Reading up on this vile phenomenon of young Hamas apologists on campus and elsewhere tearing down posters of Israeli hostages, I found an insightful piece by Tablet’s Armin Rosen about a woman named Yazmeen Deyhimi, who is identified by an organization called Stop Antisemitism as one of the NYU students caught doing it on video. A sampling:
In her apology, the NYU junior proved herself to be a fluent writer of officialese, proof her education at a hyperselective American college did not go to waste. What do young high-achievers learn at expensive universities these days—aside from, perhaps, the necessity of supporting terror attacks against Israeli families, children, and old people, of course—if not the language of virtuous self-presentation, a survival skill in a world in which one might flip from being a victim to victimizer in a hot minute? Handling these kinds of passages is a delicate art, worthy of the courtiers of Versailles.
As the NYU junior continued, “I have found it increasingly difficult to take my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times. I find myself more and more frustrated about the time we currently find ourselves in.” . . .
Deyhimi’s trajectory tracks with that of a generation of rising elites for whom staid, establishment institutions have served as a pipeline to a much edgier, more militant set of values, which themselves are admission tickets to prestige institutions. Thirty student groups at Harvard, including, initially, the university’s Amnesty International chapter, signed on to a statement endorsing Hamas’ slaughter of 1,400 Israelis—many of them believing, no doubt, that a public display of fealty to a terror group wouldn’t hurt them in the elite job market.
After all, no one suffered for endorsing demonstrations by BLM members at which multiple police officers were murdered; or by embracing the violent riots that followed the death of George Floyd; or the nightly firebombing of a Portland courthouse by antifa members; or antifa violence more generally. Fanonist principles are regularly endorsed in dozens of classes, along with attacks on the “colonial mindset” and “white supremacy.” How could a young up-and-comer at a place like NYU or Harvard go wrong by endorsing the anti-colonial struggle of Palestinian freedom fighters?
The entirety of Armin Rosen’s essay is worth your time, here.