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The Barbarians Within
This week, anti-American and pro-Hamas advocates gathered in Detroit at a “People’s Conference for Palestine.” There, they expressed radical solidarity with terrorism, celebrated the achievements of Hamas, and denigrated the United States.
“The average American will never understand the plight of the Palestinian person because the state of Israel is a carbon copy of the United States,” said one speaker. “And, therefore, the thing to do is to destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads so that they can see the humanity of everybody outside the warping of American exceptionalism and imperialism and all these evil things.”
Points for honesty.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., also showed up to express her raging hatred against the West. “They thought they could kill us, rape us, imprison us, violently uproot us from our olive tree farms, starve our children to death, and we would disappear,” she intoned. “Well, guess what? Now we’re in Congress.”
Putting aside Tlaib’s obvious lies—the only genocidal force in the Israeli-Arab conflict is Israel’s enemies—she is right about one thing: The Barbarians have entered Congress. As I write in my new book, “Lions and Scavengers,”
The Barbarian is an outsider to Western civilization who believes that all of his own maladies and ills can be laid at the feet of the “colonizers” of the West. In fact, the Barbarian argues, only violence against his purported victimizers can free him of the servile mentality that these very colonizers have instilled in him. … The Barbarians never posit a moral justification for the destruction of the Western order at their hands. They never explain just how, for example, a Palestinian state is somehow a burgeoning wellspring of human rights or how an America without American values would make the world a better place. The only thing that matters is the destruction of the West—for in that destruction lies the supposed reclamation of the Barbarian identity.
And herein lies the reality of the West’s decline: We have ushered in the Barbarians. We have done so out of a misguided sense of guilt; we have done so because we have swallowed whole the lie that those who are successful are exploitative and those who are unsuccessful are inherently victimized.
We have opened our doors to those who despise our civilization and who seek to tear it down out of a sense of envy and grievance. The West has not merely gone soft on the scavengers who would destroy it; we have allowed them to cultivate an entire generation of our children.
According to a new Harvard-Harris poll, some 60% of Americans aged 18-24 favor Hamas—not the Palestinians, but Hamas—over Israel. That’s not because young Americans know a thing about the Israel-Hamas conflict. It’s because they have bought wholesale the notion that the civilization that has given them everything is uniquely horrifying and that the only way to expiate that horror is to join those who would destroy the civilization.
Now, perhaps they will grow out of all of this. They’re not the first generation of Americans to turn against the country only to age out of their ignorance and stupidity as reality took hold. But older generations didn’t have to grapple with a social media infrastructure that celebrates ignorance and performative breast-beating over understanding and moral clarity; older generations still had some leaders in the idea space willing to speak hard truths rather than perform for clicks.
The real question, then, isn’t whether the Barbarians can threaten the existing order. It’s whether we turn over our own children to them, sowing the seeds of our destruction. And that question has yet to be answered.
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