America was supposed to be different, a replay of European ideas in a new world. Some of those ideas are now playing out in familiar form. If you are surprised that American media are lying about Israel while mobs of students celebrate a massacre of Jews and their professors egg them on, then you have not been paying attention.
The Hamas attack on Israel was a surprise. The reaction among the Democratic left, in most of the media and on the campuses of America’s elite finishing schools, should not surprise anyone.
If you can see that major American media outlets are actively misleading the public about Israel and actively covering for Palestinian terrorists, consider how else they might have misled you about what has happened in America in the last few years.
Some of us have been warning for years that the Democratic Party and its outriders in education and media were promoting racial division and class war, with the Jews in the intersectional crosshairs of both.
The young Americans who chant “Intifada revolution” on the streets know exactly what it means, just as they know what “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea” mean. When people say they want to expunge Jews from the face of the Earth, we should believe them.
It’s not as if they hide it. The latest Harvard/Harris poll, taken on October 18-19, finds that 86 per cent of American voters believe that Hamas committed a “terrorist attack” and 76 per cent think it “cannot be justified”.
The only age cohort in which a majority believe that the massacres, rapes, mutilations and kidnappings were “justified by the grievance of Palestinians” are the 18-24 age group (51 per cent).
Hatred is a learned response. The higher the level of educational attainment among 18-24 year-olds, the greater the willingness to justify Hamas’s barbarism: 29 per cent of college graduates versus 21 per cent of non-graduates.
Look at their teachers. In the field of sociology alone, 1,700 professors signed a petition claiming that Hamas’ terrorism must be “contextualized” in “75 years of settler colonial occupation and European empire”.
The left has accomplished its “long march through the institutions”. It has recruited and trained a generation in “social justice” and “decolonisation”, in the facile Manicheanism of “oppressor” and “oppressed”, and the thug’s rationale of “by all means necessary”.
Harvard demo in support of Palestone Credit Getty (2)
Harvard demo in support of Palestine (Photo: Getty)
The Left is now taking the socialist revolution to the streets. As always, the eternal Jew is the eternal enemy. This won’t stop with tearing down posters of kidnapped children. Radicalisation always ends in violence. What we are seeing is the beginning.
What did the major Jewish American organisations do as the tide of hate rose in America’s schools and campuses? They adopted the cant of their people’s enemies. They joined in the hysteria about “white supremacy” and “structural racism”. They endorsed the corrupt shakedown of BLM.
The Anti-Defamation League in particular became a press office for the Democrats. The radicalisation of the young is a moral crisis for the Democratic Party and liberal America in general. It is a particular problem for liberal Jews. Their ethnic and political identities have fused and their institutions have sold them out.
What now?
Stunned Jewish donors write letters and talk of withholding donations. But so long as America’s top universities hold the key to credentials and upward mobility, they can ignore complaints from yesterday’s customers.
A better course would be to launch class-action lawsuits against universities. The Trump administration defined antisemitism as a hate crime under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Biden administration’s Department of Education has moved as slowly as possible on implementation.
There’s no guarantee that these class-action suits would be successful. The First Amendment protects all kinds of obnoxious speech. Legal action might, however, expose “anti-Zionist” teachers and student groups for the bigots they are.
The Democrats have a moral reckoning to make. The spectacle of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib running away from reporters in her refusal to call Hamas “terrorists” shows how far they have to go.
On Tuesday, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, refused to discuss whether the campus protests were antisemitic and defended “peaceful protest”.
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