Dante
"The Libido for the Ugly"
It's a headline. A headline that actually speaks truth: "Hamas apologists are moral imbeciles, but they’re also a fringe."
The rest of us are justified in judging, scorning and ridiculing anyone who makes excuses for Hamas. We should, however, make allowances for, say, those students who foolishly joined an organization that later issued an outrageous statement without their approval — provided those students then repudiate the group.
For most of us, it has taken no heavy intellectual effort to muster a morally healthy response to the monstrous attacks that Hamas carried out in Israel. We instinctively feel revulsion and want safety for the innocent and justice for the perpetrators and their accomplices.
In certain corners of the left, though, ideology has suppressed these normal sentiments. “It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities,” laments Eric Levitz, himself a left-wing supporter of Palestine, in New York magazine. These are the people who describe slaughter as “resistance” or “decolonization.” They are the academics and campus organizations who put most or all of the blame on Israel, the activists who call for condemnations of “the occupier not the occupied,” the journalists who tell us to speak less about “the tactics” of Hamas and more about “the context” of Israeli policies.
Others have avoided such rancid commentary but also fallen short of what honesty demands. University administrations that are often quick to opine on some issues have been slow and equivocal in commenting about what President Biden has rightly called “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.” They might not have harshly anti-Israel views themselves, but they know that those views have a constituency inside the academy.