Send in the Keffiyeh Clowns
Why the pro-Palestine peace marches are the biggest circus in town.
Something revealing happens when wars end – or threaten to end, as is the case with the Israel-Palestine ceasefire. The people who screamed loudest for peace now can’t seem to find their voice. The ecstasy of righteous fury has given way to the come-down that inevitably follows periods of intoxication. Confused and disoriented, they search for reasons why this peace won’t do: the ceasefire isn’t comprehensive enough; the terms favour the wrong side; the timing is suspicious. Peace, it turns out, was never really the point.
The last few years have introduced us to new members of the activist class. These are a strange hybrid of professional protesters and outrage merchants, keffiyeh-clad leftists and Islamofascists. Resolution in the Israel-Palestine conflict signals unemployment for these protesters. Worse, it heralds the absence of meaning. Why? Because they’ve built whole identities based on righteous anger, LinkedIn-optimised careers on perpetual crisis and social capital from being more-radical-than-thou. Peace threatens all of this hard-earned bounty. War sustains it.
The psychology at work here is straightforward but ugly. Activism was once (and sometimes still is) a noble endeavour. It has led to significant achievements, including women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and other notable wins for civilisation. But in recent years, it has become less about achieving justice and improving society than maintaining the performance of compassion and empathy. The closer you look at the actors on this stage, the clearer it becomes: activism has become moral exhibitionism. The cause provides meaning, a community of like minds, and the thrilling sensation of moral superiority without the tedious work of actually solving anything.
This would explain why these movements inevitably become more extreme over time, not less. Pragmatic solutions must be rejected and scorned because compromise is a betrayal of purity and negotiation is collaboration with the enemy. The movement doesn’t radicalise in spite of its goals but because of them. This is the paradox at the heart of modern activism: achieving their stated objectives would end the movement and rob them of purpose.
Consider the activist who spent months demanding a ceasefire, disrupting events, defacing property, and verbally, if not physically, assaulting anyone who questioned their methods. Now, the unthinkable has happened: a credible peace plan emerges from the rubble. Does our activist celebrate? Of course not. They search forlornly for reasons why this peace is unacceptable. Fortunately, in every circus, there is an acrobat who can perform the sort of mental gymnastics necessary to arrive at why peace is actually worse than continued war. Word spreads: it’s genocide by other means; it doesn’t address root causes; it rewards the wrong people.
The stated position was “stop the killing.” The actual position was “validate my worldview and sustain my activism.”
This pattern repeats across conflicts and causes because none of this is about the stated issue, whether Palestine, the environment or black lives. It’s about the activist’s psychological needs. Other people’s suffering provides a stage for their moral theatre. The traumas of people they’ve never met and can’t begin to understand, whose language they don’t speak, and whose worldview might even shock them – all of it is nevertheless dramatic material for the performance of compassion.
What of the people who actually endure the conflict? I suspect they understand all this instinctively. They watch Western activists reject peace deals that would end their misery, and they realise: these people don’t want us free. They want us suffering in ways that validate their politics. Our pain is their purpose. Our continued victimhood is their ongoing justification. Hamas, with the ruthlessness of a psychopath, understands it even better, crucially manipulating the professional activist class: mainstream media journalists, first and foremost.
The dark irony is that this is actual colonialism, but with progressive branding. Western activists project their own psychodramas onto people in foreign lands, then claim to speak for them, turning traumas they can scarcely imagine into props for their own luxury beliefs. They need the conflict to continue because peace would expose how ineffective and performative their methods are, how their “advocacy” prolongs the very suffering they claim to oppose.
Which is why these movements inevitably attract narcissists in search of applause. Alongside them are the ideologues who bend reality to fit their narratives. And somewhere at the emotional centre, the perpetually outraged, whose self-righteous fury defines the personality of the movement. These are the keffiyeh clowns who speak in borrowed slogans, reducing complex geopolitical realities to a TikTok morality play. They can’t tolerate doubt because doubt leads to questions, which in turn lead to nuance. And nuance is fatal to moral theatre.
This, then, is the test for any movement claiming moral authority: how does it respond when its stated goals become achievable? Does it celebrate the achievement and commit to furthering it? If many of today’s activist movements fail this test, it’s because achieving the goal, as we have seen, would end the performance. It’s better to reject the imperfect peace, denounce everyone involved, and continue the righteous struggle. Because the struggle is the point. The performance is the point. The exquisite pleasure of moral superiority without responsibility, condemnation without consequence, revolution without risk – that’s the point.
Meanwhile, the people actually suffering pay the price, serving the psychological needs of Westerners whose privilege, security and wealth they can only imagine.
This is why Trump’s recent plan to end the Gaza war, developed through extensive consultations with Arab and Muslim countries, accepted by Israel, and endorsed by Hamas, was met with predictable outrage from activists who’d spent two years demanding exactly this outcome.
Let’s put it plainly. The grotesque alliance between far-left ideologues, far-right antisemites, and Islamist hooligans who normalise terrorism is harmful first and foremost to the people they claim to champion. One of the first steps to freeing people from the horrors of war is freeing them from the activists who’ve built careers and personal identities on that horror.
Peace was never the point for this sinister congregation of antisemites, professional activists, race narcissists, and murder junkies. Some are simply feeble minds, warped by months of propaganda; others are drunk on their own confected outrage. What binds them is moral exhibitionism: a hobby for the emotionally broken and the intellectually stunted, filling the void where purpose should be.
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This is a brilliant piece of journalism as it cuts through the BS to find the truth. These performative “keffiyeh clowns” don’t understand or care about the lives of Palestinians. They care about cameras, newscasters, and the chance to upset everyday people by blocking traffic or screaming at passerby. They don’t care about the cause, they care about the disruption.
While reading the article all I could think about was Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. MLK and his followers protested and marched but they also participated in the political process seeking allies and supporters from across the political spectrum.
And in fact MLK achieved more than most likely any protest movement. They faced hundreds of years of racism and yet caused probably the second most important piece of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (First was most likely the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution).
The Western leaders and followers of the "Free Palestine" movement have to be the most useless and counterproductive advocates of any cause in history. What has the Western Left done for these people except nurse their worst, ugliest grievances and feed them fantasies of bloody revenge all so the Western Leftist can feel the frisson of a revolution where the Oppressed delivers Justice to the Oppressor in the form of a cleansing massacre (while of course maintaining Western lifestyles and remaining at a safe distance)?
The Palestinians have a wholly symbolic existence in the mind of the Western Leftist, they are just totems and props and a new set of characters cast in the 20th century Leftist's attempted rerun of the French/October/Marxist Revolutions: after the Bolsheviks created only a police state, Chairman Mao one too many famines and purges, Hồ Chí Minh died, Fidel and Che became dictators, next up to fill the starring role came the PLO and Arafat. What was best for the actual Palestinian people was never once considered.
The Western Left bears a great deal of responsibility for the fact that Gaza is rubble: Imagine if our theorists/activists/Said acolytes/NGOs had found somewhere else to act out their Daddy issues, millenarian fantasies, and fill their god-shaped holes! This Western emotional, moral and political imperialism continues to cause so much misery. "Free Palestine" from the Western Left!
This was great work. Thanks!