The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald observed that when people are hypocritical, the hypocrisy is rarely the worst aspect of what they’re doing; and that if what they’re doing is very bad, being honest and unhypocritical about it does not make it better. (The way he said this was funnier.)
Commenting on the spread of anti-Israel protests to universities in the Netherlands, Sebas Lammers, a student at the University of Amsterdam, objects to the demands and moral stance of the protesters (“The unreasonableness of student protests,” Folia).
He says, for one thing, that “it is wrong to hold Israeli universities and their students responsible and to blame them for the actions of the government of Netanyahu.”
Um, okay. True enough.
October 7
Nor is any government exempt from criticism. But is it right to blame the government of Netanyah specifically for retaliating against Hamas for the attacks of October 7, 2023 and for doing its best to wipe out the threat of Hamas, as Lammers seems to be implying? Should Israel instead do what Hamas and allied groups would prefer: cease to exist? Are appeasement and surrender the only morally right response to the threat of Hamas?
Lammers believes that students are “very inconsistent with their vehement protests. Assuming they stand for human rights as universal principles, there are quite a few universities from controversial countries that the UvA [University of Amsterdam] also collaborates with. Consider the Universitas21 network. The UvA belongs to this, [as does] China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University. In totalitarian China, more than a million Uighurs have been detained in ‘re-education camps’ for years.”
Lammers wonders why the protesters, purported champions of human rights, don’t object to cooperation with China if they are so vociferous in their objections to cooperating with Israel by, for example, participating in exchange programs.
He says that it is possible at Utrecht University “to go on exchanges to countries such as China or South Africa. But students are not against these forms of cooperation. And let me be clear that I am certainly not in favor of ending these ties; on the contrary, we should preserve them. Yet some hypocrisy is thus not foreign to these students.”
Abetting evil
If the Dutch should “preserve these ties” with totalitarian China—which wants foreigners to voluntarily cooperate with and preserve ties with it, since implicit moral sanctions help the Chinese government to preserve and expand its power—why should they do so? And would it then also make sense for students to establish ties with Hamas by participating in exchange programs with Hamas?
I’m sure that the anti-Israel protesters in the Netherlands are hypocritical in various ways. But China finds in Hamas a natural ally. The imprisonment of the Uyghurs is just one of the many crimes that put the government of China in the same camp and category as Hamas: that of systematic oppressors and murderers. So exempting China from objective moral judgment while also exempting Hamas from objective moral judgment is not the proof of hypocrisy.
If the student protesters “stand for human rights as universal principles,” supporting and sanctioning and cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party would be hypocritical, just as supporting and sanctioning and cooperating with Hamas would be hypocritical—at the very least, confused and ill-informed (a state of mind of limited exculpatory value). But lip service and hypocrisy are not the basic issue, not the basic thing that’s wrong with what the protesters’ conduct.
“The issue is this: To side with Hamas against Israel is immoral,” writes Harry Binswanger at HB Letter, “To side with the sub-humans who committed the atrocities of October 7 is obscenely evil.”
If, however, the protesters see fit to protest Israel’s willingness to defend itself but don’t see fit to protest the evil actions of Hamas, it is entirely consistent with this horrific stance that they also give China a pass.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: “China Is Stoking a New Cold War With the West”
StopTheChinazis.org: “The China Gang, Iran Gang, Russia Gang, Hamas Gang, Houthi Gang…”
