“Oh, I see,” says the business manager conducting a job interview, “you were in one of those 31 or so screaming, absurdist pro-Hamas groups at Harvard. Sorry, but we neither trust nor like people who think it’s OK for terrorists to decapitate Israeli babies, rape teenage girls at a music festival, murder families in their homes and shoot sobbing children hiding in bushes after missiles introduced their energetic arrival, all the better to get even.”
The manager stared angrily at the slowly exiting if fiery-faced graduate for a moment, adding that this person’s idea of “truth” seemed little more than a self-rewarding, ideological, cultural, morally empty, uneducated malevolence including antisemitism afflicting Jews through the ages. While these brave, tradition-blessed, self-disciplined people are small in number, they have done enormous good for the world and are still at it, this imagined manager said by way of expressing my opinions for me through a writing trick.
Some sympathizers of the Hamas celebrants have weirdly suggested their savage deeds were more a matter of responsibility than vicious desire. By way of common sense, video viewers may have noticed the enjoyment as these thugs went about their handiwork, acts of uncivilized, inhumane cruelty that their defenders just might imitate.
The way this torture festival in the Middle East has been so widely welcomed in American colleges across the country and among certain other segments of the American population is itself tortuous. It speaks to our decadence, the wasting away of so much of what has been exceptional about us. Consider how higher education has grown greedy beyond the capacity of millions to pay tuition, that it has been downplaying the crucial humanities, that it has erased male rights in sexual abuse cases and mostly junked the once-required study of the miracle of Western civilization.
In America today, the two-parent family is withering away with atrocious consequences for the children. Public schools are well behind educational achievements in other developed countries in the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, although, wait, they are helping to instruct students on gender decisions. Common sense is hiding out.
Crime is less and less being punished while more and more ruining lives. In California, looting has been legalized with the consequence of closing down businesses, depriving citizens of sources of everyday needs, eliminating jobs and encouraging crime as a way of life. The federal government has become a mystery with President Joe Biden being the least answerable question. In growing numbers, local governments don’t know how to govern. Scads of intellectuals don’t think merit really matters, just skin color.
In the middle of all of this and far more, we have had these anti-Israel protesters all over the country, including at colleges often with special courses emphasizing diversity, equity and inclusion as the modern way of “reform.” Jews don’t seem to be diverse enough for inclusion although Palestinians definitely are. Five Middle East nations attacked Israel in 1948 right after the ancient entity was officially named a new nation. An Arab leader turned down an extraordinarily generous conciliation offered by Israel but did not go as far in contemptibility as a Hamas official, Fathi Hamad, who said every Jew everywhere in the world should be “slaughtered and killed.”
To me, the nonchalance among too many Americans about such ambitions and their blaming Israelis for what neighbors want to do to them is solid evidence of American decadence on the march.
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at [email protected]. Send comments to [email protected].
