‘Pro-Palestine’ campus mobs think Jew-hatred is progressive

‘Many declarations are being heard in defense of … a burgeoning mass movement supporting the Hamas terrorist movement that carried out the manifold atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7.’

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

Ideas that reduce complex problems into simple mantras are always popular. But those that cloak a political ideology in the sort of language and symbolism in sync with the cultural fashions of the movement and allow people to imagine themselves on the right side of history can spawn world-changing movements. When young people especially are indoctrinated with such notions—the idea of correcting a historical wrong—the results can produce the shocking surge that’s unfolding right now on U.S. college campuses.

The spectacle of a critical mass of this current generation of American college students—egged on by many of their professors and even administrators—chanting slogans about erasing the State of Israel from the map (“from the river to the sea”), cheering on Islamist terror against Jews everywhere (“intifada revolution” and “globalize the intifada”) and speaking openly about banning the presence of “Zionists” from their midst, if not condoning violence against them, has shaken many Americans. That is especially true for liberal Jews and others who believe that antisemitism is primarily if not solely a problem on the political right.

Yet the most important part of this story is what hasn’t happened. Instead of a united nation responding to these expressions of hate and bigotry with one voice, many declarations are being heard in defense of what are, for all intents and purposes, a burgeoning mass movement supporting the Hamas terrorist movement that carried out the manifold atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

Toxic leftist ideas
How is it possible for what is supposed to be the best and the brightest of American students—those who attend Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell and many other elite universities where the “pro-Palestine” protests have sprung up—to embrace such a profoundly evil cause?

The simple answer for what should be seen as responsible points to the intellectual fashion of the day, which, for lack of a better term, we are forced to call “woke” ideologies. The toxic ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality, which teach that the world is permanently divided between “white” oppressors and people of color who are their victims, have decided that Israel and the Jews belong to the former, and Hamas and its mass of Palestinian supporters are among the latter.

These ideas have been mainstreamed of late in America’s educational system and culture. Since the moral panic about race that occurred in the Black Lives Matter summer after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in May 2020, they have become the new orthodoxy against which dissent is not permitted in U.S. leading institutions.

While some of us have been pointing out for years that the BLM movement and the ideas behind it grant a permission slip for antisemitism, this has only become obvious to most people in the last six months. To the horror of many Jews, the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t engender sympathy for Israel or the Jews. Instead, it provided the spark for a surge in antisemitism around the world almost immediately after Oct. 7.

Many Jews believed they could always count on enlightened liberal opinion in this country not only to condemn expressions of right-wing Jew-hatred in the strongest terms but to also isolate it. Instead, they have watched with amazement and concern as the mobs engaging in antisemitic invective have been defended or rationalized in mainstream liberal media like The New York Times and MSNBC as idealists or, at worst, emotional kids whose actions are an understandable reaction to Israeli atrocities. In doing so, those who are taking this line aren’t just repeating and spreading Hamas propaganda and blatant falsehoods. They are accepting the premise that opposition to the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet is somehow the natural political position of those who call themselves progressives.

Anti-Israel protestcampus antisemitismHamas