Removing rank superstition from the American campus, starting with violent Palestine liberation theology, will surely require a measure of political will. Politicians must take risks. Luckily for America, activists from inside and outside the campus have elected to wage wars on the American campus this week, providing fresh impetus for political action.
The battles are still unfolding, yet the political trend lines are clear. Israel will destroy Hamas in Rafah, Americans are okay with that, and these acts of agitation only steel public resolve to withstand the imminent grim conclusion in Gaza. Rather than stopping a war Hamas brought on themselves, campus protests have destroyed trust and confidence in the American university. Tenured professors who stand in solidarity with students smashing windows and defacing buildings have nothing to say to anyone ever again about 6 January protesters at the capitol, or imminent threats to democracy on the ballot, or incipient fascism. They represent a view from nowhere.
Americans are increasingly fed up with ivory towers of superstition. They are exhausted with activist academics getting paid to tout pseudoscience in circular citations, producing the appearance of consensus through plagiarism. There will never be a better time than the present to reduce the pernicious effects of elite overproduction and the imposition of unfalsifiable luxury beliefs on broader socety by the academy. Consequences must now ensue.
Recalling how we got here, Gary Wexler, a journalist who met Palestinian organizer Ameer Makhoul 25 years ago, relates the harrowing tale of that interview. Supposedly a human rights organizer, Makhoul tried to menace Wexler in front of an eyewitness. This attempted intimidation came with a villain’s confession, Wexler writes, for Makhoul seemed to control everyone that Wexler talked to as a nonprofit researcher.
“Just like you were a Zionist campus activist, we will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.”
He stood again this time, right over me. “You wonder how we will make this happen, how we will pay for this? Not with the money from your liberal Jewish organizations who are now funding us. But from the European Union, Arab and Muslim governments, wealthy Arab people and their organizations. Eventually, we will not take another dollar from the Jews.”
Watch any YouTuber attempting street interviews with students at, say, Fordham University, or any lamestream liberal media reporter, and you will see lots of kids declining to explain what, exactly, they are protesting. Young people defer to spokespeople as if they have been discouraged from giving their own opinions. Specific demands are fuzzy, for the students are not in charge of the negotiations with college administration and barely understand what they are protesting about. They are useful idiots and foot soldiers. As with the network Ameer Makhoul built, this inchoate radicalism has a centralized structure that involves faculty and administration in coordination with professional activists.
“Palestine” must now be examined as a political project on the American campus, its funding mechanisms identified and reduced with the alacrity of wartime sanctions, its ideological hold on the profession sundered, suddenly.
Anti-Israel activism invariably defaults to genocidal anti-Semitism and terrorism apologetics at some point. Even when it wears a moniker like “disinvestment” or “anti-Zionism,” anti-Israel activism stands alone on the American campus as a form of activism calling for the destruction of a foreign state. Students have supported Ukraine without noisily organizing for the destruction of the Russian settler colonialist state, for example.
However, efforts to label speech “anti-Semitic” in law will fail on free speech grounds in the United States. What to do?
The first answer is absurdly simple, though indirect. States and the federal government must restore pre-Covid public masking bans, and these criminal bans must be enforced on campus with immediate effect. Among the “brutal” (read: effective) tactics used by NYPD last week was to remove the Covid-era masks from the people they arrested, so that their faces were captured on camera. Speech is free, but not without consequences, say the mandarins of cancel culture. Well, let them reap what they have sown, then. Arrest people for wearing masks on campus.
My second answer is that all unreasonable student demands should be ignored. Negotiations that remove encampments are one thing. Institutions which display weakness after shuttering an encampment are going to regret it later. Boards that give in to special pleading, such as scholarships for Palestinian students, will only fail the judicial test of equal protection.
Federal resources will be necessary in places where university presidents have no real police protection. Last week, Portland State University’s president capitulated to an anarchist mob, which thanked PSU by assaulting students and destroying the library. Police finally broke into the building, but let most of the Antifa members escape instead of cordoning them off. Impunity will only lead to repetition and escalation. Exemplary punishment and consequences will deter future problems.
Stop coddling this generation. Columbia Law Review student editors want free passing grades for the semester because the “violence we witnessed [Wednesday] night has irrevocably shaken many of us.” Said violence, which consisted of police forcing their way into a building, arresting protesters, and removing their masks, has left the poor dears “unable to focus and highly emotional during this tumultuous time.” These would-be jurists are unfit to defend criminal clients. Any BigLaw firm that hires someone so fragile should expect low performance. Any law school which gives in to such demands is devaluing its own brand.
