There have been many videos of “protestors” on US college campuses in recent weeks that display how spoiled – and detached from reality – these students are. There was the graduate student at Columbia, complaining because the university wouldn’t allow food to be delivered to folks who had illegally occupied a building by smashing windows and forcing their way in. There was a similar complaint from a student at Princeton about how, being on a hunger strike, she’s…hungry, and that the university wasn’t doing anything to help her. Then there was another Princeton student complaining that the university health services hadn’t looked into how she’s doing during her hunger strike. And there was another tempest in a teacup when a writer Abigail Anthony released tweets from black Princeton students that had been posted in a twitter feed that had over 1000 members, tweets that make the tweeters look stupid – as if those students expected what they said to be kept private. Don’t ask me how any of these folks gained admission to Princeton or Columbia.
But the statement that I found especially pathetic was the letter from the editors of the Columbia Law Review to the faculty, asking them to waive exams and pass all the students because the students were so upset by the NYPD’s forcible removal of the aforesaid building occupiers that the students couldn’t study.
You want traumatized? How about my wife’s MSc student who lives in Kfar Aza, who was holed up for 30 hours (with her sister and her sister’s two young kids) in the reinforced room in her parents’ house with no electricity, no plumbing and no water, while her father, armed only with a pistol, kept terrorists out – who still managed to burn half the house down? Many of her neighbors, people she’d known since childhood or grown up with, were killed that day.
How about my son and son-in-law, who respectively were supposed to start a master’s degree and second year of undergraduate degree, but who instead from October 8 through 10 were respectively in Kibbutz Beeri and Nahal Oz, and got to see first-hand the burnt-out houses and dead bodies as they were part of the effort to eliminate remaining terrorists? And who were then on reserve duty in Gaza until well into January, and who along with successes in eliminating terrorists saw some their fellow soldiers get wounded or worse? I could understand if either of them said they’re traumatized, but our son-in-law just finished his first semester exams. Our son chose not to start the degree this year, and merely returned to his job at Apple.
What a bummer for those Columbia law students. They, or their friends, chose to take over a university building and then got evicted by the NYPD when they refused to leave peacefully. As far as I know, there were no broken bones, let alone any loss of life. But, gosh, they and their fellow law students are traumatized.
Apparently no one on the faculty explained to those budding future lawyers that when it comes to the job, no one gives a crap about your feelings. During the week of October 8, while still in shock at the killing of over 1200 of my countrymen, I worked on an appeal brief to the USPTO, because we had an inextendible deadline to file it. The brief was in response to bunch of stupid rejections, written by an examiner who’s lazy, stupid, or both. There were a thousand things besides arguing with a fool that I would rather have been doing that week: helping farmers relocate their crops, returning reservists’ vehicles to their wives, organizing donations of food and clothing. But I set those feelings aside, because my client needed this job to be done.
I’m guessing that by now, the Columbia law students’ exam period is over. If the thought of some scofflaws on their campus being pulled out of a building that they vandalized left them too “traumatized” to take those exams, they clearly don’t have futures as lawyers.
That conclusion also follows from the reasoning ability of these putative legal eagles, which seems mighty deficient as well. They’re living on the Island of Manhattan, and asserting that Israelis are “colonizers”? Setting aside the falsity of the claim itself, if “colonization” bothers them, then they should get out of Manhattan and give it back to the folks that Dutch took it from hundreds of years ago. Otherwise, they’re just whiny, sanctimonious hypocrites. But that point seems to have escaped them.
By the time this is posted, it will be Memorial Day here in Israel. We’ll be remembering the thousands who have fallen over the years in defense of our country, inter alia making sure we have a free and just society. I plan to visit the graves of the local soldiers, including those who’ve fallen in the past seven months, one of whom I personally knew. Sadly, I expect that when US Memorial Day arrives in a few weeks, the Ivy league cretins will still be moaning about how the world owes them an easy life, and about how horrible it is to live in a country that grants them the right to free speech. And that instead of a word of thanks for the soldiers who gave their lives to defend that right, they’ll be at the mall or online making sure to get the best deal in Memorial Day sales.