Gaza vs. Ukraine: Selective Outrage at America’s Colleges

It has been more than two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. If the latest predictions are correct, Russia may emerge victorious from this war in the coming months. They will probably do so by toppling the Ukrainian government and turning Ukraine into something similar to Belarus: a Russian protectorate.

It has also been about six months since Israel launched its invasion of Gaza. Their overall intention is to eradicate Hamas and secure a new government that is not hell-bent on destroying Israel. So far, they have not accomplished that goal, but the overall impression from a variety of news sources indicates that their victory is only a matter of time.

These two conflicts are, of course, very different: Russia bears the full moral burden for the destruction it has inflicted upon Ukraine with its invasion. We can raise all kinds of valid points about Western diplomatic clumsiness provoking the invasion; it does not change the fact that Russia decided to go to war, and Russia alone is responsible for all the deaths that have followed. By contrast, in Gaza, the invading party has the moral high ground. There was peace in Israel and—let us not forget—in Gaza on October 6th. The massive Palestinian terror attack the following day gave Israel full moral authority to invade Gaza and do whatever it takes to end the terror threat.

However, despite the differences in the moral balance, there is one common denominator that should interest students and scholars alike at our colleges and universities. In each case, we have two jurisdictions that have ended up in a complicated conflict:

• Russia claimed that Ukraine’s growing ties to the West created an existential threat to the Motherland, while Ukraine stated that it was only using its independence as a nation to build whatever international ties it saw fit;
• In Gaza, Hamas operates under a charter that demands the destruction of the state of Israel, which for obvious reasons precludes peaceful coexistence between them and the Jewish state.

You would think that the moral, political, historic, military, and economic repercussions of these two conflicts would inspire deep, dynamic, and productive discussions, analyses, debates, and seminars at America’s colleges. After all, most of them were founded—and have until recently operated—as institutions of scholarly and academic excellence. 

But no such intellectual curiosity is to be found. What we have seen instead is a wave of rage-driven primitivism and reptile-brain ‘ethical’ rhetoric. College campuses have become the scene of a weird ‘occupy’ movement where students are sleeping outdoors in ‘solidarity.’ Notably, their ‘solidarity’ is not with the Ukrainian people—it is with the Palestinians in Gaza. 

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, America’s otherwise lively college campuses showed no sign of moral outrage. There were no protest marches, no virulent group-think activities where people shouted anti-Russian slogans. Life in classrooms, dorms, and faculty lounges went on as normal.

For clarity, I am not calling for unproductive pro-Ukrainian rallies. I am not condoning disruptive activity, for good causes any more than bad ones, especially when it is disconnected from the academic activities that should be the definition of a college. The point, instead, is that there is no academic leadership, no scholarly curiosity involved in the current protests. There is only outrage, violent chants, reprehensible slogans, and a movement without any direction. 

Add this stone-age approach to protesting to the fact that the protesters have chosen to selectively stand up for Gaza, not Ukraine, and we have in front of us a deep irony. College students around the country have abandoned their classes and engaged in protests that contribute nothing toward their academic education. They are doing this right in the heart of our nation’s best academic institutions, where scholarly excellence should be omnipresent. Yet they have not tapped into that excellence.

One of the most amusing examples of this showed up in a now-famous video on social media. In it, two students from Columbia University, an elite-of-the-elite Ivy League school, explain why they were participating in an anti-Israel protest at nearby New York University:

This ignorance is widespread among the ‘protesting’ students (or should we call them protesting ‘students’?), which illustrates the very point that this is an anti-academic phenomenon. 

Put simply: in institutions of academic learning, where scholarly thought leaders should stand ready to guide, encourage, lead, and elevate students to new heights of knowledge and new paths of intellectual curiosity, there is no intelligent leadership to be found. Instead of sitting the students down in classrooms and debating the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza conflicts based on respect, reason, methodological scholarship, and dispassionate rhetoric, America’s college faculty is missing in action.

Unless, of course, they are themselves out there ‘protesting.’

By providing zero guidance and leadership, the people who get paid to educate at the highest levels have plummeted their own students into the lowest dungeons of human instinct: the catacombs where erstwhile hatred reigns and the light of analytical exercise is nowhere to be found. 

To see what is going on down in those ugly caverns, consider this article from CBN Israel:

[The] rallying cry on many prominent university campuses glorifies Hamas, the new Nazis. Their hostile shouts, such as “We are Hamas!” reverberate on campuses across the United States with help and funding from their unashamed anti-Israel and antisemitic backers. 

