Pro-Hamas protests are spreading around the nation as radicalized students chant “Death to the Jews,” “Long live Hamas,” and “Globalize the Intifada.” At Columbia University, the protests have become so violent that school administrators are threatening to expel those who now occupy Hamilton Hall.
Yet such threats do not seem to be a deterrent. More than 100 Columbia students were arrested last month after pro-Hamas students clashed with police, yet the protests continue because school administrators refuse to address the root cause of the violence.
Police crackdowns may convince some pro-Hamas students to stay home. But they do not stop pro-Hamas students from being pro-Hamas, or anti-Jewish students from being anti-Jewish. The root cause of anti-Semitic campus violence is not the lack of law enforcement. Nor is it Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
The root cause is the professors.
In the lead-up to Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Weimar Germany, educators acting across all levels of education built the academic foundation for discrimination against Jews and legitimized a totalitarian state. A similar tragedy is unfolding in the United States as professors tell impressionable students that Hamas’s October 7 butcher, murder, rape and torture of men, women, children and babies was a “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”
How did America’s prestigious Ivy League universities become so radical?
Well, only five years before the 1968 “Summer of Love” protests against the Vietnam War, Columbia hired Palestinian-American academic Edward Said as a member of the English and Comparative Literature faculties. Said was a radical anti-colonialist and one of the first Palestinian-American intellectuals to call for a two-state solution. In the 1980s, Barack Obama took an undergrad class with Said; many analysts say this was the source of Obama’s opposition to a united Israeli state with a capital in Jerusalem.
The fact that Columbia would hire Said as a professor shows its administration was already tilting against Israel in the 1960s and was thoroughly against Israel by the time Obama went there in the 1980s. Columbia’s tilt didn’t stop. Said died in 2003, but now Columbia has endowed an Edward Said Professorship of Modern Arab Studies. The current holder is Rashid Khalidi, one of Obama’s friends who has accused the U.S. and Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
When Columbia students chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “End the occupation now,” they aren’t rebelling against what they’ve been taught by their professors. They’re repeating what they’ve been taught by their professors. And they’re repeating what Obama was taught by their professors.
Khalidi told Newsweek reporters on April 29: “There is nothing anti-Semitic about opposing a genocidal war or in criticizing Israeli apartheid.” Rather than convince people of the justness of student protests, this statement reveals that students are being lied to by their teachers.
Israel is a parliamentary democracy with freedom for all religions. Gaza is a tyrannical Islamic theocracy run by criminals. Israel’s counterstrike against Hamas terrorists in the immediate aftermath of the massacre is not a genocidal campaign against Palestinians. It is an attempt to defend democratic institutions and traditions like the rule of law, separation of powers, equal protection and civil liberties from a violent group of radical Sunni fundamentalists.
Such statements from Khalidi are shocking, but they are far from the only anti-Israel rhetoric coming from professors. In fact, Khalidi has not even been mentioned during congressional hearings over university anti-Semitism. Yet three other Columbia professors have been mentioned: Joseph Massad, Mohammed Abdou and Katherine Franke.
Massad is a professor of modern Arab politics and history at Columbia who referred to the October 7 massacre as “awesome” and a “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.” He penned an essay saying the “major achievement of the resistance” was a “death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists” had in their military to defend them. Khalidi accuses Israelis of genocide, but Massad is actively teaching his students that Hamas is right to slaughter the Jews and anyone else who ensures that Israel remains a liberal democracy.
Mohammed Abdou is a visiting Columbia scholar who teaches a weekly class on Decolonial Queerness & Abolition. He declared on social media, “Yes, I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.”
Katherine Franke, a law professor and activist, has allegedly claimed, “All Israeli students who served in the idf [Israel Defense Forces] are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus.”
Such statements are not really about Jews and Palestinians. They are about tearing down the only functioning democracy in the Middle East and paving the way for an Islamic takeover. Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia, said: “Every dirty, treacherous, ugly and pernicious happening in the world ... just wait for a few days and the ugly name ‘Israel’ will pop up in the atrocities.”
Kayum Ahmed, a law lecturer within Columbia’s school of public health, labeled Israel a “colonial settler state” that has “oppressed indigenous populations” and “displaced” Palestinians. It should be abundantly clear that Columbia students are being taught to hate Israel.
The story is similar at other Ivy League universities, which every person on Earth should find concerning. The history of the 1930s shows us that ignoring this level of anti-Semitism can lead to horrors upon horrors, up to and including the industrial-scale mass murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
Beyond the immediate threat to the Israeli people, these campus protests threaten the future of Western civilization itself.
Israeli ambassador Yoram Ettinger wrote in “How the Bible Inspired the American Founding From the Beginning,” America’s founders “were inspired by the Bible, in general, and the Mosaic legacy, in particular, which features a civic covenant, cohesive peoplehood, 12-tribe governance and a shared vision. These beliefs and values planted the seeds of the Federalist Papers, the 1776 American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the overarching American political and justice systems to come. These seeds vaulted the United States into the leadership of the free world, economically, technologically, scientifically, educationally and militarily.”
In other words, it is not coincidence that Israel is a parliamentary democracy based on the rule of law while Gaza is an Islamic dictatorship based on Sharia law. America, Britain and Israel are constitutional republics because these nations were inspired by the Bible in general and the Mosaic legacy in particular. The radical leftists who hijacked America’s university system in the 1960s hate the Bible in general and the Mosaic legacy in particular, so it was only a matter of time before leftist professors realized they shared a common enemy with Hamas and Hezbollah.
The socialist movement and the Islamist movement have little in common besides anti-Semitism, but there is a reason both movements hate Israel. This red-green alliance—named for the colors of communism and Islam, respectively—has a joint goal and a joint enemy: the destruction of Western civilization and the ethnic group that invented it.
