My latest: the Infant-fada’s winners and losers

Who benefits from these metastasizing campus encampments? Who loses?

The losers are easy to spot. They’re the families who scrimped and saved and borrowed to send junior to an Ivy League school – only to learn that he/she/they have adopted Yasir Arafat’s fashion stylings, and are sleeping through final exams in a tent beside a guy who now calls himself “ISIS Bro.”

The losers also include the university presidents, who fret about “free speech” while losing  scads of support from alumni, public opinion, GOP congressmen, new students and assorted millionaires/billionaires with big social media followings.

And the losers also include (sadly, unfairly) Joe Biden, who is in danger of being defeated by the same addled crew who tipped the scales against Hillary Clinton in the electoral college in 2016 – clueless, gormless Bernie Sanders-loving Gen Z crypto-fascists who blame Jews (here) for the decisions of an Israeli government (way over there).

The winners are equally easy to spot.

As “encampments” spread at American and Canadian post-secondary institutions – and we use quotation marks around “encampments,” here, because they’re actually illegal occupations which claim to oppose illegal occupations – one group, in particular, is deliriously happy about the Infant-fada.  And that’s Iran’s H Team: Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and haters.  They’re overjoyed.

Just read up on what they’ve been saying.  Steven Stalinsky did.  He’s the executive director at the Middle East Media Research Institute in the U.S., and he published an important Wall Street Journal piece last week, titled “Who’s Behind the Anti-Israel Protests.”

It makes for fascinating reading.  A sampling of what the H Team are saying:

• Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said “we should salute…the many people demonstrating in America” because they “apply pressure on their governments.”
• Hamas’ leader abroad, Khaled Mashal, urged Jew-hating supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.”  Hamas’ friends were “the global Left,” he said, and noted that they’d shifted public opinion against Israel.
• Another Hamas leader, and former Palestine Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called the protestors “resistance abroad…strategic allies” in creating a global caliphate and “this great victory.”
• And, not be outdone, Iran’s Supreme leader and the erstwhile boss of Team H, Ali Khamenei, went to the trouble of posting in English on X alongside videos of Western student protestors: “See what is happening in the world. In Western countries, in England and France, and in states across the US itself, people are coming out in huge numbers to chant slogans against Israel and America. US & Israel’s reputation has been ruined. They truly have no solution.”

Khamenei has a “solution,” of course.  It’s the same one Adolf Hitler had.

Reached in Washington, D.C., Steve Stalinsky is clearly concerned.  What the protesters are demanding goes far beyond a ceasefire, he says.  It’s about delegitimizing and destabilizing Israel and her Western allies.

Says Stalinsky: “The rhetorical support that Hamas and Hezbollah are receiving from these protests, whether it’s a Columbia or a McGill or any university on the continent at the present time? [Iran, Hamas et al.] are surprised how successful it is. It’s not totally spontaneous, either. Some elements are, but there’s also a lot of activity that has been going on online. And there’s been years of preparation in going after this younger generation.”

The younger generations – Gen Z and Millennials – were particularly susceptible to Internet manipulation by Iran and its proxies, he says.  The pandemic pushed them online, where their favoured research methodologies became watching TikTok videos manufactured in boiler rooms in Tehran.

Western governments have been “a huge failure” in fighting the online manipulations of the forces of Jew hatred, Stalinsky says. “Hamas, Hezbollah have indicated that these protests and rallies – the histrionics coming from these students – has been very influential. And it’s mind-boggling to me.”

He continues: “There’s been failure in governments and academia. But there’s been a total failure in the media, too – because they’re not reporting how terrorist groups are openly supporting the campus protests.  And the media are not reporting what’s going on on the ground, either, about how students are expressing support for Hamas and other jihadi groups, right out in the open.”

“It’s hate speech.  And it’s being ignored by the adults.”

Time to wake up, adults.  Because you’re losing the fight, too.