Woke culture has no historical perspective. It can only look at events within the context of current narratives. Thus, when the woke mind considers something like the Hamas/Israeli conflict, it can only do so within the context of today’s headlines or today’s lecture by a left-leaning professor.
A Limited Historical Horizon
Because of this limited historical horizon, young people, in particular, can’t accurately weigh the claims and counterclaims of Hamas and Israel. For example, a Harvard/Harris Poll found that 32% of Americans ages 18-24 believed that reports that “Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israeli civilians by shooting, raping and beheading” were false.
Yet, the State of Israel was only created in 1948, and since then there has been little evidence of such atrocities on the part of Israel. In fact, the Israeli military is credited with having an unmatched record of avoiding civilian casualties when compared to other nations.
On the other hand, Islam has a 1,400-year history of conquests involving sex-slavery, beheadings and massacres of innocents. Moreover, this is not all ancient history, but an ongoing process with many modern-age examples.
For example, between 1915 and 1923, Muslim Turks carried out a genocide against the Armenians which resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million people. It is said that Hitler used the Armenian genocide as the model for the Holocaust.
Modern-Day Examples of Purges by Muslims
Today, the Muslim country of Azerbaijan with the help of its Turkish ally is conducting a similar though smaller purge of Armenians in the Republic of Artsakh. The attack on the Armenians has involved bombing, invasion, siege, starvation, torture, beheadings, and the forcible displacement of the entire Armenian population of Artsakh.
Another modern example of Islam’s war against the non-Muslim world occurred in 1971 when the Pakistani military initiated a campaign of genocide against Bengali and Hindu communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). According to a Gatestone Institute piece, three million people were killed and 200,000 women were raped. Approximately ten million Bengalis fled to India.
What Woke Education Has Done
Unfortunately, the average American knows next to nothing about Islam’s bloody history. But thanks to their woke education, they have heard a lot about the sins of America and the rest of the Western world. So, when they look at current issues, they tend to see them through the lens of racism, oppression and colonialism.
And that’s the way many Americans, particularly young people, look at the Hamas/Israeli conflict. They look at it as a case of a Western colonial power oppressing people of color.
Of course, Israel has never had any colonies, and many Jews are of the same or darker color than the Palestinians in Gaza. But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is the woke narrative — a narrative that is flexible enough to cast light-skinned Arabs as the good guys and dark-skinned Jews as the bad guys when convenient.
An Extension of Multiculturalism
We tend to think that the woke movement is only five or six years old, but it is actually an extension of multiculturalism, a conceptual framework developed in the 1970s. Multiculturalists insisted that cultural diversity is our greatest strength and so they demanded that all cultures, customs, and religions be respected equally. According to the multiculturalists everything is relative. They held, for example that Beethoven was no better than bongo drums.
In reality, however, the multiculturalists believed that diversity is only skin-deep. They naively assumed that on a deeper level all cultures share the same values and aspirations. Unfortunately, this simplistic view of things has shaped our national and international policy ever since.
One particular irony is that the advent of this extremely naïve view of culture roughly coincided with the resurgence of Islamic jihad, a core Islamic principle which had been neglected for much of the mid-twentieth century.
But the Islamic world’s relative placidity ended in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution and the spread of its radical ideology to much of the Muslim world.
What didn’t end was the Western faith in multiculturalism. It grew by leaps and bounds, and by 1979 the average Western student was soaked in the belief that all cultures shared the same basic values.
What Naïve Westerners Believe
Except for the 444-day hostage crisis, the Iranian Revolution was looked upon as a good thing. Most importantly, the Iranians had thrown off the authoritarian Shah who many thought was an American puppet. Sure, women had to wear hijabs and hide their faces, but that was looked upon as a temporary aberration. Naïve Westerners were sure that all that would pass once Iranians had a little more exposure to enlightened Western culture.
But Iranians had already been exposed to many aspects of “enlightened” Western culture under the Shah who hoped to Americanize them. They watched Hollywood movies, listened to American pop music, and many women wore miniskirts.
Western progressives seemed to assume that after a decent interval the miniskirts would come back. But they never did. What many Americans failed to understand was that the Revolution represented a complete rejection of those liberties. The illusion that all cultures shared the same values kept them from understanding that Islam was a radically different culture with a radically different religion.
