Get the New York Times a fainting couch, some students said something!

Did you hear about the latest troubling development in Israel’s war on Gaza? The New York Times is alarmed. So alarmed d that this is the first story about Gaza on the front page today:

Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas

Columbia University Apartheid Divest has withdrawn an apology it made last spring for a member who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

The pro-Palestinian group that sparked the student encampment movement at Columbia University in response to the Israel-Hamas war is becoming more hard-line in its rhetoric, openly supporting militant groups fighting Israel and rescinding an apology it made after one of its members said the school was lucky he wasn’t out killing Zionists.

“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, said in its statement revoking the apology.

I’m not going to bother with the rest, you get the idea, I can already gauge my future levels of annoyance at the nationwide hysteria this will spawn. My future levels of annoyance will be high. I will say though that giving it this level of attention is pretty much bound to make someone do something stupid in a country with ten trillion guns, so, thanks for that.

This will, of course, be chalked up to anti-Semitism, of course. We can tell ourselves that but it wouldn’t be true. It’s just not. Yes, anti-semitism is nefarious and sneaky and is always there under the surface. It’s on top of the surface among the right-wing Trump humpers who need to blame someone for their real and imagined grievances; a historic parallel to the scapegoating and hatred of Jews in early 20th century Europe. But you will not convince me that student elites are anti-semitic. Not because of some moral superiority to Trump supporters, but because Jewish people in the US code as white. There’s just no “otherness” to “other.” Your average student at an elite school has probably been to a million bar mitzvas and most of their close friends are Jewish. Generating hatred of Jews in that cohort would be like trying to get drunk on water.

Here’s what’s going on. There are the relentless daily images of unimaginable atrocities, of course. Unimaginable. You don’t have the imagination to guess what the Israeli’s will come up with next. Remember back in the day when the world was so shocked Israel bombed a hospital that there were relatively vigorous efforts to blame Hamas for the attack?