Snowflakes and Divas Railing Against Israel at Columbia

The Motive Forces Prompting Student Protests against Israel, With a Special Emphasis on White Kids from Comfortable Homes and Arab Girls.

By

David Gottfried

Why do Ivy League Students evince such a predilection toward impassioned Left of Center protest.    What makes them imagine themselves little Abbie Hoffmans or La Passionarias¹. Why do they run through the streets, alit with an egotistical exuberance that tells them that they are young, gifted, beautiful  and that the better angels of the universe praise their name.

Does their intelligence bestow on them an alleged altruism that makes them care about  Palestinians.  I think not.  Bernie Madoff had a keen intellect, and he stole 50 billion dollars.  Adolf Hitler’s intelligence was relentless, but it was guided by a rabid, satanic ethos.   Yours truly has done dazzlingly well on IQ tests, but a lot of people consider me a cantankerous pain in the butt. 

Has the consumption of art, elegance and stately recitations of august blank verse ennobled their souls.   Certainly not.  I don’t know of any scientific studies of the morals of scholars of the Arts and letters, but the Marquis de Sade, Ezra Pound and Norman Mailer never struck me as being particularly good-natured. 

Do you propose that the study of the natural sciences instills sensitivity and grace.   Of course, such a supposition is farcical:  Think of the invention of nuclear weapons, the zyklon B of the death camps, artificial intelligence destined to make us even less human than we are today, and the Tuskegee experiment in which American blacks were denied treatment for syphilis.

Clearly, youthful dalliances with the expressionistic, impassioned left are not inspired by some blessed stirring of moral feeling or romantic goodwill.   

Many Student Activists are Relishing a Delayed Adolescent Rebellion  

Many Ivy League students were pacific, retiring, shy nerds throughout their adolescence.  They shunned rowdiness, rebelliousness and were regimented little runts devoting all their time toward getting good grades and worshipping at the altar of the SATs.     

Their less fortunate academic peers had the sense to have  a good time.  They partied hearty, raised hell, and insouciantly flouted prevailing standards of etiquette, propriety and sobriety.  As these less academically gifted people became adults, they became more serious and stopped acting like frenetic little children.

However, the reverse transpires among gifted college kids:  They leave home and go to the university where a multiplicity of vices are commended as liberatingly transgressive.   They are away from the parents who sheltered them, and in the university, they are treated to ideals, which venerate rebellion, that academia has lauded for decades.

I once read that the art world and academia have, for about a hundred and fifty years -- or ever since Impressionistic paintings shocked the Paris artworld and were consigned to the “Salon de refuse” -- been enamored of the notion that one must “epater les bourgeois,” or shock the bourgeois. 

This desire to flout  convention and shock respectable people is evident  throughout academia and the arts:   In Marcel Duchamp, whose art work seems designed to humiliate or harass the presumably cultured middle class people who will see his works (I remember one piece of art with a caption which advised the viewer to look at a painting/sculpture  with one eye closed for an hour); in DH Lawrence who whose “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was an Adulterous Garden of Eden; in Nietzsche who counsels us to chuck Judeo Christian ethics; in Freud, who argues that neurosis is created by the restraints of civilization; in Karl Marx who thunders that capitalists are artful, conniving thieves; and in the witchy, withering portents of doom in Andrew Kopkind:  “The Civil War, and the Foreign One, will murder bourgeois liberalism in its official robes.” (The New York Review of Books, August 1967).

Two mighty factors converge in the minds of bright college students:   A) They are away from home and the restraints and phobias that families will instill and B) they are given a steady intellectual diet that in the aggregate, quite ineluctably, makes one a Yoko Ono wannabe.  

And these Yoko Ono wannabes make Yoko Ono a veritable model and melody of the mellifluous.  When they are female, they remind me of Elton John’s “Dirty Little Girl.”  

When they are male, I think that Billy Joel disposed of them quite eloquently in “Captain Jack”

The Special Case of Affluent White Kids

When wealthy white students engage in leftist protests, they are feeling their oats vis a vis their entrepreneurial or professional parents.  Their rich parents often “gave them everything,” creature comforts, a fine education, and doting and often excessive solicitousness which very often veered into nagging or babying infantilization.   In other words, the more their parents did, the smaller they became.    The mightiness of the parents underscored the impotence of the kids.   

The white snowflake of a child therefore can’t wait to shove a knife into his wealthy parents, their monied background, his sheltered status, his petunia-like, relatively pussified personality.   You might think I am over doing it by using the word pussified, but read Eldrige Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice,” and his discussion of white male envy of perceived black male virility or Lou Reed’s song, “I wanna be black”:

I got this notion from Bruno Bettelheim. a psychoanalyst who ran the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School for disturbed children, who said that affluent student protestors, in the 1960’s, were expressing Oedipal hostility toward their affluent parents.

