By David Rowlands. (04-24-2024)
Below: My Queen, J.K. Rowling lays out exactly how I feel when I hear certain ghosts from my past telling me, that when it comes to recent events at Yale, NYU, Columbia and other Ivy league schools, there’s nothing to see in the way of antisemitism. Everything’s sugar and spice and everything nice with nary a cloud in the sky.
But this essay isn’t just about them, however tempting that might be. No brothers and sisters, it’s more about those who are 50 or more years younger than they.
There exists today a serious problem among the young people who are participating in the recent wave of pro-Hamas demonstrations on the Ivy League campuses, which includes those who’ve been active since the beginning on 10-08, one day after the pogrom of 10-07. The blood had yet to be wiped from the walls of the Kibbutzim before these louts were in the streets protesting against Israel.
To say that they have a serious lack of knowledge when it comes to the issues involved is an understatement, and sadly, they seem to have little interest when it comes to the noble pursuit of edification. However, by all appearances, they seem to be having a good time chanting and waving flags in this season’s production of The Woke Escapades, apparently oblivious to the dark clouds appearing on the horizon.
The Russian Revolution and Lenin’s fight against Jew hate, the rise of Stalinism and fascism, the Holocaust and the second imperialist war, the mass immigrations of Jews after the war, the founding of the two states in 1948, Israel and Palestine, carved out from the British Mandate (see addendum at the end of this essay), the 1948 war, the wars of 1967 and 1973. The list is long when it comes to the things, they know nothing about.
To them, a pogrom is a kind of fruit and Arafat is a mountain range.
Speaking of Yasser Arafat, please find below a link to his speech to the United Nations, delivered early November of 1974. I don’t endorse every aspect of his presentation, but I post it to provide a sharp contrast to the things that pass for understanding today.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat%27s_1974_UN_General_Assembly_speech
Below: 1930’s. Nazis in Germany block the entrance to a library, not allowing Jews to enter. What began as a speech and a chant ended in the construction of gas chambers as the world economic system collapsed, and the consolidation of the Stalinist murder machine left the working masses defenseless.
Today, in the United States and the western countries, the situation is more like the 1930’s than the 1970’s.
It’s not entirely the fault of the youth, however, some of whom I’m sure have good intentions. The revolutionary vanguard, represented in the United States by the Socialist Workers Party is small, and the dumb-down machine that is Stalinism, the Socialism of Fools and the crowd-think generated by social media, is large. With the working-class waiting in the wings, however, I have no doubt we will prevail — eventually.
Below: The recently published book by Pathfinder Press.
Below: the link to the Introduction to the book, published by the Militant newspaper.
And we all witnessed the sad but somewhat humorous videos, where participants were asked to name the river (the Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean) referred to in the slogan they were chanting, but were, in more cases than not, unable to do so.
As for me, I can still point out Vietnam on a map, even though I can no longer read the fine print without my 10x reading glasses from Rite Aid, and I still possess a working knowledge of Leon Trotsky’s, “The rise of Fascism in Germany”, as well as the Communist Manifesto, the tome that ends with the clarion call of, “Workers of the World, Unite”!
Not exactly “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground”, but it is what it is.
Above: A Vietnamese freedom fighter, circa 1960’s. Not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not the Houthis.
As such they’ve become, shall we say, useful idiots, the older ones and the younger ones alike. The only difference is that the older ones have no excuse.
Useful idiots when it comes to abetting the palatable rise in Jew hate that will only become more virulent as the social, political, economic and moral crisis of the capitalist mode of production deepens. How distressing that they’ve become enablers of this existential threat to the working-class instead of fighters who would choose instead to join the struggle for the socialist revolution, which today means building communist parties in the countries where we live.
Thus, the slogans shouted through the bullhorn, the placards placed on the walls and the chants that echo off the doors of the libraries, conform to the dictates of present day Wokeism as applied to the Middle East, equally devoid of serious contemplation as is the embrace of Transgenderism or Critical Race Theory. It’s also performative, the latest installment of the Woke Traveling Circus.
