Daniel Hannan is a British writer, journalist, and former politician. He is the founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade and a former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 to 2020. He is a member of the Conservative Party.
When a black man was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, it was treated as an attack on black people everywhere. From Baden, Ontario, to Bridgetown, Barbados, to Bangalore and Bloemfontein, statues of white men were taken down. Police officers around the world sank to one knee. Corporations, charities, and arts groups endorsed Black Lives Matter.
The killings in Israel were no less traumatic — on the contrary, they were both more numerous and more disturbing, the instinct to protect babies being among the most powerful in the human psyche. Nor were they any less racist. American police officers sometimes abuse their powers, and black men can be disproportionately on the receiving end of it, but this is not the same thing as slaughtering hundreds of civilians purely on the grounds of their ethnicity.
The difference between BLM and these atrocities lies in the “decolonize” doctrines that dominate our discourse. Society is conceived as a pyramid of privilege. Any group deemed to be oppressed is allowed to hit out at those imagined to be above it. Jews generally, and Israelis particularly, are too successful to be victims. Indeed, the state of Israel exists precisely because Jews had had enough of playing that role.
Some take refuge in conspiracy theories, telling themselves that Hamas must have acted with Israeli connivance. Others condemn the violence itself, but blame Israel for having provoked it. This was the position taken by, among others, 30 student bodies at Harvard. The refusal of the university authorities to challenge them prompted Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, to remark that he had never felt so disillusioned in his 50 years of involvement.
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