The Campus Protests Are Not About Social Justice
The Campus Protests Are Not About Social Justice
A guest post by Hagit Arieli Chai, Hebrew Union College, USC
On quads and lawns from coast to coast, colleges are grappling with a groundswell of student activism over Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. Administrators are having to make controversial decisions over whether to call in the police, and are often criticized regardless of the route they take.
Alan Dershowitz writes eloquently and rightly:
The First Amendment protects the right to say idiotic things, but the marketplace of ideas also requires that speakers be held accountable for the words they speak, especially if they are hateful ones. The demonstrations currently taking place on many Ivy League campuses are not only about Palestinians, Gaza, or even Israel. The war in Gaza is providing an excuse for anti-American and anti-Western radicals and anarchists to try to damage and weaken our government and those of other Western democracies.
Indeed, those students that are deeply concerned with humanity and seeking justice for all should attempt to express ideas coherently and accurately for their cause. They are writing signs with words such as genocide. It might be wise first for the demonstrators, warriors, to learn the definition of genocide. After all, they are students at a university, an institution that charges money to acquire knowledge! Here is a bisel (Yiddish words for a little) of information—genocide is a deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion.
In his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944), Lemkin noted that a key component of genocide was the
criminal intent to destroy or to cripple permanently a human group. The acts are directed against groups as such, and individuals are selected for destruction only because they belong to these groups.
Let’s go back to the start of the Gaza War, October 7th. Hamas deliberately entered the homes of civilians with the intention to kill and wipe Israel from the face of the earth. But, they CAN’T! Israel retaliated by starting an army operation deliberately to eliminate Hamas, a terror organization. Israel can wipe out Gaza, but they will not! The IDF’s actions have been as surgical as possible for an army who is fighting a war in a civilian area. While the terrorists are operating from hospitals and schools.
Moreover, the UN openly supports and funds the UNRWA. UNRWA, which has been operating in Gaza for seven decades to provide food, water, shelter, schools, healthcare, and social programs to Palestinians, were some of the murderers of October 7th. Do these students know this? Do they care to learn about the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7th? The chant from Columbia students, “We are Hamas,” is rattling. Hearing students following the evil and siding with it, is alarming. Where are the actions?
Professor Shai Davidai, an avid humanist whose main interest is focused on the forces that shape and distort people’s subjective perceptions of the world and their influence on judgments, preferences, and choices, has been screaming and warning us for six months, “I see pro-terror on campus, pro-hatred, antisemitism.” Nothing has been done, and now this phenomena has infested 48 campuses across the US.
Many of the students who are wearing the keffiyeh are calling themselves “social justice warriors.” Are they really invested in social justice? Or they think they look so cool with a keffiyeh. Do they even have a clue what the keffiyeh stands for and historically who was wearing it and why?
Until the 1920s, the keffiyeh was almost exclusively worn by Bedouin men, according to Ghnaim, and it was simply a way to identify nomadic men in historic Palestine from villagers, fellaheen, and town people. According to Ghnaim, the first time we see the keffiyeh used as a political statement was during the Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1936 — an uprising against British rule that included demands for independence and an end to Jewish immigration. At that time, the majority of the armed resistance was taking place in the villages, and the fighters used the keffiyeh to hide their features — helping it to become associated with the revolution. The revolution's leaders issued an order for men to wear the keffiyeh to express solidarity with the revolutionaries and so that the British could not distinguish the fighters from others.
The keffiyeh is a cultural symbol with various meanings and is associated in the modern era solely with attackers who call for the Intifada. I believe that it is essential to approach cultural symbols with respect and understanding and it is crucial to consider the context and potential implications. Using cultural attire inappropriately or as a signifier of aggression can be offensive and insensitive. Thus, these students from all universities that express their views and opinions in aggression are not aligned with how we educators and scholars aim to advance humanity. How did once-rigorous academic institutions come to allow distorted information to be used as a flag of hatred and discrimination? Where is the silver lining here?
As Bill Maher says:
Here is what happens when activism merges with narcissism. Is the most important thing in my life [that I am camping and not going to classes for] something that I hadn’t heard of six months ago? Do I even know what I am talking about? Am I really here for the cause, or is the cause here to bring you me?
Why do these students care so much about the cause? Where are the other causes?
North Korea starves its people. China puts people in concentration camps. Myanmar brutalizes the Rohingya. Boko Haram kidnaps entire villages of women. Assad gassed his own people, and killed 593,000. (The last death toll estimated by the UN, in 2016, was more than 400,000 people. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, placed the toll at over 593,000 as of December 2020).
The students who are supporting the fundamentalist oppressors Hamas, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad, the regime in Iran, have no idea who they really are. Just like students once wore Che Guevara t-shirts without any clue about his communist views.
“I will be on the side of the people,” he wrote in his diaries. “I will take to the barricades and the trenches, screaming as one possessed, will stain my weapons with blood, and, mad with rage, will cut the throat of any vanquished foe I encounter.”
He is the one who advised Fidel Castro to align himself with the Soviets!
Where are the morals and values of our academic institutions that would intervene and say—“go to class, to learn, to debate.”
Would these students be willing to take a quiz to check basic knowledge? Or they are here for a very specific cause calling for elimination of the Jewish race, as campus protest leader Khymani James said:
Zionists don’t deserve to live. The same way we're very comfortable accepting that Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live. Zionists, they shouldn't live in this world. [This in one example among thousands.]
BUT HAMAS???
Hagit Arieli Chai, Hebrew Union College, USC
Follow the money and foriegn influences! The US government might be very surprised to find who are the protesters supporters and influencers. Quietly, cells of unti democrats work freely in the US to weaken the American society. Israel is just an excuse and a triger.