President Biden eloquently proclaimed that “the bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas” had unleashed “pure, unadulterated evil,” with “more than 1,000 civilians slaughtered” in Israel. He recalled the lesson his father imparted that silence is complicity.
Well, if silence regarding mass murder is complicity, what should we call the celebration of mass murder? Some here have openly celebrated Hamas’s slaughter. Since Hamas would have gladly killed every Jew in Israel had it the chance, such celebration is not far removed from the celebration of genocide.
The revelry has been most notable on our college campuses, often catalyzed by chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP refers to the U.S. and Canada as “occupied Turtle Island,” the latter being the name for North America in the creation stories of some indigenous peoples. And, in its vision statement, SJP seeks “a political framework that addresses collective liberation from Palestine to the Rio Grande.” This statement, much criticized in recent days, has now been scrubbed from SJP’s website.
The Anti-Defamation League reports that in the wake of Hamas’s slaughter, the George Washington University chapter of SJP proclaimed that a “settler” — presumably every Israeli Jew — “is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.” The Bard College chapter proclaimed that “liberation is a material process that requires confrontation by any means necessary,” and multiple chapters have “adopted the image of a person flying in a paraglider, a clear reference to the Hamas terrorists who utilized paragliders as part of their massacre.”
It is one thing for U.S. citizens to celebrate mass murder and even genocide. It is quite another for aliens to do so. They are our nation’s guests (invited or otherwise) and subject to removal. Presumably their continued presence should serve the national interest.
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