It’s not just those Queens high-school kids: A lot of “pro-Palestine” demonstrations strike us as remarkably juvenile — not so much reaching out to persuade fellow Americans as acting out in ways guaranteed to annoy the rest of us.
That is, the approach is the exact opposite of the one taken by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, who aimed at orderly and utterly peaceful protests to appeal to the better angels of Americans’ souls — even as the brutality of Bull Connor and other defenders of the status quo exposed the system’s profound injustice.
As for the Queens kids: We fear that riot has more to say about the state of New York City’s public-education system than anything larger: It’s evident those students are profoundly ignorant when it comes to the Middle East (and probably everything else), and were more seeking an excuse to rampage than to say anything much.
Yes, their riot was fundamentally antisemitic — they pounced on a Jewish teacher’s support for Israel as their grievance, after all.
But that mainly reflects how rank antisemitism is the favorite hate of the ignorant these days. (Elites express their Jew-hate a bit more subtly, in good measure by making excuses for the ignorant.)
Yet what of the idiots who keep shutting down bridges, subway stations and the like, or the morons who glued themselves to the street to disrupt the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the ones who vandalized the New York Public Library?
Part of it, plainly, is that these “protesters” aren’t motivated especially by the Israel-Hamas war, except that it’s now a huge issue: These are the same lefties who show up ready to riot in the name of cause after cause.
That is: They’re close cousins (or former classmates) of the Climate Extinction fools who aim to make commuters miserable (or mar great works of art) on the apparent theory that this will somehow catalyze a drastic shift in public opinion — as if making a spectacle of how upset you are is the way to make the adults feel sorry.
These radicals are convinced that most people are basically on their side, but dark forces (The Corporations! Rich Jews!) have them fooled or cowed or whatever — so it’s just a matter of deploying enough disorder (via glue, fake blood and so on) to wake them up, and soon we’ll all be storming the Bastille together.
Similar thinking over on the other side of the spectrum was what motivated the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: When you spend enough of your free time talking to people who share your particular outrage, it gets easier to delude yourself this way.
But the left is especially prone to this handicapped thinking precisely because it’s succeeded massively in marching through the institutions these last few decades . . . . and dumbing them down in the process.
It’s not just that they’ve got so much of the media cowed (or recruited) that the evidence that most of America doesn’t buy the same nonsense gets suppressed or explained away for them.
It’s also that the left’s dominance of higher education (and most of the culture) means they’ve been taught a fundamentally false narrative of how social progress occurs in this country.
It wasn’t Malcolm X and so on, but King and his movement who peacefully ended Jim Crow — with the support, by the way, of most Republicans in Congress.
Come to think of it, we take it back: The lefties messing with your commute are actually more ignorant than those Queens high-schoolers — because so much of what they’ve been taught is completely wrong.