The Barbarians Are Inside the Gates

This weekend marked Armistice Day in Great Britain and Veterans Day in the United States. Both are somber days typically marked by honor and respect for symbols of the country and the men and women who have sacrificed so much for them. Instead, both London and New York City featured terrorist supporters marching en masse through the centers of the West, proclaiming their sovereignty.

Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once blustered that the West was so guilty for its colonization that the best path would be to be colonized in reverse: “It’s our turn to tread the path, step by step, which leads down to native level. But to become natives altogether, our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger. This won’t happen.”

Sartre, obviously, was wrong. He, along with his like-minded and soft-headed colleagues, helped to discredit the West so thoroughly that the West spent decades importing millions of people who despise it.

And so London this weekend saw radical Muslims threatening the open annihilation of Jews. It saw home-grown or imported radicals wearing the headgear of terrorist group Hamas. It saw them attempting to mob the current Secretary of State for Housing Michael Gove. At least 150 people were arrested. But there were 300,000 marching in solidarity with a terrorist group.

The philosophy of those marching with Hamas and against the West is clear and obvious: The West is powerful; the West has exploited; the West is white; therefore, the West is powerful because the West is white and exploitative.

Under this theory, antisemitism is directly linked with anti-whiteness. The idea is that the Jews are the ultimate white people: They are unduly successful, and thus must be stopped. As one pro-Hamas flyer distributed at the University of Chicago read, “Ending White Privilege Starts With Ending Jewish Privilege.”

This notion is fully coincident with anti-Americanism, too. America, after all, is largely great because of the promise that anyone of any background can get ahead. Jews are one of the great success stories in American history by that standard, given the fact that they arrived mostly in the early 20th century dirt poor, and quickly became highly educated and economically successful.

The current antisemitic movement is linked directly to hatred for the country and its meritocratic promise. That’s why pro-Hamas protesters spent the weekend ripping down American flags.

Across the world, those who have not achieved are uniting against the West. They blame the West for their lack of success while living off the West’s largesse.

The West has a choice. It can be colonized in Sartre’s fashion, or it can refuse that colonization. In the UK, that battle is taking place largely over the verbiage of Suella Braverman, former Home Secretary, who has been stalwartly calling for an end to the police and government’s coddling of pro-Hamas ralliers. Noticing the predations of the pro-Hamas crowd, however, is a dismissible offense in the U.K. In the words of Neil Basu, former head of counterterrorism policing in the U.K., “You have a chance of inflaming both sides when you make such divisive remarks.”

Yes, it was the remarks that were divisive, not the hundreds of thousands of people calling for the destruction of Israel and the West from the heart of London.

Mustn’t offend, you know.

In the United States, that battle is taking place at the universities, where enemies of the United States are ushered in and offered scholarships. The latest iteration comes courtesy of MIT, where radical students violated the university’s rules by occupying public places; Jews were told by the university not to entire through the main lobby due to safety concerns.

These pro-Hamas students are foreigners. The university could easily have suspended them. The university didn’t. Why not? It would violate their scruples about the necessity of importing people who hate the United States into the United States. Suspending the students might result in their deportation.

Yes, we certainly wouldn’t want terror supporters deported. That might open a slot at MIT to a deserving Asian-American or something.

The reality is that the West has created wildly disproportionate prosperity and freedom over the course of its history compared with other civilizations. That doesn’t excuse the West’s sins, but it does mean that tearing down the West in favor of alternatives is repulsive.

Ben Shapiro, 39, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author; his latest book is “The Authoritarian Moment: How The Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.” To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website.

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