Today’s Protest Movements Are Echoing Those of 1968, Except for the Added Antisemitism

The similarities between today and 1968 are apparent: calls to divest; university halls being taken over; the establishment challenged; Democrats fearing that their convention at Chicago could cost them an election. Yes, 1968 is calling and it wants its protest movement back. Yet the recent global outburst of antisemitism shows this is no ’60s redux.“They are like we were in the ’60s: passionate, caring, and at least they’re not on their cellphones all day,” a friend observed of the protesters the other day. On NPR, a Columbia University professor who teaches — preaches? — a course on the anti-Vietnam protest movement makes the same point.The similarities, though, are as superficial as the conceit that forever reliving the 1968 protest movement could be called an academic discipline. The Vietnam-era protesters might have been wrongheaded, but at least they had skin in the game. The main cause many of today’s protesters scream about can be boiled down to one thing: hatred of Jews.If the Keffiyeh-clad crowd really cared about Mideast deaths, where were they when — in the last decade — thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of thousands of other Arabs were killed in Syria’s civil war? Do those who chant, “We are all Houthis,” know where Yemen is, or how many Yemenis the Iran-backed terrorists kill?Demonstrators stand near National Guard soldiers at Chicago’s Grant Park during the Democratic National Convention, August 26, 1968. Warren K. Leffler via Wikimedia CommonsSome of the foreign campus agitators may come from the Mideast, but what does the robotic echo chamber know about the phrase, “From the river to the sea”? At Columbia, most have never posted a TikTok selfie taken anywhere but the streets between the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean.Their 1960s anti-war ancestors had friends or family members under fire in Vietnam. The draft system could have sent them to Southeast Asia, too. They thus could — and did — argue they’d lose limb or life in a faraway land for a cause they hated. The only way a Columbia student could be harmed in Gaza today is if she is raped and killed by Hamas kidnappers who hate her for dancing at a party in a southern Israeli desert. Sure, the rioters claim to care for the oppressed. “Always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world,” a 1960s icon, Che Guevara, once said. If a student who is queer feels oppressed, and hears that so does a Palestinian, the next logical stage these days is founding a group called “queers for Palestine.” Hamas, of course, would throw these advocates of gender fluidity from Gaza’s rooftops. Their solidarity with “Palestine” is as bogus as the idea that Che, a homicidal maniac, could care for any act of injustice except for those committed in Cuba. It’s less about Arabs and more about “Zionists.” In one video posted on social media, a student is blocked on his way to class. “Is it because I’m Jewish?” he asks. No, they say, we have Jews here, but are you a Zionist? “I certainly am,” the student says. In that case, he’s told, you can’t come in. The oft-repeated distinction between righteous Jews and evil Zionists is taken to a new level by Representative Ilhan Omar. “We should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide,” the “Squad” member said at Columbia, where she came to support protesters, including her activist daughter. No Zionist, or any other member of the group victimized in the Holocaust, is “pro-genocide.” Prior to Israel’s independence in 1948, anti-Zionists might have had incorrect arguments, but they were not immoral. No longer. Now, anti-Zionism is, in practice, genocidal.What to do with more than seven million Jews who currently live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea? A Final Solution offered by Hamas, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Columbia crowd is to kill them. Others advocate that they must “go back to Poland,” which may, technically, be merely described as ethnic cleansing. Jews of all stripes were eventually pushed out of places where anti-Zionism became an obsession, like the Soviet Union, most Arab countries, Venezuela, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The few who remained became part of, and token of, the system. So do groups favored by the current pro-Hamas global movement, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Justice in Palestine, and Neturei Karta.“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” the godfather of all radicals, Karl Marx, said. In the 1960s the Marxists wrought tragedy in Southeast Asia. Currently their clueless heirs seem almost farcical. To paraphrase an old Jewish saw, if it wasn’t so seriously dangerous, we’d laugh too.

Today’s Protest Movements Are Echoing Those of 1968, Except for the Added Antisemitism

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