The Tyranny of Victimhood

How Progressives Turned Regressive

“I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself.” (George Orwell)

“It depends on the context.” With these five simple words, uttered during a hearing in the U.S. Congress in December last year, the former president of Harvard University Claudine Gay secured her place in history books. It was her answer to a question just posed to her by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s codes of conduct?” Two academic colleagues sitting next to her, the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, had been roasted with the exact same question. All three, with a contemptuous smirk on their lips, refused to give a simple affirmative answer, instead repeating the same evasive and lawyerly phrases they had clearly rehearsed beforehand. Calling for the extermination of the Jews on our campus? Well, sometimes you can, it depends, you see.

In defense of her answer, Claudine Gay boasted that her university is “deeply committed to protecting free expression” in the spirit of the U.S. First Amendment. I wish that were true, but it shows a breathtaking level of hypocrisy. This is the same university where students and staff risk disciplinary sanctions if they address someone using the wrong pronouns or make derogatory comments about another one’s weight. ^[1] When some Harvard students shared some off-color jokes and memes — not on campus, but in a closed Facebook group — they were immediately suspended. A professor of evolutionary biology faced an internal investigation and was eventually bullied off campus because she said on television that there are only two sexes in nature (a correct biological observation).^[2] Even the former president of Harvard, the economist Larry Summers, was forced to resign in 2005 because he had dared to raise the hypothesis (at a conference behind closed doors) that male overrepresentation in STEM fields may result partly from higher variability in male aptitude (meaning more geniuses and more 'idiots'), in addition to discrimination and gender stereotypes. A perfectly legitimate hypothesis backed by some solid statistics, but it was enough to force Summers to resign.^[3]

In fact, the vaunted “freedom of expression” at Harvard is in such a deplorable state that, in the index of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the university received the lowest score ever recorded, coming in dead last out of 203 elite schools surveyed.^[4] Statistical analysis reveals that, the more prestigious and more progressive a university, the worse the protection of free speech.^[5] If you were to so much as dream about uttering the n-word on campus at an Ivy League university, even in an educational context, you would be immediately hounded off campus and expelled.^[6] Let alone that you would call for the 'genocide of Black people' and that your university president would defend your free speech in Congress.

Ideological rot

This hearing in Congress provides the most incontrovertible evidence to date (with three sworn testimonies under oath) of an ideological rot that has been spreading for decades in our most prestigious institutions. Except now the festering sore is exposed for the entire world to see—including to the wealthy donors whose money provides the lifeblood of universities like Harvard.

The moment the sore burst open was on October 7, 2023, or very soon thereafter. Just a quick recap. Just days after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel, before the country returned a single shot towards Gaza, countless student groups and academics at Western universities had already rushed to condone, downplay or even glorify Hamas’ massacre.^[7] The day after the attack, more than 30 student groups at Harvard wrote a joint statement holding Israel’s “apartheid regime” “solely responsible” for the massacre.^[8] Pro-Palestinian demonstrators aggressively harassed Israeli and Jewish students on several campuses, including Harvard, usually without facing any disciplinary sanctions. No fewer than 120 departments of gender studies around the world felt compelled to condemn Israel in the wake of the largest anti-Semitic massacre since the Holocaust, but none of them had a single word to spare for the female victims of sexual violence by Hamas and other jihadist groups. Not just sexual violence but sickening sadistic torture that almost defies description: genitals stabbed with knives or riddled with bullets, severed breasts, broken pelvises, families burned alive. ^[9]

At my own alma mater (Ghent University), hundreds of academics signed an obscene open letter that explicitly refused to condemn Hamas, shifted all blame to "Zionists" and praised Palestinians for their “tenacity and fierce resistance to racism and settler colonialism,” which the signatories found immensely “inspiring”. An open letter at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), again signed by hundreds of academics, exulted that 2023 “will no doubt be the year admired, recorded and studied for the way in which Palestinians steadfastly resisted colonialism, occupation and survived genocide”. The letter even called for the abolition of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at UvA, because the program was deemed “complicit in remaining silent on the unfolding genocide of the Palestinians.”^[10]

And the insanity was not limited to academic institutions. The official U.N. body for women’s rights, U.N. Women, dragged their feet for almost 50 days before finally condemning one of the most brutal violations of women’s rights in modern history, in a tweet that they deleted a few hours later, hiding behind a pathetic excuse (that they wanted to focus on a truce between the warring parties instead).^[11]

