The glorification of terrorists and celebration of violence against Israeli civilians demonstrate the moral rot within universities across the country.
The glorification of terrorists and celebration of violence against Israeli civilians demonstrate the moral rot within universities across the country.
T here is something broken in American higher education. It is self-evident, and has been for quite some time, that the culture of the campus has become sick and twisted. But nothing has displayed the moral rot within academia in brighter colors and with bolder lines than the student response to the truly wicked attack on Israel.
During the early hours of October 7, the terror group Hamas began its assault on the Jewish state, a spate of violence Israel has not seen since the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The atrocities Hamas inflicted on Israeli civilians are too great in number and too evil in nature to effectively catalogue. The terrorists murdered children and infants, raped women and young girls, took hostages, and burned families alive.
And then the students opened their collective mouths. I have spent the past week or so documenting responses to the horrors that unfolded in the Holy Land at the United States’ most prestigious institutions. While combing through the language of these organizations — many ostensibly committed to “justice” and “human rights” — is nauseating, it is instructive in telling us something about the environment on college campuses. Reading through these groups’ statements, one begins to notice three distinct (though not entirely different) themes. First is the implication that Israel is to blame for Hamas terrorism through the sheer evil of its existence. The second is an identification with the terrorists’ cause, the connection of the Palestinian “resistance” to other social-justice movements, and the notion that Hamas’s murderers represent some sort of righteous ideal. The third — the most despicable of all — celebrates the brutality, viewing it as the first step toward a better world free of the scourge of the Jewish state. It is worth examining all three.
First, the notion that Israel’s existence is to blame for the terror.
Thirty-one Harvard University student organizations came out swinging in a statement after Hamas’s attacks. “We, the undersigned organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. . . . The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. . . . We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
At Columbia University, the South Asian Law Student Association released a letter signed by — at the time at which I received it — ten other organizations stating that “the weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments, including the U.S. government, which fund and staunchly support Israeli aggression, apartheid, and settler-colonization.” The students claim “occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land” and that “we should not be surprised when resistance and violence break out.”
Georgetown University’s Jewish Voice for Peace — which in reality has nothing to do with Judaism — said “the violence we see today is a direct result of the brutal decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, the daily horrific human rights abuses Palestinians are forced to endure, and ongoing deadly settler colonialism that forces Palestinians off their homelands.”
The University of Chicago’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, in a note obscenely comparing Gaza with a concentration camp, said “this latest conflagration isn’t about Hamas, or even primarily about Gaza.” Amaia Elorza Arregi, the coordinator of the Tufts University Fletcher School’s Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, sent an email to the student body taking issue with the university president’s clear-minded statement, writing that “the language of ‘innocence’ and ‘pure barbarism’ paints a morally simplistic situation that fails to represent either the context or the reality on the ground.” Israeli civilians cannot be innocent, apparently.
Second, there are the statements identifying with the terrorists’ motives and aims.
Northwestern University’s SJP chapter — with which I have personal experience, having been called “Islamophobic” and a promoter of “mainstream, white supremacist discourse” because I spoke out against antisemitic violence in the past — issued its own statement. Palestinian “resistance . . . is a testament to the indomitable human spirit,” it said. “It is not only a moral imperative, but a right enshrined in global accords for Palestinians to defend themselves.”
Northwestern’s blatantly misnamed “Community for Human Rights” accused Jews of controlling news organizations through “Zionist propaganda,” saying “the media has and continues to favor white lives over those of POC (people of color).”
The University of Michigan Law School’s SJP chapter, in a letter onto which multiple other groups signed, said that “Palestinians in Gaza are fighting against the Israeli colonial entity on an unprecedented scale,” that the Hamas terrorists “remain persistent in fighting for their life,” that the law-school community should join the Palestinian cause, and that “Western nations and Israel scream terrorism, because surely the brown people are terrorists.” The University of Illinois’ SJP chapter said in an Instagram post announcing a rally for “solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters back home fighting against one of the most oppressive and violent colonial regimes in our time” that “Palestinians’ freedom can only be attained through resistance.”
Finally, and most disgusting of all, there are the statements from student organizations celebrating the wholesale slaughter of Jews in Israel.
Northwestern’s Middle Eastern and North African Student Association said that its members “resoundingly support Palestinian resistance” and that it “grieves for the martyrs.” Swarthmore College’s SJP chapter “affirms its resolute solidarity with Palestinians resisting the brutal Zionist state” who have “valiantly confronted the imperial apparatus” of Israel through “legitimate resistance.” Hamas’s heinous crimes, it said, are acts of “valiant liberation.”
In an Instagram post, the University of Virginia’s SJP chapter said it was “hopeful for the future of Palestine” after seeing the terror Hamas had visited upon Israeli civilians. The violence, the post said, was “a step towards a free Palestine” and the group’s members stand “in solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters.” New York University’s SJP chapter rejected the school’s calls for “peaceful discourse,” saying “there is no peace in a colonized people living under occupation, subjugation, and apartheid.” It is only fair to assume that the group opposes notions of peace, and that it in fact favors violence.
Hamas terrorists killed Brandeis University professor Ilan Troen’s daughter and son-in-law. For the sane, that might imbue the school’s campus with a certain circumspection about celebrations of violence. Not for SJP. The Brandeis chapter advertised a rally Monday with the message “glory to our martyrs.” The Ohio State University chapter, characterizing terrorism as a “heroic resistance,” called “on our people of Columbus to uplift and honor our resistance and our martyrs” in a flyer promoting a march on the Ohio Statehouse. New York University School of Law Student Bar Association president Ryna Workman expressed in a message to the school community her “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance,” celebrating the killings.
The George Washington University SJP said “every single act of resistance moves us closer to the liberation of our homeland,” pledging to “be caged no longer.” Members of the University of California, Berkeley, Bears for Palestine organization voiced their “unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza and the broader occupied Palestinian lands” describing the barbarity as “a revolutionary moment in contemporary Palestinian resistance.” Tufts University’s SJP chapter said “footage of liberation fighters from Gaza paragliding into occupied territory has especially shown the creativity necessary to take back stolen land.”
Then there were rallies like the one at the University of Wisconsin, where demonstrators chanted “glory to the martyrs” and shouted their desire to “liberate the lands by any means necessary” while waving Palestinian flags. At George Mason University, students chanted “they’ve got tanks, we’ve got hang gliders, glory to the resistance fighters.” University of Washington students flat-out called for more violence, chanting “there is only one solution: Intifada revolution.”
These statements and videos are hard to read and watch. But we should read and watch them. Students at institutions of higher ed the country over are celebrating the murder of men, women, and children as glorious because the slain are Israeli Jews.
The antisemitic hatred that can so easily be found on campus should worry not only those who pay particular attention to education, or Jews, for that matter. It should worry anyone who loves this country and the values upon which it was founded. How can we, as Americans, not look on these works and despair at what academia has wrought?