The beginning of college used to be marked by parents helping their children unload their stuff from the back of station wagons and carrying those suitcases, that futon, that stand-alone lamp, that print of Picasso’s peace dove or Don Quixote, or Avedon’s photographs of the Beatles, into the waiting dormitories, after which both parents and child would go out for one last meal together before they drove off and he, or she, was left to face the school daze alone.
Nowadays it’s different. Your parents drive you up to the campus, and already the anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstrators are in the quad, or in Harvard’s case the Yard, screaming their hatred of the Jewish state, accusing it of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” and insistently chanting that “Palestine will be free/From the river to the sea” which everyone knows means only one thing: the disappearance of the state of Israel, the expulsion or killing of its Jewish inhabitants, and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state of “Palestine.”
And so it was for a friend of my family who is starting his first year at Harvard. He was greeted when he arrived at Harvard Yard by protesters chanting and waving signs about Israel’s need to disappear and the Palestinians’ right to replace them, renewing the screaming from where they had left off last June, at commencement.
More on the dismal spectacle now unfolding at Harvard yet again can be found here: “Anti-Israel protesters march through Harvard, chanting ‘long live the intifada,’” Times of Israel, September 6, 2024:
Anti-Israel protesters march through Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, waving Palestinian flags and chanting antisemitic slogans.
Videos posted to social media show the protesters chanting ,”Long live the intifada” and “Globalize the intifada,” a reference to periods of deadly Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli civilians in the late 1980s and early 1990s and again in the early 2000s….
A call for “intifada” is not a call for a political solution, not a call for a “ceasefire in Gaza” or even for a Palestinian state. It is an unambiguous call for the murder of Israelis. In the last, Second Intifada, that lasted from 2000 to 2005, about 1000 Israelis were killed.
Additionally, at commencement in May, the Harvard Chabad director publicly confronted an invited speaker over what he believed was an antisemitic comment in her speech.
That commencement speaker was Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist, who had made remarks about “money and power” in her commencement speech that appeared to be directed at Jews. Previously, in a report from Rappler, a Filipino news company she founded and of which she was the CEO, Israel’s behavior was likened to that of Hitler. Need I say more?
But there is a new addition to the screamers’ repertoire of hate. No longer are they interested in just weakening Israel through BDS or an arms embargo. Nor are they any longer satisfied with the complete disappearance of Israel, to be replaced by a twenty-third Arab state. Instead, they want to “globalize the intifada” — that is, to wage an intifada not just against the Jews of Israel, but against Jews around the globe. To these campus warriors, it is Jews everywhere who must be the object of violence and murder, the way Israeli Jews were during the Second Intifada.
There may even be another message being expressed: not just to “globalize the Intifada” against the Jews, but to wage a worldwide Intifada on the entire white, advanced, West, pulling down the whole structure and replacing it with…. Oh, we haven’t thought that through quite yet. Let’s let the wretched of the earth rise up, and pull down the whole rotten edifice that oppresses them, and then we can talk about what should take its place.
It costs $84,000 a year to attend Harvard. Many of these student protesters calling to globalize the Intifada are salon Bolsheviks. How many of those sinister striplings spewing their venom think they would be spared if and when the wretched really do rise up, and kill their well-heeled parents?
James Lincoln says
Parents, do NOT send your children to Harvard University.
It is now a leftist / Hamas loving crap hole.
Consider a place like Hillsdale College – or an excellent vocational school…
Wellington says
Totally seconded, James.
Yes, an institution like Harvard has become a joke. And this spells trouble, let’s see here, to higher education in America overall, to America en masse and to Western Civilization in general.
Yes, this awful. It’s the fall of the Roman Empire all over again. Redux time.
JIM C says
I read a small book in high school called ‘THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE”,
it is the same thing happening in the US, since they can’t beat us from without, they have planted a virus that causes rot from within. God help us.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Thirded!
