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June 27, 2002 9:10 a.m. Sighs for America, boos for Martina, tales from campus, &c.

y colleague Mike Potemra noted something interesting (a frequent occurrence). The Oxford English Dictionary has added a new sense of the word “America,” a figurative sense, to wit, “a place which one longs to reach; an ultimate or idealized destination or aim; an object of personal ambition or desire.”

This caused me a few sighs. And so did a passage, relating to America, in A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul’s first novel, and the one that many consider his greatest. It is, indeed, a very great book, and I have only just now read it. I could barely stand to be away from it once I had begun it. To be in the thrall of a novel: That is a rare (for me) and deeply pleasurable experience. (I experienced the same thing with Vikram Seth’s massive A Suitable Boy.)

Anyway, in A House for Mr. Biswas, the protagonist works, for several years, for the government’s Community Welfare Department (this is in Trinidad, the author’s native land). Shortly after the war, however, “the department was abolished because it had grown archaic. Thirty, twenty, or even ten years before, there would have been people to support it. But the war, the American bases, an awareness of America had given everyone the urge, and many the means, to self-improvement. The encouragement and guidance of the department were not needed. And when the department was attacked, no one, not even those who had enjoyed its ‘leadership’ courses, knew how to defend it.”

May we just revisit that phrase, “an awareness of America had given everyone the urge . . . to self-improvement”? Astounding that such a thing could have been written, and could have been true. (Naipaul was writing in the late 1950s.)

Yes, this occasioned many sighs.

You hate to be a weary conservative. You hate to shake your head and mutter, “The country’s not what it was, and it never will be.” But then something like the latest Ninth Circuit outrage comes along, and you have to — you have to play the fuddy-duddy, the curmudgeon, the nostalgist.

The Ninth, of course, is that body of judges in San Francisco dedicated to removing every last vestige of what made America great, and American. (This is the rhetorical lengths to which that panel will drive you.) They now say that the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance in school is unconstitutional. Yes, for all these years when we’ve been saying the Pledge, we have been in violation of the Constitution. Oh, how the Framers would hang us for it!

It is no longer possible to parody modern liberalism; and it is almost futile — and tiring — to skewer it. Liberals with a conscience should be embarrassed, but they hardly ever are. We hear, “After 9/11, everything changed.” Clearly, not everything.

Et tu, Martina? The Czech-born tennis champion Martina Navratilova made her fame and her fortune in the United States, land of the free, home of the brave. Now she has blasted us in — of all places (I would say) — the German press.

She thinks that conservatives in the U.S. are suppressing free speech. Listen to this, if you can stand it: “The most absurd part of my escape from [an] unjust system [e.g., Communist Eastern Europe] is that I have exchanged one system that suppresses free opinion for another.” She continued, “The Republicans in the United States manipulate public opinion and sweep any controversial issues under the table.” And, “It’s depressing. Decisions in America are based solely on the question of ‘how much money will come out of it’ and not on the questions of how much health, morals or the environment suffer as a result.”

I can’t decide what’s truest about Navratilova: that she’s stupid, that she’s ignorant, or that she’s ungrateful. This country allowed her to achieve her full potential, become rich beyond her wildest dreams, and be an open, unpleasant lesbian.

Makes you trot out the chestnut: “No good deed [e.g., throwing open one’s gate to Martina Navratilova] goes unpunished.”

Further, I wonder whether there’s that much difference between Navratilova’s claim that free speech is suppressed here, and the claims of Arabs that, for example, they can’t send their children to hospitals, because Jewish doctors will poison them.

All of these are lies spread about the United States. A price, of course, of sole superpowerdom, and those most dreadful of qualities, envy and ingratitude.

And now, to a really unfree country, where speech is really suppressed (although that’s about the least of this country’s deprivations). I’m talking about Cuba.

The Varela Project has been pretty much stomped on. This is the effort, remember, to force a referendum on whether the present government — in power without an election since 1959 — should continue. Varela is a petition drive to trigger such a referendum, which is allowable under Castro’s own constitution. Cuban democrats borrowed the idea from the Chileans of the late 1980s. It’s how they got rid of Pinochet.

The Varela organizers, risking everything, collected at least 12,000 signatures, more than the required 10,000, despite constant harassment from the regime, and the fact that there was no means to publicize the drive, other than word of mouth. (Most Cubans heard of the project for the first time when Jimmy Carter mentioned it during his visit there — one of the few positive things that came from that visit.)

