Take the Intifada worldwide. This is the evil catchphrase that Hamas sympathizers in America use to defend unlawful camps, property damage and vandalism, verbal abuse, and even violent attacks on anyone who stands in their way. It is derived from the Arabic word for revolt or fight. Their goal is to destroy Israel, and after that, they want to turn America into something like an Islamic Caliphate.
The method of choice for this undertaking lately has been fire-bombing. Similar to how Hamas killed Israeli infants by burning them on October 7, its American sympathizers have also tried to do the same to an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor in Colorado and to the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania and his family.
The reason why so much of this crime has taken place on American college campuses is that many of the people who live there—faculty, administrators, and students—either condone it or choose not to denounce it. This is a result of the dominant academic mindset, which simplifies the complexity of politics into a simplistic binary in which all white people oppress all non-white people. Despite America’s long history of antisemitism, Jews are oppressors since the majority of them are white. Academics who embrace this combination of white Americans and American Jews despise America for the same reasons that they despise Israel, the Jewish nation-state. They believe both to be morally unsalvageable and irredeemably evil.
This antipathy toward anything American and a hearty dosage of anti-Israel sentiment are practically prerequisites for graduation at Central Connecticut State University, where I attend. The university requires students to take a course in social justice, a seemingly neutral term that hides its true purpose, even though Zulma Toro, the president of CCSU, to her great credit, approved the establishment of a committee on antisemitism shortly after Hamas launched its genocidal war against Israel in 2023. It is the eradication of racism and inequality in American society, according to the website of the John Lewis Institute of Social Justice, which was founded at CCSU following the George Floyd riots in 2020.
Graduates who are dedicated to turning their instructors’ personal politics into American politics are the desired outcome. Students’ academic freedom, which includes avoiding ideological indoctrination, is not the only thing that is being violated here. It also results from a serious misinterpretation of recent history. Systemic racism does not exist in America. Furthermore, Israel is not an apartheid state. Instead, it is the Middle East’s most democratic and tolerant nation. In Iran, homosexuals are hung from cranes, while in Gaza, they are flung from roofs. Gay Pride parades are held in Israel.
It is impossible to overestimate the amount of students that confide in me and speak in whispers that their professors spend a portion of their class time evangelizing students for this left-wing ideology that combines anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment. Intersectionality is the chosen term for the commingling. In its distorted perception of reality, it subtly incorporates American atrocities into the illusion of settler colonialism, which purports to explain Israel’s founding sin.
However, even their most outspoken critics nearly never mention Western civilization, which is another enemy of academics who despise both Israel and America equally. The heinous Columbia University Apartheid Divest is specifically dedicated to eradicating Western civilization. The civilization of which American politics and culture are both a byproduct and a fundamental component is meant by this. Individual rights, representative democracy, the separation of religious and secular authority, which permits religious tolerance, and the conviction that all people are equal as God’s creation are some of the characteristics that distinguish Western civilization from—and, in fact, make it superior to—all others in the world. Despite all of its flaws, the West was able to abolish slavery, defeat Nazism, undermine Soviet Communism to the point where its internal contradictions led to its demise, and, through the Industrial Revolution, bring prosperity to more people than any other civilization or location in the world. In fact, many of the achievements of other civilizations can be attributed to their copying of Western best practices.
This is not something that Hamas and its allies are simply unaware of. They are inherently antagonistic to it.
The existence of Western civilization is at stake in stopping the intifada from spreading over the world.
Jay Bergman is a member of the National Association of Scholars’ Board of Directors and teaches history at Central Connecticut State University.
