In December of last year, the U.S. House of Representatives summoned three "elite" college presidents (all women, from Harvard, MIT, and Penn) to Washington, D.C. to address the alarming rate of anti-Semitism on their campuses. These educators' woeful performance on that day made for one of the most stunning displays of moral cowardice in the history of Congressional hearings.
These esteemed leaders of the youth suddenly found a staunch commitment to free speech that they'd never before evinced. To wit: In September 2023, The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual college free speech rankings, and Harvard came in last, followed by Penn. Rep. Elise Stefanik repeatedly asked the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying, harassment, and intimidation in violation of their schools' respective codes of conduct. All three said that it depended on the "context," and suggested that if chanting genocidal slogans crossed the line into "conduct," it could be punished. In other words, if they actually tried to commit genocide against Jewish students, rather than merely inciting it (inciting violence isn’t covered by the First Amendment), they could be subjected to disciplinary measures. What solace this must be to Jewish students on their campuses.
Do we need any more proof that elite universities live in their own left-wing cocoons after witnessing Harvard president Claudine Gay talk in this repugnant way to the American public and think she was going to get away with it? In fact, her crazy talk got her fired, despite enjoying the extra job security that being a black woman affords one in public life. There’s no need for rational people to debate the depravity of speaking like a weasel about "context" in this situation, but if you demur, substitute "black genocide" for "Jewish genocide" and check your reaction.
Why Stefanik, who had these presidents on the ropes, didn't finish them off by asking for a specific context in which chanting for genocide would be acceptable is beyond me, but this incident provided one of the more memorable instances of the literary device of foreshadowing manifested in real life. Fast forward a few months, and there's rampant college protests against Israel's reaction to the October 7 atrocities that the death cult, Hamas, committed against Israeli non-combatants, and then bragged about them with a highlight reel video it proudly circulated. And what do all of these protests have in common? Anti-Semitism. It's as if the views of college leaders somehow found their way into the minds of their students.
American institutions of higher learning are now wedded to the left-wing ideology that the world is bifurcated into the oppressors and the oppressed. The US and other successful Western nations are the colonialist oppressors, along with Israel, easily the most successful nation in the Middle East. As a result, the current pro-Palestinian protests are simultaneously protests against an America that many of the protesters would like to see torn down, and they're funded by groups hostile to the US. When, in April, protesters in Dearborn, Michigan, chanted, "Death to America," they were just saying the quiet part out loud.
I wouldn't be thrilled with what these Hamas-sympathizing activists have in mind as a replacement for the current system, but Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appears to be more sanguine on the issue, as she declined (along with Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib) to comment on the open calls for treason in her state. That's the state where polling shows that less than 20 percent of Arab-Americans would vote for Biden as war continues in the Middle East. What a bitter surprise they'll get if this stance, in a state the Dems must win, gets them Donald Trump as the next president.
This isn’t to say that all the cosplaying, keffiyeh-wearing protesters on college campuses, or even most of them, want America dead, but the seed’s evident in these uprisings. And while the media periodically reminds us that these anti-war uprisings are just the latest iteration of the just anti-war protests of the 1960s and 70s, the facts don't support this claim. There was plenty of anti-American sentiment expressed amidst that tumult, but no Jew, or Asian, or African-American, or person of any ethnicity, race, or religion was ever physically afraid of them. Americans would be shocked if they were able to learn exactly how many of these protesters wouldn't mind seeing all Jews dead, as the Hamas (the terrorist group they are, de facto, aligned with) Covenant calls for, but the media won't touch this topic. A clueless group known as Queers for Palestine has joined the college protests while apparently unaware of what the Palestinians would do to them if they tried to walk down one of their streets. But the hapless Queers for Palestine are hardly alone amongst the protesters in their ignorance of the situation they're suddenly so passionate about. Even left-winger Hillary Clinton has said that the protesters are being fed propaganda on social media and in the classroom. She correctly pointed out, "They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country." Clinton went on to point out, on Morning Joe, that under Bill Clinton the Palestinians were offered a Palestinian state to be composed of 96 percent of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians. The head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, declined to sign the agreement, as he was said to be afraid of being murdered by a fanatic. His Israeli counterpart Yitzhak Rabin was later murdered, at the hands of an Israeli right-winger. For the Palestinians it's "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" or nothing. That involves wiping Israel off the map. I suspect that few college demonstrators could name either the river or the sea in this slogan they chant.
The current college protests aren’t grassroots movements like the campus uprisings of the Vietnam War era. They're funded by outside agitators skilled at manipulating students via social media. The cosseted campus idiots calling for Intifada claim to be protesting genocide, but they’ve no idea how many innocents have died under that banner. They're chanting a terrorist idea they don't understand, providing the ones among them who do understand what the Hamas Covenant calls for (genocide) a sense of satisfaction for a job well done.
