gaza? Read on.
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