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The Left Can’t Cheer for Peace When Trump Is Involved
US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One to depart for Quantico, Virginia, from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Sept. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
President Donald Trump has done what few thought possible: he helped broker a sweeping ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, negotiated the release of hostages, and achieved the first genuine breakthrough toward calm in nearly a year. For Israelis, the deal means quiet skies and the return of abducted families. For Palestinians, it offers desperately needed relief. For Americans, it represents a rare moment of when diplomacy actually worked.
And yet, the reaction from much of the American Left has been silence. The same political and moral voices that have spent months demanding a ceasefire in Gaza have fallen mute now that one has arrived. Even Barack Obama, who cautiously said we should all be “encouraged and relieved,” stopped short of acknowledging Trump’s role. Progressive leaders and influencers who once posted daily about “ending the killing” have said little. Media outlets that elevated every previous diplomatic setback have moved on.
It is a remarkable dissonance: the very outcome so many claimed to desire — peace, de-escalation, humanitarian access — has been achieved, but by the wrong hands. That contradiction tells us something profound about the state of American civic life. Our politics have become so saturated by affective polarization, so defined by visceral emotional hostility toward the other side, that many cannot even celebrate peace if it arrives through a political rival.
Affective polarization is more than disagreement. It is the phenomenon, now well-documented by scholars like Shanto Iyengar and Lilliana Mason, in which partisans grow to hate and distrust their opponents as people, not merely oppose their ideas. It is a moral emotion more than a rational stance: disgust, fear, contempt. The more one side is loathed, the more moral it feels to reject everything associated with it. This emotional sorting has turned politics into a theater of identity rather than a contest of policy.
That is why so many on the Left cannot bring themselves to give Trump credit for this deal. In a healthy political culture, a ceasefire and hostage release would be an occasion for shared relief, if not gratitude. But in our polarized one, positive feelings toward an opponent are experienced as betrayal. To say that Trump succeeded is not, in the mind of many progressives, to acknowledge a fact; it is to wound one’s tribe. The reaction becomes moralized: silence as purity, acknowledgment as contamination.
Political sorting has made this response all but inevitable. Over the past several decades, many Americans have come to live, worship, and socialize with those who think like themselves. Partisanship now defines moral boundaries and social identity. To be “on the Left” no longer simply means favoring redistributive policies or progressive reforms, it means belonging to a moral community defined in opposition to Trump and the movement that supports him.
When identity is at stake, the ordinary norms of evaluation break down. The achievement of peace becomes inseparable from the personality associated with it. The act cannot be good if the actor is, in the tribe’s imagination, evil. As affective polarization deepens, moral reasoning collapses into reflex. Emotion crowds out judgment.
This isn’t unique to the Left, of course. Conservatives behaved similarly under Obama, dismissing or minimizing his role in successes such as the raid on Osama bin Laden or sanctions on Iran. But today’s reaction carries a different weight. The moral intensity that animates the modern progressive movement — its conviction that it alone occupies the side of justice — makes acknowledgment of an opponent’s virtue especially threatening.
Affective polarization doesn’t just distort how people feel about politics; it reshapes how they feel about truth. Once emotions determine perception, facts that contradict the emotional order must be ignored or reframed. This is why even a genuine diplomatic success can be spun as suspect: perhaps the deal was coerced, perhaps it was opportunistic, perhaps it will fail. These rationalizations serve an emotional function, they preserve the purity of contempt.
Former President Obama’s muted response captures the dilemma perfectly. He offered relief without recognition, validation without credit. The avoidance is deliberate. He knows that open praise of Trump would fracture the progressive coalition that still reveres him. Acknowledging the achievement would invite accusations of appeasement or betrayal. In an era of affective polarization, even measured generosity risks being reinterpreted as treason to the cause.
But this silence comes at a moral cost. When leaders cannot acknowledge good done by their adversaries, they model a politics of negation. They teach citizens that truth is partisan and that virtue is contingent on affiliation. The habit of withholding praise corrodes the civic trust that democratic life requires. It signals that what matters most is not reality but narrative: the preservation of emotional coherence over empirical fact.
That logic now governs much of American political life. The reaction to Trump’s Middle East deal is simply the latest and starkest case.
This is how affective polarization hollows out moral courage. It makes sincerity dangerous and honesty costly. It turns politics into a form of emotional hygiene, where purity must be maintained at all costs. The moment we fear that recognition of another’s good deed might “taint” us, civic reasoning has already given way to tribalism.
The tragedy is that this pattern is self-reinforcing. Each refusal to acknowledge the other side’s success deepens distrust and confirms the caricature.
