Useful idiots: Why college activists are acting as unpaid interns for a dead Soviet empire

If you walk into the quad of any elite Western university today, you will be deafened by a very specific vocabulary. You will hear endless lectures on “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “from the river to the sea,” “imperialist implants,” and “indigenous resistance.” The students and tenured professors chanting these slogans are convinced they have uncovered a profound moral truth, imagining themselves as the vanguard of global justice.In reality, they are reciting the half-century-old psychological warfare drafted in Moscow.The modern packaging of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the supreme avatar of global Marxist anti-imperialism is a direct artifact of Cold War active measures. Prior to the crushing defeat of Soviet-armed Arab armies in the 1967 Six-Day War, regional Arab capitals openly framed the conflict not as a human rights campaign, but as a pan-Arab and Islamic war of annihilation. Their explicit goal was the total destruction of the only sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. How many Arab countries occupy that real estate? There are 22 of them. They are as follows: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, “Palestine,” Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. You might think that there would be room in the groves of academe for one tiny Jewish one in the neighborhood, but, according to what passes for modern intelligentsia, you would be wrong.That brutal honesty alienated Western liberal democracies. Following the 1967 defeat, Yuri Andropov and the Soviet intelligence apparatus executed a massive strategic pivot. Through sweeping disinformation operations, the KGB and Eastern Bloc intelligence systematically sanitized the conflict’s rhetoric. They scrubbed the overt pan-Arab and religious eliminationism, cloaking it instead in fashionable Marxist liberation theory. An ethno-religious war was repackaged as a noble, global anti-colonial struggle tailored for Western consumption.The operational architecture of the secular Palestinian movement was inextricably tied to Moscow. Declassified documents from the Mitrokhin archive reveal that Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat was cultivated by Soviet intelligence under the codename AREF, while figures like Mahmoud Abbas were registered intelligence operatives under the codename KROTOV.Meanwhile, the PLO received vast Soviet arms shipments, funding, and KGB operational training. The cynical nature of this rhetoric was openly acknowledged at the time: in 1977, PLO Executive Committee member and pro-Syrian Ba’athist leader Zuheir Mohsen admitted in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw that a distinct Palestinian identity was promoted primarily for tactical reasons to serve pan-Arab aims and dismantle Zionism.Today, this historical amnesia has metastasized into grotesque political delusions. An unholy alliance — stretching from European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell to libertarian theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe — now confidently peddles the conspiratorial talking point that Israel “engineered and financed Hamas” as a counterweight to the PLO and Fatah, whom they often frame as “legitimate resistance.”This claim is an exercise in historical illiteracy. In the 1970s, the Israeli military administration tolerated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Mujama al Islamiya precisely because it operated as a non-violent religious and social charity (Da’wa) — a stark, preferable contrast to the lethal, Soviet-backed PLO terror syndicate that was actively hijacking airliners, bombing buses, and slaughtering Israeli athletes at Munich. When Yassin’s movement abandoned social welfare and reconstituted itself as the genocidal terrorist group Hamas in 1987, Israel outlawed the organization, fought it, and ultimately eliminated its leadership.Decades later, when Israel permitted Qatari civilian funds to enter Gaza, it did so to prevent humanitarian collapse and stabilize the area. But unsurprisingly, Hamas redirected those resources into a 500-kilometer subterranean fortress and rocket arsenals. It perched these military assets in the neighborhoods of schools, hospitals, residential areas, the better to avail itself of Gazan shields. This is a technique of “warfare” that even the Nazis never sunk to employ.Yet modern Western activists remain blissfully oblivious to all of it. Draped in keffiyehs and chanting Soviet-era semantic tropes, they march through Western capitals convinced they are resisting Western imperialism. In doing so, they look at a liberal democracy fighting for survival against fundamentalist death cults and see only a cartoonish oppressor.This is the ultimate triumph of Cold War disinformation: Western intellectuals, diplomats, and student radicals acting as the unpaid interns of a dead Soviet empire, mistaking cynical geopolitical information warfare for an authentic moral crusade.WHAT IF NETANYAHU SURRENDERED? ISRAEL’S REAL CRIME IS REFUSING TO DIEHow is it that academia has been overtaken, overrun by leftist ideology? The top universities were not always the intellectual cesspools that they now are. One theory that makes sense in terms of explanatory power has been put forth by Milton Friedman. He opined that this was due to the Vietnam War draft. Rightists and conservatives fought against communism. For leftists, liberals, socialists, and the “progressives” of the day, that was just about the last thing they would wish to do. How to escape? One way was to emigrate to Canada. Another, undertaken in droves, was to take advantage of the academic loophole.Stay in school for as long as you can. Get a Ph.D.! No draft for the likes of you. The professors, deans, provosts, and university professors of today are the socialists of that bygone era. They have truly made a “march through the institution” of higher learning.Walter E. Block, Ph.D., is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Hushang Manuchehri is an independent writer.