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Why jihadi evil attracts the Left
Washington Examiner ^ | 30 Jun, 2026 | Hugo Gurdon

Posted on 07/02/2026 9:07:19 AM PDT by MtnClimber

Friday will be the thousandth day since jihadis massacred 1,200 people in Israel. Which means we’ve been wrestling for about 999 days with the appalling fact that the pogroms increased support for Hamas and the other terrorists instead of revolting and alienating world opinion.

The jihadis tortured and mutilated their victims, raped and murdered them, burned and starved them, and forced them to watch as they inflicted their horrors on their mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, grandparents and babies. The fact that such evil would draw rather than repel millions of people seems, on the surface, inexplicable.

Yet the killers of Oct. 7, 2023, knew it would happen. They calculated that visual evidence of their depravities would stoke enthusiasm. The rest of us should have known this, too. After all, we saw it happen only a decade earlier when young Westerners abandoned their home countries to join the Islamic State after seeing video of those black-clad executioners slit the throats, decapitate, and burn their caged victims alive.

So 1,000 days ago in Israel, the marauders strapped on cameras, recorded every atrocity, and uploaded the video for global viewing on the internet. They wanted the world to see. They knew it would not be only proud parents back in Gaza who’d swell with pride. It would be millions of others around the planet.

By Oct. 8, a Jew-hating subculture that had previously been underground emerged from tunnels beneath Western civilization to celebrate the barbarities we’d all just witnessed. They blamed Israel, they insisted rape was resistance, and they beat and intimidated fellow countrymen in America who happened to be Jews. They were not protesting Zionism or other policies, as they claimed. They were giving free, gleeful rein amid the madness of crowds, to a vile and visceral hatred.

This hatred is engulfing much of what we used to know as leftism. It explains why radical candidates lost in Democratic congressional primaries last week to other radical candidates. The difference and winning margin between the two was that the losers didn’t reject Israel’s right to exist and wouldn’t voice antisemitic hatred the way the victors did.

Subscribing to the lie that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is a litmus test. If you won’t say it, you’re an enemy of the Left. Or you’re a traitor to it, as Scott Wiener found out last weekend. Wiener is a radical transgender and pedophile activist running for Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) soon-to-be vacant seat in Congress, and he was barracked at a pride rally and accosted in a restaurant for being “terrible on Gaza.” For years, he has aced the old litmus tests of the LGBT left, but he’s Jewish, not jihadi, so now he’s unacceptable.

What is happening? Why has support for Israel’s murderous enemies grown despite their appalling crimes? This touches the heart of the matter but is the wrong question. Support for jihadi terrorism is burgeoning, not despite its atrocities but because of them. Nothing satisfies the Left’s craving for the rejection of norms quite so completely as orgiastic violence.

Left-wingers can always give you a rationale for their latest cause, but that’s often merely an intellectual cover for tribalism and a gut feeling. They will happily move on from one to the next cause without a backward glance because they are less concerned with the details of their causes than they are with the act of rebellion itself. They are gripped by a mindset of rejectionism. They would not admit this, but their frame of mind is captured by the words of the 1970s Sex Pistols’ hit “Anarchy in the UK” — “Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.”

They want the overthrow of everything normal, reasonable, accepted, and decent. People gripped by this monomania want to display their rejectionism as starkly as they can. The medium, shock itself, is the message.

That being so, focusing on the things they’ve been rejecting for years or decades isn’t enough anymore. The craving for radicalism is like a drug addiction — the more it’s indulged, the stronger it gets.

DINOS TAKE OVER THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Marriage, family, civility, good manners, civic responsibility, religious practice, freedom, markets, entrepreneurism, limits on sexual adventure and sexual predation — anything that works and produces happiness and prosperity has been attacked for so long that rejecting it has lost its frisson of excitement.

Terrorism involving murder, torture, beheadings, and the fervent desire to exterminate an entire race and civilization? Now, there is something that a really dedicated militant can sink his teeth into! It provides depravity at a sufficiently strong dosage that it can still give an extremist a buzz. How better to display the zeal and perfection of rejectionism than by glorying in the most evil excesses available to the imagination?


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: leftism
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1 posted on 07/02/2026 9:07:19 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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To: MtnClimber

It is their rebellion against God.


2 posted on 07/02/2026 9:07:31 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber

Because they Both Hate what’s RIGHT!!!


3 posted on 07/02/2026 9:10:04 AM PDT by Harpotoo (ight!)
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To: MtnClimber

Great article. Thanks for posting.


