By Jim Geraghty
Friday, May 03, 2024
You can find President Biden’s full remarks about the
anti-Israel protests on America’s campuses here. The key excerpt:
Vandalism, trespassing, breaking
windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and
graduations — none of this is a peaceful protest.
Threatening people, intimidating
people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the
law.
Dissent is essential to democracy.
But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so
students can finish the semester and their college education. . . .
People have the right to get an
education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus
safely without fear of being attacked.
But let’s be clear about this as
well. There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for
antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place
for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia,
or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.
These remarks are fine, but by the time Biden delivered
them, shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern Thursday, police had already
moved in on the protesters on many of America’s campuses, and the campus
buildings and grounds had largely been cleared. The crisis was largely over.
If Biden had made the same remarks even just a day or two
earlier, it might have looked a bit like leadership — standing up for the rule
of law, telling the protesters something they didn’t want to hear, and prodding
the hesitant college administrators to stop tolerating the intolerable.
In the past few weeks, Americans have witnessed a stark
contrast between the written statements and fierce condemnations from the likes
of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, and Biden’s on-camera, off
the cuff, mushy, “I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a
program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s
going on with the Palestinians and their — how they’re being. . . .”
White House communications staffers kept telling us how
much the president firmly believed “forcibly [taking] over a building on campus
is absolutely the wrong approach,” but for some reason, the president, who is
rarely more than a few steps away from television cameras, just couldn’t come
out and say so himself.
It turns out Biden was willing to stand up and call out
the illegal actions committed by the anti-Israel protesters . . . but only
after the worst-offending protesters had been put in zip-ties.
Also note that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre — who is so bad at this — effectively confirmed that the
White House stood and watched events on America’s campuses for the past few
weeks:
Q: Because I asked yesterday, has
there been any follow-up or a- — not follow-up — has there been any outreach
from the White House to any of the campuses — administrators, leaders on these
campuses?
Ms. JEAN-PIERRE: I don’t have
anything to read out at this time.
You can argue whether anyone at the White House ought to
be reaching out or having conversations with university administrators. But how
much antisemitic violence do we need to see on college campuses before it’s
something the president ought to address? (Particularly for a president
who said
he decided to run for office because of the tiki-torch-carrying antisemites in
Charlottesville, Va.) How many students need to get targeted for
harassment for being Jewish before the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights
Division sees something worth its time and energy? The U.S. Department of
Education, which spends billions of taxpayer dollars on student loans,
scholarships, grants, etc., doesn’t have any thoughts on colleges canceling
classes and graduation ceremonies in a surrender to an angry mob?
Over the weekend, NBC News reported, “Amid growing protests on college
campuses by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, the White House is planning for
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to have a minimal presence
for a traditional rite of spring: delivering commencement addresses.” If the
protests were serious enough to alter the president’s schedule, why weren’t
they serious enough for the president to address on-camera and at length before
the cops had cleared them all out?
Still, at least Biden eventually was roused to address
the issue. As far as I can tell, Vice President Kamala Harris has not made any
public remarks about the campus protests. The New York Times noted, “Vice President
Kamala Harris, campaigning on Monday in Wisconsin, again took sharp swipes at
former President Donald J. Trump for his actions on abortion, a hot topic
across the country. But she stayed silent on the war in Gaza, another issue
erupting elsewhere among the critical bloc of young voters she has been
courting.” While speaking in Atlanta, “Harris did not address recent
protests on Georgia college campuses tied to the White House’s handling of the
conflict in Gaza.”
The vice president is a former prosecutor. She doesn’t
have any thoughts on lawbreaking and whether the police should be called in on
campus? For much of the reelection campaign, she’s been on a college tour!
Oh, and speaking of the administration’s connections to higher
education:
President Joe Biden crashed first
lady Jill Biden’s Teachers of the Year State Dinner, where the White House
wined and dined top educators and teachers’ union leaders. . . .
“By the way I actually taught for a
number of years in law school and then I was a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania,” he said. “You don’t applaud that?” he said when the roomful of
teachers didn’t immediately clap.
