River News: Our View

The protests that have erupted on college campuses across the nation these past few weeks — culminating in police storming and evicting pro-Hamas students who had taken over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University — have evoked comparisons to the student anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly from Hamas admirers on the Left.

To be sure, there are some similarities. Photos and news stories of students occupying university academic buildings seemed ripped right out of the pages of a ‘60s-era newspaper. Confrontations with police, some becoming violent and accompanied by bottle and brick throwing, are nothing new, and the demographic of the protesters is nothing unique, either — a bit more diverse but still a largely white young affluent crowd with rich mommies and daddies paying the freight, along with taxpayers.

And yet, these demonstrations and encampments, if that is what they truly can be called, have a decidedly different and ominous character. There are different threads of thought and nuances to it, but the biggest difference is this: Rather than protesting against an unjust war and for peace and social justice, these demonstrators are protesting for terrorists and totalitarianism and against a historically oppressed people fighting against renewed efforts to exterminate them.

For the first time in the history of American campus protests, the “dissidents” hail from the authoritarian side of the equation, rather than railing against the powerful. They are protesting for oppression and for terrorists, not against them.

Make no mistake, we will defend everyone’s right to peacefully speak up for oppression and totalitarianism, if that is truly what they want to do. The problem is, that is not what is fundamentally happening on those campuses, and that is what distinguishes them so much.

First, we can dispatch the idea that these are mass, organic demonstrations, as was the case in the 1960s. The protesters who are dominating the headlines today number in the hundreds, if that, at most campuses; in the 1960s, they numbered in the thousands.

What’s more, the small groups are actually part of an organized network funded by billionaires and leftist “philanthropic” foundations, and many of their leaders are neither students nor faculty. After the occupation of Hamilton Hall, Columbia University officials said they believed those who led the occupation were not affiliated with the university in any capacity.

As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, a group called the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights has been paying stipends of $2,880 to $3,360 to “campus-based fellows” for three months of “work,” which includes assisting campaigns that “demand federal or state politicians cut U.S. military, financial, or diplomatic ties with Israel.”

The WSJ reported that the corporation behind that group — there’s another difference from the ‘60s, the almost wholesale camaraderie of corporate America with the collectivist left — is Education for Just Peace in the Middle East, which just happens to be part of George and Alexander Soros’s Open Society Foundation funding network.

Oh, they get money, too, from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In other words, just as with the Black Lives Matter riots during the George Floyd demonstrations, these are paid activists whose job it is to disrupt. At its core, it’s manufactured outrage, though the paid activists surely stir up gullible students.

Then, too, the outrage is not just directed at the state of Israel and the U.S. government. It’s directed to Jewish students on those college campuses and it represents a new strain of virulent anti-semitism that has taken hold on the left. Jewish students have been stalked, harassed, and bullied simply because they are Jews; they have been pushed and shoved; their property has been desecrated; their own rights to free speech violated. 

Wishing that the Hamas attack of October 7 be repeated “a thousand times over” as some in those crowds chant is repulsive and evil, if constitutionally protected, speech, but directly threatening the lives and health of Jewish students on college campuses is not constitutionally protected speech — it is in fact criminal.

None of this is to pretend that all the 1960s protests were noble and authentic. The Vietnam war was unjust, of course, a military-corporate complex exercise of power that sacrificed innocent lives, both American and foreign. But many if not most of the thousands of demonstrators then were marching not only because the war was unjust but because they were in danger of losing the draft lottery and being shipped overseas to fight and possibly die there.

Winning the peace was absolutely personal to them.

The only thing personal for today’s protesters is the personal hatred they feel for the Jews who live next to them, or close to them, or who attend classes with them. This is the plagiarized oppression of a people, Nazi garbage rewritten in the language of liberation: wolves in sheep’s clothing.

That this is so can be made clear by making better comparisons of today’s college protesters than with the boomer generation of anti-war Vietnam activists.

For starters, these protesters are not even anti-war. One of the most interesting developments — or lack thereof — in America’s proxy war with Russia via Ukraine is the lack of any anti-war movement against it.

It should be stressed that the Ukraine conflict is the first significant war in American history in which U.S. participation did not draw protests in the streets, particularly on college campuses. Even in World War II, though smaller, such protests took place. Yet today’s generation uttered not a collective peep, nary a call for negotiations — in fact the U.S. torpedoed negotiations with Russia — as the government swore itself to the Ukraine war for “as long as it takes” and as civilian casualties mounted.

How interesting that the protests against the American war machine and civilian casualties and genocide showed up only when it could be used against the Jewish state, even though Hamas perpetrated the terror and slaughter last October 7 and then retreated to the streets of Gaza where they could use the Palestinian civilians as human shields.

How interesting that today’s protesters embrace such tactics and demand that Israel stand down against a group whose articulated goal is to destroy the state of Israel and exterminate all Jews.

Today’s generation is not anti-establishment or populist; it is the opposite, a tool of a globalist cabal out to destroy all national and cultural identity save for the bureaucratic state, and that says a lot about the motives behind the demonstrations.

Two better comparisons can be made. One is to the emerging civil rights movement in the 1950s in the American South, when black students entering formerly segregated schools feared for their safety in an atmosphere of racial animus. Today’s pro-Hamas demonstrators more resemble the hateful mobs that confronted and terrorized black students in those days.

The second comparison, and more perhaps an even more apt one, is of Hitler’s Brownshirts, more specifically known as the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung, or SA, whose young participants confronted Jews on city streets in Germany and especially on college campuses.

We understand that, in modern American politics, to make comparisons to Nazi Germany and to Hitler is to walk on thin ice and wander near the boundary of irresponsible hyperbole. But to watch these demonstrations unfold is chilling and terrifying enough to make such comparisons necessary, not because of the political views they profess, as abhorrent as they may be, but because of the hateful actions they are inspiring and, worse, actually threaten.

It is those hateful actions, not any hateful thoughts behind them, that must be shut down, and that must give rise to warnings about the motivations behind them. To dither now is to condemn Jews and ultimately all of us to more oppression later.

Say what you want about the 1960s anti-war movement, as self-interested as it may have been, as narcissistic as it was in its proclamations for love and peace and flower power, it was at least authentic and independent of establishment power, and indeed critical of it.

But that was then and this is now, and the ugly head of anti-semitism is once again pulsing through the veins of some Americans, beating in the hearts of a propagandized generation. Such anti-semitism is always the first omen of a broad totalitarianism.

The time for action is now, for the luxury of then is long gone.