Decolonization!
A battle cry so powerful that, under its sway, mass rape, execution of families in their homes, and mass hostage takings become acts to celebrate. Or so think 1,600 — or is it 1,900? — sociology professors (hilariously, among the list of signatories they released was a professor Adolf Hitler of Austria), 75 percent of millennials, and the assorted violent millennialists who act to hasten the coming jubilee by terrorizing old men, swabbing Jewish schools, businesses, and homes with the swastika that so inspires their own new darlings: Hamas.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Hitler and Hamas
As the woke ideology is post-intellectual, words such as “decolonialization” are used to stoke violent rage rather than to share knowledge or clarify truth. While there is still time, let’s do what they don’t and examine the word and its applicability to Hamas and its new followers, who find in cheering it on a pornography more exciting than their usual because it confers on them the halo of Being on the Right Side in the Ultimate Cause.
Among the sins for which Hamas damns the Jews in its charter is: “They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate.” The caliph was the person who, at least in theory, ruled over the empire of Islam, that great swath of territory conquered by Islam since its founding that Hamas and others of their ilk believe to represent a permanent and irrevocable empire. In Hamas’ own words once more:
[T]he land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.…
This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgment.
“Any land” — including Spain (al-Andalus), as Osama bin Laden reminded us when broadcasting after 9/11. That would also include the whole of the Balkans right up to the gates of Vienna as well as most of India and the swath of France conquered before Charles Martel won his victory at Tours.
For those of us who still believe in historical truth, the emergence of independent Israel in 1948 was the first time the Holy Land had not been a mere colony of an empire since it had fallen under Roman sway more than 2,000 years ago. Even before that, Israel’s independence had always been threatened — by the next emerging empire or by a surviving one, be it Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, or the Syrian Seleucid successors to Alexander’s Greece. After Rome, it was subject to conquerors from Arabia, then the brief Crusader states, and then, for about 500 years, the Ottomans, whose rule was given religious character by its widely acknowledged claim to the caliphate.
Turkey joined itself to the German Empire and the Austrian Empire in World War I. Its bad bet had a price. Its colonial holdings throughout the Middle East were divvied up by the winners, and the Holy Land became part of the British Empire until 1948, when the Jews escaped imperial rule at last as a self-governing people in their ancestral homeland for the first time in 2,000 years.
Jewish law itself inspired the establishment of a government recognizing full political rights to all, regardless of religion or ethnicity. The American founders, as well as the Dutch and English political thinkers who preceded them, pointed to Scripture and rabbinic literature in arguing for such rights here in the West, and Israel did not fall short of its heritage.
Don’t expect the devotees of woke to care much about this. Like any fanatical religious devotee, they are impervious to anything not in their creed — for they have pumped their very human politics up into a monstrous idolatry, assigning it exclusive truth, and justify every horror in its name.
Nonetheless, I think we have room to agree, at least in part, with the woke jihadists. We are all for decolonization. In supporting the right of Jews to live independently in their ancient homeland, we are fighting the imperialists who want to reestablish the empire of the caliphs, reducing all who might survive their onslaught to dhimmitude.
Reduced to violent incoherence by a creed built on nihilistic resentment and a Machiavellian devotion to power by any means, college students and other products of education at the hands of the apparatchiks of inclusion probably won’t care. They applaud the Islamist would-be imperialists even as they commit atrocities that would make a Klansman sick. They attack the freedom fighters living on their ancient lands for being what their oppressors are. They have given up on truth, so they aren’t even embarrassed at their living a lie.
Our government and our universities and talking heads of the hard left spread the incoherence around, soak our policies with it, and grimly seek to muzzle opposition. They will seek to distract you from the horrors you saw on Oct. 7. They are trying already. Two hundred are still held captive in tunnels in Gaza, the graves of 1,500 are still fresh, anti-Semitism is skyrocketing; but they tell you that our real concern now is Islamophobia. The same folks who hailed the BLM violence are now embracing All Lives Matter.
Yes, of course. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
But let’s stay with our misguided fellow citizens and say: Yes! Decolonize! Down with the violent oppressive imperialist regime of Hamas and of every other proponent of Islamist imperialism!
