Liberal arts college students are always protesting things. I would know – I used to be one. During my senior year of college at Smith, my class (of 2014) got our original graduation speaker to withdraw herself because she was the president of the International Monetary Fund and a large group of students disagreed with the conditions under which it was lending money to developing countries.

I think. I’ll be honest, at the time I didn’t care that much. Believe it or not, I was not as politically aware and involved then as I am now and was mostly focused on applying to grad school. It was a bit of a campus controversy at the time but had no real long-term effect. We graduated. Someone spoke. Christine Lagarde still served as president of the IMF for several years following and is now president of the European Central Bank.

There were a few articles about it at the time but not a ton of media coverage and certainly not the obsessive focus we’re seeing on the protests spreading across various college campuses against the Israel-Hamas war.

People are always joking about the impotency of protests done by blue-haired college liberals. Nobody paid much attention to the Boycott Divest Sanction movement when they started holding meetings about it at Smith back when I was still a student. So my first thought this time around was: Why do we care? Why do we suddenly care so much about 18- to 22-year-olds, fairly powerless in the world, camping out on their quads to pressure their admins into divesting college funds from arms investments? Sure, I think it merits a few articles, but it’s not like there aren’t a ton of other more pressing concerns at the moment.

Where was all this concern about antisemitism in 2017, when literal neo-Nazis marched on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville? Those guys were just exercising their free speech until a bunch of gender studies majors needed the riot squad called on them.

Antisemitism is a huge problem in America today, as it has been for centuries. It’s an old prejudice and we should all work to pluck it out, roots and all. (We could start by finally pointing out that using “Soros-funded” or “globalist” pejoratively are antisemitic tropes and barely disguised dog whistles). But protesting the actions of the U.S. and Israeli governments in Gaza is not inherently antisemitic. It is, in fact, a matter of free speech. Sending in the police to shock unarmed students and faculty with a Taser doesn’t seem like a great solution.

It’s frustrating to watch the mainstream media pick one or two individuals who have said violent or antisemitic things and make it seem as if they represent the groups of protesters as a whole because they don’t.

It’s difficult to imagine getting away with doing this for any other group. Can you imagine if I pointed to Rep. Michael Lemelin – you know, the guy who said that the Lewiston mass shooting was God’s punishment on Maine for enacting “immoral laws” – and said he represented the beliefs of every single Republican in the state of Maine? I’d get torn apart. Nobody would let me get away with that.

Perhaps it is meant to serve as a warning to other young people – that if they don’t toe the line if they take a visible action such as camping out on their college’s front lawn, they will have their face plastered all over the news as being a terrible, violent radical. Nobody wants that. I don’t want to get arrested, lose my job, or be called a terrorist just because I believe the United States should stop sending military weapons to Israel until it stops using them freely against the civilian population.

I think there are a few reasons for the disproportionate focus on college campus protests. First and probably foremost, it drives engagement. Viewers are always kind of obsessed with what the youths are up to, and everyone likes watching and making judgments about college kids, favorably and otherwise.

I also think the protests are being portrayed so relentlessly and negatively in order to make it seem like opposition to the war on Gaza, and to continued military support for Israel despite the massive civilian death toll, is a minority view held only by campus radicals who live in a bubble away from the real world. That isn’t true.

According to Pew Research, the percentage of Americans who favor sending military aid to Israel is almost equal to the number who oppose sending military aid to Israel – 36% to 34%. In that same survey, 14% of Americans neither favor nor oppose it, and about 15% say they are unsure.

Those figures represent a lot of people who could be swayed. If the media focused on, say, the mass graves of Palestinian civilians discovered at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, with bodies showing signs of being shot in the head while handcuffed and in some cases still in hospital gowns with catheters in, that might sway a lot of sympathies to one side of the conflict.

God forbid we focus on that. Not while the real threat – earnest, do-good liberal arts college students – is still out there.

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