Who’s “Exploiting Paris”?

One day following the Friday the 13th attacks in Paris, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote a column–“The Exploitation of Paris”–accusing GOP presidential candidates like Donald Trump of “exploiting” the tragedy by suggesting that availability of guns to private citizens might have prevented it.

Bruni has a point in this sense. More–not less–gun control might have been a preventative, but not in France where gun bans are already draconian, but in neighboring Belgium which gives a wink and a nod to radical Muslims who have made it into perhaps the leading guns and explosives entrepôt in Europe.

What Bruni fails to note altogether is this. It’s not just the conservative right who are “exploiting” Paris burning against liberals. Anti-Semites, many on the left, are also doing it against Israelis and Jews.

In fact, anti-Semitism was being injected into the new student protest movement, including the Million Student March for free higher education, even before the Paris attacks. The Million Student March was hijacked in New York State by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, John Jay College, CUNY School of Law, and Columbia University, among others. Their statement read: “On November 12, students all across CUNY will rally to demand a freeze on tuition and new contracts! We must fight for funding for our university, and for CUNY to be accessible to working class communities in NYC as the public university system. The Zionist administration [sic] invests in Israeli companies, companies that support the Israeli occupation, hosts birthright programs and study abroad programs in occupied Palestine, and reproduces settler-colonial ideology throughout CUNY through Zionist content of education. While CUNY aims to produce the next generation of professional Zionists, SJP aims to change the university to fight for all peoples [sic] liberation.”

Then came Friday the 13th. In reaction in Gaza, there was a pro-Isis demonstration, allowed by supposedly anti-ISIS Hamas, that burned the French Tri Color in celebration of the Paris terror attacks as a blow for ending Zionist oppression. Watch for a series of French flag burnings in the same spirit on our campuses. By autonomic reflex, the Palestinian dog is sure to wag its American tail against an Israeli conspiracy to buttress Tel Aviv by burning Paris, for which Palestinians shed no tears.

In fact, Mary Hughes-Thompson, co-founder of the Free Gaza movement, has already insinuated as much: “I haven’t accused Israel of involvement. Still, Bibi is upset about the European settlement boycott. So who knows.”

In the 1930s, Oxford University students adopted a debate resolution not “to fight for King and Country.” Today, increasing numbers of American college students seem to be unwilling to fight for anything except against Global Warming (a crusade whose John the Baptist is Bernie Sanders and Messiah is Al Gore, waiting in the darkened Eiffel Tower for a providential call if the Temperature Gods decide use our thermometers to presidentially fire up his private jet), against college tuition, and against ethnically-themed Halloween costumes (a controversy that’s convulsed Yale’s campus).

Except for student loan forgiveness, this is a pretty thin ideological gruel. That may be why the gruel is being fortified with a dollop of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

And now Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Allstrom has linked Paris terror to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. She refers to the Middle East, “where not least the Palestinians see that there is no future. We must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”

“We”  must resort to violence? The Israelis may be lucky that the Swedish Army is a laughing stock.