Hamas is not part of a progressive coalition, as Judith Butler once said. It’s the Palestinian version of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. Hamas are not humanists. They are fascists. So why is it that so many of our allegedly most learned citizens found themselves rationalizing, defending, and in some cases even celebrating the barbarism of October 7?

The answer is found in a mangled paraphrase from Professor Rickford’s speech about Palestinians being unable to breathe. One hears this formulation from the pro-Hamas left all the time. The CUNY Jewish Law Students Association, in an October 10 open letter proclaiming solidarity with Palestinian self-determination, stated: “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

That line is a paraphrase of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952. … Fanon’s most celebrated work, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961, the year of his death at age 36. Its first chapter, “On Violence,” provides both the language and the original arguments many intellectuals employ today to explain their solidarity with fanatic butchers.

[Read on, as Eli has turned up a very telling artifact in the Left’s long march through the institution of Academia. Eli also captures the irony of the book, which I won’t entirely spoil but certainly feeds into the virtue-signaling and posturing of privileged elites who want to claim dispossession and oppression. — Ed]