Georgetown University students held a “martyr vigil” last night, to honor “those who have been murdered by the occupation.” The occupation, otherwise known as Israel’s defensive counter-attack against Hamas extremists who, on a Jewish holiday, invaded Israel to murder Jews. Read our coverage of Georgetown’s event here.
Students for Justice in Palestine organized the vigil in Georgetown’s Red Square. Universities right now are hotbeds for the glorification of Hamas terrorism; unlike campus activists’ other social-justice obsessions, this certainly didn’t seem to be a case of college students supporting “the current thing.” Georgetown’s SJP chapter protests Israel’s “settler-colonialism” often.
A few months ago, Georgetown flew an Israeli flag in the Red Square to celebrate the 75th Israeli Independence Day. SJP published a letter in April, calling the display of the flag “a blatant attack on Palestinian identity as Palestinians continue to live under the violent Israeli occupation and apartheid.”
“The display of the Israeli flag glorifies and celebrates a nation perpetrating present-day settler-colonial occupation and apartheid and enabling ongoing ethnic cleansing,” the group said. “The display of this flag symbolizes the injustice Palestinians continue to experience as Israel denies their right to return and invites celebration of an anniversary of ethnic cleansing and dispossession.”
Matt Continetti writes today about the student activists who support Hamas:
Campus anti-Zionism and leftwing antisemitism are not new. The organizations behind the rallies and letters and social-media posts have been around for a while. Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the United Kingdom have spent years preparing for this moment. What they have set in motion is stunning, nonetheless.
The behavior of university administrations is just as shocking. They have either been mealy-mouthed or morally imbecilic. They have done everything they could to avoid the reality of Hamas’s barbarism. They are silent as their students celebrate terrorism; they are outraged if called to account for their moral corruption. They have built an environment where dissidents are heckled and harassed and even assaulted; where intellectual freedom is stifled; where racial separatism, political correctness, and gender ideology run rampant; where due process is violated; and where violence, so long as it is “revolutionary,” is glorified. . . .
As Allan Bloom observed in his 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind, German universities in the 1920s and 1930s were seedbeds of fascism. The most prominent German philosopher of the age, Martin Heidegger, belonged to the Nazi Party. He never apologized for his affiliation or behavior. Heidegger’s abstruse thought laid the foundations for the postmodern “critical theory” that has dominated the academy since the early 1990s. The result: Two generations of students cannot tell right from wrong, good from evil, justice from terror.
Today, on October 13, Hamas calls for a “Day of Rage.” More pro-Palestinian groups will hold protests and rallies — and it’s worth remembering that on college campuses, their rage is not new.