Oppressors and Oppressed

Like the Greek hydra, the ancient monster of antisemitism has multiple heads. There is the Christian ‘head’ that regards Jews as murderers of Christ and inspired bloody pogroms in the Middle Ages, based on libelous rumors that Jewish communities poisoned the drinking water and drank the blood of Christian children. There is the racialized version of antisemitism on the Far Right, which regards the Jewish people as a parasitic life form that poisons the healthy body of society. Yet another ‘head’ is the Islamic tradition of antisemitism, which, much like the Christian variant, ultimately stems from the resentment and frustration about the Jews’ refusal to accept the latest divine revelation. And then there is the anti-Semitic tradition on the Far Left, which portrays Jews as an evil cabal of rootless and money-grabbing bankers and capitalists, outstretching their tentacles like an octopus around the world.^[12]

In short: there’s no dearth of possible historical roots for animus against the Jewish people. And yet it would be too simple to interpret the demonization of the only Jewish state in the world at our universities—and the support for its genocidal enemies—as just the hoary old monster of antisemitism rearing its ugly head.^[13] Antisemitism surely plays some role in campus protests, but the real explanation lies deeper. In a sense, the Jews and/or Zionists are merely collateral damage of a different and underlying ideology.

The intellectual roots of this ideology are complex, but the conceptual framework is easy to summarize. First you divide up the world into two mutually exclusive categories: the oppressors and the oppressed. These two groups are locked in a zero-sum struggle where one group's gain can happen only at the expense of the other's loss. There can be no middle group: either you are an oppressor or a victim. Next, you apply two completely different moral standards to those groups: those who belong to a victim group are innocent by definition and incapable of doing anything wrong. If they seem to do some horrible things, that is only because they are responding to the grave injustices to which the oppressors have subjected them. This victim group enjoys protection, compassion, the privilege of low expectations, and preferential treatment by way of compensation for their long history of suffering and oppression. As for the oppressor group, they get none of that. The only good thing the oppressors can do is to humbly acknowledge their collective guilt and strive to be good allies of the victim group by unconditionally supporting their noble struggle (although that does not absolve them).

The dichotomy that I discuss here is the one between Western and non-Western, and by extension white vs. black. In recent years, similar victim vs. oppressor dichotomies have cropped up in other kinds of progressive discourse, and their combined approach has become known as “intersectionality”. In this intersectional framework, each dimension of sexual, physical and cultural identity has its own victim/oppressor binary (male/female, straight/LGBT, cisgender/transgender, slim/fat, and so on), each corresponding to its respective system of oppression (sexism, heteronormativity, transphobia, fatphobia, and so on). The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has used the image of a cake that is being sliced up along different axes.^[14]

From Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind

Still, these binary divisions have different intellectual roots and manifest in different ways, so it’s not always enlightening to lump them together in the way activists tend to do. In fact, classical Marxism provides another example of such an oppression binary (bourgeois/proletarian), but of course Marxism long predates the rise of modern intersectionality. In any event, I think the division between Western and non-Western is the dominant and most important one, which, as we will see, takes precedence over the others in case of conflict.

Now we’re missing only one element to understand the charade in the American Congress and the apparent outbreaks of vicious antisemitism in the most progressive bulwarks of our society: Jews are perceived to belong to the oppressor group. The prime reason is that Israel, the world's only Jewish state, is seen as the last surviving project of European settler colonialism, in which white Westerners expel, oppress or exterminate indigenous populations. Another reason is that Jews (in the US but also in Europe) are regarded as a successful “model minority” against which other minorities are often judged, with many holding positions of influence and prestige. Public surveys bear this out: Among Generation Z (ages 18 to 24), 67% agree with the statement that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as such.”^[15]

In this binary framework, the ultimate enemy is not so much Israel, but Western civilization, with its long history of imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy. Islamists and jihadists often proclaim that Israel is merely “little Satan,” the squire and helper of “big Satan”, which of course is the United States, Israel's loyal ally. Something similar applies to the virulent hatred of Israel in progressive circles. The small Jewish nation of less than 10 million inhabitants is targeted only insofar as it serves as a proxy for the West.^[16] Similarly, the astonishing support for Hamas and Israel's other enemies has little to do with any genuine ideological affinity but everything with the old maxim: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The paragliders on October 7 were lionized as noble warriors not for what they stand for, but what they were construed as fighting against: Western colonialism.

