Victor Davis Hanson
At home, we have seen all sorts of violent campus and street pro-Hamas demonstrations over the last nine months. Their method is to cause the greatest disruption in commutes, or to instill the greatest outrage in defacing iconic monuments, or to elicit the greatest repulsion in chanting post-October 7 slogans that call for finishing the job of eliminating Israel.
So, they depend on the dubious proposition that the public sympathizes with terrorist gangs and rag-tag groups of residents who massacred 1,200 innocents on October 7. We are to believe from the protesters that the killers had just cause, given their “victim” status in the American leftwing reductionist binary of non-white, non-Western victims oppressed by white, Western victimizers.
But note they did not target the hated IDF, but rather women, children, infants, and the elderly. They were not content with anonymity, but often videoed their mutilations, mass rapes, beheadings, and hostage-taking, as if to emulate the old Nazi Auschwitz argument, “We have become animals because Israelis turned us into animals,” as if someone put a gun to their head and forced them to play the proxy/puppet role of Iran and use their sympathy-aid to build a subterranean military base rather than a seaside money machine like Cabo San Lucas or Corfu.
So, the protesters—now vacationing over the summer break—are alienating the American public in their defacement of cemeteries, statues, and iconic American monuments. Shutting down bridges during commute hours, wearing Hamas insignia, screaming for the annihilation of the Jews, and taking over and vandalizing campus buildings is not a particularly good way of winning public support for restraining Israel.
Sometimes it is the seemingly little things that turn off Americans, like the months-long images of affluent, smug American and Middle Eastern students spitting at middle-class policemen or leaving behind mounds of offal and detritus for campus maintenance crews to clean up. Or is the rub the passive-aggressive nature of the pampered protesters: they talk tough like seasoned 1918 Bolsheviks but when arrested scream like children in worry over the looming self-inflicted dangers to their beautiful careers.
Or is it the contrast with pro-Israeli protesters, whose comparison to the violent pro-Hamas demonstrations mirror-image the nature of the ongoing struggle in Gaza?
Pro-Israel demonstrators are not violent. They do not leave behind trails of flotsam and jetsam for others to clean up. They do not attack pro-Hamas protesters. They do not get commonly arrested. They do not hit the police. They do not deface monuments. They do not call for the erasure of Arabs.
And so, the respective protesters reflect the wartime dynamic differences between a pro-Western democratic Israel and a terrorist Hamas: one side decapitates, mutilates, mass rapes, takes hostages, and uses its own as human shields, and one side does not, whether fighting terrorist cliques like Hamas, or in prior conventional wars against overwhelming numbers drawn from some 500 million Muslims in surrounding Middle Eastern enemy nations.
A final consideration about the protests. Americans are the most welcoming of all peoples, who admit more immigrants of all statuses each year into their country than all the rest of the world’s hosts combined.
Yet even Americans have limits. And the sight of tony Middle Eastern students slandering the United States, writing anti-American graffiti, and attacking our monuments, whether the Lincoln Memorial or a veteran’s cemetery in Los Angeles, repels the majority. Take a poll and ask Americans whether lawbreaking foreign students should lose their visas and face deportations should they violate either campus rules or our country’s laws, and the outcome would be predictable— “of course.”
No one is more repulsive than the uninvited and ungracious visitor who insults and defames his generous host.
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