This article originally appeared in Hoover.org. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Mariam Memarsadeghi, June 10, 2024
For students condemning Israel in protests on America’s campuses, the October 7 terror attack is to be ignored, whitewashed, denied, justified, and even celebrated. To really think about the savagery and profound suffering of October 7 would elicit empathy for other humans who are Jews. To speak honestly about the killing, gang rape, mutilation of even babies, torture, scorching, public humiliation, and hostage-taking would require reflection on the existential threat to the Jewish people and the state of Israel by Islamists. It would require thinking about how Islamists’ genocidal hatred for Jews is one and the same as the Nazi dehumanization that resulted in the Holocaust, the singular horror that forever marks mankind’s capacity for evil. It would require an examination of the modern ideological drivers of such terror, and the training, financing, technology, weaponry, and international propaganda needed to sustain it.
It is easier for student protestors to begin and end their outrage with only Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the suffering of Gazans – and this is just what Hamas and its backer, the Islamic Republic of Iran, intend. Iran’s regime has demonstrated its willingness to kill via execution, assassination, torture, and indiscriminate shooting on the streets of Iran, as well as through its sponsorship of terror and wars abroad, and notably through Bashar Assad’s war on the Syrian nation that has taken the lives of over 500,000. For 45 years Tehran has promulgated “Resistance” in the name of the Palestinian people but in reality, has sacrificed the lives and livelihood of Palestinians at every turn to sustain its rule.
The war that Israel has been forced to wage has resulted in the deaths of Palestinian civilians as well as losses for Hamas, the Houthis, and other Iran regime terror proxies, but for the Ayatollahs these are expendable lives and proxy forces; their “martyrdom” ensures the survival of the Islamic Republic itself as a revolutionary state and an imperial Islamist project founded on hatred of Jews and Israel as oppressors. , It transcends the Shia and Sunni split and even the geography of the Middle East, seeding resentment and conspiratorial, anti-Semitic worldviews at even the most elite of American universities, as evidenced by the Hezbollah flag displayed at Princeton University, not to mention the physical assault of Jewish students and persecution of Jewish professors.
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