The Campus Intifadas Are Not ‘Anti-War Protests’ What the protesters are really calling for. by Mark Tapson
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-campus-intifadas-are-not-anti-war-protests/
In February I wrote about the seemingly strange bedfellows of the red-green alliance – red for progressivism and green for Islam – whose values on many issues seem so diametrically opposed and yet they are united in their determination to dismantle the Western civilization they both see as the obstacle to erecting their differing visions of utopian societies.
This alliance was perhaps never in quite such alarming evidence as in the worldwide, vociferous, and even violent demonstrations of left-wing and Muslim support for the Palestinian people in the wake of Israel’s military retaliation against the terror group Hamas for its barbaric massacre of over 1200 innocents in Israel on October 7, 2023.
The anti-Israel protests have only gathered momentum since February as what David Horowitz calls the “unholy alliance” has intensified its pro-Hamas activism. On April 15th anti-Israel protesters shut down San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, blocked the entrance to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, blocked Manhattan-bound traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and blocked traffic on Oregon’s Interstate 5 and roads in Philadelphia on a day of coordinated protests and rallies.
Meanwhile, college campuses have become overrun with metastasizing encampments of anti-Israel radicals intent on forcing administrators to concede to demands ranging from university divestment from Israel to full scholarships for Palestinian students to dental dams for safe sex for the encamped protesters. These privileged militants – both students and faculty – bully Jewish students, clash with cops, vandalize school property, replace campus Stars-and-Stripes with Palestinian flags, and chant antisemitic slogans including the genocidal call for “Palestine” to be free “from the river to the sea.”
Anti-War Does Not Mean Anti-War
During the George Floyd-inspired rioting across America in 2020, the left-dominated news media coordinated to spread the narrative that the looting, burning, and vandalizing carried out by Black Lives Matter revolutionaries and their allies were “mostly peaceful.” Similarly, now the media are attempting to whitewash these Jew-hating, anti-colonialist revolutionaries waging campus intifadas across America as merely “anti-war.”
And not just the media, but government leaders as well. Democrat Congresspeople including “Squad” members Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have also mislabeled the protestors as “antiwar.” But consider a few examples from recent mainstream media headlines:
From The Washington Post: “120 antiwar protesters arrested at NYU; Calif. students form barricade.”
From the taxpayer-funded PBS: “Anti-war protesters dig in on campuses across the U.S. as universities, police take action”
From CBS News: “College campus chaos continues amid anti-war protests”
From ABC News: “Campus anti-war protesters dig in from New York to California”
From the Associated Press: “College students, faculty demand amnesty for participating in anti-war protests”
And of course The View, the top-rated daytime chatfest aimed at progressive women (only 12.6 percent of its audience are Republicans and approximately three-quarters are female) is pushing this narrative as well. Discussing the ongoing protests with her co-hostesses on a recent episode, former comedienne Whoopi Goldberg took the side of the Hamas-supporting bullies calling for the eradication of Zionists, pontificating that “it is one of the great rights as an American to stand up and say something’s wrong” and that she is “thrilled” when “students get mad and say, ‘We want a change made.’” But she complained that the clickbait-seeking media is too focused on the radicals and not “the folks who are doing peaceful stuff.”
Co-hostess Sunny Hostin argued for identifying the protests as anti-war. “I think we need to shift the framing of these college protests back”:
I think college campuses have been the place for anti-war protests for as far as I can remember. I think recent protests haven’t even reached the scale of the major student protest that we saw in the late 1960s against the Vietnam War, or even the 1980s against South Africa’s practice of apartheid.
… and so I think these are anti-war protests, and I think it’s very distressing that we are framing these as pro-Palestinian protests or pro-Israeli protests.
“These are anti-war protests,” she insisted again, adding, “What we also don’t talk enough about is the fact that 35,000, mainly women and children, that are Palestinians, have been murdered” in the Israeli military response against Hamas.
This is not only a false number but the term “murdered” is a grotesque anti-Israel smear. The inflated figure of 35,000 dead Palestinians came from the terrorist group Hamas itself and sympathetic mainstream media figures like Sunny Hostin simply ran with it unquestioningly. We’re talking about an organization that ruthlessly uses Palestinian women and children as human shields and conceals weapons caches beneath schools and hospitals in order to blame even more civilian casualties on Israel.
