By John Daniel Davidson
Monday, November 16, 2015
In the wake of the terrorist attacks Friday night in
Paris that left 129 dead and hundreds wounded, we can safely say the U.S.
student protesters’ 15 minutes of fame are over. The protests, which began at
the University of Missouri and Yale and quickly spread to other schools drawing
national media coverage, were always quixotic, seemingly conjured out of thin
air.
Vague accusations that minority students are
systematically oppressed carried demands for “safe spaces” and an end to
“microaggressions,” as if American college campuses today are enclaves of the
Jim Crow South. Throw in calls for student debt forgiveness, free tuition, and
a $15-an-hour minimum wage for all college employees, and you more or less had
a series of Bernie Sanders rallies on campuses from California to
Massachusetts.
The Paris attacks, perpetrated by a violent global
movement animated by a fanatical interpretation of Islam, have unmasked these
students’ claims for what they are: the narcissistic phantoms of a coddled and
privileged generation. Oppression and bigotry are real, but you won’t find much
of it on our college campuses.
We’re So Oppressed
By Frou Frou Facilities
Consider elite Amherst College. A group calling itself
Amherst Uprising last week issued a statement and list of demands to address
“the legacy of oppression on campus,” which has made students and faculty alike
“victims of several injustices including but not limited to our institutional
legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism,” and so on.
Apparently minorities at Amherst, where tuition costs more than $63,700 a year,
are suffering terribly under this historical yoke, and they demand redress.
Further down their list of demands is a frank rejection
of the First Amendment: the college president must issue a statement condemning
those who put up posters that proclaimed “All Lives Matter” and “in memoriam of
the true victim of the Missouri Protests: Free Speech.” These were deemed
“racially insensitive” to minority students on campus, “who are victim to
racial harassment and death threats.” In turn of phrase worthy of the Cultural
Revolution, those responsible for the offensive posters must be “required to
attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency.”
But are minority students at Amherst and other schools
really victims of “racial harassment and death threats”? So far, most of the
protesters’ claims of discrimination have been unsubstantiated or, in the case
of the infamous poop swastika at Mizzou, not at all what it first appeared to
be. (In an ironic twist, an Amherst faculty member associated with the Black
Lives Matter movement issued death threats on social media against a local city
council candidate in August, which police took seriously but the college
defended as the exercise of free speech.)
In reality, the supposed oppression of minority students
from Amherst to Mizzou appears to be for the most part nonexistent—at best
aspirational. But little wonder that if you’re taught to see racial injustice
everywhere, you’ll find it anywhere: rumors of black students being turned away
from a Halloween frat party, an innocuous reference to fitting the “CMC mold”
(for which Claremont McKenna College’s dean of students was forced to resign),
or some yokel driving by flying a Confederate flag. Such is the weight of
“systematic oppression” on American college campuses today.
Let’s Talk About
Real Aggression
Compare these microaggressions to the macroaggression
unleashed on unsuspecting Parisians. For the terrorists who slaughtered
concertgoers and bombed the soccer stadium, bigotry and hatred and oppression
are not theoretical playthings but vital parts of a demented religious creed.
Issuing a statement of its own in the wake of the
attacks, ISIS claimed responsibility, calling the 89 people killed at the
Bataclan theatre “apostates [who] had gathered in a profligate prostitution
party.” Of the terrorists, ISIS boasted, “Allah conquered through their hands
and cast in the hearts of the Crusaders horror in the middle of their land.”
The attacks were a retaliation for France’s role in “the Crusader campaign” in
Syria, and “the first of the storm and a warning to those who wish to learn.”
College students willing to shut down their schools and
demand resignations over Halloween costumes and rumors of racial insensitivity
are unable to recognize the face of true bigotry. They can’t even distinguish
between microaggressions and terrorism. A surprisingly large number of Black
Lives Matter activists took to social media over the weekend to complain either
that the carnage on Paris would steal their media spotlight or that Mizzou and
Paris were equivalent. Said one typical post: “Look at all the racists on
Twitter using the Paris tragedy to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement at
home.”
It’s no surprise, then, that many college students can’t
even bring themselves to honor the victims of terrorism. Three days before the
Paris attacks, the undergraduate student government at the University of
Minnesota-Twin Cities rejected a resolution calling for a campus-wide moment of
recognition on future anniversaries of the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks.
“The passing of this resolution might make a space that
is unsafe for students on campus even more unsafe,” said David Algadi, the
university’s director of Diversity and Inclusion. “Islamophobia and racism
fueled through that are alive and well.”
The students and sympathetic college administrators
behind the protests, like many in the media, will no doubt conclude—as many of
them already have—that the greatest thing we have to fear in the wake of the
attacks is Islamophobia. The same delusion that makes them see racism and
oppression everywhere also induces a fear of a backlash against Muslims that
never comes.
The protesters are correct in exactly one sense: hatred
and bigotry and violent oppression are alive and well in the world. But you
won’t find much evidence of it on America’s college campuses. For those with
eyes to see, you don’t have to look any further than the streets of Paris.
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