Beyond Hamas’s ruthlessness — and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fecklessness — one thing that’s become increasingly clear since the October 7 attack on Israel is that social justice groups and identity crusaders no longer possess even a shred of seriousness.
How could they, with feminist organizations still questioning the legitimacy of Hamas’s sexual violence against Israeli women? Or lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans groups insisting that “queer issues are Palestinian issues” — despite Hamas’s paper trail of violent queer death? Or the folks from #BlackLivesMatter unwilling even to consider in the slightest that Jewish lives matter too?
These are platforms and organizations that staked their existence — and well-lubricated cash flows — on equity, fairness and, most of all, justice. But tasked with finding space in this arena for Jews and Israelis, “woke” warriors have failed miserably in every way imaginable.
Take UN Women, the global women’s rights group. First they failed to condemn Hamas’s campaign of mass rape, then they did so via X — only to erase the post a short bit later. Humbled — if not humiliated — this past weekend, they finally tried again and issued yet another formal condemnation. Let’s see how long this one lasts.
BLM, meanwhile, led the identity buffoonery almost immediately after the Hamas massacre when their Chicago chapter delivered a pro-Palestine post on X featuring a paragliding freedom fighter mere days after airborne Gazan terrorists infiltrated into Israel.
And then there are trans and queer folk.
Few symbols demonstrate the craven potency of Hamas’s propaganda machine quite like the endless protest signs and social media posts by groups and causes such as #QueersForPalestine and #TransForPalestine.
Such identity alignments particularly lack gravitas considering Hamas’s ruthless bloodthirstiness toward Gazans accused of homosexuality. Former Hamas commander Mahmoud Ishtiiri, for instance, was shot dead by his comrades in 2016 after being accused of homosexuality.
Yet somehow this reality reversal has only heightened the resolve of many gay folk — so much so that any critique of Gaza’s LGBT carnage merely results in even more outlandish demands. Last week, for instance, a queer group pushing back at the notion that Islamic fundamentalism and gay rights make for unlikely allies suggested that rather than critiquing Hamas, we work instead to raise the voices of embattled Gazan queers. If only those queers were allowed to speak for themselves.
Much like refusal by feminists to acknowledge Hamas’s use of rape hurts women, LGBT purple thinking is not only bad for Palestinians, it’s bad for trans and queer folk. LGBT unwillingness to both condemn Hamas and acknowledge the reality of LGBTs living under their regime weakens the very heart of next-gen identity movements like justice for victims of sexual violence and the quest for trans rights.
The potential damage to trans issues is particularly acute. Without doubt there are certainly transgender people — many of them. But their existence — for those who aren’t trans — relies on a very real suspension of conviction unlike any previous civil rights movement. Those who believe that one gender can morph into the next — or perhaps that it was always there — must agree to an identity presentation that belies corporeal reality. And this becomes harder when those demanding affirmation of their own identity deny the undeniable — such as the atrocities of Hamas.
It’s not that trans people must also be Israel-people in order for the right to exist. Of course not — particularly when most trans and queer folks are busy sitting the war out. Sadly, however, the most vocal of their lot are aligning trans and queer communities with the growing community of leftist-Islamist-white-supremacist liberals and fascists demanding Israel’s destruction. And this baffling lack of logic makes it harder to suspend belief when trans folk demand that we sign on to what has always been physically unbelievable for so many — transgenderism itself.
Of course activists will decry this thinking as a call for transphobia — an “erasure of trans lives.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The immature — and imbecilic — actions of Hamas-touting trans orgs actually hurts moderate and more reasonably-thinking transfolk most. Without their conviction or consent, they’re linked to far-left loons who are taking their movement decades in reverse.
Along with trans groups, women’s groups and BLM could also see a future unwillingness by once-plaint progressives to toe the lefty line. While most American Jews remain too worried about optics — in other words, too white — to publicly rebuke race-based causes like BLM, this is certain to change if the current wave of nationwide antisemitism continues unchecked. As I wrote a few weeks back, the time for “respectability politics” for globally-embattled Jews has come to an end
Exposing the inherent antisemitism within affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs are the most immediate ways to combat race-based identity insanity. Earlier this month, columnist Bari Weiss boldly declared that DEI simply had to go. “DEI is about arrogating power,” Weiss wrote in Tablet. “And the movement that is gathering all this power does not like America or liberalism.” Others will inevitably follow Weiss’s lead.
Ultimately what’s happening here is a case of intersectional “have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too.” Far-left activists vocally insist that their causes — be they race or gender — are furthered when aligned with Palestinians in Gaza. But by failing to acknowledge the total infiltration of Hamas in every element of those Palestinian lives, these identity groups have revealed themselves as nothing more than ideological straw men. They simply aren’t serious — and so it’s time to consider that they no longer need to be taken seriously by the rest of us.
Perhaps the time has come to stop.
