As protest camps continue on the campuses of UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, Dan O’Donnell notes that the campers have no idea what they’re actually protesting against.
May 7, 2024
Perspective by Dan O’Donnell
It was altogether fitting that the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee students who set up a pro-Hamas protest camp erected a “No Cops Allowed” sign reminiscent of the “No Girls Allowed” warnings on a young boy’s treehouse: These protesters are childishly naïve rubes at best and dangerously misinformed bigots at worst.
The central claim of protesters on both the UWM and UW-Madison’s campuses—that Israelis are “committing genocide in Gaza”—is so egregiously false that it could be considered a modern-day blood libel. Since Israel became a nation in 1948, the Arab Muslim population was 1.4 million. Today, it is more than 11 million, including 5.5 million in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
Those aren’t overly optimistic Israeli statistics, either; they come directly from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, which noted in 2022 that “the Palestinian population at home and in the diaspora has doubled about 10 times” since 1948. Needless to say, such an occurrence would be impossible if there was an active and sustained effort at either genocide or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
One would surmise that a genocidal Israeli government would first seek to eliminate the Palestinians living within the borders of Israel itself, yet the Israeli Palestinian population is now two million—nearly double the total global Palestinian population when Israel achieved statehood. Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank have similarly ballooned to approximately 3.5 million, a truly amazing feat if the nation next door was genocidal in nature.
Even after Hamas, the Palestinian governing authority in the region, murdered 1,143 Israelis, injured 3,400 more, and took more than 200 hostage in the single worst slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust, the Israeli government did not respond by attempting or even contemplating the elimination of the Palestinian people.
After nearly six months of fighting in Gaza, United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified that U.S. intelligence doesn’t “have any evidence of genocide being created.”
“Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza?” asked Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.
“We don’t have evidence of that to my knowledge,” Austin answered.
Two weeks later, during an appearance on MSNBC on April 26th, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby echoed Austin’s assessment.
“You’ve seen these protests on college campuses, some of them getting out of control,” host Willie Geist told Kirby. “It has become gospel among some of those protesters that Israel is committing genocide and that the Biden Administration is supporting genocide in Gaza. Do you see any evidence of Israel committing genocide in Gaza?
“Absolutely not, no.” Kirby immediately replied. “No, there’s no evidence. Israeli soldiers are not getting up, getting out of the rack, putting their boots on, and saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to commit genocide, I’m going to go wantonly murder innocent Palestinians.”
That sort of behavior was reserved for Hamas’ soldiers, who intentionally killed 695 civilians (including 35 children) on October 7th. Had they more time and resources, there is no doubt that these monsters would have butchered far more.
The campus protesters reject the label of being “pro-Hamas,” but what else could those who parrot the Hamas talking point that Israel is committing genocide in its more than justified response to unspeakable Palestinian savagery?
If not full Hamas supporters per se, they are the useful idiots of terrorists—a zombie army of the dumbest and most gullible kids on campus spouting the vilest but most easily disproven slander imaginable.