I once listened to a colleague rail against the million-dollar salaries paid to some university presidents and chancellors. As he saw it, such salaries were grossly wasteful; it would be possible, he argued, to find people willing and able to do the same work, just as well, for far less pay. He was right, of course. But the point of those high salaries, I said, is not really to attract rare talent.
This is such an unhinged overreaction that even the police have wondered at times, when called upon to arrest peaceful protesters, what is going on. What’s going on, in short, is that institutional authority and state power are being deployed to silence Americans who object not only to Israel’s brutality, but also to U.S. support for Israel as an outpost of imperialism in the Middle East. It is popular opposition to the human damage caused by U.S.