When the news of the attacks was first released, Saree Makdisi, a professor at UCLA, tweeted:
This one tweet shows how truly bad academia is today.
As Makdisi knows, these regular Israeli airstrikes are meant to disrupt the smuggling of advanced Iranian weapons to the Hezbollah terror group that control the southern part of the country. Hezbollah is a Shiite fundamentalist group. This American born professor of Lebanese and Palestinian ancestry, who teaches English literature, is expressing a preference of an Islamist group over a liberal, Westernized nation like Israel.
The only way that this is remotely possible is if Makdisi has an irrational hate of Israel which we see so much of, a hate that is psychologically identical to traditional antisemitism.
Secondly, Makdisi is not only defending Hezbollah's regional ambitions, but also he's also defending the ruthless, murderous regime of Syria. It isn't fashionable to defend Assad, but when the choice is to be on the side of Assad or Israel, for these moral midgets, there is no contest.
Thirdly, Makdisi seems to be basing his argument on a bizarre sense of "fairness." To him and those like him, Israel's technological edge is simply unfair. Her sworn enemies that want to destroy her should have equivalent weapons, for free, to even the playing field. Of course, such horrendous logic would result in endless, far more bloody wars. This is an immoral position. By Makdisi's logic, we should give nuclear weapons to every nation.
Of course, his sense of fairness is only for Israel's enemies to have equivalent weapons as the IDF.
Fourthly, the tweet is not even true. Syria receives the latest air defense systems from Russia. This is in fact why Israel usually shoots missiles from Lebanese airspace - because the Syrian weapons are very advanced, and in no way are they "1970s defense systems."
And finally, Israel upgrades the weapons it receives using its own expertise, so it is hardly relying only on US and European technology as Makdisi implies.
That is a lot of bias, anti-Western thinking and falsehood in a 34-word tweet.
And this is the state of academia today where such a mindset is celebrated. Facts are disparaged, it's trendy to support those who would destroy your nation (and university) if they could, and antisemitic thinking can be justified by calling it anti-Zionism.