Victor Davis Hanson has taken aim at the pro-Hamas anti-Israel protests on elite campuses here: “The Disgrace and Fall of the American Elite Campus,” by Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, May 20, 2024:
Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.
Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.
These protesters are not only students, though commonly described as such. Among them are also troublemaking activists, non-students who show up to join in the malevolent fun on campus. And some of those who are students turn out to be foreigners, Muslim students who hold student visas, but feel no gratitude to the country that, at great expense, is providing them with educations.
The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.
These protesters wear masks to hide their identity; they don’t want to be traced; this anonymity encourages a display of greater fury and violence.
More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?
Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less….
These students will rant against Israel, and declare their support for the “resistance,” but at the same time, they are careerists hoping to succeed as part of the “system” they claim to deplore. They go from screaming their hate at the apartheid, colonial-settler, genocidal state of Israel, to the very next day, showing up, all meek and mild, for their job interview at Goldman Sachs, or they will be submitting their applications to law, medical, and business schools. They are not about to buck the “system.” These brave “resisters” in fact risk nothing.
On many of the affected campuses, the administration has agreed to some of the protesters’ BDS demands, promising to review investments in Israeli companies and in American defense companies providing weapons to the IDF. And on many of those campuses, though not all, the administration has promised not to punish students if they take down their tent encampments. Only on a handful of campuses — Harvard and Columbia are examples — have some students been suspended from classes. It is unclear what the longterm effect these suspensions will have on their academic careers.
At 11 [actually 10] million, Israel’s population is vastly outnumbered by some 500 million Arab and Muslim neighbors, many of whom are existentially hostile. So the idea of an imperial overdog or colonialist oppressor Israel is absurd. Most of the hatred in the Arab world and its expatriates on Western campuses toward Israel is driven by envy and frustration that Israel is a humane, free, prosperous, and lawful constitutional state in a way most Arab nations are still not. Add that the Arab world has prompted five or six serial wars against Israel, lost them all, and on spec resorted to terrorism to gain what their militaries could not—and yet Israel still prospers while its neighbors do not since that would mean to dismantle autocracy, tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, antisemitism, and inert socialist economies.
I disagree with Victor Davis Hanson here. I don’t believe that Arab hostility to Israel is driven by “envy and frustration.” It is prompted, rather, much more by the contempt and hatred for Jews that can be found everywhere in the Qur’an and Hadith.
Two, the tip of the spear of campus unrest is from the Middle East. Such partisan foreign students and activists organize the rallies, often with planning and money provided by Palestinian front groups. They provide the keffiyeh props and the occasional Hezbollah and Hamas flags and logos.
Victor Davis Hanson wants us to understand the major role that foreign Muslims — both students and activists —play in these protests, providing signs, keffiyehs, and flags, and often leading the chants. Imagine the reaction if students from Communist China studying in American universities were to lead demonstrations calling for Taiwan to become part of mainland China. How long do you think it would take for their student visas to be cancelled?
Walter Sieruk says
The stealth jihadists who have infiltrated so many campuses take advantage of the ignorance of many young people in different institutions of “higher education.” For little do those brainwashed non- Muslim young people on campuses know or understand that history reveals that the ancient Philistines recorded in the Bible and history came from the Greek Islands and some parts of the mainland Greece. They have no connection, at all, the to the Arab /Muslim of modern times who called themselves the “Palestinians.”
From those ancient people, the Philistines, the word “Palestine” .came into being.
There is no genuine ethic group or race who are the “Palestinians.”
Early in the last century a anyone living in that land, Arab or Jew, who lived in that land was called a ”Palestinian.”
Only after 1964 did the Arab/Muslims start to refer to themselves , exclusively , by the word “Palestinian.”
The reason for that is that they felt that by giving themselves that title they would appear to have some kind of valid claim on that land.
Indeed , there never was a “Palestinian state.”
Those “students” have been led astray lies that they have been told lies and are now being used as tools because they have been wrongly influenced by insidious falsehood speakers.
Walter Sieruk says
Those young people are being manipulated as stooges by the Muslims who are stealth jihadist along with other involved in the Red/Green alliance. So much time and energy those university and college youth are wasting for a bogus cause the has no historic or rational foundation to it .
It’s very sad and also tragic that those naïve impressionable and brainwashed young college and university students non–Muslims Americans, , throughout the United States, who are protesting against the State of Israel and who likewise greatly favor Hamas are people who are ,rightly , described ,as the “useful idiots” of the leaders of Hamas and their jihadist members who are dedicated to the cause of conquest for the cause of Islam.
Those Americans who aren’t Muslims the stooges of those Hamas chefs and the other Muslim terrorist, For those of Hamas view all people who are not Muslims as inferior creatures to them and refer to them .
Behind their backs as , “Kafirs,” which is the Islamic derogatory term for “disbelievers”
It’s tragic that those non-Muslims pro-Hamas America protesters against Israel are so very deluded by Hamas that this Islamic terror / murder organization so easily manipulates and uses them as their tools.
Those poor young people are ,truly, their useful idiots.
maria says
Yes, they are real useful idiots and they can finish their lives like the when the last Shah had to flee Iran and then the useful idiots there cheered ayatollas and when the ayatollas came to power all these people who thought that the life in Iran will be a “paradise ” were executed.
And the same goes for these useful idiots
Walter Sieruk says
Those “students” are so very viciously anti-Israel is because they are both brainwashed and ignorant.
One example of this ignorance was revealed by a .Newsmax reporter walked over to one of those “student” protesters who was holding a sign that read “From the River to the Sea” and asked her “What river ?” and she replied “I don’t know.” Then the reporter asked her “Which sea ?” To that question, she answered “I don’t know.”
tgusa says
Take Israel and Jews out of the equation and then think about what those monsters did to women. These creeps on US campuses disgust me. I see what those students are supporting and it makes it really hard for me to practice Christian values towards them. For the most part I’m a live and let live kind of guy so it isn’t easy to turn my thoughts to a place where they are now. Those students have made me go where I have never gone before. Congratulations jackasses, you have done to me what I thought was nearly impossible. Enraged is an understatement. They have shown their cards but most of the rest of us are keeping ours close to the vest.
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
Sun Tzu
The Art of War
Blougeoisie says
But they didn’t do anything to ‘women’, only Jews & Zionists.
Besides, what is a woman?
tgusa says
I’m guessing that’s sarcasm but just for the heck of it. Females have two X chromosomes in their cells while males have one X and one Y chromosome.
Mike says
Not just to Jews and Zionists. There were non-Jewish and/or non-Israeli tourists and visitors there too, including women.
There were also Thais, Filipinos/Filipinas and Nepalese workers there who were murdered, raped and taken hostage.
James Lincoln says
tgusa says,
“These creeps on US campuses disgust me. I see what those students are supporting and it makes it really hard for me to practice Christian values towards them.”
Most of the actual students that have been interviewed, are “useful idiots” – and know nothing about what they are actually protesting against.
In time, many of them will be ashamed of their behavior.
But some will not.
tgusa says
“In time, many of them will be ashamed of their behavior.”
You are right James they will. But now how can they ever be trusted with anything?
The true believers will continue on…and…on…
Doing their thing, every moment of every day, everywhere.
Other than that everything is great according to the lying by omission global media.
OLD GUY says
Elite, may not be the right word. Baby Daycare centers for the rich where they are taught to play nice with each other in their CLASS, and how to talk down too and use and abuse the rest of society. More like INDOCTRINATION CENTERS for the non-working class.
Kerry says
As someone recently said “The Ivy League is now the Poison Ivy League!”