On Hamas and the moral blindness of identity politics
EXCERPT
Support for Hamas on U.S. college campuses has not surprised those of us who have witnessed the slow but decisive erosion of liberal thought on the hallowed grounds ostensibly committed to nourishing it. The humanities capitulated decades ago; now the natural and social sciences have succumbed as well. Every discipline stumbles over itself seeking absolution for sins its present-day adherents did not commit. College administrators respond to, and accelerate, this longing, while students bear the ever-rising cost of an anti-liberal crusade. In gatherings formal and informal, faculty, staff, and students signal their religious need to be counted among the redeemed rather than the damned.
All of this was foreseeable. Every anti-liberal revolutionary movement since the French Revolution has offered followers its own version of redemption. None has satisfied the deepest human longings of the human heart. Each has exhibited unconscionable moral blindness.
Joshua Mitchell is a senior fellow at Common Sense Society.
Read the full article in City Journal.