Published by an old curmudgeon who came to America in 1936 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and proudly served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He is a former law enforcement officer and a retired professor of criminal justice who, in 1970, founded the Texas Narcotic Officers Association. BarkGrowlBite refuses to be politically correct.
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Tuesday, December 26, 2023
THE REAL REASON FOR THE VIETNAM PROTESTS WAS A RESPONSE TO THE DRAFT WHICH FORCED YOUNG MEN TO SERVE IN THE MILITARY AND FACE THE DANGERS OF COMBAT
Israel-haters aren’t refighting the Vietnam War
Today’s antisemites are modeling their campaign on 1960s protesters,
even though the two conflicts are very different. Still, the same toxic
ideology influenced radicals of both eras.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Dec 26, 2023
Protesters hold a "Queers for Palestine" sign in New York on Nov. 12, 2023.
Many Americans are baffled by the mobs on
college campuses and the streets of major U.S. cities chanting for
Israel’s destruction and the genocide of its people.
That so many of their fellow
citizens—regardless of their age, education, ideology or
background—would openly take the side of Hamas, the terror group that
started a war on Oct. 7 with the largest mass slaughter of Jews since
the Holocaust, remains mind-boggling. So is the fact that those who call
themselves “progressives” are now rooting not just for the cessation of
suffering for Palestinians but for the survival of a reactionary
Islamist terrorist organization that despises their beliefs.
Take, for example, “queers for Palestine,”
who practice an alternative lifestyle that would have earned them a
brutal execution in pre-Oct. 7 Gaza ruled by Hamas, but who sympathize
with the Oct. 7 barbarians and deplore Israel’s efforts to eliminate
them. It’s equally true about most others sounding the “from the river
to the sea” slogan, whose grasp of the conflict is so flimsy that few
can identify either body of water.
The problem transcends such obvious absurdities.
Even their manifest tone deafness about
the way they are trafficking in traditional tropes of antisemitism
similarly provides little insight into their motivations. How can anyone
demand that Hamas be allowed to emerge triumphant from a war begun by
atrocious crimes against humanity, or that the Islamists ultimately be
allowed to enact their fantasy of a world without Israel and its 7
million Jewish inhabitants?
Believing in their own righteousness
The answer is simple. They think they are
the good guys and that their opponents are intrinsically evil. And that
is why the attempts on the part of publications like The New York Times to analogize
the anti-Israel protesters to those who demonstrated against the
Vietnam War more than a half century ago are worth considering. Such
claims are wildly inaccurate since the two conflicts have nothing to do
with each other. But in some ways, this evocation of the past provides a
telling insight into the psychology and motivations of contemporary
left-wing antisemites.
The first thing to understand about such a
discussion is that the corporate press is desperate to legitimize
protests rooted in Jew-hatred. The Times article is, like similar pieces—such as a Washington Poststory
that seeks to engender sympathy for “Young U.S. Muslims” marching for
Israel’s extinction in even unlikely settings like Huntsville,
Ala.—primarily an effort to treat a deplorable campaign as a righteous
cause taken up by brave idealists.
The anti-Israel bias of publications like the Times
is no longer even open to debate. On the same day that it published its
article titled, “In Campus Protests Over Gaza, Echoes of Outcry Over
Vietnam,” it also ran a piece
on its opinion pages by Yahya R. Sarraj, the Hamas operative who was
mayor of Gaza City. The piece, which mentions Oct. 7 only in passing,
focuses on the destruction that his organization brought to Gaza by
starting a war with savage crimes like rape, torture, beheadings and the
murder of entire families.
But it concludes with a passage that is
gobsmacking in its disingenuousness: “Why,” he asks, “can’t Palestinians
be treated equally, like Israelis and all other peoples in the world?
Why can’t we live in peace and have open borders and free trade?
Palestinians deserve to be free and have self-determination.”
The answer is so obvious that even a New York Times
editor ought to know it, which should have led the passage to be
deleted even under the newspaper’s current low standards. Palestinians
can’t have peace, open borders and free trade so long as they are led by
and overwhelmingly support groups like Sarraj’s Hamas, whose avowed
purpose is to destroy Israel and slaughter its people.
The idea that Israelis are simply supposed
to sit back and await the next promised, vicious attack from Hamas
would be considered ridiculous were it posed to any other nation than
the one Jewish state on the planet. But that’s the assumption on the
part of all those who are currently marching against Israel.
“Gays Against the War” contingent in a protest during the Vietnam War, 1971.
An antiwar march in Chicago before the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Nothing to do with Vietnam
But what has any of this to do with the Vietnam War?
As even the Times was forced to
concede, not much. America’s involvement in Vietnam began under the
administration of President John F. Kennedy and escalated during that of
Lyndon Johnson before Richard Nixon ended America’s direct involvement.
It didn’t conclude until 1975 with the complete military conquest of
South Vietnam by the Communist government of North Vietnam. But whatever
one’s take on the rights and wrongs of that conflict, it has little in
common with the century-old Arab war against Zionism or the events of
the last three months.
