“Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) got into an eye-opening exchange this week with Chief John Chell, head of the New York Police Department. She excoriated Columbia University on X for mobilizing “the most violent” police to deal with students intimidating Jews in support of Hamas terrorists at war with Israel.
Chell retorted, “Truly amazing! Columbia decided to hold its students accountable to the laws of the school. They are seeing the consequences of their actions. Something these kids were most likely never taught. Good SAT scores and self-entitlement do not supersede the law.” He also repudiated the congresswoman’s libel of the police.
This brushback by the Big Apple’s highest-ranking officer was exactly right against a fatuous politician’s accusations. The students think their passionate support of a (grotesque) political cause justifies trespass, theft, vandalism, intimidation, etc. There are many videos documenting their offenses.
It is not just their vile actions and moral blindness that stand out. It is also a sort of zombie unanimity — dead in the head yet dangerous. At Columbia, massed students chanted in echo of an activist with a bullhorn, challenging “Zionists…who have entered…our camp,” and they joined arms in a slow march to “push them out.”
It was disquieting to watch — not just because their actions were unpleasant, nor just because they seemed incapable of seeing that it was they and not the Jews who were threatening and intimidating. It was also because they were “as tenderly led by the nose, as asses are,” which is how Iago, one of Shakespeare’s great villains, put it.
They think of themselves as smart — they’re at an elite college — and serious, perceptive, and independent-minded. But they show every sign of being the opposite, of understanding things only by a sort of ideological rote, of being willingly enslaved to the latest radical fashion.
Like many of my generation, I’ve put several children through college. I still am. Some of their peers joined riots in 2020 over the death of George Floyd. One, I recall, got his kicks climbing atop the roof of a police car and stomping on it joyously to show how conscientiously angry he was. Another chose his Ivy League college partly because it smiled on political protest and displays of ideological fervor. He wanted opportunities to complain despite his family’s wealth and serene existence. Some glumly resisted former President Donald Trump’s legitimate election. Some joined the March for Science, which they knew for sure conservatives rejected. Many unquestioningly supported whatever the latest leftist cause was. They were ready to be led, to be duped by villains.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
As Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently and as the Washington Examiner has been reporting since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacres in Israel, America’s enemies are active as agents provocateurs, dividing our society by stoking mass demonstrations of support for anti-Jew terrorism.
Students who have grown up glued to their phones and ready to shallow-dive into one political dispute after another are a cohort ripe for enemy exploitation. The sooner the students face consequences for their actions, the sooner they discover that SAT scores and self-entitlement don’t supersede the law, the better. The country will be better for it, and perhaps in the process they’ll learn something worthwhile.