“Isn’t the blood of one Jew enough for you?” I leveled that question, implicitly referring to the blood of Jesus on the cross, at the United Church of Christ (UCC) in 2019. The denomination had demonized Israel for decades, exhibiting a scandalous indifference to the blood shed by Jews during the first and second intifadas. The demonization culminated in 2015 when the UCC’s General Synod, the church’s legislative body, passed a resolution calling on the denomination’s money managers to sell stock in companies that did business with Israel. Four years later, it turned out that the church’s investment funds still held stock the very companies they were supposed to have gotten rid of.
“It was all bunk,” I declared before recounting the one-sided resolutions from the General Synod that assailed Israel for defending itself—without condemning Hamas and other terrorist organizations who murdered its citizens. To explain the phenomenon, I surmised that the UCC, which has been hemorrhaging members since the mid-1960s, was using the Jewish state as a scapegoat. Hatred toward Israel—and not Christ’s redemptive self-sacrifice—had become a muster point around which the UCC unified its members. Such activism distracts the UCC’s current members from genuine religious practice and from their church’s decline, even today.
In a rational world, “progressives” would view Hamas as a retrograde terrorist organization worthy of contempt.
A year after the October 7 massacre, it is time to update the question and direct it to a different audience. American’s need to ask so-called progressives in the United States: “Isn’t the blood of 1,200 Jews enough for you?” The answer is no.
For those with eyes to see and ears to hear—and brains to think—the October 7 massacre was a jihadist imitation of the lynchings and massacres that took place in the American South after the Civil War and the destruction of slavery as an institution. By murdering, raping, and dismembering hundreds of Israelis, Hamas hoped to turn back the clock to sometime before 1948 and force Jews in the Middle East back into a position of submission under Muslim dominance that existed prior to Israel’s creation—just as humiliated white southerners tried to put blacks back into their former place of submission with lynchings and massacres perpetrated in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In a rational world, “progressives” would view Hamas as a retrograde terrorist organization worthy of contempt. Instead, progressives have done a better job advocating for Hamas than many Islamist organizations in the United States. Yes, groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the United States Council of Muslim Organizations cheered the October 7 attack, but since then, progressives have worked to frame the massacre as liberationist violence by an oppressed population against a colonial state falsely accused of genocide.
The day after the attack, for example, activists from the Young Democratic Socialists of America celebrated in Times Square, holding an “All Out for Palestine” rally as the equivalent of a slave revolt in the American South, or worse, a prisoner uprising at Bergen-Belsen. Motivated by this narrative, radicals associated with Students for Justice in Palestine did on college campuses what activists from Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA did in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis during the George Floyd Riots in 2020—they rendered them ungovernable with disastrous consequences. When colleges and universities closed for the summer, progressives, including gay and women’s rights activists, marched in pro-Hamas parades before and during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In the run-up to the one-year anniversary of the attack, progressives have gone so far as to praise troubled young people who have set themselves on fire in front of Israeli diplomatic missions as “martyrs” for the cause of anti-Zionism. They also lauded one of their own who viciously attacked a pro-Israel activist in Newton, Massachusetts, as someone whose example should be followed: “How can we not relate to the urge to throw our bodies on the line for Palestine?”
The day after the attack activists from the Young Democratic Socialists of America celebrated in Times Square.
With these actions, progressives in the United States follow the example set for them by leaders in the UCC. By using anti-Israel activism as a muster point for their movement, progressive leaders are distracting their followers from an embarrassing reality: everywhere progressives become the dominant force determining public policy, the lives of the people they say they want to help actually get worse. By forcing police to retreat from black neighborhoods in cities throughout America with their chants of “Defund the Police”—which became policy in many cities—Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA activists helped usher in months of lawlessness in African American neighborhoods. Murder rates increased, stores closed in response to increased levels of theft, and when policy makers came to their senses and restored police budgets, they discovered many police officers had left the profession. The economies of cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle were decimated as a result of constant riots. Progressive policies, intended to achieve the “liberation” of African Americans, resulted in chaos and degradation for city dwellers of all races throughout the country.
A similar process is taking place in response to the fighting in Gaza as the hard left in the U.S. affirms Hamas’s policy of attacking civilians, while hiding behind civilians to cause civilian casualties on both sides of the conflict. By murdering 1,200 Israelis on October 7, thereby prompting an Israeli invasion of Gaza that would inevitably cost Palestinian civilian lives, Hamas provided leftist radicals in the U.S. with a pretext for another Quixotic campaign to disrupt American life. This campaign serves to distract from the failures of the progressive movement in America and, in turn, legitimizes the cause of Islamism in American society.
It’s not the first time such a thing has happened. It happened in Iran in the late 1970s, when radical leftists followed the lead of French post-modernist—and pederast—Michel Foucault and praised Ayatollah Khomeini to high heaven. In so doing, they legitimized a tyrannical Islamist movement that is oppressing Iranians and murdering its opponents decades later. Radical leftists may not know their history, but it is up to the rest of us to prevent them from repeating it.
