As antisemitism rises, US media stays oblivious to seismic shifts in polity as it goes about pontificating to the world

The video clip was striking. A Columbia University student walks up to the podium to collect her diploma. As the student, sporting a keffiyeh and an LGBTQI+ coloured scarf, ascends the steps and approaches the podium, we see that her hands are tied with a zip-lock (ostensibly self-inflicted). She raises both her hands up in the air in a form of celebratory ritual to lusty cheers from fellow students, collects her diploma and then proceeds to rip it into shreds. She is followed by other students who refrain from the performative shredding, but cheerfully flash the Palestinian flag during the graduation ceremony.

There are many takeaways from the clip that has become viral on social media. As the student graduation season commences in the United States, in the most visible display of a tectonic shift in public opinion on Israel among young citizens of the West, “graduates across the country showed their opposition to the war in Gaza this weekend, walking out of commencement speeches, draping themselves in Palestinian flags and chanting their demands to divest from Israel,” reports New York Times.

For almost a month, the world was witness to colleges across the US and elsewhere in the West exploding in adolescent, incoherent anger over the war in Gaza with pro-Palestinian students encamping in makeshift tents on college campuses, launching pitched battles with law enforcement and vandalizing properties before being suppressed by police in riot gear with tear gas, stun guns and rubber bullets.

Thousands of students from more than 60 colleges across the US have been arrested, faculties fired while around 130 college campuses have seen sit-in or encampments. In Columbia University, state troopers were called in after students took over and vandalised the historic Hamilton Hall. Nemat Shafik, the university president, has asked the cops to remain on campus through at least May 17 to prevent more such incidents.

What do the protestors want? They want Israel to immediately stop the Gaza offensive, America to stop sending weapons, give amnesty to protestors and their universities to declare their endowments or financial ties with Israel, if any, and sever ties with companies that profit from or have ties with the Jewish state.

The Columbia University ‘Apartheid Divest’ group, in its list of demands, stated that the college should divest “all of its finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine,” and also called for an academic boycott and ending of police presence on campus. In some cases, their boycott demand extends to tech giants such as Google or Amazon.

The irony is telling. This explicit generational shift in attitude in the US against the democratic nation in West Asia busy fighting an existential battle needs better explanation, something the Western media has singularly failed to do.

The war has indeed thrown up horrific images of civilian casualties that are inevitable when an adversary deliberately uses civilians as human shields in a densely populated enclave. But what has prompted pampered Western youth to pick up pro-Palestinian protest as an issue central to their affirmation of identity?

One of the most heinous criminal acts in history has ironically inversed the victim-aggressor paradigm and sparked an identitarian moral panic among the progressive Left. Hamas terrorists snatched babies from cradle and put them to the sword, pumped indiscriminate bullets into youth “dancing for peace” in the middle of a desert, raped, killed and mutilated women, burnt entire families locked in their bomb shelters – their charred corpses locked in death embrace, killed unarmed civilians in wanton violence and videotaped it through bodycams for the world to witness and tremble in fear.

And yet Israel has been denied victimhood even in its deadliest hour since the Holocaust.

There is something else going on in the US, its staunchest ally whose president offered unwavering support in the wake of the tragedy. Joe Biden termed October 7 as “Israel’s 9/11” but in terms of the impact and Israel’s size, worth “fifteen 9/11s”. In Biden’s words, released in a White House statement on 18 October, “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period.”

The net result of the unadulterated evil? The American Left, led by the protesting students, has extended carte-blanche to the terrorists, blaming Israel for taking the war to the aggressors who have entrenched themselves amid the Gazan civilians to use global public opinion as a weapon for warfare. Young Americans are identifying with Palestinians, chanting “from river to the sea” and venting their fury against the state of Israel in an intense, fanatical stupor.

Antisemitic incidents in the US are up 400 per cent. Jewish students on elite campuses are at the receiving end of rising antisemitism that is quickly getting normalised. As even Ivy League colleges in the US see a rise in Jew hatred, students from Harvard, Penn, MIT, or Columbia, for example, have told Republican lawmakers at a deposition that university administrators have turned a deaf ear to their complaints, and they feel “unsafe on campus”.

