Seattle: Keffiyeh-clad man throws rocks through window of Jewish family
Cops took over 90 minutes to respond. They know who their masters are, and don’t dare to offend them.
The Protests on Elite Campuses
Victor Davis Hanson has taken aim at the pro-Hamas anti-Israel protests on elite campuses here:
The Disgrace and Fall of the American Elite Campus
by Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, May 20, 2024:
Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.
Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.
These protesters are not only students, though commonly described as such. Among them are also troublemaking activists, non-students who show up to join in the malevolent fun on campus. And some of those who are students turn out to be foreigners, Muslim students who hold student visas, but feel no gratitude to the country that, at great expense, is providing them with educations.
The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.
These protesters wear masks to hide their identity; they don’t want to be traced; this anonymity encourages a display of greater fury and violence.
More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?
Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less….
These students will rant against Israel, and declare their support for the “resistance,” but at the same time, they are careerists hoping to succeed as part of the “system” they claim to deplore. They go from screaming their hate at the apartheid, colonial-settler, genocidal state of Israel, to the very next day, showing up, all meek and mild, for their job interview at Goldman Sachs, or they will be submitting their applications to law, medical, and business schools. They are not about to buck the “system.” These brave “resisters” in fact risk nothing.
On many of the affected campuses, the administration has agreed to some of the protesters’ BDS demands, promising to review investments in Israeli companies and in American defense companies providing weapons to the IDF. And on many of those campuses, though not all, the administration has promised not to punish students if they take down their tent encampments. Only on a handful of campuses — Harvard and Columbia are examples — have some students been suspended from classes. It is unclear what the longterm effect these suspensions will have on their academic careers.
At 11 [actually 10] million, Israel’s population is vastly outnumbered by some 500 million Arab and Muslim neighbors, many of whom are existentially hostile. So the idea of an imperial overdog or colonialist oppressor Israel is absurd. Most of the hatred in the Arab world and its expatriates on Western campuses toward Israel is driven by envy and frustration that Israel is a humane, free, prosperous, and lawful constitutional state in a way most Arab nations are still not. Add that the Arab world has prompted five or six serial wars against Israel, lost them all, and on spec resorted to terrorism to gain what their militaries could not—and yet Israel still prospers while its neighbors do not since that would mean to dismantle autocracy, tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, antisemitism, and inert socialist economies.
I disagree with Victor Davis Hanson here. I don’t believe that Arab hostility to Israel is driven by “envy and frustration.” It is prompted, rather, much more by the contempt and hatred for Jews that can be found everywhere in the Qur’an and Hadith.
Personally, I think the 'envy and frustration' go all the way back to Isaac and Ishmail, where even God Himself seems to have abandoned Ishmail as a son of Abraham.
Two, the tip of the spear of campus unrest is from the Middle East. Such partisan foreign students and activists organize the rallies, often with planning and money provided by Palestinian front groups. They provide the keffiyeh props and the occasional Hezbollah and Hamas flags and logos.
Victor Davis Hanson wants us to understand the major role that foreign Muslims — both students and activists —play in these protests, providing signs, keffiyehs, and flags, and often leading the chants. Imagine the reaction if students from Communist China studying in American universities were to lead demonstrations calling for Taiwan to become part of mainland China. How long do you think it would take for their student visas to be cancelled?
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There must be a lawsuit in here somewhere!
There must be a lawsuit in here somewhere!
Minnesota high school yearbook news timeline
omits Oct. 7, implies Israel gratuitously
‘declared war on Hamas’
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