Roger Kimball
The Spectator, Nov. 14, 2023
‘The real change, if it comes, will be the loss of widely shared social legitimacy that this revolution-by-major-donors may precipitate.”
Maybe there is something for which we have to thank Hamas after all. That savage terror group epitomizes the latest form of murderous, antisemitic brutality. The world — most of it — has been sickened and appalled by the spectacle of burnt, mutilated and headless corpses. Aiming at maximum shock, the terrorists made no distinction between young and old, male and female, Israeli and foreign national.
Among susceptible souls in the academy and other ideological fever swamps, however, a familiar moral perversion instantly came to the fore. The weasel word “but” was conscripted and put to work early and often. Without warning, Hamas attacked and murdered Israelis. Yet somehow the Israelis are to blame, or half to blame, or at least complicit in the slaughter. Barack Obama gave a sterling performance in a much-shared article on Medium. Yes, we must lament the brutal attack by Hamas, quoth the former president. But… You know the script. António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, sang a version of the same song when he warned that the attacks by Hamas didn’t occur “in a vacuum.”
The scene at many colleges and universities dispensed with such subtlety. There, pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish protests made headlines. Some thirty student organizations at Harvard dotted the campus with pro-Palestinian posters and manifestos. At Cooper Union fifty Jewish students were barricaded into a room to protect them from rampaging protesters. At Columbia University, Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics, joyfully described the Hamas massacre as “awesome.”
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