The anti-Israel student protesters bringing the United States’
top universities to a standstill may be rabidly fanatical, crashingly ignorant, and possibly even a tiny bit anti-Semitic, but I will say one thing for them: they’ve just provided us with
the most hilarious video clip you’ll see all year.
The clip in question, which is going viral on social media, consists of an interview at Columbia University, New York, with a PhD English student – who, in her own words, is writing a dissertation on “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination”.
In recent days, however, I don’t suppose she’s had much time to pursue this vital line of inquiry. For Left-wing students at Columbia, there have been far more pressing matters to attend to. Such as illegally occupying a key university building as part of their protests against Israel.
It isn’t just
the Israelis who have displeased them, though. They’re also angry with the university authorities. Because, apparently, those authorities have failed to supply them with food and drink to keep them going during their protest.
“Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill?” wails the student in the clip. “This is, like, basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for.”
In summary: she seems to think that people who illegally occupy a building are entitled to be fed by the people who own it. Perhaps burglars should try this argument.
Break into a house during the night, and then moan to the media that the owners didn’t invite them to stay for breakfast.
In their defence, the student says that her comrades “pay for a meal plan here”. No doubt they do. Equally, though, other students pay to be educated. Presumably they, too, are entitled to get what they’ve paid for. But they won’t be able to get it if mobs of
Israel-hating hipsters prevent them from attending their lectures.
At any rate, this delightful young woman has given us some glorious entertainment. I love everything about that clip. The pomposity. The entitlement. The spectacular lack of self-awareness. And, in particular, the obscene use of the term “humanitarian aid”, when, far from facing starvation, she and her middle-class friends could easily toddle across the road to buy snacks at the nearest bodega.
Come to think of it, I suspect the reason she used that term is the same reason that so many white, Western protesters go on marches wearing Palestinian-style headdresses while calling for “intifada”. It’s all a form of role-play. Just as
little children love pretending to be princesses or pirates, so cossetted Left-wing students love pretending to be persecuted minorities. It’s yet another way to demonstrate how wonderfully empathetic and compassionate they are. (
See? We feel your pain. We need humanitarian aid, too. We were so busy protesting yesterday, we missed lunch!)
Then again, the rest of us shouldn’t laugh too hard. These
pampered narcissists might not be able to influence events in the Middle East. But they’ll almost certainly influence our future. After all, they’re students at Ivy League universities. America’s educational elite. Which means that, in due course, they’ll be strolling into America’s top jobs, and taking leadership positions in business, the arts, education and politics.
This should worry us all. Because if these mollycoddled brats are America’s future, the West truly is doomed.
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