As waves of anti-Israel protests sweep across Western countries, National Review staff writer Madeleine Kearns argued on The Editors that, while some onlookers have been stunned by these demonstrations, it’s important to understand their origins. And this includes immigration policy.
Kearns said “there’s two things going on.” “The first,” she said, “comes from policies of — and this is specifically a European problem — but policies of mass immigration justified by this just completely nonsense philosophy of multiculturalism, the idea that you can import basically a foreign culture with contradictory values and ideals into a European one and they can coexist happily. And obviously that’s just not true.”
Assimilation is crucial, Kearns pointed out, and “if you can’t assimilate and if you can’t integrate immigrants, then mass immigration is just a bad idea. And we’re seeing the effects of that. . . . Europe’s had a serious problem with homegrown terrorism for years now. . . . And America should see what’s going on in Europe and learn from their mistakes because in many respects, it’s too late [for Europe].”
There is another aspect to the anti-Israel sentiment as Kearns sees it, and that’s the role of academia. She said there’s a “belief that [Israel] is just an extension of the colonialist project. ‘Israel is a colonizer, therefore there should be no sympathy for them.’ We see this all across the academy, we see this in student groups.”
Kearns decried the fact that “50 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 believe that the atrocities on October 7 can be justified.”
“It’s people who just don’t believe in all that we believe in,” she said. “They don’t believe in liberal democracy. They don’t believe in the basic freedoms as they extend to all people.”
“It is a wake-up call in many respects.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.