Regardless of any particular details, the pandemic of Hamas-inspired campus unrest has pushed news of Trump’s hush money trial down to well below the fold.  It has also put Biden’s presidency in a most uncomfortable spotlight.  I seriously doubt that such was the intent of the organizers of these events.

Various explanations are being proffered as to who is behind this and why this is happening.  Some conservative commentators are pointing their fingers at the classical Marxist demand to replace traditional oppressive authority with their own.  Jihadis are inclined to tout the rising tide of Islamic supremacy.  College culture in its modern, snowflake-coddling sense is also a prime suspect.  I just can’t fail to notice any spontaneity in all of this.

George Soros, the archetypical James Bond villain, cannot escape consideration — but where necessary, he’s pretty good at covering his tracks.  Others are also under suspicion — and all their motives are fairly similar: destabilization of the existing “order.” 

Antisemitism seems to be the ostensible motive...but is it really?  Even before Hitler, there just weren’t that many Jews in the world.  Yeah, they tend to revere education and knowledge and are more than willing to exploit such accomplishments for material benefits.  But so what?  Lots of folks have very similar ideals.  What may be behind antisemitism is that Jews don’t look very different from Gentiles — hence, the Third Reich was compelled to make them wear yellow stars of David.  Human decency being what it is, the king of occupied Denmark wore one as well.

Colleges are certainly the focus of this phenomenon.  Initially, the administrations took a hands-off position — which allowed things more fully to develop.  They mistakenly tried to avoid bad optics...which was obviously inevitable.  In my student days, things got so bad that Governor Reagan had to call in the National Guard to shut things down.  The campus, however, wasn’t touched at all.  We just burned down the Bank of America that was across the street.  The university was our home.

Drifting back to unintended consequences, it seems seriously unlikely that Hamas and leftist campus radicals could possibly benefit by another Trump presidency, let alone with the Republicans having working majorities in both houses of Congress.  This is speculation, but Trump was already holding his own in spite of edge-to-edge lawfare.  And Biden could not possibly benefit by having to face a perplexing challenge, while also declining further into senility.

In this year’s election, only ten Republican senators have to face the voters — while 23 Democrats have the same challenge.  The disarray on college campuses, from coast to coast, is not likely to enhance the appeal of those in fear of bad optics, let alone actual serious consequences.  Oh, yeah — then there’s this pesky thing called the economy.  Vegetative Biden continues to say that things couldn’t be better, but he gets taxpayer-funded room and board, so he doesn’t have to go shopping for provisions.

Finally, to show the arbitrary nature of antisemitism, I present a joke that I read many years ago in World Press Review.  The Soviet Union had not yet crashed and burned, and so a rural Soviet grocery store posted a sign in its window saying it would be having meat for sale tomorrow.  Shortly before dawn, a line began to form in front of the store.  As the sun began to rise, a clerk began to open the store.  He walked down the line of waiting consumers and told them, “Yes, we have meat.  But we don’t have enough for everybody here in line.  So all the Jews will have to leave.  Time passes, and the clerk comes out again and walks down the line.  Then he says, “Yes, we have meat.  But we don’t have enough for those who are not members of the Communist Party.”  And thus, the line got a lot shorter.  As the day continued, the clerk came out again and told the line, “We just don’t have enough meat for everybody here in line — so only veterans of the Great Patriotic War can have any meat.  Finally, as the sun set, the clerk came out and said to the few shivering remainders, “I’m sorry.  We really don’t have any meat.”  The few shriveled, suffering old commie veterans look at one another and blurt out, “The Jews get the best of everything.”

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.