Former UCLA Professor Gordon Klein and Linir Abu Hazaz, advisor to chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Ram Ben Barak, are two sides of the same Bitcoin. About a year ago, Prof. Klein was fired for refusing to go along with a demand from the Black Lives Matter movement to grade Black students according to easier criteria. He told students he did not discriminate based on skin color, a statement that branded him a primitive racist. His courses were handed over to different lecturers, apparently ones who were privileged to discriminate.
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Facts didn't help Klein, not even in an institution responsible for scientific, critical thinking. The obligation to bow down to the weak and oppressed is being accepted in growing circles of the liberal west, just like it was with Karl Marx, as an objective law of nature. There is no parameter for measuring abilities or generalizations that can be rationally justified. If there are gaps in reality, the progressive spirit of the times, the result of unacceptable circumstances, manipulations or artificial constructions, decides that humanity is obligated to fight them and wipe them out.
The woman, the Palestinians, the impoverished, the African American, and finally, even animals – all are equally talented and qualified for everything. It's only the oppressive occupier that hasn't given them a change, and now he is morally obligation to correct this and pay. Is the price irrational? Dangerous? Chaotic? So what – the justified revenge of the oppressed proletarian is worth any price.
The spirit of the oppressed proletariat where it may be was apparently present in Ben Barak's office when he interview Linir Abu Hazaz. He felt progressive when he – as chairman of the most classified Knesset committee – an Arab Muslim woman without wondering of there was any significance to the circles to which she belongs.
"Actually, if you hire her today, Ram," the proletarian spirit whispered, 'You will have passed the entry test into the tribe of the enlightened and you'll throw off the curse of the unenlightened. If you don't, you'll be crucified as a racist."
His years on Moshav Nahalal, in the IDF's Sayeret Matkal unit, and the Mossad, did not prepare Ben Barak for the fight against the winds of progressivism. Even when he was sent pictures of Abu Hazaz with active supporters of terrorism, and he could have concluded that the congenial lawyer felt at home in the subversive and terrorist milieu of Arab Israelis, he ignored it. Only the public shock that caused major PR damage to his party [Yesh Atid] prompted him to announce that he was suspending her temporarily.
Ram Ben Barak is a peon in this global war. Our consciousnesses are all being steamrolled, and the steamroller is demanding that we remove elements of people's identity, saying that a person is a person is a person, and that is all they are. Not gender, not religious, not nationality – these are the products of a false consciousness that we must present as irrelevant. This framework of identities is presented in lectures, in legal tribunals, and in the enlightened cultural milieu, not as a lesser evil, but as a lofty moral peak. Divergence from it turns you into a primitive, excluded racist.
There is no need to say that people must not be rejected based on their ethnicity or religion without relevant context. But it is definitely vital to say that the components of our identity are inherently significant to how we assess and handle reality. The west's distancing itself from identity distances it from insight and threatens its liberty as well as its modern achievements.
One can be blinded by the darkness of the Middle Ages, but also from blinding enlightened-ness. Like the residents of Sodom were blinded, Ram and his friends are blinded by the new pseudo-liberal enlightened-ness. Intellectuals are silent, but any kid can see that the emperor is naked.
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