‘We are all watching the disintegration of the most important institutions within Western democracies. It beggars belief that we are all witness now to the rise of open and proud antisemitism made manifest in the most elite universities of America.’
The unhinged anti-Israel protests taking place on college campuses nationwide — and particularly at many Ivy League and top-tier universities — do not bode well for the future.
Campus upheavals are nothing new, writes Rod Dreher in the European Conservative. We’ve seen it before. What makes this round so chilling is the blatant, unapologetic antisemitism embraced, accepted and cheered on these college campuses, he writes.
Headlined “The Birth Pangs of a New Order,” the April 22 piece argues: “Radicalized students at elite universities are the next generation of the ruling class.” Dreher wrote:
Just as the soixante-huitards in Europe, and their co-generationalists in North America, later became the politicians and institutional leaders, these radicalized students will be administering the systems tomorrow.
True, it is in one sense satisfying to observe institutions like the Ivy League colleges suffer these outpourings of hatred and hysteria, given that they have cultivated the woke ideology at the core of these protests. These institutions abandoned classical liberalism, and taught students to judge good and evil according to identity politics. They are getting what they deserve.
More important, however, is that we are all watching the disintegration of the most important institutions within Western democracies. It beggars belief that we are all witness now to the rise of open and proud antisemitism made manifest in the most elite universities of America. It beggars belief that in London, Paris, and other European capitals, Jews are afraid to walk in public for fear of violent Islamism (aided and abetted by left-wing allies), while authorities protect the antisemites. It beggars belief that the mainstream media either downplays this or ignores it entirely, and that the political class, so sensitive to the slightest tremor of upset from the Left’s sacred victims, is largely docile in the face of this crisis.
The Democratic Party meets this summer in Chicago for the convention in which it will renominate Joe Biden. Pro-Hamas activists have vowed to make a big show there, replaying the 1968 Democratic convention in that city, at which violent protests, and police violence to repress the protests, resulted in the election of Republican Richard M. Nixon on a law-and-order platform. …
“We are facing a moment that is as big as 1914, or worse,” an economist said to me recently, about the general decadence. Yes. What is happening now on America’s elite campuses may be the birth pangs of something very ugly—either of the Left or the Right, it’s hard to say—slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. If so, then remember this: the ideological and institutional fertility of the Left, and the feeble sterility of the parties of the Right, will have collaborated to produce a monster.
The signs of his advent were all around us, early on, but our media class preferred not to see them. It comforted itself with the thought that if it just pointed and shouted, “Look! Orban! Le Pen!” loud enough and often enough, it would distract themselves and the masses from the real threats to law and liberty. And God help us, they might have been right.
Read the entire piece at the European Conservative.
MORE: Day 8: Tear gas, rubber bullets, officers injured — unruly anti-Israel campus protests continue
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