A really brutal opinion piece published today at Forward. Author Shlomo Klapper opens with a list of comments made by both professors and students at various elite universities.

Thank you to my alma mater, Yale Law School, where student groups celebrated the attacks and “Palestinian resistance,” and to Yale professor Zareena Grewal, who says Israelis aren’t civilians…

Thank you to the Harvard Jews for Liberation and the 30 other Harvard student groups who issued a statement saying they hold Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ attack.

Thank you to the hundreds of Columbia students who have cheered the killers of innocent Jews, and to Columbia professor Joseph Massad, who described the Hamas attack as “astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome” and “incredible.”

Klapper recalls a class he took at Penn in which professor Tom Childers asks on the first day why cultured Germans had embraced the Nazis and why many of the high-ranking Nazis who decided on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” had doctorates. Klapper says professor Childers never answered that question but he feels that now he has an answer.

You’ve shown me that people can make grave moral errors not despite academic achievement, but because of it. Those who are really, really smart run the risk of being truly morally dumb.

Why? When you abstract away reality in favor of broad, sweeping ideas — work that belongs at the heart of many academic endeavors — dangerous things can happen. You can abstract away men, women and children, thinking of them only as bit players in a larger (and much more interesting) intellectual drama. Why bother with reality when it is the life of the mind that matters?…

The hip intellectual move today is to see everything, everywhere, as an example of the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. The oppressor is perceived as privileged; the oppressed, marginalized. The oppressor has more power; the oppressed, less. The oppressor has agency but no feelings; the oppressed has feelings but no agency. The oppressor is automatically wrong; the oppressed, automatically right.

This is a core pieces of woke ideology, the separating of groups into oppressor and oppressed. Identity politics has turned oppression into a kind of social currency. It’s not that there’s no value at all to such analysis, it’s just that it shouldn’t supersede the fact that the oppressed can still do truly evil things and the oppressor can still do decent things. Entering people’s homes to murder and kidnap families is evil. Being part of the “oppressed” doesn’t excuse this:

8-year-old Ella and 15-year-old Dafna were kidnapped to Gaza.

Look at the terror in their faces. This is what we’re up against. pic.twitter.com/CsPxHpbXhF

— Yael Bar tur (@yaelbt) October 24, 2023

If you think these are the good guys, your intellect isn’t doing you much good.

This is an actual recording of a Hamas terrorist who murdered Israelis. He called his parents from the phone of the murdered woman. Utterly sick. pic.twitter.com/ASsGLDi2rY

— Emily Schrader – אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر (@emilykschrader) October 24, 2023

From the many stories I’ve read about it, it seems a lot of progressive Jews are finding out the hard way that their fellow progressives don’t necessarily see them, or their families in Israel, as real people. Some on the left clearly see civilians and even children as people who had it coming. And when Hamas lies about people killed at a hospital (both the number and the party responsible) Israel had that coming too. And so on ad infinitum. It’s an absurd form of moral licensing in which “the oppressed” can never be wrong no matter what horrors they commit. It’s definitely not smart.