This essay is from Ilan Benjamin, whose cousin Daniel Pearl was a journalist that was beheaded by islamist terrorists in Pakistan during the “War on Terror” in 2003. He narrates how Pearl’s murder did not destroy the family’s idealism and devotion to peace and the whole progressive agenda:
“In 2012, I returned to the States to study film at University of Southern California, and published a book about my military service that criticized the Israeli government. This didn’t win me many friends, but I continued to advocate for nuance regardless. I proudly supported Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA+, and feminist causes. I called myself a progressive Jew.”
But over time he couldn’t fail to notice that this didn’t buy him any points with the Left with respect to Israel:
“I assumed—if I cared enough, if I mourned for the Palestinian dead, if I put nuance above all else—our neighbors and their allies would give us the same decency.
How wrong I was. This past week, as over 1,300 Jews were slaughtered, the most murderous attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I saw the true face of Palestinians and their allies. All around the world, they celebrate. They gloat. They mock our tears. They do not protest against Hamas. They embrace pure evil.”
And now he has learned a lesson:
“To non-Jewish friends who have reached out, thank you. It is simply the human thing to do. To friends who dare justify what has happened, you are not friends. You are nothing but Nazi supporters dressed up in leftist intellectual language.
…
Unlike our enemy, I feel no joy at the prospect of going to war. But if our people’s existence is at stake, I will do what I must. I will be the world’s favorite villain: the Jew who has the audacity to defend his people.”
Mr. Benjamin has learned that the Left has a hierarchy and regardless of what he would wish he is near the bottom of that hierarchy because he belongs to a branch of western civilization. He is a straight Jewish western man. The only thing below that on the hierarchy is a straight Christian western man. And of course a Palestinian is much, much higher up in that hierarchy.
But the true revelation is not where he stands in the hierarchy but what actions this organization; the Left, will condone by those it favors.
Literally anything.
Their favored partisans can rape women next to the bodies of their slaughtered friends. They can saw the heads off of infants. They can film these atrocities. And the Left will still proudly trumpet a full-throated harangue that these psychotic murderers are the real victims.
Mr. Benjamin at long last has had his eyes opened to the truth about his progressive friends. Basically, they are either evil or insane or both. Possibly going forward he should examine the people who are the enemies of these “friends.” He might find additional clarity and maybe some more reliable friends.