It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like 1938
If Jews do not feel safe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City, in the United States of America, where can they feel safe?Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Contagion of University Pro-Hamas Protests
NYC is home to some 1.3 million Jews, the most outside of Israel. Jewish men and women have thrived in The Big Apple for hundreds of years, enjoying religious freedom, prosperity, political power, and the affection and goodwill of millions of their gentile neighbors, colleagues, and loved ones.
Jewish culture is NYC culture. New Yorkers of all stripes schlep packages to the Post Office, kvetch when things go awry, and mock their friends when they act like putzes. Those of us who call NYC home need not be Jewish to speak and act this way. We live in New York. We pick it up.
However, things lately have been far from dancing the Horah.
Protests began after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre against Israel. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist group butchered some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages from Israel, America, and other nations. These demonstrations have devolved from opposition to Israel’s self-defense against these killers from the Gaza Strip, into support for Hamas, and now open hatred of Jews, per se.
At Columbia University, many pro-Hamas protesters are dressed in the black and white keffiyeh headdresses that are the Brownshirts of the Palestinazis. In recent days, they have waved Hamas flags, yelled Hamas slogans, and intimidated, threatened, and assaulted Jewish students, particularly those who wear yarmulkes and otherwise visually identify themselves as Jews.
Israeli and U.S. flags have been set ablaze.
“We are Hamas!” one protester yelled, just outside the campus gates, while banging a pot against a police barricade.
“You guys are all inbred,” one protester screamed at sophomore Jonathan Lederer and some 20 Jewish students singing songs of peace on campus Saturday, just before the pro-Hamas faction threw water in their faces and hurled projectiles at Lederer’s head and chest.
The anti-Semites also chanted: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” Also: “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”
“Go back to Poland!” another pro-Hamas thug screamed at a Jewish student. “We all know how things turned out the last time the Jews were in Poland,” he said on Fox & Friends yesterday morning.
“The environment at Columbia University is absolutely dreadful,” graduate student Xavier Westergaard said Monday on America Reports. Campus police may not do anything “when presented with issues ranging from ‘I’ve just been spat on,’ ‘I’ve just been yelled at,’ ‘I’ve just been kicked.’ People are yelling, ‘Jewish students die,’ ‘Jews go back to Poland.’ This is insane. It feels like anarchy, and we are not being supported by our university.”
The situation unfolding across college campuses in the United States is a complicated one, and bears reflection. I do not propose anything definitive, but I wanted to share a few thoughts.Seth Mandel: Dr. Snowflake and Mr. Intifada
A Very Brief History of the University:
The first question we must ask is “What are universities even for?” It is not an easy one. They began as institutions to train clerics in theology and philosophy, and evolved gradually into places for training gentleman scholars. Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th century did not live up to the model St. John Henry Newman describes in The Idea of a University, but they did a much better job than we do today. Over time, led by the Germans, universities became multiversities, where scholars ceased to attempt to build a comprehensive view of the world, instead locking themselves in siloed sub-fields.
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Next, American universities led the transition away from scholarship and towards professionalization. People started studying “business arts,” as if business were the same sort of activity as the pursuit of truth for its own sake. I have nothing against business. Making a good living for one’s family is noble. But insofar as it is an art, it is a servile one, not a liberal one. Accompanying professionalization was, paradoxically, radicalization. People who wanted to get on with life started studying to be accountants and engineers; radicals took over what remained of the liberal arts. This decay is best chronicled by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, a book I encourage you all to read.
Now we are witnessing the completion of the university’s unraveling. We hardly even produce professionals now, but activists who take a few Zoom classes on racialized communism and spend the rest of their time scrolling TikTok and indulging resentment. Middle managers may not be philosophers, but at least they do something useful. A degree in Queer Theory prepares you for no life beyond perpetual adolescent whining. The professors of the 60’s gave up the classics to focus on changing the world. Well, they succeeded. Moral formation has been replaced by sweet, glorious self-pity and the narcissistic pursuit of utopia. Beauty is something to be deconstructed by art and architecture students in ever-uglier buildings. And truth? In their minds, there is no such thing. Only power remains. How terrible it must be to see the whole of existence through culturally Marxist eyes! Terrible, but, at least, cognitively undemanding.
The radical cultural Marxists weakened universities and, by extension, society. They also made it easier for radical Islam to infiltrate universities, filling the moral vacuum the radicals created with their hazy relativism. This unholy combination of radicals and Islamists then preyed on the impressionable elite students entrusted to the universities. Long story short: We have future graduates of Columbia, NYU, Harvard, and beyond bleating Pro-Hamas slogans spoon-fed to them by hardened extremists. Students who fancy themselves freedom fighters shouting “Intifada and martyrdom.” In their obnoxious gullibility they fail to see what those slogans would mean if applied to their young lives. If you’re wondering, look at what happened to the Israeli students at the Nova festival on October 7th. So ignorant and out of touch are these Ivy League scholars that they do not know that the kids dancing at that ill-fated festival were young, liberal peaceniks.
Unhoused, unfed, and even temporarily unschooled, this freedom fighter would have her story told. Except, it wasn’t actually her story. In fact, Isra Omar and her peers were warned explicitly of the consequences of their Hamasville tent city, which they set up the same day Omar’s mother browbeat the president of the university from which Omar was threatened with suspension. It’s just that Omar genuinely could not imagine that she personally would face consequences—as if she were just any other kid. Her mother the congresswoman worked very hard to intimidate Columbia President Minouche Shafik on television before Congress, and yet she was given no special treatment.
Ilhan Omar’s fellow squadnik Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has her back. She worried about “violent” cops at Columbia (of which there have been exactly zero), demanding to know why “counterterror units” were on the scene. That is, she worried that people who pledged their sympathy to a terror organization and then called on that terror organization to come kill Jewish students on campus might be made to feel unsafe by the presence of antiterrorism police.
Back to that hearing: Shafik was asked why Columbia hired as a visiting professor Mohamed Abdou, who was repeatedly, vocally supportive of Hamas and their Oct. 7 slaughter of innocents. Shafik wavered on what Abdou was doing on campus at the moment, but she swore he’d never teach his “Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition” class at Columbia again. (Which didn’t answer the question of why he’d been hired in the first place.) This week while reporting on the protests at Columbia, Free Beacon reporter Jessica Costescu noticed Abdou hanging around the encampment and started filming the scene. She was approached by a student who told her to stop filming for “safety” reasons.
So you see, these students and their congresspersons aren’t heartless monsters. They care deeply—for themselves. They just want to feel safe to threaten some Jewish students and to physically assault others. And of course, if there are Jews who want to join them in pledging fealty to Hamas, they will advocate for their safety too. It’s a big tent city.