According to historian Jeffrey Herf, this shift in the (academic) Left towards seeing Jews and Israelis as oppressors occurred after Israel’s spectacular victory during the Six-Day War in 1967.^[17] After originally supporting the establishment of Israel in the post-war years and heralding Zionism as a liberation movement for the Jewish people, leftist academics began to turn against Zionism in the 1960s, equating it with racism and colonialism, and thus anti-Zionism with anti-racism. This was partly under the influence of Soviet propaganda, but as we will see, there were other ideological reasons not directly related to communism. In any event, by the time of the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution adopted by the U.N. in 1975, endorsed by a coalition of communist and Arab nations, the volte-face was already more or less complete. From then on Jews were perpetrators rather than victims, and Israel represented racism, colonialism and white supremacy.

Never mind that there are hundreds of thousands of Sephardic and Black Jews living in Israel, as well as hundreds of thousands of Arab Israelis who practice Islam, that Jewish “colonizers” have no homeland to return to at all, that Jews are just about the most hated group in the world (comprising just 2.4 % of the U.S. population, they bear the brunt of 60% of all religious hate crimes)^[18], that Jews have been persecuted almost to annihilation precisely because they failed to pass as “white,” that Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and was founded with a U.N. mandate, that Palestinians and Israelis are ethnically indistinguishable—none of this matters in the slightest. In this infantile binary worldview, Jews and Israelis as a class are “white,” hence colonizers, hence racists. As some protestors have delicately put it on their placards: “IDF = KKK.”

How progressives became reactionaries

The demonization of Israel and reflexive sympathy for its genocidal enemies is not the only harmful result of this neat division of the world into perpetrators and victims locked in an implacable zero-sum struggle. By presenting Western civilization as the root of all evil, this ideology ultimately ends up with a wholesale rejection of everything Western civilization stands for—science, progress, freedom of expression, human rights—which are seen as cynical covers for imperialism and oppression. Worst of all, it devolves into the most reactionary form of racist essentialism: the view that democracy, rationality, and secularism are exponents of 'whiteness', not suitable for people with dark skin.^[19]

How is it possible that progressives, of all people, have embraced such reactionary nonsense? It is easier to understand why there is a long history of far-right ideologues in the West cozying up to foreign dictators, from the fellow travelers of Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s all the way up to Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.^[20] If you are nostalgic for the old days, when strong leaders, churches and traditions still commanded respect, it’s not so surprising that you develop a soft spot for someone like Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban (even fundamentalist Muslims and Christians got along pretty well before 9/11). The same goes for the belief that white people are somehow endowed with a proclivity for rationality, individualism and logical thinking. It’s one thing to find such noxious ideas in extreme right-wing circles. But that progressives, of all people, have started to warm to such racist essentialism requires a slightly more convoluted explanation.

The backdrop for this progressive betrayal of Enlightenment values is the history of Western colonialism. After the Second World War, the Western powers were exhausted from the war and increasingly unable to hold on to their overseas possessions. Independence movements were springing up everywhere, trying to throw off the yoke of colonial rule. Like a series of dominoes, the Western colonies began to topple, with one success inspiring another. Some of these decolonial movements found inspiration in Western intellectual traditions—such as socialism and communism, Arab nationalism, or Enlightenment universalism. But there were more radical thinkers who saw an implacable struggle between colonizers and colonized, and who wanted to radically break with Western civilization. Or at least, in the words of one of these thinkers, to wield Western thinkers such as Marx, Freud and Hegel “to incriminate the very civilization producing all of them”.^[21] The most influential expression of this Manichean worldview of the West versus the Rest emerged in Algeria, not coincidentally one of the bloodiest anti-colonial battlegrounds. But it was not developed by an Algerian, but by a Black psychiatrist born in the West Indian French colony of Martinique: Frantz Fanon.

The wretched of the earth

Like many other postcolonial intellectuals, Fanon was steeped in the culture of his colonial rulers. Born in 1925 into a middle-class family, the Fanon family mainly tried to assimilate into French culture, otherwise keeping a low profile. An uprising against the occupier was not exactly on their minds. The first words young Frantz learned to write at school were "Je suis Français". This strong identification with French civilization permanently changed during the Second World War when Fanon fought with the French against Nazi Germany on the European front. For the first time in his life, Fanon experienced first-hand how his white comrades viewed him and other non-white soldiers as inferior—second-class citizens at best. The humiliations he suffered while in Europe—such as the Frenchwoman who refused his invitation to dance after the liberation, preferring American dance partners—left scars that would be felt for the rest of his life.

