Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillette.

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And on this week's episode, I'll be talking to Adam Kirsch, a Wall Street Journal editor

who's written numerous acclaimed books.

His latest is On Settler Colonialism. In it, Kirsch offers a timely

and incisive explanation as to why so many Western academics and activists have turned

themselves into apologists and even cheerleaders for terrorist groups such as Hamas. As Hirsch

explains, this unsettling trend among progressive

intellectuals is rooted in large part in an ideological movement that traces the world's

evils to a phenomenon described as settler colonialism, a malevolent force that they blame

for everything from climate change to the evils of capitalism.

In their academic papers and books, these writers tend to be somewhat geographically

selective in their analysis, however.

While the planet is littered with many examples of civilizations conquering or assimilating

one another, enemies of settler colonialism tend to be very much focused on just a handful of examples,

specifically Canada, Australia, the United States, and especially Israel.

So much so in fact that the movement has come to resemble more of a radicalized ideological posture than any kind of coherent scholarly discipline. This became apparent in the wake of the October 23 Hamas terrorist attacks,

which some self-described experts on settler colonialism greeted with unconcealed joy,

a disturbing response given that those attacks resulted in the massacre of about 1,200 innocent people.

...