When news first started to circulate that Hamas had used rape as a weapon of war against Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, many Western liberals didn’t want to hear about it. Some outright denied that any sexual violence had taken place. This studied incuriosity was reprehensible, but it was also puzzling: how could so many people, whose tender hearts are forever bleeding and whose mantra during the #MeToo mania was “believe all women”, be so reluctant to reckon with Hamas’s war crimes against women and girls?
The short answer is that the atrocity couldn’t be absorbed into their preconceived narrative, which holds that Israel is a monstrous “oppressor” state, while the Palestinians are its oppressed victims whose underdog purity cannot be doubted. So the rapes had to be denied or minimised, and anyone who broke this conspiracy of silence was accused of giving ammunition to the enemy.
The same mentality can be seen in the response of many Western liberals to the horrific killing last month of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina. In recently-released CCTV footage that captures the moments before her killing, Zarutska can be seen sitting alone, looking at her phone. Decarlos Brown Jr, a 34 year old with a violent criminal history, is sitting behind her. He pulls out a pocket-knife, stands up, and slashes her neck.
“People have already been murdered for nothing,” writes the narrator of Martin Amis’s crime novel Night Train. “They take the trouble to cross the street to murder for nothing.” Zarutska, who was not known to Brown and had no pre-existing conflict with him, was seemingly murdered for nothing. This, in a way, makes her killing all the more horrifying, because it was utterly senseless.
There is also the compounding horror of the footage, in all its banality, of Zarutska’s final moments. She was killed not in a basement by a notorious serial killer, but in a train carriage, with other travellers sitting around her, in a random attack by a man who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. When she took her seat, Zarutska couldn’t have known that she was putting herself in mortal danger. The attack happened so quickly that she was unable to protect herself. Zarutska could very easily have been you, or me, or a loved one — and anyone who has watched the footage subliminally understands this. It is a deeply unsettling feeling, one that goes beyond the visceral horror of the killing itself.
Brown also happens to be black, while Zarutska was white. This shouldn’t matter: were Brown white, and Zarutska black, the killing would be no less — or no more — horrific. But for many progressives, it clearly does matter. Had the racial identities of the two been reversed, mainstream media outlets would be in full moral panic mode over the complex harms of systemic racism and colonial trauma. But instead, most of these outlets ignored the story, despite Zarutska being a woman and a refugee — or, if they did cover it, did so to make a point about how the Right has sought to politicise the killing.
For many on the Right, this selectiveness of concern is as obvious as it is damning, and much of the outrage emanating from this quarter is driven by the perception that Zarutska’s killing — and by extension her life — is diminished, in progressive eyes, by the fact of her having been white and her killer black. One does not have to be a Right-wing “rage monster” to have some sympathy for this perception of progressive bias, or to understand how it has arisen. Imagine, for example, that the perpetrator of the Southport massacre had been white and targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children. Or imagine that the assassination attempt on the life of Salman Rushdie in August 2022 had been carried out by a white supremacist (instead of a radicalised Muslim), not against Rushdie but against (the infinitely less talented) Ibram X. Kendi. In both cases, there might have been a George Floyd moment: an extended period of mass hysteria, racial reckoning and self-flagellation. Yet, in the real world, no one can remember the name of Rushdie’s assailant: Hadi Matar. And much of the progressive response to Axel Rudakubana focused on how a phantom far-Right was “weaponising” the tragedy.
Once you see this double standard, you can’t unsee it. Its logic is transparently sectarian and unfair. It operates like this: when a white person commits a grievous criminal act against a non-white victim, they are to be potently condemned, while their victim is to be cleansed of any moral taint. In some cases, such as Floyd’s, the victim is even sacralised. Conversely, when a non-white person commits a grievous criminal act against a white victim, they are to be excused, with their life-story exhaustively excavated for signs of trauma, oppression and other mitigating factors. Their victims are not seen as victims; how could they be, given their “white privilege” or “oppressor” status?
This double-standard is an insult to the most basic notions of equality and fairness, since both demand that people should be judged on the basis of what they have done rather than on who they are or what they believe.
