The Biggest Lie Fueling the Antisemitic Student Uprising

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

 

Because it is receiving so many unearned accolades, this remark by an activist with the group that led a violent attack on the Democratic National Committee headquarters late last year was recently brought to my attention. It is a succinct summation of the lie that has mobilized so many young adults to participate in demonstrations that are as antisocial as they are explicitly anti-American:

There is a banal interpretation of this remark that attributes its naïveté to the cult of youth. The youngest among us see the world through fresh eyes, according to that outlook. Their perspective is untainted by the cynicism that accompanies life experience. The young are, therefore, possessed of unique passion and resolve. They reject the conventions of the past, and they have the vigor to execute the reforms necessary to usher in a better world for us all.

 

That interpretation serves only to disguise the untruth animating the movement that has paralyzed so many campuses in the wake of the October 7 massacre. The youth are not leading some sort of insurgency against the powers that be. They are tools of the powers that be.

 

The youngish activist class fancies itself a collection of outsiders banging on doors that bar them from the halls of power, but this is self-delusion. They are already in the halls of power. To survey the list of schools presently under investigation for taking a lax approach to policing on-campus anti-Jewish discrimination is to conclude that the menacing behavior we are witnessing has been incubated in some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. The spaces they “occupy” are stepping stones along the path to a comfortable life in the wealthiest nation on earth.

 

The activists’ language — the pseudo-academic jargon native to humanities departments that festoons their arguments — is another tell. When they’re attempting to make a nuanced case for their hostility toward Israeli Jews, the student demonstrators lean into arguments around structural racial inequities and hierarchical privilege matrices. They erect an elaborate framework designed to make the most persecuted people in the history of the planet into an aggressor in the war imposed on them by a terrorist organization. There’s a reason why the elevated language of the classroom swiftly devolves into “Globalize the intifada,” “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” and “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too.” It is all the exercise of power.

 

When the professors of these besieged institutions cascade into the university courtyard and lend their support for the students’ cause only after those students have been rousted by police or have suffered the belated administrative consequences of their actions, it is because the students are merely a vanguard. The shock troops have opened a breach into which more seasoned elements stream. The goal is not to overturn the existing power structure but to take command of it, replacing the old order with their own. These students are merely prosecuting the professional jealousies their elders have imposed on them, and they are using the tools with which they have been provided by their miseducation.

 

In this sense, this generation of cultural revolutionaries is not so different from those that preceded it. Mao’s student movement was promoted as the means by which the Chinese Communist Party could be revivified, shorn of its reactionary “bourgeois” elements, and rededicated to the establishment of socialism. In reality, the project was an outgrowth of the Great Helmsman’s paranoia — an effort to discredit and pacify his adversaries inside the party after the Great Famine of the late 1950s and early ’60s.

 

The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was the ruling class’s response to its own failures, and the students were the instruments of its rehabilitation. Much the same could be said of today’s cultural revolution, though it is much smaller in scope and (so far) less oppressive. The woefully misled and vaguely menacing students glutting the quads of their formerly respected institutions fancy themselves the authors of a revolutionary power reversal, but that is self-deception. They’re merely acting out in service to the interests of the already powerful, whose primary goal is the acquisition of even more power. Of the many tragedies in this ongoing spectacle, the degree to which its participants have been tricked into tarnishing their personal and professional reputations is one of the saddest.