How do you NOT overreact?
“Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it … But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe.”
— William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Lots of talk lately of rising levels of anti-Semitism on US college campuses, focusing mostly on the Ivy League schools, since they are deemed to be the most “progressive”, whatever that means. Follow the money I guess. Many large donors have stopped giving, and the various university Presidents are being criticized for not taking more forceful action, although nobody can quite agree on what that action should be, or what sway an Ivy League president might have on Hamas or the IDF.
What seems clear, at least to a non-Ivy league educated college graduate like myself, is that the idea that the Harvards and the Yales and the UPenns are churning out the best and the brightest is as illusionary today as it’s was 60+ years ago when they were bumbling the nation into land wars in Asia. Though its graduates are not quite my social circle these days, I’ve come across a fair share of Ivy leaguers in my time, and I can assure you they can be every bit as dumb as the rest of us. And frequently even more so, because their ignorance is sprinkled with a sense of entitlement, a lethal combination. The fact that a monstrous dunce like Ted Cruz is a Harvard grad should have been enough to end this silly debate, yet here we are.
But back to the responses, or non-responses, of the schools. Seems to me it would be understood, but if words were deemed necessary, they should be brief and to the point. Something like…..”if any of you self-important little shits disrespect anybody on this campus because they are either Jewish or Muslim, to the point where they fear for their safety, you can fuck off back to wherever you came from because you’ll be expelled on the spot…”
You might feel the need to dress up the language a bit, but that about covers it. For the life of me I do not understand why “statements” need to say anything else, other than the fact that Ivy League presidents are expected to flex their oratory in much the same way Orca’s flop on the side of the SeaWorld pool to collect their fish.
Or, for that matter, why the dreaded “commissions” need to be formed to “study” something (anti-Semitism) that’s been around for thousands of years. Some obscenely wealthy alum who owns a hedge fund is gonna suddenly outthink William L. Shirer?
To be fair, there is plenty of nuance to the current situation, which seems to be something that Ivy League schools aren’t teaching very well. Along with, you know, actual history. Hamas is a vicious terror organization that exists for a stated reason. To kill ALL Jews. They admit this quite openly. You can look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say. They kickstarted this war on October 7th by killing more Jews than on any day since the Holocaust. They held a Jewish girl (who turned out to be a German with duel citizenship) hostage, tortured her, raped her repeatedly, cut her head off, then paraded her body, through the streets in the back of a truck, while supporters ran alongside the vehicle, cheering and spitting on her corpse. And then posted the results online. Hamas doesn’t fight for regular Palestinians, whom they openly despise and use merely as human shields. They are, however, skilled propagandists, quick to come out of their underground bunkers (where civilians are barred), purposely built under civilian populations, to share the carnage of the bombs meant for them. Hamas are remorseless, cowardly killers, and Israel has as much right to hunt them down as the US did in targeting Al Qaeda after 9/11.
Recall that the 9/11 attacks triggered not one but TWO wars…..in Iraq and Afghanistan, which resulted in the death of over 400,000 civilians. Our reaction makes Israel’s look positively dainty in comparison. Israel seems to be held to a different standard. Why is that?
You can surely raise your voice in support of the innocent Palestinians caught in the now vicious crossfire. But if at the same time you fail to condemn the atrocities of Hamas, it’s not hard to understand how your….somewhat selective enthusiasm for justice……might be misconstrued into something a bit more sinister. To be fair, it has become much too easy to conflate any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but to blame murdered Israeli’s on Israel sounds a bit like blaming a woman’s rape on the length of her skirt.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, there was a flurry of support for Ukraine…with Facebook statuses the world over turned blue and yellow. When Hamas attacked Israel? Not so much. Why is that?
War itself is a crime. When faced with the tortured, raped, and headless body of an innocent Jewish girl, whose great-grandparents perhaps died in the Holocaust, how do you not overreact? If that’s my child, and I’m armed with a revolver and a flamethrower, I know I ain’t bothering with the revolver, even if I have the perpetrator lined up against my own living room wall. This doesn’t excuse my sin. Or my crime. But it is hard to make peace with a group that exists solely to kill you.
To those who refer to Israel as an apartheid state, while recently supporting and enjoying the World Cup in Qatar, a country that is home to grand total of 0 documented Jews, the word hypocrite comes to mind. Along with a few others. This might be news to the random protester at Harvard…..and if it is the school’s President should worry less about her public relations and more about her obviously flailing history department.
Innocent Israeli’s died. As a result of this, innocent Palestinians are currently being killed by the cargo. Both are war crimes, because as mentioned, war IS the ultimate crime. Both demand outrage. Waving one flag over another seems too much like justifying one at the expense of the other. If history has taught us anything (and it hasn’t), it’s that an eye for an eye always ends up with blind men lobbing bombs at each other.
Both sides have been poisoned by religion, one of the evilest inventions ever devised by man. There is no way to kill your way out of the hatred that religion impales on the heart, because that hate is passed down. Trying to stop it would be like trying to kill a language.
In a bit…
—tf