As such, with this schematic approach to political, social and historical reality, Israel, which came into existence 75 years ago as a direct result of the Holocaust, becomes a colonial-settler-state with a population that consists not of a diverse and multicultural people that is four generations deep, but a population of “Zionists” and “Colonizers”.
And since Israel is a land of “Zionists” and “Colonizers”, they, including infants and children, are fair game for whatever comes their way, particularly from the Jew hating organizations (and their henchmen) that grow rich, fat and lazy from the oppression and miseducation of their own people, i.e., Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. This is Jew hate.
Furthermore, this worldview dictates that Israel has no right to defend itself and its citizens. And if they do, they are accused of committing a genocide. I call bullshit!
No mention of the pogrom, no mention of the hostages, no mention of the displaced Israelis.
No acknowledgement that Hamas broke the truce and started the war.
No mention of the transfer of populations outside the war zone and no mention of the aid being delivered, facilitated by the United States, Israel and Egypt.
No mention of the multiple times a ceasefire was rejected by Hamas.
Above: Parroting a line from Malcolm X, with whom I’d wager my entire collection of vintage Beatle records they’ve never read, is a good example of this performative cake walk, devoid of any critical thinking of what’s transpired these past 100 years.
But for the more astute among them, the slogan means it’s okay to plunder with wild abandon, as long as the carnage is directed against the Jewish “colonizers”, and Arabs, Africans, Asians, immigrants and guest workers who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Thus, the pogrom of 10-07 becomes not a barbaric massacre, but an act of resistance where all is justified in the name of liberation, including the horrors of 10-07-2023. Malcolm must be spinning in his damn grave.
Below: Malcolm X. One the greatest revolutionaries ever produced by the American experience.
But what about the Jews who escaped the Holocaust, the emigrees from Poland and other parts of eastern Europe and Stalinist Russia, the arrivals from North and South America and yes, western Europe; the Sudanese, the Ethiopians, the newly arrived from South Africa and Indonesia, and the Jews that were expelled and otherwise driven out of the Arab countries in the late 1940’s?
Above: Stalinist Jew haters like the Workers World Party and the PSL, or is that the PLS, comprise an important part of the leadership of this antisemitic mobilization, which is perpetuating a horrifying miseducation of young people. The pacifists, for the most part, have peeled away from their initial association with these psychos, and the working-class never became involved in the first place.
And it’s not a coincidence that this mobilization has its base of operations on these specific campuses. The panic manifests first within the upper-middle classes just as it did in Europe in the 1930’s, and today is no exception. And by the way, there is no analogy with the anti-Vietnam war movement, where protests likewise sprang up on the campuses of the wealthy and privileged, and which played an important part in the early days of the movement.
Why? Because they also took root on campuses in Omaha, Kent State, Jacksonville, Little Rock and Anchorage.
Heck, there was even a tiny demonstration in Medina, Ohio, (population 7,000, not counting the livestock, which were plentiful), the small town where I was raised. I remember riding to the town square on my bitchin’ Schwinn bike, all tricked out with streamers and baseball cards in the spokes, to see the haps for myself. I think this was in 1969.
Above: Mass march against the war in Vietnam.
Below: A transcript of the chant recently recorded at Columbia University (not satire):
“Ya Hamas, make us proud,
Take another soldier out,
We say justice, you say how,
Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,
Ya Hamas, we love you,
We support your rockets too,
We support Hamas this time.”
Below: See the video.
https://www.facebook.com/672740741/videos/788181312943704
Please find below an exchange I had with a former participant in the revolutionary socialist movement within the United States, where I live. What prompted this back and forth was his apparent inability to see the elephant in the room, and who refuses to appreciate the fact that today the term “Zionist” has been conflated with “Jew”.
I embarked upon a tutorial of sorts with him and those who think like him, although I estimate the chances that it will do any good to be just below zero. He has other fish to fry, places to be and people to meet, and defending Jewish students from out-of-control thugs isn’t on the To-Do list.
