Making Sense of Widespread Western Favoring of Hamas Against Israel
What accounts for the coalition of diverse Leftist groups rallying together for Hamas and against Israel? What binds BLM, Jewish Voices for Peace, Gays 4 Gaza, Queers 4 Palestine, Lesbians 4 Liberation, Antifa, The Squad, Abortion Activists, Green Climate Police, Democratic Socialists of America, university professors and students, and Jewish intellectuals in solidarity with Hamas to oppose Israel? Matt Walsh rightly explains, “So, this desire to promote a murderous ideology—one that, if unleashed worldwide, would kill a lot of Leftists—is not unique to the current war in the Middle East. It tells us something fundamental about how Leftists think. Specifically, it exposes how heavily they rely on abstraction, rather than practical thinking informed by real-life consequences.” For example, Megan Rapinoe, who is an outspoken advocate against Israel and a fund-raiser for children in Gaza who also claims to be married to Sue Bird, a Jewish woman with Israeli citizenship, effectively illustrates his point. How long would Rapinoe and her female sexual partner survive in the Gaza Strip?
Walsh summarizes well the reasoning that coalesces the disparate Leftist groups. They view Israelis and their allies as the current great oppressor who must be toppled.
They see Hamas fighters, like BLM rioters, as a physical manifestation of the many anti-American concepts they’ve been taught in school. These barbarians are the “de-colonizers” and the “anti-oppressors.” They are the answer to “whiteness” in all its forms. The Left will humanize its allies, like George Floyd. But they will abstract their enemies as “oppressors” and “agents of white supremacy,” and then celebrate their destruction and murder.
Has the coalition of Leftists with disparate, even conflicting, interests overreached, transgressing their own religious dogma of tolerance versus intolerance by defending the cause of Hamas terrorists as the oppressed and identifying Israelis as colonizing oppressors? One might be tempted to think they have, given (1) the inescapable appearance of anti-Semitism on the face of their cause, and (2) how many Democratic Party politicians, their surrogates, and media talking heads have not joined them even if they stand mute lest they alienate their voting base. Does endorsement of undisputed anti-Semitic Hamas as oppressed by Israeli oppressors finally expose their Marxist agenda for all the world to see? If not, why not? Their applauding Hamas, hoping to rally world opinion against Israel’s sovereign right as a nation to defend its citizens from Hamas’s terroristic attacks, exposes the moral bankruptcy of their Marxist view of and for the world.
Will the world finally wake up to the destructive ideology of “Wokeness”? One would hope, but do not count on it. Why? Because the ideology entails a religious belief system antithetical to Christianity and the Western culture it shaped. Marxism’s “long march through the institutions,” conceived by Antonio Gramsci, and later Rudi Dutschke, is deep and thorough, as Gramsci schemed: “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. . . . In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”[1]
1. Roger Kiska, “Antonio Gramsci’s Long March Through History,” Religion & Liberty, 29.3 (Dec. 12, 2019).
Socialism’s ideology has been saturating Western culture for more than fifty years, deluding multiple generations of Westerners who have become its “useful idiots.”[2] From Kindergarten to University, Cultural Marxism has overwhelmed our education system with its morality and culture-destroying ideology. Known by its various innocuous sounding Orwellian iterations: “Multiculturalism,” “Diversity,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Diversity-Equity-Inclusion,” “Anti-Racism,” or simply “Wokeness,” Big Ed(ucation) has become a hotbed for Marxist ideology. Thus, since October 7, the world has been observing “Anti-Racism” in action, the divisive core principle Ibram X. Kendi candidly asserts with moral sanctimony:
2. “Useful idiots are not what one would call stupid; they are highly intelligent and aware of the circumstances. The problem appears to be that they attribute to a given cause its positive effects only while turning a blind eye to its derogatory ones. The most benighted of useful idiots will even argue against any accusations that what they have supported may not, in fact, be wrong at all. Still, the accusers are wrong and even mean-spirited.” Mark Herring, “The Ubiquity of Useful Idiots,” The Carolina Journal (June 28, 2022).
If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.[3]
Given Kendi’s forthright acknowledgment that “anti-racism” is reverse-racism, it is evident that since October 7 Western Cultural Marxists believe they have taken up the righteous cause of Hamas, racist anti-Semites, whose aggressive actions seek “liberation” from their alleged racist Jewish oppressors. Cultural Marxism’s deceptive and seductive power is evident in that intellectual Jews have joined with their excessively daring endorsement of Hamas, whose terrorism of October 7 cannot avoid recalling the historic mass murder of Jews known as the Nazi Holocaust, an association intellectual Jews like Omer Bartov unconvincingly reject. Is this risky overreach by Cultural Marxists finally the death knell to Cultural Marxism’s wokeness?
3. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be An Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 19.
Again, we can hope so, but such willful blindness will require more than well-made arguments from classical liberals or Christless conservatives.
