The universities are destroying themselves by countenancing pro-Hamas protests and encampments. And in doing so, they will eventually be doing the larger US society a great public service.
Rabbi Joseph Ber Soleveichik was the scion of a very important Torah family from Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Vlinius, or Vilna, had a large Jewish population with hundreds of years of leading Torah scholarship. In his writings, Rabbi Soleveichik relates some of the depravations that came to the city with the arrival of the Nazis. In one story, he relates that an SS officer had a piano placed in the courtyard of the local police station. As this officer played Mozart with one hand, he used a machine gun with his other hand to murder Jewish children placed up against the courtyard wall. Similar stories were told about another SS officer, Amon Goth.
If one knew nothing of the Holocaust and was told about it in general terms, he might assume that the perpetrators were from some backwards, thuggish culture. He would be shocked to learn that the Germans were the killers, as Germany was the leader in the arts and sciences. Music, painting, architecture, philosophy, chemistry, physics and more—the Germans were the best or nearly so. Hitler once boasted that the Americans would not catch German military greatness until 1970. And he had reason to be confident: the first cruise missile, the first ballistic missile, the first submarine-launched missile, the first jet fighter to see action and more were German war accomplishments. The land of Goethe was also the home of the first recorded fission experiments which netted two Nobel Prizes. Germany, like its officer in Vilnius, saw no conflict in being the best in culture and the cruelest in mass murder.
I was reminded of the SS story as I read more and more about the protests on college campuses. Every university proudly tells of its Nobel laureates, its discoveries, its famous alumni, its sports prowess, and its role in local and world affairs. Yet, these same universities allowed for months protests and later encampments and even building takeovers in the name of wiping Israel and the Jewish people off the face of the Earth. “From the river to the sea” and “Intifada Revolution” as well as “Death to Israel” were all very blunt ways of saying that Israel and its nearly nine million Jews must go poof. And the same universities that boast their success in stem cell research or interstellar studies were just fine with such demands.
While the Nazis saw in the mass destruction of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other “lesser humans” a direct contribution to the future improvement of German and world culture, the universities tolerate and even support the destructive actions of their students and their many non-student “advisers” because it fits in with the zeitgeist of the time. Many of the older schools like Harvard and Yale were either religious schools in their founding or had religion as a key component of student instruction. With the jettisoning of religion both at home and at the universities, something necessarily had to replace it. And that something has been intersectionality and its enforcement arm, DEI. If a student has been told since well before college that whites and Jews are oppressors, while blacks and “brown people” are necessarily victims, then how can the university come out against students simply living out everything they have been taught? Begrudgingly, the universities brought in police and had encampments and occupied buildings emptied. Arrest records will vanish and the university will not have the guts to expel students simply regurgitating what their professors, often arrested with them, taught them. If the protests had been directed towards blacks or trans, they would have ended in a minute.
As is known, facts are often stubborn things, so the well-documented barbarism of Hamas on 10/7 presented a wee bit of a problem for our brainwashed youths. Thousands of videos, eye-witness testimonies, first-responder descriptions, and even terrorist admissions showed that Hamas had committed mass rape as well as sadistic murders of civilians and soldiers. So the ideologically-rigid pro-Hamas protesters and vandals simply took one of two approaches to get around these details. There are those who say that nothing happened on 10/7. One old woman claimed that Israeli women are too ugly to be raped. The other approach is to admit what happened but claim that the Jews had it coming. They had stolen Palestinian lands so they deserved everything they got. This coming from students at Columbia. In New York, land that by their theory should be returned to Indian tribes. These people never seem so big on “decolonization” when it comes to their parents’ home or their present university dorm.
That a majority of those hauled out of Hamilton Hall were not Columbia students is no real surprise. I have written previously about the joint efforts of jihadists and leftists. The non-students bring experience, money, resources, and no doubt stories of shooting at IDF soldiers or the like, all to engage the student wannabe terrorists. The NYPD made it clear that the supplies they pulled out of Hamilton Hall were not reflective of novice protesters but rather pro troublemakers. In a normal country, the Department of Justice would want to know who is funding all of this activity; in our current state of affairs, all involved are Democrats. Nothing to see, nothing to investigate.
The universities could have kept the non-students off of campus; they sure did during my time at Harvard. They let the professional protesters in and the marches became autonomous zones and trashed university buildings and property. Americans are further souring on universities and wondering what they have to offer their kids and more generally American society. One day, the protests will end. And hopefully shortly thereafter so too will federal funding for institutions that coddle “Death to America” chants. When the frat boys are the heroes, then the university’s days are numbered. The university has shot itself in the foot. Let us hope that it never recovers.
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