Jonathan Chait
New York Magazine, Apr. 22, 2024
“ … the groups themselves are very clearly not advocating for “peace.” They are for war. Their objection is not to human suffering but that the wrong humans are suffering.”
The anti-Israel demonstrations around Columbia University turned threatening and antisemitic Saturday night, as they have repeatedly across the country. On social media, you can find footage of crowds taunting Jewish students to “Go back to Poland!” and chanting, “We don’t want no Zionists here!” There is a masked protester with a sign that reads “Al-Qasam’s Next Target” with an arrow pointing at Jewish counterprotesters nearby. Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas. A protester screamed at Jewish students, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you!”
The protest groups and their supporters have attacked the Biden administration for denouncing these incidents and the media for reporting them. “We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us,” asserts the Columbia chapter for Students for Justice in Palestine.
It is true that most anti-Israel protesters do not engage in antisemitic harassment. It is also true that the formal demands associated with anti-Israel protests are legitimate (if not policies I’d endorse) and do not require the collective punishment of American Jews. But the reason incidents like these occur over and over is that they are part of the ideological character of the movements that give rise to them.
Dismissing this pattern as the actions of “inflammatory individuals” is to evade the question of who is inflaming them.
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