How quickly civilisation crumbles.
I visited Columbia University in New York City just two weeks ago. Bright-eyed youths lounged on the manicured lawns, lost in conversation. Professors hurried through the quad, thick tomes tucked under their arms.Students diligently walked their bicycles across campus: this was far too hallowed a space to be sullied by tyre marks.
Young people of every ethnicity buzzed about the place, all united in devotion to this cathedral of education, this seat of learning that counts among its alumni an American founding father, Alexander Hamilton, and the first black US president, Barack Obama.
I felt cleverer just by strolling its grounds. These are the places, I thought, where civilisation is stored. The flame of knowledge is kept alight here.
Fast forward a fortnight and Columbia is unrecognisable to me now. That quad that hummed with curious conversation now bristles and simmers with bigotry. This arena of civilisation has been overrun by fuming youths singing the praises of savagery.
Columbia has fallen to the forces of barbarism.
On Wednesday last week, students set up a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in the quad. The speed with which this “pro-Palestine” gathering morphed into an orgy of hatred for the Jewish state, even for Jewish people, has been chilling.
Calls for the destruction of the Jewish homeland now ring out on this campus where only weeks ago I heard cerebral chatter.
“We don’t want no two states/We want all of it,” protesters chant. That is, they want all of Israel – every last kibbutz, every last synagogue, every last inch – so that they might hand it to Hamas.
“We don’t want no two states/We want ’48,” comes the follow-up cry. They mean 1948, a time before the modern state of Israel existed. They want a world without Israel. This isn’t a cry for peace in the Middle East – it’s a cry for the erasure of the world’s only Jewish nation.
Their thirst for war that hides behind a mask of pacifism becomes clearer every day. “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” some campers have chanted. Love for Hamas is in the air. “Go Hamas, we love you!” echoes across the quad.
That activists at one of the most prestigious universities in Christendom are cheering the movement that raped and butchered more than 1000 Jews just six months ago should send a chill down every spine.
Unsurprisingly, such feverish loathing for the Jewish state can turn with frightening ease into open contempt for Jewish people. Jewish students have been harassed. “Go back to Poland,” protesters yelled.
One white activist in a keffiyeh – that’s cultural appropriation, no? – held up a placard with an arrow pointing at a group of Jewish students and describing them as Hamas’s “next targets”.
In short: kill these Jews. Learning has given way to genocidal dreaming. Study is superseded by violent fantasy.
In the middle of the encampment, attached to one of the tents, there’s a placard describing Israel as “the scum of nations”, the “pigs of the earth”.
Pigs of the earth? Don’t you dare call this anti-Zionism – it’s straight-up anti-Semitism. As President Joe Biden said, rightly for once, there is “blatant anti-Semitism” swirling around Columbia and other campuses. Right before our eyes, Columbia, citadel of enlightenment, has been swallowed up by medieval hysteria.
This university of the New World is now awash with the world’s oldest hatred.
It’s the crisis of Western civilisation distilled: trust-fund genderfluid pink-haired kids singing the praises of a movement that wouldn’t think twice about throwing them from a top-floor window. Media apologists for Columbia’s strange, seething camp insist that the worst chanting, the really racist stuff, is coming from outsiders, not the students themselves.
Please. That this camp so swiftly became a magnet for Jew-haters is a testament to its own rancid nature. The moral fall of Columbia captures what is at stake in the post- October 7 world.
It’s not just the continued existence of Israel, as essential to humanity as that is. It’s the future of Western civilisation itself.
Hamas’s fascistic pogrom dragged into the open the moral corrosion of our own societies.
It confirmed that among the young, in particular, sympathy for barbarism is terrifyingly commonplace. Confronted by a clash between a democratic Jewish nation and an army of extremists that had freshly carried out the worst single act of anti-Jewish slaughter since the Holocaust, far too many of our youths sided with the latter.
Students at George Washington University projected the slogan “Glory to our martyrs” on to the campus library wall after October 7. They meant glory to Hamas. Glory to these rapists and killers of Jews.
In London, young people on “pro-Palestine” marches have worn green, Hamas-style bandanas. Three young women were convicted of supporting terrorism after attending a march wearing images of paragliders. That was a clear nod to the Hamas pogromists who paraglided into Israel to visit their cosmic bigotry on the Jews there.
Polls capture just how widespread Hamas fandom has become.
In December, a Harvard-Harris poll found that 50 per cent of Americans aged 18 to 24 supported Hamas over Israel. A poll in Britain found that 24 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds thought Hamas were “freedom fighters”. It horrifies me that a quarter of youngsters in my country think the racist butchers of October 7 are fighting for liberty.
The moral disarray of the young has been a long time coming. Even Columbia’s turn from learning to lunacy, swift as it might seem to me, has been brewing for years.
These are the wages of wokeness. Having educated the young to hate their own societies, to view Western civilisation as virtually a crime against humanity, we cannot now be surprised that they’re finding comfort in the arms of civilisation’s enemies.
Universities in particular have become cradles of anti-civilisation. Fashionable new theories depict Western society as a cesspit of colonialism, racism and empire.
We end up with a new generation so addled by anti-Western thought that they come to see savagery as praiseworthy if its target is “the West” – in this case, Israel, the West’s key ally in the Middle East.
We are losing our young to the drumbeat of barbarism. Rediscovering pride in our own civilisation and its great gains and wonders is surely the most pressing task of our times. We should not rest until Gen Z hates Hamas as much as the rest of us do.
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