Richard Wolin
From the “Socialism of Fools” to the “Jihadism of Fools”: The Lessons of October 7
The October 7 attacks, in which over 1200 Israelis were massacred in the most brutal fashion imaginable, were not surprising because they were committed by Hamas. After all, the Hamas Charter invokes the precepts of Islamic fundamentalism—a discourse of uncompromising theological intolerance that is inimical to all forms of secular and religious pluralism—in order to justify its commitment to the ethos of “redemptive antisemitism”: the conviction that the world will not be “redeemed” or “made whole” until Jews are eliminated from the Middle East. The authors of this document justify their exterminationist credo by claiming—not unlike the Nazis before them—that by annihilating the Jews, they are “doing God’s work.”
As the Charter proclaims: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious . . . The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me come and kill him.” Article 15 of the Charter emphasizes that it is a religious duty incumbent upon all Muslims to exterminate “infidels”—above all, Jews—via the methods of “Holy War” or “Jihad”: “The day that enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp)
Hamas’s exaltation of Jihad is wholly consonant with the group’s self-acknowledged “culture of death.” As Article 8 of the Charter avows: “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” By celebrating the Hamas attacks, the international Left has demonstrated its support for what is truly insupportable: the ideology of Jihadi apocalypticism. By confusing terrorism—the deliberate massacre of innocents—with “resistance,” the Left has inexplicably aligned itself with “the hatred of freedom and the spirit of submission that characterizes the Jihadi politics of terror” common to all movements (Pierre-André Taguieff, Une France Antijuive: Regards sur la Nouvelle Configuration Judéophobe [Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2016], 234). In effect, these armchair militants have effectively become apologists for the worst excesses imaginable.
According to the German journalist Thomas Assheuer, the October 7 attacks exemplified “radical evil,” since, “by wiping out entire families, the Hamas death squads denied Israelis not only the right to exist as a state, but the right to life itself” (“Israel und die Linke,” Die Zeit, October 31, 2023). In stark contrast to the Left’s efforts to glorify the October 7 massacres as an act of “resistance”—a claim that perversely echoes Hamas’s self-understanding as an “Islamic Resistance Movement”—Assheuer’s point about denying Jews the “right to life” goes to the heart of the problem. The attacks were bereft of a focused and delimited military objective. Instead, Hamas militants indiscriminately targeted Jews—men, women, and children—simply because they were Jews.
The mantra favored by pro-Palestinian activists, “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea”—a chant that was ubiquitous in the pro-Hamas demonstrations that followed the October 7 massacres and that implicitly underwrites the elimination of 9 million Israelis by whatever means necessary—only underscores the Western Left’s myopic, unconditional support for the Jihadi agenda.
By embracing the ethically repellent notion of “progressive atrocity”—the idea that acts of murder committed on behalf of leftwing causes are morally and politically licit—the Left transitioned from the “Socialism of Fools” (August Bebel) to the “Jihadism of Fools,” an epithet that conveys the escalating symbiosis between overprivileged Western Leftists and Islamist militants hell-bent on murdering Jews (See Fred Halliday, “The Jihadism of Fools,” Dissent 54 [Winter 2007], 51-54). The “Jihadism of Fools” reflects a sad chapter in the political evolution of the international Left: a process whereby “anti-imperialism” substitutes for “anti-fascism,” Third World peasants supplant the proletariat, and the glorification of terrorism replaces the patient work of community organizing grassroots struggle.
By openly scorning the democratic norms of universalism, human rights, and religious tolerance, the gauche caviar has effectively betrayed the core values of the progressive Left. Thus, when all is said and done, by identifying uncritically with the Jihadi agenda, the Western Left had essentially gone over to the political Right. Eva Illouz has aptly summarized the ethical devolution of the “pro-Hamas Left” following the October 7 massacres: “The perpetrators were instantly and automatically declared innocent of massacring Jews. By virtue of their association with Israel, the dead Jews were responsible for their own death. The reaction of universities, intellectuals, and artists worldwide repeated the same position with a dull uniformity. Israel was the real and only culprit” (Eva Illouz, “Global Left’s Reaction to October 7 Threatens Fight Against Occupation,” Haaretz, November 2, 2023).