Meanwhile she had nothing to say about the more than 1200 innocents murdered in Israel on October 7th, which kicked off the military action by Israel’s IDF, the most civilian-sensitive military force in world history, against Hamas in the first place. She went on to slander the IDF as being guilty of war crimes – again with no mention of Hamas barbarism.
To her credit, former White House aide and token conservative co-hostess Alyssah Farah Griffin countered, “There’s a right to free speech and a right to assembly, but Jews also have a right to feel safe on college campuses”:
As a Lebanese American I’m disgusted at seeing Hezbollah flags, a terrorist organization, fly on American college campuses, and I understand that these young people are coming out protesting for peace, protesting for a ceasefire.
But I also want to say, there was a ceasefire before October 7th. Israel has proposed two since then, Hamas has rejected them, and Hamas’ own charter in Article 13 states that it rejects any peaceful solutions, any negotiated peace.
And beyond that, we have seen this language go into something that is far more radical, anti-Semitic, saying that Jews do not have a place on campus.
Her fellow panelists and the audience were not swayed.
Left-wing anti-war protesters in America are never actually anti-war; yes, there have been some who opposed the draft and genuinely wanted the government to “give peace a chance,” as John Lennon put it. But as a movement they are generally driven by anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, revolutionary sentiments. The campus protesters during the Vietnam War were not “anti-war” but pro-communist. If they had been truly anti-war they would have protested both parties to the conflict or at the very least the side that instigated the conflict – in that case, North Vietnam. Instead, the ostensibly “anti-war” protesters turned all their subversive energies toward the capitalist United States.
Leftist organizations of the Vietnam era such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), arguably the most influential student “anti-war” group, actually openly supported the Viet Cong. Discover the Networks, the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s online encyclopedia of the left, details SDS’s true agenda:
As the Vietnam War dragged on, SDSers famously chanted, “Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win.” Ho was the Communist revolutionary who served as president of North Vietnam from 1945-69. The NLF was the National Liberation Front, formally National Front for the Liberation of the South, a Vietnamese political organization (established in 1960) whose aim was to overthrow the South Vietnamese government and reunify North and South Vietnam.
Bernadine Dohrn, partner in crime of Barack Obama mentor and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, wrote an infamous article with the slogan “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” as the title. The antiwar left then, like today, largely used “anti-war” as a flag of convenience; they had a larger revolutionary agenda, and many embraced violence to advance it, committing acts of terrorism including arson and bombings against targets in the United States. The Weather Underground was one such organization:
Emerging in 1969 as the most militant wing of the SDS’s Revolutionary Youth Movement, the fledgling Weatherman issued a “manifesto” eschewing nonviolence and calling instead for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the “mother country”; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the “white” United States on behalf of the non-white Third World.
The left sees everything through the Marxist lens pitting the oppressor against the oppressed. In their view, downtrodden Palestinians are engaged not in a war, but in righteous resistance against a bellicose, genocidal Israel and its imperialist ally the United States. CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, for example, recently called the conflict “the war on Gaza,” as if Israel is the aggressor.
But Israel and the Jews are the targets. Videos of university confrontations are circulating which show, for example, a Jewish student being blockaded from attending class, a Jewish man on campus being tasered by a female protester, a young Jewish woman sent to the ER with a concussion after being bludgeoned in the head by a pro-Hamas mob who stomped on her Israeli flag, another Jewish student being told to go back to the gas chambers, and an encampment leader declaring that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” This is not anti-war; this is antisemitism.
And it is antisemitism in conjunction with the progressive (i.e., Communist) agenda to destroy capitalism and upend Western (i.e., white European) civilization. Journalist Cam Higby reported that at the University of California, Los Angeles encampment he saw Communist hammer-and-sickle symbolism everywhere. He also filmed an anti-Israel protester at UCLA waving a Palestinian flag and dismissing a counter-protester because he is white. “You’re just a white person; you’re a white person [so] get out — we don’t like white people,” she stated before chanting, “Free Palestine.”
In response to that video, media personality Anthony Koch tweeted, “‘Anti-whiteness’ is real, it’s corrosive, and it’s a major organizational rallying cry for the modern western left.”
