Celebrated British physicist was a victim to outcries from the left, which is fuelling the Palestinian cause

The case of a celebrated physicist being torn down over the shirt he wore was a signpost for how the “enlightened” left went from annoying campus offendotrons to thuggish apologists, writes James Morrow.

At the time, the case of Matt Taylor just seemed like another bizarre skirmish in the culture wars.

Yet looking back on it, his plight is actually a great signpost as we work out how the progressive, “enlightened”, intersectional left went from being just a pack of annoying campus offendotrons to thuggish apologists for some of the worst butchery the world has seen in 80 years.

If you don’t remember who Taylor was, it’s okay. The outlines of his case are simple enough.

A celebrated British physicist, back in 2014, Taylor was part of the European Space Agency team that pulled off the incredible feat of landing a probe on a comet travelling at 135,000km/h.

Dr Matthew Taylor British astrophysicist employed by the European Space Agency. Here he is wearing a different, loud shirt.

Taylor’s sin – or at least the sin he was ruined for – was all too typical.

After his triumph, the man showed up on a space agency livestream in a novelty bowling shirt bearing drawings of what the New York Times sniffed was “numerous bodacious women in various cleavage baring poses”.

The outrage spread online faster than the comet he landed his probe on, #shirtgate went viral, a once respected scientist was destroyed as nothing but a chauvinist pig who represented everything wrong with his discipline and the whole thing ended in a sad and tearful apology. So far, so typical – but here’s where things get interesting.

Fast forward nine years and the same side of politics that was destroying Taylor in the name of defending women is now siding – whether tacitly or explicitly – with Hamas, a gang of thugs who proudly treat women as the spoils of war.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have filled the streets from Sydney to London in crowds where one does not have to look hard to find the most vile anti-Jewish signs and chants and attacks not just on Israel but the entire West.

Artists impression shows The European Space Agency’s billion-euro Rosetta spacecraft caught up with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko more than 400m km from Earth as it streaked towards the sun at around 55,000km per hour.

On university campuses from Melbourne to Manhattan, where once everyone’s speech was closely policed for microaggressions, out-of-control students regularly intimidate, harass and sometimes attack anyone they take for a Jew or Israeli.

At New York’s Cooper Union, Jewish students had to be rescued by cops after they were trapped in a library by protesters.

Protesters wear white masks during a rally in support of Palestinians at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on November 12, 2023. Picture: AFP

At the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the administration let the mask slip when they admitted they wouldn’t suspend students involved in such bullying because (and doesn’t this reveal much) doing so might jeopardise their immigration status.

So what is the link between the A of Matt Taylor’s ‘unpersoning’ and the B of Hamas apologism? How did we get here from there?

Well, it’s simple. Leftist academics have lots of words for it, terms like “intersectionality” and “subverting the dominant paradigm”.

Harvard professor turned independent presidential candidate Cornel West summed it up in what has become a viral online video: “We stand in solidarity with anybody who’s occupied, anybody who’s subjugated, anybody who’s exploited, and that’s why we focus on Gaza at this moment.”

Police officers detain a man in the street close to the 'National March For Palestine' in central London on November 11, 2023. Picture: AFP

In principle, this sounds lovely and appealing. But once you start to divide the world into oppressor and oppressed, coloniser and colonised, you can justify any atrocity.

The tragedies this logic has justified go back as far as the terror of the French Revolution, the starvation of small landholders by the Soviet Union and the multiple man-made disasters of Mao’s China.

Yet, as we have seen, this logic is not consigned to the history books.

Whether it is the likes of a Matt Taylor being made the scapegoat for male misbehavior or Hamas’s crimes played down because of Israel’s non-occupation occupation of Gaza, the morality is as lazy as it is tragic.

It perverts justice to defend injustice and consolidate power for those who advocate for “change”.

A Palestinian woman gestures as she explains how her home was destroyed duing the Israeli bombardment, in Bureij in the central of Gaza Strip, on November 14, 2023. Picture: AFP)

It’s why, in 2020, Americans saw leftist rioters torch the livelihoods of immigrant shopkeepers in the name of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, or “anti-fascism”, and it explains the left’s Taliban-like lust for destroying statues of heretics from James Cook to George Washington.

And it shows how utterly opportunistic the progressive left can be and how they will throw anyone under a bus for power.

Presidential candidate Cornel West summed it up in a viral online video .

A major pro-Palestinian protest and march, commencing at Sydney Town Hall and marching to Belmore Park. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Monique Harmer

In the case of Taylor, well, the battle lines were obvious.

A white male physicist advancing Western science – which, in growing numbers of universities and educational systems is derided as “problematic” and a tool of “colonisation” – had no chance.

This is not an exaggeration, by the way. The once prestigious journal Nature has, in the last year or so, run more than a dozen features on “decolonising” maths and science.

As one recent contributer to the series wrote earlier this year: “Maths is built on a modern history of elevating the achievements of one group of people: white men.”

The exact same logic, if that is the word, is being applied to Israel, with far worse consequences than just an unfairly ruined career.

Israel is a “settler colony”, as activists now repeatedly tell us (including on the ABC), and therefore illegitimate. And Hamas? Well, mistakes were made. But, hey, it’s all in the name of “resistance”.