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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27692 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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(can move to the Israel/Palestine thread, but thought I'd post here as it's not geopolitics)

Looks like donors of elite schools are starting to pause their donations to schools due to the Israel/Palestine situation.

Well, rather, by the reaction and statements from some students at those schools, combined with the lack of reaction/statement by the school presidents condemning the initial Hamas attack. It seems donors, like Ken Griffin, are either pressuring the school to change tact, or stopping donations altogether.

Just today, apparently [some Jewish students at Cooper Union] were blocked in a library due to a pro-Palestine/anti-Israel rally](https://twitter.com/stopantisemites/status/1717300476524322969?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ). Not sure why the library only had Jewish students (Hillel meeting?), but seems bad if true.

George Washington Uni. got pro-Hamas projections saying things like "glory to our martyrs" (!!) on school buildings (ironically with donors like "Gelman" right underneath the projections). Protests that shout "from the river to the sea" all over every elite school, from Brown to NYU to UCLA, you name it. And on and on...

Social media wasn't that developed, and I wasn't paying attention, last time the large Israel/Palestine hostage situation happened in 2014, or the situation in 2008. Was it always been like this, pro-Hamas/anti-Israel/ and I just didn't notice? Or is it noticeably larger now, more organized, more tolerated? It's not just US either, it's also in UK, it's in Berlin and Vienna and Paris. Obviously there's big protests in Jordan or whatever, as they are closer and have millions of Palestinians, so I'd expect protests there. But it almost seems kind of shocking how brazen many people are, in NYC!?

Seems like influential folks, even sjw/leftist-friendly (?) youtubers, are realizing the changing cultural winds, and perhaps political winds downstream.

The donors' using their money to cause change is not new, but seems like there is urgency from them to change some of the culture in universities. Will this actually change things, though? My bet is no, Griffin's $300mil will not change how Harvard students think and say. What do you guys think?

edit:

This was an interesting thing, that I was trying to but failing to reference/get at:

In the 1960s, the radical left and black militants engaged in terrorism and mass violence for several years. During that period, a disproportionate amount of money and leadership on the left came from Jews and Jewish organizations. Then the Panthers took the movement by storm and imposed a Third World, anti-imperialist focus on the left, which turned hard against Israel after the Six Day War in ‘67. The Panthers’ anti-Zionism bled over into plain anti-Semitism, and many disillusioned Jews began to back away from the movement. Then, in ‘69, black militants in NYC picked a fight w/the mostly Jewish NYC teachers’ union, and the virulent antisemitism that had been just beneath the surface burst out into the open. The Jewish Defense League was actually formed in the aftermath of the conflict, to protect and retaliate on behalf of Jews who were being harassed and attacked by black militants.

The loss of Jewish support was the end of the ‘60s radical left as a serious movement, and the long march on the institutions began. Now that it’s had a half decade to regroup, it’s back on the streets causing mayhem. As before, Jewish organizers and groups played a disproportionate leadership role w/BLM, campus radicals, and other militant groups, and as before, the movement has turned against Israel and Jews more generally. If the rest of the cycle repeats, turning against the Jews will mark the beginning of the end of this round of left wing madness…

Hopefully we all learn a more lasting lesson this time.

What's interesting to me here is that the brutality of the terrorism, and the filming of it, seems to have resulted in increased support for Hamas in the West, rather than less. It has energized those who already sympathized with the Palestinians, and recruited some new fans.

Anyone care to hypothesize around why?

Some tentative bullet points from me:

Blood in the water - the enemy has shown weakness, is bleeding. Time to strike.

Just world fallacy (selectively). If the Israelis were tortured it must have meant they deserved it.

Edit: And the flipside: If people see someone doing something horrible, expressing great hate, they think it's justified, according to blank slate + cultural relativism. "The Palestinian terrorist must have been a great person just like me, not a complete antisemite, until they were grievously wronged and the vengeance they inflict is just"... I dunno.

What's interesting to me here is that the brutality of the terrorism, and the filming of it, seems to have resulted in increased support for Hamas in the West, rather than less.

With the exception of support directly resulting from a larger Muslim population (ie not the result of ‘ideological conversion’ so much as ‘ideological import’), has Western support for Palestine really risen since 2014 or even 2004? I don’t know that it has, it’s essentially been a progressive cause célèbre since the ideological realignment in the 1970s (when much of the radical left switched from Zionist to Palestinian liberationist ideas).

Nothing the student types have chanted at US colleges in the last couple of weeks has been different to what they were chanting when I was at college in the early 2010s.

The ‘Corbynite’ sympathy for Hamas stuff was always less pronounced in the US than Europe, because the former had a smaller Muslim population and a much larger Jewish one, but in either case it’s been a thing for more than 40 years now. Younger people poll as more hostile to Israel than older people, because younger people are almost uniformly more progressive than older people, certainly in the Anglo countries. In France, the radical right is as skeptical about Zionism as the radical left, but again the French hard right is strongly tied to a specific kind of at-least-mildly antisemitic Vichyite right, and to counterrevolutionary ultra-Catholicism of the SSPX school which often blames variably Masons, Jews, Protestants and so on for the decline of France (since 1789).

has Western support for Palestine really risen since 2014

Not according to this.

The question here is different. On the 2nd on it's Hamas, not Palestinians.

That's true, but it still doesn't show basically any sort of support for Hamas in the US.

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