Watching clips of college students celebrating Hamas’s savagery, I always remember a scene from Godfather II where Sonny Corleone asks brother Michael: “Whatcha go to college? To get stupid? You’re really stupid!”
Replace “stupid” with “ignorant” and you have a new class of college students who wield contempt for Israel to confirm their superior insight and virtue. To find the source of such ignorance, look no further than professors who endorse Iran’s claim that Israel is the Middle East’s “Little Satan,” a proxy for the world’s “Great Satan” — the United States.
Composition instructors could cite that fallacy to review the tactics leftists use to recruit fledglings to their causes. A timeless insight into the type can be found in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the French Revolution,” which notes that insurgents “find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution…in order to justify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical principles of retaliation, their own persecutions, and their own cruelties.”
The type Burke identified in 1790 still preys on pliant youth whom former anarchist Conor Barnes has dubbed “Sad Radicals,” that is, “hurt people looking for an explanation for the pain they’ve endured” and deriving “meaning for that suffering by attributing it to the force that they now dedicate themselves to opposing.” Barnes adds that “radical communities also attract people looking for an excuse to be violent illegalists.” Today’s young bullies have found that Jewish classmates make handy targets for their unspent rage.
Nothing short of Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-SC) proposal to rescind funding for colleges and universities that “peddle anti-Semitism or authorize, fund or facilitate events that promote violent anti-Semitism” can disarm professors who infect students with contempt for Israel. But adults who have access to young anti-Semites during the holidays might let them know they’ve been hoodwinked by sophists who withhold facts that undermine their position that it’s the Israelis — not Hamas terrorists — who are guilty of genocide.
I doubt, for example, that professors who charge Israelis with genocide show students footage of slaughtered Jews being bulldozed into common graves during the Holocaust. And I doubt they tell students that the Palestinians rejected statehood in 1947, 2000, 2001, 2008, and 2014 — the better to serve their mission to annihilate the “Zionist colonizers” — that is, “thriving, prosperous, westernized Israelis”.
A sharp insight into Hamas’s pretext for revenge came from the Hoover Institute’s Shelby Steele during the Gaza flotilla incident of 2010: “The quickest cover for inferiority is hatred. The problem is not me; it is them. And in my victimization, I enjoy a moral and human grandiosity — no matter how smart and modern my enemy is, I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only reflect a moral superiority, while my enemy’s wealth proves his inhumanity.”
Missing from that appraisal is a prediction that thirteen years later Hamas’s revenge would descend into sadism. Watching clips of Hamas’s assassins exult in their butchery, I replayed a memorable scene from King Lear. Struggling to make sense of the carnage he’s witnessed, the Earl of Gloucester laments: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport.” When Hamas’s assassins act as wanton boys, killing innocent Israelis for their sport, they are simply meeting the terms of their charter, which holds “death for the cause of Allah its most sublime belief.”
Professors who spend whole careers cultivating the victims of “settler colonialism” hit the mother lode with Hamas, overlooking Hamas’s persecution of gays, overlooking its definition of women solely as “the maker of men,” and agreeing with the late Yasser Arafat’s claim that “Whoever stands by a just cause…cannot possibly be called a terrorist.” They have found a powerful ally in former president Barack Obama who alleges that “all of us are complicit to some degree” in the Palestinians’ “unbearable” plight.
I repeat…nothing short of an act of Congress can penetrate the iron dome leftists have erected over our universities, but informed parents can re-educate young rebels who’ve been hoodwinked by the apologists for terrorists.