October 7 Revealed Snowflakes Has Genocidal Streak When It Comes to Jews | opinions

The following is adapted from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: October 7, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization. Buy it on Amazon here.

We live in an age where you can get rejected on campus because a woman doesn’t have a penis, but you’ll be fine if you say “Kill all the Jews.”

We live in a time when asking students where they come from is considered a racial micro-aggression, but hollering “Globalize intifada” after an intifada in which thousands of Jews were killed is apparently okay.

We live in a culture where students will demand access to a “safe space”, complete with Play Doh and bean bags, if the speaker they hate is on campus. But the disciples who are afraid of words like the rest of us who are afraid of death will be happy with Israel’s invasion and the killing of hundreds of its citizens.

There is no such thing as a “safe space” for Jews, it seems.

This was one of the most startling revelations after the Hamas pogrom against Israel on October 7 last year: that snowflakes have a secret killing streak.

The student activists who cry because they feel “erased” if you fail to use their preferred pronouns seem to have no problem with the literal elimination of hundreds of citizens of the Jewish State.

Overnight, students who have bristled at such “micro-aggressions” as “Don’t you want a family?” (it is an unforgivable act of “heteronormativity”, to assume that everyone wants a family) they are happy because of the massacre of entire families in southern Israel.

Just two weeks after the pogrom, students at George Washington University painted the slogan “Glory to our martyrs” outside the campus building. That is, glory to the multitudes that have invaded the Jewish nation to rape, kidnap, and kill innocent people.

This is a university whose list of microaggressions includes asking Asians for help with math problems (which acts as “implicit bias”, apparently) and using the words “When I look at you, I don’t see. color” (this mini-rage “rejects people who have racial/ethnic experiences of color,” it seems).

After the pogrom, George Washington was shaken by a direct pro-Hamas protest. In one, the crowd chanted: “We will honor all our martyrs!” This is a university whose sports team nickname—”Colonial”—had to be changed because the student body found it too offensive. Earlier in 2023, before October 7, the campus community demanded a “reckoning” with the “fraught history” of this painful nickname. But just a few months later, he honored Hamas.

The disciples who have felt wounded by words like the literal wounds of the Jews.

Other student activists descended on the office from New York Times to decry “reporting (of) Hamas rape.” Palestinian Youth Movement student activists took over multiple‘ lobby and condemned the newspaper for spreading “lies” about Hamas carrying out sexual assaults on October 7.

This is the kind of progressive student who has been complaining for years about “unwanted sexual advances.” But now they provide moral cover for an army of anti-Semitic rapists. It seems that he badly flirted with a drunken jock is an intolerable instance of “rape culture,” but the violent degradation of Jewish women by Hamas bigots can only be written off as “lying.”

As of October 7, students at the University of Pennsylvania invited to campus a “solidarity activist” who had tweeted “Hamas killed the dog” in response to a photo of a 22-year-old woman killed on the site. Nova music festival. Campus activists who once feared a man’s hand on their shoulder now rubbed shoulders with a man who saluted the killing of a young Jewish woman.

At Harvard University, on October 7 itself, 31 student communities published a letter saying that Israel is “fully responsible” for all the “violence that occurs.” Even as women and children are killed, these privileged Ivy Leaguers absolve the killers of responsibility and say Israel “is the only one to blame.”

This is the kind of student who resents “victim-blaming.” It’s anger, say progressive activists, saying “victims rather than perpetrators are responsible for attacks.” But that’s exactly what the Harvard poseurs are doing – blaming Israel for its own brutalization at the hands of an invading racist army. It’s less politics than “They get it” dolled up as progressive activism.

After October 7, every rule of political correctness was thrown out on campus. Suddenly, you can attack as much as you want, as long as your target is the Jewish State or the Jewish people.

In the Gaza encampment at Columbia University, a placard called the Jewish people the “pigs of the earth.” The Jews were told to “Go back to Poland.” A protester in a keffiyeh held a sign with an arrow pointing at a group of Jews and describing them as Hamas’ “next target”.

A campus activist who has raised his hand through micro-aggressions asks people where they are now actually wanting the death of Jews.

Jewish students at Penn were told to go back to “f**king Berlin where you’re from.” Penn acknowledged the rise in outright antisemitism, including the daubing of “swastikas and hateful graffiti” on university property, as well as “chants at public meetings … that glorify the atrocities of Hamas terrorists.” It felt, wrote Noah Rubin New York Postthat our “elite school” has become “Hamas University.”

The rise of “Hamas University” after October 7 confirmed that Jews, and Jews only, were denied access to the “safe space.” They are denied the protections of political correctness enjoyed by other groups—African-Americans, Muslims, and trans people.

This is discrimination in the purest sense: Where other minority groups are forced from every slur, however imaginary, the Jews are expected to be insulted, harassed, and told that their homeland is a worthy “pig” nation. destroyed.

Understandably, some responded to this racist distinction by calling for safe spaces to be opened to Jews as well. For Jews to be shielded from hate in the way of other students. That would be wrong. For the rise in campus antisemitism is not a glitch in the ideology of safe space; that’s the function. It confirms that it is a safe place, far from bringing peace to the campus, it actually nurtures grievances, hatred, even violence.

In the act of promising students protection from “transgressive” people, safe spaces also put those transgressive people in the crosshairs. In the act of portraying a certain idea as the potential eraser of your entire identity, the safe space evokes fear and hatred of that idea. And, by extension, the catchers.

It is the very ideology of progressive censorship that condemns the Jews to a new round of racial hatred, by branding them as a privileged group whose Zionist beliefs cause offense and even harm to less privileged groups.

Instead of demanding the inclusion of Jews in a safe space, we should demand that all students be freed from this zone of infantilizing paranoia and intolerance. Gentiles and Jews alike would benefit from withering away from the progressive hysterias of the 21st century campus.

Brendan O’Neill is Spiked’s chief political writer. His new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.

The opinion expressed in this article is only from the author himself.