This one is for the morons.
For the students busily cosplaying at being terrorists on our city’s campuses.
The automatons whose new radical-chic uniform is an Arab keffiyeh.
Specifically to the ones who have decided to chant for “Intifada” and unveil a vast banner down the side of Hamilton Hall at Columbia this week.
“Intifada,” the banner said, in huge letters as the mob below shrieked approval.
Most of these students weren’t born when the Palestinians last had an “Intifada.”
So although youth and ignorance aren’t any real excuse, perhaps I can educate these students about what they are actually calling for.
I invite them to “do the work” of understanding what it means when people call for “Intifada” and what it actually means.
In June 2001, the Intifada that Palestinian clerics and politicians had called for was in full flight.
Every day Israelis boarding buses had to look around in case one of the other passengers was wearing a suicide vest and about to turn the vehicle into a charnel house.
On June 1, young people in Tel Aviv were enjoying a beautiful summer evening.
Many of them were milling around a nightclub much like those that the students at Columbia go to on a weekend.
But this one was more beautifully located, sitting on the city’s beachfront.
The Dolphinarium club was packed that night.
Outside were crowds of young people hoping to get in.
The Hamas terrorist detonated the bomb amid the queue of young women who were hoping to get into the club.
He killed 21 young people.
Sixteen of the victims were teenagers. Not even college age yet.
The youngest of them was 14-year old Maria Tagilchev.
Many of the victims were children of parents who had emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union.
Their parents fled one totalitarian regime only to lose their children to terrorism in Tel Aviv.
Eyewitnesses described the limbs of the young women lying strewn across the road.
Some of the bodies were lying in piles.
This is what Intifada means.
But perhaps the students at Columbia don’t care about those 21 people who never grew up.
Perhaps they think, like Columbia protest leader Khymani James (pronouns he/she/they), that it doesn’t matter.
As he said recently, “Zionists don’t deserve to live. I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”
Well, perhaps the students at Columbia care about the lives of Americans?
In which case, they should know the names of Benjamin Blutstein, 25, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Marla Bennett, 24, from San Diego; and David Gritz, 24, from Massachusetts.
They were among the five American students killed, among nine in total, when Hamas attacked the cafeteria of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on July 31, 2002.
The students were enjoying a lunchtime break in the crowded cafeteria of the Frank Sinatra International Student Center when Hamas exploded its bomb.
In the minutes after, dying students and 85 who were seriously wounded staggered out of the cafeteria.
Many lost limbs, and even the living had burn marks on their bodies from which they will never recover.
This is Intifada.
But perhaps the students at Columbia and other campuses across America don’t care about these students either.
While they dress in their Palestinian terrorist gear, perhaps they just think, “Well, it doesn’t matter. After all, they’re Jews. What were they doing at a Hebrew University anyway? Whatever it takes. By any means necessary.”
To quote just a couple of the slogans you now hear on this nation’s campuses.
Well, I’ll throw out one other example.
Perhaps the students calling for Intifada should know the name of 20-year old George Khoury.
George was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an Arab.
The students at Columbia probably don’t know such a thing is possible.
After all, “Apartheid. Apartheid.”
Right?
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Well, George Khoury was a student.
He was also a member of a leading Arab family.
On March 19, 2004, he was out jogging in Jerusalem.
Members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade thought Khoury was a Jew.
And so they shot him.
Of course.
Specifically, they shot him in the stomach, the neck and the head. Just to make sure.
George´s distraught father called the murder “barbaric.”
“Terrorism” he said, “is blind.”
Indeed.
But “hate” is even blinder.
This week, one of the Columbia protesters made herself famous by demanding that the university let in what she called “humanitarian aid.”
It was interesting watching Johannah King-Slutzky do her performance art.
She is a PhD student at Columbia in English and “comparative literature.”
The world could probably do without the subject of her PhD.
According to a now-deleted Columbia webpage, her research is about “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.”
I doubt that even King-Slutzky actually knows what any of that means.
But she doesn’t have to worry.
King-Slutzky doesn’t really have to worry about anything.
She can occupy a university building, take part in a racist protest movement, call for “Intifada” and demand that the adults feed and water her while she does so.
Call for Intifada, then call for water.
That’s a nice gig right there.
The perfect intersection of entitlement and evil.
But what interests me about King-Slutzky is that she is 33.
Think about how derailed your life has to be to be trying to use Marxian lenses to provide “an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination” at such an age.
But what lies ahead of her?
Not much.
The thing is, she’s the lucky one. Unbelievably lucky.
Like all the other students calling for Intifada on American campuses, King-Slutzky has had the chance to grow up.
To some degree.
That wasn’t a right that Maria got.
Or Benjamin, Marla, David or George.
Or many others.
If the students at Columbia didn’t know what they’re calling for when they call for “Intifada,” perhaps they do now.
