How Hamas Became an Environmentalist and Gun Control Cause
By
Daniel Greenfield
On
November 28, 2023
In
recent
From Queers for Palestine to marchers carrying signs reading, “Palestine is a Reproductive Justice Issue”, the Hamas cause has been vertically integrated throughout the Left. Greta Thunberg was booed after injecting anti-Israel chants into environmental rallies. The BLM movement was a longtime foe of Israel, but Asian Studies departments recently joined in.
The leaders of March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement, a gun control group and an environmental protest group, signed a letter to Biden warning that young people wouldn’t vote for him unless he forced Israel to stop attacking Hamas.
How better to promote gun control than by defending mass murderers who used machine guns to kill innocent people and how better to champion the environment than by supporting terrorists who deliberately start fires in Israel. What does Hamas have in common with gun control advocates, environmentalists and abortion activists?
“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Israel’s Labor leader Merav Michaeli complained. “People who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women, the LGBTQ+ community… The more you go to the left, the more there’s a big mix-up. Something went very wrong on the way.”
The ‘something’ that went wrong is called ‘intersectionality’. That’s why abortion protesters, gay activists, environmentalists, gun control activists and the entire Left have to support Hamas. But intersectionality is also bait and switch. While gay activists have to support Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group doesn’t have to stop throwing them off buildings. Making sure Hamas has enough fuel to fire rockets at Israeli kindergartens may be a reproductive justice issue, but no one expects masked men armed with RPGs to shout, “Allahu Akbar” at a Planned Parenthood rally.
Rather than a daisy chain connecting all the leftist causes together, intersectionality is actually a hierarchy that prioritizes the worst causes. It’s how the entire gay rights movement, to the dismay of some gay men and many lesbians, was drafted into the transgender cause. It’s why the extreme wing of each individual movement, from BLM in civil rights to art vandals in the environmental movement, have come to dominate while the moderates have been shut down.
Intersectionality has sidelined both principles and tactical considerations while making protestations of victimhood into the only consideration that matters. The more violent the rhetoric and the more extreme the cause, the more it takes over the entire Left.
This would make little sense if leftists actually cared about feminism, gay rights or global warming. But then again if they actually cared about those things, wouldn’t the USSR, China and Communist China be utopias where benevolent gay people cleaned up the environment?
The first and foremost thing that Merav Michaeli and most leftists don’t understand about the Left is that causes, whether it’s gun control or men pretending to be women, are just leverage to recruit activists, tear up society and then seize power. And once that happens, the new regime will have as much use for transgenderism or environmentalism as the Soviet Union did.
When you understand that, it becomes quite obvious why the Left supports Hamas, how it can juggle support for Islamic terrorism with the LGBTQ movement, and why it demands that gay rights take a back seat to Jihad. Intersectionality is just a new suit of clothes on the very old leftist idea that all causes are ultimately subordinate to the overriding cause of the revolution.
Under Stalinism, American Jewish leftists were told to support a regime that was massacring Jews and had allied with Nazi Germany. American feminists advocating for reproductive rights were ordered to back Communist China which was forcibly breeding women and aborting their babies. The American Indian movement was expected to support the Sandinista regime which was burning its own Indian population alive. To be a leftist is to be a traitor to your own cause.
These crimes which scarred generations of leftists were whitewashed out of history by leftists and the movement was rebranded as identity politics narcissism. Much as the military tried to appeal to a self-identified generation with the slogan ‘Army of One’, the Left rebranded as a movement centered around the personal identity of each of its members. But just as the army is still a massive hierarchy, not a personal development seminar, the Left is a collectivist movement whose central idea is that it is the group, not the individual, that actually matters.
Intersectionality promised a more individualistic leftist movement, one that was highly attuned to the ‘lived experience’ of its members and the more complex, and less black and white nature of identity politics in a world of many ethnic groups and sexualities, but that was bait and switch. Instead of customizing the movement to its members, intersectionality customized its members to the movement and its overriding objectives of burning down everything and seizing power.
And thus Hamas.
The American Left originally embraced third world liberation movements. When what it thought were secular Arab Socialist movements, including the PLO, turned out to be Islamist, it went along without missing a beat. After 9/11, liberals and Democrats in a fit of schismogenesis countered Bush’s War on Terror with a war for terrorists. Islamists became an oppressed group and a vital part of the leftist coalition not in spite of their destructiveness, but because of it.
If the Left actually cared about the things it claims to care about, it would be natural for it to side with Israel. But if the Left actually cared about those things, it would wave the American flag and condemn the Third World. Instead the Left acts like America is the worst place in the world and that every backward dictatorship is morally superior to us.
The hostility of the Left to the countries it’s in is the best evidence that it doesn’t believe in its causes. The diversity of the causes are a pretext for the true cause of mass destruction.
The inner purpose of any leftist cause is to create division and sow mistrust. The specificity of the cause is only a means of recruiting activists from a particular part of the spectrum. The more causes, the more races, ethnicities, sexualities, classes and belief systems, it can recruit from. Intersectionality is ultimately an academic term for demanding that the outer purpose, the official cause, must be subservient to the inner purpose.
How are abortion rights, gay rights or gun control served by supporting Hamas? The outer purpose of those movements is not served, but the inner purpose is advanced. And the inner purpose is the same as that of Hamas. The gun control advocates, environmentalists and other leftist activists are not here to improve our society, like Hamas they want to destroy it.
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Thank you for reading.
The leaders of March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement, a gun control group and an environmental protest group, signed a letter to Biden warning that young people wouldn’t vote for him unless he forced Israel to stop attacking Hamas.
How better to promote gun control than by defending mass murderers who used machine guns to kill innocent people and how better to champion the environment than by supporting terrorists who deliberately start fires in Israel. What does Hamas have in common with gun control advocates, environmentalists and abortion activists?
“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Israel’s Labor leader Merav Michaeli complained. “People who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women, the LGBTQ+ community… The more you go to the left, the more there’s a big mix-up. Something went very wrong on the way.”
Rather than a daisy chain connecting all the leftist causes together, intersectionality is actually a hierarchy that prioritizes the worst causes. It’s how the entire gay rights movement, to the dismay of some gay men and many lesbians, was drafted into the transgender cause. It’s why the extreme wing of each individual movement, from BLM in civil rights to art vandals in the environmental movement, have come to dominate while the moderates have been shut down.
Intersectionality has sidelined both principles and tactical considerations while making protestations of victimhood into the only consideration that matters. The more violent the rhetoric and the more extreme the cause, the more it takes over the entire Left.
This would make little sense if leftists actually cared about feminism, gay rights or global warming. But then again if they actually cared about those things, wouldn’t the USSR, China and Communist China be utopias where benevolent gay people cleaned up the environment?
The first and foremost thing that Merav Michaeli and most leftists don’t understand about the Left is that causes, whether it’s gun control or men pretending to be women, are just leverage to recruit activists, tear up society and then seize power. And once that happens, the new regime will have as much use for transgenderism or environmentalism as the Soviet Union did.
When you understand that, it becomes quite obvious why the Left supports Hamas, how it can juggle support for Islamic terrorism with the LGBTQ movement, and why it demands that gay rights take a back seat to Jihad. Intersectionality is just a new suit of clothes on the very old leftist idea that all causes are ultimately subordinate to the overriding cause of the revolution.
Under Stalinism, American Jewish leftists were told to support a regime that was massacring Jews and had allied with Nazi Germany. American feminists advocating for reproductive rights were ordered to back Communist China which was forcibly breeding women and aborting their babies. The American Indian movement was expected to support the Sandinista regime which was burning its own Indian population alive. To be a leftist is to be a traitor to your own cause.
These crimes which scarred generations of leftists were whitewashed out of history by leftists and the movement was rebranded as identity politics narcissism. Much as the military tried to appeal to a self-identified generation with the slogan ‘Army of One’, the Left rebranded as a movement centered around the personal identity of each of its members. But just as the army is still a massive hierarchy, not a personal development seminar, the Left is a collectivist movement whose central idea is that it is the group, not the individual, that actually matters.
Intersectionality promised a more individualistic leftist movement, one that was highly attuned to the ‘lived experience’ of its members and the more complex, and less black and white nature of identity politics in a world of many ethnic groups and sexualities, but that was bait and switch. Instead of customizing the movement to its members, intersectionality customized its members to the movement and its overriding objectives of burning down everything and seizing power.
And thus Hamas.
The American Left originally embraced third world liberation movements. When what it thought were secular Arab Socialist movements, including the PLO, turned out to be Islamist, it went along without missing a beat. After 9/11, liberals and Democrats in a fit of schismogenesis countered Bush’s War on Terror with a war for terrorists. Islamists became an oppressed group and a vital part of the leftist coalition not in spite of their destructiveness, but because of it.
If the Left actually cared about the things it claims to care about, it would be natural for it to side with Israel. But if the Left actually cared about those things, it would wave the American flag and condemn the Third World. Instead the Left acts like America is the worst place in the world and that every backward dictatorship is morally superior to us.
The hostility of the Left to the countries it’s in is the best evidence that it doesn’t believe in its causes. The diversity of the causes are a pretext for the true cause of mass destruction.
The inner purpose of any leftist cause is to create division and sow mistrust. The specificity of the cause is only a means of recruiting activists from a particular part of the spectrum. The more causes, the more races, ethnicities, sexualities, classes and belief systems, it can recruit from. Intersectionality is ultimately an academic term for demanding that the outer purpose, the official cause, must be subservient to the inner purpose.
How are abortion rights, gay rights or gun control served by supporting Hamas? The outer purpose of those movements is not served, but the inner purpose is advanced. And the inner purpose is the same as that of Hamas. The gun control advocates, environmentalists and other leftist activists are not here to improve our society, like Hamas they want to destroy it.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
