OPINION:
The Israel-Hamas war has become President Biden’s worst nightmare. The president is caught between irreconcilable factions of his own party, one fully behind Israel and the other siding with Hamas and the Palestinians.
Students at the nation’s elite colleges forced the issue into the spotlight last week. At Columbia University, a filthy “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” was set up on the campus lawn in which agitators chanted anti-Israeli slogans whenever cameras were in range. Organizers of the ongoing disturbance say the college must divest its $14 billion endowment from “companies profiting from the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Note the selective outrage. Columbia has far stronger ties to Beijing than Jerusalem, yet where is the protest over the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of Uyghurs, classified as a “crime against humanity” by the United Nations?
Rather than address student concerns, Columbia called the cops to break up the mostly peaceful protest. Some professors responded by walking out in solidarity with the arrested fans of Hamas. The tent city returned, so the school decided to replace in-person classes with online courses for the rest of the year.
The events repeated across the country — at New York University, Harvard, Yale, Indiana University, the University of Southern California and MIT.
All of this is the fruit of leftist education. Absent from the demonstrations is any notion of using reason to persuade. There is no Oxford Union-style debate; there’s only a mob of petulant children waving banners, chanting slogans and issuing demands.
Parents must be proud of what they’re getting in return for $90,000 in annual tuition. Or rather, federal taxpayers are now paying for it all, thanks to Mr. Biden’s loan-forgiveness schemes.
Billionaire alumni donors, like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, are appalled by the campus takeover. “I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken,” he wrote on X.
That’s the kind of demand that does reach university administrators, and it explains the attempt at clamping down on campus free speech — once a core principle of being a liberal. Uncouth as the content of the protesters’ message may be, however, it shouldn’t be suppressed if made in a way that is not disruptive.
Israel has a right to defend itself following the Oct. 7 murder of its citizens, but it’s fair to ask at what point self-defense becomes vendetta.
Mr. Biden, not known for reflecting on such deep questions, appealed on Monday to those on both sides of the debate. “I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that,” he said, adding, “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
No wonder the White House has been funneling money to both sides of the war, giving $16 billion to Iran, paymasters of Hamas, and $26 billion to Israel through the supplemental he signed into law on Wednesday.
Given the incoherence of the administration’s foreign policy, it was only a matter of time before Democrats’ discordant political coalition fractured — particularly at ivory tower institutions that thrive on racial division.
What’s happening now is a problem entirely of the leftists’ making. It’s up to them to solve it.
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