The ugly farce that has been unfolding on the US and European campuses lately in the name of anti-Israel protests has achieved little, but it has made parents around the world sit up and re-read the recording slips of their chequebooks.
Just how much are they paying for their child’s education?
Rather, how much are they paying for their child to learn how to wear the Arabian keffiyeh, hold up placards in support of a terror organisation like Hamas, play the Indian dafli, and shout ‘azaadi’ to perfect poetic metre (the last two being JNU exports to Western campuses)?
Turns out, it can go up to $90,000 a year in premier institutions like Columbia, Stanford or UCLA.
In a new episode of his show Real Time With Bill Maher, the writer-comedian asked the same question, not on behalf of parents but American taxpayers.
“I’m so incensed about some of this stuff because when I read about the college loans, the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation will cost a combined $870 million to $1.4 trillion. That’s a lot of debt forgiveness…so, my tax dollars are supporting this Jew-hating?” Maher asked.
It most definitely is, and in a brainless, unquestioning way, as writer Douglas Murray points out in a recent column.
“This one is for the morons. For the students busily cosplaying at being terrorists on our city’s campuses. The automatons whose new radical-chic uniform is an Arab keffiyeh. Specifically to the ones who have decided to chant for ‘Intifada’ and unveil a vast banner down the side of Hamilton Hall at Columbia this week,” he writes.
Murray goes on to cite the doom that the Palestinian clerics’ call for ‘intifada’ caused.
On June 1, 2001, terrorists blew up The Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv, killing 21 youngsters milling around the nightclub, the youngest of them being 14-year-old Maria Tagilchev.
On July 31, 2002, Hamas bombed the cafeteria of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, killing five American students among nine in total. One of those killed was 20-year-old student George Khoury, an Arab.
It is unlikely that the American students watch Bill Maher or read Douglas Murray. But they definitely scroll TikTok posts and Instagram reels, hundreds of which tell them far-Left ideology and Communism are cool, it is ‘resistance’ to side with Hamas and Hezbollah, and Jew hate or anti-white, anti-Hindu racism is a legitimate expression of anger.
In part, it is the success of the Left, and in particular, forces like China, which have insidiously infiltrated campuses either through funding or setting up Confucius Institutes on more than 500 college campuses worldwide, with over 100 in the US alone, including at the George Washington University, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa. These institutes are overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known as Hanban. They are part of the Chinese government’s broader $10-billion-a-year propaganda initiative.
To top it, there are predatory globalists like George Soros, Klaus Schwab and the Rothschild family and Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i Islami which reportedly inject billions into anarchic, violent, far-Left movements like Antifa, Black Lives Matter and the pro-mamas protests.
Their aim is to weaken not just governments but society at large so that they can exploit nations like parasites.
They are succeeding.
One of the main reasons is that parents have outsourced parenting to the internet and sometimes morally compromised and psychologically derailed teachers.
A parent’s duty does not end with paying for the child’s education. It begins there.
An estimated 1.5 million Indian students study abroad. In 2022-23, nearly 269,000 students from India enrolled in American colleges.
It is important to question, before it is too late and all wrapped up in a keffiyeh, what that admission fee or tax is buying for the child’s and nation’s future.
Is education getting our children knowledge and values, or setting a bomb timer in their hearts?
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.