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Pro-Hamas college activists deserve all the mockery they get

Just hoist Old Glory and sing the Star Spangled Banner. It’ll drive ’em nuts

At the beginning of this month, writer Ani Wilcenski put out an interesting piece in Tablet titled “Normal Kids Get F*cked.”

The article is laden with examples of, well, normal kids on college campuses getting screwed by faculty and administrators over silly minutiae while whiny crybullies like these get every possible consideration.

It starts off pleasingly enough, especially the recent tale of University of North Carolina frat guys who had enough of anti-Israel activists’ antics and raised an American flag during one of the pro-Hamas whine fests (below). A similar incident took place at Arizona State.

But Wilcenski is correct in that the “smallest infractions” by fraternities, among other politically incorrect organizations, are used by universities (especially the Ivies) as “grounds for immediate and sometimes harsh limitation.”

At Cornell, site of some of the worst anti-Israel and antisemitic activity since October 7, an anonymous tip against several fraternities led the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards to suspend some of them. During the investigation, the frats were severely limited in what they we permitted to do.

One of the punishments was new members not being allowed to eat in the frat house, even though they’d already paid for the fraternity meal plan. You may recall this has been a complaint of anti-Israel activists who have occupied campus buildings: Why can’t we have food? We paid for a semester of dining hall privileges!

So, an anonymous tip vs. illegally occupying a freakin’ building in plain sight — guess which got a lot more consideration and leeway from campus officials?

One Cornell fraternity member said regarding a pair of 20-year-olds getting busted for holding cans of Keystone Light that “The school will find any excuse to get us in trouble. It feels like Cornell only wants to mess with the normal kids at this school, normal kids who don’t want to sit in tents all day, they just want to have a beer at a frat party with their friends.”

Another said “It’s pretty clear the school views a certain type of rule break as honorable and just, and other rule breaks as violations by entitled jerks, so this was not surprising to me.”

A perfect example occurred down at the University of Mississippi where NBC News (among others) framed the situation between that campus’ anti-Israel/antisemitic student contingent and a bunch of counter-protesters thusly:

[A] group of roughly 30 to 60 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on the quad and added to the list of demonstrations on college campuses nationwide. But the event turned hostile as they were outnumbered by counterprotesters, who at one point drowned out the chants of protesters by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Videos of the event circulated online, with many noting that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators appeared to be a multiracial group but were surrounded by a mostly white group of counterprotesters taunting them.

The network and its kindred spirits got what they obviously had been waiting for in a single individual — a frat bro briefly caught on camera jumping around and making “ape” noises towards an overweight black female protester —  while everyone else was “giving it back to her,” so to speak, during her protest, part of which included calling her “Lizzo” (she was giving them “the finger” at one point).

MORE: No sympathy: College administrators and professors finally reap what they sow

The student who made “ape” noise is now under investigation by the school, and was booted from his fraternity on May 3. The Ole Miss chapter of the NAACP wants the kid expelled, along with two others. The school’s Black Student Union also chimed in, saying the counter-protesters in the video had “malicious intent” and “a prominent lack of knowledge on the situation at hand.”

(The far-left NBC actually included the following to, well, drive the point home: “More than 100 years ago, the state’s senators voted to send all of its Black people to Africa. When the university was ordered by a federal court to admit Black students in 1962, 2,000 white people rioted …” Gosh, thanks.)

A few thoughts:

First and foremost, don’t be an idiot and do what that single Ole Miss counter-protester did. It doesn’t matter the circumstances — there’s no excuse for that sort of garbage. Outlets like NBC and race baiters like Jemele Hill (not to mention universities themselves) are craving for something like this to happen so as to exploit it for all its worth.

Singing the National Anthem, laughing and scoffing at the activists, and yes, even calling this particular woman “Lizzo” are fine (for haven’t we been told how beautiful and awesome the singer is?), especially given the lingo and jargon of some of the anti-Israel activists (like “from the river to the sea,” just one of the placards at the Ole Miss pro-Hamas gathering).

Second, if groups like Ole Miss’s Black Student Union want to bring up “lack of knowledge,” I’d suggest going through any campus anti-Israel encampment and ask basic questions about the founding of Israel and the history surrounding it. You’ll find a copious lack of knowledge. Not to mention self-delusion.

Seriously, given what I’ve seen and knowing the ideology of the pro-Hamas college crowd, nothing irritates them more than a group of counter-protesters garbed in red, white and blue, all holding Old Glory, and singing the Star Spangled Banner and/or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. That’s it — that’s all you gotta do. The smoke will begin to spew from protesters’ ears when, for the umpteenth time, they hear “Oooh say can you see … !!”

(I have to admit that, of all things, the recent Tom Brady roast makes me optimistic that the days of wokeness are numbered. Everyone on the stage — white, black, Jew, gentile, gay, straight — took it on the chin in a no-holds-barred joke fest, and even the perpetually woke Netflix, host of the show, was the brunt of some DEI-focused put downs.)

Keep in mind, too, that no matter what they say, today’s campus activists are not like civil rights protesters in the 50s and 60s, nor Vietnam War protesters of the 60s and early 70s. Those folks actually had skin in the game, for lack of a better term — the former basic American constitutional protections, and the latter the right not to be shipped off ten thousand miles to fight a war that Washington DC wasn’t committed to winning.

No, they’re taking a stand for one of the most brutally savage regimes of the 20th and early 21st centuries: Hamas and its allies. As such, they deserve to be endlessly mocked.

MORE: American U. professor: Don’t come to my school – it’s an ‘accomplice to genocide’

IMAGE: National Federation of College/X

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About the Author
Associate Editor
Dave has been writing about education, politics, and entertainment for over 20 years, including a stint at the popular media bias site Newsbusters. He is a retired educator with over 25 years of service and is a member of the National Association of Scholars. Dave holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Delaware.