When a US citizen, just 19, was taken captive by a fascist militia, what did America’s progressives do? They cosplayed as his captors. They wrapped their faces in the keffiyeh in gleeful mimicry of the militants who seized their compatriot. They cheered the jailers of their fellow citizen. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, some cried, ‘martyrs’ meaning the radical Islamists who had dragged their teenage countryman into a hellish lair and kept him there for 583 days.
Beyond these Hamas-loving agitators, even milder ‘progressive’ voices will have helped to make Alexander’s life in captivity harder
The release of Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage in Gaza, is cause for celebration. He was born in Tel Aviv and raised in New Jersey. He was just 19 when he was seized during Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. He’d been patrolling the Israel-Gaza border as part of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unit. According to freed hostages, he was held in the grimmest of conditions, deep in one of Hamas’s dank tunnels. He had two birthdays there, meaning he emerges today, blinking in the sunlight, as a 21-year-old man.
Yet even as we share in the joy of the Alexander family, we must never forget how others in the US betrayed this young American. Some even became unpaid propagandists for his captors. Last week, the radical brats of Columbia University, including scores of they/thems and a daughter of Hollywood stars, occupied the campus library to damn Israel yet again. It was a sea of keffiyehs. As their fellow American, the same age as them, languished underground, these rich kids were essentially paying sartorial tribute to the army of bigots holding him captive.
You couldn’t have asked for a better, uglier snapshot of the West’s moral crisis: entitled ‘progressives’ gussied up as Palestinian militants as one of their own suffered under the ruthless boot of those militants. For 18 months, America’s self-styled ‘anti-fascists’ didn’t so much as mention the words ‘Edan Alexander’, except perhaps to slam him as a soldier of the ‘settler-colonial Zionist entity’ who deserved everything he got. They saved their warm words not for Edan but for his persecutors.
Students at George Washington University hailed Hamas’s ‘martyrs’. Campus chants grow ever ‘darker’, the Washington Post reported. Many keffiyeh-adorned hotheads now ‘openly endorse Hamas and its leaders’, it said. At Columbia, students cheered the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ – the name Hamas gave to its 7 October pogrom – and cried ‘Revolution until victory!’. They were celebrating the carnival of violence during which Alexander was kidnapped. They cried out, not for the release of their compatriot, but for the victory of the army of anti-Semites that seized him.
We cannot overlook the unusualness of this, not to mention the horror of it. Young Edan will have a lot of readjusting to do following 583 days of captivity. And, tragically, one of the things he’ll have to adjust to is that so many American youths sided with the brutes who robbed him of his freedom. That American radicals expressed more sympathy for Hamas than for its victims, even the American ones, is surely one of the greatest betrayals of decency of our time.
Beyond these Hamas-loving agitators, even milder ‘progressive’ voices will have helped to make Alexander’s life in captivity that bit harder. Unwittingly, sure, but still. Their constant cry that the IDF is the wickedest army, the sickest gang of killers since the Nazis, will certainly have done nothing to shake Hamas’s conviction that it had the right to persecute the likes of Alexander. To Hamas, he was an evil settler deserving of humiliation – and that sick belief will likely have been emboldened by the noisy Israelophobia coming from the West.
Where was America’s media? Why did its worthy broadsheets not report more often on Alexander’s predicament? Why did they not make a cause célèbre of this young American and his unjust captivity at the hands of racist terrorists? ‘Who is Edan Alexander?’, asks the New York Times today. I know that’s just a style of headline for explainer pieces. But in this case it feels like an apt question. I bet there really are some liberal types out there who’ll hear about Edan Alexander today and think to themselves: ‘That name rings a bell…who is he again?’
Of course, not everyone turned a blind eye. Jewish communities in the US and elsewhere held vigils for Edan. Crowds have gathered today in Tenafly, New Jersey, where he grew up, to await news of his liberation. This is the America some of us love: the America that detests anti-Semitism and terrorism and cares deeply for the life and liberty of all Americans.
That’s what Edan Alexander’s tragic captivity has revealed: that there now exist Two Americas. One lost to the lunacy of Israelophobia and identity politics, the other clinging for dear life to the values of the American republic and of Western civilisation itself. Today’s a good day for the latter.
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