ZOMBIE PROGRESSIVES DEFILE OUR VALUES

RESPONSES TO THE LATEST TRAGEDY REMIND US THAT PEOPLE WHO CLAIM TO SHARE OUR VALUES DON’T.

Heartbreak.

As I have noted before, my Substack is not about “breaking news.” Among other things, I am putting some context around current events.

However, it is impossible to say anything without confronting the news about the Bibas family. Mother Shiri and sons Ariel, 4, and Kfir, nine months, were abducted during the Ocotber 7 pogroms. The photos from the moment of their abduction have become symbolic of the plight of the hostages and the pain of our epoch.

Yesterday, the murderers returned the bodies of the children, as well as the body of Oded Lifshitz. A fourth body returned is not that of Shiri. We have no idea the fate of the mother.

Jewish people around the world — and their allies — are grieving, enraged, horrified. This is one of the darkest moments since that dark day a year and a half ago.

But not everyone is grieving.

As they have done with every hostage release, Palestinian terrorists have engaged in what amounts to a festival. Indeed, they have much to celebrate. Their grotesque inhumanity has won the freedom of some of the world’s most blood-soaked terrorists, who will now go on to kill and maim more Jews.

There are others who are not grieving. Some are even celebrating.

Some of these are my former friends. These are self-described “progressives” worldwide whose perverted worldview has allowed them to see the murder of innocent children and the kidnapping and torture of civilians of all ages as legitimate “resistance.” (For the real definition of resistance, read my post here.)

Palestine — that is, the “idea” of Palestine — is the ideological Bermuda Triangle of progressives. They sail too close and are never seen again.

No. That’s not quite right. The idea of Palestine, for progressives, is more like a hydrogen bomb. The bomb goes off, the people remain alive but the progressive infrastructure evaporates.

Hang on. I’ve got another one. They’re like zombies.

They are zombie progressives. Their bodies look the same, they still chant for peace, coexistence, equality, but all they really want to do is eat brains. Or, less metaphorically, justify mass rape, decapitation, live immolations of families, and mass murder.

The point is, Palestinianism changes a progressive person. Everything that they and their friends believed about them goes flying out the window. Palestinianism is like a brain-eating phenomenon that leaves the host looking a little glassy-eyed but mostly the same — except everything they claim to believe in disappears.

Like the idea that we should believe victims of rape. For zombie progressives, that ends at the border between Gaza and Israel. Whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no — unless you’re wearing a Star of David and happen to be in Israel, according to zombie progressives.

They still believe in gay rights — just not for Palestinians. Let’s not pretend that LGBTQ+ Palestinians are living in some kind of nirvana under Israeli occupation. But there’s a reason queer Palestinians are lining up to get citizenship in the “apartheid state” of Israel.

Zombie progressives believe in multiculturalism, diversity, equity and inclusion — but in their dystopic vision of Palestine, they endorse a Jew-free state that would probably be an Islamist theocracy.

People should be free to determine whatever kind of government they want, right? Let’s say that is so. But if a misogynistic, homophobic, jihadist, theocratic, repressive state is what a “Free Palestine” would look like, why have progressives made this the absolute, number one, unparalleled centerpoint of our foreign policy?

If Palestinians, given the choice, chose to live under an oppressive jihadist regime, who are we to argue? At the same time, why does this anti-progressive outcome seem to be the only foreign policy issue progressives give a damn about?

Zombie progressives still believe in democracy, if democracy means opposing the January 6 Trumpist insurrectionists. But when it comes to Palestine, their chants of “Free Palestine” ring completely hollow. There is precisely no substantial movement for democracy in Palestine and so the very term “Free Palestine” just rubs salt in the open wound of Palestinian oppression. Worse, for all the tsunamis of “pro-Palestinian” activism from Seattle to Sydney, effectively none of it actually advances a Palestine that would be “free” in any sense of the word an American or an Australian would recognize it.

Zombie progressives allow this topic — including a falsified genocide — to eclipse every other topic on the planet … including actual genocides elsewhere in the world. Not so progressive.

Contemporary progressives, apparently concluding that our values would not defile themselves, have taken it upon themselves to trample everything we have always believed in. Feminists side with the most misogynistic forces on the planet. LGBTQ+ people side with the world’s most rabid homophobes. Antiracists align with the most racist nationalist and ethnic cleansing movements. Pacifists side with mass murderers. Atheists align with jihadists.

How? Why?

Somehow, Palestinianism has become an overstrike key that erases everything else progressives claim to believe. (Elsewhere, I’ve tried to explain why.)

It is a form of false consciousness, of voting against our self-interest, in the same way that Ronald Reagan and so many others convinced low-income voters to support tax cuts for the rich by distracting them with social issues that had no pocketbook impacts.

Feminists, queer people, progressives of every stripe have allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked to believe that Palestinianism is our cause. This is not only a distraction from the issues that should truly matter to us. It not only distracts us from advancing women’s equality, queer rights, economic and social justice everywhere. Even worse — it actually betrays Palestinians themselves in ways I have written about before.

Palestinianism is like the right-wing culture wars, in which obsession over comparatively irrelevant topics distract people from what really matters.

Palestinianism convinces activists to abandon feminism, gay rights, equality and everything else we thought we believed for a racist, violent nationalist movement.

As a gay person, in Canada, I know there are gay rights battles left to fight. Canada is a pretty good place to be gay. But that should put a burden on us to make life better for queers elsewhere — like the dozens of countries where being gay can lead to life sentences in prison or even death.

Places like Palestine, come to think of it.

Instead, we ignore that inconvenient truth, abandon queer Palestinians (and women and minorities) to effectively grant carte blanche to the tyrants of Hamas and Fatah.

See why I use the term zombie progressive? “Progressive” sure as hell doesn’t fit anymore.

The obvious question should be … who benefits?

If Palestinianism betrays everything else we claim to believe in — and, at the same time, doesn’t help — but actually harms — Palestinians themselves, then who the hell does it benefit?

In whose interest is it to perpetuate this massively effed up anti-progressive pathology?

Surprise! I’ve got an answer! Coming up …

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