These Protests enable Arab Girls to Have their Cake and Eat it Too:  They show Fealty to Arabs and Islam while Acting Like Jane Fonda and not at all like an Arab female.   

I haven’t conducted any formal research on the issue, but it has been my impression that many of the most ardent advocates for the so-called Palestinians, on college campuses, are young Arab girls.  They are often little wisps of a person, standing barely 5 foot tall or less, yet their screaming voices make them stand-out like red pepper flakes in an otherwise bland meal.  

I think that these young Arab girls are such loud and ardent protestors because these protests enable them to have the time of their life.  In traditional backgrounds, children are most subservient to their parents.  The parents do not worry about finding activities which will enrich a child’s self-esteem; the parents worry if their children are not dutifully cooking supper. Furthermore, in the Arab world, women are serfs laboring under the whip of a male nobility.  Hence, a little Arab girl, in a traditional Muslim household, is manacled to an ancient morality that brooks no feminist dissent.

But when she screams and shouts for Palestine, she is belting-out the rage she has suppressed though twenty years of childhood.   Her primary antagonists are not Israel and Zionism; they are her mother and her father and her Faith. 

She is having her cake and eating it too:  She is fighting the perceived enemies of Muslim, but she does not act like a Muslim girl while hysterically cursing Jews in Columbia University. 

As such, she is experiencing the same exhilaration that young Nazi thugs savored when they satisfied two antithetical impulses:  Young Nazi thugs were fighting for Germany, but while fighting for Germany they were not compelled to behave like traditional Germans, hyper-regimented and obsequious toward authority; rather, they experienced the savage and sadistic glee of maniacal mayhem devoid of all traditional German order, such as the quasi spontaneous riots of Kristallnacht, the sudden seizure  of Viennese Jews from their homes and the demand that these Jews scrub the streets with toothbrushes, etc.  

The Students are so Bewitched by their Romantic Political Faith that they haven’t Bothered to Notice the Demerits in the Arab Argument.  

There are so many reasons why the Arabs are wrong about the issue, and I am not going to repeat what I have said in prior posts. For an enumeration of those points validating the Israeli position, I refer you to a prior substack article ²  In this essay, I will proffer an argument that I never mentioned before and that I don’t think anyone else has posited. 

If China were to stop imprisoning Muslims, in Western China, in concentration camps, the liberation of those poor souls would not endanger China as China vastly outnumbers the Muslim minority.   

If Lebanon and Egypt were to stop persecuting their Christian minorities, Muslim power in Lebanon and Egypt would not be endangered as the Muslim populations in those states far outweigh the Christians.    

However, if Israel, a  nation outnumbered by the Arabs by one hundred to one, and with one five hundredth of the land mass of the Arab nations, made any more territorial concessions to the Arabs she would be endangered, and probably largely slaughtered. ‘(Besides, she is not persecuting minorities as are China, Lebanon and Egypt.)

And what concessions do they demand ?  Do they want Gaza to be free ?  Israel already freed Gaza and not only withdrew its military from Gaza, but also forced all Jews to leave Gaza, in 2004.  And the Gazans have been using their territory as a launch pad to strike Israel ever since Israel withdrew. 

Furthermore, before Israel gave the Arabs Gaza, they built factories in Gaza so the Arabs would have an income. When Israel did this, they did this as part of a peace accord.  And the Arabs have been violating that peace accord from the day it was signed.    And when Hama killed over 1200 Israelis on October 7, they drove nails into women’ s vaginas.

Do they want us to give up even more territory.  At present, one can drive from Tel Aviv to Gaza in 90 minutes.   If we give up any more territory, we will have no depth, no insulation and the first lunge of an invading army could lacerate Israel’s heart on the very first day of battle.  

For example, at the start of the German invasion of Russia, in World War Two,  Panzer divisions were moving East at the rate of about 40 miles a day.  Russia did not fall because when the offensive began, German forces were more than 1000 miles from Moscow.  

However, about 2 miles North of Tel Aviv, the West Bank is only 9 miles from the Sea.  If Israel gave up the West Bank, she would be 9 miles thick, and the Arabs will realize their oft repeated threat to drown the Jews in the Sea.   Why must Israel hold on to the territory.   She is holding onto it for dear life.        

Peace will only come when, as Golda Meir sagely said, the Arabs love their children more than they hate us. 

1. A communist leader in the Spanish Civil War

2.