Why antisemitic college protests are far more vile now than those in Charlottesville
Americans both left and right have sensed for a long time that the society that created the world’s most durable constitution, its most robust economy, its citadel for freedom and human rights, appears in serious decline.
Our politics have grown so dysfunctional that the best among us have checked out, and the screamers fill the vacuum. Beyond the shouting, nothing seems to happen. Raw hatred seizes both major political parties.
The American economy is still humming, but ill serves our young people who can’t afford even the starter homes to begin living that now hazy vision of the American Dream.
Drug use is rampant. Homelessness is on the rise. Tents metastasize across our major cities.
And amid all that din, now comes the most certain historical marker of social decline.
Jew hatred.
Jewish people are history's scapegoats
There are no easy answers for why the Jewish people are the chosen ones — our barometer for the decline of civilization. There are many theories, but it probably has something to do with envy — that cardinal sin.
The Jews are history’s most persecuted people, and rather than fold, they built a culture of survival and resiliency that has led to enormous achievement — all earned.
When societies begin to unravel, they look for excuses, and the Jews are handy scapegoats. They were for the Russian czars, Hitler’s brownshirts and the communists who enslaved much of Asia and eastern Europe.
In our age of decline, we see antisemitism rearing itself on the right during the march on Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. “The Jews will not replace us,” chanted the neo-Nazis who descended on that Virginia college town.
Now we’re seeing it again with antisemitism baring its teeth on U.S. campuses and calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, and by inference, the annihilation of Israeli Jews.
For a moment, some of us thought we were watching the left’s Charlottesville, but this is something more vile.
Protesters overlook atrocity that started this
It must never be forgotten that the American college protests that began in the fall of 2023 started immediately after the terrorist slaughter of some 1,200 mostly Israeli Jews.
Our hip young college students skipped over that crime against humanity as if it were a mere pebble on the path of human events.
But when the Israelis had barely begun to defend themselves, our student radicals broke out their keffiyehs and started chanting “From the River to the Sea” — the eliminationist battle cry of Hamas terrorists.
U.S. student protesters became the tools of Jew haters across the Middle East who play a double game with the Israelis. They attack Israel by themselves or through proxy armies and then condemn the Israelis for striking back — for defending themselves.
Here’s a rule of thumb. If you slaughter and mutilate Israeli Jews and rape their women and kidnap their grandparents and grandchildren, the Israelis are not going to roll over.
“There can be no compromise,” said a former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir. “They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise. And that’s why we have no choice.”
There's a larger ideology at work here
The American college protesters say they are condemning the Israeli counterstrikes that have killed children in Gaza. But they never acknowledge that Hamas uses those children as human shields.
The game among Israel’s enemies in the Palestinian territories and Iran is to provoke the Israelis to defend themselves by killing Palestinian children and thus bring international condemnation upon the Jewish state.
But our college students are signaling far more than just a defense of Gaza.
They use the Palestinian cause as an instrument to advance their own politics of decolonization — a madcap theory that the global south and peoples of color will rise up and take back what was theirs from the more-white and colonizing global north.
At Columbia and NYU, at Yale and USC, you see and hear the cries:
“From New York to Gaza, globalize the Intifada!”
“NYPD, KKK, IDF, you’re all the same.”
Today's protests are worse than Charlottesville
And when our college protesters occupy and push everyone else out of the public square and spew their antisemitism and their genocidal fantasies for Israel, who comes out to defend them?
The professoriate.
More than 100 faculty members at Barnard and Columbia University formed a protective ring around their campus protesters to defend their speech rights and to protest arrests by police.
“Hands off our students!” read their faculty placards.
Why protests at ASU: Are so poisonous
Had Charlottesville been anything like this, the professors at the University of Virginia would have come out of their lounges and formed a protective circle around the close-cropped Neo Nazis who had taken over the commons with their tiki torches and sulfurous slogans.
They would have fed them the ideology that fueled their protests, because that’s what happened at Columbia and Yale and NYU. Go to the class catalogues of any of our elite universities and you will find a cornucopia of “decolonization” themes and courses.
Had Columbia or NYU’s student protests aimed their bile at African American students rather than young Jews, you would have seen a much different picture, NYU professor Scott Galloway told MSNBC.
College campuses are feeding antisemitism
“If I went into the NYU square with a white hood on and said, ‘Lynch the Blacks,’ or ‘Burn the Gays,’ it would be shut off by that night, and I would never work in academia again.
“There would be no need for the words context or nuance. I wouldn’t be protected by terms like First Amendment or free speech. I would be out of the world of academia. It seems like a double standard when it comes to hate speech as long as it’s against Jews.”
The Oct. 7 terrorist strike on Israel has ripped the mask off the American left and shown the poison it is feeding our young people — an ideology that has festered now into virulent and even casual Jew hatred.
This has been bubbling up for some time now. U.S. Jewish college students have been raising the alarm for at least a decade that our college campuses have become hotbeds of antisemitism.
The American left was so focused on the misdeeds and vulgarities of a certain Republican populist that it failed to see the mote in its own eye and the threat it also poses to our republic.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: College protests are far more vile than Charlottesville. Here's why
