What Is a Terrorist?

Responses to the Israel-Hamas conflict reveal the sad state of our modern social imaginary.

Source: Yoga Yugustira.

Introduction

For the past two weeks, I have tried to make sense of the atrocities taking place in the Middle East. Like the rest of the world, the story of the Israel-Hamas conflict comes to me primarily through what shows up in the various newsfeeds I encounter online. And, like the rest of the world, I struggle to consciously avoid the echo chambers in order to decipher genuine truth from falsehood. Frankly, I find it mentally exhausting to have to question every tidbit of news I come across, which news outlet it comes from, what bias the writer speaks from, etc. I can understand why some would choose to abstain from engaging these global issues altogether; by the time you’ve figured out who’s saying what and why, there’s an entirely new set of facts for you to suss out. It’s like playing an endless game of keepy-uppy with my kids, only the balloon is full of nihilism and my youngest has pooped herself.

International geopolitics are not exactly my strong suit, so I freely admit to venturing out of my element here, at least as it pertains to the particular inter-workings of this conflict. But writing is how I make sense of things anymore, and the most fascinating part of this story for me has less to do with what’s actually taking place on the ground in Israel (tragic as those events have been) and more to do with the reactions we’ve seen on this side of the Atlantic. Specifically, the response of the American academic community to the initial Hamas attacks have been nothing short of astonishing to me.

Source: Reuters.

In the initial aftermath of the October 7th attacks, the full force of American academia, including practically every Ivy League school, came out in support of the people doing the shooting. In the image above, over 30 student groups from Harvard University gathered together and released a joint statement claiming “'We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Similar scenes played out at Columbia and Penn. A Cornell professor was filmed at a Pro-Palestinian rally making claims that, no matter where you stand, simply defy all manner of human dignity.

Apparently, America’s best and brightest no longer know what a terrorist is when they see one. The call for “both sides” and #FreePalestine as a justification for the murderous attacks on defenseless civilians has been loud and constant for weeks now. This, we are being told, is the good, wise take. Fellow Substack writer

Ed West

insightfully referred to the Hamas attacks as “the Reverse Floyd moment.” As incredible as it may seem, we have apparently so conflated virtue with tolerance that we have become a society that is either too stupid, too bored, or too scared to meaningfully distinguish a moral good from evil.

My intention here is to explore how this manner of thinking is the direct result of our culture having lost its moorings. Any society that permits some to publicly cheer for the murder of innocent children and families has gone astray, and only with great conviction and the grace of God himself can we hope to find our way back again.

Imperious Ignorance

What we are seeing play out on a global scale can best be described by what the late academic Michael J. Ovey deemed “imperious ignorance.” To be sure, when it comes to situations like the Israel-Hamas conflict, the details can be incredibly nuanced and complicated. The long, contentious history of this conflict simply cannot be restricted to what has transpired in the last month as if the previous millennia or two had nothing to do with it. Anyone with a working brain should be able to say this with the same confidence he recites his own address. But for whatever reason, be it the rise of the internet news cycle, the untrustworthiness of mainstream media, or a kind of existential exhaustion over the constant state of crisis the world finds itself in, what we now find are people claiming that a situation is so vastly complicated and so thoroughly nuanced that it is impossible to ever really know anything about it. Not only does the person claim to not know what is true, but neither can anyone else. Such a claim, Ovey states, “exercises power over others without, at times, the inconvenience of reasoned argument.” In other words, it becomes an excellent trump card. Ironically, true wisdom in this case is necessarily reappropriated from knowledge to ignorance; it is only by not knowing that one can truly be in the right.¹

A perfect example of imperious ignorance can be seen in a recent exchange between presidential candidate Cornell West and law professor Alan Dershowitz over the Hamas attacks. The video below is only eleven minutes long, but it’s so dizzying to try to follow West’s position here that it feels like an hour.

West insists that Israel bears most of the responsibility for these attacks, then immediately equates the loss of life on both sides as being exactly the same, without any meaningful distinction. He seems to have somehow overlooked the fact that innocent people were assaulted and gunned down with extreme prejudice, instead referring back to “the larger backdrop of an ugly occupation.” West repeats many truths here, but ultimately claims no Truth. This is because nothing can be more true for him than the harsh reality that everything is the same and nothing can be known.

If you don’t know how to think, what West says in this video may sound like humility. In reality, however, it’s little more than intellectual cowardice.

Writing on this subject earlier this week, the venerable Carl Trueman stands as a helpful foil for West’s imperious claims:

It is especially odd that the American left is so equivocal. It has spent the years since 2016 warning us all about the existential threat posed to democracy by fascism and fascists, from Donald Trump to those terrifying Moms for Liberty. The same goes for racism. Apparently, it is everywhere, and all are guilty of it, hence the need for costly action, such as wealthy sports stars taking the knee before a game and countless Facebook accounts sporting Black Lives Matter logos. But now that we have some real fascists on the block, the left seems oddly conflicted. When, I wonder, was the last time we saw men, women, and children (even infants) rounded up because they were Jews and carried off to be raped and murdered?

Our Social Imaginary is Broken

In many ways, this response is the inevitable result of a moral equivalency that has slowly cemented itself into what Charles Taylor calls our social imaginary. In his book Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor speaks of “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, [and] how things go on between them and their fellows.” For Taylor, our social imaginary is how a society understands what it means to be human. It is the value set a society establishes as normative and acceptable.

As the modern world slides ever more precariously into liberal progressivism, we can see that both Ovey’s imperious ignorance and the idea of moral equivalency have found a home within our collective social imaginary. We view the ability to see “nuance” and “both sides” as a core strength, even over and against the ability to disseminate right from wrong. This is what happens when we conflate tolerance and virtue: we experience a great moral flattening that extols one virtue at the expense of all the others. Good things become bad things when they become ultimate things.

When we refuse to name evil for what it is, we find that moral equivalency breeds moral bankruptcy. Saying that everyone is right from a certain point of view is another way of saying no one is right, because there is no such thing. Inevitably this leads to hopelessness, cynicism, despair and contempt for life itself. Things fall apart, and the center cannot hold.

We were not made to live this way.

We Have Cause to Be Uneasy

All this points us to a bone-chilling reality: if modern culture is allowed to continue along this path, a path where we cannot even recognize the blight of terrorism when we see it happening before our eyes, soon enough we will find ourselves careening down a path toward total societal incoherency. And whenever people fail to effectively communicate with their words, the threat of war is never far behind.

When there is no categorical distinction to be made between a genocidal terrorist attack and a democratic nation rising up to defend itself, when right and wrong become states of mind rather than hard realities that can shoot you or save you, we will end up like the dog that chews on his own leg, unaware of what he is doing or why, and eager for a master to subject himself to.

I do not seek to weaponize melodramatic and fear-mongering language, but this is truly what’s at stake for us. We must recognize these moral lapses in judgment for what they are, name them, do the opposite, and encourage others to do likewise. There is too much at stake to hope for less.

So let’s end with a bit of clarity: what is a terrorist? A terrorist is someone who willfully seeks out the suffering of others, for no other reason than to proliferate their agony. When the anguish of another brings abject joy to the offending party, we must first call it what it is, then seek to eradicate it wherever we find it.

It is imperative that we recover our moral bearings if we ever hope to pass on to our children a world worth living in.

Lord, have mercy.

1. Another place where we see this tactic deployed is in the area of biblical interpretation, a topic which I hope to expand on sometime in the future. For a good write-up on this, see Kevin DeYoung’s excellent article “That’s Just Your Interpretation.”