It Can Happen Here

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, October 26, 2023

 

Earlier today, Charlie Cooke wrote eloquently about how Jews have been horrifyingly (and yet, alas, to us conservatives, entirely predictably) abandoned by their woke former brethren on the left even as they are now being directly persecuted on college campuses across America. In that piece, he centered the singular and wildly alarming protest/public-intimidation session that took place yesterday at Cooper Union, a college in New York City. Zach Kessel has now provided a fuller account of the latest reporting on the disgrace. Read both pieces, for I fear this story — and the school’s craven and wickedly bloodless response — represents a real escalation of danger for Jewish students nationwide. The radicals are getting bolder, and they are getting away with it. It is right to worry about where this all ends — or begins, for that matter.

 

The short version is that a pro-Palestinian demonstration (one composed primarily of students and instructors, though Lord knows who might be capable of worming their way into the inattentive heart of such a crowd) supposed to take place outside the urban campus of Cooper Union “somehow” veered onto campus. The chanting protesters then marched farther onward into the main building and proceeded to barricade the library once word spread that there were Jews — honest-to-goodness, in-the-flesh, kippah-wearing Jews! — available conveniently right there on the premises to bully, threaten, and terrify.

 

The videos from the scene are horrifying: Four or five young people stand anxiously inside a library as a shadowy, zombie throng of marchers chants intifada slogans and pounds on the windows and doors outside. You may think you’d have been brave — at least one student is reported to have disgustedly elbowed his way through the crowd, and that right there is a man, my friends — but you’d be forgiven for being something more than merely nonplussed when suddenly trapped and threatened by a volatile mob. (In a twist that boggles the mind, administrators on the scene offered the beleaguered students the option of hiding from the Jew-hating mob in the attic, a tellingly inadvertent — thus transcendently repulsive — historical echo of something that should need no explanation.)

 

The Cooper Union administration was wretched in its response: “The library was closed for approximately 20 minutes late this afternoon while student protestors moved through our building. Some students who were previously in the library remained there during this time.” The last sentence alone is a marvel of selective narrative, a hideous masterwork of dysphemistic precision; there is a blighted, centuries-long tradition of hiding behind the cloak of language when it comes to discussing attacks upon Jews, and we are witnessing the dawn of a new dark age for the form.

 

It must be emphasized that this crowd deliberately sought to barricade the library only after it had been told that Jews were sheltering inside. Jews. Not Israelis, but Jews, and classmates of theirs, in fact. Who they were clearly mattered less than what they were to these people: the racial enemy. The message is so unsubtle it refuses alternate interpretation: If you are a Jew, you are a target — even at school. (They’re not making fine distinctions here, friends.) The media has spent the past five years averting its eyes to the increasing danger that Jews face on the streets of New York City as the targets for racially motivated assault; I expect them to now spend the next five downplaying the growing threat within the halls of academia as well. Prepare yourselves for an exquisitely cowardly stage act of acrobatic misdirection and avoidance, performed with zeal and professionalism.

 

I am filled with an inarticulable, lightning-charged anger about this subject; its enormities and cruel ironies are so many and so complexly layered that I cannot unpack them all right now. (For example: My patience with those who straight-facedly insist “It’s anti-Zionism, not antisemitism!” is brutally at an end.) By far the least interesting observation is the one that nevertheless must be made first, because it is critical: No other people or nation would ever be subjected to such a blatant double standard as Jews and Israel are. (A key ideological reason underpinning this is the academic concept of “settler-colonialism,” which I anticipate we will soon be hearing about in much the same way as America became unhappily aware of the phrase “critical race theory” several years ago, and for the same reasons.) But on a more fundamental level, I am intellectually and morally offended that any of this is even up for discussion: Jews should not have to haggle over their own safety, to have it treated as merely one “interest” to be balanced against the (presumably morally superior) right of their classmates and colleagues to shriek eliminationist antisemitic bile at them. This sort of behavior was supposed to be a European stain, a third-world or medieval one. We find instead that not even America is immune.

 

And what truly enrages me is that I see where this is all going. When institutions such as Cooper Union tacitly yield to tactics like these without imposing severe and permanent consequences, they mainstream it. Radical organizations — and Palestinian “justice” organizations are the sine qua non of the campus variety — are inherently radical: They push boundaries, test limits, and always seek to escalate. We will be getting more of this in the future because of the lack of backlash now. The confrontations will be heightened. The rhetoric will be even more sweepingly bloodthirsty. Tempers will flare even higher as the implicit threats become explicit, gleeful — maybe even chanted by a crowd.

 

I fear something terrible will happen next. People have reassured themselves for years that these kids were only cosplaying radicalism, and that they would “grow out of it” as their parents did. Now an entire generation of adults on the Left are discovering that, as both Shakespeare and Vonnegut would have been happy to remind them, the line between playacting and true belief in this sort of fully immersive radicalism fades away after one has spent enough time steeped in it. The manifest incoherence of sentiments like “LGBTQ + reproductive freedom for Palestine” has allowed us to treat the people who turn out behind such banners like harmlessly confused children rather than a truly insidious and growing force within the American Left. We just assumed they couldn’t possibly be serious. It turns out they are.

 

What haunts me is that the logic of it all leads toward violence. In the event of a ground invasion of Gaza, protests like Cooper Union’s will not merely start to happen on campuses everywhere, they will start to compound, as the stakes get raised with each new “outrage” from Israel that must be answered with even more insane rhetoric. How long, then, before some madman from the crowd chooses to attack? The hatred these people feel in their hearts is real; we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of pretending that they are not exactly who they say they are. How long before it boils over? And who will be able to claim that they did not see this coming, when it has been coming for two millennia already, and has returned once again?