Tension is growing in American colleges due to the virulent pro-Palestine protests that have occurred in recent days. According to what was reported by theAssociated Press, Columbia University canceled in-person classes, while at Yale and New York University a few dozen protesters were arrested. In particular, a few hundred demonstrators had camped out at New York University, indulging in “intimidating chants and various anti-Semitic episodes”: a situation which, yesterday evening, led the police to intervene.
In short, the situation is becoming increasingly heated. “While every American has the right to peacefully protest, calls for violence and intimidation toward Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly anti-Semitic, irresponsible and dangerous,” the White House said. “These days we see attacks and calls for violence against Jews. This clear anti-Semitism is reprehensible and dangerous and must have no place in colleges, or anywhere else in our country,” added Joe Biden himself. Meanwhile, however, the far-left congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has retweeted a statement from pro-Palestinian students at Columbia in which, calling for “divestment from genocide”, they argue that the episodes of extremism should be attributed to individuals and that the media they would be painting them in a distorted way.
Here, the discrepancy between Biden and Ocasio-Cortez highlights the structural problem that the American Democratic Party is experiencing. If its centrist wing tends to be in favor of Israel, the far left wing instead takes pro-Palestinian positions and does not give up sometimes winking at rather radical environments. And here four types of problems emerge.
The first is obviously that of the safety of Jewish students, who increasingly find themselves having to deal with hostile demonstrators and episodes of real anti-Semitism. The second concerns the extremism of rather large sections of the left dem: a radicalism, theirs, which for too long has been ignored (or at least silenced) from the media point of view. The third then has to do with the high degree of ideology that runs through many large universities across the Atlantic. Finally, the fourth issue concerns the next American presidential elections.
The pro-Palestinian wing of the Democratic Party has been accusing Biden for months of being too supportive of Israel in the current Gaza crisis. In this context, just a few days ago, NBC News reported that the Muslim-American community would be very irritated by the aid package for Israel that will soon arrive on Biden's desk. A Biden who fears an electoral boycott from pro-Palestinian circles in the November elections, especially in some key states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. The point is that, in trying to keep those worlds good, the American president often tends to get by. This line, however, has led Biden to take positions bordering on contradiction in his Middle Eastern policy. When someone tells you that conservatives are responsible for polarization in the United States, remind them of what the American far left is proving capable of.
