The Most Disturbing Part of It
The Big Ten, the Pac12 and the Ivy League are overrun with antisemitic students protesting in favor of Hamas. They claim they support Palestinians, but “Globalize the intifada” and “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” are explicit genocidal slogans of Hamas. Democrats insist words mean things. These words mean the students are terrorist sympathizers.
Some of the protestors are chanting “Death to America.” At least one Columbia University student screamed at Jewish students, “The seventh of October is going to be every day for you!” Jewish students have been pushed off campuses, harassed, attacked and silenced. The protestors say it is about Israel and “Zionism” but attack any Jewish student without first asking the student’s views on Israel and Zionism.
The protests are not organic. They are organized by several antisemitic groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine. That organization claims, “Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.” Nationwide, these college kids did not all spontaneously run to their local REI and buy tents. There were organizers and organizations advancing the funds, coordinating and getting ready for action. It is no coincidence the protests really took on a life of their own on April 20. That is Hitler’s birthday. The kids who would otherwise be getting stoned instead decided to stone some Jews.
But one aspect of this has been more disturbing than everything else we have seen. And what we have seen has been disturbing enough. The antisemites have harassed Jewish students. They have antagonized Jewish professors. They have assaulted Jews. They have stormed into events organized by Jews to chase out the speakers and harass the attendees. At Columbia, one blondhaired white girl with a keffiyeh covering her face stood in front of a group of Jewish students who were waving Israeli and American flags. The girl held a sign with an arrow pointing to the students that read “Al-Qasam’s Next Target.” Al-Qasam is the military wing of Hamas that orchestrated the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
Around Yale and Columbia, students have chanted for Al-Qasam to target Tel Aviv, kill more Jews and otherwise commit violence. But that was not the most disturbing thing to happen. The most disturbing thing was a video of a Jewish student approaching the protestors with a microphone and camera asking the white American kids if Hamas should release the remaining Israeli hostages. Many of the protestors refused to answer, but of those who did, every last one of them said, “No.”
The video came out the day Hamas released a proof-oflife video of Hersh GoldbergPolin. Goldberg-Polin had attended the music concert for peace on Oct. 7. He and others went into a bomb shelter to escape Hamas, which began throwing grenades in. Goldberg-Polin and a friend started throwing the grenades back. The friend died. Goldberg-Polin lost his hand. Hamas took him hostage. White, privileged American kids think Hamas can keep him.
Now the protestors have trotted out Jewish students who are protesting to claim the protests are not really antisemitic. On social media, Black trans-conservative (a progressive who identifies as a conservative) Candace Owens has been on a tweet storm defending the Nazis. A Black defender of the Nazis no more absolves the Nazis of their racism than a few ethnically Jewish rubes absolve the protestors of their vile antisemitism. Every barbarous regime depends on useful idiots for cover.
Queers for Palestine would be thrown off buildings in Palestine if they ever went there. The white, blond Americans chanting “Globalize the intifada” would be shot. Hamas killed Vivian Silver. The 74-yearold Canadian lived in Israel championing the Palestinian cause.
What we are witnessing on American college campuses is evil. It has infected college campuses across America. Only the Southeastern Conference has seemingly remained untouched along with most of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Those concerned about the rise of antisemitism should look to those schools for future workers and the rest of us need to understand something — too many academic institutions have become breeding grounds for evil.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www. creators.com.
Was the passage by the House last Saturday and the Senate on Tuesday of the foreign aid package with money for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan a turning point in American foreign policy?
It certainly was a turnabout in rhetoric and in partisan behavior. House Speaker Mike Johnson led the narrowly Republican House to pass by resounding margins bills to aid Ukraine (311-112), Israel (366-58) and Taiwan (38534), and to sanction Iran and force the sale of TikTok (36058). The narrowly Democratic Senate passed the whole kit and caboodle by a similarly lopsided margin (79-18).
These results are broadly in sync with public opinion. Republican members who voted against aiding Ukraine seem to represent only a minority of Republican voters. And, thanks to Johnson’s adopting former President Donald Trump’s suggestion of calling the aid a loan rather than a grant, they’re more skeptical of helping Ukraine than the former president.
The vocal and, on campuses, violent left-wingers who oppose aid to Israel have got President Joe Biden worried enough that he felt obliged, after condemning the “antisemitic protests,” to also condemn “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” It’s a comment that deserves the treatment that Trump got for talking, without specifying exactly whom he meant, about “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville, Virginia.
As Walter Russell Mead wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Friends and foes who thought America was paralyzed by internal dissension are taking another look.”
But that is no reason for complacency. Bipartisan agreement on an aid package does not make a dysfunctional foreign policy functional. As Mead writes, the Biden administration’s “failures to deter Russia in Ukraine and Iran in the Middle East, and fears of what a similar failure of deterrence could mean in the IndoPacific, have created bipartisan majorities for a more activist, better-armed American presence on the world scene.”
The failures go back a ways. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama not gauging Russian President Vladimir Putin’s potential for evil, the collapse during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s incumbency of the plausible hopes that trade ties would make China a “responsible stakeholder” in world trade and politics, the Obama administration’s inexplicable cozying up to the mullahs of Iran — these initial failures have only now become clear.
Just as Nazi Germany made a pact with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1939 and formed the Axis with Japan and Italy in 1940, America is faced now with a working alliance of revanchist dictatorial powers determined to alter the balance of power in their favor. The historian Niall Ferguson has no compunction about comparing aid opponents’ complaints about Ukraine with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 description of Adolf Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia as “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.”
Republican aid opponents have their own history to cite. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) argues that the establishment is presenting “the same exact talking points 20 years later” as those for the invasion of Iraq in 2002-03. But aid is not invasion, Ukraine is not Iraq, and Vance’s arguments are no more compelling than the arguments made in 199091 that the Gulf War would be another Vietnam.
Ferguson seems more persuasive in saying we are now in Cold War II, only this time with China united with Russia and in possession of an advanced economy intertangled with ours.
The Biden administration, in its latest move to cut off Chinese bank financing of the Russian war effort, seems to recognize this, as does Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who complained last month that China is building “overcapacity” in solar energy and lithium ion batteries.
But just saying “don’t,” as
Biden said to Israel before it launched its retaliatory strikes against Iran last week, is not enough.
In the wake of the HitlerStalin pact, which gave those two totalitarian allies control of most of the Eurasian landmass by the summer of 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt persuaded Congress to vastly increase military spending, allow aid to Winston Churchill’s Britain and institute a military draft — at a time when more than 80% of Americans opposed going to war.
As hard as it may be to imagine Biden or Trump carrying out such an enterprise, there’s a strong case that some significant military buildup and some demonstrated determination to resist aggression is necessary to deter this Cold War’s axis of evil from plunging into war with damage — destruction of lives, of economies, of human rights — far greater than the horrors inflicted on Ukraine and Israel.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” is now available.