Fury on US campuses

The college kids are revolting (or some of them are) and US campuses are racked with protests the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Vietnam War.

It makes for good pictures — screaming students being carted off by brutish cops. Very Instagrammable (“And what did you do in the peace of 2024, mommy? Oh, I was arrested by the pigs because I screamed for Israel to be exterminated ...”). Also it’s safer — for the reporters and the students — than being in or near the actual war in Gaza.

Let’s get one thing straight. Israel’s military campaign in the enclave is obscene and heavy-handed and it needs to stop. The death toll and suffering is off the scale.

But the fury on US campuses doesn’t hide the ugly truth that this isn’t just about the Israeli Defence Forces battering Gaza with heavy weapons, but a seething hatred of Jewish people.

“Go back to Poland,” some have screamed at Jewish students, displaying, if nothing else, an expensive waste of a college education.

Poland. The country where the Nazis built the death camps, away from the soil of the Reich. (Poland’s Jewish population was, of course, all but obliterated during World War 2.)

Now US students are wearing keffiyehs and chanting “Globalise the intifada” and, in New York, hurling slurs at the police, because a uniform with a gun must be a fascist pig, right?

The cops, so far, seem to be showing remarkable restraint, picking up the protesters almost as if they were tired retriever puppies. No baton charges, no quirts, no rubber bullets, no students being hurled into Casspirs, not to be seen for months and sometimes years.

The longer it goes on, the bigger the chance that someone is going to get hurt or killed and it will be Kent State all over again and student rage will be boundless, and Gaza’s suffering will drop off the front page. Again.