The Left dreamed of a “new 1968.” Good boys fighting for a better world for everyone.
Dani Dayan, director of Yad Vashem, wondered instead whether Columbia University would go down in history as Heidelberg, the German city that was home to the university that produced so many Nazi leaders.
To consider them young idealists going through a phase of rebellion before becoming adults, as many did, meant hiding what was new and terrifying about them. Now the pro-Palestinian group that generated the student camp at Columbia in New York is throwing off its mask. “We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” said the Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
The group celebrated October 7 by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used the name chosen by Hamas for the pogrom: “One Year Since the Al Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory,” with a photo of terrorists violating Israel’s security fence. They quote Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s late political leader. “October 7 was not ‘barbaric’ or ‘unlucky,’ it was strategic and anti-imperialist,” says the editorial headline.
“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” said the Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
Not just a campus, a caliphate. “Long live October 7,” wrote Nerdeen Kiswani, the director of Within Our Lifetime, an increasingly influential group on American campuses.
Students for Justice in Palestine, a student group with chapters on hundreds of colleges across America, also published praise for October 7. “The flooding of Al-Aqsa was a historic act of resistance.”
Columbia University Apartheid Divest quotes Lenin and Fanon and expresses solidarity with the “Axis of Resistance”—Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Hamas—because they oppose imperialism. It also praises Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish state, calling it a “courageous move.” And defends Khymani James, the student who said in a disciplinary hearing that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
So the green and yellow flags of Hamas and Hezbollah with the Koran and the Kalashnikov, the calls for a “global Intifada,” the photos of Sinwar, the inverted red triangles symbolizing Hamas’s military targets, the bloody hands of the Ramallah lynch mob, and the hunt for the Jewish student shouting “go back to Poland” were not incidents on the road, but part of the terrorist choreography that has taken over parts of the American academy.
In recent days at Columbia a sign read: “Long live the al Aqsa flood,” flanked by photos of a Hamas terrorist and a paraglider, symbol of the massacre at the music festival in which 364 young Israelis were murdered by Hamas.
Columbia, whose name should evoke Christopher Columbus and the voyage to a new world but which today has more in common with Edward Said and Hassan Nasrallah, invites us to explore a strange universe in which idiotic Westerners who enjoy all the privileges that a democratic society offers embrace the “Woke Jihad,” as Abe Greenwald in Commentary calls it.
Sinwar is wasted in Gaza. He should leave his tunnel and enroll at Columbia University, where he will feel right at home.
