Student protesters don’t really care about Palestinians or human rights. They are indoctrinated sheep who have been taught to think that Israel and Zionism are evil.

By: Jonathan S. Tobin

Ideas that reduce complex problems into simple mantras are always popular. But those that cloak a political ideology in the sort of language and symbolism in sync with the cultural fashions of the moment and allow people to imagine themselves on the right side of history can spawn world-changing movements. When young people especially are indoctrinated with such notions—the idea of correcting a historical wrong—the results can produce the shocking surge of anti-Semitism that’s unfolding right now on U.S. college campuses.

The spectacle of a critical mass of this current generation of American college students—egged on by many of their professors and even administrators—chanting slogans about erasing the State of Israel from the map (“from the river to the sea”), cheering on Islamist terror against Jews everywhere (“intifada revolution” and “globalize the intifada”) and speaking openly about banning the presence of “Zionists” from their midst, if not condoning violence against them, has shaken many Americans. That is especially true for liberal Jews and others who believe that anti-Semitism is primarily if not solely a problem on the political right.

Yet the most important part of this story is what hasn’t happened. Instead of a united nation responding to these expressions of hate and bigotry with one voice, many declarations are being heard in defense of what are, for all intents and purposes, a burgeoning mass movement supporting the Hamas terrorist movement that carried out the manifold atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

Toxic leftist ideas

How is it possible for what is supposed to be the best and the brightest of American students—those who attend Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell and many other elite universities where the “pro-Palestine” protests have sprung up—to embrace such a profoundly evil cause?

The simple answer for what should be seen as responsible points to the intellectual fashion of the day, which, for lack of a better term, we are forced to call “woke” ideologies. The toxic ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality, which teach that the world is permanently divided between “white” oppressors and people of color who are their victims, have decided that Israel and the Jews belong to the former, and Hamas and its mass of Palestinian supporters are among the latter.

These ideas have been mainstreamed of late in America’s educational system and culture. Since the moral panic about race that occurred in the Black Lives Matter summer after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in May 2020, they have become the new orthodoxy against which dissent is not permitted in U.S. leading institutions.

While some of us have been pointing out for years that the BLM movement and the ideas behind it grant a permission slip for anti-Semitism, this has only become obvious to most people in the last six months. To the horror of many people, the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t engender sympathy for Israel or the Jewish people. Instead, it provided the spark for a surge in anti-Semitism around the world almost immediately after Oct. 7.

Many Jews believed they could always count on enlightened liberal opinion in this country not only to condemn expressions of right-wing Jew-hatred in the strongest terms but to also isolate it. Instead, they have watched with amazement and concern as the mobs engaging in anti-Semitic invective have been defended or rationalized in mainstream liberal media like The New York Times and MSNBC as idealists or, at worst, emotional children whose actions are an understandable reaction to Israeli atrocities. In doing so, those who are taking this line aren’t just repeating and spreading Hamas propaganda and blatant falsehoods. They are accepting the premise that opposition to the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet is somehow the natural political position of those who call themselves progressives.

‘Very fine people’

Indeed, much like the BLM riots that wreaked havoc in American cities in the summer of 2020, the campus protests are being described as “mostly peaceful.” The narrative about the campus mobs in much of the corporate media is that they are merely “pro-Palestine” and that any anti-Semitism is merely the excessive behavior of a few marginal people who don’t represent the true spirit of the protests.

Almost as troubling is the fact that even when the anti-Semitic nature of the protests is recognized, the core problem is ignored. It’s not just that those taking part are engaging in demonstrations where Israel and its supporters are demonized, Jewish rights erased and Jews are being threatened. It’s that the people doing this don’t think they are wrong. They are convinced that they are speaking up for a righteous cause. Not only is that false premise being reinforced by mainstream press coverage, but it is also being upheld by leaders of the political left.

Indeed, the most outrageous example of that didn’t come from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who is notorious for her own anti-Semitic statements and who showed up on the Columbia campus this week to show solidarity with the “pro-Palestine” mob in the company of her daughter, a student at Barnard College who had been suspended for her role in violating the school’s rules.

