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Think how far we’ve come since October 7th 2023. When I first referred to US campus protests, back then, I was careful to refer to them as “pro-Palestinian”. Careful not to say “pro-Hamas”.
I could not imagine — in those naive early days of the Gaza war — that anyone in the U.S. would support a designated terrorist organisation! One which is openly genocidal against the Jews, which lives by a Charter that drips with hostility and hatred of Jews and the world domination of Islam, that is murderously homophonic and misogynistic. But I was wrong. It wasn’t too long before the pro-Hamas signs came out, the kids wearing Hamas bandanas proudly, faces hidden by Hamas-style masks.
Jonathan Tobin speaks to guest Uri Kaufman. They offer this simple explanation to answer the headline above. That the progressives on campus, in American universities, in the liberal media, view the Gaza war through a racial lens. The Gazans are “people of colour”. The Israelis are white. Whites are alway the oppressors. POC are always the oppressed. The “white” jews are “colonial settlers”, the Palestinians the people of colour driven cruelly from their ancestral lands.
Of course, none of this is true. It’s simple, sure. But not the truth. Half of Israelis are what the Left itself would call people of colour, Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and Africa. And they’ve always lived in this land, right back to a known specific date, which story Kaufman tells us.
But as with so much in the world, when you’ve got a fixed prism, an ideology, truth be damned.
Kaufman mentions Jimmy Carter”s book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid”. I read this book when it came out in 2006. I remember being shocked at its blatant anti-Israel tone. Kaufman gives it a good going over. “There’s a factual inaccuracy on virtually every page!”, he says. The harm Carter did to peace in the region carries on to this day. Including in Gaza.
From the intro:
Why do so many Americans side with Palestinian Arab terrorists against Israelis? JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin believes the answer to that question lies in an understanding of how progressive ideologues have largely taken over American education and culture. They have helped indoctrinate a generation with false ideas that cause them to view the conflict in the Middle East through the prism of American race relations. That led them to wrongly believe that Israelis and Jews are “white” oppressors rather than the objects of a Palestinian Arab obsession with destroying the Jewish state and the genocide of the Jews.
He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by Uri Kaufman, author of the new book, American Intifada: How the ProgressiveLeft learned to hate Israel and love Hamas. According to Kaufman, the problem lies in the cognitive dissonance experienced by many Americans who are prepared to see the world through their distorted ideas about “privilege” and race even if it requires them to ignore the facts about Israel, the Palestinians and what happened on Oct. 7, 2023.
