Would Adorno have had a Twitter account? Resignation and counter-resignation on October 7
Fakhry Al-Serdawi
Platypus Review 174 | March 2025
PERSONALLY, I AM NOT in the business of “condemning” things. I have already alienated my moralist Palestinian and Palestinian-American friends when I said that the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings in New Zealand were working-class people killing working-class people. They wanted me to say that the Australian Brenton Tarrant was a Trump voter with an AR15, and I was already offering critiques for the critiques of Trump voters, even after Trump recognized Israel’s illegal annexations of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. I also alienated my friends by viewing the protest movement over the killing of veteran journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli sniper in 2022 as a sort of moral panic within the professional-managerial class both Palestinian and international. This class was shocked by the reality that murder-by-occupation can grasp one of them, a journalist at a prestigious journalistic organization who is also an American citizen. In early 2020, I went to a pro-Palestine protest in front of the U.S. embassy in Madrid. After witnessing the performative nature of the protest firsthand, I understood that no “protest movement” should be treated with baby gloves, not even the ones for Palestine. Besides the legitimacy of the ceasefire demand, I have also critiqued the Palestine protest movement as early as October 8.
Even before I got acquainted with Theodor Adorno’s principles, I had a natural distrust of the “protester,” something that would come in handy to understand events in my part of the world. Yet, while the Adornian analysis of “Resignation” (1969)[1] is usually used to critique the Leftist moral outrage from Western colonial and imperial violence, this analysis is rarely the case when it comes to Leftist responses to modern Islamist violence, commonly described as “terrorism.” Critical counterterrorism studies offer a critique of the attitudes and views of security institutions of the capitalist state, but they do not usually critique the bourgeois middle-class responses to Islamic violence, let alone dedicate themselves specifically to studying the moral responses of the Left and its protest movements to violent Islamism. The moralistic social response to “terrorism” is that it is either fully justified (including by anti-anarchist Marxists) or written off by the cultural Left as blatantly racist and Islamophobic without sufficient analysis.
One of the closest examples I can think of is Chris Hedges’s writings about the New Atheists,[2] and their response to Islamism, how they utilized abstract slogans like the secular and rational superiority of the West to justify resigning from thinking about the complexities of U.S. foreign policy during the War on Terror. Another prominent example, which studies a wider demographic, is the writings of French philosopher Emmanuel Todd,[3] who critiqued the French Republican marches[4]in response to the Islamist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, viewing the protesters’ public assertion of the republican values of secularism, free speech, and unity, as apolitical while claiming to be a high form of political engagement, because such symbolic and cathartic assertions do not address complex socioeconomic realities. Todd sees that the real motive behind the protest is not the proclaimed commitment to republican values but an anxiety over France’s changing social landscape within the context of the social and economic failures of globalization.
What are we then to say about the “We Stand With Israel” movement in the West after October 7? Is there anything that signifies an intellectual resignation by its Adornian term, more than that social movement? In my February 16, 2024 teach-in at the New School chapter of Platypus, I talked about how unintentionally entertaining and how Late-American / Late-Soviet that movement is. Its public intellectual leaders seemed like characters from a sitcom from another universe featuring Grace (Debra Messing), Will (recast as Douglass Murray), and the angry foreign-exchange student (Mosab Hassan Yousef). The supposedly smarter people in the movement, like the editors of Tablet magazine and The Free Press,[5] have almost completely escaped reality. Since October 7, They have been raising the alarm that the Biden-Harris Administration, an active participant alongside Israel in the war efforts in Gaza and Lebanon, is about to betray Israel[6] or have already betrayed it.[7]
Nonetheless, this response to Hamas’s violence has also been exempted from Adornian critique, which is mostly employed these days to criticize the mainstream Left’s response to the Palestinian question. In this essay, I will discuss the convictions in the Western imagination about October 7 that led to diverting all critique to the Leftist faction that at least has a concrete political demand, ending the war in the Middle East.
