The spate of pro-Hamas protest activities that swept several US college campuses the past days would likely disappear as quickly as they arrived.
These protest encampments cannot be compared to the anti-war and anti-apartheid protest movements that swept across US universities many years ago. The pro-Hamas activities that began about two weeks ago did not enjoy a higher moral ground and a broader base of social support. It espoused a freakish cause that most citizens could not identify with.
Brief as this episode might be, there is much to learn from it.
As I write this, the New York police has moved into the Columbia University campus to clear protesters who managed to occupy a number of buildings and even hold several service workers “hostage.” After doing that, through the din of vandalism being committed, the protesters demanded university authorities supply them with food. This is such a privileged lot.
The main building occupied by the protesters was Hamilton Hall, a place with much history. This edifice was occupied by anti-war protesters in the late sixties and anti-apartheid activists in the eighties. Today’s pro-terrorist activists clearly want to undeservedly benefit from the glow of historical legacy.
Pro-Hamas activists occupied the main university quadrangle and pitched strangely matching tents while university authorities quibbled. They were perhaps hoping the anarchists would soon enough fold their tents, gather their abundant food supplies, stop harassing other students and quietly go away.
The police needed an official complaint from university authorities to come in and clear the trespassers. New York being an epicenter of “woke” ideology, university officials were hesitant to provoke a confrontation. That complaint was long in coming.
Meanwhile, the encampment at Columbia University, although never attracting more than a few dozen militants, provided the template for similar protest activities in other US universities and a few institutions abroad. In other US universities, state authorities reacted with greater dispatch. The encampments were dismantled and militants were arrested for trespassing and other offenses. Similar attempts to mount protests in German and French universities were quickly and efficiently quashed.
Those arrested at Columbia were routinely booked by the police. The process of identifying the protesters, who strangely wore surgical masks and wrapped their heads in Palestinian scarves for anonymity, confirmed what many suspected: the majority of those involved were not students at the institution. They were trespassers who, in many instances, bullied regular students.
By intimidating those who do not share their point of view and by indulging in wanton vandalism, militants in these encampments marginalized themselves. They were behaving more like a cult than an organic social movement. They were out to offend rather than win sympathy.
The academic campuses were hospitable places for this sort of ideological scam. A significant number of their faculties were leftists preaching “woke” ideology to the young.
Under the sway of a malignant ideology, it was easier to gather warm bodies to man the barricades, sing praises for a terrorist group and wrongly characterize what was really happening in the Middle East. Many of the students lured to join the protest encampments had a weak grasp of history, making them gullible to the sort of pro-terrorist propaganda the instigators mouthed.
This was a highly contrived protest movement to begin with. It could not plant deep roots in the political landscape. It could only attract those alienated from the comfortable humdrum of the democratic polities that bred them. They were just too happy to shock their families and communities by praising tyrannies abroad, many of them as hostile to the US as they are to Israel.
Under the sway of radical propaganda, they were ready to indulge in denialism – such as saying the massacre of Israelis last Oct. 7 never happened or even that the Holocaust never occurred. They could not condemn the terrorist group holding the population of Gaza captive and using them as human shields. They could not bring themselves to demand that Hamas release the hostages they still hold as a condition for peace in this ravaged land.
Over the next several weeks, we should benefit from better insight into how this bizarre protest movement was birthed and how it was financed. A careful profiling of the arrested vandals and trespassers should bring us better clarity.
From all the indications so far, it is obvious this rash of protest encampments benefitted from a well-funded conspiracy that was organized long before. When Hamas brigades crossed into Israel last Oct. 7 on a mission of murder and mayhem, they seemed confident their allies could swing world opinion in their favor, using useful idiots abroad. There must have been some basis for this confidence – outrageous as it may be.
Despite the gross atrocity committed by Hamas militants, the international propaganda network laid down by allies of terrorism succeeded to some extent in downplaying the case for releasing the Israeli hostages and transforming the narrative into one about Tel Aviv’s use of excessive force against an unarmed people.
The civilian toll of urban warfare through the length of Gaza is understandably horrific. Hamas (and Iranian propaganda) was consistently on overdrive, magnifying civilian casualties and downplaying the fact that the militants used all the hospitals as fortresses.
There are leftist militants in our own midst aching to join the pro-Hamas action for whatever benefit this might bring them. So far, they have, like their comrades abroad, been marginalized.