Israel is not the Target

Israel is not the target. You probably think I’m nuts. Students are protesting all across the country, waving Palestinian flags and shouting, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They are occupying campus public spaces and setting up tents and barricades. They are threatening Jewish students and rabbis are advising Jews to avoid campus. Classes have been cancelled or gone online. Graduation ceremonies celebrating four years (or more) of hard work have been called off. You would think that Israel is definitely the target of all this hate and antisemitism.

But a lot of protestors are not students. New York City Mayor Adams reports that about thirty percent of the protestors arrested for the takeover of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University were not students or affiliated with the university. Most (60%) of those arrested at City College of New York were not students. One notorious protester, James Carlson, aka Cody Carlson, aka Cody Tarlow, has been arrested many times for protesting going all the way back to 2005 when he hit the protest line for the West Coast Anti-Capitalist Mobilization and March Against the G8 (by the way he lives in a multimillion dollar mansion that he owns in Park Slope, Brooklyn). Professional organizers with funding traced to George Soros have been training the protesters for months on how to occupy campus buildings, dismantle security cameras and disrupt emergency services. This is not a spontaneous reaction to Israel’s pursuit of Hamas terrorists. It has been in the works for a long time.

Israel is not THE target, it is A target. Ukraine is also a target. South Korea is a target. Taiwan is a target. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO because they believe that they might also become a target. There are also many more targets – Moldova, Transnistria, the Philippines, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are also targets. Any country or region that strives to be independent, to be democratic, to have a free market economy is a target. Israel is a target because it is the lone representative of Western civilization and culture in the Mideast. THE target is the United States.

There is a reason that Iran calls the United States the Great Satan. Iran’s theocracy is opposed to democracy. It is opposed to freedom of religion. It is opposed to everything in our Constitution. The goal of Iran is to impose its religion throughout the Middle East. Only two things keep the ayatollahs from succeeding in creating a new caliphate – Israel and the United States.

China desperately wants to erase the century of shame and recreate the middle kingdom that dominated Asia and much of the world for millennia. The Communist Party of China wants to subordinate individual freedom of choice to the will of the state. Taiwan is a thorn in their side, not only standing in their way but also providing a beacon of hope to the oppressed masses on the mainland. The United States is blocking Xi Jinping’s plans to create a Chinese world order. The United States is THE target.

Vladimir Putin wants to resurrect the tsarist empire of greater Russia and considers the fall of the Soviet Union a great disaster. He cares little about the collapse of communism but cares a lot about recreating the Russian Empire. Ukraine, the heart of Kievan Rus, is essential to his plans. The Baltic States, Georgia and Central Asia are also essential to recreating Putin’s new empire. The hopes of the Ukrainian people mean nothing to his plans. The hopes of his own people mean little either. NATO backed by the United States is the only thing standing in his way.

Do the protestors really understand the implications of the simplified slogans they are chanting? Do they understand that “from the river to the sea” means the elimination of Israel and its people? Do they understand that “globalize the Intifada” means persecuting Jews, not just in Israel, but all over the world. Do they understand that “divest now” implies damaging the companies that not only make weapons used in the Israel-Hamas conflict, but damaging the companies that protect Ukraine, NATO and America – because they are all the same companies?

I think not. Interviews of many protestors show that they have little knowledge of the real causes of the conflict. But some do. Columbia faculty linked arms to protect the protestors just before agitators among the protesters occupied Hamilton Hall. Of course these professors want to protect the students. After all, the students are only acting on what they have been trained to do by far-left faculty. Postmodernism and woke ideology permeates most university campuses. Critical race theory that emphasizes the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed is the basis for the Palestinians’ claims. The fact that there is little difference between Jews and Palestinians (both are semitic people speaking semitic languages) is lost on them. Both peoples have valid claims to the Holy Land, but the Israelis are rich compared to the Palestinians so they must be the oppressors that must be eliminated

But the same concepts taught to students at left-leaning universities that have prompted the visceral hate apparent at the anti-Israel protests, also applies to America. The students are being taught to hate America as well. There is no role for America as we know it in the future they envision.

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City University of New York law professor Jeffrey Lax said it clearly in an interview with Stuart Varney on Fox Business news. He stated, referring to the protests, “This is not antisemitic, this is anti-American, this is anti-western culture, the jews are the low hanging fruit. Next is America, next is western culture.”

America is THE target because America is the keystone, the glue, the essential country that holds together the much disparaged Western rules based world order. Without US support NATO would collapse. Without US support Korea and Taiwan would absorbed by their communist neighbors. Without US support, the rules based world order would disintegrate.

But if the cost to the United States of maintaining that rules based world order is high, the cost of its disintegration would be even higher. Our prosperity is based on that world order. Our safety is based on our network of allies within that order. Many Americans have died maintaining that Western world order but many more of our allies have also died. South Korean military battle deaths were five times those of the US and civilian deaths in the South were estimated to be around one million. South Vietnamese battle deaths far exceeded ours in a losing effort against an enemy that still oppresses their people after Americans grew tired of war.

Without our US-led Western world order, the world would be a very nasty place – the nasty, brutish world that Thomas Hobbes feared. Enemies would be on our doorstep. Our economy would be strangled. The lives of every American would be worse. Yes, the cost of being the leader of the free world is great, but the cost of not being the leader is even greater. That is the future the anti-Israel protesters would subject us to if they had their way. That is the same grim future that the racist woke ideology would bring. The same grim future that antifa would concoct. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to not let that happen.

It is time to stop treating these protesters with kid gloves. Barricading campuses and occupying university buildings is not free speech. It is criminal trespass. The protesters are demanding amnesty for their criminal behavior. I think we should give them some time, instead.