The best encouragement the students received was from President Joe Biden, who, when asked about anti-Semitism on college campuses, condemned it but then added that he was just as concerned about “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” It was, as Alan Dershowitz and Andrew Stein wrote in The Wall Street Journal, a “very fine people” moment for the president.

That referenced the infamous claim that former President Donald Trump had said that there were some “very fine people” among those who gathered in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 for the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally. Of course, Trump didn’t say that since he was referencing those who opposed the taking down of Confederate statues, and not Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan.

While that distinction was ignored in the media scramble to condemn Trump, Biden is largely getting a pass for his own effort to treat the cause that the anti-Semitic agitators are supporting as valid. The point being is that much of the media and leftist opinion are treating those yelling slurs at Jews as “very fine people” who are just going a little too far in their advocacy.

In the wake of Columbia University president Minouche Shafik’s ambivalence about enforcing the school’s rules against illegal demonstrations and hate speech, the narrative in the liberal media has again flipped with The New York Times concentrating on what they see as a wrongheaded decision to call in the New York City Police Department to remove the pro-Hamas encampment (though the tents returned the next day). Indeed, the paper’s urban affairs columnist Ginia Bellafante wrote that the main problem isn’t campus anti-Semitism but the willingness of administrators to punish the anti-Semites, who she and those reporting in the news section analogized to the anti-Vietnam war and anti-South African apartheid demonstrators of the past.

A movement steeped in ignorance

What is lacking in the coverage and most of the discourse is that—as interviews with them show—most of the students even at a school like Columbia can’t really explain why they are against Israel except by mindlessly repeating slogans about racism and oppression that have nothing to do with the facts on the ground in the Middle East or patent falsehoods about “genocide” in Gaza. They don’t know the history of the conflict and seem to think that Israelis and Jews are, as Palestinian propagandists claim, settler/colonialists in the one country in the world where Jews are, in fact, the indigenous people. Their demands for university divestment from Israel are based on intersectional ideology in which the century-old Arab war to deny Jewish rights is falsely depicted as analogous to the civil-rights movement in the United States.

The ignorance of these young adults is pathetic, as is their absurd cosplaying in which the wearing of keffiyehs has become campus terrorist chic. Lacking their own strong identity, they are adopting one that they perceive will give them some cachet as supporters of an embattled though fashionable cause. But having been spoon-fed the same lies that spawned the BLM movement throughout their educational experience, in which anti-Semitism has been redefined as progressivism, no one should be surprised by any of this.

Nor should we accept the claim that they are merely demonstrating sympathy for Palestinians or shock at human-rights violations. Far greater losses of life in wars in the Congo or Sudan—and an actual genocide in Western China where Beijing has put an estimated 1 million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps—haven’t moved them to utter a single word. If they really were for peace or the theoretical cause of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they would be in favor of eradicating Hamas, which is opposed to any peace that doesn’t involve the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its people.

The sad truth is that massive numbers of students at elite schools and elsewhere have been taught to adopt the Hamas Charter, whether they understand what they are supporting or not. If you think that Zionism—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people—is racism, you are denying rights to Jews that no one would think to deny to anyone else. That is anti-Semitism. If you are advocating for a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to get away with mass murder, you are supporting Hamas. And if you think Israel is illegitimate and should be destroyed, you are also supporting Hamas terrorists, and their genocidal plans and actions.

Tolerating the intolerable

People who advocate for hateful ideologies—whether they are directed at African-Americans, Jews or anyone else—have a First Amendment right to express their views. But they don’t have a right to be tolerated in educational institutions or treated as principled dissenters in the Times. We all know that there is zero tolerance for neo-Nazis or other right-wing extremist Jew-haters at American universities or in the liberal media. But because these institutions have been captured by woke ideologues and mainstream politicians like Biden fear their wrath, their moral equivalents on the left demonstrating on college campuses to “free Palestine” are tolerated, rationalized, excused and even lauded as heroes. In doing so, we are being asked to tolerate the intolerable.