Islamic militants murder hundreds of defenseless Jewish civilians, yet implausibly—and in defiance of internationally recognized standards of moral and legal reasoning—the Jews themselves, rather than the actual perpetrators, are deemed culpable. According to the leftwing supporters of the Jihadi mindset, the murder of Jewish innocents is unobjectionable as long as it advances the Palestinian cause.
How is it possible that Western leftists could, in good conscience, rally behind Hamas—an Iranian proxy, which, in keeping with the totalitarian ethos of its Shi’ite benefactor, systematically suppresses women's rights, summarily executes suspected collaborators, and, in accordance with Sharia law, forcefully condemns homosexuality as a sin—as putative “freedom fighters”? In light of this background, how are we to make sense of leftwing academic Judith Butler’s flabbergasting declaration that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important” (“Judith Butler on Hamas, Hezbollah & the Israel Lobby,” Radical Archives, https://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/). Not only does Hamas emphatically reject the fundamental precepts of democratic liberty: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of worship. Instead of protecting the lives of Gazans, it places them in harm’s way by recklessly embedding command and control centers and munitions depots in civilian locations such as hospitals, schools, and mosques. In light of these facts, to portray Hamas as a “progressive social movement” and its militants as “agents of resistance” can only be construed as a deliberate and grotesque mischaracterization.
Following the October 7 attacks, Butler was one of the numerous signatories of “An Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations” published in Artforum. In its haste to foreground the issue of Palestinian suffering, the Artforum circular made no mention whatsoever of the 1200 Jews who had been mercilessly butchered two weeks earlier. The systematic refusal to acknowledge—if only in passing--Jewish suffering was one of the hallmarks of the international Left’s lamentable, knee-jerk support for the Palestinian struggle following the October 7 assault.
Another example is the declaration issued by 33 Harvard University student organizations—in a textbook instance of “blaming the victim”—that attributed “responsibility” for the October 7 atrocities solely to the state of Israel. As a statement released by Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee asserted: “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison . . . The [Israeli] apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
According to the hypocritical calculus of leftwing “intersectional” struggle, Jewish suffering doesn't count (See David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count [London: TLS Books, 2021]). Whereas racial injustice perpetrated by the “Israeli apartheid regime” must be volubly called out and denounced, antisemitism—as exemplified by the Hamas Charter and as horrifically actualized during the October 7 attacks—is regarded by Western enthusiasts of the pro-Palestine movement as an acceptable weapon of post-colonial struggle. (In light of the fact that approximately 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs [so-called Arab Israelis], to anathematize Israel as an “apartheid regime” can only be construed as part of a leftwing strategy of ideological delegitimation.)
Moreover, in keeping with the strategy of “Holocaust inversion”—a technique of ideological delegitimation that demonizes Israelis as “Nazis”—Palestinian deaths must be reflexively denounced as genocide. Thereby, Jews, who were formerly the victims of genocide, are now anathematized in the court of world public opinion as its perpetrators. By the same token, as the reactions to the October 7 massacres attest, atrocities committed against Jews—no matter how egregious and in keeping with the selective ethics of post-colonial revolutionism—are exalted as inherently legitimate. Here, the operative assumption, as canonized during the heyday of “Third-worldism,” is that les damnés de la terre are justified in utilizing all the means their disposal—including the ruthless massacre of innocents—to overthrow their colonial masters. In his inflammatory preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre codified this credo, declaring that “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [New York: Grove and Weidenfeld, 1963], 21).
The oppressed, of course, are entirely within their rights to overthrow their oppressors. Nevertheless, the Western Left’s unqualified celebration of revolutionary violence overlooks the fact that the methods of struggle adopted by the downtrodden inevitably precondition the nature of the political outcome. As the case of Leninism readily demonstrates, revolutions that are masterminded by a violent revolutionary elite rarely transcend the missteps of their sanguinary, authoritarian origins. The tragic dénouement of the Algerian Revolution, which under the leadership of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) metastasized into one of the world’s most oppressive dictatorial regimes, is an excellent case in point.
