The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘The Freedom Struggle’

Posted on | November 3, 2023 | Comments Off on ‘The Freedom Struggle’

Pro-Hamas protesters in New Orleans

Did you know that Jews are 44% of undergraduate students at Tulane University? Why does this notorious party school in New Orleans — Andrew Breitbart’s alma mater — have such a disproportionate number of Jewish students? My guess is that, because of anti-Jewish discrimination at Ivy League schools in the name of “diversity,” there are a lot of high-achieving Jewish students shopping around for non-Ivy schools with an academic program good enough to qualify graduates for law school, medical school, etc., and Tulane fits that description. Plus, it’s in New Orleans, a funky Spanish-moss-draped old city that has an “exotic” appeal to students from Connecticut or wherever. (For similar reasons, you get a lot of kids from up north attending Charleston College or Savannah College of Art and Design — Yankees just love that whole “quaint” Southern Gothic vibe with live oaks and Spanish moss.)

If you’re a Hamas supporter who wants to express hatred of Jews, what better place to do it than at Tulane University?

Anti-Israel protesters assaulted multiple people at Tulane University in New Orleans on Oct. 26, the most serious being after Jewish students at a rally responded to those aboard a truck who attempted to set an Israeli flag on fire. Several arrests were made. None of those arrested were students, and all have been banned from campus.
A rally organized by Tulane4Palestine, a group that was created a week earlier, was called for 12:30 p.m. at Freret and McAlister. Pro-Israel students took up a position across the street, holding Israeli flags and posters of Israelis who were abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7.
At the same time, Tulane Hillel was co-hosting an Antisemitism Awareness Week event with the university and the Anti-Defamation League, recommending a particular route to the building to avoid the demonstration. Hillel also encouraged students “not to engage in conflict.” . . .

Let me interrupt for a minute to call this to your attention: The pro-Palestinian group had been organized ad hoc, and they deliberately chose to stage their protest in the vicinity of the Hillel event for Antisemitism Awareness Week. Which is to say, this was a deliberate provocation. Now we return to the story:

Tulane President Michael Fitts, in a message to Tulane students on Oct. 26, said the rally “was intentionally staged on the public sidewalk… over which we do not have control.” The block in question connects two sections of the campus but is not technically part of Tulane.
Tulane4Palestine had distributed a map showing where to meet on the public side, cautioning to stay on the sidewalk and not enter the street or the campus territory on the other side of the street. . . .

(In other words, these Jew-hating thugs knew exactly how to avoid having their provocative rally shut down by university authorities.)

Dylan Mann, a Jewish freshman studying homeland security at Tulane, told JNS that he saw Jewish students waving Israeli flags and handing out fliers about kidnapped hostages. Across the street, others were rallying against Israel and its actions in the Gaza Strip after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. Soon, the two groups were responding to one another.
The protesters “were screaming hateful things like ‘From the river to the sea’ and calling us ‘genocide supporters’,” Mann told JNS. “I knew at that point, I wasn’t going to leave. I was gonna stay.”
The pro-Israel activists began calling those across the street “terrorists,” and “it got very hateful very quickly,” he said.
A red pickup truck with two people in the back passed the rallies a few times, then stopped. While one person in the back of the truck waved a Palestinian flag, another began to burn an Israeli flag, and a pro-Israel student ran to the truck to grab it. The person waving the Palestinian flag started hitting the pro-Israel student with a flag pole, and Mann intervened to try to protect the student. The person who had tried to burn the Israeli flag gave a double-barreled middle finger to the pro-Israel crowd.
“The driver starts punching me, and there were a couple of people who joined them,” Mann told JNS. “That’s where someone blindsides me with the megaphone and hits me in the face. And they instantly broke my nose with that.”

You can read the whole thing, but you get the general idea. This group, “Tulane4Palestine,” isn’t officially recognized by the university and was started from scratch in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel with the obvious purpose of harassing Jews at Tulane.

Well, the aftermath of that has been . . . interesting:

The New Orleans-based Tulane Students for Palestine, which the university does not recognize as an official student group, on Wednesday took to Instagram to defend its use of the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which calls for the Jewish state’s annihilation. That slogan, the group said, is merely a call for a state in which “all people, including Jews, could live as equals.” The group also dismissed the threat of Palestinian terrorism, arguing that “white supremacy” is a larger threat to the Jewish people than what it called “the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”
“What we have seen for far too long is that it is Israel and the fantasy of Zionism that results in the expulsion and mass killing of Palestinians, not the other way around,” the video says. “The biggest threat to us as Jews is and has always been white supremacy, not the struggle for Palestinian liberation and self-determination. You are hurting Jews and Palestinians when you conflate the freedom struggle with white supremacy.”

There’s a word for this, and that word is insane.

You can click here to see the full video on Instagram, but when I say it’s insane, I don’t mean to dismiss the danger of this rhetoric. Nor do I think Instapundit’s “LOL” reaction is meant to be dismissive. What he means, I suppose, is that it’s ridiculous for anyone to claim that the “biggest threat” to Jews in America is “white supremacy,” just as it’s absurd to suggest that the Hamas “from the river to the sea” slogan means anything other than the annihilation of every Jew in Israel. (Hamas leaders have been explicit about what this slogan means, even apart from the obvious definitive aspect of their murderous attack on innocent Israeli civilians.)

To a certain kind of left-winger, however, the real enemy — “the biggest threat” — must always be right-wing, and so “white supremacy” is the bogeyman, rather than the Hamas fanatics who are killing Jews. The use of the phrase “freedom stuggle” in this context reminds me of Borat: “Throw the Jew down the well, so my country can be free!”

The “Tulane4Palestine” crew go to great lengths trying to distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, but if the end result of both is dead Jews, what difference does it make? And you’ll note a similar theme in how the Left claims that being against “white supremacy” is different than being anti-white, but if you pay close enough attention, you may start to think this also is a distinction without a difference.

Buck Throckmorton at AOSHQ highlighted these tweets:



 

Category: Israel

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