Protest DOES have a place on campus. Hate DOESN’T.

Confession Time: I was a campus protester. It was the late 1960’s. The Vietnam War was raging. I believed then, and I still believe today, that America was simply on the wrong side of that war. Recently, we signed a mutual defense treaty with Vietnam, the hated enemy back then. So, why were we fighting, dying, killing vast numbers of Vietnamese, and ruining the country with napalm and agent orange? It seems now that losing that war was one of the few good things that happened.

In my case, I marched alongside my future wife and my favorite engineering professor (The head of the computer science department!) down the middle of the biggest street in Salt Lake City – North Temple Street – along with a thousand or so like-minded protesters. I don’t think anything else like that has ever happened in Salt Lake City. Before or since.

To be a little more complete, when my local draft board finally lowered the boom on me and sent a polite letter that said (in translation from bureaucrat-speak): “We’re onto you sonny. Either show up at the induction center or the next communication you get from us will be delivered by a US marshal. Which one is it going to be?” After weighing everything, I showed up at the induction center and allowed the government to totally waste my newly minted engineering degree and the next two years.

That was then and this is now.

There are people in Israel – a lot of people – who are doing the same thing today. “Netanyahu” is simply “Nixon” in Yiddish. The root of the Israel-Gaza war is the same blind ultra-nationalism that fueled America’s war against the Vietnamese. Good on them! (The Jews in Israel trying to stop the brutality of the Netanyahu government.) I wish them every success. I know what they’re up against.

But the brutality (and, like Nixon, the criminality) of Netanyahu is NOT an excuse for antisemitism at campuses like Columbia University today. And the October 7 attack by Hamas was a horrible and unforgivable murder of innocents.

It is possible to be PRO-Jew and ANTI-Zion. The protests at Columbia have crossed the line from “protest” over to “hate”. I’m anti-Zion. The Zionist state of Israel has been robbing and murdering the Palestinians for decades. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, the Zionists WERE the terrorists. Remember the King David Hotel ! But I’m against what the protests at Columbia have turned into.

My mother taught me that “two ‘wrongs’ don’t make a ‘right’”. There is no excuse for what the “proto-terrorists” at Columbia have become. I don’t have an answer for what is happening in the Israel-Gaza war. I didn’t have an answer during Vietnam either. I just knew right from wrong.

And this is from a (now old and retired) campus protester.