Is there anything more loathsome than watching milk-fed, trust fund, nepo-baby, no common sense, gullible, spoiled, privileged, pampered, preening, $93,417/year tuition and costs, cosplaying, interpretive dancing, vegan, gluten free, nut sensitive, Jew-hating, Jew-harassing, Jew-attacking Ivy League students occupy buildings, assault campus employees, and act out their various neuroses while clashing with police officers? (Here’s the “nut sensitive” context: The Columbia protesters’ makeshift outdoor canteen had readily available sanitizer wipes “with a sign on the bottle urging attendees to ‘keep each other safe and wipe hands after touching NUTS,” along with $12 croissants and a hot sauce stand.)

Yeah, in fact there is. It’s way more loathsome if their faces are covered while protesting because, “they wish not to limit their future prospects, including employment opportunities.” In other words, “Can we hold off on the revolution until my recruiter hears back from McKinsey Consulting?”

These aren’t your 60’s peacenik hippies shoving flowers into the barrels of soldiers’ guns and naively whirl-dancing the South Vietnamese toward the fall of Saigon and communist reeducation camps. These are coldblooded advocates for the destruction of Israel “by any means necessary” who don’t believe the rape and slaughter of October 7th was unjustified.

How did our most coddled elites become these savages? Mostly, it’s because their Ivy League courses have brainwashed them to be, “totally on board with neo-Marxist oppressor-oppressed ideology.”

In an act of national suicide, we’ve allowed those colleges that routinely springboard graduates into society’s most powerful positions to fall under the sway of the simpleminded reductionism of settler colonialism, which teaches that societies created against the will of the land’s earliest inhabitants are permanently illegitimate—though this woke ideology certainly doesn’t even apply to Israel, as the Jews were actually there before the Arabs.

“For the academic discipline of settler colonial studies, the goal of learning about settler colonialism in America and elsewhere is not simply to understand it, as a historian would, but to dismantle it.” And in the process of dismantling, as any Columbia undergrad can tell you, “Violence can not only be justified in these ideologies but is also often deemed essential to the process of ‘liberation.’”

So, on October 7th, Hamas’s bestial violence was justified because,

By killing old people and children inside the borders of Israel, [Hamas] acted on the principle that every citizen of a settler colonial state is a fair target, because none of them has a right to be there.

Which explains why our keffiyeh-clad elites unashamedly march to bloodthirsty chants of, “Globalize the Intifada!”; “Hamas make us proud, kill another soldier now!”; “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too!”

But what does it mean to love Hamas? And what do they mean when they say, “By any means necessary”? Well John Fetterman, one of the few congressional Democrats who unflinchingly support Israel, knows what it means because he’s seen Hamas’s brutality for himself:

‘I’ve seen that video,’ he says – meaning the video recordings compiled by the Israeli government of the Oct. 7 murders – ‘and I can’t believe’ – he stops. ‘Where does that kind of depravity and that hate, where does it come from? Even the Nazis, with all their depravity, all their evil, they tried to hide those kinds of atrocities. These people filmed it with their GoPros, and they cheered like they scored a goal. In the videos, they call their parents and they’re like, ‘Hey, I just killed some Jews.’ Where does that kind of hatred come from?’

He isn’t done. ‘That wasn’t just Hamas, either,’ he says. Now he’s looking at me. ‘Let’s not forget the majority of the Palestinians support what happened.’

Congresspeople and media stars were allowed to see the 45-minute video — Time magazine called it, “the worst film you’ll ever see…a dark reality which must be seen” — but not ordinary citizens, which allows Hamas supporters to deny or downplay the extent of the atrocities. Why is this information being hidden?

Wouldn’t it help the world understand why Israel has resumed bombing Gaza and has apparently decided, along with Trump, that it can’t coexist with a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip? Wouldn’t it show what Hamas’s college counterparts really mean when they say, “By any means necessary?” Wouldn’t it make clear what’s at stake if we don’t deport noncitizens who aid and abet Hamas?

Are they afraid we’ll be traumatized by the brutal violence of the video? That’s like worrying fish will be traumatized by exposure to water. Thanks to our sordid nonculture, we’re marinating in violent images all day long.

Do what’s necessary to hide the identity of the victims and release the video. It’s past time.

Peter Merkl blogs at pmerkl.co.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.