Varela did well — so well that Castro was roused to crush the movement. As the Washington Post put it, the dictator “orchestrated a forced march through the center of Havana and dozens of other towns that, by the official account, rounded up 8 million of Cuba’s 11 million people. Then he forced the country’s voting population to line up again . . . to sign a petition that calls for his . . . system to be enshrined as ‘untouchable’ in the national constitution.”

The Communists say they garnered 8.1 million signatures, constituting 99 percent of the island’s legal voters. This figure is yet another, redundant proof of the regime’s totalitarianism. (Remember Charles Krauthammer’s “Tirana Index”? You could judge the unfreedom of a country by the returns of its sham elections. In Albania, the dictator Hoxa would win with 98.5 percent of the vote or something. One had to wonder: What about the other 1.5?)

The Cuban people, on their forced march, looked tired, sullen, and grim — as could be seen in the news photos published in Castro’s official organ, Granma! Some signers of the government’s petition apologized to dissidents, explaining that they could do no other, that this was survival in Castro’s Cuba. One Communist official, Lucia Abreu, said, “The participation of the people is spontaneous.” This is the old Communist lie; it has been told from at least 1917 on, in countless places, tropical, frigid, and in between.

So, Castro declares that his rule is “untouchable.” But with the continued bravery of people like the Varela Project activists — and a little support from free people and governments — he may find that he’s more touchable than he cares to contemplate.

I have spent the past week and a half or so immersed in a fascinating and disquieting topic: the rash of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic acts and rhetoric on our campuses; the new, bold push-back against it; and the phenomenon of “second thoughts” among people once comfortable in their liberalism.

(I should note, before continuing, that the line between that which is strictly anti-Israel and that which is blatantly anti-Semitic is blurring more and more. Some critics of Israel say, “We can’t criticize Israel without being called anti-Semitic!” I say, “The way to criticize Israel without being called anti-Semitic is to do so without being anti-Semitic.”)

I have done a piece on this general subject for the forthcoming NR (entitled “Rude Awakenings”). But I hope you will indulge me in a couple of more words here.

Do you know that it has become a common stunt on campus to set up “checkpoints,” in imitation of Israeli checkpoints? (To be sure, no one is trying to get through with explosives — that would be realistic.) Michael Granoff, a lay official of the Hillel Foundation, says, “Can you imagine if Jewish students attempted to imitate what Palestinians do?”

An Israeli group called Upstart Activist is urging something close to that, as it happens. It is advising students on how to perform “guerrilla theater” and the like of their own. Among Upstart Activist’s suggestions are “chalked outlines,” “mock funerals for terror victims,” and “mock Palestinian jails.” That would be a sight.

One woman you should know something about is Laurie Zoloth, who is a bioethicist and the director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University. She has been widely written about, for reasons which I will explain.

SFSU, sadly, is the site of the worst known outbreak of anti-Semitism on an American campus. Jewish students were subjected to a mob attack by a pro-Arab, anti-Israeli group on May 7. The Jewish kids had just participated in a peace rally — a nicely left-liberal affair, on Malcolm X Plaza, near the Cesar Chavez Student Union. Laurie Zoloth calls SFSU’s campus “extraordinarily left-wing” — and she doesn’t do so disapprovingly, believe me. At their rally, the students sang peace songs and wore T-shirts with the word “PEACE” written in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. All very gentle and all-inclusive.

And for their trouble, they had to be escorted to safety by police from the howling, death-threatening mob. The details have to be read to be believed.

And you can read them in a now-famous report that Zoloth sent to her colleagues on the faculty. This letter made its way, by e-mail, literally around the world, prompting an enormous reaction. Zoloth received thousands of e-mails, from every corner.

I urge you to read the letter in its entirety, but I will quote a little from it:

I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled ‘canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,’ past poster after poster calling out “Zionism = racism, and Jews = Nazis.” This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech, and this is the Weimar Republic with brownshirts it cannot control. . . .

[As the mob attacked] was I afraid? No: really more sad that I could not protect my students. Not one administrator came to stand with us. I knew that if a crowd of Palestinian or Black [note the capital letter] students had been there, surrounded by a crowd of white racists screaming racist threats, shielded by police, the faculty and staff would have no trouble deciding which side to stand on. . . .

One young student told me, “I have read about anti-Semitism in books, but this is the first time I have seen real anti-Semites, people who just hate me without knowing me, just because I am a Jew.’ She lives in the dorms. Her mother calls her and urges her to transfer to a safer campus.

And so on.