A Christian Assessment: Our Only Hope
Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear realize that long before October 7, 2023, the world has been a battlefield where a spiritual war is regularly dramatized. For the present, all eyes are on the war between Hamas and Israel, but I do not suggest that it is a religious war between Islam and Judaism, for Israel is not a religious state. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that the war being waged between Hamas and the Israel Defense Force is a visible earthly drama of the invisible but real heavenly realm.
Given God’s revelation in Scripture, we must understand that every conflict waged since humans plunged into sin, where good and evil are integral to the battle, is an earthly shadow representation of the much greater original and ongoing conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, righteousness and unrighteousness, the cosmic battle between the Son of God and the devil.[4] It is this cosmic war of which the psalmist wrote in Psalm 2.
4. Given the biblical worldview concerning earthly representations of heavenly realities, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke a truth greater than he understands, reported in The Times of Israel: “We will win, because our existence here is at stake,” he says, likening Hamas to Nazi Germany and calling the conflict “a war between forces of light and forces of darkness, between humanity and animalism.”
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us” (Ps. 2:1–3).
Given how abstracted their reasoning is, it is unlikely that many from the crowds of anti-Israel protestors would verbalize their opposition to Israel with reference to God’s promise of the Anointed One, the Christ, to Israel. Many of them may even celebrate Christmas. Yet, it is Christ’s dominion they despise and reject. Contempt for the Lord’s Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, is readily apparent in the speech of many who routinely use his name and title in vain. Contempt for Jesus, who is of Jewish descent, conceived by and born of a young Jewish woman, continues to spill over to Jewish people, especially to Israelis who dwell in the land where the Christ was born.
The Apostle Paul speaks of the cosmic battle between two rival totalizing views of and for the world, one God’s redemptive kingdom and the other Satan’s seductive enslavement: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). Elsewhere Paul speaks again of the spiritual war that all earthly battles represent:
For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete (2 Cor. 10:3-6).
Significant as the combat is between Hamas and Israel, more crucial is the battle for the mind and heart of billions. This is why I have devoted such close and extensive attention to understanding and explaining the true war that is being waged between two antithetical worldviews, the biblical-Christian view and the anti-Christ view which is nonetheless religious in nature. The anti-Christ view is religious because “virtue signaling,” conspicuously exhibiting attentiveness to “politically correct” issues, especially so-called “social and racial justice,” without effecting any real change for the alleged oppressed is at its core.[5] This anti-Christ view steals daily news headlines with reports concerning crowds of devoted protestors who subject all of human life to their ideologically reductionistic oppressor versus oppressed paradigm, identifying but never lifting the alleged victims, who advance their cause, and excoriating and demonizing the alleged victimizers whom they passionately despise.
5. The Lord Jesus tells us that “virtue signalers” receive their reward here: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward” (Matt. 6:1-2).
Thus, when Jordan Peterson appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, he spoke better than he realized. He stated, “The Leftists have already decided the Palestinians are the victims. If you’re a victim, then you’re morally righteous. Even more conveniently if you stand for the victim then you’re morally righteous regardless of what you do with your own life” (emphasis added).[6] What do I mean? Whether they are willing to admit it or not, for Leftists, their Marxist oppressor-oppressed ideology is their righteous cause, their essential religious belief system notwithstanding the formal religion with which they may identify—atheism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, etc. “Political correctness” governs their “moral righteousness” and its exhibition. Taking up the cause of the correctly identified victim of oppression and opposing the properly recognized oppressor is their righteousness.
6. Expressed more crudely, Greg Gutfeld offers this, “They took the pro-Hamas cause, and they slipped it right into the BLM costume. Never mind the radicalism, the violence, the sexual atrocity; they took the costume of the oppressed and they switched it. Now the Jews are the oppressor.”
This is the only hope Karl Marx, an atheistic Jew, with his oppressor versus oppressed ideology offers his devotees who now scream against Jews who inhabit the land of Israel, and strangely, many who rage against Israel are Jews themselves. Oh, how greatly they all need to come to know the True Jew, the True Israel (John 15:1), the Lord Jesus Christ, the True Seed of Abraham (Gal. 3:16) who constitutes everyone in him Abraham’s seed (3:29). Sadly, these folks are as we all once were, “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). Such were we also, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both [Jew and Gentile] one” (2:13-14).
Our only hope is in Christ Jesus our Lord as the Heidelberg Catechism asks and answers.
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death— to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
To call everyone to submit to the dominion of the Lord Jesus Christ is our mission at Christ Over All. And this month, we will herald the good news for all to see. With the backdrop of Israel in the Bible and in the news, we will endeavor to preach the gospel, which is the power of God for salvation for the Jew first but also for the Gentile (Rom. 1:16). Pray with us that the Lord will use our proclaiming of the good news as it is in Jesus as the means by which he draws many under his Lordship.
