Why Are 200 Hollywood Stars Pushing For A Terrorist Leader To Be Released?

Celebrity narcissists looking for another virtue to signal have alighted upon a fresh cause appropriate to their moral stature: freedom for a notorious mass murderer of the innocent.

Some 200 high-profile actors and musicians, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Nixon, Sir Ian McKellen, Paul Simon, Sting and Brian Eno, have called for pressure on Israel to release the former Fatah terrorist leader, Marwan Barghouti, from prison.

Barghouti, 66, consistently comes top of opinion polls asking Palestinian Arabs who they want to replace 90-year-old Mahmoud Abbas as head of the Palestinian Authority.

Now these celebrities have jumped on the bandwagon, describing Barghouti as a "powerful symbol of unity and a longtime advocate for freedom and dignity for the Palestinian people" and claiming that he has been "illegally held by Israel" for more than two decades.

The petition and its signatories are listed on a campaign website under the slogan "Free Marwan." The site presents Barghouti as "a husband and a father" and a "nation-builder" who has "consistently believed in a future rooted in international law."

Even by the standards of today's morally degenerate celebrity followers of the Palestinian cause, this is jaw-dropping.

Barghouti was properly convicted in 2002, with overwhelming evidence, for orchestrating multiple deadly terror attacks during the years of the Second Intifada, in which he murdered five people, including four Israelis and a Greek monk. The court determined that Barghouti also bore moral responsibility for numerous other terror attacks in which many more Israelis were murdered.

On entering the courtroom before being found guilty, Barghouti flashed a victory sign with his shackled hands and declared to all: "So long as occupation continues, the intifada will not stop. As long as Palestinian mothers are weeping, Israeli mothers will also weep."

This is the man who these celebrities have described as "a longtime advocate for freedom and dignity for the Palestinian people" and have likened to Nelson Mandela, the South African leader who, for the West, is the nearest thing to a secular saint.

Actors and other showbiz types habitually support ridiculous causes. It goes with the territory for individuals whose lives are a performance, playing roles and gazing at their own image in rapt adoration. Posturing as high-minded idealists, they tend to be the worst kind of liberal hypocrites.

This type of person generally maintains a principled opposition to war on the basis that civilized people oppose violence and believe instead in reason, negotiation and compromise. Yet here they are promoting as a hero someone who has committed heinous acts of mass murder that they don't even seem to register as violence, and certainly not as attacks against the innocent.

Their ignorance is epic. They know nothing about Israel or the Middle East other than what they have absorbed as Palestinian propaganda. Even so, choosing to support a monster like Barghouti requires further explanation.

This is part of a pattern of behavior among people on the left going back centuries. Ever since the French Revolution, they have been drawn to revolutionary violence, manifesting itself in more recent times as support of bloody tyrants such as Stalin, Che Guevara and Pol Pot, or terrorist causes such as the IRA in Ireland or the Palestinian Arabs.

Such left-wingers appear to be seduced by the apparent romance of the revolutionary, someone who practices a violence that they themselves wouldn't dream of using. For such people, violence is what's used by people of whom they disapprove, such as Israelis. Violence against Israelis isn't violence but resistance.

Consumed by various types of guilt--their privileged backgrounds, their wealth, their whiteness--they outsource its expiation to individuals demonstrating resistance to an equivalent oppression.

Believing that only by such "resistance" can their ideals be realized about the betterment of society, they tell themselves that bringing about the end of oppression justifies the means. The terrorist's violence is thus sanitized, and the innocents he has murdered are dehumanized. The celebrities think these victims deserved what they got because their very existence was an offence against the righteousness of the cause.

And the righteousness of the Palestinian cause is held to be axiomatic. Throughout the "progressive" world, it is the cause of causes.

One reason for this is its promotion by the global human-rights humanitarian complex. Led by the Hamas-sympathizing United Nations, which has betrayed its role as the global avatar of peace and justice, and instead turned into the tool of tyrants, kleptocrats and fanatics, this complex has weaponized international law to persecute the world's only Jewish state.

A new report by NGO Monitor has highlighted just how corrupt this complex is. Based on internal Hamas documents, the report spotlights the terrorist group's systematic control of foreign NGOs operating in Gaza.

Hamas operatives describe their surveillance of NGO officials and offices, their methods for manipulating foreign-funded humanitarian groups, and the military and intelligence-gathering considerations that guide the limitations they impose on NGO activity. Similarly, the documents reveal that NGOs have hidden or downplayed Hamas abuses and acquiesced to its demands.

One document from 2021 suggests that Oxfam worked with a Hamas-linked local group on an infrastructure project that appears to have contributed to Hamas military preparations.

Medical Aid for Palestinians-UK's "administrative director" in Gaza works in Hamas's military arm and "is affiliated with Hamas and has pledged allegiance to its rule."

The "guarantor" for U.S.-registered Catholic Relief Services, the director of the NGO in Gaza, is "affiliated with the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine] (PFLP)" which is designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Canada.

None of this is likely to make a shred of difference among the celebrities calling for Barghouti's release. This is because the Palestinian cause has helped destroy the West's moral compass.

This cause stands for nothing less than the destruction of Israel. The Palestinian Arabs say so repeatedly.

They teach their children to hate and murder Jews. They demonize the Jews as rats, snakes or octopuses--monstrous demonic figures said to be secretly controlling the world in their own interests.

This is why many Jews in the West view the forest of Palestine flags on their streets as a forest of Nazi flags. It's why British Jews view the hospital nurse or business associate who confronts them wearing a Palestine pin with as much dread as if they're wearing a swastika.

Yet for "progressives," the Palestinian cause is their badge of conscience.

This is why it has corrupted Western discourse and thinking. Those who have embraced that cause parrot the same blood libels about Israel, the same visceral disgust of Jews, the same deranged and poisonous fantasies, the same recycling of the ancient stereotypes--"Jewish supremacy," the "chosen people," the blood libels.

Posing as the championing of an oppressed people, the Palestinian cause has legitimized such vile discourse and made it respectable in Western society. It has also normalized the inversion of truth and lies, victim and victimizer, aggression and defense.

This has not just caused Western useful idiots to promote a mass murderer as a hero. It has not just damaged the West's ability to acknowledge the Islamist war of extermination against Israel. It has also undermined the West's ability to acknowledge the Islamist war of conquest against itself.

The inverted thinking that accuses the Israeli Jewish victims of genocidal assault of being the genocidal aggressors is the same mindset that denounces those who warn against the Islamists' agenda to conquer the West as being guilty of "Islamophobia."

The Palestinian cause is the Trojan horse for antisemitism. And antisemitism is the Trojan horse for the attack on Western civilization.

Originally published at JNS.org