The manufactured crisis of the Left’s tailing of Hamas
Prioritizing the critique of the pro-Palestine resignation over the pro-Israel resignation is justified by the claim that the mainstream Left’s resignation is more quantitatively and qualitatively dangerous. Marxists who prioritize the critique of the mainstream Left and their response to the current conflict, do so because it is the “mainstream”Left. Its hyperbolic actionism towards Palestine and its “tailing of Hamas” is a much bigger phenomenon than any other Leftist positions on the war. For those Marxists, intellectual resignation over support for Israel has tainted a small fringe of the Left, which became preoccupied with making the Israeli military the equivalent of the Red Army, and with making Netanyahu, as Ariel Sharon before him,[8] the equivalent of Lenin, like the Antideutsch always did. This small minority, therefore, is not worth our attention.
There are several problems with this proposition. First, how much “mainstream” is the pro-Palestine left in the West? Benjamin Studebaker, who offers a non-alarmist, more nuanced critique of the pro-Palestine left, indicated that the Gaza War is a very low priority among Americans compared with the Iraq War in the 2000s which was “important to people from all walks of life.”[9] Within this not-so-mainstream Left, there are also not-so-mainstream currents. There is a diverse spectrum from those who seek Israeli defeatism through armed violence to those who comprehend the humanitarian priority of a ceasefire. The most extreme, graphic, and anti-semitic manifestations of the pro-Palestine Left happen also within a fringe minority. Why then, we should give all our attention and energy to those and not to the likes of the Antideutsch?
The other problem with this proposition comes on the level of strategy and Left-building. It is not solely our mission as socialists to critique the Left; we should critique bourgeois society as a whole. It serves us no real function to claim that the Antideutsch is a minority when the whole German capitalist state, which is the inheritor of the German empire of 1914, is supporting one side of the current war. Once you fall into this mystification, you are no longer an enlightened member of the Spartacus League,[10] especially when criticizing the “behaviors” of the Left while ignoring the fact that Western bourgeois society as a whole creates the conditions to make a ceasefire impossible.
Quantitative considerations aside, orthodox Marxists could argue that there is a true crisis in that many on the Left are “tailing” Hamas, reaching a new level of fascist barbarization. But what does “tailing” Hamas even mean outside of alarmist abstractions and within the contemporary material context? Does the Western Left have recruitment offices for young naïve men to go to fight alongside Hamas? Is the Left sending money and weapons to Hamas? Has the Western Left gone totally anarchist, planting bombs in cafés and cars in Brooklyn and Rome over its love for Hamas?
In the context of the current war in the Middle East, “tailing Hamas” is a pejorative term for Leftist infighting, used by Leftist citizens of Western countries participating in the war alongside Israel, in the areas of diplomacy, intelligence, armaments, and military, to accuse other citizens in the same countries of “choosing the side” of the so-called Axis of Resistance in the Middle East. A more Spartacus League kind of behavior would be to try to reach out to citizens and Leftist organizations in Israel and Iran who are against a wider war, not to scold your own countrymen and women for the symbolic, apolitical online behavior of “choosing a side,” or worse, pretending to be scolding them for choosing a side, while they are actually doing what the Spartacus League would have done; calling for a ceasefire.
The true-crime-ification of October 7
Why do large segments of the political and intellectual society today in the West keep thinking over and over about Hamas’s real and imaginary actions on October 7 to the point of removing themselves from reality? And why do orthodox Marxists accept this migration from reality, jeopardizing their own intellects to leave on the same voyage? After more than one year of the events, the metaphorical October 7 memorial museum, something that is legitimate in and of itself, has turned into the October 7 labyrinth of endless rumination on the human condition. This reminds us of Adorno's warnings. In Minima Moralia (1951), he saw danger in a kind of abstract, detached, empty, circular contemplation that avoids confronting real social conditions and issues.
