Mitch Albom (author of "Tuesdays with Morrie" and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven"), wrote the following in the Detroit Free Press.
Let's be clear on what these campus protests are (Detroit Free Press – May 5. 2024), by Mitch Albom
Imagine, if you are Christian, that there is only one nation in the world where you are the majority (instead of more than 150). And nearly half the Christians on earth live there.
Or if you are Muslim, and there is only one country where you are the majority — instead of nearly 50 — and half the world’s Muslims live within its borders.
If you are Black, imagine just one country where you are the dominant race, and half of the world’s Black population shares the space. Same thing if you are Latino or Asian.
Now imagine if college campuses across America were screaming for your country’s elimination. Your one country. Your only country. And you watched those protests grow in size, in hate, in violence, and wondered why so few people were defending you?
Then you can begin to sense how Jewish people felt these past few weeks.
This is not a column about the two sides of the Israel-Hamas war. That is for another day. Nor is this about those students who genuinely empathize with the death and suffering of innocent Palestinians caught in the conflict. That, too, deserves its own reflection.
No, today the subject is the antagonism toward Jews, subtle and outright, in these recent college protests.
And let’s be clear. That is the end-game desire of many angry students, faculty and outside agitators who, wearing masks, erecting barricades and occupying buildings, turned college campuses into theaters of the absurd these past few weeks.
They would like Israel eliminated. From the river to the sea. Half the Jews in the world left to find someplace else to go, or worse, if Hamas has its way, eliminated altogether.
Many people, journalists included, seem to tiptoe around what these protests were about, afraid of offending one sensitivity or the other. Joe Biden went nine days without personally commenting on them, and he’s the president!
But in the face of hate and destruction, it is no time to be timid. So let’s be clear about what’s really going on here. History is owed at least that much, right?
Turning ugly quickly
When these protests began, many outsiders stretched to emphasize their “peaceful” nature. Media noted pizza and dancing. But Jewish students sensed things differently. Pretty soon, the world did, too. Belligerence grew. Anger grew. Pizza and singing were replaced by confrontations, vandalism, barricades, smashing windows, taking over buildings and creating locked-arm human shields to deny Jewish students access to the facilities they pay to use.
Chants of “Intifada” grew. So did screams of “brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel must fall.”
One of Columbia’s protest leaders, Khymani Jones, an American raised in Boston, had said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and spoke about “murdering Zionists.” (His subsequent apology is meaningless.)
At UCLA, a Star of David was drawn on a walkway, under the words “Step here.” (Imagine if that were a cross!) Videos emerged of Jewish students on campuses being denied access by keffiyeh-wearing protesters. One Jewish student was asked “Are you Zionist?” and when he answered, “Of course I’m Zionist,” he was not allowed to advance.
Note that he didn’t say “I believe Palestinians should die,” or “I hate Muslims.” His sole “crime” was believing Israel has a right to exist.
Peggy Noonan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal, visited the Columbia protests and came away with this observation: “They weren’t a compassionate group. They weren’t for anything, they were against something: the Israeli state, which they’d like to see disappear, and those who support it.”
Hate can't be tolerated
So it’s been stunning to watch the pretzel twisting people go through to parse the antisemitism out of this wave of campus hate. Some point to the smattering of Jewish students amongst the protesters. “See,” they say, “we have Jews who agree with us.” (So what? Does having Black members of the MAGA movement keep critics from calling it racist?)
Others seem to believe that as long as they don’t say the exact words “I want to kill all Jews,” they are absolved.
Sorry. “From the river to the sea” (Jordan River, Mediterranean Sea, by the way) means all of Israel. You take that, Israel is gone.
“Intifada” may technically translate to “uprising” in Arabic, but it is also the word used to describe the violent terrorism against Israel from 1987-1993 and 2000-2005. And everyone there knows it.
“Go back to Poland!” as was shouted by one Palestinian-flag waving protester, suggests Jews leave America and return the land of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
And “Final Solution” — words actually on a sign at George Washington University — doesn’t refer to an answer. It was Hitler’s phrase for murdering every Jew in Europe.
