The Intifada as American Performance Art

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Western civilization is arrogant. Some would say it is confident, but we passed that threshold a ways back down the road to the future. No doubt, this arrogance is based on a damn good track record of success, but perhaps the greatest arrogance is the idea that because we have certain standards and see things a certain way here in the West, everybody else sees things our way – or should.

I guess that is why the infantile intifada performance art installations that are popping up across the nation at the institutions of “higher learning” are chafing and rubbing us the wrong way and making most of America a bit saddle sore.

I can’t help stopping to consider the stunning and brave stances of the wokesters, especially in light of their normal state of existence. Keep in mind this is the same group of people who need crisis counseling, safe spaces, warm blankies, and cuddly puppy dogs to snuggle any time it is announced Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, Jordan Peterson, or Riley Gaines are going to show up on campus to give a speech that would force them to consider an alternative to their strongly held opinions (assuming they ever heard the messages from these people when, in fact, their worlds collapse in on themselves when they just see a poster on campus about these people coming).

I think it is interesting these fragile little flowers are openly supporting people who have openly called for the extermination of the Jewish people – and for those on doubt, the chant of “Palestine from the river to the sea” means ending the state that currently holds title to that little piece of real estate, which happens to be Israel, the only Jewish state on the face of the earth.

What they are calling for, in a word, is war.

In many ways, war is the anthesis of what the wokesters believe because war is the ultimate expression of reality.

And God knows, these are people at war with reality.

But because of the tolerance and permissiveness of modern Western civilization, this war is conducted in a battle space consisting of Starbucks, college dorms, university greens and outside meeting halls. It is a war of emotions and words, not of death and physical destruction.

They are, however, pushing the world closer to war. For people on the front lines of any real war, the consequences are binary – either life or death. There are no pronouns, no seven thousand genders, no microaggressions, no “silence is violence”, and no safe spaces because war is the human condition in its least common denominator. They will take it down to fight or flight, even though they are fastidiously at work to eliminate anywhere flight could result in safety.

The policies of economic “fairness” they support result in impoverishment of the middle class (the rich can survive, as well as any on the dole from the bottomless pit of government largess and borrowing). They constantly worry about “income inequality” when the real back breaker is the imbalance between inflation and real wages – when inflation rages and wages can’t keep up, people struggle to buy necessities until their reserves are drained and they can’t by them any longer.

We know this – the hyperinflation brought on by Hugo Chavez’s socialist “reforms” ended in people killing zoo animals for food and hunting rats to survive. Similar conditions under the democratic Weimar Republic of Germany eviscerated the German middle class. Perhaps worse than the economic cost was the loss of faith among individual Germans that they could plan for and meet the future with hope.

The policies of social “fairness” set the classes, social, economic and/or racial, against each other. For all their yammering about ending racism, they seem to lack the awareness that their jihadi friends want to exterminate Jews for one reason – because they are Jews. That’s as racist as it gets.

I have respect for anyone who has fought and overcome, in war or in life, but I have no respect for the Don Quixote’s who have only tilted at windmills yet continue to act and believe they have fought dragons. I can only repeat the words of Christ on the cross: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

God will have to forgive them because I can’t.