My modest proposal is to simply shut down any campus where an encampment springs up, from now on, and expel anyone arrested inside them. Anyone involved in any encampment that damages or defaces college property should have to pay for the repair or cleanup of buildings and infrastructure. All faculty identified as leading students and conspiring with outsiders in protests that result in violence and/or property damage should face discipline, including loss of tenure. Don’t like it? Cry me a river, professor. Cry me a river to the sea.
As an historical matter, the campus protests are not going to save Hamas, or change anything in the Middle East for the better. Such protests never do stop the wars they oppose or contribute to the establishment of actual peace. Ineffective and counterproductive organizing are simply the wartime tradition of the liberal arts professoriate in “postwar” America and Palestine long ago became a kind of sacred totem for this type of academic.
When the protests against the pending invasion of Iraq began in 2003, Annie (a pseudonym) wanted to stop the war from happening, “but we failed. And I place part of the blame on the activists I met, professors” at her university campus, Annie tells me. Even then, “this horrible ideology in a proto form about Palestine was already strong.”
Annie has graciously allowed me to share her story. She was inspired to contact me after I wrote last week about the political opportunity to defund on-campus hate speech and restore academic freedom across America. The cult of Palestine has always been a self-defeating, ideologically prescriptive bunch, as Annie saw for herself.
“When I was trying to work with these leftist professors (who themselves lived in cushy houses) to organize rallies and message etc about preventing a war in Iraq, I slowly learned that all they wanted to drone on and on about was Palestine,” Annie says. “It frustrated me because it was ineffective, and yet I didn't have the power — they did. They were the leaders.”
They seemed to take pride in the rallies having crap sound systems and a cultural vibe that was exclusive, not inclusive. My goal was actually to stop the invasion. I wanted to produce good and clear messages. I wanted to involve the local churches, because every major denomination was against the war. To me it was a no brainer. I wasn't religious, but I wanted to build bridges. I even got a pastor from my mother's church to come to a rally, but it was just so culturally weird for him. I wanted to build coalitions for this ONE CAUSE that most Americans agreed was bad. But me and others like me were shouted down. These professors insisted over and over and over that "the Palestinian cause" was connected to this bad idea of invading Iraq. It's all connected, they said.
“I was politically naive, and I thought because they were professors, they must know something.” Annie explains. “They are themselves partly to blame for the result that we could not join forces with other Americans to make our voices heard, because they insisted on this ideological purity.”
“These professors were Marxists,” she adds. The anti-Israel message was central to their efforts at ‘education’ — ideological programming which unfortunately worked on Annie for a while. It was “the first time I got the idea that creating the state of Israel after WWII was a heinous idea, and that ‘indigenous’ people's land was taken from them by force and ‘colonized’ by the Jews,” Annie recalls.
The reactions of those same professors to the death of Rachel Corrie, run over by a bulldozer on the day that the invasion of Iraq began, started to change Annie’s perception of the academy. All these years later, the scales have entirely fallen from her eyes.
“I no longer see [Corrie] as a brave and brilliant martyr. I now think that this bright, caring young woman went and stood before a bulldozer because the professors directed her to use her ‘whiteness’ as a shield,” she explains. “This is long before Ibram Kendi, so before the word ‘antiracist’ was in existence, or the reverse hierarchy of races and oppressed people was mainstream in the culture.” Death by devotion to DEI.
Annie does not blame Corrie, who had nothing but “the desire to do good in her heart. She was peacefully resisting. But now I wonder about the group that she was working with, maybe their ideology was rooted in antisemitism and terrorism. I just don't know,” Annie says.
Today, she worries for a close friend living near the scene of the 7 October atrocities. “The people on her kibbutz, only 2 km from the others where so many of their friends were slaughtered, raped, and kidnapped, were non-religious Jews.” Southern Israel had been known as a place where peace and justice activists settle. “They were the ones protesting Bibi's corruption. They were the ones working hardest for a two-state solution, trying to help the Palestinians for decades by hiring them, driving them to hospitals in Israel. They were believers in peace” going decades back, she explains, “and now they are the ones who trudge to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv weekly demanding that they bring the hostages home.”
“I fear for my friend's safety, and I mourn with her the destruction of her peace on every level of her life.”
Something like this happened during my first undergraduate experience. In 1991, as in 2003, tenured professors of intellectual underwater basket-weaving were unduly convinced that enough agitation from angry flower power children could stop the next war, because Vietnam. They failed each time, in 1991 and 2003, muttering about Israel as they failed.
Years later, I understood they were ‘manifesting’. Tear down the Israeli state, too many members of the American academy professed to me, and there would be peace in the Middle East. Believe it with enough conviction and it would manifest. Clap for the Palestine Tinkerbell hard enough, and it would live.