Journalist Andy Ngo tweeted that at a far-left rally for Gaza at George Washington University, an extremist with a microphone said, “There’s only one solution, intifada revolution. We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist reconstruction of the United States of America.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Christian Julio Lasval reported from the same GWU rally that a speaker declared, “We want to smash the Democratic Party, we want to smash the Republican party, we want to smash this whole goddamn capitalist, imperialist empire!”
(As noted by Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, “smash” was the favorite word for Mao’s ruthless young Red Guards, who called for smashing the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits), smashing the old world, smashing the criminal justice system, and so on.)
After replacing GWU’s American flag with a Palestinian one, an anti-Israel protester from the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” praised the crowd, “Each and every one of you believes in a world liberated from colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and Zionism. We are here to create that world.”
Not a word about ending war. This movement is about ending the West, by any means necessary.
In an incident that highlights the undercurrent of violence and hatred for Israel and her supporters surging through the protesters, a prominent local Palestinian activist at a Bakersfield, California city council meeting accused the council of being “horrible human beings” because she claimed they did not care about “anything happening in Palestine or any other country where oppression occurs.” She concluded her first presentation at the podium by saying, “I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you motherfuckers.” After her second turn, her parting shot was, “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.”
Astroturfed, Not Anti-War
The campus protests are far from being a spontaneous, grass-roots flowering of anti-war sentiment. One tell is the identical tents springing up in the encampments dotting college campuses across the country. Further evidence abounds that this is an “Astroturfed” – highly and professionally organized – movement supported by subversive funding from the red-green alliance both within America and without.
Breitbart News, for example, reported that Iranian opposition activist Vahid Beheshti exposed a confidential letter from a high-ranking officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a U.S.-designated terror organization, to a “cultural and psychological operations” officer of the IRGC, which revealed that Iran has been secretly supporting anti-Israel rallies around the world, such as the April 15 wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations mentioned above. The organizers described their action as an “economic blockade to free Palestine.”
Beheshti noted that Iran is keenly interested in causing “as much chaos and instability as possible” to “destroy the modern society and build a global Islamic state.” Under that caliphate, progressivism will be crushed, but until that stage is achieved Islamic fundamentalists are happy to fuel the revolution of progressive “useful idiots.”
(Speaking of which, reports from the University of Southern California reveal that “hundreds” of students have converted to Islam en masse to show solidarity with Palestine, and female students are now donning hijabs.)
Breitbart also reported that the Iranian foreign minister Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian praised the demonstrators and called for the “Israeli regime” to be held accountable for war crimes. Iranian state TV echoed the anti-Israel messaging, approvingly repeating statements from the protesters occupying Columbia University and Yale University
Writing at Tablet, Park MacDougald reveals that, just as in the BLM rioting of 2020, strategic and financial support is flowing to the demonstrators from “a vast web” of left-wing foundations, NGOs, and dark-money groups “backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.”
Politico echoes this analysis, noting that donors to the demonstrators include some of the biggest names in Democrat philanthropy: David Rockefeller Jr., Hyatt Hotel heirs Susan and Nick Pritzker, and of course, the corrosive billionaire financier George Soros. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund “has given nearly $500,000 directly to Jewish Voice for Peace, which explicitly describes itself as anti-Zionist, over the past five years,” writes Politico. The Pritzkers are major donors to President Joe Biden, and Soros seeds the Tides Foundation, which promotes a multitude of leftist agendas and proclaims that it is “committed to advancing social justice.”
Again, these contributions are not designed to bring a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but to exploit and aggravate that conflict by empowering activists to advance a slate of left-wing causes.
Investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield wrote last month that Soros and his even more politically-minded son Alex have provided “an estimated $15 million to the pro-terrorist groups storming cities in support of Hamas, and an estimated $758,000 already to Biden.” Those “are only partial estimates of much larger spending by the family of radical billionaires which have simultaneously been funding the anti-Israel movement, trojan horse Jewish groups and the Democratic Party politicians whom they are busy pressuring.”