There are of course powerful reasons behind this intellectual resignation. The “resigned” has witnessed what “resignation” looks like on the side of the opposing camp; personified by the brutality of Hamas and the immorality of the mainstream Left accepting the brutality of Hamas. James Robb, in the Platypus Review, aimed once again to emphasize the “exceptional brutality” of Hamas on October 7, claiming that the Left has understood this brutality, absorbed it, and then defended it as a necessary means for liberation, descending into fascist darkness, surrendering to the collective delirium of the “pogrom.”[11]
The first problem with Robb’s analysis is that it mischaracterizes the behavior of the Left, which is not based on the sadistic enjoyment of violence but on the practices of selective forgetfulness, focusing only on the perceived positive aspects of October 7: breaking the fence, overcoming the Merkava tanks (Tiananmen Square style), etc. The Left might have intellectually resigned, but not in the way that fits Robb’s description. This leads us to the second problem with this discourse; Robb depoliticizes the practices of remembrance by focusing on the inhumanity, pathology, and sadism of the perpetrators, a trope that is usually encountered by applying critical counterterrorism research.[12] The third problem with Robb is that he copies the “discourse analysis” methods of the race- and gender-critical theorists he is trying to take down, in a similar manner to how the War on Terror academia in the West tried to copy the “discourse analysis” of the New Left academia in the 1970s. Even Edward Said, the intellectual accused of being the father of postcolonial studies, called “discourse analysis” a cult and condemned it for giving a sense of “weightlessness to history.”[13] During the culture-war years, Ben Burgis wrote a book called Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns.[14] Robb wants us to cancel gender theorists while the Middle East burns.
Just as Emmanuel Todd claims that the “Je Suis Charlie”movement was less about solidarity with Charlie Hebdo and more about cultural and social middle-class anxieties in France, James Robb's remembrance of Hamas’s brutality is less about solidarity with the October 7 victims and more about his application of the apolitical business model of the American culture war to the conflict, focusing on the depravity of the Left and Judith Butler the same way the Democrats overemphasize “the depravity” of Trump and his followers. In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), there is a hidden conflict between Winston Smith and O’Brien about the “moral superiority or failure” of Winston. O’Brien, knowing that Winston is desperate for revolution, sets up a moralistic trap for him:
“You are prepared to give your lives?”
“Yes.”
“You are prepared to commit murder?”
“Yes.”
“To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?”
“Yes.”
“To betray your country to foreign powers?”
“Yes.”
“You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases—to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?”
“Yes.”
“If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face—are you prepared to do that?”
“Yes.”
Winston has failed this moral test. This reminds me of one of the rare rational analyses on October 7 by Alex Gourevitch in Damage magazine who says,
Once you have decided that some people fail a basic moral test—your moral test—then morality is playing a political function without anyone quite acknowledging it. And morality serves the political function of delegitimation. Any organization labeled immoral becomes impermissible as a representative in a political conflict or deliberation. In the Israel-Palestine setting, this moralization has played the role of destroying any political relationship with Palestinians. . . . It is not enough for them to have the perfectly normal human reaction of recoiling from Hamas’ tactics. They are supposed to put on a public display of that moral reaction, so as to publicly delegitimize Hamas. And if they do not make the appropriate display, then they are considered insufficiently differentiated from Hamas itself.[15]
Worse for the Palestinians, morality has not only replaced politics, it replaced the law. The true-crime-ification of October 7 can only happen in a context where the mundane rule of law is not allowed to exist. On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice confirmed the lawlessness (not the mere immorality) of the Israeli capitalist state presence in the Palestinian-occupied territories since 1967.[16] The same international body is looking at the case of the lawlessness (not the mere immorality) of the Israeli response to October 7.[17] This is one of the reasons why there is no interest in the “illegality” of Hamas’s actions as opposed to the grand interest in its “immorality.” The goal of the law is to attempt to prevent barbarism (even if the law protects the capitalist interests, the violent erosion of law and private property leads to a faster fall to barbarism). The goal of depoliticized morality is to bemoan barbarism, not in good faith, but to surrender to the process of barbarization itself. An impartial, cold, just, international investigation on what happened on October 7 is refused or dismissed because it would undermine the West’s unintentional descent into barbarism through its war against “totalitarianism.”
