Hatred of Western Civilization Stokes the Campus Antisemitism Crisis
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2023/12/hatred-of-western-civilization-stokes-the-campus-antisemitism-crisis/The unspeakable brutality and depravity of the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel led soon afterward to aggressive protests on many of our college campuses. The protests (and declarations, blog posts, marches, signs, etc.) were overwhelmingly in favor of Hamas, not the victims. Liberal feminist and women’s-rights groups were silent or dismissive of the widespread gross sexual abuse of Israeli women during the attack.
At a large rally near campus, one professor at my school (Cornell) said that the attacks were “exhilarating.” While paying lip service to protecting civilians, his visceral reaction to what was known to be a barbaric attack elicited applause and genocidal chants from the large crowd. A student at Cornell was arrested for making threats against Jewish students. Jewish students have testified in Congress to the poisonous atmosphere at Cornell and the complicity of some faculty.
Jewish students have been vilified as if they were guilty of some heinous crime. Mobs of pro-Hamas students have harassed and taunted them. At Cooper Union, a group of Jewish students had to take refuge in the library when they were harassed by an anti-Israel mob. At George Washington U., slogans like “Glory to Our Martyrs” were projected on buildings. The genocidal chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now commonplace. At Arizona State, Jewish students needed a police escort to escape a howling mob throwing rocks. “By any means necessary” is the frequent phrase used by these student mobs to justify Hamas’s crimes against humanity.
Why did American campuses erupt with expressions of hatred for Israel and Jewish students? What could possibly motivate college students to act in such an inhumane, deplorable way?
Wokeness promotes hatred of Western Civilization and fuels antisemitism.
Yet the problem is even deeper than expressions of antisemitism. What the mobs are against, at the core, is Western civilization, with its distinctive characteristics of individual liberty, limited government, and capitalism. They are intent on tearing our system down and have made common cause with Islamicists who desire a world with only one religion, which they would enforce through Sharia law. This is what many now call the Red-Green alliance.
Both the Islamicists and American DEI advocates portray Israel as an evil force in the world, but, for the latter, Israel is merely a proxy for Western civilization.
To Islamicists such as the Iranian Mullahs and their followers, Israel is “the little Satan” and the United States “the Great Satan.” American left-wing academics use “social-justice” verbiage more palatable to a Western audience, speaking of the U.S. as “systemically racist.” They constantly tell their students that America is irredeemably stained by slavery and colonialism. They often succeed in getting their impressionable students, who seldom hear any rebuttal, to see themselves as detached from their country and eager to see it radically transformed. Radicalized American academics and Islamicists have a shared goal of tearing down the United States and destroying Israel.
American college students don’t realize how fortunate they are to live in America, and they never contemplate how much worse off they would be if our institutions were in fact torn down and replaced with a government devoted to the nebulous concept of group equity. When they hear from Hamas or Osama bin Laden or Ayatollah Khamenei that Jews are evil and that violence against them is justified, they’re inclined to believe it. The idea fits perfectly with the worldview they’ve been absorbing through their years in school, strongly reinforced by college professors and administrators.
Leftists and Islamists have more in common.
