A profound irony of Israel’s latest grim suffering is that the knife- and gun-wielding Palestinian (Hamas-sponsored) terrorists and their leftist cheerleaders in the American academy reveal a deplorable collusion between what ordinarily would be antagonists.  

The collaborative condemnation by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for” the October 7 slaughter suggests a bewildering collusion between far right and far left: fundamentalist Islamists supported by woke, neo-Marxist radicals.

A rebarbative synthesis

It is as if, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War that pitted Israel against Egypt and Syria, Hegel’s dialectic (actually Johann Fichte’s) overcame the diverging ethos of antagonists.  Thesis: Islamofascism; Antithesis: neo-Marxism (submission to Allah versus a godless war on exploitation).  The rebarbative synthesis: death to Jews.  

It appears there is a metastatic malignancy perfusing elite universities all across the country, as the emerging generation of America’s foreboding political future (young Democratic Socialists of America) celebrated in Times Square amid reports of the beheading of toddlers and the rape and murder of young women in their parents’ homes.  Can it really be that Ivy League and other prominent universities are graduating Nazi youth?  Are there in fact neo-Nazis reimagining the Barack Obama/Joe Biden wing of the Democrat party? 

Matriculating radicals

A perspicuous rationale is needed to explain the pitiless way the woke Harvard student radicals blamed the victim for the latest Hamas intifada.  Why, sane people want to understand, do Ivy League students hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding barbarity? 

We are struck by the irony of Harvard admissions officers recruiting applicants who “have demonstrated concern for others ... can be graceful ... under pressure ... [and] open to learning new ideas. [I]t [is] important for you to treat others with kindness and demonstrate that you care for others in addition to caring for yourself.” 

Left-leaning moral concerns  

As the research of Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind illuminates, the left’s two (almost exclusive) moral concerns — for care/harm and fairness/cheating — which, Haidt explains, “means equality to the left but proportionality to the right” (emphasis added), almost guarantees that Harvard’s students will empathize with their partisan professors’ perspective on the Middle East. 

Taught by impressive and persuasive progressive professors to see the Palestinian issue through Haidt’s care/harm, fairness/cheating lens of lamb versus lion, rabbit versus wolf, or (ironically) David versus Goliath, the weaponized professorial casuistry often tracks the calumnies recited by Amnesty International: that Israel is a Zionist, apartheid bully state that (with the backing of American money and weapons) has swaggered between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea for seventy-five years.

What young person of idealistic bent doesn’t root for an underdog?  Unfortunately, this saga is about two very different underdogs that appear to be fighting over the same bone.

Given that openness is considered a particularly progressive personality trait, one would expect a commitment to the diversity of ideas in academe.  Instead, The Harvard Crimson 2022 survey of faculty found that “more than 80 percent of Harvard faculty respondents characterized their political leanings as ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal.’”  Sixteen percent labeled themselves “moderate,” while “only 1 percent of respondents stated they are ‘conservative.’” 

Progressive student psychology  

Jonathan Haidt explains the students’ likely primary moral concerns for care/harm, fairness/cheating.  But what explains their wildly inhumane demonization of the innocent victims of utter savagery?  

The answer is a matter of psychology, about human tendencies that have been understood and written into the characters of plays and novels long before Freud gave them a nomenclature, before human behavior became a clinical profession or an academic discipline. 

The Harvard student groups that published their deplorable statement blaming the Israeli victims responded in a way that is consistent with their prejudices and philosophical assumptions about humanity.  They believe, in the abstract, that all human beings are basically good...except, perhaps, recently realized (post–George Floyd) exceptions such as white (especially conservative) Americans and Israelis.  

There is an unquestioning belief by these young, care/harm, fairness/cheating idealists that Hamas terrorists — what they have been conditioned to believe are only dispossessed freedom fighters — are just as righteous as the Harvard students consider themselves to be.  The students project their own relative decency onto the objects of their political concern.  And their feelings, even if not articulated, are very real. 

Preposterous translation  

When the radical young Ivy-Leaguers hear about or see video of the savagery of innocents by the barbarism of Hamas terrorists, their reaction is determined by a translation.  

Not only are they predisposed to see the Palestinians as surrounded by merciless gorgons, but they interpret the pitiless terrorism of Hamas as a desperate, understandable response to decades of intolerable abuse by Israeli masters.  The students think: What unspeakable degradation these poor Hamas freedom fighters and their loved ones must continually suffer to be willing to risk their lives and the contempt of the world to express their agony in such sadistic acting out!

Absurd and unreasonable as they obviously are, the Harvard student radicals reimagined the Israeli victims as vile oppressors and the Hamas barbarians as recipients of torture beyond toleration. 

In short, the students who support Hamas are identifying with Hamas “freedom fighters,” enabling the Ivy-Leaguers not only to explain away, but even to celebrate their sadistic actions.  

Educational dereliction

The students’ care/harm and fairness/cheating moral outrage is purely in defense of the Palestinians, but their assumption that Palestinians are good and Israelis are bad is due largely to the imbalance of their Harvard education.  This monolithic distortion in the political posture of American university faculty is to blame for so many of our increasingly violent political divisions. 

What is a poor (actually often wealthy) Harvard student to make of life’s political dilemmas, especially when he is not taught to think critically, not taught to grapple with contrasting points of view, and often encouraged to ignore views that do not fit his leftist narrative?  Sometimes they just close their eyes, plug their ears, and yell. 

So many young Ivy-Leaguers are unaware that the perfect is the enemy of the good, informed primarily by partisan dogma, unable to reason from cause to effect, incapable of paying it forward, and willing to see Hamas only as the champions of downtrodden Palestinian refugees.  So what do the radically woke Hamas-loving students really want? 

In their ignorant, soft-souled, underdog-loving, decency-projecting hearts, they demand heaven on earth — the politics of hell. 

Hamas-loving Harvard student radicals illuminate a criminal neglect: the failure of the American educational complex to represent history with reasonable balance.  This dereliction of U.S. higher education, especially since WWII, is particularly evident in its failure to inform students how in the recent century, men with utopian and totalitarian impulses (dreamers with power) slaughtered scores of millions of human beings that the woke generation is hardly aware of. 

As Whitaker Chambers wrote in 1961, “[i]t is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization.  It is already a wreck from within.” 

Douglas Hackleman has a Master’s degree in psychology from Pepperdine University.  

Image: scottgunn via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.