Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
From Italian school site ilsole24ore:
A score of pro-Pal students, affiliated to left-wing university collectives, interrupted a lecture at the political science department of the University of Pisa this morning. And in a few moments what was supposed to be little more than a demonstration action for Gaza became a physical assault on a lecturer who had tried to stop the demonstrators. 'They accuse me of being Zionist,' says Rino Casella, associate professor of comparative constitutional law, 'just because I have always said that I am not pro-Pal. 'None of the more than 200 students who were attending my lecture,' added the lecturer who filed a complaint, 'sympathised with these people and when one student tried to snatch the Palestinian flag from their hands the beating started, I shielded him but both the boy and I suffered kicks and punches. At the emergency room they gave a report of seven days'.Solidarity with the lecturer was immediately expressed by Rector Riccardo Zucchi, who also vindicated "the goodness of the choices made in recent months by the University, which has decided to say no to any scientific research with military purposes, and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, victims of something that closely resembles ethnic cleansing: having said this, any form of violence is unacceptable and it is also violence to interrupt a lesson, even more so when it leads to physical aggression".
It reflects a deeper pattern: violence against Israel and its supporters does not discredit the movement. Instead, it legitimizes it.
And it all started in the 1970s.
Palestinian Arab terrorists pioneered the use of hijackings and spectacular acts of violence to force themselves onto the world stage. Simultaneously, Arab states wielded the oil weapon, threatening embargoes against countries that appeared too sympathetic to Israel.
After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the oil embargo sent Western economies into crisis. Many governments shifted policy to appease Arab states. This was presented as support for “justice” and “self-determination,” but the underlying driver was fear of economic collapse.
Groups like the PFLP and Black September hijacked planes and kidnapped diplomats. Nations that accommodated the PLO could pretend they were embracing liberation movements, when in reality they were buying protection.
In 1974, Yasser Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly with a gun holster at his side. The PLO was not treated as a terrorist gang and pariah but as a legitimate political player. . Governments justified this as recognizing a national struggle, but the timing showed the leverage of terror and oil.
What began as fear-driven accommodation was converted into a moral narrative. The violence worked not only materially but discursively: it created the story of Palestinianism as a righteous cause that the world must endorse.
The dynamic is simple but powerful. Nobody wants to admit that they bend to violence out of fear.. Individuals and institutions prefer to present themselves as moral actors rather than cowards. So when intimidation works, it is re-framed as principle: We are not yielding because we’re afraid of being attacked. We are standing with the oppressed. This alibi transforms submission into virtue.
That is what happened in Pisa. A professor was beaten, yet still felt compelled to emphatically deny being a Zionist. The rector condemned violence, but paired that condemnation with a sweeping accusation against Israel.
The real message: we oppose the method, but not the ideology behind it.
The immediate effect of the violence was intimidation. The lasting effect was narrative capture. By condemning violence while embracing its underlying cause, the institution repeated the old pattern: fear masked as virtue.
The result is that anti-Zionism becomes ever more entrenched as moral common sense, while Zionism itself is treated as a stigma. Violence legitimizes the ideology rather than discrediting it.
In fact, the rector's comments highlighted a hypocrisy so common that it is unnoticed. Anti-Israel violence, even a classroom beating, does not delegitimize the movement. But Israel’s war against Hamas - fought under impossible conditions imposed by the world, with more concern over civilians than any army in history in remotely comparable circumstances - is reflexively assumed to be ethnic cleansing. Violence in the name of Palestine is treated as a regrettable tactic, while Israeli self-defense is treated as a crime.
The Pisa incident is not just about campus disorder. It is a reminder of how propaganda works: the threat of violence creates compliance, and compliance is then laundered into ethics. Even though Italian politicians are roundly condemning the incident, they are saying they are on the same side as the lawbreakers.
Until societies learn to name this mechanism honestly - to distinguish between genuine solidarity and fear dressed up as principle - the cycle will continue, and anti-Zionism will go on winning twice: first through intimidation, and then through the moral respectability that intimidation creates.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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