The Outstater
Deport Them; They’ll Like It
THE ADMINISTRATION of Indiana University is deep into what my colleague Mark Franke has identified as cognitive-dissonance reduction, a way of cramming inconvenient facts into an impossible ideology.
Pamela Whitten, with a doctorate in communication studies, is the university’s first female president if that is important to you. She seems confused or perhaps just stymied as to why students from foreign countries can be expelled for something as innocuous as shouting “Free Palestine.”
That is so even though the irate sign-holders straining the police lines nationwide don’t look like they are indulging in what their apologists claim to be a harmless greater jihad, that is, a spiritual struggle within oneself against sin. It is not to be confused with a lesser jihad, which is more severe, as witnessed in Israel earlier this month.
We are grateful that Whitten has spared us the popular campus rationale that Israel (and the U.S.) deserve this treatment because of our “settler colonialism,” a concept so juvenile it defies serious explication except as a trope of revived socialism.
In any case, the governor’s appointees on the IU Board of Trustees can let Whitten know that these students may be citizens of the mythical Socialist Republic of Bloomington but they are not citizens of the United States. They have no rights here. We were reminded of that this week by U.S. Rep. Jim Banks who is urging that they be summarily deported.
Good for him. Whitten should be publicly cooperating with Banks’s office in compiling a list as authorized by Section 212(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
“We’ve already had a record number of illegal immigrants from terrorist-harboring nations,” Banks said. “We need to shut down our border and then deport all non-citizen Hamas sympathizers. The Biden administration has the legal authority and an obligation to do both — anything less betrays America’s national security.”
But still, who can be against a “free” Palestine? Or against callow over-stimulated students from another culture taking an energetic study break, asserting their space? What happened to freedom of speech and all that? Don’t people have a right to be wrong?
Not that wrong. To borrow a phrase from City Journal, IU students are supporting hard-line Islamists who are to freedom “what a fire is to a library.” For what many in the IU administration had hoped — that students from Muslim nations, millions of them, would learn to admire and emulate the freedoms of the West — has not happened. Instead, they envy and hate us. Here recently is the author Ann Coulter, shouted off the stage at IU a few months ago:
“This isn’t the old, ‘They hate us for our freedoms.’ Rather, it is simply an acknowledgement of the fact that the most common and destructive human emotion is jealousy. People will brag about being gluttons, prideful, greedy, angry, lustful and lazy. The only venal sin no one will cop to is envy. That’s how insidious it is.”
But what was that stuff about beheaded babies? “There were no beheaded babies,” Hamas has said and the IU protestors apparently believe. And if there were, it were only an irrelevant few. And everybody knows that the clever Israelis spread around beheaded babies and raped children after a Hamas raid.
If these students are too young to understand what moral tommyrot that is, then their adult sponsors do understand. We need to start practicing the ancient diplomatic supplication “Go back home.” Whitten can just tell them we have reached our quota of dangerous ingrates and envious malcontents, some of them elected to Congress.
“They’ll like it! Vastly fewer ‘white supremacists’ to oppress them,” concludes Coulter. “They can hate us all they want. Just do it from their own countries.” — tcl
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