When even far-left MSNBC is willing to call out the campus insanity spreading like a plague across the land, we may have reached a point of no return in the leftists’ depraved obsession with one of the most barbarous movements of modern times. These radicals are becoming ever more violent in defending and uplifting a proudly terrorist organization, Hamas, and its stated goal of wiping Jews off the face of the earth. Indeed, when students (and likely a host of masked outside provocateurs) stormed and took over Columbia University’s administration building on April 30, Mika Brzezinski, co-host of an MSNBC morning show, observed that the increasingly chilling anti-Semitic protests at the once-prestigious university have now moved “into the realm of violence” and “look like Jan. 6.”
That is about as bad as it gets for leftists with little else to offer beyond purveying fear of another 1/6/21. How will they continue to effectively demonize Donald Trump for the Capitol riot when they cannot control violent agitators associated with their own party? Democrats’ attempts to distance themselves from the protests are falling on the deaf ears of those who have become accustomed to Joe Biden-era radicalism. Thus, this president is experiencing the worst of both worlds: He is blamed for laying the groundwork for revolt with his embrace of the most extreme elements of his party and yet is subject to chants of “Genocide Joe” from leftist protesters expecting him to call for a permanent ceasefire and renounce his support of Israel.
The Democrats already got a pass for their tacit or outright support of riots across the nation following the George Floyd affair in 2020. At that point, people were still trying to cope with a pandemic, the likes of which we had never before witnessed, and so the Democrats’ radical activity and ability to change the subject to Trump allowed them to land the presidency. This time around, it is hard to envision how they can manage to sidestep culpability for the upheaval in academia.
Columbia — Tip of a Long-Forming Iceberg
Columbia is merely Exhibit A in the growing list of verbally or physically violent anti-Semitic protests clearly being centrally orchestrated, with George Soros topping the list of suspects despite his own Jewish heritage. UCLA canceled classes on May 1 following another violent protest that rocked the campus. Northwestern University gave in to the demands of radicals linked to the movement called BDS, meaning Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel, by placing anti-Israel activists on its advisory committee on university investments, among other concessions. More than 1,000 people have been arrested as no fewer than 51 colleges and universities, according to CampusSafety.com, have experienced protests and encampments, most of them scaring the tar out of Jewish students wanting simply to move freely about the campus and attend class.
It is undeniable that the protests and riots of 1968 represented ground zero for transforming academia into a cauldron of first liberal, then socialist, then Marxist indoctrination. Nevertheless, no matter your view of the student riots of the 1960s, with Columbia famously at the center of the most radical activity, those protests were against an explosively controversial war in which the United States was directly engaged. The protesters, already enraged at the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were violently opposed to the escalating conflict in Vietnam, where thousands of young Americans paid the ultimate price or had their lives inalterably damaged by physical and mental injury. It was a humiliating and transformative chapter in American history, a conflict that radicalized the young and brought down a president who had won a landslide victory just four years earlier.
In stark contrast, the United States has not even participated in the Israel-Hamas war, even after no fewer than 32 Americans were slaughtered by Hamas on Oct. 7, and at least 10 US citizens were taken hostage. There can be no moral ambivalence about which side is responsible for the war, nor about the peril faced by a rock-solid ally surrounded by countries committed to its annihilation. And yet, there is zero sympathy among the protesters for the hostages or Americans murdered in cold blood, but instead a contempt for their plight. Living in a dream world, they have somehow turned the perpetrators of mass murder into the victims. Their utter nihilism continues to amaze.
Envy is one of the seven deadly sins and for good reason. Those poisoned by it are destined for lives of misery — for themselves and all whom they touch. Israel is an exceptionally prosperous nation with no ambition beyond its own borders. But most all of the states surrounding it, other than Egypt and a precious few brought into Trump’s Abraham Accords, are living miserable lives under brutal authoritarian rulers devoting extraordinary resources to the marginalization and ultimate destruction of the Israeli state and all Jews who inhabit it.
It is one thing to go to the mat for a widely unpopular and disastrously executed war on the other side of the world that cost some 50,000 American lives and resulted in the first defeat in American history. It is quite another to militantly protest on behalf of a movement defined by its savagery and contempt for fundamental Western values like free speech, a free press, and equal rights for women. Like Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, Biden has lost control of a war and may soon experience what it feels like to be abandoned by the very people who, as in 2020, he had counted as supporters.
