University protests result of Islamist penetration puts West in danger

The wave of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli student protests that has swept through US universities, and to some extent also overflowed into Europe, is the most blatant demonstration of the failure of Western education and its training system, starting with the most powerful and influential country in the world. It aptly illustrates how in our times the worst enemy of the West, its principles and its freedoms lies within the West itself, in the nefarious ideologies that have long subjugated its ruling classes.

The fringes of students who have occupied university campuses calling for reprisals against the Jewish state, as well as attacking and discriminating against Jews as such, in order to oppose the alleged 'genocide' taking place in Gaza are in fact the worthy heirs of more than half a century of reducing western university education to an ideological indoctrination based on hatred of western civilisation itself. An indoctrination hinged on the blanket condemnation of Western history as systematically racist, exploitative, and imperialist; on preconceived third-worldism; on cultural relativism that preaches the goodness and innocence of any non-Western culture, ethnicity, customs, and religion; on the cult of the 'different' in all its varieties; on the 'identity politics' that preaches endless, inexhaustible, and arbitrary 'rights' for every minority indicated as discriminated against and deserving of moral compensation.

Those students are, in short, the children of many generations of 'bad teachers' who have turned culture and teaching into an instrument of disintegration of the principles of liberal-democratic civilised living: from Marcuse's anarchic rebellionism to Derrida's theory of 'deconstruction', to the systematic reduction of Western rationality to cultural and psychological manipulation theorised by Foucault and his many emulators. Doctrines that have become dogmas of a knowledge that is radically falsified in its premises and methods, instrumental, destructive and self-destructive.

Only this uninterrupted work of desecration and corrosion, which has imposed the reduction of civil debate to a purely emotional, moralistic, blackmailing appeal, based on victim and victimist paradigms, explains the unrealistic, hallucinated vision of international reality proposed by the lamentations of these fanatical hordes. And in particular, today, it explains their reduction of the Middle East and Arab-Israeli question to a grotesque Manichean fairy tale in which an irredeemable and usurping villain animated by 'systemic racism' (the Jewish state) would like to enslave or eliminate a population of defenceless sacrificial victims: that is, the Arabs of the Palestinian territories, portrayed tout court as the repositories of a national identity of which there is no trace in previous history.

Ignoring the constant aggression to which Israel has been subjected since its birth by those in the Arab and Islamic world who only want to destroy it and reject any possibility of peaceful coexistence, culminating in the horrendous massacre of 7 October 2023. And without realising - or perhaps realising, which would be even more chilling - that the slogan 'Free Palestine from the river to the sea' means neither more nor less that Israel should be wiped out and all its inhabitants should be massacred or deported.

This brings us to two further considerations on the historical significance of the current agitations, already defined with little imagination by some commentators with the abused formula 'the new '68'.

First, it must be said that the militancy of many factions of the left, student and otherwise, in favour of the anti-Israeli Arabs was a recurring phenomenon during the Cold War and even afterwards, always in the context of the constant demonisation of Western interests from a prejudicially 'third-worldist' point of view. But the current uprising largely transcends that legacy, as in the present context of Middle Eastern conflicts the Western youth protest movement sides, fully espousing its narrative, specifically with the most extreme faction - Hamas - most unequivocally devoted to total hatred against the Jewish state, which has just as unequivocally been the author of a cold aggression against its civilian population, carried out through atrocious and cruel mass violence, and which currently still holds dozens of hostages, whose fate is unknown, while many others have undoubtedly suffered further violence or been slaughtered.

This faction is Hamas, and with it its protectors and financiers, namely the Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship of Iran, also avowedly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. While on the contrary, various Arab states, from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to Egypt to various monarchies of the Persian Gulf, are taking a much more moderate, helpful and even to a certain extent supportive attitude towards Jerusalem, as seen in the case of the recent Iranian missile attack.

It is evident, therefore, how in many circles of the Western left today a much more hostile and intransigent attitude towards Israel is manifested than in much of the Islamic world. And how, therefore, the redde rationem between Israel, Hamas and Iran has brought to light a pre-existing violent anti-Semitism, deeply rooted in societies of European and transatlantic culture, which was thought to be outdated, but is instead more active than ever, and which is a hatred first and foremost of one's own civilisational roots.

Secondly, it should be emphasised that the current anti-Israeli movement is only partly composed of students: many of those arrested and identified in the occupations of American universities, and many of those taking part in the most aggressive demonstrations on either side of the Atlantic, are militants of extremist organisations, often precisely Islamic ones. The particular virulence of these protests (like the large anti-Israel demonstrations held in recent months in many major European cities) should therefore also be seen as the consequence of the progressive increase in the percentage of Islamic immigration in western countries, and of the fact that this increase inevitably leads to a growing incidence of those minorities in general in political life, and to a growing, aggressive pressure from the most extreme and intolerant fringes of them on issues that are sensitive to them.

This is a very dangerous trend that the Western political classes have generally underestimated, if not pretended not to see, and on which they would do well instead to think very seriously, even starting from this disturbing alarm bell, before it is too late and the situation becomes uncontrollable.