Zoloth says that, if anything, her report was “understated.” And yet, people find it difficult to believe. One director of a Hillel chapter confided to me that, on reading the report, he could scarcely believe it. “Do you think it’s really true?” he asked. If a Hillel director has trouble grasping the ferocity of this thing . . . As Zoloth says, she and her band — and the truth — had one thing going for them. Three, actually. Her prompt report. The resulting journalistic interest. And — very fortunately — police videotapes. Incontrovertible. Otherwise, the entire episode might have been swept under the rug, as some are attempting to do anyway.

Do you know that anti-Israeli students have developed the charming habit of holding demonstrations on — of all days — Holocaust Remembrance Day? Yes. It happens at SFSU. It happens at Boston U. It happens at Berkeley. It’s a fad — and it’s hard to think of a more twisted or hateful one.

An article in the Jerusalem Post detailed some of the grislier anti-Semitic acts on SFSU’s campus. I especially “like” this nugget from 1994: “A mural depicting Jewish stars covered in dollar signs had to be sandblasted from the Malcolm X Plaza, under the guard of police dressed in riot gear. Previous attempts by the campus administration to destroy the mural by painting it over were foiled when protesters removed the cover-up paint. The mural was commissioned by the Student Union Governing Board, which approved the final version without seeing it. It was drawn up by a member of the Pan Afrikan Student Union, who said at the mural’s dedication: ‘We don’t owe white people an explanation.’”

No, indeed.

Laurie Zoloth, of course, is thinking about leaving the campus, because how can one teach — Jewish Studies! — in such an atmosphere, and how can one recruit? As it is, Jewish students are tucking their Stars of David under their shirts. Zoloth says, “Is the social contract that defines an academy intact?” It seems not. She has an American flag at her desk — for the first time ever. “It is important that my students see this. Part of what I teach is love of country. We have to be alert to the situation as it is now before us.”

I’ve written before about my experience at the University of Michigan, particularly in the Near Eastern Studies Department. (Here is a relevant Impromptus.) At Michigan recently, there was a conference called “Perspectives on the Muslim World: Unveiling the Truth.” It was sponsored by such lovely entities as my old Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Department of Sociology, the Black Student Union, and the Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs — the gang was pretty much all there. There was a book sold at the conference — a single book. This was The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, featuring a chapter entitled “The Myth of the Holocaust.” Under pressure, the organizers apologized — pro forma.

And then there was this lovely appeal, circulated on campus:

“Muslims and Non-Muslims can boycott Israel financially by pulling their money out of their savings and checking accounts and investing in gold. Even keeping cash in a jar at home is better than letting it sit in the bank where the Zionists can lend it to themselves to finance their war crimes. Remember, the US government is borrowing money from YOU in order to give it to Israel. Then, the Jewish bankers collect interest on the loans and make even more money. Don’t let them get away with this. Keep only enough money in your account to pay your bills.”

As I’ve been talking to people about their “second thoughts” — the jolts of reality they suffer — the word “Kronstadt” keeps coming to me. (I should have said earlier, by the way, that “Second Thoughts” is the title of a volume by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, about those who moved away from 1960s-style radicalism.) Kronstadt is a place in the Baltics, the scene of a famous anti-Communist uprising in 1921. It was the first serious challenge to the Bolsheviks, and they wiped it out ruthlessly. This shocked a lot of people who had been enamored with the Revolution, causing disillusionment.

Others would have their own “Kronstadts” — events that tear the veil, that remove scales from eyes. For some, it would be the Kirov assassination; for others the show trials; or maybe the Hitler-Stalin pact (a biggie, wouldn’t you think?); or Khrushchev’s “secret speech” — that was damn late.

I believe that, on campus and around the country and world, little Kronstadts are occurring, with respect to the Arab world, the place and purpose of Israel, the uniqueness, greatness, and indispensability of the United States. This is just a thought. I had my “Kronstadts,” to the extent they were necessary, long ago. Others get theirs in due course.

Many of us have been buzzing over a piece on motherjones.com by Todd Gitlin, the famous leftist professor, and author of the renowned book The Sixties. It is titled “The Rough Beast Returns” (the beast that is anti-Semitism), and it has very much to do with the campus agonies we’ve been discussing.

You want to see an example of “push-back,” as I call it, at a university? An example of a student’s doing something constructive in a challenging time? I’m pleased to say that Rachel Zabarkes, who will be a senior at Harvard next year — and who is presently a National Review intern — has established the Harvard Israel Review, whose website is here. A deep bow.

I’d better end with something lightish. A reader tells me, “I once lived in Santa Cruz — attended UCSC — and saw many anti-logging protests. Problem was, the protesters would come with cars bearing bumper stickers from causes past, and there was almost always one that read, ‘Split wood, not atoms.’”

Oh, glory. Glory.