https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/dr-snowflake-and-mr-intifada/?

Dr. Snowflake and Mr. Intifada

Seth MandelApril 25, 2024

Just as Dr. Jekyll’s transformations into Mr. Hyde eventually become involuntary and serve to muddy the reader’s sense of which is the man’s true character, pro-Hamas protesters are unable to stay in tough-guy mode forever.

Following the antics of the Jew-baiting campus demonstrators these days is akin to reading The Strange Case of Dr. Snowflake and Mr. Intifada. When one objects to these cretins assaulting and harassing Jews, one then hears “there’s a genocide in Gaza and you’re complaining about someone getting poked in the eye?” Mr. Intifada is not simply a jerk, you see; he is contemptuous of the idea that a Jew anywhere deserves to be free of violence. And yet, by the time the cops show up, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, Dr. Snowflake is the only one home.

“This is a dark day for UT,” Cally Hibbs, a University of Texas graduate, remarked when police began removing nonstudents from an unsanctioned protest aimed at taking over the campus. “This brings tears to my eyes.”

Is it even legal for the police to enforce laws? Some weren’t sure. “This militarization of police is the first step towards dictatorship,” said a UT student who hopefully isn’t pursuing a degree in criminal justice.

Similarly, Columbia University law students admonished their Jewish classmates who welcomed police on campus. After all, those police officers make them “feel unsafe,” and therefore the actual, tangible safety they provide is “not real safety at all.” I suppose it’s always jarring to meet consequences for the first time in one’s life, even (or especially) if that first meeting takes place during adulthood.

Our old friend Dr. Snowflake is much better at getting sympathetic press than Mr. Intifada (although the latter has many fans among the firefighters and democracy defenders of the press corps). “When Isra Hirsi, the daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, joined several of her classmates in a pro-Palestinian campus protest known as the Gaza encampment, she had no idea she would end up suspended, homeless, and left without food within a matter of days,” posted the Daily Beast.

Unhoused, unfed, and even temporarily unschooled, this freedom fighter would have her story told. Except, it wasn’t actually her story. In fact, Isra Omar and her peers were warned explicitly of the consequences of their Hamasville tent city, which they set up the same day Omar’s mother browbeat the president of the university from which Omar was threatened with suspension. It’s just that Omar genuinely could not imagine that she personally would face consequences—as if she were just any other kid. Her mother the congresswoman worked very hard to intimidate Columbia President Minouche Shafik on television before Congress, and yet she was given no special treatment.

Ilhan Omar’s fellow squadnik Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has her back. She worried about “violent” cops at Columbia (of which there have been exactly zero), demanding to know why “counterterror units” were on the scene. That is, she worried that people who pledged their sympathy to a terror organization and then called on that terror organization to come kill Jewish students on campus might be made to feel unsafe by the presence of antiterrorism police.

Back to that hearing: Shafik was asked why Columbia hired as a visiting professor Mohamed Abdou, who was repeatedly, vocally supportive of Hamas and their Oct. 7 slaughter of innocents. Shafik wavered on what Abdou was doing on campus at the moment, but she swore he’d never teach his “Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition” class at Columbia again. (Which didn’t answer the question of why he’d been hired in the first place.) This week while reporting on the protests at Columbia, Free Beacon reporter Jessica Costescu noticed Abdou hanging around the encampment and started filming the scene. She was approached by a student who told her to stop filming for “safety” reasons.

So you see, these students and their congresspersons aren’t heartless monsters. They care deeply—for themselves. They just want to feel safe to threaten some Jewish students and to physically assault others. And of course, if there are Jews who want to join them in pledging fealty to Hamas, they will advocate for their safety too. It’s a big tent city.

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