See the evil in crime, Hamas
While reading the recent opinion piece by Robert Kretzmer in The Californian, I began to question my sanity. Is Kretzmer seeing the same protests that the rest of the world sees? Or is he merely gaslighting to excuse the inexcusable?
His article attempts to launder the actual nature and motivation of the violent protests we’ve seen on college campuses around the country by imputing noble intentions to the perpetrators. In doing so he makes a case that they themselves do not make.
He claims that the protesters merely want a cease-fire and that they do not actually support Hamas. Are we to believe his assertions or should we believe the signs carried by the people he defends — signs that say “death to Israel,” “death to Jews,” and “death to America”? No one who advocates death to Jews has a belief system compatible with American values, and anyone who proclaims “death to America” is a self-declared enemy of our country. We certainly should not condone or make excuses for these sentiments, and neither should we pay off student loans for the spoiled and entitled reprobates who express them.
Kretzmer attempts to wrap these antisemitic protesters in the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement by invoking John Lewis and the concept of nonviolent civil disobedience. This comparison is an insult to the Civil Rights Movement in this country and the principles upon which it was based.
The fact is that Hamas has acted on a belief system that pervades many cultures in the Middle East by murdering Jews in an effort to destroy the Israeli state. This belief system was the fuel for the terrorist acts of Oct. 7 and is the foundation of the wailing protests against Israel’s entirely understandable response. If Hamas wants a cease-fire, they can come out from behind the women and children they’re using as human shields, release all of the hostages they’ve raped and tortured for the past several months, and surrender unconditionally to the Israelis.
But Hamas won’t do this. Hamas is relying on people in the West, led by people who share the views of these fools protesting on our campuses and before our city councils, to pressure Israel into allowing them to survive. Survival for Hamas means survival of terrorists — survival to commit atrocities again.
The First Amendment protects the right of the people to “peaceably assemble” to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” This right does not extend to vandalism, theft, trespassing, assaulting police officers or any of the other crimes we’ve seen on these campuses.
I’m not a postgraduate student researching a doctoral thesis on 21st century Marxist feminism and its effects on climate at an Ivy League school, so maybe my intellect isn’t comparable to these protesters. But seeing the evil in crime, even committed by earnest idiots, is easy. Seeing the evil of Hamas is easy. Seeing through terrorists’ flimsy efforts to paint themselves as victims is also easy, perhaps easiest of all.