Israel vs Hamas: West wakes to micro wars as Ivy League varsities sold soul for Arab money

Capital after capital, campus after campus in Europe and America have suddenly started mimicking war zones after Israel commenced military ops to decimate Hamas in the wake of the dastardly attack on several Israeli kibbutz in broad daylight on October 7, killing over 1400, including women and children of all ages. Over 200 still remain captive in Hamas tunnels, the Gaza Metro, as they are called.

Since the war began, oceans of pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine and anti-Israel protestors and demonstrators have flooded roads and intersections across pro-refugee, pro-immigration countries, such as Germany, Italy, France and the UK, to name just a few.

This anti-Israel position has seamlessly melted into antisemitism and a blatant, but unfortunate exhibition of open hostility towards Jews. Worse, pro-Palestine propagandists have once again cast dark clouds of contention over the veracity of Holocaust. As corollary, there has been lionisation of Adolf Hitler.

Pakistani senator Afnan Ullah Khan, educated at such ostensibly esteemed varsities as Oxford, York and University College London, posted this on social media: ‘Now you know why Hitler Killed the Jews’.

Jews have once again started being derided as ‘kike’.

While all this is situated in the history of World War II, the micro wars that the Hamas-Israel conflict has spawned are being waged across European and American cities, especially those with high numbers of immigrants, particularly coming from the Islamic world.

The faultlines now, unlike World War II, are not flags of nations, but, as Samuel P Huntington pointed in his Clash of Civilisations, the lines of conflict are drawn along religious/civilisational/ethnic identities and associations.

A subtext of these civilizational micro wars is the faultline of immigrants’ vs original citizens. For long European countries have followed open-borders policy, incessantly taking in refugees and immigrants from poorer countries, especially Islamic countries, to the extent that some of these iconic metropolitan cities have, in their quest to become liberal cosmopolitan spaces, lost their original character. Paris is one. Take for instance London. The Capital of UK is under threat of losing its character of being a Christian-majority city.

Well, that doesn’t mean much, until it comes to bite you in the back. Now, Muslim immigrants in London have desecrated even the Armistice Day celebrations to carry out a huge rally in supporting Hamas and deprecating Israel. Home Secretary Suella Braverman even went ahead to accuse the Met Police of being left-leaning, with negative bias towards right-wing or conservative causes.

In all, Muslim immigrants, who have now established themselves both in numbers as well as professionally in their respective western countries of refuge, though not all, are using West’s freedoms of speech and expression to subvert the nature of these nations. London, for another example, is witnessing these immigrants working for five days a week and carrying out rallies and protest marches on Saturdays.

The Hamas-Israel war has, therefore, not divided the European society, rather it has bared open the chasms that had always been there, which the liberal experiment post-World War II of making the world a better and happy place at any cost has failed to bridge or weld together. The liberal hopes of assimilation of Muslim immigrants in their respective societies of the West have been dashed. The papering-over stands exposed.

The concomitance of these religious-civilisational micro conflicts, exposed by the Israel-Hamas war, with universities and campuses, especially those called the Ivy League, is also not surprising. These campuses, heavily left-leaning as they have been, have run a silent project of creating and defining victims for whom they could become sole spokespersons, which would then fuel their relevance. These institutions found willing victims in what they called minorities. Immigrants, of course, start as minorities in any nation, and are therefore, willing subjects of and partners in this invention of victimhood.

Once victimhood is established, positive discrimination becomes part of the game. Then is reached the stage when you can’t cancel a protest rally even if it is to valourise Hitler and attacking Jews? After all, people, especially minorities, have rights.

Moreover, these left-leaning academic structures and institutions are also in the “business” of creating victims and fashioning a narrative of victimhood on which modern nations can be blackmailed, the gun of their own ethics and constitution held to their heads.

It is good money to create victims, minorities and victimhood.

For decades China has been derided for running covert information ops in the US and other countries. Its Confucius Institutes, in the garb of cultural bodies, are extension counters of the Chinese Communist Party. They have, on college campuses, pushed propaganda, recruited spies, and fished for US tech.

But, figure this: while China has donated some $1.2 billion to US universities between 2014 and 2020, West Asian countries have roughly donated $4.86 billion to American universities and higher-educational institutions. This, according to estimates, makes for 30 per cent of all foreign donations, drawing not even a fraction of attention.

According to Mitchell Bard, associated with Jewish News Syndicate, and who has published a number of studies on foreign influence peddling going on in US varsities, says the total contributions by Arab world between 1986 and 2022 roughly stands at $11billion.

Interestingly, Qatar and Saudi Arabia lead the pack.

“More than 10,000 contracts and gifts were spread across 273 institutions. And these figures grossly underestimate the total. My report documents numerous unreported donations, such as gifts of $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown universities in 2005. In its 2019 and 2020 reports, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) identified nearly $3 billion in unreported funds, primarily from Qatar,” Bard wrote this June.

According to another report, the two countries invested some $3.7billion in American varsities across 2,303 gifts, grants and contracts of which 422 were over a million dollars each, while 17 exceeded $50 million. These legatees included Cornell and Carnegie.

Qatar? Yes, where the high command of Hamas lives in opulence and luxury. The same Qatar that is, along with Saudi Arabia, the biggest donor to Palestinian bodies and organisations and is also a staunch backer of Muslim Brotherhood.

According to Bard, while the Department of Education up until 2020 did not pen down if the donor was a government source or not, the latest report said that 90 per cent of the funds contributed from Arab sources—nearly $10 billion—have no specific donor listed.

So, why the surprise at the eerie silence of varsity presidents in not condemning the Hamas attack on Israel or allowing unfettered freedom to pro-Hamas elements to run amok on the campuses.