[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Why don’t you go ahead and just say why you think that is instead of these vague allusions to it?

When people coded as Western or privileged kill people coded as oppressed, it’s regarded in some quarters as much more of an injustice than when people coded as oppressed kill the privileged or each other. The reason is Standpoint Theory.

The attacks in Israel raise a troubling question: Why are so many unwilling to denounce terrorism?

…Some of the most famous universities in the world – including both American institutions such as Princeton, Yale and Stanford and Canadian ones like the University of Toronto – neglected to release statements, or only did so after they came under intense pressure on social media. At Harvard University, it took an outraged thread on X (formerly Twitter) by Larry Summers, a former president of the institution, to prompt his successor into belated action.

Worse still were the people and organizations who actively celebrated the pogroms. Multiple chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, an influential organization that counts famous members of Congress among its ranks, encouraged their followers to attend rallies that glorified Hamas’s terror as a righteous form of resistance. As its San Francisco chapter wrote on X, the “weekend’s events” should be seen as part and parcel of Palestinians’ “right to resist.” The Chicago chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement even glorified the paragliders who murdered scores of people at a rave in southern Israel in an invitation to yet another solidarity rally, pairing a now-deleted image of a paraglider with the caption: “I stand with Palestine.”

… All of this raises a simple question: How could such a notable portion of the left side with genocidaire terrorists? Why have key institutions proven so reluctant to denounce one of the worst terrorist attacks in living memory? What, to them, renders the victims of these attacks so much less worthy of solidarity than those of the many other atrocities they have full-throatedly condemned?

…But the double-standard that has in past days become so obvious on parts of the left also has a more profound source, one that is ideological rather than practical or atavistic. Over the past decades, a new set of ideas about the role that identity does – and should – play in the world have transformed the very nature of what it means to be on the left, displacing an older set of universalist aspirations in the process.

This novel ideology, which I call the “identity synthesis,” insists that we must see the whole world through the prism of identity categories such as race. It maintains that the key to understanding any political conflict is to conceive of it in terms of the power relations between different identity groups. It analyzes the nature of those power relations through a simplistic schema that, based on the North American experience, pits so-called whites against so-called “people of colour.” Finally, it imposes that schema – in a fashion that might, in the fashionable academic jargon of the day, ironically be called “neo-colonial” – on complex conflicts in faraway lands.

… And yet, this misleading analogy governs how many on the left ascribe the role of victim and perpetrator, explaining why dozens of student groups at Harvard could claim that Israel is somehow “entirely responsible” for Hamas’s decision to murder more than 1,300 people. At a deeper level, they even help to explain how some of the world’s most prominent left-wing academics can contrive to perceive a deeply authoritarian and overtly theocratic regime that is explicitly hostile to sexual minorities as a progressive movement.

For people like the feminist theorist Judith Butler, what determines whether a movement should count as left-wing or right-wing is based on whether it claims to be fighting on behalf of those they believe to be marginalized. Since Hamas is an organization of underprivileged “people of colour” fighting against “privileged” “white” Jews, it must be seen as part of a global struggle against oppression. Even though its program – which incidentally includes the violent suppression of sexual minorities within the Gaza Strip – is reminiscent of some of the world’s most brutal far-right regimes, Mx. Butler considers it “very important” to classify both Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opin...y-are-so-many/