Campus Nihilism

From a short essay by Carl Trueman at First Things:

Now, expressing criticism of Israeli military action is of course entirely legitimate in a democracy like the United States. There is a right to dissent and a right to protest.

But the nature of these particular protests reveals something very disturbing. It is clear that they are not motivated by legitimate concern for Arab and Muslim lives, whatever the rhetoric. If they were, then Israel would hardly be the only, or even primary, target.

The death toll from over a decade of government-led bloodshed in Syria is catastrophic but has not gripped the imagination of campus activists. The slaughter there continues to this day, though one could be forgiven for not knowing this, given the lack of media and student interest in the conflict. Rather, these campus protests are motivated by hatred of Jews.

One can offer the specious dodge that Hamas’s 2017 manifesto speaks of Zionists rather than Jews as the enemy. But Hamas thinks Israel is the result of a Jewish conspiracy. To replace “Jews” and “Judaism” with “Zionists” and “Zionism” is thus to change words but not to change direction.

Anti-Semitism is the motivation of both Hamas and the student activists who care only for Muslim lives when they are threatened by Israeli rather than Syrian bombs.

This also points to the nihilism that lurks just below the surface. When one notes the craziness of some of the protests—queers professing solidarity with Palestine, for example, or a drag queen leading children in pro-Palestinian chants—it becomes clear that, for all of the blather about “human rights,” these people share no common vision about what it means to be human.

The thing that unites these groups is neither concern for Arab lives nor a respect for Islamic culture. They are united only in wanting to tear down. In short, these protests are a manifestation of the Mephistophelean spirit of negation or, in religious terms, the spirit of desecration.

To borrow from Marx, all that is holy must be profaned. What is to replace it—Shariah law, drag queen story hour, Judith Butler reading groups—is anybody’s guess. There is no agreed moral vision here. There is only consensus on a hatred of Jews, of Israel, of America, and of what is. And ironically, it comes from those who enjoy some of the greatest privileges that America has to offer.

The ignorance of these protestors and their faculty abettors concerning the history of the region as well as the nature of Islam in general and Hamas in particular, is appalling. But then the point isn't to rectify wrongs or get the history right. These protests are just one battle in a long war to destabilize and destroy the institutions and culture of the West, and Israel is just one battleground on the front lines in that war.