Jeffrey Blehar
National Review, Oct. 11, 2023
“While one would expect college-age pro-Palestinian activists (morally deranged as they are) to stand up for Hamas in their sloppily knotted keffiyehs regardless of how many women and children the organization butchers or rapes, one would not have expected nearly every other South Asian, Middle Eastern, or North African student group at Harvard to do so as well.”
I’ve made a number of regrettable errors in my life — heck, I just posted a piece that jumped the gun in a major way — but in terms of the ones that were immediately, obviously bad ideas even at the time, I am comforted by the fact that I have never made a mistake quite so easily avoidable as deciding to go balls to the wall in defense of the terror group Hamas the way so many on the left have over the past five days. The most traditionally “woke” and ultraprogressive elements of the online commentariat have been producing junk masterworks of glib, breezily offhanded hatred and lizard-like amorality: Emblematic is the academic who smugly announced, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” (Calling both dead Jews and those horrified by the slaughter “losers” was a lovely touch.) Such flashes of gloating cruelty are usually typed (or favorited) in haste and repented of at leisure.
That of course brings us to the more considered acts of insanity, those emerging from college campuses. There have been a few protests, of course — I had to chuckle at the inadvertent cringe comedy of a hapless George Washington University student delivering a supposedly from-the-heart stem-winder to an indifferently sized crowd whilst wearing a Covid-19 mask and pausing every few seconds to look at his iPhone to read his lines — but mostly the disgrace has been confined to the ever-popular “public statement.” We’re compiling a list of all these here at National Review (at this rate it might end up a database), and it will be a running tally: Here’s a look into the mouth of activist madness.
I want to focus specifically, though, on the spectacularly repulsive “joint statement” that came out of the “Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups” (whose organizational composition may be set or ad hoc but is in this case irrelevant). It deserves to reprinted in full, given its brevity and odiousness:
… [To read the full article, click here]
