Much has been made of the anti-Semitism of the pro-Hamas mobs, but the destruction of the state of Israel is only step one for them.
Commentary
What do the separate disruptive, if not outright vandalizing, mobs on campuses in the United States, at Elon Musk’s Tesla factory in Berlin, and at the site of this month’s Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden have in common? They all want, in some form or other, the destruction of capitalism—which is to say, to put every business they can out of business. And yet so many businesses are complacent about or tolerant of what is a growing long-term threat, some even siding ideologically with the criminals.
On May 10, all over the country, police in self-protective riot gear—their resources directed away from where they should be, protecting citizens from violent drug dealers, intervening in domestic violence incidents, and catching shoplifters—were busy
moving out defiant pro-Hamas demonstrators from college campuses and dismantling their tent encampments, in some cases braving bottles and other projectiles.
There are plenty of oppressed peoples in the world: the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, for instance, so heavily
persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party; victims of family
“honor killings” in Pakistan whose capital offense is to choose for themselves a spouse; and hundreds of millions of
Christians in Africa. Why, of all the conflicts in the world, are college students in the United States getting worked up about the Palestinians versus the Israelis? Especially because Israel’s operations are a response to Hamas’s October 2023 sneak attack massacre of 1,200 innocents.
From a historical perspective, it is difficult to not conclude that Palestinian is an artificial nationality that would never have emerged except as an opposing response to the success of the Zionist movement in establishing a self-governed Jewish homeland. The Ottoman Empire ruled the region until World War I, followed by Britain, and with the founding of the state of Israel, the West Bank was governed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israelis took over the territories out of self-preservation. Today, more than 2 million Jordanian citizens consider themselves Palestinian. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established in only 1964. And before the establishment of Israel, “Palestinian” was universally used to refer to Arabs and Jews alike who lived in the Holy Land; the Jerusalem Post was called the Palestinian Post before the establishment of the Jewish State.
But Israel is a longtime staunch ally of the United States, its culture and rule of law indelibly Western, its people transplanted white Europeans and their descendants for the most part, and after a long dalliance with socialism, it became a global leader in high tech. Israel is thus easily categorized as the poster child of neocolonialism and wealthy privilege.
What better target for student organizers whose underlying motivation for these riotous violations of college property is the Marxist-Leninist upending of society everywhere?
Malmo, Sweden, is this year’s venue for the Eurovision Song Contest, and thousands of anti-Israel
demonstrators took to that city’s streets, young enviro-celebrity Greta Thunberg among them, to object to the inclusion of an Israeli singer, Eden Golan, who made it to the contest’s final round. The demonstrations necessitated a large police presence, metal barricades, and large concrete blocks, along with metal detectors for visitors to the arena. They declared that Ms. Golan’s presence rendered the event the “Genocide Song Contest.”
About 800 environmentalist extremists
stormed Tesla’s Berlin factory earlier this month, angry that founder and CEO Elon Musk’s expansion plans would utilize forest land. This follows an arson attack at the site in March, temporarily cutting the plant’s power. Green fanatics attacking the world’s foremost electric vehicle maker may seem self-defeating for a movement seeking to end the use of fossil fuels, but it goes underappreciated that the goal of the global warming left is to end the personal independence that comes with driving one’s own car, leaving us all, at best, at the mercy of government-run public transportation or—their real ideal—rescinding the Industrial Revolution and forcing us “back to nature” to subsist as peasants, somehow living off the land.
The leader of the Tesla attack, a group called Disrupt,
described itself as fighting for “a just and solidarity-based world beyond capitalism,” placing “the question of the system at the center of our political action.” It declares that it is “no longer a secret: every day the capitalist economic system destroys part of our livelihoods for profit.” Companies’ appeasement of environmentalists is discounted as mere “greenwashing,” according to Disrupt.
There is one and only one way to go beyond capitalism, and that is for the government to steal every business’s private property.
“Capital and nation states are interwoven,” the group goes on to say, and “a good life for all ... can only be achieved outside of capitalism.” So no property and no nationality either. This is the shallow, pretty-sounding utopianism of John Lennon’s “Imagine”—“Imagine there’s no countries. ... Imagine no possessions. ... Imagine all the people sharing all the world.” Imagining no possessions was a stretch for Lennon, whose
net worth at the time of his death in 1980 was an inflation-adjusted $620 million.
Major global corporate entities bend over backward to be viewed as green, hoping to not find themselves in the sights of groups such as Disrupt. The self-flagellation is usually not as explicit as that practiced by Sweden’s A Good Company, which
boasts of “replacing plastic with plants” and from which you can buy notebooks with paper made from rock and pens made out of grass.
“We think the traditional way of running a company—with a big office that no one else can use, a fancy reception, stale conference rooms, and faceless art—is out of date,” the firm stated on its website.
It may not realize it, but “the traditional way of running a company” being targeted for eventual destruction by those that it and so many other businesses are trying to make friends with is private ownership itself.
Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez and Trump administration national security official Katharine Cornell Gorka’s new book “NextGen Marxism” describes how Marxist scholars, notably Max Horkheimer, the German sociologist who was one of the fathers of “critical theory,” saw that the free market was, contrary to Marx’s expectations, improving workers lives, and so the focus had to be veered away from a class struggle, and the revolution had to be sold, instead, “to members of racial and sexual ‘marginalized’ groups,” as Mr. Gonzalez
put it, “to seek the ‘revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,’” quoting Horkheimer.
At the cultural root of it all is the United States’ and the rest of the free world’s inexcusable failure to teach basic economics to our populace long before they reach college. When the “inequality” of the bank accounts of a genius entrepreneur and a factory worker is viewed as unfair, instead of representing the just rewards of ingenuity and dedication and wealth is seen as a finite pie to be sliced equally instead of the infinitely fruitful harvest of economic freedom, the inevitable result is to see some form of totalitarianism as the solution. Saving man from himself.
Much has been made of the anti-Semitism of the pro-Hamas mobs, but the destruction of the state of Israel is only step one for them. French revolutionist Bertrand Barère disparaged England as a “nation of shopkeepers”; these agitators’ own words show that their ultimate objective is no more privately owned shops and no more nations. Just “all the people sharing all the world.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
