Opinion: Commencement Protests Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

The 2023-2024 school year is closing on a sour note. No one should be surprised.

Numerous colleges are cancelling their commencement exercises. Where they don’t cancel them; numerous graduating students are choosing not to attend, out of safety fears.

And on Sunday, May 12, comedian Jerry Seinfeld – as inoffensive a speaker as one can imagine in a politically-charged time – stood up to give an address at Duke University’s commencement ceremony, and hundreds of attendees booed him, with dozens walking out of the event in protest. (Just how many of these were graduating students, faculty and administrators versus how many were planted activists is unknown.)

These kinds of leftist disruptions have been going on for half a century, since the hippies started their sit-ins and campus protests in the 1960s.

The American academe was taken over by the anti-academic Left, decades ago. Outside of a few conservative institutions that we could count on the fingers of one hand, the students, faculty, and administrators are overwhelmingly partisan Democrats. Their commencement speakers reflect the committees that select them, so what on earth is there to object to?

Only one thing remained available for these intersectionality-addicted hordes to agree on: Judaism.

Duke’s guest speaker, Jerry Seinfeld, is just as committed a Democrat as the rest of them, but anti-semitism is the one bigotry that is always allowed among Marxists, whether in a Middle Eastern theocracy, a German dictatorship, or the modern United States.

If Duke’s commencement embarrassment were a one-off event, it wouldn’t merit national coverage. But this was far from a one-off.

Throughout the 2023-2024 school year, we have seen tent cities erupt overnight on dozens of high-visibility locations like Northwestern University’s “Deering Meadow,” the University of Pennsylvania’s “College Green,” and New York University’s “Gould Plaza.” As the school year approached its end, many of the radicals grew more violent, requiring local police to use SWAT teams and other riot control units to finally clear these illegal demonstrations.

This didn’t happen overnight.

When Hamas conducted its unprecedented attacks on the most innocent and vulnerable of targets on October 7, 2023, it was inconceivable to most onlookers in the West that anyone would ever take Hamas’ side; public support of Israel’s need to conduct a police action in response was nearly universal. At first.

But the Left has spent years poisoning young minds – in preparation for exactly such a moment.

The Left’s teachers are instructed to refer to Israel’s government as the pejorative “Colonizers.” They refer to Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza – key regions of Biblical Israel – as “The Occupied Territories.”

And the ubiquitous insult – “white privilege” – somehow goes double for Jews in academia, even though Jews have received the brunt of more universal bigotry, and for far longer, than any other group, for thousands of years.

The Left has spent over a decade using this engineered bigotry to support a campus campaign for illegal demands for their universities to join the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” movement (commonly abbreviated as BDS), which would join the Arab League’s boycott of Israel – a move that has been illegal in the United States for over 45 years, frequently enforced against private businesses but, inexplicably, never against colleges.

Well below the radar, Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and other thought-directors of the islamic-convert subculture have spent generations spreading all sorts of outrageous claims – from general denial of the Holocaust to the ideas that Jews invented AIDS to kill blacks, that Jewish bankers are behind the impoverishment of black inner cities, and so forth. While every historian knows that African muslims were largely the sellers in the 18th and 19th century slave trade, the Nation of Islam and related groups have insisted that Jews were behind it.

Students of history would recognize such bald-faced lies in a second, but how much real history have today’s children ever been exposed to?

Also largely unreported has been the shocking rise of Middle Eastern funding in a large number of American colleges today. Various recent studies demonstrate that Qatar alone has distributed over five billion dollars among Ivy League and other major universities in recent years, ranging from the funding of islamic studies departments to student and professor exchange programs, from campus building programs to joint research projects (likely often skirting the U.S. Export Control laws in the process). In what context – from what point of view – is the Israeli-Hamas conflict taught to students caught up in these propaganda factories?

George Soros has been supplementing the income of college students and administrators for years, with a combination of formal grants funding student organizations, and Craigslist-posted part time jobs as rent-a-protesters, providing everything from busfare to box lunches, from North Face tents to a daily stipend. Many probably don’t even pay attention to the issue of the day anymore. Whether it’s a protest against carbon dioxide or nuclear power, a rally against Wall Street or the government of Israel, these distinctions are uninteresting to many of these demonstrators.

One day they hold some Central America flag to welcome illegal aliens, another day they wave the rainbow flag to support alphabet sexuality. So this month they are holding the fictional “palestinian” flag; they’re just happy to have found this purpose in life and a steady paycheck that requires neither work nor study. In fact, at some of these colleges, they add to their demands a call for the elimination of homework or final exams, along with dismantling the sovereign state of Israel.

In this environment, is it any wonder that Jewish students and instructors fear for their lives when going to class? These haven’t all been peaceful demonstrations, after all – the pro-Hamas crowd chants versions of the same thing that Hamas chants in Israel – “from the River to the Sea, palestine shall be free” (a not-too-subtle call for genocide against the Jewish, Christian, and even Arab citizens of Israel proper, to empty the land of Israel to facilitate a new palestinian state).

The pro-Hamas demonstrators have been covering campuses in graffiti – a range of destruction and spray paint that calls to mind the Germany of the 1930s, a time we all imagined, however hopefully, was relegated to the history books, generations ago.

Democrats want to believe that all this is an exception – that the fact that all these different elements of the Left wing are unifying in a focused attack on the very existence of Jews is – and must be – a peculiar anomaly.

They are mistaken.

All these things don’t happen by mistake or by coincidence. There is a reason that Soviets persecuted Jews, and Nazis persecuted Jews, and American Ku Klux Klan persecuted Jews.

Anti-semitism is part of the Leftist experience. There is no other explanation.

Today’s Democrats – some of whom are themselves Jewish – have tried for their entire lifetimes to deny this fact. They shut their eyes to history; they purposefully forget the origins of the Klan, and the truth of what “Nazi” is an acronym for. They refuse to admit any of it to you and me, sure, but more important is that they refuse to admit it to themselves.

But these seven months since the October 7 attacks must settle this question, once and for all.

October 7 wasn’t just a particularly rough day for rocket fire. For the world’s Jewish population, October 7 was a worse attack than any other since the Holocaust itself. The hundreds of Hamas terrorists who attacked innocent kibbutzes and concertgoers committed the most horrific crimes, from slaughtering babies and elderly farmers, to forcing families to watch and listen as their children or parents were raped and tortured, before burning or stabbing or shooting them all to death.

Nobody with an ounce of humanity could continue to support Hamas after that.

But many Leftists still do.

And that’s all you have to know about the modern Left, which now controls the Democratic Party – lock, stock, and barrel.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo