Campus freedom fighters, here’s your poster boy!
October 7 is just around the corner. I thought it would be a nice gesture to provide a proper visual for those preparing to celebrate a year since Hamas’s… er, heroic resistance
For Israel-haters, it doesn’t get much better than this: Security cameras provide an October 1 close-up of an oppressed brown man showing a white oppressor who’s boss. And in Tel Aviv!
The Palestinian shooter, the muzzle of his assault rifle flashing, is shown making sure that his victim is dead. The results are pixelated but, I assure you, it was bloody. It was also full of skull fragments and brain matter.
In all, he and his knife-wielding accomplice killed seven people before their murder spree was over. One of the dead was a mother shielding her infant. The infant survived. (Their dog was shot, though. Imagine: a canine white oppressor.) Another of the victims was a comic book illustrator. There was also a Greek national studying architecture in Israel and a young woman dancer who was a newlywed. White oppressors all.
Fittingly, Hamas claimed responsibility. So, with October 7 just around the corner, you might say it’s the perfect visual for those gleefully planning on taking to campus greens once again to mark a year since the heroic Islamist group opened the gates of Hell.
SURE, ISRAEL’S RETALIATION for October 7, 2023, has been heavy handed. The leadership in Jerusalem, after all, is not particularly sympathetic to the argument that reactions should be proportional to the actions they follow.
While I myself will admit that Israel sometimes strikes back too hard at those who lift a hand against it, I’m not sure what “proportional” means in this case. Does it mean Israel should have ensured that the same number of Gazan villages would be attacked in response? The same number of kids and old people summarily executed? A similar number of civilians dragged away as hostages? A comparable cadre of women raped, and others gang-raped?
People know by now that Israel has jet fighters and tanks and long-range artillery. When angered, it is not going to send in combat troops aboard a hang glider or in the bed of a Toyota Hilux. It also seems to know a thing or two about exploding beepers.
In short, one should expect to get decrapped for messing with Israel.
But let’s be honest. That’s not the reason those people took to campus greens on the original October 7. Israeli villages and towns were still burning. The victims were not yet cold (and many were still dying). Not a single Israeli boot had crossed the border to wage war. Even the air force had yet to bomb anyone or anything inside the Gaza Strip.
No. It was the thrill of payback for the oppressors at the hands of the oppressed.
By the time the sun had risen over Harvard and Cornell and Berkeley, some of the horrors and outrages in southern Israel were already known. So yes, it was the thrill. Even exhilaration, as memorably expressed that day by Cornell professor Russell Rickford, caught on video while students stood around him nodding in agreement, some even enthusiastically.
THE STILL PHOTO derived from the Tel Aviv security footage of October 1 will provide succor and sustenance – and perhaps even exhilaration – for many of the protesters who continue their fight against… well, whatever it is. Zionism. Israel. Israelis. Jews. From that river… what’s its name again?
The protests surely make them feel good, especially if they themselves enjoy white privilege. After all, they reside in a land stolen by white oppressors from Native Americans. (Harvard is on land once peopled by the Massachusett tribe. The Cornell campus sits astride land once belonging to the Cayuga Nation. Berkeley is where the Ohlones once hunted, fished and gathered.) And ditto the fact that whites in the protesters’ country enslaved non-whites barely a century and a half ago.
If they are sincere and true to their beliefs, these facts must make them at least a bit queasy about their own whiteness. After all, what can they do to set things right in their country? Make their college give back the land? Shell out reparations to blacks from their own pockets? Please…. That’s a bit too close to home.
But there’s Israel!
In their eyes, Israel is the epitome of modern white oppression and can help expiate their own sense of guilt. Israel could be made to give up land. (It wouldn’t be a first.) It could pay reparations. (Another thing not entirely unprecedented.) It could even cease to exist. (The USSR went away, for heaven’s sake!)
And what better encouragement for furthering the fight to end white oppression than that nighttime snap of a brave brown Palestinian giving a bunch of fearful white Israelis their comeuppance. Perfect!
I will give some of the protesters credit though. A few of the more sensitive ones, I’m sure, will wonder why he had to shoot the dog.