"Intersectionality": Hate for Israel and America Go Hand in Hand

Hat tip American Spectator and Campus Watch

“Intersectionality” is a term someone on the left invented not to describe traffic patterns, but to link different issues together in innovative ways when their relationships are questionable at best. Thus, the leftists in academia have been able to explain to our children in college that the “plight” of the Palestinians is relevant to the experience of African-Americans, gays, and the threat to our environment to name just a few.

A more credible example of intersectionality would be the connection between hatred for Israel and hatred for America. Having listened to way too many anti-Israel diatribes at UC Irvine and other campuses over the years,  I have noted in almost every case, the speaker drifts from condemning Israel to condemning America as being “imperialistic”, “genocidal”, “racist”, and God knows what else. In this piece by Paul Miller in American Spectator (and cross-posted in Campus Watch), Miller writes about a professor at UC San Diego and a graduate student at UCSD. Please be patient, Dear Reader because there is an intersection between the two. This Ethnic Studies professor, Yen Le Espiratu, as you can see from the article, is full of loathing for Israel. (What professor in the humanities isn’t?). The graduate student, Leslie Quintanilla, who is also an asst. professor of *Chicano Studies at San Diego City College, and is also a harsh critic of the US.

(* Chicano is a term that refers to Mexican-Americans. When I was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the young toughies who embraced this term. To my wife, who was born in Mexico, it is an offensive term. Yet, the far left in academia use it constantly.)

So now here comes the intersection. Espiratu invites Quintanilla to address her class in which she tears into both Israel and the US. (Quintanilla is also a leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement.)

“So, when we think about the relationship between what we call Israel and what we call the US, we see a similar — not completely the same, but a similar strategy of genocide and indigenous removal from indigenous lands.”

And so it goes. In American universities, no two countries are loathed as much as Israel and the US. Not North Korea, not Iran, not Sudan, not Pakistan, not Venezuela, not Cuba, not Russia. To any logical thinker, there is obviously something very wrong in our universities. If it were merely the expression of free thought, that would be one thing-except that speech favorable to the US or Israel is met with disapproval to the point of violent and disruptive protests. No, what we must conclude is that our universities-specifically in the social sciences and humanities- have been literally taken over by the far left. 

To “prove” their viewpoints are valid, the leftists must concoct obtuse theories like “intersectionality”, a perversion of connecting the dots. Another example would be how the left in academia deal with Israel and gay rights. The fact is that there is only one nation in the Middle East where gays can live openly, safely, and in full enjoyment of their rights. That nation is Israel. In the neighboring Middle East lands, gays are killed, thrown off high buildings in Gaza, or hanged from construction cranes in places like Iran. Not be deterred, the left is intent on linking Palestinians and gays in common cause (at least in the West). In this case, their version of intersectionality requires a detour, which is the theory of “pink washing”, a term bought into by some in the US gay lobby that says that Israel takes unfair advantage of the above facts to the detriment of the poor Palestinians. It is totally devoid of logic, but in the world inhabited by people like Espiratu and Quintanilla, logic and common sense are useless exercises.

It would be easy to want to laugh all this off and let academia live in splendid isolation. We cannot ignore it because it is our children whose minds are being poisoned. I am not arguing for censorship, but until the free exchange of views returns to our universities and this nonsense dies of its own natural causes, we need to consider as students and as parents whether we want to consider alternative fields of study and alternative ways of getting an education.