By Andrea Widburg
As the moral equivocators weep tears about Israel’s reprisal against Gaza, I keep thinking of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s realization that, when you are dealing with totalitarians, their first target is never their only target. Nor can I stop remembering the old Jewish man who left the concentration camp and said, “When people promise to kill you, believe them.” For anyone paying attention, the socialists in America, who are happily making common cause with Hamas, have been using some of the same eliminationist rhetoric that the Muslims use against the Jews in Israel.
Niemöller initially supported the Nazis. He thought Hitler would be good for Germany, and he disliked Jews. He believed it when Hitler said he wouldn’t persecute the Church and Jews would be subject only to limited persecution. By 1938, though, he realized that Hitler had no brakes and found himself interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau through war’s end. In this context, Niemöller made his famous “First they came…” statement, not as a poem, but as a confession.
That confession was eventually turned into the free-verse poem we recognize:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
What does that poem have to do with moral equivalence in America? I’m glad you asked.
I think we all agree that you cannot move with reason squishy people who think there is equivalence between Hamas soldiers, trained, funded, and equipped by Iran, who target civilians for slaughter, and an Israeli military response against Hamas headquarters that are deliberately hidden behind civilians. For these squishes, Hamas beheading a baby for fun is the same as Israel warning people to clear a Hamas building before bombing it.
Ironically, I’m willing to bet that over 90% of these squishes support abortion. Some baby killing is a good thing. And why is it a good thing? Because it benefits them. At an individual level, it means sex without consequences and a blow to the patriarchal idea of motherhood. At a societal level, it means keeping women wedded to the workforce while lowering the population to save the insensate earth.
In other words, rather than having absolute morals, they have self-interest. So, here’s some self-interest to offer them that might help them rationalize coming down on Islamic terrorism with unabated fury: You’re next.
Why are you next? Because Islam and the socialists have come together to decry “colonialism.” Colonialists are evil, having deprived non-white peoples of their indigenous lands. Never mind that, in the case of Israel, Jews are the indigenous people. Moreover, given the influx of Jews from across the Middle East and Africa, Israelis are a brown people. My Facebook feed shows me that many people slaughtered were “melanated” rather than pale Caucasian.
For Muslims, Jews are the colonizers. For the left in the West, whites are the colonizers. It doesn’t matter that you start your meetings by guiltily acknowledging that your university or government office was built on stolen indigenous land. What matters is that, for leftists, it’s not your land; it’s their land, and they’re entitled to take it back by any means necessary. That is why they express solidarity with the Palestinians:
Najma Sharif, a freelance journalist for InStyle and Teen Vogue, both hard-left publications, was perfectly blunt in her approving assessment of what “de-colonizing” means. In a since-deleted, subliterate tweet, she wrote:
what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers. “not like this” then like what. show us LOL.
Karen Attiah, a Washington Post columnist, liked the tweet:
At a guess, I’d say Najma is Muslim, while Attiah, who identifies as Ghanaian and Nigerian, may be Muslim. What matters is that both are using the language of modern anti-colonialist socialism.
Those shared values mean that these people don’t just approve of the “anti-colonialist” violence in Israel; they approve of it coming here. In this video, the man uses that same rhetoric to threaten all “colonizers”:
I admire his honesty. I wish more people would listen to him and understand what’s going to happen.
In response to the above tweet, conservatives noted that we Americans are armed. Well, yes, but not all of us. In Israel, the armed kibbutz survived, but the rest died horribly.
When the de-colonizers finish with the Jews and come from you, if you’re not armed (and if you’re a morally equivalent leftist, I know you’re not armed), you’ll be one of the guys and gals at the peace rave. No one will save you. And they’re coming for you. Your only choice is to let a legitimate military kill them before they kill you.