Josh Hammer: Restore Order and Crush the Campus Jihadist Thugs
n his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington reached a stirring conclusion: "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."Meet the new Left, who think Hamas are good and that Swastikas are woke
Washington is rolling in his grave right now at Mount Vernon.
Jews are so "afraid" at Columbia University that an Orthodox campus rabbi recently urged students to "return home as soon as possible." The situation at many purportedly "elite" universities is dire, as jihadist mania supplants Black Lives Matter as the vogue, faux-moral cause rotting the minds of impressionable Gen-Zers.
Hamas' useful campus idiots are, at best, blithering morons. They do not realize that Zionism—the Jewish people's national liberation movement in their ancestral homeland—is the quintessence of the very "anticolonialism" and "indigenous people's rights" they claim to champion. They are clueless about international law and how the doctrine of uti possidetis juris establishes that Israel has the best legal claim to Judea and Samaria (i.e., the "West Bank"). They know nothing about warfighting; John Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at West Point, has demonstrated that Israel's combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza since the war began is "historically low for modern urban warfare."
Why let inconvenient facts get in the way of the thrill one feels for supporting a chic social justice movement ... er, genocidal terrorist organization?
The activism now upending Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and other morally bankrupt institutions is done in explicit support of a U.S. State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization. Keffiyeh-wearing mini-jihadis at Columbia recently chanted "We are Hamas!" and "Long live Hamas!" Other agitators at Columbia called for Tel Aviv—a liberal secular city that will remain in Israeli hands under any possible future settlement with the Palestinian-Arabs—to be "burned to the ground." At the University of Michigan (where my speech in November was shouted down by a pro-Hamas mob), student Hamasniks distributed a pamphlet that says "Freedom for Palestine means Death to America."
Give them credit for the candor.
It wasn’t long ago when the activist Left had a whole laundry list of systems and impersonal forces that it was battling against: sexism, homophobia, white supremacy, ableism – you name it. The Millenial Left may have nodded along to Bernie Sanders’ old labour-Left leanings. Still, they largely abandoned the class struggle of old for a struggle against boutique oppressions that were contingent but intersecting, hence the rise of so-called “intersectionality.”George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests
That’s the once-trendy academic philosophy that relies on a view of power relations of society, where advantages and disadvantages are filtered primarily through identities: race, gender, and sexual orientation. But intersectionality is old hat. It’s not revolutionary enough anymore now that it’s been mainstreamed and gotten absorbed and institutionalised by the blob of liberal media and corporate institutions – including, believe it or not, the Scottish government.
So, in the wake of the shock of the massive Israel-Hamas war since October 7 and a lack of purpose after the political failures of Left-wing populism – the Western Left has found a way to get its groove back by simplifying yet expanding its moral framework.
Goodbye, intersectionality – hello, “It’s All One Thingism.”
In this nebulous new cosmology, Palestinians – even Hamas themselves – aren’t just engaged in a specific geopolitical fight over territory and resources. No, they’re the tip of the spear of a perceived collective liberation against the West, the Global North, “colonisers,” whatever you want to call the Bad Guys. It’s a magical world in which all politics and world affairs once seen through intersectionality’s colourful prism have been flattened into (somewhat ironically for self-proclaimed atheists) a more Biblical view of the world: black-and-white, good and evil.
“Palestine is every single issue in one issue,” wrote Scarlett Rabe, a singer-songwriter who describes herself as an anti-racist mother and an abolition feminist/womanist, in a viral tweet in February. “It’s reproductive justice. It’s social justice. It’s climate crisis… It’s not just one issue; it’s all the issues in one.”
All One Thingism explains why a group of a few hundred masked protestors who chanted “Death to America” and “Hands off Iran” this week also employed the relatively meaningless slogan “From Chicago to Palestine.” Or that another viral post on Instagram by a person wearing a “Fatties for a Free Palestine” T-shirt insisted that “Palestinian solidarity is not a niche issue. Fat liberation and Palestinian liberation go hand in hand.”
George Soros and his hard-left acolytes are paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country.
The protests, which began when students took over Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus lawn last week, have mushroomed nationwide.
Copycat tent cities have been set up at colleges including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia — all of them organized by branches of the Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — and at some, students have clashed with police.
The SJP parent organization has been funded by a network of nonprofits ultimately funded by, among others, Soros, the billionaire left-wing investor.
At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are “fellows” of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).
USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based “fellows” in return for spending eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.”
They are trained to “rise up, to revolution.”
The radical group received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.
It has three “fellows” who have been major figures in the nationwide protest movement.
Nidaa Lafi, a former president of the University of Texas Students for Justice in Palestine, was seen at an encampment at UT Dallas Wednesday making a speech demanding an end to the war in Gaza.
Lafi, a former legislative intern for the late Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, graduated from the school last year with a degree in global business and is now a law student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
In January, she was detained for blocking the route of President Biden’s motorcade after he arrived in Dallas for the funeral of Johnson, her former boss.
At Yale, USCPR’s fellow Craig Birckhead-Morton was arrested Monday and charged with first-degree trespassing when SJP’s branch, Yalies4Palestine, occupied the school’s Beinecke Plaza, the Yale Daily News reported.
Birckhead-Morton — also a former intern for a Democrat, Maryland rep John Sarbanes — emerged from custody to address a sit-in blocking traffic in New Haven.
The most high-profile of the fellows is Berkeley’s Malak Afaneh, co-president of the Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine.
She has been a serial speaker at an anti-Israel protest on the campus this week — which came after she first shot to prominence by hijacking a dinner at the law school dean’s home to shout anti-Israel slogans, then accused the dean’s wife of assaulting her when she asked the radical to leave.