The Left’s Hamas embrace shows that a creation culture complements the Left’s cancel culture. While the latter is recognized, the former is overlooked. Not satisfied with nullifying its opponents, the Left also vivify victims according to its subjective worldview. Between the two, there is no place for objectivity — least of all regarding truth and justice.
READ MORE: Are We Seeing the End of Cancel Culture?
The Democratic Socialists of America called the Left’s first pro-Palestine rally on Oct. 8 in New York City. Its intent was as clear as its timing was grotesque: to remake the Hamas–Israel war into one about Palestine instead. The same day, Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee led 30 groups in signing a letter “hold[ing] the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Similar efforts would take place across the country.
By Nov. 17, the U.S. Department of Education was investigating cases of anti-Semitism (and, because it’s Biden’s Department of Education, cases of Islamophobia too) at seven colleges, including Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. The incidents would only grow and spread.
By April, pro-Palestine encampments were sprouting on numerous college campuses. Next would come building takeovers — and they are still coming. Then, it was graduation disruptions. Expect more. Any event or large gathering has become a target.
There are a multitude of “whys” that the Left will gladly offer — demands for divestment from Israel, an end to research ties, immediate ceasefire. Yet overlooked among these demands is the one that should have been asked of them and should have come first: Why the Hamas–Israel war as a cause for protest?
There was no shortage of conflicts from which the Left could have chosen on Oct. 8, 2023. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 in an unprovoked act of naked aggression; Russia has committed war crimes, including targeting civilians and using gas attacks; and the number of Ukrainian casualties far exceeds that of those claimed in Palestine. If the Ukraine’s suffering was somehow insufficient, there were also longstanding wars in Yemen, Myanmar, and the Sahel.
Yet the Left chose the Hamas–Israel war, and it chose the day after Hamas’ terrorist attack to start it. Its choice committed the Left to a laborious salvage operation. Before its Oct. 7 atrocities, Hamas had brutalized the Palestinian people for years, including embedding its terrorists within the civilian population in tunnels that would guarantee civilian casualties. It held an unknown number of Israeli citizens hostage.
The Left had to ignore all this, convert Israel’s retaliation against Hamas into a war against Palestine, absolve Hamas’ genocidal attack against Jews, and then claim that Israel’s self-defense against Hamas terrorism was instead a genocidal attack on Palestinian civilians.
In short, the Left extended its sympathy to the most unsympathetic group imaginable and endeavored to make that group sympathetic. Why?
Because the Left’s worldview is the West versus the Rest. Only once a conflict fits that template can the Left embrace it. The Left did not see that potential in any of the rest of the world’s wars; so, it immediately seized the one it thought could work and then went about recasting a terrorist attack into something that fit its template.
Hamas became Palestine, then victim (the Rest); Israel went from victim to aggressor (the West). By so doing, the Left revealed its creation culture. For the Left to see something, that thing must fit the leftist worldview; if it doesn’t, it will be made to conform.
The Left’s Hamas exercise is beyond subjectivity. It is the exclusion of objectivity. Injustice, racism, oppression, exploitation — even wrong itself — can only run one direction: from the West to the Rest.
An example of the practical result of the Left’s exclusion of objectivity is the Defund the Police psychosis. Violence in the Black community is allowed to increase in the name of racial justice. In the Left’s Gaza protests, it is calls for ceasefire, no arms for Israel, ignoring hostages, and “river to the sea” — all under the guise of “justice.”
The Left’s embrace of Hamas exemplifies its abandonment of principle — not simply in a specific instance but even of principle as a concept. The Left shares only words with the rest of society, not those words’ meanings. The Left only values words as tools — levers for the toppling of the social order, wedges to be driven into any societal crack into which they can be jammed.
The Left cannot see injustice objectively even when it is black and white because it insists only on seeing the world as Black versus White — the Rest versus the West. Its vision is the reverse of a blind spot, instead seeing only what fits — or can be made to fit — within its pinpoint gaze of life. To ensure it does, the Left has not only a cancel culture but a creation one too. As its ideological alchemy shows, what the Left wants, the Left creates.
The Left sees only its worldview. If things do not conform, it creates them anew; if things oppose, the Left cancels them. The rest of society must, therefore, see the Left for what it is and for what its words and actions mean. There is only one thing America can thank the pro-Palestine protesters for: allowing us to see the Left’s myopia in its fullness — creating as well as canceling.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.
