It was the moment which underscored the absurdity of those behind the anti-Israeli student unrest that is currently sweeping through American university campuses.
Clad in a keffiyeh, the Palestinian scarf that is now de rigueur garb for protesters — I guess some cultural appropriations are deemed OK if the cause is sufficiently Left-wing — one of the many young women leading the protests stood before the media outside New York’s Columbia University on Tuesday.
Students had just forcibly taken over its famous Hamilton Hall on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and her purpose was to demand the university now provide ‘humanitarian aid’ to the occupiers.
Since they’d only seized the building a few hours before, it wasn’t clear why they were already desperate for food and water. But they couldn’t wait to cosplay as Palestinians under siege, as if their position was as dire as those in Gaza.
In pursuit of this performative nonsense they were even prepared to upend the very concept of humanitarian aid, which is usually reserved for those trapped and unable to replenish declining supplies of sustenance. Palestinians in Gaza, perhaps, not over-nourished posh students in New York, where there is an eaterie on almost every block.
These students were free to leave the hall whenever they wanted, wander down the road to the nearest Manhattan Starbucks and guzzle to their hearts’ content.
The students’ spokesperson, dubbed Keffiyeh Karen, was asked why the authorities had any obligation to supply provisions to students who were trespassing and destroying university property. You wouldn’t want to see students ‘die of dehydration and starvation’, she replied.
Moreover, the students had paid for a ‘meal plan’ with their fees (they can only dream of such things in Gaza).
Of course, that did not mean Columbia had an obligation to deliver any food to law-breakers. And a quick online check would have revealed that the campus canteen was open to anybody prepared to stroll across the lawn.
‘The revolution will be televised,’ we used to say as students in the late 1960s. It never crossed our minds that it should also be catered.
K eep in mind this was no first-year, wet-behind-the-ears student spring chicken but a 33-year-old Comparative Literature PhD candidate researching ‘Poetry as interpreted through a Marxian [naturally] lens to propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination’.
Whatever that means — and frankly I have no idea — it clearly doesn’t include lessons on how to turn on cold water taps, which are plentiful in Hamilton Hall, when you’re thirsty. But it is perhaps too big a sacrifice to expect such precious souls to drink tap water.
I dwell on this because it is the perfect illustration of the self-indulgent, pampered, privileged mindset behind the U.S. student encampments and occupations, which started in — and are still largely dominated by — America’s elite Ivy League universities, where annual fees can top $90,000 (£72,000) and the scions of America’s upper-middle class still take a disproportionate number of the places.
A few yards away from our aspiring PhD, another Keffiyeh Karen — fully masked — was hurriedly shoving food through the university railings for the occupiers as if she’d just given the evil Israeli Defence Force the slip to feed and water the university’s pro-Palestinian martyrs.
I fear she was not thanked for her sterling efforts in the face of danger for there was a distinct lack of carrot juice, açai and quinoa, the bread wasn’t gluten-free and the water wasn’t Evian.
Later requests specified no bananas, no bagels, no nuts. I get the bagel bit (too Jewish for them) but what do they have against bananas?
The protests have generated all manner of supportive sub-groups, such as ‘Queers for Palestine’ and ‘Dykes4Disinvest’ (as in close down investments in Israel). These are the equivalent of ‘Chickens for KFC’ and ‘Turkeys for Christmas’.
Such is their ignorance they seem blissfully unaware that the penalty for being gay in Hamas-run Gaza is ten years in jail, if you’re lucky, and being thrown off a tall building if you’re not. Ironically, the only place in the Middle East where they could safely enjoy their lifestyles is Israel.
The blunt truth is that the protesters’ antics demean the plight of the very people they are supposed to care about and make light of very real hardships.
But, in practice, this is all about the protesters, the faux Palestinians worried about Ivy League meal plans, not actual Palestinians under Israeli bombardment and wondering where their next meal will come from. Despite their passion for the cause, their ignorance and stupidity is astounding.
One student interviewed on TV at another New York university said she’d rushed over to the campus the moment she’d heard protests were underway. Asked what she was protesting about she confessed she ‘didn’t really know’ and turned to her friend for guidance. She didn’t know either.
A favourite chant of the protesters is ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. That, of course, implies the destruction of Israel. But I’m not sure many of them appreciate that. A professor at Berkeley in California discovered that fewer than 50 per cent of his political science students could name which river (Jordan) and which sea (Mediterranean).
Some thought it referred to the Nile and the Euphrates, which would imply a Palestine entity straddling most of the Middle East. Some thought the sea was the Atlantic (it’s an ocean), the Dead Sea (an inland lake) and even the Caribbean (which is at least a sea, if an Atlantic Ocean away).
At Hamilton Hall and other occupations, huge banners promoting ‘INTIFADA’ have been unfurled. Again, it is not clear if they really understand what this involves.
It is certainly more than a few Palestinian kids throwing stones. At its worst, it has meant suicide bombers blowing up buses and nightclubs, killing youngsters the same age as the students waving the intifada banners from the safety of their campus. You have to be especially stupid to go down this road.
It is easy to ridicule entitled know-nothings who get a kick out of saying, in effect, ‘Look at me — I’m just like a Palestinian refugee’, who still couldn’t find Gaza on a map after weeks of protest, whose only source for details of the complex and historic Israeli-Arab dispute is TikTok and who now believe the most important thing in their lives is something about which they weren’t even aware less than a year ago.
But there’s a dark underside to it all: because they are so ignorant they’re easily led into espousing repellent views by activists and agitators who know exactly what they’re doing.
S o anti-Israel sentiment, understandable given the pictures coming out of Gaza (especially when you have no concept of, nor context for, Hamas tactics), quickly became pro-Palestinian and then, just as speedily, morphed into pro-Hamas.
In the process it became acceptable to deny Israel’s right to exist, to bar Jewish students and those who supported them from campus (just as they did in the early days of Nazi Germany) and even to claim that October 7 wasn’t really that bad or, worse, was justified.
These are all sentiments that have emanated from makeshift university encampments across America in recent weeks as the protests gathered pace — encampments which the New York Post described, with some justice, as ‘Woodstock for anti-Semites’.
They are also the reason university authorities from Columbia on the East Coast to UCLA on the West Coast belatedly called in the police to clear out the protesters.
The pressure to act became irresistible as Republican and Democratic politicians averred that anti-Semitism was now more rife than it had ever been before in America — and that, incredibly, universities had become the main source of the poison.
Yet, perhaps, not incredible at all. American academia is dominated by a neo-Marxist narrative in which all the current ills of the world can be traced to racial injustice and colonialism, and the peoples of the world divided into oppressed and oppressor.
Seen through this simplistic prism — perhaps beguiling to those who know no history, politics or economics — the Middle East becomes easily understandable: Israel is the oppressor, backed by evil imperial powers like America and Britain; Palestinians are the oppressed. Israelis are largely white (or so it is claimed) and Palestinians are brown. All the boxes are ticked. It is Israeli-Arab geopolitics for dummies.
These views are also prevalent in British academia, which is why what has been happening on American campuses is now infecting our universities. It’s an old story. Most movements which kick off in America soon reach our shores, whether they are relevant or not.
U.S. anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the 1960s and early 1970s spawned British imitations, even though Britain did not participate in that war and, unlike America, no young men here were ever conscripted for it.
More recently America’s Black Lives Matter movement was imported after the murder of George Floyd, with all manner of public figures performatively ‘taking the knee’, even though the British and American experience of race (and slavery) could hardly be more different.
The barren wastelands of identity politics have been an even more recent U.S. import.
And now British students are mounting pro-Palestine protests of their own, also tilting towards being pro-Hamas, and U.S.-style encampments have taken root at Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds and Newcastle universities.
At Goldsmiths University in South London, students have been occupying buildings — including the library — for weeks, replete with U.S.-style chants such as: ‘No justice, no peace, if you don’t give us justice then you don’t get no peace.’ Clearly, neither originality nor good grammar are their strong points.
So far the British protests seem pretty half-hearted. They could peter out when universities close down for the summer, though an autumn election campaign could reinvigorate them if Israel-Hamas hostilities are still extant. They could run out of steam in America too, but I suspect they will retain more traction there.
There is increasing evidence in the U.S. that hardline agitators and anarchists are now orchestrating the protests, with privileged, naive students their useful idiots. A Leftist website, CrimethInc.com, run by veterans of BLM, Antifa and Occupy Wall Street, has been publishing lessons learned and coordinating activities across the country.
According to the NYPD, half the protesters arrested at Columbia and New York’s City College were not students. They push for the occupation of buildings wherever possible — and that is when violence and vandalism are most likely to occur.
They were behind the occupation of Hamilton Hall, which was roundly trashed, and behind the wilful and appalling damage done to the library at Portland State University in Oregon.
There was a feeling in America this week that perhaps the worst was over. The university authorities had acted at last, major figures on the Left and Right had condemned the encampments, police intervention from Los Angeles to Texas to New York had been effective (and largely non-violent) and even President Biden was wheeled out to give his tuppence worth.
It was the first time we’ve heard from ‘Silent Joe’ since the campus unrest took root. He has proved strangely reluctant to condemn the protesters and even on Thursday did no more than spout a few mealy-mouthed platitudes about free speech and peaceful protest.
He needs the youth vote — essential to his victory in 2020 — to be re-elected in November and has been keen to court that vote with a $160 billion student debt write-off (with more to come before election day) and the reclassification of cannabis, effectively decriminalising it.
Saying a few robust home truths to student protesters has so far eluded him. And this could come back to hurt Biden.
If the protests continue and the Democratic convention in Chicago in August is hijacked by violent protesters, as the 1968 convention (also in Chicago) was by anti-Vietnam war protesters, then a sense of lawlessness would only help Donald Trump as it helped Republican Richard Nixon in 1968.
So Biden might have to stiffen his resolve and his response before the summer is out to secure his re-election chances.
More fundamentally, sensible politicians of all persuasions need to think seriously about why so many young Americans — especially the ones who are supposed to be the smartest — are so easily prepared to make common cause with a genocidal Islamism.
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Andrew Neil
