The response to the barbaric attack in Israel has exposed the liberal and intellectual left as being bereft of knowledge, insights, judgment, and compassion. The left has become a pathetic collection of ideological zealots.
Imagine the Olympics. One of the premiere events is the 4x100 meter relay race. The United States and Brazil are considered the favorites. The race starts and the two are ahead of the pack and are neck-and-neck until the anchor runner. The US runner puts on the afterburners and blows by his Brazilian counterpart and crosses the finish line in Olympic and world record time. The crowd goes wild until it is discovered that the US runner forgot the baton. Yeah, he crossed the finish line first, but with no baton in hand, he won nothing.
The example above would seem to apply to our modern liberal left which has great technical knowledge but no moral depth. All of our leaders are university-trained, without exception. Some have bachelor's degrees while others have advanced diplomas. Yet, they have shown themselves to be morally bereft of compassion and understanding of the severity of the events in southern Israel two weeks ago. Virtually every important institution is openly left-leaning in its actions and official statements. Universities, governments, Hollywood, sports, major businesses: all of them show their left-leaning bonafides via commercials, public comments, rallies, or through their products. Nobody forced Anheuser-Busch to put a “trans” person on a can of beer and nobody demanded that Harvard students come out en masse for Hamas. These are natural outcomes of their worldview, and their worldview has been shown to be bankrupt and corrupt to its core. These people are the final product produced by our modern educational system.
There was a time when people of different political stripes could agree that some actions were beyond the pale. While the 9/11 attacks were horrific, with an enormous loss of life and exceptional destruction, there were moments after the attack when it seemed that both Republicans and Democrats could clearly condemn the actions of Al-Qaeda and demand a response to the mass murder of American citizens. Going further back, the attack on Pearl Harbor brought millions of young American men to their local recruiting offices to join up. How many stories over the decades have been told about the underage kid who lied about his age to join up and fight? Today, the political and religious spectrum in Israel is united in a desire to destroy Hamas and annihilate those who murdered, raped, and tortured innocent civilians.
In the attacks in Israel, 1,400 people were murdered, over 4,000 were wounded, and 200 are assumed to be held captive in Gaza. Numerous countries had citizens killed or wounded, and those in captivity include Americans and other nationalities. But with all of these facts known in the first few days, protesters on the left went out into the streets in countries that lost citizens and onto the Internet to justify Hamas’ actions and in some cases praise them as “exhilarating” or the like. We are talking about the wanton murder of civilians—men, women, and children—many of whom were tortured, burned alive, killed in front of loved ones, or decapitated. Oftentimes, when we have mass-casualty events, we find it hard to put our arms around so many dead and wounded. As Stalin, the greater murderer himself said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Still, those who are pro-Israel or at least have some level of humanity in them can relate to the horror stories of families destroyed or children being taken prisoners to Gaza. Wouldn’t a normal person cry, seeing the 13-year-old boy who buried his entire family this week, or at least feel empathy for a boy whose entire life has been destroyed. Yes, he has a pulse and he is physically alright. How will he deal with not having parents at home to take care of him and guide him? How will he get by without siblings with whom to joke and play? I think that only the cruelest or most hard-hearted person would not feel sympathy for an orphan created under such tragic circumstances. We have now found that Muslims and the university-educated are such people and they are sick enough to tear down pictures of Hamas captives. We are talking about moral illiterates endowed with Nazi-style cruelty.
Many of those who applaud or justify Hamas’ murder of over a thousand people, including young men and women attending a rave, are the most credentialed people on earth. We are not talking about illiterates (though Muslim immigrants do not need a degree to hate Jews) but rather university graduates or students currently at the finest universities in the world. If the marches and protests were solely Muslims, then one would not be that surprised that they brought their hatred with them from their home countries. But the ranks of those who have sided with the barbarians include many non-Muslim students, professors, professionals, and leaders. The US just vetoed a UN resolution condemning Israeli retaliatory actions but making no mention of Hamas' actions. The same one-sided arguments are made by Harvard students, “Jewish Voice for Peace” who crashed the Capitol, and of course Muslims, including those in Congress. When they said that Israel hit the hospital in the Gaza Strip it was a war crime; when it was conclusively shown that Palestinian Islamic Jihad was the perpetrator, some continued to blame Israel, while others said that it was just a parking lot and only a few people were killed anyhow. These people are the most educated our generation has produced. They fashion themselves as our intellectual betters. The university has been billed as a citadel of information and a place to find truth. It has been exposed as a grotesque echo chamber that produces poorly-educated, ideologically-rigid and inarticulate morons.
When I was at Harvard in the 1980s, there were still a few of the very, very old “Veritas” (Truth) symbols on campus. The word veritas is broken into three groups of letters, each group on an open book. The ancient seal had the third book facing downwards—it was suggested that when one finished at Harvard, he (it was only men then) was now fully educated. I would suggest that my old alma mater make all three books closed. The people who teach there and the ones who pay $75,000s a year to be indoctrinated there don’t give a whit about the truth. Their ideological rigidity has no place for truth, and their hatred of Jews is so white-hot that they cannot come to condemn the murder, rape, torture and imprisonment of of civilians, if the majority of them were Jews. One dead George Floyd led to hundreds of thousands marching in his favor; over a thousand dead Jews had the same folks marching in favor of the killers. Our fellow citizens on the left are morally bankrupt whether they be in the university, the press, government, or industry. A higher education is a near guarantee to producing a morally defective version of a human being.