ASU protesters have a poisonous ideology about Israel and the world
It’s still not clear what exactly happened on Arizona State University’s main campus on Tuesday night.
Pro-Palestinian students reportedly threw landscaping rocks at a building in which student leaders were set to weigh a resolution.
The motion, if passed, would have expressed support for all students affected by today’s Arab-Israeli war, The Arizona Republic’s Sasha Hupka reports.
Jewish students who attended the meeting said afterwards on social media that they were escorted from the building by campus police, who were there to protect them.
Most ASU protesters supported Palestine
ASU President Michael Crow went to the internet with tough words: “ASU will not tolerate acts of intimidation or violence.”
Crow has been a stalwart defender of Jewish people and Israel over the years, as he has been for all marginalized groups.
What was clear from video is that the student numbers are overwhelmingly with the Palestinian side of this conflict, as they have been on college campuses across the United States.
One of the groups chanting outdoors on the Tempe campus was Students for Justice in Palestine at ASU, whose national organization has declared common cause with Hamas.
After Hamas murdered some 1,200 mostly Israeli Jews on Oct. 7, the national SJP emblazoned its “Day of Resistance” posters with the image of a paraglider.
Hamas attackers flew paragliders over the Israeli border fence early on Oct. 7 and slaughtered some 260 young people at an outdoor music festival.
They don't realize what they have in common
Those Israeli young people were roughly the same age as the students at Tuesday’s meeting in Tempe, and like their Tempe cohorts, idealistic.
They envisioned a better Middle East and a better future for the Palestinian people. Theirs was a “Festival of Peace and Love.”
Then Hamas crashed their world.
You can see the videos now to know what that meant.
Young Israeli adults huddled and cowering in shelters with eyes filled with the knowledge they were about to die. Then, the footage of their bloody corpses.
This generation has been fed lies
Before Israel could count or bury its dead, American college students were already marching in protest.
Against Israel.
They didn’t pause to assemble the facts or consider hard the options facing Israel, whose civilians had just been murdered on a massive scale.
The U.S. students immediately condemned the Jewish state for fighting back, for bombing Hamas positions in Gaza, where the terrorists dug in among the Palestinian civilians.
Earlier generations of American students, though not all, would have instantly recognized the cowardice of an army that shields itself with its own mothers and fathers.
Not this generation.
This one is plagued with an ideology that has lied to them — that tells them the world divides up neatly into the oppressors and the oppressed — the fair-skinned colonizers and darker-hued colonized.
The biproduct of those lies is antisemitism
In this ignorant and race-obsessed vision of the world, the Israelis are the white colonizers and the Palestinians their more darkly complected victims.
This ignores the fact that most Israelis share the same DNA as the Arabs, whose forefathers settled the Holy Land and Middle East centuries before Christ or Mohammed walked the earth.
Americans and especially progressive Jews are discovering today that this ideology nurtured on college campuses has a filthy biproduct — antisemitism.
One of the most influential voices of this conflict is Douglas Murray, a British journalist who has covered for decades the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the ground in Israel and Gaza this past week, he has been lamenting the American young people and their newly embraced belief system.
UA president becomes: The voice of moral clarity on Israel
“(It is) a very selective mapping of a particular interpretation of the world that very dumb people in America have tried to put on very selective other cases (such as the Arab-Israeli conflict),” said Murray on the Modern Wisdom podcast. “And it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.
“But may they never find out how much it doesn’t work. May they never find out. I wish them bliss in their ignorance because if their ignorance ever gets popped it will be as brutal a day as can be imagined.”
What that hammer and sickle represents
One of the groups of ASU students protesting Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinians was outfitted in matching red T-shirts imprinted with “Socialist Revolution” and a hammer and sickle.
I wonder if any of those young men have ever heard of the Katyn Massacre in which soldiers under the hammer and sickle put bullets in the heads of some 20,000 Polish military officers whose hands were bound.
How many have heard of The Great Purge, when Stalin executed some 680,000 people from 1937 to 1938.
Or the Khmer Rouge, who slaughtered 1.5 to 3 million — roughly one-fourth of their fellow Cambodians — in the mid-to-late 1970s.
The hammer and sickle have presided over more carnage and forced starvation than any symbol in history, by some estimates as many as 94 million deaths.
The ASU young people in their hammer-and-sickle T-shirts might as well have been wearing swastikas or white hoods.
It's not idealism. It's sinister
I would say to the anti-Israeli protesters we were all young and stupid in college, but your generation has seized on something young and stupid and sinister.
Your political philosophy is menacing Jewish college students and Jews across North America, who are being assaulted and harassed on campuses, in public schools and on street corners especially since Oct. 7, but well before then.
Many of us have been patient for years with your woke fantasies and dreams of de-colonization. But now your politics have become intolerable, and your bubble is about to burst.
America is waking up.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: ASU protesters have bought into a poisonous ideology about Israel