To be “pro-Palestine” today is not to stand up for oppressed people. To the contrary, it is an expression of solidarity with latter-day Nazis and a willingness to mainstream hatred of the Jewish people, not just Israeli policies. But to condemn them is not enough. The only way to explain what has happened and to do something about it is to roll back the woke tide and purge schools, cultural institutions and the mainstream media of those spreading racialist ideas that foment this toxic hatred. Until the “progressive” ideas at the heart of the problem are dismantled, all the hand-wringing and expressions of concern about campus anti-Semitism will be meaningless.

            (JNS.org)

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

Phyllis Chesler (published first by The American Spectator)
Have you noticed that young women all across America are demonstrating for Hamas, Iran, and Palestine? Why would such privileged and educated women, the heirs to the #MeToo movement and to Second and Third Wave Western feminisms, cheer for male rapists and male killers, arguably the most blood-thirsty and sadistic misogynists this side of Ghenghis Khan? Why side with Islamist barbarians who have jailed, tortured, and executed their own women over a slipped Islamic veil, and who would forcibly convert their Western female admirers to Islam, veil them as well, and coerce them into polygamous marriages?

Do these educated daughters of affluence understand that were they to express any views deemed dissident in Gaza, Teheran, or Kabul or, were they to announce that they were “queer” or gay, (which is how some of these activists identify themselves), that they would be instantly honor killed?

In the months since 10/7, in addition to the odious, faux-feminist silence about the gang-rapes of both women and men, the torture of babies and whole families, the kidnapping of civilians — a terrifying tsunami of hatred towards Israel, America, and Jews has exploded into non-stop jihadi-style, belligerent mobs, whose goal is to disrupt civil society and gain both attention and followers for their reprehensible views. The news of Hamas’s pogrom on steroids, unleashed their Jew hatred, and whetted the mob’s appetite for more of same.

Post Iran’s most recent attack on Israel, in the past few days in New York City, where I live, such activists camped out on the lawn at Columbia University “for Gaza,” “for Hamas,” endangering Jewish students, daring to be arrested. For the first time, Columbia’s President actually had them arrested. Although they were all quickly released, many returned later that same night, with celebrities in tow, to re-constitute their encampment. (READ MORE from Phyllis Chesler: Opera House Bigotry)

Those who were detained, included the daughter of Democratic Congresswoman and “Squad” member, Ilhan Omar; a young female intern for New York State Attorney General Letitia James; a third young woman who is about to intern for Democratic Senator Dick Durbin; and two daughters of corporate titans. Three of the five are Columbia students.

Are they stupid? Has their indoctrination into politically correct narratives utterly blinded them to reality? Do they wish to die? How are we meant to understand this?

Well, some women are famously known to propose marriage to convicted male serial killers, who primarily kill women. One woman actually married the jailed monster, Ted Bundy, got herself impregnated by him, and gave birth to a daughter.

Maybe this is a familiar form of female ambition, that Beauty can tame the Beast — an even darker version of “Fifty Shades of Gray,” in which girls are attracted to Bad Boys who will, fairy-tale style, ultimately love and marry them.

On the other hand, and rather paradoxically, the body language of these BLM/Antifa-style female activists is often rather male-like. Most of the female demonstrators are loud, aggressive, angry, arrogant, and young; they shout, bang drums, blow whistles, wear face masks, keffiyehs, sneakers, or combat boots. While Arab Muslim girls in hijab do participate, the majority seem to be bareheaded Caucasian students, and self-identifying lesbian, queer, and transgender activists.

The Jews and queers among them are not “self-hating” Jews or persecuted queers. Rather, they are privileged political opportunists posturing as victim-pariahs who feel that they are “occupied” by Western patriarchy, just as Palestine has allegedly been occupied by Israel. They are more obsessed with the rights of a country that has never existed than with the rights of their Muslim “sisters.”

This denial of facts, history, and reality about the Middle East, and especially about Islam’s long history of religious and gender apartheid, as well as its’ colonial and imperial past, is similar to another trendy delusion, namely the insistence that transwomen are women and transmen are men; that biology, genetics, anatomy, hormones, sex-specific genitalia, either do not exist or are not important. Like society, they, too, can all be perfected and at any cost. As one banner at the Columbia encampment proclaims: “Palestinian Return by Any Means Necessary.”

