OPINION:
Words matter; actions matter even more.
For too long, America has allowed the left to divorce the two with its newspeak. Hamas’ bloody Oct. 7 rampage and New York socialists’ coinciding Oct. 8 rally rejoined the two; they also demonstrated the consequence of their attempted divorce by leftists.
Hamas is no militant organization; it is a terrorist organization. America’s progressives are anything but. They’re socialists, and socialists have long supported the methods and ends of terrorists.
As Saturday dawned on Oct. 7, Hamas launched a coordinated attack by air, land and sea. The attacks took place in Israel but were not aimed at Israel. They were aimed at Israelis.They took place in streets and homes, on beaches, and even at a music festival. They took place wherever Hamas terrorists could find Israelis to kill.
It did not take place indiscriminately. It took place with every bit of premeditated, coldblooded, deliberate discrimination. If there is any doubt, then the taking of hostages — women, children, old people — and their parading through Gaza streets in the sickest possible manner removes any doubt.
This was not collateral damage from an intended strike against Israel’s military. Instead, Israeli military casualties were the collateral damage that resulted when they confronted the terrorists. This was nothing short of an intended genocidal attack on the Israelis themselves.
Before Saturday’s blood had dried, the Democratic Socialists of America, the party of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman announced a Sunday, Oct. 8, pro-Palestinian rally at 1 p.m. in Times Square.
Just as with Hamas’ hostages, the socialists sought to hide behind their human shield — in this case, support for the Palestinian people. But the timing was unmistakable. So, too, was its intent. For those seeking to obfuscate it, a participant’s holding an image of a swastika on his phone and the burning and trampling of an Israeli flag in the street removed any doubt about the event’s true purpose.
Just as Hamas had intended to exterminate Israelis, the socialists rallied in the midst of the carnage.
Only those who have sought to sanitize Hamas and the socialists — and those so benighted to listen — could have been surprised. Both organizations have long legacies of using terror to exterminate and silence their opponents.
Just a year after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas won a Palestinian election. A year later, Hamas seized Gaza in a civil war. A year after that, Hamas fired missiles into Israel. The first victims in Hamas’ reign of terror were undoubtedly Palestinians who opposed it — a callous disregard for its own being a hallmark of its practice of embedding its terrorists within Palestine’s own civilians — but its favorites remain Israelis.
The socialists’ embrace of terror is so long and so tight that only their attempts to foist their own history on to the right can obscure it. Sadly, we have been complicit in allowing them to do so.
The Soviet Union? Its full name was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; it was founded on terror and survived on terror — the KGB and gulags. The Nazis, whom the left have tried to recast somehow as being attached to the right? It was the German Nationalist Socialist Workers Party— Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
Even the fascists were socialists, despite the left’s insistent recasting. As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in his monograph Socialism reminds us: “Nobody could surpass Mussolini in Marxian zeal … [and] from the dust-heap of discarded socialist utopias, the Fascist scholars salvaged the scheme of guild socialism.”
So it is hardly surprising that New York’s socialists would so rapidly and readily coincide their embrace of Palestinian leaders with the fresh terror of those leaders’ terrorist government. The acorn does not fall far from its oak.
Their pathetic attempt to later exculpate themselves is penned with the penitence of having been caught and called out: “We understand why many, including our allies, were shocked by the timing and the tone of this message in a moment of profound fear and grief. We are sorry for the confusion our post caused and for not making our values explicit.”
There was no confusion — not by those gleefully rallying in coincidence with the slaughter of Oct. 7 or those sickened by witnessing it. There was only the bursting of the illusions of the misguided who had wished to see the socialists as something other than what they truly are.
It is not enough for the broader left to denounce Hamas — something that sadly, even as the Israeli death toll surpasses 1,400, the left finds hard to do. The left must denounce its socialist siblings, too.
For too long, America’s left has sycophantically socialized socialism and fixated on making fascism fashionable. They are not only known by the company they keep; in the case of socialism, they have also been captured by their company.
The actions in Israel on Oct. 7 and New York the next day were atrocities. Although of different magnitudes, they were of one mind. They spoke louder than the left’s lies can hide — and those pitiful attempts by some on the left now seeking to hide from them.
• J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987 to 2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004 to 2023.
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