Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Oct. 31, 2023
“… there is a logical line from the furious denunciation of certain forms of speech as ‘violence’ to the implicit acceptance of actual violence if it is directed against ‘bad’ people. That line is what we might call narcissistic savagery, where almost anything can be justified in the name of protecting one’s beliefs and one’s psychic sense of security from harm.”
Since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October, there’s been a storm of commentary on how unhinged campus culture in the West has become. Politicians and writers are bewildered that at universities where it’s a ‘microaggression’ to ask someone where they are from, and where you can be subjected to a Salem-like grilling for wearing an offensive Halloween costume, actual genocidal violence doesn’t seem to bother people. The same fresh-faced Maoists who will weep and stomp their feet if you say ‘women don’t have penises’ have collectively shrugged their shoulders over the mass murder of Jewish women and children. Some have even justified it. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said a projection on to the wall of a building at George Washington University.
Touch an African-American student’s hair and you’re a white supremacist, but murder Jews in cold blood and you’re a martyr. Wear your white-people hair in cornrows and you’re a racist thief, but invade a country with the express intention of killing Jews and you’re the ‘resistance’. Serve up bad-tasting sushi – as the cafeteria at hyper-woke Oberlin did a few years ago – and you’ll be damned as a cultural appropriator. But kill hundreds of revellers at a peace festival in southern Israel and the same kids who wail over Japanese fare being served by white chefs will make excuses for you. Israel is ‘entirely responsible’ for ‘all unfolding violence’ in the Middle East, said student activists at Harvard before the bodies of the 1,400 Israelis were cold.
Our woke universities hold forth on ‘every topic under the sun’, said former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, yet they’re chilled out about the ‘most grave grotesque attacks on Jewish people since the Holocaust’. College kids kick up a fuss about ‘stupid’ things like ‘microaggressions and gender pronouns’ yet they erm and ahh – or worse – on ‘the slaughter of innocent Israelis’, says one columnist. When Jewish students at Cooper Union in New York City had to be locked in the library to save them from a mob of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists, Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute said: ‘Not another word – ever – about safe spaces, microaggressions or “erasure” on a college campus. Not one more damn word.’… [To read the full article, click here]
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