“Students for Pogroms in Israel” is the headline of Conor Friedersdorff’s article in The Atlantic. Indeed, if you take the time to read the language in these various resolutions of support for Hamas emerging from college campuses, you might be a little confused.
Isn’t beheading babies always bad? Isn’t slaughtering civilians a war crime? Apparently not.
“Decolonization is not a metaphor,” the George Washington University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter stated. “It is not an abstract theory to be discussed and debated in classrooms and papers. It is a tangible, material event in which the colonized rise up against the colonizer … We reject the distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘militant.’ We reject the distinction between ‘settler’ and ‘soldier.’ Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.”
Yes, these are stupid college kids with a major-league lack of critical thinking skills. And yes, they’re far-left radicals whose moral compass is shot and who are without human feelings or empathy.
So why are colleges and universities funding these moral pygmies?
“A lot of Jewish students are really struggling when they see their peers or their classmates celebrating, not just condoning, but celebrating what’s happening as a form of resistance,” said Julia Jassey, a recent college graduate and the CEO of Jewish on Campus, an advocacy group for Jewish and Zionist students.
The Israel on Campus Coalition is circulating a letter demanding that schools immediately defund Students for Justice in Palestine and withdraw official recognition of the organization.
“It’s a really impossible moment, a really impossible thing to grapple with, and university administrations have an obligation to stand in support with Jewish college students,” said Jassey.
Close to 30 Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee, Democratic Majority for Israel, and the Israel on Campus Coalition signed the letter. The nearly 200 other signatories included Jewish and non-Jewish student groups, local Jewish community organizations and state lawmakers from around the country.
Statements signed by coalitions at some schools have blamed Israel entirely for the massacre of its own citizens. Video of a protest on Tuesday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed a call-and-response chant with a group of pro-Palestinian protesters, including children, that called to “liberate the land by any means necessary.”
“By any means necessary” is a phrase used to justify anything Hamas is doing. Even if it means beheading babies, raping and murdering women, and cutting babies out of the wombs of pregnant Israelis — all of it is justified to advance the cause of “decolonization.”
One can understand the gimlet-eyed, Palestinian radicals making idiotic, genocidal statements about “decolonization.” But many of the members of these Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are middle-class American kids who have never seen Gaza or been to the West Bank. Surely they’ve read about the Holocaust. Knowing what they know, what do they think will happen to the “colonizers” if Israel were “decolonized” and Palestine ran “From the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea? One might notice that the state of Israel would cease to exist if that genocidal fantasy were to come true.
Allowing students to rally in support of Hamas is more akin to allowing a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus, in the days after white supremacists had killed African Americans. What would Harvard do in that situation? It’s a ludicrous thought experiment on its face: We know precisely what Harvard would do, and how swiftly they would condemn the rallies, shut them down, punish the students involved, and rush to safeguard the lives of black students on campus.
Instead, American universities shrug while Jewish students on American campuses face students cheering for their murder. As one Jewish young woman cried to a professor, during yesterday’s University of Washington pro-Hamas rally, “How are you allowing this. They want us dead. Please.”
Indeed, another coalition of Jewish groups circulated a letter organized by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law calling on universities to protect Jewish students.
“University leaders often have less courage in addressing antisemitism than other forms of discrimination. When other groups are hurting, university leaders feel they can respond without courting controversy,” the chairman of the Brandeis Center, Kenneth Marcus, told the New York Jewish Week. “But the Jewish community is both internally divided and also opposed by some other groups, which makes it more difficult for university leaders to respond as forcefully as they should.”
In this situation, that statement is far too understanding. The demand to protect Jewish students should be accompanied by a threat of legal action if any harm befalls students because they’re Jewish. And the Students for Justice in Palestine could be arrested for supporting a foreign terrorist organization.
The full force of the government and the legal system should come down on these pro-Hamas terror-supporters, and their funding as a student group should be stripped. They should be banned from campus the same way that the Nazis and the Klu Klux Klan are banned and defunded.
There’s no moral difference between them.
