After the Oct. 7 slaughter in Israel, author Brigitte Gabriel posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, about her experiences growing up in Lebanon. She described her childhood in the once-prosperous and peaceful country as “idyllic” and recalled how its capital, Beirut, had been hailed as the “Paris of the Middle East.”
All that changed as Muslim extremists gained control of the country and plunged it into war. Both Jewish and Christian families such as Ms. Gabriel’s were persecuted. After the destruction of her home and a decade spent living in a bomb shelter, Ms. Gabriel and her family were able to escape to the United States, a country she loves dearly for the opportunities it afforded her.
Ms. Gabriel’s account reminded me of the decade I spent living in the Detroit area. During that time, I met so many people with stories similar to Ms. Gabriel’s. They left nations wracked by war and economic privation and came to the United States.
In Dearborn, Michigan, I frequented their pastry shops, where you could buy traditional baklava, and their cafés that featured exotic coffees. My favorite restaurant in Birmingham, Michigan, was famous for its mouthwatering Mediterranean entrees and desserts and was owned by a Lebanese couple who always spoke to me in French.
And in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, my friends and I patronized a day spa run by a Jewish woman who had fled the former Soviet Union with her family when Jews were allowed to leave with only the clothes on their backs and a suitcase in each hand. They immigrated first to Israel and then came here.
I loved hearing these people’s stories; I admired their hope, their resilience, and their determination. There was nothing remarkable about any of the modest businesses they started here; they simply enabled their owners to live lives in peace and freedom, with some semblance of financial stability. That’s all that their owners wanted for themselves and their families.
That’s what most people want.
We’re told that “there will never be peace in the Middle East” because of the centuries-old hostilities between the countries and the peoples there. And yet people from those same countries can come here to the United States and live peacefully, not only in the same nation but in the same city, the same suburbs, the same neighborhoods.
It’s a testament to our founding principles that this isn’t only possible but commonplace. Those principles are why the United States is a country of (for the most part) peace and prosperity. It’s why so many flee their native countries and come here.
But as sacrosanct and successful as those founding principles have been, their continuity isn’t inevitable. In that vein, the vicious anti-Semitism and apparent support for the barbaric murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel that has erupted across the United States needs to be a wake-up call.
Mobs have swarmed into our city streets, decrying Israel as an “oppressor” and an “apartheid state.” Israel is blamed for making Gaza an “open-air prison,” without the corresponding acknowledgment that if the Palestinian “leadership” wasn’t devoting every dollar and ounce of effort into wiping Israel off the map—if they hadn’t spent tens of billions of dollars of foreign aid on instruments of war and terrorism—Gaza could be a little paradise, and its residents would be able to freely go between their home country and Israel the way that Americans travel between states.
Social media is filled with videos of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, screaming obscenities at pro-Israel speakers, and carrying signs calling for “decolonization” or the “cleansing” of Jews from the Middle East.
Most Americans are shocked; where has this come from?
In no small part, from our colleges and universities. Consider that, over the past few years, we’ve seen incident after incident of speakers being shouted down, threatened, and even physically attacked. Polls of college students reveal astonishing support for censorship and the characterization of political viewpoints with which they disagree as “hate speech.” Some of the most appalling support for Hamas’s brutality has taken place on college campuses this month. Students at George Washington University recently projected slogans praising Hamas butchers as “martyrs” and calling for the eradication of Israel onto the campus library named for the family of a Jewish alumnus.
For decades, faculty at U.S. institutions of higher education have been promoting—not merely educating about—uber-leftist philosophies of moral relativism and myriad versions of Marxism. At its core, Marxism is a philosophy rooted in resentment, devoted to the abolition of religion and the replacement of God with government. For the diehard Marxist, there’s no “truth,” no ultimate arbiter of “right” or “wrong,” no natural law, no divine source of fundamental human dignity or inherent individual rights. There’s only power and whatever it takes to wield it to bring about the “revolution.”
It’s no coincidence that anti-Semitism festers in this climate. And these ideologies are equally antithetical to the U.S. founding principles. The incident at George Washington University is a metaphor: The writing is, literally, on the wall. The same voices calling for the eradication of the state of Israel won’t stop there. They won’t rest until America—a country expressly founded “under God” and in opposition to totalitarian regimes—is brought to its knees as well.
What has been built here in the United States isn’t perfect, but it’s precious and exceptional, and the successes of people of every conceivable background, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class are proof. We can’t permit it to be destroyed from within by the greedy, the corrupt, the ignorant, or those who want to marinate perennially in the hostilities of our own bygone eras.
It’s time to hold academia accountable.
