The Joy of Oikophobia

Cheering on Hamas and Hezbollah fills empty souls with . . . something.

Today is the first anniversary of a day that has joined December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, in the dark museum of infamy. It deserves, in fact, a more conspicuous place than those others. Pearl Harbor was a legitimate military target, even if attacking it without a declaration of was barbaric. The aerial terrorists of 9/11 massacred civilians, but they did not rape them, mutilate their corpses or take the survivors hostage. Hamas thus overleaped prior villainy on October 7, 2023. Its atrocities beg comparison with the worst excesses of the Thirty Years War or the Taiping Rebellion.

Yet the perpetrators of October 7th will be celebrated today. Crowds around the world will glorify their deeds and execrate Israel’s struggle to ensure that Hamas will not be able to perpetrate such cruelties ever again.

Some of the celebrants regard themselves as fellow countrymen of the terrorists. Their support for atrocities is shameful but understandable. They are taking what they view as their own nation’s side in a war and refusing to see any evil in its conduct.

But most of those who shriek “From the River to the Sea” have no natural connection to Hamas. Their sympathy for it is founded on hostility toward its enemies: the State of Israel and, looming behind Jerusalem, the United States of America and, behind Washington, a larger, if cloudier, spectre, the entire course of Western civilization from 1492 to the present day.

The civilization that has brought the entire world unprecedented liberty and prosperity is, in the minds of a significant part of its own intelligentsia, a demonic force, the fount of all that is detestable and immiserating. The fact that the villainous civilization is their own embitters their hatred.

That unreasoning loathing is at work is shown by the bill of particulars against the West, which contains nothing that has not been commonplace throughout the history of all civilizations. The headline complaint these days is that Europeans migrated to lands occupied by others, settled there and assimilated the previous inhabitants or reduced them to a small minority. Yet where on this planet, save for Antarctica, has the same not occurred, the only difference being the identities of the settlers and the displaced?

No crime can be imputed to Western civilization that does not taint every other civilization. The West did not invent slavery or racism or conquest. . . . On the other side of the ledger, it is unique, or nearly so, for having invented freedoms of conscience and commerce and for discovering that wealth is the product of freedom.

Two thousand years ago, the entire region that is currently contested between Israel and “Palestine” was settled predominantly by Jews, secondarily by Greeks, Phoenicians, Aramaeans and a very few Arabs. Six centuries later, Arabs conquered it, as well as a gigantic swath of the globe with which they had no prior connection. Were they not “settler colonialists” on a grand scale? Why is the restoration of ancient Zion not hailed as a triumph of indigenes over imperialism?

Particular acts by particular actors can rightly be praised or condemned. The notion that movements of peoples and the interactions among them are themselves proper subjects of blame is, however, as preposterous as blaming puberty for violence and sexual assault. Even more preposterous is stigmatizing as indelible evils in one people acts that are all but universal.

No crime can be imputed to Western civilization that does not taint every other civilization. The West did not invent slavery or racism or conquest. Some horrors – human sacrifice, for instance – it avoided altogether. On the other side of the ledger, it is unique, or nearly so, for having invented freedoms of conscience and commerce and for discovering that wealth is the product of freedom.

So why do many of those brought up in the West detest it? Moreover, why is their detestation not accompanied by melancholy but, rather, displayed with self-satisfaction, even a kind of joy? The mobs that turn out “for Gaza” today will, like those on other days, give every appearance of having fun. They find it delightful to chant, “Hezbollah, make us proud! Burn the settlers to the ground”. It is a time of merrymaking, of happy anger.

In short, there is something strange, divorced from human experience, about those marchers for a judenrein Middle East and a humiliated America. I cannot pretend to penetrate their psychology. Perhaps this is the way for empty souls whose existence is reducible to a succession of feelings and impulses to spur themselves to stay alive another day. Tearing down what is old and noble and grand is much easier than building it up and offers the satisfaction of having done something more significant than completing the latest TikTok challenge.