The result is a democracy that can no longer experience joy together. A moment of peace in the Middle East becomes not a unifying event, but another test of loyalty. Even moral goods, saving lives, freeing captives, are recoded through partisan emotion.
There was a time when American leaders resisted that temptation. When Richard Nixon opened up to China, Democrats recognized its strategic value. When Jimmy Carter mediated peace between Israel and Egypt, Republicans offered credit. When Ronald Reagan forged arms agreements with Gorbachev, Democrats applauded the breakthrough. These gestures were not signs of weakness, but of civic strength. They reflected a shared moral confidence that truth and goodness could exist outside partisan lines.
We have lost that confidence. Affective polarization has made cross-party acknowledgment feel morally dangerous. It has replaced civic humility with moral narcissism.
The solution begins with a small but radical act: honesty. A willingness to recognize good wherever it appears, and to praise virtue even when it originates in the hands of a rival. That act does not diminish one’s convictions; it dignifies them. It affirms that truth exists independently of our tribes, that moral worth is not determined by partisanship, and that peace — real, tangible, human peace — is a universal good.
The ceasefire and hostage release will face challenges, as all fragile peace deals do. But for now, lives have been spared, families reunited, and the possibility of stability renewed. That is cause for gratitude, not partisan discomfort.
Peace, like truth, does not belong to one party or president. It belongs to all who value life over politics. To say so should not require courage. But in today’s polarized America, it does.
And that, perhaps, is the clearest measure of how much work remains to be done.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Ilhan Omar Poses for Photo With Swedish MP Wearing Garment Depicting Erasure of Israel
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) speaks at a press conference with activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, Dec. 14, 2023. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MI) has come under fire after being spotted posing for a photo with Malcolm Jallow, a virulently anti-Israel member of the Swedish parliament.
The picture, which was posted on Jallow’s Instagram page on Sunday, showed the controversial Swedish politician posing alongside Omar and anti-Israel political pundit Medhi Hasan. Jallow draped a stole around his shoulders depicting the complete erasure of the state of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian state.
“Spending these days with so many inspiring leaders from around the world — including two of the most inspiring and courageous voices of our time, Congresswoman @ilhanmn Omar and international journalist @mehdirhasan — has been like reigniting an inner flame. I feel recharged with energy, hope, and determination,” Jallow wrote on Instagram.
Jallow has an extensive history of attacking Israel and promoting antisemitic conspiracy tropes. For example, he has “liked” a comment on social media that accused Jewish organizations of participating in freemasonry, fueling a false conspiracy theory that claims a secret coalition of Jews and Freemasons is working to control the world.
The Gambian-born lawmaker also lambasted Sweden for its supposed complicitly in a “genocide” in Gaza and stated in another social media post that Europe “betrayed” the Palestinian enclave by “financing the bombs” and “legitimizing the apartheid & the occupation.” He further appeared to threaten Swedish civilians who support Israel, writing, “To every ordinary citizen who waved the flag of the oppressor & laughed while Gaza burned, We will not forget you. We know your names. We save your statements. We screenshot your posts.”
He also seemed to threaten legal action against Swedish citizens who publicly demonstrate support for Israel’s defensive military operations against Hanas.
“And one day, whether in courtrooms of law or the court of history, In this life or the hereafter, you will be held to account,” Jallow posted. “That is not a threat. That is a promise to the people of Gaza.”
“Why is the Swedish government complicit in Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinian people?” he added on Instagram.
Jallow has also criticized Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson for taking certain measures to combat antisemitism, arguing that such actions endanger the country’s Muslim population.
“The Swedish Prime Minister’s statement that antisemitism holds a ‘special status’ and is worse than anti-Muslim propaganda is deeply problematic and dangerous. It not only diminishes the severity of hatred against Muslims but also normalizes the growing Islamophobia in Sweden,” Jallow wrote in an official statement last year.
“Ranking hate and prioritizing one group’s suffering over another is not only ignorant and offensive — it undermines our collective struggle against all forms of intolerance and discrimination,” he continued.
Sweden has reported a notable increase in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, prompting alarm within both the Jewish community and governmental bodies.
According to a report released by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA) last year, hate crimes motivated by antisemitism in the country surged in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. The BRA found that police registered 110 complaints between the Hamas invasion and Dec. 31 in 2023, compared to just 24 incidents the prior year.
While Jews constitute a small fraction of Sweden’s population, they have represented a disproportionately high share of religious-hate-crime victims. In 2020, for example, antisemitic incidents made up about 27 percent of all religion-based hate crimes documented by police despite Jews making up only 0.1 percent of the population, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
Omar for years has been one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress, calling on Washington to impose an arms embargo on the Jewish state.
