Only the most naive would still believe that the call to be openly yourself in universities applies to Jewish youth.
Looking back over recent years, it’s hardly surprising to see a confluence of institutions aligning their interests under the same umbrella. The same groups were glued to each other in the timid response to 7 October, as opposed to the vociferous indignation at the Israeli response to the barbaric attack carried out by Hamas (and the public threat to repeat it again and again).
Legacy and social media
Once feared by the establishment, the legacy media has been transformed into a tool controlled by the elite to manipulate the population. Social media has replaced the legacy media as the main source of information, forcing the latter not only to adapt to new ways of communicating, but also to adopt their ideology, which has nothing to do with standing up for the truth, as genuine journalism used to do. Both traditional and social media, which we can simply call mainstream media, have relied on the likes of Hamas to point the finger at the IDF at every opportunity. The most notorious example – and there are several – was the explosion at the Christian hospital in Gaza sometime at the beginning of the Israeli offensive. It turned out a day or two later that it was caused by an Islamist missile, and the damage wasn’t as bad as was reported. Obviously, the mainstream media neither admitted nor apologised for the blunder. To this day, some audiences still think that Israel is to blame. And the mainstream media are playing a major role in the disinformation campaign. Another example – which isn’t related to a single event, but ongoing – is the number of Gazans killed in the war. Again, the data is based on input provided by Hamas and hasn’t been fact-checked. In reality, the tendency is not to mention the terrorist organisation when releasing the figures. Everyone knows it would raise eyebrows.
NGOs
I can’t remember much coverage of the Red Cross in the aftermath of 7 October. They were probably there, but not with the same passion as in Gaza. You would think they are there to support the hostages. That’s not the case. They accompanied the hostages who were lucky to be released, that’s it. Some accounts say that Red Cross workers even exchanged hostile language with the hostages’ relatives. Women’s rights organisations around the world haven’t shown too much interest in the appalling abuses suffered by Israeli women at the hands of Hamas. Solidarity hasn’t even touched the hearts of those who have been savagely murdered, some of them after being brutally gang-raped alongside dead bodies. Not so long ago, the world believed every woman no matter what. A Tanzanian man was tortured and gruesomely killed by the terrorists. Not a peep from BLM (Black Lives Matter). The silence of the NGOs is just obscene.
UN
The UN is in principle an NGO, or a collection of NGOs. I’d rather mention them separately, given the upper hand the entity has over geopolitics. António Guterres, the organisation’s Secretary General (whom we’ve had cause to take to task in this recent article) made it very clear he wouldn’t openly condemn the murdering of more than 1,200 innocent lives, most of them young people out enjoying a music festival and, at its core, advocates of peace. Israel called on Guterres to resign, but the UN didn’t disassociate itself from the Portuguese man’s remarks, making it clear that their stance was not too different. In my view, Israel cannot afford to let the UN decide who’s going to govern Gaza in the future – a scenario that would allow some other evil tribe to rise from Hamas’s ashes (and satanic wishes).
Universities
If there is one thing universities can still teach us, it is that we should take our lessons from elsewhere. The credibility of American colleges is seriously at stake with the cretinous comments of Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard University whose disastrous testimony before Congress about on-campus antisemitism has attracted much criticism. Like a deck of cards, the prestigious centres of knowledge and forums of debate in Britain are also going downhill. The same goes for Ireland and Western society at large. Despite the so-called ‘safe spaces’, Jewish students no longer feel comfortable on campus, and some of them don’t dare to show their cultural or religious ornaments. Only the most naive would still believe that the call to be openly yourself in universities applies to Jewish youth.
The end of those institutions as we know it
I’d like to think that if there’s one upside to the Hamas atrocities, it’s that we can now declare that the above institutions have been fully exposed. In fairness, they had already been unmasked, but not to the extent that their true colours have been revealed to the entire world, especially to the ones in their twenties who spend an awful lot of time on Tik Tok, get their not always useful degrees in dubious academia, and some end up employed by NGOs that are merely activism with no shortage of antisemitism, identifying Israel with capitalism and cursing its citizens and their culture for the brutal exploitation of others. The manipulation of the youth is so extreme that they are deluded into believing that they represent the rebellion, whereas they are the most devoted soldiers of the system. How else could Osama Bin Laden return to the stage as a kind of hero?
By Vitor Vicente.
Vitor Vicente (pictured below) is a Portuguese author with 12 published books. Some of his works have been translated into English, Hungarian and Spanish. He resides in Dublin and writes a column for The Echo and The Blindspot.
As with all articles published on this website, the views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Ireland Israel Alliance.
