Editors’ Note: The author, Conlan Salgado, is a college junior. He is an astute political observer and highly informed conservative. America needs more young patriots and gifted writers to awaken citizens to the existential danger our nation faces in the decades-long political war with a radical leftist party and culture increasingly out-of-control. We recommend all of his superb writings. Access Conlan Salgado’s essays in The Prickly Pear here. 

If you understand the true nature of Leftism, very few things coming out of the Left can surprise you. At least in theory, evil is incapable of shocking the sober-minded individual, the one who has read about, lived through, studied, and reflected on human nature. God is full of surprises, the devil is full of tricks, which seem like surprises, until you realize that they surprised you only because you lost focus for an existential moment.

And yes, I did just use “Leftism” and “evil” synonymously. If you are ever in doubt about the compatibility of those two, you need only read the media to re-convince yourself that they are, if not siblings, at least very close friends. In an article entitled “Why US Double Standards On Israel and Russia Play Into a Dangerous Game”, Patrick Wintour of The Guardian achieves what I thought impossible: he provided a Leftist take on the Israel-Hamas war which surprised me, though not in a good way. Although he uses full words and complete sentences, the majority of the piece is political stuttering and stammering about proportionality, excessive use of force, and “indiscriminate bombing”—all of which are lies.

Wintour acknowledges that Putin’s actions are not quite equivalent to Israel’s, since Putin was not responding to an unprovoked terror attack when he invaded Ukraine, “But once the bombed-out buildings of Gaza get juxtaposed on social media alongside those of Mariupol on social media, it gets more complex”. Apparently, for Winter, social media propaganda campaigns ought to determine whether the international community sanctions Israel’s defense of itself.

But this is hardly the surprising part of his article. The bulk of his message is this: “Yet, by and large, the West, with some exceptions, fell silent about Gaza when Israel’s assault began”. I, who live in Chicago, know firsthand how quiet the West is about Gaza. And of course, Biden’s state department hasn’t made so much as an antisemitic peep about how Israel needs to accept a ceasefire immediately, and stop all self-defense.

Wintour continues: “Julien Barnes-Dacey, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, argues that the damage to American standing may ultimately be felt most not in the Global south but in the west itself. . . .”The west’s response to what’s happening in Gaza, and our inability to call out Israel, hasn’t suddenly woken the Global South up to double standards but it has reconfirmed to them what they believe the West is about.”

The Global South? Before we delve any deeper into Western Hypocrisy: is this the same Global South that includes China, which at this very moment is committing mass genocide (real genocide, the kind where your population decreases instead of doubling) against the Uyghur Muslims of Southern China? This genocide includes the systemic rape of Uyghur women, the mass incarceration and torture of Uyghur men and children, harvesting of organs, and forced slave labor – it almost sounds like Hamas writ large, does it not? Uyghur culture and identity are being wiped out.

Oh, there are 11 million of these Uyghur Muslims? I admit, 11 million Muslims is not quite as impressive a number as the 20,000 Palestinians who have died (remembering that this number is provided by Hamas, and therefore inherently unreliable), but I suspect the Uyghurs are being ignored because they are not being “victimized” by the Jews – more on that below. Islam—not Middle Eastern Islam, not radical Islam, Islam in general—has a Jew-hatred problem which nobody wants to address.

The Global South? That would not include North Korea, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, India, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, would it? All those places have widespread persecution and even killing of Christians. India is the worst country in the world for sex trafficking. Latin America (which includes all of South America) has the highest homicide rate in the world, and continues to rank as the most violent region on planet earth. The West is beginning to experience the same problems as the Global South, but precisely because we are importing those problems from the Global South through unchecked immigration and other disastrous policies. That is all just to say: I’m positive the Global South has no leg to stand on in criticizing Western anything, even if it is the case that the West is deeply hypocritical.

Now back to Mr. Wintour, who saves his most perverse opinion for last: “It is understandable why Zelenskiy took the unambiguously pro-Israeli position he did, but Timothy Kaldas, deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, said: ‘If you are arguing for a rules-based international order, if you want to be pushing back against countries taking territory with the use of force, then Ukraine should not be seeing itself as aligned with the Israelis.’ For others such as Borrell, the worry is that the pre-existing trends towards a more more multi-polar, yet less multilateral world will accelerate.”

Did you catch that? Do you understand what he’s saying? Allow me to translate: Israel is threatening the unilateral world order by defending itself, by making its own decision about how best to address the existential threat of Islamic and Palestinian terror. Why? Because the West has not given Israel permission to defend itself on its own terms—or more specifically, the United Nations and the American State Department have not given their full consent. Ukraine is righteous precisely because the West has granted permission to Ukraine to defend itself – by which they mean: sacrifice your entire population and still lose, since Ukraine cannot and will not win this war. No such permission has been granted to Israel.

Doesn’t Israel know that they are allowed to wipe out Hamas only if the West decides this will improve its geopolitical standing with the Global South? Does Israel not realize that every innocent Jewish life lost is worth it, if this means that those in the Global South can look at America without seeing hypocrisy (or any objection to radical Islam)? Hasn’t Israel caught on that the systemic rape of Jewish women is a small price to pay for the moral approval of the West by China, India, the Middle East, and South America?

Apparently, Israel is obtuse and is not abiding by the understood rules of the “unilateral” world order. In other words, for Wintour, national sovereignty and Israeli self-defense and self-determination threaten the Neo-liberal West’s ability to create a world controlled by the transnational, democratically unaccountable, bureaucratic dictatorship of Globalist institutions that is best represented by the U.N. and the American mega-bureaucracy.

