Rowdies

 Over the past days, since the student protests began to make national news, I've noticed a strange disconnect in the media coverage. The campus protest movement is often described as "antiwar" and motivated by concern over the civilian death toll in Gaza. And if this is all these protests stood for, I could certainly get on board. I too want to condition U.S. aid and push both parties toward a ceasefire. 

But then you actually see what the protesters have painted on their signs, and you realize that this is all about something quite different. A friend of mine was walking through the Berkeley campus the other day, and spotted one of the encampments. I asked him what messages they had written on the entrance. The first sign he saw, as he reported, read: "Glory to the Martyrs." A Hamas slogan. 

I had the same moment of realization watching the videos of the protesters smashing windows and barricading the doors of a campus building at Columbia this morning. They too have chanted the slogans of martyrology—words they could only have picked up from jihadist literature. This is not about humanitarian concern at this point for suffering people in Gaza. This is about a cult of violence. 

The young are often looking for some Sorelian transcendent meaning through the shedding of blood. Today's radicals seem to have found their avatars. The fact that they have settled on Hamas as their revolutionary role models bespeaks a depth of nihilism on their part that is profoundly sad, in addition to being disturbing and dangerous. 

Some will protest that "martyrs" here means only the innocent children slaughtered in IDF explosions. But that is not the term any normal person would use to describe this conflict, unless they had been huffing a great deal of jihadist-inflected propaganda. And if the students were actually trying to end the violence in the Middle East, they would certainly not be borrowing from the ideology and rhetoric of Hamas. 

How quickly all of these students have forgotten that Hamas gunned down hundreds of young people their own age at an outdoor music festival just six months ago. How quickly they have forgotten that other young people their own age—some of them U.S. citizens, just like them—remain captive in Hamas's hands, where they may still be subject as we speak to torture or sexual violence. 

A movement that endorses the aims and borrows the rhetoric of a group like that is not motivated by "peace." These are not "antiwar" protests. These are pro-war protests. They have simply picked one side over the other in an ongoing conflict that has brought incalculable suffering to two already highly-traumatized and long-suffering peoples in Israel and Gaza. 

Some may say the protesters occupying the university building at Columbia are doing something bold. I say: look to the fact that they all wear masks, to hide their faces. Some may applaud the protesters for showing intellectual independence. I say: there is no independence in joining a cult. There is no intellectual or moral courage in adopting an utterly one-sided and totalistic view of the world. 

Seeing the images of the Columbia building-occupiers, all wearing identical university sweatshirts and dark face-coverings while they break windows and barricade doors, I could only think of Vladimir Nabokov's comment on the student protesters of yesteryear: "Rowdies are never revolutionaries, they are always reactionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found."

That is what we are really seeing in these protests. Ideological conformity and philistinism in the service of a cult of violence. It may be "revolutionary" in the sense that it wants to overthrow the State of Israel. But it is also reactionary in the deepest and oldest of senses. 

For centuries, there has been no surer sign of a reactionary ideology than antisemitism. And any movement that openly embraces Hamas slogans deserves that label.