(November 16) To see so many rabid protests in favor of Palestinians, against not just Israel but Jews in general, and to buy into the anti-American narrative that is a major subtext of those protests, is to recognize a mass contagion, a mental virus, a pathology so dark that an observer can’t know exactly how much of it is malevolence and how much is sheer lunacy.
There is no doubt, though, that the pathology is indeed a combination of lunacy and malevolence with no redeeming features.
Many of the protesters, and many of the supporters of the Palestinians and the excuse-makers for Hamas, are young adults. They buy into the pathetically simplistic narrative that divides the world into oppressors vs. oppressed, colonizers vs. colonized, victimizers vs. victims. Some observers want to make excuses for them, to lay the blame on leftist professors or on ignorant grade school teachers. Or, observers say that because this cohort is too young to remember the 9/11 terrorism or at least to have understood its context in real time, they can be excused for being confused.
These excuses are pernicious nonsense.
They are pernicious because in a free society there is no excuse for adults to side with rank hatred. This is not a totalitarian society where no information aside from an official narrative is available to thinking adults. Especially in this information age, the excuse that people are brainwashed by crazy professors, or that they are innocently ignorant of actual history or incapable of commonsensically applying normative ethics, is absurd. If young adults adopt antisemitism, or if they side with those who deliberately butcher or burn alive innocent women and children over those who make extra efforts to spare civilians, then the blame for their moral rot is theirs alone.
The truth is so easy to find, so readily available through so many sources, that it is unforgivable to succumb to facile sloganeering in favor of a hateful cause.
And if these young people can’t see that hundreds of thousands of people on the National Mall peacefully and lovingly standing in solidarity with Israel are far more admirable than hundreds yelling hate and violently blocking roadways, bridges, and building entrances — or if, worse, they join the violent pro-Hamas mobs — their moral compasses are haywire.
It is an objective fact that ordinary Arabs and Muslims enjoy more civil rights and more human rights in Israel than they do in any other Middle Eastern nation…. [The full column is here.]
