Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society, by Ron Unz

Notwithstanding every effort to disparage the college students protesting American and Israeli policies in Gaza, the outrage continues to mount among those not slavishly devoted to Israel. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

I think the striking events we have witnessed in American society over the last few months—and especially the last few days—are best understood if we consider a shrewd observation widely misattributed to Voltaire:

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who are not allowed to criticize.

From the years of my childhood I’d always been aware that political activism and protests were a regular feature of college life, with the 1960s movement against our Vietnam War representing one of its peaks, an effort widely lauded in our later textbooks and media accounts for its heroic idealism. During the 1980s I remember seeing a long line of crudely constructed shanties protesting South African Apartheid that spent weeks occupying the edges of the Harvard Yard or perhaps it was the Stanford Quad, and I think around the same time other shanties and protesters at UCLA maintained a long vigil in support of the Jewish Refusedniks of the USSR. Political protests seemed as much a normal aspect of college years as final exams and had largely replaced the hazing rituals and wild pranks of traditional fraternities, which were increasingly vilified as politically incorrect by hostile social censors among the students and faculty.

Over the last decade or so, the Black Lives Matter movement raised such nationwide protests by college students to new heights, both on and off campus, often involving large marches, sit-ins, or vandalism, and this was possibly propelled by the increasing influence of smartphones and social media. Meanwhile, the mainstream media regularly praised and promoted this “racial justice movement,” which reached its sharp peak following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Soon afterward, a massive wave of generally youthful political protests, riots, and looting engulfed some 200 cities across our entire nation, the worst urban unrest since the late 1960s. But unlike during that earlier era, most of our establishment media and political class fiercely denounced as outrageous any suggestions that the police be deployed to quell that violence. Indeed, in many or most cases local law enforcement stood down and did nothing, even as some of their political masters loudly raised the outcry “Defund the Police!”

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