Simon Cottee
UnHerd, Oct. 18, 2023
“… these Hamas murderers can and did think. And they had no doubt spent a lot of time wolfishly fantasising about how they would inflict maximum degradation on Jews. And they would have been able to entertain these demonic thoughts because they were raised in a culture that is saturated in a genocidal hatred toward Jews.”
Norman Geras, who died 10 years ago today, was an unusual figure on the Western Left: he was a Marxist who steadfastly and unequivocally opposed militant Islamism and jihadi terrorism. As a free-thinking political theorist, he was as strident in his opposition to the abuses of Western imperial power as he was in his support for individual human rights, especially free speech. But he was also a formidable critic of the worst tendencies of his own side, often making him a pariah in that quarter. This week, his most relevant legacy is this iconoclasm: a willingness to expose the moral and intellectual nullity of Left-wing apologia for terrorism and war crimes.
When I first embarked on an academic career 20 years ago, I became friends with Geras after reading his blog, which he launched in 2003. What I most admired about him was his moral clarity and unerring political judgment, as well as his congenital aversion to bullshit. If I was ever uncertain about a political issue, or couldn’t articulate why I felt the way I did about it, Norm’s blog, which he assiduously kept right up until his death from cancer, would invariably supply the answers. The world has changed dramatically since he left it, but his thinking, especially on evil and political atrocity, provides an essential guide for navigating its darker fringes.
Long before BLM and Harvard students were siding with the murderers of partygoers and children in Israel, Geras was contending with the same diseased mindset that saw the September 11 attacks and subsequent jihadi atrocities in the West as a form of retribution for the crimes of imperialism. The dean of this school of casuistry was Noam Chomsky, who is now lauded by some on the Right as a champion of free speech. He responded to 9/11 by changing the subject: he compared it to far worse atrocities that the US had committed, according to his calculus. … [To read the full article, click here}