American Higher Education Has a Serious Hamas Problem
“This is plainly a moment in which they ought to reckon with their misconceived enthusiasm.”
The attacks on Israel by Hamas have caused thousands of left-wing academics to reveal themselves as supporters of Hamas. This problem in higher education is far worse than most Americans have ever realized.
From the National Association of Scholars:
Higher Education’s Coddling of Hamas
On Sunday, October 8, hundreds of supporters of Hamas’s terrorist invasion of southern Israel gathered in Times Square to celebrate the atrocities inflicted the day before. The Times Square celebrants gave substance to the oft-repeated slogan of American anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activists who vow to pursue their agenda “by any means necessary.” Those means clearly include wanton murder, rape, and kidnapping.
The scale and viciousness of the atrocities have shocked the civilized world—or at least the civilized part of the civilized world. An exception must be made for the many faculty members and students at American colleges and universities who have gone out of their way to justify and excuse Hamas’s crimes. Chief among these apologists are the campus supporters of the anti-Israel boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) movement, but they are far from alone. The campus diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement also has close ties to Jew-hatred and support for Palestinian terrorists.
This does not mean that every activist in BDS and DEI is delighted with Hamas’s surprise attack. It is no doubt awkward for people who have spent so much effort declaring their zeal for “peace” and “justice” and opposition to “oppression” to now see the behavior of one of the factions they have favored. This is plainly a moment in which they ought to reckon with their misconceived enthusiasm.
Some indeed will; others will fall silent for a while, waiting for the occasion to denounce Israel’s response to the attacks, which can then be twisted into an ex post facto extenuation for Hamas’s atrocities. Yet others unflinchingly endorse those atrocities. These include not only the celebrants in Times Square but also radicalized student groups across the country.
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Comments
I always wondered how the German people could come to support the Nazis, with all the terrible acts they perpetrated. As I watched the “Teach-In” supporting Hamas at the college here in town, I could see how Hamas manages to gloss over beheading babies and raping and killing grandmothers to make itself look like a civil rights group. It scared me to see how people could be manipulated, through their ignorance and political fervor, to support a group with genocidal goals.
I wasn’t surprised that many of the leaders of the rally were “Democratic Socialists” (an oxymoron, if I ever heard one!), since the Nazis were also Socialists (National Socialists). Socialism provides the powerful control of society that a dictator like Hitler needs to take over, and once he does, he can control the media to make his atrocities seem necessary to keep order.
I have always disregarded comments that invoke the Nazis, because they were invariably overblown. But in this case, the crowd of Hamas supporters, with their virulent antisemitism and some wearing swastika armbands, looked just like the crowds of Germans headed toward the Jewish shops in the Kristallnacht newsreels.
“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”
Thomas Sowell, PhD (1986) A CONFLICT OF VISIONS
As horrifying as some of the videos are, they must be shown, because otherwise too many in the rest of the world will continue to deny the reality of the murderous blind hatred manifested in the Hamas attack on Israel Saturday. Too many people want to avert their eyes, and a while later to sit by and let supporters of this obscene ideology of “de-colonization” get away with denying the evil demonstrated here. They want to return to their comfortable beliefs that everyone can be reasonable, there is virtue on all sides, and that there is no real evil in our world. This is a lie, and people’s noses must be rubbed into the truth until they realize, deep down, that there are some things that are not moral equivalents, and that some kinds of compromise represent the approval of evil.