For the millionth time, Joe Biden was not “a professor at
the University of Pennsylvania,” as he keeps describing himself. The Philadelphia
Inquirer reported in 2019 that, “The former vice president
collected $371,159 in 2017 plus $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 for a vaguely
defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public
appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” Note the words “on
campus,” meaning that while the Penn Biden Center would intermittently host once-a-week class sessions, it wasn’t
primarily used for classes or teaching.
The more Biden insists upon describing himself as a
former professor, the worse it makes his stance on the campus antisemitic
insanity appear.
Professors at UPenn are running around declaring “playing the
victim is what Jews are best at,” but the self-described “professor at
the University of Pennsylvania” in the Oval Office doesn’t have any thoughts
about what his old employer ought to do about it, huh? What a profile in
courage.
The Campus Protesters Lose the Argument
I don’t begrudge anyone for looking at the functionally
— sometimes literally, in their choice of headgear —
pro-Hamas protesters and feeling like America’s college campuses are going to
hell in a handbasket.
But as a public-persuasion tool, the anti-Israel protests
and the unhinged campus left are actually turning into Israel’s most effective
public-relations ally. For the past six months, we’ve seen enormous efforts to
push the argument, “Regardless of how you feel about Hamas, Israel has become
the aggressor in the war in the Gaza Strip, and Israel is no longer morally
worthy of American support.” And that argument has absolutely failed to get any
traction, in large part because the people making it come across as a bunch of
maniacs.
The campus protests have had no discernible impact on generally pro-Israel American public
opinion:
While 59% think Muslim students
face Islamophobia on campus, the 69% who see antisemitism there has come on
strong. “That number wouldn’t have been stratospherically high, and it is very
high, even as recently as one year ago,” said Nesho.
Two-thirds of voters today believe
that it’s not safe to be openly Jewish on university campuses, and a huge
majority favor suspension for students or teachers who call for violence
against Jews, which is what many onlookers hear in common protestor chants.
“The majority of the public, and the majority of voters, are not with the
protestors,” Nesho said.
Among the 64% who believe there’s a
“problem” with what higher ed institutions are teaching students these days, 40
percent identified racially divisive theories, 34 percent cited a lack of
political diversity, 33 percent deplored the promotion of anti-Americanism, and
27% cited teachings that promote antisemitism.
Wait, there’s more. The April Harris survey found that 52 percent of Americans
feel favorably toward Israel, and just 28 percent feel unfavorably. Just 16
percent feel favorably toward the Palestinian Authority, and 51 percent feel
unfavorably, and 14 percent of Americans feel favorably about Hamas, and 64
percent feel unfavorably. (Admittedly, the ideal percentage of Americans who
feel favorably about Hamas would be zero.)
In the ongoing conflict, 80 percent said they support
Israel more, and 20 percent said they support Hamas more.
In perhaps the single biggest demonstration of the
ineffectiveness of the anti-Israel message, 67 percent believe Israel is trying
to avoid civilian casualties, and 33 percent believe it is not trying to avoid
civilian casualties. Among respondents ages 18 to 24, 64 percent believe Israel
is trying to avoid civilian casualties, 36 percent do not.
Sixty-one percent believe “a ceasefire should happen only
after the release of all hostages and Hamas being removed from power.” That’s
down slightly from 63 percent in March. Seventy-eight percent believe Hamas
should be removed from running Gaza, and 72 percent believe Israel should “move
forward with an operation in Rafah to finish the war with Hamas, doing its best
to avoid civilian casualties even though there will be casualties.”
In a vivid demonstration of how the wording of question
matters, Harris asked people, “Do you favor or oppose a permanent ceasefire in
Gaza?” and 70 percent said they favored one. When they followed up, “Would you
favor or oppose that ceasefire if it meant that Hamas was allowed to continue
to hold hostages and Hamas were to continue to run Gaza?” 68 percent said they
would oppose such a cease-fire.
ADDENDUM: Daniel Gordis shares the thoughts of Yotam Berger, an
Israeli Ph.D. student at Stanford. The whole thing is worth reading, but this
excerpt may well summarize America in 2024 as well as anything:
This year I finally got it. No, if
I were an American, I still wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I now understand those
who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the
other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction.
A madness no less terrible than Trump’s madness. No, if I had the right to
vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.
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