Globalizing the Intifada Threatens Western Civilization

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“Globalize the Intifada.”  This is the malevolent mantra, using the Arabic word for “uprising” or “struggle,” that Hamas supporters in America invoke to justify illegal encampments, vandalism and property damage, verbal harassment, and even physical assaults against persons in their path.  Their objective is the destruction of Israel, and once that is accomplished, the transformation of America into something resembling an Islamic Caliphate.  Recently, this endeavor has adopted fire-bombing as its tactic of choice.  Just as Hamas burned to death Israeli babies on October 7, so, too, have their supporters in America attempted the same to an 88 year-old Holocaust survivor in Colorado and to the Governor of Pennsylvania, who is Jewish, and his family.

That much of this criminality has occurred on American college campuses is because many who inhabit these campuses – faculty, administrators, and students – either support it or refuse to condemn it.  This, in turn, is because the prevailing ethos in academia reduces the complexities of politics to a crude dichotomy in which everyone who is white is an oppressor of everyone who is not.  Because most Jews in America are white, they are oppressors notwithstanding the long history of anti-semitism in America. Through this conjunction of white Americans and American Jews, those in academia who accept it hate America for the same reason they hate Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people. Both, in their view, are irreversibly evil and morally unsalvageable.

On my own campus, Central Connecticut State University, this hatred of all things American and a healthy dose of hostility to Israel are virtually a requirement for graduation.  Although the president of CCSU, Zulma Toro, to her great credit authorized the creation of a committee on anti-semitism shortly after Hamas began its genocidal war against Israel in 2023, the university requires students to take a course in “Social Justice” – a seemingly neutral term that disguises its real objective.  As expressed on the webpage of the John Lewis Institute of Social Justice, established at CCSU after the George Floyd riots in 2020, it is the extirpation of “inequality and racism in American society.”

The intended result are cadres of graduates committed to making the personal politics of their professors the politics of America.  This is not just a violation of students’ academic freedom, which includes the avoidance of ideological indoctrination.  It is also the consequence of a profound misreading of recent history.  America is not systemically racist.  Nor is Israel an apartheid regime.  It is instead the most tolerant and democratic country in the Middle East.  Homosexuals are thrown from roofs in Gaza and hanged from cranes in Iran.  Israel holds Gay Pride parades.

I cannot overstate the number of students who tell me in confidence and in whispered tones that their professors devote a percentage of their classes to proselytizing students in this left-wing politics that conjoins hatred of Israel and hatred of America. The preferred term for this commingling is “intersectionality.”  In its warped view of reality, it melds the evils of America imperceptibly into the mirage of the “settler colonialism” that ostensibly explains the original sin of the establishment of Israel.

But there is an additional enemy of those in academia who hate Israel and America in equal measure that even their most vocal critics almost always ignore: Western Civilization, to the eradication of which the execrable “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” is explicitly committed. By this one means the civilization of which American politics and culture are both a product and an essential part.  Among the attributes of Western Civilization that make it different from, indeed preferable to all others in the world are individual rights, representative democracy, separation of religious and secular authority making religious toleration possible, and a belief in the equality of everyone as creations of God.  It is these virtues that enabled the West, for all its failings, to end slavery, defeat Nazism, weaken Soviet Communism to where its internal contradictions destroyed it, and through an Industrial Revolution provide prosperity to more people than anywhere else and by any other civilization in the world. Indeed, much of what other civilizations have accomplished has been by borrowing all that is best in the West.

Hamas and its supporters are not merely oblivious to this.  They are unalterably hostile to it.

At stake in preventing the globalization of the intifada is nothing less than the survival of Western Civilization.

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Jay Bergman is Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars.