Jewish students lock themselves in Cooper Union school library during anti-Israel rally
Jewish students at Cooper Union lock themselves in a school library as protesters moved through the hallways on Wednesday, banging on doors and windows.
In the almost 50 years that I have been alive, Americans have been so protected from evil, that many can no longer recognize it.
In that time the United States has faced no sustained terrorism, it has not been a war zone, by and large when we have witnessed atrocities it has been thousands of miles away and from the comfort of our couches.
The shock of 9/11, for those old enough to remember it, was rooted in how unthinkable it was, a Pearl Harbor in Lower Manhattan, nothing like it had ever happened before, and importantly, hasn’t since.
For Israelis, 10/7, was not unthinkable, its scale and savagery was unprecedented to be sure, but for decades they have stared down suicide bombings and rocket attacks, they recognize the evil depravity of Hamas’s actions.
I can remember a time when nobody outside the farthest fringe in this country would rationalize the murder, rape and torture of civilians for reasons of social or geopolitical justice, and yet today, such rationalizations are all around us.
Democrat Rashida Tlaib, a sitting member of Congress from Michigan spreads Hamas propaganda on social media, elite law school students refuse to condemn the atrocities of October 7th, thousands have taken to the streets, seemingly to celebrate the murder of Jewish children.
On Wednesday, Jewish students at Cooper Union in New York City had to be barricaded in a library to protect them from pro-Hamas protestors, eventually evacuated through tunnels.
In the United States of America.
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Meanwhile, the New York Times has astonishingly defended its decision to rehire journalist Soliman Hijjy, who has openly praised Adolf Hitler on multiple occasions, to cover a war involving a Jewish state.
Apparently they chatted with him and he understood their concerns, that was all it took.
In the America in which I was born, when the Americans who liberated Nazi death camps were in middle age, Hitler and Nazism signified evil so terrible that nothing could be said in its defense, no equivocation was allowed.
This is in large part because those men and women had paid the personal price of war to defeat an evil regime and many witnessed its horrors in the rotting flesh.
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What is key to understand is that the privilege of moral relativism is afforded only to those who are safe from the effects of evil moral choices.
These college students and protestors pay no price for their callous support of murderous terrorists, to them it may as well be a midnight game of Risk in the dorm, with America always as the bad guy.
This is how bizarre absurdities like "Queers for Palestine," come to be.
From the safety of the West Village it's easy to waive a rainbow flag and chant "from the river to the sea," in Gaza just being gay can get you arrested or worse.
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The irony of course is that these pampered and protected elites and activists live in nearly perfect safety precisely because of the American power and values that they so detest.
Americans of good conscience must entirely reject moral equivocation in the face of the pure evil executed by Hamas just as our society would have a half century ago.
Good and evil exist in the world, to refuse to name them, to give comfort and succor to terror is to betray the generations of Americans who fought for a more moral, just and equal society.
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It is right to shame those who support such evil, it is just to rescind job offers and to protect our institutions from those who justify Hamas’s atrocities.
After all, students at elite law schools go on to become United States attorneys, and federal judges, if they can support the massacre of babies in the name of social justice, is there any doubt they would violate the rights of Americans to achieve it?
This is a moral line that requires consequences for those who cross it.
163 years ago, on the eve of a civil war to end the evil of slavery, Abraham Lincoln took to the stage of that same Cooper Union where Jews were rounded up this week.
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He ended his famous address with these words:
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
That duty begins with calling Hamas and their actions what they actually are, the true and vicious face of evil.