Cal Thomas: Optimistic signs

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday April 25th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: some optimistic signs of push back against anti-Semitism. Here’s WORLD commentator Cal Thomas.

CAL THOMAS: With all that is occurring in our political and cultural life, there are signs some Americans have had enough.

Google recently fired 28 employees for protesting the company’s cloud-computing contract with Israel. In a memo obtained by the media, Google’s vice president for global security, Chris Rackow, said the sacked employees violated company policies. They “took over office spaces, defaced our property and physically impeded the work of other Googlers.” The protestors apparently aren’t familiar with this sage advice: don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Another optimistic sign. Columbia University decided they had enough of protesters disrupting the campus and shouting anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas slogans. Police arrested 108 protesters who had set up tent camps on school property. Columbia’s President said the occupiers posed a “clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” After those arrests, more people joined the demonstrators, keeping students from attending class. All should be arrested and the violent and anti-Semitic ones expelled.

The definition of “student” is “a person formally engaged in learning.” That ought to bring some humility, but for too long and in too many places adults have ceded their leadership responsibilities to teenagers and twenty-somethings influenced by leftist professors and friends on social media.

At Columbia, at least three tenured professors dispense propaganda about the history of the Middle East. Joseph Massad specializes in Middle Eastern studies. The New York Post says he “has faced widespread calls to be fired ever since he referred to the Oct. 7 attack inflicted by Hamas terrorists [on Israel] as ‘awesome.’”

Mohamed Abdou, described on Columbia’s website as “a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist” declared on social media, “Yes, I’m with … Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad but up to a point.”

There is also Hamad Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies. The Post reports, “He’s come under fire in recent years for a slew of controversial social media posts, including a since-deleted one in which he blamed Israel for every ‘dirty’ problem in the world.” He wrote, “Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name ‘Israel’ will pop up in the atrocities.”

There are likely more professors with views like these at Columbia and elsewhere, but you get the picture.

It may be a generalization, but too many young people have been treated as though they were the font of all wisdom while older, wiser, and more experienced people have been sidelined and their views silenced. Few speak of responsibility or accountability for actions once deemed illegal, immoral, impractical, uninformed, duped and just plain stupid.

Students who take out big loans to learn propaganda and worthless subjects at too many universities now expect those loans to be forgiven at taxpayer expense.

But some are now waking up to reality. Let’s hope that others follow the lead of Columbia’s president and Google management.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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