These arrogant lost souls are out there, all across America, chaining and gluing themselves to bridges, holding a never-ending series of Israeli Apartheid weeks, mounting tent cities on campuses, cursing, threatening, cornering, and chasing down Jewish students. Many strongly resist being removed and physically fight the police whom they accuse of having been trained by the IDF. However, in the rare instances that such protestors are handcuffed or arrested, they are outraged, insulted. Some smirk, some weep. (READ MORE: J Street Jerks Manipulate Wiesel’s Words)

Again, I must ask: Who are these female protestors? Is this just another Rite of Spring, an annual dance round the Maypole, or is it a more serious version of a communist uprising against capitalist America? In a sense, this is partly what’s happening. They do resemble the young communist Chinese Red Guards and the Stalinist mobs, ready to usher in and to celebrate the reigns of bloody terror to come.

Although both left-wing, foreign national, and Islamist sources have funded such motivating beliefs, I doubt that most of these activists are being funded to march and protest.

Their ideas are completely unoriginal and repetitive and routinely reduced to slogans. The signs and banners are visually arresting and seem to be professionally made. “End the Occupation.” “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free.” “Intifada, Intifada.” “Death to Israel, Death to America.” “End Israeli Apartheid.” “This is genocide.” “Hamas are Freedom Fighters.” “Long Live Hamas.”

We know that some mentally ill Muslim women have been manipulated into becoming suicide killers of Jews, Israelis, and of other Muslim women in the Arab world, and that some Muslim women have been threatened by Palestinian Islamists with being honor killed for an indiscretion and offered a chance to “cleanse” their names and go out in glory.

We are are also familiar with some high profile, educated, and well-to-do women, such as Aafia Siddiqui, aka Lady Al-Qaeda, who chose to make bombs for Jihad and attack American soldiers in Afghanistan, and autistic-schizophrenic savant, Margaret Marcus, aka Maryam Jameela, who fled America for Lahore, Pakistan, and became the English translator of Maulana Abu Ala Maudidi’s work. He was the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami. Both women hated Jews, Zionists, and America.

Are the American women demonstrating for the demons of 10/7 similarly mentally ill? Have they been coerced by threats of honor killing into supporting terrorism? The answer seems to be no.

These protestors are unpaid performers, action-artists, attention-grabbers, virtue-signalers. They are high on a new kind of drug, one which solidifies a false tribal identity. They are ignorant and intolerant, but, on their own, they are relatively powerless. However, as part of a murderous mob on the move, they are formidable, untouchable — perhaps beyond gender?

These pro-Jihad, anti-Israel protests are certainly one way to escape many of the ongoing and rather dangerous female realities in the West. This includes young girls agreeing to being choked by boys during sexual encounters (in which the girls do not experience orgasms); mentally ill teenagers opting to become transmen as part of a cult that is ruining their lives but enriching surgeons, drug companies, and mental health professionals. (READ MORE: Silence of the Feminist Lambs: Not a Word on Hamas Horrors)

These post-feminist realities include the continuing epidemic of sexual harassment, rape, and intimate partner violence in the West; the loss of women’s reproductive rights in America; the movement toward a gender identity based, not a sex-based equal rights amendment in America; the increase in trafficking and prostitution globally; the rise of transgender women who imperil women’s sports and women in women-only prison; the continuation of economic disparities which some young American women “solve” by finding Sugar Daddies and/or live-in boyfriends to help support them.

While I support same-sex unions, I do not privilege them above the tradition of heterosexual marriage and motherhood. These time-honored choices are also being challenged by legalized surrogacy, a practice in which women are viewed merely as “surrogate uteruses.” The availability of blow-up female sex dolls and the disappearance of womankind from what used to be Women’s Studies are signs of how dangerous the times have become.

Or: Is something else also at work? Are these female protestors for Hamas so afraid of freedom and so ill-equipped to handle it that they have chosen to appease and support the most dangerous demons on earth by supporting them?