To rephrase Timothy Kaldas, “If you are arguing for a rules-based international order, if you want to be pushing back against corruption and anti-democracy, then the West should be seeing itself as much more aligned with the only democracy in the entire Middle East, rather than one of the most corrupt semi-oligarchies on earth that would be Ukraine.

But there’s the rub. “The West”—in the sense of the Neo-liberal, bureaucratic, globalist elitist class—is not looking to defend democracy abroad, nor are their ideological foot soldiers, those activists pouring out into Western streets to indulge their Jew-hatred and publicize their ignorance. In fact, we do not even have democracy at home. How could we possibly defend abroad what we cannot defend at home? Earlier in his article, Wintour revealingly quotes supposed Israeli specialist Daniel Levy: “A US monopolistic exercise regarding the fate of Gaza is out of sync with the world we live in today and with contemporary geopolitics. . . for so much of the so called Global South and in many cities in the west, Palestine now occupies this kind of symbolic space. It’s a kind of avatar of a rebellion against western hypocrisy, against this unacceptable global order, and against the post colonial order.”

So, to reiterate: Israel’s defense of itself is not in accordance with contemporary geopolitics. Jews must die and America must support it; this is what is geopolitically savvy at the moment. Let me quickly note that the Palestinians have been offered many chances for self-determination: 2005, when Israel pulled completely out of the Gaza Strip, 2007, when the Palestinians were offered their own state based on a return to pre-1967 borders, and 2020, when they were again offered statehood, to provide just 3 instances. Furthermore, notice the phrase “post colonial order”, which gives the game away: Levy is an activist disguised as a “specialist”.

Palestine is indeed an avatar, but not of rebellion. Palestine is an avatar for anti-democracy, anti-life, and anti-civilization. It is a “symbolic space” for a group of Westerners who want to pretend to be on the side of the victim, while promoting the very forces which victimize and destroy civilization: terrorism, radical ideology, radical Islam, hatred of life, belief in a God who sanctions violence and hatred, fanaticism, etc.

Never before have the forces of death been able to appear as a force for life, as a defender of innocent civilians. Western elitists and Western activists have appropriated, globalized, and metaphorized the methods of Hamas: embed yourself within a civilian population; identify yourself with them; make it impossible for your enemy to kill you without also causing collateral damage to civilian populations. The activists of the West are able to advance an agenda of racial hatred, antisemitism, anti-democracy, in the name of “fighting genocide”.

The activists of the West are able to undermine women’s rights, equality before the law, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, human rights, gay rights, freedom of the press, all under the banner of “freedom fighting”, or “advocacy for the victim”. Regarding Islam, if one were to sum up the above injustices in one word, that word would be “Sharia”.

And since Wintour had the. . . .well, not balls, because Leftists don’t have those; let’s say, had the temerity to mention double standards, allow me to mention a few of the ones which I perceive. The Palestinian paramilitary organizations (PLO, Black September, Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad) have made terror the main instrument for achieving their ends, which include the destruction of the Jewish state and the murder of all Jews, yet for some reason, those terror organizations must be allowed to continue to exist because to get rid of them would appear unsavory—geopolitically inconvenient—to certain very unsavory countries. America is allowed to flatten two entire cities, and kill upwards of 8-10,000 civilians in its campaign against ISIS, but no such allowance will be made for the Israelis in their campaign to abolish Hamas.

The various military organizations of the Palestinian people are allowed to launch rockets indiscriminately into Israeli civilian areas, bombing Israeli schools and hospitals.  Unlike Palestinian schools and hospitals, there are no guns or terrorists hiding, but unless Israel uses a JDAM to guide every single projectile it launches, we will label Israeli aerial bombing as “indiscriminate”, never mind that the IDF has military lawyers review every aerial bombing mission they conduct to ensure it accords which the international laws of war. The military organizations of the Palestinian people will use rape, beheading, torture, and hostage-taking as their weapons, but we will call for a war crimes investigation of Israel if those same rapists and torturers have an uncomfortable time surrendering.

And yes, I say “of the Palestinian people” for a reason: the Palestinian people, sixteen years ago, invited a terrorist organization to help lead their society. What did they think, that a terror organization would lead them away from terror and not toward it? Did they think that they could invite terrorism to lead their society, and that this same terrorism would not infect their homes, their hearts, their hospitals, their schools? Terrorism has embedded itself in Gaza because the Gazans invited terror to make a home with them. Or, as the Left likes to say: ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. When you elect Hamas, expect the Hamasification of your culture. When the West imports radical Muslims, expect the Hamasification of Western activism and Western outlooks.

Finally, the Israel-Palestinian conflict ought to be an opened and closed case, speaking in social justice terms. In founding the state of Israel, in continuing to support it, the world has a chance to help end one of the worst, most brutal diasporas in history. The Jews are the most victimized ethnic and religious minority in history. Their return to the land of Judah, to their ancestral lands, is one of the few examples in history of an indigenous people reclaiming what was taken from them through violence and force. Israel is a democratic, multi-ethnic, open, pluralistic society, guaranteeing equality before the law for women, Arabs, and other minorities, including gay people, about whom the Left pretends to be sole defender.

There is no angle from which to support the Palestinian people at the expense of Israel or the Jews: not from a historical angle, not from a social justice angle, not from a geopolitical angle. Like all forms of hatred and bigotry, the Free Palestine mania is a true—if I may so put it, a metaphysical—example of insanity. It is the formalization of the West’s self-hatred. It is a suicide note which is performed, rather than written.