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Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder
Adolf Hitler had a sexual disorder that made it more likely for him to have a micro-penis, according to the first-ever analysis of his DNA. He also did not have the Jewish ancestors that some have claimed he had.
The analysis is being revealed in detail in “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator,” a new documentary premiering Saturday night in the United Kingdom. The documentary looks at the researchers who decided to tackle the genetic makeup of one of history’s greatest villains, as well as what they learned — and cannot learn — from his DNA.
They found that he had Kallman syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by incomplete puberty, according to an exclusive report published Wednesday in the Times of London. They also found that he had genes making him more likely to have autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, though they cautioned that the DNA alone is not sufficient to deliver a diagnosis.
Among those quoted in the documentary is the prominent British Jewish psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (father of actor Sacha). “Behavior is never 100% genetic,” he said in the Times report. “Associating Hitler’s extreme cruelty with people with these diagnoses risks stigmatizing them, especially when the vast majority of people with these diagnoses are neither violent nor cruel, and many are the opposite.”
The analysis, conducted by a team led by a prominent British geneticist, is more definitive on the subject of Hitler’s possible Jewish ancestry. Rumors about such a background were prevalent during Hitler’s rise: In one notable example, a newspaper aligned with the Austrian chancellor who the following year would be assassinated by Nazis in 1933 challenged German authorities to disprove his Jewish ties.
And the rumors have endured: In 2022, Russia’s foreign minister repeated the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry to rebuff criticism that Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine, that it needed to be “denazified,” was undermined by the fact that Ukraine’s president is Jewish.
But while previous analyses of the DNA of Hitler’s relatives suggested that he may have had some genetic links to groups that he sought to destroy, including Jews, the new analysis, on Hitler’s own DNA, shows only Austrian German ancestry.
The analysis is based on a swatch of fabric stained with blood that a U.S. soldier cut from the couch upon which Hitler shot himself. The researchers were able to confirm without a doubt that the blood came from Hitler by comparing the DNA found in it to DNA previously confirmed to have come from one of his relatives.
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The post Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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German Authorities Arrest Another Suspected Hamas Operative Amid Growing Terror Threat to Jews in Europe
Supporters of Hamas gather in Berlin. Photo: Reuters/M. Golejewski
As concern mounts over a potential surge in Hamas-linked attacks in Europe, German authorities have arrested another suspected member of the Palestinian terrorist group accused of acquiring firearms and ammunition to target Jewish communities.
On Tuesday, local police arrested Lebanese-born Borhan El-K, a suspected Hamas operative, after he crossed into Germany from the Czech Republic — part of an ongoing probe into the Islamist group’s network and operations across the continent.
The German federal prosecutor’s office confirmed the suspect obtained an automatic rifle, eight Glock pistols, and more than 600 rounds of ammunition in the country before handing the weapons to Wael FM, another suspected member of the terrorist group, in Berlin.
Local law enforcement arrested Lebanese-born Wael FM last month, along with two other German citizens, Adeb Al G and Ahmad I.
Prosecutors believe the three men acted as foreign operatives for Hamas and procured firearms and ammunition intended for attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions in Germany.
Hamas, long supported by the Iranian regime as well as Qatar and Turkey, is designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union and several other Western countries, including the United States.
Earlier this month, Mohammed A, another alleged member of the Palestinian terrorist group, was arrested in London at the request of German police. He is accused of taking five handguns and ammunition from Abed Al G before moving them to Vienna for storage.
Last week, Vienna authorities uncovered a hidden arsenal linked to Hamas, reportedly intended for “potential terrorist attacks in Europe” targeting Jewish communities.
The Austrian government confirmed that the Directorate for State Security and Intelligence Service (DSN) has been conducting an internationally coordinated investigation into a global terrorist network with ties to the Islamist group.
During the investigation, Austrian authorities uncovered evidence suggesting that this group had brought weapons into the country for potential terrorist attacks in Europe.
For its part, Hamas issued a statement denying any connection to the criminal network, calling the allegations of its involvement “baseless.”
However, experts have warned that Hamas has expanded its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East, exploiting a well-established network of weapons caches, criminal alliances, and covert infrastructure quietly built across Europe over the years.
Last month, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study detailing how Hamas leaders in Lebanon have been directing operatives to establish “foreign operator” cells across Europe, collaborating with organized crime networks to acquire weapons and target Jewish communities abroad.
In February, four Hamas members suspected of plotting attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe went on trial in Berlin, in what prosecutors described as the first court case against terrorists of the Islamist group in Germany.