Victor Davis Hanson: Hamas Relies on ‘Useful Western Idiots’ for Sympathy, Backlash in U.S. ‘Ensures’ GOP Victory

Protesters gather
AP Photo/Susan Walsh, file
Joshua Klein

The Hamas “death cult” relies on “useful Western idiots” to support the Palestinian cause, which has “fused with the leftwing DEI industry,” according to world-renowned military historian and professor Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, who notes that pro-Palestinian protests and support for Hamas in the U.S. have alienated many Americans and will all but ensure a tough conservative president in 2024.

Consequently, he explains, Hamas has become “the Middle-East counterpart to BLM… and, more preposterously, the trans/gay/feminist movement,” while Israelis are “recalibrated as the demonized Western ‘colonialist’ white supremacists.”

In an essay published this week titled “What Were the Hamas Monsters Thinking?,” Dr. Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, describes the strategies and motivations behind Hamas’s “monstrous” actions on October 7.

Hamas’s Barbarism

The U.S.-designated terrorist group’s massacre in Israel last month — the deadliest against Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust — saw the torture, rape, execution, immolation, and abduction of hundreds of Israelis of all ages, mostly civilians, and dozens of Americans.

Thousands of others were injured and mutilated.

In light of their “eagerness to commit the unspeakable,” Hamas members aimed to shock the world with extreme brutality, believing the group would force Israeli concessions, the essay notes.

“In precivilization fashion, [Hamas] wished to kill and mutilate the most vulnerable of all Israeli civilians and thus to shock the world that it was capable of — and proud about — anything, from decapitation to necrophilia,” Hanson writes. 

“Such animalistic savagery, in the reckoning of Western therapeutic society, was supposedly to be seen as forced upon Hamas murderers by the ‘occupation,’” he adds.

In addition to provoking an Israeli response leading to collateral damage, Hanson suggests Hamas aimed to “terrify the entire civilian population” and prove that “2,000 killers could enter sacred Israeli ground with impunity and kill in one day more Jews civilians than at any day since the Holocaust.”

Knowing its methods and ultimate goals, the famed historian questioned why the terror group would “think the civilized world would support their barbarity or at least excuse it.”

Western Perceptions and Institutions

According to Hanson, Hamas banked on Jew-hatred in the West and the Middle East, believing its actions against the Jewish state would garner sympathy and support.

“Hamas assumed anti-Semitism was prevalent throughout the West and was canonical in the Middle East,” he writes. “Palestinian authorities count on the fact that being an enemy of the Jews of Israel wins them empathy of the world and creating their own unique rules of passive-aggressive victimhood.”

“So Palestinians demand to be the only ‘refugees’ in the world — not Greek Cypriots, Eastern European Germans, and Prussians, Kurds, Armenians, and certainly not a million Jews cleansed from the Arab Middle East,” he adds.

He also notes that from such a perspective, Israelis are to be regarded as “settlers,” as opposed to the “millions of Middle Easterners who surge and settle into the West, form resistance communities, sneer at integration and assimilation, and use Western liberality to protect and project their own illiberality.”

As Hanson points out, Hamas also counted on Western institutions and puppets, aligning its cause with activist groups on the left to gain support.

“Hamas relies on useful Western idiots. It understands its terrorists repel the majority of Americans. But it figures Western and globalist institutions — academia, the media, popular culture — in their wealth, ignorance, and self-importance, alleviate guilt and find resonance by mouthing the shibboleths of the ‘underdog,’” he writes.

He also highlights Hamas’s strategy in grasping that “the Palestinian cause has fused with the leftwing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry.”

“Thus Hamas becomes the Middle-East counterpart to BLM, aggrieved minorities, and, more preposterously, the trans/gay/feminist movement. Meanwhile, Israelis are recalibrated as the demonized Western ‘colonialist’ white supremacists,” he notes.

The essay posits that Hamas also believed that Middle Eastern expatriates in the West would view Western tolerance as weakness and manipulate it for its ends:

[T]he Islamic expatriate populations of Europe and the U.S. have soared. In the strange logic of the Middle Easterner in the West — on a green card, or a student visa, or either as an illegal alien or a first-generation immigrant — he will envision the magnanimity of Americans and Europeans who offered him refuge from the violence, hatred, tyranny, racism, sexism, terrorism, and violence of his homeland all too often as weakness to be manipulated, not as generosity to be appreciated much less reciprocated.

“Middle Eastern expatriates brag of their growing numbers and the political clout that Islam accrues in liberal democracies, without a clue of their hypocrisy of supporting illiberal tyrannies whose violence drove them out to the West in the first place,” he added.

Observing their recent radical actions in America, Hanson describes watching Middle Easterners in the U.S. “trying to ruin iconic events such as crashing ‘Black Friday’ shopping, disrupting the New York Thanksgiving parade, or tearing down American flags on Veterans’ Day.”

“Only in America would the Iranian terrorist theocracy’s ex-ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, be accorded a professorship at Oberlin or a former top diplomat for the Iranian regime Seyed Hossein Mousavian land a coveted billet at Princeton,” he writes.

Highlighting the use of Western freedoms by expatriates to further radical agendas, Hanson declares that from “such perches” these expatriates are “free to promote pro-Hamas, Iranian, anti-Semitic — and Anti-American — agendas,” adding that they “consider their hosts not so much tolerant as stupid.”

