Israel’s Gaza atrocities unfolded over months with scarcely a whimper of campus protest. Then suddenly all hell broke loose. Why now?
Well, the weather is nicer now.
But seriously, who’d want to march outdoors or sit in a tent with temperatures below forty?
Am I suggesting some shallowness there? Israel’s Gaza actions merit the outrage. Yet I can’t avoid a somewhat jaundiced view toward the protests.
What comes to mind is a decades-old locution: radical chic. Coined by writer Tom Wolfe about upper class white dilettantes lionizing the likes of the Black Panther party. Maybe that was actually supportable. But they didn’t really know what they were talking about. Just nevertheless thought they were being cool.
Today’s campus demonstrators may have romanticized protests past, and were just looking for a suitable opportunity to reprise them. The fact of making a stand on something being more important than what that something is.
Footnote: The Economist’s Lexington columnist mentioned that these demonstrators often make a thing of pronouncing “Gaza” in the Arab way, much like 1980s predecessors embraced an exaggeratedly spanishy pronunciation of “Nicaragua” (Nee-ha-RAH-hua). I inquired of my daughter, who’s studied Arabic, and “Gaza” sounds something like HRUH-zhuh.
Meantime, the issue has deep historical roots of which most protesters appear ignorant. Yet it’s readily slotted into the standard woke-left paradigm of nasty white(ish) Western(ish) colonizing oppressors versus noble non-white(ish) “indigenous” peoples. A perspective these protests almost seem to parody.
With the obligatory censoriousness toward other viewpoints deemed impermissible. Thus a scheduled commencement speech by America’s UN Ambassador was cancelled. But elsewhere a student’s valedictorian address was barred because she happened to be Muslim and the school poohbahs feared controversy. Over-reacting being endemic.
Of course, for the protesters, it’s good guys versus bad guys. In the real world most conflicts are not right-versus-wrong but right-versus-right (much harder to assess). And much as Israel (its present government at least) strives hard to earn its bad guy chops, Hamas is not exactly good guys. A nuance that doesn’t often come through in the protests.
And it’s not as though this is the only bad thing happening in the world. Not a whisper of campus protest greeted Russia’s Ukraine invasion (a true case of right against wrong). Nor regarding what’s happening in Myanmar, Sudan, or Xinjiang. Guess none of those fitted the woke narrative like the Gaza story does. And the difference is that the students might imagine themselves conceivably influencing U.S. policy, or even Israel’s. Whereas protesting about any of those other crimes would be whistling in the wind.
And what is it with the anti-Semitism? Slamming Israel’s government is one thing, targeting Jews quite another. The student protests seem to lose it when the one veers into the other. It’s actually a well-known phenomenon that when people form a mob their moral compasses go haywire; opinion within groups moves toward that of their most extreme (and vocal) members. And a comprehensive historical ignorance (so common today even among the notionally educated) doesn’t help. A shockingly high percentage of these students, in surveys, think the Holocaust was a myth. Even more say they don’t know.
Unfortunately all this presents campus administrators with impossible dilemmas. Somewhat their own fault after years of upholding a political orthodoxy with free speech for only those mouthing it, while demonizing any dissent as equivalent to violence. Now they’re faced with real violence by the very voices they’d coddled. Freedom of speech does not extend to that. And we see that “hate speech” isn’t after all (as if we never knew) exclusive to the right. It can be a fine line between letting these protests run amok and overreacting with yet more violence.
I believe they’ve drawn the line clumsily. All those cops with billy-clubs. What were those Lords of Academe thinking? Had they never heard the words “Kent State?” Well — at least this time it hasn’t been national guardsmen with guns.
