VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What Will They Not Do?

By Victor Davis Hanson

“Beat the F---king Jew” and the American Campus

October 7 and its aftermath have confirmed to the general public that the American university is not just dysfunctional but corrupt—a sad reality known by many on campus for years.

University presidents have no obligation to weigh in on the weekly news, and probably should not.

But that is not the ethos of academic administrators. Instead, they gratuitously opine on almost everything—at least if such virtue-signaling resonates with their leftist faculty and students.

So, they are quick to write performance-art memos on Supreme Court abortion or affirmative action rulings, trans issues, the Trump danger, the Covid lockdowns and vaccinations, the George Floyd aftermath, BLM, the 2016 and 2020 elections, January 6, fossil fuels, climate change, etc.

But on October 7th?

Most did not utter a peep until alumni, donors, or both forced them to belatedly issue some anemic “on the one hand, on the other” mush.

Otherwise at MIT, when DEI/woke/pro-Hamas students make it unsafe for Jewish students to walk in certain places, campus officials warned Jewish students to stay away—rather than outraged administrators declaring that the campus would never concede no-go, apartheid corridors to anyone.

MIT now admits that foreign students harass Jews, interrupt classes, and violate their own rules that call for suspension. But they claim they cannot kick them out, because their student visas might be revoked. So, they would rather have serial anti-Semites on campus than back in the Middle East. In essence, they give more latitude to foreign pro-Hamas law breakers that to wayward American students.

Such campus anti-Semitic hate protestors claim they are only anti-Israel, even though they harass Jews per se, without interest in learning of their particular attitudes about or relationship with Israel.

At UCLA, protestors whack a Netanyahu piñata, screaming “Beat the f—king Jew”. Note: they don’t yell “Beat the f—king Israeli.”

Why? They really do hate Jews and they know their anti-Semitism resonates with the DEI/woke student and faculty crowd, which long ago branded Israelis “settler colonialists” and lumped Jews into the increasingly stereotyped and caricatured possessors of “white privilege”.

The step is quite small from long-institutionalized racially segregated campus safe spaces, graduations, and dorms to administrators currently warning Jewish students that certain areas are unsafe and thus no-go for them.

What will the pro-Hamas protestors not do?

Tear down U.S. flags on Veterans’ Day? Shut down the Manhattan Bridge? Storm Grand Central Station? Deface the White House wall? Trap Jewish students in a library? Hijack classes? Rip down posters of the captives of Hamas? Chant monotonously that Israeli Jews should be wiped out “from the river to the sea”? (The chant surely does not mean to include the 21 percent Arab population of Israel.)

Substitute blacks, Latinos, gays, or trans for Jews as the targets of any of these hateful campus outbursts and currently invertebrate administrators would be issuing serial memos declaring that “hate has no place on this campus” and promising expulsions for any student guilty of such “hate speech.”

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