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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, London and New York City featured terrorist supporters marching en masse through the centers of the West.
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.
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 saw radical Muslims threatening the open annihilation of Jews. 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.
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.
The current antisemitic movement is linked directly to hatred for the country and its meritocratic promise. 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.
Yes, it was the remarks that were divisive, not the people calling for the destruction of Israel and the West.
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.
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.
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.