Junko Case

[Victor Davis Hanson @VDHanson]

Our Immoral Monsters

Students at UCLA, some of them perhaps on foreign-student visas and others on some sort of taxpayer-funded support, are now marching with a new controversial and disputed chant: “Israel, Israel you cannot hide, we charge you with genocide”.

But how strange that the same crowd that charges Israel with “genocide”, for replying to the mass murdering of its citizens on October 7, has a signature English-rhyming chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. That jingle is tailor-made for Western-residents eager to parrot the Hamas charter.

Despite the usual denials, that mantra is a euphemism for destroying the state of Israel and those within it. They are then to be replaced by a nation of Palestinian Arabs from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean—in other words, requiring a genocide, or what happened on October 7 expanded to encompass all of Israel.

When professors faced little in the way of consequences for calling for Jews to be separated from their classmates, or advocating that the children of “Zionist propagandists” should be singled out, or claiming Israelis were “pigs” and “excrement,” what do we expect would follow?

Something like what just happened at the Cooper Union campus in New York?

There, some 50 Jews were locked in the library to protect them from raving pro-Hamas protestors pounding on the windows, zombie-like in their hatred, as if they were hired extras for The Walking Dead.

Why was Biden press-secretary Karine Jean-Pierre matter-of-factly denying the anti-Semitism was a problem (50% of hate crimes victims are Jews [2% of the population]), and why appoint Robert Malley to anything—unless the hatred of Israel is deeply engrained among the Left?

It is, after all, the effective goal of the new DEI/Middle East/Jacobin nexus to demand the mass killing of Jews and the extinction of Israel.

That agenda is randomly evident in the BLM glider posters, or the “river to the sea’ chants, or the August 1988 charter of the now idolized Hamas— ″Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam invalidates it, just as it invalidated others before it″ / “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Is the current war in Gaza City, thus, the “Jihad” that Hamas had always promised—or did they mean just the one-sided surprise murdering of unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly?

We are reversing the Nazi sequence of the 1930s. Then cadres of thugs physically attacked Jews in gruesome efforts to shock all Germans into supporting their anti-Semitic agendas.

In today’s America, leftist intellectuals and their useful idiots on campuses are at the forefront as shock troops.

They are seeking to acculturate the nation to widespread, commonplace hatred of Jews in hopes of birthing brownshirt street violence of the sort we are already beginning to see at Cooper Union and elsewhere.

We have not yet reached depths of tabloid Jew-hatred of the Der Stürmer sort. But the New York Times and The Washington Post, along with other major news outlets, as tensions rose, ran with the incendiary Big Lie that the IDF had intentionally bombed a hospital “killing 500 Palestinians”.

That lie was compounded when our addled President weirdly seemed to lament that Islamic Jihad could not shoot straight: “It’s that old thing: Gotta learn how to shoot straight.”

The logical subtext to Biden’s remonstrations is that if Islamic Jihad had just hit their target—civilian Jews in Tel-Aviv—then the ensuring global fury and protests, and his cancelled meetings with Arab leaders (all recipients of massive US aid) would not have occurred.

I suppose as well Biden would not have sent $100 million in fungible money to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip—had the terrorists just learned “how to shoot straight” and not hit their own hospital parking lot.

The war in the Middle East will not end soon.

It is not easy to root out the Hamas death squads from their subterranean tunnels and cities and their human-shielded mosques, hospitals, and schools. It will be tricky to deter Iran and Hezbollah from entering the fray.

Meanwhile each day expect the campuses and streets to get a little bolder, a little closer to reifying their “river to the sea” chanting—as all the more Hamas erodes.

After all, there are no consequences to death chants. Even when the protestors incite violence, they correctly understand no college president will call them out.

Even when Rep. Tlaib incites mobs at the Capitol by shouting the lie that IDF leveled a Gazan hospital, she knows she is a protected “victim”—and her lies mere competing narratives.

When will they stop?

Not until the Democratic hierarchy disowns the growing Hamas wing of its own party.

Not until universities become more afraid of the donor class than they are of the DEI/pro-Hamas bunch and their protected hatred.

And not until a sane administration stops inviting to America those who despise their generous host.

None of that will happen soon—if ever.

So for now we Americans are like Diogenes the Cynic, stumbling around in broad daylight with a torch looking for just one honest college president, one truthful US president—all in vain.