{"id":108778,"date":"2023-11-22T18:05:17","date_gmt":"2023-11-22T16:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=108778"},"modified":"2023-11-22T10:12:59","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T08:12:59","slug":"28-05-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=108778","title":{"rendered":"The Return of the Progressive Atrocity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Return of the Progressive Atrocity<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Susie Linfield<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Photo by Amir Hanna on Unsplash<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

It is the responsibility of Western activists to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves\u2014openly and decisively\u2014from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

All lies and jest,
\nStill a man hears what he wants to hear,
\nAnd disregards the rest\u2026<\/em>
\n~Paul Simon, \u201cThe Boxer\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1957, Albert Memmi addressed the question of the Left\u2019s relationship with terrorism in his book,\u00a0The Colonizer and Colonized<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0Memmi was a Tunisian Jew, equally committed to socialist Zionism and anticolonialism. The Left tradition, he observed, \u201ccondemns terrorism\u201d as \u201cincomprehensible, shocking and politically absurd. For example, the deaths of children and persons outside the struggle.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But Memmi\u2019s suppositions were outdated even as he wrote. The history of the modern Left\u2019s romance with terrorism\u2014not the \u201cold-fashioned\u201d version aimed at czars or imperial officials, but the kind directed against unarmed civilians\u2014had already begun. It started with the Algerian War and gained momentum throughout the 1960s, \u201970s, and beyond with the emergence of the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen, and the panoply of organizations included in the Palestine Liberation Organization and, especially, its Rejectionist Front. The latter held pride of place: \u201cFor the Sixth International, the Palestinian resistance is a banner … an inspiration for the revolt of the dispossessed, both in its ends and in its means,\u201d proclaimed Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, a prominent Egyptian leftwing intellectual and activist.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was at this time that the oxymoronic and ethically repellent concept of what the late Middle East scholar, anti-colonialist, and socialist Fred Halliday criticized as \u201cprogressive atrocities\u201d gained credence on the Left, particularly within the Palestinian movement and among the groups supporting it. Of course, the Palestinian national project\u2014like Zionism\u2014has always contained a variety of ideologies ranging from peaceful coexistence to the elimination of the other. (The latter tendency is appallingly prevalent among many members of Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s current government.)\u00a0But it is no exaggeration to say that the Palestinian movement, even before the founding of Israel in 1948, has been defined by terror more than any other, and that terrorist groups have always been prominent\u00a0within<\/em>\u00a0the movement.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the age of the \u201cprogressive atrocity,\u201d PLO terrorist attacks on Israelis, Jews, and civilians throughout the world were hailed as instruments of liberation. A very partial list of such incidents would include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (the games continued, nonetheless) and the Lod Airport massacre the same year (death toll: 26, along with at least 80 injured); the Ma\u2019alot massacre of 1974, in which 115 Israelis, mainly schoolchildren, were taken hostage (resulting deaths: 31); the Entebbe hijacking of 1976, in which Israeli and other Jewish passengers were separated from others and threatened with death (most were rescued by Israeli commandos); the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which a civilian bus was highjacked (death toll: 38, including 13 children; 71 wounded); the 1982 attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg kosher restaurant in Paris, considered at the time to be the worst incidence of antisemitism in France since the Holocaust (death toll: six, with 22 injured); and numerous other instances of air piracy. Various international groups, especially Baader Meinhof of Germany and the Japanese Red Army, sometimes assisted their Palestinian brothers \u201cin solidarity.\u201d Not all leftists or leftwing organizations supported these actions, but to criticize them was a sign of \u201cbourgeois moralism\u201d as Ghassan Kanafani, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put it. (Kanafani, who was also a gifted writer,\u00a0was assassinated<\/a>\u00a0after the Lod attack by the Mossad.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Curiously, none of the groups that employed terrorism, other than the Algerian National Liberation Front, achieved its aims\u2014well, sort of. The Algerians gained their independence, but the regime established by the NLF remains one of the most repressive on Earth\u2014the NGO Freedom House\u00a0ranks Algeria<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cnot free,\u201d its worst category. The revolutions that did succeed\u2014the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and South African revolts\u2014weren\u2019t nonviolent, but they largely refrained from attacks on unarmed civilians. Indeed, Marxist movements had traditionally shunned terror against civilians on both moral and political grounds. Terror against civilians demoralizes ordinary people and almost always pushes them to the Right, often into the arms of authoritarian leaders; terrorism exalts the singular act at the expense of building a mass movement. Andr\u00e9 Malraux\u2019s 1928 novel\u00a0The Conquerors<\/em><\/a>, set during the failed Chinese Communist uprising of 1925, opens with a dramatic act of terror; it is Garine, the book\u2019s hero and a Marxist, who opposes this. The dire state of the Palestinian movement today suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the use of terror and the achievement of freedom.<\/span><\/p>\n

In recent years, the Left\u2019s embrace of terror seemed to have ebbed; you won\u2019t find many defenders of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, or Boko Haram. The notable exception has been groups devoted to the destruction of Israel: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, all of which still garner enthusiasm and deluded admiration. One might have thought that an orgy of sadistic murder, of the kind that Hamas committed on October 7th, would have inspired serious moral and political self-interrogation. As the past four weeks have illustrated, however, the exact opposite is the case.<\/span><\/p>\n

The extraordinary nature of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have swept through the capitals of the West\u2014demonstrations that began\u00a0before Israel dropped a single bomb on Gaza<\/em>\u2014has, perhaps, not been fully appreciated. Horrific massacres of unarmed civilians are, unfortunately, taking place right now in South Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Syria, and Darfur. Unforgivably, the so-called international community usually ignores them. But none inspires cries of esteem for the perpetrators and acclaim for their crimes. And nowhere are the victims\u2014defenseless civilians, including children and their mothers\u2014blamed for being murdered. That is what is happening now. The deadliest single day in the post-Holocaust history of the Jewish people has been greeted in some quarters with joy and\u2014to be blunt\u2014an entirely undisguised hatred of Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many of the sentiments that have been expressed\u2014on social media, during street marches, and in the pages of various publications\u2014reveal an astonishing distance from anything that might be considered rational political judgment and ordinary humanity. At\u00a0the \u201cAll Out for Palestine\u201d rally<\/a>\u00a0in Times Square, held just one day after the massacre, elated chants of \u201c700!\u201d\u2014the number of estimated Israeli deaths at the time\u2014rang out, and demonstrators made throat-slitting gestures.\u00a0<\/strong>A speaker at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally in Brighton, England, also held on October 8th,\u00a0described the attacks<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cbeautiful and inspiring.\u201d The image of a hang-glider\u2014just like the ones Hamas used!\u2014with a Palestinian flag has gone viral on the web, posted by everyone from Black Lives Matter\/Chicago to neo-Nazi groups, which gives intersectionality a whole new meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

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