The Latest Hamas Atrocity Is Splitting The Left, And That Is Very Good

"Yes... Ha ha ha... Yes!" - Sickos

There’s a Twitter meme asking for people’s most X (“left-wing”, “right-wing”, etc.) view. Well, my most Boomer view is that Jews and Israel are cool and worth supporting. It is a completely uncomplicated view and purely based on vibes and memes (as all my views are). Joking aside, I understand why certain American paleoconservatives are frustrated with a certain style of politics that includes over-the-top displays of slavish support for Israel (though these displays, as often in politics, are indicative of a different reality), but it really shouldn’t be hard to understand why a French nationalist would have instinctive affinity for any country blessed with enemies such as Israel. If you don’t get it, google “Bataclan” (where atrocities very reminiscent of the recent Hamas crimes were committed) or “Algerian War”.

Anyway, my point here is not to discuss the right but the left.

To someone who remembers the 2000s and the various “Intifadas”, while the terrorist attack itself was a shock given its scale, what happened after was sadly predictable, with the usual suspects lining up in the expected positions. But several things did change.

The first was that Hamas, playing to its Arab audience, filmed itself committing what to Western eyes is the most horrifying atrocities imaginable but is just part of the standard Arab razzia style of warfare. The live videos had an impact that words and descriptions cannot have.

The second is that Muslim immigration to the West has increased to the point of forming a very active fifth column, so that the attacks were followed by many objectively pro-Hamas demonstrations, led by a combination of Muslim immigrants and homegrown left-wing activists.

The conjunction of these phenomena has led many on the center and center-left, many (but not all) of them Jews, to suddenly and in shock realize a few truths, truths that the right has been warning about for a long time—

• Large numbers of Muslim immigrants to the West, to a distressing degree, do not assimilate to our culture or moral norms; they feel a sense of ethnoreligious affiliation with the Muslim third world which to them takes precedence over any sense of affiliation they may have towards their host countries; their sense of empathy and morality is perfectly compatible with approval of massacres and atrocities committed against enemies of the Faith.

• Left-wing activists just love mass murder and atrocities, as long as they’re against the “right” people, and Jews are definitely on the list. As a viral tweet put it, “What did you think decolonization meant?” What, indeed.

Many centrists and center-left personalities have suddenly realized these things and reacted with shock—shock! It is easy to mock… But it is also a true opportunity.

I believe it was Steve Sailer who first described the Democratic coalition in the US as the “Coalition of the Fringes”: the coalition of all groups that feel “excluded” from the mainstream, such as single women, racial and sexual minorities, the very poor, and so on. And he pointed out, correctly, that such a coalition cannot be held together by shared interests, indeed their interests must conflict—instead, what can hold together such a coalition, if not shared interests, what must exist to hold them together, is a shared enemy—the white, heterosexual, Christian, male.

We can see how true this frame is, since, as soon as left politics are no longer about hating “cishet” white men, the coalition immediately starts tearing itself apart.

The logical endpoint of the Coalition is what has been called in French politics “Islamo-leftism.” In France, the Hamas attacks have led the left-wing movement LFI to drop the mask completely and essentially come out as an islamist party, refusing to label Hamas a terrorist group, and darkly implying that any politician who disagrees with LFI’s pro-Hamas stance must be controlled from Tel Aviv. (LFI leader Mélenchon is obsessively tweeting about National Assembly Speaker Yaël Braun-Pivet, a boring politician who, as best as I can tell, is indistinguishable from other members of the Macron Administration apart from having a Jewish name.)

On its face, “Islamo-leftism” is absurd. What could be more fundamentally incompatible than the left’s belief in the total emancipation of the individual, and Sharia law? But if you understand left politics as being based on enemies and not substantive beliefs then it makes complete sense: Islam and leftism have an obvious shared enemy, which is Western civilization.

Hence much-mocked banners such as “Queers for Palestine” or “Reproductive Justice Means Free Palestine.” But while it’s easy to mock, these banners embody a profound truth. The resentment that animates Hamas and the activist left is the same: anti-European, anti-Western, anti-greatness, anti-civilization. They share the same enemy and they know it, and so the alliance is natural.

In France, this new crack in the left-wing coalition caused by Islamo-leftism looks likely to have momentous consequences. French politics has been defined for decades by the “cordon sanitaire”, the media-driven idea that the National Front/National Rally, the populist-right party, was somehow uniquely toxic, uniquely impure—an idea that never applied to the Moscow-affiliated and openly totalitarian Communist Party. Today, it looks like the “cordon sanitaire” is on the other side, as it were, with centrists and other authorities denouncing LFI as beyond-the-pale while welcoming the National Rally’s strongly anti-Hamas sense. While the National Rally has been traditionally excluded from national commemorations of tragedies, it was invited to the commemoration of the Hamas attacks—while LFI was excluded.

The point is that this split in the coalition is a huge opportunity for the Right—if it plays its cards well. It’s easy to mock the naïve centrists who are only now discovering that water is wet. Instead, right-wingers should try to do their best to respectfully enlighten them and show them the error of their ways. This rift in the left-wing coalition won’t close easily, and we should do everything to deepen it, by pointing out what some on the center are confusedly encountering for the first time.