4 posted on 07/02/2026 9:11:08 AM PDT by Reddy (BO stinks)
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To: MtnClimber

Jealousy. Leftist are largely intolerant of anything they are sour on. They dream of just slitting throats and punishing those that hold views not aligned with their own.


5 posted on 07/02/2026 9:12:40 AM PDT by blackdog (The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.)
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To: MtnClimber

“It is their rebellion against God.”

... Which puts them squarely in league with the devil and hell. And they are speeding headlong on a path towards that horrific place.


6 posted on 07/02/2026 9:16:34 AM PDT by Migraine
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To: MtnClimber

Which oddly they don’t believe in but at its core leftism is just that. They think it’s all about the world and how its organized, economics and power and everything but a religious rebellion.


7 posted on 07/02/2026 9:17:07 AM PDT by xp38
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To: MtnClimber

Islam like democracy simply caters to the 7 deadly sins.


8 posted on 07/02/2026 9:22:38 AM PDT by fella ("As it was before Noah so shall it be again," )
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To: MtnClimber

All for the love of power.


9 posted on 07/02/2026 9:23:22 AM PDT by Kudsman (John (no can do) Thune. Where are ya John? We need you John. Send help. Send up flare!)
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To: blackdog

They hipocrisy of it is that the vile,angry,hateful lefties who justify violence of the most barbaric nature will call anyone who isn’t a marxist or islamist like they are a fascist just for looking at them cross-eyed or saying something slightly critical or disagreeable to their cult-like dogma


10 posted on 07/02/2026 9:23:58 AM PDT by z3n (Kakistocracy)
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To: MtnClimber

If Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, they are sure doing a lousy job.


11 posted on 07/02/2026 9:31:14 AM PDT by bk1000 (Banned from Breitbart)
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To: MtnClimber

Mentally ill individuals who find kinship with the largest, longest surviving, most evil collective in the history of civilization.


12 posted on 07/02/2026 9:47:52 AM PDT by PGalt (Past Peak Civilization? )
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To: MtnClimber

“People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky


13 posted on 07/02/2026 9:48:56 AM PDT by faithhopecharity ("Politicians aren't born, they're excreted." Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BCE))
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To: MtnClimber

“”It is their rebellion against God.””

***

And that is exactly the ‘why’ of all of the evil on planet earth.


14 posted on 07/02/2026 9:54:28 AM PDT by Danie_2023 (I'm America First, but I stand by Israel and against 'anyone' that acts against America or Israel.)
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To: MtnClimber
Logically, the Left should be opposed to radical Islam. All of the things that they criticize Christian fundamentalists for - "sexist" beliefs in traditional roles for women, opposition to homosexuality, etc. are a thousand times more prevalent in Islamists. Christian fundamentalists oppose government money funding abortions, Islamists treat women like cattle. A Christian baker won't sell his custom-made cakes for a homosexual "wedding", while Islamists behead homosexuals and throw them off buildings.

Yet supposedly atheist or agnostic "humanist" left-wingers hate Christians but love Muslims. This points to the fact that they aren't really animated by "women's rights" or "gay rights", but by hatred towards Western civilization. Any non-white or non-Westerner who shares these aims, regardless of religious or social views, is seen as an ally or at least a valuable attack dog by the left. The irony is that their Islamist friends (as well as black radicals) will eventually turn on them too.

15 posted on 07/02/2026 10:01:27 AM PDT by ek_hornbeck
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To: MtnClimber

satan has many brand names...including “allah”


16 posted on 07/02/2026 10:07:00 AM PDT by newfreep ("There is no race problem...just a problem race")
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To: MtnClimber
“My name is Danny Pearl, and I'm on your side …”

17 posted on 07/02/2026 10:11:36 AM PDT by Governor Dinwiddie ( O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is gracious, and his mercy endures forever. — Psalm 106)
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To: MtnClimber

Yep.


18 posted on 07/02/2026 10:12:46 AM PDT by sauropod (Make sure Satan has to climb over a lot of Scripture to get to you. John MacArthur Ne supra crepidam)
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To: MtnClimber

Good article
The inevitable outcome of anyone who feels morally more righteous than all of humanity that preceded their eye blink of chronological existence today


19 posted on 07/02/2026 10:13:55 AM PDT by wardaddy (If u hate Trump you’re stupid Tor clueless and what’s going on We’re fighting for our civilization s)
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To: wardaddy

The article captures the essence of Leftism very well.


20 posted on 07/02/2026 10:31:10 AM PDT by marktwain (----------------------)
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