But before you do that, watch the video below, from Columbia University, where a speaker announces to the crowd, “We have Zionists who have entered the camp. We are going to create a human chain where I am standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to disrupt our community. Please join me in this chain.”
“Zionists” being a couple of student reporters who are Jewish, and a wall of people formed to forcefully expel them from a public space.
My exchange.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, but if you can’t recognize that these demonstrations are, firstly, pro-Hamas, and secondly, antisemitic, then I’m at a loss as to what to say.”
“As is the case so much of the time, people prefer the past to the present. In the 1960’s and early 1970’s, there was a huge uptick in the world revolution, a bona-fide upsurge that included, but was not limited to, the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions, the anti-colonial struggle, including within the Arab lands, birthed by the contradictions produced by the second imperialist war, the anti-war movement in the imperialist countries, the proletarian struggle against Jim Crow and the emergence of Malcolm X.”
“During this same period of time the PLO had on its National Council, Jewish members, as well as rank and file members who were Jewish. This situation, which seems almost unbelievable today, lasted for only a small sliver of time, but this revolutionary dynamic did break through, under the influence of the international class struggle.”
“Naturally, with the world situation being what it was, hundreds of millions of working people and their middle-class allies had at the time, a working knowledge of the difference between being a Zionist and being Jewish, but that’s been obliterated, and was so a long time ago.”
“Today, the term Zionist is, for all practical purposes, conflated with “Jew” and many of those, like yourself, that does know the difference, can’t grasp the increasingly fraught and dangerous situation we’re heading into.”
“The demonstrations that have taken place since the pogrom have been pro-Hamas and laced with Jew hate, and they have progressively become more dangerous for Jews and the working-class, especially since the pacifists have peeled away from them.”
And one more thing, I am not a supporter of the Israeli war policy.
Israel is a capitalist country with a capitalist government and a bourgeois state apparatus, and an officer corps that represents the interest of this exploiting class. I can easily envision how a revolutionary army would take a very different course when responding to a pogrom of their citizens, as we have examples of this from the twentieth century. The most notable being how the armed forces of the Cuban revolution, under the command of Fidel and Che, conducted itself.
Below: the Rebel Army crashes Batista’s New Years eve party in Havana.
Trigger Warning: Members of the battalions of the Sierre Maestra who committed rape were tried and shot — if found guilty.
But this is a shooting war, and I am a Marxist, not a pacifist, and thusly it’s incumbent upon me to pick a side. In this war between Hamas and Israel, I favor an Israeli victory, similar to the way I support a Ukrainian victory over the Russian invaders.
Nothing more, nothing less.
In the coming days, weeks and months, we should support any and all efforts by the Jewish students to defend their right to walk freely anywhere on any campus and in all parts of our country and the world.
For the union of the workers of the levant, be they Jewish, Arab, Yemeni, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, or immigrant!
For the defeat of Hamas!
Victory to the women and the working-class of Iran!
No to Jew hate!
Rebuild Gaza after the war!
Addendum:
Correction to my previous post, “Concerning the Recent Demonstrations at Yale, Columbia and other Ivy League Schools.”
In my post, published 02-24-24, I wrote the following:
“The Russian Revolution and Lenin’s fight against Jew hate, the rise of Stalinism and fascism, the Holocaust and the second imperialist war, the mass immigrations of Jews after the war, the founding of the two states in 1948, Israel and Palestine, carved out from the British Mandate, the 1948 war, the wars of 1967 and 1973. The list is long when it comes to the things, they know nothing about.”
This sentence in bold print is partially incorrect, as pointed out to me by several readers. You know who you are, and I thank-you for the feedback.
There was no Palestinian state created in 1948, only the State of Israel. The areas below in brown, was the territory that was to become an Arab state. This did not come to pass, however, in what was to become a frequent pattern, because Israel, one day after its founding, was invaded by the surrounding Arab nations. That invasion was a failure.
David Rowlands (04-26-1924)
The Union Of Workers 