The eruption of anger, hatred and anti-Israel prejudice across America last year had its epicenter in the country’s universities. What were meant to be places for the acquisition of knowledge, exchange of ideas, concepts and discovery had changed. They had long become breeding grounds for intolerance and a political and cultural Orthodoxy that tolerated and tolerates no dissent or deviation.
Professors and teachers who in the sixties and seventies largely reflected the range of opinion across America, mostly no longer exist. Republican voting and thinking professors have been systematically purged. Like America’s media, the vast majority are left-wing and often occupy the most extreme territory of leftist thought. Books like Jonathan Turley’s “The Indispensable Right…Free Speech in an Age of Rage” or Douglas Murray’s, “The War on the West,” show how this expulsion of intellectual diversity was achieved.
DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion became one of the dominant and inviolable principles and drivers of left thought. It sounds not too dissimilar to the seemingly noble motto of a different uprising that began in May of 1789 in Paris; Liberty, Egalitie (equality), Fraternity.
What could possibly be wrong with those three great principles of the French Revolution? What could possibly be wrong with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? That’s especially so when the inclusion seeks to ensure that all people are treated fairly and have full participation in society, especially those groups that have been historically discriminated against.
Well… like the French Revolution, most of the revolutionaries concluded from the get-go that neither the “L” nor the “E” nor the “F” applied to Jews. Napoleon even convened a “Sanhedrin” in 1806 to answer 12 questions that “might” permit Jews to have full rights as Frenchmen.
For Jewish students across American campuses today, joining the new student uprising and belonging to the DEI community requires denying and denouncing your people and your peoplehood. Sadly many young U.S. Jews have done so.
DEI is consequently designed at its core to exclude Jews as a group that have suffered historic discrimination. It has discrimination against Jews baked into the mix.
Then of course there was the fact the French Revolution very speedily gave birth to “La Terreur,” the reign of Terror where the fraternity-motivated revolutionaries, unleashed a series of massacres and public executions that killed between 30-40 thousand of their perceived enemies.
The protests and riots on America’s campuses of course and the violence on the country’s streets, hasn’t seen anything remotely like that. In fact, some of the images of middle-class American kids wearing keffiyehs and calling for a “Global Intifada” were actually very funny. This was especially so when interviewers asked them to name which river and which sea they had in mind when they were shouting about “Palestine” being “free” and they responded by looking like goldfish staring through a glass tank with mouths agape.
One of the funniest pictures from last year’s nastiness that had me chuckling was of a large group of Muslim anti-Israel protestors who filled the quadrangle of Columbia University. They had all bowed down in prayer and right in the middle of them was a white American kid who had concluded that this would be the right moment to “Take the Knee.” This poor idiot apparently thought that his “George Floyd” gesture somehow showed his solidarity and embrace of the values of the radical Islamist students who surrounded him.
We mustn’t allow the comic value of people like this bright young cretin and all the thousands of other useful idiots like him, to blind America to the very real threat they pose and may pose in the future. We should also be suspicious of those who try to excuse their behavior because they are “young” and “immature.” They are exactly the age when the thoughts and beliefs of some of the most evil people in history were formed.
The radicalization and weaponization of university students, has been a feature of extreme political movements of both the left and the right since the nineteenth century.
The National Socialist German Student League (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) was founded in 1926. It was created to spread ideological training across university campuses, and it did so with great success. In 1933 in Freiburg, its members ransacked and occupied the house of the Jewish Fraternity. Professors who did not align with Nazi thought were threatened and attacked. Infamous pictures of these “young” and “immature” students at book burnings or intimidating Jews on campus are resonant of 2023-24 American academia.
The activities of communist students across nearly every campus from Russia to China and throughout the world in the 20th century needs little to jog the memory. That’s especially true as it is still going on today.
One of the most notorious examples was “The Cambridge Five.” This was a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the USSR during the Second World War and after.
The group were recruited by Moscow’s NKVD as students at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s. They eventually graduated to key positions in the British establishment including MI5 and the Foreign Office where they did immeasurable harm to the West and its secret agents.
Americans should certainly recall the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and especially the fifty-two American hostages who were held by armed “young” and “immature” university students whose youth did not inhibit them from carrying or using AK-47 assault rifles.
Like so many other fresh-faced young men of those other student groups, their campus activities paved the way for their subsequent careers.
One of these was Hossein Dehghan who became Iranian Minister of Defense. Another was Mohammad Ali Jafari who became the Revolutionary Guards Commander in Chief. Then there was Mohammad Bagheri who graduated to occupy the position of Chief of Staff of the Iranian Army.
Of course, the reaction of 1979’s Jimmy Carter administration had disturbing parallels to the 2024 Biden-Harris one. Both showed inaction and weakness. Perhaps that’s why so many members of Iran’s student revolutionary movement saw their future careers in provoking the “Great Satan.” It seemed determined not to notice their provocations and what they believed they saw in their enemy America, was cowardice.
The “Young and Immature” defense of people who have embraced and aligned themselves with evil is nonsense. They are old enough to threaten, intimidate and physically assault. They are also old enough to kill.
Columbia University’s CUAD (Columbia University Apartheid Divest) recently issued a statement calling for violence, “We support liberation by any means necessary including armed resistance.”
Organizations that monitor anti-Jewish hate report that anti-Israel summer “schools” for students mushroomed across the U.S. over the vacation period. It would not be at all alarmist, to assume that some of the attendees will take their anger, hatred and prejudice and seek to advance it by “any means necessary… including armed resistance.”
In case you have ever asked yourself, “What’s the perfect age of terrorism?” I would suggest it is around 18 to 23. History shows, that’s when “young and immature” minds are ripe for indoctrination, radicalization and a lifetime’s commitment to the worst forms of anti-Jewish hatred and violence.
