You can stand up and be counted, or you can be anonymous. You can’t do both, no matter how much the masked, publicity-shy protestors roiling American campuses wish it were so.
A flyer announcing pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last week advised participants to hide their identity. Demonstrators shouting anti-Jewish slogans around the country wrap their faces in keffiyehs or COVID masks. These coverings are not the marks of savvy social justice warriors.
They are the costumes of cowards.
The endgame is to foment as much hate, spread as much ignorance and disrupt as many operations as possible, all without reprisal.
Which begs the question: how can they be so passionately devoted to a cause, and yet so unwilling to be seen advocating for it? The United States has seen its fair share of demonstrations, including the violent campus scenes in 1968. Protestors were bare-faced and being arrested for their actions was a point of pride.
Now, however, students are skittish. They’re willing to shout, to break the law by camping out on public streets and taking over university buildings, but keep their names and faces out of it, please.
Some psychiatrists are blaming the whole thing on the pandemic. Students were isolated and angered by school shut-downs and social distancing and are desperate to find a connection, community and a voice, experts told the New York Post.
The pro-Palestinian cause allows discontented youth to express “long-withheld rage,” said forensic psychiatrist Carole Lieberman. It gives them an “opportunity to identify with the ‘oppressed’ against ‘oppressors.’ ”
It’s terrifying to think that the result of being cut off from the prom or hanging out in the cafeteria is spewing antisemitic hatred en masse. While that does offer a possible reason for the collective desire to make signs and pitch tents, it doesn’t explain the aversion to being identified.
We’d like to think that underneath the ignorance, the disregard of historic facts and understanding what colonization is and isn’t, there is a modicum of morality that knows that calling for the extermination of Jews is wrong. They haven’t worked out how to criticize the Israeli government for the way it is handling the war without being useful idiots in the service of Hamas terrorists.
And so they shout and ride the wave of mob mentality. Parallels to 1938 Germany are lost on them, but some twinge of awareness must at least tell them that the Nazis weren’t the good guys. And so they hide their faces in shame.
The more likely reason, sadly, is that the concept of facing consequences for their actions is anathema. Students are shocked at school suspensions, as some colleges are doing. This could affect their graduation status, future jobs, they lament.
As the Post reported, more than 100 Barnard and Columbia faculty staged a “Rally to Support Our Students” last week condemning the student arrests and demanding suspensions be lifted.
The campus protestors, while accountable for their actions in full, have nonetheless been let down by the adults in their lives: the progressive, anti-Israel faculty who replaced lessons in critical thinking with pro-Hamas propaganda, and the parents who taught them that they shouldn’t have to face consequences for their actions.
The students aren’t the ones who should be hiding their faces.
