NEW YORK—Police broke up a pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University last Thursday, arresting more than 100 protesters for trespassing. The effort followed six months of violent anti-Israel demonstrations that left many Jewish students and faculty members feeling abandoned.
Protests had been bubbling for months but kicked into a higher gear after more than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had camped out on Columbia’s upper Manhattan campus were arrested Thursday. Dozens more protesters have been arrested at other campuses since, and many now face charges of trespassing or disorderly conduct.
With tensions at Columbia continuing to run high and some students afraid to set foot on the campus, Columbia University has announced classes will be remote for the rest of the year as anti-Israel protests rock the school.
There are now growing calls for tuition refunds for the $70k a year college—now that it has practically turned into an online school. These calls are from legitimate college students whose lives are being disrupted by the protestors.
Junior Michael D’Agostino, 22, said the hybrid classes were frustrating given “the amount we pay to be at this school to learn from these amazing faculties and professors.”
“I’m studying applied physics and applied math and those are classes I really benefit from being in-person. I went through COVID and all that when we were online for about a year and it really disrupted our education,” he added.
Commentary
Arabs and Jews have been fighting for 1000 years. There are faults on both sides, enough to fill three volumes.
If we completely disarmed Israel, they would soon be wiped out. If we disarmed the hostile Arabs in the Middle East, I believe there would be peace—the Bible rightly says that Ishmael (his descendants) will be a wild man (Genesis 16:12).
We should be very concerned about younger Americans on the progressive Left, that are turning pro-Hamas. We need to understand that these misguided (woke) zealots are not just a threat to national Israel. They will eventually also be a threat to the national security and the national interest of the United States of America. Many of them appear to have just as little concern about the security of the United States as they do about Israel. They routinely cry for the death of both.
I agree that neither nation is perfect and above error. But to wish for the death of these two electoral democracies—which are accountable to their electorates, and have been outposts of freedom in a world increasingly hostile to freedom—is moral insanity.
Israel is just one front in a global war between savages and civilization. And not all of the savages bow to Allah. Some bow to Critical Race Theory (CRT), some bow to wokeness and black pride and LGBTQ. There are inner city gangs across the American hemisphere that behead and torture their victims. And there are children of civilization that turn into savages--whether violent or leftist. Ideological savages applaud violent savages because they are of the same family. They share a common father (John 10:10; 8:44).
What we have seen in the Hamas and Isis attacks, and all the rest of the atrocities, comes from the same ideology and culture as the one that beheaded prisoners and burned them to death in Syria and Iraq. It is the same ideology that raped imprisoned political prisoners so that they would not die virgins in Iran, and that sexually assaulted 12-year-old girls in Iraq by evil men who declared that rape "brought them closer to Allah." It is the same ideology that flies planes into skyscrapers, sets off bombs at a Boston marathon and drives trucks into spectators.
Savagery is not a condition of birth; it is a choice. People born into savagery can become civilized and those born into the highest echelons of civilization can turn on us like the worst vicious animals. Ezekiel 18 tells us this, plainly.
College students howling for the blood of an entire nation are savages wrapped in the racist garments of genocidal religion. Their high sense of self assurance and low sense of self control make them the parochial companions of jihad.
Only in Christ can the wild man (Genesis 16:12) be tamed. Only in Christ can the unbelieving Jew be saved (Romans 10:1; Galatians 3:29). Both of them need the Desire of Ages (Haggai 2:7), a transformation so complete it is called the second birth (John 3). Spurning that, they will get the Second Death.
Our world is careening headlong towards the End, bouncing off the walls of complacency and auto-developed ‘truth’ masquerading as enlightenment. In the End, false religion persecutes the genuine. Eschatological Cain forces Abel against the wall and seeks to kill him there. He is the captive companion of arrogance and anger, convinced that his ways are superior to God’s ways. And he is the ultimate savage, the final one in a long line of malignant hostility towards the things of God.
And he is reduced to a full and eternal end, while Abel who submitted himself to God’s ways finds beauty, peace and eternal life in Him (Matthew 25:23; Psalm 100:4).
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