Greenfield goes on to detail some of the beneficiaries of Soros’ largesse, including
Linda Sarsour’s Arab American Association which took part in a rally celebrating the Oct 7 attacks where the pro-Hamas mob attacked police officers; Jewish Voice for Peace, a fake Jewish group which has blocked traffic to stop Israel from attacking the terrorists; J Street, which falsely claims to be “Pro-Israel” and “Pro-Peace” but has actually lobbied against Israel’s fight against terrorists; and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, a vanity group co-founded by Alex Soros, which tries to provide Jewish cover for members of the antisemitic “Squad” while accusing their Jewish critics of “weaponizing antisemitism.”
He concludes that “Soros money funds Muslims, leftists and people of Jewish ancestry who support killing Jews under a variety of banners and names, but they share the traditional hateful Soros agenda.”
No Crime in Revolution
When it comes to weaponizing the purported suffering of Palestinians under purported occupation by Israel, the left will draw no moral boundaries. The Free Beacon noted, for example, that two residents of UCLA medical school’s psychiatry department hosted a talk this past April called “Depathologizing Resistance,” actually glorifying self-immolation as a form of “revolutionary suicide” in support of “indigenous Palestine.”
Referring to the suicide of Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. serviceman who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. in February to protest U.S. support for Israel, Drs. Ragda Izar and Afaf Moustafa argued that the mentally ill man could be considered a “martyr” responding rationally to a “genocide” thousands of miles away.
“Yes, he carried a lot of distress,” Izar said of Bushnell in audio of the talk. But shouldn’t you “be distressed when you’re seeing this level of carnage” in Gaza?
But Drs. Izar and Moustafa are not promoting self-immolation as anti-war protest, but as anti-colonialist resistance. They argued that our taboo against self-immolation serves to “discredit” resistance to “power structures” like “colonization,” “homophobia,” and “white supremacy,” framing legitimate acts of protest as signs of psychiatric dysfunction. Their presentation urged fellow psychiatrists to “embed your practice with an anti-colonial lens” and “recognize that mental health is intimately tied to liberation.”
At one point, Izar condemned statements made by the American Psychiatric Association and other medical bodies about Hamas’ October 7 rampage, complaining they had “centered the suffering of one group of people” – Jews – without discussing the “trauma” Palestinians had endured “at the hands of colonizing forces for 75 years.”
For the left, the end justifies the means; whatever empowers the oppressed and deconstructs systemic oppression is just. It does not necessarily have anything to do with law and order or right and wrong; instead, it has everything to do with crushing opposition to the revolution, by any means necessary, to reverse the power dynamics of an unjust society. “There is no crime in revolution!” went the Maoist slogan of the Cultural Revolution – meaning, no act which furthers the overthrow of the “old” can be considered criminal.
A truly horrific example of this is in the left’s defense of the barbaric terrorism waged by Hamas in Israel four months ago. Decent souls everywhere were sickened by the shocking war crimes committed there on October 7th, but the Left have been untroubled – even celebratory – and defiant. “You don’t get to decide how we resist,” is their pro-Hamas slogan on placards – on which blood drips threateningly from the letters of the word “RESIST.” The perverse narrative behind this slogan is that Israel is an oppressor regime that must be overthrown, and therefore no crime committed by the purportedly oppressed Palestinians can be considered unjust. Gang rape, torture, murder, kidnapping, all of which were gleefully carried out by sadistic Hamas “freedom fighters,” are not seen by the left as crimes but as just “resistance.”
Permanent Revolution
Make no mistake: when every single protest about Gaza features a sea of Palestinian flags (and sometimes those of Hezbollah and even ISIS as well), chants of “Free Palestine,” and genocidal calls against Israel and the Jews; when harassment, sometimes violent, of Jewish and pro-Israel students is rampant at these events; and when these protests are driven by Soros’ money and equipped by American socialist and communist organizations proclaiming revolutionary “solidarity” with Palestine; it is undeniable that these protests are not anti-war but anti-Israel, antisemitic, anti-American, anti-capitalist, and even anti-white (the Left considers Jews to belong to the supposed white oppressor class).
Despite the concerted media effort to camouflage their true aims, these radicals (students, faculty, and outside agitators) seizing college campuses are not calling for an end to war in Gaza. They are calling for a state of permanent revolution until every status quo is eradicated, and a new, collectivist utopia (either Muslim or Communist) is established on the ruins of today’s West. They are calling for an end to Israel and America.
Originally published at the Deep Dive blog of filmmaker Gloria Greenfield’s Doc Emet Productions.
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