The recent pro-Palestinian student protests on elite university campuses across the country offer fascinating, if somewhat depressing, insights into the state of modern American culture. It is not so much that the lunatics have taken over the asylum as the kindergartners have taken over the nursery. But the protests are more sinister than childish because they are motivated by hatred of Jews, and by the Mephistophelean spirit of negation or, in religious terms, the spirit of desecration.