“We’ll make Columbia confront the blood on their hands!” Huh? I had to laugh at this BS- stupidity when a student supporting the terrorist group Hamas made this statement, an immature brat who was angry and looking for anything to justify their making it. First, these kids protest against Netanyahu’s fascist government—not a bad thing to do, per se—but then they turn that into an anti-Semitic movement, not popular with most people except that small group of far-left agitators. When that didn’t resonate either with the majority of Americans, they invented their divestment demands. What right do they think they have to demand that a private school change its financial plans? And they’re ignorant as well because I’ve never heard them mention any names of Israeli corporations that Columbia invests in.
Other schools, now even public ones like UCLA, are joining in the protests. Like many things these immature kids support, supporting Hamas and dissing Israel has become a popular fad; they’re all jumping on the bandwagon even as its burning. They and the outside agitators (some Congress people even) are screaming they’re “on the right side of history.” What damn BS! They took over the Columbia campus’s Hamilton Building that played a key role in the institution’s Vietnam War protests to make a symbolic expansion of their protest based on an incorrect association, and that was falling flat on its face. The Hamas-Israel War is not the Vietnam War:
One, our goverrnment waged the Vietnam War. While the Viet Cong might have had some characteristics of a terrorist group, they weren’t murderers and violent rapists like the members of Hamas. They also weren’t like other terrorists that have plagued the free world late in the 20th century and early in the 21st. And as bad as Netanyahu and his fascist friends are, Israel has a long ways to go to be as bad as Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China.
Two, campus protests during the Vietnam era didn’t involve religious persecution. Religion was never used as an excuse by the Viet Cong. (Columbia’s protestors might argue that Communism was the Viet Cong’s religion, though, because it’s theirs?) Columbia and others’ protests are obviously religious persecution, though, which can never be allowed in any true democracy; free speech rights can never go that far! What occurred, of course, is that these protestors realized they’d run out of justifications for the ugly undercurrent of anti-Semitism defining their protests, reducing their protests to mirror images of what occurred in 1930’s Germany. (Germany today would put the members of this neo-Nazi youth corps in jail because they know how bad anti-Semitism can become. They lived it!) What a few radicals have expressed in their rabid rants that’s basically summarized as “Death to Jews!” is often hidden below the surface in other haters’ diseased minds. That simmering hatred is still there. When people aren’t happy about and frustrated with their lives, they create scapegoats: Jews are often those who are blamed. And the protestors are now using this hatred politically just like the Nazis did.
Three, the protestors represent a small but vocal and violent minority whose tactics all too often reduce to pissing off everyone who dares to disagree with them. Normally the protests in favor of Hamas and against Israel would be ignored for this reason; but the protestors have become more vocal and violent as well as destructive, so the majority can’t ignore them: Standard protest techniques now say to demonize all who disagree. That did occur in Vietnam War protests—in particular, blaming veterans who managed to return alive only to be spit on and bullied, as if they were culpable instead of US leadership—and it ripped apart this nation. Is that what these current protestors want? Certainly that’s what the agitators on Columbia’s campus who aren’t students want!
The majority of Vietnam War protests were peaceful, the violence originating with authorities not knowing how to handle protests and leading to atrocities like the one at Kent State. Now the NYPD showed commedable restraint; Columbia’s administration showed commendable patience, although they waited too long to ask the NYPD to clear the quad and the building; and the protestors, led by outside agitators, showed reprehensible behavior that a very small group of radicals committed.
Maybe the Vietnam War protests also originated with a minority of Americans, but a much larger minority than the one involved in the Hamas-Israel War protests. And the majority of the Vietnam era protests were peaceful, non-violent, and less destructive to private property. I know because I participated in them. I held hands with my fellow students and our professors during noontime prayer protests; I marched in front of the White House in 1968, my middle fingers my only weapons raised against Nixon; and I suffered from the wrath of a Maryland sheriff department’s deputies as they filled my campus with tear gas. All of that participation occurred because I’d studied that war and concluded we had no business being in Vietnam. We the people! A hell of a lot of Americans! Our motivation wasn’t the racial hatred against Jews the Hamas supporters feel most mostly never dare to express.
These current protests were never about the nebulous and silly theoretical conundrum of deciding whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism either. Young people get too rapped up in their isms—socialism, communism, whatever-ism—when ideologies are the crutches of idiots that are easily debunked and shown to be worthless in a modern, secular world. These current protests are about whether silly, immature kids have any business supporting the terrorist group Hamas in their campaign to murder Jews and destroy Israel. Instead of working positively for a peaceful resolution that includes a two-state solution, the only possible settlement that will work, they negatively champion Hamas, a horrible group of butchers and rapists, encouraging them to kill more Jews! I cannot possibly support any of their craziness.
‘Nough said.