Ultimately, by misleadingly characterizing Israel as a paradigmatic case of “European settler-colonialism,” the postcolonial Left has succeeded in discursively stripping Jews of their humanity, which of course makes it easier to justify slaughtering them à la Hamas. Blatantly disregarding the precepts of international law, the “settler-colonialist” narrative has effectively reduced Israelis to the status of hostis humani generis: “outlaws” divested of international legal protection. Latter-day pirates, Israelis are deemed “fair game”; according to this rationale, they may be killed with impunity by the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian regional proxies.
However, the “settler-colonialist” designation is wholly inapplicable to Mandate-era Jewish Palestine, in which the quintessential features of a colonial society—“the exploitation of a native workforce; the confiscation of the natural riches of the country; a monopoly of political power that created two different classes of inhabitants, citizens and others who had no rights” (Zeev Sternhell, “In Defense of Liberal Zionism,” New Left Review 62 [2010], 99)—were markedly absent. Instead, the Jews of Palestine, whose overtures toward mutual co-existence were emphatically rejected by the local Arab population at nearly every turn, were left with no other choice than to establish a closed, self-sufficient society.
The unparalleled sadism of the Hamas attack—the systematic employment of gang rape against women, which was “live-streamed” by the perpetrators; decapitated babies; innocent noncombatants, including women, children, and the elderly, abducted at gunpoint as hostages, in violation of well-established norms of international law—attests to a level of visceral Jew-hatred not seen since the days of Himmler and Goebbels. However, in the aftermath of the attacks, what was equally disturbing was the outpouring of support that these “progressive atrocities” received from leftwing activists claiming that neither basic human morality nor the laws of war applied to pro-Palestinian Jihadis. Instead, these armchair revolutionaries elevated the Hamas terrorists—who, in accordance with the group’s Charter, believe that, by murdering Jews, they are sanctifying the will of Allah—to the status of “freedom fighters” or “militants,” whose every word and every deed deserves to be celebrated as an expression of revolutionary authenticity.
Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History, Political Science and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has taught at the University of Paris, the University of Copenhagen, and Beijing University, and writes frequently on intellectual and political themes for The New Republic, The Nation, and Dissent. His new book Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology was recently published by Yale University Press.
As the Charter proclaims: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious . . . The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me come and kill him.” Article 15 of the Charter emphasizes that it is a religious duty incumbent upon all Muslims to exterminate “infidels”—above all, Jews—via the methods of “Holy War” or “Jihad”: “The day that enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp)
Hamas’s exaltation of Jihad is wholly consonant with the group’s self-acknowledged “culture of death.” As Article 8 of the Charter avows: “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” By celebrating the Hamas attacks, the international Left has demonstrated its support for what is truly insupportable: the ideology of Jihadi apocalypticism. By confusing terrorism—the deliberate massacre of innocents—with “resistance,” the Left has inexplicably aligned itself with “the hatred of freedom and the spirit of submission that characterizes the Jihadi politics of terror” common to all movements (Pierre-André Taguieff, Une France Antijuive: Regards sur la Nouvelle Configuration Judéophobe [Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2016], 234). In effect, these armchair militants have effectively become apologists for the worst excesses imaginable.
According to the German journalist Thomas Assheuer, the October 7 attacks exemplified “radical evil,” since, “by wiping out entire families, the Hamas death squads denied Israelis not only the right to exist as a state, but the right to life itself” (“Israel und die Linke,” Die Zeit, October 31, 2023). In stark contrast to the Left’s efforts to glorify the October 7 massacres as an act of “resistance”—a claim that perversely echoes Hamas’s self-understanding as an “Islamic Resistance Movement”—Assheuer’s point about denying Jews the “right to life” goes to the heart of the problem. The attacks were bereft of a focused and delimited military objective. Instead, Hamas militants indiscriminately targeted Jews—men, women, and children—simply because they were Jews.
