“How Columbia students sparked a nationwide revolt.” So reads the headline of this frontpage Washington Post story.
If you consider the events of January 6, 2021 an “insurrection,” then I suppose you can call what’s happening on college campuses a “revolt.” But the former description is an overstatement and the latter is wishful thinking by the Post.
What’s really happening on campus is that a relatively small number of students and outsiders* are throwing a fit — including violence, threats, and harassment against Jewish students — while administrators — due to a combination of sympathy and lack of nerve — are letting it happen. To me, that’s not a revolt.
The Post gushes that “historians” are calling the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli campus movement “one of the most consequential student uprisings the nation has seen in recent times.” What’s the competition, though.
The Post mentions the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations over “corporate greed.” If you have forgotten about these protests, there’s a reason. They were minor and inconsequential.
There hasn’t been a significant campus protest movement since the one that took place 55 years ago against the Vietnam War. The Post doesn’t claim that the current protests are in the same league as those.
Nor could they be in that league. The Vietnam War was a threat to the well-being of America’s male college students. We might be drafted and called on to fight that war. And even after the draft lottery at the end of 1969 effectively exempted many of us from the draft, our friends and relatives might still be drafted and sent to fight.
The only Americans in jeopardy in the Israel-Hamas fight are ones being held hostage by Hamas. Their captivity seems almost forgotten these days and is studiously ignored by the protesters, many of whose sympathy resides with the terrorists holding Americans hostage.
Fear of being drafted wasn’t the only fuel for the anti-war protests of the late 1960s. The Vietnam War was considered unjust, or at least not worth American lives, by college kids of all political persuasions. Bill Otis, a staunch conservative, was against the war, although as far as I know his activism consisted mainly of writing fiery editorials in the student newspaper (which, to be fair, were almost certainly more influential than anything I did at the “barricades.”)
Those of us in the vanguard of the college anti-war movement took advantage of this broad sentiment to rally large chunks of the student body to our cause. We kept our radicalism in the background.
I assume that Israel’s war effort against Hamas is unpopular with a great many college students. And leading anti-Israel activists are trying to rally students around the idea of university divestment from weapons manufacturers, an agenda that sounds non-threatening on its face.
However, the activists aren’t hiding their true goal which is “Palestine from the river to the sea” — in effect the destruction of Israel. This agenda will never support a mass movement the way “U.S. out of Vietnam” did.
As David Cortright, a professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame told the Post: “In terms of what counts as effectiveness, one of the cardinal rules is to build a broad coalition and don’t alienate potential supporters. You don’t come up with a slogan that turns away potential allies.” “Some would-be demonstrators have been deterred by tactics and chants some view as antisemitic,” the Post adds.
If you read the Post’s article to the end, it becomes clear that the anti-Israel protesters are neither building a broad coalition nor leading a large movement:
At George Washington University. . .a few hundred students, some from other D.C.-area schools, set up roughly 30 tents to form a pro-Palestinian encampment. George Washington enrolls 26,000 students.
(Emphasis added)
Within a few days, after the university threatened to discipline the encamped students and have the police remove them, the number of demonstrators “diminished considerably” to around 100. This hardcore, probably consisting mostly of Arab students like the ones quoted by the Post, chanted “Zionism will fall,” among other anti-Israel slogans.
As I said, calling this a revolt amounts to wishful thinking by the anti-Israel crowd, including those in the media.
I should also note that even a mass student movement like the one that opposed the Vietnam War is likely to have limited effect on policy. U.S. participation in that war continued for four years after campuses erupted in protest during the Spring of 1969 and three years after they reached their peak in 1970.
Nor did these protests change the political landscape of America very much. Richard Nixon was reelected in 1972, carrying a majority of the youth vote, it is said. My generation went on to help elect Ronald Reagan twice, the Bushes three times, and Donald Trump once (and counting?).
The Vietnam protests did cause some colleges to end ROTC on campus. And protests by black students led to the creation of Black Studies programs (sad legacies, both). I suppose the demand for divestment can be compared to the demand for eliminating ROTC.
However, the Post makes this important point about divestment: It’s extremely difficult to accomplish:
Divestment is practically impossible, experts said. Universities probably have very few if any direct ties to companies that are Israeli based or weapons manufacturers; most of those relationships would come through index funds.
[One expert] said it can be extremely difficult to figure out what companies are represented in a large index fund — or what companies the fund may be indirectly linked to. Israel is a hot spot right now for solar energy, innovative climate change solutions and pharmaceuticals.
The Post also suggests that divestment is “likely to yield little if any real benefit” to the anti-Israel crowd. Where’s the evidence that weapons manufacturers depend on investments by colleges to the point that, faced with the loss of that investment, they would no longer do business with Israel?
I don’t mean to say that rising anti-Israel sentiment poses no threat to the Jewish state. On the contrary, I’ve argued that due to that sentiment, Israel won’t be able to count on the support of the Democratic Party for very much longer.
But that’s not because of any campus “revolt.” It’s because the Party keeps moving leftward, and the left is anti-Israel.
Members of the vanguard leading the student protests could return to their dorms and their books, or to Palestine, and the Democrats would still continue their march towards embracing Israel’s enemies. If anything, the vile, anti-Semitic actions of the vanguard and their followers might slow down that march.
Meanwhile, their actions are making life miserable for Jewish students and for college administrators. But they don’t amount to a revolt.”
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*The Post quotes a Brown University student who touts the protests on her campus as “organic” and “student led.” However, it also reports that “protesting students at encampments nationwide have repeatedly denied any such harassing behavior [of Jews], often attributing it to outsiders.
I don’t know the extent to which it’s “outsiders” who are doing the harassing. Clearly, though, outsiders are involved. As for who is really behind the protests, the Post has shown little curiosity.
The real question is what does the Post want? Revolution? The end of the American Experiment? Communist rule? Chinese hegemony? Iran with a nuclear weapon dominating the Middle East? The Jews of Israel to be overrun and murdered? What do they expect to happen by the "revolution" they think is happening?
I agree this isn't going to start a revolution. It will die down when Israel finishes the war. But the real revolution has already taken place and the radical Marxists have won. Virtually every university humanities and social science department in the entire country is run and staffed by hard-core radical Marxists. It's almost impossible to get tenure otherwise. And nobody at any level certainly not within the University or in the government or the private sector seems to understand the danger and has expressed a real willingness to do anything about it. It will take enormous courage strength moral clarity and perseverance to even begin to stop this onslaught. It will require terminating thousands of professors and defending the actions in court. It will require tens of thousands of lawsuits. It will require a Justice Department as dedicated to the task of uncovering and punishing transgressing universities as Elliot Ness was to stopping Al Capone. I don't see it. Donald Trump is someone who just likes to whine. He's not truly a man of action. DeSantis might have been able to do it. Reagan would have given it a good try. But I'm not optimistic. I think what's going to happen is that normal America is going to just reject higher education leaving the colleges free to continue to indoctrinate weak minds. Those weak minds will be in charge not that long from now.