You could see woke ideology crumbling during Kamala Harris' NAU visit
Americans are waking up to the grift that is the modern social-justice movement.
The pillars of wokeness were already crumbling when a Middle East war broke out and left our social-justice warriors with their pants down and their antisemitism fully exposed.
East coast college professors exulted at the slaughter of some 1,400 mostly Israeli Jews.
Cornell’s Russell Rickford told students he was “energized” and “exhilarated” by the attack on Israel.
Columbia’s Joseph Massad called the greatest bloodletting against the Jewish people since the Holocaust “astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome” and “incredible.”
Across America, thousands of students marched at the urging of the National Students for Justice in Palestine, who had festooned their “Call to Action” posters with the silhouette of a paraglider.
The paragliders, as we all know by now, were the Hamas choir boys who descended from the sky to gun down or burn alive some 260 Israeli young adults at an open-air music festival.
NAU crowd reveals its allegiances
Then there was the student crowd at Northern Arizona University that attended the get-out-the-vote rally of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris.
It’s always hard to work up enthusiasm for a vice presidential visit. That’s not Kamala Harris’ fault; that’s just American apathy for second fiddles.
But the visit did arouse some cheers, and one of the loudest came when a student activist got the microphone and said:
“This administration has continued to deport children and their families while simultaneously building the wall. Children continue to die at the wall because of this country’s inhumane policies, much like the policies, crimes that have been committed and funded against those in Palestine.”
The young activist raised his fist, and the students in the auditorium were ecstatic.
Not one word from this activist and his cheer section about the Jews in Israel, who are still awakening to the horrors Hamas inflicted on their civilians — horrors that were premeditated and violate any code of war or standards of morality.
No the sympathy for the Jewish dead?
These were crimes against humanity, historic in their scale.
So, did the NAU faithful focus their anger on the people who committed them?
No.
They cheered as their squeaky wheel raged at the Israelis and the U.S. administration.
You can accuse the Biden White House of mismanaging the border. They have done that. But you can’t accuse them of killing migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico line.
The Biden White House is running one of the most generous immigration policies in the developed world. The U.S.-Mexico border has been a gusher of new arrivals to a nation that is the most immigrant friendly on the planet.
There’s a reason all of those migrants from Central and South America don’t stop in Mexico and keep moving north. Because the United States and this current administration are going to treat them more humanely.
Why do you think the immigration left railed against Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy? Because the migrants waiting in Mexico were badly abused and neglected there.
VP Harris sets the student straight
Our NAU activist, who describes himself as a “proud Chicano,” would do well to educate himself about the bigger picture rather than scold a vice president who is a person of color and knows something about borders.
To her credit, Harris schooled the young upstart, letting him know that as the daughter of an immigrant mother, she would take no lectures from him.
She reminded him that the Biden administration in its first days tried to create a pathway to citizenship for America’s undocumented, only to have Republicans block it.
As to the Middle East, Harris said, “I believe Israelis and Palestinians both deserve peace” — a both-sides construction that elicited a loud cheer.
But when she explained to the crowd that Israelis had suffered a terrible attack at the hand of terrorists, one student — perhaps the only Jewish person in the crowd — tried to start a cheer and was met with dead silence.
This was obviously a pro-Palestinian crowd.
American Jews have awakened
As American Jews see what is happening at America’s elite universities, Harvard, Columbia, UPenn and Cornell, they have awakened to the fact that our college campuses are breeding grounds for antisemitism and a one-sided and ignorant view of the Middle East.
Jewish business executives and their allies are quitting university boards, closing their checkbooks and urging young people to go to schools that don’t hate them.
Where did this hatred come from, they ask? Who spawned what American journalist Yasha Mounk, a German immigrant and Jew, calls “the little monsters” at Harvard?
Marc Rowan, CEO of private equity giant Apollo Global Management, has an answer. He is leading a big-donor revolt against the University of Pennsylvania and the antisemitism festering on its campus.
Writing in The Free Press, he described the root problem:
“The pursuit of truth — the ostensible mission of our elite institutions — was traded for a poorly organized pursuit of social justice and political correctness. (College administrators, trustees and alumni) sitting on the sidelines (have) undermined trust in academia, hindered the production and acquisition of knowledge, and, most troubling of all, allowed for calls of violence and slaughter against a minority group across campuses. We can accept that no longer.
“While the moral and human cost for what we have done to a generation of students cannot be calculated, the picture is ugly. The financial cost of these policies is large and increasing. Much of this loss is kept silent as acknowledging it endangers the status quo and would encourage questions in the direction of the university from trustees, alumni, and students.”
Woke agenda was already in freefall
As I wrote above, the pillars of modern social justice were crumbling before the Hamas attack on Israel.
The high priest of woke ideology, Ibram X. Kendi, was caught piddling away tens of millions of dollars in corporate donations, forcing him to lay off half his staff. He’s now being investigated by his own administration at Boston University.
Before that, Black Lives Matter leaders were caught lavishing themselves with new homes with donations diverted from the cause. They have since seen their popularity plummet from a high of 67% to 51% and diving.
Now, after the slaughter of Israeli Jews, a number of Black Lives Matter offshoots are unabashedly voicing their antisemitism with images of paragliders and indifference to Jewish suffering.
Black Lives Matter at School — which is touted by the National Education Association, the national teachers union — has this to say about the Hamas massacre in Israel:
”BLM@School wants to be clear in our recognition that this unfolding loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives is the direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid, and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians. ...
“The ongoing fight to #TeachTruth in the U.S. must include Palestinian existence, resistance, culture, global contributions, and the ongoing struggle to realize a free Palestine. It also must directly name the ways that U.S. imperialism has fueled and supported apartheid and war crimes.”
What about those slaughtered — the Jews?
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the spiritual muse of the modern reparations movement, beclowned himself this week as the lead signatory on a letter that reads like “Hamas propaganda,” as National Review’s Noah Rothman called it.
“On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza,” the letter reads. “More than 1,300 Israelis were subsequently killed.”
“This is depraved,” responded The Free Press founder Bari Weiss.
Woke abandons humanity: After Hamas slaughters Israelis
Particularly vile is the letter’s passive voice. Somebody murdered those Israelis. Who was it? And where is your empathy for those victims?
As for Gaza being a prison, the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005. With all that beach front, some Palestinians dreamed of turning it into the Hong Kong of the Mediterranean.
But two years later, the Palestinians voted into leadership the terrorist organization Hamas.
Remember the real monsters. It's Hamas
On Oct. 7, Hamas launched an attack on Israel. Their body count of dead Jews has now reached roughly 1,400. But that bloodshed was only an objective, not a final goal.
The point of all this was to provoke such outrage in the Jewish State that the Israeli government would overreact and kill Palestinian men, women and children, turning world opinion against Israel and further eroding its legitimacy.
Let me help the students at NAU.
What do you call those who would kill their own men, women and children for political gain?
That’s right. “Monsters.”
Class dismissed.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kamala Harris witnessed woke ideology crumble during her NAU visit
