BARI WEISS: A Year of Revelations.
In October 2023—just in that first month—George Washington University students projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” in giant letters on campus buildings. At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library from a mob pounding on the door. At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad called the slaughter “awesome.” At Cornell, Professor Russell Rickford said it was “energizing” and “exhilarating.” At Princeton, hundreds of students chanted “globalize the intifada,” which can only mean: open season on Jews worldwide. At NYU, students held posters that read “keep the world clean,” with drawings of Jewish stars in garbage cans.
Over the weeks that followed, posters with the faces of the hostages were put up on lampposts and bulletin boards in campuses and cities across North America and Europe. And young people—and sometimes not so young—started tearing them down.
At first, we rationalized this by assuming that the people tearing them down were abnormal. But there were more than a few of them, including college professors. And they were gleeful.
Posters of lost cats aren’t systematically torn down by Broadway producers and graduate students, and yet these were human beings stolen from their beds. The only sane conclusion was that our times are not normal. To pretend that they are is as delusional as insisting that the supreme leader of Iran was merely speaking metaphorically when he said over the weekend, at his first public sermon in almost five years: Israel is a “malicious regime” that “will not last long.”
“A total derailment from civilization” is how the Nobel Prize–winning German writer Herta Müller described the Hamas massacre in her extraordinary speech delivered this past May. But the phrase included derailments closer to home.
Listen to the words being shouted on our streets.
Just this weekend, thousands of people in Toronto gathered to declare, “We don’t want two states, take us back to ’48,” the kind of call for the elimination of Israel that has been heard in cities across the West over the last year. At a rally in Philadelphia, one speaker recalled: “On October 7 when I was watching those resistance fighters flying into Palestine on paragliders, I was cheering.” In Berlin, protesters shouted in Arabic: “Anyone have a bullet; either you kill a Jew with it or give it to Hamas.”
There is no political argument consistent with the values of a free society that justifies this behavior. There is no moral universe that explains how two visibly Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh were recently struck with a bottle; or how a literary festival in New York cancelled a panel because the moderator was a Zionist; or why a (now former) member of Congress downplayed the sexual violence Jewish women suffered on October 7; or why medical students and doctors in San Francisco shouted “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!”
This is not to say that the majority of Americans aren’t horrified by these examples and hundreds of others—or that they are without precedent. In 1939, after Kristallnacht, more than 20,000 Americans flooded Madison Square Garden to cheer for Adolf Hitler. Today, with the distance of almost a century, that shames us. We owe it to ourselves and to our country to be no less horrified when today, in New York City, Hamas’s allies “Flood New York City,” an allusion to the group’s October 7 massacre, which it called Al-Aqsa Flood.
Jim Geraghty writes that on college campuses, “The Antisemitism Is the Point:”
Have you seen any college protests against the Houthis’ “partial and limited reintroduction” of slavery and child marriages?
There are ongoing “atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan — wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago.” Nicholas Kristof reports:
After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.
“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.
Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.
Do these black lives matter? Apparently not, judging from the lack of reaction of the overwhelming majority of America’s college students.
Any activists even notice new claims of the mass killing of the Rohingya by the Arakan Army in Myanmar?
Nope, the only “genocide” that seems to interest the angry young leftists on America’s college campuses is the Israeli use of military force against Hamas in retaliation for the massacre perpetrated by the terror group.
If your lone measuring stick of geopolitical events was the reaction of American college students, you would think that (a) the October 7 massacre and mass rapes were a minor provocation, not even worth much discussion, and (b) the Israeli military response to that massacre is a greater outrage than the Rwandan genocide, the Islamic State’s brutality, the “ethnic cleansing” of the Balkan wars, or the millions killed or displaced in Congo.
Maybe, if you look hard enough, you can find a sparsely attended, largely ignored, on-campus effort against these other moral abominations, one that garnered little or no media coverage and minimal student interest.
But only Israel gets American college students’ blood pumping, propelling them up off the dorm bed and out to march, protest, occupy buildings, and assault their classmates. (From an Anti-Defamation League report released last month, summarizing the 2023–24 academic year: “Twenty-eight assaults were recorded on approximately 20 campuses across the country in the following states: California (10), Massachusetts (4), New York (4), New Jersey (2), North Carolina (2) and one assault each in Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Washington and Wisconsin.”)
John Podhoretz writes: that Kamala and Doug Emhoff will be planting a tree today: Kamala Harris’s October 7th Tree.
I just pulled up the New York Times‘s list of stories on that day. You can find it here by clicking on this sentence. There is not a single article listed here commemorating the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Not one. December 7, 1942 was not a day for chin-scratching, soul-searching, wound-dressing commemoration. Men were fighting and dying on that day, as they would every day for another two and a half years. It was a time for action. It was a time to kill the enemy and save your friends and take and hold territory and raise the flag, and at home, to write letters to loved ones in uniform and worry yourself sick about them and accept your rations and collect scraps of tin and metal that might be useful for the war effort.
* * * * * * * *
It is another day in the war that must be won for the Jewish people to be safe, the Jewish state to reestablish its deterrence against its genocidal enemies, and the West to prevail against the anti-Western Muslim ideologues who made their anti-human intentions known 45 years ago when they took 52 American embassy employees hostage and held them for 451 days. The 101 hostages held by Hamas have been in captivity for 365 days. For them, too, this is just another day, a day of horror. It’s unlikely they even know what day it is, as they have not seen the light of the sun in a year.
And yet here we are in America, commemorating as though this were some kind of…what? Holiday? It’s also just another day—a day when I walked by my bank on the Upper West Side to see it defaced by red-paint graffiti that read “CITIBANK GENOCIDE,” which is a new one for me, and I thought I’d seen it all. A day when people aligned with the monsters who want to see my children dead and my people wiped off the earth are marching in support of those goals. Just another day in the world after October 7.
Oh, and I’m delighted to announce that on this day, the vice president of the United States, who is also leading in the polls for president in the election that will conclude in 29 days, will be planting a tree in commemoration of—again, what?—next to her house as her husband stands next to her, possibly sated by some leftover brisket from lunchtime cooked by the Veep. Yes, the brisket that, he informed us, helped bring him back to his religion. Together, as I said, they will be planting a tree.
A tree, people.
A tree.
It’s a tick-the-box gesture that does something to commemorate the anniversary of 10/7, without accomplishing anything, as Harris attempts to thread the needle between the 21st century equivalent of FDR’s coalition.
And possibly without saying very much, in the hopes of not offending any of her disparate constituencies. Exit question: Why Does Nobody Talk About the American Hostages in Gaza?
