Mick Hartley

To reinforce that Columbia jibe in the last post, here's John Aziz in the JC:

“A message to the scum of nations and pigs of the Earth. Paradise lies in the shadow of swords. Glory to he who makes the occupier taste bitterness”, the tattered brown cardboard sign read in peculiarly pretentious and melodramatic language, attached with a wedge of black duct tape to a nondescript tent.

“Let it be known”, the woman in the brown keffiyeh spoke into the microphone with a coiled passion, her voice inflected with an American accent. “It was the Al-Aqsa flood (of October 7) that put the global intifada back on the table again. And it is the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian freedom fighters that will guide every struggle on every corner of the Earth to victory. How far are we willing to go in losing all of the trappings of a respectable life, the material spoils that we have been taught to value as individuals?”

This is the kind of message that as a Palestinian, I have heard a lot over the years from a range of voices on my own side of the conflict. A message of unrestrained militancy, a threat to the world, a warning, an omen of violence. The language of Hamas, the language of al-muqawama (the resistance), the language of war.

But this is not Gaza, nor Yemen, nor Tehran. These are not the militant words of some radical imam amid the dust clouds of Arabia, or the war-torn Mediterranean landscape of Gaza. These are signs posted and words spoken at Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment, in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world – a city populated by 1.6 million Jews as compared to second-place Jerusalem’s 546,000 Jews. If these students wished to emulate their heroes of the Al-Aqsa Flood and attack or kidnap Jews, they would have plenty to choose from.

“Jews, Jews”, the hordes of American students chanted, “go back to Poland”. Many of these students might identify as left-wing and anti-racist, but the only recent historical parallel to this uncloaked antisemitism were the naked chants of “Jews will not replace us” spewed by the so-called alt-right, the incels, groypers, and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017.

Do these idiots really think Jews came from Poland? Don't they know any history beyond a fairy-tale fantasy of lovely innocent brown people and horrible Jew colonisers? – that Israel is the Jewish ancestral homeland? – that they were there thousands of years before the Arabs showed up with the Islamic Arab conquests of the 7th century? – that nearly a half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, mostly expelled from Middle Eastern countries and with no connection to Europe?

And do they know that Auschwitz is in Poland? Or is that the point?

Update: Brendan O'Neill:

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.