In the course of Fanon’s all-too-short career—he died of leukemia at the age of 36—this bitterness and resentment led to a savage condemnation of Western colonialism, culminating in his legendary book The Wretched of the Earth. For centuries, the colonial occupier had violently oppressed and humiliated its subjects, robbing them of their humanity. The only way the 'wretched of the earth' could regain their humanity, argues Fanon, is by murdering the colonizer. Real freedom could not be granted by the occupier, or achieved through peaceful protest; it had to be wrested by force. For the psychiatrist Fanon, violence was not only instrumental in shattering the colonial chains, but also a form of therapy, a refreshing tonic with purifying and cathartic effects on the minds of the oppressed. Like the electroshock therapy he prescribed to his psychiatric patients, outbursts of violence could resuscitate the enslaved mind, which had been dulled to passive resignation and feelings of inferiority, “On the level of the individual, violence dis-intoxicates”, Fanon wrote, serving as an antidote to the sickening oppression of colonialism: “For the colonized, life can only arise from the decomposing corpse of the colonist”. In Fanon’s anticolonial struggle there is no room for compromise, because (de)colonization is a zero-sum game with only one possible winner and one loser, or as he put it: “The last shall be first.”^[22]

This was no idle talk. Fanon, to his credit, also walked the walk. In Algeria he supported and joined the Front de Libération Nationale, even when they started massacring French civilians in terrorist attacks (to which the French predictably responded with brutal retaliations). Fanon believed—against his better judgment as a clinician—​​that such outbursts of bloody terror would ultimately herald a society of freedom and universal brotherhood.^[23] In reality, it led not only to a cycle of retaliation and revenge, but also to brutal internecine fighting among the Algerian guerrillas, with executions of dissidents and rival groups, and to new forms of oppression. As conservative Islam slowly gained the upper hand in the Algerian liberation movement and began to oppress women and religious minorities, Fanon turned a blind eye and remained silent. The wretched of the earth had only one true enemy, and that was the Western colonizers.

Frantz Fanon during an FLN press conference (Tunis, 1959)

The lyrical and rousing diatribe of The Wretched of the Earth, combined with Fanon's heroic self-sacrifice and tragic death at the age of 36, turned him into a patron saint of the anti-colonization and anti-racism movement. His book became required reading for the Black Panthers, South American guerrillas, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and assorted guerrillas and Islamists from Iran to Palestine. More remarkably, some “progressive” European intellectuals started masochistically cheering for this bloody revenge against their own civilization. In a delirious foreword to The Wretched of the Earth, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre—at that time one of the most influential intellectuals on the European continent—​attempted to surpass the author of the book in anti-western bloodlust. Only by killing Europeans, Sartre theorized from the comfort of the Café de Flore in Paris, could the colonized ever become human again:

[When] you slaughter a European, you kill two birds with one stone, you get rid of an oppressor and an oppressed at the same time: what remains is a dead man and a free man. […] We were human at his expense, he becomes human at our expense.

For those progressive humanists who support the Algerian liberation struggle but condemn its barbaric excesses, Sartre had nothing but contempt: “no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.” Appeals to humanism are just “an exquisite justification for plundering.”^[24]

Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Café de Flore in Paris.

While you can feel some sympathy for the vengeful fantasies of Fanon, in view of his humiliating experiences with racism, the bloodthirsty masochism of the “progressive” in Paris is above all pathetic. Sartre’s behavior is even more revolting if you bear in mind that he had no qualms at all about covering up and whitewashing the bloody reign of Joseph Stalin, a man who literally colonized, starved and oppressed half of Europe. But for Sartre, as for many “progressives” after him, the only real enemy was Western bourgeois capitalism, and its victims the only true and noble heroes.

Echoes of Fanon’s philosophy of detoxifying violence could be heard soon after the carnage of October 7, before the blood had even dried. If you wonder why on earth left-wing professors would describe a sadistic massacre as “exhilarating” or “awesome”^[25], or why students decorated pro-Palestinian posters with heroic Hamas paraglider, you should look no further than Fanon and his extreme version of the victim vs. oppressor binary. In an interview with the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, even Fanon's sympathetic biographer Adam Schatz had to admit that the pogrom of October 7 can be read as a “classic example of Fanonian struggle”.^[26]

The Western hunger for power and domination

A second pivotal figure in the rise of anti-Western ideology is the Palestinian-American writer and literary critic Edward Said. In his brooding autobiography Out of Place, written at the end of his life, Said writes that he always felt torn between his very British first name—borrowed from the Prince of Wales—and his Arabic family name. The offspring of a wealthy Palestinian-Christian family (his father also had a U.S. passport), Said grew up in the twilight of the British Empire, traveling between Cairo and the British Mandate of Palestine. Like Fanon, Saïd writes that, despite his privileged and affluent background, at crucial moments in his life he felt that white Europeans were treating him as a second-class citizen. Although Said was not very politically conscious in his youth and early adulthood, even in the aftermath of the founding of Israel in 1948 and the Nakba, he gradually became more committed to the Palestinian cause when he studied at Princeton.