Never mind the pogrom from the river to the sea, implied or flatly stated in their calls to smash the Israeli Apartheid state. The horror would be worthwhile. Peace in the Middle East would be peace on earth, and also the end of imperialism, and also the end of the state itself as a mode of oppression. Heaven on earth, basically, but with millions of slaughtered Jews implied, wink wink. Worth it! White capitalists deserved the fate of Crusaders, anyway. “No blood for oil,” because oil was the enemy of the planet, and therefore so was Israel.
Gary Wexler encountered a major figure in this world of anti-Israel activism during the heady days of the Oslo Accords, before the terms “decolonization” and “settler colonialism” became ubiquitous. Ameer Makhoul, the Palestinian organizer who menaced Wexler, was also a Hezbollah spy who ended up spending nine years in prison. His Union of Arab Community Based Associations, or ITTIJAH, started in the tearful disappointment of the First Gulf War, when Palestinian hopes that Saddam Hussein would smash the Israeli state were themselves smashed to bits. Like Columbia University professor Edward Said, Makhoul was a revisionist who refused to give up on the dream of destroying Israel. They were not looking for a peaceful two-state solution.
Someone is always willing to pay for this form of “resistance.” Qatar, which became a close ally of the United States during the “global war on terror,” surpassed Saudi Arabia as the most prominent state funder of anti-Israel organizing during the overlong “war on terror” that Annie protested. This continuum of violent revisionism must be disrupted. The Biden administration has shown itself capable of standing on their hind legs — “Qatar is prepared to accept a request from the US for it to expel Hamas’s leaders from Doha and is anticipating one could be made soon,” the Times of Israel reports — so perhaps there is hope that the Qataris can be persuaded to turn off the funding pipeline for campus hate speech, too. State level diplomatic means are potentially more effective than legislation here, in the short term.
Longer-term, process may its own best legislative punishment. Putting university leadership under the congressional spotlight is easier than defining “anti-Semitism” in law. Students and faculty should remain free to speak for the destruction of the Israeli state, but they should not expect immunity from consequences. American taxpayers should not be required to subsidize anti-American speech, or speech calling for the genocidal destruction of some other nation-state, in any institution which receives public funding. No other country on the planet has crowds of protesters on American campuses calling for its destruction. Only Israel, the one Jewish state on earth, receives this kind of abuse. Perhaps when campuses need is more education, which is to say more speech, about the history of Israel and Palestinian violence.
Free speech is clearly making a comeback in response to these events. Perhaps the most encouraging fact about these protests is that so many annoyed and harassed students have pushed back against the encampments. If the campus is to be a laboratory for testing the limits of free speech, so be it. Counter-demonstrators erected a huge screen to show the UCLA encampment a loop of Hamas social media videos displaying their terrorism, rapine, and murder on 7 October. Students ate bananas within sight of that encampment to troll activists inside who complained of food allergies. Demanding gluten-free bread and vegan options be delivered to them, the UCLA encampment began to fortify its boundaries against bananas, as though they were terrorist bombs being smuggled over a border. As if possessed by some Chthonic deity, these middle class radicals have no idea what they look like to outsiders.
Violence had escalated for days on the American campus, but something seemed to snap this week. Overnight Tuesday evening, a siege developed at the UCLA campus. Students armed with sticks and pepper spray started tearing at the encampment walls, playing Hebrew music with PA systems, and setting off fireworks over the encampment. Police finally moved in after 2:30 AM Wednesday with a crowd of students chanting U-S-A! U-S-A! in support. Police withdrew, however, finally returning again early Thursday morning to make arrests and close down the encampment. The police union is now saying that all this furtive failure, which allowed the violence to escalate, was the result of “campus leadership, not law enforcement.”
Moving more aggressively on Wednesday morning, New York Mayor Eric Adams sent police “to allow Columbia University to remove those who have turned a peaceful protest into a place where antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes were pervasive.” Over one hundred people, half of them reputedly not students, were arrested and charged. Adams vowed to oppose the “professionals at radicalising our children.” NYPD officers took down the Palestinian flag and restored the US flag (see above). This symbolic moment inspired fights over flagpoles around sympathy encampments that sprung up the next day. At George Washington University, a group consisting of several activists and possibly some students replaced the American flag with a Palestinian flag, then tied themselves to the pole in an effort to prevent its removal. Whoever told them that this stunt would win American hearts and minds to the cause of Palestine was a liar.
Contrary to activist cries that all of their on-campus enemies are fascist “Proud Boys,” Jews seem to be at the forefront of counter-protest, certainly at UCLA, while the protesters themselves seem largely white and well-off. Ani Wilcenski also notes that the leadership of the resistance to “the resistance” at Sun Belt campuses like Arizona State University has come from fraternities. This should not surprise anyone, for “at elite schools where the encampments have been most persistent, fraternities have faced university-driven witch hunts aimed at eliminating their presence on campuses” for years, Wilcenski writes. They are, after all, toxic white boys.
