What campus protests at ASU and elsewhere are really about. It's poisonous.

At the height of the pandemic and the race protests of summer 2020, one of the more perceptive thinkers in American journalism, Peter Savodnik, wrote a haunting essay for Tablet magazine.

Amid all the upheaval in the country, his mind had wandered back to 2012 and the quietude of rural Vermont, when he taught a retreat course at Middlebury College on the intersection of Russian literature and politics.

That summer he guided 18 students, “mostly freshmen and sophomores,” on an excursion of 1860s Russia by way of three novels of that time — Ivan Turgenev’s "Fathers and Sons," Fyodor Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s "What Is to Be Done?"

“I focused on the 1860s because that was when everything seemed to pivot just so,” he wrote, “and the arc of history started to bend in a more precarious direction, toward a precipice that few could have foreseen more than a half-century before the revolution.”

An ominous message posted by ASU students 

Since reading Savodnik’s long and prescient essay in a magazine devoted to Jewish perspectives on news and culture, I have since recommended it to friends and family so they too may be haunted.

I’ve not stopped thinking about it for years and have returned to it often.

It was on my mind again several weeks ago when one of the student political organizations at Arizona State University found itself in big trouble with the administration.

MECHA de ASU had joined the maelstrom of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests across the nation and, according to ASU’s student newspaper, The State Press, had posted an ominous message on Instagram:

“Death to boer. Death to the Pilgrim. Death to the zionist. Death to the settler."

Anyone who follows international news would instantly recognize “Death to boer (sic)” as similar to the expression of South African populist Julius Malema, who has called on his followers to “Kill the Boer!”, frequently with his hand held in the shape of a pistol.

American businessman Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, said Malema is calling for the murder of South Africa’s white farmers – “for the genocide of white people in South Africa.”

But Malema and others in South Africa have argued “Kill the Boer!” is merely an old protest slogan and song lyric of apartheid South Africa and does not literally mean to kill white people.

That didn’t stop The Economist in February from asking, “Is Julius Malema the most dangerous man in South Africa?”

In Mecha de ASU’s Instagram, it also calls for death to “pilgrim,” “zionist” (sic) and “settler,” which should be interpreted as that group’s embrace of “decolonization” or the “global intifada” — the effort to unwind white control of land, property and government across parts of mostly the global north, including North America.

Mecha de ASU is playing with fire 

We should interpret it that way, because that’s how Mecha de ASU describes its goals in its mission statement:

“Mechistas must take it upon themselves to organize and politicize our communities to build power to enact liberatory politics. This means not only combating the legacies of colonization such as capitalism and white supremacy, but creating a movement that centers Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, and Femme people.” 

If you’ve wondered how any LGBTQ people could support the Palestinians, who would brutally abuse them for their sexuality, here’s why.

The campus movement is about bigger things than the children of the Gaza Strip. It’s about power.

As the Mecha de ASU mission statement explains...

“...we must devote ourselves to ending settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, heteronormativity, borders and prisons because our liberation does not exist until these legacies of colonization are abolished. ... MECHA values are rooted in anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, anti-heteropatriarchy, anti-imperialism, and antiracism.”

After the Instagram post, the university administration placed Mecha de ASU on interim suspension for violating the university code of conduct, the State Press reported.

In an October 2023 statement, ASU officials had written that the school fosters "a safe and inclusive environment," and "respectful conversations that promote mutual understanding and empathy," the State Press reported.

I’ve listened to some of Mecha de ASU’s podcasts, and they sound like pretty nice young people. But they are playing with fire.

College protests are about global intifada, not just Gaza

It’s the kind of fire that turned into a conflagration at Columbia University this past week.

Pro-Palestinian student protesters swarmed the campus as Jewish students and parents recorded them telling them to “go back to Europe,” “go back to Poland,” “you have no culture,” “all you do is colonize.”

Other protesters celebrated the slaughter of 1,200 mostly civilian Israeli Jews on Oct. 7, praised the Hamas killers, told Jewish students on campus that Oct. 7 will happen again and again “not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times!”

That prompted a New York rabbi to tell Columbia’s Jewish students to leave campus and stay away until things have “dramatically improved.”

The danger of decolonization ideology 

After the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, students at many of America’s elite universities celebrated the Hamas atrocities and accused the Israelis of war crimes for their counterstrike on Gaza.

That turned into a rallying cry: “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”

In reaction, British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore write an essay in The Atlantic magazine headlined, “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False.”

“This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. 

“But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the ‘oppressed’ to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an ‘oppressor’ to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as ‘white’ and ‘privileged.’”

As Peter Savodnik reflected back on his leafy retreat in Vermont, he noted that “the metaphysical gap between mid-19th-century Russia and early-21st-century America is narrowing. The parallels between them then and us now, political and social but mostly characterological, are becoming sharper, more unavoidable.”

In those 1860s Russian novels you find parallels to today’s United States, he wrote, “the coarsening of the culture, our economic woes, our political logjams, the opportunism and fecklessness of our so-called elites, the corruption of our institutions, the ease with which we talk about “revolution,” the anger, the polarization, the anti-Semitism.”

We may want to believe that what is happening at our universities can be contained to that ivory-tower world, but that would be a mistake, writes Savodnik.

“It is true that the decisions that shape our daily lives are mostly made in faraway cities, but the ideas that inform those decisions are learned, promulgated, hotly debated on campus.”

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Protests at ASU, other campuses are over decolonization. They're toxic