The American contribution to rolling back the Nazi conquest of Europe and defeating Hitler’s regime was ornamented by the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, which first appeared in Stars and Stripes, the soldiers’ paper. I own a collection of those cartoons and, from Bill Mauldin’s introduction, learned of the exclusive club to which his dirt-encrusted heroes, Willy and Joe, belonged: 

the fellowship of them

wot has been shot at.

If I were still on campus, practicing my profession of teaching philosophy, there is no doubt in my mind that I would be out there fighting the horrible outbreak of anti-semitism at our colleges and universities.

But aren’t the campus-out-breakers legitimately concerned (I may be asked) about the damage inflicted on Gaza’s civilian population by Israeli military actions in Gaza? Wouldn’t that natural concern have been the prompt for re-normalizing the oldest continuous hatred in recorded history?

First, hatred brimming over into gleeful malice isn’t normal. Second, a little history helps, I think. When Israel withdrew from its occupation of Gaza (having only occupied it to ward off jihadi attacks from its neighbor) it left behind for potential use its small manufactories and farms. The natural hope was for a regime of good neighborliness in Gaza.

Too bad for that natural hope. Within a year, Gazans had voted Hamas into power. The founding charter of Hamas actually called for the murder of every Jew on planet earth. Hamas took the international contributions, which had flowed into Gaza following the IDF withdrawal, and used them to build 300 or so miles of underground tunnels from which to launch murderous attacks on its Israeli neighbors – attacks which culminated in the grisly torture murders of October 7, 2023. The October 7 crimes against humanity have been compared to the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered. Of course, as crimes they were far less extensive; but in deliberately publicized sadistic relish, they were morally comparable.

These horrors were actually cheered and celebrated by those whose images of victim and victimizer derive – not from facts on the ground – but from a script whose actors (exploiters from the hegemonic Western countries v. the exploited from non-Western countries) are assigned their fixed labels in advance, without reference to what was actually done, and when it was done, or by whom, or from what motive. As to the longer history of the players, that’s not part of the artificially shortened script.

Prominent among the script-clippers are young men and women presently at American institutions of higher education. They are the demonstrators at whom I’ve been simply staring. Are these the young people to whom I’ve devoted the work of my life as a college professor?

Jerry, also a former philosophy professor and chair of a well-regarded philosophy department, reminds me that I didn’t devote myself to philosophy students per se. I devoted my working forces to speaking, writing and acting truthfully. As for the students, they could take it or leave it.

Some took it.

Some left it.

Plato’s Academy was not built for students. It was built to protect and facilitate the search for truth. In that sense (and I can give you particulars) I’ve never retired.

*          *          *