Why did elite students cheer the atrocities of Hamas?
by Michael Cook, Mercator:
“I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”
Over the past two weeks many American intellectuals must be feeling like Dr Victor Frankenstein did about his Monster.
On October 7 Hamas militants burst out of Gaza and swept through surrounding Israeli towns and kibbutzim and an all-night rave music festival. They slaughtered some 1,300 people, men, women and children. They spared neither babies nor grandparents. Most were shot, some were burned to death, some were beheaded, some were tortured. Women were raped. It was barbaric, a vicious pogrom on a scale not seen since the Holocaust.
Israel and the Palestinians have a difficult history. Its great achievements notwithstanding, Israel has made terrible mistakes and is making them right now by bombarding Gaza. But October 7 was a premeditated attack on Jewish people carried out with inhuman sadism.
You would think that American college students would sympathise with the Israelis in this disaster, even if they disagreed with Israeli policies. Human dignity does not depend upon religion or nationality. It doesn’t even depend upon past history. After all, their nation’s Declaration of Independence says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Amazingly, ignoring Israel’s sorrow, on campuses across the United States, students organised demonstrations in favour of Hamas and celebrated its victory. A coalition of student groups at Harvard College published an open letter holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” At Tufts, another college in the Boston area, one group called the terrorists “liberation fighters paragliding into occupied territory,” who had “especially shown the creativity necessary to take back stolen land.”
Student groups at Columbia University called the massacre a justified “counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor.” Disgusted alumni of the University of Pennsylvania have stopped supporting it. One large donor called his alma mater an “anti-semitic cesspool.”
You get the picture. Elite colleges are producing students with no empathy and no analytic skills and a moral compass which is stuck pointing towards a savage terrorist group.
The Old Guard was shocked.
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