It is therefore right and necessary to call it out. But many voices on the online Right have gone much further, adopting a tone that is every bit as unhinged and frenzied as the liberal-left derangements of 2020 over race and its various “reckonings”. For example, Matt Walsh, a prominent American political commentator, seems to have shape-shifted into an inverted BLM activist. Zarutska, in his view, is a quasi-martyr whose death is symbolic of a “deep and widespread systemic corruption” at the heart of America. “She should have the murals and the streets named after her,” he demanded on X — seemingly inspiring one X user called Eoghan McCabe, an Irish entrepreneur, to offer half a million dollars’ worth of $10,000 grants for people willing to “paint murals of the face of Iryna Zarutska in prominent US city locations”. Elon Musk has pledged $1 million to the same cause.
“Many voices on the online Right have gone much further, adopting a tone that is every bit as unhinged and frenzied as the liberal-left derangements of 2020.”
In another post, Walsh shared a screenshot of a menacing Brown standing over a terrified Zarutska. “This image will define the new civil rights movement,” he wrote, insisting that “we have a right to safe communities where violent animals are rounded up and caged”.
Just as those who didn’t performatively condemn Floyd’s killing were accused by liberal activists of maintaining a silence that was “violent”, the online Right has condemned the mainstream media for downplaying the story of Zarutska’s killing and thus colluding in a monstrous lie. And just as BLM activists brazenly politicised Floyd’s murder for clout and status among their in-group, the online Right seems to be engaging in a form of “outbidding” by insisting, with no real evidence, that Zarutska’s killing was racially-motivated. Moreover, these activists are calling for ever more extreme criminal justice policies against violent offenders — like making armed robbery a capital offence, which seems every bit as extreme as calls to defund the police.
These comments are unappealing in both their tone and temper. Particularly unattractive is the instrumentality with which some on the Right are using Zarutska’s death to make a point about delusional Democratic lawmakers and judges. This sort of stuff: “She was 23. She was on her way home from working at a pizza parlor. She bled out on a train. Because the Democrats liberate criminals. We arrest them. We deport them if they’re here illegally. We kill them if they’re terrorists. Choose.” Even if you agree with Sebastian Gorka’s point about the Democrats’ disastrous criminal justice policies, the transition from Zarutska to the terrible Democrats, and then to the triumphant Republicans, is so swift as to be callous.
It is also a mistake to think that since the Left has a long record of politicising crime and stoking racial resentment the Right should do the same and those cynically making a lot of hay out of Zarutska’s killing ought to be condemned. But the Left still has itself to blame, for the current firestorm of anger over Zarutska is a direct and wholly predictable consequence of years of institutionalised identity politics that vilified whites or whiteness in any form while simultaneously sacralising blacks or blackness. That the Right is now mercilessly playing the same toxic game of identity politics, albeit in defence of its own tribal interests, is an irony that liberals must acknowledge and properly reflect on.
Liberals, in short, are now picking up their own tab. They treated their in-group with kid gloves, and tried to hide or whitewash some of their more egregious crimes, even as they came down especially hard on other segments of the population for lesser or non-existent crimes. Do this and you will create a reservoir of tribal resentment and hostility that may become difficult to contain at some point.
In Britain, it is precisely this sense of grievance, encapsulated in claims over two-tier policing, that has fuelled the protests and distemper of the last 18 months. This unrest has surfaced in the Southport riots, in the widespread outrage over the grooming gangs scandal, and the various protests outside migrant hotels. In all of these cases, the driving grievance is that non-British citizens, or non-whites, are being prioritised, coddled and protected by the state, whereas British citizens are being lied to, unfairly treated and exposed to acts of flagrant criminality from which the state should have offered them protection.
Iryna Zarutska was the random victim of a terrible act of violence committed by someone who should have been in psychiatric care. Ordinary Americans will want to know why he wasn’t, and may well wonder at the state of a criminal justice system that allows serial offenders like him to wander the streets with impunity. Meanwhile, liberals will stick their heads in the sand or make noises about how the killer himself was suffering — and everyone else will be driven mad by their hypocrisy.
