It has become a cliché to say that we live in a time when words have lost their meaning. But the reaction of many in the media and political class to the recent wave of “Gaza Solidarity Camps” on university campuses has reaffirmed the fact that there is often wisdom in platitudes.
That I was standing in the middle of an anti-war, anti-terrorist rally Thursday morning when I went to see what was happening at the encampment at my old school, George Washington University. became clear within minutes.
“There is only one solution: an intifada revolution,” chants were heard, calls to “crush that Zionist settler state” and declarations that “when people are occupied, resistance is justified.” . I looked to my right and saw a huge banner that read, “No justice, no peace.”
Calls for intifadas are commonplace in such protests, but we shouldn't distract from how shocking they are to educated Americans. The second intifada, which lasted from 2000 to 2005, resulted in more than 130 suicide bombings against civilian targets such as buses and cafes, as well as numerous shooting and stabbing attacks. It was orchestrated by cold-blooded terrorists whose main objective was (and still is) to wage forever war to achieve the “Final Solution” of the State of Israel.
For those who rallied to the GW encampment, compromise was unthinkable. Pointing to all of Israel, they shouted, “We don't want two states. We want '48 years.'” Then, on Golden Week, when an Israeli student stood among the demonstrators holding an Israeli flag, they shouted to his face, “Settlers, settlers, go home. Palestine is only for us.” I started screaming.
Later that day, I saw a man walking around with a hammer and sickle flag and spoke with an elderly woman who spoke of the horrors of the second intifada, when Palestinians “rose up against their oppressors.”
The demonstrators fully accepted Hamas's position on the conflict, which is that Israel is obliged to take up arms until it is destroyed. It rejects, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, the approaches of all other Palestinian factions and supports only the most radical factions.
But if you look at the accounts of this event in the media and by people in the political class, there is no reason to know that anything untoward was going on.
George Washington University's student newspaper, GW Hatchet, described the rally accompanying the encampment as “pro-Palestinian” and advocating a “ceasefire.” But that's a totally inappropriate way to describe the people who spent the entire day chanting “Intifada revolution.” Hatchet's coverage of the encampment never mentions Hamas, October 7, or the hostages.
Or consider how members of Congress have described the encampment movement. Several members of the House Democratic bloc, known as the “Squad,” were arrested after more than 100 anti-Israel activists were arrested at Columbia University. condemned police actions and a label is attached as “”antiwar“Protest.
But the video that came out of the encampment showed the speaker. saying“I want you to know that it was the al-Aqsa floods that brought the global intifada back to the forefront.''Al Qassam's next target“Zionists don't deserve to live,” one of the leaders of the Colombian encampment said in an Instagram Live video, and people should be “thankful I'm not just going out and killing Zionists.” It goes without saying that he said this.
The Washington Post adopted exactly this framework in a news article with the headline, “How anti-war student protests are spreading to U.S. universities.” Similarly, Ian Bremer, a prominent political scientist, Posted in X Map He described it as “a map of recent anti-war protests across America.”
It is impossible to reconcile what people actually say in the camp with the euphemistic labels that outsiders apply to them. This is extremely dishonest and serves a specific purpose. Most people will not sympathize with or support a protest movement that they know espouses the same views as a U.S.-designated terrorist organization (and, in some cases, waving the flag).
This is a perfect illustration of the Mott and Bailey fallacy: when a person's beliefs are challenged, they defend a position they prefer to the one they actually hold; Pretending to be a defensible position (in this case, a ceasefire) is synonymous with a sincere but even more controversial belief (in this case, an “intifada revolution”).
We must not be fooled by it. Rather, we must have clear eyes to discern the true meaning of the message of these gatherings and to reveal this truth to as many people as possible.
Jack Elbaum is a student at George Washington University.
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