Fear and Terror

Another strategy used by Hamas was the threat of terrorism, reminiscent of events like the September 11 attacks on U.S. soil, to intimidate the West into opposing Israel.

“[B]ehind all these considerations, is the reality of terrorism and the fear it instills in the West, given the 21st century history of Middle Easterners slaughtering thousands of Americans and Europeans,” he writes. “In crude terms, Hamas and its terrorist affiliates signal us, ‘damn Israel or be prepared for another 9/11.’”

He also points to how Hamas, who he describes as a “death cult” and “updated terrorist version of the more organized SS — with the qualifier it broadcasts rather than hides its savagery,” uses tactics including using human shields and targeting civilians, expecting Israel’s reluctance to reciprocate in kind.

“Radical Palestinians brag that they love death more than Israel loves life,” he writes. “So they count on Israel giving up three convicted terrorists for one elderly or young captive, on targeting civilians with rockets while Israelis drops leaflets warning of their bombing attacks, on coercing human shields that they assume Israel will avoid, on sanctioning raping, mutilating, and beheading in a way Israel would never conceive of reciprocating in kind, and on and on.”

Despite any support for Hamas emanating from the UN and the media, Hanson argues that the terror group’s tactical and strategic methods will likely not work this time.

“October 7 was a declaration by Hamas that all barbarity imaginable was now fair game. Yet its sheer evil has unleashed the IDF that perhaps not even Joe Biden, hostages, and ‘world opinion’ can permanently stop,” he writes.

“For all the boasts about loving death, it was Hamas who cowardly murdered the unarmed, scampered back to the safety of their tunnels, and used their own kindred Gazans to shield them from death—delivered to them by supposed nerds who love life too much,” he added.

European Reaction to Immigration 

According to Hanson, the actions of Hamas and its supporters are causing a shift in European attitudes towards Middle Eastern immigration, with increasing public resentment, stating that “Europeans also have had it with unlimited immigration from the Middle East.”

The popularity of “restrictionist politicians throughout Europe” as seen in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Sweden, he argues, “reflect[s] growing public anger that Europeans are hated by the very people who seek them out and wish to destroy their Enlightenment institutions by manipulating and discrediting them.” 

“The thousands who hit the streets to cheer on October 7 and damn their hosts only confirm a growing global consensus—in the West, Latin America, Asia, and even throughout the Middle East—that admitting migrants from Palestine or Gaza, or their supporters, is a veritable death wish,” he added.

Impact on U.S. Politics 

Hanson also argues that pro-Hamas activities in the U.S., including disruptive protests like the attempt to impede the much beloved Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting on Wednesday night, are alienating many Americans and could influence future political decisions:

Pro-Hamas protestors calling Joe Biden ‘Genocide Joe’ and boasting about the Arab or Muslim vote in Michigan is incoherent. Not only do harassing Thanksgiving shoppers and parades, disrupting iconic American holidays and events, swarming highways and bridges, and preying on Jews alienate Americans. But also taking credit for ensuring Biden’s defeat will only distance the Democratic establishment, such as it is, from its embarrassing, loud, but ultimately relatively impotent Islamic constituency.

“Shouting for mass death ‘From the River to the Sea’ does not endear the pro-Hamas crowd to half of their fellow Democrats, much less unabashedly strutting their anti-Semitism,” he adds. “The current overt support for Hamas, in other words, has revealed to the nation the bankruptcy of the entire pro-Hamas/DEI base of the Democratic Party and will do much to ensure a conservative president in 2024.”

That Commander-in-Chief, Hanson asserts, “will likely deport anyone on a green card or student visa promoting Hamas terrorism, or violating U.S. law, while ensuring a travel ban from terrorist supporting regimes in the Middle East.” 

“Such measures will win overwhelming public support, despite media and academic outrage,” he adds.

Long-term Implications

The piece goes on to suggest that, while “for now Hamas and its American-residing apologists are full of themselves and feel they are leveraging and manipulating the West,” the terror group’s actions and the reactions of its supporters in the West may ultimately harm the Palestinian cause and Middle Eastern immigration to the West, arguing that “such haughtiness may be a delusion.” 

“Hamas in the Middle East and its enablers in Europe and America have done more to harm the Palestinian cause and the idea of Middle Eastern immigration to the West than at any time since 9/11,” he writes. 

While it is “hard to anger Westerners,” Hanson maintains, if supporters of the Palestinians “continue the death chants, the violent demonstrations, the creepy anti-Semitism, and the proud support for the Hamas bloodwork of October 7,” then they will “be surprised at the growing anger of otherwise postmodern Europeans and distracted Americans.”

Regarding the challenges faced by Israel and the West, the article concludes by noting that just as Israel “realizes that there is no living with Hamas killers,” so too the West is “learning that it can no longer sustain universities that despise the culture that nourishes it or Middle Eastern immigrants, visiting students, and residents that use the gift of freedom and tolerance to promote their abhorrent anti-Semitism, violence, intolerance — and, yes, hatred of their generous hosts.”

Following the October 7 massacre, Hanson slammed the Hamas “SS murderers,” while accusing the Biden administration of bolstering the terror group, and calling on Americans to demand “not one more American cent” be transferred to the Palestinians.

He also insisted that Hamas’s unprecedented invasion of Israel would in “no way” have transpired under the presidency of Donald Trump, as he urged America to take back its international standing.

Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.

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