Hamas Finally Answered The Question: “What Is Woke?”

When people show you who they are, believe them.

Even when everyone agreed it meant “awake to racial prejudice and discrimination,” the word “woke” was on shaky ground.

Sure, for some, it meant noticing the racial injustice in the legal system and the stereotype-enforcing portrayals of black people in the media. It meant asking why Willie Horton’s face played such a prominent role in George Bush’s presidential campaign. But for others, it meant believing that soft drinks made black men infertile and that saying “Good morning” is racist.

As we’re often reminded, language evolves. And in the 85 years since it was coined, “woke” has been used to describe everything from representation for children with disabilities to opposing regimes that imprison or execute gay people to making cartoon M&Ms “less sexy.”

But in amongst all the usual “culture war” silliness, some of us saw something else.

We saw people so obsessed with identity that they think treating each other as individuals is “dangerous." We saw an aggressive political movement that refused to debate or compromise or even define itself. We saw cruelty and absolutism that were utterly at odds with liberal values.

And sadly, after the reaction to the Hamas terror attacks, we’re seeing that it’s even worse than we thought.

If I asked you to condemn the slaughter and rape of innocent people, you probably wouldn’t have too much trouble.

You might go for something tried and tested, if mostly meaningless, like “I reject terrorism in the strongest possible terms.”

You might spend some time deriding the cowardice of targeting unarmed civilians with automatic weapons.

You might even clarify that you stand with oppressed people but stand against burning civilians alive and murdering babies.

But believe it or not, some people have found this test of moral clarity surprisingly tricky.

Take, for example, the World Workers Party, who described the Oct 7th terrorist attacks, in which 1400 innocent Israelis were raped and/or butchered, as “a heroic example for people longing for liberation.”

Or the numerous chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who defended the attacks on civilians claiming “it is not terrorism or anti-semitism to fight against this injustice.”

Consider BLM Chicago, who in a display of sociopath-grade tastelessness, tweeted an image of a paragliding terrorist with the caption: “I stand with Palestine.”

Or the Harvard student groups who had no words of condemnation for Hamas, but claimed Israel was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

It’s worth noting that all of these people think they’re on the right side of history™. They all claim to be awake to prejudice and discrimination. They all have the right hashtags and emojis in their Twitter bios.

But because they believe the world is made exclusively of perfect victims and evil villains, because there’s no room for nuance in a worldview that sees everything in black and white, they think that being a good person means mindlessly defending one side, no matter what they do.

This is why they can describe terrorists as victims and the innocent people who they rape and murder as oppressors.

This is why they can’t tell the difference between the past and present actions of the Israeli government and the Israeli citizens, be they Jewish, Muslim or otherwise, who had nothing to do with them.

This is why they tear down and deface posters of women and girls who’ve been kidnapped by terrorists.

This, whatever it used to mean, is what “wokeness” has become.

And to be clear, these aren’t just teenagers being edgy on Twitter.

The DSA counts Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar among its members (although both of them have personally condemned the Hamas attacks). BLM is one of the most well-known and influential charities in the world. Harvard produces more business and political leaders than any other university.

These are people with connections and influence and financial backing. People who are immune to reason and logic and basic compassion. These are people who are unshakeably convinced of their ideological and moral superio…oh, okay. I get why they side with terrorists now.

For the avoidance of any doubt, this isn’t an attack on liberalism or one of those insufferable “wHy i LeFt ThE lEft” posts.

Wokeness is not the Left. It’s not kindness or a tool for social justice. It’s intellectual cowardice and laziness taken to its most shortsighted, vindictive, reality-denying extreme.

It’s people who are so incapable of defending their position that they think it’s “far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.” Apparently, persuasion doesn’t even register as an option.

It’s people who are so conditioned to see the world in terms of “dominance hierarchies” and collective guilt that they cheer the deaths of innocent people based on group identity.

It’s people who are so used to abdicating responsibility to “systems” and “structures” that they can’t hold even terrorists responsible for their actions.

It’s everything liberalism exists to fight. Except we’re not fighting it, because we’ve been tricked into believing we’re on the same side.

But if we no longer understand that terrorism is wrong no matter who commits it, if we can’t agree that the murder of innocent civilians is never cause for celebration, if we aren’t awake to the fact that the slaughter of children is never justified, well, we might as well stay asleep.

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