Anti-communism, anti-semitism, and orientalism
Interestingly, James Robb’s essay had a similar ending to Schuyler Mitchel’s article in The Baffler, “Pinkwashing the Timeline.”[18] While Robb warns that gender theorist Judith Butler and her pro-Palestine ilk are fascists, Mitchel sees that anti-trans Zionists are also fascists. This shows how anti-fascism has always limited the Western imagination, as Daniel Bessner has described: “fascism’s power in American discourse comes from the fact that it has no stable meaning—it’s mostly an all-purpose curse word.”[19] Even Benjamin Netanyahu himself plays into the plasticity of this term in Western societies when he likens the university protestors to what happened in German universities in the 1930s.
The reason why Western societies are divided into major opposing groups accusing each other of fascism goes back to changes in Western capitalist ideology, after the Holocaust, in two ways. First, there was the anti-Western academic postmodernism, and the myth of irredeemable Europe, irredeemable whiteness, and irredeemable colonial settlers. Second, and most importantly, there were the orientalist tendencies of the theory of totalitarianism, born out of a fusion between an over-optimism about the Anglo-American “liberation” of Europe and over-pessimism about the rest of the world outside of Western Europe. For this theory, what is to be blamed for the Holocaust is essentially un-Western, for totalitarianism is a product of an unholy unity between Western technology and oriental despotism.[20]
The theory of “oriental despotism” is the source of conduct that applies apocalyptic and biblical morality, not modern legality and constitutionality, to encounter the likes of Hamas’s actions on October 7. This theory can be traced back to the writings of European Enlightenment thinkers who were contemporaneous with the liberal constitutional projects since the 18th century, and who were trying to make sense of the limitations of these projects, blaming these limitations, nonetheless, not on the contradictory condition of capitalism, but on identitarian factors seen as external to the project of Enlightenment. Laws and rights, including the right to private property, had a universal character but could not be applied universally due to limitations in non-European societies. Montesquieu, for example, considered in his Spirit of Law (1748), that there is no private property in the Orient, for him, Oriental subjects were the property, the slaves of the oriental despot, therefore, it was moral for them to be colonized later on.[21] Montesquieu had parallel views on the Jews in Europe, associating them with the Orient; considering that “nothing more closely resembles a Persian Jew than a European Jew.”[22] He and many other Enlightenment thinkers were doubtful that the Jews, as the “Asiatics of Europe” and the Oriental “refugees” could be assimilated into the European project for liberty. While Enlightenment values have opened up possibilities for religious tolerance and the legalization of Jewish civil rights, including access to labor and education, the European nationalist turn from bourgeois society to state capitalism brought back the exclusionary discourse of Enlightenment towards the Jews as the outsiders of the national project, making their right to equality before the law and private property permanently unstable.
The Oriental and Jewish questions were then intertwined in their relations to state capitalism and imperialism. Socialist Internationalism before 1914 could have been an overcoming of this dilemma, prompting Jewish participation in the international working class in an area that spanned between Central Europe and Western Asia. After the death of socialism in the aftermath of the First World War, many of the citizens of Greater Syria opted for a more cosmopolitan solution to the Oriental question in the Near East: a constitutional form of government under an American mandate of the League of Nations.[23] The European powers never took that route, as their solution to the Levant was artificial division, ethnonationalism, and state capitalism. The death of the socialist project in Europe led to the Holocaust, and the death of the liberal-constitutional project in the Near East led to Israeli colonialism and Arab authoritarianism.
Zionist nationalism was not the only alternative to socialist internationalism. Something else in the post-World War II American-led order was presenting itself as a “complementary” solution to the Jewish question; it was even presenting itself as a different form of universality than socialist internationalism. Pax Americana became the solution, especially after the shift from the thesis of Christian civilization to the thesis of Judeo-Christian civilization, a sympathetic and laudable effort, according to Samir Amin, to eradicate anti-semitism after the horrors of Nazism. This shift occurred alongside two parallel major shifts in Pax Americana: the move from Eurocentrism to American exceptionalism, and from the struggle against fascism to — again — the struggle against communism.
