Approximately six months ago, well-known British TV broadcaster, Piers Morgan, was mortified when Dr. Abdul Wahid, an extreme Islamic leader and National Health Service physician, refrained from condemning the October 7 Massacre, going as far as to deny it had ever taken place.
Many across Europe and North America have become gradually aware that such views do not only reflect poignant criticism against Israel and Zionism, but an entire set of values that is gaining a foothold in the West in stark contrast with the basic principles prevalent there.
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Pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University
(Photo: Michael M. Santiago / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP)
There is a direct link between the heated interviews Morgan has been hosting since October 7 and the unsettling events spreading throughout U.S. Ivy League campuses in recent days, which include blocking Jewish students’ path as they attempt to access these campuses, praising Hamas (and even marking pro-Israeli protesters as “Al Qassam Brigades’ next targets”), calling for Israel’s annihilation, and tearing down U.S. flags. Although described as “progressive popular protesting”, these incidents often share striking antisemitic and violent traits.
The Israel-Hamas War is showing the West a glimpse of the dramatic demographic and cultural shift that is taking place within it. At its center lies the alliance between Muslim communities that are at the forefront of the anti-Israel protest, the power of which is consistently growing, and the progressive influential elites in politics, the media, and academia.
Such public opinion shapers and intellectuals who adhere to politically correct principles and postcolonial theories that place the indigenous on pedestals, giving them every right to every form of violence in the name of alleged liberation from enslavement.
It reveals the dark side of multiculturalism. Not just accepting those who differ from us in ethnicity, religion, or skin tone, but those who believe in a set of values that contradict the liberal democratic one. Thus, communities that raise the banner of embracing a wide range of faiths are now required to accept dogmatic, monolithic views that boast a backward set of values: lack of self-criticism; a dichotomous outlook that divides the world into absolute goods and bads; manipulative twisting of truth and morals to fit interests; and lack of empathy for “others”.
Pro-Palestinian western intellectuals regard Israel as convenient means by which to clear their sinful colonial conscience. They are afraid of attacking human right-trampling powers such as China, and therefore view lashing out at Israel, to the point of arguing against its very right to exist, as an opportunity to be seen as enlightened.
And if that means siding with Islamic organizations that reject the LGBTQ community’s right to exist, and impose an oppressive cultural code on the public sphere that applies primarily to women, so be it. Thus, a combination of naivety, ignorance, and hypocrisy renders those who claim to represent progress and humanism active war crime supporters, who are repeating the betrayal of western intellectuals who regarded Stalin, Mao, and Khomeini as leaders of “just” revolutions of the oppressed against imperialist oppression.
Zoomers’ social media shallowness and monolithic perceptions also serve as a source of power for the anti-Israel protest. At a time when superficiality and slogans replace complexity and profoundness, many young adults don keffiyehs or the green headbands worn by Hamas terrorists that have become fashion symbols supposedly representing the defense of the weak, or call for “resistance”, without realizing that it is a euphemism for unrestrained violence directed at the innocent.
The war in Gaza has sparked a culture clash within, and not just between, countries. a conflict between utterly different definitions of truth, ethics, and attitudes toward others, in which Israel strives to emerge as a force on the West’s frontlines in the battle against the dark forces that oppose liberalism and its values.
Dr. Michael MilshteinTo establish its unique position, Israel must maintain the kind of attributes that will demonstrate that it belongs to the right side of history, including an independent justice system (requiring, inter alia, the discarding of the judicial reform) as well as a liberal and opinionated civil society, alongside the willingness to promote a strategic arrangement pertaining to the issue of the Palestinians, which is front and center on the global agenda and a source of international unrest, making it a crucial point for rapid yet thorough resolution even in the absence of external pressure.
Dr. Michael Milshtein is the Director of the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center.