The mantra favored by pro-Palestinian activists, “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea”—a chant that was ubiquitous in the pro-Hamas demonstrations that followed the October 7 massacres and that implicitly underwrites the elimination of 9 million Israelis by whatever means necessary—only underscores the Western Left’s myopic, unconditional support for the Jihadi agenda.
By embracing the ethically repellent notion of “progressive atrocity”—the idea that acts of murder committed on behalf of leftwing causes are morally and politically licit—the Left transitioned from the “Socialism of Fools” (August Bebel) to the “Jihadism of Fools,” an epithet that conveys the escalating symbiosis between overprivileged Western Leftists and Islamist militants hell-bent on murdering Jews (See Fred Halliday, “The Jihadism of Fools,” Dissent 54 [Winter 2007], 51-54). The “Jihadism of Fools” reflects a sad chapter in the political evolution of the international Left: a process whereby “anti-imperialism” substitutes for “anti-fascism,” Third World peasants supplant the proletariat, and the glorification of terrorism replaces the patient work of community organizing grassroots struggle.
By openly scorning the democratic norms of universalism, human rights, and religious tolerance, the gauche caviar has effectively betrayed the core values of the progressive Left. Thus, when all is said and done, by identifying uncritically with the Jihadi agenda, the Western Left had essentially gone over to the political Right. Eva Illouz has aptly summarized the ethical devolution of the “pro-Hamas Left” following the October 7 massacres: “The perpetrators were instantly and automatically declared innocent of massacring Jews. By virtue of their association with Israel, the dead Jews were responsible for their own death. The reaction of universities, intellectuals, and artists worldwide repeated the same position with a dull uniformity. Israel was the real and only culprit” (Eva Illouz, “Global Left’s Reaction to October 7 Threatens Fight Against Occupation,” Haaretz, November 2, 2023).
Islamic militants murder hundreds of defenseless Jewish civilians, yet implausibly—and in defiance of internationally recognized standards of moral and legal reasoning—the Jews themselves, rather than the actual perpetrators, are deemed culpable. According to the leftwing supporters of the Jihadi mindset, the murder of Jewish innocents is unobjectionable as long as it advances the Palestinian cause.
How is it possible that Western leftists could, in good conscience, rally behind Hamas—an Iranian proxy, which, in keeping with the totalitarian ethos of its Shi’ite benefactor, systematically suppresses women's rights, summarily executes suspected collaborators, and, in accordance with Sharia law, forcefully condemns homosexuality as a sin—as putative “freedom fighters”? In light of this background, how are we to make sense of leftwing academic Judith Butler’s flabbergasting declaration that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important” (“Judith Butler on Hamas, Hezbollah & the Israel Lobby,” Radical Archives, https://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/). Not only does Hamas emphatically reject the fundamental precepts of democratic liberty: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of worship. Instead of protecting the lives of Gazans, it places them in harm’s way by recklessly embedding command and control centers and munitions depots in civilian locations such as hospitals, schools, and mosques. In light of these facts, to portray Hamas as a “progressive social movement” and its militants as “agents of resistance” can only be construed as a deliberate and grotesque mischaracterization.
Following the October 7 attacks, Butler was one of the numerous signatories of “An Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations” published in Artforum. In its haste to foreground the issue of Palestinian suffering, the Artforum circular made no mention whatsoever of the 1200 Jews who had been mercilessly butchered two weeks earlier. The systematic refusal to acknowledge—if only in passing--Jewish suffering was one of the hallmarks of the international Left’s lamentable, knee-jerk support for the Palestinian struggle following the October 7 assault.
Another example is the declaration issued by 33 Harvard University student organizations—in a textbook instance of “blaming the victim”—that attributed “responsibility” for the October 7 atrocities solely to the state of Israel. As a statement released by Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee asserted: “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison . . . The [Israeli] apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
According to the hypocritical calculus of leftwing “intersectional” struggle, Jewish suffering doesn't count (See David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count [London: TLS Books, 2021]). Whereas racial injustice perpetrated by the “Israeli apartheid regime” must be volubly called out and denounced, antisemitism—as exemplified by the Hamas Charter and as horrifically actualized during the October 7 attacks—is regarded by Western enthusiasts of the pro-Palestine movement as an acceptable weapon of post-colonial struggle. (In light of the fact that approximately 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs [so-called Arab Israelis], to anathematize Israel as an “apartheid regime” can only be construed as part of a leftwing strategy of ideological delegitimation.)
