I recently posted my first substack post (Available for free at https://substack.com/@harrybinswanger):
To combat anti-Israel, anti-Semitic outbreaks on campus, two things are indispensable.
1: Recognize that the cause is the ideas taught by the faculty.
The student chanters and rampagers are not intellectually equipped to form independent opinions about anything. They are marching to the moral and political slogans of their teachers and professors.
From The New York Sun:
Social media posts from accounts apparently of Harvard faculty and staff call Jews “the most powerful people on the planet,” accuse Harvard administrators of “kissing the feet of Zionist power,” and assert, “any academic who supports Israel, drown in shame forever.” Another contends that she “cannot understand” and “cannot forgive” colleagues who “support the crimes of Israel.”
The social media posts, which appear to be by some of those who signed a “statement by Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine,”
The venom directed toward Jews and Israel is the culmination of two and a half centuries of German philosophy, especially Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Briefly, Kant socialized consciousness (objectivity redefined as shared subjectivism), Hegel pushed the collectivism and statism that that implied, adding a worship of brute power (the “world historical figure”), and Marx added a secularized version of the Sermon on the Mount (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”)
(For further info, see Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual [the title essay therein], Leonard Peikoff, The Cause of Hitler’s Germany, and Peter Viereck, Meta-Politics.)
Obsessed with alleviating their inner sense of emptiness and often guilt, these “protestors” cling to others’ approval as if that could bring them a sense of worth. “Virtue signaling” is what it’s neatly named.
What these “demonstrators” are desperately seeking to demonstrate is not some alleged injustice abroad, but their own righteousness. They are protesting against something all right, but not against war casualties; they are protesting against their own inner state, their secret sense of emptiness and helplessness, the emotional consequences of the anti-self and anti-reason poison they have been force-fed for years.
2: Do not fight on the territory and with the weapons of your enemies. Don’t lodge “complaints” with DEI bureaus. Don’t invoke anti-discrimination laws. Don’t make the argument that Jews are being subjected to harassment that wouldn’t be tolerated if it were directed against blacks or gays.
The issue is not even free speech. The issue is good and evil.
Israel is a basically moral, civilized nation; the protestors are taking the side of their destroyers. To side against Israel with the life-hating monsters of the October 7th atrocities is unspeakable. To express solidarity with gleeful monsters is evil, and those engaged in it must be denounced, expelled from the universities, and shunned. It is the protestors’ support for pure evil, not their campus tactics, that should be damned.