In fact, after your kids graduate from school, go for vocational training. In particular, consider MikeRoweWorks, which helps one get the proper certification in skills like plumbing, electrician and other technician jobs. Those are one genre of jobs that will never go out of vogue, not until they can come up w/ an optimal AI/machine learning combo that can do those jobs
In the meantime, a request to everyone who funds these schools through Alumini donations: STOP 🛑! You are doing your country more damage than good by continuing to sponsor them, and making them almost boycott-proof
James Lincoln says
Thank you for your informed replies, Wellington and Infidel.
SC says
Perhaps when all the Jewish corporate funding dries up Harvard might think twice about who it allies itself with. Maybe Universities and politicians should be totally barred from ALL none US funding. That would shut down things like bidens CCP funded national secrets reading rooms.
gravenimage says
+1
Wellington says
A take-over is in the offing. Not just at Harvard. Harvard is just the tip of a very invidious iceberg. The take-over, and which remains in full throttle mode, is the obliteration of the best of the West and its replacement with retrograde, heinous and idiotic Leftist and Islamic “ideals.”
The fools and worse only too ready to continue promoting the so-called Palestinians on American college campuses. such as at Harvard (which institution has seen better days to put it mildly), serve as a testimony to how much Western Civilization has fallen, how the West has conceded to enemies of liberty like Islam and Leftism, and which liberty the West all along explored as no other civilization or society ever has. Oh yeah, what a waste of great ideas; what a waste of a great civilization.
Anyone still not seeing what is going on, and this would include here in America a whole host of RINOs like the Bush and Cheney family, never mind what has happened to the Democratic Party en masse, is blind to the core. Sadly, there are way too many in the West who remain “blind to the core.” Time for a beer.
gravenimage says
All too true, Wellington.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
If the intifada is “an unambiguous call for the murder of Israelis”, then “Long live the intifada” is a call that this struggle to kill Israelis should last a long time, like a century or a millennium. Why is a long, drawn-out intifada more preferred than an intifada that ends in quick success?
SKA says
Worse is whenever they chant the Arabic phrase “Iqbal qolahum” meaning “kill them all.” This cannot be rationalized as a merely flowery or poetic expression. It means what it says. “As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come.” Proverbs 26:2
gravenimage says
SKA, the only ambiguous thing about “Iqtal qolahum” is that it is in Arabic, which I’m sure a lot of these useful idits don’t understand, and just think means something like “Se su puede” (“Yes, we can” in Spanish, also often chanted at demonstrations).
SKA says
Correction: not “Iqbal” but “Iqtal”
Sorry!
Donovan Nuera says
How far Harvard has fallen in so few years. Prof. Richard Pipes (1923-2018), the great Russian historian (especially about the Bolshevik Revolution) and Reagan era National Security official who was part of “Team B” to assess the Soviet’s capabilities was a Polish Jew whose family fled just in time to the US in 1939-40. He enlisted in the US Army Air Corp. Then studied at Harvard. He was a serious lecturer when I took his class. I wonder what he would think about students conflating what his relatives and neighbors went through with what the late Haniyeh and tunnel-coward Sinwar has forced upon their stupid followers.
I don’t think alumni will show up in 2036 for the Quadricentennial Anniversary of Harvard/s founding the way they are declining. In 1936, with alum FDR as guest of honor, they had an academic procession of all the ancient Old World universities that marched in order of age. It was led by the officials of al-Azhar Theological Institue of Cairo (founded in 970) but as an islamic theological school with a college added hundreds of years later. (Bologna is the oldest in Europe, followed by Paris (Sorbonne) , Padua, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.). I hope they do not extend an invite to al-Azhar as the grand muftis still condone killing of apostates and Jews.
Donovan Nuera says
The Harvard Band still plays “Fight Fiercely Harvard” at each football game. It was written by Tom Lehrer (Satirist, pianist, and mathematics professor) I think back in 1945 when he graduated. It is still the most effete fight song of all time…. and has hilarious lyrics! It is on youtube.
gravenimage says
Yes, Donovan–back when college students had a sense of humor–and something to be happy about.