Equity, Equality and Hamas
Daniel Greenfield
How we got to college students supporting Hamas.
.How did we end up with Hamas rallies on college campuses across America? Start with ‘equity’.
America started out with the idea of ‘equality’ that all people should be treated equally so that regardless of where they started out, everyone had the same rights and their lives had the same value. Advocates for ‘equity’ argue that this was unjust because different people were starting out in different places. What they really needed was a level playing field by imposing ‘equity’.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion disposed of equality. Its equity agenda dismissed the idea that people would be treated equally. The only way to achieve equality was through an indefinite period of inequality: raising up some people and pushing down others. Organizations, from the White House to Corporate America, vowed to ”embed equity” into everything that they did.
The moral DNA of society was completely rewritten so that everything from freedom of expression to the value of human life had to be weighed in terms of identity politics. Even the most basic moral questions came down to the paradigms of oppressor and oppressed. Right and wrong were determined purely in terms of ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’.
“Is it wrong to murder, rape and kidnap people?” was a question to which the answer was no longer “yes”, but “were the victims or the killers members of an oppressed group?”
What matters is not so much that Hamas raped, killed and kidnapped kids, but that it appears to be the weaker party in the conflict, the one with backing from leftist figures in good standing, and the one that has the revolutionary vibe that bourgeois radicals love so much.
Siding with Israel or Hamas has become a litmus test for the left of center. It evenly divides liberals from leftists. The dividing line is between human decency and ideology. It’s a familiar moral struggle that played out time and again throughout the twentieth century.
Morality can only exist in a society that believes in equality. Equity is obsessed with outcomes which is another way of saying that it believes that the ends can always justify the means.
“To put it brutally,” Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent, busy covering up Communist atrocities in the Soviet Union, famously wrote, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Equity is all about the omelets. It reduces all morality to a political program. Right and wrong is determined by where everyone starts out and where they want to end up. Violence is just another means. Sometimes eggs have to be broken and millions of people have to be killed.
Brutality, rather than something to be deplored, becomes a sign of revolutionary commitment. Only those who truly believe in a new age and are determined to overthrow the existing order will be utterly ruthless, vicious and destructive in the campaign against the system. The worst barbarism is justified as a ‘reaction’ to oppression and a determination to rush out an end to it.
The Left never lets go of bad ideas. It just rebrands them. Equity is just the same old program of promising to make everyone equal through a temporary totalitarian ‘evening out’ period. Under this umbrella, there is no room for individuality or freedom, and the only morality is political.
Radicals claim that equality perpetuates the system while equity disrupts it. The reality is that equality is genuinely dangerous because it disrupts all systems of power while equity is just another means of eliminating individual rights, and replacing it with a system of power.
Expecting people dedicated to this proposition to side with Israel over Hamas is foolish. And those indoctrinated to view the world through concepts like anti-racism, intersectionality and orientalism have been groomed throughout their miseducation to support Hamas. All the tools and the information they have been given have trained them to understand Islamic terrorists as the oppressed, not just in Israel, but in America, Europe, India and all around the world.
This may seem like madness to conservatives and liberals, but if you understand the world as a conflict between the old order and an emerging new order, as leftists and some far righters do, siding with Hamas is wholly reasonable. Not to mention China, Russia and Al Qaeda.
Equity is all about forcibly ‘evening out’ humanity while intersectionality connects all causes.
When abortion rights ralliers carry signs reading, “Palestinian resistance is reproductive justice”, it seems like madness, but it’s a very particular species of ideological madness. The same one that led Communists to defend Nazi Germany during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Or led the Trotskyists who still form the backbone of the anti-war movement to sabotage the defense industry in the United States and the United Kingdom once WWII was in full swing.
If the only real measure of morality is the oppressor/oppressed or ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’, then why be selective about who the oppressed ‘punching up’ are? Nazis and Hamas both look pretty good when they’re inflicting defeats on the people you want to overthrow.
Some radicals may be well aware that Hamas Jihadis would be shooting or raping them if they were in the wrong place, but it didn’t especially bother them when their friends ended up on the guillotine or in gulags, or when they were beaten during race riots or killed in Latin America.
Equity requires sacrifices. We can’t all be even until some of us are broken or killed.
Where equality sees us as individuals, equity reduces us to members of a group operating within a political context. Our lives are sacred only to the extent that our death serves a political purpose. Do black lives matter? Only when they’re taken by a police officer, not by the stray bullets of a gang member over a long weekend in Chicago.
College students who cheer Hamas or tear down posters of kidnapped hostages ask themselves what is the political context in which these crimes were carried out. It is the context that matters, not the people. In the right political context, anything can be justified.
The further away we get from equality, the more we find ourselves in this abyss of equity where the only morals are political, the only crimes are political and the only people that matter are political. The cruel god of the leftist is politics. Men, women and children are sacrificed to him, but he yields nothing except a permanent sinecure for the bloody priests wielding the knife.
Equity gazes at the past and the future, but has little interest in the present except as a meeting point of the two. It destroys the present to avenge a poorly understood past and ensure its impossible plans for the future. It dehumanizes people on the promise of humanizing them. It convinces them to support discrimination to end it, to spew hate for the sake of love, and to support mass murder so that all mankind may live in peace.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism
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