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The real problem with Hasan Piker

Spoiler: It’s not about Israel.

Hasan Piker is exceptionally good at ranting about politics while playing video games. In the late 20th century, this would have made him a fun (if exhausting) hang. In today’s era, it has rendered him one of the most influential left-wing commentators in America, an increasingly popular surrogate for progressive candidates, and a flashpoint in the Democratic Party’s internal debates over Israel and “platforming.”

• Hasan Piker is right to criticize pro-Israel Democrats’ apologetics for Israel’s abuses.

• And yet, Piker himself also excuses or minimizes the crimes of anti-Western movements and regimes.

• A left that tolerates such double standards risks undermining its own moral authority.

For the last month, some moderate Democrats have called on their party to shun Piker in light of his “antisemitic” and “hateful” remarks — among them, that “America deserved 9/11,” that “Hamas is 1,000 times better than Israel,” and that ultra-Orthodox Jews are “inbred.”

This ostracism campaign has gained little traction. In recent weeks, the center-left columnist Ezra Klein defended Piker against charges of antisemitism, while the flagship podcast of Resistance liberalism — Pod Save America — had the streamer on its show. And even resolutely pro-Israel Democratic politicians, such as Rahm Emmanuel and Gavin Newsom, have suggested they would appear on Piker’s livestream.

From a political perspective, that makes sense. Piker’s audience is formidable and comprised of people who share at least some of the Democratic Party’s basic goals. But the merits of the streamer’s own politics are another question — and one that doesn’t merely concern the legitimacy of anti-Zionism, as much commentary has suggested. Piker may be worthy of engagement. But his worldview does not deserve any enlightened person’s admiration.

Many on the left beg to differ: Prominent progressive candidates have touted him as a surrogate, and socialist commentators have extolled him as a valiant critic of “Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, of US warmongering, and of a Democratic establishment that supports both.” In their account, it is Piker’s uncompromising commitment to egalitarian principles — not his unfortunate (and retracted) comments about Orthodox Jews and 9/11 — that have earned him centrists’ ire.

This narrative has a kernel of truth: Many centrist Democrats have excused Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians in the West Bank and its mass murder of civilians in Gaza. But Piker is prone to similar moral errors.

On topics as varied as Chinese communism, Russian imperialism, and Islamist terrorism, Piker’s commentary is often just as ethically rudderless as what it claims to oppose: If Washington’s jingoists downplay or rationalize the crimes of America and Israel, Piker does much the same for those nations’ adversaries.

The best word for Piker’s ideology may be “campism” — a strain of leftism that judges foreign movements and regimes more by their degree of hostility toward the West than by their adherence to progressive values.

Such tribalism is poisonous, whether it surfaces on the left, right, or center. When political movements decide that their allies’ abuses are forgivable because their enemies’ crimes are so much worse, they open the door to atrocities.

Chairman Mao was bad, actually

Campism is a bit like disco; it made more sense in the 1970s.

During the Cold War, much of the world was divided between the American and Soviet blocs — or, in the socialist jargon of that day, the world’s “first” and “second” camps.

In that context, some Western leftists felt that it was more important to propagandize for the communist bloc than to criticize its myriad crimes. Other socialists insisted that the left must oppose both American capitalism and Soviet communism. The latter sometimes derided the former as “campists.”

After the Soviet Union’s fall, the rationale for campism fell........

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