The Jihad of Higher Learning
Taking a step back from the sound and the fury, isn’t the most fascinating thing about the anti-Israel protests on university campuses in the USA how naturally and seamlessly murderous Hamas has piggybacked on the activists that seem to control those universities? What can explain the rapt acceptance of a Jihadist world-view that through word and action stands 180 degrees in opposition to everything that these students purport to believe?
Most of the commentary trying to explain this focuses on a supposed common cause against a common enemy: the colonialist Zionist state, and its Zionist inhabitants, and its hangers-on, otherwise known as Jews-in-general. It is undeniable, this finely tuned conjunction of old and new Antisemitism. At the same time it is insufficient to describe the wholesale infatuation of these students with all things jihadi.
It is trite to say that where there is a spiritual vacuum, demons will appear, but that is what is happening on college campuses in America. Look at what Hamas themselves uploaded to social media before they realized that it was bad PR. It is worse than a nightmare. It is the negation of life. It is the negation of the Good, and now this very sadism is championed ferociously by keffiyeh-donning activists shouting “false narrative” or “fake!” A quick look at these students reveals that even if they are drawing some sort of stipend from sympathetic non-profits, their commitment to the cause is far beyond that explained by any financial recompense.
There is little chance that these demonstrators have not seen the gruesome footage of the slaughter of the Jews. The fact that they aggressively and proudly deny the slaughter with seemingly little outside encouragement demonstrates a rapt approval of those events. The fact that these Double-Speak demonstrators have been treated as legitimate indicates one thing: that humankind is not equipped to acknowledge the demonic when it rears its ugly head once again, let alone to combat it. Recognizing this is what invigorates the activists. Nothing substantial stands between them and whatever they imagine to be their lofty goal on the horizon. This is the directional convergence with the Global Jihad. These useful idiots are the camel bearing the new Jihadi, whose goal is clear: nothing short of the complete conquest of the West. He clucks and squeezes his heels on the camel’s flank, maybe glazing the camel’s hind with a switch, leans over and whispers in the camel’s ear: “There, up ahead, on the horizon. They are waiting for us. It’s an endless rooftop party in Gaza, a party where no-one will ever tell you to turn down the music.
You hit the nail on the head, especially with the title - the Jihad of Higher Learning. I commented at Michael Oren's blog that my personal university history involved the University of Minnesota where I did my doctorate in Islamic literature 16th c. Hadith in 1978-1983 then was invited to remain on staff as non regular faculty in a small department where I was the only Jewish female - the dept was already marxist anti-israel/anti-semitic. Ultimately I sued the U of MN under the Rajendra Class Action sex discrimination on first appeal the U of MN made an offer but I did not accept bc I could not relocate and I wanted my job back - they forced a second appeal and I petitioned for cert. but the underlying issue was anti-semitism and already back then U of MN was the back door into MN giving us Ilhan Omar. None of what was taught by the department made any sense. It was shear garbage and we see now how it has flourished uninhibitedly.
The utterances and chants, goals and demands of the protesters amount to the crystallization of 40 years of myth building. Academia set foot in the wilderness, leaving critical thinking and reflection, observation and factual analysis for a road of narrative and catechistic belief with an artistic weaving of "intersectionality" of interests irrespective of any real confluence of values. The protesters, their academic neo-theologians, and the craven politicians supporting them either actively or passively by not acting against them, are play acting their destruction of the walls of Jericho. The support for the elimination of Israel and the attendant anti-semitism is the first step in their battle for the end of liberal democracy -- they are intolerant and unwilling to debate or accept differences of opinion, and in fact the flip-side of the neo-fascist/autocratic coin. Jews are different, a tiny minority with their own civilizational values and traditions, and it is differences that they cannot accept as valid. They are on a quest of uniform domination based on their belief and ironically, as you point out the jihadist universities are now leading Western civilization into a contemporary Dark Age.