His­to­ry has shown, repeat­ed­ly, that the best the extreme left or right can man­age is a rev­o­lu­tion, which in the end eats itself and accom­plish­es lit­tle of last­ing val­ue. Three events this week prove the point that  extreme views can be  cat­a­lysts for debate, but cast­ing change and progress comes from when the two meet in the middle.

The  protests  on U.S. uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es over Gaza have faint too hope of achiev­ing  their high-flown goals, but they have already  shat­tered  the facile view that cam­pus­es must above all pro­vide “:safe spaces” where stu­dents feel “com­fort­able”  and intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenges  are classed as  “micro-aggres­sions”.
The most cogent sum­ma­tion of that I’ve seen was from Mari­am Jal­low, a 21-yearb old who will be next year’s stu­dent body pres­i­dent at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty:  “We came to col­lege not exact­ly with this expe­ri­ence in mind, but def­i­nite­ly expect­ing dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions and dif­fi­cult growth. I came here for an edu­ca­tion, and I’ve got­ten a great one in the last few weeks.”
That it took  mass destruc­tion and slaugh­ter of the inno­cent  to make stu­dents pay seri­ous atten­tion to the plight of the Pales­tini­ans is shame­ful evi­dence of how lim­it­ed their edu­ca­tion has been when it comes to world affairs,
The chant “From the riv­er to the sea…” ignores the fact that Pales­tini­ans and Israelis accept­ed the con­cept a “two state solu­tion” under the Oslo  Accords of 1993. And even if they no longer like it or agree, only Hamas thinks the Israeli part can be ren­dered non-existent.
But that’s only slight­ly more fan­ci­ful than the politi­cians who think that order­ing  stu­dent pro­tes­tors to aban­don an anti-war cru­sade and go back to class will have any effect what­so­ev­er. As for threat­en­ing and then tak­ing harsh­er action, maybe take a quick look back at the anti-Viet Nam war period.
Equal­ly, protest lead­ers and par­tic­i­pants  would  do well to take a hard look at the seg­ment of their com­pa­tri­ots who seem to believe being pro-Pales­tin­ian needs to equate to anti-Semi­tism, and how they pro­pose to deal with the many Jews, both in the dias­po­ra and Israel itself, who oppose the con­duct of the war and see the Netanyahu gov­ern­men­t’s Pales­tin­ian poli­cies  as unjust.
The dan­ger in the growth and tol­er­ance of the one-sided point of view was summed up in  a recent arti­cle by  British  author and jour­nal­ist Howard Jacob­son: “Voice for voice, the edu­cat­ed out-sang the igno­rant in big­otry and bloodlust.”
The “edu­cat­ed” more often than not defend what­ev­er posi­tion they choose by shout­ing “free speech”. As a jour­nal­ist, that’s a right I am genet­i­cal­ly pre­dis­posed to wor­ship and defend.
How­ev­er, I am also inclined to the view that just as patri­o­tism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, defend­ing one’s every utter­ance, no mat­ter how inane, hurt­ful or sim­ply self-serv­ing as “free speech”, is the last bolt hole of the unprin­ci­pled and the greedy.
Which brings us to Elon Musk.
In a rant against an Aus­tralian court injunc­tion order­ing his social media plat­form “X” to removed graph­ic videos of a teenag­er stab­bing a bish­op in a church, Musk test­ed: “Our con­cern is that if ANY coun­try is allowed to cen­sor con­tent for ALL countries…then what is to stop any coun­try from con­trol­ling the entire Internet?”
The ques­tion is valid, up to a point. The point Musk is miss­ing is that Aus­tralian court would have  nei­ther  excuse nor grounds for inter­ven­tion if  the plat­form he con­trols had stan­dards that can dif­fer­en­ti­ate between  free speech and vio­lence voyeurism.

                SCIENCE OVER SNAKE OIL

And then there are those who can­not seem to dis­tin­guish between evi­dence and ignorance.
This year marked the 50^th anniver­sary of the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion (WHO) Expand­ed Pro­gramme on Immunization.
So far, the pro­gramme has saved at least 154 mil­lion lives, 16 nil­lion of them chil­dren under the age of five, from 14 dis­eases, includ­ing: measles, menin­gi­tis, polio, tetanus, tuber­cu­lo­sis and yel­low fever.. There are now also vac­cines against, cer­vi­cal can­cer  and malaria.
And yet. accord­ing to the author­i­ta­tive British med­ical jour­nal The Lancet, “vac­cine deniers have evolved from a fringe sub­cul­ture to an increas­ing­ly well organ­ised, net­worked movement.”
As some­one who has gone through the  uncon­trol­lable com­plete body shak­ing, sheet-soak­ing sweats and wild hal­lu­ci­na­tions of a malar­i­al fever, I sug­gest any­one who thinks  a vac­cine that will pre­vent the dis­ease  is a bad idea make friends with a female Anophe­les mos­qui­to.
That includes, in no order of pref­er­ence, Novak Djokovic and the sev­en­teen “celebri­ty”  anti-vaxxers list­ed by Rolling Stone mag­a­zine which includes Don­ald Trump (who as we know prefers bleach),.
The 17th cen­tu­ry French writer and philoso­pher summed up Eng­lish­men as being ”like their own beer: Frothy on top, dregs on the bot­tom, the mid­dle excellent.”
I leave it up to you to decide in which lev­el of that delight­ful scale each of the fore­go­ing fit.

Com­ments are wel­comed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.