CNN quoted Talia Khan, a second-year Jewish student at MIT, who is also the co-founder of the MIT Israel Alliance, as saying that “MIT has become ‘overrun with toxic antisemitism’ and by ‘terrorist supporters that directly threaten the lives of Jews on our campus… It is not overly dramatic to ask that something be done when our very existence is under threat’.”

Several university presidents have been subjected to Congressional grilling over campus antisemitism and calls for genocide of Jews, with UPenn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay tendering their resignations. These are extraordinary times.

There is a clear generational shift visible in the US where young citizens are siding with the Palestinians and even the terrorist group, Hamas, and raising slogans such as “Long live the intifada!”, “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too!”

There’s a fair bit of Qatari money sponsoring the antisemitism on American college campuses, aided by Palestinian advocacy groups and general troublemakers such as Rockefeller Brothers Fund and George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation has been running with the hare and hunting with the hound, funding Biden’s reelection bid as well as fuelling pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Chinese money seems to have also made its way into the mix, with New York Times identifying Chinese puppet Neville Roy Singham as one of the donors to the ‘cause’.

Be that as it may, that does not fully explain why students in the US are openly calling for ‘intifada’ – a genocidal call to wipe out the Jewish population amid a broader surge of antisemitic incidents. Several opinion polls indicate and reinforce the sharp generational divide in American support for Israel. The young generation, according to a recent research from Pew, are more likely to support Palestine with a third of adults under 30 saying their sympathies lie either entirely or mostly with the Palestinian people, while 14 per cent say their sympathies lie entirely or mostly with the Israeli people.

A Quinnipiac University survey finds that among voters in the 18 to 34-year bracket, “a majority (52 per cent) say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, while 29 per cent say the Israelis. This is a sharp reversal from October, when 41 per cent said the Israelis and 26 per cent said the Palestinians.”

Not just shifting of support amid indoctrinated youth amid a portrayal of Israel as a ruthless military power and a “settler-colonial” state where any terrorist attack against it by definition cannot be anything but a “decolonial pushback”, Jews themselves are being subjected to stereotypical antisemitic objectification of being all-powerful, shadowy puppet-masters pulling the diverse strings of high finance, banking industry, entertainment, or media and setting the course of global events through ‘Zionist control’ over global economy.

A broad swathe of the Democratic Left has unified its radical causes into a monoculture of identitarian politics and Israel has been identified as the signifier of oppression. In this ‘oppression Olympics’, only the ‘most oppressed’ win, and the competition is invalidated. Butchered Jewish babies or captured Jewish women have no chance to get a shot at victimhood.

Dismantling of ‘Zionist superstructure’ has such a nice ring to it that activists from climate, immigration, labour or other myriad triggers have all hitched their boat to the Palestinian cause without even a perfunctory idea about the complexity of the issue where they have taken a resolute stand.

On climate activist Greta Thunberg wearing a keffiyeh and identifying with the pro-Palestinian cause, Mary Harrington writes in Unherd, “a similar mimetic quality can also be seen in the current American Palestine protests, where participants often seem hazy at best about what they’re actually protesting, and mostly there for the vibe. In this sense, it seems less a programme, than a sensibility: a social norm of rebelliousness, sanctified by idealism and spread mimetically, that expresses a secularised version of the Puritan style of faith and has become central to identity-formation.”

If journalism is the first draft of history, Western media has failed to grasp the winds of change, much less present a cogent narrative to describe the shift in their own society, preferring to instead sermonise, bully or bluster their way to shape the discourse in democracies of the Global South such as India and attempt to influence India’s electoral exercises.

At one level this may be construed as an example of American statecraft, as I have elucidated in a recent column . And External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s point, that Western countries, having influenced the world for the last 200 years, cannot rid themselves of their “old habits so easily”.

It is primarily a failure of the American media that still enjoys tremendous discourse power and sets global narratives. Its inability to reckon with, explain or even identify the causes behind the disaffection of American youth who seem to be gravitating towards what Harrington calls “a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause” as the signifier for identity-formation, reeks of a deep-rooted cynicism. The mainstream media in America is simply happy being an extended arm of the deep state and the perma-bureaucracy.