This new American anti-communism of the 1950s was not as majorly anti-semitic as its Nazi counterpart in the 1930s. While Hitler applied the same anti-semitic rhetoric in his opposition to both communism and Western capitalism, Atlanticist Americans applied orientalist rhetoric in their Cold War anti-communism. The public enemy was no longer the Jewish Bolsheviks, but the Oriental, Asian, Mongol, and Sino Bolsheviks. According to anti-communists, not only were Stalinism and Maoism caused by the fusion of Oriental despotic mentality and Western technology, but also Nazism. In the same way, anti-Western postmodernists blamed European fascism on the problem of an irredeemable and toxic condition of “whiteness,” the Cold Warrior theorists of totalitarianism blamed Nazism on the infiltration of the eternal “oriental mind” to the democratic West.[24] Both camps gave an identitarian face to “barbarism” instead of seeing it as a historical condition to which the capitalist state could relapse.
Despite these defects of the post-war American order, it was still morally ambiguous. One signifier of the moral complexity of American power is the fact that its nuclear hegemony was built by Jewish nuclear scientists in Operation Crossroads (Manhattan Project) and by Nazi rocket scientists in Operation Paperclip. Nevertheless, the universalist constitutionalist aspects of the American order offered many Jews, including the recent survivors of the Shoah, a seemingly progressive substitute for dead socialist internationalism, an internationalism that for a long time has been, on the surface, compatible with Zionist nationalism. (Later on, Palestinians and the PLO[25] themselves would opt for American internationalism. Just like there were several opportunities for solving the Jewish question by the American-led order after the Second World War, there was an opportunity to solve the Palestinian question at the American unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War.)
The American Cold War project also, contextually and opportunistically, had an immaterial “rhetorical” place for Muslims in general, adding to its imperial ideology the ideas of “positive orientalism” towards Islam as a rigorous force for anti-communism as opposed to negative orientalism towards Eastern communists and their allies.[26] Although many Cold Warriors were disdainful of Islam, many were Islamophiles, to the extent that in the Afghanistan War, the U.S. government had invested in replacing Marxist values in the Afghan school curriculum with Islamist values.[27]
America had a duality in its composition: a free civil society in all of its states and a political society of the empire in Washington.[28] This has divided American Jews between rejecting or embracing the Orientalist tendencies of American anti-communism. It is an uncomfortable fact, but American and Western Jewish anti-communists were also Orientalists, as a part of the general trends of anti-communism in the West. This was problematic for two reasons: first, it associated Marxism with Oriental despotism and subsequently with the Holocaust, making it unattractive to American and Western Jews. Second, it squandered the Bundist characteristics of the Jewish working class in the West by making them preoccupied with thereness (overthinking about the dangerous world outside of the West) instead of hereness — the American civil society of immigrants where the opportunity to build the “million workers” party is always present. If socialism failed in Europe because of inter-imperial rivalry and fascism, and if socialism failed in Eurasia because of Stalinism, socialism failed to crystallize in the Anglo-American world because of anti-communism (many comrades in Platypus would downplay this) and Jewish anti-communism — as is Islamic anti-communism — is a part of this problem, diverting energies from building the international working class into inter-imperial rivalry.
The “resignation” of anti-communism has been a precursor to the many subsequent resignations among the political and intellectual society in the West, which adopted moralistic, apolitical stances to deal with the world in the post-Cold War humanitarian phase, the War on Terror era, up until today’s American-Israeli extensive war in the Middle East. Ayn Rand was a fierce anti-communist who described the Arab-Israeli conflict as the battle between the civilized and the uncivilized.[29] Hungarian philosopher Arthur Koestler, who described Islam as a “harsh faith, born in the desert, which has never been reformed or liberalized,” condemned the alliance of the “Soviet Kommissar” and the “Oriental Yugi” against civilization. Many have a similar anti-communism in today’s post-October 7 world: Left-wing American Netanyahuists, free-speech loving Marxists who suddenly woke up to the “kernel of truth” in Mccarthyism, anti-establishment populists discovering the sudden necessity for neoconservatism, the Republican warriors against anti-semitism, the European alt-Right, Jordan Peterson’s copycats (and the famous streamer Destiny). Israel did not uniquely confiscate the conversation about anti-semitism; that was mostly done by gentiles. For those anti-communists, the woke Bolsheviks (the thought criminals), and the traitor Norman Finkelstein (Emmanuel Goldstein) are all enamored with the Islamist October 7 massacre (the crimes of Eurasia and Eastasia).[30]
This embrace of anti-communism with orientalist tendencies is also dangerous because it opens the door for old forms of anti-communism with anti-semitic tendencies to emerge (an ironic karma for anti-Soros Netanyahuists). Trumpism is a big enough phenomenon to include both Zionist and anti-Zionist currents. Not all Trumpist populists love Israel. Some of them have even based their anti-communism on reprehensible anti-semitic conspiracy theories, which turn AIPAC[31] into a conspiratorial operation for creating globalization for the world and nationalism for Israel. Edward Said rejected such an attitude, not only because of its blatant anti-semitism but also because intellectuals should not give AIPAC more than its actual size and weight. After all, Said considered both the Israel lobby and the Arab lobby (in the 1980s) as embarrassingly apolitical bureaucracies.
