The “Death to America” Party

Victor Davis Hanson, the voice of reason:

The Pro-Hamas Crowds will Soon Have a Rendezvous with Reality

For over six months, the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests have accelerated, and now are predictably incendiary and violent.

Recently, they have jumped the shark with unapologetic chants of “Death to America”. Or so a cheering crowd in Michigan chanted in homage to the late king of all Western-hostage-takers, the murderous Ayatollah Khomeini. And the huckster speaker revved them up by quoting Malcolm X that America is “one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this Earth.” (Does such a condemnation of fellow Americans presage mass reverse migration of unhappy Middle Easterners back to the West Bank, Gaza, and Iran?)

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The more these demonstrators shut down major bridges at commute hour, defaced iconic government monuments and cemeteries, disrupted Easter and Christmas services (try that with mosques at Ramadan), broke into the Capitol and congressional chambers (no January 6-like penalties to come?), and hunted down Jewish students, the bolder they became.

Apparently, the demonstrators were convinced that they were either exempt under the woke aegis, or too precious in Joe Biden’s Michigan electoral calculus, or too useful to campuses as rich full-tuition-paying foreign students on gold-plated student visas.

But everything and everyone have limits. They have now crossed them, and are about to face an accounting, and for a variety of reasons.

1) News is leaking out that Hamas may have for some time been bluffing about a ceasefire for hostages. Given Hamas has suddenly announced that they cannot meet the conditions of the proposed ceasefire, since not all the forty women and sick and elderly men taken hostage are still alive.

If true, then their months of bartering and “negotiating” were a likely sham, and their earlier claims that three hostages were collateral damage of Israeli strikes become more dubious.

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Why would they kill their escape route?

To hide their torturing and raping of the kidnapped? In furor at their own-self-inflicted dilemmas? Sick hatred of Jews?

Who knows? But, if true, this may remind the gullible West that it cannot trust anything the lying Hamas says: that the ultimate fate of the hostages did not depend on the Israeli entrance into Gaza, given that Hamas had either already killed many of the remaining kidnapped, or had planned to do so under any circumstances.

2) For the first time since the ‘60s, universities are facing protests that they genuinely fear. College presidents are starting to realize that if they continue to allow the pro-Hamas violent demonstrators to make a mockery of campus rules and laws, they soon will have no campus at all. And the mob then will determine who can and cannot speak with impunity. Administrators’ tolerance of overt anti-Semitism and violence against Jews is turning American campuses into something like late-1930s German universities.

3) Yet at Vanderbilt and Pomona we for the first time are witnessing a return to administrative sanity, marked by suspensions and exemptions. And the reactions of those held accountable confirm how pathetic these bullies are. They prove eager to resort to violence and crash into lecture halls, only suddenly to become fragile and terrified for their beautiful career plans endangered by a modicum of accountability. Expect more universities to be encouraged by just how well deterrence can work against woke thuggery.

4) Joe Biden’s pandering in Michigan is reaching the point of obscenity and if continued will be counter-productive. For each Muslim-American voter he thinks he can keep by abandoning Israel and protecting the agendas of the October 7 killers and kidnappers, he is going to lose two voters appalled that fellow-Americans in Michigan are now calling for death to America.

Biden is so confident of the Jewish-American vote and donor class that he is now siding with those calling for the absolute destruction of the Jewish state and everyone inside. Is he convinced that his Jewish base is permanently in tune with Chuck Schumer—or will it finally have had enough?

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5) The old myth that being anti-Israel had nothing to do with being anti-Semitic is now exposed for the lie it mostly always was. The pro-Hamas crowd makes no distinction, and certainly not on campus, where the more educated the protestor, the more likely he is to harass Jews first, and ask questions later if at all about whether his targets support Israel.

The new myth that being pro-Gaza has nothing to do with being pro-Hamas is equally exposed as a lie by the chants of “from the River to the Sea” and calls for a return to the pre-1947 borders—in other words, the Hamas charter of destroying Israel.

6) Do these protestors who scream “Genocide Joe” really see an alternative in November? Because the more they show America who they are and what their values and agenda intend, the more they make it clear why we need to reexamine every aspect of immigration, junk DEI and substitute required civic education, and undertake a complete reappraisal of higher education. The latter would revisit current tax-exempt endowment income, government subsidized student loans, massive unaudited federal grants, the huge number of foreign students, and their exemption from federal oversight.

It is long past time to overhaul of the student visa programs, replete with rapid cancellations of visas and deportations for those who come to study but end up breaking our laws.

In sum, the more brazen the pro-Hamas crowd and the more they reveal the cravenness of the Biden administration, the more they may ensure their rendezvous with Donald Trump in 2025.