In 1978, Edward Said threw a bombshell into the Western canon, the aftershocks of which would be felt for decades. Orientalism—a good contender for the most influential academic book of the 20th century—is one long indictment of the deep-seated prejudices Western civilization has been harboring for centuries against Eastern cultures, especially Islam. Before Said, ‘orientalism’ was a neutral concept, referring to Western artistic movements drawing inspiration from Eastern styles or to scientific studies and travel reports about the East. Ever since Said’s seminal book, however, ‘orientalism’ has become a dirty word. In almost the entire Western canon, according to Said, the Orient appears as a stereotypical essence (mysterious, exotic, sensual, bloodthirsty), serving as a mirror image to sharpen the self-esteem of Western civilization (rational, enlightened, civilized, masculine): “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”^[27]

Said’s focus on the discourses of Western domination and colonialism rather than its actual practice was heavily indebted to the French postmodernist Michel Foucault. For both thinkers, violence is not only inflicted through bayonets, cannons, or torture racks, but also in less visible and more insidious forms, namely through oppressive discourses. This means that even apparently peaceful practices and institutions can really be deeply violent at their core. And just as Foucault directed his critical gaze mainly on the innovations of modernity that seemed most innocuous (such as schools, hospitals and asylums), Said attacked primarily those aspects of Western civilization that seem the least offensive: the thirst for knowledge and the attempts to understand other cultures. In Said’s eyes, the orientalist does not simply investigate, study, and measure his object of research—he destroys, dominates and plunders it. Said believes that this pernicious orientalist discourse extends all the way to the American empire of the 20th and 21st centuries. Even today, Western universities, media and think tanks are deeply complicit in the imperious ambitions of the countries in which they operate.

Orientalism made a splash both at home and abroad and was translated into thirty languages. For the first time, as the Palestinian historian Tarif Khalidi wrote, here was a book “by one of us telling the empire basically to go f— itself.”^[28] Providing further evidence of deep-seated orientalist prejudices, the Western academic world offered Said distinguished professorships (at Berkeley, Yale and Johns Hopkins) and showered him with abundant prizes and honors throughout his career.

Fully in line with the moral dichotomy of Frantz Fanon—an avowed source of inspiration—Said’s diatribe in Orientalism and later works was almost exclusively a one-way street. Only the prejudices of the (alleged) perpetrator towards the (alleged) victim commanded Said’s critical attention. A comparative study of the ways in which cultures harbor prejudices about each other was of no interest to him. In fact, Said wrote next to nothing about those indigenous cultures and their own discourse of oppression (such as the caste system in India). By treating Eastern cultures and civilization mostly as hapless victims of the all-powerful West, Said deprived them of moral autonomy. The Other is not freed from its chains but condemned to the role of passive plaything and puppet. In his sweeping condemnation of Western civilization, Said also fell prey to that which he claims to combat. For instance, writing about 19th-century Europeans, Said produces this sentence without a hint of irony: “Every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”^[29] And mind you, just like Sartre his ire was above all directed at the liberal, democratic, free West. Even though Soviet cultural imperialism and persecution of Muslims came much closer to what Said laid at the doorstep of the democratic West, the communist bloc—itself an offshoot of Western civilization of course—mostly gets a free pass.

Although he never used the word, it is no exaggeration to call Edward Said the godfather of the concept of “Islamophobia”, the favorite immunizing tactic to shield the regressive beliefs and practices of Islam from criticism. Throughout his work, Said attributes to the West an irrational fear of Islam, which has been part and parcel of its imperial ambitions for centuries. An irritating effect of this Foucauldian style of “discourse analysis” is that it always deflects attention away from the question: how accurate were those representations of Islam? To what extent do Muslims really support violence and terrorism in the name of religion, or the death penalty for apostates and adulterers, or the subjugation of women (spoiler alert: to an alarming extent)?^[30] It’s like doing a discourse analysis of how the planet Venus is “represented” in the Western media—as a scorching and inhospitable wasteland, as a cautionary tale about runaway greenhouse warming, as the brightest celestial body in our firmament—​​without ever considering the question: but are these representations correct? Does our discourse about Venus correspond with the real planet out there? All in all, Said's work was a wonderful gift to the conservative mullahs and ayatollahs who wanted to cleanse the Arab world of toxic Western ideas and fend off unwelcome criticism of their religious dogmas.

