The Alternate Universe of Anti-Israel Protestors By Robert Weissberg
Contemporary universities have created youngsters who are willfully blind to reality and demand that others share their fantasies.
The sudden outpouring of anti-Israel, pro-Palestine outrage on countless campuses is hardly surprising given how universities are so grievance group friendly. More surprising is the content of these protests, namely proclaiming a morally upside-down world where Israel is the oppressor and Hamas the victim (the Harvard letter said, “Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.”) Here the killing of innocent civilians and the beheading of babies counts for nothing while Humas savagery becomes noble “resistance.” It is this rejection of reality that is truly puzzling.
What allows college students and even a few professors to justify the anti-Israel rage? That this occurs at some of America’s top schools — Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford — makes it all more remarkable.
Lacking mental health experts to psychoanalyze protestors, let me offer two possible explanations for this toxic flight from reality.
The first concerns the personal costs of living in a fantasy world for today’s college students and faculty. In the “real world” having totally wrong ideas can have dire consequences. You may decide that astrology is the key to knowledge, but normally friends will convince you of the truth. In nearly all circumstances, harsh reality constrains fantasy.
This is less true on campus where thinking “outside the box” can flourish. Oddball pundits may become “cutting edge thinkers” and thus advance their academic careers. At some point, unfortunately, acting as if there were no consequences for stupidity can become a habit, and like rabbits in Australia, stupidities multiply unchecked.
The flight from reality is rampant on campus and much of today’s higher education is teaching youngsters that 2+2=5. Who would believe that there are more than seventy-two genders, and that “male” and “female” are just socially constructed? At Clemson University men recently demanded that menstrual products to be put back into campus men’s rooms. Does any sane person believe that all statistical gaps between groups are due entirely to discrimination, racism, and sexism? Many on campus believe it.
For those who live among such absurdities, it is hardly a reach to deny savagery against innocent Israeli civilians regardless of the evidence. Moreover, the automatic condemnation of Israelis while forgiving Arabs is perfectly consistent with campus indoctrination. According to this cosmology, Hamas terrorists are non-white Arabs, and thus by virtue of this non-white identity, they are, as per the principle of intersectionality, classified as “an oppressed people” Forget that Arabs once trafficked in African slaves and brutally conquered millions of North Africans and Europeans. Of the utmost importance, the label “an oppressed, colonized people” is forever and supplies a permanent “get out jail free” card to be used against the powerful, i.e., privileged white Europeans.
The parallel is how many on campus dismiss African American criminal behavior so that murdering police officers, shoplifting, and all the rest are, supposedly, legitimate response to oppression, and even labelling this behavior “criminal” is racist. The participant’s race/ethnicity, not actions, determines who are the good guys and bad guys.
In the current battles the Israelis are white Europeans (bad), the Arabs non-white people who were colonized (good), so no matter how vile the behavior, moral judgements remain fixed. This permanency of good and bad explains why all the Israeli concessions, including land for peace, changes nothing and why, conversely, all the Arab savagery similarly changes nothing. The only moral high ground option for Israeli Jews is to abandon the Holy Land or vanish from the planet. For today’s campus Left, moral standing is absolutely fixed, a lodestar in a world where people can freely alter their biological identity.
A second contributing factor to this bizarre thinking infusing these pro-Palestinian demonstrations is how evil has been trivialized on the contemporary campus. Molehills have become mountains for so long that nobody can recall a real mountain. The campus world is a place where misgendering a person is hate while complementing an Asian for their mathematical skills is hurtful stereotyping. Inflicting psychological discomfort, not actual physical harm, is a serious offense.
This focus on psychological hurtfulness is predictable where victimhood “winners” might get their own academic major (“Queer Studies”) and safe spaces in school dorms. Of course, heterosexual white males receive zero victimhood points regardless of their suffering.
This trivialization means that tangible, catastrophic human suffering is pushed into obscurity. Students may be “triggered” by a rumored visit from Bell Curve author Charles Murray, but how many are aware of the millions killed by Stalin? Indeed, skilled victimhood players are ingenious at discovering novel obscure hatreds, for example, teaching English by exclusively reading the writings of white males.
It is not that historical atrocities are banned from discussion; rather, with scant exception (e.g., slavery in America) there is nothing to be extracted from this historical study. No campus group benefits by trying to understand the horrific religious wars of 17th century Europe. Better to protest against a dorm’s Taco Tuesday as a cultural appropriation that stigmatizes Hispanics.
Lacking any awareness of past evil, students can barely grasp current issues in historical context to draw clearheaded conclusions. It is no wonder, then, that supporters of the Palestinian cause denounced Israel as practicing apartheid, a South African series of laws where everybody had to register with the government with a racial designation. These laws required strict racial segregation, discouraged inter-racial marriage, and excluded blacks from high-status occupations and political office. Jim Crow laws would be the American equivalent. It is bizarre to accuse Israel of such practices, and any visitor to Israel can see this firsthand.
A similar cluelessness applies to the accusation of “Israel occupation” as if the Jewish state were a foreign power garrisoning Gaza and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Both entities are self-governing where leaders are elected, and nobody asserts that Israeli officials dictate policies in the Gaza, or the PA as the British Viceroy governed India through native subordinates. Yes, Israel may occasionally intervene militarily in their affairs to stop terrorism, but this is a far cry from “occupation.”
Ditto for “decolonizing,” a term that is carelessly tossed around. Properly understood, the term applies to how colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, along with India and Vietnam overthrew European rule. This genuine decolonization often involved long, bloody wars, and in no way resembles Israeli policy, now or in the past. Palestine was once part of the Ottoman Empire, and after that a British-run territory, and it is bizarre to suggest that the Palestinian Authority and Gaza are currently Israeli “colonies.”
Clearly, these pro-Hamas demonstrators require some remedial education. They are trivializing and misinterpreting important historical terms with long, complex histories. One can only ask what the best and the brightest are learning at Harvard.
These anti-Israel/pro-Hamas demonstration are more than just anti-Semitism, although they are certainly that. The rallies expose yet another pathology afflicting today’s academia, namely students are being indoctrinated into a misleading, cartoonish understanding of the world and an obviousness to true historical evil. Particularly at elite universities, such ignorance is an embarrassment. How is it possible for a group of Columbia University students to announc, “Gaza is an open-air prison that lacks essential necessities such as food, clean water, medicine and electricity”? How did the Israeli air force destroy nonexistent facilities? Parents should demand tuition refunds. Contemporary universities have created youngsters who are willfully blind to reality and demand that others share their fantasies.
Comments are closed.