The Vietnam War was justified as an
attempt to prevent the spread of communism around the world. The result
of the North Vietnamese victory was the imposition of a brutal
totalitarian regime in the South with millions put in “re-education”
camps and many more forced to flee as “boat people.” That proved that
the pro-war cause was nobler than its critics, who damned it as
imperialist oppression of Third World people, understood at the time.
A radical core of the anti-Vietnam
movement led by the far-left may have seen it as part of an ideological
war against the West, in which Communist oppressors were to be lauded
because they were fighting imperialists. But most Americans who opposed
the war had a different perspective.
The protests gained widespread support
primarily because many believed that there was no good reason for a
generation of young Americans to die in a civil war in Southeast Asia
that wouldn’t ultimately impact the outcome of the Cold War with the
Soviet Union. The large-scale anti-war movement was a response not so
much to an unsympathetic South Vietnamese ally. Nor was it really about
the war’s mismanagement by Johnson and the Kennedy appointees that LBJ
kept in place and allowed to drive the nation further into a war they
were unwilling and unable to win.
The real reason for the protests was
self-interest. It was a response to the draft, due to which young men
who couldn’t get out of being conscripted through various exemptions
(primarily a function of their economic status) were forced to serve. As
soon as Nixon stopped sending draftees to Vietnam and then ended the
draft entirely, the antiwar movement evaporated. By the time the war
actually ended, few Americans cared then or since about its consequences
for the Vietnamese people.
So, the notion that the alleged idealism
of the groovy ’60s is making a comeback among the “from the river to the
sea” crowd is pure bunk. Nobody is drafting American kids to go fight
Hamas. That’s the obligation that young Israelis have willingly taken up
to defend their homes and families. And if American protesters really
are that concerned by the impact of war in Third World venues, there are
plenty of opportunities to vent their concerns about other conflicts
around the globe in which far more people have been killed.
Marxism’s comeback with DEI
Still, it’s not entirely wrong to see the
roots of today’s anti-Israel protests in those radicals, who were the
most violent elements of the protests against the Johnson and Nixon
administrations. Unlike most Americans, the Marxists of the misnamed
Students for a Democratic Society—veterans of which were featured in the
Times article—wanted the Communists to win in much the same
way those who compose the mobs tying up traffic, breaking up Christmas
celebrations and intimidating Jewish students on campuses want Hamas to
defeat Israel.
Unlike most of the Americans who were
against the war in the 1960s without expressing hatred for their own
country, the motivations of the large number of young people and Muslims
who have swelled the numbers of the anti-Israel movement are
ideological in nature. They are the product of a generation of education
in which leftists—many of them former ’60s radicals—who believe in the
myths of intersectionality that falsely analogize the Palestinian war
against Israel to the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
They’ve been indoctrinated in the toxic catechism of diversity, equity
and inclusion (DEI), as well as critical race theory, which divides the
world into two immutable groups: victims of racism and racist
oppressors.
This is a neo-Marxist dialectic not
unrelated to the ideas of the so-called New Left that spawned SDS and
the radical Weatherman terrorist movement
that tried to blow up the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the State
Department and dozens of other targets during their campaign in what
might well have been termed a real “insurrection.”
And that is what blinds them to the fact
that they are devoting their energy and passion to supporting a cause
that is fundamentally evil. The ideological prism through which they
view the world mandates that the side that is designated by leftist
doctrine as “white” and colonial (Israel) must be wrong and the one
labeled as the cause of the oppressed “people of color” (the
Palestinians) must be right.
They are insensible to obvious truths
about a complex conflict that isn’t racial and that has always been
driven by Arab refusal to share the land with the Jews. Their acceptance
of the idea that Jews, who are the indigenous people of their ancient
homeland, are colonizers in Israel much as Americans were depicted in
Vietnam is as egregious as it is false.
But that doesn’t matter to the protesters
because they see the facts as irrelevant. Nor do they care about the
horrors perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 or even against their own people
as they continue to sacrifice them on the altar of their never-ending
war against the Jews.
Mainstreaming antisemitism
It’s true that Hamas’s useful idiots are
using some of the same tactics pioneered by the anti-Vietnam movement.
But what those seeking to lionize today’s demonstrators want to
obfuscate in their alleged idealism about helping Gazans is given the
lie by the antisemitism they are spreading. The arguments about Vietnam
were not predicated on the horrible notion that wiping the only Jewish
state off the map—an objective that could only be achieved by the
genocide of the Jews—is a righteous cause. And even at their worst, the
Vietnam protests didn’t target Jewish students, Jewish businesses or
seek to drive Jews from the public square as these mobs seek to do.
There’s no denying that the same core
ideology driving the movement to destroy Israel is linked to the war on
the West and the principles of American freedom that were championed by
the Marxists of the ’60s New Left. Yet what is so damaging about
demonstrators right now is not just their unabashed antisemitism. It’s
the fact that their lies are being bought not by just a radical fringe
but by a broad cross-section of young Americans who have been educated
to believe that a genocidal, Jew-hating terrorist movement is the
underdog deserving of support. This is the greatest tragedy of the
post-Oct. 7 protests. And it is ultimately one that not just threatens
Israel or the Jews, but the future of the United States as a free
country.
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