The West is always to blame

The victim/oppressor binary inspired by Fanon, Said and others continues to loom large over many leftist geopolitical analyses, even apart from Israel.^[31] In this one-note symphony, “we” are always and everywhere to blame for whatever happens. If the West intervenes somewhere, then we are war-mongering imperialists in the pocket of the Military-Industrial Complex and guilty of all the misery that ensues. If the West refrains from intervention, we are no less guilty, this time because of negligence and callous indifference to the suffering of non-white people. And if the West backs one of the warring parties from the sidelines, it is attacked on both sides: because we are doing too little to help the 'good guys' (which gives the bad guys the upper hand), or because we are adding fuel to the fire and playing into the hands of the bad guys. Heads I win, tails you lose.

In fact, the best predictor of moral outrage among Western progressives about an international conflict is how easy it is to frame the West as the culprit: sympathy for the victims is directly proportional to how close their oppressors are to the West. In other words: no “Teach-Outs” at our universities for the massacres in Sudan, Ethiopia or Syria, because those are just subalterns killing each other. But the Palestinians of Gaza, on the other hand, can be framed as victims of Israel, which in turn is an ally of the United States—now that kindles the revolutionary fervor. For years, activists expressed no interest at all in the Houthis in Yemen, an Iran-backed Shiite terrorist group that has unleashed a civil war there. That is, until in January 2024 these selfsame Houthis started shooting rockets at Western ships in the Red Sea, as punishment for its support of Israel. All of a sudden you could hear chants at university campuses: 'Yemen, Yemen make us proud, turn another ship around!’

And you could hear deluded academics hailing the Houthis as “the most humane force in modern history”, who should be applauded  for their “remarkable act of revolutionary solidarity”.^[32] Who cares that the official slogan of the Houthis is “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam”, or that the group literally stones and crucifies homosexuals, and would happily slit the throat of any of the Western activists that are cheering them?^[33] As long as the freedom fighters are aiming their missiles at Western ships, they’re on the right side of history.

Although ostensibly standing up for victims of Western imperialism, such analyses have the effect of denying moral autonomy to any geopolitical players except the West. Just as Frantz Fanon remained blind to the theocratic and reactionary tendencies in the Algerian independence movement, many anti-Israel activists today have no interest at all in the noxious ideology of their 'freedom fighters'. The role accorded to Hamas is that of heroes in an anti-colonial Western drama, regardless of how they regard themselves. In reality, of course, Hamas, is a genocidal, racist and theocratic organization that aims to wipe Israel off the map, as everyone can read in their original charter in 1988, and in countless pronouncements from Hamas leaders ever since. The notion that Hamas would lay down its arms in return for the removal of settlements in the West Bank or for any two-state solution (whatever the borders), is a delusion on the part of secularized Westerners who fail to take other people’s religious beliefs seriously.^[34]

Even when a conflict somewhere in the world cannot be easily shoehorned into the binary scheme of Western oppressors and non-Western victims, analysts will still try to implicate and condemn the West. You can still hear the argument today that it was NATO who “provoked” Russia for years by recklessly interfering in Russia’s historical “sphere of influence”. When Ukraine or Finland expresses their fervent desire to join NATO for protection against Russian aggression, we hear the same people talk about NATO's “expansion”, as if the West was ramming membership down these countries’ throats. In reality, the West has been reluctant for years to grant NATO and EU membership to Ukraine and other former Eastern Bloc countries, precisely for fear of provoking Russia.^[35] Even Noam Chomsky, still a towering figure on the Left, has accused the West of refusing to negotiate with Russia and instead choosing to “fight Russia to the last Ukrainian”, a statement which, among many other things, is an incredible insult to the Ukrainians.^[36]  From day one of the invasion, Ukraine has been practically begging the West for more and better weapons to fight the Russians, and the West has been slow and reluctant to give them over, lest they “provoke” the Russian bear and escalate the conflict. But according to Chomsky and his ilk, the only relevant moral actor in this conflict is the West, and the Ukrainians are just hapless pawns sacrificed to our Western designs.

