‘Globalizing the Intifada’ at Harvard

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.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

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?