Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet. Having emigrated from Israel to New York, he draws on his experience to ask what accounts for the marches, riots, and demonstrations supporting Hamas in the urban centers of the United States. He calls it the banlieueization of American cities and college campuses in his City Journal column “American Banlieue.” As for the rioters, he observes: “Most are young, and most are of Middle Eastern descent.” I’m not sure that’s right, but the possible explanations (links omitted) he offers for their support of Hamas imply a deeper problem and are worthy of consideration:
Like all grim and weighty questions, this one, too, resists a simple explanation. In part, it may be because these kids arrested in Bay Ridge, many of them native New Yorkers, got their education from a morally bankrupt school system held hostage by a pernicious union that was quick to co-sponsor one of the first pro-Hamas rallies in the city and defend teachers who giddily supported terrorism. Not that the Department of Education itself is much better: Teachers turning to the city’s official guide in search of resources to help explain this war and its origins will discover gems such as these, from the Arab-funded Middle East Policy Council, informing anyone curious that “Israel has neither the moral legitimacy nor the national interest to refuse to negotiate with Palestinian organizations that have employed terrorism, particularly Hamas.”
In part, it may be because our colleges have committed themselves not to the free and unfettered exchange of ideas but to peddling the sort of paganism that drives some professors in Ivy League schools to behold the beheading of babies and feel “exhilarated” at such “awesome” examples of “innovative Palestinian resistance.”
In part, it may be because our most chic magazines now employ bozos who were quick to take to social media and accuse Jews of collaborating with the Nazis or, at the very least, of vastly exaggerating the reports of their own suffering. “Last night,” confessed one such self-styled moral authority, New York feature writer Eric Levitz, “I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them.”
And in part it may be because anyone knocking about New York during the riots that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020 internalized all too well the message sent by everyone, from the mayor upward to the Democrat Party’s leadership—that it’s alright to loot stores, vandalize synagogues, and toss Molotov cocktails at cop cars, as long as you’re wilding out in the name of social justice.
The list goes on, and it tells a sordid story. Unlike the rageful youth in Paris, Lyon, or Marseilles, our rioters aren’t the hopeless products of lawless enclaves, segregated from the rest of society. They’re our friends and neighbors, the kid sitting next to us in class or the go-getter acing that internship with the Anti-Defamation League, only to turn around and tear down posters of Israeli citizens held captive by Hamas.
And their hatred isn’t a bug—it’s a feature, a core tenet of identity that has no rational explanation or excuse. In our classrooms and our newsrooms, in our streets and our chambers of government, we’re rearing a generation to express nothing but contempt for that most foundational of our shared virtues—the idea that, though we come from different backgrounds and profess different beliefs, we are all, first and foremost, Americans.
In his concluding paragraph Leibovitz writes:
[T]he battles raging on the streets and in the quads these days aren’t about Israel; they’re about America. If we want red, white, and blue banlieues, if we want the sort of sectarian violence that we see regularly in the Middle East but rarely on these shores, if we want the politics of virulent tribalism, let us continue to do nothing. But if we hope to sustain the principles and ethos that made this country a beacon for the world, we need to extinguish these fires before they burn us all up.
Whole thing (with links) here.
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