The anti-frat crusade, which features a questionable judicial process led by antagonistic university bureaucrats hired to promote DEI initiatives, is troubling enough before you consider its glaring hypocrisy in the face of the ongoing protests. Universities that now treat the smallest fraternity infractions as grounds for immediate and sometimes harsh limitation—including accidentally setting off smoke alarms with a candle to turning in party permit applications an hour late—are now, very publicly, allowing disruptive and even aggressive encampments to persist despite their deliberate violations of policy, making the school’s double standards for the application of rules and the distribution of consequences abundantly clear.
Strangling campus life to make it more political has antagonized the normies on campus for almost a decade, and now they have had enough. Camp organizers have antagonized the majority of students on purpose this spring until they have had enough. Making people fed up is the primary achievement of these protests. Administrators are increasingly fed up with their faculty leading the protests and lining up as human shields to protect encampments that mostly seem to be populated by professional agitators rather than students. People see the mess left behind by protesters, and see who is cleaning up the campus after the protesters are evicted, and feel fed up with activism.
Thus the whining about “fascist mobs” is a joke. The protesters know that they do not represent a majority of the student body. Free speech has allowed them to marginalize themselves, hooray for free speech.
Speech is not magic. Protest is not inherently a form of empowerment. The American professoriate convinced itself that youth protest worked a spell on American policy sometime around 1970, forcing the military-industrial complex to withdraw from South Vietnam through sheer, radical righteousness. This is magical thinking. Public pressure was not responsible for Richard Nixon, of all human beings, nor Henry Kissinger, of all inhuman beings, suddenly having a change of heart about killing communists. The war in Vietnam remained popular with polling majorities right to the end of American involvement.
In reality, somewhere between 500,000 and one million communists died in the Indonesian genocide of 1966-67. The PKI, or Indonesian communist party, first annoyed and provoked the middle class for years, then launched an underprepared military coup, sparking mass violence and repression. Most of Indonesia’s academics, artists, and activists died — first by lynch mob, then in batches taken from the prisons, using death squads armed with machetes, swords, clubs, bullets, and garrottes. Without a ‘left’ left, political disorder disappeared. Magazine covers in the US praised Suharto for resolving the “crisis” in Indonesia.
Withdrawing American forces from Vietnam — peace — thus required the blood of millions. Indonesian mass murder made it possible for Kissinger and Nixon to stop worrying about dominoes in Southeast Asia and contemplate withdrawal of military forces from the region; peace protests had nothing to do with it. Suharto’s counter-revolutionary politicide was such a success that the CIA wrote a report explaining how to emulate Indonesia’s approach. Anti-communist forces in South America used the phrase “Jakarta is coming” in their grafitti as they prepared to purge the left using that guidebook.
Nor are bourgeois campus counter-revolutions confined to friends of the United States or Israel or the West. Contrary to another superstition of the American academic left, Ayatollah Khomeini was only too happy to transform the college campuses of Iran into war zones, shut them down for two years, and “Islamicize” them, violently uprooting the entire academic left from his own country and destroying the communist Tudeh Party. What has transpired on campuses across America this week is mild as milk compared to what the Islamic Republic does to student protesters and enabling faculty, let alone masked anarchists in a library.
Foad Izadi, a professor of the University of Teheran and a regime intellectual, wants his country to build networks within the new pro-Hamas campus protest coalitions of America. Izadi believes that Iran can have even greater success in the United States than they have enjoyed in Lebanon with Hezbollah. Already, Iran is trolling the United States with scholarship offers to American students who get expelled for protesting. Congress must act to prevent a state sponsor of terror from developing a network of campus support in the United States.
I said last week that defunding the new campus hate speech will likely become an essential form of taxpayer revolt in America. Congress and state legislatures have the right and duty to prevent the creation of an American Hezbollah through legislative action, the easiest action being zeroized budgets for problematic departments at public universities. Identifying organizations that no university administration should support is so easy that any BigLaw firm can do it. Jewish students who were denied access to their classrooms by keffiyeh-masked protesters are also filing slam-dunk litigation. American Jews are sending their kids to southern schools. Lawmakers have the advantage of leaning into this market correction in higher education to exert change forces on the American university.
America has not fallen. America remains a land of laws, where consequences are constitutional. Massive lawsuits, mass arrests, mass expulsions, and even mass faculty firings are the soft touch of a free country gently correcting error. America’s colleges are not chartered to teach civil disorder. As spokesman Steve Orlando said, “the University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences." Normies everywhere cheered at those words. They are ready to witness the handing out of well-deserved consequences.
I remember Rachel Corrie. I was a senior in high school when she died, and considering Evergreen State College - her recent alma mater - as one of my top school choices. I think I still have the clipping of the Washington Post news article about her death saved in my journal from that spring.