I’d say anyone celebrating Star Wars Day today (“May the Fourth be with you!”) on this May 4 needs to get out more.

In addition to being a day that promises further depressing developments on college campuses as the decades of progressive, anti-American, and Marxist indoctrination have their predictable (and probably intentional) consequences—though somehow the ivory tower revolutionaries in charge of those campuses were oddly unprepared for them!—this date has an ominous history.

The Vietnam protests reached their violent zenith with the National Guard shooting four Kent State students on May 4, 1970, a tragedy eerily reminiscent of the Boston Massacre. I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been a student fatality in the current unrest yet: as always, the protest organizers are hoping for one to “radicalize” the campuses. Another development that seems inevitable is a terrorist attack in support of Gaza and Hamas. Today is a date that portends that, too: during a huge labor protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois on May 4, 1886, a someone threw a bomb among the 200 police officers attempting to break up the demonstration. Police then started shooting at the pro-labor crowd, killing more than a dozen protestors and wounding nearly a hundred, several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more. The protest had been organized by pro-labor activists to protest (and exploit) of the killing of a striker by the Chicago police the day before, and about 1,500 workers participated. That episode galvanized both the labor movement and the progressive movement that produced Teddy Roosevelt, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, and Woodrow Wilson.

The anti-war rioting at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 also took place in Chicago, and where do you suppose the Democrats are holding their nominating convention this year? If nothing else, you can accuse the party of being superstitious. That call is the equivalent of naming a new cruise ship “Titanic.”

But wait! There’s more! On May 4, 1994, then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat reached an agreement in Cairo on Palestinian self-rule, following the Oslo Accords signed in Washington, D.C. on September 13, 1993. The agreement acknowledged Israel’s right to exist! Israeli agreed to withdraw from most of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, all land won by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 when the Arab nations collectively tried to wipe Israel off the map. The Palestinians agreed to avoid terrorism and maintain peace. and prevent violence in the famous “land for peace” bargain. The agreement transferred authority from the Israeli Civil Administration to the newly created Palestinian Authority, its jurisdiction and legislative powers, a Palestinian police force and relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Sounds promising, no? Almost immediately after the Israeli military withdrawal, the Palestinians began attacking Israel and its civilians. The periodic terrorism continued: there was never real “peace.” The promise to accept Israel’s right to exist was just words. Seven years later came the “Second Intifada” in 2000, a violent Palestinian uprising against Israel that left over a thousand Israelis dead and thousands injured. The schism was complete when the Palestinians elected the openly terrorist organization Hamas to lead Gaza in 2006. The fable of “The Scorpion and the Frog” comes to mind.

I wonder how many of the campus protesters are conversant in this history?

It is fascinating to see how left-leaning information sources try to spin this sordid story to absolve the Palestinians as much as possible. I checked the History Channel’s “This Date in History” site. There was a “spate” of attacks on Israel civilians, it says. “Timetables stipulated in the deal were not met”—the wonderful anonymity of the passive voice! “The momentum toward peaceful relations between Israel and the Palestinians was seriously jolted by the outbreak of the 2000 Palestinian uprising,” the website tells us, leaving out the little detail of the dead Israelis. Funny how that would “jolt” “momentum toward peaceful relations.” The same was said about the attack on Pearl Harbor: it jolted the momentum toward peaceful relations between the U.S. and Japan. Then the article tells us, “Further strain was put on the process after Hamas came into power in the 2006 Palestinian elections.” “Strain.” Yeah, I’d expect there to be strain when a group that has promised to accept Israel’s right to exist in return for self-government elects a terrorist organization openly committed to Israel’s destruction as its leadership.

In other developments beyond the calendar and faded memories…

1. In a webinar this week, Nadine Strossen, a former ACLU President (and a college classmate of mine), was asked “When a group of students call out Intifada now, Globalize the Intifada on a college campus where Jews are walking and going about their business, how different is it from saying let’s have a pogrom or how about a lynch mob?”

Strossen’s answer: “I want to set the record straight. You are allowed to do that under the First Amendment if the only element of the distress is the message and let me be very precise about this. This is not a radical proposition under First Amendment law. Way back in 1969, the United States Supreme Court unanimously issued a decision that not a single justice has disagreed with since then, despite the many other differences among them, where they said even advocacy of violent or lawless conduct is constitutionally protected the line is crossed only when it’s not just advocacy but it’s incitement and moreover intentional incitement to imminent violence which is likely to happen imminently.” Strossen added, “The line has been crossed on so many campuses and I’m being precise. I’m referring to detailed complaints that I have read that have been brought by Jewish students and organizations against a number of campuses including Columbia and Harvard and we’re talking complaints that are almost 100 pages long with hundreds of specific allegations that it’s not just chanting odious slogans in the middle of the campus, it’s deliberately targeting and sometimes following Jewish students. it’s invading classrooms, it’s confronting physically with menacing gestures students who are perceived to be Jewish or Israeli.”

This is inexcusable coming from an “authority” on free speech. The 1969 case Nadine is referring to is Tinker vs Des Moines. The case involved public school students wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War—how quaint! No student could possibly feel threatened by that act. A new SCOTUS examination of the limits on Tinker when a protest appears to target other students, their families and their ethnicity or religion is long overdue.

1969 was a period in which all of the protests were against a foreign (undeclared) war being waged by the U.S. Nobody on the campuses of Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley or Kent State could feel personally attacked by the protests whatever their political views. Today’s student protests are pointedly anti-Jewish and pro-Hamas. Tinker was also not unanimous—I would expect a former head of the ACLU to know that. In fact, the two best thinkers (and writers) on the 1969 court, arch-liberal Hugo Black and conservative scholar John Harlan, both dissented vigorously in the 7-2 decision.

3. More Strossen: Even the strongest champions of free speech, she said, “would consider many of these infamous viral incidents we have seen not to be protected speech due to it posing “an emergency by directly causing or imminently threatening certain specific serious harm,” such as reasonable fear that you’re going to be subject to an immediate attack, intimidation, targeted harassment, and violating content neutral time, place and manner restrictions.”

This is double talk: what else do student protests supporting a terrorist organization that launched a horrific attack on Jewish citizens mean besides “threatening specific serious harm” to Jewish students?

4. If I were a college student, today, I’d be tempted to organize a symbolic anti-black, anti-female or anti-gay demonstration—maybe all three— with signs and chants equivalent to “We are Hamas” and “From the river to the sea,” and challenge administrators to parse the distinction. Would it be that Jewish students aren’t likely to respond with violence, unlike some other groups?

5. On the same webinar, Pamela Peresky, who is an anthropologist and pop psychologist, said, “Even the presidents of colleges and universities don’t understand what constitutes free speech and if the presidents don’t understand surely the students don’t understand.” Peresky doesn’t understand free speech as it applies to student conduct and responsible university leadership.

6. Here is a head-exploding, topsy-turvy, intellectually disgraceful attempt to frame the anti-Jewish campus protests as innocent expressions of political opinion being mischaracterized as a result of a Jewish-led conspiracy. The source is Jacobin, a Marxist publication—a coincidence, I’m sure.

7. Finally, courtesy of NBC, comes this list of the colleges and universities where major pro-Hamas demonstrations have occurred or are ongoing: