Terrorism In The Academy
Over the past six weeks, Hamas has shown the world what “intifada” means: mass murder, beheading children, gang rape, taking hostage babies, women, and the elderly (#TheWestIsNext). How have the hallowed hall of academia responded?… You may not believe it.
At Harvard, dozens of student groups signed onto a letter from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) on Oct. 7 — the day Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel — holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” This judgement was the consensus of a coalition of more than 30 left-wing student groups at Harvard. Amazingly, it has taken Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, three tries (and counting) to issue a statement distancing the administration from the letter and making it clear that the university condemns the terrorist attacks. Worse, Ms. Gay acted only after being pressured to do so by former Harvard president Larry Summers and some of the school’s biggest donors.
University of Pennsylvania president M. Elizabeth Magill likewise needed multiple attempts to issue a forceful statement condemning the terror attacks. She, too, found her moral compass only after megadonors to Penn said they were closing their checkbooks and urging other philanthropists to do the same. In an updated statement following the backlash, Magill finally condemned Hamas, and emphasized the University’s “position on anti-Semitism,” the Daily Mail reported. “She referred to the violence from Hamas as a ‘terrorist assault,’ a change from her initial statement.” Note, however, that, recently, the University of Pennsylvania had hosted the first-ever in-person “Palestine Writes Festival,” a gathering of anti-Israel ideologues.
In New York, the president of NYU’s Student Bar Association wrote that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” It’s quite ironic, isn’t it, that leftists think that blaming Israel will, somehow, exonerate Hamas? You would think that it’d be apparent to students matriculating in elite “higher education,” that all the blaming of Israel in the world will not change the fact that, on October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists INVADED Israel and tortured and murdered innocent NON-COMBATANTS. No amount of B.S. will change that.
At a pro a Palestinian demonstration, students at Princeton shouted demands to “globalize the intifada” and “there is only one solution: intifada revolution!”
They were very close to the words “final solution,”weren’t they? Where have we heard those words before?
So, it’s shocking to contemplate that all of this blame from many top institutions of higher learning was heaped upon Israel… after IT was attacked! And, this anti Israel animus is not exactly new. Harvard University, for example, has a long history of promoting Islamism and normalizing anti-Israel sentiments. In 2005, it accepted a $20 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal. And, then, when bin-Talal gave another $20 million to Georgetown University, Georgetown quickly renamed its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding to the “Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.”
In 2020 Brown University endowed America’s first-ever chair in Palestinian studies. It named the chair after Palestinian poet and PLO member Mahmoud Darwish and gave the chair to Beshara Doumani, the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor of Modern Middle East History who would go on to launch the “decolonization”-focused New Directions in Palestinian Studies (NDPS). One year later, Doumani took a leave of absence to become the president of Birzeit University in Ramallah.
So, in the groves of the Academy, Hamas has been garnering much support and Israel much opprobrium. How could this come about? The answer, however, is not hard to discern, as support for Islamic causes in general and Hamas in particular is entirely leftist in origin. As such, it goes all the way back to the most loathsome provocateur and antisemite of all time: Karl Marx (Despite being of Jewish extraction, Marx was, in fact, an antisemite!). But the pedigree here is not the classic one. The current leftist movement is not “your father’s Marxism.” It has a new twist. As noted by A.J. Caschetta of The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (November 1, 2023, www.meforum.com):
“Marxism suffered a global setback with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it has never gone out of fashion in academia. The latest permutation, called “intersectionality,” divides all humans into camps based on race, ethnicity, and group history and then labels them either “oppressors” or “oppressed.” Black and brown skin, homosexuality, and disabilities make some groups oppressed peoples, whereas white skin, heterosexuality, and an absence of disabilities make others oppressors. Israel is intersectionally doomed to be the “oppressor.” Today’s far left accuses Israel of ‘white supremacism.’”
So, there you have it. By modern Marxist “intersectionality” standards, Israel meets every criteria for condemnation as oppressor and the Palestinians, contrawise, meet every criterion for support as the oppressed.
So, among significant percentages of both American University faculty and University students, support for a terrorist entity that murders and tortures innocent civilians, rapes women, cuts the heads off babies, uses human shields, squanders the “humanitarian” largess given them by the United States, and, most distressingly, have vowed to NEVER CHANGE their ways, is wide spread. And these University people are the same ones that get upset IF YOU REFER TO SOMEONE USING WRONG PRONOUNS!