The ultimate betrayal of self-professed ‘progressives’—I can’t help resorting to scare quotes again—occurs when the demonization of whiteness is extended to the realm of ideas. By labeling ideas and beliefs as ‘white’ just because they happened to have originated in Western Europe, Enlightenment and modernity become targets of decolonization in their own right. All those lofty principles and ideals of all those dead white males of the European Age of Reason? Nothing but cynical rationalizations for oppression and exploitation, which indigenous non-Western peoples should have no truck with.

Before you know it, you end up with full-blown racist nonsense according to which liberalism and secularism are just ‘white' notions that are unsuited to brown or Black people. By openly abandoning Enlightenment universalism in this way, progressives have become the allies of religious reactionaries and fanatics in non-Western cultures, as the Indian historian Meera Nanda has argued. They have made it all too easy to dismiss liberation struggles within non-Western cultures as a covert form of Western imperialism, of a “colonial modernity which privileges a Western conception of reason and modernity.”^[37] When it comes to Islam, you then get a narrative, as the Pakistani-Canadian ex-Muslim Ali Rizvi told me, in which “the only good Muslim is a conservative Muslim”.^[38] Or in which, as Yasmine Mohammed has written in Unveiled, Western progressives are empowering their own worst enemies.^[39] If anything is guilty of “Orientalism” in the pejorative sense of Edward Said, it must be the offensive assumption that misogyny, antisemitism and hatred of homosexuals just happens to be part of “their” culture, which we should all respect. 

Wellspring of hilarity

Fortunately, there is also some mirth to be found in all this insanity. In recent years, we have witnessed how victim/oppressor narratives, when applied to relatively innocuous issues, have generated an endless stream of silliness that is hard to distinguish from parody.^[40] Especially efforts towards “inclusive” language, intended to protect one or another designated victim group, are an endless source of hilarity? Just a small sample:

It is easy to make light of inanities like these—which for lack of a better word have become known as “wokeness”—but when the same ideology is wielded to condone and justify horrific terrorist attacks, I am significantly less amused. It is all well for privileged students at Western universities to wallow in performative radicalism about “decolonization” and “offensive language” precisely because, at the end of the day, nothing much is at stake. It’s just empty posturing that mainly functions to signal moral virtue within certain ideological tribes. But when it comes to the conflict in Gaza, there is something at stake. If Israel becomes increasingly shunned and abandoned by its Western allies, the future of the only liberal democracy in the region looks bleak indeed. In the worst-case scenario, the current conflict in Gaza could escalate into an open war with Iran and its proxies, or even with other Arab nations. 

The most charitable explanation of the one-sided demonization of Israel by Western progressives is that, unlike progressives in Israel itself, they no longer understand what it means to live in a country that has been existentially threatened since its founding, with multiple terrorist groups and nations having vowed to wipe the “Zionist entity” off the map. It is easy to shout anti-Zionist and pro-Hamas slogans if you’re thousands of miles away, safely ensconced in your elite campuses. If these same students were living next door to a terrorist group that had just massacred a music festival and half a city, and has vowed to repeat the same horror over and over again, I think they would sing a different tune. 

It is time for these pampered students, academics and administrators to “check their privilege”, to echo one of their own favorite phrases. In the wake of October 7, it has become abundantly clear what kind of moral monstrosities you end up with if you start dividing the world into evil oppressors and noble victims. If elite universities want to stem the rapidly dwindling trust in academic institutions, they need to consistently apply free speech principles and adopt institutional neutrality across the board, and they need to tackle the ideological rot that they have allowed to spread and even cultivated for decades (mostly in the form of the massive DEI bureaucracy).^[41] The last thing they should do is to abet and give cover to this pernicious ideology in U.S. Congress, for the eyes of the whole world to see.

[This is a draft of my chapter for an upcoming anthology about academic freedom and why it is under threat]

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^[1] ‘Harvard Tells Students: Using Wrong Pronouns’ Constitutes “Abuse”’, Washington Free Beacon, 14 Sep. 2022. ‘Harvard Rescinds Acceptances for At Least Ten Students for Obscene Memes’, Harvard Crimson, June 5, 2017

^[2] Carole Hooven; ‘Why I Left Harvard’, The Free Press, 17 Jan. 2024.

^[3] ‘Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women’ New York Times, 18 Jan. 2005.

^[4] The ranking: https://www.thefire.org/college-free-speech-rankings Harvard's last place: https://shorturl.at/hSzpK

^[5] Analysis by Freek Van de Velde (KULeuven), based on a paper in preparation (personal communication).

