As Palestine protests spread, the West is devouring itself

Universities are often where dark cultural movements draw their first breaths. In Germany, Nazism was embraced by students and given intellectual ballast by lecturers. As early as 1920, two German academics published a book entitled Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living. Six years later – with Hitler’s election still seven years in the future – the National Socialist German Students’ Union was formed.

In the 1960s, the engine of Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution was China’s youth. The Red Guards paramilitary movement was led by a vanguard of students. In 1979, when American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution, it was once again students to blame. We live today with the menace of the theocratic regime they midwifed.

With the first quarter of the current century almost behind us, it is the turn of our universities. After decades of saturation with toxic and abstruse ideologies, they are revealing just how far they have travelled along the path of anti-democratic fundamentalism. The phenomenon that I have come to call the new radicalism – “woke plus Islamism”– has long been brewing in those ivory towers. For years, people laughed it off. Then came October 7.

We know that the brains of these children have been addled by social media. According to Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University, TikTok offers “52 videos that are pro-Hamas or pro-Palestine for every one served on Israel”. But where does credulity end and repulsiveness begin? When does naivete cease to be an excuse? Is it too much to expect the hard-Left Jews in these encampments, who provide an alibi to racist demagogues, to visualise the hand-rubbing in the shadows beneath Rafah?

By comparison with their malevolent 20th-century forebears, today’s youngsters are practically illiterate. But one could place side by side a photograph of Nazis linking hands to keep Jews out of Vienna university – where 2,700 Jewish students and academics were expelled in 1938 – and a video of masked Columbia students blocking entry to “Zionists”. One could ask if the fanaticism was not of a piece.

We have arrived at the culmination of decades of Critical Race Theory being pumped into our young people’s brains by academics who inherited their radicalism from the Cold War. Central to the dogma is the notion that equality is a cover for white supremacy, so society must instead be structured advantageously to non-whites. That this will lead us into a perpetual state of identity warfare – a future fast becoming reality – is of no concern to these shrieking revolutionaries.

That the “anti-racist” movement is a Trojan horse for the oldest hatred, revamped as Israelophobia, is now blindingly obvious. Starting on campus, our culture is eating itself. The Jews are just the first course. Or rather, the Jews plus the silent majority of decent Britons. When does modesty become cowardice?

Overseas, we face an “axis of resistance” as Russia, China, Iran and authoritarian states form up together. At home, we face an axis of radicalism, with different factions devoted to race, climate change, transgenderism and Islamism rallying to the Palestinian flag. The “queers for Palestine” movement speaks volumes; this was never about real-life Palestine. It’s counter-cultural rebellion at home.

But the idiocy of these people doesn’t make them less useful. Which brings me back to Gaza. Meeting with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh last month, Iran’s supreme leader said: “We have, so far, successfully won the media and PR wars, and have managed to change public opinion across the globe. We must continue with this.” In November, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said: “We must salute all those who took to the street in support and solidarity with the Palestinians, from all over the world.” In Gaza, signs were held up paying tribute to campus protests.

It’s myopia that’s the problem, isn’t it? That and the narcissism. But the danger is real.