As president, Donald Trump brought the Middle East to the brink of peace.
Now campaigning for the White House again, he’s weighing in on the turmoil plaguing the nation’s “elite” campuses over the war that President Joe Biden’s weakness has fostered in the region.
And the advice is as simple as it would be effective — if the men and women who are supposed to be in charge of higher education would follow it.
“STOP THE PROTESTS NOW!!!” Trump wrote in a post on the Truth Social social media platform on Monday.
That might be too complicated for the progressive administrators who manage to turn a blind eye to the blatant anti-Semitism overrunning the grounds of supposed institutions of higher education.
It might be too crude for the wine-glass and whining crowd, who find themselves confronted with keffiyeh-clad campus thugs and their “from the river to the sea” chants.
But it’s exactly the kind of strength that has been missing during the entire season of discontent that’s descended on the American left since Israel was so viciously attacked Oct. 7 and has responded to force with overwhelming force.
In that invasion, since it seems to have been forgotten by the privileged scions of American society, an estimated 1,200 innocent men, women and children were slaughtered by bloodthirsty Hamas killers based in Gaza. About 250 survivors were taken hostage.
Some hostages have been returned, rescued or killed, but according to the BBC, about 130 remain unaccounted for.
Have colleges and universities bent too far in appeasing radical students?
Since then, hostilities have increased as Israel attacked its attackers, only for the terrorist nation of Iran to suspend its previous reliance on proxy patsies in its war on the Jewish state long enough to launch a swarm of missiles and drones at Israel from Iranian soil.
No other state in the world would be expected to show restraint under those conditions.
The evil force here is so undeniable, the identity of the aggressor so obvious, it’s hard to think of any decent human being taking the side of Hamas. Yet that is the side chosen by many leaders of the nation’s left, including members of Congress.
And that means it’s the side chosen by the Quad commandos across the country — and too many administrators have been too spineless to do anything about it.
Unfortunately, as Trump pointed out in a second post, the fate of many of those hostages is unknown, and many could well be dead.
“Israel will find, very sadly, that there are far fewer hostages than currently being thought,” he wrote. “Hamas is incapable of holding Jewish people for a long period of time without killing them, and it will only get worse.”
Trump also declared that the Hamas attack on Israel would never have happened if President Joe Biden hadn’t been in office. “October 7 WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED IF I WERE PRESIDENT,” he wrote, with all-caps emphasis. “NOT EVEN A SMALL CHANCE.”
That’s impossible to verify, barring the existence of an alternative universe somewhere, but it’s very likely true.
It was under Trump that the United States finally moved its embassy in Israel to the capital of Jerusalem — defying predictions of Arab “street” unrest that never happened.
It was during the Trump years that Israel managed to establish relations with the Muslim countries of Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.
Some form of official understanding between Israel and Saudi Arabia even appeared possible, driven by their mutual interest in keeping Iran in check.
That’s all disintegrated under Biden, along with peace in Europe. (Russia never invaded anyone while Trump was in the White House.)
On foreign policy, the Trump years were a textbook example of “peace through strength,” as the United States military stomped out the killers of the Islamic State group that bedeviled the world during the Obama presidency and confined its fighting to trade wars with international foes like China.
The key word there is “strength” of course, which is so sorely lacking among the edutocracy of higher education, which in turn allows pro-Palestinian lies to spread among the willfully obtuse or simply ignorant.
Do these radicals have a right to protest, to demonstrate, to make their feelings known?
Of course they do, thanks to the same Constitution leftists despise.
But they do not have a right to terrorize campuses and their fellow students. That’s what they’re doing in far too many cases — and it’s what they’re being allowed to do, while far too many who are supposed to be leading look the other way.
“Stop the protests now” is simplistic advice, but the “leaders” of American colleges and universities have both the means and the moral and legal right to put it into action.
What they lack is the will to take it. But if they did, if they actually fulfilled their responsibilities to their jobs, to their students and to their country, it would change everything.
Don’t hold your breath.