^[6] ‘Professor is suspended for using the N-word in class in discussion of language from James Baldwin essay’, Inside Higher Education, 1 Feb. 2019.

^[7] ‘Anti-Israel Activists Celebrate Hamas Attacks that Have Killed Hundreds of Israelis,’ Anti-Defamation League, October 14, 2023. bit.ly/3Wk2xr4

^[8] ‘Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine’, www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654370.

^[9] Gil Troy, ‘Feminists Are Consenting to Hamas’ Rape Culture’, Tablet Magazine, 30 Oct 2023. Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz & Adam Sella, 'Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7', New York Times, 28 Dec 2023.

^[10] UGent: ‘Statement in solidarity with the Palestinian people’, https://shorturl.at/bO0q5. UvA: ‘UvA Support for Palestine, End Occupation’, https://shorturl.at/2iYlA.

^[11] ‘Amid outcry over silence, UN Women posts, then deletes, condemnation of Hamas attack’, Times of Israel, 28 Nov. 2023.

^[12] Jeffrey Herf (2023), Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist. Taylor & Francis.

^[13] Musa al-Gharbi, ‘Misunderstanding antisemitism in America’, Slow Boring, 11 Jan. 2024. shorturl.at/kExhD

^[14] Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind, Penguin. See also Yascha Mounk (2023), The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Penguin.

^[15] Harvard-Harris poll in Dec 2023: https://shorturl.at/EjFuh

^[16] Douglas Murray (2022), The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, HarperCollins.

^[17] Herf (2023), Three Faces of Antisemitism.

^[18] ‘FBI director warns antisemitism in US reaching 'historic levels', BBC, 1 Nov. 2023.

^[19] Jonathan Chait, 'Is the anti-racism training industry just peddling White supremacy', The New Yorker, 16 July 2020.

^[20] Jacob Heilbrunn (2024), America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Liveright.

^[21] Edward Said (1994), Culture and imperialism, Vintage, p. 252

^[22] Frantz Fanon (2007), The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Atlantic, p. 2.

^[23] Adam Shatz (2024), The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

^[24] Jean-Paul Sartre; ‘Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”’, English translation at: bit.ly/4fu4KsE

^[25] “Exhilarating: ‘Cornell Prof. Russell Rickford Speaks at Pro-Palestine Rally’,

"Awesome": Joseph Massad, 'Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?’, The Electronic Intifada, 8 Oct. 2023.

^[26] ‘Would Frantz Fanon Have Supported the Oct. 7 Massacre? His Biographer Isn't So Sure’, Haaretz, 2 Feb. 2024. https://archive.ph/1e995

^[27] Said (1978), Orientalism, p. 3.

^[28] Udi Greenberg, ‘The Lost Worlds of Edward Said’, The New Republic, 13 April 2021.

^[29] Said (1978), Orientalism, p. 204.

^[30] Ruud Koopmans (2021), Das verfallene Haus des Islam: Die religiösen Ursachen von Unfreiheit, Stagnation und Gewalt, C. H. Beck. Pew Research Center: ‘The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society’ (2013).

^[31] Michael Walzer (2018), A Foreign Policy for the Left. Yale University Press.

^[32] Lecture of Max Ajl, researcher at Ghent University: https://t.co/bH8YWXUjtA

^[33] ‘Yemen: Huthi authorities sentence seven to stoning and two to crucifixion for homosexual 'crimes'’, Amnesty, 9 Feb. 2024 bit.ly/3zFR2Cw

^[34] Maarten Boudry (2019) ‘Disbelief about belief. Why Secular Academics Do Not Understand the Motivations of Religious Fundamentalists’. New English Review, May 2019. shorturl.at/jR2ZP

^[35] ‘NATO Allies Oppose Bush on Georgia and Ukraine’, New York Times, 3 Apr. 2008.

^[36] ‘Noam Chomsky on How To Prevent World War III’, Current Affairs, 13 Apr. 2022.

^[37] Meera Nanda. (2001). ‘We are all hybrids now: The dangerous epistemology of post‐colonial populism’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 28 (2), pp. 162-186.

^[38] ‘“Liberals Have Compromised on Their Own Values”: An Interview with Ali A. Rizvi’, Quillette, 28 July 2018. See also Rizvi’s excellent book (2016), The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason. St. Martin's Press.

^[39] Yasmine Mohammed (2019), Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, Free Hearts Free Minds.

^[40] Titania McGrath (2019), Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, Little, Brown Book Group.

^[41] Steven Pinker, 'A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself', The Boston Globe, 11 Dec. 2023.