A Deadly Embrace

The Western Left's "solidarity" with the Palestinian cause corrupts them both

Mike Johnson at Columbia University, telling it like it is

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The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives did something extraordinary yesterday. Mike Johnson traveled from Washington DC to New York City, where, at Columbia University, he resoundingly denounced the vile antisemitism that runs rampant on campus. And mincing no words, he roundly criticized the university administration for its shameful failure to vindicate the rights of all students to a safe and supportive learning environment, free of intimidation, harassment, and expressions of racist hate.

Needless to say, the Speaker and the four GOP House members who accompanied him were greeted with boos and denunciations from the Hamas-hugging “student activists” who’ve established a fascist enclave on the Columbia campus. To these scurvy Jew bashers, it goes without saying that Israel is a white-supremacist, settler-colonialist entity that deserves to be sponged off the map. And since they’re powerless to destroy the “Zionist Entity,” they have to content themselves with attacks on their fellow students who happen to be Jews.

As I pondered this sad and scandalous decline of American higher education, a couple of thoughts occurred to me. One is that we shouldn’t have been surprised by it. In the 1930s, there were no more enthusiastic supporters of Hitler and National Socialism than Germany’s professoriate and university students. Intellectuals are not immune to the virus of ideology. In many ways, indeed, they’re especially susceptible to theories of everything like Nazism and Marxism-Leninism. Postmodern discourse, the standard of the industry among today’s intellectuals, merely updates those earlier ideologies. What’s the difference between today’s “anti-Zionist” Left and the Nazi Sturmabteilungen? The Brownshirts marched in step.

And I was struck also by the thought that all the marches, blockades, sit-ins, tent cities chants, signs, banners, Palestinian flags purporting to demonstrate solidarity with “Palestine” are utterly futile. Vile as they are, these antics betray a disconnect from reality that would be comical except for their blatant antisemitism and fervent advocacy for genocide.

A year from now, when the keffiyeh-wearing goons now polluting America’s college campuses have moved on, there will be no river-to-sea Palestinian state. The land will not have been cleansed of white supremacist, settler-colonialist Jews. The Zionist Entity will still be there, and the Palestinian Arabs will still be mired in the misery to which the “support” they receive consigns them.

“Justice is truth in action.” Benjamin Disraeli’s trenchant observation points toward a great evil of the anti-Zionist Left, second only to its genocidal antisemitism. The whole narrative it has constructed to explain the long-running conflict between the Jews and the Arabs over the land that the Romans named Palestine is nothing more than an elaborate lie, a barrier to justice, spreading corruption from American university campuses to Gaza and the West Bank.

When Israel is reviled as an “apartheid state,” when Israel is accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing, when the Jews of Israel are denounced as alien interlopers who should be shipped back to Poland and Russia, justice for the Palestinians recedes farther into the future. There can be no justice for them within the bounds of a narrative that canonizes them and damns the Jews. Only the truth can set them free.

And the truth isn’t black and white. Anyone who surveys the Arab/Israeli conflict with a candid eye must see that there are legitimate grievances on both sides. With a modicum of mutual goodwill, those grievances could be addressed or forgiven, and the people who inhabit the land could settle down into a decent and mutually beneficial relationship. But there are powerful forces, some indigenous, some intruding from the outside, that conspire to make any such settlement impossible.

One such force is our own anti-Zionist Left, which since October 7, 2023, has unmasked itself as the postmodern iteration of fascism, exploiting the plight of the Palestinian people to justify its antisemitic rage.

Perhaps the miserable wretches who’ve established the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University really do think that they’re forwarding the cause of Palestinian liberation. Ideology does have the effect of blinding one to the realities of life. Or maybe it’s all just a great and glorious game to them: Lord of the Flies comes to campus. One thing’s for sure, though: Their “activism” is hurting the ones they profess to love—by giving us a preview of what a Palestinian state would really be like.