Academia Growing Barbarians
In the wake of the barbarous assault on Israelis, the antisemitism that has been percolating in plain sight in Muslim communities, academe, and Congress boiled over with open chants of “gas the Jews” and “f*ck the Jews” resounding in front of the Sydney Opera House.
As anecdotes and images of raped women, kidnapped children, mutilated elderly, and decapitated infants and toddlers accrued, Jew-haters—the contemporary incarnation of Nazis—chanted and ululated their murderous desire for the deaths of Jews.
Ryna Workman, the black “nonbinary” president of the New York University School of Law student bar association wrote this as around the world civilized humans were reeling from the carnage wreaked by Hamas:
This week, I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance.
Israel bears responsibility for Hamas mowing down young women and men at a music festival? Israel bears responsibility for the beheading of babies? Israel bears responsibility for Hamas terrorists displaying the dead, mangled, partially clothed body of a 23-year-old German woman and spitting on her?
The truth-averse Workman wasn’t done spewing her malevolent thoughts:
I condemn the violence of apartheid. I condemn the violence of settler colonialism. I condemn the violence of military occupation. I condemn the violence of dispossession and stolen homes. I condemn the violence of trapping thousands in an open-air prison. I condemn the violence of collective punishment. … I condemn the violence of obfuscating genocide as a “complex issue.” I condemn the violence in labeling oppressed peoples as “animals.” I condemn the violence in removing historical context.
Apartheid? In Gaza? Just as Palestinian Arabs wanted, all Jews left Gaza in 2005. Hamas—a U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organization—was elected by Palestinians in 2006 and took control of Gaza in 2007. Hamas wants no Jews in Gaza. Hamas wants no Jews in Israel. Hamas and its disciples want no Jews to exist. Hamas endorses the most extreme form of apartheid imaginable: the wholesale extermination of all Jews. That is genocide.
While Israel has been providing water and electricity to Palestinians living in Gaza, Hamas has stolen material sent by Israel for water distribution to use to make weapons and has built no infrastructure to ease conditions for Palestinians.
While Israel warns Palestinian civilians via text and “roof knock” bombs to flee areas that are military targets, Hamas uses the weakest, most vulnerable Palestinians as human shields and bursts into Jewish homes massacring entire civilian families from infants to grandmothers, and kidnapping children to use as bargaining chips—or publicly execute. Hamas savages are not animals. They’re worse. Animals can’t commit acts of evil.
What does Workman think the rape of Jewish women, kidnapping of Jewish children, and beheading of Jewish infants is if not the collective punishment and genocide of Jews?
The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee wrote a letter co-signed by over 30 antisemitic groups in which they laid blame for the massacre of Jewish women and infants solely at the feet of Israel:
We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.
Princeton University law professor Robert George tweeted a denunciation of this letter that includes a broader and justifiable condemnation of academia:
31--yes 31--Harvard organizations have declared that the murders, rapes, kidnappings, and other atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent people are in no way the fault of Hamas, but are rather entirely the fault of ... Israel. Something is deeply, deeply wrong in academia.
At Columbia University, another Ivy League school, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine argued the responsibility for the war and casualties “undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments”:
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine stands in full solidarity with Palestinian resistance against over 75 years of Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid. … Yesterday was an unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza. … As Columbia students, our classes regularly discuss the inevitability of resistance as part of the process of decolonization.
On Sunday, the national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine issued a “call to action” urging local chapters to “mobilize” for a national “Day of Resistance” on Thursday October 12, 2023 spurred by Hamas’ atrocities:
Catching the enemy completely by surprise, the Palestinian resistance has captured over a dozen settlements surrounding Gaza along with many occupation soldiers and military vehicles. This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.
Armed confrontation with defenseless sleeping infants.
This antisemitic cancer has been growing on college and university campuses for years. The Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis released a study in 2015 which found, among other things, that “One of the strongest predictors of perceiving a hostile climate toward Israel and Jews is the presence of an active Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group on campus.”
The La Fuerza Student Association of California State University advertised their training day for the Day of Resistance with a poster of a Hamas murderer paragliding into the Supernova music festival to help slaughter 260 innocents.
But don’t be naïve. Leftist lies are not solely the domain of student groups. Our secular colleges and universities are overrun with deceitful demagogues who self-identify as "educators" who use their power and positions to inculcate students with their views and call their propaganda “education.”
Fortunately, a few good men and women remain courageously standing in Ivory Tower muck to sift truth from lies, including Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell whose words deservedly circulate regularly on social media.
Victor Davis Hanson reminds those with ears to hear that “Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes—affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism—the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.”
And Thomas Sowell warns that “If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”
Barbarians will forever try to storm the gates of civilization. Right now, barbarians are being germinated and fertilized with manure in our hothouse towers of unlearning.