An American Intifada?

Anti-Zionists everywhere are seeking to draw equivalency between American protests against police brutality and Palestinian “resistance” to Israel.

The radical chic ideology of “intersectionality,” a Manichean view that divides the world into oppressors and the oppressed, helps explain why some privileged American professors draw parallels between intifadas against Israel and ongoing protests and riots in American cities. Campus Watch Fellow A.J. Caschetta addressed this curious (and spurious) notion yesterday at JNS:

Watching as a variety of actors, known and unknown, attempt to tear the United States apart at the seams has me thinking about the intifada, the Palestinian “uprising” against or “shaking off” of Israel. The “protests” (riots?) in America have taken on some peculiarly Palestinian qualities. While most Americans recoil in horror from the images they have been seeing, others are looking for ways to capitalize on the situation and win adherents to their side.

Chief among the latter is Hatem Bazian, a lecturer in the departments of Near Eastern and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. . . . At an anti-America rally in San Francisco in 2014, he called for an uprising that “changes fundamentally the political dynamics,” and asked, “How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?”

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Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.
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