Student Protests a ‘Howl Against Civilisation’

Brendan O’Neill is one of the few British journalists who has managed to see steadily and whole what those anti-Israel pro-Hamas student protests are all about — not just solidarity with a pogrom, but a scream of ignorant fury against all of Western civilization. His comments can be found here: “A howl of rage against civilisation,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, April 22, 2024:

…Media-elite sympathisers with Columbia’s Gaza camp claim these pro-Hamas cries, these demands for the obliteration of Israel and this hanging of target signs around the necks of Jews are rare occurrences in an otherwise peaceful protest. Plus, it’s mostly outsiders doing this stuff, they say. I call bullshit. If you create a space in which anti-Semites feel comfortable, so comfortable that they’re happy to openly glorify Hamas’s cosmic racist violence, then that’s on you….

We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.

How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.

Israel is a standing reproach to the rest of the Western world. It is a country that is secure in its skin, unafraid to stand up for itself against its Muslim enemies, unlike so many in the Western world who seem to be unable to deal with the Muslim challenge from within to their continued existence as Western polities. Instead of this mad desire to vilify Israel, the young — both ignorant and malevolent — who on college campuses are now praising Hamas for the acts of “resistance” it committed on October 7, and chanting “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free,” which is a call for the annihilation of Israel and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state, or most offensive of all, are screaming “Say No To Genocide” — ought to be studying the texts and teachings of Islam, and consider carefully how Muslims have treated non-Muslims over the past 1400 years.

The hair-raising Qur’anic texts that encourage the killing non-Muslims, who are described in the Qur’an as “the most vile of created beings,” need to be better known, or known at all, by these protesting students. And they need to study the history of Muslim mistreatment of non-Muslims. They will find that under Muslim rule in India, for example, between 70 and 80 million Hindus were murdered, and Buddhism virtually eradicated in the country of its origin; that in Africa, Muslim Arab slavers engaged in a slave trade that began earlier, ended later, and claimed many more victims, than the Atlantic slave trade about which we hear so incessantly, while scarcely a syllable of protest is directed at the enslavement of tens of millions of black Africans captured in the bush, especially young boys who were castrated on site so as to later be used as eunuchs in Arab harems. Those who survived the operation, and the long march by slave coffle to the coast, were then brought by dhow to the coast of Arabia, and finally transported by camel caravan, to be sold in the slave markets of Islam, in Jeddah, Muscat, Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul. Will those student protesters learn about the many legal, social, and economic disabilities, that non-Muslims endured in Muslim lands, including the crippling capitation tax known as the “jizyah,” which had to be paid by non-Muslims to avoid being attacked by Muslims?

Do you think any of these young people will devote attention to such study of both the doctrine and history of Islam? Of course not. Will they continue to be satisfied to mindlessly chant “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” and “globalize the Intifada,” which, rightly understood, are sinister calls for the end of the Jewish state? Alas, we all know the answer to that.