(For a different point of view see: Counterpoint: Students’ Struggle for Justice in Gaza Must be Protected at All Costs)
The protesters taking over college campuses are not antisemitic, so we’re told, they want to destroy the only Jewish state. They just want all of the Jews to go … somewhere else. They chant for the creation of Palestine from the river to the sea, an explicit call for the end of Israel.
Would Jews be welcome in the Palestinian state? Consider the only Jews in Gaza are Israeli soldiers trying to free Israeli captives.
They’re not antisemitic; they just have an affinity for all the organizations that have spent decades explicitly calling for the murder of Jews and carrying out those crimes whenever possible. They proudly wear headbands of Hamas and fly Hezbollah flags, and, yet we still pretend not to know who they are and what they want. They are terrorist wannabes at best, and they want what all Islamic extremists want: dead Jews.
For the Daily Wire last week, Kassy Akiva reported, “One of the most vocal student activists leading the anti-Israel Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, Khymani James, openly stated in a livestream of an official university inquiry in January that ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live.’” Only because of the following uproar did Columbia take action, booting James from the university.
And yet, the day after Akiva’s report was published, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised the encampment during a visit, gushing, “The leadership you have is just so fantastic.”
Ocasio-Cortez, a founding member of the Squad, a group of legislators with a long problematic history of antisemitism themselves, isn’t the only one wholeheartedly supporting the protests. Rep. Ilhan Omar joined the protests after her daughter was suspended for her involvement and called some Jewish students “pro-genocide,” drawing a deserved rebuke from the Anti-Defimation League.
The protests aren’t just in response to how Israel has handled its operations in Gaza. Their love of terror was immediately evident before Israel launched its response to the attacks of October 7. It’s not about what Israel has done or what they have alleged it has done. It’s that the Jewish state dares to exist. The Jerusalem Post reported in October, before any Gaza operation began:
“A tenured professor at New York’s Columbia University authored an article praising Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians last Saturday, less than a day after the attacks took place. What can motorized paragliders do in the face of one of the most formidable militaries in the world?” asked Joseph Massad, who has taught Modern Arab Politics at Columbia since 1999, in his article for the website Electronic Intifada. “Apparently much in the hands of an innovative Palestinian resistance.”
The protests taking over America’s college campuses can’t be more explicit. And their love for terror organizations is reciprocated. Sami Al-Arian, convicted financier of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, tweeted his support of his wife, Nahla, who had set up camp at Columbia’s encampment. She knows who her friends are.
In an email recently, Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, told the campus community that the pro-Hamas camp and the environment on campus have become intolerable to Jewish students and others. Many Jewish students, at the behest of their rabbi who sent a WhatsApp message to observant students on campus, have already fled. Shafik went on to explain that antisemitic language and actions, not to mention calls for violence, have no place on campus.
This had to be said because this is the environment that these protests have created. They are antisemitic at their core, and they need to be dismantled immediately.
These protests and encampments have shown that there is a large and growing fifth column of terrorist sympathizers in our most elite institutions from coast to coast.
