How does one explain the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas campus protests against Israel sprouting up around the country? After Oct. 7, 2023, attention was fixed on Harvard. On Dec. 5, 2023, when the three college presidents testified before Congress, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the focus. Recently, Columbia has become an epicenter. And now, encampments and protests have spread to more than 50 college and university campuses.
It is worth asking again, how did we get here? I contend that this is happening because of what we stopped doing and what we started doing.
What we’ve stopped doing is the basics of a traditional college education. We’ve not just abandoned the Judeo-Christian tradition (which happened so long ago that many cannot even remember that fatal step), but we’ve also deconstructed the humanities and largely forsaken the liberal arts. It has left us with a secular vacuum that would eventually be filled by a disastrous ideology.
More recently, we stopped requiring students to learn our history. We don’t teach about Western civilization or require American history. Nationwide, only 17 percent of colleges and universities require a course in Western civilization. Only 18 percent require a course in American history of government. This means that the majority of students graduate knowing little about World War II, the Holocaust, or, for that matter, the reason why the United Nations moved to establish a Jewish state after the war, let alone the massive contributions the Jews have made to our civilization.
Preoccupied with absolutizing diversity and the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, we have forgotten what unifies us (or used to). Adding to that, we stopped thinking critically about everything, including radical Islam. That’s what we stopped doing. But then, what did we start doing?
In the secular vacuum that we created after removing every trace of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the left further radicalized and embraced a neo-Marxist narrative (not economic Marxism but cultural Marxism) that redefined the idea of class struggle. The inevitable conflict is no longer between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, as Marx imagined. Post-war Marxists focused on culture and identity. They divided the world between the culturally oppressed and the oppressors. This is the inevitable conflict that is driving history. The goal is still revolution. This framework now drives many students’ interpretations of reality and is more important than the truth itself.
The left then employed critical theory in all its variety (post-colonial theory, critical race theory, queer theory, gender theory, and so forth) to explain and analyze this new class struggle. Who are the oppressors? They include Israel, the West, the United States, the free-market system, the Judeo-Christian tradition, heteronormativity, and so forth. Who are the oppressed? Hamas, the Palestinians, and every racial, sexual, and gender identity group on the intersectional spectrum. This all results in crazy coalitions that defy imagination. But together, these groups conclude that the world must be liberated from irredeemable traditional norms and systems and that violence is a legitimate tool, a “necessary means,” in the struggle.
This is the ideology that has filled the secular, post-Christian vacuum. This is what is creating a new ideological monoculture that has captured so many of our students. Unfortunately, most Americans are oblivious to the shift that has taken place in our universities. They still imagine college as it used to be. They do not realize how much students have been catechized into a new campus orthodoxy.
What is particularly unusual is the collaboration between the new post-liberal left and radical Islamic jihadists. Remember, Hamas is an acronym that stands for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It is officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Its charter declares that Islam must destroy Israel because it stands on Islamic land. It claims that it is the individual duty of every Muslim to liberate the Palestinians. It is not just anti-Israel, it is anti-Jew, because Israel, you will remember, is a Jewish state. The radical left and Islamic jihadists both have an interest in not just obliterating Israel, but also in deconstructing and destroying the West.
This is a stark reminder that what is taught (or not taught) in the universities today is played out on the streets tomorrow. This is a large part of what is behind the surge in anti-Semitism on our campuses. As the old musical put it, “We’ve got trouble in River City!” While the protests may die down after the spring semester ends, they will resurface with the political conventions of late summer and as students repopulate campuses in the fall.