So let’s be real. If you can get fired for using the wrong pronouns on a college campus these days, this is miles beyond that. If during the George Floyd aftermath, a broadcaster was terminated for tweeting the words “All lives matter,” because his accusers said everyone knew what he meant, this is miles beyond that.
Yet the same people who wagged those fingers are now spewing vitriol against Jews and Israelis and want a mulligan. Sorry. You can’t have it both ways. If you get furious over implied racism, then you must be furious over implied antisemitism.
And if you want to erase Israel off the map — as Hamas has stated, as UNRWA schoolbooks teach, and as those who wave the Hezbollah flag support — you don’t get to say you’re not anti-Jewish.
Do they even know what they're protesting?
The irony is many of these protesting students have never been to Israel. Some, I’ll bet, couldn’t find Gaza on a map. Yet they are being praised by the President of Iran, who last week called their efforts “a big event.” That ought to scare everyone.
The truth is their behavior doesn’t necessarily reflect a sudden passion, just before finals, to make the suffering in Gaza the most important cause in their lives.
In fact, a recent Harvard poll (yes, Harvard) found that “Israel/Palestine” ranked 15th out of 16 issues as most important to young people ages 18-29. You even see videos of protesters who shout “from the river to the sea,” but can’t name either the river or the sea they are talking about.
The New York Times, after interviewing many protesters, concluded that beyond Palestinians, their causes ranged from “intersectional justice” to “the idealistic desire to be a part of a community effort” to the continuation of ideals expressed during the Black Lives Matter movement.
Many of these “student protesters” weren’t even students at all. Of the 44 people who barricaded themselves inside Columbia's Hamilton Hall, 13 weren’t even affiliated with the university, despite the school’s supposed insistence that no outsiders get onto campus. In fact, outsiders played an enormous role in what looked like spontaneous revolt.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published a long story headlined “Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests.” It detailed Zoom meetings, coordinated plans and internet encouragement between many organizations, including National Students for Justice in Palestine and former Black Panthers. A virtual training session was hosted by a group that had previously celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. According to the WSJ report, its leader told the participants, “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas. These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.”
Yeah. These are also the people who murdered, raped and kidnapped over 1,400 Jewish people on Oct. 7. And who vow to do it again and again and again. No wonder the Hamilton Hall occupiers hurled a banner out the window that read “Glory to our martyrs.”
Tell us again why Jewish students shouldn’t be afraid.
Call these protests what they are
“What do these kids want?” You heard that uttered everywhere last week. In the 1960s, anti-Vietnam protesters clearly wanted an end to the war so our young men did not have to fight it. In the 1970s and '80s, Americans protesting South Africa wanted an end to apartheid rule.
These recent protesters are more hazy. Some demand divestment from companies doing business with Israel (something that won’t happen, but would make no financial difference if it did.) Others demand an end to exchange programs with Israeli universities. (How exactly is that going to help a Gazan child?) Others demand action on things like policing and climate change. At the absurd end was the Columbia grad student demanding the school feed the Hamilton Hall occupiers, and the Columbia law students demanding their finals be canceled due to the trauma they were enduring.
Yet while American kids screamed to free Palestine, you heard no screams to free American hostages being held by Hamas for more than six months (or, heaven forbid, the Israeli ones). Instead, you have graduations canceled, classes put online, buildings vandalized, American flags replaced with Palestinian flags and a statue of George Washington at a university named after him defaced, spray-painted and covered with a keffiyeh.
Let’s face it. The U.S. has a soft spot for protests. We are proud of our free speech principles. And baby boomers who fondly remember the 1960s seem to reflexively associate campus unrest with righteousness.
But this is not “hell-no-we-won’t go.” And just because you congregate lots of people doesn’t make you noble. Especially in the days of Instagram and Signal, where inviting a million souls is as simple as flicking a finger.
In the end, this campus fever was about many things, some of them earnest, some of them pathetic, but only one of them vile and terribly dangerous: the elimination of the only country on earth that calls itself a home to Jews, and the hostile backdrop of antisemitism behind it which left Jewish students across the country studying online, hiding their yarmulkes and Jewish stars, or weeping on school staircases, wondering how bad this will get.
Go back to Poland? Final Solution? Murdering Zionists? We wouldn’t tolerate that for any other minority groups. Why on earth have we been tolerating it up till now?