The CBN Israel minces no words, comparing this wave of Jew-hatred to the Nazi era. Hitler, the report explains, gave his propaganda minister Joseph Göbbels the mission to spread their ideology to America:

Examples of pre-World War II anti-Semitism on elite campuses such as Columbia and Harvard are easy to find. Administrators welcomed Nazi leaders to campus, enrolled Nazi-trained German exchange students, and promoted the idea of American students studying in Germany under Nazi oversight. Some returned to the United States mesmerized into supporting Hitler’s “New Germany.”

As a sordid parallel to today, CBN reminds us that in 2007, Columbia University invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fervent Holocaust denier who at the time was president of Iran. Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak under respectful circumstances and with no protests or critical questions allowed. Even more recently, Ivy League university presidents Claudine Gay at Harvard and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania ended up resigning after having put on full display their lack of interest in reining in recent antisemitic activities on their campuses. 

Gay formally quit her job after having been accused of plagiarism, but that was just a sideshow so the faculty at Harvard could stomach the resignation of a black woman.

The pervasive lack of leadership at our colleges has created a herd in search of a leader. Seeing the shape of this herd, John Nolte at Breitbart suggests that the current unrest is a breeding ground for a new Hitler Youth. I would not go that far—the forces that are behind the campus riots and protests have not yet influenced America’s political leadership, and they are very unlikely to ever get that far. 

Not even our less-than-astute current president has capitulated to the antisemites. Despite his maddening flip-flops on the Gaza conflict, Joe Biden remains committed to the ties between America and the Jewish state. So is an overwhelming majority of Congress. 

With that said, Nolte’s point is not without merit. The abdication of the college faculty from the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza has allowed virulent, openly anti-intellectual forces to hijack the protests (and probably organize many of them in the first place). Students have joined the protests in large numbers not because they support Hamas—many of them probably cannot even spell the terror group’s name—but because they have learned, in class, that you don’t have to exercise reason, analysis, and discernment in order to engage in social and political issues. 

All you need to do is feel, and what you feel counts as ‘your personal truth.’ Having invented that truth, you deserve a participation trophy. Or, after four years, a college degree.

The reason why our college faculty are absent is, plain and simple, that they, too, are devalued intellectually. After at least two generations of hiring faculty based more on political opinion than academic prowess, the men and women who are supposed to educate our college students are generally far less intellectually astute than their predecessors were only half a century ago. 

I cannot speak for the natural sciences, but in social sciences and especially the humanities, you do not make an academic career today by pushing scholarly boundaries. You are tenured and otherwise promoted based on the loyalty you show to the prevailing political paradigm in the faculty lounge. Your career also depends on how you perpetuate and exacerbate the ideological bias exercised in the classrooms.

As senior faculty, who hold the future of junior faculty in their hands, are increasingly of lower scholarly quality, they will of course not hire or promote younger colleagues who have strong research ambitions. The less academically astute they are, the more politics will determine the entry and upward mobility of new faculty members.

Part of the problem here is that what qualifies as an academic education has changed not just within established disciplines, but by the addition of new ‘disciplines’ for the study of various ‘studies.’ These ‘studies,’ which sarcastically could be bundled together under the banner of ‘grievance studies,’ have opened the doors for faculty who never have to establish a scholarly foundation in the traditional disciplines. This has led to more shallow thought being dispensed in classrooms, lower analytical standards at exams, and to students finding easier, intellectually less challenging ways to get through college.

Faculty no longer have to be thought leaders. They no longer have to hold themselves and their colleagues to certain standards. When complex events enter their workspace—anti-war protests on campus—they lack the methodological skills to lead those protests in a peaceful, productive, and academically illuminating direction.

Students, on the other hand, are left roaming the universities, thinking they are at the forefront of what it means to be in academia. Emotional rhetoric replaces rational thought; hatred usurps the moral dimension of their mindless activities. 

The silver lining in the current campus protests is that the students protesting are, for the most part, so ill-educated that they will have a hard time climbing the ladders of influence in American society. Let us not forget who controls our political system: the corporations and their mega-wealthy owners. To become one of the few at the top of that sphere, you have to be an expert in something of relevance to the corporate world. You also have to be driven, to be ready to work 12-15 hours per day, seven days a week—and forget about participating in the pronoun crusade. 

Our future corporate leaders, and therefore our future political leaders, are cut from tougher cloth than the campus protesters are. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the people who run our academic institutions. For this very reason, many of today’s protesters will be tomorrow’s tenured college faculty.

In other words, if there is one worry to be derived from the current wave of campus unrest, it would be that our universities and colleges will continue to decline—academically, politically, and morally. Once these protests are over, the big debate to be had is how we as a country can—and why we should—save our universities.