By Peter Fernandez

According to an April 29th All Things Considered broadcast with Pat Bradley of Northeast Public Radio, students at  two Vermont colleges have set up encampments, “echoing a trend across the country protesting the Israel-Hamas War.” Encampments at the University of Vermont and Middlebury College were supported by Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, but according to The Cynic, the UVM student newspaper, “the only violation of college rules are the tents, which are temporary structures and not permitted on campus.” At Middlebury, the college paper, the Middlebury Campus, reported that “about 40 students set up tents and have not violated college policies.”

What are we to make of these tiresome anti-Israel protests that blitzkrieged across American colleges and universities this spring? All that was missing were torchlit parades with sharply dressed-in-black, goose-stepping SS officers, brown shirts &  Nazi youth chanting “Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles!” Many of these impressionable imps of ignorance hide their entities behind keffiyehs and hijabs, but remain oblivious to this conflict’s facts. 500 Middlebury alumni supported Hamas by preparing an open letter siding with Hamas:Students at UVM and Middlebury set up encampments to protest Israel-Hamas war. Middlebury Students for Justice in Palestine hosts teach-in, as over 500 alumni sign letter on Israel-Palestine war – The Middlebury Campus

History appears not to be taught any longer in these expensive and decadent dens of relativism and revisionism where Democracy once thrived, but dare disagree and debate, and one is in danger of taunts, or worse, physical violence. Ironically, these Hamas-supporting bozos, brats, and beatniks, whose liberal ideals regarding LGBTQ would assure these ignorant imbeciles of being stoned to death or their throats slit by polygamous Hamas henchmen, who slap around their wive(s). Sadly, these pathetic protests are based on synthetic sociology and other popular lies as they ignore the fixed realities of this conflict. Screaming repetitive slogans and threatening other students’ well-being is bullying and boorishness, and now that these feral hypocrites are on summer break back home in their childhood bedrooms and maybe spending a few weeks at a protest camp in perhaps Plainfield, they can return to campus as new&improved surly haters of Israel and America.

It wasn’t challenging to find telling online sources to burn down the misinformed Antisemitic/Zionist myth that Israel is systematically reducing (murdering) the Palestinian populace. In 1950, according to the Jewishvirtual-library, there existed 1,203,000 Arabs in Israel/Palestine. No, can’t trust them?  Ok, peruse 1950 Arab and Jewish population statistics in Britannica.com’s figures, but at 1,400,000 Arabs, they correlate handsomely with one another. Approximately 1.2 Jews lived in Israel at that time.

World Population Review.com’s 2024 figure of 5,477,459 Palestinians living in Israel today doesn’t mathematically add up to genocide, period. WPR’s sources are the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and population estimates and projections by the United Nations. See: Palestine Population 2024 (Live) (worldpopulationreview.com)  These aforementioned figures do not even account for the approximately 3 million Palestinians living in Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza, and that 2015 figure is based on analytics provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, or UNRWA. How did Hamas censors allow such telling numbers to slip through their filthy claws? Sadly, World Population Review.com wasn’t available in 1950 since hyperbole is an essential literary device in Arabic storytelling, i.e., pulp-drama-propaganda.

“As black South African parliament Kenneth Meshoe observes,” wrote Gerald Steinberg in his 11/06/2018 Jerusalem Institute of Justice article, “there would have been no need for armed struggle in South Africa, and no need for Nelson Mandela to go to prison, if conditions under apartheid had been comparable to the human rights situation in Israel.” 

Steinberg also writes that “Zionism are not manifestations of European colonialism, in contrast to the white settlers…who created Johannesburg and Pretoria while black labor was exploited in slavery-like conditions under apartheid, in contrast, Palestinians are dependent on Israeli employment…” 

Apartheid in South Africa existed from 1948-1994, meaning blacks were not allowed to vote or to be candidates in general elections, nor could they attend white universities or be treated in white hospitals and were forcibly removed from white cities. According to a March 6, 2010, Jerusalem Post article by Dore Gold, “Anyone who is the least bit familiar with Israel knows that Israeli Arabs vote for the Knesset and that there are Israeli Arab Knesset members, who also serve as deputy speakers of Israel’s parliament; an Israeli Arab judge sits on Israel’s Supreme Court; Israeli Arabs study in all Israeli universities and there are  mixed Arab-Jewish cities, like Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle and Jerusalem.”

In 2006, a former anti-apartheid activist from South Africa, Benjamin Pogrund, now living in Israel, countered Great Britain’s daily, The Guardian, comparing Israel and apartheid South Africa. Pogrund, who was also a deputy editor of Johannesberg’s Rand Daily Mail, stated that when he was hospitalized in Jerusalem for surgery, “he looked around and noticed that the patients, nurses, and doctors were both Arabs and Jews.”

Please excuse the first-person intrusion, but while volunteering in Israel, I sometimes accompanied patients to Tel Shomar Hospital and witnessed many Arab families visiting their recovering kin. Don’t believe in repetitive brainwashing broadcasts, protests and chants by these hateful fanatics. They only echo Nazi-like hate and superiority.