If the Campus Left’s response to Israel’s Gaza offensive after the Islamic terrorists of Hamas butchered about 1,400 Israeli civilians — women, children, and senior citizens alike — is any indication, those who lauded “In Defense of Looting” have now graduated to be the proponents of full-blown violence.

In defence of looting

In the thick of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa rioting across the US and elsewhere in the aftermath of the death of George Flolyd in 2020, National Public Radio (NPR) featured an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of the book In Defense of Looting.

The book makes the case that looting isn’t a betrayal of protests for Black lives, but it is a vital aspect of the movement. The author says that the attempt to portray the rioters as separate from the “peaceful protestors” is a lie: “Another trope that’s very common is that looters are not part of the protest, and they’re not part of the movement… They have always been part of our movement.”

Three years later, the widespread condemnation of the Israeli response to unprovoked violence by Hamas and occasionally violent protests on US campuses have given us a first-hand glimpse into the facade of the progressive liberal ideology. Even the murder of 1,400 innocent civilian Jews in a matter of a few hours, according to Vamsee Juluri, “somehow did not add up to half a George Floyd”. Juluri is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, California.

The 7 October Pogrom of Israeli Jews

Hamas going door-to-door shooting innocent Jews, parading their dead bodies on the streets and pickup trucks as a war bounty was not enough of a moral reckoning for the Campus Left. Antisemitic incidents went up by about 400 per cent, a lot of it on elite US campuses, since Israel started its counter-offensive against Hamas. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish advocacy group, the incidents included “physical assault; violent online messages…; and rallies where “ADL found explicit or strong implicit support for Hamas and/or violence against Jews in Israel.”

Soon after the Jewish pogrom in Israel, several top US universities — students and faculty alike — blamed Israel for instigating the violence. Many of them also supported Hamas, a designated terrorist organization sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. A professor at Cornell University called the Hamas attacks “exhilarating” and “energising,” while a professor at Yale University called Israel “a murderous, genocidal settler state.”

Anti-Israel protests on US campuses

At Harvard University, thousands of students published a statement that held Israel entirely responsible for unfolding violence. The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee is an umbrella organisation of over 30 student groups. In their signed letter, they stated that Israel’s “apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for the violence.

At Stanford University, a faculty member called the Jewish students colonizers and downplayed the Holocaust. According to news reports, the teacher asked the Jewish students to raise their hands, separated those students from their belongings, and said they were simulating what Jews were doing to Palestinians.

At the University of California, Bertley, students were offered “extra credit to attend pro-Palestinian rallies on campus. The joint statement from the Palestine Solidarity Groups at Columbia University declared that the “Weight of responsibility of the war and casualties lies with the Israeli extremist government…”

At Yale University, the editors at Yale Daily News, America’s oldest college daily newspaper, slapped Sahar Tartak’s pro-Israel column with an update that read: “Editor’s note, correction, Oct. 25: ‘This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.’” Tarak is the Editor-in-Chief at the Yale Free Press. The Editor of the Harvard Law Review attacked a Jewish student on campus during an anti-Israel rally.

Left-wing capture of educational institutions

The Leftist/Marxist ideology thrives on the narrative of division and conflict. This narrative is presented as a conflict between the ‘exploiter’ and the ‘exploited.’ Marxism, in its ideological implementation, is also violent as it makes people believe that if certain people (exploiters) are eliminated, a glorious future awaits them. Sir Karl Popper, an Austrian-British scholar and philosopher, claims that Marxism is unscientific in its methodology as it cannot be tested and possibly be falsified mainly because it sees the replacement of Capitalism by Communism as “historically inevitable”. In that sense, Marxism is much like a “faith” than a social framework. 

The events of the past few weeks have given us the most unfettered glimpse of the rot in America’s once-storied elite educational institutions. These institutions, under siege from the Leftist-jihadi ideologues, have displayed an ugly and dangerous interplay of regressive identitarianism — race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. “The near-total control of the most prestigious universities and colleges by intolerant extremists of the Left,” writes Gerard Baker, Editor at Large of the Wall Street Journal, “is breeding not only generations of entitled little authoritarians but legions of apologists for violence against their own perceived enemies.”

Many in the diaspora would recognise the parallels between the Left’s takeover of the American institutions and those of India and their impending destruction. The Indian Leftists planted their foothold in elite Indian institutions through a power-sharing deal they made with prime minister Indira Gandhi.

After being expelled from the Congress party, Mrs Gandhi was 45 seats short of a majority in the Lok Sabha in 1969. She turned to the Communist Party of India (CPI) for support. The Indian communists were too eager to support, but not without their pound of flesh. Under this “support” plan, an openly Leftist historian and academic, Saiyid Nurul Hasan, was appointed Education Minister of India in 1971. Nurul Hasan’s policies would ensure a Leftist stranglehold over Indian institutions for years to come.

In the academy, liberals now outnumber conservatives by roughly 5 to 1 in the US. According to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, 42 per cent of professors identified as “liberal” or “far-left” in 1990. By 2014, that number was 60 per cent. As a result, US campuses have become incredibly homogeneous in ideology, where diversity is used as a euphemism for skin colour.

Beyond faculty, college bureaucracy also helps indoctrinate students. On US campuses, liberal administrators outnumber conservative ones 12-to-one. Despite coming from diverse educational backgrounds, these college administrators, as part of the Campus Left, are surprisingly monolithic in their ideology. They also set the terms of engagement and the rules for student discourse.

Settler colonialism

The Campus Left pedagogy, designed and implemented in coordination with the Leftist college bureaucrats, turns students and researchers into activists. A course in “decolonality” and “settler colonialism”, for example, teaches future teachers and administrators to deconstruct the society in which they live and then promote their views at work, in dining halls, dormitories, and throughout campus. Ania Loomba, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, led her class in a walkout “to show her disappointment in administrator’s lack of concern and compassion for the loss of lives in Gaza”.

Decolonality in the classroom “requires decentering dominant groups to make space for marginalized voices and experiences”. Settler colonialism, on the other hand, is “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population”.

Anticolonial movements, like many Left-communist movements, profess violence as a means to achieve their ideological goals. According to Franz Fannon (Wretched of the Earth, 1961), “The colonised man finds his freedom in and through violence.” This violence, for the anticolonialist, “itself is redemptive and therapeutic”

As a Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, alumnus, the author had a first-hand experience of the Leftist justification for violence on campus. However, the author confesses he was too naive to think this would not happen in the US. We saw a glimpse of this violence in Donald Trump’s (2016) election. It was solidified during Covid-19 censorship and authoritarianism on campuses.

And now, this may already be too late to “fix”.

(The article was published on FirstPost.com on November 07, 2023 and has been reproduced here)