The normalisation of savagery
Since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October, there’s been a storm of commentary on how unhinged campus culture in the West has become. Politicians and writers are bewildered that at universities where it’s a ‘microaggression’ to ask someone where they are from, and where you can be subjected to a Salem-like grilling for wearing an offensive Halloween costume, actual genocidal violence doesn’t seem to bother people. The same fresh-faced Maoists who will weep and stomp their feet if you say ‘women don’t have penises’ have collectively shrugged their shoulders over the mass murder of Jewish women and children. Some have even justified it. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said a projection on to the wall of a building at George Washington University.
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Our woke universities hold forth on ‘every topic under the sun’, said former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, yet they’re chilled out about the ‘most grave grotesque attacks on Jewish people since the Holocaust’. College kids kick up a fuss about ‘stupid’ things like ‘microaggressions and gender pronouns’ yet they erm and ahh – or worse – on ‘the slaughter of innocent Israelis’, says one columnist. When Jewish students at Cooper Union in New York City had to be locked in the library to save them from a mob of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists, Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute said: ‘
Not another word – ever – about safe spaces, microaggressions or “erasure” on a college campus. Not one more damn word.’...
It is not only irritating but infuriating that youngsters who think ‘misgendering’ is an act of violence are relaxed about literal violence. That these cloyingly sensitive sons and daughters of privilege will demand a safe space, complete with colouring books and dogs they can pet, when a controversial speaker darkens the door of their Ivy League college, yet they don’t seem to think Israeli Jews deserve a safe space from Hamas’s neo-fascists. Wound their self-esteem? Sacrilege. Wound and kill unarmed Jews? Martyr poo.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/31/the-normalisation-of-savagery/