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[/audioplayer]In 1793, on the eve of the Terror in France, the royalist journalist Mallet du Pan coined the adage ‘The Revolution devours its children.’ Today, on the left, history is repeating itself as farce. In universities, childish pseudo-revolutionaries are devouring their elders and self-styled radical betters.
Last week, student activists at Columbia University in New York mounted a concerted campaign against that notorious neo-fascist puppet Pinocchio. A big blow-up Pinocchio doll had starred in a display by Students Supporting Israel, staged as a counter demo to a fun-sounding campus festival called ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’.
Presumably his role was to suggest that the pro-Palestinian students were telling porkies and their noses should grow. After these opponents protested, the university authorities removed Pinocchio — purely, of course, as a ‘safety’ measure, the new all-purpose excuse for political censorship.
But why pick on Pinocchio? Because, the anti-Israeli lobby insisted, the inflatable constituted ‘an explicitly and overtly anti-Semitic image’.
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