But this is not to say that the Iranian Revolution was a radical departure from traditional Islam. Rather, it was meant to be a return to it. The Ayatollahs believed that under the shahs, Muslims had drifted far away from true Islam — a religion that was revolutionary from its inception.
Yet, despite the Iranian Revolution, despite the fact that Iranian leaders now pledge “death to America,” despite 9/11, and despite multiple large-scale massacres in Europe, Westerners cling to the belief that the vast majority of Muslims are moderate and that common cultural values will triumph in the end.
Europeans, in particular, doubled down on the idea that a more welcoming attitude, combined with greater tolerance and more generous welfare benefits would coax Muslims to assimilate to European culture.
Blood in the Water
But it hasn’t happened. Muslims, looking through the lens of their own culture, saw these gestures in a completely different light. The tolerance and appeasement were taken as a sign of the submission that Islam, being the superior religion, was due. The welfare payments were seen as the jizya tribute that was traditionally paid by subjected people to their Muslim masters.
Some of this submission to Islam can be seen in French schools. Ever since the French Revolution, French schools have been dedicated to passing on the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Now, however, it looks as though a kind of reverse assimilation is taking place — a gradual assimilation to the values of revolutionary (i.e., traditional) Islam.
The Subdued and Submissive French
After the 2020 beheading in broad daylight of Samuel Paty, a high school teacher in a Paris suburb, French teachers have become subdued and submissive and very careful about what they teach. The guiding principle is not to defend liberté, but to avoid offending Muslim students. According to Professor Guy Milliere, of the University of Paris, the Holocaust is no longer taught, neither is Darwin’s theory of evolution, or secularism, or teaching that the earth is round. Moreover, teachers are routinely threatened by Muslim students that they are “risking a Samuel Paty” if they offend Islam.
As a result, says Milliere, “teachers have been resigning in increasing numbers, and recruiting new ones has become a problem… In the autumn of 2022, thousands of high school teaching positions were vacant; the French government had to recruit people who lacked the required diplomas.” One supposes that many of the new recruits will be Muslims and that the end result will be the Islamization of French education — precisely what Michel Houllebecq predicted in his best-selling novel Submission.
‘It Can’t Happen Here’
Of course, far worse things are happening in Nigeria where approximately 4,000 Christians and other non-Muslims are slaughtered every year by Muslim tribesmen and Islamic terrorists who take pleasure in burning down villages and kidnapping school girls. But most Americans are convinced that what happens in far off Africa can’t possibly happen here.
They might, however, be more open to the possibility that what is now happening in Paris suburbs can someday happen in American suburbs. American schools have long taught that tolerance is the highest value, and they are even more steeped in multiculturalism and wokeism than their French counterparts. It may be difficult to believe that American schools would ever cooperate in the promulgation of Islamic ideology, but 10 years ago who would have believed that they would collude in the spread of transgender ideology?
‘Islam is Peace’ Propaganda
The fact is, our woke educational system has for decades indulged in the “Islam is peace” propaganda that enables Islam’s cultural jihad. For many years, American students have been taught a whitewashed version of Islam. After 9/11, textbooks were rewritten to glorify Islamic history. Students learned that Islam invented just about everything from algebra to astrolabes; and they learned that 9/11 was the work of a handful of extremists, and had nothing to do with Islam.
All this, of course, came on top of years of multicultural indoctrination to the effect that all cultures shared the same basic values. Little surprise then that students all over the Western world flooded streets and squares in support of the Hamas cause in the wake of Hamas’s savage surprise attack on Israeli settlers on October 7th.
A Harvard/Harris Poll conducted on October 18-19, 2023 found that 48% of Americans ages 18-24 sided more with Hamas than Israel, and 32% in that age bracket thought the report of Hams terrorists killing 1,200 Israeli citizens was a false story.
In short, our educational system, like the one in France, provides fertile ground for Islamist organizations to continue their campaign of stealth jihad, increasingly punctuated by bouts of violent jihad.
This article originally appeared in the November 29, 2023 edition of The Stream.
Pictured above: Protest rally
Picture credit: Pixabay
