One of the pressures college kids face is wanting their time on campus to feel like it meant something, which gets us to the ongoing TikTok moments regarding Israel and Gaza.
I get it, that you want to quibble with me for diminishing the protests on several U.S. college campuses as TikTok moments, but sorry, not sorry, that’s what they are.
It’s a dance battle challenge writ large.
How you can tell: it’s hard to imagine that there’s this much actual support among our 18- to 25-year-old population for the Hamas regime.
Hamas, in addition to wanting to wipe Israel and Jews off the face of the earth, isn’t even good to its own people.
The kids wouldn’t know this, of course.
Hamas has, for years, systematically stolen foreign aid meant to help the citizens that its disastrous internal policies have impoverished for the enrichment of its top leaders.
This, as it has routinely resisted overtures from Israel, the West and other Middle Eastern leaders to sit down at the table to talk peace and stability.
Hamas even used a lengthy period of standdown as cover for what it had planned for last Oct. 7, when it sent teams of militants streaming across the border into Israel to kill, maim, rape and take hostages, which is what precipitated the Israeli counterattack that has since killed more than 34,000 Gazans.
If the kids on our college campuses really wanted peace in Israel and Gaza, they wouldn’t just be protesting against what the Israelis are doing in self-defense against what happened on Oct. 7, and to prevent the next one.
Why aren’t we hearing from the kids any criticism of Hamas, any calls from them toward Hamas leaders to get them to discontinue their decades-long cold and occasionally hot war with their Jewish neighbors?
Wouldn’t it make sense, if you really wanted peace in Gaza, to get in on the Hamas part of this as well?
The Israeli side, most certainly, is not without blame, both in the immediate term and over the course of the tenure of hard-liner rightist Benjamin Netanyahu, whose aggressive policies toward Gaza and the West Bank have exacerbated the tense situation that has existed in the Middle East for decades, centuries, millennia.
Protest Netanyahu, protest what he’s having his IDF do in Gaza.
Don’t protest Zionists and Zionism, because when you do that, you’re protesting Israel’s right to exist.
That’s where you’re crossing the line, in addition to not also holding Hamas to the same standard that you’re holding Netanyahu and his hard-line government.
Netanyahu and his Likud party aren’t serving their Israeli citizens well.
Hamas definitely isn’t doing well by the residents of Gaza.
Kids, you don’t like looking like you don’t know what you’re doing? Protest them all, on behalf of the everyday Israelis and Gazans who are the ones caught in the middle of what’s going on, and don’t have the privilege of mommy and daddy paying the bills for them to skip class so they can go viral.
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Chris Graham
