The Left’s October 7 Problem: Progressive Ideology Meets Islamist Terror

Post 7 of 8 — The Inheritance: Western Civilization, Its Critics, and What Is Actually at Stake

Mar 27, 2026

aerial view photography of city beside body of water — Photo by Shai Pal on Unsplash

Every coherent worldview contains within it a set of commitments that can be tested by events. The commitments of the progressive ideology examined in this series — anti-oppression, anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, solidarity with the colonized — were tested on October 7, 2023, and in the weeks and months that followed. The ideology failed the test. Not at the margins but at the center. Not because individuals behaved badly but because the framework itself produced the failure as a logical output.

October 7 was not merely a terrorist attack. It was, as Brendan O’Neill establishes in After the Pogrom, a pogrom — the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-twentieth century that progressives love talking about [1]. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered 1,200 people, raped women, abducted 250 hostages. This was not ambiguous. It was documented, filmed, and acknowledged by the perpetrators themselves.

The response from the progressive intellectual establishment was not condemnation. It was, in significant measure, celebration.

What Actually Happened

The timeline is worth stating precisely, because its speed is part of what it reveals.

Within hours of the attack, “decolonisation” was the word on the lips and tweeting fingertips of many academics and students [2]. An Islamic scholar at UC Irvine described October 7 as “a gift from Allah” [3]. A professor at Columbia University, the day after the pogrom, wrote of the “jubilation and awe” inspired by Hamas’s “remarkable takeover” of facilities in southern Israel. Students at Columbia organized a “Resistance 101” event at which speakers praised Hamas, one referring to “our friends and brothers in Hamas and Islamic Jihad” [4].

O’Neill’s inventory of the silence is as damning as the celebration: “Where were the feminists? Hamas is a notoriously misogynistic movement. It had just kidnapped, raped and killed huge numbers of women. Yet feminists, too, certainly those of the intersectional persuasion, were likewise prepping their Palestine flags in the immediate aftermath of 7 October. As for the LGBTQ activists — could they not find one word of condemnation for the homophobes of Hamas whose incursion into Israel involved the mass murder of young Israelis at a music festival in the desert? Apparently not. The ‘Queers for Palestine’ set also responded to the pogrom by protesting against the nation it was inflicted on” [5].

A dawning, chilling realization: too many had taken up the cause not of the Jews, but of their persecutors [6].

O’Neill’s Central Question

O’Neill frames the question that anyone who watched this unfold was compelled to ask: “Why did self-styled anti-fascists cosy up to the fascists of Hamas? Why did anti-racists make excuses for racist violence? Why did feminists whose mantra is ‘Believe women’ refuse to believe that women were raped on 7 October?” [7]

The answer is not hypocrisy, though hypocrisy is present. The answer is internal logic.

The decolonization framework — examined in Post 3 and Post 5 — organizes the world into oppressor and oppressed along lines of race, colonial history, and what it regards as structural power. Israel is positioned as a settler-colonial project; Palestinians are positioned as the colonized. Within this framework, the moral valence of any action is determined not by the action itself but by the identity and position of the actor. The barbarous dearth of sympathy for the dead and raped of Israel is the logical, inhumane conclusion to a pseudo-progressive politics that judges people’s moral worth by their skin color, their presumed privilege, and their placement on a racial hierarchy fashioned by the unaccountable overlords of Western opinion [8].

This is not an aberration from the ideology’s principles. It is a direct application of them.

The Fascism Panic Inversion

O’Neill identifies what may be the most revealing single data point in the entire episode. For years before October 7, the same progressive commentariat had maintained a near-constant state of alarm about the return of fascism — in Trump, in Brexit, in any manifestation of national populism. The fascism analogy had been their standard intellectual currency.

Then October 7 happened. There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom — the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-twentieth century these people love talking about — their fascism chatter evaporated. In fact, they started warning people not to use Nazi analogies. Not to compare October 7 to the 1930s. Just two weeks after the pogrom, the Guardian published a piece denouncing Israel for ‘weaponising the Holocaust’ in its response to Hamas’s assault [9].

The logic is not obscure. The fascism analogy was always instrumentalized — deployed against political enemies identified by the framework as oppressors, and withheld from movements identified by the framework as the oppressed. When the oppressed commit acts that look fascist, the analogy is suppressed. And now we have the activist class on the streets, forbidding the Jewish State from mentioning the Holocaust while also accusing it of carrying out a new Holocaust in Gaza [10].

Butler’s Formulation: The Logic Made Explicit

Judith Butler, one of the most influential academics in the progressive humanities tradition, supplied the clearest available statement of the framework’s internal logic when she described Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are parts of a global Left” and declared that understanding them as such was “extremely important” [11]. Murray notes the obvious implication: if Butler lived under a regime run by Hamas or Hezbollah, she would be executed at worst and made to cover her face from male attention at best.

The Queers for Palestine activists were operating by exactly the same logic Butler articulated: they are “bewildering” in their “flirting with justifying Hamas’s atrocities” given that Hamas’s Islamist ideology is “clearly antithetical to the rights and values these groups claim to champion.” Hamas’s “reactionary agenda” is “profoundly hostile to women’s rights and LGBT individuals” [12]. But the decolonization framework overrides all of that, because position on the oppressor/oppressed hierarchy is the only variable that matters.

The Rotten Fruit of Abandoning the Enlightenment

O’Neill’s synthesis is the most important sentence in After the Pogrom: “It seems to me that the post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s turn against civilisation. Of our creeping abandonment of reason. Of our trading of the Enlightenment ideals of rational thought and democratic deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance” [13].

Post 2 traced the postwar consensus’s systematic weakening of the West’s intellectual and cultural inheritance. Post 3 traced how critical theory replaced the search for truth with the analysis of power. Post 4 showed how CRT made race the only legitimate lens. Posts 5 and 6 showed how this framework produced historical falsification and civic dissolution. October 7 is where the accumulated logic arrives at its real-world endpoint: a progressive establishment so thoroughly captured by the decolonization worldview that it cannot extend sympathy to Jewish victims of political violence without first computing where those victims fall on its racial hierarchy.

This is what the abandonment of Enlightenment universalism produces in practice. Not the multicultural harmony its architects promised. A hierarchy of victims, administered by people who cannot say the word “pogrom” without first checking whether their framework permits it.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper... without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom — the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-20th century these people love talking about — their fascism chatter evaporated.”