Campus Pro-Hamas Protesters Knew They Would Face Scant Negative Consequences

Victor Davis Hanson discusses the pro-Hamas anti-Israel protests on elite campuses: “The Disgrace and Fall of the American Elite Campus,” by Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, May 20, 2024:

Student guests in the U.S. are not shy about siding with the Hamas eliminationist agenda. Indeed, their protests were not just anticipated by, but integral to, Hamas’ October 7 strategies. Hamas’ murderous plan was always to retreat back to Gaza with hostages, which, along with their own Gazan civilians, would ensure the killers could murder another day. So they were to descend into a $1 billion, Morlock-like tunnel complex—using thousands of Gazan civilians above in hospitals, schools, and mosques as collateral deaths to protect the terrorists beneath. Note the sick asymmetry: the entire strategy hinges on a humane Israel seeking to avoid killing civilian shields, a fact accepted by Hamas, which tries its best to sacrifice them.

The resulting surety of collateral civilian damage could then be reduced to Israeli-induced “genocide.” From there, useful idiotic American student unrest, along with Middle Eastern voters, would pressure American institutions and politicians to limit Israel’s options and responses. And, presto, Hamas would emerge from the rubble intact and ready to plan its next murder spree.

That, of course, is precisely what Biden has done — attempted to limit Israel’s options, in announcing his withholding of bombs and artillery shells from the IDF if Israel goes through with its plans to invade Rafah. But Israel has no choice. If it does not destroy the last four intact battalions in Rafah, Hamas will be able.to claim that it has “won the war,” because it managed to remain standing, despite the IDF’s ferocious assault. And Hamas’t threat to repeat the October 7 atrocities “again and again” will hang in the air, ever more plausible.

Middle Eastern students would also airbrush the nihilist agendas of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas as benign efforts of “resistance” and “liberation.” American students nodded, as if they could sanction baby burning, mass rape, or an extinct Israel if packaged correctly as anti-Western violence. Moreover, the protests took off because American students assured Middle Eastern activists that in Joe Biden’s America, their lawbreaking would not be punished—no expulsions, no jailing, but instead likely covert support from sympatric officials. Their proof was the summer-long, violent 2020 riots, arson, violence, and assault of police.

So many of the Black Lives Matter rioters in 2020 were let off without any punishment that the Middle Eastern students and activists figured — correctly — that they would not suffer major consequences for organizing, and participating in, the pro-Hamas anti-Israel riots on more than 100 American campuses.

Middle Eastern protestors, both students and not, assured that they were exempt from consequences, added contempt to their general dislike of their magnanimous American hosts. All knew that if American students in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank or Egypt, mutatis mutandis, had decided to lead pro-Israeli, anti-Arab protests on their hosts’ campuses, they would be imprisoned or, more likely, “disappeared.”

These Middle Eastern students and activists know what real police states — their own Arab counties — would do to protesters. They had nothing to fear from the American police; most would be left with a warning; a few of those who were students could face suspensions but nothing more. It’s not gratitude that these Middle Easterners feel, but contempt, both for the university administrations that have so easily caved to their demands, and for the gullible American students they so easily manipulate for their own ends.

The students talked grandly of “justice” as they violently rampaged, vandalized, and exuded hate. None felt any would be deported or even suspended from university, much less jailed for criminal offenses. They proved prescient….

No everywhere. At Harvard, 35 students have been suspended, and among them are seniors who will not be graduating with their class. At Columbia, too, students have been suspended and banished from the campus. But so far, it is true, none of the foreign students on American campuses have been deported, which is the punishment that would have the greatest effect on changing their behavior.

The student protesters against Israel (“Intifada Now,” “Say No To Genocide” and other slogans of that ilk) have managed to alienate major donors, persuaded would-be students, especially Jewish students, to apply elsewhere, and offered a most unpleasant spectacle of entitlement, in their often-condescending treatment of the custodians who have to clean up their pig-sty encampments after the tents have been taken down. Parents, faculty, and many university administrators have not been impressed. It is likely that if there is another round of such protests, tent encampments, etc., there may no longer be a display of forbearance; the students could be warned only once to disperse and those who remain will be arrested and charged with violating campus rules. And many, this time, may find themselves in prison for hate speech and disrupting campus life. It’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.