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Catherine Perez-Shakdam

The Great Abdication: How the Woke Left Betrayed Truth, Justice, and Itself

Courtesy of Catherine Perez-Shakdam - Executive Director We Believe In Israel
Courtesy of Catherine Perez-Shakdam - Executive Director We Believe In Israel

There was a time—was there not?—when the Left stood for something. A time when the so-called progressives, the self-anointed custodians of justice, fashioned themselves as the torchbearers of human decency, the last, best hope against fascism, authoritarianism, and religious fanaticism. But oh, how the mighty have fallen. Today, these same moral titans, these self-styled warriors of justice, march not against tyranny, but alongside it. They do not rail against oppression; they excuse it. And they do not seek truth, because truth, inconvenient and unsparing, has become their mortal enemy.

For what other explanation is there? What else but sheer, self-inflicted blindness can explain how they have abandoned the only truth that matters—that Israel is engaged in a battle for survival against a tentacular evil reborn from the ashes of history? That the same forces which sought to annihilate the Jewish people in the past have merely changed banners, swapped their armbands for keffiyehs, their jackboots for bomb vests, and yet remain, at their core, the exact same thing: genocidal fanatics determined to erase Jews from the world, or die trying.

And what has the woke Left done in response? They have sided with the arsonists while spitting on the burning victims. They have found a way to rationalize—to intellectualize, even—the systematic abduction, rape, and murder of Jews as part of some grand “anti-colonial struggle,” as though that phrase, spoken in their hushed, sanctimonious tones, can cleanse the grotesquerie of it all. They have elevated Hamas, a death cult that treats Palestinian civilians as cannon fodder, to the status of freedom fighters, while branding the only liberal democracy in the Middle East as a rogue state.

How clever they must think themselves, with their pseudo-intellectual acrobatics, their tedious, patronizing drivel about “nuance” and “decolonization.” And yet, how very stupid, how very dangerously ignorant they are. For they have convinced themselves that Israel is an aggressor, rather than what it truly is—the last, best bulwark against the theocratic abyss, the frontline in a war that will define whether democracy lives or dies in our time.

And make no mistake, democracy’s fate will not be decided in a lecture hall in Cambridge or a coffee shop in Brooklyn. It will not be determined by the latest fashionable opinion piece in The Guardian, nor will it be sculpted into existence by the idiotic placard-waving students who chant for an “intifada” they will never experience. No, our collective future—our ability to live freely, to speak our minds, to resist theocracy, to keep the flame of civilization alight—will live or die in Israel.

Because should Israel fall, it will not be the end of the story, but the beginning of a nightmare that no “progressive” will be able to escape. If the armies of the mullahs and their proxies—Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad—succeed in their ambitions, if they are allowed to erase the Jewish State from the map, do these activists, these well-meaning simpletons, imagine that the war will end there? Do they believe that those who burn Israeli flags today will not be burning their own capitals tomorrow?

It is a fantasy so delusional that it beggars belief. The idea that Hamas, Iran, the great Islamist juggernaut that seeks dominion over the Middle East and beyond, will simply stop at Israel, that they will be content with the blood of Jews alone, is an arrogance so breathtaking, so historically illiterate, that it should qualify as a form of insanity. But the woke Left—drunk on its own virtue, intoxicated by the sheer thrill of being “on the right side of history”—refuses to see it.

They march, not for peace, but for a world in which Sharia law reigns supreme. They march, not for justice, but for a future in which women are veiled and silenced, where dissidents are hanged from cranes, where gays are thrown from rooftops, where free speech is a crime and free thought is an impossibility. They may not realize it, they may not understand it, but they are foot soldiers in a war they do not comprehend, puppets for an ideology that, given half the chance, would see them crushed beneath its boot.

So let us be clear. Let us say it plainly, because history will demand it of us:

There is no other side to be on.

There is no middle ground.

There is no fence upon which to sit, no neutrality to be found, no hand-wringing “both sides” analysis that can sanitize the truth.

You stand with Israel, or you stand with Hamas. You stand for democracy, or you stand for barbarism. You stand for a world in which humanity can rise again, or you stand for a world that will fall, irretrievably, into the abyss of theocratic fascism, a world in which Iran and its proxies dictate the terms of human existence, and every last vestige of liberty is obliterated.

History will remember. History will record, with merciless precision, who had the courage to stand for Israel and who cowered behind moral relativism. It will not be kind to those who excused terror, who turned their backs on the only Jewish state, who cheered as the worst evils of the past re-emerged under a different flag.

And when the great reckoning comes—when the full weight of their complicity is finally, inexorably, laid bare—not all the empty slogans in the world will be enough to absolve them.

About the Author
Catherine Perez-Shakdam - Director Forward Strategy and Executive Director Forum of Foreign Relations (FFR) Catherine is a former Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and consultant for the UNSC on Yemen, as well an expert on Iran, Terror and Islamic radicalisation. A prominent political analyst and commentator, she has spoken at length on the Islamic Republic of Iran, calling on the UK to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. Raised in a secular Jewish family in France, Catherine found herself at the very heart of the Islamic world following her marriage to a Muslim from Yemen. Her experience in the Middle East and subsequent work as a political analyst gave her a very particular, if not a rare viewpoint - especially in how one can lose one' sense of identity when confronted with systemic antisemitism. Determined to share her experience and perspective on those issues which unfortunately plague us -- Islamic radicalism, Terror and Antisemitism Catherine also will speak of a world, which often sits out of our reach for a lack of access.
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