Why Gaza and not the Uighurs?

The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.”

Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces.

But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity. “Pardon me,” they say, “my virtue is showing.”

The Babylon Bee also picked up another interesting point the legacy media missed. The keffiyehs worn on campus today come from China, like so much clothing. Ah, globalization. Palestinians used to produce the scarves themselves but cheaper Chinese production squeezed them out of the market. The protesters’ attire is a hidden mark of the international trade they loath.

Another symbol of that global commerce is the vast number of international students involved in the protests and often leading them. Have you seen objections to that aspect of globalization? No. But then no one ever accused the mob of intellectual coherence.

What is it about Gaza that excites such large, ferocious and often violent demonstrations? Why are there no massive demonstrations about other human-rights atrocities around the world? Why is the campus silent about Hong Kong and the prisons in Siberia? Why such intense focus on Israel, which often bleeds into open antisemitism?

A few reasons top the list. The first is the nature of the hard-left coalition on campus. It centers on two groups, both of which position themselves as righteous victims. The number one domestic victims are African Americans. The number one international victims are Palestinians, plus Muslims more generally. Other victims run the gamut, Native Americans, queers, transgenders and others. White students and increasingly Asian Americans are labeled as the oppressors or victimizers. Their only chance at salvation from their “sin” is to make common cause with the putatively oppressed and follow their lead. Hispanics are rarely part of this coalition, even though their professors are.

The word “sin” is important here. The ideology has the intensity of a religion and the hatred of apostates.

The coalition would crumble if it emphasized positive issues, such as “gay rights in Gaza.” So they focus on common hatreds. Those are what hold the coalition together.

Second, these hatreds have been stoked by the left’s “Long March through the Institutions,” which began with 1960s radicals who became professors and has now permeated K-12 education, both because of the teachers’ ideology and the unions’ political position. The Long March has been extraordinarily successful in achieving its ideological goals.

Israel is a prominent target of that ideology. Why? Because, for the left in the US, Canada and Europe, the Jewish state represents so much they hate, wrapped into a single package: capitalism, nationalism, Western religion and economic prosperity success thanks to hard work, intensive education and merit. Since the state’s formation in the 1948, Israelis have resolutely avoided the self-conception of “victimhood,” on which all campus politics is built.

Had Israel chosen to depict itself as the “wretched of the earth,” it had every right to cloak itself in victimhood. The Holocaust, a true genocide, killed more than 6 million and destroyed European Jewry. Arab states have repeatedly launched wars of annihilation against Israel and expelled virtually all Jews from their territories, where Jews had lived for centuries. The ideological left and their Muslim allies demean those refugees as part of a “settler colonial” influx.

The smear of “settler colonialism” is a staple of every Middle East studies program and has spread through fields such as anthropology, English literature and other humanities. The faculty there were hired by true liberals, several decades ago. Their commitment to diverse viewpoints was not reciprocated by the anti-Israel scholars who came to dominate those departments. Applicants for faculty positions or graduate study would destroy their chances by letting slip that they were Zionists.

American Jews don’t think of themselves as victims, either, even though they suffered discrimination for years. Instead, they have distanced themselves from the path of collective grievance and worked their way up by individual merit. Their success in college admissions came from high SATs and high-school GPAs, after elite universities dropped their anti-Jewish quotas in the mid-1960s. Their very success has made them targets of leftist ideology, which depreciates the concept of “merit” and smears hard-earned success as unearned “privilege,” for which they should feel guilty. Who have they actually oppressed? No one.

Third, the ongoing war in Gaza is visible on cable networks and TikTok, presenting an obvious target for demonstrators. Human-rights violations in most of the word are hidden from view. Seen any Chinese prisons for Uighurs lately? The war in Gaza, on the other hand, receives a lot of media coverage, including disturbing pictures of destroyed homes and larger buildings. It is easy to visualize the people, many of them innocents, who died in that devastation. Though civilian deaths were not Israel’s goal and Israeli Defense Forces have tried hard to avoid them, civilian casualties are inevitable in urban warfare.

Hamas deliberately added to the carnage by occupying civilian structures and using civilians as human shields. It has been a self-conscious strategy for two reasons. First, Hamas knows that civilian casualties add to the anger at Israel. Second, they know Israel may be reluctant to target Hamas structures and gatherings if civilians are present. So they use innocents are part of their strategy to fight the kinetic war on the ground and the cyber war in the media.

Fourth, Hamas has been far more successful than Israel in telling its story — a story that has resonated with students primed by leftist teachers. Since the reporters covering the war don’t have extensive local knowledge or sources, they rely heavily on “stringers” who are closely connected to Palestinian organizations, fear retaliation from Hamas if they don’t hew the terrorists’ line and actually spew casualty figures distributed by a Hamas propaganda organ, which has labeled itself the Health Authority. Did you hear this Health Authority object to terrorists using hospitals as hideouts and shooting galleries? No. Did they object to terror tunnels being dug under those facilities? Of course not. The main goal of the “health authority” is not the population’s wellbeing, it is Hamas’s victory.

The success of Hamas’s media strategy, its eager repetition by progressive media and the lengthening time since the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians have combined to reinforce students’ opposition to Israel.

Fifth, the strong alliance between Washington and Jerusalem gives local protesters a target much closer to home. The US sells weapons to Israel and works closely with its high-technology defense industry for mutual benefit. Since Israel has world-class universities, there are multiple exchange programs for students and faculty. Why don’t many students go to exchange programs in Jordan or Algeria? Name a world-class university there.

These connections between Israel and American universities, corporations, and the government give students a foothold to damn them all as responsible for the war in Gaza. Since hyperbole is the language of these demonstrations, they scream that President Biden is “Genocide Joe.” They say the same about college presidents and provosts. The police are, of course, “pigs.”

It’s the old cry of “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” This time the epithets are directed by a new generation at the world’s oldest target: the Jews.