Moreover, in keeping with the strategy of “Holocaust inversion”—a technique of ideological delegitimation that demonizes Israelis as “Nazis”—Palestinian deaths must be reflexively denounced as genocide. Thereby, Jews, who were formerly the victims of genocide, are now anathematized in the court of world public opinion as its perpetrators. By the same token, as the reactions to the October 7 massacres attest, atrocities committed against Jews—no matter how egregious and in keeping with the selective ethics of post-colonial revolutionism—are exalted as inherently legitimate. Here, the operative assumption, as canonized during the heyday of “Third-worldism,” is that les damnés de la terre are justified in utilizing all the means their disposal—including the ruthless massacre of innocents—to overthrow their colonial masters. In his inflammatory preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre codified this credo, declaring that “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [New York: Grove and Weidenfeld, 1963], 21).
The oppressed, of course, are entirely within their rights to overthrow their oppressors. Nevertheless, the Western Left’s unqualified celebration of revolutionary violence overlooks the fact that the methods of struggle adopted by the downtrodden inevitably precondition the nature of the political outcome. As the case of Leninism readily demonstrates, revolutions that are masterminded by a violent revolutionary elite rarely transcend the missteps of their sanguinary, authoritarian origins. The tragic dénouement of the Algerian Revolution, which under the leadership of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) metastasized into one of the world’s most oppressive dictatorial regimes, is an excellent case in point.
Ultimately, by misleadingly characterizing Israel as a paradigmatic case of “European settler-colonialism,” the postcolonial Left has succeeded in discursively stripping Jews of their humanity, which of course makes it easier to justify slaughtering them à la Hamas. Blatantly disregarding the precepts of international law, the “settler-colonialist” narrative has effectively reduced Israelis to the status of hostis humani generis: “outlaws” divested of international legal protection. Latter-day pirates, Israelis are deemed “fair game”; according to this rationale, they may be killed with impunity by the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian regional proxies.
However, the “settler-colonialist” designation is wholly inapplicable to Mandate-era Jewish Palestine, in which the quintessential features of a colonial society—“the exploitation of a native workforce; the confiscation of the natural riches of the country; a monopoly of political power that created two different classes of inhabitants, citizens and others who had no rights” (Zeev Sternhell, “In Defense of Liberal Zionism,” New Left Review 62 [2010], 99)—were markedly absent. Instead, the Jews of Palestine, whose overtures toward mutual co-existence were emphatically rejected by the local Arab population at nearly every turn, were left with no other choice than to establish a closed, self-sufficient society.
The unparalleled sadism of the Hamas attack—the systematic employment of gang rape against women, which was “live-streamed” by the perpetrators; decapitated babies; innocent noncombatants, including women, children, and the elderly, abducted at gunpoint as hostages, in violation of well-established norms of international law—attests to a level of visceral Jew-hatred not seen since the days of Himmler and Goebbels. However, in the aftermath of the attacks, what was equally disturbing was the outpouring of support that these “progressive atrocities” received from leftwing activists claiming that neither basic human morality nor the laws of war applied to pro-Palestinian Jihadis. Instead, these armchair revolutionaries elevated the Hamas terrorists—who, in accordance with the group’s Charter, believe that, by murdering Jews, they are sanctifying the will of Allah—to the status of “freedom fighters” or “militants,” whose every word and every deed deserves to be celebrated as an expression of revolutionary authenticity.
Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History, Political Science and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has taught at the University of Paris, the University of Copenhagen, and Beijing University, and writes frequently on intellectual and political themes for The New Republic, The Nation, and Dissent. His new book Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology was recently published by Yale University Press.