It’s recently been suggested that the widespread pro-Palestinian protests and riots on campuses are like the ill-fated Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

Seth Mandel of Commentary magazine tweeted this on April 7, 2024

There's basically a Charlottesville every other day https://t.co/wmAhZnTpfC

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) April 7, 2024

And on April 22, he published this on Commentary’s website:

United States of Charlottesville https://t.co/fTLZ5kTOuH A campus culture diseased by blood-and-soil racial politics about Jews cannot so easily be fixed. But that does not absolve school officials of trying. In fact, the opposite.

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) April 22, 2024

Here’s his pitch:

United States of Charlottesville, by Seth Mandel, April 22, 2024

A couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of the Dearborn al-Quds Day hatefest, I noted that America was experiencing a regular bout of Charlottesvilles—the 2017 white supremacist race-war rally known as Unite the Right. That characterization has very quickly become common, and not a moment too soon. You cannot defeat the ideas you don’t understand, and you cannot understand the pro-Hamas protest movement without recognizing that their entire guiding philosophy is the one strain of blood-and-soil nationalism that survived the 20th century unscathed.

“Jews will not replace us” was the favored chant in Charlottesville. At the progressive campus rallies and beyond, “From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab” has made quite the comeback. In the past, the second half of that line was often “Palestine will be free,” a slightly more politically savvy version of the slogan that calls for the murder and enslavement of all Jews in the land of Israel. “Palestine is Arab” is even more openly violent than “Jews will not replace us,” a white nationalist chant that seeks to hide its bloodlust behind anti-immigration euphemisms. (It does not hide it well; a man radicalized by these theories massacred Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.) [More]

A lot of the time we see arguments from blacks that the American Revolution was about slavery, or that American foreign policy is an expression of white supremacy, and we need to explain to blacks that most of American history—including, to a significant extent, the Civil War—is not about them.

In the same way, in spite of the chant, the Unite the Right rally was not about Jews. It was about (a) the statue of Robert E. Lee (that being the question that Trump said had “fine people on both sides”) and (b) the ability of the pro-Trump Dissident Right to hold a rally, after many rallies had been attacked by Antifa/Leftists with the police failing to stop them, forcing them to fight back—and be arrested for it.  See Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also...Increasingly Unequal Justice For Whites and Trump Administration Must Use Civil Rights Law To Defend #BasedStickMan, Supporters Against Berkeley Anarcho-Tyranny, both from early 2017.

Both the rally and the totally legal pre-rally torchlight march were not only legal, but “permitted” in the sense that Jason Kessler had applied for and gotten a permit.

This didn’t involve foreign politics, it didn’t involve any “occupying” of college campuses, and the Unite the Right marchers were not trying to prevent anyone from entering the park. (There was some Antifa activity like that, which the police did nothing to stop.)

And while some jurisdictions and colleges are doing nothing to stop the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, rioters, and occupiers, others are cracking down, in ways that should have been done during the 2020 riots, when it would have been harder (although more necessary) because many of the rioters were dangerous black criminals, or organized Leftist Antifa.

The pro-Palestinian riots on campuses are much more like the annoying Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011, except that instead of being anti-capitalist and pro-socialism, they’re anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.

Now, while Leftist whites are common at Ivy League colleges, some of these pro-Palestinian demonstrations are being done by… actual Palestinians, because colleges deliberately recruit them, and other Muslim foreign students.

The white students who join in are doing so not because they’re “blood and soil” nationalists, but because they’re anti-white, and they think of Israel as a white settler community.

In 2015, President Obama, trying to get Israel to agree to his Iran deal, complained of, according to Tablet Magazine, “‘well-financed’ lobbyists, as well as the ‘big check writers to political campaigns,’ and ’billionaires who happily finance super-PACs.’”

He didn’t actually say he meant Jewish billionaires, or mention AIPAC, but Tablet was able to figure out what he meant, and arch-neocon Bill Kristol tweeted this:

"It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President."http://t.co/1CCKQHjwlZ

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 8, 2015

To which I replied at the time: Bill Kristol Thinks Barack Hussein Obama Is Talking Like He’s At A ”White Power” Rally? Seriously?

I said that Obama’s biography is “not the biography of white power anti-Semite, it’s the biography of a Black Muslim anti-Semite. If you want a President who will play nice with Israel, and not make ‘coded’ remarks about AIPAC, you need to elect someone whose middle name isn’t ‘Hussein.’

So if you find that you’re not safe on campus from people in hijabs and keffiyehs, you need to crack down on (a) Muslim immigration, (b) anti-white racism, whether it’s called CRT, DEI, or Cultural Marxism, but not (c) American nationalism.

By the way, I am not calling these anti-war rallies. Like the Vietnam era protesters, these people aren’t opposed to war as such, but just one side in a war.

The well-known IQ and crime stats poster on Twitter @eyeslasho found a case of a self-proclaimed Zionist American called Adam R. Fisher   tweeting ludicrous claims about the non-evilness of Vietnam-era protests, and comparing them to the Palestinian flag-flying, keffiyeh-clad students of today.

Can't load tweet https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1781693228904817020: Sorry, that page does not exist

@eyeslasho used a picture of Fisher’s Tweet in case he gets embarrassed and deletes it, but at present Fisher is still trying to defend his position, saying:

As some have rudely pointed out, among the millions of protestors there was the occasional Viet Cong flag. It was controversial among the anti-war protesters because critics of the protests seized on it to paint all anti-war protesters as communist sympathizers and militants when the vast majority were not. It was by no means the typical flag students unfurled on campus.

I don’t want to argue about how many Viet Cong flags they unfurled, or what they chanted (I can remember contemporary reports of chants of “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!”). I’d like to talk about Fisher’s claim that they didn’t “call for the eradication of South Vietnam.”

They didn’t just call for it, they achieved it. South Vietnam isn’t there anymore, and that was achieved by the “anti-war” Left in Congress taking out Nixon, getting even more Leftists in Congress, and cutting off all supplies to the former Republic of South Vietnam [Peace? Defeat? What Did the Vietnam War Protesters Want?, by James Webb, American Enterprise Institute, May/June 1997].

What happened to South Vietnam is unlikely to happen to Israel—but to the extent that it could, it’s not because of Trump or the Dissident Right, but the relentless importation of Muslims into America, and the anti-white ideology that led to the similar betrayal of the ”white settler community” of Rhodesia.

James Fulford [Email him] is writer and editor for VDARE.com.