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I've Read Student Protesters' Manifestos. This Is Ugly Stuff. Clueless, Too.

(Washington Post) Max Boot - Today's pro-Palestinian protesters are their own worst enemies. The students are not succeeding in forcing universities to divest from Israel, and even if they were, it wouldn't have much impact on Israel's economy. Mainstream figures in both parties are right to denounce the demonstrators' anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish bias and their disruptions of campus life. The protesters are usually described as being opposed to the war in Gaza and in favor of Palestinian rights. In truth, the groups organizing these protests are opposed to the very existence of what they call the "Zionist project." A manifesto from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, endorsed by 94 student groups, makes no mention of all the violence perpetrated against Israel, including the horrifying Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and the Iranian drone and missile strike on April 13. While denouncing alleged Israeli atrocities, the manifesto has not one word of censure for Hamas or its brutal tactics, which include seizing hostages and perpetrating sexual violence, in addition to committing wholesale murder. Even though the protesters claim to care about Palestinian lives, they do not denounce Hamas for stealing international aid to build its tunnels and missiles or for using civilians as human shields. They call for Israel to stop fighting but not for Hamas to release its hostages. The protest movement's ideologues see Israel as merely an "imperial outpost in the Arab world," even though Jews have lived in the area since antiquity. The National Students for Justice in Palestine website denounces "bourgeois democracy" and showers praise on the fundamentalist Houthis ("Yemeni comrades stopping commerce in the Red Sea"). Although the students are failing to achieve their ostensible goals, they are getting to enjoy the thrill - and the media attention that comes with it - of revolutionary performance art. They have managed to shift attention from what's going on in Gaza to what's going on on U.S. college campuses. That's a victory for self-regarding student radicals - not for Palestinians.
2024-05-09 00:00:00
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