The events taking place on North American campuses are not academic. They are the flames of a war being waged in what should be the bastions of civic learning and civilization.
The campus encampments at Columbia University in New York and elsewhere are many things, but “pro-human rights” is not one of them. These protests are calling for the violent end of the State of Israel. They are also calling for the downfall of the West. If these keffiyeh-wrapped faces shouting slogans like “There is only one solution – intifada, revolution” is the face of the future, it looks ugly indeed.
There is nothing sophisticated about the messages or the messengers, but the campaign itself has a certain sophistication to it. They are not “spontaneous” and, like all mass protests, they are not cheap. Follow the funding, and it will lead back to the supporters of global terrorism and mayhem. The ideological direction is that of Iran, the brainwashing tactics are the Soviet-style favored by Putin’s Russia.
These protests should not be confused with the heady days of anti-Vietnam War rallies, as journalist Brendan O’Neill so succinctly noted in Spiked! Online: “Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.
“The willful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.”
The various chants being heard across North America provide a woeful litany. The mantra “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has morphed into “We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!” (The abuse inflicted on the English language adds insult to injury.) That slogan was already being heard at least two years before October 7, 2023 – a date recorded for posterity in its infamy. It was reported by The Jerusalem Post in August 2021, shortly after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) launched a massive campaign of rocket attacks that culminated in Operation Guardian of the Walls.
Not a call for Middle East peace
It is a battle cry, not a call for peace in the Middle East. To paraphrase BDS star-supporter Roger Waters, “We don’t need no education” to understand that it is a call to eradicate Israel. Ignorance is no defense, especially when it comes to universities with a price tag of some $70,000 per academic year. However, many students seem to rely on TikTok and other social media for what passes as their education. And the result is nasty.
A video clip by Getty Images this week shows demonstrators with placards protesting a police presence on the Columbia campus and the alliterative but idiotic slogan “Dykes for decolonization.” It’s identity politics and intersectionality gone mad. Members of the LGBTQ+ community are free to shout their slogans from the rooftops of Gaza – before being thrown off by Hamas terrorists faithful to its Sharia regime.THE CAMPUS crowd has convinced itself that the Jewish people – who have just celebrated the Passover festival marking the exodus from Egypt to the Land of Israel some three and a half millennia ago – are “colonialists.” They would like to paint the conflict in war colors of anti-imperialism, but only the “anti-” part is true. They are against everything the West stands for – those very precepts that are meant to be cherished and cultivated on campuses.
“Globalize the intifada,” as another popular chant demands, means global jihad. The one Jewish state is the first to suffer, but the nearly 50 Muslim-majority countries and the nominally Christian world are all in the line of fire.
“Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” will be followed by a desire to see London, Paris, and Sydney in flames. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE helped respond to the Iranian missiles and drones in last month’s unprecedented assault because, like Israel, they are also being targeted.
Article 13 of the Hamas Charter states: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.” The promise by Hamas supporters to repeat October 7 is a threat to all residents of the global village. The impact of the jihadist ideology that fuels Hamas has been felt in attacks against Jews and non-Jews alike, in concert halls, shopping malls, schools, houses of worship, and on the streets of major cities.
As the Post’s Michael Starr noted last week, “On October 7, anti-Israel activists... took to social media and the streets and celebrated before any IDF response had begun.
“More than just celebrating, anti-Israel demonstrators called for more blood, acting as if they were on the cusp of complete victory, i.e., the toppling of Israel.
“They called for the gassing of Jews in Sydney, and across X [formerly Twitter] they urged Hamas to carry out the same actions committed on October 7 across Israel... Every time the pro-terrorist mob felt they were winning again, they allowed us a glimpse at what they truly advocated for.”HAMAS AND its Iranian backer must consider the campus sieges as a victory. It is a show of support. True, the protests themselves are limited in size, but they create an atmosphere of fear in which terrorism can flourish.
The utter barbarity of the Hamas and PIJ attack on October 7 resulted in some 1,200 people murdered, 250 abducted, thousands wounded, and some 200,000 displaced. As a result, it brought together Israelis on the Left and Right, despite the previous year’s divisions surrounding the judicial reform.
The campus riots should unite Diaspora Jews. It is a brutal wake-up call. In an age when identity politics rules, somehow antisemitism still reigns supreme. There are just 15 million Jews worldwide, yet they are not considered “a minority.”
Extraordinarily, those accusing Israel of “genocide” for fighting the terrorist regime in Gaza are boldly calling for nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state – for the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to be Judenrein.
The dangerous antisemitism is not confined to the pro-Hamas encampments on university lawns, it is running down the corridors of academia, where Israeli and Jewish lecturers and researchers have discovered they are not welcome, and spilled into the streets and workplaces.
I recall a British teenager a few years ago sharing his dilemma about what to include in his CV: Would the fact that he volunteered with a Jewish charity help or hinder him? Would it show that he was a caring person or mark him as “a Jew,” an undesirable? Eight decades after the end of World War II, it is shameful that this is an issue.
Jews are scared to attend their college classes (or have been advised to stay away); afraid to travel on public transport while openly displaying signs of their religion; and wonder about the advisability of admitting their religious affiliation. And that’s in countries that were on the winning side of the battle against Nazism.
When Columbia University finally decided to suspend students participating in the encampments, it mumbled something about wanting “members of our Jewish community to feel safe, welcome, and valued.” In a society so attuned to micro-aggressions, it took Columbia University way too long to begin to take action. The protesters who broke into Hamilton Hall and before being dispersed demanded food and water as “humanitarian aid” redefined chutzpah.
Israel next week commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day, still reeling from the October 7 Hamas mega-atrocity, still under rocket attacks, and still worrying about the fate of the hostages Hamas so cynically exploits, from one-year-old Kfir Bibas to 86-year-old Shlomo Mansour.
These Gaza “protest encampments” should be dismantled because they should never have been permitted to be established with a nod and a wink and a promise to keep the Jews off campus “for their own safety.” They are an expression of hatred, not free speech.
It is time to take the masks off the protesters and reveal the ugly face of enmity, the open support for terrorist organizations, the backing of those who raped, beheaded, and burned all those they could during their ISIS-style invasion.
Universities are under siege. There are lessons that should be learned – history lessons.