After I attended a recent screening of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack footage, it became clear to me that Americans are overwhelmingly taking the wrong message away from the still-unfolding Israel-Hamas war. There are millions of people in the U.S. who cling to cultural resentment and violent ideology with religious fervor, just like members of Hamas, and their numbers are growing. In many ways, the domestic threat we face could soon be more dangerous than Hamas is to Israel.
The Oct. 7 footage largely reiterates what we already know: Jihadis find delight in murder. They quite literally have a religious obligation to slaughter innocent people — in this case, Israelis — who belong to ethnoreligious groups outside their own.
If you followed along with the events of Oct. 7 as they occurred or viewed social media footage of the attack in its immediate aftermath, this will sound familiar. Islamist soldiers gleefully decapitated noncombatants, burned people alive, and slaughtered people in their homes. They butchered parents in front of their children, giddily stomped on the heads of those they massacred, and shot people in their backs as they attempted to escape. When they returned home, they were greeted as heroes. Gazans flooded the streets to run alongside pickup trucks filled with bodies — some lifeless, some alive for political capital. All of this was done to victorious shouts of “Allahu akbar.”
The Islamic world, particularly those aligned with Hamas, believes Israel is an illegitimate colonial state. Israel, a Western nation in all but geography, is forced to deal with neighboring societies — all from the same different civilizational tradition — that despise its main ethnic and religious demographic (Jews) and view its very existence as an aberration and threat to their way of life. As such, the Jewish state must routinely ward off attacks from neighbors who emphatically desire its destruction.
Palestinian Islamists believe Israel is an illegitimate oppressor state filled with “colonizers” who are complicit in violence against them. They are, however, primarily motivated by a tribal, ethnoreligious disdain for Jews. (The former “oppressor-oppressed” dialectic is largely a backfilled, ideological justification for the latter so Westerners can understand the thought process more easily, but I digress.)
That said, Israel has hard borders and defensive measures that are used to differentiate and distance itself from those seeking to destroy it. America does not. Israel’s greatest threat is kept at arm’s length; America’s is a cancer rapidly spreading throughout its body.
Effectively, every major American institution is controlled by and committed to churning out people who cling to a similar “oppressor-oppressed” dialectic that motivates Hamas. This worldview is institutionally endemic from the campus to the boardroom to the federal bureaucracy. It — antiracism, progressivism, intersectionality, gay race communism, et al. — is the basis of our defacto state religion. Those who are filtered through and direct American institutions cling to this ethos with religious zeal.
That presents a serious threat to the lives and safety of the American people. Observe how adherents of this worldview embedded within the U.S. government foment chaos and violent crime by refusing to enforce the law at the southern border. Currently, legions of fighting-age men from across the globe, including several suspected Islamic terrorists, are illegally flooding across the shared border with Mexico before finding themselves in the country’s heartland, where they’ve committed hundreds of thousands of violent crimes.
But whole generations of people are reared to sincerely believe this isn’t a problem. They believe the U.S. is an illegitimate nation whose institutions seek to target and oppress nonwhite residents, such as these illegals. From their earliest days in the education system, virtually every child in America is taught to despise the nation and its culture because it is deemed “oppressive” and infringes on an abstract, ever-expanding notion of “rights.”
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Thus, they are taught that perpetual revolution — typically slow and bureaucratic but often rapid and violent — is the only solution to nonprovable injustices that are both seminal and sempiternal.
This revolution is meant to amplify grievances from the “coalition of the dispossessed,” consisting of racial and ethnic minorities, LGBT-identifying individuals, and their “allies.” These constituencies are the basis of a left-wing political firewall, and, as established, their grievances are the basis of a new civic religion that seeks to refound the nation and erase its history.
One need only look at the removal and destruction of historic American monuments to see that this coalition’s goals are the targeting and oppressing — and, taken to its natural end, killing — of people who oppose them. Their utopia begins when the last dissenter is silenced. Similar to how Hamas will never be satiated until “Palestine” is “free” from “the river to the sea.”
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Clearly, the Venn diagram juxtaposing this group of people with Hamas has considerable overlap. They are both radical contingencies that seek the complete annihilation of those with whom they are not aligned and view their causes as righteous crusades against oppression.
Israel is competent and capable of defending itself from those seeking to eradicate it; America is not. Those seeking to unmake the U.S. quite literally control it and are invested in perpetuating its destruction. If we are to take anything away from the Oct. 7 attacks, other than refamiliarizing ourselves with Hamas’ brutality and capacity for evil, it should be a grim understanding that a similar fate awaits those who dissent from the current American orthodoxy.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.
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