An Israeli Profile in Courage

Tis a puzzlement. How did America’s great institutions of higher learning become infested with leftist agitators who hate higher learning?

Writing in the Atlantic George Packer traces the origin of today’s student protest movements to the Vietnam Era. Then, students occupied the office of Columbia University’s president, making non-negotiable demands and insisting on the overthrow of academic authority.

Packer does not mention that the student radicals of the 1960s had a very specific reason for wanting to end the Vietnam War. They did not want to fight. They did not see anything worth fighting for. They thought that Communism was the future-- it was preordained-- and that it was futile to stand in the way of history.

Students rebels considered themselves to be idealistic peace lovers. People in other parts of the country believed that they were cowards. The moral taint that hung over the Vietnam protesters suggested that they were less idealistic and more chickenshit.

One recalls that Winston Churchill once opined that the only thing that was worse than losing a war was refusing to fight.

So, a generation of presumptive cowards was faced with a daunting task. How to erase the presumption of cowardice. The group decided to take over the American mind, to undermine the value system that defined martial culture, and to teach students that those who rebelled against authority were courageous while those who defended American values were involved in a criminal enterprise that had succeeded in exploiting of non-white peoples. 

Rather than embrace the moral taint of cowardice, the opponents of the Vietnam War declared that they would be willing to fight, but only not for America. They would fight injustice. They would fight oppression. Remember the song: Street Fighting Man. They draw a line at America. They would not defend a criminal enterprise.

If you believe that this is recent history, recall the words of Susan Sontag, uttered during the Vietnam Era:

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

Or else, this:

The white race is the cancer of human history.

There is nothing new under the sun. People do not quote Sontag any more, but they believe that the meaning of America lies in slavery. They believe that the white race is a cancer and that America was founded in a genocide.

Again, these hysterical minions are creating a new world, where they are courageous and where those who fought to defend America or who worked to build America are criminal conspirators.

So, children go off to college and learn the lessons of twentieth century anti-Americanism. They learn lessons that glorify their anti-war parents and disparage those who fought and died for America. That is, they learn how to think like totalitarian leftists.

They might, Ross Douthat remarks, study some of the classics, but once they arrive at the twentieth century, it’s all leftist propaganda:

But then comes the 20th century, and suddenly the ambit narrows to progressive preoccupations and only those preoccupations: anticolonialism, sex and gender, antiracism, climate. Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault. Barbara Fields and the Combahee River Collective. Meditations on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how climate change is “colonial déjà vu.”

To understand the world before 1900, Columbia students read a range of texts and authors that are important to understanding America and the West in their entirety — Greek and Roman, religious and secular, capitalist and Marxist.

To engage with the contemporary world, the world they are being prepared to influence and lead, they read texts that are only really important to understanding the perspective of the contemporary left.

These students are being recruited into the vanguard of the revolution. They are going to fight the good fight against capitalism and patriarchy. 

A minimal understanding of history would have told them that the central conflict in the twentieth century, between capitalism and communism, has been resolved. It would have taught them that communism lost, but not before killing tens of millions of people, most often by starvation.

No one with a brain still believes in the hopes peddled by communism. And yet, American students are told that they ought to be engaged in permanent protest against a criminal enterprise like America. They are not allowed to feel any patriotic stirrings over America’s victories in wars, in world wars and in the cold war.

Given the world that the left is trying to produce, Israel is now a reproach. A pro-American nation, where people are proud of what they built, where citizens are willing to fight to defend their land-- this refutes all of the most sacred beliefs of the American academy.

Israelis are showing what it means to have courage. They have not bowed down to Biden and Blinken. They know that they did not deserve October 7.

If they had simply accepted the atrocities of October 7 they would have been showing that they believed the horrors to be just punishment for their white supremacist conspiracy. They would have accepted that they had accomplished nothing during the past decades, and that whatever successes they garnered were built on oppression and exploitation.

Israel did not think this way. And yet, if theirs is a profile in courage what does that make those who have rallied to Hamas, imagining that committing atrocities should be rewarded and that the cowards who raped and mutilated women and children were heroes fighting oppression.

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