Columbia University Students Fight for the TOTAL Eradication of Western Civilization
Justice in Palestine is Anti-Justice
In what is arguably Plato’s greatest work, The Republic is a search for justice. The Republic is both philosophy and literature, an artistic quest for truth. It can be said that Western civilization is founded upon a search for justice.
When the concept of justice is reduced to hopeless abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus in The Republic, Socrates envisions the ideal State to continue the search. The rulers of this State, first and foremost, are to look to education to assure harmony between the individual and the government.
For Plato, justice becomes the order of the State, and the State becomes the visible embodiment of justice. One is the soul, and the other is the body.
Flashforward to the 20th century when the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead pronounced, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato." That pretty much sums it up. The search for justice and the values of Western civilization are inextricably intertwined.
And yet more and more radicals are attempting to cut the tie that binds the West to the pursuit of justice, truth, and good. They’re doing it by approximating the terms, ripping them out of historical context, and turning them against the spirit that gave them life.
This is not to suggest that other cultures and civilizations are devoid of justice. In China, Confucius and Mencius put forth intricate arguments on the subject. The radicals attacking the West aren’t attacking them. Why? Because in China, the revolutionaries would have disappeared before they could form a coherent group.
That’s not how it works in America. Anti-Western protestors are guaranteed free speech and the right to foment revolution. They’ve been showing up a lot on college campuses to sow discord and confusion.
There's something wrong with the leaders of the colleges and universities. Their job is to promote reason in the pursuit of truth and justice. Universities once served as strongholds of Western tradition and virtue. One of these virtues is the free exchange of ideas.
The leaders of these institutions no longer hold education in the high esteem Plato did. Instead of promoting harmony, institutions of higher education are championing disharmony and nurturing unreason. They have given up on the search for justice and pander instead to the Marxist identity politics propagated by their faculty.
Disharmony Realized
The Student Intifada is a coalition of pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist student groups. It intends to wreak havoc during the fall semester on campuses across the U.S.
The Student Intifada’s grew out of the National Students for Justice in Palestine. Not surprisingly the SJP was founded in 1993 at the University of California Berkeley, a haven for radical left ideologues.
It also comes as no surprise that the SJP has picked up disciples since the war in Gaza combined with all the media attention following the student encampment at Columbia University last year.
This year, there are calls for masked vigils in support of Palestine. Many of the groups associated with The Student Intifada have evolved from organizing demonstrations to advocating the use of violence and “the total eradication of Western civilization.”
Pro-Palestinian protestors won’t be satisfied until they’ve desecrated the graves of Socrates, Plato, St. Peter, St. Paul, Charlemagne, George Washington, Honest Abe, and anyone else who they deem to have contributed to Western civilization. Be careful, you could be next.
The problem isn’t their nihilistic dream of disharmony and the abyss—though that is a problem these days—it’s that the whole orgy of incensed discord is based on untruth.
Just the Facts
No matter what they tell you, there is no state of Palestine, and Israel is not a territory.
Nobody knows for sure, but the name Palestine is believed to be “derived from the Egyptian and Hebrew word peleshet.” It means something like “rolling” or “migratory,” and was used for the Philistines of northeast Egypt. The Philistines were related to the Greeks with no connection ethnically, linguistically, or historically with Arabia.
A derivative of the name “Palestine” first appears in Greek literature in the 5th Century BC. The Greek historian Herodotus called the area “Palaistinē” (Greek – Παλαιστίνη).
In 135 CE, the Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina—that is, “Palestinian Syria.” They did it to obliterate the link with the Jews who were always rebelling. “Palaestina” referred to the Philistines, whose home base had been on the Mediterranean coast.
There is no Palestinian state. An independent Arab Palestinian state has never existed, not under Ottoman rule, British Mandate, or the United Nations Partition Plan that was rejected by every Arab state and even the Palestinian leadership.
There was no Palestine when the Palestinians were governed by Jordan and Egypt, and it didn’t pop into existence when the Arab states rejected Israel's peace offering following the 1967 and 1973 wars.
Arabs can’t even properly pronounce the word “Palestine” in their native tongue. They call it “Filastin.”
Neither the word “Palestine” nor “Filastin” appears in the Koran. The term “peleshet” appears in the Jewish Tanakh no fewer than 250 times.
Rebellion of the Deluded
The Student Intifada coalition stirring up trouble on college campuses across the U.S. is uneducated, delusional, and nihilistic. They have no idea of what they are trying to destroy. For them, justice is violence for the sake of violence.
They’re akin to Thrasymachus in The Republic, who can be read as “a foreshadowing of Nietzsche, who argues as well that moral values need to be understood as socially constructed entities.” Thrasymachus is the poster child for a might makes right. It takes a nihilist to know one.
The problem is The Student Intifada isn’t right and they have no real might, but their delusion is real.
It’s fitting that the SJP began on a college campus. Institutions of higher education have become a breeding ground for delusion ideologues who take great joy in biting the hand that feeds them. They want to tear everything down but have no idea what will come next.
Only in America, if it can last. Defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, doesn’t mean letting the enemies use the Constitution to light an inferno of hate. First, they burn flags, next they’ll be burning down the house.
The Western way of reason informing justice won’t prevail if our education system continues to willfully undermine it.