By
Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday,
October 11, 2023
I’ve
made a number of regrettable errors in my life — heck, I just posted a piece
that jumped the gun in a major way — but in terms of the ones that were
immediately, obviously bad ideas even at the time, I am comforted by the fact
that I have never made a mistake quite so easily avoidable as deciding to go
balls to the wall in defense of the terror group Hamas the way so many on the
left have over the past five days. The most traditionally “woke” and
ultraprogressive elements of the online commentariat have been producing junk
masterworks of glib, breezily offhanded hatred and lizard-like amorality:
Emblematic is the academic who smugly announced, “What did y’all think decolonization
meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” (Calling both dead Jews and those
horrified by the slaughter “losers” was a lovely touch.) Such flashes of
gloating cruelty are usually typed (or favorited) in haste and repented of at
leisure.
That of
course brings us to the more considered acts of insanity, those emerging from
college campuses. There have been a few protests, of course — I had to chuckle at the inadvertent cringe comedy of a
hapless George Washington University student delivering a supposedly from-the-heart
stem-winder to an indifferently sized crowd whilst wearing a Covid-19 mask and
pausing every few seconds to look at his iPhone to read his lines — but mostly
the disgrace has been confined to the ever-popular “public statement.” We’re
compiling a list of all these here at National
Review (at this rate it might end up a database), and it
will be a running tally: Here’s a look
into the mouth of
activist madness.
I want
to focus specifically, though, on the spectacularly repulsive “joint statement” that came out of the “Harvard
Palestine Solidarity Groups” (whose organizational composition may be set or ad
hoc but is in this case irrelevant). It deserves to reprinted in full, given
its brevity and odiousness:
We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime
entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades,
millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.
Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in
Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge
and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear
the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has
structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From
systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to
military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings,
Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and
sudden.
Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The
coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on
the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of
Palestinians.
The
moral rot on display here barely needs discussing — every piece written
for National Review on the
Hamas attack provides ample refutation of its arguments — save to note how
icily, pitilessly brutal its tone is. “The apartheid regime is the only one to
blame” is a remarkable assertion to make given that Israel was the victim of
unprovoked mass slaughter, but the authors actually follow its implied train of
logic all the way to the end of the tracks and into a wall by infantilizing
Hamas and speaking as if a powerful and well-funded terrorist regime lacks
either moral or political agency. In the activist discourse, their monstrously
inhuman cruelty is excused (when acknowledged at all) as the regrettable but
understandable impulses of people who simply can do no other. It’s
both an appalling inversion of any acceptable moral universe and a
backhanded act of Western condescension.
But
here’s the thing: As inhumane as these sentiments are, I consider them to be
entirely predictable coming from a campus-based Palestinian activist
organization. They were already this crazy when I was in college during
9/11; why should anyone expect them to have gotten saner since? I well
remember the antics of Students for Justice in Palestine during the heyday of
the War on Terror. For them this is another day ending in “y.” Anyone who has
spent time on a university campus in the last 30 years will be happy to tell
you: The Palestinian activists are often the most fearlessly tasteless,
precisely because they are so confident in their self-righteousness.
They
will do as they have always done; it’s all those other undersigned
organizations — 31 to be exact, at least initially — that are the
problem. While one would expect college-age pro-Palestinian activists (morally
deranged as they are) to stand up for Hamas in their sloppily knotted keffiyehs
regardless of how many women and children the organization butchers or rapes,
one would not have expected nearly every other South Asian, Middle Eastern, or
North African student group at Harvard to do so as well. We can at least take
some comfort in the fact that the signatory student organizations weren’t
purely broken down along ethnic lines: In a move that truly shocks the
conscience, Harvard’s chapter of Amnesty International appended its approval to
the statement as well. That’s right: Amnesty International — an
organization founded to campaign for international human rights —
signed onto a statement quite explicitly calling for Israel to simply suck it
up, rub a little dirt on the wounds of more than 1,200 dead in a sneak attack,
and let 200 women and children be raped, tortured, and murdered without lifting
a finger in response. The aspiring future leaders of tomorrow’s human-rights
movement, as educated by Harvard.
Harvard’s
Amnesty chapter was later shamed into “withdrawing” its
signature from the statement, especially in light of the negative media
attention it drew (particularly on social media, where a great deal of effort
has been put into to finding executive-leadership and membership lists of all
these organizations), and at this point they would probably appreciate an
amnesty themselves. I tend to think the professional mark of Cain is more
appropriate — at least for the leadership of these organizations. (As the old
military maxim for putting down mutinies goes: amnesty the troops, hang the
leaders.)
This
highlights the most appalling aspect of the Harvard-statement incident (and it
has very much turned into an official incident for students on campus at any of
the affected organizations): In an act of stunning arrogance, almost all the
decisions to sign this statement seem to have been made by these groups’
elected leaders (or leadership) without consulting their members first. It’s a
selfishly presumptuous act that puts any random member of, say, the nominally
nonpartisan Harvard Kennedy School’s South Asian Caucus in the position of
having to answer for the indefensible whims of its leadership. Several
organizations (Amnesty being one) are withdrawing their signatures for precisely
this reason, but I’d be remiss if I failed to dwell for a moment on the withdrawal statement from the
Harvard Undergraduate Nepali Student Association, which manages the neat trick of somehow being
even more craven and sleazy than the statement it initially signed on to:
We regret that our decision to co-sign the latest PSC statement to call
attention to historical injustices against Palestinians, with an earnest desire
for peace, has been interpreted as a tacit support for the recent violent
attacks in Israel.
We deplore the attacks that have taken the lives of hundreds of innocent
civilians including 10 Nepali students in Israel. We are deeply saddened by
this news and mourn the lives that we have lost in the Nepali community. We
worry for the many people trapped in the midst of an escalating conflict.
The
first sentence alone deserves top marks for brazenness. How could anyone have
ever misinterpreted HUNSA’s intent? The statement they sign onto did not, it is
true, tacitly support the recent violent attacks in Israel: It
excused them altogether and placed 100 percent of the blame on the “apartheid
state.” (It was not a subtle document!) But I also like the way it slides “By
the way 10 Nepali students died as well” in the next paragraph, as if to say,
“Okay, now I guess it’s sort of bad.”
Forget
for a moment about the moral folly of writing or signing the Harvard
statement’s utterly reprehensible rhetorical swill. Irresponsibly forcing
countless others in your class to answer for those unanswerable political
sentiments without even consulting them is equally as bad, if not worse, and
indicts far more: the leadership abilities, trustworthiness, and moral
character of all who participated in this latest example of the insolence of
office.
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