Boot on the university protests

Yet more Washington Post content for you:  I find it very hard to find any fault in Max Boot's criticism  of the  pro-Palestinian university protests.   I'll extract some parts:

In a 1988 academic journal, two scholars who studied the impact of the Vietnam-era protests concluded that “anti-war protesters were viewed negatively by the great majority of Middle Americans” and that “anti-war protesters probably increased support for the war.” Indeed, revulsion over campus unrest helped rally the “silent majority” behind President Richard M. Nixon and allowed him to keep the war in Vietnam going for four more futile years in a failed bid for “peace with honor.”

 So, too, today’s pro-Palestinian protesters are their own worst enemies; they have even been reenacting some of the excesses of the past, such as briefly occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last week before police cleared them out. The students are not succeeding in forcing universities to divest from Israel, and even if they were, it wouldn’t have much impact on Israel’s economy.

Instead, the demonstrations are making an in-kind contribution to former president Donald Trump’s campaign by fostering an erroneous impression that the country is out of control and requires his authoritarian rule to restore “law and order.” The damage will only grow if demonstrators disrupt this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August as they did the one there in 1968.

I particularly liked this part, about the stupid "settler" rhetoric that we also see gushing from dubious academics in Australia who couldn't find anything useful to do apart from organising tiny conferences for themselves and writing the next application for funding from the ARC:

The protesters’ agenda does not end in the Middle East; indeed, the movement’s ideologues see Israel as merely an “imperial outpost in the Arab world,” even though Jews have lived in the area since antiquity. The Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto proclaims: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawai’i, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.”

Reading this politically correct claptrap, I was left with many questions, beginning with: What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was a name used by some indigenous groups for Central America and North America, but that only raises another question: Who do the students want to liberate “Turtle Island” from? Assuming that most of them aren’t Native Americans, aren’t they occupiers, too? Many of the other territories listed are just as puzzling — who, exactly, is occupying Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Haiti, Cuba or Korea (either North or South)? I can guess who is supposedly oppressing Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but I’m at a loss to say what this oppression consists of. Too much tourism?

Just as notable are the omissions — there is no call to liberate Ukrainian territory from Russian occupation, the Uyghurs from Chinese imperialism, Syria from Bashar al-Assad’s bloody reign or North Korea from Kim Jong Un’s Stalinist police state. This is not an objective list of global injustices; it is a grab bag of far-left grievances that includes trendy but vacuous calls for “creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization.”