Conclusion: The era of counter-fascism
In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer express how conflicting societies can mutually reinforce their own authoritarian tendencies by pushing each other into defensive postures, just like what happened to societies under opposing American and Soviet bureaucracies; a political and moral burnout in America that even remorseful Cold War thinkers George Kennan and Walter Lippmann have predicted. Instead of the imaginary differentiation between fascism and anti-fascism, we live in the era of “counter-fascism”; all of us now have the duty to be fascistic in order to fight fascism, and all of us have the right to abolish legality and constitutionality in our war against our fascist enemy because he had threatened our legality and constitutionality.
After we have replaced socialist universality with First-Worldist bourgeois outrage, what is the end game of this counter-resignation after October 7? Nihilistic acceptance of a nuclear winter, I believe, is the highest form of resignation. In 2002, Professor David Perlmutter was frustrated by the Black March, the October 7 equivalent of that year. He aired his frustration by saying:
Israel has been building nuclear weapons for 30 years. . . . Sampson in Gaza? With an H-bomb? What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. . . . For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away—unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans—have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?[32]
The mere showcasing of this quote would also be “discourse analysis,” so let me go deeper into the historical material conditions that would reproduce this intellectual exhaustion. Dr. Perlmutter is a decent average man, he is like you, me, Judith Butler, her admirers, her haters, and all the Hamas inflators on both sides in the West. We are not Palestinians in the West Bank or Lebanese in the South of Lebanon trying to put food on the table every day (in a way that would make any “homo economicus” theorist ashamed of themselves), let alone being Palestinians from Gaza. We are not low-tier Palestinian or Lebanese fighters nor are we the Jewish, Druze, and Bedouin young soldiers being thrown into the meat grinder, not by the liberal British Raj, but by Itamar Ben Gvir[33] and Bezalel Smotrich.[34] (When I met Ofer Casif last September, I asked him whether Netanyahu was inspired by the Russians and the Ukrainians to accept losing tens of thousands of men in a wider War.)
No; we are well fed, well sheltered, well medicated on Prozac, and well informed by the Electronic Intifada and Tablet. We have not come to love Big Brother by the end of our story, since we killed our Stalinist father in 1968 and 1989. More dangerously, we — as Winston Smith — have become over-obsessed with war maps outside of our own atomized realities, while paradoxically being also far removed from the realities of those living in war.
All of this made me think of what Adorno means to me in current times. Resignation used to be a moralistic rejection of the Vietnam War; now it means accepting anything for “the just cause,” even nuclear war. Maybe Adorno has foreseen this. When the moralism of the anti-colonial wars clashes with the moralism of anti-terror wars, all of this would continue until “pushing the button” is also a “moralistic necessity.” |P
[1] Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation” (1969), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 289–93.
[2] See Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists (New York: Free Press, 2008), republished as When Atheism Becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalists (New York: Free Press, 2009).
[3] See Emmanuel Todd, Who is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).
[4] January 10–11, 2015.
[5] The Free Press is a media company founded by Bari Weiss.
[6] See Paul Gross, “Baris Wess is right about the singular importance of freedom,” The Times of Israel (May 28, 2024), <https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/bari-weiss-is-right-about-the-singular-importance-of-freedom/>.
[7] See Julie Strauss Levin, “The President’s War Against the Jews,” Tablet (March 27, 2024), <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/president-biden-war-against-jews>.
[8] See Felix Baum, “German psycho: A reply to the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum,” Platypus Review 33 (March 2011), <https://platypus1917.org/2011/03/01/german-psycho-a-reply-to-the-initiative-sozialistisches-forum/>.
[9] Benjamin Studebaker, “The Left Cannot Make Use of the Gaza War,” Sublation (April 7, 2024), <https://sublationmedia.com/the-left-cannot-make-use-of-the-gaza-war/>.
[10] Spartakusbund. Founded in 1914, it became part of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany) in 1919.
[11] James Robb, “Means and ends in Gaza: A note on the morality of the October 7 massacre,” Platypus Review 170 (October 2024), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/10/01/means-and-ends-in-gaza-a-note-on-the-morality-of-the-october-7-massacre>.
[12] Henrique Tavares Furtado, “Against state terror: lessons on memory, counterterrorism and resistance from the Global South,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 8, no. 1 (2015): 72–89, <https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2015.1005936>.
[13] See Benita Parry, “Edward Said and Third-World Marxism,” College Literature 40, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 105–26.
[14] Ben Burgis, Cancelling Comedians while the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left (Winchester: Zero Books, 2021).
[15] Alex Gourevitch, “Seven Realities of Israel/Palestine,” Damage (March 5, 2024), <https://damagemag.com/2024/03/05/seven-realities-of-israel-palestine/>.
[16] See International Court of Justice, “Press release 2024/57” (July 19, 2024), in Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, <https://www.icj-cij.org/case/186>.
[17] See International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), <https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192>.
[18] Schuyler Mitchell, “Pinkwashing the Timeline,” The Baffler (April 30, 2024), <https://thebaffler.com/latest/pinkwashing-the-timeline-mitchell>.
[19] Daniel Bessner, “Does American Fascism Exist?,” The New Republic (March 6, 2023), <https://newrepublic.com/article/170890/does-american-fascism-exist>.
[20] See William Pietz, “The ‘Post-Colonialism’ of Cold War Discourse,” Social Text 19/20 (Autumn 1988): 55–75.
[21] See Franco Venturi, “Oriental Despotism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 1 (January–March, 1963): 133–42.
[22] Quoted in Lourens Minnema, “Different Types of Orientalism and Corresponding Views of Jews and Judaism: A Historical Overview of Shifting Perceptions and Stereotypes,” Antisemitism Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 290.
[23] See Ussama Makdisi, “Cosmopolitan Ottomans,” Aeon (October 17, 2019), <https://aeon.co/essays/ottoman-cosmopolitanism-and-the-myth-of-the-sectarian-middle-east>.
[24] See Pietz, “The ‘Post-Colonialism.’”
[25] Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964.
[26] See Andrew J. Rotter, “Saidism without Said: Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History,” The American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (October 2000): 1205–17.
[27] See Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Afghanistan and the Genesis of Global Jihad,” Peace Research 37, no. 1 (May 2005): 15–30.
[28] See Edward W. Said, “The Palestine Question and the American Context,” Arab Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 127–49, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41857536>.
[29] See Ayan Rand’s appearance on The Phil Donahue Show (1979), <https://archive.org/details/the-phil-donahue-show-1976-1992/>.
[30] In Orwell’s 1984, citizens are accused of thought crimes, Emmanuel Goldstein is the principal enemy of the state, and Eurasia and Eastasia are territories.
[31] American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group.
[32] David D. Perlmutter, “Dark Thoughts and Quiet Desperation,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2002, <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-07-op-perlmutter-story.html>.
[33] See “Ben Gvir urges ‘massive assault on Gaza’ after Hamas postpones hostage release: ‘We must return to war,’” The Times of Israel, February 10, 2025, <https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ben-gvir-urges-massive-assault-on-gaza-after-hamas-postpones-hostage-release-we-must-return-to-war/>.
[34] See Sam Sokol, “Smotrich says he supports Saudi normalization, but not if it means ending war,” The Times of Israel, February 3, 2025, <https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-says-he-supports-saudi-normalization-but-not-if-it-means-ending-war/>.
