Revolting Students

The sweeping Republican victories in the midterm elections have yielded the customary progressive analysis: Americans are not just fearful and irrational, they are angry and downright dangerous as well. And as everybody knows, when non-progressives get mad—when they suffer a mass temper tantrum, or vote their hatreds, or lash out against some unidentified “other”—the long dark night of national shame ensues. Already, responsible observers, recognized experts, and prominent newspaper columnists are publicly worried about being targeted by right-wing crazies, whipped into an ideological frenzy by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Fox News, Rep. Michele Bachmann, or the Wall Street Journal (take your pick). 

Extracurricular activities: Students storm London.

NEWSCOM

The trouble with this scenario is that it is not only patently untrue, but it has never been true. Yes, The Scrapbook is aware that the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, harbored grievances against the federal government; and to some progressive minds, the pro-life movement is indistinguishable from the handful of terrorists who have attacked abortion clinics or shot physicians. But the sad truth is that most political violence in the United States—from the campus bombings, burnings, and killings of the 1960s and ’70s to the European-style rioting at IMF/World Bank meetings—has its origins on the left. Lest we forget, the man who shot John F. Kennedy was a committed Marxist and an -officer of his local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The man who shot Robert Kennedy was a Palestinian exile who targeted Kennedy because of his support for Israel.

This basic fact of modern political life is nowhere more evident at the moment than in Europe. Two countries are enduring political violence at the moment—France and Great Britain—and it is not being perpetrated by conservatives, free-marketers, or supporters of the war on terror. In France, students and labor unions have sought to shut down the country and paralyze Paris because the center-right Sarkozy government has proposed to raise the French retirement age from 60 to 62. And London was the scene last week of a mob attack on an office block that contains the headquarters of the Conservative party. The grievance? A government proposal to lower teaching budgets as part of its austerity program, and to raise tuition fees for university students to about $14,000 per year.

The student march in London was largely peaceful and, we are told, not intended to be violent. But a radical element within the company of marchers was determined to be violent—and were they ever: The glass front of the Millbank Tower was shattered, hundreds of rioters swarmed into the building, vandalized the interior, and held sway on the roof, dropping heavy projectiles onto a knot of outnumbered policemen. The rioters, in the aftermath, were pleased with what they had accomplished: Government policies justify violence, several explained, and one Cambridge undergraduate commented that since nobody had been killed, and only property was stolen or destroyed, no real harm was done.

Let us hope that this will concentrate minds on the left in Britain—and perhaps in France—and cause them to worry less about their democratically elected governments’ attempts to put their fiscal house in order and more about what’s brewing within their own ranks. And the same goes for their progressive brethren in America.

Lost in Translation

Last week the Washington Post reported that 17 Northern Virginia residents “had excitedly prepared for the hajj, the pilgrimage that is sacred to devout Muslims,” by hiring a California travel agency to arrange their tickets and get visas for their passports. The package, however, scheduled for overnight delivery to the Dar AlNoor mosque in Manassas, never arrived. It turned out that it wasn’t lost, as UPS initially claimed, but had been seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “We cooperate with government agencies on security matters,” explained a UPS spokesman. Given the recently thwarted terrorist plot originating in Yemen and targeting Chicago synagogues that had sought to use UPS and Federal Express as delivery mechanisms for explosive devices, it is hardly surprising that express mail services are on a higher state of alert. 

While some observers, like CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper, wondered if this wasn’t an instance where authorities had profiled Muslims, it is worth remembering that after the Yemen plot the FBI warned that American mosques, as well as synagogues and churches, were possible targets.

At any rate, the package eventually reached its intended destination, but only after “all but one of the travelers had missed their flight.” At this point, the customs agency again intervened, this time to buy $34,000 worth of replacement tickets to ensure the Northern Virginians got to Mecca in time for the hajj.