As the brutal battle between Israel and Hamas rages on, a cultural war is being waged at American universities, as pro-Palestinian students are facing real-life consequences for their vocal support of the terrorist group.
As reports of raped and slaughtered Israeli women and children began flooding social media following the Oct. 7th attack, swarms of American students gathered at universities across the States to blame Israel for the soul-shocking incursion.
Harvard students who allegedly signed a letter that placed the blame on Israel for Hamas’s savage attack saw their names and faces on a digital “doxxing truck” that was launched by Adam Guillette, president of the non-profit watchdog group Accuracy in Media (AIM), and driven around the campus.
CEOs vowed not to hire the students, and Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife resigned from the executive board of Harvard’s Kennedy School in protest of Harvard president Claudine Gay’s late and weak response to her students’ blatant anti-Semitism.
Billionaire’s call NOT to hire Harvard students who issued controversial Israel statement gains traction https://t.co/BVvm0KSN4z via @BIZPACReview — BPR based (@DumpstrFireNews) October 12, 2023
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle argued, “What is being done, or at least attempted, is cancel culture.”
“I’m mad at these people for saying awful, stupid things,” she wrote. “I’m also mad that I now have to defend the worst of them from cancellation.”
But, according to conservative columnist Bethany Mandel, the students are old enough to know better than to support a “genocidal massacre.”
“Four-year-olds are able to decide their gender, but 24-year-olds aren’t able to understand that endorsing a genocidal massacre against 1,400 civilians is bad,” she told Fox News Digital.
(Video: Fox News Digital)
“These are legal adults who are able to open up a computer,” Mandel said. “I mean, unfortunately, the photos of what happened here, the fact that 80% of some of the victims in specific communities were tortured before their deaths — that is common knowledge. And there are, unfortunately, photos of what happened and graphic descriptions.”
Playing “dumb,” she said, is not an option, regardless of the age of the college students.
“I’ve spoken personally to families who have lost their family members in the most grotesque way imaginable, and these brave individuals are doing interviews,” she said. “So no one can play dumb and say that the information wasn’t there. Hamas did a GoPro and they posted it on Telegram. They’re proud of what they’ve done.”
“So you can’t say as a legal adult with access to the Internet that you just didn’t know,” she argued, “because the Nazis hid their crimes but Hamas is livestreaming them.”
Younger children who are espousing Hamas rhetoric should not be held to the same standards as adult students, Mandel stressed, but she reminds them that the Internet is “forever.”
“Do I think that a 15-year-old should be held accountable for the rest of their life? No, absolutely not,” she stated. “I don’t think that there should be a publicly accessible blacklist, but the Internet is forever. I think that everyone growing up in the Internet age needs to understand that, because whether someone adds them to a blacklist or not, what you say will exist in perpetuity.”
While she “always knew that there was a bad antisemitism problem on American college campuses,” Mandel was nonetheless shocked by the response to the war from college students and professors.
Maybe not reported widely, but big noisy pro-Palestinian rally at, of all places, Harvard Yard in Boston. The right to peaceful protest fundamental to democratic society – so much injustice in the world today that needs to be called out. pic.twitter.com/73Rom0P4A0 — Philip Thalis (@PhilipThalis) October 14, 2023
“This is how antisemitism festers,” she noted. “They’re telling us who they are, and we should listen very carefully.”
She finds the anti-Israel messages from professors particularly disturbing.
“I think it’s incredibly powerful that professors are doing that because they’re sending a message to their Jewish students who feel incredibly unsupported by their universities and by university security in a lot of circumstances,” Mandel said. “I’ve also been speaking to American college students and leaders of Jewish communities on American college campuses. And they’re telling me, ‘We are scared, and we feel unsupported, and we don’t even feel like they believe us, that we’re in danger.'”
“It’s really important for students and also Jewish staff and Jewish administrative individuals to hear from people who have tenure and who have the safety to say this was wrong and I stand with you,” she stated, “because unfortunately, on American college campuses, not enough people are hearing that.”